For much of the last few hours of her life, Lauren Patterson was at Club 7 in Doha's La Cigale Hotel. It's a rotten place to have spent your final night on Earth—it looks how a 90s teen sitcom might have imagined a nightclub, with futuristic pod chairs clustered around white lacquered tables and watchful men in dark poplin going-out shirts leering at the action on a sunken dance floor. It was the night of October 11, 2013, and the 24-year-old Patterson had just returned to Qatar from the UK, where she'd attended her grandmother's funeral.

She met up with friends that night at the hotel because that's where you go if you live in Doha—to one five-star hotel or another, to drink and to pretend for a few hours that you're not in the middle of a Potemkin village in the gullet of the Persian Gulf.

Patterson was a member of the Facebook group "the Doha Clubbing Authority" and in her pictures, she always seems to be with friends, looking a bit like a tanner version of Snow White. She had jet-black hair and rimmed her green eyes with dark liner so they'd pop. The thought that she might have carefully lined them that way the night she died reminds me of a picture of myself, also at 24, in the middle of a crowd at that same hotel, wearing liquid-liner-flicked cat eyes and red lipstick and drinking a vodka-something. In the snap, the backlit cityscape is blurred like the Northern Lights and no one is really looking at the camera, except for one startled girl whose name I barely remember, cigarette in hand, flimsy Union Jack sweater on her back.

That's how I remember nights in Doha. Inconsequential, British, and boozy.

Sometime around 3:30 AM on October 12, Patterson got a ride, along with a girlfriend, from two male Qatari acquaintances, Badr Hashim Khamis Abdallah al Jabar and Muhammad Abdullah Hassan Abdul Aziz. The friend was dropped off, but Patterson never made it home. Her burned remains were discovered in the desert a little over a day later by a falconer, not far from the Saudi Arabian border. Prosecutors later claimed that al Jabar had "conquered her body" in a house he kept in Doha. Patterson was stabbed twice before being lit on fire, a knife still lodged in her ribcage when she was found.

The idea for Westerners is, if you have to endure desert heat and the oddities of the Gulf, then your standard of living had better be something akin to Celine Dion's tenure in Las Vegas.

To those who've spent time in Doha, the Patterson case is compelling not just for its lurid details but because it highlights the curious culture—and troubling undercurrents—of the city. The influx of Westerners into Qatar, a Wahhabi state, over the past decade, has meant a sometimes uneasy mix of conservatism and the kind of behind-closed-doors hedonism that's born whenever desires for freedom chafe against rigid societal constraints. And as the country's population continues to grow thanks to a pre–2022 World Cup building boom, the contrasts have only been thrown into sharper relief.

Ninety percent of the Qatar's population is expatriate, many of them Westerners convinced of their inherent safety in the country. Perhaps that's why Doha News, the English-language website that serves as the preferred source for Western expats in Qatar, has followed the twist and turns in the Patterson case with fidelity—something that cannot be said of the local print newspapers, whose coverage has been paltry in comparison. Al Jabar was convicted last March for Patterson's murder and sentenced to death, while Abdul Aziz was given three years in prison for helping dispose of the body. Late last month, a court upheld al Jabar's death sentence on appeal, and once again local news outlets and the British tabloid press replayed the crime. Next week, a verdict is expected in the case of the 2012 rape and murder of American teacher Jennifer Brown, which has also garnered significant attention from Qatar's English-language online press.

The murders have come as a shock to the Western expat ecosystem. Part of Qatar's allure to this demographic is its tranquility—a center of calm in a region where, so often, the center does not hold. Many of the jobs necessary to grow a rentier state into one of the wealthiest per capita countries in the world require degrees of education and skill that, until recently, were not easily sourced from the Qatari population. Westerners who came in to operate natural-gas-processing plants, advise wealth funds, and manage construction projects also brought with them their own ways of unwinding at the end of a workday that didn't stop at smoking shisha and drinking tea. The bar scene grew exponentially, even though alcohol can only be served in hotels, or in the private homes of non-Muslim residents who have obtained a license to buy it. Hotels have become social Switzerlands where outside rules don't always apply.

As if to indicate the threshold to this liminal space, Doha hotel lobbies are uniformly overwrought, with marble, mahogany, and hydrangea globes or calla lilies arched back and wound into glass bowls like nature's little Romanian gymnasts. Luxury is Qatar's lingua franca; the promise of it is what lures mercenary Americans and Europeans, and the aspirational desire for it is what keeps the more desperate expatriate elements streaming in. The idea for Westerners is, if you have to endure desert heat and the oddities of the Gulf, then your standard of living had better be something akin to Celine Dion's tenure in Las Vegas.

In this way, Patterson appears to have been your average young Western expat. A kindergarten teacher at a private elementary school, she would have earned a good wage, likely better than what she'd have gotten back home in Chislehurst, a suburb of London, England. Her Facebook page boasts pictures of exuberant midair jumping shots on sunny beaches and excursions to Paris. She was enjoying the fact that middle-class girls could act like rootless cosmopolitans in this odd little place.

Ruth McDavid, another young British woman who was acquainted with the social circle of men that included the two accused of killing Patterson (she has stayed over in the house where the murder took place), recalled their nights.

"Each weekend we would all go out to the club and drink the most expensive vodka or champagne and then stay in hotel suites," she wrote me in an email.

The thing about Qatar, though, is that it's not actually cosmopolitan. The trappings of the city are that of a gleaming new global capital, but centuries-old mores still govern, and double standards abound. This hit home in the Patterson case as the months dragged on. Defense attorneys for the accused tastelessly alluded that her drinking habits were troublesome and that her moral fiber was lacking, pointing to the fact that Patterson's Qatari ex-boyfriend sometimes spent nights at her apartment. The implication is that Western women are courting trouble with their nights on the town, never mind that Qatari men—so long as they aren't in traditional national dress, a long white robe known as a thobe and a ghutra headscarf—are a common sight at bars. Many Qatari women, on the other hand, find their public movements constrained to those establishments that have "family sections."

The hierarchies of race and class in Qatar are every bit as fraught as ours in America—some lives literally do matter more there.

Perhaps the most insidious insinuation surrounding the case has taken place outside the courtroom. Some in Qatar have held onto the idea that Patterson's death is an aberration—a tragedy, to be sure, but not something that usually happens in the country. In the days following her death, local messageboards buzzed. "I have been here for seven years and have not ever feared for my safety. It is a terrible thing that has happened but it is not something that happens often," one commenter wrote on the Facebook page of Qatar Living. As in America, the death and likely rape of a white woman proved to be a sensation, but violence of that sort is not a complete anomaly. Filipinas and South Asian women, for example, anecdotally experience a high incidence of sexual assault in the country—they often come to Qatar without their families and are seen as easy prey. There are no official statistics available to confirm this, but it's enough of a problem that, in 2014, the Philippines' ambassador to Qatar said he was "a little bit alarmed" about the incidence of sexual assault in the country. Abuse is so common that the Filipino embassy has a safe room for runaways and rape victims.

