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Alastair Campbell photographed ahead of his talk for the Financial Times' "Undercover Economist" series. Photos by T-Bone Fletcher.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Alastair Campbell wants to teach you how to win. In his new book, Winners: And How They Succeed, he profiles victors from the fields of sport, politics, business, and acting, creating a blueprint for success modeled on the stories of people far more successful than you. It's by no means a self-help book, but you'd probably benefit from paying it some attention if you ever want to dredge yourself out of that entry-level recruitment job.

As Tony Blair's chief strategist, Campbell helped steer the Labour Party to three consecutive election victories, so there's plenty of personal insight in the book as to what it takes to win. However, I wanted to hear some of that insight applied to what's currently going on around us, so I met with Campbell last week ahead of his talk for the Financial Times' "Undercover Economist" series. We spoke about winning, Malcolm Tucker, and the silliness of modern politics.

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VICE: Tell me, is Ed Miliband a winner? Or Clegg? Or Farage?
Alastair Campbell: They all have some of the qualities that you need to be a winner, but the point about the election is that there are only two people who can be prime minister—that's Cameron or Ed.

Is Nick Clegg a winner? He set himself the objective of getting into power in some form. He's done that, so maybe. But I think he'll struggle this time. Farage is somebody who superficially might look like he has real importance, but I don't see him as a winner. I think he'll fade. Cameron, as I say in the book, should have walked the last election, but didn't.

Yeah, that was a weird one, because how many years were Labour in before he was elected?
It was 1997 to 2010—13 years. But it wasn't just the time; it was the economy, it was Iraq, it was Afghanistan, it was MPs' expenses... the media were giving him a really easy ride. So I don't think he's a winner. I don't think he's strategic. The one thing he's quite good at is looking and sounding like a prime minister.

Then there's Ed. A lot of people say he doesn't sound and act like a prime minister, but I think he does at least have a sense of his own strategy, and does believe big things—like the world is too unequal, like the economy should be the servant of society rather than the master. I didn't vote for Ed, I voted for his brother. But remember, he won that, and a lot of people said he wouldn't.

So they've all got different qualities. I think, if you look at the public, they're not sure; they don't know whether they want either to win. So the campaign's going to be important.

Do you think there might be some lessons for all of them in your book?
It is, I hope, useful to people in politics and business. What I'd like to happen with the book is, people in politics, rather than just looking at sport as something interesting on the telly, they see they can learn a lot from it—so you can learn from some of the great stories of teamship, and innovation, and strategy.

Sportspeople and politicians have different views of what strategy is, but people who are interested in strategy should look at the ways in which strategy is used in different worlds. So I wrote a chapter about Mourinho as a strategist—not just as a manager, but as a strategist. Or Gary Kasparov, the chess player, he's a proper strategist.

Yeah, and you say, although he's very anti-Putin, he'd still recognize Putin's mastery.
Well, see, it's obvious he hates Putin. But I think, although most people outside of Russia would say he's got all the qualities of a bad man and wants to be a totalitarian leader and all that, he does have an understanding of strategy.

Are you worried that your book might be used for ill? That someone like Farage might take some lessons in strategy and tactics from it?
I hadn't thought of that. You know, I don't think so, because I'm not saying anything that I don't believe, and I do think a lot of politicians could get a lot from studying strategy more deeply than they do. My hope would be that [it's used by] politicians who want to do good things, but that's a very good question. Nigel Farage... I hope he doesn't use it. I mean, there's nothing to stop him.

Yeah, he could just pick a copy off the shelf.
Actually, to be fair to Farage, he does have fairly clear objectives.

To leave the EU.
Yeah. And his objective for the election is to kind of make the weather—to be the noise. But his strategy is kind of falling apart. He's a bit like Cameron: he's good at tactics, but I'm not sure what his strategy is. Because recently, for example, he said he believes in the health service as a publicly-funded blah, blah, blah, not long after he said it should be a private model. Good question, though, about the book being misused. What if it was used by some evil terrorists, you know? I hadn't thought of that.

You regularly interview people yourself for GQ. What question would you like to be asked?
I love being asked questions I've never been asked before, because I do a lot of talks and you tend to get the same questions again and again and again. That's the first time I've been asked, "How would you feel if somebody took your ideas and used them for evil?" So that made me think.

I'll tell you the question I get asked the most: At Labour Party events it's, "Why don't you stand as an MP?" I also still get quite a lot of questions about Tony and what I think his legacy will be. But I like the left-field questions.

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Is House of Cards' Francis Underwood a winner?
Definitely. I put Kevin [Spacey] in the book because of the Netflix story of innovation. It was really interesting, the fact that Kevin and David Fincher refused to do a pilot [for House of Cards]. They said to all the networks, "We're not doing a pilot because pilots are shit. Pilots basically force you to truncate everything and put the whole thing into 50 minutes, and we're just not going to do it." And Netflix were the only ones who said, "OK, right, we'll just pay what you want."

So Francis Underwood is a winner. However, here's an interesting thing: Is Lance Armstrong a winner?

He was...
So Lance Armstrong won a lot, but there's a great quote in the last chapter, in an interview with a runner called Haile Gebrselassie. He says, "Lance Armstrong's got a winning mindset, but he's a big loser, man." He's basically saying he's lost his reputation, and you can't win if you lose your reputation.

So Francis Underwood is a winner now... but President Nixon was a winner for a while, so I suspect Francis may come to a sticky end.

You said you're asked a lot about Tony Blair. If you were running Miliband's campaign, what would you advise him?
Well, there's only ten weeks to go. If you look at this through an objective, strategy/tactics prism, the objective is to win, and the strategy has to be related to what Labour's wanting to do in power, so I think his best strategy is being absolutely upfront about change, because that's how he came to lead the party. He basically said, "Of all the people standing, I'm the one who's going to offer the most change." Now he's got to do the same with the country. He's got to have people feeling that he's more on their side than that of the people at the top, which is where the Tories are. But then you've got to really get back to the point with teamship, energy, fight. There's not long to go; they've got to be out there more, and they've got to be far more aggressive in taking the fight forwards.

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Are you a winner?
Well, I've won things, and I've helped to win things, and I definitely have a winning mindset—but I also lose things, and I've had setbacks and difficulties. I think the reason I wrote the book is not to say, "Look at me, I'm a winner," but to show I think I understand those things that people need to know to win, and this is why, at the end, what people say about you doesn't matter that much. It matters a little bit, but not that much.

Yeah, you use a Harry S. Truman quote in the book, which is fitting here: "It's amazing what you can succeed in if you don't care who gets the credit."
Yeah, I love that.

Is that applicable to you?
I think so, yeah. I have a big ego—I really have. But I genuinely am a team player.

But, to serve that ego, you were also credited as being the "master of spin."
When I was doing the job, I think the media changed fundamentally. It changed in scale, so the media age became a reality—24-hour news, social media—and it became much more focused on the means of communication. So I think that's the reason we copped it like we did.

So the role of being the publicity guy changed?
Totally. In the modern world you have to communicate, and you have to communicate on your own terms.

And it seemed you also got more publicity than previous press officers.
Yeah. I remember Andy [Rawnsley] at The Observer saying to me, "You're probably too interesting." I said, "Well, I'm just doing my job." And he said, "Yeah, but most people in politics don't have a backstory of a drinking problem, they don't have a backstory of a breakdown." I think most people do have a backstory of some sort, but that's what he felt.

Also, I was the one who was seeing the media all the time. You know, twice a day, they all came into the briefing room, and I think they elevated me as a way of elevating themselves. That's my theory.

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That kind of works. And then they created a character who's a comical version of you.
Yeah, Malcolm Tucker. Do you like him?

I'm not sure I'd like to work for him, but he's very good at swearing. How similar are you to him?
Well, he's a comic character, but I think... I think the idea of wanting control is real, but I didn't want control for me; I didn't want to control the agenda because I wanted to control the agenda. I wanted to control the agenda because that was supposed to help Tony Blair win elections, and then, I hoped, be an effective prime minister. That's what it was about. It was never about me saying, "Look at me, I control the agenda."

Are there any current politicians who you see as having a bit of a Machiavellian streak?
I think Boris Johnson is quite Machiavellian. I don't think what you see is what you get. You see all this sort of pose-y bumbling and eccentricity, but I think that, actually, he's quite a right-wing politician who's desperate to get himself a lot of power.

Who is Machiavellian? The ones they've always talked about are me and Peter Mandelson, aren't they?

Do you think there's any truth in that?
You know, I must admit, I did like it when somebody—it was David Starkey, I think—said that Hilary Mantel's [fictional Thomas] Cromwell was basically Alastair Campbell with an axe. Then Jonathan Price, who played Cardinal Wolsey, did an interview where he said he had me in his mind when he was playing it. I thought that was quite cool. To be both Cromwell and Wolsey—now that is Machiavellian.

I don't feel Machiavellian, but I know I can be. I mean, I've done things that people describe as Machiavellian.

Yeah?
Yeah, of course I have. Everybody does.

Would you say that Peter Mandelson is Machiavellian?
I think we both have traits, but I think we both have values as well. "Machiavellian" has become something of an insult, but actually, Cromwell is all about getting things done. What Kevin said in GQ about Francis Underwood being liked because he gets stuff done—there's something in it, you know? In any organization, particularly politics, to get change to happen you sometimes have to do difficult things. That's part of politics. And the media, you know, the media are the biggest manipulators.

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You think?
Journalism is more manipulative than it's ever been. Because, if you take the Daily Mail, in most stories there's a fundamental dishonesty, and that can affect policy. Like if you look at the debate on immigration, it's just... I think I'm right in saying that there are more Brits in Germany drawing German benefits than there are Germans in Britain [he's right—according to figures collated by the Guardian, there are almost four times as many], but the whole debate—you know, even Cameron is saying, "We've got to stop Britain being such a top draw for immigrants."

Now, it's true that Britain's a country people want to live in, and that's great. But the whole debate, I think, is skewed to this premise that's set by not just the Daily Mail, but the whole media landscape, and I think most politicians pay far too much heed to the media.

Would they be better off ignoring it altogether?
I don't think you could ignore the media—they make so much noise. But politicians should focus much more on what they themselves say and do, and worry far less about what people say about them, because, ultimately, politicians still have a lot of power. They're scared, though, of facing up to the idea that maybe they have less power [now] than they did.

And they're also scared of social media, right? Tweet a picture of a white van and it suddenly becomes a huge deal. Do you think politics has become a bit silly in that respect?
A lot of it has become silly, yeah, but I still think politics is terribly important, and I think it's still how changes for the better are made. If you look at a lot of good things in the world—women's rights, racial equality, sexual equality, the stuff I'm doing now on mental health—all the big campaigns involve politics.

The silliness has always been there, by the way, but now—with the dumbed down, downmarket media—I think what it means is that the stuff that used to be a diary story, you now see on the BBC, because they feel they've got to take people to this downmarket center of gravity.

Finally, in the book, you often talk about "making the weather." What do you mean by that?
Setting the agenda, being one of the forces around which others gravitate. So Farage is an example. Or Alex Salmond in the referendum. If you look at the media, I hate to say it, but the Mail make the weather. There was a time when the Sun made the weather more. You'd say, at the moment, because the Telegraph did that sting with Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind, that they were making the weather for a day or two.

I would say, within Europe at the moment, Angela Merkel makes the weather more than anybody. Russell Brand makes the weather. He says things that command space and attention, and others make space around it.

I hope my book makes the weather.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alastair Campbell's new book, Winners: And How They Succeed, is available to buy now.

Follow Hope on Twitter and visit T-Bone's website for more of his photo work.

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Alex Da Corte in his installation Die Hexe, 2015. Portrait by Matthew Leifheit

What would happen if some of your favorite living and dead artists collaborated with you on the creation of a life-sized dollhouse that also mirrored your grandmother's struggle with dementia? The largest installation artist Alex Da Corte has made to date, Die Hexe, is all of that and more. It opened to the public last Thursday night at Luxembourg and Dayan, a secondary market gallery on New York's Upper East Side. The installation is so bizarre and complicated it defies words—so below you'll find a lot of pictures that are ordered to mirror the experience of walking through the installation. It's a really narrow townhouse located around the corner from the Carlyle Hotel on East 77th Street. Just 12 and a half feet wide, the Mamas and the Papas once lived there. (Suggested soundtrack for this article here.) Da Corte has spent the past five weeks exhaustively remodeling the interior of its first three floors into an art haunted house, which reveals a nonlinear but surprisingly hopeful narrative about death, rebirth, and renewal.

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As I entered the townhouse last Thursday night, I noticed a creepy Victorian-looking door knocker in the image of a hand with a spider on it. This was the only exterior sign that something unusual might be going on inside this usually quiet address, besides the line to get in, which extended down the block toward Park Avenue.

