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The CISTA logo

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When you think of the smell of cannabis, as familiar to some London streets as sirens and the night bus, you don't really think of Tottenham Court Road. For all its alternative religion and dodgy electronics shops, TCR is still part of the culturally bankrupt tourist heart of London. But it's here, in a back alley behind the Burger King-Boots megacomplex, that CISTA, a new political party dedicated to the legalization of cannabis in the UK, is holding its launch event.

The party is in glass-half-full flow when I arrive. "Eighty people signed up on Eventbrite," one of their organizers tells me, "but we'd be happy with half of that." The venue, CrowdShed, is full of little pockets of men sipping Peronis, and, presumably, talking about weed. There are four women in the room, including a journalist from the Evening Standard. The mood of the gathering is like a free drinks event at a Silicon Roundabout startup, but with the pre-hipster millennials discussing Westminster policy rather than apps.

CISTA's logic is increasingly common: they want to legalize cannabis because they believe the War on Drugs has failed and that new strategies need to be employed. CISTA's draft manifesto declares that people "no longer wish to criminalize social and medicinal users of cannabis, fund organized crime, or divert police and criminal justice resources from more pressing local needs." With only 80-or-so days before the 2015 General Election, they're joining the race unfashionably late, but—with their ambitiously bourgeois launch event—they're definitely taking it seriously.

Paul Birch is both the brains and financial brawn behind CISTA. A tech start-up guru and brother of Bebo founder Michael Birch (it is said, in whispered tones, that he has "Bebo millions"), Birch is a rangier, middle-aged Zuckerberg. "I've been working on this since December," he tells me, when I corner him and his PR agent (who looks like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction) downstairs. It's a recurring theme: when I ask people how long they've been involved with CISTA, their answers range from "last week" to "Thursday." Tarik, who gave the final speech at the launch event, bundles onto stage, declaring that he didn't know he'd be giving a speech having only heard about CISTA a few days earlier.

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CISTA founder Paul Birch. Photos by Jake Lewis

But all these men (and it's hard to ignore a gender imbalance that would make the UKIP chairman blush) share a common belief. "It's a simple argument, there is only really one side to the argument," says Birch, before delving into the wild world of metaphor, "When you've got that much of a one-way street it needs to change as quickly as possible.

"There is no drug policy related political party here in the UK. That's why we started it. If it was already there, we wouldn't need to." Birch even talks fondly of the Lib Dems and it would be hard to believe that he's a politician, in any sense of the word. He just seems like a peppy kid with a new toy, albeit the Action Man of Social Change. He started CISTA because he's a) an entrepreneur, and b) he wants to free the weed.

"We're looking for 100 candidates," Birch announced in his earlier speech to the congregation, "at the moment, we have about five."

The name of the party, CISTA, stands for Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol, which seems to set two of the nation's favorite drugs in direct opposition to each other. As the free booze flows, I ask Birch whether CISTA is anti-alcohol. "I used to have a few drinks," he says, "but the data is clear that alcohol is more dangerous than cannabis." His PR guy tries to interject with the citation that heroin actually makes people more healthy if it's pure enough, but Birch looks uncomfortable, sinking into his seat like a toddler being warned off gummy bears. "I didn't know that," he says, and then steers conversation back to cannabis and CISTA's electoral plans.

"We're looking for 100 candidates," Birch announced in his earlier speech to the congregation, "at the moment, we have about five." One hundred candidates is a pretty optimistic target for any minor party, not to mention the 500 quid deposit you have to set down just to run (you don't get it back unless you get 5 percent of the vote and CISTA are only hoping for 1 percent). So who's going to shell out £50,000 [$77,000] to put up these candidates? "We're hoping to crowdfund," Birch tells me, but I can't help wondering about those mysterious "Bebo millions" I'd heard tell of. How much will he personally put up? "I'd be willing to put in about £100,000 [$154,000]."

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Birch himself is planning to stand, although he hasn't decided where yet. He thinks it'll be Hackney South and Shoreditch, which, in the last election, saw three independents and a Communist League candidate in the field. Labour won it with a 14,288-vote lead over the Lib Dems in second. Who knows how the introduction of CISTA will shake up Shoreditch's cosmopolitan cocktail?

Reaching that fabled 100-seat target remains but a glint in Birch's eye, but his team has already started to amass an army of activists. CISTA's few already-committed candidates run a small gamut of collared-shirted respectability. There is nothing of the Kevin Smith stoner tradition here, just intelligent leftists who smell like a Denver Broncos jersey. In fact, Colorado is something of an inspiration for CISTA. When the Rocky mountain state legalized marijuana, back at the start of 2014, they saw a tangible economic and social boom. It was such an explosion that "Colorado cannabis" became the top Google result for the state.

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Tarik Fontanelle

At the event, I had a chat with Tom Mullany, one of the few candidates who has committed to standing. He has a sort of cherubic Gary Barlow vibe and looks like he's come straight from work. "I got involved after giving an impassioned speech in a pub on drugs policy," he tells me, "and then, over brunch, they asked me to stand."

Mullany will be going up against Chuka Umunna in Streatham this May and I ask him whether this is a way of flirting with the Labour man about reforming the party's drug policy. "No, it's to challenge him." Mullany is obviously passionate about the issue and he's not alone. The room is a complete choir to CISTA's preacher, but the UK is reaching the point, along with the US, where reform to cannabis laws are a matter of when, not if. "No politicians will tell me they're against reform," Birch says, "I think we could realistically see a change of policy in the next parliament."

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Paul Birch and (second left) his Harvey Keitel lookalike PR guy

Ed Miliband, one of the country's Prime Ministers in waiting, has already come out against that idea. "I haven't taken drugs," he said. "I'm not in favor of decriminalization, for example, of cannabis, because of my reading about it—and I have read about it." What Miliband has been reading is anyone's guess, but a YouGov poll commissioned by CISTA states that public perception of cannabis places its safety somewhere between the dangers of tobacco and the light-hearted frivolity of booze.

Legalization of cannabis is one of the complete no-brainers to most people (or most people who will make up the electorate in, say, 20 years, at least). But only the Lib Dems have committed to a Royal Commission on the issue, and, let's face it, if the Lib Dems get any real power in May, we've all lost. So reform on this issue continues to require the efforts of single-issue groups like CISTA, and mugging media clowns like Russell Brand, to force the arm of the men and women with real power: the lawmakers who have "never tried," "never experimented," and "never taken" the drugs in question.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

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The author in her nu-metal days. All photos courtesy of the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

How exactly I got into nu metal is hazy, but I seem to recall it starting—like most things did—with a boy. I met one at a summer camp, we kept in touch on MSN Messenger, and he made me a mixtape with Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory on one side and Deftones' White Pony on the other. This all coincided with me learning how to smoke cigarettes and wanting to express my individuality while also desperately needing to completely fit in with everyone around me.

From there, I spiraled into Slipknot and System of a Down, Korn and Kittie, Incubus and Papa Roach. I found a gang: We'd sneak out to the Oast House in Rainham and sit outside drinking gas station vodka in our Coal Chamber hoodies; Or later, sneak into the Manor Club in Chatham, where snakebite would slosh over our heads as people screamed: "The toxiceeeeteeey of our ci-yer-ty."

I also made out with guys who braided their beards.

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To many, nu metal was the worst thing since Tommy Lee's tiny chin strip, providing a wholly undesirable stopgap between grunge and garage rock, not to mention fodder for Fast and Furious soundtracks until whenever Vin Diesel packs in the explosions for a career on the stage.

And yes, sometimes I want to kick the teenage me in the tits for listening to bands like Adema and buying the first and only album by the Union Underground. But when you were a kid growing up in nondescript suburbia, going through the stuff that kids go through, and you hear a futuristic metal track with proper angst and screaming and rapping and emoting, it all makes total sense. Remember, this was just before 9/11 and the Iraq War—the sound of a generation that had nothing to be pissed off at other than itself.

Here's what I took away from it.

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YOU'RE NEVER TOO OLD TO BE ANGRY AT YOUR PARENTS
Nu metal's foghorn motto was that everyone should fuck off and die and leave you alone, which, of course, was perfect for the defiance against our parents we all have when mom and dad are still paying for literally everything we do.

In the year 2000 I was 12 going on 13, hurtling towards periods and adolescence, and trying to make sense of what all these new feelings were. Mostly, it was white-hot hate. I hated my father for choosing booze over his daughter, and I hated my mother for moving me to a different town so that she could get a better job and raise me as a single parent.

We relocated at the peak of my nu metal phase, and the music both encapsulated and harnessed my pre-teen rage. I vented to Fred Durst's rap-whines about wanting to "break stuff." I played Papa Roach's "Last Resort" at volume so that no one, no matter how "concerned," would try to come into my room for "a little chat." And I'd sing along to all the shriek-y bits from White Pony like I was a 25-year-old man from Sacramento fretting about going "back to school." Kids are such dicks.

METAL IS EVEN MORE AMAZING WHEN IT'S WEIRD
Trent Reznor once compared nu metal vocalists to people auditioning for Sesame Street's Cookie Monster, and it's true that pretty much every nu metal band has, at some point, probably sat around in the studio and gone, "Hmm, what bat-shit gargle can we get the kids to sing along to this year?"

The "woo" in Deftones' "Street Carp." The orc mating sound at the beginning of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness." The demonic scatting during Korn's "Freak on a Leash." It's all a big joke, isn't it?

Now, I'm not very technical when it comes to the provenance of genres, but I appreciated that nu metal was basically metal's weird younger sibling—the little brother who gets suspended from school for trying to solder a classmate's hand to the desk. It was also indefinable: Some nu metal bands didn't have rapping; others didn't have superfluous DJs drafted in to do three seconds of scratching at the beginning of every song.

Nu metal was just unashamedly odd, which suited me perfectly as a 13-year-old, because I liked to think I was a little odd, too.

