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This article was originally published by VICE Alps.

In every city, there's a neighborhood where walking on the streets makes you fiddle in your pockets, trying to make a weapon with your keys. In Vienna, that's the area surrounding the Josefstädter Straße subway station, which has in recent years become a popular hangout for drug dealers, users, and other persona non grata. Since a good friend of mine moved there, it's also become a place I frequent—every so often coming across situations in which people are searched by the police while exiting the subway.

One of those nights—it was a Friday—a group of policemen in the middle of the station caught my eye. They made me feel a little uncomfortable—not because I had anything to hide or had done something wrong, but because of my appearance. It might seem a little paranoid, but I just know that I look exactly like the kind of person the Austrian police like to stop and search: I'm young, tall, male, and black.

I decided to remain relaxed and simply walk past the policemen but it only took a few seconds until one of the officers pointed his finger at me. Another approached. I took off my headphones.

"Identity control. Could I see your ID?" said the second policeman.

Unfortunately, I had left my wallet at another friend's place. As I tried to explain this, the officer pointed his finger at something or someone behind me. I turned around to see and realized there was another black man on the opposite side coming down the stairs.

I am not naive and such behavior on the part of the police was not a new experience for me, but the transparency of it all made my jaw drop. I turned back to the police and looked at him questioningly. "What you are you doing is racist," I said. He looked at me dumbfounded. "What did you say?" he asked. I told him again that what he and his colleagues were doing was obviously racist. The policeman seemed to get even more angry. "We only stopped the other guy because he was attempting to walk in the other direction. And now you follow me, please," he demanded.

I followed him into one of the rooms for the subway staff. The policeman pointed to a table and asked me to empty my bag. I refused: "What is the reason you want to search me?" The policeman put on the same stunned face as before, and said that if I had nothing to hide I wouldn't have any problem unpacking my possessions.

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The station at Josefstädter Straße

"I have nothing to hide, I've just had enough of being stopped and searched only because of my looks," I responded. This time the cop gave me a choice: I would either unpack my things, or I would have to go to the police station. I told him I would not do either: "I have rights, and I will make use of them."

"Right now you don't have any rights," he said.

I begun to regret that I didn't have a smartphone to record the conversation. He told me once again that I should follow him, and we went to the patrol car, which was parked in front of the subway station. He told me to get in the car so we could go to the police station. I asked him if I was detained. He said I wasn't. "If I am not arrested, I'm not going anywhere," I said. He again asked me to stop creating unnecessary problems.

As time passed I realized that this man did not have the slightest understanding of what was bothering me. I then asked him how he would find it if he, for example, lived in Africa and was constantly being hassled because of his skin color. He said, "Well, then that's the way it is."

"But that's racism!" I retorted.

He again replied, "Well, then that's just the way it is."

I was again asked to get in the car. I again asked if I was detained. This time one of the policeman said, "Yes, you are arrested." I wanted to know for what reason. "Article 5," he said. Like most people, I don't know the Criminal Code by heart, so I asked what "Article 5" meant. He only said, "Article 5." There was no point in talking to him any further.

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I wondered if he would even read me my rights. He didn't. So I got in the car with the blue light and we drove to a police station. When we arrived, I heard the policeman whisper to his colleagues, "I think he is carrying something." I laughed.

Officers, who apparently had nothing better to do, gathered around me. I tried not to be intimidated and asked the policeman who had "arrested" me to give me his service number. "You will get it sooner or later," he said.

Another officer came to me and asked me to empty my pockets and my backpack. I put my bag on the table and he searched it. I also put the contents of my pockets on the table. The policeman asked me to open a used tissue.

Of course, he didn't find anything so I was asked to take my shoes off and put my cap on the table. At this point I just did what they asked. Two officers took one of my shoes and disappeared into another room. I saw one oft them smell my shoe, and say, "Uh, it stinks." At least that kind of amused me.

During the whole procedure I openly told everyone present my opinion. Namely, that it was actually their duty to serve the society and to provide security, not to humiliate people. A senior police officer said, "But you guys sell poison" and, "What were you doing walking around Josefstädter Straße, anyway?"

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My backpack, phone and cap—the things I had with me on the night of my "arrest"

By now, the policeman who had stopped me had gotten angry and started screaming, "You reek of cannabis!" Things got even worse when, tired from standing up, I decided to lean on the table. "Don't you sit your dirty ass on our table! Didn't you go to school?" he yelled.

I tried to stay calm and told him that he all the aggression he showed toward me, he really had toward himself. He took that the wrong way, and screamed back, "I have no aggression!" When I asked him to give me back my cap after he had searched it with absurd thoroughness, he grabbed it and refused to give it to me. Instead, he asked me to take off my shirt. Then he looked at me and said, viciously, "And maybe we should also take a look into your shorts?"

At least it only was a threat. Since I didn't have a wallet with me, I gave the officers my full name, date of birth, address, and other information. They checked my data in the register and realized that I had no record—I guess to their surprise.

I asked the policeman who had approached me for his service number once more, and this time he actually went to a desk, pulled out a card, wrote it down, and gave it to me. The policeman who had yelled before said, "Give him mine as well!" in a clearly sarcastic tone. I told him that I was not interested in him. They said I could leave and that I would be getting a police report in the next month. A few weeks later I received the report and it turns out the reason for my arrest was "Aggressive Behavior." I should pay a 99 euro [$110] penalty—apparently it would have been 100 euro, but since I was detained for half an hour and the suspicion could not be confirmed, one Euro was deducted as a redemption. I lodged an objection.

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The police's version of the story

Due to the objection, the police now had to explain their version of what happened. Unsurprisingly, their story is different than mine. According to them, I screamed and called them Nazis (I did not). My behavior attracted the attention of passersby, who then begun to interfere and this is why the arrest was necessary. (Under Section 35/1, not Article 5 by the way.)

But the most absurd and offensive part of the report is the bit where according to the police officers' testimony, I was obviously a part the drug scene because of my appearance—specifically my "lack of personal hygiene and dirty clothes." It's a shame that I have to state this, but I'll do it anyway: I was in no way even remotely dirty or unsanitary.

In addition, the report says that on the evening a search protocol was submitted to me, but I refused to sign it. That's a lie too: No protocol was ever given to me. I have been summoned to describe my take on the events, in court later this month. I do not intend to pay that 99 euro under any circumstances, even though I know that my word stands against that of about a dozen police officers.

This op-ed was published under an alias—the real name has been supplied to our editorial staff. Upon request, the police press office told us that the person concerned "was stopped during a key action for a security check." Besides that, they basically confirmed the version of the story that was contained in the police report. Austrian Police spokesman Thomas Keiblinger did not respond to the question whether "unhygienic appearance and dirty clothes" are a common reason for detentions and whether officers at Josefstädter Straße use skin color as a basis of searches.

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Left: Wild Woman Voodoo Granny Doily Chrocet (2007/2015). Right: 'Wanderlust' costume (2007)

All photos by Sam Clarke.

This morning, the Museum of Modern Art held a press preview for its blockbuster retrospective of Björk, a multimedia exhibition that includes more than 20 years of work from the artist's career. Featuring photography, music videos, costumes, theatrical performances, sound installations, and a site-specific film project called Blake Lake, we can't think of a more hotly anticipated opening or reason to be excited about Iceland.

The retrospective was brought to life through a close collaboration between Björk and Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large at MoMA and director of MoMA PS1. On top of exhibiting a melange of cultural ephemera that ties to the musician's entire discography—from 1993's Debut to this year's Vulnicura—visitors will be able to get a peak inside the mind of the iconic artist through journals, personal photos, and more. While VICE and its sister-sites will continue to cover this landmark MoMA event in the upcoming weeks, we wanted to make your mouths water with some sneak-peek photos from the press preview.

Björk is open to the public from March 8 through June 7. For more information, visit MoMA's website. The retrospective was made possible by a partnership with Volkswagen of America.

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"All Is Full of Love" robot, Chris Cunningham (1999)

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Crystal Mask, Val Garland (2013/2015)

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Left: Coat from "Jóga" music video (1997). Right: Model for 'Debut' (1993)

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Left: Notebooks from 'Homogenic' era (1997). Right: Airmail jacket, Hussein Chalayan (1994/2015)

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Bell dress from "Who Is It" music video, Alexander McQueen (2004)

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Left: Swan dress, Marjan Pejoski (2001). Right: "Pagan Poetry" dress, Alexander McQueen (2001)

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"All Is Full of Love" robot, Chris Cunningham (1999)

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I wanted the moon in Majora's Mask to be bigger.

That's what I remember thinking when I first saw the game being played at a friend's place back in 2000. I wanted the moon to fill the sky, looming massive and terrifying over everything, an inescapable presence inching ever closer as the seconds flew away.

It was because of this print ad I'd seen in GamePro, my favorite print ad ever for a video game, depicting our moon dwarfing Manhattan. I couldn't get that image out of my head. I couldn't stop seeing the moon descending on New York, grinding all its buildings into dust. When I heard that an updated release for the 3DS was on the way, I immediately flashed back to that image and my heart broke a little, the presence of the Twin Towers making the game's constant threat of cataclysmic destruction even more haunting.

And when I first saw the moon fall on Clock Town and witnessed the shockwave radiate outwards, unstoppable and unendurable like the shockwaves in those old films of early nuclear-bomb tests, I knew that it's not the size of the moon that matters. It's what you do with it. And with its setting and structure and premise and that moon sinking in the sky, Majora's Mask does so much.

I love the way that Termina, the land where Majora's Mask takes place, feels like a dream. I think of Link's Awakening, my other favorite Zelda game, which always felt to me like a product not of Link's subconscious but of the subconscious of Nintendo itself, with so many characters from other franchises showing up in one form or another. Majora's Mask feels like Link's dream to me, as if he rode his horse into the mysterious forest we glimpse at the start and end of the game and nodded off, and the whole game took place in his mind.

By this point, the lore of Hyrule, the usual setting for Zelda series adventures, is relatively concrete. Hyrule feels established as a physical, geographical place with a kind of history. But what even is Termina? Where exactly is it in relation to Hyrule? What is its history? Thank goodness Majora's Mask never bothers to answer any of these questions. It's precisely the vagueness surrounding Termina, the lack of lore and explanation, that prevents Majora's Mask from feeling burdened by reality. If Hyrule is a fantasy world, Termina is a surreal world. This lets Majora's Mask take root in my mind as a kind of symbolic quest, rife with dream logic, in ways that more grounded fantasy adventures just can't. And although the first time I played the game I was disappointed that so many of the residents of Clock Town were duplicates of Hyrule citizens from the preceding Ocarina of Time, I now think this is essential to Majora's Mask's dreamlike power. I imagine Link returning to Hyrule and feeling like Dorothy feels when she wakes at the end of The Wizard of Oz. "You were there! And you were there!"

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Skull Kid and the Moon

What I find so affecting about Link's time in Termina is that he never gets to really connect with any of those people. Link's path—the hero's path—is often a lonely one, but Majora's Mask is more directly concerned with loneliness than any other Zelda game. It's loneliness that drives the antagonistic Skull Kid to lash out against the world as he does, and I understand the bitterness and anger that loneliness can threaten to cultivate in someone. In a way, I know loneliness better now than I did 15 years ago when Majora's Mask first came out on the N64, so the game only seems more relevant to me today. When people ask me about the things I've been through over the past year, they often assume that the toughest thing has been losing my job. But the truth is that the toughest thing, the thing that makes everything else tougher, is the loneliness.

And so, while I think it's important that Majora's Mask wants us to view Skull Kid with some compassion, I also think it's important that it lets our experiences as Link show us a different way of dealing with solitude. As is always the case in Zelda games, Link never gets to truly be a friend to most other characters; he's too busy being their hero. There's no opportunity for closeness to form. There are no dinners and drinks, no heart-to-heart conversations. But Majora's Mask feels lonelier to me than other Zelda games because of its three-day cycle structure, and because each time you restart the cycle (as you inevitably must), your actions are undone.