Once inside the dark-purple foyer, a guard allowed members of the crowd to peer inside a glowing orange peep hole one by one. Inside was a Robert Gober sculpture of an infinity mirror leading to a drain. The last room of the exhibition, on the third floor of the townhouse, contains another Gober drain piece, this time a replica, fabricated in white by Da Corte. It sits at the bottom of a drawer—the kind of stainless steel drawer a morgue uses to keep bodies in, but filled with Listerine, which gave the mirrored, pale green room, and the whole floor of the house, a pungent spearmint tang. This kind of planned but playful cyclical logic pervades Die Hexe, which also includes and builds onto pieces by Mike Kelley, Bjarne Melgaard, and Haim Steinbach.

Upstairs, I recognized a lot of art critics, saw clusters of expensive-looking older people who I judged to be collectors based on their indiscernible European accents and bold choice of glasses frames, and ended up running into nearly everyone whose Instagrams were ripped off by Richard Price. As someone who suffers from social anxiety, all of these cool people trying to squeeze past each other in a 12-foot-wide blacklight hallways only added to the house-of-horrors vibe. So I came back on Saturday when the place was empty to chat with Da Corte, and it was even spookier without all the people.

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VICE: I read that the show has something to do with your grandmother. How does she feel about it? Has she seen it?
Alex Da Corte: She hasn't seen it. She is dealing with dementia. And so more than anything, the installation is dealing with dementia, and how our memories and images we rely on, and the words we connect to those images can fail us, and shift. In the same ways that a new context for a Mike Kelley work can shift its meaning... it traces back to this idea that things aren't always constant, and how we have to be on our toes and re-evaluate what's around us at all times, similar to the moment my grandmom's having right now.

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If people buy the room that contains the Mike Kelley piece included in Die Hexe, or the Bjarne Melgaard table, do they get the actual piece?
No, they get a replica of the piece that I make in white. Anything I've contributed to the work remains in color. So, the vessels—the Avon perfume bottles and bongs that are on top of the table would stay in color, but the Bjarne Melgaard Allen Jones table remake would be replicated in white. And the same with the Mike Kelley, it would be white, crocheted the exact same way that he did.

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Interesting that with the table, yours would be the third iteration. I'm interested in ways of collaborating with dead artists, which is something you've done multiple times before. And there's also something spooky about that.
It's just trying to align yourself to understand parts of history or art history that seem out of reach, even though they were made by people with very similar feelings and positions as you might be dealing with as an artist. These works that I have included come from those kinds of concerns—they come from a studio practice of making things, and trying to understand the things around you at some particular point in the world. Reconnecting with them is just like reconnecting with what they were going through, and trying to learn from it, and trying to make sense of it now.

I used the word collaboration, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. How do you call if when you're working with another artist that way? Do you consider it collaborative because you're changing the context?
I think it's cooperative. It's not pushing down or raising up, but equalizing, or trying to equalize content or equalize value in objects. It's this thing of flattening context. Thinking about dimension, you flatten the symbol, or you flatten the purpose of the functionality of an image, and then you have to build up from nothing.

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This is a haunted house, though, so the presence of these dead artists is interesting to me for that reason.
The beginning of the house has all of the makings of what connotes "fear" or "haunted" or "spooky" in terms of like a commercial, Halloween, American consumer culture. But as you go through the space, those things are flattened, and reconsidered so that what defines how an object is "haunted" or fraught or complicated is analyzed in each room. there are certain kinds of things that can be scary in cinema but not necessarily in real life, like a man in a mask. Real life fears—losing your memory, losing your sense of place, your sense of self, are much more chilling and horrifying. I think as you arrive toward the end of the show, you might see that reveal itself.

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In the last room, a gallery employee told me the drain inside the body drawer is a replica of a Robert Gober piece. It's white. Does that have some relationship with the remaking of pieces in white if they sell?
So if in the beginning is the real Bob Gober, and at the end is the remake. You kind of go through the full cycle of understanding an object as it is, with its given value and relationship to history as it stands, and then how that may be transferred and renewed in the end, by arriving at a new platform and a new material but the same thing. How can something be the same but different in time?

What's the relationship to the band the Mamas and the Papas?
They used to reside in this home, and I was thinking about their image of a band, and then a band that's kind of crumbled within, due to emotions that were between others and different relationships that were unraveling. Who are my Mamas and Papas? Who are the Mamas and Papas of my work? So I took my two mamas, Bjarne and Bob Gober, and my two fathers, Mike Kelley and Haim Steinbach, and channeled them. I thought, This is what would it be like if they all made music.

You have been doing installing this for five weeks. Are you starting to lose it? It seems like this place could induce some kind of psychological state.
It did. You know, part of the work is the lights and the textures on the wall that try to control and manipulate your psyche, but also recess and like go into the walls.

We are literally in a padded room. Maybe just one more question: what can we expect from your first museum retrospective, opening next year at Mass MoCA?
Something different.

Die Hexe will remain on view at Luxembourg and Dayan through April 11th. See more of Alex Da Corte's work on his website.

Follow Matthew Leifheit on Twitter. Read his previous interview with Alex Da Corte for VICE here.

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Image via Wiki Commons user Ultra-lab

There's something weird happening in the world of Harry Potter. Something I can't quite get my head around.

On March 14, the most popular Harry Potter book you've never head of, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, will come to its conclusion. It has been running online as a fan fiction for the past five years. It is 600,000 words long and contains 112 chapters. By the end, we'll be looking at a grand total of 700,000 words and 125 chapters. This will put it somewhere between Gravity's Rainbow and Route 66 in terms of length.

It has over 7,000 Reddit fans, 26,000 reviews, and a fan-made audiobook.

There will be worldwide wrap parties to celebrate its culmination; throughout its pages there are cameos from its readers as Hogwarts students, little walk-on roles that make them feel alive. It's similar to the furor that surrounds a Murakami release and celebrated with a passion we only see these days for things like Netflix posting a new series of House of Cards in its entirety.

Much like all things these days, this came to me through word of mouth. Most people agree that it's brilliantly written, challenging, and—curiously—mind altering. HPMOR (as it's known by its fans) is categorically not your average piece of fan fiction.

Here, for example, is a random clutch of chapter titles: "The Fundamental Attribution Error," "Positive Bias," "Working in Groups Pt. 1," "Pretending to Be Wise Pt. 2," and "The Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis." Not, I'm sure you'll agree, your average fan fiction fodder.

There is no place here for Harry and Ron fucking or Harry as a rare species of incubus who has to have sex once a day to survive. Or, indeed, his brief spell as "a wild card that will change the Japanese middle school tennis scene." There's about as much sex as a night at home with the box set of Downton Abbey, so its popularity confused me. What's going on?

Why are regular, hard-working humans spending their time on a piece of fan fiction that doesn't even include a subplot where Hogwarts falls in love with a gigantic squid? And what the fuck have the methods of rationality got to do with the Boy Who Lived?

Imagine a book where Harry Potter is not a sex-starved, self-hating little dweeb but instead a miniature Ravenclaw Spock with a taste for deductive reasoning and a bowl haircut from Diagon Alley's hottest new barber, and you'll be someway to understanding its charm.

HPMOR reads like the originals after a lifetime spent playing Nintendo's Brain Training. Similar scenes feel like they've been moved at right angles to themselves and shunted into the fourth dimension. That is to say, I could sense the shadow of a shape I couldn't quite understand, as if the book was trying to tell me something about life.

Turns out, it was. The most common thinking errors humanity makes is something called a systematic thinking error, or cognitive bias. Like the sunk cost fallacy.

This can be explained by remembering the last time you went out to a club because, "I've already drunk six beers so might as well." That existence-questioning hangover you get that feels like your intestines have collided with the entire Heineken brewery? Yeah, that's nature's way of telling you to stop making decisions based on a logical fallacy.

All those times in the original where Harry grieved over his dead parents or said precisely the wrong thing to Cho Chang to get in her pants, turns out he was acting irrationally.

This new Potter, though, doesn't. He's basically the Jesus Christ of Rational Thought. He owns this book. He hits Voldemort out of the fucking park with a bunt while scratching his ass with his foot. And—here's the kicker—if you start copying him—that is, making rational decisions that overcome cognitive biases—you, too, can make life your bitch.

Welcome to the world of rational thinking, the art of being Less Wrong.

On February 28, 2010, somewhere between the western edges of San Francisco's Bay Area and the Pacific Ocean, 35-year-old American rationality and AI specialist Eliezer Yudkowsky uploaded the first ever chapter of HPMOR, "A Day of Very Low Probability." The success it went on to have could have been predicted by no one.

The act of reading this literature like stepping into a parallel universe one millimeter away from our own. On the one hand, it feels convenient that Yudkowsky chose the most popular character on the planet to write about, but on the other, it makes perfect sense. Because what's more irrational than using a spell to turn into a cat?

"I'd been reading a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction at the time the plot of HPMOR spontaneously burped itself into existence inside my mind, so it came out as a Harry Potter story," Yudkowsky told me on the phone. "If I had to rationalize it afterward, I'd say the Potterverse is a very rich environment for a curious thinker, and there's a large number of potential readers who would enter at least moderately familiar with the Harry Potter universe."

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Eliezer Yudkowsky. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Taking a read of his website, it becomes quite clear that Yudkowsky is not your average fan fiction author. He is far more likely to talk about the Twelve Virtues of Rationality than how sad he was when Dumbledore died. His updates for his fan fiction include links to a place called the Center for Applied Rationality, where he is a Curriculum Consultant (though not employed, so it's unlikely he's making any money from his writing personally).

It "pursues," Yudkowsy said, "what I see as an important common project for the human species, namely taking all humanity's wonderful cognitive science research and trying to translate it into teachable skills for thinking better in real life, doing better in our own lives and the world."

There's a curious correlation between the work at CFAR and that which occurs at Yudkowsky's day job at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose main goal seems to be to ensure that Skynet never happens. The former helps make humans think like machines. The latter makes sure super smart computers think like us.

I was interested in finding out how much Yudkowsky's work and personal beliefs factor into his Potter story. "Overwhelmingly, of course," he says. "It informs every shade of how the characters think, both those who are allegedly rational and otherwise. You can't spend years studying cognitive science and come out not having any opinions about how literary characters would realistically think, or, if you could, it would be sad."

The website for CFAR reveals a lot about the aims of the association—helping people overcome flawed thinking to self-improve. "What if," the website asks, "we could shrug off our feelings of defensiveness, and honestly evaluate the evidence on both sides of an issue before deciding which legislation to pass, what research to fund, and where to donate to do the most good?"

HPMOR's official website contains a page asking for support and funding for the Center, though Yudkowsky told me he is now "superfluous" to the company as those who spent most of "their whole working weeks prototyping the teaching units rapidly went past the point where my helpful advice could be any use to them."

These teaching units extend from walk-ins to weekend get-aways, called "minicamps"—Rejection Therapy (now known as Comfort Zone Expansion), Againstness Training (how to react under pressure), and they have a handy rationality checklist. A workshop weekend costs $4,000 a person, or you can be their test subject.

Make no mistake, this is a self-help system, just as something like Dianetics originally was. Facebook is one of their previous clients and—logic—Facebook is evil.

If this all sounds slightly cultish to you— a sacred text, a big bold call out for test subjects, the promise of a happier life, the call for donations on top of fees—that's because there are similarities here to the growth of other belief structures. Only in Silicon Valley would we get a group that treats the human mind like an app.

Having said that, a lot of the stuff they do actually sounds good and feels about as dangerous as Colin Creevey at a Quidditch match. Rather than basing their ideas on aliens that crash-landed on our planet millions of years ago, everything is empirically based. Why not see if you're acting rationally, right now?

You do begin to wonder if this really is a cleverly disguised academic exercise or a marketing tool for a belief structure rather than a piece of fan fiction. It's clear that HPMOR feels more like Flatland than The Philosopher's Stone, though I concede that a vast majority of its readers may just be there for the magic—quite literally.

I asked Yudkowsky if he'd be willing to go the way of 50 Shades and, after a bit of a facelift, sell the book as an original: "That's not possible in this case. HPMOR is fundamentally linked to, and can only be understood against the background of, the original Harry Potter novels. Numerous scenes are meant to be understood in the light of other scenes in the original HP."

When, in the 1930s, science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard began work on Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, no one could have anticipated his brand of self-help later becoming the center of a multimillion-dollar religion. It's strange, but it doesn't seem a stretch to say there are echoes of that movement here—hiding just behind one 11-year-old boy's scar.

Follow David on Twitter.

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Illustration by Tom Scotcher

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last week, a head shop in Leeds won a landmark appeal to overturn a conviction for selling smoking paraphernalia, including bongs and grinders.

Hassan Abbas, 35, had been running his shop, Fantasia, in Leeds since 2009 when police raided it in May of 2013. Following the raid, he and his assistant, 29-year-old Owen Allerton, were charged under Section 9A of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which prohibits the sale of any article that the seller knows will be used to administer an illegal drug.

The seized stock included bongs—or "water pipes" to your nan and other busybodies—decorated with cannabis leaves. Police argued that they had only seen such items used in a drug user's home, and that the cannabis leaf emblems would encourage users to buy and consume cannabis.

"We've got bongs here with positions from the Kama Sutra on them," Hassan tells me over the phone. "Does that mean it will make you want to try that position?"