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MOSHING IS A VIOLENTLY EXCITING BONDING EXPERIENCE
Ozzfest, Milton Keynes Bowl, 2001. It was my very first festival, and the lineup couldn't have been more nu metal if you'd given every performer black goatees and frosted tips. Slipknot, Papa Roach, Soulfly, Disturbed, Amen, and Mudvayne were all there, supported by the kind of bands that made every teenage stoner blowing off PSATs believe they too could one day play a half-hour set to a room full of disinterested teenagers.

I charged to the front as if I was a minotaur and not a young girl with developing boobs and easily breakable bones. I shoved a lot of cute boys and got whacked in the eye by a girl (cool!). The mosh pit fired me up: The shared enjoyment of music never felt so forceful than when Slipknot made us crouch down, only to "jump the fuck up" in unison and dodge the flying wallet chains (overdone now, thrilling back then).

These days at gigs I stand at the back, arms folded. Though really what I want is to let go enough to partake in nu metal's demented tribal dance.

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DON'T BE AFRAID TO DRESS LIKE A TOTAL FUCKING IDIOT
Just as nu metal's sound was confused and diverse, so was its dress code. Korn sported Adidas tracksuits and decomposing dreadlocks; Limp Bizkit had backwards caps and a guitarist who looked like he knew what human flesh tastes like; and the less said about Mudvayne the better.

None of these looks quite worked in British suburbia, so nu metal fashion here took on its own freakish form. Most people went into the local head shop with $10 and emerged as a low-rent cyber-punk—knock-off band T-shirts, dog collars, shag bands, hoodies, fairy wings, facial piercings, blue hair gel, army shirts, fishnet tights worn as crop-tops, and Criminal Damage pants so baggy at the bottom that my mom called them "pavement sweepers." Honestly, it's a wonder any of us ever got laid.

Still, there was solidarity in looking like total fucking idiots, huddled around at the Rochester Castle Gardens, as we were, fooling around with townies, smoking menthol Super Kings, and having our first lesbian experiences. Older relatives were constantly telling me that nu metal was "a phase I would grow out of," which only made me more determined to prove them wrong. Even though it smells of days-old placenta, I still have a small stretching in my ear. My ongoing tiny act of rebellion.

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READING AND LEEDS FESTIVAL IS AN ESSENTIAL RITE OF PASSAGE
All music journalists ever associate Reading and Leeds with these days is doing coke with pompous indie bands in the Holiday Inn bathrooms. It'll always have a special place in my heart, however, for teaching me some essential life lessons during my nu metal era.

One: owning being on your own. I don't think I'd be the woman I am today had I not lost all my friends during the main stage segue from Incubus into Slipknot into the Offspring in 2002, decided I was actually fine on my own and crowd surfed my way to the front.

Two: extreme scheduling. Running between tents like you were trying to escape your own ass was the only way to see bands. If you weren't watching something then you were simply wasting your time.

Three: gladiator-strength endurance. The Reading campsite was a hellscape of jumping naked over fires as they were sprayed with Axe, getting fingered by guys with chipped black nail polish, and 100,000 crazies screaming "I am Spartacus!" outside your tent. As someone who completed five consecutive years of Reading Festival, I'm pretty sure I'm equipped to survive Armageddon.

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BODY DECORATION DOES NOT AGE WELL
Nu metal was an interesting time for experiments in body adornment. Facial hair, for example, was worthy of its own specialist containment team. This was a time before conditioning oil, when most guys had wiry chin straps or, in the extreme case of Shavo Odadjian from System of a Down, actually attempted to see how many elastic bands they could fit onto their beards. Worse was the guy from Disturbed, who tried to style out the saber-toothed soul patch he'd actively inflicted on himself.

It's not hard to imagine how they'd go down in the job office, let alone what it would be like, um, down there. I'm ever grateful to my mother for only letting me get so far as some offensive temporary braids, like the ones Rayna Foss from Coal Chamber had.

Had I had free reign over what I stuck on or in my face, I would've had platinum dreads, piercings anywhere you could fit a needle, and probably some horrendous tribal tattoo on my neck. Not so great if your dream occupation is anything other than working in your local Hot Topic.

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SEXIST SCUMBAG LYRICS WILL BRING OUT YOUR INNER FEMINIST
I had no idea what misogyny was when I got into nu metal, but it's funny how songs that detail a "titty suckin' two balled bitch with a fat green clit" (Korn's delightful track "Kunt") set off the raging feminism alarm you didn't know you had. Nu metal was my gateway into alternative rock and, as I discovered grunge and then Riot Grrrl, I began to question why these fat-fingered white guys were slut-shaming women in their songs.

For years I had relished in nu metal's gnarled riffs, swirling misery, and simpleton heaviness, when the music I was empowered by this whole time was, in actual fact, demeaning. Even Deftones, a masterpiece of a metal band, veer wildly between sexy and sexist at times. I'll never be able to divorce the music from my sense of nostalgia, but nu metal's problem with women is the genre's great shame. I haven't got into music at the recommendation of a boy since.

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PEOPLE REALLY DO = SHIT
Slipknot were wrong about a lot of things. Like, say, boiler suits and clown masks being practical stage costumes. They were right, though, when they condensed the problem with the human race into one, screamable slogan. At their recent Wembley show with Korn, two people behind us in their Slipknot T-shirts bleated at my friend and I to sit down so they could see. They were about to play "Wait and Bleed," FFS.

This fleeting moment of fury made me remember that it doesn't matter what band's name blares across your chest, or what multicolored hair extensions you have, or what boys with six-inch spiked hair you are into: being alternative is a state of mind. If you're the sort of person who asks people to sit down at a Slipknot gig then you should probably just fuck off, have a lemon ginseng tea, and beige away your Friday nights sewing War on Drugs patches onto your army surplus satchel.

Follow Kate on Twitter.

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It's no secret that Tumblr is full of porn. You don't even need to go looking for it: On Tumblr, porn finds you. Start an account, follow a few blogs, and before long your dashboard will be full of S&M gifs and nude selfies of self-promoting cam girls, or nasty stuff, like revenge shots, photoshop forgeries, and hacked celebrity nudes.

The upside, though, is that Tumblr offers alternatives. Tumblr is sex-positive and inclusive, full of diverse, feminist-friendly porn. Experimental porn. Tasteful porn. Maybe even porn that's safe for work.

Audio Porn is one of those Tumblr blogs. At first it doesn't look remarkable: it's plain, text-heavy, pastel pink, and devoid of images. Instead, there are little black bars of clickable audio. No one glancing over your shoulder would have suspicions, unless they were to read the URL.

But Audio Porn lives up to its title: It's a little online treasure trove of sexual experiences, each post submitted by readers who have recorded themselves during sex. It's disconcerting, ASMR-like, intensely intimate, and more than a little bit adorable.

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Tracks are published without context and without contributor's names: Only the track's title is provided, offering few answers (" Great sex" and "Cute boy moans" are among the most popular posts on the site). They act like a prompt for sex, rather than giving you the full story, asking the listener to imagine the rest.

The effect is something like having stumbled onto a phone sex line, or living next door to insatiable neighbors in a building with very thin walls.

I spoke to Audio Porn's founder, who prefers to remain anonymous but who also runs the Romantic Pornography Tumblr (aka " Porn4Ladies") where the tagline is "Yes, women actually masturbate! Happy orgasming."

Both blogs have gained a significant following, though Audio Porn's success was less predictable. "I have almost half a million followers on P4L," says the site's founder, "and some of the most popular audios on Audio Porn have been listened to over half a million times."

The experimental measure of restricting porn to sound clearly found an instant niche: "I'd listened to audios before and it really turned me on—I mean, who doesn't secretly enjoy it when they can hear someone having sex in the next room? I also like it because the followers aren't crusty middle aged men masturbating by themselves at home. The audience is much younger and very female."

The minimalist approach goes against porn's historical tendency to cater to the male gaze by disposing of the gaze entirely. Some tracks feature gasping and female screams of pleasure, others are far less identifiable and might pass as entirely unrelated to sex were we not given a clue in their title.

The result is female-friendly, democratic, and inclusive, and followers are all too happy to join in. "I get too many submissions to cope with. Most of them are ladies masturbating... I think sex audios are my favorite thing to receive in my inbox." The format allows for exhibitionism with minimal chance of being identified: "People seem very relaxed about their privacy. It's a lot harder to identify audio of people having sex or masturbating compared with pictures or videos."

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Still from audibleporn.tumblr

Getting off on audio is not without precedent: rumors famously plagued Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg's " Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" that the orgasm sounds at the end of the track were real, leading to a radio ban for the track and ensuring its everlasting infamy. And on a skit on 1994's Ready to Die album the story has always been that, yes, that really is the sound of Biggie getting a blowjob.

The tracks leave listeners curious, and the blog's creator is no different. "People don't tell me much about the submissions, which is frustrating. I'd like to know more." And yet that has to be part of the fun: the idea that you could be listening to anyone, a unique and random cross section of Tumblr users.

It's hard not to ascribe a certain reactionary quality to the Audio Porn blog, standing against the very different, very visual porn blogs which already populate Tumblr. Taking away one key element makes it experimental, and political in a sense. It's amateur porn with no risk of exposure, no body politics and no identity, leaving just the immediacy and intimacy of sex. The threat of doxxing so often leveled at women in particular loses its currency.

It seems little coincidence that the blog receives audio of female-sounding voices most of all: the blog lets women negotiate amateur porn on their terms. Says the site's creator: "Running the blogs has just reminded me how much women do masturbate, regardless of whether they admit to it. I love scrolling through my followers and finding all these pretty innocent faces, and realizing how kinky they really are."

Follow Roisin on Twitter.

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Diasporic Cyanotypes, Sanaa Hamid

This article first appeared on VICE UK.