The hierarchies of race and class in Qatar are every bit as fraught as ours in America—some lives literally do matter more there. The "blood money" payout in the caused death of a Filipina maid or an Indian taxi driver, for example, is likely to be far less than that for a Muslim man or woman, much less a Qatari. While Qatar has few official statistics on domestic violence, a 2008 study by the Supreme Council of Family Affairs revealed that 28 percent of the married women surveyed had reported they were on the receiving end of some form of violence at home.

The question of women's violent deaths is a murkier one—the code of omertà that so often surrounds domestic violence is bolstered by a culture where the privacy of the domestic sphere is sacrosanct. Few outsiders ever actually see a Qatari home, and family business is held close to the chest.

When I first arrived in Doha in 2009, I went with friends to a standalone bar at the Ritz-Carleton called the Admiral's Club. It had just reopened after a period of being shuttered and everyone was excited to sip gin and tonics on the deck outside. Why had it been closed, I wondered. Renovations? The reason, my friend who had lived in the country for a few years told me, was that an honor killing had taken place in the parking lot—a Qatari woman whose family found out she went to bars.

I googled the incident later, but nothing came up. Rumors and whispers are a way of life in Doha, but so much goes unsaid officially, that it's hard to sort out truth from lies.

For Ruth McDavid, the unflinching fact of Lauren Patterson's death was enough to curdle life in Doha. She now lives in Australia, the desert playground elements of the city having lost their allure.

"For me Qatar is a mysterious paradise that I loved to hate," McDavid wrote. "I miss it every day, but it is not a reality."

Clare Malone is a freelance writer and an editorial staffer at the New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter.

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Contessa Alura and Violet. All photos by Mattha Busby

After a bus, a train and yet another bus I finally arrived at the gothic detached house of Contessa Alura that I'd been told I "couldn't miss." After I tentatively knocked on the double door, a 5-foot-11 transwoman, donning a choker around her neck, wearing a little black frilly dress answered the door, seated me in a single couch and instructed me to wait for Alura.

I sat down to drink an anglophile's milky, sugary tea, served from a teapot enveloped in a leopard-print cozy. The spine of Dante's Divine Comedy winked at me and I pondered heaven, hell, and purgatory as I waited for Contessa Alura's arrival.

Latex-clad, wig-wearing, suited, and booted, Contessa embraced me courteously before dismissing Violet, her slave to whom I was just introduced, who performed a clunky courtesy and made haste for the kitchen.

We sat and spoke for around 40 minutes before lunch, broaching subjects from "vanilla" sex to the Alternative Lifestyles Community Centre that Contessa also runs from her home—which possesses its own 50 Shades of Grey-esque dungeon—to the misrepresentation of BDSM in popular culture.

I hadn't been entirely sure what to expect; all I knew was that I would be interviewing professional dominatrix Contessa Alura and sitting in on one of her classes with her students. Now though, I realized that this was my opportunity to observe a domestic dominant-submissive relationship. From the outset I found it both bizarre, intriguing, and certainly benign—although I suppose the punishments occur behind closed doors.

Through her self-employed work as a "Professional Elite International Dominatrix," Contessa educates a group of aspiring dominatrixes. As a dominatrix and an educator, she effectively teaches her students how to be her from her own home.

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On the day I visited, her students gradually filtered into the house and congregated around the kitchen. Contessa quickly revealed herself to be a lovely, wonderful teacher who opened the floor for discussion. But beyond the power and knowledge she holds, she is genuinely humble and down to earth, at ease with and conscious of her self professed eccentricity.

Drinking from a mug that professes "THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES," Contessa provided her apprentices with a lunchtime workshop that stressed the importance of protocol.

In keeping with their protocol, Violet waits on Contessa's every need. In the kitchen–Contessa had cooked alongside her two previous subs–Violet obediently prepared a lunch of cream of broccoli super after I, the guest, cast my preference.

Alura seemed slightly irritated that she had had to remind Violet to set the table. Once she had done so she served the soup and crumbled two brittle, tasteless, crackers into her dominatrix's mediocre soup before kneeling on a cushion to Contessa's right to ask whether she could now eat.

I then excused myself and listened from afar as the workshop went into full swing and Contessa elucidated upon the varying facets of their protocol, including the provision that Violet cannot look her in the eye without permission.

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The rigid, strictly applied protocol that Alura enforces on Violet is essential to the smooth functioning of their sub-dom relationship that exists from 9 AM until 6 PM, five days a week. Violet is paid for her time, and while she takes the weekends off, she lives with Contessa permanently.

"Protocol is what I get off on," she told her group, which probably explains why she employs someone to ensure her fetishes are constantly indulged, citing the British monarchy as a wonderful example of a system where protocol is essential to upholding the rigid hierarchies within.

At 8:30 each morning, Violet will present herself, dressed and showered, at Contessa's door to receive her collar. She kneels and places the unlocked collar onto Contessa's lap, kisses her ankle, praises her beauty that "makes the most beautiful flowers fade" before receiving her collar that Contessa stresses is "a gift" from her.

The class of aspiring dominatrixes––who numbered four––are nearing their May 8 graduation day, after which time the doms will be full-fledged and ready to offer their often lucrative services to the subs of the world.

They ranged in age from around 20 to 45, I'd say; from flamboyantly dressed to the bland, brown attire of one ambitious 20-something dom who had brought his own smoothies with him.

I enjoyed chatting with them as they explained domination topics for me, but largely they let Contessa do the talking as we sat huddled over our creamed brocs. They were all keen to graduate. One female dom had taken the initiative to advertise her services already, which Alura congratulated her for.

Professional domination is a personal business, Alura told me as she explained the details of her business, which is based around the dungeon theatre of her living room.

Contessa's seminal encounter with a sub-dom relationship was when she watched the Pulp Fiction scene where they bring out the gimp. Contrary to Peter Greene's character Zed, whose sadist fetishism led him to habitually keep his sub confined to their cage, Alura only ordered Violet into their cage for our photoshoot.

"You know you're not allowed to dribble in the cage," Contessa lectured as the conversation turned to Friday night's Sin Social Club at Café Cléopatre, where she and Violet often appear.

Contessa and Violet have known each other for many years, primarily through the local submission and domination social scene, before entering into a business relationship through the Alternative Lifestyles Support Centre. Violet and Contessa are the organization's president and director, respectively.

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Eventually, they discovered the potential for their relationship, through which they both regularly receive a particular sort of gratification—this relationship is both personal and economic, Contessa told me. There is an exchange of money.