Nevertheless, a magistrates court found the pair guilty and Hassan was fined $1,230 and ordered to pay $800 costs and a victim surcharge of $123, while Owen was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay $153 in costs with a $23 victim surcharge.

Hassan has 17 years of experience in the head shop industry, having worked at his father's store in Bradford after leaving school, before opening his own one in Leeds. He is, therefore, well-versed in keeping on the right side of the law. His staff receive months of training and, he claims, never promote the use of illegal drugs when making a sale.

"It's just nonsensical," he says. "The fact it has a leaf on or not is actually irrelevant. Head shops around the country have got hundreds of thousands of pounds of stock with leaves on it, so it's a massive part of their business."

The pair could have accepted the relatively small fines and got on with their lives, but instead they decided to fight the conviction with the representation of QC Rudi Fortson, an experienced barrister in the field of drug laws.

Last Monday, February 23, after an appeal hearing at Leeds Crown Court lasting less than four hours, the pair emerged victorious, their convictions overturned.

"We were in a position to be able to fight, but someone else not in our financial position might not have been able to do something."

Hassan believes the ruling represents a landmark case for head shop owners all over the UK.

"If we had lost in the appeals court then that would have set a precedent where the police can go to the magistrates court and say they found them guilty with hardly any evidence," he tells me. "We were in a position to be able to fight, but someone else not in our financial position might not have been able to do something. When you are running a business you can't get legal aid for this sort of thing anyway."

Hassan says he and Owen invested $64,000 in fighting the case to defend their estimated $230,000 worth of stock. Another unnamed head shop in the UK gave them a small donation towards their legal fees.

Despite the expense involved, Hassan insists he had a duty to take a stand.

"We decided to do it more for the industry than anyone else," he says. "Sometimes you have to say, 'I've had enough of this rubbish and I'm going to fight it.' They're talking about all these issues of freedom of speech in the media, and you don't have the right to go out and buy something with a cannabis leaf on it. They had no evidence against us that we knowingly sold those items for consumption."

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Casey Hardison

Hassan and Owen also received legal advice from non-practicing solicitor Darryl Bickler, who has also worked with Casey Hardison, a US citizen sentenced to 20 years in prison for running an LSD lab in Brighton.

"It was great to see the police stuttering their way through this ridiculous position," Darryl told me the evening after the successful appeal. "It's really an attempt to censor freedom of expression. They are basically going round saying, 'We advise you to stop selling these things, and if you don't we will close your shop.' They start whinging about children and safety, but it's not their job to appoint themselves in that capacity; their job is to apply the law."

Darryl claims the police did not do a test purchase, but simply relied on the fact that some people leaving the head shop were found to have had cannabis on their person.

"For someone to strike back and show the police up for the nonsense they have done in this action is really great," adds Darryl.

Darryl argues that head shop owners should be allowed to give advice to customers about their products, especially in the case of legal highs, which can be "exceedingly dangerous if misused"—as was the case with those kids from Luton who took them before school last week and didn't even make it to first period. One local authority, Lincoln, has even banned the taking of legal highs in public places.

"What you need is experienced, clever people in shops who can tell you what to do, but if you do that you get locked up," says Darryl. "You can't criminalize people who think they are on the right side of the law. But you get some police officers who want to abuse their power and make up the law as they go along."

Follow Michael on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Pegida UK" got off to a slightly limp start in Newcastle this weekend. In Germany, the right-wing Pegida movement has seen tens of thousands of bigots take to the streets against what they see as the Islamification of Europe. This got Islamophobes in the UK excited, so they tried to mimic the success. Their first demo happened on Saturday in Newcastle and 375 people showed up. About 2,000 not-racist people turned out to throw them an un-welcoming party.

Pegida were made to hold a static demonstration in Bigg Market. They flew Union Jacks and England flags and were surrounded by police tape, like it was a Jubilee party where a crime had taken place. Speeches were made on both sides and Pegida had a better sound system despite their small numbers. In broken English, a Pegida speaker from Germany questioned who the "real" Nazis were, because of her country's own laws against displaying Nazi symbols. There was a flag of the Greek neo-Nazi Party the Golden Dawn on display, as well as a National Front flag. Maybe those guys are the real Nazis? There was also some Sieg Heiling, which was a bit confusing, given someone was flying a Israeli flag and a rainbow flag together.

The larger counter-march started at Gallowgate and weaved through China Town, ending up at Monument. With St James' Park, Newcastle United's soccer stadium looming over, black and white banners reading "Newcastle Is United" could be seen alongside old Mineworkers' trade union banners as a Hare Krishna band played.

The demos didn't pass without incident—there were five arrests on the day. One of them came after a heavyset bald guy started screaming and shouting at the speakers at the anti-Pegida demo. It seemed that he was a Pegida supporter who had infiltrated the crowd. He was hauled over by the cops and cuffed pretty much immediately.

After about an hour, which included some vague attempts on behalf of Pegida supporters to break out of their playpen, things died down and people started to head home. They had been around for long enough to confuse some passing stag parties in superhero costumes and Newcastle United fans.

So will Pegida grow in the UK like it did in Germany? Obviously it's hard to tell after just one demo, but on Saturday they looked more like a re-branding of the English Defence League than anything genuinely new.

Follow Kieran on Twitter.

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A tableaux of despair and filth

When I was in St. Petersburg one night in 2005, I stumbled upon the entrance to a dingy building that could have been a theatre or cultural centre. What drew my attention was a six-foot-tall wax figure of Freddie Mercury, fist raised in triumph amidst the chilly Russian air. What could this portend? An animatronic waxwork Queen tribute plunked bizarrely beside a rail yard? Closer inspection revealed the show had more to do with Mercury's fondness for cocaine than his unimpeachable fashion sense.

A sandwich board had been placed in the entrance featuring a lurid illustration of a young beauty, her face split down the middle so that one side revealed the visage of a skeleton, surrounded by roses and hypodermic needles obviously pilfered from a stock photo site. The text on the board read:

The Wax Person Museum
Presents: A Stunning New Project
"On The Verge"
Illustrating the effects of narcotics on the human organism

The bottom of the poster revealed the project was presented in association with a government agency. The pieces fell into place: this was an anti-drug version of the "hell tours" they take to state fairs in the southern US warning teens about the perfidy of heavy petting. I paid a 50 ruble entrance fee (about $2) to be treated to one of the most heavy-handed cautionary tales of my life.

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The other night I saw a weird amorphous shape moving on the ground just in front of my apartment door. It was dark and I was returning home from a late-night caffeine run and couldn't see very well over the reddish glare of a street lamp that cuts the shadowy façade of my building in two.

Now expecting an encounter with whatever the hell I was looking at, two thoughts ran through my head simultaneously: it was too big to be a cat, and it must be some mutated horror infected by the T-Virus. When it turned to face me, I met the beady gaze of a possum (next thought: hope it's not rabid). Not exactly the Umbrella-engineered biohazard I'd assumed, but that's what gorging on nothing but Resident Evil for weeks on end does to your brain.

There have been other effects, both expected—soundtracks bleeding into my dreams, being able to rattle off every key Umbrella researcher and whatever virus they developed—and not, like idly concluding the fictitious pharmaceutical, run mostly by stodgy old men, probably doesn't get many Silicon Valley applicants.

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A scene from 'Resident Evil', as illustrated by Stephen Maurice Graham

Not that I started out intending to revisit the entire bloody Resi saga. In replaying the recently released HD remaster of the 2002 GameCube Resident Evil remake (phew), the plan just sort of grew out of it naturally, like a new virus-born appendage. Suddenly it wasn't enough just to re-experience the Spencer Mansion's ornate decorum and arcane traps or to see Barry exclaim, "What the hell is that thing!" again and again, despite the dire extremity of the situation having already been firmly established. Charting its evolution was somehow important.

Does Resident Evil really inspire this kind of voluntary insanity? Maybe. 2012's Resident Evil 6 took the series to ridiculously lunatic heights about as far removed as you can get from the survival horror of creakily obtuse puzzles, scarce ammo, and tank controls seen in the earlier incarnations of the series (including the remaster), so it's nothing the developers haven't reveled in before.

Much like Umbrella itself, Resi's past and history fold in on themselves, calling back to a weird collection of motifs repeatedly used throughout the series. The Spencer estate is the most obvious here, with Raccoon City's ravaging by the T-Virus as first seen in RE2 coming in second. (Fun fact: 2003's online multiplayer spin-off Outbreak marked the first series entry where Capcom didn't feel it necessary to cover the events of the zombie epidemic in an intro cutscene.)

It made sense in the beginning. Resident Evil was an unexpected hit in when it was first released for the original PlayStation in 1996, and in creating it Shinji Mikami more or less kicked off a new genre. Inspired by Capcom's own 1989 Famicom title Sweet Home as well as The Shining's Overlook Hotel, Resi married elements of traditional point-and-click adventure design (puzzle-solving and exploration) to a 3D space, adding real-time combat designed to make you feel vulnerable. And it didn't play like anything else.

Tank controls that forced players to awkwardly move by rotating their character left or right using the D-pad (holding up to move whatever direction they were facing) were unwieldy enough to have you feeling never quite in command of your actions, while a lack of ammo for any weapons you might find made it impossible to kill everything lurking in the mansion. Across the board, the game was designed specifically to keep you on edge.

For better or worse, Resident Evil also established a precedent that may well have been nearly accidental: its camp qualities. The original is mined (and rightly so) for atrociously awful dialogue and stilted acting—Barry being one of the most memorable of the cast.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/IFx_xi2hQTI' width='560' height='315']

It also featured equally terrible live-action cutscenes, seemingly shot almost as an afterthought with a cast of whatever Westerners the director could find in Japan at the time. (Oddly, the editing in the uncensored opening—unreleased in the West on its original platform—changes the pacing enough that it almost works.) And on the subject of camp: Mikami has said the team discarded the original Japanese voice recordings because they were "really lame." Just let that sink in for a minute.

Regardless, that B-movie schlock has come to define part of Resident Evil's personality, and it's as much an integral part of this mid-90s time capsule of polygonal models and pre-rendered backgrounds (look how brightly the mansion is lit!) as anything else. As rudimentary as its design may be, the first game was in some ways still pretty sophisticated for its time—and accordingly it eventually sold over 5 million copies.

1998's sequel would follow in the original's footsteps. It replaced Resi's iconic mansion with the comparably bizarre architectural plans of the Raccoon City Police Department, not to mention the war-zone ruins of the city itself. RE2 also swapped out original S.T.A.R.S. members Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield with rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy and Chris's sister Claire.

With a bigger budget, RE2 tried to step back from the unintentional silliness of the original with CG cutscenes and a more serious tone. (Sadly, voice acting in video games was pretty amateurish in those days.) In order to get the most out of Resi you have to take a lot of it at face value; the scariest shit when you're 14 is probably just going to seem charming and quaint when you're older. Which isn't to say that some of RE2's choreographed scares aren't surprisingly effective in 2015.

In fact, RE2 remains an impressively responsive and worthy entry overall if you meet it on its own terms. It's proof that subtle animation improvements and a few tight pacing edits, among other things, can have amazing effects. The game was a bigger hit than the first, of course. Millions of fans have been clamoring endlessly for a remake, with Capcom even teasing players by including the location as 3D space to one degree or another in four other Resi games—but for whatever reason, it hasn't happened yet.

Sometime during or after 2's development, Resident Evil took a strange and likely inadvertent turn and began resembling Umbrella's own narrative. Each new installment introduced a new virus, strain, or parasite, typically accompanied by a new researcher to expand the series' growing canon with Umbrella's clandestine influence.

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Claire Redfield by Stephen Maurice Graham

Similarly, players also knew basically what to expect with every new Resident Evil. They would visit a location with some variation on the Spencer Mansion's baroque aesthetic. There would be a secret Umbrella research base. They would trek through at least one industrial facility. Former S.T.A.R.S. member and Umbrella conspirator Albert Wesker would probably be trying to kill someone. In every iteration, and its viral counterpart, history was repeating itself.

Interestingly, Resident Evil's timeline begins in 1998, not far from the release of the original game. It wasn't until 2003 that the series moved much beyond the events of that first year of the T-Virus outbreak—in Dead Aim (a light-gun spinoff set in 2002) to boot. Unlike most series that timeline stands, meaning Resi's once youthful characters get older as years pass between releases.

In 2005, Resident Evil 4 came along to reinvent the wheel of survival horror, following poor sales of Mikami's RE remaster. RE4 traded its archaic tank controls and methodically placed scares for a higher-octane approach of intense battles against a new kind of "smart," non-undead zombies that would chase a now older and more experienced Leon throughout large, open-ended arenas, using weapons and attacking in crowds. RE4 was as big a success as it was a departure, and sold about six million copies as proof.

RE4 had some narrative differences as well, if only cosmetically. Wesker was only mentioned in the original GameCube campaign, later playing a larger role in an expanded version starring RE2's slinky Umbrella double agent Ada Wong, developed for its PS2 release. There were touches of the old motifs in the plot: The Salazar castle certainly has some Spencer-like opulence, for one, and there are eventually labs with mutant monsters that must be dealt with. (Leon's one-liners are killer.)