Zine publishing and DIY culture has a long-running and thriving connection to the feminist discourse. The current wave of self-published material from women and girls is an exciting and active demand for autonomy and control over creative content. The all-female collective OOMK (One of My Kind) publishes a biannual zine comprised of the creative work of women and girls, with a specific focus on activism inclusive of color and faith. They're open submission, but they've also published work by well-known artists, such as regular VICE contributor Molly Crapabble.

To discuss the current surge of female collectives and the social contexts in which women—particularly women of color—create art in Britain today, we asked OOMK editors Rose Nordin and Sofia Niazi speak to London-based art historian and regular OOMK contributor Aurella Yussuf. They also shared with us some of the work they've printed within their first three issues.

OOMK: Feminist and girl zines have a growing prominence. Why are zines so synonymous with challenging sexism?
Aurella Yussuf: I think they are a sort of democratic space—anyone can make them and produce any kind of content. I think there's also something to the craft aspect of it. There's been a historical division between the masculine, elite field of fine art practice and craft which has for a long time been feminized.

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What can we take from this to apply to the art world?
I think it's the power of the collective, really. What we've seen is women, especially women of color, working in collectives—which is something that is repeated, whether sewing quilts, or publishing zines, or organizing protests, or curating exhibitions. But it's not very compatible with the hierarchical structures of the art world.

As an art historian, what do you consider to be key roles of women in the arts, and how has this evolved over time, if at all?
On the surface it appears to be quite a woman-centric industry: There are more female art students, and generally arts organizations are predominantly staffed by women. However, most senior roles are still held by men—particularly the highest-paid roles at the most prestigious galleries and museums, and the work of women artists still sells for less than their male counterparts. If we are the majority in the field then why are we still marginalized?

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In OOMK's second issue you interviewed The Guerrilla Girls, who have been challenging sexism and racism in the arts since 1985. How has the landscape changed since they began?
I feel like there's now a culture of box-ticking without addressing root causes of discrimination, or embracing inclusivity at the core. I mean there is no shortage of all kinds of people making art. You can't put a lid on creativity, it will just manifest in different ways depending on the resources available.

What is your reaction to what is being termed fourth-wave feminism, and do you think this evolution of the movement is more inclusive of women of color?
I don't like to get bogged down with "waves" of feminism, but in any case, women of color are marginalized in society, and of course this is replicated in all kinds of groups, even liberal, activist, or feminist ones. Just absence from certain spaces speaks volumes.

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In art school, we've experienced the lack of diversity of the student/staff body and the course content. Despite this, we are seeing women of color working and developing their practice outside formal institutions. What has been your experience of studying art history, and with the increase in student fees what do you think formal art education has to offer?
I feel lucky with my education, having had a diverse curriculum, and a faculty that was very supportive of my interests. But it does get tiring always seeing panels of white, male experts. I do worry that the rising costs will put young people from marginalized groups off studying arts and humanities in favor of something that will "get them a job." But I've come across a number of young people who say, well there aren't any jobs in any field, so I may as well study something I like. I'm not sure if that's encouraging or depressing.

The benefit of art school is that it buys you time to play around with your ideas and try out different techniques. Whether or not the tuition fees for art school itself are worth it is debatable, but spending three to four years just to work on your craft? I don't know when else you get an opportunity to do that.

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What do you feel, strategically, is key to inclusivity in the arts?
It's about more transparency and lower barriers to entry. One of the biggest factors is money—either having it, or knowing how to access it. And it's great to have women-only spaces, and culturally specific institutions, but it's not enough to say, "Oh, let's just stick all the women in there, or all the ethnics can exhibit their work in that space now." I don't want to see a slew of black artist exhibitions during Black History Month, and nothing the rest of the year. Inclusivity needs to be incorporated across all areas of cultural institutions, from top to bottom, not just in outreach.

What's next for you?
I'll be appearing at DIY Cultures for the third year in a row, which I'm looking forward to! I'm also working on a project about Somali history through visual and material culture, launching in the next few months, so look out for that. In the meantime, check out my blog or catch me doing theater reviews on Colourful Radio.

Any recommendations for art exhibitions or zines to check out?
Look out for the Lonely Londoners. They are a young collective of creatives who make and curate artwork, and recently published their first online zine called Queenies, Fades, and Blunts. There's an exhibition coming up at Tiwani Contemporary by Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. Her work is paper-based and feels kind of ethereal but at the same time it has a really rich, sprawling narrative.

We've recently created a zine reading room around the theme "Visions of the Future" at the IHRC Bookshop Gallery. What book would you like to see written in the future?
The Definitive Guide to Afrofuturism.

Follow OOMK on Twitter or check out their website.

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A nurse administering a vaccine. Image via Rhonda Baer

"In Weberian socio-economic terms," says Wikipedia, "the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class." Which is an incredibly awkward way of saying "the people between the rich and the poor." Being middle class means a bunch of things—degrees, the News Quiz, kale, and so on—but it can also have a pretty big impact on your health.

Top of the list is that you're more likely to have something wrong with you. Or at least, you're more likely to have it diagnosed. A study out recently, for example, found that kids from poor families in the UK were half as likely to be diagnosed with coeliac disease than their middle class peers. Given that there's no real reason why one group should have it more than the other, the most likely explanation is that kids from poorer areas just don't get diagnosed as often.

So far so good for the middle class. The trouble is, more diagnosis isn't always a good thing—especially if it's likely to lead to more false positives.

Cervical screening is a good example of this. It's a great way to detect the early stages of cancer and saves lives, so you'd assume that getting more women of all ages to have it done would be a good thing, yet at the moment women in Britain under 25 aren't screened—something that upsets quite a lot of people. Trouble is, women under 25 are much less likely to get cancer and much more likely to have random abnormalities in their test results—oddities that go away naturally over time. That means more false positives, which means more unnecessary treatment, which means more harm to women on average than if they weren't screened.

Things get even murkier when you delve into mental health issues. There's a long-running debate in the medical profession about increasing rates of ADHD for example, and whether too many kids are being given a false diagnosis thanks to parental pressure and a pretty subjective test. An article in the BMJ last year cited evidence that up to half a billion dollars was wasted in the US on inappropriate diagnosis, which in real terms translates as a lot of kids medicated up to their eyeballs on strong prescription drugs they might not need.

That said, it may not be as simple as too many kids being diagnosed. Better testing and more vigilance also explain some of the rise in cases of things like ADHD and Asperger's. What is clear is that middle class parents are far more likely to seek and get a diagnosis than poorer families—class has a bigger impact on rates than pretty much anything else. So where there are false positives and over-medicated children, there's likely to be a larger representation of the middle class.

And yet if middle class kids are overmedicated for some conditions, they're under-treated for others, which brings me to the MMR vaccine and the measles clusterfuck current hitting the US. Measles just shouldn't happen in a modern nation with a functioning healthcare system, because for decades now we've had safe, effective vaccines. Unfortunately, some parents have stopped letting their children have them, and now kids are getting sick.

A big problem with anti-vaxers is they tend to live together. Not literally in the same house, but it tends to be the same types of people who fall for this anti-vaxxer crap, and they tend to live in the same sorts of areas, which means their children go to the same schools, which means a big localized pool of unvaccinated kids for outbreaks to take hold in.

Who are these people? Well, there are two basic groups. One, as you'd expect, is people in poverty. Folk from rough inner-city neighborhoods, with poor access to services, whose main impression of government is a bunch of greasy white assholes telling them how useless they are and how they should fuck off back to wherever they came from.

The other group, a bit more surprisingly, is middle class parents with graduate educations in richer areas. In Kensington and Chelsea in the UK, for example, MMR vaccination rates fell to less than 60 percent during the early 00s. You can see a similar effect in California, in the wealthier parts of places like Orange County, where rates of vaccination are a lot lower than surrounding areas.

The problem with these people is that they're just clever enough to be stupid. They know enough to be confident searching for alternative sources of information on Google, but all that new information confuses their poor, harried brains and they end up making bad choices anyway. These are the people responsible for much of the current mess in the United States right now. Working class people may skip the odd vaccine, but it takes middle class Californians to be so colossally moronic as to throw measles parties.

So can being middle class kill you? Is it bad for the health of you or your children? Unless you've done something spectacularly stupid, probably not. For all the unnecessary crap you bring down on yourself with your Googling and your hypochrondria and your stupid tiger parenting, the simple fact of your class means that you've got up to seven extra years of life baked in from your cozy, organically-fed womb.

It's not easy being middle class. But it's far better than being poor.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

Four years since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant went into full meltdown and the resulting 12-mile evacuation zone was enforced, one farmer still remains, braving high levels of radiation and loneliness to tend to abandoned animals. His name is Naoto Matsumura, and he is the last man standing in the ghost town of Tomioka. VICE Japan headed into the evacuation zone to speak with Matsumura and hear his views on TEPCO, government inaction, and life in this post-nuclear landscape.

The sign outside the building reads: Every Saint Has A Past, Every Hellion A Future. This must be the place. I park next to a stack of motorcycles and pickup trucks, alongside a bus with "THE FIRST HEAVY METAL CHURCH" written in the same font that Iron Maiden uses.

"Woo!" says the enthusiastic man greeting me at the door. "Welcome to the Heavy Metal Church, bro!" He puts up his hand to give me a fist-bump.

"Woo!" I offer in response. I'm wearing an outfit that I hope will make me blend in—a sweater with a large skull on the front and a rocker headband—and it turns out that I've nailed it. I'm surrounded by a sea of tattooed bikers. We're all here to put the Jesus pedal to the heavy metal at the First Heavy Metal Church of Christ in Dayton, Ohio.

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FHMCC was founded three and a half years ago by Pastor Brian Smith, a heavy metal musician who became disillusioned with the Christianity of his youth. "I used to go to a church where every Sunday I was told I was going to Hell for wearing shorts or going swimming in coed swimming holes, or listening to any other music than hymns," he said in a recent radio interview.

