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New York security officials may get a fancy new terrorism registry. Photo via Flickr user New York National Guard

The public registry is an American institution, a Puritan-esque way for the community to slap a scarlet letter on bad citizens, a warning to all through the shaming of one. For sexual offenders, the registry is a permanent sentencing of sorts. For shitty landlords, it's a way to pressure them to clean up their act.

In both situations, the message is pretty simple: Beware.

But what if there were a registry for American-bred, homegrown terrorists? New York State Senator Thomas Croci, a Republican from Long Island, wants to find out.

Meet the "New York State Terrorist Registry Act," a bill that would essentially create a publicly available list of neighborhood jihadists.

The registry would be compiled using suspects from state agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and exist as a shared source of information for future like-minded projects. Once the list is out, you'd receive a notification telling you who on your block may or may not be a convicted terrorist.

Forget a repeat sex offender—you may have an Islamic State sympathizer living nearby.

In true Red Scare fashion, a special phone number and website would be available should you want to blacklist the Islamic fundamentalists who are possibly living right in your backyard. It would even be considered a class A felony for alleged terrorists to not put their name on the list, or fail to provide the state with DNA samples.

Of course, the most confusing part of this list is exactly who would belong on it: technically, the registry would include anyone convicted of a terrorism-related crime, or has committed a "verifiable act of terrorism"—defined here, in part, as appearing on a massive FBI terrorist screening database. But while the term "terrorist" might be the most fearful word in the American lexicon, it's also one of the most legally ill-defined terms out there.

"There are serious problems with the breadth of what can constitute a criminal act relating to terrorism under federal and state laws and guidelines, and the arbitrariness of how those laws are enforced," Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told me. "We know, for example, that political speech and activism, and broad associations having nothing to do with the conduct of the person herself can lead to investigation and prosecution, and that convictions are mostly the result of pressured plea deals, not the government proving its case.

"This registry would add on to those underlying problems by further stigmatizing, harassing and punishing many people who have already been wrongfully targeted and punished," he continued.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there are over a million Americans on secret FBI-administered terrorist watch lists deep inside the US government, with nearly half a million added in 2013 alone—many of whom have never actually been convicted of a crime. The Intercept has also reported that nearly 700,000 Americans are routinely kept a close eye on by the feds (some 280,000 of whom lack any link to a known terrorist organization). Widdle those numbers down to the Empire State, and, according to Capital New York, you have tens of thousands of New Yorkers making this VIP list of America's Most Wanted.

So this registry could be as thick as the Yellow Pages, with an uncomfortable search bar to sift through dozens upon dozens of names. And in the end, a registry to warn us about creeping terrorism could end up just revealing how insane our security state has become. After all, it's not clear which is more frightening: a terrorist list that includes a few suspicious neighbors, or one that spans an entire neighborhood. At least sex offenders and shitty landlords are few and far between.

Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, argues the bill makes "absolutely no sense," and that databasing of this kind wastes taxpayer money. According to Sarsour, a well-known social justice advocate and staunch opponent of the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program, most of the time the people on these lists do not even know they're deemed a terrorist in the eyes of the federal government.

"Sometimes when and if people are convicted, it's based on 'secret evidence,' so we don't even know the nature of their crime," she wrote me in an email. "It could be that they let a man stay at their home who then later was tracked by CIA internationally and deemed a member of a terrorist group and you then get charged for material support even if you absolutely had no idea. These types of lists end up long and include innocent people of all walks of life."

I brought these civil liberties concerns up with Christopher Molluso, Senator Croci's chief of staff, and he responded that the bill is a "work in progress" that would enlist the help of federal and state agencies to compile the most sensible inventory. "We're open to suggestions as to how to best make this list," he said. "We do not want to be overbroad in our interpretation of the bill."

As to whether the registry might end up as big as the entire population of a mid-sized city, Molluso said no one has identified that problem to the Senator's office yet, but amendments being introduced next week aim to make the registry more "focused and targeted."

As it stands, the bill would allow the New York State Division of Homeland Security can place anyone on the list who, although not convicted of committing a "verifiable act of terrorism," is deemed a 'serious and immediate' risk. And to get off of this list, one would have to petition state supreme court judges. If you're not convincing, the Division of Homeland Security could appeal, meaning you'd a classified terrorist until the court says otherwise (whenever that may be).

Rest assured: The terrorist registry, according to Senator Croci, would not be an Orwellian trap. "We're in the process of clarifying the verifiable act language and that will be different from what you're seeing now," he told Capital. "It will be more explicit as to what that means and it'll be more restrictive."

The New York State Terrorist Registry Act has ten co-sponsors in the State Senate but no sponsor in the Assembly. We reached out to the office of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has so far offered no indication of whether he'll sign the thing into law, but haven't heard back.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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The book's cover. "Spitzenprodukte" is Lemmey's pen name

Chubz: The Demonization of My Working Arse is Huw Lemmey's story of a young man, Andy "Chubz" Wilson, who spends a long, hot summer unemployed in London fucking around the city via Grindr. He meets a young, left-wing journalist, Owen, whose earnestness is matched only by his sex drive. In the background, a poppers-addicted Nigel Farage rises to power as Prime Minister, and police crawl the sweating city streets as they begin to erupt in sex and violence.

It's political pornography. Not in some mortifying Michael Gove in the Whip's Office way, and not because it tries to make its sex right-on and joyless (the sex is filthy, uninhibited and completely uninterested in any agenda except pleasure). It's political because of the people it involves, the class and taste lines it crosses and, especially, because of the way Chubz's getting off is placed in direct, violent conflict with other uses of the city. All these things—class struggle, the cult of Farage, and our obsessive relation to technology—are hung around the characters' desire to cram as much sex into their days as possible.

As suggested by the reference in the title, the "Owen" of the book is of course based on real-life journalist Owen Jones, author of Chavs, The Demonization of the Working Class. The real Owen would probably raise an eyebrow at what his fictional counterpart gets up to:

"He's in a spunk-fuelled stupor, a high that pumps more and more opiatic pleasure into his balls, and he's grinning and his dick is pumping out spunk, not precum but thick white globules, a rhythmic pump pump pump ... His face is beyond serene, though. We look at each other in this breathless ecstasy – he seems so peaceful knowing this is it, this is the end of his brief time here, willing himself towards death in the warmth of my rectum, sweating semen from every pore."

But Lemmey isn't just interested in the grotesque outer limits of fantasy for the hell of it. He has suggested that he cares less about the actual Owen Jones than in how his public image is received, and in what has to be excluded from a public persona to be counted as "credible." In that sense—fantasizing about what a public figure keeps private—Chubz has its roots in internet fanfiction, a genre dominated by young women writing graphic fantasies about their favorite celebrities. Chubz is more ironized and self-aware than this, and in a sense has to be: there's only so much mileage in a sex fantasy before you start thinking about the way sex connects to the world around you. It's smut, but it's not just smut.

One of the ways to understand the politics of scandalous literature is to go back to France in the years before the Revolution. Paris was a city that thrived on smutty stories, and political careers were made or broken by the circulation of gossip, innuendo, and scandal. Simply by standing on a street corner in Paris, you would hear some filthy rumor or burning "secret." Real news and libels, or collections of anecdotes, circulated in little haphazard gazettes printed in presses on the French borders—free from the elaborate categories of censorship applied to printed books by the French authorities.

Robert Darnton, the preeminent historian of this literary underground, has uncovered the networks through which these best-sellers circulated. Sometimes the banned works were those of dangerous political philosophers and radicals, but more often outright pornographic works, or raging anti-establishment tracts—and they all circulated in the same catalogues. It's a useful corrective to the idea that the literature that proliferated before the Revolution was all (or even largely) chin-stroking philosophy about the rights of man.

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Owen Jones, upon whom the fictional Owen is based. Photo by Adam Barnett

By far the most interesting were the books that purported to be the "secret lives" or "authentic memories" of this-or-that member of the aristocracy, often one of the king's mistresses. These books traced (in great and salacious detail) the degeneracies of the regime, either through their sexual disorder, or little stories that foregrounded something corrupt in their character. One of these books of libels began with Marie Antoinette masturbating, then describes her various orgies, and goes on to describe the king as impotent, limp, and useless.

The French police at the time took these libelles seriously, both because they were injurious to public opinion of the monarchy and because they could have serious effects on public order. Darnton mentions one 1752 rumor that said police were stealing working-class children so a royal prince could bathe in their blood, actually causing a riot. Slander, rumor, and gossip of this kind were literal weapons, with aristocrats even hiring libellistes to bolster their reputation and destroy others. It's hard to reconstruct how much of a role these libels played in creating the crisis of legitimacy before the revolution—though some of their authors were among the revolutionary leadership—but they undoubtedly spread the image of a monarchy in decay, where the body of the king, the source of law, was rotted from the inside out.

It's in this tradition of secret lives that we have to read Chubz's fictional Farage: nursing a secret loathing of his supporters, driven to illness by endless pints of ale, possessed by a secret longing for European food and sophistication—a delicate sfogliatella and glass of light Italian rosé—that he has to hide to maintain his public image, and addicted to poppers at the behest of a continental dominatrix called Gutrot Essenem.