Alongside its action tone, RE4 brought to the series a new level of slapstick drama, and while Umbrella might not have been involved, when all was eventually revealed about the secret cult of the Los Iluminados and their ultimate plans, the apple clearly hadn't fallen far from the tree.

After RE4, anticipation was high for the inevitable Resident Evil 5, which apparently would take place in Africa and starred a much beefier Chris in blistering HD. Here, again, Capcom and Umbrella aligned, creating a high-definition version of RE4 (with added co-op) while telling an origin tale of how the Progenitor virus was initially was harvested from a flower species native to West Africa.

RE5 also brought an end to Wesker's long-standing arc as the series antagonist—with Umbrella dissolved and Wesker dead, it could well have let the series go out on a high note, even with its gameplay relatively untouched from RE4.

Instead, RE6 reunited many of the favourites of Resident Evil: Chris, Leon and Ada alongside newcomer Jake (Muller, son of Wesker), in a game that's probably only pushed into second place in the chase to be the Paul W.S. Anderson of the series by the terrifically awful Operation Raccoon City. Claire, meanwhile, stars with Barry's teenage daughter Moira (and Barry makes a return himself) in the currently episodically running Revelations 2 (more on that here).

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/sS_bGpe9qE8' width='560' height='315']

If there's one thing to be gleaned from studying a history of Resident Evil it's that Capcom seems to be unwilling or unable to sever the connective tissue that's been present in every single major series release since 1999's RE3. It's infected with the memories of its own past. I'm not saying that I blame Capcom, though, as I like the format of bringing back favorite characters while introducing new ones (but let's be clear, 2012's Revelations did itself no favors there).

Resident Evil is at its heart genre fiction—it's not really horror in the same sense that Silent Hill is horror, and it doesn't need to be. It's become a Japanese amalgam interpreting a Western triple-A action game and the genre twists that Mikami himself came up with for RE4. (And the director appears to share in Capcom's late sensibilities, as his 2014 game The Evil Within isn't that far removed from RE4.)

It may sound like I'm disappointed that it took Capcom seven years to recognize that it was no longer 1998. I'm not (though by now I might have a touch of Stockholm Syndrome). By the same token I'm not complaining about the series' batshit evolution or repeated use of certain ideas or settings (what's with all the boats?). I'm not even (necessarily) complaining about the ludicrous dialogue, at least as long as nobody's sweet ass is on the way.

At the same time, Chris and Leon are looking older in RE6. Claire seems to be pushing 40 in Revelations 2, with Barry likely approaching his mid 50s. Would I love to see a Metal Gear Solid 4-style free-for-all, with its classic cast now Expendables-recalling badass geriatrics? Hell yes. If Resident Evil ever ends, I hope Capcom sees fit to let it go out with a bang like this.

Unfortunately, in the very likely event that never happens, it's worth considering that these characters can't—or logically shouldn't—be around forever. Which brings up the more critical question: what is Resident Evil without its past? After an unholy amount of time spent replaying the series (and finishing damn near every one), I don't know that Capcom's ever really given a good answer. Umbrella certainly never did.

Capcom recently reported that the Resident Evil remaster is their "fastest selling digital title in history," so hope may be on the horizon that now is the time for the series to strip off its at-times bloated legacy and make a return to form, like Mikami did on the GameCube in 2002. I would welcome that. RE's remaster is as wonderful now as it was when it was new.

I'm sure that the next numbered Resi is already in development for current-gen hardware, and I think, after a lot of reflection, I've come to accept that even if it's as dopey and Hollywood-ized as RE6, I'll be able to enjoy it for what it is. Still, Capcom might do well to take a moment to consider Umbrella's history and act accordingly—if they ever want to get away from familiar visions of viral monsters.

Follow Steve on Twitter.

Cancer has been such a scourge of humanity for so long that the very word inspires a deep dread in anyone who hears it—it's a two-syllable gut punch, a hole that suddenly opens up beneath you. Similarly, a "cure for cancer" has been a holy grail of modern medical research the way getting to the moon used to inspire space programs. All told, the world has spent decades and billions of dollars trying to cure cancer, or cure some kinds of it, or simply make some of them less awful and deadly—and in three weeks, VICE is going to give HBO viewers an inside look at the most cutting-edge cancer treatments in the world.

The third season of our Emmy-winning HBO show doesn't start until March 6, but VICE Special Report: Killing Cancer will air at 10 PM EST/PST and 9 PM UTC on Friday, February 27. It's an hour-long in-depth documentary that focuses on therapies that go far, far beyond chemo. We'll be taking a look at how doctors use HIV, measles, and genetically-engineered cold viruses to strengthen patients' immune systems and wipe out cancer cells without damaging their bodies the way chemo normally does.

While experimental, these techniques are already saving lives, like that of Emily Whitehead, who was dying of aggressive leukemia before doctors used re-engineered HIV cells to seemingly destroy the cancer eating her body.

"My life, like most people's, has been negatively affected by cancer, and the thought of my young children living in an age where this is no longer humanity's number-one health fear was simply overpowering," said Shane Smith in a statement. "My first thought was, 'How soon? How soon can we get these types of therapies to market and helping people?'"

VICE Special Report: Killing Cancer airs at 10 PM on Friday, February 27.

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Melbourne revelers partying in tomato pulp and possibly blood. All photos by Christopher Callil

La Tomatina is a Spanish festival where tourists throw tomatoes at each other and seemingly have a great time. It looks fun and somehow culturally significant, which explains why Melbourne tried to recreate it at the Flemington Racecourse on Saturday. But somehow Melbourne's version became a tomato bloodbath featuring injuries and people mistaking it for Stereosonic with food waste.

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When I arrived the tomatoes were in a huge rotting pile and people hadn't started flinging them yet. The crowd, dressed in brightly-colored costumes that had nothing to do with anything, ground against each other while a DJ played club bangers. At first I thought the heavy house soundtrack was out of place for a food event, but the advertising girls in tight shorts assured me everything was fine.

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Half party, half farmers market, this midday purgatory continued for some time. The sun was hot, even though it was overcast, and I began to wonder exactly why we were dancing. My queries about the music and dress code were soon replaced by genuine fear as the first tomato flew.

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Tossing semi-rotten objects at your siblings as a kid is fun. Five thousand strangers pelting each other with acidic fruit is a little more intimidating. With adrenaline and fat bass pumping friends turned on friends and we did what we were all born to do—we threw tomatoes.

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As I ran through the crowd I realized getting hit in the face with a tomato hurts. But as you take that first impact, and the rogue passata fills your nostrils, you gain a bit of nerve. There's something primitively satisfying about smashing fruit into a person's face. So I shoveled some slush into my hands and pushed further.

Shoving between some body builders (presumably) and old ladies (why were they here?), I remembered my conversation with one of the coordinators earlier that day. She was lovely and assured me all the tomatoes were very old, soft, and completely safe. "Oh! By the way," she added, "Have you signed the waiver?"

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The author after being hit in the face a bunch of times

She was right to double-check. There was nothing safe about this. I saw a guy almost blinded when his glasses were smashed. I saw a kid in a tiger suit crying on the ground. I saw a woman struggling to pick herself up among the fury of legs and arms. It was like Platoon, I saw things I'll never unsee.

The music didn't stop the whole time. The DJ kept the ceaseless electronic beat thumping like war drums. I was consumed by it. Who was a friend? Who was an enemy? All I knew was that I had a tomato.

Then through the screams came a muffled voice, barely audible over the slosh of tears, blood, and exploding romas. Only a few people stopped to listen.

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"Everyone! Please, listen!" said the voice over the PA. "Stop throwing tomatoes! I repeat. Stop throwing tomatoes immediately!"

Almost no one paid attention. People kept throwing tomatoes at one another. There was no sense of time or place, only the battle. The bloodshed continued.

"Everyone! Please! People have fallen down in the tomato pit! We need to get to them! Everybody! Stop throwing tomatoes!"

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This time more people listened and held their friends back. A lady dressed as a giant cat began screaming at people to stop. "Can't you see there's people hurt in there!" she yelled.

Gradually the onslaught abated. Senses returned. We realized something was amiss. One by one, we raised our open hands to show we weren't throwing anything. This was awkwardly misinterpreted as a celebration and—like the sheep we are—we started cheering stupidly while medics carrying stretchers pushed passed.

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It was not one of Melbourne's prouder moments.

From where I was, I could see three people had slipped and hit their heads and been trapped beneath the slosh. They must have been there for quite some time.

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As medics rushed to their sides, we stood and watched them apply neck braces and shift them onto stretchers. On the fringe, some people were still indifferently throwing tomatoes. They had to be told to move away. In a matter of minutes a couple of ambulances came pushing their way through the crowd.

This sort of wrapped up the day. The ambulances put a bit of a dampener on the event. People began to collect their stuff.

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But despite the somber end, I still had fun. And so what if our Melbourne version doesn't compare to the ­­­Spanish original? Who cares if there were a few blokes showing off washboards, or if every second person was a bit hacked on VB? If we were going do something, I'm a bit chuffed we chose to do it as dangerously as possible. Grass sucks, let's do it on concrete.

Follow Jack Callil on Twitter.

Though polls can always remind us that most Americans (and about half of nonwhite ones) tend to trust law enforcement to keep them safe, something has changed since last August. I've been writing this Bad Cop Blotter column for more than a year and a half, and the pre-Ferguson, post-Ferguson divide is palpable—if only in a media-giving-a-shit kind of a way.

Since Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, there has been a major surge in the attention the mainstream media gives to the police. Even after the murder of two NYPD officers in December, and a subsequent pro-cop backlash, the news folk appear to have learned that people want to know what armed enforcers of state, local, and federal laws are up to. In addition, it's possible that reporters assume law enforcement sources are telling the truth a little less often after the still-disputed incidents that led to Brown's demise—not to mention the consensus that Eric Garner didn't need to die via chokehold.

But unanimous horror over Eric Garner and his cries of "I can't breathe" is one thing; fixing this mess is another. The problems facing law enforcement and its relationship with the public are enormous, and they're divided into poisonous, spiny slices. It's not just local police, and it's not just federal authorities. It's local cops, and it's federal money. It's dangerous and unnecessary laws against vices like drugs, prostitution, and gambling—and it's the conduct of individual bad cops. It is mission creep. It is excess war gear going to police departments, and it is the feeling that police are at war with the people whom they ostensibly serve. It is police who don't understand mental illness, or physical disabilities such as deafness—or rather, it is police who pull the trigger too quickly on even suspects who don't understand what's happening.

It is racial bias in policing, and it is also the existence of laws against selling loose cigarettes. It is the idea that laws are unquestionable and inarguable—and that means never just letting a cigarette seller or a fleeing graffiti artist get away unchased.

It is the ease with which everyone accepts the policy of kicking down a door to search for an illicit plant—to the detriment of homeowner and police officer alike. It is the Supreme Court decisions that back up these actions, and the lax civil asset forfeiture laws that incentivize so many of those thousands of SWAT raids that happen every year. It is more and more anecdotes of horrible incidents piling up, but a lack of complete data on how often cops actually use their guns nationwide.

If you write a column like Bad Cop Blotter—and no, that name was never exactly accurate—you're going to get accustomed to a handful of reactions. On the rare occasion on which you highlight a cop who used lethal force in what appears to be a fair and necessary manner, you will be called a hack. Most of the time, when questioning police behavior in a high-tension, dangerous—or seemingly dangerous, if the gun turns out to be just a pellet gun—situation, you will get criticism. Could you do it? Could you decide when to shoot, or when to use a Taser, or when to just talk it out? No, I personally couldn't, and I don't want to. Luckily for me, there's no law enforcement draft; every one of the roughly 800,000 law enforcement officers wanted to be a cop badly enough to, well, become one.

Asking for more from the guys and gals with guns and badges is not a personal insult towards your uncle or your grandma who was a cop and who in all likelihood never fired their gun on duty. But it is fair to say, OK, you want this tough job? You want to be as brave and important as you say you are? Then we're going to badger you, the way we should all public servants. Especially the ones who can rid of us of the myriad horrible laws you enforce. You police have a power, which is backed by societal trust, and a long legal leash. We are going to hold you to that. And we're going to do a better job of it than we have before.

That's all this was ever supposed to be.

Now—for one final time—here are this week's bad cops (for coverage of future police indecencies, check out VICE News' excellent Officer-Involved blog):

-On Sunday, LAPD officers shot and killed a man reportedly known locally as "Africa" on Los Angeles's Skid Row. VICE has coverage of the incident, which was capture on at least one camera, here.

-It seems like when a 12-year-old boy holding a fake gun gets killed, someone besides the boy might be to blame. Not so, said the city of Cleveland on Friday, when it officially responded to a lawsuit filed by the family of Tamir Rice, who was killed by Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann in November. According to the city, Rice is at fault for his own death, not the officer who drove up way too close to him, not Loehmann, not Loehmann's supervisors, who had complained about his work problems, but still let him do the job. No, it's the dead 12-year-old's fault for being shot.