Apparently, though, it is sometimes difficult to maintain the dynamic of a friendship on the one hand and a business relationship on the other. Beyond the dominatrix-submissive relationship, the two spend the majority of their time together, but their relationship is entirely platonic beyond the kinks.

"After 6–6:30, I have to sit and decompress––back to Violet the friend, as I turn off slave mode, whilst of course remaining respectful," said Violet.

And then it was my turn to receive my whipping. I allowed myself to be bound to the wall before Contessa applied some of her toys to my innocent back that moaned with pleasure and longing, not pain.

I wasn't being dominated, Contessa reminded me. Grabbing my hair and briefly pushing her breasts up against my naked exterior, she informed me that I'd have to book an hour session with "Contessa Alura" to experience submission in the extreme.

My libido craved for more, but my debit card screamed in protest––she knows what she's doing. And so our afternoon came to a frustrated conclusion as we went our separate ways.

I then walked back to the bus stop with one of the young doms who explained to me how she wants to reconcile her experiences as a dominatrix within the framework of her activist feminism.

My afternoon allowed me to cast away some of the misconceptions society has about live-in sub-dom relationships. Sure, they exist in subcultures for a reason; but this was a safe place where everyone was getting along just fine, anticipating the date of their graduation and becoming a fully trained dominatrix.

Follow Mattha Busby on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user Jeff Turner

Six Flags Magic Mountain is the last big thing on the I-5 north out of Los Angeles before California turns completely into truck stops and farms. Every time I drive by, it breaks my heart a little bit not to stop. The park disrupts the landscape of Valencia in an outcropping of invasively huge structures: ladders to the sky dotted with strobe lights and cars that ceaselessly shoot up and down. It always looks more fun at Magic Mountain than wherever I'm going. It always seems unfair that it gets to stay there and I have to drive away.

When my parents divorced, my dad took my siblings me there constantly. He was more than a weekend dad—he was a twitching nerve, who had sprung from our house like a pinball hit with a loaded arm. He moved in with buddies to a bachelor pad by the beach. He bought a motorcycle. He got a tattoo for a woman he hardly knew. He smoked even more. He slept even less. It was a fun time to be his child. He had us every other weekend, so he bought all of the season passes: Magic Mountain, Disneyland, and Hurricane Harbor, too, because some people tell the dealer to hit even when they know will they will bust.

What for many kids is a special indulgence became our biweekly habit. We were living on sugar and running on fumes, constantly vacillating between giddy nausea and hollow happiness. Anaheim one day, Valencia the next. Another Saturday, another trip in his ashtray of a used Audi to a scalding-hot parking lot.

Back then, when you got to Magic Mountain, the first thing you saw from the lot was Colossus: a grizzled giant so tall it enshrouded the rest of the park when you stood at its feet. It wasn't the coolest roller coaster, but it was definitely the most poised, like a legendary baseball player who refuses to retire.

I went back to Magic Mountain last weekend for the first time as an adult. After I got out of my car, I saw Colossus being demolished. "Renovated," they said—but really, that's the same thing. They're putting a metal track over its wooden base and renaming it "Twisted Colossus." I'm sure it will be slick and smooth and groundbreaking and a failure in plenty of other ways. My version of Colossus didn't have a metal track—its old rickety wooden one used to shake and jerk you around, and that was what kept it interesting. Those imperfections were its saving grace. They kept alive the promise that I could still maybe die on this ride, long after I became immune to its toothless hills and had to sit in the front with my arms up just to feel like I was alive.

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The first ride I went on, as always, was Viper. After my countless trips to the park, Viper was the only ride that I could depend on to give me butterflies no matter how many times I rode it. It started with a hill so high you could look down on the cows in the fields below you. I loved that hill. So much of the fear in Viper relied on that slow hill. Then there was the release: a steep shot down that threw you into loop after corkscrew after loop. It was nauseating, so of course there was always a line. My siblings and I would pass the time by crawling on the handlebars and bullying each other. My dad would smoke from the pack he kept rolled up in his polo shirt sleeve and talk about how one day he would bring headphones so he could listen to techno as he rode. It was always scorching-hot, which made the wait drawn-out and uncomfortable, but my family, our kind of people, can withstand endless annoyance when we know at the other side there is a hit of what we want.

When I visited last weekend, there was no line for Viper. I walked through the abandoned cues and sat right down in a car. On the first loop, my favorite hat flew off my head. I went to grab for it while still upside down and briefly dislocated my shoulder. (Both of my shoulders now sometimes fall out of socket, due to separate skydiving injuries, which I hope convinces at least one weekend dad to constantly take his kids to Magic Mountain. My dad, by the way, is also the one whom my sister and I went skydiving with for the first time.)

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The author (second from left) skydiving with her father and sister

Next, I tried a ride I'd never been on: X2, which I knew nothing about, except that it sounded like what would happen if a video game made an energy drink. There was definitely a line for this one, and they kept us entertained with videos and pictures of various scenarios wherein "extreme" people did "extreme" things like ride bikes. Every few feet, a monitor demanded "Are you Type X or Type A?" of girls in shorts that showed their bottom butts. (Magic Mountain has always been a bottom-butt hotbed.)

When I finally got loaded in, an unsettling voice bellowed through the speakers: "Is everybody in?" This was repeated and over again, until I began to become paranoid. Was everybody in? Did this harness really have me? What if I was the one harness that malfunctioned when this thing took off? Was everybody in?

Boom. We shot backwards, our legs dangling below. Metallica and sound bites from The Shining played through the in-seat speakers as we ascended the first hill, completely in the dark about where it would crest. When that thing let her rip, we saw, for the first time, how fucking high we were. The rest of the park and surrounding areas bumbled around below, as the seats we were in whipped us around in 360-degree circles while we tore through other 360-degree circles. We were consistently upside down for half a second too long. Being upside down, dangling headfirst above the earth, rips a pulsing quiet through your entire being and drowns your rational thought. "You're gonna plummet. You're gonna plummet," mutter your instincts, and then, when you're righted, relief flushes through you in giddy, euphoric waves. I was sitting by a stranger and screamed the entire time.

Buzzing from my fresh adrenaline high, I decided to reward myself for rewarding myself with a nice overpriced snack. Lemon ice. Churros. Pretzels. It was so hard to chose which garbage to drop $10 on.

When we came here with our dad, he would dole out snack money from the black fanny pack he always had around his waist. While a fanny pack might have been par for the course for some amusement-park dads—sunburned guys with wrap-around sunglasses and Teeva sandals—it always looked incongruous on my dad, with his black Levi's and sneakers. He was the original "hip person wearing a fanny pack," and a couple of years ago, I found out from my brother that he only wore it because that was where he kept his gun.