So he left that church and, armed with a cheap PA and a stack of discount Bibles, started his weekly FHMCC services in the back room of a venue where he played with his secular metal band, across the street from a strip club.

"Go to all corners of the Earth and baptize all men in the name of the Holy Spirit," says Pastor Brian. "What better place to do that than a bar?"

As the popularity of his metal church grew, Pastor Brian moved the service to a biker bar called Jackass Flats, which soon became a standing-room-only affair. The congregation eventually grew big enough to hold regular Sunday services in both Dayton and Greenville, Ohio, inside the auditorium of a former elementary school, with a different band performing every week.

This place rocks for Jesus. But according to Pastor Brian, the name has a double meaning: It also refers to the "full metal [or armor] of God." And unlike some churches, the First Heavy Metal of Christ makes a point of saying its house of the holy is open to all. In the words of its website:

Prostitutes, drug addicts, bikers, gang members, metalheads, felons. It doesn't matter what you've done, or where you come from. Here at the FHMCC, everyone is welcome with open arms.

"This is a church for people who might not feel comfortable in a traditional church setting," says Pastor Brian, looking around at the crowd of people studded with piercings and tattoos. "Most people want God in their lives, but think they must clean up first before coming to Christ. You don't clean up before you jump in the shower, do you? No. God wants you exactly the way you are at this very moment."

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The FHMCC service begins at noon. I don't know how many have arrived at the church hungover, but I can count at least one. (It's me.) After fist-bumping another biker, I'm handed a FHMCC program with Jesus riding a Harley on the front.

"This is truly a cross-section of what the body of Christ should look like," says Pastor Brian, referring to the crowd. If you squint, the long-haired, bearded bikers do look sort of like old-timey biblical characters. There are roughly 300 people packed inside the auditorium; there are bikers and bikers' girlfriends, but there are regular-looking folks too, and little kids. There are tons of people wearing black FHMCC T-shirts, which are sold at a merch table near the back.

"We're going to have healing, redemption, salvation, and deliverance take place here today," says assistant Pastor Ron, from the front of the auditorium. Pastor Ron is a bearded guy who, if he were in a motorcycle movie, would probably be nicknamed "Tiny."

"Woo!" goes the crowd.

Then the music starts. It's a head-thrashing, blood-pumping tune, with decidedly Jesusy lyrics: "I believe / How about you / I believe / It's true / I believe in him!" We bang our heads.

"Get your hands clapping! Come on!" says the guitarist wearing black who plays Judas Priest–style guitar with his combo.

"Woo!" goes the crowd, throwing their hands up.

"WE SAY HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!"

When the opening act is over, Pastor Brian takes to the black pulpit, which is adorned with a large red heavy metal cross. The self-proclaimed "Rebel for Christ" makes an Angus Young reference about the guitarist and mentions that FHMCC is forming a house band and they're currently looking for a drummer.

And then: "Last Sunday, four confirmed people came to Jesus for the very first time in their lives," Pastor Brian says. "We've had 300 baptisms in seven months. There are churches that don't get 300 baptisms in a decade. Isn't that amazing? God rocks!"

"Woooooo!" everyone screams. I "woo" with them and accidentally make devil horns with my fingers.

"God is using this church in amazing ways, and it's plain just ticking the devil off!"

And then we rock some more. More metal. More head-swaying. If gospel music is a mainstay of Southern Baptist churches, then heavy metal plays the same role here in blue-collar Ohio.

When the metal concludes, Pastor Brian delivers a classic rock sermon: "Pink Floyd's The Wall came to me when I read the book of Philemon. It's like, Tear down the wall," he says. Everyone gets silent. "That is the theme song of the book of Philemon—tearing down the wall."

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Pastor Brian believes that there could be a Heavy Metal Church of Christ in every major city, if led by the right pastor. But surprisingly, he's found that the church's main opposition is other Christian groups. He's gets hate mail: "You need to quit the First Church of Satan. You're leading your congregation to the pits of Hell. Repent!"

"A lot of people, when they hear the name alone, automatically judge us," he says. "We've been called a cult. I've heard everything from, 'We serve beer at our services' to, 'We're nothing but a bunch of hell-raisers that want to live the way they want and play church on Sunday.'" He pauses. "Nothing is further from the truth. The devil is alive and well and he'll use Christians and non-Christians to do his bidding."

Taken by this, Pastor Brian penned a pamphlet called "Christians That Give Jesus a Bad Name," which he passes out at secular metal shows to connect with people who have had a bad experience with church. The catalyst was a Marilyn Manson concert in 2006, where he saw a group of "super-Christians" with bullhorns and signs yelling at the kids walking in that they were going to burn in Hell.

"The kids were yelling obscenities back—it was just horrible," Pastor Brian recalls. "They were just doing it all wrong. If you want to win kids over to Christ, you attract more bees with honey and not vinegar. I'd rather love the Hell out of you than scare the Hell out of you."

Pastor Brian thinks that this was the way Jesus would have done it. "Let's get together and save these lost souls because the world is going to hell in a bucket right before our eyes. The devil is the real enemy," he says. "That's what I've learned from this ministry—I can forgive sinners all day long; sinners and saints alike—we have to forgive them."

Pastor Brian's secular metal band was less forgiving, though. They recently parted ways, after complaining that Brian was mentioning FHMCC too often during gigs.

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The service is concluded with a story about Led Zeppelin. "I was up at five in the morning working on my sermon, and I thought 'I hope Robert Plant makes it up to heaven,'" Pastor Brian says.

Heavy metal laughter.

"'Robert, I hope you make it to heaven and we can be singing together on the streets of gold,'" he continued. "Then it dawned on me—what about that homeless man on the corner? I put Robert Plant on a pedestal up to here because he is one of my vocal heroes—but I want that same kind of passion for everyone out there, even people who hurt me and spit on me. We need that passion for all lost for all people."

There are "amens" from the crowd.

"This is where I'm going to leave you today," says Pastor Brian. "If you want easy, go live like a rock star. Being a Christian, it's not easy—it's not. But I'm telling you, it's worth it."

Then there's a final song—and once again, we rock out. People are head-banging, singing along, and hugging the big bikers who are praying for us at the front of the auditorium. A few tough guys are crying as the music builds, with their heads and hands lifted upward. Looking around, I think if I had to believe in a big magical invisible man in the sky, this would be my go-to place.

I start talking to a man wearing a motorcycle patch that says "Satan Sucks." He tells me he's the lead singer of a punk band that does Dead Kennedy and Clutch covers, and he compliments my skull sweater.

"I used to do shows and all I could think about was getting the show over so I could go meet my drug dealer," he says of his life before FHMCC. "Then I met Brian at a metal show. When I first met him, I had a beer in each hand—and he still invited me to his church."

He tells me he's now sober and still plays in his punk band—and he attributes the FHMCC for saving his life.

"Have you changed your set list at all now that you've found Jesus?" I ask.

"I won't do the Rage Against the Machine song 'Killing in the Name,'" he says. "It has all that swearing at the end."

Follow Harmon Leon on Twitter.

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If you're white, racist and fed up with the grinding oppression of living in the West, where you're forced to rub shoulders with a small proportion of people who are not the same race as you, there's a new solution: move to Africa.

That's according to plans made by the users of one thread on 8chan—a cesspit for people who are too uninhibited in their internet vulgarity even for 4chan.

Here's how forum user "Kommandant" began his call for his white supremacist mates to join forces with him and create a new neo-Nazi utopia in Namibia [all sic]:

I just want to start by saying that no feat is too great, no task too arduous when done for the love of ones clan and ones blood. I have a hope for this future to prevail. And I know you can all see it too. It's an ember, but with just the right amount of breath it can become a raging fire. And all of Africa will see its beautiful glow in the night sky. Call it south West Africa, call it Rhodesia, Call it whatever you want.

Over the last couple of months, a motley crew of white supremacists, Latvian lawyers, and fertile women have heeded the call, in a last-ditch effort to save white culture. They have launched a project to found a new nation on the principles of "European Heritage," "Western Values," and National Socialism in the largely black country in southern Africa.

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A typical post on the forum

8chan's aspiring colonists believe that Africa is a lawless space where enterprising white people can carve out a slice of Empire for themselves. They are driven by what Kommandant calls a "love for a dying culture and a people under systematic attack" (i.e. white people). The forum users have decided that the best way to avoid this systematic attack is to found their citadel in a nation whose people were fighting an insurrection against white supremacists as recently as 25 years ago. Some on the forum seem to be in it for the racist lulz, but others seem to be taking it seriously.

The project is mostly overblown rhetoric but there have been some attempts to get organized. Over 150 people have volunteered to join as colonists, crude plans have been made for the foundation of the nation, and a popular vote has chosen the name "New Rhodesia"—after what Zimbabwe used to be called when it was trying to keep apartheid rule going.

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A map posted by a forum user to help decide who is allowed in the colony

One of the more surprising problems with getting the whites-only colony off the ground is that non-white people want to join. As one completely exasperated user posted:

Can we stop it with the 'can I come here guys? I'm not white BUT'
No, you can't. It's intended for white people... It's not that we hate you (though I can imagine some very well do) it's that we don't want to live anywhere near you.

Don't want to live anywhere near non-white people? Better go to Africa then, mate.

The project lurched forward recently thanks to a burst of critical thinking from one user, who pointed out that the Namibian government might take issue with a 150 dollar store Colonel Kurtzs landing in their country and starting a nation founded on the principles of white supremacy. It took user "Curonian," a Latvian lawyer, to come up with the group's masterstroke—the creation of an NGO called the "Latvian-African Civil Welfare Project" which would be founded under the guise of, in one user's words, "helping the poor starving Africans."