-The Department of Justice is set to release its report on the Ferguson Police Department's racially-biased traffic stops any time now. In brief: The Ferguson cops need to either get that shit figured out, or they will probably face a federal lawsuit. A separate DOJ probe into whether Michael Brown's killing was a civil rights violation could also come down soon, though it's not expected to produce charges against Darren Wilson.

-In 2012, Douglas Dendinger agreed to serve papers to Bogalusa, Louisiana, police officer Chad Cassard, on behalf of his nephew, who was filing a brutality lawsuit. He did so and says he was cursed at, the papers thrown back in his face. Then, 20 minutes after he got home, Dendinger, 47, was arrested for battery on Cassard. Two prosecutors and five cops witnessed the incident, and they all backed up the battery claim. One prosecutor claimed he hit the cop so hard, she was sure he had been punched. Two police officers said Dendinger fled from the scene, even though he is disabled.

Soon after his arrest, then DA Walter Reed officially charged him with the crime, and because of a previous cocaine charge, Dendinger says he could have faced up to 80 years in prison. Thankfully, some fuzzy cellphone footage filmed by his wife and nephew helped clarify the flimsy quality of the charges against him. Reed's office was prevented from pursuing the case due to the conflict of interest, and the Louisiana Attorney General's office dropped the case. Now Dendinger has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Bogalusa cops, the DA's office, and Washington Parish Sheriff Randy Seal. They're all denying the allegations, but why exactly would they have let Dendinger get away if he violently assaulted a cop in front of the rest of them? It sure looks like without the cell phone footage, Dendinger's life might have been essentially over thanks to an appalling level of collusion between the prosecutors and the cops. Everyone involved here should be out of a job.

-Philadelphia DA R. Seth Williams penned an editorial defending the city's $6 million a year civil asset forfeiture racket Sunday, blaming drugs for the violence and devastation of communities that have been move ravaged by the war on drugs. Not that he has a vested interest in that opinion, or anything.

-Police in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the New Hanover Sheriff's Department department kicked down the wrong door on Thursday. The woman who suffered the brunt of that assault didn't wish to release her name, but she told local press that police broke down her door early in the morning, threw her out of bed when she asked for time to get dressed, and cuffed her wrists, bruising them and her knees. After several minutes, police realized their error, and took off. As Wilmington Police and the New Hanover Sheriff's Department pointed fingers at each other, Wilmington Police spokeswoman Linda Rawley magnanimously admitted that a mistake did indeed take place, but then noted that the woman was wanted on child support payments, so they totally could have arrested her if they had wanted to anyway.

-Miami Gardens, Florida's police chief was arrested in a prostitution sting this weekend. Stephen Johnson, 53, says he answered an escort service ad due to "stress." He has been fired. Johnson's conduct is only immoral due because of its deep, deep hypocrisy.

-On Tuesday, the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman published a deeply disturbing account of some of the shady goings-on at Chicago's Homan Square, a short-term holding facility for people under arrest. Numerous attorneys said they're unable to reach clients who are taken here. One of the few former residents of Homan Square willing to speak on the record said he was shackled for 17 hours after being arrested at an anti-NATO summit protest. There are other allegations, which include beatings and the fact that suspects' records are not made public. Of course, Chicago Police are denying this, and say Homan Square is just like any other jail.

-On Wednesday, Stockton, California Police Officer Pejman Zarrin was driving on patrol when he heard the frantic honks of a 19-year-old woman whose baby was unconscious and not breathing. Zarrin and the woman drove to a gas station, and he soon figured out that the baby had inhaled milk into its lungs. Before the paramedics he called even arrived, Zarrin had whacked the baby on the back and dislodged the milk. Right place, right time? Sure. But Zarrin responded quickly and effectively to a terrified person who needed his help. That's a Good Cop of the Week, and a fine note to end on.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter, and check out more of her work here.

Los Angeles police shot and killed a man reportedly known locally as "Africa" while responding to calls in the heart of downtown Los Angeles's Skid Row on Sunday.

The incident was caught on a video uploaded to Facebook—already viewed over 6 million times—that shows several officers wrestling two people apart, handcuffing one, and shooting the other five times while he was on the ground.

Though the video does not reveal anything graphic, it certainly makes for disturbing viewing.

[facebook_card href="https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1009126519115..." width="466" user_href="https://www.facebook.com/anthony.blackburn.376" byline="Anthony Blackburn"]

Officially, we still don't know what happened. The LAPD has not released the name of the victim, indicated how many shots were fired, nor many bullets hit the victim. LAPD Commander Andrew Smith told the LA Times two officers and a sergeant shot the victim. The LAPD's own "Force Investigation Division" is probing the shooting, and will return an official declaration of events after interviewing witnesses and the officers involved.

What we do know is that at around 11:30 AM Sunday, LAPD officers responded to several simultaneous calls about robbery and battery just outside one of the largest rescue missions in LA's skid row, as local radio outlet KPCC reported. One witness told the LA Times that when the officers arrived, they found two men fighting inside a tent. Officers then allegedly Tasered the man who was later shot, dragged him outside the tent, and attempted to restrain him.

This is about where the video starts, showing us the officers already using force to try and subdue the victim. We can hear a Taser firing, but don't know whether or not it stunned its intended target.

A few seconds later, we suddenly hear one of the officers shouting, "He's got my gun, he's got my gun!," followed by several repeated calls to "drop the gun."

Then five shots pierce through the city's soundscape, shocking bystanders, and prompting them to immediately start questioning police: "Why did y'all shoot that man?" one person asks.

Early eyewitness accounts, of course, differ. Some have the man grabbing an officer's gun, while others insist he was shot unarmed. (One witness who called himself Booker T. Washington told the LA Times that Africa "got shot over a tent.")

Either way, the fact remains that LAPD officers shot and killed a (possibly) homeless man while he was on the ground, surrounded by at least five cops.

Information on who exactly the victim was remains spotty. The LA Times reports that his peers and neighbors on Skid Row knew him only as "Africa." According to those who talked to him, he had just finished ten-year stint in a mental hospital, and had been living in a tent on Skid Row for the past four or five months.

In 2013, deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department shot and killed a homeless man underneath a Freeway overpass, after he brandished a stick at the deputies in a threatening manner. But the LA Times reports that there were no officer-involved shootings in downtown LA last year, and one so far this year prior to Sunday's incident.

Follow Matt Tinoco on Twitter.

Update: Here are a couple of photos from the scene on Skid Row taken early Monday:

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Photo by Matt Tinoco

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/02/' filename='lapd-officers-shot-and-killed-a-man-on-skid-row-in-broad-daylight-sunday-302-body-image-1425317269.jpg' id='32097']Photo by Jamie Taete

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I like to think of Kim Longinotto's films as gangster movies. Only, instead of giving violent men the limelight, Kim's protagonists are the women who fight back against the men—the kind of women you wouldn't dare fuck with.

Take Kim's 2008 documentary, Rough Aunties, which won the Sundance documentary award for its portrayal of the "Bobbi Bears," a gang of five women in South Africa who look after abused and abandoned children. Or 2010's Pink Saris, the story of Sampat Pal, a formidable vigilante taking on India's endemic rape problem. You could say that, throughout her prolific career as a documentarian, Kim's always championed the female as the underdog.

"It's not really about the oppression of women," says Kim when I meet to interview her for the second time. She's not keen on that word. She says she doesn't like films about victims—watching or making them.

"Take Sampat Pal," Kim starts. "She's quite dour, she's full of anger, and she's quite damaged—but she's not a victim. She was a woman with nothing, no money, and no education, who triumphed over it, and is now helping other people and breaking all the rules. If you think about it like that, these stories are about rebels, and those rebels are usually women, because, in most situations, men have an awful lot more power."

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British-born, Kim started making films in the late 1970s, when she attended the National Film and Television School in London. The first film that really got people talking was Shinjuku Boys, a sensitive look at Tokyo's female-to-male transgender community and a nightclub that only counts trans boys among its staff. Unlike her good friend and contemporary Nick Broomfield, Kim doesn't appear in her own films. She is softly spoken and, by her own admission, quite scruffy.

We've met to talk about Kim's new Chicago-set documentary, Dreamcatcher, the story of Brenda Myers, an ex-prostitute and crack cocaine addict turned guidance councillor. Like Sampat Pal, Brenda is a survivor. Near the opening of the film, she recalls the time a John attempted to cut away her face with a blade, setting a precedent for the shocking accounts of violence that pervade the film; murderous pimps, systemic child abuse, and drug-related crime all feature.

Kim was homeless herself at one time and empathizes with Brenda's situation. "A lot of people who've been down and out in different ways want to deny it or move on," she tells me. "Probably the hardest thing in the world it to admit to being an ex-prostitute for 25 years, whereas Brenda doesn't care. She's now living in the suburbs, she's got a job in the jails, and she's got a husband.

"A lot of women would think, I want to be respectable now. I don't want people to know about my past. I'm going to reinvent myself and work in a bank, or something. But Brenda isn't doing that; she's constantly telling these girls she's one of them. And I love her for that."

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Brenda conducts her outreach work under the banner of The Dreamcatcher Foundation, which she founded in 2008 to aid women like herself and fight human trafficking in Chicago. Today, Brenda holds seminars for female sex workers in prisons, as well as talking to "high-risk" girls in inner-city schools. The foundation also owns a van, which Brenda and her colleagues drive around downtown Chicago at night, offering girls on the streets everything from condoms to a support network, should they want to quit drugs or leave the game.

The opening scene of Kim's documentary shows Brenda talking at length to the girls she pulls into her van off the street. Kim and her producer, Lisa Stevens, are right there in the conversation, their camera unflinching, as one women recalls multiple stabbings from a client, followed by another young sex worker talking about her homelessness and crack addiction. There is no other film I can think of that listens so calmly and intently to the critically underrepresented voices of black American women—or women anywhere, for that matter.

I ask Kim whether she'd consider her work vérité, and she said she found it quite the opposite: "It's not fly on the wall, it's participatory. I don't know what the word is, but it's totally subjective, totally involved. I want the audience to feel like they're there, and they're me, and they're watching it through the camera."

I ask her whether access was ever a problem, given that none of the sex workers in the film seem to have a problem with safeguarding their identity. "There was never any problem," she says. "I don't think anyone said they didn't want to talk to us. I think it helped that we were women, that we looked a bit scruffy and we weren't putting them down. They knew we would do it with them."

The only time Kim's presence is felt is when you hear her voice float over the camera as she asks someone on screen a question. Even though you haven't seen her, the suddens sound of her voice feels natural. Maybe it's because, throughout the film, you can subtly tell a woman is filming. Kim agrees: "You could see that Dreamcatcher was definitely made by a woman. It couldn't not be made by a woman; a man couldn't have filmed Brenda in the bathroom with no clothes on, or have got so close."

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Dreamcatcher is a powerful and harrowing character-led documentary from start to finish. But there's one scene that really stays with you—the worst rape scene I've ever seen in cinema. Kim is filming Brenda giving her weekly school workshop, and the girls start to talk about their experiences of sexual abuse. One by one, domino-effect, they blankly recall childhood rapes from family members and strangers, as though it was perfectly normal. Almost every girl in the class has been abused. The rape is graphic—more graphic for the fact that we don't see it—and particularly horrific because abuse is clearly so ingrained in this community.

"The young girls talking about rape in the class really rocked me," Kim remembers. "I was crying as I filmed that. When one girl, Sharita, said, 'I tried to fend them off, but I couldn't because I was only little, so my body was covered in scars and I was nine when it happened to my four-year-old sister,' I was thinking, Oh my poor girl, how are you still sane? I'm not meant to cry, but I do. And Brenda is shocked because she's there to tell them all how not to get raped and how not to go into sex work, but finds out they've been having sex since they were four. I think what moved me most was the fact that they were all so nonchalant about this abuse. And I think, I hope they don't see me crying, because it seems so indulgent.

"Most people I know have had some kind of experience of violence or abuse, and we don't tell people—we're trained not to because it's such a taboo subject and so shameful when it happens to us. When I was raped at film school it was this horrible gang rape. I was really beaten up and I remember going into the canteen and this one woman said to me, 'Oh God, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Last night I was on the heath and I was beaten up and raped,' and she backed away from me. I never spoke to that woman again, and I thought, 'It's going to be hard to keep telling people why I'm like this, because it makes them awkward with me.'

"In this country we do tend to call people victims and blur their faces and give them special court screens. It's like you're not meant to tell people it's happened. Actually, it would be so much better if everybody was open, because sexual abuse is far more widespread than everybody thinks, or anyone wants to believe. So is child abuse, and we're starting to come to grips with it, but what we need to do is learn from Brenda. I want people to see this film in schools and colleges, because she's saying to them, 'I'm teaching awareness of this so that it doesn't happen to you.'"