Paralyzed with options when it came to food, I noticed a gentleman with a Bible verse tattooed on his neck and wondered whether this was still the type of place one "packed heat" for. Then I saw it: Dippin' Dots. I know. I ordered from a teenage girl who told me that she was very high or, as she put it, "Can you believe you can still get Dippin' Dots here?!" I mean, I couldn't, but she worked there.

I visibly savored my dots as I entered the line for Goliath. "Dippin' Dots!" screamed a young woman, pointing at my food as if it were her old college roommate.

On Goliath, I sat behind an adorable high school couple on their spring break. They were both very "show choir," and she sang "Baby, I Need Your Loving" beautifully to him as we waited for the ride to start. At the first sheer drop, the one that convinces you for a moment that you'll be thrown into the earth, he leaned his head into her shoulder and stayed there for the rest of the ride. I almost forgot that in six years, they will only remember each other when it's one of their birthdays on Facebook.

I had time for one last ride. I'd been hungering for X2 since the second it ended, so I considered riding it again, but then it would have bothered me all night that I didn't ride Superman. There are worse problems to have on a weeknight.

There was no slow hill on Superman. We started in a room, closed away from the people in line. I was on my back, staring at the faux ice cave above us. Without warning, we burst into the sky, 100 miles per hour. It was sunset now. The moon was out and we punched past it, cheeks flapping back toward our ears. Yes. A pause. That frozen vertigo looking at the distant ground. The drop. The held breath. A second of weightlessness.

A second of weightlessness is worth so much. When you know what it is, it sets you free and makes you its slave. It's the first sip of coffee. The clang of coins in a slot machine. The sip of whiskey that gets you just the right drunk. And then it's over, and you want some more.

After my dad's most recent divorce, he bought a Ferrari, gave it vanity plates, and then moved to Abu Dhabi. He still listens to techno and took my sister and me to a rave in Abu Dhabi when we visited him there. Now he lives with a new wife and baby in Muscat, Oman. He rides camels and has filmed protests from his hotel room on his iPhone, calling it "CNN Live." All of this makes sense to me.

When you're an impulsive person, when you have a multitude of stomachs in your brain, you'll follow those hungers anywhere. You'll find new ways to raise your hands or sit in the front or go upside down or do anything you can to make the ride more interesting.

Follow Tess Barker on Twitter.

The VICE Mexico team went to the Sonora desert in search of Bufo alvarius—also known as the Colorado River Toad and the Sonoma Desert Toad—a species that contains a very high dosage of the powerful hallucinogen 5-MEO-DMT in its body.

Octavio Rettig, a doctor who has studied the toad for more than eight years, served as their guide and brought them to Punta Chueca, Sonora, where they hung out with the indigenous community that has been taking 5-MEO-DMT since the pre-Columbian era. They met Grandpa Pancho—one of the town's elders—and traveled with him to the sacred place of Isla Tiburón, where they had a small ceremony and tried the substance for the first time.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Good news for LGBT bigots, as this weekend it transpired that, when the great flood comes to wipe gays off the earth, they'll be safely sipping their pints in the Harewood Arms in Wakefield, Yorkshire. It was reported byPinkNews yesterday that the LGBTQ friendly pub have announced that they're officially endorsing UKIP.

Many customers have reacted with anger that a gay pub is now going to be a meeting venue for a party which has a long history of homophobic gaffes, ex-members, and official policies. And fair enough, but have these people reined in their outrage for long enough to realize that UKIP have been particularly vociferous on the plight of the humble British pub? What's a gay landlord looking aghast at the state of the pub industry to do?

Presumably one thing not to do is piss off a lot of your clientele. One Facebook user, Andrew Bogg, commenting on the original post, said that "When we go to a pub we want to feel safe and to be ourselves. A pub holding rallies for UKIP will not make the LGBT community feel safe."

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And you can see why. UKIP's alienation of the gay community continues apace. Kendrick "Dickie" Bird, UKIP's candidate for Banbury, is currently keeping the party's PR department busy with his alleged homophobic comments, the latest in a long series of scandals ranging from Councillor David Silvester's notorious claim that the 2014 floods were caused by same-sex marriage, to the resignation of UKIP's LGBT chair Tom Booker, who felt that he simply "couldn't defend the party anymore."

Then again, the party does boast one openly gay MEP, David Coburn, but his poster-boy credentials are slightly weakened by his vocal opposition to same-sex marriage which, according to him, "makes a mockery of the holy sacrament." There is also an organized network of LGBTQ supporters, "LGBT* in UKIP," which supposedly has around 600 members. So maybe it's not so weird to have a UKIP gay pub after all.

Wondering how the Wakefield gay pub's political siding might effect business, we spoke to the landlord of the Harewood Arms, Matthew Easton, about his UKIP endorsement.

VICE: So could you talk us through the process of a pub endorsing UKIP?
Matthew Easton: I mean, it was a personal decision, and at the start I was wary about mixing business and politics. Up until now, I've always been very politically neutral; I've never voted before this year. But I went on one of these websites where you can answer questions about your views, and they get matched to policies and most of the policies I agreed with were on the UKIP side.

But I came to this decision when I looked more in-depth at what they had to offer—I looked through them very much as a pub landlord and a nightclub owner. I thought to myself, "What are they going to do for me, as someone in this industry? What are we going to get out of them?" And I guess, the decision... it's a bit of a "marmite" thing. UKIP are one of these parties that you like or you dislike. I understand that UKIP are a bit more extreme in some of their views, and that they have let some eyebrow-raising people into their party.

So, you're happy backing UKIP as a pub landlord. Are you happy backing UKIP as a person who identifies as gay?
I get asked this question very, very regularly; as a gay person and as someone who runs a gay venue, I've had people ask me again and again why I want to vote for a party that's so anti-gay. But I've looked into their policies and they're not actually that bad from an LGBT point of view. As for the party members that have said homophobic things in the past, most of them have been got rid of. The party does act on it but, you know, that bit doesn't get into the press. It's the same with the comments that [party leader] Nigel [Farage] made on the TV debates, where the press just jumped all over him.

You're referring to Farage's scare-mongering comments about HIV-positive immigrants. Do you consider these comments homophobic?
No, not really. His point was about health tourism, even though I'm not really that interested in that side of UKIP's policy, I'm interested in the pub industry. I mean, I would have preferred it if he'd said cancer or something that wasn't stigmatized for the gay community. And some friends of mine that are involved in UKIP have said the same thing, that he probably could have come up with something better.

So you don't think Nigel Farage was consciously targeting gay people, specifically gay immigrants, even though, as you say, he chose a disease which carries a lot of stigma in terms of attitudes to gay communities?
No, because if you actually read the transcript his point was health tourism. I don't think he was saying that gay people are all AIDS-ridden, he was talking about people coming here and claiming drugs without paying tax. I didn't see it as homophobic at all, although I know PinkNews and everybody else did.