The charity would provide them with the bona fides to establish their colony, until it was strong enough to get rid of any non-white people using means that neo-Nazis are more accustomed to. As one user put it: "Don't worry, we will act all tolerant while we are still under Namibian rule, but when we get independence all the non-whites will get the boot or the bullet."

The colonists have identified a few areas of Namibian land ripe to be settled, while "Operation: First Contact" has sent out feelers to attract local white Africans. Meanwhile, volunteers have been quick to explain the skills that they can offer to the New Rhodesian enclave.

One user states that he is "a white male who has lived around blacks the majority of my life, and speaks passable German." Others claim experience in logistics or military operations, while one aspiring Goebbels believes that his degree in Media Studies will help him "promote the cause of National Socialism."

Another user, describing himself as Polish with a BA in War Studies, claims to have "connections to the British Far Right" and more mainstream right wing organizations including the Conservative Monday Club, Western Goals Institute. He claims to be a, "real life acquaintance of a few UKIP MEPs, a few Tory MPs and personal acquaintance of [former UKIP MEP] Godfrey Bloom and Paul Weston"—a far-right politician with links to the EDL. There is absolutely no suggestion that those people or organizations are involved with, or sympathetic to, the aims of the colony.

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The colonists discuss reproducing

Right now, however, there's one asset which trumps even supposed connections to British politicians—possessing a womb. The project has a bit of a gender imbalance. As one would-be colonist points out, "To prevent inbreeding, considering there's 200 of us max and we need 5,000+ to create a safe naturally selective gene pool, we need people who can reproduce plentifully." He hastens to add: "no gays."

One user, posting as "Concerned Citizen" calls herself a "white British 22-year-old female free of both disease or deformity." She seems to have missed her calling writing erotic fiction and describes herself as being, "in an impersonal sense, the ideal breeding stock." She put a pressing question for the project's high command:

Now I'm curious that if you guys ever wanted this little plan of yours to actually produce something, how exactly would you go about convincing women like me to leave with you? I genuinely want to know because a colony isn't going to last long without a potential next generation, and for that you require females, and for lack of females how would you prevent a colony from breaking down, violating laws put in place and raping every available female regardless of whether they're spoken for or not?

Weirdly, nobody seems to have come up with an answer as to why leaving home to hang out with some guys who go on and on about racial purity isn't a more appealing prospect. The question has been asked a lot, resulting in some navel-gazing about countries that have high proportions of women.

If they do ever manage to have any kids out there, one user has some insight into how to raise them properly:

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Users have tended to prefer to play real-life Age of Empires, debating flag colors and military organization while more boring, practical matters get comparatively short shrift. That said, they have worked out that goading elephants is a bad plan:

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Another discussion is what they should do for fun, given that "degeneracy," such as anime and homosexuality is off limits:

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Maybe they can listen to this guy's poetry instead:

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The main discussion of the project has moved from the public boards of 8chan to password-protected chat rooms, leaving some users concerned about the project's future. Whether this is a tactical decision to avoid exposure or a response to hostile criticism and mockery is hard to say.

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Unfortunately for the colonists, Namibians have cottoned on, with an article in the Namibian Sun newspaper, with the headline, "Racists hatch a Boer nation plan for Namibia." So I guess if they ever make it there, they won't be particularly welcome anyway.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This Valentine's day thousands of people from the UK will be alone, and not because they don't have anyone they would like to spend it with. Rather, because their spouse is barred from the UK by the country's increasingly draconian immigration policy.

In Swansea, a married couple are currently crowdfunding to avoid becoming another pair of victims of the government's spousal visa minimum income requirement, which a 2013 report by a group of MPs and peers described as "tearing UK families apart and causing anguish."

Brandon, a US citizen, moved to Wales in 2012 to live with his British wife, who has schizophrenia and has, in the past, made several attempts on her life. Recently, Brandon's wife's disability benefit has been cut, leaving Brandon in danger of being deported if he can't pay for expensive legal advice (like many immigration cases, Brandon's no longer qualifies for legal aid) or find full-time employment.

Since the summer of 2012, UK citizens have been required to prove an annual minimum income of £18,600 ($29,000) in order to be eligible to sponsor a spousal visa — more than £5,000 ($7,700) above the annual UK minimum wage. In effect, this means that poorer people—or around half of the population—aren't allowed to bring a partner to live with them in the country where they were born.

In the year ending June 2014, 25 percent of family visas were rejected, which works out as nearly 12,000 families denied the right to live together. And those are just the ones that applied for visas—there are probably many more who have sought pricey legal advice or spent hours studying the rules just to realize that it's not even worth trying. Or, perhaps they couldn't afford to pay the £601 ($925) visa fee applicants are required to submit with their spousal visa application.

Brandon's friend Pete, who set up the crowd-funding appeal for him, points out that, although the couple have had half an hour here and there of free legal advice, this is insufficient to "unravel the complexities of immigration law." The minimum income rule comes with caveats such as the visa sponsor having to have been employed for more than six months at the required salary and not having a child (a child boosts the minimum up to £22,400 [$34,500] a year).

Like many modern couples, Brandon and his wife met on Facebook, where nation state borders aren't a problem. "We started talking, I fell in love and eventually I moved down to Wales," Brandon told me. "I filled out all the paperwork and did everything we needed to do to emigrate."

Brandon's wife's mental health condition means she's unable to work, but in 2012 her disability benefit was sufficient to sponsor Brandon's visa. Since then, Brandon says her health hasn't improved. "She's still the same as when I met her," he says. In fact, Pete says that now she "relies on Brandon for care and support."

But the government believe otherwise. According to Brandon, operating by the "rule" that, if you get married, you suddenly become magically better. As a result, Brandon's wife has lost her disability payment of £60 ($92) per week, leaving both her and Brandon struggling to survive on a reduced amount intended for only one person. "Even worse is that this benefit cut means she can no longer sponsor Brandon for his spouse visa and he is likely to be deported back to the USA," says Pete.

Setting a compulsory minimum income for people wanting to bring their partner to the UK is based on the government's preoccupation with reducing immigration figures. The right-wing rhetoric of immigrants as benefit scroungers goes hand-in-hand with this plan.

When the Court of Appeal reluctantly upheld the minimum income threshold in the summer of 2014, the Conservative Immigration and Security Minister James Brokenshire said he was "delighted" with the ruling. "We welcome those who wish to make a life in the UK with their family, work hard and make a contribution, but family life must not be established in the UK at the taxpayer's expense and family migrants must be able to integrate," he said. "The minimum income threshold to sponsor family migrants is delivering these objectives and this judgment recognizes the important public interest it serves."

Brandon's wife has lost her disability payment of $92 per week, leaving both her and Brandon struggling to survive on a reduced amount, intended for only one person.

Other than the fact that the UK economy would be completely fucked without immigrants, this is nonsense because family visas explicitly prevent the recipient from accessing public funds. As a foreign national staying in the UK on a temporary spousal visa, Brandon, for example, is not entitled to claim benefits. But like many people in the UK, he's finding it impossible to get a job. "Times are really tough and there aren't a lot of jobs out there," he tells me. "I apply for jobs and no one calls me back."

"Brandon has attended interviews where employers have been impressed with his enthusiasm and skills, and has been offered irregular part-time or zero-hour contract work," says Pete. "But this is not an option as his wife's ESA and housing benefit are stopped when he works. And she needs professional help to fill in forms and to get letters of support from social services to evidence her condition each time he stops or starts work. To date she has done this eight times, and finds it a dehumanizing and distressing process."

Currently, Brandon contributes to the community by doing voluntary work at an environmental recycling center. He says he would accept any job offered and would even consider moving elsewhere—"anywhere in the world"—because the job market in Swansea is so bad. But of course, this is difficult to do without any money to make a new start with.

As well as asking people to contribute to Brandon's legal advice costs, the crowd-funding appeal is explicitly asking anyone in Wales with a full time, reliable job going to give Brandon a chance at working it. If nobody steps forward and Brandon doesn't find work, it's likely he'll be deported. Because Brandon's wife's mental health condition would immediately disqualify her from being eligible for a US visa—according to Brandon, "They don't want anyone that's a bit off, they only want super people,"—the couple would be separated, and Brandon would be unable to offer his wife the day-to-day support she needs.

At the time of the judgement in favour of a minimum income requirement, Ruth Grove-White, policy director at the Migrants Rights Network, stated : "These rules are a shocking infringement of the right to family life, as almost half of the UK working population earns below the required amount."

The European Convention on Human Rights takes a similar view, emphasizing the right to family and private life. It stipulates that this can be overridden only in the "interests of national security, public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others." Given that people on family visas have no access to public funds, it isn't clear how spousal immigration can damage any of these interests.

The government's disregard for Human Right's guidelines, erosion of legal aid, and inadequate benefits system have left Brandon, his wife, and many others in similar situations with nobody to turn to—except, it seems, strangers on the internet.

Right now, Brandon's marriage is under constant stress. "We fight and argue all the time about it," he says. "It's a really bad situation." He supports his wife the best he can, but, as Pete points out, the fear and threat of Brandon's deportation is a stressor that can make his wife very unwell.

The thing is, it would take very little to make things a lot better for them both. So far they've raised £416 ($640) toward the fairly small £605 ($931) figure they're asking for to cover legal advice. And even this might be unnecessary if a local business steps up and helps out. "Really," Brandon says, "I just need a job."

Follow Charlotte on Twitter.

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'Skyrim': a tick for both "SOMEONE ELSE'S EYES" and "SOMEONE ELSE'S BACK"

Now that we've got January out of our systems and given up on the ridiculous premise that 2015 will make us better people, it's time to start effecting genuine change. Nobody cares that you gave up booze for three weeks or almost ran a 5k when it was really cold, and now you're back to reality with the rest of us—which means too much cheese and lovely video games.

Although, hang on: Is gaming even relevant anymore? The only thing I was able to recover from the black box of the wreckage that was 2014 is that the word "gamer" has become a bit confused. Up until recently I'd wrongly assumed that it represented anyone who enjoyed playing video games, but it turns out that the hobby is impossible to properly appreciate unless you enjoy specific types of games and think that women could probably do with being knocked down a peg or two.

So now that mainstream perceptions of our digital fun-times have been drowned in an endless cavern of piss, we may as well burn everything and start again from scratch. This might not seem like a useful attitude, but I'd never had any problem getting an ex-employer to rapidly send me a W2.

The terminology we had in the first place was mostly shit anyway, so I'm sure that precisely nobody will mind that I'm tossing them all and renaming every genre.

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The very shiny Gun Murder Simulator 'Killzone Shadow Fall'

FIRST PERSON SHOOTER

FPS is a staple acronym for those who love shooting people in the face but are keen to elevate themselves just above the masses. No, I don't just play Call of Duty—to be frank I like my Gun Murder Simulators to be a little less gauche. Fuck it, let's just go with that one, shall we? I came over here expecting to settle on Shooty Bang Bang Bang Bang Bangers (SBBBBB), but I've flippantly decided that it's probably for the best that we all just accept the horrifying reality that this is what our brains have decided that we like doing. Gun Murder Simulator doesn't beat around the bush— if anything it climbs into the bush and starts tearing it apart from the inside, like that bit from Alien re-enacted in a local garden center.

Sit there face-frumping at me all you want, but when was the last time you played a shooter where you weren't being tasked with killing other stuff? Robots might seem like a strong get-out clause for now, but give it 20 years and stuff like that will see you ground into meat-fuel by our new overlords.

It's certainly weird that we're culturally obsessed with luxuriously shiny digital worlds that let us shoot things that look like people in the head, but in lieu of any better sociological explanation I think it's time that we accept that humans are simply awful and weird.

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'Gone Home,' which obviously isn't a real game anyway

FIRST PERSON GAMES

Oh God I'd forgotten about these. Not all first person games involve guns, incredibly, which leaves a question mark hanging over what we're supposed to do with games that have the downright gall to stop you from swanning around with a sniper rifle.

Skyrim isn't too bad I suppose, on the merit that it lets you set fire to wolves, but what do we do with something like Gone Home? You don't get a gun, you can't set fire to wolves, and the only reward you get for playing is a simple, yet rich and compelling, story. Obviously that's easy—Gone Home isn't a game.

But what about all of the ones where you can kill people but don't necessarily get to do it with guns? That's easy, we just get rid of the whole First Person genre. Instead, we have a little chart with green ticks on the back of the box: SOMEONE ELSE'S EYES or SOMEONE ELSE'S BACK, with a potential third option for SOMEONE ELSE'S BUM. If you're confused, ask the man at the counter.

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'Dark Souls II', a recent Number Hero Game hit

ROLE PLAYING GAMES

This one's been total bollocks for a very long time. In theory RPGs are about stepping into the shoes of one specific character, and making decisions from the perspective of a person that might have nothing in common with you. These days that's a more accurate description of the stuff that Telltale Games tends to make, but doesn't have a huge amount in common with the modern RPG.

It's such a slippery genre to pin down that I think we'll have to settle with Number Hero Games. Sometimes you have potions and monsters to fight. Other times you're off on a galactic gallivant—but consistently you'll be making numbers go up, and you'll almost definitely save the world at some point. It's pretty much the same role every bloody time.

I'm still waiting on the tale of the country bumpkin whose family is murdered by an evil lord, and embarks on a quest for glorious revenge only to discover that – as a penniless farmhand – he lacks the skills and the means to do anything of any value. One man's hope gradually crushed as he's beaten up by minions and earns pennies growing onions. You might not see the entertainment value in gawping at the hopeless, but my mate Simon Cowell has already proven it to be a deeply robust business model.

Japanese RPGs are an entirely different beast, of course, so we'll just call them Four People Line Up In Front Of A Dragon.

RACING GAMES

One of the few genres with a name that you really can't fault. Some people call them Driving Games. That's fine too. Everything is fine. If you're determined to walk away from this paragraph with something childish and stupid, then fine—let's call them Fast WheelyZoomers. I didn't want this. Are you happy?

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The stars of 'Carry On Attaching a Car Battery to a Man's Nipples'

ACTION/ADVENTURE GAMES

I can never work out why these two always end up bundled together, with action routinely meaning fighting with swords, while adventure could mean almost anything. The first two titles listed in this category on GAME's website are LEGO Lord of the Rings and GTA V. Some people like to bumble about in the shoes of a tiny plastic Gandalf, other people like to murder the elderly with cars—either way it's all just a magical adventure.

This genre is clearly a weird throwback to a time when 60% of all games released were a blatant pastiche of Tolkienesque guff, but these days unless you've got a magic sword or you're a photocopy of Indiana Jones, the term "Adventure!" just seems woefully camp. We might as well get Barbara Windsor mo-capped and call GTA V "Carry on Attaching a Car Battery to a Man's Nipples."

Action is just a piss-weak way of pretending that the cherry on the cake isn't violence, and adventure doesn't mean anything at all. Let's go with Violent Games, Story Games, and Violent Games 4 Kidz.

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'Dota 2' is a leading Click On The Man Then Click To Go Somewhere game, sort of

MOBA GAMES

Online Multi-person Arena-based Tactical Combat Games (OMpAbTCGs). Look, if it was easy to come up with a better name for these then the internet would have stopped constantly arguing about it flipping years ago. For the sake of simplicity, let's bundle the bastards in with Strategy.

STRATEGY GAMES

It's a proven fact that no-one really knows what strategy games are, which is why "it's like Command & Conquer" has been the go-to phrase for anyone dealing with dads since 1995. Allow me to end this reign of awful confusion by pulling the curtain back to reveal this beauty: Click On The Man Then Click To Go Somewhere Games. Pow. If that isn't specific enough for you, wrap your brain-lips around this little treat: Make a Cool Base and Then Kill All the Baddies Game. I should definitely work in marketing.

And as far as I can tell, that's everything fixed. If in doubt it's probably a game where the aim is to kill people efficiently, so next time you're shopping with your mates you can impress them with your expert knowledge by pointing at the shelves and simply shouting, "MURDER!"

Finally, in other business, the genre terms "Beat 'em up" and "Shoot 'em up" have both been decommissioned and the people responsible for coining them will shortly be boiled down into glue.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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Strolling on the slopes of the Illinizas, two volcanic mountains in Ecuador

Today, a lot of photographers might start with a phone and work toward an expensive camera. Ivan Kashinsky has gone the other way. While shooting for National Geographic, Time, and Geo, he's amassed an Instagram following of 116,000, mostly from stuff he's taken with his iPhone. He says this has been so satisfying that he now often leaves his professional gear at home. I was curious about how this universal shift in journalism could be embodied in one photographer, so I called Ivan at his parents' place in California. We talked about his story, the speed of internet-led change, and about shooting in his adopted Ecuadorian home.

VICE: Can we start with some background? Who are you?
Ivan Kashinsky: I'm from LA originally. I got into this by playing with my dad's Nikon F when I was in high school and I fell in love with taking photos of my friends. But I never thought I'd make a living with photography so I went into psychology. I did that for a while and ended up in a class called social documentation where I started taking photos of homeless people. It felt so good to be in the darkroom and people liked my photos so I decided it was my calling. So I went back to community college, did a few internships, and met my wife—she's from Ecuador—who edited the university newspaper. We moved to South America in 2004. I've been there since.

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Investigating the toxic waste left behind by Texaco in the Ecuadorian Amazon

And why photography?
I like to tell people's stories, and especially when they can't tell their own. I've been doing a lot of environmental stories lately for that reason. I also work a lot with my wife and we try to spend time with people, get to know them and their lives. I guess it's all about seeing others live.

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Due and posing, Ecuador

Why have you switched to using phones?
A year ago my wife was pregnant, so we were at home a lot. And I just started shooting photos with my iPhone around our town in Ecuador. So I got excited about it and started uploading my photos straight to the National Geographic Instagram account, and linking it back to my own. That got me heaps of subscribers really quickly and I had full creative control. I realized I was onto something.

Is this the direction for photojournalism?
I think so. I think photojournalism has already changed so much over the past few years. Now, if you have a big enough name and followers through social media, you can take it into your own hands and be your own publisher. You can publish your own books using Kickstarter and upload all your own stuff to the web. You don't need the middle guys. It's scary in some ways because magazines and newspapers are going downhill, so we don't know how we'll survive, but then I'm probably working more now than I ever did.

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Heavy metal fans in Ecuador

Maybe the internet has sped up that rate that people consume images.
I think that's true. And you know, I heard the other day that more photos were taken last year than have ever been taken in the history of photography. With all the camera phones out there now, I believe it.

But don't photos from a phone look kind of shitty?
No, you can take really beautiful photos with phones now. The technology has become that good. You have less control, that's true, but then there's something freeing about the phone. It's less intrusive. People are intimidated by big cameras but with phones, it's like, You take a photo of me then I'll get one of you . Another thing is that you always have a phone. If you're walking to the store or whatever, you're always ready to go if you see something. I love that spontaneity.

Follow Julian Morgans on Twitter.

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Look at Lane Milburn's website and get his book from Fantagraphics.

This month the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a report (pdf) called "Drug and Alcohol Crash Risk" that took a look at how often illegal drugs cause car accidents. In a finding that should surprise nobody, researchers found that people who used drugs were more likely to crash. "However," they added, "analyses incorporating adjustments for age, gender, ethnicity, and alcohol concentration level did not show a significant increase in levels of crash risk associated with the presence of drugs." In layman's terms, that means that you're not statistically more likely to get into a wreck if you're on drugs—but it's possible that if you're driving on drugs you'll also be drunk, or simply young and making bad decisions, which increases your chances of bending your vehicle around a telephone pole.