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When Dreamcatcher ended, I sat in my kitchen and cried for about five minutes. Like, really cried. Cried like Kim did in the classroom. Which demonstrates the success of her films; the extent to which they really do pull you into the story. By the end of the 100 minutes you are there with Brenda 100 percent. You might know that she left her babies in cockroach-ridden crack houses; that she, at one time, was responsible for bringing other girls in for her pimps. But you entirely forgive her.

This was always Kim's intention: "What I'm trying to do is put layers into the story," she says, "so that every time you watch it you get something different. I'm not so interested in an investigation, I'm more interested in making a film that's like a novel; novelists can empathize with someone else's situation, they can see into other people's lives. That's what I'm trying to do, even with the pimps in Dreamcatcher... I want you to understand people rather than judge them."

Dreamcatcher is in UK cinemas starting March 6, and was recently acquired by Showtime in the US.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

"God's Tea Party" is a story from César Aira's story collection The Musical Brain (New Directions), which comes out tomorrow. The author of no fewer than 80 novels, Aira is regarded as one of the most prolific, adventurous, and thrillingly mischievous writers in the Latin American world today. He is known for his improvisational "flight forward" approach, in which he claims to only write ahead and not to go back and edit. Using such a process he can veer into wildly different genres, styles, and registers, upending conventions and even previously established conceits. Often his novels, novellas, and stories will begin with a surreal, off-kilter premise: a mad scientist seeks to clone an übermensch in the form of a literary celebrity; a shopper in a supermarket discovers a secretly sentient cart; a genie appears from out of a milk bottle, offering our narrator the choice: to have a Picasso, or to be Picasso. The story below operates on a similarly fantastic and marvelous level.

—James Yeh

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God's Tea Party

I

According to an old and immutable tradition in the Universe, God celebrates His birthday with a magnificent and lavish Tea Party, to which only the apes are invited. Nobody knows or could know, in those timeless regions, when this custom began, but it has become a fixture in the great year of the All: It seems that the patiently anticipated day will never come, but come it does, precisely on time, and the Tea Party takes place. It is said, plausibly enough, that the original reason for the ceremony was negative: The idea was not so much to invite apes as not to invite humans. Apes are a sarcastic joke, a kind of deliberate and spiteful (or, at best, ironic) slight on the part of the Lord, aimed at a human race that has disappointed Him. It may well have begun like that. But as soon as the arrangement was in place, it was accepted as an ancestral tradition, without a clear meaning, but saved from blatant absurdity by the hefty weight of precedent.

Traditions cannot be separated from the societies that created them. A community's traditions function like a sympathetic nervous system. They tend to be rather irrational, because their historical components were produced by an intricate web of causes that not even the most careful study would be able to disentangle. The case of God's Tea Party, however, should be simpler, because it's a tradition of the Universe, so there was nothing particular or historical about its origin; instead of a causal network there was the gong of the absolute, no less. Yet, whether simple or difficult to grasp, its origin and reason for being remain obscure, perhaps just because the theologians never took the ceremony seriously, or were afraid of compromising their reputations by attending to something so grotesquely silly.

Nevertheless, to clarify, it can be said that it's not a natural occurrence like the spring thaw or an eclipse or the migration of ducks. It's a social event. It doesn't have to happen, should the Master of the house decide that He doesn't feel like having a Tea Party. Up until now, the custom has been observed and will, most likely, continue for all eternity. Even He respects the old established traditions, perhaps simply out of habit.

Like every social occasion, this one has its formalities. The first, which is really a sine qua non, is the issuing and distribution of the invitations. (This too could be different. Were the judgment to be rescinded or the sentence commuted one day, the guests might be human.) The invitations, addressed "To Evolution," are automatically transmitted to the ape's instincts, like the sound of a doorbell. They are sent out all at once, en masse, and the operation may consist of no more than the divine enunciation of the word "apes." That is enough for all concerned to know that the day has arrived.

But what day is it? When does the uncreated Creator celebrate His birthday? Any time at all. It could be today. Except that "today" could be a lapse of countless eons or a slice of a microsecond — it depends what plane you're on — since His universe is a puzzle of days, hours, months, and centuries, all of different shapes and sizes, locked together in a polyhedron without end, on whose faces dawns and midnights, emptiness and plenitude, ends and beginnings coexist. Naturally He who created time has the right to celebrate His birthday if He so desires. Even so, "God's birthday" sounds odd, and the slight surprise provoked by the expression is the reason why the whole thing is so odd.

II

More than odd, impossible: a five o'clock tea impossibly happening outside time, in a realm of pure fantastic invention. Were a witness present, he'd see a sheer frenzy of senseless movement. The apes can't keep still. They leap up and down as if possessed, on their own chairs and those of the others. Incapable of staying put, after barely a moment in one place, they're looking for somewhere new. They squeeze in wherever they can, and there's always a space, because the others keep shifting too. They are possessed, truly possessed, by an enthusiasm without object, as if they knew that, just for a while, eternity was theirs to play up in, and were determined not to waste the opportunity. With their giddy diagonal leaps across the table, they knock over the cups, send the spoons and forks flying; their stamping feet scatter the pastries, their tails swipe at the cream-laden cakes and come away spotted with white. What do they care! Their faces, hands and chests are sticky with cake, tea, crumbs, and chocolate. The cups of fine porcelain implode in their clumsy grips, and to counteract the scalding tea they splash themselves with cold milk. They're constantly fighting; there's always some pretext, and if they can't find one they go ahead and fight all the same. Sometimes it looks like a battlefield: They bombard each other with sugar cubes, spit marmalade, hurl the trays of scones. Inevitably one of them rises above the mêlée by swinging from the chandelier, until he gets distracted, lets go and comes crashing down in the middle of the table, devastating the china and scattering the confectionery. And how they scream! The racket is so deafening a fire truck's siren would be inaudible.

Exercising His omnipotence, God pours tea into all the cups at once. And while He's at it, He repairs some of the breakages. In a circus like this, of course, His good intentions only aggravate the chaos, giving it a velocity it wouldn't have in the natural order of causes and effects. The cataclysm becomes as inextricable as a thread a million light years long in a complete snarl.

And yet, it's as if there were an order of ceremony, because every time God has a Tea Party, the same things happen. Every leap, every stain on the table cloth, the trajectory of every slice of strawberry tart thrown from one end of the table to the other, exactly repeats what happened the time before and anticipates what will happen next time. The whole thing is identical. But there's really no reason to be amazed, because, after all, every event is identical to itself.

This identity explains why the party continues to be repeated. Without it, God may well have decided not to invite the apes to tea again, having seen what an awful mess they can make and just how badly they can behave. But yielding the initiative to the automaticity of the same takes all the risk out of repetition. The bad manners of the guests become a given configuration of reality, like a landscape. Nonetheless, the question of whether manners are subject to evolution does arise. Detached one by one from the apocalyptic block in which they manifest themselves at God's Tea Party, and isolated like signs, perhaps they could develop, becoming part of a story, and after a great many centuries or millennia, we would arrive at a divine, unprecedented spectacle: a gathering of apes sitting quietly around a table, lifting their teacups in one hand, their little fingers pointing at the surrounding void, dabbing at the corners of their mouths with napkins, perfectly demure and genteel.

III

The problem of the bad behavior might be due to the fact that God doesn't preside. Or rather, He does and He doesn't. As we know, God is omnipresent, which turns out to be very handy for carrying out His functions, but it has the drawback of preventing Him from being visibly present in a particular place, for example sitting at the head of the table, keeping things under control. His absence (if His omnipresence can be counted as an absence) could be regarded as a discourtesy that legitimates all the subsequent discourtesies of his guests: a host who fails to turn up to his own party thereby authorizes his guests to behave as they like (this is the household version of the well-known saying, "If God does not exist, everything is allowed.") But taking a wider view should allow us to see that His behavior is the transcendental form of the solicitude that characterizes the perfect host, who "thinks of everything" in order to guarantee the well-being of his guests, ensuring that plates, cups, and glasses are never left empty, all the provisions are of the finest quality, sweet and savory, hot and cold are balanced, the lighting and the temperature are just right, the table cloth is well ironed and doesn't smell of mothballs, and the conversation never languishes or strays toward inappropriate topics. There are so many details to attend to! Only God could keep track of them all.

By making an appearance He could put a stop to the uproar, but if He were to be in one place He would cease to be in others and would thus betray His essence. So one of the apes stands in for Him. This King of the Apes is a legendary personage. Nobody believes in his real existence, for good reason: He exists only for the duration of God's Tea Party. He does what God would do were He to take a fleshly form, but he does it as the misshapen caricature that he is. Standing on the chair at the head of the table, frantic and raucous, intoxicated by his own impatient and capricious majesty, he distributes punches and kicks, yells his head off, hurls everything within his reach, and in his determination to impose order ends up being the most disorderly of all. Sometimes he is so maddened by his own energy that he is the one who starts a new brawl or launches a new campaign of destruction, which he then insists on quashing with renewed violence. The other apes, displaying an atavistic respect that seems to have been instilled in them by the light of divine reason, refrain from challenging the king's authority (not that it has much effect on their behavior). Indeed, if Supreme Command is diffusely present everywhere, it follows that it must be present in the King of the Apes, and it could even be argued that, while remaining evenly distributed, it is, in a sense, more present in him than elsewhere. However mechanically or automatically God's representative is designated, a Will is involved, and Will is beyond the reach of calculation and conjecture.

The king is the one who shouts the most, and who shouts the loudest. He prefigures the invention of the loudspeaker. He would like to have a thousand arms, so he could slap all the guests at the same time. Still, he manages pretty well with the two he has by leaping about unpredictably and keeping on the move. Apes are naturally endowed with exceptional agility, but he surpasses his physical limits. It's as if he were pure mind, and his mind is twisted and perverse, bitter and sadistic, sick with power. Like so many others, "he thinks he's God." He persecutes the slowest and most vulnerable apes, and especially the timid ones, at the bottom of the pile; he sprays lemon juice in their eyes, dips their fingertips into the boiling tea, plugs their ears with candy and their noses with marmalade, pushes silver spoons into their anuses... In the breaks, he downs gallons of tea, to fuel his causeless fury. There must be something in that tea.

IV

On one occasion a curious being interrupted God's famous Tea Party. As a rule, people who join a gathering to which they have not been invited try to go unnoticed; they don't draw attention to themselves; they keep a low profile and try to blend in. That's the interloper's logic. It doesn't always work, and some adopt the opposite strategy: Assuming they'll be found out sooner or later, they decide to make it sooner and justify their presence by being "the life of the party."

In this case, the intruder apparently chose the first approach, for which she was unsurpassably equipped by her natural attributes. For a start, she couldn't have been smaller, because she was a subatomic particle. One of those pieces of a part of an atom that were left over when the Universe was formed and have been floating about ever since. To her the Void and the All were one; she roamed them both, in free fall, idle and unattached.

Millions of galaxies had seen her go by; or hadn't, but she'd gone by all the same. A well-informed observer would have been able to recognize her as an archaeological trace of the dimensions that had ceased to exist, or one of time's wandering milestones, or a messenger from the origin. Her tiny little body, on which not even the finest brush could have inscribed a single letter, nonetheless contained a long history. The most advanced cyclotrons would have been required to decipher that diminutive hieroglyph, but the eminent scientists who operated those costly instruments were busy with more important and beneficial projects. In any case, it would have been hard for them to capture or even locate her, because there were no maps showing her trajectory, and she didn't draw attention to herself. Discreet to the point of stealth, she slipped away quietly; before she'd finished arriving she was gone. She was there and not there.

The same was true of her path. It couldn't really be called capricious because all things obey the laws according to which they were created, but when a thing is as small as she was, literally off the scale (when, that is, it exists on a plane that is prior to measurement), there's no predicting which way it will go, or when. To give an idea of her size (although it's an inconceivable idea), if you took as many of those particles as there are atoms in the Universe and stuck them together, they still wouldn't make up the volume of an atom.

This intensified tininess gave her a quality that would have been extraordinary in a normal-size being: She didn't need to change course and never bumped into anything because she went right through whatever happened to be in her way. It would misleading to liken this to a bullet's trajectory because she made no holes; she didn't need to. From her point of view solid bodies were not solid. The atoms of a stone, which to us seem so tightly packed, were, for her, as far apart as the sun and the moon. So she glided through a meteorite of nickel and iron as a bird crosses the blue sky on a spring morning. She traversed a planet without even noticing. With the same oblivious fluidity, she passed through an atom. Or a sheet of paper, a flower, a boat, a dog, a brain, a hair.

For the particle there was no such thing as a closed door. So to find her appearing (so to speak) at a party to which she hadn't been invited, or at all the parties, could hardly come as a surprise. She was the prototypical interloper. Her gate-crashing was systematic, unstoppable and supremely elegant. So many might have envied her! All the outcasts, the embittered, the paranoiacs, eaten up by jealousy, left at home alone while the others gather to enjoy themselves in the glittering salons of the Universe. But the envious would have had to consider the price the particle was paying: diminution, insignificance. Was it worth it, under those conditions?