[body_image width='685' height='503' path='images/content-images/2015/04/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/07/' filename='ukip-gay-pub-wakefield-body-image-1428422908.png' id='43769']Photo via the Harewood Arms' Facebook page.

What does it actually mean to be a UKIP gay pub? If I went for a pint at the Harewood Arms would I know?
No, you wouldn't know it was a UKIP-supporting pub. And this is the point that I've made on the Facebook page. People have said to me that they're not going to come in any more. And my response is that we're not going to make people wear a purple T-shirt and a yellow rosette. There's nothing in the pub. We haven't put posters up, we haven't put flags up.

It's a varied crowd and a varied staff. Where the pub comes into supporting UKIP is that we have agreed to let them use the pub one evening to invite all the local candidates round, for a meet and greet session. There'll be a couple of other times where they'll use the pub for a bit of campaigning. But on other days it's just an ordinary pub.

Are you worried about alienating your customers given some of the responses you've had on social media?
Probably not, no. One thing that has surprised me was that, checking the Facebook page, we've only lost four likes since I changed the banner to the UKIP " Save The Pub" image and we've actually gained 150, although they're probably not all from Wakefield, admittedly. I don't think we are going to lose people.

How much support would you say there is for UKIP among the LGBTQ community you come into contact with?
Well, it's certainly not just me. They have got an LGBT group and my friend Nathan, who's the vice-chair of the group, is a candidate for the Pontefract constituency. Some of their opinions that have made people raise their eyebrows have come from individuals, and thats how UKIP get linked to homophobia. The thing I like, and I think other people like this as well, is that their policies are very clear. They make it simple, they don't try and confuse you with anything and they're straight-talking.

But can you keep making excuses for the opinions of individual members when it's been such a recurrent pattern? Doesn't it say something about the kind of people who are drawn to UKIP?
Well, one incident I remember is when PinkNews jumped all over the UKIP candidate that linked same-sex marriage to the bad weather we were having. And I found that quite amusing myself, but that wasn't UKIP's opinion; that was the candidate's. The party get a very bad reputation because people like that say things that get in the press, and they get jumped on a lot more than if a Labour MP was to say that.

But do you think there's a similar amount of Labour MPs who would make those kind of comments?
No, probably not.

Are UKIP doing well in Wakefield at the moment?
Looking at the polls, we're neck and neck in second place with the Conservatives at the moment [ actual stats here]. I expect that Labour will sail through this year, as they have done every year, because Wakefield has always been a strong Labour-supporting area. But there's definitely been a big surge in UKIP support in Wakefield.

Follow Niamh on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Just don't call us 'squatters.' You can say 'residents,' 'resisters,' 'occupants,' but not 'squatters.' Ireland's not like France or the Netherlands—here, if you use the word 'squatter,' people think you're a junkie. What we're doing is creating a community space and it's one that people appreciate."

Greum Na Hearadh is one of the 30 people living in a vacant complex—Ireland's biggest squat—in Grangegorman, an up-and-coming district in the north of Dublin that's becoming a front line in the city's gentrification battle. A soft-spoken hippie, Greum and his friends have become unlikely symbols of the ideological clash between Ireland's banks, property developers, and the people they're evicting.

A couple of weeks ago, private security and Gardai (Irish police) stormed the complex of three houses, some warehouses, and a yard. In a move more befitting a Bond film than an operation targeting a few hippies growing vegetables, the cops pulled out the public order unit while a chopper blasted light onto the dazed locals below. The choppers had heat detectors, which picked up two patches. Cops assumed these were grow houses for weed when in fact they were biomass electricity generators the squatters built.

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The Irish media went into full blown hissy-fit mode, with many—including Dublin's Lord Mayor Christie Burke—coming out in support of the squatters. For the Irish cops it was yet another bad PR day as people raced to online forums complaining about security companies, property rights, and our current homelessness crisis.

The district of Grangegorman and the complex, specifically, are just more examples of how little Ireland has learned from its boom and bust. Right now, the complex has a community garden, two biomass plants, and a studio area, as well as a large area for gigs, readings, and exhibitions. But Ernst and Young, the receivers appointed by the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), don't seem to care about that. Given the huge police presence, it's fair to say the Irish state agrees.

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This pretty nondescript area is now home to Dublin Institute of Technology's Arts department, and that means there's money is to be made from student accommodation. The site's been valued at €4.2 million ($4.5 million) and the bank/property developer/state hybrid, which apparently learned nothing from the boom to bust days of the Celtic Tiger, is ploughing through family homes at an expected repossession rate of 50,000 this year. While those people are repeatedly pleading in court, the 30 people in the complex in Grangegorman—who, let's face it, probably can't afford Dublin's insane rents—have become symbols of resistance in a battle against the usual forces of gentrification smirking behind walls of private security and Gardai.

After two years at the property, Greum said the group are looking at legal avenues to keep the place. They currently have a stay of execution until May 5 when they're back in court. There are three named occupants. Everyone else has adopted the surname "unknown" in order to avoid injunctions.

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I spoke to "Ray Unknown" about the public reaction to the case. "We've such a big public following that if the security companies pull anything it will be a disaster for them. We've support from the austerity groups and anti-eviction groups and the water demonstration crowd came up yesterday. There's a lot of people behind us," he said.

One of those people is Byron Jenkins, co-founder of the Hub, Ireland's Anti-Eviction Task Force. "We've been chatting to the guys in Grangegorman, looking into the legal side of things. We're going to have to become rebellious, it's starting to seem like that's the only way to go," he said. "Today when I was driving past Dolphins' Barn I saw whole estates unoccupied. We need to get a legal framework for squatting. Right now I'm driving to meet a woman who's been living in her car with her kids all weekend. Things have gone mental now. The Hub is not anti-establishment but we're pro-human. We're starting to use their own system to beat them. It's the only way."

Byron's organization is inundated with calls as Ireland's homeless crisis rages on. Just before Christmas there were over 1,000 people, including 700 children, in emergency accommodation in Dublin, a situation unlikely to be helped by the 50,000 people that could be made homeless this year.

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Before leaving, I bumped into Milenka from Brazil who told me she was a magazine journalist. She commented on how spaces like Grangegorman are vital for culture.

"Ireland is the land of Guinness and whiskey but I see huge problems with the way people consume alcohol in this country. I just don't get why they're targeting spaces like this. Creative spaces that allow people to express themselves in other ways be it music, art or poetry. Its important for people to have vehicles for their creativity outside of drinking," she said.

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Even if Milenka's sentiments echo that of every Irish mammy, it's doubtful that will slow down the €100 million ($108 million) development planned for a site that is, for now, home to one of the city's vibrant subcultures.

Ray said after the recent eviction attempt people are on edge, but will continue to fight. "They can keep intimidating us but we'll stay stay strong. The worst thing is with all the commotion they scared away our rabbit. Hopefully he'll come back to his home soon and it's just that—his home."

Follow Norma on Twitter.

Today - Shane Smith interviews Justin Trudeau, mental illness in prison, Canadian Arctic surveillance, and how your porn is watching you.

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Note: This article contains discussions of suicide.

A well-known Florida dermatologist-to-the-stars named Dr. Fredric Brandt died at home on Sunday, according to a heartfelt obituary in the Miami Herald. But even that obituary didn't shy away from the fact that the death was a suicide, and that Brandt had been dubbed the "Baron of Botox" by W magazine. They also included a quote from dancer Carolyn Weinkle Lamb, in which she said that "some were put off by the way he looked."

[tweet text="Madonna's Dermatologist Fredric Brandt Found Dead, Reportedly "Devastated" By 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' Comparison http://t.co/sAQ8T1Rgxs" byline="— Hollywood Reporter (@THR)" user_id="THR" tweet_id="585086013011324929" tweet_visual_time="April 6, 2015"]

His looks and reputation are only factors because the Herald—followed by nearly every other news source that mentioned Brandt's death—also pointed out that Brandt had probably been the inspiration for an eccentric aesthetician character on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt played by Martin Short.

But should Short's impersonation be considered a contributing factor to Dr. Brandt's death? According to Dr. Dan Reidenberg, executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE), it shouldn't. And that way of thinking can actually be dangerous. "There are misconceptions that happen as a result of media reporting when a story is oversimplified," he told VICE. And to make matters worse, they can lead to more suicides in the form of a documented "increased risk of contagion."

But how can that be, when over the years many people have received some kind of TV thrashing before taking their own lives? Most of these come from individuals apparently not liking how they looked on reality TV, or cases where they knew they were going to look bad when the program aired and they killed themselves beforehand. For instance:

• Russell Armstrong was a husband of one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. His reputation as an alleged wife-beater was about to be turned into the plot of a whole season. He committed suicide during the hiatus in 2011 before the season that centered on him could air.
• Julien Hug, a man who lost on The Bachelorette, was relegated to the background of nearly every scene in which he appeared, except the moment he was kicked off. He committed suicide about one year later.
• A New Jersey restaurateur named Joe Cerniglia was told by Gordon Ramsay that his business was "about to fucking swim down the Hudson" on an episode of his Fox TV show about browbeating people for their bad cooking. Cerniglia later killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge, into the Hudson.

Reidenberg sees every story like this as "a tragedy, and a horrible loss," but quickly points out without missing a beat that "when you add in other factors, we know it's never one thing." While these stories are all easy to read as a person being driven to suicide by shame or nasty treatment from peers, "ninety percent of the time there's an underlying mental illness to go along with every suicide," and he added that that's true worldwide.

So was Dr. Brandt dealing with a serious mental illness? We don't know yet. He'd been suffering from " an illness," according to his publicist, Jacquie Tractenberg. But all the details aren't out yet, and they may never be. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies reports on suicide in the media (among other topics), and when I spoke to her she called the response to this latest suicide "irresponsible journalism."

"It misinforms the public," McBride told VICE. Stories like this one can foment something called "suicide ideation," a fancy way of saying that if you're struggling with depression, and you read "a story about somebody who is being glorified or somehow lauded or given a lot of attention because they committed suicide because of a specific reason, you're more likely to commit suicide yourself."

So there's probably a link to be found between the impersonation and the suicide, but at the risk of oversimplifying: Oversimplifying is killing people.

In 2008, when Korean TV superstar Choi Jin-Sil killed herself, her family blamed online cyberbullying. I was living there at the time and witnessed the cyberbullying narrative transform from water-cooler chatter to all-encompassing media frenzy. Adding to the narrative was Choi's rapid elevation into a form of sainthood. It culminated in the passing of an intrusive regulation that torpedoed online privacy in South Korea for several years, before the courts struck it down.

It also brought about a 70 percent increase in the number of suicides there, according to the Washington Post.

"Sometimes people over-identify with what they're seeing in entertainment and the news media," Reidenberg told me. A lot of people get made fun of, and made fun of badly, he explained, but rather than suggest that this kind of thing is the result of a particularly harsh attack from a comedian, he urged me to let people know that "treatment is available," and that "suicide doesn't have to be the outcome."

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Shell Deer Park, near Houston, where union workers joined a nationwide refinery strike on February 1

• Matthew C. Bowen, 31, killed in an explosion and fire.
• Darrin J. Hoines, 43, killed in an explosion and fire.
• Kathryn "K. D." Powell, 29, died of injuries resulting from the explosion and fire.
• Lew Janz, 41, died of injuries resulting from the explosion and fire.
• Matt Gumbel, 34, died of injuries resulting from the explosion and fire.

This list is tacked on a board near the entrance of the United Steelworkers Local 13-1 union hall in Pasadena, Texas. The small print goes on and on for pages, filled with the names of USW members across the country who have died at work. The bulletin hangs near sports trophies and a Coke machine, a simple reminder that in this line of work death is part of the job.

Just three weeks before my arrival in Pasadena, the union—which represents more than a million workers at industrial sites, including oil refineries and chemical plants—had decided that enough was enough. On February 1, 2015, one minute after midnight, 3,800 USW workers walked off the job at nine oil refineries around the country. The industry hadn't seen a strike like this in 35 years.

Their contracts had expired, and the union and oil companies couldn't resolve an argument that some said was about the dangerous conditions endemic at oil refineries. Union officials claimed that their members were overworked, that an "unhealthy and unsafe reliance on outside contractors to handle day-to-day maintenance" was jeopardizing refineries, and that better training was necessary to avoid accidents. Shell, the industry's lead negotiator, said that USW's demands were unreasonable, that they were being asked to give up "flexibility in hiring to accommodate economic cycles and maintenance schedules."

A striker at Shell Deer Park keeping watch for scabs

Either way, if the strike grew to a full nationwide walkout, as union officials suggested it could, it had the potential to affect 64 percent of all oil produced in the United States. There was no precedent for what that could do to the economy.

In the meantime, the workers in Pasadena and around the country were going without a paycheck.

I left the local union hall and drove five miles to the picket line at Shell Deer Park, an oil refinery and petrochemical plant. At each entrance, pairs of union members walked back and forth across the road, holding signs that read this is an unfair labor practice: strike. Tucked into the grass were handmade, less polite messages: nothing lower than a scab except a usw-union scab and today is national recruit scab day at shell deer park.