There may not be reliable statistics on the number of accidents caused by specific drugs, but thanks to years of studies we do know quite a bit about what certain chemicals do to your driving abilities. Here's a rundown of the worst things you can put into your body before you get behind the wheel.

Obvious disclaimer: Don't do drugs and drive. You're probably safest if you don't do drugs or drive, but definitely don't do both at the same time.

Uppers

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Via Pixbay user Sammisreachers

If you're a three-cups-a-day type of person, you'll probably protest that you need your morning coffee or you'll (at least figuratively) crash during your drive to work. Coffee has been shown to improve vigilance, and people have long assumed that stopping for caffeine can perk up tired drivers—but in 2011 researchers found that "improvements in driving performance and alertness after caffeine are likely to represent withdrawal reversal rather than a net beneficial effect of caffeine." In other words, you're better off just not drinking the stuff at all.

To make matters worse, if you're sleepy and you grab a cup of drive-thru coffee to wake you up, you're going to keep getting sleepy for an hour before the caffeine takes effect, meaning you might still be a danger on the road long after you think you're back in business.

More extreme sleep-killing drugs are even more hazardous for drivers. Cocaine may jolt you awake, but science says it also makes the world around you more frustratingly boring, leading coked-up drivers to engage in what the NHTSA calls "turning in front of other vehicles, high-risk behavior, inattentive driving, and poor impulse control," which is also known as "driving like an asshole." An Australian study found almost identical problems in meth-addled drivers.

MDMA, believe it or not, has a reputation for helping people's driving. The authors of a 2012 study noted, controversially, that the drug can "improve some psychomotor driving skills when administered during the day." But who takes ecstasy during the day? The meat of the study focused on people coming home after raves, and they tended to be pretty bad drivers in those conditions—but the researchers blamed the sleep deprivation, not the drug.

Downers

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Photo via Flickr user museinthecity

There's a good chance you've already driven after smoking pot, which I've already said is probably not a good idea.

But the major problem with driving while stoned is that increasingly, people are driving with both marijuana and alcohol coursing through their veins, as shown by an HBO documentary about the catastrophic 2009 Taconic State Parkway crash, which killed eight people and is believed to have been caused by a driver's lethal combination of marijuana and alcohol. "The two drugs potentiate each other, at which point one and one don't equal two anymore," Carol Weiss, an addiction psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College, said in the documentary.

In that same film, Betsy Spratt, Director of Toxicology for Westchester County, said that "alcohol may increase the absorption of the marijuana," and that since pot "[is] a hallucinogen, your cognitive function can deteriorate pretty rapidly," resulting in drivers getting confused, lost, or, as in the case of the 2009 tragedy, driving the wrong way on a freeway for almost two miles before causing a deadly three-car pileup.

Opiates, meanwhile, can cause horrible, life-ruining addictions and fatal overdoses, but there are worse drugs to be on while behind the wheel. When it comes to pills like Vicodin and Oxycontin, a 2013 survey found that high doses were dangerous for drivers, but low doses weren't necessarily a huge problem. And having trace amounts of drugs hanging around in your bloodstream is a necessary part of day-to-day existence for methadone users in recovery.

Killers

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Some stuff you can get at your corner pharmacy without anyone looking at you sideways can seriously impair your driving. Over-the-counter cough syrup with dextromethorphan (DXM), for instance, is notorious for being abused by suburban high schoolers. If they get behind the wheel of a car, they're probably no safer than drunk drivers. An Erowid user who enjoys the drug advises people, "Don't think for a moment that you can drive on DXM; even if you can't tell, it greatly reduces reaction time."

Meanwhile, Benadryl, according to Dr. John D. Weller of the University of Iowa, "may have an even greater impact on the complex task of operating an automobile than does alcohol." It produces such a heavy-duty high that the NHTSA commissioned a paper on it that detailed exciting effects like ataxia (lack of muscle coordination), tremors, hallucinations, and convulsions. That paper concluded the drug "clearly impairs driving performance." An Erowid user says a high dose of Benadryl caused a freakout behind the wheel that included hallucinations spanning "from shaky trees to just thinking trash cans were people."

No, Seriously, These Will Kill You

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Azreey

Then there are drugs with such pronounced effects you would think no one would actually take them and then try to drive, but then again, humans have a seemingly limitless capacity for stupidity.

PCP, obviously, can make people do some insane things—news reports about angel dusted drivers include accounts of decimated gas stations and accidents that turned into attempted abductions.

Driving on LSD has obvious problems as well—who wants to be operating a huge machine in the middle of a trip?—but people still do it on occasion. Sometimes these stories can be almost cute, like when George Harrison and his wife drove around London really slowly in a Mini Cooper. But you are not George Harrison, in so many ways, and it's best if you avoid that sort of thing. Most people seem to know this already, which is why the NHTSA report on LSD says "the incidence of LSD in driving under the influence cases is extremely rare."

Just stay home, people. How hard is that?

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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A mining facility in Chiapas, Mexico owned by Calgary-based company, Blackfire Exploration, Ltd. Image via Wikimedia.

An employee of a Canadian-owned gold mine in Cocula, Mexico is among two people still missing days after local police freed ten others said to be victims of a kidnapping.

The group was travelling in an SUV about 30 minutes outside of Cocula on Friday when kidnappers dressed as police or military personnel abducted them.

Mexico's interior ministry said Sunday that ten of the victims were "rescued" by local Mexican forces, with one being treated for a gunshot wound. Three of the victims were hired at Media Luna on contract.

It all happened in the troubled Mexican state of Guerrero, where 43 student-teachers were allegedly murdered and burned to ashes in September by Mexican narco-traffickers colluding with state forces. More than 70,000 people have died in Mexico's war with narco-traffickers since 2006, while officials say 22,000 are missing.

The recent kidnapping is just the latest in a dizzying web of corruption, collusion, and human rights abuses that constantly revolve around Canadian-owned mines in Latin America.

And while Cocula is a case unique to Mexico's troubled political landscape, it serves as a reminder for Canadians to more closely examine perhaps the nation's best-kept secret: our mining companies are under accusation of constant human rights breaches.

Canadian mining activity in Latin America has skyrocketed over the past decade. Acting on 1994's North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada signed agreements with several Latin American countries to facilitate easy access for resource extraction. Those countries include Peru (2009), Colombia (2011), Panama (2013), and Honduras (2014). As such, five of the top ten locations for Canada's international mining assets in 2014 were Latin American countries.

According to Natural Resources Canada, the value of Canadian mining assets abroad reached $148.7 billion in 2012, accounting for 66 percent of all Canadian mining assets.

Canadian activities in Mexico are especially pronounced. With nearly 200 companies in operation, Mexico is the top destination for Canadian mining investment outside of Canada. In Guerrero, terror, violence, and intimidation are a daily occurrence and the gold is said to be cheap and easy to mine. Indeed, Canadian companies such as Goldcorp, Newstrike Capital, Alamos Gold, and Torex Gold Resources all have a strong presence there.

Several experts have pointed to the recent incident in Cocula as part of a battle between armed narco-trafficking groups struggling for power. MiningWatch Canada says it's an "all-out war" between these crime groups in nearly every municipality in Guerrero.

Pablo Piccato, a history professor at Columbia University, told VICE that Cocula could represent a situation where one armed group was trying to extort money from Torex, the owner of the Media Luna mine. The group could also be trying to undermine competing groups that might sell protection to Media Luna. As with the Missing 43, though, what exactly happened in Cocula remains unknown.

Unofficial reports claimed that the group responsible for the abduction demanded ransom from Torex, but the company's vice-president of investor relations said it hadn't received threats or been the victim of extortion attempts. In fact, Torex CEO Fred Standford told one outlet that the motives behind the lone employee's extended kidnapping has nothing to do with the mine.

About 200 people work for the company full-time at the site and 1,200 work for contractors.

Neither vice-president Gabriela Sanchez nor Stanford responded to inquires from VICE.

In Mexico, like in other Latin American countries (including Canadian trade partners Colombia and Peru), foreign mining companies indirectly deal with local narco or paramilitary groups for access.

Often those groups work at arms' length with government and military, collusion especially felt after the chilling case of the Missing 43. The crime is still largely unsolved, but it has been established that a local police force was working alongside narco-traffickers the night of the incident.

Countless cases of violence in Mexico are connected to the country's strangling presence of narco-traffickers, but the end result often mirrors that of mineral-rich countries like Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and Guatemala, among others. Locals and activists standing in the way of foreign investment are often met with violence from paramilitary groups.

"In Guerrero these crime groups operate in a highly militarized environment and each one will often have various kinds of relations with state forces," said Dawn Paley, a Vancouver-based journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism. "Over and over again, the same forces that are supposedly protecting these transnational corporations have also been found to be working closely with these criminal groups."

Though Mexico is unique compared to the rest of Latin America, these same types of groups continue to exert their will. Recent incidents have sprung up all over the country, including in Chihuahua City, Tamaulipas, along the coast, and the Sierra Madre mountain range in the north.

They're all rich in minerals or gas, and as one can guess, Canadian companies have a presence in nearly all of them.

The same trends surface in resource-rich areas across Latin America. In Colombia, Paley has written about the "militarization of the extractive industry," where US-trained energy battalions protected pipelines, roads, and other infrastructure. She says the US-funded "War on Drugs" is used as a pretext to improve conditions for foreign investment.

Headlines seem to spring up every week in Latin America where locals are confronted with danger and Canadian companies are involved. A quick visit to MiningWatch Canada shows news of an indigenous anti-mining leader in Ecuador murdered by a SWAT team and locals from a mineral-rich area near Cusco, Peru facing intimidation at HudBay Mineral's Constancia project. Then there's news of the CEO of Vancouver-based Tahoe Resources being summoned to a Guatemalan court over accusations of criminalizing community leaders. The list goes on and on.

"If you take a map of where a Latin American country's resources are and a map of where that country's conflicts are, they overlap well," said Arno Kopecky, a Canadian journalist and author of The Devil's Curve. In his book, Kopecky examined two separate incidents in Peru and Colombia in which the activity of Canadian-owned mines ultimately led to the displacement, violence, or murder of local and indigenous populations trying to defend their land.

It's a sad but constant reality: for those who decide to resist a given transnational mega-project, violence often follows.

"I've written about cases of activists being murdered for asking for information about a mining project. Not even doing a blockade, but just asking questions," said Paley.

Those who choose to resist such projects do so for many reasons, but often because of a lack of any long-term legacy left by the mines. "The legacy is for the Canadian shareholders and execs who might get a huge payout for overseeing this mine, but it's the locals who pay a very high price," said the Mexico-based journalist Paley.

"Once the mines close, the locals are left with little more than a polluted natural environment," said Paley, referencing Vancouver-based Goldcorp's recent foray into Honduras through the San Martin gold and silver mine.

As a result of all of Canada's free-trade agreements with Latin American nations, Kopecky said companies are entering territories without firm regulatory checks. Social corporate responsibility amounts to little more than propaganda for many of these companies.

"The mine will be building schools and hospitals for local communities only because it makes good business sense. As soon as it stops making good business sense they'll stop doing it," said Kopecky.

Back in Cocula, the likelihood of the truth behind the kidnapping may never surface. As the late celebrated criminal journalist Charles Bowden once said, "Rumours fly across Mexico; facts crawl."

Meanwhile, the idea that Canada treats the rest of the world with benevolent care have been slowly eroding, too.

"I think that there is some conflict around those kinds of Canadian investments that people are not generally aware of," said Eric Olson, the associate director of the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, a Washington-based think tank.

Kopecky argued that a much closer eye is kept on the industry than even just ten years ago, but in the end, agreed with Olson.

"People cannot nearly get away with as much murder and mayhem as they could before, but I would characterize it as extremely naive to think Canada is on a positive footing."

Follow Joseph Czikk on Twitter.

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Everyone in this photo will one day die. Photo via Flikcr user Adam Fagen

Facebook announced today that it is developing new functionality for your digital life after death. Housed under "Security Settings" is a "feature that lets people choose a legacy contact—a family member or friend who can manage their account when they pass away." But, if the thought of your mom posting on your behalf makes you spin in your grave, "people can let us know if they'd prefer to have their Facebook account permanently deleted after death."

Facebook will also memorialize your account when it's been notified of your death. And if you have selected a legacy contact, that person will be able to write a post to display at the top of your timeline, respond to new friend requests, and update your profile picture and cover photo. However, legacy contacts won't have access to your private messages, so no one will find all those sex chats and have to think about your weird dead boner.

This move didn't come totally out of the blue. Facebook's been inching its way toward this for some time. There was already a form you could fill out and send to the social network's admins titled "Special Request for Deceased Person's Account." But this is the first time the power to decide what happens after you die is in your hands.

Thanatology (study of death and dying) professor Heather Servaty-Seib at Purdue University has been wrestling with the issues surrounding social media and death a lot lately. "I'm teaching a death and dying course right now, and the question has come up in class," she told me. "One of my students asked, 'How will my friends know if I die? Because I communicate with them so much over Facebook and there won't be the possibility for something to be posted.'"

She added that Facebook pages of the deceased actually serve a useful purpose. "Grievers really benefit from being able to interact with the actual Facebook page of someone who died," she said. "Not a memorial page, but the actual page. It's sort of like being able to visit the grave."

Some people are concerned with "sprucing up" their profile before they die for this reason, but Servaty-Seib told me that according to her research, people "kind of liked when it didn't change, actually. You could go back to this page and it was like a virtual grave marker to what the person was like. It provides information that is part of the essence of that person, and it's positive for millennials to go back and see that essence of the person still there."

Needless to say, when Facebook does something in the social media space, everyone reacts. So it will be interesting to see how these new post-mortem options impact other social media services like Instagram, Twitter, or even Grindr. Considering we're living more and more of our life online, it's only right that we should die there too.

Follow Giaco on Twitter.

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A baby pangolin that hopefully wasn't turned into a stew. Photo via Wikicommons.

On February 1, police in Vietnam rescued 42 endangered Sunda pangolins from poachers. On the surface, this seems like a nice thing for Vietnam to do. After all, we are talking about a country that just a few days ago came under fire for crushing hundreds of cats to death with a dump truck. Unfortunately, the cops gave the animals to forest rangers, who in turn sold them to local restaurants for pangolin stew, or whatever recipes call for endangered pholidota. The tragic irony and proximity of these events suggest that Vietnam has some serious, systemic flaws in the local government's approach toward animal rights and management of wildlife conservation.

Statements from local conservation group Education for Nature-Vietnam point out that not only will the light fines issued to the pangolin poachers and counterintuitive actions of the forest rangers fail to deter illegal wildlife trade in the country, but it makes the authorities tasked with animal protection an explicit link in the financial chain of demand for trafficked pangolins.

"Any violations regarding [pangolins] should receive criminal punishment [not just a cursory fine]," Thanh Nien News quoted EfN-V's Nguyen Thi Phuong Dung as saying. "We also can't treat [pangolins] simply as evidence of a crime and then trade them."

Pangolins are small, little-known anteater-like creatures found in parts of Africa and Asia. A particularly odd species (one of ten Sir David Attenborough would put on his own personal ark) dating back 80 million years, they are the only mammals with scales. These toothless creatures have tongues longer than their bodies, which they use to eat seven million ants and termites apiece per year, grinding them with special stones in their stomachs. They have a habit of hanging from trees by their prehensile tails and rolling into pill-bug-like balls for defense—hence their name, which comes from the Malay term pengguling: something that rolls up.

They are also incredibly endangered. Arguably the most poached mammal in the world (while simultaneously one of the least known poaching victims), over a million have been captured and killed in the past decade. Due to a lack of study, we do not know how many pangolins are left in the wild, but thanks to trafficking and habitat loss we are fairly sure that the Chinese and Sunda (two of eight species) are critically endangered. And since they rarely survive in captivity and we're not sure how to get them to breed in the six zoos that manage to keep them, once they die out in the wild there's basically zero chance of rehabilitating a managed or wild population.

Most of the demand for pangolin is fueled by markets in China and Vietnam, which value their meat as a delicacy and scales as a cure-all medicine. Demand has decimated local populations, leading to imports of poached and smuggled pangolins, alive or dead, from Africa and Indonesia. In Vietnam in particular, a kilo meat (the tongue makes a soup, the blood is drunk fresh as an aphrodisiac, babies are dropped into wine, and the remainder is steamed) sells for $250 and a kilo of scales will sell for up to $1,500. Demand is so high that within the first eight months of 2013, officials found ten metric tons of pangolins in the northern port of Hai Phong alone (most weigh about 33 kilos as adults, meaning over 300 pangolins were trafficked there). Then in the summer of 2014, authorities uncovered a single shipment of 1.4 metric tons of scales alone, which adds up to as many as 3,000 pangolins. And those are only the cases they catch.

Most nations that deal with pangolin smuggling take it pretty seriously. In China, smugglers busted in stings can face up to ten years in jail for a first-time offense. Many nations with native populations, like Zimbabwe, also work with trusts and conservancies to rehabilitate rescued pangolins and release them back into the wild to help maintain their threatened populations.

Thanks to increased publicity about the animals (Britain's Prince William tried to raise awareness about them last November by getting pangolins featured in Angry Birds, for instance)—including work on pangolin protection PSAs by EfN-V—Vietnam has made moves in recent years to bring its conservation policies in line with international norms. Under Government Decree No. 160, pangolins now enjoy protections status on par with elephants, rhinos, and tigers in Vietnam. And in fall of 2014, it seemed like officials might be pushing for cooperation between police and the nation's pangolin conservation program in Ninh Binh Province's Cuc Phuong Park, agreeing to turn over smuggled animals for rehabilitation and release.

"This [was] the first time confiscated pangolins [had] been transferred to the Carnivore and Pangolin Conservation Program since 2010," Thanh Nien News quoted project head Luong Tat Huang as saying of the handover of several seized pangolins that fall. "This is considered as a positive signal for wildlife conservation in Vietnam."

Yet there does not appear to be much commitment to enforcement of the new, strengthened protections on the ground. Local conservationists believe that police do not actively investigate poachers, but only stumble upon them when rival traffickers snitch them out. They also claim that forest rangers tend to see the protection of trees rather than animals as their primary remit.

And it appears that news of policy shift toward protection and conservation didn't reach any of the (numerous) authorities involved in the recent pangolin smuggling incident. According to Thanh Nien News, Le Van Minh of the Bac Ninh Forest Management Department believed it was legal under 2006 regulations for authorities to sell and profit from seized pangolins. (Apparently the sale of smuggled, poached animals upon their seizure is not uncommon amongst Vietnamese officials.) Minh's decision was approved by the province's People's Committee and the animals were inspected by health officials and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to verify that they were (supposedly) beyond rehabilitation. This suggests that multiple layers of government knew of the forest rangers' intentions and signed off on them.

However according to Thanh Nien News, Hoang Thi Thanh Nahn, a senior official of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, reaffirmed that selling seized pangolins is no longer a valid practice. And the government has taken the money raised from the sale.

Although officially Vietnam is on the right track regarding poaching protection and pangolins, this is a pretty good and clear example of how things can go screwy between proclamations from on high and practices on the ground. Officers seem to be operating under old regulations, which fail to adequately punish those trafficking a critically endangered species and just feed the demand for and complete the financial chain of poaching. Hopefully the publicity of this case will help disseminate the new pangolin-related regulations. But one way or another, this latest incident, coupled with the recent cat crushing, just makes it clear that Vietnam seriously needs to get its shit straight, from official policy to on-the-ground implementation, with regard to animals.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.