The Gorons won't remember that pleasant spring day we shared at the racetrack. The Zoras won't recall the time we got the band back together. For them, these things never happened. And even if they did remember, they wouldn't know it was Link who shared these things with them. They see you as the Goron warrior Darmani, or the Zora musician Mikau. They don't know the part you played in their lives. You don't get to establish bonds with them, and then you erase the events from existence altogether. And that makes me wonder, as a transgender woman, about the things I shared with people when I was younger, when I was pretending to be someone I'm not: Do the people I shared those things with associate them with me, with Carolyn, or with a person they think doesn't exist anymore? It's my life to live and I have to live it this way in order to form bonds with other people that feel real to me, and I don't apologize for that; but I know that, in the difficult process of finding my path, I hurt other people.

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Try though he might, Link can't save everyone.

Which brings me to the other great theme of Majora's Mask: forgiveness. Forgiveness comes up again and again: The four spirits you go to so much trouble to summon tell you to "forgive your friend," and the ghosts haunting a kingdom of the dead tell you: "Believing in your friends and embracing that belief by forgiving failure... These feelings have vanished from our hearts." But I don't think it's just Skull Kid here who needs forgiveness. I think Link does, too.

This is a game with failure built into it. You can't help everyone. You can't save everyone. There's just not enough time. And you're just one person. I hate not being able to help everyone. And I think about how we help people, and how we let people down, how we fail others and fail ourselves, how I've walked away from people I loved who were in desperate need because I didn't know how to help them without destroying myself, and how hard it has been for me to forgive myself for my failures.

Even in the end, when all is said and done, the world is saved and a new day has dawned, Link doesn't get to share in the celebrations. "Well... it's almost time for the carnival to begin..." his fairy says. "So why don't you just leave and go about your business? The rest of us have a carnival to go to." And so, on he goes. Whatever it is Link is looking for on his secret, personal journey, like many of us, he still hasn't found it. But whether it was real or all just a dream, I like to think that he takes two things with him from his time in Termina: a hope that can sustain him on the lonely road ahead that somewhere there's a place where he belongs, and a greater willingness not just to view others with compassion but to view himself with compassion, too. At least, these are the things I take with me from my time there.

Follow Carolyn on Twitter.

Trying out skate tricks on new grounds for the first time can be nerve-racking, but skateboarder Micky Papa jumps right in, ready to go. Watch as Micky tests out Montreal's challenging new skatepark in our second instalment of the Dew Underground series.

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In 2007, photographer and self-described "Uppity Fatty" Substantia Jones started the Adipositivity project, which "aims to promote the acceptance of benign human size variation and encourage discussion of body politics," by publishing images of women, men, and couples of larger proportions. The idea is described on her website as "part fat, part feminism, part 'fuck you.'"

I recently talked to Substantia about body positivity and the ins and outs of her photographic practice.

VICE : How do you find your models?
Substantia Jones: I'll occasionally ask someone if they're interested in dropping through for my camera, but mostly people contact me, asking me to photograph them. Model search isn't really a part of the equation.

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How do you approach them?
Not every fat person is an "out" fat person—unapologetic and openly accepting of the place their body occupies on the spectrum of benign human variation. Many experience body shame, often hoping and/or attempting to alter their bodies to conform to a narrow beauty ideal.

The word fat is a morally neutral descriptor, while overweight is a term of judgment, and obese pathologizes that which is naturally occurring. So approaching a stranger with a pronouncement about their body—any pronouncement about their body—is likely to be unwelcome. And being naked on the internet is a big decision. I don't want to talk anybody out of their pants. As with many things in life, "willingly" is best. "Enthusiastically," even better.

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Do you generally find it easy to get people to pose for you?
I get more requests than I can comfortably handle, but getting subjects to relax during a shoot is another matter. I mean, would you be relaxed if you were standing naked with a person you'd just met ten minutes ago aiming a camera at you, with the promise of putting your bare ass on worldwide blast? I invite Adiposers to use whatever might be helpful during a shoot. Music. A cocktail. But more than anything, I think laughter calms folks in this situation. There's always plenty of that. Laughter and nudity are a well-suited pair.

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What do you think posing for you brings people? Do some take it as a sort of "revenge" over all the magazines that show only very thin, "perfect" bodies?
I'm not sure "revenge" is on anyone's mind. But, subversion? Certainly. Photography is a tool commonly used and manipulated to convince people—particularly women—that they're unworthy in their natural state; that they need to swallow what the $66 billion a year US weight loss industry is feeding them. The Adipositivity project is about taking that concept and subverting it, using photographs to promote self-love and ask people to embrace their natural state.

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How did the idea for this project come about? What do you want to express with it?
I discovered, anecdotally, that what we find visually displeasing, particularly when that displeasure has been media-manufactured, can be altered through repeated positive exposure to it. I likewise observed that we usually assign more validity to that which we find aesthetically pleasing. There's nothing better than to challenge nature, no matter how problematic it may seem.

My aim is to encourage people to become informed about body politics, to follow the money, to seek out science that's not been manipulated by the diet industry. I want them to love their bodies, and allow others to love their own.

Do you ever pose for pictures yourself?
I do. Especially in the beginning, when few people knew about the project, and folks were naturally reluctant to meet a stranger in a private place to make naked photos that'll be posted on the internet forever. Admittedly, not an appealing proposition. Many of the early images are of me and a few friends. I find I get the same pleasure from it that other Adiposers do. Lots of empowerment and "fuckyouism."

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Obviously, it's brilliant that you are countering the portrayal of unrealistic body ideals in the media, but—to play the devil's advocate—do you think there is a risk that these pictures in any way glorify a lifestyle that is, by some, considered unhealthy?
There are indeed many lifestyle practices which have been found to have a causal relationship with ill health and early death. Do fat people engage in these practices? Sometimes. Just as thin people do. But being fat isn't a lifestyle. If my photographs promote any lifestyle, it's that of body acceptance, happiness, and well-being, romantic love, and gettin' your yoga on. I do not promote choosing your size, which has been proven to be a wildly unsuccessful task. No, it's the diet industry that does that. I'd love to see this question presented to them. "Dear Diet Industry: Do you think there is a risk that these pictures may glorify a lifestyle that, medically, is considered unhealthy?" I'd be your best friend forever if you do that interview.

That question is an understandable one, and one often asked of me. I understand this may seem counterintuitive to many, but consider non-corporate-sponsored medical science on the subject. There have been several JAMA-published studies establishing that weight is a poor indicator of one's health, as well as an American Heart Journal study and a couple of others suggesting that a focus on weight rather than health can actually be harmful. Factor in that the failure rate for dieters is alarmingly high. According to a 2007 Medicare study, roughly 95 percent of dieters regain the lost weight, sometimes more, within three years of the loss. This study also showed that practitioners of Health at Every Size achieved the same health benefits as dieters in the short term, yet after three years, most of the dieters studied had lost their health improvements, while the HAES group maintained their improved health, never having lost any weight.

There's also an enlightening study in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine from a couple of years ago, following groups of different weights but similar health. That study found that six years later the fat participants, even those considered "severely obese," had similar or even lower death rates than those of "normal weight." ('Normal' being their word, not mine.)

So no, I have no problem justifying a project which promotes well-being by helping people love and care for the body they have today, rather than jeopardizing their health trying to attain the unattainable. I sleep like a drunk baby, in fact.

Which locations do you usually choose for the shootings?
I shoot wherever I can. I prefer using the apartments of my subjects, but most of them aren't local, so it's usually rental studios, hotel rooms, back yards, city streets, parks, or apartments of friends. More unusually, I've also shot in front of a police precinct as the cops all emptied out of the building and stood around watching us. I've also used several public restrooms, and the bed of a Buddhist monk.

Have you ever had problems during shoots in public spaces?
Most onlookers are quite lovely. Others, not so much. I've been screamed at, shooed away, shut down, threatened with arrest, threatened with worse than arrest, kicked off an island, and accused of disrespecting the legacy of George Washington. It's not uncommon for a model to hear me say, "OK, here they come. Let me do the talking."

You've photographed many couples. Were both partners usually both of a larger body size? Does that say anything about the fact that people find it easier to be with someone that resembles them in some way?
Similarities in personality, ambition, tastes, and lifestyle certainly have a bearing on whether a pairing will be successful, but I don't find that to be the case when it comes to body size. Not everyone has a physical "type" to which they're sexually attracted, but of those who do, their "type" is not determined by their own body. I'm flummoxed by the number of people who believe fat folks are, or should be, exclusively coupled with other fat folks, or thin people with thin. I see evidence to the contrary every day. Happy, thriving evidence.

Although a couple I photographed for the Valentine Series earlier this month told me the Adipositivity Project factored into their meeting one another. She posed for the project a few years ago—though not nude—and later used the photo on a dating website. He told me when he saw the photo, he thought she must be awfully cool to have done such a thing. Today the two are researching venues and caterers for their upcoming wedding. I should expect an invitation to that one, right?

Follow Alice on Twitter.

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Check out more of Substantia's work here.

On Saturday Finnish TV viewers officially selected Pertii Kurikan Nimipäivät (PKN), a punk rock group composed of four middle-aged men with learning disabilities, as their entrant for the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. The competition will be held in Vienna, Austria from May 19 to 23.

Many Finns have high hopes that PKN, the first-ever Eurovision punk act, will score them their second Eurovision win. (Their last victory came in 2006 with a performance of "Hard Rock Hallelujah" by heavy metal band Lordi, dressed up as monsters.) Members of the band seem to see their upcoming participation in the competition as a platform to promote awareness of and respect for people with mental disabilities—a respectable use of a historically bizarre and garish event.

"We are rebelling against society in different ways but we are not political," PKN bassist Sami Helle recently told the Guardian. "We are changing attitudes somewhat, a lot of people are coming to our gigs and we have a lot of fans. We don't want people to vote for us to feel sorry for us, we are not that different from everybody else—just normal guys with a mental handicap."

PKN formed in 2009 at a workshop for adults with learning disabilities hosted by Lyhty, a Konala, Finland-based organization providing housing, resources, and innovative, engaging activities for adults with intellectual disabilities. After the event, Pertti Kurikka, a guitarist with cerebral palsy, kept in touch with singer Kari Aalto, bassist Sami Helle, and drummer Tony Välitalo and workshop coordinator-turned-band manager Kalle Pajamaa. They started holding regular practices and writing songs inspired by their experiences of the oppressive regimens and disrespect shown to the mentally impaired in shared residential care homes, with lyrics like, "I need a little respect and dignity in my life."

"We are different to other people," Aalto recently told The Center for Welfare Reform of the feelings that inspire their work and the message he hopes PKN can communicate to audiences. "Some people are just different—but we have the same rights as everybody else."

In 2012 the band started to gain a larger following with the debut of The Punk Syndrome, a documentary by Finnish filmmakers Jukka Kärkkäinen and Jani-Petteri Passi chronicling (with little narration or editorializing to speak of) the band's path from its first practices to its first European tour. Hooking people in with the usual band antics (a womanizing singer, finicky bassist, diva guitarist, and likeable drummer whose disputes are managed by a level-headed manager) and short songs about the problems of daily life, like terrible pedicurists, they've developed a strong following in Scandinavia and Germany and toured throughout Europe and North America—not just as a novelty act but as a serious and beloved punk band.

"There's nothing more anti-establishment as [sic] four disabled and fiery individuals literally sticking it to the institutions which they've been surrounded by," wrote Nick Hard of List in 2013, explaining his and many others' love for festival circuit darling The Punk Syndrome.

The popular support behind PKN was on display during February's Uuden Musikiin Kilpailu, the Finnish national Eurovision qualifier competition, which putted the band against 17 others ranging from bhangra to pop to reggaeton acts. Performing their 85-second-long "Aina Mun Pitää" ("I Always Have To"), a screed against healthy eating, chores, and general mundanity, the band received third place in the jury vote, but a landslide first place in the popular ballot, scoring them a spot performing the same song in the Eurovision Semifinals in two-and-a-half months.

Observers believe the band's popularity has already started to change attitudes in Finland.

"We've started to see that people consider the mentally disabled more equal than before," Kärkkäinen told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2013. "They have feelings, they want to have children, they want to drink alcohol and they want to have sex."

And the band seems to hope that their success will also inspire others with learning impairments to take a leap, put themselves forward, and start demanding their own rights and respect as well.