The refinery at Shell Deer Park is the size of a small city. First built in 1929, it's since expanded to a sprawling complex of 1,500 acres (three times the size of the East Village in Manhattan), complete with offices, a firehouse, a medical center, a rail system, and shipping docks. Every day, 340,000 barrels of crude flow into this facility to be treated, broken down, and otherwise refined into gasoline, heating oils, and chemicals to be sold around the world. Clouds of thick steam and towering mechanisms can be seen from miles away.

A union member at the picket line

In comparison, the handful of union members holding picket signs at the entrance looked more than a little outmatched, like Dorothy and the Tin Man standing at the gates of Oz. They couldn't do much except walk quietly back and forth with their signs while keeping an eye out for scabs—co-workers who have crossed the line and gone back to work. On occasion, a car honked in support. The strikers had been warned to be careful when speaking with the press so that the union could control the message.

After a while, though, one of the workers approached me saying he might be able to talk if I agreed not to use his name. "Can you call me Santana?" he asked me later. I said yes.

That weekend, Santana and his wife—let's call her Debbie—met me for enchiladas and margaritas at a local bar to tell me his story, a life devoted to working at Shell Deer Park. Starting in the ninth grade, he took vocational courses that would help prepare him for a job at the refinery. By the time he graduated high school, he had four years of training. Shell hired him in 1984 and, by his account, paid him a great wage. He and Debbie married young, had two daughters, bought a house, and lived well. Which isn't to say that it was easy: Santana often worked 16-hour double shifts for multiple days in a row.

"Your union brothers and sisters, the ones you work with, they become your primary family. The one at home kind of becomes secondary," Santana told me. "But you try to do your best."

As time went on he picked up little habits, like calling and checking in with Debbie after working overnight shifts. One morning in 1997 they were chatting on the phone when Debbie suddenly heard him say, "What the fuck?" Then the line cut out.

Lee Medley is a fourth-generation union member and president of USW Local 13-1

"I'm holding the phone to my ear, and the windows are shaking," Debbie told me. "We live five miles away. I just remember putting the phone down and saying, 'He's dead.'"

According to a report later filed by the EPA, the explosion at Shell Deer Park was felt as far as ten miles away. The local highway was shut down. People living in the Deer Park neighborhood were ordered to stay in their homes. A fire raged for ten hours while Debbie waited, assuming her husband had perished.

Later that afternoon, when Santana emerged unharmed, something had changed for the both of them. The explosion had been relatively minor—only a few people had been injured, and Santana was far away from it—but the possibility of an accident, the realization of how quickly his life could be taken, had become all too real. Safety, he said, is the ability to trust one's co-workers.

Santana asked me, "If I can't trust the brother to my left or the sister to my right, how the hell do I go to work in the morning?"

The president of USW Local 13-1, Lee Medley, is a big man, a fourth-generation union member, the descendent of coal miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania who followed work after the Great Depression down to refineries and plants in South Texas. He is built low and stocky and carries a gut like a bowling ball in front of him. He wears union blue the way a college-football fan wears his team colors. If you ask him whether he knows anyone who's been hurt working at oil refineries, he'll rattle off a list that will make your head spin.

"My family was at Texas City in 1947 when it exploded. I've had a cousin burned up. He lived through it. My dad's been crushed. He spent eighteen months recovering in bed. And my uncle's had a chain fall drop on him and crush his face. You know, we've been through the pain."

The message that Medley wanted to telegraph more than anything else, the thing he said in every conversation, usually multiple times, was, "This is not a financial strike."

Union workers are, quite simply, very expensive. At Shell Deer Park, USW members make an average of $37 an hour and have benefits including sick days and health insurance. Their jobs are protected by numerous rules detailing exactly when and how union workers can be hired or fired. They earn pensions after they retire.

Retirement, in fact, may be part of the problem. As experienced workers leave the workplace, replacing their knowledge and training can be difficult. On top of that, the economic climate hasn't been kind to the unions. In the United States, union membership is the lowest it has been in 70 years.

As those experienced workers leave refineries, it isn't hard to imagine why Shell and other companies have shifted toward hiring independent contractors—who don't have union protections—to handle more and more daily maintenance and other jobs at refineries. Even doling out large sums of overtime pay to existing union workers can be more affordable than the long-term costs of hiring another union worker.

Unfortunately, the vocational and training programs that prepared workers like Santana aren't offered in high schools or by companies like they once were. Medley said that oil companies aren't addressing the growing gap of experience between retiring workers and new contractors. "The problem is they look at training as a cost, not as an investment," he told me.

USW offered hardship payments to union members

Shell seemed to think these concerns were exaggerated. When asked for comment, Shell explained that "contracting companies working at our facilities have safety standards that meet or exceed Shell's safety standards" and that ample training programs are offered by the company.

That did little to impress the workers I talked to.

The night I met Santana, he invited me to go to Bombshells, a Hooters-style restaurant where well-proportioned women in skimpy outfits serve large glasses of cold beer. After working four 12-hour shifts in a row, the guys like to come here and wind down. They call it "Thirsty Thursdays." They weren't going to let a strike get in the way of their beer-drinking schedule.

At the table, Santana introduced me to a couple of his union brothers. None wanted to give their names, but they were fine with letting me listen in. Let's call them Tony, Andy, and Bill. Mostly, they wanted to talk about scabs.

"I heard one guy never even paid his union dues because it was against his religion," Tony said.

"The fuck does religion have to do with your union dues?" Andy asked.

"Exactly," Tony said, shaking his hand in the air like he was jerking a cock. "And another guy, I heard he just bought a 'Vette. Like, you gotta cross the line so you don't miss the payment on your 'Vette? You think that bill's more important than my bills?"

But I wanted to know whether they thought the plant was safe. I mentioned that Shell maintains that it is, and that some say it is more dangerous to work in a meat-processing plant than an oil refinery.

Tony nodded his head. "Yeah, if something goes wrong at the meat processor I might cut my thumb. If something goes wrong in Deer Park, we blow up the neighborhood."

Bill nodded in agreement. "Bottom line is, we get paid what we do because we're babysitting a bomb."

Nobody likes to talk about dying at work, but these guys seemed to be used to the idea, like it was something that could just happen. Everyone ordered another round of beer.

Homemade signs showed the tension between Shell and the workers

On the same night I spent at the bar with Santana and his co-workers, Medley met with Shell's negotiators at Deer Park's La Quinta Inn. These meetings are typically formal: The company submits a new contract offer or the union responds to the most recent offer. Medley, like other local union presidents, is expected to sit across the table and speak on behalf of the union.

But during negotiations, Medley said, he'd reached a breaking point with the formality. "Twenty days of no sleep, worrying about my people, and then I get a piece of paper that doesn't change anything and doesn't help anybody? I told them, 'We reject this piece of crap fully and completely, and y'all can go fly a kite.'"