V

And even granting that no space was exempt from the little wanderer's intrusions, it's still hard to accept that she could have snuck into the most exclusive gathering of all: God's Tea Party, the legendary party held to celebrate His birthday. It was a bit too much, even for her. Not just because the whole point of the gathering was to exclude the uninvited, but also because it was governed by an absolute. It was, in other words, a kind of fiction or artistic construction, and as a result each of its details, whether big or small, subtle or crude, had to correspond to a meaning or an intention. And the particle was not a detail in a story; she didn't contribute any information or advance the plot: She was an accident and nothing more.

On the other hand, it was bound to happen. Because the particle was one of a countless multitude, falling through the Universe. That's why it's called a "rain of particles," and although the analogy is misleading (this "rain" is falling in all directions, and never ends, and doesn't wet things), it does at least quash any hopes of detailed monitoring, because even the briefest local shower is composed of more drops than anyone could count, let alone name. And since these particles are so numerous and intrusive, why should it be surprising to find one passing through the scene of God's Tea Party?

Perhaps it wasn't an exception. It hasn't occurred to anyone to look into this question systematically, but it's entirely possible that particles are attracted by parties. Why would that be strange? Or to put it the other way around: Parties may well be a natural sieve for particles. (The resemblance between the words is not a mere coincidence.)

Coquettishly, the particle identified as a geometric point, which meant that her manifestation in reality was linear, because over time a point will always trace a line. And since a line is the intersection of an infinity of planes inclined at different angles, when this line entered God's Tea Party, something like a windmill of superfine screens appeared, screens tilted at various, changing angles, over which the apes went slipping and sliding, tumbling over and getting up, finding themselves somewhere else altogether, climbing a slope only to realize that they were actually descending, or whizzing down a slide that, to their surprise, was going up. Since there were so many planes, it was very rare for two apes to be on the same one, which didn't stop them fighting—on the contrary. Their leaps became multidimensional, as if they wanted to jump through spaces that space did not contain. Suddenly they would discover that the floor beneath their hairy feet was also beneath the feet of an ape on the other side, defying the law of gravity. Or the space across which they stretched their extra-long arms, reaching for a profiterole, was narrowed by the pressing in of two spaces from neighboring planes, squeezing the arm into a super-thin ribbon. Or the tea they spilled flowed upward, downward, sideways, backward, and forward, like a thousand-pointed liquid star. All this intensified their silliness and drove them crazy; they treated the phenomenon as a theme park specially built for their amusement, and that's when chaos really began to reign. They started moving like wonky robots loaded with explosives. They jumped in all directions, put their hands and feet in the tea and their tails in the pompoms of Chantilly cream on the cakes; they yelled as if competing in a noise contest, choked, vomited, and crawled under the table cloth, sending the dishes flying, as you can imagine.

It was amazing that such a tiny being could produce such far-reaching effects. The particle seemed to be everywhere at once, although, of course, she wasn't. At each moment she was in one place only, but present there as a cause, so her effects were simultaneously present in many other places, and while they were still being produced, she was already generating new planes and scrambling the apes into new configurations. The size of a cause doesn't matter: a cause is a cause, whether big, medium or small. Even when it's the cause of madness.

VI

With its baroque superposition of necessary accidents and accidental necessities, the Tea Party was, it seemed, complete both as an event and as a symbol. The birthday was duly celebrated, and rather than passing unnoticed, the date was marked, if not with the ecclesiastical pomp that might have been expected, at least with the animal (not to say bestial) energy and joy of the primitive and the authentic.

But, driven on by an obsessive perfectionism appropriate to His status and function, God wanted to add one last stitch, or sew on a final button, and tie off the end of the thread. He still had to give the particle an origin. He had to make her come from somewhere. Or, to put it more precisely, he had "to make her have come from somewhere." This was a preliminary task, which should come as no surprise, since all God's tasks are preliminary; otherwise the completeness of His world would be compromised. It wasn't a problem, given His habitually bold approach to space and time. The problem came afterward, as we shall see, not that it was really a problem (partly because for Him before and after had no meaning).

God's Tea Party would have been incomplete without the story of the particle. Because the Party was a story, and every story is made up of stories, and if it's made up of anything else it ceases to be a story. We will never know whether it was a weakness on God's part, one of those forgivable little vanities, or a matter of logic, but He dearly wanted the birthday party to make a good story, a "once upon a time," every repetition of which would be a perfectly accomplished rehearsal. He couldn't allow the anonymity of the furtive interloper to spoil everything.

The nature of the object meant that his work was already half done: It couldn't be hard to find the origin of a particle because the word itself indicated that it was part of something. All He had to do was find that something, or invent it. God had made far more arcane discoveries, in the course of His long career. How many times had he found a needle in a haystack, just to satisfy His creatures' appetite for metaphors or proverbs!

In this case, it could have been anything, literally, and more than literally: The particle could have come not only from a material object but also from an event, a lapse of time, an intention, a thought, a passion, a wave, a form... By virtue of its size, it belonged in the primordial roundabout, from which the paths of mass and energy depart, with their respective mutual metamorphoses. The particles were at the heart of the action. Which didn't mean that the origin of this one in particular had to be sought exclusively at the beginning: She could have emanated from any state of the Universe, even the most recent. The infinitesimal birth of that nosy little globule could have taken place in a flare from the surface of Alpha Centauri or a pan used to fry a dove's egg in China, in a child's tear or the curvature of space, in hydrogen, blotting paper, a desire for revenge, a cube root, Lord Cavendish, a hair, or the unicorn... The catalogue that God had to flick through, so to speak, was inordinately long. Not for the first time, it was borne home to Him that omnipotence is limited by l'embarras du choix. Words were his only guides in that great chaotic enumeration. At bottom, it was a question of language. There weren't any things in reality, only words, words that cut the world into pieces, which people end up taking for things. God didn't need to use words Himself, but when He had to intervene, when, as in this case, He wanted to imprint something on human memory, He had no choice but to take part in the linguistic game. He regarded it as a challenge. It was quite a bit harder for Him than it would have been for a grammar teacher, because He had to consider all languages, living, dead, and potential (each of them carved the world up differently, and, viewed from above, their coincidences, divergences and overlaps formed a super-intricate patchwork).

Cutting to the chase: It has taken longer to formulate the problem than He took to solve it. As if He'd pressed a button, the particle had her birth certificate, which also served as an invitation to the party, to which she would return for her debut. And here, the Creator made an exception: He who keeps no secrets kept one on this occasion. He didn't tell anyone what he had chosen as the particle's origin. And that, ever since, has been the profound little mystery that runs through God's Tea Party.

—Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

Shortlisted for the Neustadt International Prize, César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. New Directions publishes many of his books including the novels Ghosts, Conversations, The Literary Conference, and the story collection The Musical Brain.

The poet Chris Andrews teaches at the University of Western Sydney and is a primary translator of Roberto Bolaño and César Aira.

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A picture of those who attended the first "Sigurd" ISIS inspired Nazi training camp. Their faces are obscured by the Totenkopf—the badge of Hitler's SS.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Newcastle has just breathed a sigh of relief following the passing of the weekend's Pegida demonstration, when a few hundred bigots took to the streets to shout about Islamification. But the city will have to gear up for another, more extreme far-right street demo later this month. Neo-Nazis from across Europe are set to descend upon Newcastle for a protest against what organizers describe as the "systematic destruction of the white race."

Until now, nobody has really noticed beyond a small handful of anti-fascists, because the Pegida demo was getting all the hype. The media has also been paying attention to the anti-Semitic "Liberate Stamford Hill" protest in North London against the "Jewification of Britain" which could take place on the same weekend.

The "White Man March," taking place on March 21, could be more significant than both. The Pegida UK protest was trying to latch onto the success of the German Pegida movement, which has seen tens of thousands of people take to the streets against Islam. But it doesn't really have much chance of that success. It's basically a re-heated version of the ideas and tactics of the English Defence League with a different name. The Stamford Hill event, meanwhile, is organized by a lone neo-Nazi crank. The White Man March, on the other hand, sees several members of the far right intent on bringing neo-Nazis together in a more open and better organized way than ever before.

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Promotional material for the march

The White Man March is part of a neo-Nazi attempt to copy the way protests spread like memes in the wake of the Arab Spring and Occupy. It was started by American racist Kyle Hunt who spoke to VICE about it last year. The idea is that the kind of people who are terrified at the idea of having mixed race grandchildren should take to the streets to warn other white people about what they think are attempts to systematically exterminate the white race.

Last year's UK White Man March wasn't a big deal. It wasn't really even a march. Five supporters of secretive British neo-Nazi group National Action (NA) unveiled a banner reading "anti-racist is a code word for anti-white" in Birmingham city center's Victoria Square, later hanging it from a motorway bridge.

This year, the event looks like it might be worth paying attention to. The protest is being organized by individuals linked NA and their friends in the British Movement—a tiny, old-school British Nazi group—who are expected to attend the event. A secret Facebook group being used to encourage people to attend the White Man March includes over 300 far-right activists, including members of the extreme right National Front (NF) and the Blood and Honour Nazi-Punk network. The event page shows an Italian fascist saying that a group of them will be flying in to Newcastle for the protest. Young Russian and Belgian neo-Nazis also discuss traveling to the event.

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NA members at an MMA training session.

Key organizers NA are a pretty sinister bunch. Their members have been attending ISIS inspired "Sigurd" training camps, where young neo-Nazis from across the country gather to practice fighting in groups, using knives as weapons, and learn about Nazi ideology. NA recently held a weekend event where around a dozen members practiced mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting.

The group were set up in 2013 by Alex Davies—who was then a Warwick University student and Benjamin Raymond, the current leader. They hit the headlines last year after a young member, Garron Helm, 21, from Liverpool, was jailed for tweeting anti-Semitic abuse at Labour MP Luciana Berger.

They are trying to build a group capable of "ethnically cleansing Britain." But you won't see them goose-stepping around in black military uniform like the Nazis of old—they are part of the European autonomous nationalist scene: neo-Nazis who copy the look and tactics of far-left subculture. They dress in black-bloc type gear and listen to music that sounds like West Coast crusty hardcore but with racist lyrics—like if From Ashes Rise were a bit less musically competent and screamed about how much they love being white. Some of them also dress like hipsters, showing that the "Nipster" subculture—Nazis who dress like pop-up coffee shop baristas—is heading to the UK.

This protest shows the UK neo-Nazi movement is starting to look outward, having spent years expressing their White Pride anonymously on the internet while maintaining a relatively respectable façade for their political activity. Many of NA's members were involved with youth wing of the British National Party (BNP), including one of the group's founders. With the collapse of Britain's most successful fascist project, these young Nazis have abandoned BNP-style electoral politics and are looking to build a violent street presence, drawing on inspiration from European fascists like Golden Dawn.

Organizers claim they have picked Newcastle because they believe it is one of the cities in the UK with a high proportion of white residents, but there may be other reasons for their choice. Far-right protests in the UK are frequently opposed by anti-fascists, but in recent years several have taken place in Newcastle where there has been little to no anti-fascist opposition. One example is protests by the NF against grooming gangs last year, attended by the White Man March's main organizer, a guy who goes by the name Wayne Jarvie.

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Free Gary Yarborough demonstration organized by Chris Livingstone.

Jarvie, which is probably not his real name, is being assisted by Chris Livingstone, 44, originally from Rainham, Kent. Livingstone is a former BNP organizer who recently organized a protest outside the US embassy in solidarity with Gary Yarborough, a former member of a US neo-Nazi terror crew called "The Order." Yarborough has served 30 years in prison and is not being granted parole. The protest was backed by a wide range of neo-Nazi and far-right groups, but only around 30 people turned up, including Jarvie.

Jarvie first got involved in far-right politics in 2009 through the EDL, with his involvement lasting until 2012 when he started hanging around with the NF. During this time he attended meetings and protests, including one opposing Irish Republicans in Liverpool. In 2014 he joined the British Movement, who have close links with NA. He was one of the ten NA activists who were arrested in Liverpool, who had their homes raided by the police and were given strict bail conditions. No further action was taken against those arrested.

Taking to the airwaves of a far-right internet radio show, Jarvie was asked to name historical figures who inspire him. He named Adolf Hitler. But he was keen to stress the whole Nazi movement deserves credit for what happened in Germany—not just the Führer. He goes on to describe how NA are "openly national socialist and anti-Jewish." When asked about electoral politics, Jarvie describes how he thinks UKIP need to come to power to restore "sanity" back to British politics. But he doesn't see neo-Nazis standing in elections as a great idea, describing that route as "dead"—"we're going to have to go to war," he said.

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More promotional material for the march

North East anti-fascists are set to oppose the White Man March, but may get little support from elsewhere in the country. On the day Unite Against Fascism, a group that frequently organizes protests against the far right, will be holding a demonstration against racism and fascism about 250 miles away in London while actual white-supremacist neo-Nazis take to the streets of Newcastle. Other anti-fascists might focus on opposing the "Liberate Stamford Hill" demonstration the following day in North London. This could mean one of the potentially larger explicitly neo-Nazi events in recent years goes mostly unopposed.