"Every person with a disability ought to be braver," Aalto told YLE recently. "He or she should themselves say what they want or do not want."

The Eurovision selection will prove a great platform for PKN to continue developing their fan base and raising awareness around and respect for people with mental disabilities.

"The most important thing for the band is music," Teuvo Merkkiniemi, PKN's new and current manager, told VICE, "but we understand that [our inclusion in Eurovision is a] huge statement for those European countries [where rights] of people with learning disabilities are poor."

Despite its reputation for bizarre and kitsch acts (think: Russian violinists on skates and Irish turkey hand puppets), in recent years the competition has become a forum for continental cultural discussions and social debates thanks to its 180 million person, trans-national, rabidly engaged viewership and penchant odd-to-groundbreaking acts. The 1998 win by Israeli transgender artist Dana International and 2014 victory by bearded Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst (né Thomas Neuwirth) both sparked massive conversations on gender and sexuality. And now the hope is that a strong PKN showing can start a few much needed conversations about the rights, abilities, and socio-political status of those with mental disabilities in European societies.

Odds makers presently put PKN's chances for victory at 5-to-1, the third best bet behind Italy and Estonia (despite the fact that they're competing with perhaps the shortest song in Eurovision history). Even if they don't win, the visibility that will come with the competition is likely to greatly expand their following and allow them to push their message of respect and capability across a few more borders.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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2:00 PM

In the early-afternoon light, the Show Palace looks pretty innocuous. The Queens strip joint is at rest, hours away from powering up at night. Mike Diaz, the club's manager, meets me there in a slick gray suit and lifts up the metal gate. He's an old-school NYC character—constantly cursing, teasing, and jabbering away, the kind of guy who always seems a little bit angry but in a charming way.

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He's been running the day-to-day operations of the Show Palace since the summer of 2012, when the club first opened its doors. Back then, it was on track to becoming a run-of-the-mill NYC titty bar. But then the strip joint was denied a liquor license, the result of a citywide effort to hurt the profitability of adult clubs by making them go dry . Around that time, a lot of clubs in red-light areas like Hunts Point had to close their doors because they lost their licenses along with their booze-related income streams. And national chains like Rick's Cabaret, which were looking to expand at the time, got rebuffed from opening up new spots when they couldn't lock down a license.

But the Show Palace soldiered on without booze and used it as an opportunity: Not selling alcohol absolves it of the regulations that govern other exotic dance clubs, thanks to loopholes in the city code. The club is still fighting in court for a liquor license—but in the meantime, its girls can offer fully nude, full-friction entertainment to a clientele that is 18-and-up. (Other strip clubs in New York City that serve alcohol can provide merely topless entertainment to their 21-and-up crowds.) Upping Show Palace's ratchet level is the fact that it's the only after-hours strip club in the city. On Fridays, it's open from 4 PM to 8 AM. And so here I am.

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The inside of the Show Palace comprises multiple levels. Although the main floor of the house—with its poles, booths, stages, and non-alcoholic bar—is what gets most the of the attention, prior to opening hours, all the action happens elsewhere.

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3:00 PM

I follow Mike downstairs to take care of some technical stuff in the basement, which is a drab, all-concrete affair. We then ascend to his office on the top floor, which is painted a heavenly white. This is where he runs the club from his computer, watching a live feed of strippers strolling in and undressing in the locker room.

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On his office walls is a framed newspaper clipping about Belle Knox, the infamous Duke University porn star. "The first time she ever danced was here," he says. "She had no idea how to do it. I had to literally pick her up on stage and show her how to move."

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The Show Palace often hosts high-profile dancers like Knox. "Because we're alcohol-free, we have to go the extra step," he says. "So we come up with a lot of ideas to promote the place." Tonight's attraction is Jessica Bangkok, a busty 34-year-old Asian porn star whose videos have racked up more than 100 million views on XVideos.com. Jessica also boasts more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, where her profile describes her as a "True cumm guzzler!!! There isn't a load I don't want to swallow."

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4:30 PM

After a bit of clerical work, I head downstairs with Mike. The club's technically open, but it's dead. One sexy dancer named Dior is on the stage working the pole to Divinyls's " Touch Myself ." She's slowly stripping for the only customer in the joint, twirling around on the pole and then lying down and twerking her booty as he stuffs singles between her cheeks.

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We make our way backstage to the dressing rooms, where more girls are filing in. The dancers can show up whenever they want, but a lot of them try to get in before the evening rush, which starts around 9 PM and goes through the following morning.

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In the dressing room, there are makeup-less dancers getting outfitted in thongs and high heels. They stand half-naked in front of the vanities, chatting with one another and dolling up their faces for the night. It's a pretty sexless scene. One dancer, clutching her stomach in the corner, tells Mike she feels sick.

"Go take a shit," he says.

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Mike works the room—hugging the girls, grabbing their wrists, kissing them on the cheeks, teasing them, complimenting them, or insulting them in jest. One gets so frustrated she lets out an "ughh" and walks away. But the way Mike looks after her betrays a real compassion.

"I hold these girls in high regard," he says as we walk out of the dressing room. "I treat them with respect, and so they treat the customer with respect. Some strip clubs, they're run like a brothel, the girls act like they don't want you. That doesn't happen here."

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6:00 PM

More customers trickle in. Many of them are young and alone, here to escape whatever their post-adolescent realities are confronting them with. Other patrons are older, family men with wedding rings on their fingers, here to have a good time before they go home to a cold can of beans, a disappointed wife, and SportsCenter...

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Some peruse the menu, which is full of peculiar beverages like "Fre Merlot," "Fre Chardonnay," "Fre Champagne." All fake. The bottle service isn't cheap, either—non-alcoholic champagne costs $100. There's also a full kitchen, pumping out everything from steak to seafood pasta, which I order from a pantless waitress.

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7:00 PM

Dior comes back onstage for the prime-time crowd, clearly pulling out all the stops now that she has a real audience. Rihanna's stripper anthem "Throw It Up" booms out of the house speakers as she flips up and down the pole like a sexed-up acrobat.

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I walk over to her and pull out a stack of singles. She moves closer to me, and I start to "make it rain" on her, the way I've seen in rap videos. Cash engulfs her in a plume of green, her smile getting wider with every dollar I toss out. A hundred dollars is gone in seconds.

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Then she grabs my hand and leads me to a dark corner of the club. In my lap, her gyrations seem to test the limits of human physicality. She's like an Olympian gymnast, using my knees like balance beams. As she moves, she tells me she's only 20 and has been dancing at the Show Palace since she graduated high school. When our song ends, I give her $50—$25 for the lap dance, $25 for the tip.

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10:30 PM

In addition to lap dances, the Show Palace also offers private rooms upstairs where a customer can spend much longer periods of time and money with a dancer. I follow Mike into one with two women—Nikki and Amber—who he grabbed from the dressing room.

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Mike and I sit down and the girls began to grind on us. Mike and Amber laugh at the situation. "This is awkward," Mike says. "I know her so well. It's like getting a lap dance from my sister."

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I'm matched up with Nikki, who makes jokes to me and runs her fingers through my hair. She tells me stories of certain guys' less-than-savory behavior during dances—"I looked back and I was like, 'Damn,'[this dude has] a third leg!'" As she dances, she grabs Mike's shaved head, strikes a pose, and says, "Ball is life," then collapses into a fit of laughter. Nikki also fills me in on the drama in the club—apparently a dancer from another club has come in tonight and is trying to steal some of the girls' money off the stage—the girls of Show Palace are rightfully pissed.

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11:00 PM

It's time to pick up the porn star guest of the night, Jessica Bangkok. We leave the club and hop into Mike's medium-size black car outside. It's clean, with plush leather seats.

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On the trek, Mike plays his favorite podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. He talks about how he is trying to bring in Mia Khalifa —one of PornHub's top actresses—as the club's next guest star. But apparently, according to Mike, the Lebanese American actress, who occasionally wears a hijab in sex scenes, is scared that her family might try to do something extreme if she did a public appearance.

Jessica's hotel is close, a five-minute drive away. When we pull up, she's waiting for us under the chandelier of the hotel's well-lit lobby with the doorman at her side. She has on a thick black coat that obscures her famous curves.

When we get to the club, we walk upstairs and hang out in Mike's office. Jessica talks about her plans to walk around New York City and soak in the tourist attractions. Then I head back down to the main floor to let her get ready for the show.

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2:00 AM

The DJ cuts the music off and Mike grabs the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen," he says, waving his arms in the air. "The moment you've all been waiting for. Jessica Bangkok, all the way from California! Are we ready to see Jessica nude?!" The crowd cheers in response.

Jessica struts out on stage in a firewoman outfit. "New York State of Mind" rings out from the sound system. She works the crowd like a pro. She pulls off her panties and holds them against one man's face, then tears them away, leaving him to fall over. She pulls another guy's face into her bosom, and then sits him back down. Jessica gives the men glimpses, whiffs into a world of their dreams, then, once they give her all their cash, she pushes them away.

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After her show, she agrees to give me a private lap dance. We walk upstairs to one of the private rooms, far away from everyone else. "You ready?" she says before pushing me down onto a couch and straddling me. She put her boobs in my face and guides my hands down to her ass, catering to me for five minutes straight.

3:00 AM

I walk downstairs with Jessica, where about a half a dozen men are lined up to get photos with her. They rave to her about how she "changed their life" and tell her they're her "biggest fan." To her credit, she beams, hugs them, and makes them feel special. They hug her back, touching beyond the limits of normal social acceptability. They break away, then suddenly spark up a new conversation topic just to stay near her her a bit longer, and hug her again at the talk's conclusion. They can barely contain their ids. When one guy finally takes a parting picture, she puts his hands on her boobs and jiggles them for him. His eyes pop out like a fish's. He hugs her one more time, squeezing her tight.

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4:00 AM

This, as Mike predicted, is when the real ballers come in, and the hip-hop look takes over. Guys walk in wearing fur coats, leopard jackets, crazy sneakers. The music changes to accommodate them with a healthy mix of trap and rap hits. The girls are getting wilder, too.

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Most of the ladies aren't even stripping anymore—they're just walking around butt naked. They sit in guys' laps, twerking on their crotches. On stage, it's a lot of simulated sex, with girls clapping their booties with no panties on and dancers pretending to eat each other's asses.

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5:00 AM

I get another lap dance from Nikki, this time in a private booth in the back. I ask her what she likes to do during lap dances. "I really like hair," she says, as she plays with mine. "You got nice hair." She tells me a little about her life. She played tennis in college. She lives in the Bronx, but she grew up upstate, which explains her accent. "It's part country and part New York," she says.

We talk about the music playing. I tell her if I was DJing I would play a ton of Gucci Mane. "Yo, I love Gucci!" she says, laughing. "I like you. You're funny." The song concludes but she keeps dancing on me. She puts her leg up on the table and grinds against me. "You gotta come back," she says. Her friend walks over. "This my new boyfriend," Nikki says to her. "I don't even like Asians, but damn you sexy," her friend says to me.

I know they are just playing with me—both of them are five years older than me, and were flirting with me in the way that seniors in high school flirt with freshman. But it still makes me feel special.

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8:00 AM

Closing time. They turn on the lights and expose the mess. There are simmering hookahs on the tables and cups and bottles strewn everywhere. Without the flashing lights, turn-up music, naked girls, and guys with money, it's just another party to clean up.

We watch as the strippers file out of the dressing room, bundled in thick dark coats and boots. Their bodies are concealed, their extravagant makeup gone. You'd never guess they were strippers in the light of day. Some of the guys hang around and try to talk to them. One takes out his phone and tries to get a girl's number. She smiles. It doesn't work that way.

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Then the maintenance crew comes in. Mike, who's Puerto Rican, shouts, " Hola, amigos!" and other various Spanish non sequiturs at them. They rifle through the joint, picking and preening the refuse.

The half-naked waitress I saw earlier in the night notices I'm still hanging around. "You're still here?!" she gasps. I say the same thing to her, and she just shakes her head. The angry exhaustion is evident in her eyes. The end of a 20-hour shift is no time to be making jokes.

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9:00 AM

Mike's behind his desk, closing the club down. Nikki and some other remaining dancers hang around his office as he counts out their money. Each one holds fat wads of cash amounting to a few hundred dollars, mostly in small bills.

Mike then explains to me the way the system works. The dancers pay the club nothing if they come in early, and $140 if they come in after hours. Other than that, all the singles stuffed in their orifices are theirs to keep.

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10:00 AM

We go downstairs with Nikki and a few other strippers and wait for their rides. I try to talk to Nikki more, but without the pretense of a lap dance in between us, I stumble and trip over my words. Mostly, the girls chat and gossip among themselves about which guys they liked and which guys were creepy before they get driven off to their homes and their lives outside the Show Palace.

Soon the strippers are all gone and the place is looking just as it did when I first arrived. I go back up to see Mike in his office and hang out until the end of his shift, when he's finished wrapping things up. He kindly offers to take me home.

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12:00 PM

Off in the distance, we see a fire raging—plumes of smoke blot the sky. (It turned out to be a major Brooklyn warehouse fire.)

"I haven't seen something that big since 9/11," Mike says to me. "I was living in Manhattan. It was like a movie. I turned on the TV and literally saw the second tower being hit. Then I knew we were being attacked. I ran down to the hardware store, bought an American flag, and ran down the street, waving it up and down. Then the police stopped us, and we watched the first tower fall. Then I started to cry and went home. It was over."

We talk some more as we drive across the Williamsburg Bridge and into Lower Manhattan, but I can't keep the conversation going because I'm exhausted. Before he lets me out of the car onto Houston Street, he looks over at me and catches me rubbing my eyes. "Tired?" he says. "Now you know how I feel! [Running a strip club is] like having sixty girlfriends and all of them have PMS, but you never to get to fuck any of them!"

Scroll down for more photos from the Show Palace:

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Follow Zach and Amy on Twitter.

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Cheryl Gallant talking to a constituent. Photo via Gallant's MP website

Last month, one of Canada's most controversial Members of Parliament stood up and blew away expectations.

"Mr. Speaker," Conservative Cheryl Gallant began. "If anything demonstrates the need for the House to quickly pass Bill C-26, our Conservative legislation for tougher penalties against child predators, it is the decision by the Liberal Party in Toronto to introduce sweeping changes to how grade school children are taught sex education."

Gallant wasn't done ripping on Ontario's (still pretty prudish) sex-ed curriculum.

"This curriculum was written by someone charged with two counts of distributing child pornography, one count each of making child pornography, counselling to commit an indictable offence, and agreeing to or arranging for a sexual offence against a child under 16. As a hand-picked provincial Liberal deputy minister, this powerful party insider was caught only after an international online probe."

Gallant was referencing Benjamin Levin, who was an advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne until 2013. Levin pled guilty to three counts related to child pornography on Wednesday; he was originally charged with seven counts.

But Gallant still wasn't done.

"If withdrawal of this Liberal policy can prevent one child from being groomed for exploitation, it really must be withdrawn. On behalf of the parents, grandparents, and the vulnerable children of Ontario, we demand that the federal party leader order this outrageous policy to be withdrawn now."

Gallant finally sat down. She was speaking on a Friday morning, when the House of Commons is virtually empty and Parliamentary reporters—myself included—are usually asleep at the switch. Ears usually perk up when Gallant, who represents the Eastern Ontario riding of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, stands up.

VICE reached out to Gallant's office for some comment about her comments—which, indeed, isn't that easy, considering that her website contains neither an email nor a phone number for her Parliamentary office—but there has, to date, been no response.

Amazingly, accusing the government of Ontario of grooming a generation of children to be molested by a former advisor to the Premier isn't the craziest thing that Cheryl Gallant has ever said.

Light Bulb Conspiracies
A staunch crusader for freedom, Gallant made it her political objective to stop an evil plot by the government to ban inefficient, expensive, and environmentally damaging incandescent light bulbs.

Warning that the new compact fluorescent lightbulbs are expensive and dangerous killing machines, even though the bulbs are cheaper in the long run and completely safe, Gallant lobbied her own Conservative government to delay the ban.

Gallant actually got in some trouble, because she had launched stopthelightbulbban.ca and funnelled donations to herself, without ever branding it as her website.

She eventually had to take down the website, after the Ottawa Citizen exposed it as a pretty shady political fundraising gimmick. It was also awkward, because the incandescent light bulb ban was enacted by the Conservative government.

Of course, Gallant's record on environmental issues isn't great. One time, in the House of Commons, she somehow came to the conclusion that, "after decades of drug-running, extortion, and prostitution by the mafia," La Cosa Nostra has now gotten into an even more profitable racket: wind turbine subsidies. It's not entirely clear how she came to that conclusion.

Some Anti-Gay Nonsense
Cheryl Gallant won't be winning any Egale awards anytime soon.

In 2002, she heckled then Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham during Question Period, yelling "ask your boyfriend" at the gay-friendly Liberal minister. (Graham is married with children, but rumours have always pursued him.)

She told the House of Commons that a bill criminalizing hate propaganda against sexual minorities: "robs Canadians of their freedom of speech."

Once that bill became law—and started making it illegal to, say, call for the execution of all gays—Gallant told CTV that "the danger in having 'sexual orientation' just listed, that encompasses, for example, pedophiles" and went on to say that she wants it repealed.

She's dragged out such tortured phrases as "Christiano-phobic" and compared abortion to beheadings.

And The Rest
Gallant's history of foot-in-mouth comments is pretty storied. In 2011, she compared then-Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to Muammar Qaddafi because of his support for a carbon tax. In 2014, she insisted that there is no stigma in the Canadian military around PTSD—for soldiers, "the stigma that has to be overcome is a stigma within themselves." In 2006, she was chastised for scraping constituents' personal data from passport applications in order to send them mail-outs. Another time, in 2009, she told Parliament that debating a withdrawal from Afghanistan put Canadian soldiers' lives at risk, adding that the opposition parties were doing the Taliban's bidding and that a soldier she apparently spoke to "credits the leader of the NDP [Jack Layton] directly for the death of his best friend as a consequence of that."

Gallant also raised ire after some masterful victim-blaming, insisting that drowning victims off the coast of Newfoundland were being welfare queens in expecting search and rescue to come save them.

"In Ontario we have inland seas, the Great Lakes, and it would never occur to any of us, even up in the Ottawa River, to count on the Coast Guard to come and help us," she told a committee in St John's. She apologized later, saying that her comments—which very clearly said that those sinking in the ocean shouldn't be relying on the federal government—were taken out of context.

Gallant won her seat in the 2011 election with over 27,000 votes, 53 percent of all votes cast, decimating her nearest opponent Hec Clouthier—a former Liberal MP and noted fedora enthusiast—who ran as an independent.

She's running again and is almost certain to retain her seat.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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Yesterday, Kotaku reported on a short, text-driven game called Pregnancy, newly stocked on Steam. The title is, in the words of its maker Rodrigo Silvestre, "an interactive short story where the player tries to influence the decisions of a 14-year-old girl about the future of her pregnancy." The girl in question is named Lilla and is Hungarian. You act as her conscience. She's pregnant from being raped.

Kotaku writer Mike Fahey has uploaded the moment in the game when it's revealed that Lilla's pregnancy is the result of a (very graphically recalled) rape. The video's below, with the scene beginning just after the two-minute mark.

Obviously, watch the video at your own discretion.

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Pregnancy follows a great many other text games, several of which have come under considerable scrutiny from commenters questioning whether the "interactive fiction" genre of the market should qualify as gaming at all. I personally have no problem counting these words-alone affairs as video games—I relate to them, physically, in the same way I would Grand Theft Auto or Tetris, by controlling the action and affecting its flow. The Sailor's Dream and 80 Days are as much games as BioShock and Bulletstorm.

A handful of the Twine games I've played have left an impression deeper than some big-budget console blaster, among them Pierre Chevalier's orchestrate-your-own-apocalypse Destroy/Wait and Michael Lutz's blood-chilling The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo. Perhaps the most infamous Twine game is Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn, which found itself caught up in the roots of 2014's Gamergate shitshow. And these games have explored rape before, too—Emma Fearon's Calories is absolutely unflinching in its violent denouement.

If you've enjoyed playing "bigger" games where choice is a core mechanic, be that the Mass Effect series, something from Telltale Games, or even a title from as far back as the BBC Micro's Granny's Garden (still pretty scary), there's no reason not to explore the ever-expanding array of (often free to play) Twine titles. All the same, high-profile knockers have crawled out from beneath their rocks to give their blinkered opinions on these interactive stories. He might not have meant it as a deliberate attack on Twine's creative community, but YouTube personality TotalBiscuit (aka John Bain) certainly caused a Twitter storm with the following micro-missive in December last year:

I should check out this new version of Twine. The idea of being able to make a game of sorts without any talent or skills is tempting.
— TotalBiscuit (@Totalbiscuit) December 23, 2014

Bain subsequently explained that he wasn't intentionally looking to provoke, to actively troll Twine fans and more besides. But a couple of weeks later he put his curiosity into practice by releasing a Twine-built "ethics adventure," an entirely pointless project as a game but nonetheless a politically charged comment on the persistent Gamergate agenda of corruption in the gaming press. He stands as a vanguard in this "consumer movement" and is, in his own way, a white knight to the vocal minority.

There are those who would call for politics to have no place in gaming, but games can do so much more than simply entertain, and we've seen this for years. There is nothing pleasant about playing through the later stages of 2012's Spec Ops: The Line, for example, as paranoia and personal pain pervades and twists the typical trappings of the third-person shooter genre. Pregnancy is not marketed as "fun," something to pass the time with a smile, and it arrives with rape in the news for a number of reasons.

From Indian public transport to US college campuses and right here in Great Britain, rape is a shockingly common crime that requires combating wherever it happens, however possible. And video games offer a way to experience things that, if we encountered them for real, would leave us irreversibly scarred. One in six American women will experience rape in their lifetime, and more than 22,000 Brits were raped in a 12-month period from June 2013. Who knows: Games like Pregnancy might just help more women, more girls, come forward and report such attacks.

I'm repeatedly told TV isn't the most viable way for kids to get their fix of what's going on in the world—that interactive mediums are where they're turning. So video games should trade in themes that matter. They need to. If Pregnancy changes its player's perception of teenage pregnancy and their attitude to rape for the better, then it's succeeded. Likewise if it plays a part, however peripheral, to an accusation becoming a conviction. There is value in its content, and it warrants its place on Steam.

Inevitably, not everyone thinks so.

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Comments on Steam run from advice about the game's value for money – it retails for under two dollars/pounds, but Steam user "Raylorne" suggests you spend that cash at Starbucks instead—to a series of comedy thumbs-up reviews recommending Pregnancy to fans of Call of Duty and rating it "5/5—would abort again." Classy (and it only gets worse on the game's Greenlight listing). Criticism on its quality of writing is fair enough, and a personal opinion that's as valid as any other. But it's on Kotaku's US site where a clutch of the net's finest fuckwits have come out to play.

"This is lame, disappointing, and totally not a game."
"This guy wants to make a quick buck off rape."
"Getting tired of these games that are more about force feeding you a message and less about fun."
"I see now everyone can call himself a developer if the bar is this low."

There's more on Kotaku's Facebook, where such gems as these have been posted for public consumption: "im sorry if im being mean but This is fuckin retarded;" "this is a cash grab for the shock value and will appeal to SJWs;" and "The people who buy this game will already be aware that rape is bad, and only buy it to jerk off about how they are holier than the rest of us." It's OK to criticize any game, even one with morally sound intentions—and Pregnancy sure isn't The Walking Dead. But these predictable, puerile responses are just depressing. Anyone who wants gaming to be appreciated as a medium for thought-provoking narratives and genuine cultural resonance will read such words and just sigh. In the words of one indie developer, Gamergate already pushed the reputation of gamers back a decade. We can do better than this.

And if you can't, and you seriously think that someone trying to raise awareness of rape is "retarded," it might just be you who's got the real problem.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

On Friday, Colorado's Marijuana Enforcement Division released its first annual report on the state's regulated pot industry, offering comprehensive data on the sale, licensing, taxing and investigations of weed in 2014. While there have been plenty of newspaper polls and think-tank studies on the subject, no organization has previously had access to this much data, which offers a proper glimpse into the nature of the world's first fully regulated, seed-to-sale pot market.

After pouring over "37 million recorded events," the MED report says that "109,578 pounds of medical marijuana flower were sold," and "38,660 pounds of retail flower sold," meaning a grand total of nearly 75 tons of cannabis was purchased. While flower (buds) were more popular with medical marijuana patients, edibles were a bigger hit with recreational buyers, who purchased 2.8 million edible products, compared to 1.9 million for those with prescriptions. (It's worth noting that medical edibles can be significantly stronger than recreational ones.)

Edibles also played a starring role in the controversy surrounding Colorado's marijuana legalization in 2014. From Maureen Dowd freaking out in a Denver hotel room, to hysterical myths about children being dosed on Halloween, to Nancy Grace alleging they're responsible for suicide and murder, edibles both made cannabis consumption more accessible to those averse to smoking and became a major talking point for activists preaching against the poison of pot.

"When I see what's happening in Colorado with edibles—the sodas, ice-creams being targeted toward kids—I think that's really worrisome," says Kevin Sabet, former senior advisor on drug policy for the Obama administration and co-founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, an anti-cannabis group. "We think that Colorado is ushering in the next Big Tobacco industry."'

When 2014 began, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper's public statements on pot weren't all that different from Sabet's. From the beginning, Hickenlooper was against legalization, saying, "I hate Colorado having to be the experiment," and went so far as to set up enormous rat cages around Denver, warning kids that since we don't know how marijuana affects young brains, smoking pot will make you "a lab rat."

But just as polls show a majority of Coloradans remain pleased with legalized marijuana, and more residents than ever (about one in eight) are consuming the substance, Governor Hickenlooper has similarly relaxed his tone, sounding more like a marijuana advocate than a prohibitionist.

"I think even after the election, if I'd had a magic wand, I probably would've reversed it and had the initiative fail," Hickenlooper told 60 Minutes in January. "But now, I look at it and I'm not so sure I'd do that even if I had such a wand. . . . I think it will become like the whiskey or beer business. From time to time, people want to relax and help relieve the pressure of their day, in whatever form. And they might choose to have a drink, or they might imbibe some marijuana. It will just be one of several choices of people trying to relax."

Still, Coloradans are far from unanimously celebrating their state becoming the pioneers of legal pot. The recent MED report shows that of Colorado's 321 jurisdictions, 228 currently prohibit licensing for any type of marijuana business. And even some of those in areas that do allow it are still resisting the Mean Green.

Last month, the owner of a Holiday Inn in Frisco, Colorado, filed a federal lawsuit against state politicians, businesses, and public servants, suggesting that plans to open a dispensary near the hotel would cripple their business. This came shortly after Nebraska and Oklahoma filed similar suits against Colorado, claiming marijuana was being trafficked across their borders.

Anti-marijuana activists like Sabet point to the number of jurisdictions that ban marijuana sales as evidence of lingering public concern over the substance. But Director of Communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, Mason Tvert, tells me that "Most of those localities are very tiny. When you look at the areas that issue the most licenses, they're the largest populated areas."

Whatever your feelings on the issue, it's undeniable that marijuana is one of the biggest growth industries in Colorado. "Overall, the industry has grown from 1,734 licensed premises to 2,249 licensed premises" in 2014, according to the MED report, "a growth of almost 30 percent."

What does all that growth mean, though?

"To me the question is, how much these numbers reflect the novelty of the first year of sales, and how much is driven by tourism," offers Douglas A. Bergman, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in criminal justice and teaches a seminar on marijuana policy. "And will that decline over time, or will more and more people become users as the stigma goes away? We still don't have numbers about the black market, and how much that has declined. It's not necessarily a complete picture of what's going on with marijuana in Colorado."

Sabet believes that the strong profit motive of this business has led marijuana companies to deny the health risks of their product. He says this behavior mimics that of Big Tobacco companies, who as recently as the 1990s denied cigarettes were harmful despite contrary scientific evidence.

"This is addiction for profit," Sabet tells me. "The tobacco industry relies on heavy users for their profit base, and we're worried that the same thing is happening with marijuana. Every medical organization in the world acknowledges the addictive properties of marijuana: the American Medical Association, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, the American Society of Pediatrics. The people who deny the science [of marijuana] have the same thinking as the people who deny climate change, or the use of vaccines."

Of course, Tvert—who co-directed the campaign to legalize marijuana in Colorado, and has spearheaded a push to boycott all Holiday Inns for their role in the federal lawsuit—says that Sabet linking marijuana with tobacco is a misleading tactic designed to make pot look more dangerous than it really is.

"He loves to talk about Big Tobacco, because tobacco is incredibly dangerous and results in hundreds of thousands of deaths each year," Tvert says. "Marijuana is not remotely on the same level, and is not found to be the direct cause of any deaths, ever. He could just as easily say, 'This is just like Big Caffeine,' because caffeine has been found to be more addictive than marijuana in some cases.

"I don't know of any professional advocate for marijuana that claims that it is not addictive," Tvert continues. "Any human behavior is potentially habit-forming. [Anti-pot activists] claim that, 'Those people say marijuana is entirely safe.' Who are they talking about? They're making up their own opponents. Never in the ten years of our campaigns have you ever heard anyone claim marijuana is not potentially addictive for some people. We've only said it's less addictive than alcohol, which is simply a fact."

Comparing the health effects of marijuana to alcohol has been an enduring tactic of weed legalization campaigns. When a recent study was published in the journal Scientific Reports showing that marijuana is about 114 times less deadly than alcohol, it seemed like pretty good news for marijuana proponents. But Sabet thinks a more nuanced conversation about the health risks of the drug is still warranted.

"Mason Tvert has admitted that the reason they use that alcohol thing is that it polled well with people, but the science isn't there," he says. "The harms are different for people. You can smoke tobacco and drive a car, because it doesn't impair driving. You can smoke tobacco and go to school, because it doesn't impair learning. It does result in lung cancer. Marijuana has strong links with psychosis, impaired driving, and low IQ. Alcohol is legal not because it's safe, but because it's been in mainstream Western culture for 5,000 years. Marijuana hasn't had the vast majority of people using it for years."

By likening the marijuana industry to Big Tobacco—and pegging those who say it's harmless as comparable to climate change or vaccine deniers—Sabet has developed a modern strategy for communicating what has usually been an antiquated, grouchy message. He goes out of his way to tell me that "we're not Reefer Madness," uses the term "GMOs" when describing industrialized marijuana, and says that his campaign is "in favor of removing criminal penalties for use, and increasing education and treatment."

What does seem clear that Colorado's $700 million in marijuana sales in 2014 has forever altered the national dialogue about legal weed. For legalization opponents like Sabet, the MED report is evidence of commercialized marijuana's extreme profitability, and this is leading to greed and the spreading of misinformation on the part of industry leaders.

But Tvert says he wasn't surprised by anything in the report, and actually found it to be "incredibly boring, which is as it should be. If this was an annual report showing the number of liquor licenses out there, no one would care. It's noteworthy at the moment because, for the first time, we have hard data on how many people are producing and selling marijuana, which we never had. In five years, this kind of thing won't even be newsworthy, because it will just be another legal product available to adults."

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

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A scene from the original 'Blade Runner'

When news broke on Friday that Harrison Ford had signed on to reprise his role as Rick Deckard in a Blade Runner sequel, the internet freaked out. When news also came out that the wonderfully talented Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy) was attached to direct, I started to take this sequel seriously. There are no real plot details on Blade Runner 2 yet, but that obviously won't stop everyone from guessing.

Here's a collection of ideas critics and fans of the series have about what we could expect from Blade Runner 2. I asked them to speculate wildly, and they didn't disappoint.

MARK FRAUENFELDER
Founder of Boing Boing
"In Blade Runner 2, it is revealed that the Voight-Kampff test is not reliable and as a result, thousands of replicants have been able to infiltrate themselves into society undetected. With Deckard and Rachael's help, the blade runners proceed to round up the 1 percent into an internment camp called Galt's Gulch, which is built on the giant floating garbage island in the Pacific. The rest of the world enjoys a thousand years of peace and prosperity."

GARY WILLOUGHBY
Owner and site manager of Bladezone.com, a Blade Runner fansite
"[I have to make a] wild guess—and I mean wild—since all the replicants were retired, and only Deckard, Rachael, Gaff, and Bryant were alive at the end of the film... We know that Harrison Ford is coming back, but we don't know how large a role he will be playing... One thought would be to take the premise that was originally written in the script that the real Tyrell was frozen in a lab. That could be expanded, I suppose, since replicants are replicas of real humans. Perhaps the real human Deckard and others could be found? If they are frozen and preserved, they could be brought back after 33 to 34 years in the deep freeze. If Harrison is coming back does that mean his love, Rachael (Sean Young), is coming back as well? It certainly would be wonderful to get my hands on the shooting script."

DEVIN FARACI
Film critic and writer for BadassDigest.com
"If the first film asked what it means to be human, this film could ask what is the point of existence... which it sort of does inherently, since the film shouldn't exist.

Beyond that? Man, I have no idea. There aren't a lot of narrative loose ends in Blade Runner, beyond the idiotic question of whether Deckard is a replicant. The movie is probably going to be an irritating dive into that question, and since it's 2015, it will probably end up with Harrison Ford meeting up with a CGI younger version of himself in a factory shootout. Ugh."

CHRIS HARDWICK
Host of Comedy Central's @midnight and the Nerdist Podcast
"The film picks up not too long after it left off. Fearing that the death of Dr. Eldon Tyrell might collapse the economy of dystopian future Los Angeles, Rick Deckard and his new pal Larry Wilson (played by Andrew McCarthy) spend the entire film tricking people into thinking Tyrell is still alive with various madcap dead-guy schemes and crazy Hawaiian shirts. Because of his obvious lack of eyes, the boys keep a thick pair of future-y looking Ray Bans (TM) on his face, explaining to everyone that he has recently taken up jazz trumpeting. In the climactic scene, the lads take their human marionetting skills off the hook with Tyrell and a deceased musical rival in a trumpet-off at Tootsy's—the hip-hoppingist jazz club in town—that has to be seen to be believed. When it all comes out in the wash, though, Rick and Larry have learned a valuable lesson, and everyone's lives are better for it. Except for all the humans who get brutally murdered by replicants in a quick post-credit Easter egg."

Follow Giaco Furino on Twitter.

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/03/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/03/' filename='washington-dc-is-already-trying-to-cash-in-on-the-legal-marijuana-industry-303-body-image-1425413569.jpg' id='32676']Just days after marijuana became legal in the nation's capital , cannabis connoisseurs arrived in the city to claim their new territory, flocking to a Holiday Inn on Capitol Hill for the city's first-ever cannabis convention. I was sitting on a bench in the lobby of the hotel, drinking a can of Canna Energy, a hemp oil-infused energy drink, when a tall, slender middle-aged woman with dangly hippie earrings and long hair sat down next to me and started up a conversation.

Dhyani, who gave no last name, told me she had driven from her home in West Virginia to attend the convention. "It's going to be the new gold rush," she said. "Let me ask you, would you have gone out West? I would have saddled up my horse and gone. It wouldn't be easy being a woman in a frontier town, but I would do it."

Dhyani, 52, said she worked for 20 years as an economist at the Department of Labor before retiring, and now she wants to become a financial analyst in the marijuana industry. She was just one of many entrepreneurs, weed enthusiasts and potential investors who flocked to the expo in the hopes of cashing in on the "green rush" that has boomed as the legalization movement gains ground across the country.

Down the hall, around 150 people had shelled out at least $89.99 to attend the sold-out "cannabis academy," a series of lectures on the ins and outs of starting a "canabusiness" hosted by ComfyTree, a company that provides business guidance to those looking to get in on the growing legal marijuana industry.

Attendees had good reason to show up with dollar signs for eyes. The legal market for marijuana ballooned to $2.7 billion last year, up 74 percent from 2013, according to ArcView Group, an investment and research firm. Colorado, which in 2012 became the first state to fully legalize and regulate recreational marijuana use, reported last week that the industry has created 9,400 new jobs in the state. Another recent report predicted the legal weed market could generate $35 billion a year by 2020 if current legalization trends continue.

Nestled among a cluster of government agency headquarters and just blocks from the Capitol Building, the expo was an unsubtle "fuck you" to Republicans in Congress, who have attempted to block the city's new legalization law. While possession is legal in the District as of last week, Republicans in Congress have barred city officials from regulating and taxing sales of marijuana, preventing the local government from reaping benefits from the estimated $130 million local market.

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A sleek smoking accessory for the "un-stoner. Photos by author

Tabling outside the expo hall, Davis Clayton Kiyo was rushing to keep up with demand for his high-end smoking accessories. Kiyo started his local company Myster a few years ago and described it as a "un-stoner brand." These are accessories for the business-class smoker, Kiyo impled, the sort of thing a Goldman Sachs employee with a taste for bud would buy. There's the Stashtray, a sleek metal rolling tray with an equally stylish trio of stash jar, grinder, and ashtray magnetically attached. The deluxe version can be folded up and discreetly placed in a bookshelf, right next to The 48 Laws of Power and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Or there's the FogPen, a vaporizer that at first glance could pass for a Montblanc pen.

Outside the entrance of the expo hall, a man in an orange safety vest handed out pamphlets on responsible use of marijuana, with guidelines to help prevent users from pulling a Maureen Dowd . About 20 feet away, Maggie Volpo was selling a series of educational books for children about marijuana, narrated by a cartoon skunk named Stinky Steve. "Stinky Steve Explains Grandma's Growroom" and "Stinky Steve Explains Daddy's Dabs," for example. "Stinky Steve Explains Why Papa Is In Prison" is coming soon.

Volpo said she was inspired to create the series because she saw so many parents lying to their kids about smoking. "You know, closing the bathroom door and stuff," she said. "Stinky Steve will help show that we're self-policing and responsible parents."

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"Stinky Steve," a child's guide to "casual cannabis."

Inside the expo hall, some old stoner stereotypes persisted. Although smoking was not allowed, an unmistakable dankness saturated the room, amid the obligatory tables of goofy glassware. But among the packs of curious Virginians who drove up ("I was just hoping there would be free weed") and painfully obvious dudes canvassing the room for a hookup ("You guys have any tree?"), were couples with infants in BabyBjorn carriers and investors in suits.

A sign at one booth advertised job opportunities in "accounting, administration, budtenders, chefs, consulting, delivery, education, entertainment, extraction, growing, inspectors, investing, laboratory, management, marketing, sales, security and trimming." There are currently hundreds of publicly listed marijuana-related companies, although most of them are penny stocks and not one is listed on a major exchange. Monitoring all this activity are analysts like Michael Swartz, who stood dressed in a sharp suit behind a booth for Viridian Capital & Research, a boutique banking and financial advisory firm. Viridian tracks 75 of the weed-related penny stocks and said its index gained 38 percent last year, despite major shakeups in the last quarter.

Viridian's 2015 outlook is bullish. Swartz said that institutional investors have begun dipping their toes in the marijuana industry, and that he expects more will get on board in 2015, along with increased merger and acquisition activity. Still, there are some uncertainties for the industry, and the firm predicts several publicly listed companies will delist in 2015. Understandably, given the newness of the market, there is a lack of seasoned management among legal marijuana firms, and core business practices have yet to be established.

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On the whole, though, the industry is poised for massive expansion. Where pot isn't legal yet, activists are laying the groundwork for what they see as an inevitable relaxation of drug policy. Whitney Morgan and Kayla Brown, two second-year law students at Texas A&M University manning the booth for the Texas Cannabis Industry Association, have taken that approach—cannabis isn't legal in Texas yet, but being prepared couldn't hurt.

Brown and Morgan said the organization launched in November and now has 18 members. The duo put together a law seminar on marijuana at Texas A&M, the first of its kind in the state, ever. While legalization isn't on the horizon for Texas in the near future, Morgan called the state "the sleeping giant."

"We want to have a foundation where everyone who wants to have a cannabusiness can come to us," Brown added.

As the day's events wound down, I stopped to chat with Tia Gilbert, 22, a member of the ComfyTree staff responsible for social media work. If local activists are laying the foundation one brick at a time, ComfyTree is like an airlift operation, dropping in experts, guidance and resources. The company is hosting another convention in Dallas in March. Gilbert said she found the position on a marijuana jobs website, and has spent the last year travelling around the country for the company. She said she wants to pursue a career in digital marketing for cannabusinesses, and when she gets on a roll, she sounds more Glengarry Glen Ross than Pineapple Express.

"There's no stopping [legalization]," she told me. "You're either going to make a million dollars off it, or you're going to sit on your couch eating Cheetos and wondering if you could have."

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[body_image width='1600' height='1068' path='images/content-images/2015/03/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/03/' filename='artist-lawrence-abu-hamdan-demands-the-right-to-stay-silent-981-body-image-1425413136.jpg' id='32670'] Installation view of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 'Conflicted Phonemes' (2012) at the Tate Modern, London

Text is probably the wrong medium to record a conversation with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who's having a killer couple of weeks in New York: There is a floor dominated by his art at the just-opened New Museum Triennial, and he is the commissioned artist at this year's Armory Show, which starts on Thursday. The 29-year-old has been making art for years that obsesses over the information encoded in the spoken word, over and above what's being said. (If this was an audio file, you'd hear the urgency in his precise voice, in which traces of his split upbringing—he lived in both Jordan and North Yorkshire—can be heard.)

This interest in the spoken word, and more precisely in what Abu Hamdan calls "the politics of listening," has taken many forms. Among a trio of works bought by MoMA last year is a wall chart visualizing the component sounds of asylum seekers' accents, and he has given theatrical lectures at Tate Modern and elsewhere on taqiyya, the Islamic principle that allows forced denials of religious belief to function as silence disguised as speech. While much contemporary art is deliberately ambiguous, Abu Hamdan's is precise, political, research-driven, and dense with ideas. Engaging with it for a while will leave you interpreting the raw data of the outside world differently afterwards.

When I found him at the Triennial's preview, schmoozers were circulating around the New Museum as he sat at one of the café's tables, staring at his laptop, jetlagged and trying to work out where the cell phone he'd left in a cab the night before had ended up. I lent him my phone to make some calls and then he explained the ideas behind his art.

VICE: How did you become interested in sound?

Your work fits well in the New Museum show: There's a lot of sensory overload.

Don't we have a right to silence?

But they say that you have the right to remain silent when they arrest you.

So we should be able to speak and not always be heard?

Do your works in this show engage with that question?

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Installation view of ' The All-Hearing' (2014) and 'Gardens of Death' (2013) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan. From 'Tape Echo' (2013–2014) at Van AbbeMuseum

You live in Beirut at the moment, after years in London. It seems like an exciting place to make art.
I prefer it to London in many ways, because it's less professionalized. It fits my more hybrid practice. What it means to be an artist in London, I find that more clearly defined. [However,] there simply is no real art school in Beirut—people came from theatre or film or wherever—there's this way of adapting to the production of art, which I find more interesting than this logic that comes out of art schools and is applied to the gallery. It's this idea of things that are not in their natural home in a space, which is an interesting tension. Rather than things which are made to sit there and be looked at.

Has it changed things for you?

Is that something that you could only say in this point of time, that the work is placeless, because of the internet and plane travel?

Tell me about the Armory Show commission.

They've been engineered specifically—

It's all whispers.

Does it feel like you're at a career tipping point right now?

2015 Triennial: Surround Audience is at the New Museum until May 24. The Armory Show runs March 5–8 at Piers 92 and 94, New York City.

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Via Flickr user Rob Friesel

Some scientists do extremely important work curing diseases, building machines that predict the weather, and inventing the internet. But not everyone is Alan Turing, and sometimes scientific inquiry goes in a direction you might find in a middle-school locker-room conversation.

For example, how big is a normal dong? There have been many, many attempts to answer this question (usually asked by nervous men), but the most ambitious to date has just been published by the British Journal of Urology.

It's called "Am I Normal?" and it is supposed to be a definitive answer on whether your dick is an OK size. The authors went through 96 full-text studies on the subject, excluded 70 for one reason or another—"penis size not measured" was one reason; "cadavers" was another—and synthesized and interpreted the data from the rest.

"One might hypothesize that men without any concerns about their penile size have 'rose-tinted glasses'," according to the study, which is an odd sentence for it to include, considering the fact that it's a direct product of almost 100 groups of people obsessing over the same concern.

The rationale behind this obsession over girth and length is that everyone will talk about it if you have a small dick. Sorry, the rationale is that men might develop body dysmorphic disorder if they become too preoccupied with how they stack up. The authors hoped to provide a graph for doctors to point to if their patients mistakenly think they have micropenises or are inadequate in some way.

The good news is that your cock is fine. Really, it's totally adequate. Apparently only 2.28 percent of men have an abnormally small appendage, with the average size being 5.6 inches when erect and 3.6 inches when flaccid. What's more, there's apparently no real correlation between penis size and height, weight, age, finger length, or basically anything else. To be clear, actual scientists with PhDs spent a significant amount of time analyzing the whole shoe-size myth so they could tell the world that—surprise!—that's not a thing that exists.

Although the sample populations were largely of European descent, some data was culled from scientists in countries like Nigeria, Jordan, and Korea. In creating the profile of the universal penis, the authors found that "It is not possible from the present meta-analysis to draw any conclusions about any differences in penile size across different races."

But while the study seems to promote a strange multicultural message of unity and hope for men across the world, it's going to make exactly 2.28 percent of them very upset. "Comparing one's self or one's attributes against others is a 'double-edged sword' and may confirm perceived inadequacy," the study notes.

The authors say the study will also help "investigate the relationship between condom failure and penile dimensions"—a decent enough cause. In fact, back in 2001, LifeStyles Condoms attempted basically the same thing, although that attempt sounded more like the plot of a really terrible porno than anything approaching science. During a Cancun Spring Break, the condom makers stood outside a club and invited 401 males into a tent to be measured with the goal of "designing a better condom." (Only 300 of them could get hard, for the record.)

"Using the figure of 5.877 inches from the LifeStyles Condoms Average Penis Size Survey it appears that men on average exaggerate their penis length by a quarter to a half an inch when they are permitted to measure and report their own size," LifeStyles found. "The results do show that the difference between small penises, average penis size, and large penises is not so great as folklore might have us believe."

And just before Valentine's Day this year, Thailand's Ministry of Public Health had to issue a warning to teens about the dangers of buying baggy condoms. Apparently, the kids there are too embarrassed to buy an appropriate size, which is causing an STD epidemic in the country. I guess reassuring dudes about their dicks could have positive real-world consequences? Though something tells me the type of guy who worries about his tiny penis isn't the type of guy who cares about scientific studies. Anyway, your dick is fine.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Psychics, like lots of other forms of paranormal and supernatural nonsense, have a strange foothold in Americana. Because Americans totally believe in magic, and angels, and aliens, and pretty much everything else. James Randi, the 86-year-old magician and skeptic, would change that if he could.

He's been shutting down quacks since the 70s, when bending spoons with your mind was fodder for Johnny Carson. Randi started by emulating Harry Houdini, who died two years before the Amazing Randi was born. But by 60, after sealing himself in a metal coffin in a swimming pool, beheading Alice Cooper every night on tour in 1974, appearing on Happy Days, and writing a bunch of books about magic and fraud, he switched his focus to busting faith healers, psychics, spiritual gurus, and anybody who publicly came out and said they had supernatural powers. He even offered a million actual dollars to "any person who demonstrates any psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability under satisfactory observation."

This week, a biopic about Randi's life is being released, titled An Honest Liar, with Bill Nye, Adam Savage, Penn and Teller, and, hilariously, one of the disgraced psychics, Uri Geller.

When I spoke with Randi and his husband, Deyvi, over Skype, he had the energy of someone ready to jump up and start doing calisthenics, just to prove he could. He's quick-witted, self-deprecating, and funny. And so old.

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VICE: With all the bad people in the world, why devote your energy to psychics and fraudsters?
James Randi: Well, that's my expertise. I am a magician by trade. I should say, more correctly, I conjure. We magicians don't do magic. The word conjurer is much more accurate, which is somebody who gives the illusion of doing magic. So I am a conjurer by trade, have been since I can remember. I think there were a few days there at the beginning of my life when I wasn't one, but they don't count. So 86 years ago I started this business and the experience I gained since has given me, I think, a great deal of insight into how these so called psychics and paranormalists do their thing.

So what is it exactly about them sets you off?
I have sat with many people over all those years who've been absolutely hornswoggled, cheated, swindled, lied to, and taken advantage of by the so-called psychic. Because they are very personable, they are not familiar with the fact that they can be fooled like that and they are easily fooled by experts in the field. People like the late Sylvia Brown and John Edward.
Deyvi: Popoff.
Randi: My partner just said Popoff, who is Reverend Popoff, but it's exactly the same thing. A religious angle. They purport that they have direct contact with spirits and ghosts and such, and they can be believed by naive people.

Who do you think is the most dangerous fraudster out today?
Oh, that's very hard to say. It depends; they have different fields of activity. Popoff is back in business. I remember that when we exposed him on the Johnny Carson show, at the end of the program, when the audience was leaving, I was sitting at the table with Johnny, and his producer came over and looked at him and shook his head and said, "We're gonna get letters." John looked right up at him, and he said, "Yes, and you're gonna answer them." And the letters that came in were just from people saying, "Oh, you're all wrong, and this is a man of God." Of course these are the only people who continue to believe, because they find their illusions shattered and they can't quite make it out, even though the program explained the hearing device that he had and how he got the information from his wife. They don't listen to that. They don't want to know about. They'd rather have the wool up and ignore all the evidence.

Why do you think people are like that? Why are people so willing to believe a lie?
They need magic. That's why. They're taught from the very beginning, when they're taught about Santa Claus, and angels, and devils, and demons out of the earth and into the sky. They're told all this fanciful stuff as small children, and they get to believe that. And they want that to be theirs, that kind of magic to visit them. And they want to—pardon me [ noisily sneezes]. Ah yes, that shows my respect for them, so there.

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Your life is obviously, by its nature, entangled in fraud and deceit. What is your most prideful deceit?
That's hard to say. Well, the business that we carried on in Australia. We figured that the only way to prove to people that these folks were fakes was to create a fake, and that's exactly what Deyvi did. We [decided we] would expose the thing immediately after the program, as soon as we could. And we got a lot of very grateful people in Australia after that. We could hardly pay for taxi rides or for coffee.

What was that one? Did Deyvi pretend to be psychic?
Deyvi: No, no, a channel. The Carlos Story.

Oh you're talking about the Carlos Story. I just watched a screener of your movie last night.
Randi: The Carlos Story went down in history for a century. It was very well done. He had never done a thing like that before, but he watched the so-called channelers on video tape and he could pick up those gimmicks rather easily, and he just acted and did very well.

What is the closest thing to paranormal that you've come across?
Sophia Loren. I've never met the lady, but she has a summer home near here in Florida. And for someone to look that good at that age, that's almost supernatural. I may have to give her the prize, I'm not too sure. But no, just joking of course. But I must say it's very hard to give you a specific example of an actual individual or an individual circumstance.

I guess I'm just wondering if anything has caught your attention as something you know is fake but you can't figure out.
Oh, as a magician for 86 years, that's a long time to know about these things and develop your knowledge about it. None of this stuff fools me at all. The only thing that does fool me on occasion is when a master magician like a Lance Burton or Penn and Teller, some of these folks, pull a stunt that suddenly has me saying, "Hold on, I want to see that again." And usually when a magician sees a masterful thing done in the art, they can usually figure it out. But I had a couple of comeuppances like that. And Max Maven, the mentalist, he's done things in front of me that made me gulp a bit. But eventually it gets figured out.

What's the media's part in misinformation?
Well, the media is responsible for a great deal of misinformation because of the system it's based on. You have a newspaper, you have a television program, we go on at six o'clock, we gotta have some stories, get some stories together. And the newspaper is being printed and we need a headline. Anything that comes along that looks attractive, even if it's doubtful. That will go into print or get on the evening news so easily because they need something to scoop somebody else.

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Your movie's just coming out. What's the reaction so far?
We've traveled all over the world to publicize it, and in the Q&A that follows the film, the reaction has just been overwhelming. Well, the occasional person will stand up and walk out of the film because I've threatened their favorite religious belief, maybe, the occasional person. But very very seldom. We managed to get them and I get people coming to me, literally looking me straight in the eye, with tears coming down their face, saying, "You've made a big difference in my life, Mr. Randi." And you can't buy that. I've said this many times, to so many interviewers. It's true, though—you can't buy that. And I'm always grateful to hear it because I know that we have had an effect, and that's important for me to know and for us to realize that the work is worth doing.

Do you think that the general population's ability to spot bullshit is changing?
It depends on their education and their preparation in life. It really does. People who have a scientific background, you would think, would not be fooled by that sort of thing, but my experience has shown me, in cases like Uri Geller, for example, there were scientists that actually, and still to this day, believe that when he bends his spoons he does it with his mind. It's hard to believe, but remember, they would have to say, "I was absolutely wrong, and I spent twenty years of my life being wrong." That's difficult for someone to say, particularly in that profession, like science. I can understand their reluctance to do that.

Speaking of Uri Geller, have you ever had a personal, private contact with him?
Oh yes, several times. I simply told him I have nothing to say to him until he starts to be straight with the world and tell people what he's really all about. And he says, "Oh well, people know." No, they don't know, Mr. Geller, and you are giving the impression and you're saying it repeatedly, "I don't know how to do tricks. It's all real, you know?" That's a blatant lie. That's all there is to it.

Have you spoken to him recently?
Oh no, not for quite some time now.

I was curious, because I saw that they got him for the documentary.
They could hardly avoid it, you see. They asked, first of all, for him to be in the film, and his management said, "Oh we have to have a whole list of questions that will be asked in the order that they will be asked with the same wording and the whole thing." And they just said, "OK, well, then we don't need him," and they hung up. It wasn't more than a few minutes before the phone rang, and it was Mr. Geller saying, "Oh, I want to do this film!" The most dangerous place to be on earth at this moment is between Uri Geller and a TV camera. You can get run down so easily, and the velocity at which he travels is just breathtaking.

You mentioned your million-dollar prize. How many people have actually tried to win it?
Randi, to Deyvi: Do you know what the recent count is?
Deyvi: No. I don't. But there have been quite a few where the foundation agrees with the agreement to go ahead with the procedure.
Randi: Oh yes, we have to come to a mutual agreement with the claimant, and that's hard to arrive at in many cases. But once we go ahead with the test, everyone falls on their collective nose. They just can't do it. Many of them are honestly convinced that they have some sort of power. They're honestly puzzled that it didn't work.

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Do you think that you have a good sense of when someone genuinely believes that they have powers and when someone is just lying?
Oh yeah, I think I can pretty well tell. I think I can have a good notion of that, and most of them are not lying. They really believe they have these various psychic powers, but they don't test themselves properly. They're keeping all this information in their head and making up a score. They make up exceptions as they go along.

What does it take to fool people? How would I become a better liar?
I don't know. I don't know you that well. That would be almost criminal if I were to give you advice on that. But magicians use misdirection. They use language, and they use gestures and such. For example, if I'm on stage, and I look over to one side of stage, everybody in the audience looks over to that side of the stage too. And they do that because they think that I'm looking at something that they should know about. So it's very easy to misdirect people's attention with "What have I got here? You can see a simple little plastic box, right? This is for a memory chip of some kind. Now watch this, I'm going to cause it to vanish or go some place." This is just misdirecting your attention. I'm getting you to look some other place. [ laughs] That will be $25, please.

You've essentially devoted your life to this cause. What do you think when you look back?
I've had very few regrets—the skeptics, including myself, have accomplished a lot. Skepticism has really spread across the world. There are so many organizations that are devoted to skepticism, and I think that's a very healthy attitude. I'm not talking about—what's the opposite of skepticism?
Deyvi: Cynicism?
Randi: Yeah. You can't be cynical about these things, I'd say, because the world is full of all kinds of wonderful developments. Computers, for example, where would we be without them? Where would we be without the electronics that we're using right at this very moment, for example? Where are you located?

San Francisco.
We're looking at one another, and this is costing us zero. We're not paying for this. This is a free service.
Deyvi: Not quite. That's what they make you believe. [Laughs]
Randi: See? He's learning!

An Honest Liar premieres in theaters on March 6.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

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Nigel Farage on stage at UKIP's Spring Conference. Photo by the author

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

"It's PC this, PC that," said Mary, the lady next to me, as we headed into Margate's Winter Gardens together. "Multiculturalism and open borders just isn't working, and we need to stop it. I've had enough of the thought police telling me I can't say it."

I was in Margate for UKIP's spring conference. The party's PR machine had a tough week, so it was no surprise that the conference kicked off with a reminder for members to be on their best behavior. "Folks, you know what not to do," said Tim Scott, Chairman of UKIP South East and prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) for Beaconsfield. "They're scared of us, let's not give them any ammunition."

About that coverage, then. Over the past week, Channel 4 had projected a worrying timeline of the party taking power; we saw Rozanne Duncan talking about how she has "a problem with negroes" and "people with negroid features" on a BBC2 documentary; a UKIP official claimed the Taliban were running a whiplash insurance scam in Leicester; several UKIP candidates were reported to have posted a racist BNP cartoon online. You get the idea.

Taking my seat, I noticed that the average age of the crowd must have been around 65. In the space of an hour, hospital parking costs were mentioned five times, a $200 million-a-year budget was earmarked for dementia and the regulation of care homes was to be "shaken up." I was beginning to think I was at the local day center, until Louise Bours MEP started talking.

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UKIP health spokeswoman and Nick Griffin's constituency successor—who went by the name Louise van de Bours until 2013—proclaimed, to rapturous applause, "It's not fair for the British taxpayer to pay for foreign nationals to use the NHS. This is Britain."

Downstairs, the merch stall was buzzing, with necklaces, rings and tote bags up for grabs. I got myself a mug, hoping Farage might sign it when he showed up later.

It was only the start of day one, but already the atmosphere was growing dry. A fair few of the seated pensioners had bowed their heads forward for a mid-morning nap. Deputy leader Paul Nuttall was moaning about the SNP on stage, so I headed out to the exhibition fair to have a chat with the Kippers.

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Among the tables filled with UKIP-branded purple scarves and weird homemade fox hunting badges was Phillip Foster, a long-serving party member representing the Christian Soldiers in UKIP. He was explaining, at length, the reasons why global warming is bullshit and that, in fact, CO2 levels are actually "dangerously low."

I slowly stepped away as he shoved a pile of leaflets into my hand. I was looking for a bin to throw them in (not a recycling one, though—no need since the environment isn't fucked), but noticed an unassuming flyer called "CHIPS with everything," an "exposé" on the fastest growing and most dangerous force currently taking over Britain: the gays.

"What the LGBT is achieving, of course, is a recruitment drive," I read. "They must recruit fresh blood and this is best done among children in schools, the younger the better."

There were hundreds of these flyers all over the place. Clearly, UKIP had confused gay people with vampires—as I often do myself. When it got onto the subject of same-sex attraction, it read: "Children still have a natural sense of shame about such things." I turned back to the stall and saw that Mark Reckless MP (who was sued by the Tories over wasted campaign expenses) had come to say hello. Him and Foster go "way back," I was told.

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Feeling pretty uncomfortable by this point—it being crystal clear now why UKIP's LGBT Chair had resigned from the party just days before—I took a seat next to a friendly-looking bloke, thinking it couldn't get much worse. I was wrong.

Winston McKenzie, self-described "really tough dude," has been a member of at least five different parties, yet has failed to ever be elected. He's standing to be an MP in Croydon, a place he described to me like this: "If you can't see it's a dump, then you need some psychological help."

Despite his electoral failure, McKenzie maintains he's "one of the most experienced politicians in the country—I've sat on all different sides of the fences, I get around, I'm a real man." I wasn't sure if he was coming on to me at this point, so to test the water I asked him about his previous homophobic remarks and what he made of the gays generally.

"The LGBT community exists," he affirmed. "They are real, regardless of whether you believe in what they do or not." He went on to explain that there are people "it seems, within that community, who are actually happy to live that way."

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Winston McKenzie

McKenzie also held a pretty strong stance on the idea of same-sex SRE, believing that it should be segregation all the way. "You have to look at the majority and what they're feeling," he said. "If you have parents who say they don't want their children to learn about LGBT stuff, then you have to have segregation."

Really? "Yes, then the teacher would tell the straight ones why the others are against them."

He went on: "There was some controversy when I said that gays and lesbians shouldn't adopt. It's against my beliefs. I said that it was tantamount to child abuse, but I still believe that."

It was lunchtime by this point, so I headed back to the main hall to consider whether I—as a gay man—should be allowed near children. A woman munched away on a packed lunch next to me, repeatedly offering me one of her cheese sandwiches. We started to chat. I'd been keen to speak to other non-white party members—the majority of whom seemed to be PPCs for the 2015 election—and this woman turned out to be Rathy Alagaratnam, the hopeful future MP for Dulwich.

An ex-Labour activist, she told me why she left. "Labour talks so much about people having an equal share, but they're not. You still have just a few people owning a whole lot of property compared to the majority of us," she said. I asked whether, in that case, socialism was a UKIP policy. "Like everything in life, UKIP takes time. I'm thinking about the future."

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Rathy Alagaratnam

Unsurprisingly, talk turned to immigration pretty quickly. "What about the Malaysian airlines flight that disappeared?" she asked. "You could have had people who were illegal immigrants. Maybe there was a crime racket going on that we don't know about on board. If it had crashed the box would have been found."

I went back inside.

Up on stage was Nathan Gill MEP, who was talking foreign aid. He kicked off with eight reasons why we need to cut the aid budget. Coming it at number six: "It goes to terrorists." A leaflet that was handed out as he spoke helpfully pointed out that foreign aid is actually spent on "giving dance lessons to Africans," and on "Palestinian children trained by the government in 'Paradise Camps' to become suicide bombers."

The couple next to me were getting restless. "When will Nige be on? I want to get home for The Simpsons," one said. Waiting for the headline act, one bloke whispered to his friend that he needed a slash, but couldn't risk missing the big speech. Then the crowd went ape-shit. Nige was up.

Farage entered as a cult-like figure, whipping the audience into a whooping frenzy just by putting one foot in front of the other. He talked about the politics of hope and how much he hated the establishment—the result, one can only assume, of hanging out with Owen Jones too much.

At UKIP's last conference in Doncaster, Mark Reckless MP had defected. I was expecting another big name to join him on stage, but instead Farage introduced Harriet Yeo, an ex-Labour politician. No one seemed to know who she was, but gave her a standing ovation nonetheless.

"It's not an international or European health service, but a British National Health Service for the British national people," she said as part of her opening gambit. Just in case anyone doubted her right-wing credentials, she then assured us that, on welfare, she makes Iain Duncan Smith "look warm and cuddly."

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Neil Hamilton

Sitting next door I found Neil Hamilton, Deputy Chairman of UKIP. Conversation turned to now ex-UKIP Councillor Rozanne Duncan's racist rant. "People with unacceptable opinions should leave, but that's not to say we take the bludgeon to anyone with some weird views on the world," he said.

I showed him the gay vampire literature to see what he made of it: "They presumably believe the big man with a beard in the sky will probably be really displeased with all this stuff."

Is there really a space within UKIP for people who preach this hate, though? "I don't get too worked up about people with weird religious views," he said.

Hamilton talked about a public mood of anti-establishment politics, but as a former Tory MP with his own expenses controversy, he's clearly pretty establishment. He had a strong message to the anti-UKIP protesters expected to show the next day: "Don't think our vote will be diminished by abuse yelled by losers."

Farage had announced an Australian-style points system as the answer on immigration. I asked Harjinder Sehmi, an Indian-born hopeful MP, if he'd have had enough points when he arrived in the UK. "No, actually," he said. "I moved here to get married."

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Harjinder Sehmi

As the first day of the conference winded down and the center was emptied, I heard someone shout, "Where are the racists?" from down a stairwell. A ruddy-faced man appeared. He took a picture of the program, before getting into a shouting match with a Kipper about who was "really the racist," before finally being chased away by a throng of guards.

On my way to the hotel, I asked my cab driver, Riaz, how he coped with the UKIP rise in the area. "They're ignorant," he says. "They don't realize the history or what built this country. Imperialism built this country—these people have no idea. That this country is just for white people is completely wrong. If they don't like it, they should leave."

At the hotel, the man on reception was pretty sure UKIP would win his vote. He reckoned that Farage was "bringing attention to an area that's been completely forgotten," and he had a point. As one local pointed out earlier, "When even the McDonalds is shutting down, you know you're fucked."

Arriving for breakfast in the morning, the man from reception was chatting to the table next to me, a crowd of Kippers, about his childhood. "I remember in RE, our teacher made us go home and make a list of Jews," he said. "I could only think of one—Des O'Conner—so I just wrote a list of juices instead."

I was mentally trying to get to the bottom of the Des O'Conner thing, but got distracted by the hotelier shouting "Jews/Juice" as he replenished the miniature marmalades.

It was time to head back to the conference for round two.

Janice Atkinson, UKIP MEP and the party's spokesperson for women, was up first. She bemoaned the "London liberal elite" who insisted on having a Minister for Women and Equality—something she intends to scrap. She was visibly angry as she talked about how shops no longer sell pink toys for girls, before scolding the media for describing female politicians by their "hair, cleavage and clothes."

As she left the stage, the Chair (a guy called Steve) and the Party Director called out for some men who were needed by "the woman in the bright yellow blazer" next door. I tried to catch up with Atkinson after her speech, but she wasn't keen on talking. An aide told her I was from VICE, then she grabbed a passing UKIP staffer and whispered in his ear as they rushed off together. Once around the corner she thanked him and walked away, thinking I could no longer see. It's a shame, really. I'd hoped to ask Janice about why she used the term "ting tong" for a Thai woman, or why she'd piggybacked on the serious issue of child trafficking to offer her warnings on Eastern European "gang masters" infecting Margate.

I nipped outside to find Deputy Chair of the party, Suzanne Evans, on a UKIP bus. With Atkinson avoiding me, I asked Evans if she thought someone who uses "ting-tong" was in a position to call for a scrapping of the Minister for Equality post. "I don't think she is racist," said Evans. "She just made a mistake. If we're going to have a Minister for Women, we need to have one for men... they need representation." Yes, lads!

Back inside, I asked seven different people who was on stage. No one had a clue. Whoever it was was spouting nonsense about Europe. "At the risk of sounding melodramatic, let's suppose our leader was issued with a European arrest warrant for allegedly stealing a chicken from a Carrefour in France," was one of his most memorable sentences.

Peter Baillie, another parliamentary candidate, told me about the secretive ball held for members only the night before. "It certainly wasn't the black and white ball," he explained—a reference to the Tory Mayfair bash held a few weeks ago, rather than an observation on the lack of racial diversity, I hoped.

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By this point I was desperate to talk to a young Kipper. There are over 3,000 members of Young Independence, the UKIP youth wing, but finding someone under the age of 40 had been pretty challenging. So 15-year-old Jonathan, dressed sharply in a suit and tie, cut quite a conspicuous figure. "UKIP want to introduce grammar schools, so people from all backgrounds can have a better education," he said.

"Some of my teachers are Labour and we have a bit of banter, but some of them are just horrible to me," he explained. I asked what he made of voting at 16. "At the moment I don't think it's a good idea. Our education system fails to teach us about politics properly, so it's very easy for far-left or far-right organizations to indoctrinate us." Is that why he's part of UKIP? "No," he said, firmly. "I'm different."

Feeling saddened by my conversation with Jonathan, I fell into the path of a lady called Linda, from West London, who had joined UKIP in November, popping her party political cherry.

"It's like when you get into a lift," she said, on immigration. "At first you can all fit in, but then people don't." On accusations of the party's racism, she dismissed it as "nonsense," stating with some rigor how she had friends "from lots of different backgrounds." But then things took a strange turn as she told me how any racist headline was part of a conspiracy from the far-left. "I keep thinking, logically speaking, 'Are these people planted into the party?' There are some people with their own axes to grind, with the primary intention of bringing us down, and Councillor Duncan may well be one of them," she actually said.

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Photo by Oscar Webb

Outside the main entrance stood eight members of far-right group Britain First. Led by Steve Lewis, their regional commanding officer, they stood guard to counter "the communist left-wing militia" gathering down the promenade. He said he "quite liked" UKIP, adding he "wasn't fussed" when I pointed out that Farage has banned people from "extremist" groups from joining. Instead, he told me how busy him and his mates had been "stopping the Islamification of the UK."

Sue Sanders, Chair of Schools Out, was waving a rainbow flag outside the venue. I was about to call security, but thought I'd better check if she really was here on the hunt for fresh blood first. Turns out she wasn't, instead saying, "It's a load of shite."

Walking down towards the protest I met a man called Robert who lived down the road. He told me UKIP "attract a whole load of racists" and explained that "this nationalism all started in Germany in the 1930s. In the end, they'll put you in a uniform and fascism is go."

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I turned back to Britain First, whose members were all decked out in their trademark embroidered green fleeces. More than 500 protesters blocked the road, but a car got through. It was a Polish man, driving towards ASDA. He wound down his window, telling a group of trade union types with a London Branch Banner to "fuck off back to where they'd come from."

Back in the crowd, a couple called Eve and Steve had travelled from France for the protest, striking a double blow to the Kippers inside. Keeping an eye on my wallet, I asked Eve what she was trying to nick, as I'd heard inside that the French were trying to steal British schools, jobs and car parks. She was having none of it. "He's exploiting peoples fears," she said, on Farage, "and leaving the real issues behind."

Earlier in the afternoon one UKIP MEP had called this lot the "great unwashed," but Steve was adamant that he'd showered that very morning. Just in case, the lads from Britain First were on hand, spraying deodorant in the faces of the lefties marching past.

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Shortly after, a man called Prophet Zebediah (above) rocked up. A founding member of the Al-Zebabist Nation of OOOG, he's running against Farage in the constituency, demanding that Thanet be cut off from England to form an independent state. His manifesto pledges include "the peaceful annihilation of Broadstairs, giving one half to Margate and the other half to Ramsgate," as well as turning "the college into a barracks to train the youth ready for the coming war against England." He was up for battle with the People's Army of UKIP, it seemed, telling me that "England is doomed."

Just after Sandrom, a German man who'd joined the march, introduced me to his pregnant wife—whose imminent due date would proudly see "another immigrant child taking up space in Kent"—two men across the road in England shirts were shouting, "Send them all home," among other slurs. Another Kipper—all in tweed—came out to tell the protesters that Farage "will invest in mental health, to sort you loons right out."

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"Farage will invest in mental health, to sort you loons right out," said this man.

Back inside, I made a final attempt to chat with Martyn Heale (like Atkinson, he seemed very reluctant to talk to VICE), who used to be in the National Front. Unfortunately, he wasn't having it. It was time to leave. As I exited the conference center for the final time, I stumbled across a woman, standing alone and telling the last dregs of the party faithful that she thought they were "racists, fascist, nasty people." She lived locally, and looked exhausted by it all.

Of course, once the media had all pissed off, Margate would have to carry on as before. Many of its inhabitants believe that UKIP are bringing attention to an area that feels like it's been forgotten. They feel forgotten themselves: unemployment is high, shops are empty and, unless you're part of the increasing influx of ex-Londoners able to actually buy property there, there is still a pervading sense of hopelessness in this east Kent town.

I grabbed some chips on the way back to the station, asking a lady in the queue what she made of the party. "I know sod all about politics, but at least this lot are here," she said. "I'm not convinced that they're right, but it feels like they're trying."

Follow Michael Segalov on Twitter.