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Nigel Farage. Photo by James Turner

The Farage character is of course fictional, but the point of the fiction is to bring out the contradictions that must mark the inner life of someone like a Farage, who must pretend every day he's just one of the people, despite his stockbroker background and fine tastes. It takes a commonplace of political life—that political leaders must pretend to be cartoon versions of themselves—and explores what twisted desires might lie behind the façade. Reading it makes it impossible to look at Farage's swollen grin without thinking he's just huffed half a bottle of poppers.

But not all of the book is about the secret life of Nigel Farage: much of it is about Chubz's pursuit of sexual pleasure, his negotiation of the city, and his use of Grindr. Chubz is a pleasure seeker, uninterested in respectability, politics, or romance. As Owen takes him on an excruciating date in an All Bar One temple of blandness, all the typical codes of mainstream gay life, the desire for respectable profession, relationship, and career break against Chubz's insistence that he just wants "spit and skin and dick." But even that's not quite true. In the middle of sex later, Chubz thinks to himself, "I wish this were mediated." "I wish this were data."

Desire and regulation are never far away from each other, and when they come into conflict it's often over who gets to be in public and use public space. Grindr promises Chubz and its many devotees not only an on-demand menu of sexual options, but a way of reordering the city, uncovering sexual opportunity around every corner. It's an ordering of the city that is only open to its participants, and a way of reclaiming control over a city only otherwise configured for transportation between home and grinding, miserable work. Chubz's worry is about whether, unaware, digital augmentation has become an inextricable part of how he thinks about sex.

But Grindr is largely a privatization of the kind of cruising that used to happen in certain public toilets and desolate night-time urban spaces. The vague conception of gay history most young men grow up with is that being gay was "illegal" until somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, and then there's been a gradual swing in tolerance until the present day. If we think of our predecessors at all, it is at the mercy of violent police and a hostile society, haunting rundown establishments in the hope of a furtive fuck.

Matt Houlbrook, in his history Queer London, challenges this notion: though subject to police raids, early 20th Century London had a wide range of queer institutions, from Turkish Baths to private clubs, and a huge number of public spaces used for sex. For many of the men Houlbrook describes, the queer and the urban are inextricably linked—the book begins with a letter from a married man who had "only been queer since [he] came to London"—and often possessed of a defiant pride and very little sense of shame. The same man, in the middle of a police raid, drew himself up, introduced himself to the presiding Inspector as "The Countess" and demanded that he take one of the young cops on the raid home with him.

Houlbrook uncovers a world that extends far beyond contemporary notions of the homosexual, to encompass the highly-flamboyant West End queen, the generally respectable middle-class homosexual, and the otherwise "normal" working-class man. It's surprising how widely tolerated out-and-out flamboyancy was, but the real surprise is in the highly-fluid, highly-conflicted sexuality of "normal" men, who were otherwise straight. Though freer to openly enjoy sex than middle-class homosexuals, a "normal" guy who had just enjoyed some gay sex clearly felt the need to scorn, extort or violently separate himself from the "brown-hatter" he had just fucked. There is nothing so brutal and uncaring as desire satisfied.

The 1957 report issued by the Wolfenden Committee—which had as its remit two "problems" of urban life, female prostitution and male homosexuality, and took evidence from distinguished middle class homosexuals—marked the beginning of toleration for homosexual men, and the gradual decline of the old queer world. But the rise of easily available, anonymous apps like Grindr have meant easy access to a digital cruising ground where cross-class liaisons, and interactions with men who consider themselves "straight," are far likelier than for those in highly "gay" environments like late 20th century Soho. How else, these days, would a feral NEET like Chubz meet an established middle-class journalist like Owen?

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Illustration by Michael Oswell and Huw Lemmey

Lemmey is too canny to give us a simple tale about Grindr as a tool of liberation, though it must have been tempting, given the endless parade of pop drips lining up to condemn anything but the most dishwater-dull sexuality—for instance Sam Smith saying hookup apps have "ruined romance." His visual work with graphic designer Michael Oswell shows clearly how technology that claims to free us can just loop back around into narrow repression.

Though Chubz is without a doubt the smartest character in the book, his pursuit of pleasure and violent catharsis as the annihilation of existing society isn't a conventional hero's tale. The book is far more interested in the way sexual pleasure is always almost a liberation from alienation and political oppression, and the way looking for sex forms and changes our sense of self: "I identify as red neon in wet asphalt and I use the pronouns now/nearby/online," says Chubz.

If you watch the news after reading Chubz, it's hard not to wonder about the secret desires that lurk behind the eyes of David Cameron or Ed Miliband. Hard not to see sex—and power, which always follows hotly on its heels—lurking in every interaction. It provides an easy way of asking: how might those in power be lying to us? What might they be concealing? Even if Chubz's anal apocalypse isn't your cup of tea—they're good questions to ask.

Chubz: The Demonization of My Working Arse is available from Montez Press

Follow James Butler on Twitter.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

After a report from a Turkish daily newspaper alleged a Canadian intelligence agent is in the custody of the Turkish government, long suspected of supporting ISIS in its war in Syria and Iraq, Canadian authorities were mum on details.

While the government hasn't confirmed specifics, they are willing to say that the individual is neither Canadian nor a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) spy. Though when asked if CSIS were operating in countries like Turkey, Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney exclusively told VICE Canada, "I believe CSIS is operating in a region where there is potential high-risk travellers."

It's well known that the corridor between Turkey and Syria is the major trafficking point for foreign fighters joining up with ISIS.

One alleged Canadian fighter told VICE in June that the Turkish border with Syria is where foreigners join the militant organization in its fight against Syrian, Iraqi, and Kurdish forces.

While declining to comment on specifics due to operational security, Blaney maintains that any activities CSIS is engaged in "have been conducted respecting Canadian laws."

The news report comes on the heels of expanded foreign spying powers for CSIS and the advent of bill C-51, legislation which promises to bolster the legal capabilities of law enforcement agencies to surveill and arrest terrorist threats within Canada.

According to the Daily Sabah, Turkish authorities arrested a Canadian linked agent after the individual, currently detained, helped three British girls join the ranks of the Islamic State.

Speaking to Turkish television on the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq from the Turkish border, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu accused a member of a foreign intelligence service of helping to ferry those British girls into the war zones of northern Syria.

"We were informed by Britain about three girls who left to join ISIS a few days after they departed for Turkey," said Çavuşoğlu during the interview. "This person was working for the intelligence service of a country participating in the coalition against ISIS. This country is not the United States or a member of the European Union. I told this to the British foreign secretary and he replied 'as usual.'"

The Daily Sabah reports that several Turkish media outlets claim the individual currently in detention is a Canadian, while it is known that the current coalition against ISIS includes Canada, Australia, and other Arab countries within the region.

Turkish diplomatic officials in Canada have not confirmed or denied the reports to VICE Canada, citing a lack of reliable intel, while a Reuters reporter has a source confirming the agent's links to CSIS.

VICE Canada has reached out to Tahera Mufti, spokesperson for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), but they have yet to respond.

With additional reporting from Justin Ling.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

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Bill C-51, the many-headed legislative monster. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Bill C-51 is the most polarizing issue in Canada right now. It has been criticized by over 100 legal experts as "a dangerous piece of legislation" yet polls suggest widespread support across the country. At the heart of this controversy is the fact that C-51 will give Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), extensive but vague new powers, namely to "disrupt" terrorist activity at home and abroad with very little supervision or judicial review.

But this national debate about surveillance is also a distraction from the fact that Stephen Harper is once again using a monstrous bill to simultaneously change dozens of pieces of legislation while severely limiting Parliament's ability to have a meaningful debate about these issues.

Bill C-51 is an omnibus bill, meaning that it is creating two laws but also amending roughly a dozen others from the Department of Fisheries Act to the Criminal Code to the Income Tax Act.

This mechanism may seem inherently undemocratic, but it isn't. Omnibus bills can be a pretty useful tool for speeding up our sometimes cumbersome legislative process and they can also be an instrument of social change, like the 126-page Criminal Law Amendment Act introduced in 1967 by Pierre Trudeau when he was minister of justice.

That bill decriminalized homosexuality, anal sex between adults (although it's still illegal if you are not a grown-up), abortion, and contraception, prompting Trudeau's famous "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" soundbite. It was considered massive at the time, but at least there was a unifying thread—modernizing Canada's puritanical Criminal Code.

Fast-forward five decades and omnibus bills are now being championed by the Conservatives, who have passed eight of them since winning a majority government in 2011.

Mike Spratt is a criminal lawyer from Ottawa who has testified numerous times before House and Senate committees about the detrimental effects of omnibus legislation on the criminal law landscape in Canada, from increasing jail time for minors to minimum jail sentences for possessing more than five marijuana plants.

"I have appeared a bunch of times before Parliament on these bills—they are insane," Spratt told VICE. "These omnibus bills prevent meaningful study. Critics are demonized—you are either with us or against us. The government says these crime bills are about keeping the public safe but quite often the evidence shows that the opposite is true. That demonstrates either insanity or crass politicking. I don't know which is worse."

"C-51 is a good example of omnibus legislation. It is obviously responding to very serious events and national security concerns, but when you cloak a bill in rhetoric and link it to fear and you demonize those who may have contrary opinions, which are based on evidence... it's very hard to subject these bills to rigorous and intellectually honest criticism."

But Bill C-51 is not the first time this tactic has been used to muffle debate.

In 2012, the Conservatives rammed the Jobs and Growth Act (Bill C-45) and the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act (C-38) through Parliament in 2012 with almost no time for meaningful debate. With a combined length of 900 pages, they contained over 1,200 clauses which amended 135 unrelated federal laws affecting everything from nuclear safety to judges' pensions to the Seeds Act.

In doing so, C-38 and C-45 also became catalysts for social change but in a far more perverse way than Trudeau's libertarian crime bill because buried within those 1,200 clauses were significant changes to the Indian Act, Navigation Protection Act, and Environmental Assessment Act, which have had a profoundly detrimental impact on aboriginal land and fishing rights.

These "budget" bills were perceived by many in Canada's aboriginal communities to be the last straw in a long battle with a federal government that has systematically and unilaterally reneged on legally binding treaties. This frustration led directly to Idle No More, one of the most vital political movements within Canada in recent history.

Bob Rae is the former premier of Ontario and one-time interim leader of the federal Liberals. "Use of omnibus legislation has become abusive. We've seen several budget bills that are over 400 pages long and that cover everything from budget to the environment," he told VICE.

Rae has retired from public life, but unlike most political veterans who end up working for Power Corp. or Bay Street law firms, he has chosen to practice aboriginal law and has acted as chief negotiator for the Matawa First Nations group seeking reconciliation with the Ontario government.

"We need to achieve reconciliation with First Nations," Rae says. But the mind-numbing length of these bills is proving to be a huge obstacle to that.

"The process has been badly abused by the recent government. Major changes in environmental legislation came through budget bills which makes it very difficult to debate or divide these amendments. And when you consider the importance of the protection of land and water to First Nations—who believe that treaties were never intended to undermine these rights but to protect them—then it's just unlawful."

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Idle No More protester in Ottawa in 2012. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nor is it inconceivable that C-51 could have a direct impact on First Nations groups who frequently protest fracking and pipeline projects that violate legally binding treaty rights. A recently leaked RCMP report describes these groups as "violent aboriginal extremists."

When asked about the impact that the broadly worded Anti-Terror Act could have on aboriginal or environmental groups, Rae brought the issue back to a lack of oversight: "The question really is, does a protest represent a threat to 'security'? The risk is always there that authorities will interpret the act too broadly, which is why the accountability and review questions are so important."

So while omnibus bills are not inherently undemocratic, they can, and are, being used as a legislative sledgehammer. Even Harper agrees with that, or at least would have when he was a starry-eyed Reform MP for Calgary West who went on tirades against the dangers of omnibus bills during parliamentary debate in the 90s:

"We have a chance to right some of the wrongs and some of the questionable practices we have fallen into, in particular the practice in recent years of presenting omnibus legislation with respect to budgetary matters." Stephen Harper, MP

"I submit to you that it has become a standard practice with governments to bring in omnibus legislation following every budget under what we might call the kitchen sink approach." Stephen Harper, MP

"In the interest of democracy I ask: How can members represent their constituents on these various areas when they are forced to vote in a block on such legislation and on such concerns? Stephen Harper, MP

Spoken like a true democrat.

Conservatives now defend their use of omnibus bills by pointing out they have been used by other governments, or more often, by saying Canada's economy requires the quick passage of these big bills.

So how is it that in the space of 15 years Stephen Harper can go from staunch critic of mega-bills to their biggest proponent in parliamentary history? That's a complicated question. Better call Saul.

John Ralston Saul is one of Canada's foremost intellectuals and author of The Comeback, a recent book about the legal triumphs of aboriginal groups and the failure of our governments to recognize reconciliation as "the greatest issue of our time."

"These enormous anti-democratic bills have nothing to do with the Canadian tradition of what used to be called Omnibus Bills, which simply gathered together legislation dealing with a single area of interest such as trade or criminal justice reform," Saul told VICE. "And they aren't budget bills. They are like a thick jungle hiding dozens of dangerous traps."

In fact, in The Comeback, he goes as far as comparing Harper's reign to the tyrannical but efficient regimes of Napoleon, Mussolini, and Peron.

"Their view was that debate wasted precious time and brought unplanned results. They argued that patriotism, along with centralized power, the heavy use of secrecy, and an emphasis on self-interest should replace such things as debate, the public good, and the concept of citizen responsibility." Sound familiar?

"Bill C-51 has already been questioned or condemned by a very wide range of legal and other experienced figures who are known to believe in democracy and the rule of law. They come from the right, the centre, and the left. The biggest concern today in western democracies is that governments are attempting to make use of fear in order to increase their prospects in elections."

And the fear-mongering seems to be working.

And the fear-mongering is definitely a tactic that the Conservatives have not hesitated to employ is the C-51 debate.

"The most worrying thing is that the principal outcome of a strategy, which was clearly formulated by Bin Laden, has led western democratic governments to cut back on free expression and citizens' rights," said Saul. "Our own democratically elected governments have set about undermining the role of citizenship and the complexity of democracy. This is exactly what people like Bin Laden wanted."

Unregulated spies, aboriginal rights, and mandatory jail for marijuana possession might all appear unrelated on the surface, but looking at these issues from the omnibus perspective shows a direct link between political hot potatoes and the Harper government's willingness to avoid debate and ram the bills through the House. And unless the rest of Canada mobilizes as effectively and as vocally as aboriginal groups did during Idle No More, that tactic is unlikely to change.

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From Steinbeck's invocations of Judeo-Christian scripture to today's beachfront real estate squabbles, Californians have long taken on unwise financial and practical burdens in order to live near the sea. Even in a land-locked mid-city enclave like LA's Koreatown, the dream of coastal California living is never far. Among K-Town's several nautical-themed restaurants stands Café Jack, a Korean coffee shop and sushi restaurant housed in a replica of the Titanic.

The owner of Café Jack is Jack Shin, who was so moved by Titanic that he changed both his own name and his son's to "Jack", after Leonardo Dicaprio's character Jack Dawson. "After he saw the movie, he wanted his own Titanic," explained Café Jack manager Christie Ne.

The café is split in two parts: its bow houses the kitchen, while the stern functions as a communal dining area. Most customers eat in small, private "ship cabins." There is also a patio that one might use to, say, scale onto a lifeboat off a jagged ice shard.

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Café Jack's decor fluctuates between committing fully to its theme, interpreting it loosely and ignoring it altogether. Its walls display a mixture of topical posters, fan art, screen caps, and visual non-sequiturs: a knockoff Keith Herring, a Curious George poster, an Impressionist-style landscape. Some windows are plastered with café-press decals with love-related phrases or the template message "Your text here." In my favorite of Café Jack's many enclaves, Titanic stuff coexists with personal photographs and unrelated memorabilia. But Jack's crown jewel is an original mural version of the Titanic cover, commissioned by Shin.

Ne told VICE that after the coffee shop's initial novelty wore off, Shin tried different menus and approaches to drum up business. The coffee shop currently serves sushi, a few pastas, pastries, and Korean dishes, and an extensive selection of boba smoothies and fruit slushes. The phrase "Are you ready to go..." is ominously printed on the first page of the menu, the rest of which is in Korean. Though there is a non-smoking sign, smoking is tenuously allowed, provided you use the designated ashtray, a Dixie cup filled with coffee grounds.

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The Titanic craze hit the girls of my generation hard, though I was not among them. (I remember proudly yelling "More like Leonardo Di-CRAP-io!" in elementary school.) Hoping to better understand why Shin and Ne liked the movie so much, I enlisted some translation help from local writer Lena Kim and her husband Park Hyonkyu, and was surprised to find out that I had missed Café Jack's main attraction entirely.

According to Ne, Shin reads tarot cards in the back of the restaurant, which accounts for most of the business's revenue. This business, not the café's somewhat steeply priced menu items, is what keeps the ship afloat.

"The owner is very famous," Ne told us, explaining that Shin tends to be "booked solid" after seven each night: customers schedule readings far in advance.

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Even taking Shin's psychic side-hustle into account, Café Jack draws surprisingly few tourists for a structure that so loudly screams "tourist attraction!" Most of the café's business comes from locals and regulars. Even when Shin, the "captain," is out, the vessel's private rooms are popular spots for daytime business meetings, while local students use Jack's spacious, communal dining room to study. "It's their go-to place," Ne explained.

LA if filled with monuments like this: misapplied simulacra in rapid sequence, Hollywood mythology ventriloquized as a business model or business muse. Like others of its kind, Café Jack commemorates a history that is both cannibalized by popular fiction and preserved by it. As we sat waiting for our plum slushes, a Drake song cut abruptly into "Strawberry Fields Forever."

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Unlike most of Cameron's characters, Shin's dream has managed to weather the storm: Café Jack survives as a quiet haven of mysticism and camp, choosing not to compete with the chic, modern coffee shops nearby. Titanic tells of a kind of love that is permitted by devastation and inhospitable to compromise, but real love requires us to compromise daily. Ashtrays need to be emptied. It's always someone's turn to clean the kitchen floor.

Follow Lucy Tiven on Twitter.

It's an early spring weekend in Manchester, and Emily Smith is sitting in the Radisson Hotel with her baby, selling goods from her northern New Hampshire farm. There are jugs of maple syrup in various sizes laid out on the table, and also guns, .308 caliber rifles, lovingly hand-assembled for improved accuracy. The combination would raise eyebrows in most company, but not here, at the annual gathering of the Free State Project, a libertarian movement to create a limited government utopia in the Granite State.

Hundreds of Free Staters were assembled for the three-day Liberty Forum, which brings together the movement's pioneers, prospective members, and sympathizers. The Free State Project aims to relocate 20,000 committed citizens to New Hampshire, change local laws, reduce taxes and regulations, and ultimately establish a literal Galt's Gulch where—to quote a popular libertarian saying—married gay couples can use guns to defend their marijuana plants. According to organizers, more than 1,700 people have moved so far, and another 16,000 or so have pledged to promising to do the same once the full 20,000 have signed on.

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The annual conference is a way to bring on new recruits, showcasing the full spectrum of the Free State fringe. There are sessions on anti-war activism, school choice, and polyamory . A heavy-hitter in Koch brothers-backed political groups is giving a talk on "Freedom and Well-being." In one time slot, there were dueling panels on "the Tao of Anarchism" and a critique of anarchy based on the work of Ayn Rand. A woman in business casual tries to sell people on ziftrCOIN, a New Hampshire company that helps retailers accept cryptocurrencies.

Smith and her husband joined the migration in 2007, relocating to New Hampshire with another couple and opening up Bardo Farm. She told me the move was about freedom, but also about finding a great piece of land that came with oxen, goats and solar power. "We wanted to be off the grid," she explained, nursing her baby as we spoke. The Free State Project provides a built-in network of customers, she said, and the farm often gives like-minded libertarians a place to stay when they're in the area.

Like most Free Staters, Smith and the other farm owners are engaged in local politics. Ian Underwood, one of Smith's business partners, said selling the rifles is partly an effort to build a self-sufficient community in their area. "People who have guns can defend themselves," he said. "Who knows where the cops are, but your neighbors are right there." Plus, he noted darkly, cops might not be on your side at all. "One of the things that you may have to defend yourself against is your government," he said.

Not far from Bardo Farm, in rural northern New Hampshire, the small town of Grafton has become a haven for Free Staters, to the consternation of local residents frustrated by the libertarian zeal to overhaul local laws. At the Liberty Forum, Grafton resident James Reiher tried to sell potential movers on the town, promoting it as a great place for libertarians to create their alternatives to the mainstream. "They should be creating coops and doing what the government does on their own," he told me. "If you like fair wages, open a fair-wage store. You don't have to wait."

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Free Stater Rich Angell has found freedom as a "voluntary servant" in New Hampshire.

Another member of the Free Grafton contingent, Rich Angell, tells me he grows most of his own food and lives as autonomously as possible as a "voluntary servant." He wouldn't tell me who he serves—"let's just say a landowner in Grafton"—but said he pays rent by making himself useful, tending the boiler and wood stove and shoveling snow. "I pay my way with my labor," he said. "I am about as free as I can be in this country."

Angell tells me he's a former "card-carrying Republican," a "college graduate, clean-cut former Marine, good-old American." He talks a lot about things like "unraveling the left-right paradigm." His politics, based on the principles of freedom and nonaggression, are hard to pin down, except to say that they're about as far outside the mainstream as you could imagine. He credits his political awakening to the issue of circumcision. "When I saw what we do to our children it opened me up to what else is going on in this country that nobody is paying attention to."

These days, Angell is cynical about politics. "If Hillary Clinton is the best the Democrats can do, and Jeb Bush and that crowd are the best that the Republicans can come up with, it's time we seriously start thinking about voting for Vermin Supreme," he said, referring to the perennial presidential candidate whose New Hampshire primary campaigns are equal parts anarchist activism and satirical performance art.

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Davi Barker and his doomsday merchandise.

Davi Barker, a California designer and writer giving a Liberty Forum talk on "The Undead Democracy Apocalypse," told me his activism is focused on influencing cultural, rather than politics. He's the author of a survivalist children's book, "Survivor Max," about an 11-year-old boy trying to navigate a zombie apocalypse. He sees zombies as a metaphor for libertarians—in zombie stories, he explained, heroes band together in small autonomous groups, to fight a multiplying army of stumbling automatons. "They're a democratic monster," he said.

Wandering around the conference floor, I barely registered a table for the Atlas Society, until the guy staffing it, George Johnson, asked me urgently if I was familiar with the work of Ayn Rand. Johnson was handing out ballots for the Society's Crony Awards. According to an explanation on the ballot, the current economic system is not "true capitalism" but a bastardized version where companies depend on government favors, not the free market; I'm supposed to vote for the "clearest and most egregious cases" of cronyism. Candidates include the AFL-CIO, George Soros and Elizabeth Warren, but also Dick Cheney, Chris Christie and Walmart. Perhaps sniffing me out as a lefty, "They say free markets are an illusion, and they're right," Johnson tells me.

Many of the Free Staters were big supporters of former Congressman Ron Paul, giving his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns a boost in New Hampshire's first-in-nation primary. But Paul's son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, doesn't seem to have inspired the same enthusiasm, and activists seemed generally disinterested in national politics. "I don't think the enthusiasm is strong for Rand Paul," said Free State Project Chairman Aaron Day, an active organizer who holds a half dozen titles with local libertarian and Republican groups.

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Libertarian utopian Matt Philips

Matt Philips, who works with Day on a couple of projects, said he cares about the presidential election only to the extent that it affects down-ballot races. Philips is a sort of libertarian cliché, a Princeton graduate who interned at the Cato Institute and later worked for a digital advertising company that sold to Yahoo! for $680 million. With no need to work after the sale, Philips eventually gravitated to the Free State Project. "It gives back more to the world than internet advertising," he said, "although that's laudable in an Ayn Randian sort of way." He's currently focused on New Hampshire issues, including cutting state taxes and fighting federal incursions on healthcare and education.

At the one conference session devoted to running political campaigns, the 2016 race didn't come up until the question-and-answer session. "I haven't heard anybody talk about what's going to happen in this cycle," said activist Paul Breed. "It's the elephant in the room." But the roomful of activists seemed more interested in local candidates than the national horserace.

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New Hampshire libertarian Lisa Gravel, on the lookout for the mainstream media

For most of the Free State hardliners, the focus for 2016 is mostly on forcing candidates to address libertarian concerns. "We party-crash," said Lisa Gravel, a native New Hampshire libertarian and former candidate for local office. "We show up at the events and talk about the issues they don't want to talk about. We make them nervous. It's great."

When I approach her later, Gravel demands to know if I'm part of the mainstream media. I'm not sure how to answer, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. She keeps talking, telling me that she likes Rand Paul, but has a lot of reservations. "I'm very disillusioned," she says. "Really, I am."

Follow Livia on Twitter

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Australian federal minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion has announced a proposal to ban kava importation into the country. The move comes amidst claims that organized gangs of Pacific Islanders are smuggling the substance into remote Indigenous communities in north east Arnhem Land, where kava is allegedly used to an unhealthy degree. But the ban that would bring an end to the two-kilogram importation allowance for personal use has outraged local Pacific Islander communities, as kava is an integral part of their culture.

Scullion told VICE that due to Pacific Islander communities' concerns, he would be continuing consultations with them on a range of ways to approach the kava situation."Kava use outside of traditional South Pacific Islander cultural settings is associated with a number of social problems in some remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory," he said.

Kava is derived from the root of the Piper methysticum, a member of the black pepper family. The substance produces mild sedative, soporific, and calming effects. At many Pacific Islander ceremonies and social occasions people form a circle around a large bowl and drink powdered kava infused in water. They consider kava to contain mana (spiritual power).

A 30-gram bag of kava sells for $50 in North East Arnhem Land communities. It's smuggled into the region from a number of areas, including Sydney and the Pacific Islands. Between January 2009 and February 2013 the Northern Territory Police seized close to eight and half tons and made 216 arrests. Last Sunday, police seized 40 kilograms of kava, which if sold in remote communities has a value of up to $80,000.

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Pouring Kava

"Kava was introduced to East Arnhem Land by missionaries as a substitute to alcohol prior to the 1980s," a spokesperson for Northern Territory Police said. "The situation is neither better nor worse. Police continue to work with community members to gather intelligence on the supply of kava in remote communities."

Controversy has surrounded kava usage since it was introduced into the NT. This led to the launch of the NT Kava Management Act of 1998. Karen Avery, senior director of Licensing NT, explained, "The act established regulated access to kava under certain conditions and controls, and helped to eliminate the black market in kava that was particularly rife in the Top End of the territory."

In 2002, the government set up a licensing system that allowed a controlled, locally-owned retail market to operate, which funneled money back into nearby communities. But in 2007 a federal government ban on the commercial importation of kava into Australia— due to concerns over usage in some Aboriginal communities—led to all legal sales of the substance coming to halt. Since that time the two-kilogram allowance to import kava for personal use has been in place.

The 2007 commercial ban simply led communities to purchase kava that had been cut with substances such as cement and baking soda.

Dr. Lucas de Toca of Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation said prolonged use of kava can cause skin irritation and liver damage. In addition, groups of people have been using kava late into the late, disrupting the community, and many locals are against its use.

As de Toca explained "Some of our concerns come from the widespread unregulated, certainly laced and uncontrolled use of a substance that we don't fully understand," de Toca said. "It's a substance that can be abused and is potentially dangerous to a vulnerable community."

VICE found representatives of the local Indigenous population reluctant to discuss kava and the impending ban. A local non-Indigenous source, who wishes to remain anonymous, explained that the Indigenous locals "don't want to be seen as being on one side or the other because straight away you get targeted by the government. They're frightened of being targeted by the police. We're living in a silent community here."

But concerns are being raised by representatives of Pacific Islander communities in Australia over the proposed ban, especially since the proposal is being made at a time when Australian overseas aid is funding the development of a bottled kava drink export industry in Fiji.

Osaiasi Faiva is the general secretary of the Tonga Parish, which is part of the Uniting Church in Sydney. He said that all official and social Tongan events are incomplete without kava. And although he doesn't drink kava himself, he said the ban would have devastating effects on local Pacific Islander communities, as people would turn to alcohol.

"How about alcohol? Which is more damaging? Most violent crimes are alcohol-related," he said. "The problem with kava is if you abuse it, yes there will be problems. If you don't abuse it, it's part of the culture and doesn't create any problems."

The 2007 commercial ban also negatively impacted Pacific Islander communities with people smuggling the substance, paying inflated prices and many younger people turning to alcohol.

Faiva welcomes Scullion's decision to consult Pacific Islander communities. "I think it's a great idea to have input. I'm sure they are deciding based on information available to them, so if this consultation goes ahead, this information should be debated," he said.

Dr. Apo Aporosa is a research associate at Waikato University's Anthropology program who has written a PhD these focused on kava use in contemporary society. He said that kava unites Pacific Islander communities and that the "ban amounts to a social justice, human rights issue threatening cultural identity, empowerment, and wellbeing."

Aporosa believes the kava problem is a political diversion. "The sociocultural dysfunction in Arnhem Land is the result of land confiscation," he said. "The government influenced legal injustices and disempowerment, which has caused traumatic social change," he said. "It's not kava. We all know that because before kava was even introduced to Arnhem Land there were major sociocultural issues there."

Follow Paul on Twitter: Twitter.

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Photo of a Secret Service SUV via Flickr user Erik Drost

Yesterday morning, news broke that two Secret Service agents drove a car into the White House's security barricades. The accident allegedly occurred on March 4 after an late-night rager and involved high-ranking officials. As if driving into the building you're supposed to guard wasn't already a massive fuck-up, rumors that the security bros might have driven directly into a potential bomb site emerged yesterday afternoon.

According to the Washington Post, earlier that night a Pennsylvania woman had jumped out of her car and approached an agent near the southeast entrance to the White House with a package she claimed was a bomb. After she sped off—injuring the agent in the process—the area naturally became a subject of a delicate investigation.

Enter our drunken heroes, who not only disrupted the scene, but allegedly drove right over the package.

The Washington Post has reported that the drivers' supervisor convinced cops to let the agents off the hook and not give them a DUI test. That means we'll technically never know if the agents were wasted while they drove into the building they're supposed to protect. But if history is any indication the Secret Service can't handle their liquor.

In April 2012, a huge scandal broke when an alcohol-fueled bacchanal in Colombia led to a bunch of agents hiring strippers. Although that embarrassing incident led to a new code of conduct that barred agents from drinking ten hours before starting work, the reform didn't stop them from raging. Obama also brought in the first-ever woman director, Julia Pierson, to try and clean up the agency's "frat boy culture."

It didn't work. In March of last year, three agents were sent home from Amsterdam after one was found passed out in a hotel hallway. It's natural to ask why these incidents keep happening even as higher-ups scramble to prevent them, and the answer might be because addiction is hard to stamp out with finger-wagging. According to some experts, alcoholism is rampant in the Secret Service.

Pierson stepped down after a series of humiliating security breaches, and last month Joseph Clancy took over to try and finally clean up the Secret Service—a task that's starting to seem impossible.

It's unclear why alcohol is so entrenched in the culture of the Secret Service, or why its members are disproportionally involved in booze-soaked scandals as compared to those of other government agencies, like the FBI. One reason could be that they've been historically much more lenient with drinking and driving than other federal law enforcement offices. That reputation could keep bad apples around longer, or attract people with predilections for partying who might otherwise become air marshals or FBI agents.

But basically, no one knows why the Secret Service can't get its collective shit together, and Obama is reportedly "disappointed" about the latest high-profile blunder. And while he might be doubting the ability of his new appointee, he's got to at least be publicly hopeful that something will finally change and that this is the last scandal. "Nobody has higher standards for the Secret Service than Director Clancy," a White House spokesperson told the Associated Press.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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The Times Square NYPD station. Photo via Flickr user Tony Fischer

Back in January, the New York Daily News first reported the strange story of two NYPD cops who went binge-drinking with an alleged rape victim. In July 2013, the paper wrote, officers Lukasz Skorzewski, 31, and Adam Lamboy, 44, flew to Seattle to speak with a woman who said she was assaulted in someone's apartment in New York City, where she attended college. Somehow, this interview on a very sensitive subject led to Skorzewski and Lamboy partying into the night with the alleged victim. As the 24-year-old told the Daily News, "I was going through this all alone. My family didn't know. It felt good that they were being so nice."

But that niceness included nine hours of drinking, and the officers pleading with the woman not to go to work the next day.

On Monday, Skorzewski and Lamboy pleaded guilty to official wrongdoing—"prohibited conduct"—but will not face criminal charges. And they get to keep their jobs a after a long internal investigation concluded allegations made by the accuser had been "partially substantiated." Whatever happened, it wasn't enough, it seems, to punish the officers with anything besides a, "Seriously? You thought this was OK? Welp, we'd better transfer you!"

More disturbing than this laughably extreme lapse in professionalism on the cops' part is the woman's allegation that Skorzewski groped her and tried to take off her clothes after she was convinced to stay in the cops' hotel room (to sleep off her drunken state). She told the Daily News, "He was insistent on feeling me up ... He tried to work his way up my pants, I pushed his hand away."

This does not sound like a case of signals getting crossed. This sounds like a drunken grope that the officer had no good reason to suspect would be welcomed by the woman. Now, she implies that she liked Skorzewski enough to kept in touch with him—and even talk daily on the phone. But after a month, the case and the friendship with the officer both seem to have collapsed. When the woman asked the cop why he stopped calling, she says he blamed her. And her rape case was never resolved.

Finally, in April 2014, she reported the whole thing to Internal Affairs, and gave them numerous texts and records.

It's difficult to make sense of Skorzewski and Lamboy's lax punishment. Skorzewski got a month of vacation taken away, and was put on unpaid leave for ten days. He was also transferred out of the sex crimes unit, because, well, yeah.

Lamby, who had previously pleaded guilty to being paid for non-existent overtime work, got 15 days unpaid leave, and a month and a half of vacation taken away. He, too, was transferred.

So again, since it apparently needs to be said: When a woman is reporting a rape, don't get hammered with her, don't call her your "favorite victim," don't encourage her to drink more, don't suggest she stay the night, and then don't put moves on her—consensual or otherwise. Even if she semi-forgives you afterwards, don't try to rip her clothes off. Unwanted groping is criminal and can be classified as sexual assault.

In the face of awful things like a naked black man getting fatally shot in Georgia and a shirtless alleged Florida pot dealer getting killed during an early-morning SWAT raid—not to mention the latest in Ferguson—it feels exhausting to care about this story. And hell, punishment happened, right? Isn't that progress?

Except when we're talking about disturbing power dynamics, it's hard to beat a woman who was recently raped on one side, and male police officers on the other. Nobody died here. Nobody was physically hurt. But the punishment doled out to these idiots still feels strangely slight. Back in January, the woman told the Daily News, "I think what [Skorzewski] did was bad enough that he shouldn't be a cop."

Indeed. What are we waiting for here? What possible reason is there to defend these officers when they have proven perfectly well that they have no business being in this line of work?

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

Earlier this week, Republicans in the US Senate sent a weird open letter to the leaders of Iran, informing them that any nuclear deal they make with President Obama will be torn to shreds by Congress. If you weren't paying close attention you might think republicans want Iran to make nuclear weapons. They don't. They say they just don't want Obama to make a deal that lets Iran off to easy, and apparently fanning the embers of tension is a good way to make sure he can't.

But what's everyone so afraid of? Would Iran be a temperamental loose cannon like North Korea? Would they immediately push the Big Red Button, and strike at the heart of Tel Aviv on day one? Would they use their beefed up negotiating power to bully us right out the region and take away our access to foreign oil? Or in spite of all our fear, would Iran just become a responsible member of the international community, albeit one that happens to have a nuclear arsenal?

To figure out what the world would be like if the Islamic Republic of Iran wielding nukes, I asked two experts to walk me through it: William H. Tobey, Senior Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and Kamran Bokhari, advisor on Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs at Stratfor.

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Artists' rendering of two competing belligerents, not our two esteemed experts

VICE: Before we get to the hypothetical, how likely is this?
William H. Tobey: They've undertaken some actions that have caused pretty serious concerns, by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council, so I don't think it can be ruled out. But it's not a certain thing.

Kamran Bokhari: Are nukes what they really want, or do they want conventional geopolitical power that's worth more to them? Maintaining influence in Syria. Using the Daesh [aka: Islamic State] threat to get the US on its side? Making sure that the Shiite-dominated government in Iraq continues to stay in power? Having Hezbollah remain the dominant force in Lebanon? Making sure the Houthis continue to make gains in Yemen? That's the kind of thing the Iranians value way more than nukes.

Alirght, let's say they've got them. What happens day one?
Bokhari: They'd quietly acquire the technology and not test until the coast was clear. Or not test. If I'm the Iranians, why would I test, knowing that it'll only bring the wrath of the international community? I'm already under sanctions. I'm already negotiating to get rid of the sanctions and I'm going to get more sanctions. It would be a reversal of all the gains they've made, especially through negotiating with the United States for two years now.

Tobey: It completely changes Iran's risk calculus. It would give Iran essentially a cover to act beneath in ways that would be destabilizing to the region. It would create, for Iran, escalation dominance with its neighbors. It would know that it could take the most extreme step, and it would empower it to undertake—for example—significant terrorist acts in the region.

Is Israel threatened?
Bokhari: If you look at the size of Israel, if there were an enemy country out there that could potentially use nukes against them, for them that's a doomsday scenario, and they cannot even tolerate a single strike. The thing is that in states like that, Israel cannot afford to base its policy on what the other side may or may not do. Usually policymakers in a strategic military environment will assume worst-case scenario. The Israeli will all the more take this position given the fragility of their environment.

Tobey: They listen to people in Iran saying things like "Israel is a one-bomb country," and they fear that even more extreme governments than the current one might take over, driven by some theological beliefs that an apocalypse is somehow beneficial. Those are positions held by people in Israel, and that's what's behind some of the belief that this is an existential issue for Israel. And if a nuclear weapon went off in Israel, people's willingness to continue living there would be greatly diminished. They cause enormous destruction.

What would a nuclear strike actually do to Israel?
Tobey: The primary effects that people are talking about would be political and economic. It would create a belief on the part of the people who remained that they aren't safe. It's not literally a one-bomb country. One nuclear weapon can't destroy Israel literally, but if you sap the economic and political viability of the place by essentially eliminating any sense of security, Israel might succumb. It's certainly unimaginable to us, but unfortunately there are people who are imagining it. It's less dependent on kilotonnage than on what the secondary effects are.

Bokhari: For many years there's been this idea that, "Oh, the Israelis are going to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities." Let's talk about what that would entail: It requires a certain amount of aircraft, fuel, midair refueling capability, flight paths, and will the payload be enough to penetrate through god knows how many meters of concrete under which the Iranian nuclear facilities are buried and dispersed widely around the geography? Not to mention Iran is physically 1,200 miles away from Israel. If you do that math, there are physical and logistical constraints you have to factor in before you can conclude one way or the other about whether Israel can or cannot successfully strike at the nuclear facilities.

Tobey: I think a tangible threat would be that it give Tehran room to be more active in its support of groups like Hezbollah, and would feel like the threat of retaliation either by the United States or by Israel would be diminished, because it possesses a nuclear weapon with which it could deter actions against its forces. Hezbollah is now operating in both Lebanon and Syria. In terms of a [non-nuclear] attack on Israel, it would come from the north.

Bokhari: The United States isn't willing to do it because—and again, you can never be sure—but by negotiating with Iran, you keep Iran as sorta the "bad guy." You don't want to attack it, and let it gain sympathy around the world. The Chinese and the Russians aren't going to negotiate then. I'm sure the Europeans would be shocked as well.

Tobey: Now, the Iranians will make the argument that for 300 years or so, their borders have remained essentially unchanged, and Iran doesn't fight wars of aggression, and if you're talking about invasions of neighboring countries over the past few centuries I think that's essentially true. But what Iran has done is use proxy groups or other governments to try and spread its influence. So in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, Iranian influence is very strong, and it's exercised at the expense of other countries in the region, namely Sunni countries. The spread of Shiism is an Iranian strategic goal, [although] probably not exclusively. I'm sure that Tehran is much happier to have a friendlier government in Baghdad than, for example, the Saddam government that waged a very costly, very long war against Iran.

Would it have an economic effect on the other countries like the US?
Bokhari: I think the biggest economic impact would be on Iran itself. It'll be slapped with more sanctions.

Tobey: There's been a cold war going between Iran and Saudi Arabia for a long period of time. If that cold war heated up, it could affect oil flows, because perhaps Saudi oil production or refining capacity could be damaged, which could affect oil prices, and our economic interests. We're less sensitive to them now because we are producing so much oil ourselves and in fact, the largest Saudi customer is China. But the world economic flows are so interdependent that a recession China would affect the United States.

Is Iran going to know what they're doing with nukes, or might they do something stupid?
Tobey: If you're introducing nuclear weapons, the possibility of accidental or unauthorized launch goes up. You've got a whole new country with nuclear weapons. You don't know what their doctrine is for deployment, checks there would be over use—American systems have locks on them to make unauthorized launch impossible. Would Iranian weapons have such mechanisms? And even if they did, what would the Iranian command and control structure look like? Who's in charge? Is it the supreme leader? Is it the president? Could one person order the use of nuclear weapons.

Bokhari: You can miscalculate, but you're not intentionally doing something stupid. [For instance, when Islamic State militants] burned that pilot, which was the height of brutality, I'm pretty sure there was a certain logic behind it. It's not like, "Oh well, you know what? I think I wanna axe my foot today. Lemme go burn another Jordanian pilot." It's not a deliberate blunder. There is a method behind the madness.

Is there a real chance that Iran might hand nukes over to groups like Hezbollah or Hamas?
Tobey: There are people who worry about that, and there are people who counter that it would be unlikely given that it would be tracked back to Iran, and the consequences would be so severe—that they could a military attack in return—that they would be deterred from doing so. I think it's a difficult question. We know that Iran has supported terrorist attacks against civilians. Would that translate to handing over nuclear weapons to terrorists? I don't know.

Bokhari: It's not like nukes are somewhere on the shelf and you pick them up and go use them. It's not as simple as that. They're de-mated unless there's a situation where nukes need to be ready to be deployed. We at Stratfor looked into this in 2006. We did a major study of CBRM (Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Missiles) and non-state actors and frankly speaking, the infrastructure required to have nukes for non-state actors renders it impossible almost for them to acquire them. You need territory, resources, technical know-how, and facilities, so it's just not feasible that they could get it. This idea is kinda like saying that the rag-tag Taliban in Pakistan could get their hands on a nuke, which is fantastical.

Is it possible that anything non-horrible could come out of this?
Bokhari: It's not outside the realm of possibility that we could work with Iran to counter Daesh and then the jihadists. It's not beyond the pale to think that the United States and Iran could have some kind of an understanding. We've done this in the past. The United States has a history of working with unsavory actors. Washington aligned with Stalin to defeat Nazi Germany. It worked with Communist China to deal with the Soviet Union. We toppled the Taliban regime in collusion with the Iranians, and also coordinated and cooperated in regime change against Saddam. It's not black and white.

Tobey: I just don't know. I hope it can be avoided.

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Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow Sam on Twitter

Illustration by Heather Benjamin

When I was ten I stole some books from my grandmother. Her books were best sellers (this was the 70s), and excepting a memoir about a plane crash, they were all really smutty. I learned about prostitutes, the 70s American attitude toward Jews, class anxiety, and the best positions for cunnilingus. More important, I learned that my grandmother read smutty books. This very old woman with a slightly hunched spine and a hand tremor, she still wants to read indulgently graphic sex scenes. She will do it without shame or any paranoid sense that she's behaving illegally. She will do it on a park bench and on a train, i.e., she will do it not at all in secret, as I was doing it, behind a living-room couch.

Read is not the right verb to describe what I did to her books. I selectively strip-mined them. Her books were quarries. I scanned their interiors for the louche sparkle of a word like cock, and then I pickaxed it free of its surroundings and pulled it to the surface. I did this again and again until all the books were empty. In my mind, these plundered sentences turned liquidy, and conjoined to form one slippery and ebullient act of intercourse traversing many story lines and connecting characters that, in the confines of the original books, at least, had never even met.

Thirty-six years later and in the midst of a lot of sexual-politics talk, and campus-rape talk, and mega-best-selling-erotic-literature talk, and discussions regarding what, starting as girls, women learn about sex and how to behave actively or passively during it, I was curious to revisit my stolen sex education. I wanted to create the textbook I'd covertly piecemealed. I wanted to rub together the sentences I remembered most vividly and (maybe) generate the same heat of discovery. I wanted to see if I remembered the excitement and the confusion and the loneliness and the empowerment that come not from being empowered, necessarily, but from being small and believing that someday you will dare.

Each sentence is from one of the following books: Scruples by Judith Krantz; Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann; Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read; The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander; Wifey by Judy Blume; Fear of Flying by Erica Jong; Class Reunion by Rona Jaffe.

One day I was lying around by the pool thinking I would go ape out of horniness. My mother walked in unannounced and found the mustard girl, her mink coat open and nothing underneath, down on her knees lustily sucking my father's penis. The hell with them, she thought as she tossed in a barbiturate haze. He always left shit stripes on my sheets. Then there came a deafening crash as the right wing hit the side of the mountain.

They ordered more drinks. Blood poured out of the severed artery. I became aware of the big German shepherd lying restless by my side. I started kissing his balls, but not for too long. (Often they really appreciate a good blowjob.) She sat on the lid of the toilet, forced him down on his knees, thrusting her aching, wet cunt at his lips.

Now Vazquez was dead. Emily walked nonchalantly toward the booze table. Their food supplies were running out. She was a baby hippopotamus—it was incredible, a disgrace. She committed the crime of marrying a Jew. She was once thrown into a little wooden hut full of corpses where the temperature was like that of an oven, for a week. They knew from their estancias that one should never eat a steer that dies from natural causes.

"Small, long bones—long, small bones," she murmured to herself like a mantra, over and over for hours—"small, long bones."

So here they were, in a dream house built on the side of a mountain. She helped herself to some caviar. They would have to eat the bodies. Laura stuffed two high-speed vibrators into her pussy and her ass. Her social position in Atlanta made her overqualified for most jobs.

It was time for the children's baths.

"They say it will be a vintage year," she murmured to the speechless pilot. What was wrong with her not to feel happy and grateful? The ass is much like the vagina—a warm place to put a finger or a cock in.

There now arose a division among the boys. It was the worst Christmas she could remember. Billy took to fucking Jews with an enthusiasm even Jessica couldn't have matched. They were like flowers, opening, waiting to be discovered and picked. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. Boobs, bottoms, and legs—in that order—are more important. If she has never sucked a cock before, I show her some of my home movies. She is obviously the type who never goes out because she enjoys staying in Cabbageville, raising the family. The Nazi bitch, I thought, the goddamned Kraut. She never even sucked me off. A quality called in French, du chien.

"It is meat," he said. "That is all."

(Tiny, vulnerable, shrieking children. Chien is spicy, tart, amusing, pungent, tempting and puts the male world on notice that this is no ordinary woman. The brains smelled putrid so they put them aside and set off back down the mountain.)

With the need for mature, conventional sex now critical in my mind, I found myself at home alone one day with my brother-in-law. "Don't put your cock in—whatever you do—keep your promise, slave." At the same time I was handling the animal's penis. "It's just that Jewish girls are so bloody good in bed." The snow was like rock and their tools were inadequate. Each orgasm seemed to be made of ice.

Loneliness... rebound... social pressures... the narcotic of love. Her advisor was an attractive middle-aged woman named Mrs. Tweedy. She leisurely drew the whole length of his prick across her clitoris.

Should we join a new tennis club?

Should we get a divorce?

If they had been found, why were there no helicopters?

A couple of days after the dog episode, I was in charge of the children. Barbara and Gish. Lucille and Ben. Phyllis and Mickey. At a certain level of society, heiresses are treated with the same attention as women of accomplishment. As he stood there on all fours I climbed across his back facing away from him with my clitoris pressed against where the curve of his tail meets his body, and started moving back and forth. "How come we're having chicken tonight? It's Monday, we always have chicken on Wednesdays."

The ones who had eaten the meat were quite well.

They had no means of knowing that Harriet was a member of the most hidden of all major sexual subgroups, an international network of middle-aged and powerful Lesbians. They got ready for bed without speaking. He drew back and rammed his prick all the way up, brutally, wonderfully, just as she came in violent, mindless, racking shudders. Only the spine, the ribs, the feet, and the skull remained. A French aristocrat, female, without money, has an equal obligation to maintain certain forms, until she literally starves to death. The corpses were difficult to move.

"Max is here on business," Ken said. I reached down languidly and started stroking the hair-covered mound between his hind legs. His cock was as hard as a cock should be. Her clitoris, already engorged, pouted out from her pubic hair. That was her cue to go to the kitchen and start dinner. There was no alternative but to eat it wet and raw off the bone.

Ken sighed. What did you expect after five years of marriage anyway? A man who'll go down on you when you have your period? An officious Austrian girl in harlequin glasses and a red dirndl? Let's put the "mutilated genital" question to rest. Look like a whore and you'll be treated like one is my belief. The British toilet is the last refuge of colonialism. Too much friction can injure a girl's vagina. I look like a fresh, contemporary girl, which is one of the reasons I do pretty well. Men in their late twenties to forties don't mind a slightly older girl, so long as she has a nice personality. But from this experience I learned to be very careful letting anyone get anything from me, and especially I have never let any pictures be taken anymore of me sucking a cock. Their little dog stood at the bedside, wagging his tail in amazement. A good education was never wasted.

China's booming billionaire population has developed a penchant for personal bodyguards, who often serve as status symbols as well as muscle. Female guards, valued for their covert presence, precision, and elegance, are in particularly high demand at the moment. VICE China recently visited Beijing's Yun Hai bodyguard training school to see how this fierce fighting force is trained.

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Photo by Myrmi via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When he was knighted for his contribution to literature, Terry Pratchett said he suspected that this contribution "consisted of refraining from trying to write any" more books. He was, of course, being facetious, but his comment couldn't have been further from the truth; in their subject matter, Pratchett books always felt like fringe concerns, yet their massive success actually put him at the center of public taste.

There's never been a Hollywood film of any of his stories, and pushing out two books a year meant that there was no single totemic best seller he could hang his reputation on. So in a funny kind of way, it was only as his death was announced yesterday that it became totally clear what a crater he'd smashed into readers' lives.

Time will continue to appraise his literary merits, so what is there left to do but pick out some of the more interesting, unusual, and amusing moments from his life?

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Artwork from the Discworld series

HIS MOTHER PAID HIM TO READ
A penny a page. As a child, he didn't give a damn about books, preferring the outdoors and fiddling with machinery. Until one day he read The Wind in the Willows and books crawled up his trousers and bit him hard in all the right places. He worked through the Beaconsfield library, before discovering a pornographic bookshop that also sold small quantities of hardcore sci-fi. Then he went on to become one of the most beloved British authors of all time, suggesting he ended up being quite into reading.

WE FORGET NOW THAT PRATCHETT WAS ROWLING BEFORE ROWLING
At his peak, Pratchett was selling 3 million books a year. Before J. K. Rowling, he was on course to be the best-selling British author of the 1990s. He'd do two new books a year. More than 40 Discworld books. More than 80 million copies sold in total. In 1997, booksellers estimated that 6.5 percent of the entire trade in books in this country were Terry Pratchett novels. Whether or not you ever read any of his books, there's no doubt you know his name.

NO ONE SEEMS TO BE BE ABLE TO FIND A SINGLE BAD WORD TO SAY ABOUT HIM
Honestly, we'd tell you if we could find one, but we can only conclude that the grinning wizard bloke was one of the nicest men anyone ever met. Early on, he made his name giving avuncular speeches at fan conferences and seemed to be a guy who genuinely loved meeting his fans. He'd do legendarily long book-signings. One fan reminisced on Twitter yesterday about sitting around patiently, waiting for Tez to finish signing every single of his 40-volume "complete set" of Discworld books. Some joked that an unsigned Pratchett was more valuable to collectors than a signed one.

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Artwork from Pratchett's book 'Guards! Guards!'

HIS FIRST BOOK STARTED AS A KIDS' NEWSPAPER COLUMN
Pratchett's first proper job was as a newspaper journalist at the Bucks Free Press in High Wycombe. It was there that he took on the lowest job on the ladder—compiling the kids' section: a list of child birthdays and a short-story column. Pratchett wrote the stories, turned his column into a serial, turned the serial into a book, and sold it as The Carpet People. A bit like The Borrowers, The Carpet People features tiny people living on the floor of a house who cross the carpet world in search of a new home after their village is destroyed.

HE DIDN'T GIVE UP THE DAY JOB UNTIL HIS FOURTH BOOK
"Local journalism is journalism," he told the Guardian. "If you get it wrong, they know where you live. You see more things and do more things than you would ever see or do on a mainstream newspaper. I saw my first dead body on my first day at work."

After the Bucks Free Press he went on to the Western Daily Mail, and by 1973 he'd jumped across the fence to be a PR man for the nuclear-power industry—a decent early test for his powers of imagination. Only when he bought his mother a house did she finally relent in her requests that he keep up his day job to "have something to fall back on."

HE READ ALMOST EVERY COPY OF PUNCH THAT EVER EXISTED
Despite the magazine folding in 1992, that's still 150 years of the stuff. "I didn't only look at the humor and the cartoons. I read the other stuff, which had the additional advantage of me picking up a lot of Victorian vocabulary, which comes in useful," he once said, also crediting Punch with shaping his particularly whimsical satirical worldview.

As a boy, Mad Magazine and Private Eye held a bigger sway, and he was also a big fan of 1066 and All That, W. C. Sellar, and R. J. Yeatman's deliberately flimsy history of England.

HE WAS VAGUELY WORRIED ABOUT BEING "THE RIGHT-TO-DIE GUY"
In recent years he campaigned for a greater awareness of assisted dying, but the thought that it had begun to overshadow his books in the public mind troubled him. At the same time, he was powerfully committed to changing the law. At one point, he kept a photo of fellow right-to-die campaigner, the late Tony Nicklinson, on his desk. "I put his picture [there] because I don't want this guy forgotten," he said. "He was very clear about what he wanted, and you cannot tell me that two doctors helping him to go to sleep would constitute murder."

He also did the TV show where a man killed himself at Dignitas in full view of the BBC's cameras, one of the more astonishing TV moments of the past decade.

HE WANTED TO TALK ALL HIS BOOKS
By 2010, Pratchett could no longer type efficiently, so he installed six screens in his office and used Dragon Dictate to keep going via voice recognition software, plus a human assistant who'd help him with revisions. His publisher reckoned that the shift had changed his writing style, mainly because of the difficulty with revising. Far from feeling set back, Pratchett thought the new way was more natural: "If it all came back, I would probably stick with talking," he said. "Because we're monkeys. We chatter. It's easy to do. It's mutable."

HE WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF DOUGLAS ADAMS
While Adams operated in a similar parallel satirical universe, the Hitchhiker's author was the worst for actually writing. He sometimes had to be locked in his hotel room by his publishers when the deadline for a new novel drew near just to get him to stop procrastinating.

Pratchett, by contrast, couldn't stop the words. After he left his full-time job, he often felt bereft because he'd done all of his work in the mornings, then still had to fill his day. Later on, he'd start work at 10 AM, take a few hours off in the afternoon, then return to his desk until nearly midnight. The pace of his writing drew down a bit in the early 2000s, when his novels became more considered, less gag-led. When he went on his annual holiday to Australia, he boasted, he'd write even more than when he was at work, waking at dawn and putting down a thousand words before breakfast.

HE WROTE WITHOUT ANY REAL PLAN
He compared it to woodcarving: "You start cutting the shape you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own. If you're sensible, you work with the grain, and if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate it into the design."

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Pratchett talking in Milan in 2007. Photo by Moroboshi via Wikimedia Commons

HIS DAUGHTER WRITES STORIES FOR VIDEO GAMES
Rhianna Pratchett wrote scripts for the Tomb Raider reboot and Overlord. She was also co-writer on the BBC's Discworld series, The Watch. There's still a question mark over whether she will take over the Discworld series in at least a creative-director role.

HE TURNED DOWN MORE MONEY THAN THE GDP OF BURUNDI
They made 15 stage plays, nine radio adaptations, and seven TV ones of his books. But however loudly Hollywood called—and for a property second only to Rowling's, you can assume that was VERY, VERY LOUDLY—Tez never replied. He demanded creative control over whatever was put out under his marque, and hence the LA moneymen could never come to any proper deal with him.

HE EXPERIMENTED WITH ALTERNATIVE TREATMENTS FOR HIS ALZHEIMER'S
These included a helmet that sent light bursts at a particular wavelength into his skull. He was skeptical of its powers, however. "But it has become a kind of totem—an act of faith that the disease can be controlled, if not by this, then by some other development," he said.

HE HAD A LONG TIME TO PLAN HIS END, AND IT SHOWED
His death was announced to Twitter with three messages. "AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER." / "Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. / "The End."

HE BELIEVED DEATH IS NOT ENTIRELY 100 PERCENT THE END
As a card-carrying humanist, Pratchett was against the idea of there being any afterlife. Though he did delight one Telegraph interviewer by singing a hymn to her from the darker recesses of his hymnal: "Over the world there are small brown babies / Fathers and mothers and babies dear / They do not know the love of Jesus / No one to tell them that he is near..."

His views on what happens next were simple and neat: "No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away," he wrote in 1991's Reaper Man. It's a safe bet that he'll keep rippling out for a long time to come.

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I miss the Wiimote. You know, the pointy, wavy thing that you held when you played the Wii. Don't be all, "I never played on a Wii, it was for people who didn't like games," or something like that. Everyone played the Wii.

But I understand why (some, foolish) people hated the Wiimote. The batteries died constantly, using it did make you look like a total dickhead, and it could occasionally have a hissy fit, the cursor on the screen bucking as wildly as a wildebeest with its ass on fire. Yet I believe it was the most important innovation in gaming control since we first clicked a mouse, as we know them, in the late 1960s.

Like the iPhone, the beauty of the Wiimote—OK, the Wii Remote, for the pedants—is in its immediacy. Want to select that button, or go to that section of the screen? Just point at it. Want to hit that ball? Swing your arm. The Wiimote made sense just by watching someone use it, and welcomed inexperienced gamers with open arms.

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Hours were spent on the console's 2006 launch title Wii Sports with family members who had never touched a gamepad, while my more gaming-savvy friends enjoyed its sequel, Resort, for not having the barrier to enjoyment most modern multiplayer games have, such as steep learning curves, complicated controls, or disproportionate XP levels.

The only crime those titles ever committed was that Nintendo created and perfected the motion-controlled sports game genre at the first attempt. And, for many, the Wiimote fad died there and then. Returning serves that only really existed as an alien construct of code, playing a round of golf in your living room without ruining the carpet.

But for me, it was once the sports-centric games had lost their instant-click novelty that the fun began. Plugging in a Nunchuk transformed the device into a magic wand, able to improve just about any genre. Three-dimensional platformers that had struggled to step out of Super Mario 64's shadow on previous Nintendo platforms were reborn. Moving with the Nunchuk's analogue stick while chaining together your movement using the pointer elevated the Galaxy games to the pinnacle of their genre. Those worlds were a joy to navigate through, to experiment it, overflowing with ideas that could only work with this unique interface.

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'Metroid Prime'

Similarly, the Metroid Prime games felt even more like you were behind that visor using these controls. Moving the controller and cannon in parallel was hypnotic, and adjusting the Wiimote's direction mid-jump allowed for passage through tricky platforming sections—the kind that could prove incredibly frustrating in other games with other controllers (I reckon Mirrors Edge could have solved many of its issues using these controls). The extra tasks in the series, such as welding, rotating keys to solve puzzles and pulling levers come Corruption, represented interesting uses of motion control.

First-person shooters now seem lacking to me after playing CoD:MW and GoldenEye 007 using the Wii's singular setup. The default settings the games shipped with were woeful, but a few adjustments made both a joy to control. Using the Nunchuk to take down someone as you lined up your next shot with the Wiimote made GoldenEye's linear campaign far better than it had any right to be. Subtle touches like twisting the Nunchuk to lean round corners to shoot were also game changing, allowing you to play the game both stealthily and as a full-on firefight. These touches would have benefitted Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored hugely.

The Wiimote's MotionPlus add-on made close-up combat in games just as interesting as it became in guns-and-ammo experiences. Red Steel 2 was a brilliant set of fighting mechanics held back by a repetitive game world, but credit must go to Ubisoft for building a game from the ground up exclusively for the Wii and its individual controller. Fighting ninjas armed with both a sword and gun simultaneously made for some epic battles.

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'Skyward Sword' made great use of the Wiimote's motion sensors—once you clicked with it

These mechanics were built on further in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, but a lot of people struggled to master Link's new, physical skillset. If you flailed around aimlessly you were going nowhere, but methodical timing and angled movements with the Wiimote yielded incredibly satisfying results. Skyward Sword had its issues, but the forthcoming Zelda for the Wii U has its work cut out to improve on its predecessor's combat, once it'd comfortably clicked into a riot of rhythmic aggression.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories used the device to terrifying effect. The internal speaker on the Wiimote rang occasionally and talked to you like a possessed phone, while the pointer on screen acted as a torch in darker areas. Sounds entirely standard, yet the game psychoanalyzed where you pointed at most, working out if you were a completest exploring every corner, or a pervert constantly shifting the camera to look at a nurse's cleavage.

Resident Evil 4 (and, indeed, third-person action adventuring) was perfected with the updated controls the game's Wii port brought into action, and Okami's central gameplay mechanic of drawing Japanese characters on the screen suddenly felt natural after it'd debuted with only the PlayStation 2's analog sticks for support.

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'Zack & Wiki'

The Wiimote continually opened up opportunities a traditional gamepad could not: it brought much-needed physical interaction to on-rails shooters, freshened up point 'n' click puzzlers and made using your console to browse the internet rather less of a chore. Zack & Wiki felt like the logical evolution of Monkey Island-like puzzlers, World of Goo felt like a spiritual successor to Lemmings, and the awesome Sin & Punishment: Star Successor took on-rails shooters to their peak by adding free-flowing movement as you moved and fired There is a blueprint within its mechanics for the best Starfox title yet to be realized.

Like the scrum that follows any innovation, as soon as there was money to be made a host of less-able advocates of the Wii's motion controls set about exploiting them. Developers crowbarred in completely inappropriate moves and gimmicks which did nothing to play to the platform's strengths. And the Wii certainly suffered its share of games where waving the Wiimote around was pretty much all you did, with no real reason to, or weight behind your actions. But when people did embrace the scheme in the right way, realizing its flexibility and potential for accessible yet surprisingly complex play mechanics, the results were often spectacular.

I wonder where a second iteration of the Wiimote would have taken us? A revised model would no doubt have linked the Nunchuk wirelessly, and perhaps taken on a more ergonomic design. Alas, it seems we'll never know.

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Wii-style controls would really suit VR gameplay

For most, the Wiimote was a gimmick, and despite the Wii U's compatibility with the controller, even Nintendo seems to have turned its back on it. It occasionally gets utilised in its uncomfortable sideways position, as a cheap extra controller for Mario Kart or something, but Nunchuk integration has been ignored completely bar a brief flirtation on the excellent Metroid Blast mini-game, featured in Nintendo Land. PC gamers learned to live with swapping between keyboard and mouse and gamepad, so it's a shame Nintendo haven't credited Wii U owners to do the same.

More positively, though, the opportunities the Wiimote began to open up may be expanded on in the next control revolution: virtual reality. Kinect and Move attempted to ape the Wiimote's success and failed, but VR devices have taken its principles and blown the possibilities wide open, as this interesting NeoGAF thread highlights. The Nunchuk and Wiimote combo seems like the perfect setup to use with VR headsets.

In attracting newcomers who'd not been bothered before by interactive adventures, the Wiimote was widely derided by "hardcore" gamers, and in truth 95 percent of the time it deserved the shit it got. But when used correctly, it showed that games could move in new, previously mysterious ways—something that may yet benefit the industry as it moves forward into new worlds of multi-sensory immersion.

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