It would be easy to write off NA as a joke. There's a story about them that does the rounds on the anti-fascist scene. Supposedly when the group was in its infancy, they turned up at a demo in support of the Golden Dawn at the Greek embassy in London and were found amongst other Nazis by anti-fascists in a pub. NA often talk about "smashing the reds," so the anti-fascists went up to them and said, "We're the reds" asked them if they "want some." NA members declined, as anti-fascists drunk their pints and stole their flags. The anti-fascists then offered to escort them to a train station so that they would go away, and the NA members accepted the offer unlike other attendees of the demo.

But since that happened, they've been attending MMA training camps. Perhaps more significantly, while they have some of the most openly unhinged ideas around, they seem to be better-organized and more confident than many of their peers. Other neo-Nazis are happy simply to go through some political motions before heading to a Nazi-punk gig, with little real prospect or ambition of achieving anything.

That's not the case with NA. General Secretary of the British Movement Steve Frost recently told an audience including NA members that he applauded the flash demos and street activity they have been carrying out, describing it as "the sharp end of building a grassroots movement." But those flash demos all they have really managed—until now. It shows how much the group has grown that in the space of a year they have gone from a small group dropping a banner unannounced, to publicly advertising an explicitly racist neo-Nazi protest in advance. It looks like the "sharp end" of British fascism is coming to Newcastle.

Follow James on Twitter.

Tony Hardt is the pseudonym of an anti-fascist activist who co-authored this article.

Separating Netflix's House of Cards from its antihero, Frank Underwood, would be like taking the bull out of bullfighting. Kevin Spacey's scheming congressman has turned the show into a national phenomenon, and the character serves as both a counterpoint and stressor for how we see our politicians: Underwood is ruthless and effective, but he's also corrupt, unscrupulous, and a serious weirdo.

The show takes place in a sort of coked-out version of DC, where congressmen act like mob bosses and journalists like spies. But it does raise the question of whether there are precedents in real-life Washington for Underwood's kind of backhanded, behind-the-scenes power maneuvering. While it's unlikely that any of these actual human beings ever ________ a girl in front of a __________ (spoiler free!) but they have their own kinds of skeletons.

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Sam Rayburn, middle, escorts FDR to his inauguration in 1941. Photo via Sam Rayburn House Museum

Sam Rayburn
No representative has ever served longer as the Speaker of the House than Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from Texas who was in the position for 17 years, the longest tenure in US history. As Speaker, Rayburn was known for working other congressmen privately, mastering the art of the backroom deal, and his methods of persuasion and compromise were so effective that the far-left of his party criticized him for working too often with Republicans, despite his generally liberal politics. In Rayburn's obit, the New York Times described him as a "bald, blocky Texan, puffing a cigarette in one of his relaxed moods," which is a terrific way to be described.

He was famous among lawmakers for his Board of Education meetings, where Democratic leadership would drink bourbon, play cards, and strategize—invitations to the meetings were highly sought after, and attendees included Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Rayburn also played a major role in shepherding the rise of Johnson, a fellow Texan, to the White House. After serving as permanent chairman of three straight Democrat National Conventions, he stepped down to be LBJ's floor manager in 1960, the year that Johnson ultimately became Kennedy's running mate.

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Rahm Emanuel gets cozy with Obama's then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Photo via US Department of Defense

Rahm Emanuel
A notorious backroom pitbull, Rahm Emanuel is perhaps the closest living embodiment of Underwood, except without the restraint. Emanuel has been a fixture in Democratic politics since the 1990s, helping Bill Clinton get elected to the White House. As Clinton's chief campaign fundraiser, Emanuel raised enough money to help Clinton overcome attacks about his extramarital affairs; later, in the White House, he spearheaded campaigns to bully Congress on NAFTA, health care reform, and anti-crime legislation.

Like Underwood, Rahmbo was also kind of a motherfucker. Famously, he once a pollster a dead fish in abox when he was late with results. A Clinton speechwriter once remembered that the most powerful thing you could precede a statement with during that administration was, "Rahm says." And after Clinton's win in 1996, as his team sat around celebrating, Emanuel got up, took a knife, and starting yelling the names of people he believed had betrayed them, plunging the knife into the table and yelling,"DEAD" after each name. Now the mayor of Chicago, Emanuel is focusing his manic political energy on browbeating the city into electing him for a second term.

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James A. Baker III, arriving in Kuwait in 1991. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

James A. Baker III
James Baker is one of the most important backroom men in the Republican Party's Reagan-Bush dynasty, playing a singular role in shaping foreign policy in the last quarter of the 21 ^st Century. As Reagan's chief of staff and then Secretary of the Treasury, and later as Secretary of State and then chief of staff for Bush Sr., Baker was so powerful that a number of other Republicans even led an effort to see him removed from the Reagan administration because they suspected him of sabotaging conservative efforts. Obviously, they failed.

Baker's biggest machinations involved the Middle East. He was a leading critic of Saddam Hussein, helping to orchestrate Operation Desert Storm, and reportedly declaring he would wipe the regime off the face of the earth if there were any evidence of Iraq using chemical weapons against Kuwait. He also played a major role in preventing the creation of a Palestinian state by threatening to cut funding to any international organization that recognized Palestine.

Although Baker is now 84, that hasn't stopped him from haunting the smoke-filled back rooms of Republican politics, now as a senior foreign policy advisor to Jeb Bush's nascent presidential campaign.

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Ted Kennedy in 1987. Photo by US Navy

Ted Kennedy
While the name alone suggests authority, Edward "Ted" Kennedy often gets shortchanged next to his brothers John and Robert. But during nearly 40 years as a Democrat senator from Massachusetts, the youngest and longest-surviving Kennedy brother became one of the most influential men in government, until his death in 2009, briefly serving as Majority Whip and writing more than 300 bills that were passed into law.

Kennedy's time in politics was not spent peacefully. Jimmy Carter still blames him for having defeated the healthcare reform bill he proposed while in the White House, claiming in 2010 that the recently deceased Kennedy did so out of personal spite and a desire to prevent Carter from a major success so that he could take over as president himself. Kennedy did eventually challenge the sitting president for their party's nomination in 1980, taking his campaign all the way to the floor of the Democratic National Convention, but ultimately lost.

He also bore some hallmarks of the notoriety that has characterized his family. In 1969, a passenger in a car Kennedy was driving died when he accidentally drove off a bridge. Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, and the incident likely kept him from becoming president. Frank Underwood is a fictional character, and to compare the things that happen to him on a TV show to an incident in which a real human died would be insane, but the Chappaquiddick Incident, as it's known, definitely has some HOC undertones.

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Reagan and his Iran-Contra braintrust. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Caspar Weinberger
Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Weinberger had his hands in most of the major scandals we associate with that administration. A major backer of Star Wars—Reagan's doomed attempt to develop a missile-defense system that would exist partially in space—Weinberger pushed his own deep distrust of the Soviet Union onto the White House and the military, even as others in the administration were starting to feel a little more conciliatory. This great line about Mikhail Gorbachev pretty much sums up Weinberger's views: "I don't think just because he wears Gucci shoes and smiles occasionally that the Soviet Union has changed its basic doctrines."

As Secretary of Defense, Weinberger also oversaw the largest peacetime increase in military spending in American history. His shadiest dealings, though, involved the Iran-Contra scandal, which, for those of you not brushed up on your late Cold War history, involved Reagan administration officials conspiring to sell arms to Iran and then use the proceeds to fund a rebellion against the socialist government of Nicaragua. Weinberger resigned before the trial, but was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, after the commission investigating the ordeal accused him of trying to hide nearly two thousand notebooks that might have held evidence implicating Reagan and himself in the arms deal. President George H.W. Bush eventually pardoned Weinberger before he stood trial.

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Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg welcomes future president Gerald Ford to Congress. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Arthur Vandenberg
Vandenberg went from being a newspaper editor-in-chief to a Republican senator from Michigan, which is such a hilarious transition that it makes me want to run for office out of pure joy. Notorious for his isolationism leading up to Pearl Harbor, Vandenberg eventually conceded to the American war effort after the Japanese attack, and, because of this earlier position, his conversion to internationalism became a major world event: the Senate website's obit refers to it as the "speech heard round the world."

Vandenberg's influence in Congress had a significant impact—both positive and negative—on the sitting presidents of the time. Prior to World War II, he was a major opponent of FDR's New Deal efforts, and he led the successful opposition to FDR's attempts to pack the Supreme Court. After the war, he played a major role in gaining support for Truman's attempts to rebuild the global economy, and reposition the US geopolitically. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he gathered bipartisan support for the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and NATO. When Truman turned to him for advice on how to deal with the rising power of the Soviet Union, Vandenberg advised the president to "make a personal appearance before Congress and scare the hell out of the American people."

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LAPD Officers at the scene of Sunday's shooting. Photos by the author

There was exactly one topic of conversation on downtown LA's Skid Row Monday morning: the shooting death of an approximately 28-year-old African immigrant now known alternately as "Africa" and "Cameroon."

LAPD cops shot the man five times Sunday while responding to a robbery call just outside a homeless shelter in the middle of the district known for having the highest concentration of homeless people in the United States.

While the facts are still somewhat foggy, it seems most likely at this point that during the altercation between Cameroon and the officers, he grabbed at one of the officer's guns, prompting the officers to shoot him lest he open fire on them or bystanders.

Most critical, however, is the question of how Cameroon's alleged mental illness played into the entire incident.

"I watched the whole thing from right there," said Ceola Waddell, a 58-year-old black man from Memphis, gesturing to the spot where he lives, about 20 feet away from where the victim was killed across an alleyway.

Waddell told VICE he saw the police ruffle Cameroon's tent, shoot a Taser inside, drag him outside, and stun him again.

"There were five police officers, and they couldn't keep him down. He was having an episode of some sort and they kept attacking him. It didn't look like he was attacking them out of malice or anything. It looked like he was terrified out of his mind for his life," he said.

Waddell is known locally as "the Cook." Using ingredients both donated and purchased, he often prepares large meals for his neighbors on Skid Row. Though he didn't know Cameroon particularly well, he regarded him as a mostly quiet fellow who, despite his drug habits and apparent mental illness, largely kept to himself.

Another man who identified himself only as "Hutch" echoed that claim.

"Sure, he smoked crystal. Everyone here smokes crystal. It's no secret. It lets us escape our miserable existence. But he never really bothered anyone and the drugs helped him cope," Hutch said.

In the past, Hutch and Cameroon smoked a couple of joints together. Nothing too formal, but they were friends. Hutch added that when they did talk, Cameroon mentioned that he had spent some time in a mental institution of some sort, leading him to believe that Cameroon's death occurred because the police simply didn't know how to properly react to someone with mental illness

"I didn't see the shooting happen, but I know that there must have been something to instigate him," he said. "Like a lot of folks here, he was mentally ill. And a lot of the time the cops don't know how to deal with people who are mentally ill."

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According to multiple sources, the victim was about 28 years old. He was an immigrant from Cameroon who spoke English with a heavy accent, spoke French fluently, and was a profoundly religious man. In the words of a man named "Juju" who said he was his closest friend on Skid Row, Cameroon was simply grateful to be in the United States.

"He didn't take anything for granted, that a lot of people in this country do. He came from a place where he had no rights. And here, he did. He had the right to speech, and the freedom to live how he wanted to," Juju told VICE.

Juju is from Cameroon as well, and the two were "like brothers" on Skid Row, almost always together and frequently speaking in French.

"He was a deeply spiritual man. He set his tent up right there so he could look up at that cross," said Juju, gesturing to a cross formed into the adjacent building's architecture.

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Juju didn't mention anything about mental illness, but another man who also watched the shooting happen from inside a public toilet he sheltered in said he had seen Cameroon act out in the past.

"Usually he kept quiet, but I definitely remember him sometimes acting up, yelling and hitting things with a small baseball bat he kept his in his tent for security," that man, who declined to give his name, explained.

Cameroon's tent and possessions were still sitting out on the sidewalk this morning when I went to have a look at the scene. When asked what Cameroon's legal name might have been, Juju ruffled through some belongings, looking for the man's wallet. He couldn't find it, and guessed that the police or Coroner's department must have taken it during their investigation.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck held a press conference around noon local time on Monday, speaking mostly in broad generalities about what he called "an extreme tragedy." While he emphasized that the officers involved were trained to deal with homeless and mentally ill patients, he didn't explicitly say whether the officers acted within the confines of department policy.

"We feel great compassion in the LAPD for people who live in conditions of homelessness, and often mental illness with no treatment," Beck said. "We prepare our officers to deal as best they can with them, but the reality is, this is much more than a problem that the police alone can solve."

The chief added that the victim reached for an officer's gun, citing the weapon being partially engaged as evidence. Whatever the case, the shooting is already being touted as a test for the LAPD's relatively new body camera program.

Though Cameroon's official identity isn't yet known, and likely won't be until the Coroner's department positively identifies his body, his friends on Skid Row already miss him.

"If only they had stepped back and given him a minute to see what was going on, calm down, and stop panicking, then he might have been here today," said Juju. "He didn't wake up yesterday thinking he was going to die."

Matt Tinoco is a young reporter in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter.