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VICE Vs Video Games: I Played ‘Bloodborne’ for 24 Hours Straight

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

At 9 AM on Sunday morning, I died. I watched myself at a remove, falling first with the right knee and then the left, until my whole body collapsed prone onto the floor and began to fade into opacity. Before me, a gigantic skeletal structure, electrified in blue and white, swiped and smashed the space I had just vacated. A few seconds passed, to let me appreciate another failure, before the words "YOU DIED" appeared on the television screen. No fucking shit, Bloodborne, I thought. No fucking shit, Miyazaki, you glorious bastard.

I looked at my phone. I added another notch to my tally and then checked my watch. The timer read 18 hours. Only six more to go. I think I had a drink of Lucozade, felt a bit sick, and then took myself back into Yharnam, a shadowy figure wailing bloody murder down the shaft of his axe.

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The author, all smiles as the nightmare's just beginning

Over the weekend, while you were all out enjoying the sunshine, I played Bloodborne for 24 hours straight. For some reason, I thought this would be a good idea. I am, clearly, an idiot.

I struggle to stay up late. I'm the sort of guy who can't wait for the headliners to play at a festival, so that I can go straight into my sleeping bag and read the Observer Food Monthly. I have never seen the dawn from the satisfaction of an all-nighter. If I were to run a VICE series it would be called something like Straight to Bed After Dinner. You get the idea.

I suppose it was a challenge. To see what would win out: the spiritual successor to "the Hardest Games Ever made," Demon's Souls and the two Dark Souls titles to date, or me, a 26-year-old guy who just so happens to adore the series. I've lost count of how many hours I put into the previous Souls, but it's safe to say that if my social circle caught wind of what I was really doing when I was "feeling a bit sick," they'd stage an intervention.

If the beginning of this article hasn't given it away already, I will not leave you in suspense, folks: I lost. His name is Darkbeast Paarl and he is a motherfucker. After two hours and—I counted—21 unsuccessful attempts to defeat him, I decided the rest of my playthrough would be best spent exploring the remainder of the game world.

Yeah, I wimped out. Yes, I found fighting Paarl about as enjoyable as a BBQ at a vegan cafe. But, I was tired, okay. It was a challenge to keep my headache from consuming my entire body, let alone out manoeuvre a super-fast, super-belligerent, undead prick with a penchant for endless attacking.

I went back into the world and did some exploring and discovered that I wasn't meant to be fighting Paarl at the point I had attempted to. This is classic Bloodborne design. For as long as I played, I stumbled through the maze-like city of Yharnam with no real idea of which way I was supposed to go. I adored this. At first I was disappointed in its apparent aimlessness, but after taking a hidden elevator here or secret door there, I fast realized that Bloodborne doesn't just contain one Firelink Shrine or the Nexus (the hub worlds of Dark and Demon's, respectively), it has about seven.

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After dark, still optimistic

No matter how deep you chisel your way into the darkness, there will always be a way back. And if you happen to find yourself somewhere you shouldn't be, then, as is only polite, FromSoftware has ensured that you'll be carting your backside out the door faster than you can say "Umbasa."

Yharnam itself resembles a goth pub that goths would never go to. It's like an overly stylized quirky London boozer, filled with tourists whispering how "quaint" the "Brits" are. It's a decent place to visit for a cheeky pint or two, but I've got to admit it's no Lordran, wherein I'd happily drink Estus with Solaire for days. A man can only talk to so many NPCs behind locked doors before it all feels a bit bland.

Luckily, the city of Yharnam is not the only place you get to visit—From has obviously put the work in, here, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of players consider this the greatest world they've ever made.

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'Bloodborne' launch trailer

BUT HOW HARD IS IT, DAVE? I hear you ask. STOP TALKING ABOUT THINGS WE DON'T CARE ABOUT.

Well, OK. Up until Paarl, I was actually finding Bloodborne a relatively gentle ride. As is customary in a From game, I died at the hands of the very first enemy, but from then on actually found the combat relatively simple. This isn't to say it was easy—a word that to some of the Souls community is synonymous with terrible—but familiar in a comforting way, like that first sip of tea after being away.

To the point I reached, I beat most bosses on the second or third attempt. Very few enemies, large or small, gave me much trouble. But I was nevertheless dying. A lot. The action, which is much faster than its predecessors and focuses on quick reactions over defense, can easily get out of hand. Especially when you get cocky, which will happen.

Bloodborne punishes you when you make a mistake—it's not out to stack the odds against you, it just simply shows you the rules and asks you to play by them. So, yeah, Bloodborne will make you its bitch if you accidentally get too big for your black leather boots.

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Whatever this is, you can bet it wants to kill you

And it's fair to say that as I played, I got worse. It's funny what staying awake for an entire day/night cycle actually does to you. Turns out that pizza, chocolate, and beer is a fucking terrible way to nourish your body. Around the time I was killing the second boss, my teeth began to ache; at midnight, I started to experience mild anxiety; by four in the morning, I could actually feel a spot growing out of my face.

Think about that for a second. The neuron receivers in my face were so wired on sugar and grease that I was experiencing the swelling of a spot, in real time.

A really odd alteration involves armor and weaponry. Nobody drops shit. It took me about six hours to find a new get-up and another couple to pick up a unique weapon. This may not disappoint everyone, but for me it was a vital part of what made the Souls games so special: You may not be able to make it to the next bonfire, but as long as you picked up that new straight sword, then who cares? Bloodborne does not dish out small bonuses like this. From my vantage point, there are no boss weapons.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream death threats in block capitals to From president Hidetaka Miyazaki on anonymous forums. But more than anything, I wanted to have a shower. Take this from me: If you don't sleep or move for ages, the human body sweats more than Lee Evans on a really hot day.

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Possibly broken

At the end of my trial, I decided to stay up. I was a quivering gelatinous mess of nerves, but I was also deeply satisfied. If any game better captures the learning curve of life than Bloodborne, then I haven't played it. Again and again you are forced to redo the same areas, taking notes, developing your understanding of what works and what doesn't, until you are spat out on the other side and have to do it all over again. And, unlike the Souls games, Bloodborne rewards you for taking a chance. It celebrates experimentation and balls. If Bloodborne were a person, it would be that bloke you know who's always off on adventures around the world; it'd grab you by the collar and demand you ask out your crush right this second; it'd be the first one on the dance floor and the last one to leave.

This is what it teaches us. This is what I did for one day.

Bloodborne is a fucking brilliant game. The law of diminishing returns has definitely been halted—it is a far, far, far superior experience than Dark Souls II. More demanding than a drunk at last orders, sure, but a truly wonderful experience, that will get you—like it did me—crying and cheering in equal measure.

In the end, as my alarm sounded completion, I thought of Ernest Hemingway. There is nothing to playing Bloodborne. All you have to do is sit on your sofa and bleed.

Follow David on Twitter.


VICE Premiere: VICE Exclusive: Listen to Bright Like the Sun's New Post-Rock Song

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I it's still a little unclear what the term "post-rock" is supposed to actually mean, but most music deemed part of the genre is melancholic, dramatic, and heavily instrumental. Texas-based band Bright Like the Sun makes music that fits the bill—it's dense and emotive and builds to huge crescendos. But they also pull influences from such disparate sources as the Beach Boys and 90s alternative band Failure to create something wholly unique.

Check out "Smile Wide and Look Alive" and then preorder their new album here.

This Is What You Get When You Cross a Floating Island Mansion with a Pink Ball Sack

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Still from 'Escape Pod' (2015), by Jonathan Monaghan

In David Cronenberg's 1986 horror masterpiece The Fly, Jeff Goldblum plays scientist Seth Brundle, the creator of a set of so-called Telepods capable of teleporting matter from one pod to the other. While teleporting himself across the room, Brundle unwittingly fuses his DNA with a housefly and becomes a trash-eating monster with a raging libido.

Three decades later, video artist Jonathan Monaghan has arrived with an installation called Escape Pod, which revolves around a continuously looping 20-minute animation suggestive of a future where Telepod technology has developed to allow fusions of living matter with buildings, video games, and designer sofas. Whereas The Fly was fixed on a human scale by the limitations of cameras, actors, and conventional special effects, Escape Pod unfolds in a sleek, floating realm susceptible to radical shifts in scale. Although the aesthetic look is closer to video games than cinema, Monaghan's concerns resemble Cronenberg's old-school body horror. To what degree has our physical matter been irrevocably jumbled with the commercial culture that we live and dream in, online and off? Monaghan envisions a world where these impossible fusions become breathtakingly real.

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VICE: With Escape Pod you've filled a world with numerous hybrid fusions. There aren't any human characters per se, but there's still pieces of human viscera floating around. An elbow here, an anus there.


Jonathan Monaghan: I like to think of the environments and objects in my work as part of a postapocalyptic, dystopian world, where technology kind of becomes alive and takes over everything else and evolves into a new thing in weird ways. The escape pod is this high-end luxury pod that's also a life form.

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Still from 'Escape Pod' (2015), by Jonathan Monaghan

Some of these things are pretty while others are monstrous. There's one in particular that I can best describe as a sort of radial UFO composed of three architecturally distinct levels, with enormous testicles and a retractable escalator dangling from the bottom. The world of Escape Pod seems not too far removed from The Island of Dr. Moreau .


They're funny and surreal, but they also have a very ominous quality about them. There's an ambiguity about whether they're life forms or architecture or what. It's a metaphor for what happens when we put our lives on digital platforms and everything blurs together.

If there is a main character or avatar in Escape Pod, it's a golden deer, whom we meet after passing through a portal and emerging from his butthole and also witness being born from between the cushions of a very expensive BoConcept sofa. Why a golden deer?


If you look at mythology, Japanese or Western, the deer represents something otherworldly and unattainable. He's able to traverse these different worlds. Being golden represents power, and the material desire that goes along with it. I want you to see the disconnect between our reality and the reality I'm creating, which is a metaphor for how digital technologies shape our reality. That's where the deer comes from.

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Still from 'Escape Pod' (2015), by Jonathan Monaghan

Visually, Escape Pod uses the vocabulary of exploratory video games like Myst. Why do you choose to work in this style?


Even though I operate as a video artist, I think my works have a bit more in common with video games than they do the history of cinema. I think of these works as windows onto another world, a world that parallels our own, but where our elements and imagery are mashed up into something new. They're not quite films and they're not quite video games, but somewhere in between.

Can you describe any artists or experiences you had that inspired you to become a fine artist?


I looked at a lot of video art. Matthew Barney was a big influence in a number of ways. I think what I got from studying these works was the feeling that I could produce something like that, but that I could do it with the skills I was already proficient in. I didn't have a studio or a big budget—I didn't even know how to use a camera—but I could do it with what I knew.

It seems like we're in a renaissance right now for video art that doesn't involve a camera.


Totally. It's like The Man Without the Movie Camera right now, if you think of Dziga Vertov's groundbreaking film work. It's a virtual world now, and we're figuring out how to film in it. It's a magic world that I create and I film it, just like a cinematographer would. Before I knew anything about art, the big draw of 3D graphics was the ability to create something that was photorealistic. It was something that I was really excited about because it felt like it had a lot of power.

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Still from 'Escape Pod' (2015), by Jonathan Monaghan

The photorealistic world of Escape Pod is full of impossible scenarios and movements, beginning with a duty-free store full of weapons and riot gear that is unlike any you'd encounter in reality. What motivated you to create these kinds of environments?


They're idealized environments that relate to wealth and power, and they're all rendered with a very slick, seductive, commercial aesthetic. There's lots of elements that can be very banal, like the duty-free store, but there's always this surreal, fantastical interjection. We see car commercials and slick product photography and visualizations of condos or whatever, and I'm complicitly working like that. [But] I'm appropriating that aesthetic for a much different purpose.

The video for Escape Pod is listed as being available for sale in an edition of three. What does selling a work of digital video art involve for you?


All of my work, including sculptures and photographic prints, it all begins as a digital file. With this video, the collector would acquire a super high-res master copy in addition to a nice case that I designed and made, and they also receive a unique ID that relates to a Bitcoin blockchain transaction, which is a kind of cryptographic certificate of authenticity. It's one way to certify a digital file, which can be infinitely produced, and identifies it as the original. I'm experimenting with these cryptographic ways of certifying digital works. Whether it's a collector or a museum, it gives them the ability to maintain some control over the digital file. That said, nobody's quite figured it out yet, there's no one way of selling digital work.

Where does your process start? Do you design in digital and build everything from the ground up?


My process usually starts in a place like a museum, where I hoard images and concepts and motifs and themes from the rich history of Western art. I start by sketching out the objects and environments in a small notebook. Then I take my sketches and sculpt them into 3D on a computer.

I see a strong thematic line between Escape Pod and the work of Matthew Barney. The jumping off point between Escape Pod and something from The Cremaster Cycle would seem to be the human body. Everything Barney undertakes is on some level a physical challenge where he tests the body, whereas Escape Pod works in a hypothetical space.


As far as bodies and materiality go, something that always interested me with digital animation was that it offered you the ability to render or create images that are very seductive. They could be soft like fur or supple like flesh, but ultimately there's always going to be this frustration that you're left with a flat image that you can't get into.

My work is very realistic and I make it look seductive and inviting, but there's always a disconnect or barrier to entry. I work with that disconnect as a way to parallel the disconnect that we often get when engaging with technology. I'm playing with the need technology always has to be more realistic or natural.

Escape Pod is on view through May 3 at Bitforms Gallery at 131 Allen Street in New York City.

British and American Immigrant Detainees Are Going on Hunger Strikes for the Same Rights

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Earlier this month, hundreds of people detained in Britain's immigrant detention centers went on hunger strike, the largest protest migration activists have seen in several years. In at least eight facilities across the UK, migrants and asylum seekers refused food and demanded change to a system that they see as abusive and inhumane.

The events in the UK roughly coincided with the one-year anniversary of a hunger strike at Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, providing Americans with a reminder of the immense risks taken by hunger strikers—and the culture of criminalization that shapes migrant life on both sides of the Atlantic.

The hunger strikes began after British news station Channel 4 posted footage secretly recorded in two detention centers. One Home Office employee at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow, was caught on tape suggesting that cameras were prohibited on the inside in order to prevent the poor conditions from becoming public knowledge. Another video captured a detainee speaking to his case worker. "I'm tired, I don't want to die here," he pleads on the phone. "I want freedom, I got detained, three years now I've spent my life behind doors. Why?" A website called " Detained Voices" has since been set up to publish the stories and experiences of people held in detention.

Over the first few days of the hunger strikes, demands emerged, including access to justice/legal representation, proper healthcare and adequate food, and an end to indefinite detention and unlawful or expedited removals.

Immigrants in the US have reported experiencing similarly appalling conditions while detained—they have been held for months or even years, endured alleged physical and sexual abuse at the hands of guards, and received extremely low wages for their labor.

In both the UK and US, corporations play a large role in running immigration detention centers. The same company that operates the Northwest Detention Center, the GEO Group, also operates Dungavel, one of the facilities where detainees went on hunger strike in the UK.

Dr. Daniel Wilsher, Professor of Law at City University London, told VICE that the US and Britain utilize similar legal and and policy frameworks when it comes to immigration detention. Each year, about 30,000 people are held in detention facilities in the UK, compared to about 450,000 people in the US. Neither country has implemented strict limits on the amount of time people can be imprisoned.

According to leaders from last year's action at Northwest Detention Center, hunger strikes enable migrants to assert a sense of power and agency even in the most desperate of circumstances. "Civil disobedience is necessary to stand on your own and refuse to be humiliated to conform," a group of activists calling themselves the Northwest Detention Center Resistance told VICE via email. "They want to make us believe we are imprisoned even mentally, these actions prove that we won't continue allowing for oppression to take over us, even if we are detained."

At least 750 migrants participated in last year's action.

Hunger strikes have become a common enough tactic in the United States that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has developed a protocol to rely on when they pop up. Britain's Home Office has also issued specific guidelines for how to manage "food and fluid refusal" on the part of detainees.

Along with establishing official polices for hunger strikes, British and American immigration authorities have gone to great lengths to undermine resistance actions on the inside. Last week, the British Home Office issued removal orders to several people participating in the hunger strike there, and moved strike leaders to different detention centers.

Both in the Northwest Detention Center and its British counterparts, hunger strikers have been thrown in solitary confinement when they refused to eat. During last year's actions in Tacoma, participating detainees were even threatened with force-feeding.

In the context of such repression, according to advocates and migrants, measuring the "success" of a hunger strike is not always easy. The latest action in the UK did receive prominent news coverage, which activists hope will translate into increased public awareness about the problems inside detention centers.

But none of the specific demands outlined by the migrants were met, and some detainees have expressed doubt they'll benefit from the actions. Although the British hunger strike at Harmondsworth officially ended on March 18, Mohammad Waqas, 25, has continued to refuse food on his own. In a series of phone interviews from the detention center, he told VICE that the British government "doesn't care if we're on the hunger strike or not." At the time of his last interview, had had not eaten for 15 days.

When asked, the Northwest Detention Center Resistance activists were more confident that their actions that had resulted in real change. They said that the hunger strikes brought increased access to bond hearings, lower bonds, more humane treatment on the inside, and sustained outside support and media interest.

Meanwhile, like much of Europe, the United Kingdom has been embroiled in an increasingly vitriolic national debate about immigration policy. "What's new in the last year is that hostility towards migrants has explicitly become government policy," said London-based activist Rose Stark, who asked to use pseudonym since she feared losing visitation rights. According to Home Secretary Theresa May, the stated aim of the Immigration Act of 2014, which was passed last year, was to turn "create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants."

"I think in some ways Britain is following in the footsteps of the US, actually," said Stark. "There's been an increasing conflation between the idea of foreignness and the idea of criminality, and you see that in the bogeyman of the so-called foreign national prisoner."

In a 2012 election debate, President Barack Obama called for American immigration control officials to aggressively deport "criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they're trying to figure out how to feed their families."

But even if the president has vocalized sympathy for undocumented people without criminal records, his actual record on deportations suggests that no category of migrant is safe.

"President Obama deserves credit for adopting immigration detention conditions reforms early in his presidency and for his recent executive action on immigration," said Carl Takei, Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, in an email to VICE. "However, he has also presided over the biggest immigration detention system in US history—and deported more people than any of his predecessors."

According to some experts, these trends can be linked to changing ideas about fear and threats in post-9/11 America.

"The new danger is masculine, one personified by terrorist men and 'criminal aliens,'" Tanya Golash-Boza, an Associate Professor at University of California Merced, said via email. "Mass deportation and mass detention have emerged as a primary strategy for protecting the nation from the gendered and racial threats of criminal and fugitive aliens and terrorists."

As detainees in the UK wound down their hunger strike, the Northwest Detention Center Resistance activists reflected on the events of last year and urged those held in immigration detention to continue fighting for their rights and building power.

"If you are not being treated as a human being, what else is left to do?"

Aviva Stahl is a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes about prisons, particularly the use of solitary confinement and the experiences of terrorism suspects and LGBTQ people behind bars. Follow her on Twitter.

A Prison Sentence for a Facebook Image Shows How Restrictive Burma's Anti-Free-Speech Laws Have Become

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Philip Blackwood accompanied by police at his hearing. Via CoconutsYangon

Last week, a Burmese court sentenced New Zealander Philip Blackwood to two and a half years in prison for a Facebook image. The picture was a depiction of Buddha wearing headphones that Blackwood used to advertise a bar he managed in Yangon called VGastro.

Burma is 90 percent Buddhist, so it's certainly possible to see how that image might piss people off, but Blackwood's action was also apparently illegal. Under Section 295(a) of Burma's Penal Code, it is a criminal offense to undertake "Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs." Blackwood maintains that he never deliberately sought to offend Buddhism, and the incident has ignited an international discussion over the charge and the motives behind it.

Robert San Aung, a Burma-based human rights lawyer, told VICE that groups of ultra-orthodox Buddhist monks, who have a history of violence, ensured Blackwood never faced a fair trial.

"The monks are the ones who first reported the image, and then pressured the judge and the defense lawyers," he said. "They make people afraid to speak out, so Blackwood got the maximum punishment."

Blackwood's family struggled to find legal representation because of the country's limits on free expression. His parents told VICE that lawyers were afraid to represent their son. "Each lawyer we appointed dropped out in a matter of days," said Brian, Blackwood's father. "They were threatened with violence and loss of credibility by police and hardline monks."

Even U Mya Thway, the lawyer who finally agreed to represent Blackwood, mentioned his inability to speak out after the verdict. "I would dare to say [my opinion] if I was in another country," he told the Myanmar Times. "But if I make any comment on the court's decision I will end up in jail."

What Thway is reluctant to say is that Blackwood's "intent" to offend Buddhism was never proved. Under Burmese law proof of intent is required, and this point is a source of frustration for his family back in New Zealand.

"He made an ignorant mistake, and I know how he must have offended people," said Brian. "But he doesn't have an evil bone in his body. He's a typical Kiwi lad. How can they can they think he purposefully tried to offend anyone?"

For what it's worth, after the image went viral and was clearly making people angry, it was quickly removed from VGastro's Facebook. That was followed by a lengthy apology acknowledging the restaurant's "embarrassing ignorance."

While the verdict is likely confusing to Westerners, prominent Buddhists have also denouncing the verdict as harsh. Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Burma's most prominent Buddhist monks, called the action contradictory to the virtues of the religion. He said the "real insult" against Buddhism was the history of the government's treatment of its monks.

"The Buddha image is not a big mistake," Sayadaw told VICE. "The real insult against Buddhism is the beating and killing of monks by the military regime in the past. Where are the charges against those policemen?"

Some believe Blackwood's hefty sentence is politically motivated. Interfaith activist and founder of Coexist, Htuu Lou Rae, told VICE the verdict will make Buddhism appear as something in need of more protection. "In the lead-up to the coming election," he said, "this case will allow political parties to play the religion card to attract votes."

Blackwood's case comes at a time when Burma's parliament is considering four new laws that would further restrict freedom of religion and discriminate against religious minorities. These include the Religious Conversion Bill, which would required any Burmese citizen wishing to change religions to apply through a government body, and the Buddhist Women's Special Marriage Bill, which would make it a crime for the non-Buddhist husbands of Buddhist women to attempt to convert their wives. These laws have been widely lambasted by human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

David Mathieson, Senior Researcher for the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, said the Blackwood case demonstrates flaws in Burma's judicial system. "It's been used by people with a twisted agenda who see any slight as an attack," he said. "Now people are worried about how this case will affect the whole country, not just one bar manager."

After their hearing last week, Blackwood, along with co-offenders Htut Ko Ko Lwin and Tun Thurein, were returned to their cells in Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison, where they have remained since their arrest last December.

Blackwood isn't the first to fall afoul of Section 295(a). Last year, writer Htin Lin Oo was arrested for criticizing Buddhism at a public literary event, and Canadian Jason Polley was exiled for sporting a tattoo of Buddha on his leg.

Follow Jack on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Greatest Moments of ‘Final Fantasy,' Part 1

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Vivi illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

This year sees a buffet of Final Fantasy goodness that will appeal to hardcore series stalwarts and absolute beginners alike. We've already had the HD port of Final Fantasy Type-0 for current-gen consoles, the PSP original translating decently to home systems. With it comes access to a demo of the upcoming Final Fantasy XV, "Episode Duscae." In the summer Heavensward, the first expansion pack for FF's MMORPG title will be released. And that's not all, as news has emerged that a smartphone port of FFXI, a co-development between franchise overlords Square Enix and mobile specialists NEXON, will be available in 2016.

Because there's so much happening, here's a run down of Final Fantasy's greatest moments. Now, the most important thing to remember is that this is not a numbered list. The order doesn't denote the importance of each individual moment against the rest of them, because I'm not that much of a glutton for punishment. Final Fantasy is such a huge, well-loved series, and most of its entries have something to adore about them, so rather than argue over which ones should have been higher on the list, this way we can all concentrate on arguing over which ones I've neglected to feature in the list at all instead. You're welcome!

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Red XIII learns the truth about his father—Final Fantasy VII

I took a shine to weird fiery-wolf-lion-thing Red XIII the moment he was introduced in Final Fantasy VII, as a lab experiment that stringy-haired scientist Hojo was going to force human flower-girl Aerith to copulate with in order to provide new specimens to incarcerate and torture. You'd think, as a scientist, he'd have figured out that this probably wasn't biologically viable.

Anyway, it transpired that Red XIII, despite being endangered and (technically) a teenager, wasn't interested in sex with some random street vendor, so he broke free of his cage, launched himself at Hojo's jugular and very politely asked Cloud and company for assistance in perfect English. Red, or Nanaki, then says he'll accompany your party as far as his home, Cosmo Canyon, which incidentally is also where you'll hear the best music in the entire Final Fantasy series. And that's saying something.

Once you take him back there, his adopted grandfather Bugenhagen—a strange old dude who floats around on a levitating green orb—discovers Nanaki's resentment of his father Seto, who he believes was a coward that ran out on his mother and his entire community during their war against the vengeful Gi tribe. In response, Bugenhagen takes Nanaki and the party through the haunted Gi Cave, where their angry spirits roam. Upon making it to the other side, Nanaki learns the true fate of his father: he rushed to defend his home and family on his own, and in doing so was pierced by several of the Gi's poisoned arrows. But he fought on, keeping Cosmo Canyon safe from harm and preventing his enemies from taking even one step into the village. Eventually he succumbed to the poison and was turned to stone, never able to return home, but still he kept guard over the cave's entrance.

Upon learning this, Nanaki is filled with grief and pride over his father's sacrifice, promises to save the planet in his name, and howls to the moon in his honor, whereupon little crystal tears start falling from the petrified Seto's eyes. I'm tearing up now thinking about it, and this is why when it's good, the Final Fantasy series is really good—it can make you, a grown adult with things like mortgages and tax returns to worry about, care enough to leak water from your own eyes because a silly wolf-lion thing is sad and proud of his dad.

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Vivi discovers his origins—Final Fantasy IX

Timid, gullible Black Mage Master Vivi (illustrated, top) is a sweetheart. He's filled with wonder for things like skipping ropes, lacks the confidence of his friends and party members and, really, is just looking for a place to call home. He even has an adorable little waddling walk animation, so you just know you're supposed to fall completely and inexorably in love with him.

When Vivi, Zidane, Garnet and the rest of IX's motley crew arrive in the village of Dali and Vivi discovers an underground black mage production plant, it triggers a sort of existential crisis within him. Finding out one's true origins is a common theme throughout Final Fantasy, but never is it so affecting as with Vivi, who not only discovers that his lifespan may be severely limited, but also that he and his kind were created as mindless weapons of war and destruction. Eventually he finds peace and enough confidence within himself to become a proficient mage and an asset to the party—thanks to the love and support of his friends.

The epilogue of the game, voiced by Vivi himself, reveals that he had sons and thanks his friends for all their adventures together, but it all but confirms that Vivi himself died due to the limited lifespan imposed upon him by Kuja. Instead of fear and sadness though, Vivi is just happy for the good times he was able to have. "Farewell," he says. "My memories will be part of the sky." Oh, god.

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Yuna and Tidus observe, "The wind... it's nice."—Final Fantasy X

I first played Final Fantasy X when I was 14, an awkward, bony little mess of hormones yet to discover who I was or what I liked. So, the burgeoning love story between Tidus and Yuna really spoke to me. They weren't dashing or cool; they were young, painfully inexperienced, and as baffled by the world around them as they were by each other. They feel a connection, they want to get closer, but they have no idea how to act on it. In my teenage mind, one scene very early in the game, where the two are just getting to know each other, is perfect.

They stand together, alone, on a boat as it sails toward Kilika. Unsure of what to say but wanting to say something, Yuna blurts out one of the worst icebreakers in memory: "The wind... it's nice." Tidus probably should have shut the whole thing down at that point, but he humors her, and within moments they're at ease, laughing and giggling. It was cute and camp and awkward and it gave a weirdo like me a glimmer of hope that it was OK to be like that, even around people who you sort of liked.

Many people hate it, but I like the infamous "laughing scene" later on in the game for precisely the same reason. Watching them share small, silly moments like that made the big ones even more meaningful. It kind of sucks that, canonically, they're no longer together (he dies a couple more times and Yuna basically realizes that she's way too good for him), but what teenage relationship ever lasts? Aside from those that result in pregnancy, obviously.

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Tifa jumping off Junon's cannon—Final Fantasy VII

Tifa is my favorite Final Fantasy character, hands down. I'm not exactly sure why any more, if I'm honest, but she was different to other female characters I'd encountered at that time. She didn't wear pink, she fought with her fists rather than a stupid staff, she ran a bar all by herself, and she didn't let her formidable physique (read: chest) define her as a character. I rarely left her out of my party in my multiple playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII and, while it never happened, if I'd ever gotten anyone else for Cloud's Gold Saucer date, I'd have turned the console off and started again from the beginning.

She was a gentle soul and a bit of a romantic, but man could she slap a bitch down if she needed to. After Weapon is summoned, President Rufus Shinra sentences Tifa and Barret to a public execution to calm people's fears over the impending meteor. Tifa is placed in a gas chamber, but wriggles free from the chair just as Sapphire Weapon arrives to attack the city and blows a hole in the room right before Junon's cannon blasts its head clean off. Tifa climbs out on top of the cannon but is stopped by the Head of Weapons Development at Shinra, Scarlet.

The two engage in an epic catfight, before Scarlet pussies out and calls for help from her guards. Hearing a voice that tells her to run, Tifa turns and races to the end of the cannon, where Cid's airship, the Highwind, heroically rises to greet her. It's an exciting moment, and marks a changing point in the overall narrative as Tifa takes on the role of the party leader until Cloud is found. That's my girl.

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Galuf's Final Stand—Final Fantasy V

Bet you're sitting there wondering when Aerith's death is going to show up on this list. I'll save you some time—it isn't. (Except, it just sort of did.) That's not to say that whole incident in the Forgotten Capital wasn't sad and shocking. It left a lasting impression on thousands of Final Fantasy fans; Cloud's "Aerith will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry, or get angry" speech still gets me every time. But for my money, Galuf's death in Final Fantasy V is much more potent.

When he originally joins your party, the elderly Galuf suffers from amnesia and is, well, a bit strange. As his memories gradually return, however, the party discovers that Galuf is actually a king from another world, and one of the original four Warriors of Dawn who sealed V's Big Bad Exdeath away many years before the events of the main story.

Eventually, Exdeath catches up to the party in the Forest of Moore, where he binds them using powerful magical crystals. Galuf is forced to watch as his granddaughter Krile is engulfed in a ring of fire, but being the badass that he is, he alone breaks free and throws her clear of danger. He then charges at Exdeath and takes him on one-on-one in a glorious, heart-breaking last stand. His health is completely drained after one or two attacks, but somehow Galuf will keep on fighting even after his HP falls to zero. Exdeath, unable to beat him, runs away, and the party, now freed, crowds around Galuf in an attempt to save him. They cast Curaga and Raise, and even use a Phoenix Down and an Elixir on him (no-one bothered to try all that for poor Aerith) but it's too late, and he flickers away and dies in his granddaughter's arms.

He borrows strength from the Guardian Tree to speak with her from beyond the grave, however, and tells her not to cry, to be strong and fight, because she's not alone—he'll be in her heart, always. Then she flies off—on a fucking dragon—to save the world in his name. Don't tell me that's not some inspirational stuff right there.

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Alexander and Bahamut fight—Final Fantasy IX

Eidolons, Espers, GFs, Aeons, Avatars, Totemas—summoned creatures have been a staple of Final Fantasy for pretty much forever, and as such they've been featured in quite a few memorable moments across the series. Though the wedding scene in Final Fantasy X ranks highly (Valefor FTW), the epic battle between good and evil that is Alexander against Bahamut in IX just about tops it.

Queen Brahne and Kuja both use eidolons to further their own evil ends, with Kuja using Bahamut to kill Brahne and then attempting to kill her daughter Garnet, herself a summoner, with the dragon as well. Garnet is having none of this, however, and together with fellow summoner Eiko she calls forth Alexander—basically a fortress with angel wings—who obliterates Bahamut with a beam of holy light before being destroyed by Garland. Sadly, because of this, Alexander is never summonable by your party—but the confrontation is still quite the light show, and is one of the few times in the series you really get a true sense of the scale and majesty of these often wondrous beings.

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Vanille and Fang are crystalized—Final Fantasy XIII

It has its fans, and it has some interesting ideas, but generally speaking I really didn't get on with Final Fantasy XIII. It wasn't awful, and I wanted to like it—on paper, a female version of Cloud sounded like a character I'd always pushed for. But the characters and the world and the overall story arc just felt flat. I persevered, mostly because XII had been something of a disappointment to me too and, damn it, it was Final Fantasy—but struggled to give any kind of a shit about its two sequels. Noel Kreiss? Fuck off.

However XIII's ending, where Vanille (one of the game's most annoying characters) and Fang (one of its most interesting) join hands, summon Ragnarok and willingly sacrifice themselves, turning into crystal to save Gran Pulse, is one of the series's most memorable events. It's even more poignant because the two, who are from the distant past and only recently awoke from crystal stasis, are implied throughout the game (and considered by many fans) to be in a romantic relationship.

I like to think that's the case, as it makes their fate all the more bittersweet: they're happy to give up their lives and save the world, so long as they're together, holding hands. Also, even if only ever hinted at, a gay female relationship is kind of a big deal for Final Fantasy. Or any big gaming franchise, for that matter.

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Part 2 of this feature is coming soon, with some Squall, a dash of Kefka, and just a sprinkling of Cyan.

Follow Aoife on Twitter.


We Spoke to the Guy Who Tricked the World Into Thinking That H&M Were Selling Neo-Nazi Metal T-Shirts

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We Spoke to the Guy Who Tricked the World Into Thinking That H&M Were Selling Neo-Nazi Metal T-Shirts

Post Mortem: How Bodies Were Buried During History's Worst Epidemics

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Photo by Jari Lindholm, IFRC

There's a common belief that dead bodies pose a major risk of disease, which leads to a lot of hysteria during major epidemics. This is mostly a myth, studies have found. Even so, mass deaths during plagues have changed burial customs as people scrambled to prevent contamination or just find a place to put all the corpses. How do these pandemics alter the funeral practices in the affected areas during the outbreaks?

I've been thinking a lot about these epidemics lately, and the way they alter the way people perceive death, so I examined three large and well-documented epidemics. One—the West Africa Ebola outbreak—is ongoing; the other two are historical.

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Photo via Flickr user Jon Bennett

Black Plague, London, 1348-1350

The residents of medieval London were accustomed to being around the dead. The Christian church was the center of cultural life, and people were buried on church grounds. As Catharine Arnold writes in her book Necropolis: London and Its Dead, "With land at a premium, churchyards were communal spaces at the core of parish life, more like streetmarkets than parks. Laundry fluttered above the graves; chickens and pigs jostled for scraps. Bands of traveling players enacted dramas, and desecration was inevitable, with 'boisterous churls' playing football, dancing, drinking, and fighting on the hallowed ground." Poorer residents did not have an expectation of a dedicated funeral plot, often buried in pits wrapped only in shrouds.

As Arnold notes, the "bond between the living and the dead was very different from today," namely because the dead were kept so close.

The arrival of the black plague in fall 1348 changed all this. Plague isn't directly transmitted from contact with dead bodies, but the presence of fleas or lice that often accompanies those bodies can transmit sicknesses to the living—so keeping dead bodies close to the living helped the disease to spread rapidly. Arnold estimates that between a third and a half of London's residents died during this 18-month epidemic.

There was no way these tens of thousands of new dead bodies would ever fit inside existing burial grounds. According to William Maitland's 1756 work History of London, the Bishop of London bought a property called "No-Man's Land" to bury the victims of the plague. When this filled up, a local landowner purchased an adjacent 13-acre property for the same purpose. Later excavations at these mass graves found that the bodies were stacked five deep. Gone were the communal burial spaces where the living and the dead co-inhabited.

According to Arnold, this led many to reexamine many of their core assumptions: "The Black Death led the devout to question the very nature of existence. Death, once the inevitable conclusion of a good Christian life, now became a terrifying apparition, striking without warning and wiping out an entire generation."

What about the effects of death on such magnitude on everyday life? In his book In the Wake of the Plague, Norman Cantor suggests that "the Black Death accelerated the decline of serfdom and the rise of a prosperous class of peasants, called yeomen, in the 15th century."

Cantor explains that "because of labor shortage, the peasants could press for higher wages and further elimination of servile dues and restrictions. The more entrepreneurial landlords were eventually prepared to give in to peasant demands. The improvement in the living standard of many peasant families is demonstrated by the shift from earthenware to metal cooking pots that archeologists have discovered. The Black Death was good for the surviving women. Among the gentry, dowagers flourished. Among working-class families both in country and town, women in the late 14th and 15th centuries took a prominent role in productivity, giving them more of an air of independence."

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Photo by the British Red Cross

Spanish Flu, United States, 1918-1919

The 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic was large and recent enough that researchers have used it as a case study to inform decision making in the event of a bioterrorism attack. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, between 30 and 50 million people died worldwide. Approximately one-fifth of the world's population was afflicted, and as many as 675,000 died in the United States alone.

Prior to its arrival in the US, the virus travelled through Europe. According to John Barry's The Great Influenza, the virus likely got its name due to an accident of history: "Spain actually had few cases before May [1918], but the country was neutral during the war. That meant the government did not censor the press, and unlike French, German, and British newspapers—which printed nothing negative, nothing that might hurt morale—Spanish papers were filled with reports of the disease, especially when King Alphonse XIII fell seriously ill."

By October of 1918, major US cities were introducing blanket bans on almost all public gatherings and limiting retail hours in an effort to limit transmissions at the behest of the US Surgeon General. This included a prohibition against funerals, and soon it became increasingly difficult to make burial arrangements in the fashion families were used to. According to a 2000 study by Monica Schoch-Spana in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases:

At the climax of the Spanish flu pandemic, the numerous and rapid deaths overwhelmed undertakers and gravediggers (many of whom were ill) and exhausted supplies of caskets and burial plots. Corpses remained unburied at home as relatives searched for the virtually unobtainable: a willing mortician, an affordable yet "decent" coffin, and a prepared grave. Some funeral homes and cemeteries were accused of price gouging, and local leaders were accused of not doing enough to help the bereaved. With body disposal interrupted, city and hospital morgues exceeded capacity, in some cases tenfold, prompting a search for auxiliary space. Cities took desperate measures: Philadelphia commissioned coffins from local woodworkers, Buffalo produced its own, and Washington, DC, seized railroad cars with coffins en route to Pittsburgh, where the demand was equally desperate.

Witnessing the breakdown in people's ability to hold dignified burials led to a sense of severe disillusionment, Schoch-Spana explains: "Emergency internment measures such as mass graves and families digging graves themselves undermined the prevailing sense of propriety. Bodies stranded at home and coffins accumulating at cemeteries provided powerful symbols of the country's inability to function normally during the fall of 1918."

While public health researchers and historians maintain an acute interest in this epidemic, the greater public seems to have largely forgotten it. The National Archives even has a special page that informs people that Spanish flu had more casualties than World War I. In his book America's Forgotten Pandemic, Alfred Crosby offered an explanation as to why that might be: "The very nature of the disease and its epidemiological characteristics encouraged forgetfulness in the societies it affected. The disease moved too fast, arrived, flourished and was gone before... many people had time to fully realize just how great was the danger."

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Photo by Jari Lindholm, IFRC

Ebola, West Africa, 2014-present

According to the CDC, there are upwards of 10,000 dead due to the ongoing West Africa Ebola epidemic that started last. While the hardest-hit countries are struggling to cope with these dire figures, strictly speaking it's not the amount of dead that has driven them to change how they bury people. Rather, it's the nature of the virus itself that has necessitated rapid changes in funeral rites.

Unlike most ailments—including both the plague and Spanish flu—Ebola is highly contagious via direct human contact after a person's death. Burial customs in West Africa traditionally involve family members washing, touching, and kissing the bodies of dead loved ones, thereby significantly increasing their chances of transmission. How many have been infected in this way? As of last November, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that "at least 20 percent of new Ebola infections occur during burials of deceased Ebola patients." Indeed, it is believed that patient zero in this latest outbreak transmitted the virus to others during a burial in Guinea.

The initial response was to employ standard disaster response practices referred to by the WHO as " management of dead bodies." These were developed mainly to deal with large natural disasters that leave many dead at once. What ended up happening is that rescue workers in hazmat gear would come and remove bodies for burial or cremation with little regard for standard burial practices in the region. The shortcomings of this approach became apparent within a few months. The CDC found that in Sierra Leone "safe burial practices, as initially implemented, were not well accepted by communities" which led to lack of trust and cooperation with the authorities.

In response to this, the WHO together with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and other NGOs, religious groups, and medical anthropologists came up with an improved protocol for burying dead Ebola victims in October of last year. The new protocol refers to " safe and dignified burials." Per the WHO, "the [new] protocol... includes ways for Ebola burial teams to carry out their work safely while respecting family sensitivities."

Abu Bakar Thorodor Jalloh, the cochair of the burials pillar for the Sierra Leone Red Cross read out to me the instructions that the ten-person burial teams are given:

Upon arrival at the house, the burial team supervisor should introduce himself or herself and other team members. A community leader or counselor should be included in the discussion with the family. We are supposed to express condolences for the family's loss, counsel the family about why special steps need to be taken to protect the family, [and] help them to understand the need for safe medical burial. If they wish, we can also allow a family member to give any object that should be buried with the body. We will inform the family of exactly where the body will be taken, and we always treat the body with respect.

While safe and dignified burials are conducted in a culturally sensitive manner, they are still a very risky activity that can only be done consistently at a large scale by trained staff. All burial team members must wear personal protective equipment (PPE). They then spray the area with a strong 0.5 percent chlorine solution before securely placing the body in a body bag, spraying with chlorine again, and then placing in another body bag.

Cremating an Ebola victim is logistically easier than a safe burial, but it's not a common practice in West Africa. Of the countries hit hardest, only Liberia mandated cremation during the height of the epidemic. Sierra Leone and Guinea have been burying Ebola victims in cemeteries.

Notwithstanding a recent uptick in Sierra Leone, new Ebola transmissions are significantly down from their peak in November. How much the new burial practices had to do with that is hard to quantify since they were part of a broader mobilization. The long-term effect of the epidemic and the international response on these communities will also be hard to predict. At least in Liberia, a desire to return to pre-Ebola customs—and perhaps to enhance cooperation with the authorities—seems to be afoot. The government announced at the end of last year it was discontinuing cremation and opening cemeteries for Ebola victims.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.


​Florida Is By Far the Worst State for Kids Up Against the Law

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This story was co-published with The Marshall Project.

Last week, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Falcon v. State that juveniles not convicted of murder may not be sentenced to life in prison, and that even those convicted of murder may not be sentenced to life without parole, citing a US Supreme Court precedent that children are inherently less culpable and more amenable to rehabilitation.

This week, in the wake of that decision, approximately 200 inmates in Florida's prisons—those who are serving life in prison for crimes they committed as juveniles—may begin applying to have their sentences retroactively reduced.

"It's a major landmark, what we're seeing with Falcon," says Tania Galloni of the Southern Poverty Law Center's branch in Florida. "This is a huge deal for juveniles in the state of Florida."

But for Florida juveniles accused of lesser crimes—in other words, crimes that were never punishable by a sentence of life in prison—the outlook in the Sunshine State remains exceedingly dark. In fact, by most available metrics, Florida remains the worst state in the country to be a child in the justice system.

"It has been and, I think, continues to be the worst state for young people accused of crimes," says Mishi Faruqee, an expert on juvenile justice for the ACLU. " North Carolina and New York are unique for the lowest maximum age of juvenile jurisdiction. But otherwise, Florida is absolutely the unique state."

Below, a rundown of the most critical ways in which Florida is decidedly not the state where children want to find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Florida transfers more juveniles to adult court than any other state.

Florida is "the clear outlier" in terms of how many children it transfers to adult court, even among states with similar reporting practices, according to the most recent available data from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The state transfers juveniles at eight times the rate of California, a state with similar transfer laws and reporting.

Between 2003 and 2008, Florida transferred an average of 164.7 juveniles per 100,000; the next highest rate was Oregon's, which transferred an average of 95.6.

And most of these youngsters diverted to adult courts are charged with nonviolent crimes. Florida transfers children for drug and property offenses at an abnormally high rate. Over the last five years, over 12,000 juveniles in the state have been transferred to face adult charges, 60 percent for nonviolent crimes and only 2.7 percent for murder.

These extraordinary numbers are mainly the result of the nation's most expansive law allowing prosecutors the discretion to "direct file" juvenile cases in adult court. Prosecutors in Florida may "direct file" the cases of all 16 and 17-year-olds, as well as those of any 14- and 15-year-olds charged with a range of offenses against persons or property—and even some misdemeanors.

And the choice to transfer these children to adult court is entirely the prosecutor's. There is no hearing, no burden on the prosecutor to explain his or her reasoning, no opportunity for the defendant's lawyer to make counter-arguments. Neither the judge in juvenile court nor the judge in adult court may dispute the prosecutor's unilateral decision.

What's even scarier for children in this situation is that prosecutors in Florida truly use this power, frequently as a source of leverage to coerce pleas and keep cases from going to trial, according to a 2014 report by Human Rights Watch that analyzed juvenile cases around the state.

Because the threat of adult court—and, with it, adult jailing—is so real, many juveniles plead guilty before they have the chance to assert their right to see the evidence against them.

Finally, once in adult court, the consequences for children are severe. They face much longer sentences (though not life without parole, as a result of Falcon). Their rehabilitation is not an explicit intention of the proceedings, as it would have been in juvenile court; nor does the judge have any obligation to make the proceedings more comprehensible to a child, as a judge in juvenile court would. And they are saddled with a lifelong criminal record, precluding them from taking out student loans before ever applying for college, and disabling them from voting before they ever got to vote.

Florida holds more juveniles in adult facilities than any other state.

But extensive transfer to adult court is not the full extent of Florida's abnormal treatment of juveniles. The state also houses more juveniles in adult facilities than 28 other states combined, according to the most recent reported data from 2009.

The reason? In Florida, by statute, all juveniles charged as adults in adult court are held pretrial in adult facilities.

In these adult facilities, juveniles are often farther from their families; they are not offered age-appropriate educational programming; and they are at greater risk of experiencing—or, also traumatic, witnessing—violence, sexual abuse, or suicide. (To wit, in the past few months, we have learned that prison officials at a Florida prison regularly "gassed" inmates with chemicals as punishment for filing grievances, and that a record 346 deaths occurred in the state's prisons in 2014.)

For children charged as adults in Florida, serving time in dangerous Florida prisons is adult punishment indeed.

Florida is one of only a few states that has privatized all of its juvenile correctional facilities.

Florida also takes an unusual approach to how it imprisons juveniles who aren't transferred to adult facilities. Namely, all of the state's juvenile correctional facilities are privately operated. Not a single one is publicly-run, subject to full oversight by public officials.

Twenty-eight of these juvenile facilities are operated by G4S, a multinational security and risk-management corporation. Nine of the facilities are operated by Youth Services International (YSI), a company with such a history of sexual abuse scandals that only Florida has signed contracts for youth facilities with them in recent years.

Rays of hope?

But all is not hopeless for juveniles in Florida's justice system, according to many advocates. Under the leadership of two consecutive secretaries—first Wansley Waters and now Christina Daly—the state's Department of Juvenile Justice has shifted toward a more rehabilitative approach, according to Deb Brodsky of the Project on Accountable Justice, a Florida-based organization that collects data on criminal justice.

"Over the last five years," she says, "DJJ has tried to divert a lot of these kids out of the system, by reducing the number of beds instead of charging so many of them."

Five different bills that would eliminate or greatly limit prosecutors' discretion to "direct file" have made significant headway in the Florida legislature. One bill moved out of a House committee in early March—by a 12 to 1 vote. Another bill, the subject of a hearing this week in the Senate, would put the decision to transfer juveniles to adult court in the hands of a judge, not prosecutors, and would prohibit the holding of juveniles in adult facilities.

These bills enjoy the support of an increasingly broad coalition, according to Galloni, one that has emerged as the citizens of Florida learn more and more about their state's unique treatment of juveniles.

"At one of the hearings," she says, "everyone from the James Madison Institute [a conservative think tank] to Human Rights Watch to the PTA was in attendance. And that's because the story has gotten out about Florida's frankly embarrassing status as the worst of the worst in some of these categories related to juveniles."

As Brodsky puts it, "Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant."

This article was reported by Eli Hager for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign-up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Son of Hells Angels Boss Accidentally Released from Quebec Prison

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Photo via Flickr user Mark Strozier

Yesterday morning, Francis Boucher, son of Hells Angels kingpin Maurice "Mom" Boucher, was let out of a provincial prison—by accident.

Boucher, a former member of the Hells Angels' defunct "Rockers" training school, and now a fugitive, was serving a three-month sentence for uttering death threats to police officers after they were called to a Montreal bar he had threatened to burn down. He had been locked up in Bordeaux prison, north of Montreal, since March 10 and was due out in May.

Quebec's Minister of Public Safety Lise Thériault called the situation "totally unacceptable" in a press release issued this morning, adding that further details would not be revealed because of the ongoing investigation.

VICE spoke with Sûreté du Québec spokesperson Gino Paré who painted an equally murky picture.

"Obviously there was a mistake made somewhere, and for the moment we are investigating what exactly that mistake was. But right now it's too early to confirm," Paré said.

As absurd as yesterday's apparent gaffe may seem, it's actually the second time in two months that a Quebec prisoner has walked out of jail.

In January, Shamy St-Jean was awaiting trial at the Rivière-des-Prairies detention center in Montreal's east end when he managed to slip out unnoticed by pretending to be his brother Edgar, who was also being held there but was scheduled for release on January 27.

Walking out of prison is ballsy, but nowhere near as bold as the two separate incidents of helicopter jailbreaks that have also taken place in Quebec.

The first took place in 2013 at the Saint-Jérôme Detention Facility on Montreal's north shore, where two detainees climbed a rope into a hijacked helicopter hovering over the rec yard of the prison. They were eventually found and recaptured following a shootout with police, the CBC reported.

Then last year, three inmates at the Orsainville Detention Centre near Quebec City who were on trial for murder and drug trafficking also fled via helicopter. Their dramatic getaway was filmed via CCTV and released in November by Quebec Superior Court.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/CXO0m45tSFQ' width='500' height='281']

VICE also spoke with André Cédilot, an expert on Montreal's underworld, and even he was puzzled by Boucher breaking out of prison with so little time left to serve.

"He was so close to being released, it's almost bizarre that he would have concocted this plan."

"I find it very suspicious. But whether it's corruption or a bureaucratic error, we still don't know," Cédilot says. "If this really was a scheme to escape, he's going to hide. If it isn't an escape then it's in his best interest to turn himself in because if he's charged with escaping from prison, he will be looking at a few more years behind bars."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

Here’s Why China Should be Worried About the Islamic State

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Here’s Why China Should be Worried About the Islamic State

Is Ireland's New Left-Wing Alliance Actually Going to Change Anything?

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Protesters against the water charges showing their support for the left-wing government in Greece. Photo by Will Hederman

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Fed up with crappy political parties, a growing class divide, and the privatization of the country's water, Ireland's unions and grassroots activists are set to wade into the quagmire that is Irish politics.The anti-austerity energy created by the water charge protest movement has made political parties keen to cash in on the anti-government sentiment in time for the next election, which needs to take place before April 3, 2016.

In that context, the five unions behind the Right2Water campaign are holding a "Platform for Renewal" conference on May Day, when they'll unveil a 12-point policy plan agreed on by a loose conglomeration of community activists, members of the established political left, and trade unionists. Some of them are likely to run as independents in the next election.

It's uncharted territory for conservative Ireland, a country once famed for "doing the right thing" by agreeing to whatever austerity measures the Troika enforced. The question is, is this new left-wing electoral project going to bring about lasting change? Or will it just collapse into insignificance?

Certainly, Ireland is miserable enough for something drastic to happen. Since 2008, the country has been ravaged by waves of emigration, mass unemployment, and a dismantled public sector. There are 504,500 people receiving social welfare—a sizable chunk of the 4.5 million population—and whoever runs the government next will have to deal with a battered health service and a housing crisis along with the fallout from the unpopular decision to privatize the water supply.

The country also has another of the components that saw Syriza leap to power in Greece and Podemos rocket in popularity in Spain. Namely, the collapse of the center-left party—in Ireland's case, that means the Labour Party, which in December earned its lowest poll numbers ever.

One of the central figures in this new left-wing alliance is trade unionist Brendan Ogle, who seems to scare the shit out of the Irish media and the country's conservative forces. After asking electricity workers to strike over Christmas in 2013, the outspoken Marxist received death threats from people pissed off their tree decorations wouldn't light up over the holidays.

Ogle is emerging as the clear leader to Ireland's new union-backed alliance, which he claims will not evolve into a fully-fledged political party any time soon. But he made it clear in an interview with me that he wasn't going to throw in with Labour either.

"The Labour Party is finished in Ireland," he said. "Only the unions affiliated to R2W and others now working with us can rescue the labor movement. The Labour party have shamed and disgraced the movement. It's about people and our communities. That party deserve the humiliation the next elections will bring."

Professor Paul O'Connell, of SOAS University of London has been involved in the community movement against water charges in Ireland. He said the countrywide protest movement that stated in a working-class area in Cork took Irish political forces by surprise. "Ultimately the movement against water charges grew out of the self-mobilization and self-organization of working-class people and communities," he said. "Since then there has been much in the way of revisionism, with various parties wishing to claim that they led the movement from the start, but that's simply not the case. Most of the established political actors—party political as well as unions—were caught by surprise with the emergence of the movement."

So what will come out of the Irish left's May Day meeting? The unions have invited 180 people to their policy conference: 60 from the grassroots community movements—the people blocking the meter installations—60 from Ireland's left-leaning political forces, and 60 from the unions.

They're saying it's just a platform for discussion, but a source told me that the unions will bankroll certain candidates from the communities who want to run as leftist independents in the next election. That move would be pretty seminal in opening up the Ireland's political playing field to a host of new contenders.

O'Connell, however, is skeptical that this is the smartest political move. "The proposals for the new broad left alliance in Ireland—the Irish Syriza or Podemos—result from a desire to capitalize on the energy of the community movement and the developments in other European countries," he said. "It seems, however, to be very ill-conceived. There are massive historical, cultural and organizational differences between the milieu that gave rise to Syriza and Podemos, and the conditions that exist in Ireland today."

He's not wrong. Ireland has no history of radical left politics in government. The Greek Communist Party is nearly 100 years old and has formed governments. Ireland has stuck to centrist politics since the inception of the state.

O'Connell worries that this means an electoral project is not the savviest political move. "The community led movement in Ireland needs more time and space to develop it's own structures, ideas, and organization, and if it's sucked into an electoral alliance at this stage with existing parties, the danger is that we end up with an entity that is less than the sum of all of it's parts," he said.

Those concerns are shared by members of the grassroots movement. I spoke to Bernie Hughes, a grandmother and grassroots activist who was recently thrown in jail for breaking a 20-meter exclusion zone during the installation of water meters around the country. Bernie's imprisonment pissed a lot of people off, with people setting up "The Regime Just Locked Up Your Ma" Facebook pages.

She said it is vital the communities retain their independence from any political strangleholds. "The communities have come out strong as leaders in this movement now it's about politicizing people. A lot of people think 'I'm not into politics' but what they're doing is very political like coming to protests or stopping the meter installations," she said. "They're going head to head with the establishment and that's political. People just aren't into party politics. Any new movement that comes from this will have to take its direction from the communities. We can't have the politicians jumping to the front. This is a people's movement."

Follow Norma Costello on Twitter.

This Former Aerospace Engineer Turned Reverend Says Hell Is on Venus

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Photo via Flickr user Aslak Raanes

The Black Hole is a Disney-produced science fiction movie from 1979 that tried to cash in on the Star Wars phenomenon. The film has a cult following but is generally considered to be a miserable failure. One thing about it that's interesting, though, is the premise that hell exists inside a black hole. If you're going to go ahead and believe (i) hell exists and (ii) it's a physical place, the site of a massive star's collapse is a pretty good representation of it.

Michael Santini, a former mechanical engineer turned evangelical pastor, has a different idea about hell: He thinks it's on Venus, the planet, and he wrote an entire book about it.

It's called Venus: Don't Go There: What Science and Religion Reveal About Life After Death, and on page seven Santini promises an "honest and straightforward description of a known, undesirable location." His goal in writing the book is to scare people, he says, about the prospect of eternal damnation by making the concept more real to them. I called up Santini, who says he worked on the Milstar Communications System as well as classified projects he's "sworn to secrecy" about, to figure out how he came to his rather unusual conclusions.

VICE: What got you interested in trying to figure out the physical location of hell?
Michael Santini: I started suspecting it a few years ago. What really made me think about it was the fact that when Jesus comes back, he's going to come back to the Earth in a physical body, a body that was similar to his resurrection in the Bible. And people after the Final Judgment are thrown into the Lake of Fire. The idea of the Earth being here for a while after the return of Christ and the setting up of his kingdom—that whole idea of the Earth surviving forever—makes you try to find a place where people are going to be going who do not stay on the Earth. So Venus became a candidate, a model if you will, for where people go after the Great White Throne Judgment.

So what makes you think hell is on Venus?
The Bible says that hell and a Lake of Fire burn with sulfur. In other words not only is sulfur there, the sulfur is actually burning. How can that be true on Venus? Here's the amazing thing that I discovered. The planet not only has a whole lot of sulfur in it—there's sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, the clouds are made of sulfuric acid—there's lightning on Venus. Lightning that was detected by the Venus Express spacecraft a few years ago teaches us that the sulfur is literally burning, just like in the Bible says. It's one thing for sulfur to just be sitting around on the ground, but it's another thing for sulfur to be in the atmosphere. Venus is full of lightning events.

Can you give me another example of why Venus is hell?
The Bible says that hell is unquenchable fire. You cannot put it out. On Venus it's 864 degrees Fahrenheit. It's burning-hot, day and night. And when it's nighttime, and the planet rotates, and there's darkness on Venus? Guess what? There's no quenching of that heat. It stays exactly at 864 degree Farenheit all night long because the cloud cover and the density of the carbon dioxide lock in the heat. The Bible teaches us that hell is a place of unquenchable heat, and Venus is the only place in the solar system that gives us unquenchable fire.

Why did you decide to write this book? How does knowing the physical location of hell help people to avoid it? I mean I'm assuming the end of your goal is to help people avoid that fate. But how does knowing where it is make any sort of difference?
Because a lot of people who don't have any faith do not believe in physical hell. They don't believe in heaven. There is no way in their physical minds that hell could exist. But I'm trying to tell you that the planet Venus is the perfect model for where hell is. Every scripture that talks about it fits that planet. Get scared. Get worried. There can be a hell. God can come back and send you there. In other words, I'm trying to make these people who think that hell is just an imaginary place to go, "No, no it's in the solar system." It can be right here. It fits what the Bible teaches. Get scared. Get worried. Come to Jesus. [ laughs] You know what I mean? Be concerned about your afterlife.

So what does hell look like, anyway?
In my last chapter, I have a vignette where there are six men who have been condemned to Venus. They are in a lava tube, because Venus is full of lava tubes, and they're talking about their situation and it's very dismal. I mean if you look at the pictures in my book, the planet is nothing but lava fields. So they are bored. They are completely bored. They are very warm in their immortal spiritual bodies. They are not literally burning up, but they are uncomfortable. They don't have any water to drink, and even in the afterlife, you notice in Revelation, people on Earth, they eat and drink and celebrate with Jesus, but on Venus you can't eat and drink but you have the desire to eat and drink and it won't be fulfilled. It's a place of unfulfilled desires, Allie. It's a place of unfulfilled desires is really what hell is. It's two things: It's separation from God, and it's a place of unfulfilled desires.

So if you know the physical location of hell, do you have any idea of who the Devil is or what the Devil looks like?
I don't know what the devil looks like, but I know that Satan and his minions are [going to get sent to Venus after the Second Coming]. Because when Jesus comes back he's not going to tolerate any of these people being around, especially these spirits. Right now, he's on Earth causing mischief, causing evil, causing things like the Holocaust to happen and inducing people to do evil like human trafficking. A lot of wicked things in this world are done by satanic coercion. So right now he is working evil on Earth, but when the Lord comes back he's going to go to Venus. He will be there with his demonic army. So you do not want to go marching around Venus because these evil spirits are on that planet with you. So not only are you going to be in this cage, you're going to be worried about where Satan and his demons are because they were thrown on Venus, too. It's a vast wasteland. As a matter of the fact I give a place where Satan and his army is probably going to be, and I give a place where lost humanity goes. They'll be in a different spot. But part of the fear factor, part of the undesirableness, is you're on the same planet with the Devil.

What happens when we can travel to Venus? Will we be able to interact with the dead?
We've got the technology now to go to Venus, but people are not there now. In my book you'll find people are in Hades. People are not in hell right now. The Bible teaches us that Hades is in the center of the Earth, and my book goes on to say the center of the Earth is not solid. Sheol is where people went in the Old Testament who were lost, and in the New Testament, people called it Hades. Now nobody's on Venus. You can go there, but after Jesus comes back, then they go to Venus. There's not gonna be a need to travel to Venus when Jesus makes Heaven on Earth. Could we go? Sure, God let us do that. He gives us everything. We would probably not want to go there, but if we wanted to go there, we could probably go in the afterlife.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

EDM Doesn’t Have a Women Problem, It Has a Straight White Guy Problem

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EDM Doesn’t Have a Women Problem, It Has a Straight White Guy Problem

Why Are We So Obsessed with Plane Crashes?

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Rescue teams near the Germanwings crash site on March 24. Photo by Patrick Aventurier via Getty

This morning, Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed in the French Alps, killing all 144 passengers and six crewmembers onboard. The victims include German, Spanish, and Turkish citizens, and a German school class returning from an exchange trip. As efforts continue to access the wreckage near the remote ski resort town of Barcelonnette on the Italian border, media coverage has ramped up as well.

As a large-scale tragedy, some level of news coverage is expected. After all, plane crashes are terrifying. As humans, they play to some sort of visceral fear inside of us—we aren't supposed to fly, so the thought of something going wrong up there is particularly unsettling. Perhaps that's part of the reason the media—VICE included, as this article can attest—is so eager to cover them. Still, the minute-by-minute updates and manpower being devoted to this story above all others (a pattern we've seen in other major flight disasters last year) and its domination of social media sometimes feels like a distracting and potentially invasive form of rubbernecking. As the crash currently remains a mystery set in fairly inaccessible terrain, it's likely that this coverage will continue for some time, forcing us to confront the question of just why we're all so morbidly obsessed with gawking at plane crashes.

The obvious answer for the current coverage is that we've been primed to pay attention to fatal plane crashes by an especially deadly year of flight. Between the disappearance of MH370 a year ago, the downing of MH17 and crash of Air Algérie Flight 5017 last July, and the wreckage of Air Asia Flight 8501 in December (just four of eight fatal crashes that year), commercial airline accidents killed at least 992 people worldwide in 2014, the most deaths on record since 2005.

But although 2014 was an especially deadly year, coverage of those deaths only revealed that flying is safer than it's ever been, and still much safer than any other form of transit. Based on statistics from 2000, we should have expected to see up to 39 commercial crashes with fatalities (less than a quarter of flight accidents result in deaths) in 2014. The fact that we saw eight is a testament to airlines' focus on safety and maintenance—private planes are definitively less safe. Even after all these tragedies, the chances of dying in a plane crash are still 1 in 8,321 over the course of one's entire life (compared to, say, 1 in 723 for death in a pedestrian accident or 1 in 119 for unintentional poisoning). Deaths in cars and motorcycles are 100 and 3,000 times more common per-ride, respectively.

There's been a little borderline scaremongering today, claiming that there might have been clear warning signs or endemic problems with the Airbus A320 jet class involved in the Alps crash. But these planes, even a 24-year-old model like the one that went down, are among the most automated and safe aircrafts in the skies. With about 5,600 in service worldwide, carrying over a billion people in 2014 (including the A319 and A321 variants), these extremely popular planes have only been involved in 12 fatal accidents since their 1988 release (and a number of non-fatal crashes, like 2009's Miracle on the Hudson). That gives the A320 a remarkable 0.14 accidents per million flights record according to Boeing safety experts.

Yet despite the fact that we know there's no progressive safety concern, we still give definitively more attention to flight deaths than other more common and lethal tragedies. In 2014, media outlets gave 43 percent more coverage to the 992 commercial flight deaths than they did to all of the 1.24 million ground traffic deaths worldwide, according to a Google Trends analysis. This isn't surprising, of course. Much of it has to do with news outlets chasing ratings (and thus income). CNN saw a 68 percent spike in their prime-time viewership during their MH370 coverage according to Nielsen data, which likely fed back into their decision to obsessively follow the story. That crash, at its peak, inspired 1 million Tweets per day and the 17 stories run on it by the BBC brought that outlet its heaviest traffic since the 2011 Japanese tsunami. The allure of the market for plane crash stories is so great that NatGeo recently developed a show dedicated to the subject entitled Air Crash Investigation, which premieres this Thursday.

As to what drives the demand for excessive coverage of plane crashes, several factors seem to be at play. Some of it has to do with our general obsession with disasters, which Eric Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest University and author of 2012's Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away, says stems from both voyeuristic and empathetic impulses:

"Fixating on disaster reportage can bring out the worst in us: getting a rush from the suffering of others, and the best: a feeling of empathy for those suffering as well as a deeper understanding of the meanings of suffering and death," Wilson told VICE. "I also think that we probably get a feeling of relief when watching disaster coverage, relief that this terrible thing didn't happen to us."

Planes, Wilson went on to explain, are probably especially engaging as a subject for rubbernecking because of their scale and the cinematic images that accompany them.

"These crashes, unlike car crashes, usually kill hundreds of people all at once," he says. "[Also] we can imagine ourselves in such a crash—if it could happen to them, then it could happen to us. Most of us can't imagine ourselves dying in a war in the same way, since most of us have never fought in a war."

In addition to spectacle, the safety of air travel and rarity of major crashes (which take on shorthand names and become national tragedy marker stones) lends a dog bites man effect to these stories. Mid-air crashes, which account for just 10 percent of all fatal plane accidents, especially ride this wave. And when there's a mystery angle, as in MH370 or 2009's Air France Flight 447, the stories will stay in the news much longer as new clues slowly emerge and reopen coverage.

Highlighting these rare and vivid events also plays into common neuroses. In America, according to the 2014 Chapman University Survey of American Fears, 43 percent of us are somewhat afraid of flying (both because it's fucking flying and because we don't have as much control over our fates as we do with our hands on a steering wheel, for instance) and 9 percent are very afraid or refuse to go up in the air. As with any good morbid fixation, there's now an app for this paranoia—launched earlier this year, Am I Going Down? allows us to indulge and grow this common anxiety by checking a rough likelihood that our current flight will crash.

All of this combined—rubbernecking, the scale and visuals of plane crashes, man bites dog effects, and our collective flight neuroses—are a potent recipe for media oversaturation. Fortunately this cultural obsession doesn't seem to be raising rates of aviphobia, which hold fairly steady over time and across cultures. But such constant coverage can't be great for our more general anxieties or collective sanity, much less for the wellbeing of all those directly affected by these tragedies, which rapidly turn into spectacle for the rest of us watching on.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.


Ted Cruz Wants to Lead an Evangelical Ghost Army in 2016

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Someone had to be the first to jump into the 2016 presidential race, and it seems only fitting that that someone was US Senator Ted Cruz, leapfrogging over his likely opponents to launch his campaign early with a Jesus-soaked speech at the world's largest fundamentalist college. Cruz is a long shot for the GOP nomination, partly because he lacks experience, and mostly because no one likes him. But tucked into his speech Monday, in between stories about sin and redemption and abolishing the IRS, Cruz offered one reason he actually thinks he can win.

"Today, roughly half of born again Christians aren't voting. They're staying home," he told students, who were forced to attend the event or else face fines. "Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values."

The fear that born-again Christians aren't voting enough in US elections is not new. Conservatives have fretted over the idea since at least 2008, often citing it as an explanation for Barack Obama's two wins. White evangelicals have been a potent Republican voting bloc since the late 1970s, when Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell mobilized fundamentalist Christians to enter public life under the leadership of his Moral Majority. The relationship reached its peak just over a decade ago when Christians delivered a resounding re-election victory for George W. Bush. Since then, evangelical influence has waned, and activists claim conservative Christians are now opting out of politics altogether, frustrated by the GOP's shift away from social issues.

With his speech Monday, delivered from the cradle of Falwell Fundamentalism, Cruz cast himself as the candidate who could reverse this trend. He dangled deeply conservative views not just on free markets and Obamacare, but also on the regulation of sexual morality and zealous, unconditional support for Israel.

"Ted Cruz has decided he's going to run on his faith—I think it's terrific," said David Lane, an evangelical operative whose organization, the American Renewal Project, is focused on getting pastors to engage in politics. "The issue is going to be that half of evangelicals in this country aren't registered to vote. Republicans have been bleeding evangelical voters." To address this, Lane said, his organization is working to get 1,000 pastors to run for office in 2016.

"It's time to decide if we are a pagan nation, or if we're going to get on with it. Ted Cruz decided to get on with it," he added. "Now it's up to the 65 million evangelicals living in America if we are going to restore America to a Biblically-based culture."

Cruz's campaign plan seems to rely on what he perceives as a singular ability to turn out these hidden Bible-thumpers, inspiring a "grassroots army" of born-again Christians in megachurches and Bible colleges and Appalachian revival tents to vote for him next year.

"God's blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation and I believe God isn't done with America yet," he exhorted the audience Monday. "I believe in you. I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America."

The question, of course, is whether turning out disenfranchised Christians can really make Cruz a viable candidate—and whether these voters will even like him in the first place.

On the one hand, Cruz is clearly overstating the evangelical turnout problem.

"Evangelicals don't turnout enough to the extent that any group with a politician who wants their vote doesn't turn out to vote enough," said Jason Husser, assistant director of the Elon University Poll. "It's true that they don't turn out to vote that well, to the extent that most people in this country don't turn out to vote that well." In fact, among white evangelicals, turnout is usually fairly consistent, and higher than it is among the general population.

What Cruz is asking for, Husser said, "is exceptional turnout," the idea being to boost the evangelical share of the vote in the same way that Obama's campaigns did that of young people and minorities. But, Husser pointed out, this is not an implausible goal. "There is room for advancement," he said. "There are a few scenarios where you can see evangelicals" really flocking to a candidate who appeals to their religious mores, he suggested, such as the upcoming Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, or a perceived threat to Israel's security. And as Bloomberg Politics points out, more than a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical Protestants, according to Pew Research, so even a one-point shift in turnout could swing a state.

That doesn't mean Cruz's plan will work. The Texas Senator is currently trailing far behind in polls, with only about 3 percent support in the first primary states. In what's likely to be a crowded GOP presidential field, he's not the only candidate who can appeal to Christians—Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Bobby Jindal can all push the same buttons, and without the messianic narcissism of an Ivy League debater-turned-televangelist.

There's also the possibility that the born-again coalition Cruz is counting on for votes no longer exists. Without powerful leaders like Falwell, the evangelical bloc has splintered, perhaps irreparably. Young evangelicals in particular have shifted their priorities, turning away from the sexual culture wars that defined the Christian Right . And like pretty much everyone else in America, born-again Christians are just generally bored with politics.

"There was a Bible Belt illusion of a Christian America that never existed," the Southern Baptist Convention's Russell Moore told reporters last spring. "We will continue contending for the culture ... but certainly not contending for electoral politics as the end goal."

Love, Lies, and the Long Aftermath of My Parents' Divorce

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Illustrations by Meredith Wilson

The problem with this story is that I'm willfully ignorant of so many of the details. A lot of people would think that should disqualify me from narrating—especially, probably, the people this story's mostly about. I tried, once, to get my mother to tell me what had happened so I could maybe think differently about myself while I was still young enough for that to be an option.

We were sharing a hotel room during a trip she took all her children on the spring before they graduated college. We each got a leg of a European tour. One was London, one was Paris. I picked Athens. Several days in, after 80 straight hours with her, I felt bold enough to ask. In close quarters, a truly tiny room, she agreed. Staring at her Suduko book as maybe a crutch, she started where I wanted: the last day. I asked specifically about it, as if there was even something so technically clean as I imagined. I realized, only words in—I think all that came out was "Well, your father," before I cut her off—that I didn't want to know. I'm happy with my memories the way they are, even if they aren't happy memories. Even if the truth may change things, make me less of a myth of my own creation.

This actually happened: I found out I didn't even know how old I was when my parents divorced. I was, I am certain I was, two months old. But when my mother read an essay of mine about my first tattoo that contained a glancing reference to the divorce, she had a note to give me.

"It's great," she said, as though a mother would have any other feedback. "But can I correct one thing? You were eight months old when your father and I separated. Not two months."

I'd always thought I was two months old. That's how I tell the story—one I frequently use, one that's so central to why I feel the way I do, about everything.

"What do I know about love?" I reflexively respond when women I've dated ask me what's going through my mind, when they ask me if I feel the same way about them that they do about me. "My parents got divorced when I was two months old."

I say it to shock and shut down the conversation and it always works. I used it repeatedly with one person, stretching a three-day breakup at the end of college into three years of torment, reminding her all along that this wasn't me being intentionally mean or malicious, that all it was was I didn't know how to feel about love. It worked. It always works, silencing people, shutting them up, because no one's parents would ever be so cold and so callous as to get divorced when their kid was two months old.

Apparently not even mine.

I haven't changed the way I tell the story, or my reasons for doing so. I used it to convince myself that my parents didn't bring me into what anyone would call a loving family. Not that they didn't love me—they did and they do—but you know how doctors recommend playing classical music to your baby when it's still in utero to jumpstart its intelligence? If my parents broke up when I believed they did, I gestated to screams and shouts, the sounds of a relationship gone sour.

That makes me think a lot about me being a baby. I don't truly know what I was born into, yet it's hard to believe it wasn't bad. I imagine I understood anger and vitriol before I even knew what the words being used meant. Those emotions ensconced me, seeped into me.

I've coped in my own way. I've been a shitty person to every woman I've ever dated. Cheated on all of them, every one (there's only been three, but still). I pick fights and I lie. It feels good to try to hurt the other person, because that's what you're supposed to do. Make the ones you love hurt.

If my parents broke up when I believed they did, I gestated to screams and shouts, the sounds of a relationship gone sour.


There's another story I tell people about my parents' relationship, one that's ingrained in me that also might be bullshit. It begins with my mother on the phone with my father. Upset, if I recall, but then again maybe not. The fight—argument, conversation, whatever—was about who would drive. The deal we had was that my mother drove us to our father's Friday after school. Sunday afternoon, after church, our father brought us home (he didn't like that we called that house "home," but as kids, there was no way that a place we stayed two nights a week merited the same recognition in our hearts as the one we stayed in for five). That schedule never varied. The problem this time was that neither of my parents wanted to drive the entire round-trip journey in the middle of a snowstorm.

Well, it was snowing. Maybe it was a blizzard, maybe only a light blanketing. Whatever it was, it was enough for adults to declare the roads bad.

If you aren't from Northern Virginia, then you've never heard of Seven Corners Shopping Center and that's perfectly fine. It's just a place. Why it made such an imprint on me is that it's the biggest landmark that's most equidistant to my mother's and father's house. That's what I remember the fight on the phone being about. What point on the map would be a fair meeting point? And that's where the story picks up, with my sister and my sister and me, wrapped in our snow clothes, waddling through the unplowed parking lot of the Fuddrucker's in Seven Corners, heading from one car to the another, the most important thing being that the handoff was completed before it became too dangerous to drive.

It's not really a memorable story and some times I'm not even sure it's happened. But it had to have, since it's given me one of my my only uncompromising tenets.

"It's hard to believe in unconditional love," I remember telling a woman when we were in bed (her four drinks in and me probably something like 12) and she asked if we had a future, "when you hear your parents fight about how far they're willing to drive to come pick you up."

I don't want to have a future with anyone if the future can be like that. People always, always, always tell me that it won't be, that it will be different, but just knowing that it can is enough to scare me away. To stop me from ever trying. Isn't that the right thing? To avoid it all lest I do it to someone else? To a kid of mine?

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My parents fought about everything involving us. How to raise us. What schools we should attend. (You haven't lived until you've been six and heard over the phone one side of a fight about whether you should take the gifted and talented test for a third or four time.) Or which way we should be disciplined.

If they were pressed to explain that, my parents would give some answer like, "Well, yes, of course we fought, but only because we wanted what was best for each of you."

You can't argue with that, but it also seems so boilerplate. Like they had a convention where all the divorced parents were given a handbook. "You say this. Your kids will have to accept that." I guess I'm glad parents get to use lines like that. It must be hard. There are things you need to know you can fall back on.

I only saw my parents fight in person once. That's the beauty of being too young to remember their split.

"At least we didn't pit you against each other." Every kid's heard that one. Sure, they didn't, not directly. Our mom always told us not to feel bad when we blew off our dad. That it was OK. Did it stem from her feelings from him? We listened to her. Maybe we would have felt the same way without her advice, but still, that helped. Is it our dad's fault that we weren't close enough with him to get his perspective? On the other hand, does he get points for never saying the same thing? Because all us kids keep score, biased as it may be.

Fortunately, there's a fairly low bar for divorced parents. All you have to do is not be awful about it.

And mine weren't. They weren't awful about it. I guess. I don't know. I guess it was fine. I'm fine, I think. I could be worse.

What I do know about me is that I only saw my parents fight in person once. That's the beauty of being too young to remember their split. Unlike my friends, whose parents divorced in middle school and high school and later, I never saw the tumult that precipitated the break. I'm mostly thankful for that.

There are times I'm not. In college, I dated a girl and we fought about our parents' relationships. Hers—who to the best of my knowledge are still married—fought all throughout her childhood. She said it was terrible. That it hurt her to see. That she'd run up to her room when it happened.

"At least you saw them together," I countered. (I've never been good with empathy.) I guess the idea behind my remark is that if I had felt what it was like to be held in a living room, with the two of them holding me and bouncing me and looking at each other and smiling—knowing the world was good because they were with each other—I would be a different person. Maybe I would. Both my sisters were older than me when it happened and they're beautiful people now. The best parents. They worry about their kids but I don't. Their kids are going to be fine.

Fight all yours may, at least you get to say, "my mom and my dad."

Anyway, the only time I saw my parents fight was when I was 20, after I was arrested for drinking and driving over Memorial Day weekend.

They felt they needed to meet with me, together, in person, to, you know, parent. The meeting came after the court sentenced me, meant as an addendum of punishments because the two of them felt the state hadn't been harsh enough.

We met at a Starbucks in that same Seven Corners Shopping Center. Neither of them had moved since the snowstorm and neither of them were willing to drive an extra inch this time either. My dad arrived with a yellow legal pad, and scribbled in his illegible script on the first page were all the topics he wanted to cover: whether I'd be allowed to spend that upcoming semester in South Africa (no), whether I could go back to college (fuck no), and a litany of other shit, like whose house I would have to live in. We all got coffee. Drank it and talked. Fifteen minutes in, still on the subject of if I could go back to college, they started fighting. They stopped talking about me and began arguing about something else entirely. What were they bickering about? I couldn't care to decipher their words because at first I couldn't believe they'd fight in front of me when they were trying to save me. But then I came to enjoy it. A lot.

This is what it's like, I thought.

That summer was by far the most depressed moment of my life. I woke up in jail, was picked up by my father, came home to my enraged mother, couldn't explain away to either of them what I did, and that meeting the one I dreaded the most. But here I was, happily watching this moment. They didn't notice, but I was grinning. My parents were acting like normal parents. Imperfect, not entirely in love, but together. There. My mom and my dad.

That's what I was trying to say to my girlfriend. That's what she didn't get. Fight all yours may, at least you get to say, "my mom and my dad." Together, in the same room. In the same sentence. I've rarely had the privilege of saying that.

Now that my sister has a baby and my other sister has two, my parents are in rooms together more frequently. Typically Thanksgiving, but sometimes other big events: birthday parties, preschool graduations. Hell, I think they once both stood together at the bottom of a slide as a grandchild came down it. At the beginning of these encounters, when their paths first cross in a foyer or parking lot or the mulch of a playground where unwitting kids are enjoying themselves without care, my mom and my dad will say hello to each other. It's exactly what you imagine, curt and tense and bullshitty and so, so insincere, and each time it happens, it makes me so happy I want to cry.

Then, as soon as the greetings over and they move to opposite sides of the room and don't interact anymore, I want to cry again.

Then I remember we're all adults. And it's too late to care.

David Covucci is on Twitter.

Trans Artist ​Juliana Huxtable's Fight for Acceptance

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Juliana Huxtable's naked body is triumphantly on display in Frank Benson's new 3D-scanned plastic sculpture, which is simply titled Juliana. I saw the statue in late February at the opening of the New Museum Triennial—the prestigious New York exhibition that focuses on emerging artists. Exhibited with Huxtable's poems and futuristic photographs, the presentation offered an intimate look into the sexual and creative evolution the downtown DJ and internet it-girl underwent to become a local trans icon. But, on a personal level, it also served as an intimate message from the artist to her estranged Southern Baptist mother, whom she hadn't spoken to in five years.

"It was intense for her, as a mother, who was still processing me as I exist in the world," explains Huxtable. "It has been a journey. But to be in a room with people looking at an object of me, as me—that's why I invited her."

And it's true, all eyes were on Huxtable. Although she was already a downtown star prior to the exhibit—with a significant internet following, appearances on the runways of fashion brands like DKNY and Hood by Air, hyped DJ sets, and a cover shoot with Candy Magazine—her contribution to the Surround Audience exhibition elevated her from scene queen to Vogue critic Mark Guiducci calling her the "star of the New Museum Triennial."

Benson's statue made in her likeness was a post-internet response to the Louvre's classical Grecian sculpture Sleeping Hermaphraditus. Like that ancient artwork, Huxtable's naked pose reveals body parts of both sexes. However, Juliana updates the abashed Hermaphraditus with a futuristic metallic sheen, a "mudra" hand sign, and a bold gaze and pose that challenges the viewer on ideas of femininity and representation.

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'Juliana' (2015), by Frank Benson. Courtesy the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Sadie Coles HQ London

Huxtable's entry into the New Museum is right on time considering trans people face unique obstacles in America today. Issues such as high attempted-suicide (41 percent) and homelessness rates (69 percent) are intimately connected with the lack of acceptance trans people get in this country. As Benson notes, "It wasn't until the opening of the Triennial that I realized how important the sculpture would be for the rest of the trans community. More than one person remarked that this was the first time they had seen a sculptural depiction of a body that they could relate to in a major museum."

"I felt that the only option I had was either to be a freak or a weird boy."

Huxtable is no stranger to these struggles. In fact, they define her and have had an essential impact on her art. Born intersex and assigned to the male gender, the artist was raised in a conservative Baptist home in College Station, Texas, in the 1990s. Back then, Huxtable identified as a boy and went by the name Julian Letton. Her mother, Kassandra, worked as a college administrator at Texas A&M and her father was an engineering professor at the local college.

"My childhood was very Christian and very Texan," she says. From the outside, it seemed like a typical American middle-class upbringing. Her parents were married. She had two siblings, sang in the church choir, played club soccer, and dreamed of being a poet and painter.

It wasn't until the fifth grade that her idyllic life started to break down. Huxtable started getting bullied because she was often the only black student in her school. Kids would call her the N-word, and her parents once had to pull her out of an American Civil War school play because she was given the role of a Confederate soldier. "I always kept a writing journal and a drawing journal," says Huxtable. "And when I look back at my watercolors and paintings from that period, that's when they got really dark."

Huxtable's parents divorced, and her father moved to Alabama to teach at the Tuskegee Institute, leaving her mother alone to raise Huxtable and her two siblings. "I was experiencing a lot of physical abuse at home that I internalized as normal. I would go home and my mom was in a dark place, and she took that out on me."

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Photo by Job Piston, makeup by Amanda Wilson, and dress by Eckhaus Latta

Juliana's mother grew up in Gary, Indiana, after her family left the South during the second wave of the Great Migration North. In the 1960s, Gary was a steel town and represented a kind of Black utopia that instilled in Kassandra cultural values centered around God and family that she would attempt to pass on to her children.

"My mom's sense of racial identity and affiliation was super intense," says Huxtable. "And for her to go to Texas and have her Cosby fantasy fall apart, in an all-white town, was very intense for her."

As Huxtable's breasts grew, her relationship with her mother continued to fray. Eventually, she developed an eating disorder, in part because her father told her she wasn't exercising enough to get rid of her feminine chest. In high school, Huxtable even considered reconstructive surgery at the request of a therapist and her mother.

"Being trans wasn't a viable idea," she says reflecting on that time in her life. "I felt that the only option I had was either to be a freak or a weird boy."

"Juliana's voice is integral in this time, because she truly is a beacon of hope. She exists at the crux of almost every type of intersectionality, but still thrives."

The shame she experienced in her hometown followed her to Bard College in upstate New York, where she wore a chest binder. But she managed to find an outlet. "I was fully brainwashed by the Bible Belt shit," she says, "but the internet became a form of solitude. It gave me a sense of control and freedom that I didn't have in my everyday life, because I walked through life feeling hated, embarrassed, trapped, and powerless. I felt very suicidal."

In her second year at Bard, Huxtable began to slowly become in real life what she had only been in chatrooms. "The first time I brought home the clothes I would wear at Bard, my mom went through my luggage, threw them out, and didn't say anything," she says.

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Photo by Job Piston, makeup by Amanda Wilson, and dress by Eckhaus Latta

Eventually, Huxtable came out and cut off ties with her family. She even changed her name. She adopted her surname from the Cosby Show at the behest of the House of LaDosha, the queer arts collective she belongs to. The group saw it as a proper nod to her longing to experience, in her trans body, the kind of black normality that the Huxtable family portrayed in the 80s.

From there, she fully embraced the New York nightlife scene and became the subject of works by young artists like Frank Benson. She also began expressing herself through her own poetry and photographic portraiture.

In Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), one of her photographs on display at the New Museum, Huxtable revisions herself as a self-described, "cyborg, cunt, priestess, witch, Nuwaubian princess." For the unacquainted, the Nuwaubian Nation is a sect of the Nation of Islam that, according to Huxtable, "believes black people are the descendants of lizard aliens and created white people." In the portrait, Huxtable presents herself in a futuristic world, which is far removed from the trauma and self-loathing of her childhood.

Like so much of her work, the photograph opens up alternative ways to think about the fluidity of sexuality and gender in a heteronormative society. As her best friend Christopher Udemezue says, it's these kinds of offerings from Huxtable that explore "what it means to be queer, a person of color, living the grind in New York City."

And as Kimberly Drew, the founder of the popular Black Contemporary Art Tumblr, puts it, "Juliana's voice is integral in this time, because she truly is a beacon of hope. She exists at the crux of almost every type of intersectionality, but still thrives."

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'Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm)' (2015) from the 'Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming' series, by Juliana Huxtable. Courtesy the artist

However, despite all the success in the New York art world, the artist was still driven to try and reach back and repair her relationship with her estranged mother, if only to share with Kassandra the new person that she had become.

"A year and a half ago, I wrote a letter to my mom, my brother, and my sister, and explained to them that I had been struggling with this my whole life and everyone has known this," says Huxtable. "I went through years of brainwashing, and if their conservative views prevent them from accepting me, then I didn't have time for them."

It took her mother some time to come around, but she eventually did. After years of little to no communication, and months of therapy, Huxtable traveled to her hometown to rekindle their relationship. Ultimately, Huxtable invited her mother back to New York to share one of the most important moments at the outset of her artistic career.

"My mom being in New York for the opening of the Triennial was a really powerful moment because she realized what I do is legitimate. And there's a community of people who love and respect me."

Juliana Huxtable's Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming series and Frank Benson's Juliana are on view at the New Museum's 2015 Triennial, Surround Audience, through May 24, 2015. For more information, visit the museum's website.

Follow Antwaun on Twitter.

There's Finally a Documentary About Perpetual Presidential Candidate Vermin Supreme

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The first time I saw Vermin Supreme was behind a line of riot police on a muggy day at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Or rather, I saw his rubber boot, the one he wears on his head, rising above the shiny black helmets of the cops and a sweaty mass of Occupy protesters beyond them. The crowd was trying to get closer to Bank of America Stadium, where politicians and Democratic Party delegates were cloistered, past a series of militarized checkpoints. A solid bloc of cops were standing in their way, billy clubs hanging at their sides. It was a surly scene, intensified by a muggy August heat that had sweat dripping down the back of everyone's neck.

In the midst of it all, speaking soothingly into a megaphone about loving your fellow man, was Vermin Love Supreme, shirtless, red cape and his signature Wellington boot on his head. A perennial stunt candidate, Supreme has been running for various elected offices since the late 1980s, including mayor of Baltimore and Detroit, and most famously, president of the United States.

Any reporter or activist who has spent much time around electoral politics have likely run across Supreme at one point or another. Others might have seen a video of him glitter bombing pro-life extremist Randall Terry at a 2011 "lesser-known candidates forum" in New Hampshire. Supreme describes himself as a "friendly fascist." His platform includes compulsory tooth-brushing and giving every American a pony. A benevolent tyrant, then.

Now, after three decades of Supreme's freak campaigns, someone finally decided to get to the bottom of the act. A new documentary, Who is Vermin Supreme? An Outsider Odyssey, directed by Steve Onderick and funded through Kickstarter, held its first non-festival screening in Boston last week. We caught up with Onderick to talk about the film, and find out what it's like to spend a year on the road with one of the most enigmatic performance artists in American politics.

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Photo courtesy of Steve Onderick

VICE: When did you first discover Vermin Supreme? How did you decide to make this documentary?
Steve Onderick: I first ran into Supreme at the NATO Summit protests in Chicago in 2012. I was there to film the protests, and I just happened to find him on the street. I was familiar with him because of the glitter bomb video. I thought the video was funny, but seeing him at NATO protest, that proved to me that there was something else to what he was doing. It was sort of performance art and comedy in the context of protest.

I don't know whether it was just sloppy police work or what, but the cops started surrounding everybody at the end of the march because they'd gone over the time limit on the demonstration permit. Hundreds of state police had been brought in as reinforcements. Panic was sort of rising, and I think five or six people tried to run through the police line. Vermin came in and started doing a comedy routine, saying stuff to the police like, 'Come out with your hands up and your pants down. We have you surrounded by love.'

How long were you on the trail with him?
Let's see, from May 2012 in Chicago, we went to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, the Republican National Convention in Tampa, the presidential debates in Long Island, the Rainbow Gathering, up through the inauguration in [Washington] DC, where Vermin went and tried to inaugurate himself. I would go back to Boston in between events, and then drive or fly out to meet him. There was a lot of sleeping on couches. Vermin knows a lot of people in a lot of different cities, so he would have places where we'd crash.

The 2012 campaign was a particularly interesting year for him because he did a lot of collaboration with other performance artists. Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High Party was officially his running mate, and Rob Potylo, who's a Boston musician, was out there with him. It was pretty surreal to see them all together, these talented guys who all do different, weird performance art. There are some endearing scenes of Potylo and Vermin singing songs for police.

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Vermin Supreme strikes me as kind of the spiritual heir to the Yippies and some of that '60s absurdist politics. What's your take on his project and what he's trying to do?
His project is interesting. He recognized that people will respond a lot more positively to absurdity and humor. A lot of the more conventional tactics, the public and police have seen them so many times that it doesn't affect them much. You can walk in the street with a sign and yell at the cops, people have seen that a hundred times.

So you have the entertainment aspect, but beyond that his form of campaigning—or what he calls campaigning—is pretty cool. He's physically pressing the limits of free speech and the First Amendment. There's some people who take it for granted that we have free speech in the US There's another category who see it's not actually working out that way. Vermin takes a third path and goes to these events and tries figure out the limits of where he can go. How close can he get to Barack Obama or the Republican National Convention. What he finds are all these weird and inconsistent stipulations. You know, the police telling you that you can stand on this corner but not that one, or can walk down the street one direction but not the other.

Vermin gets arrested very rarely for the kind of things he does. He has the experience and knows how to deal with the cops. His wife Becky will come along with him. There's one scene where she's talking to a cop and schmoozing him up and explaining what's going on.

You mentioned the Rainbow Gathering. And Vermin Supreme was also associated a lot with the Occupy movement. What are his actual politics beneath the "friendly fascist" act?
He will definitely call himself a social anarchist. He recognizes there are limitations to that view, but he definitely hangs out with a lot of oddballs. He's learned a lot at the Rainbow Gathering, because he's been going there for about 20 years.

I've never been to the Rainbow Gathering. What was that like?
The reductive way to describe it is thousands of hippies hanging out in the woods, but the Rainbow Gathering is very different. While they're there they refer to the outside world as Babylon. It's like stepping into a foreign landscape.

The Rainbow Gathering was right at the beginning of the project. Vermin asked me to come down to gathering and meet him. The thing is Vermin doesn't have a cell phone. So there's 15,000 hippies there, and he says, "Oh, just find me." It took a couple days of searching. Maybe he wanted to test me or something.

[He] and his wife have a small house up in the woods [on Massachusetts' North Shore], and he's surrounded the place by all this bizarre art. He's kind of the real deal. He's living the eccentric lifestyle and has devoted most of his life to these political and comedic activities. He makes some extra money painting houses. He's sort of living in the style of the Rainbow Gathering.

Follow CJ on Twitter

The VICE Report: Big Cats of the Gulf

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Buying illegal wild animals in Kuwait is, as one local puts it, "as easy as acquiring a cupcake." Pets have long been used as status symbols the world over, but citizens of the Gulf take the prize when it comes to keeping the most exotic, controversial species—most commonly, "big cat" cubs.

International law governing Kuwait and other Gulf states forbids the import and sale of wild animals, yet the sight of supercars being driven around with a cheetah in the front seat is starting to become commonplace on Arab Instagram feeds.

Although there are legal ways to bring an animal into Kuwait, paying people off along the way is easier. Lion, cheetah, and tiger cubs are in the highest demand, fetching up to $15,000 each through black market agents. More often than not, the owners have little idea how to care for these creatures, which have no history of domestication and quickly become unmanageable—even lethal—once they're fully grown.

In Big Cats of the Gulf, VICE investigates the area's flourishing trade in animal trafficking and how it impacts the depleting wildcat populations of Central and East Africa. We gain exclusive access to Kuwait's biggest Instagram star of the big cat phenomenon and hear first-hand of the deadly consequences of the business—both for the animals and their owners.

Follow Charlet and Grant on Twitter.

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