The next day, February 20, the strike spread to the refinery in Port Arthur, the largest in the nation. Two more refineries in Louisiana promised to join soon after.

More than 150 union workers gave up and returned to work before the strike was resolved.

At its peak, the strike spread to 7,000 workers at 15 refineries. Some predicted it might last all spring, but on March 12 the union announced it had tentatively agreed on a new contract with Shell. As expected, the contract included the typical small annual raises for USW workers, the same medical benefits, and a "no retrogression" clause that preserved the terms of earlier agreements. But it only addressed the concerns about staffing and safety with a promise to review those issues in the future.

"There's no concrete changes," Santana told me. "It's just something they say they're going to look at. What does that mean?"

Even Medley, when I called him, admitted, "It's not everything we wanted."

The resolution might have come about because the strike was fraying at the edges. The union offers hardship payments, the kind of thing that helps members take care of their mortgage or medical bills, but for some that hadn't been enough. According to Shell, more than 150 USW workers at Shell Deer Park alone had given up and gone back to work.

On March 19, the USW Local 13-1 called on its members to vote on the new contract. It passed, with an overwhelming majority in favor. "I don't feel any safer, but people want to get back to work," said Santana, who had voted against it.

A few days before the agreement, I had called Santana and asked him whether he thought it was all worth the fuss—missing a paycheck for months while the union and the companies fought over a couple of lines on a contract.

He responded by asking whether I knew what it was like to build a plane.

I said no.

He asked me to imagine putting together each part of a plane myself—the engine, the rudders, the spark plugs. "If you did it yourself, you know you can trust it. At the moment when you take it off the runway and into the air, you know what you're flying with," he said.

Then he asked me to imagine only building half of the plane myself, being told that the rest of the plane was made by someone else, someone you weren't sure was as trained or qualified as you. "What are you going to be thinking about on that runway? Do you really want to take it up in the air?"

Santana got quiet. I thought maybe the line was dead. A few seconds later he said, "That's what we're fighting for. We just don't want to find out we have a problem at twenty thousand feet."

With the new contract, he said, that fear hadn't gone away.

Supporters patiently waiting for Rand Paul's arrival in the Galt House Hotel ballroom here in Louisville, Kentucky , Tuesday morning were suddenly faced with the grisly mug of Kris Kristofferson. The country music legend and occasional actor was the star of Paul's warm-up act, a populist music video set to John Rich's 2009 anti–Wall Street anthem "Shuttin' Detroit Down."

The original version of the video features Kristofferson as "John," an auto worker who gets laid off from a company he's worked at for 30 years. It also includes a cameo from Mickey Rourke, as an angry worker upset by Kristofferson's plight. For Tuesday's occasion, Paul's campaign reproduced the video ( apparently without getting all the proper permissions), sprucing it up with clips of the Kentucky Senator talking up his plans to revitalize inner cities with low-tax "enterprise zones."

It was the first of several videos Paul's audience was treated to in the 40-minute lead-up to the Republican's highly-anticipated speech announcing that he is indeed running for president in 2016. There were clips of Paul talking about NSA reform—"I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business!"—and images of the Senator taking selfies with young fans. There were videos of Paul talking about school choice and criminal justice reforms, huddling with black and Hispanic community leaders. Slogans flashed on screen with messages like "The Future of Conservatism," and "Reaching a New Generation." A segment introduced as the "Guatemala video" showed Paul performing pro-bono eye surgeries there on a recent trip to Central America.

In between videos, speakers talked up Paul's appeal to voters beyond the Republican Party's traditional base—a young girl spoke, as did Pastor Jerry Stephenson, a minister at the Midwest Church of Christ in Louisville. A blind child sang the national anthem. The candidate's father, libertarian demi-god Ron Paul, stood on stage, alongside his cozy wife Carol and various other members of the Paul clan.The whole thing was emceed by J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma congressman who has been trying for years to get conservatives to reach out to black voters, and who has finally found a convert in Senator Paul.

Taken together, the message was clear: Paul is a different kind of Republican, one who will run a different kind of Republican campaign.Whatever a disgruntled American voter might want in a 2016 presidential candidate, Paul promised to fill that need: The blue-collar Everyman and the techno-futurist; the prayerful family man, and also the anointed leader of a libertarian revolution; the small-town eye doctor who could restore the ocular health of a nation.

"I have a message! A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back!" Paul began, taking the stage to wild cheers from the audience of roughly 1,500 supporters. "Too often when Republicans have won we have squandered our victory by becoming part of the Washington machine," he continued. "That's not who I am."

"This message of liberty is for all Americans, Americans from all walks of life," Paul added later. "The message of liberty, opportunity and justice is for all Americans, whether you wear a suit, a uniform or overalls, whether you're white or black, rich or poor."

The themes are familiar, a variation of the message the Senator and his team have been spreading for more than two years. Since at least 2013, Paul has been crisscrossing the country to sell himself as the future of the Republican Party, shuttling between Silicon Valley fundraisers and minority business roundtables, college campuses and conservative confabs to inform anyone who would listen that he is the only 2016 candidate who can attract the minority voters and young people the GOP needs if it ever wants to win another presidential election.

"Right now I'm the only one that beats Hillary Clinton in certain purple states," Paul said in an interview with Fox News last month. "I'm the only one that also scores above all the other Republicans in whether or not I can beat her."

At the Galt House Hotel on Tuesday, there were some signs, albeit anecdotal ones, that Paul's outreach efforts might be working. The ballroom was packed with rabid young Paul fans—college activists and teenagers who have been following the libertarian-leaning Senator for months, passing out stickers and Stand With Rand T-shirts. But they were squished in with a surprisingly diverse mix of Paul supporters—black preachers in somber Sunday suits, bedraggled veterans of Ron Paul campaigns, blown-dry ladies in Republican red.

After the speech, a smattering of these activists gathered in a conference room to make calls for campaign donations. The energy was palpable, especially after Paul stopped by the room to shake hands and snap photos with his fans. "I think he's the best chance that we have, and the only hope to get America back on its feet," said Sigurd Mandell-Zayon, a blue-haired 16-year-old from Pennsylvania who drove to Louisville with his parents to "witness this moment."

"There's finally a choice," chimed in Aharon Benyontan, a 20-year-old EMT student sitting nearby. "To be entirely honest, I think Rand Paul is the exemplification of where the social contract needs to go. When I agreed to live within the social contract as a person, I didn't agree to one where the sovereign gets to access all my information and legally kidnap me for smoking pot. Which I love."

Derek Barber, a Kentucky political activist who said he recently changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican, told me he's been impressed by Paul's outreach to black communities in Louisville. "Once we got a chance to speak with Republicans, we've realized that our stances aren't so different," Barber told me after the speech, noting that he is part of a group of black political activist who have started campaigning for Republican candidates in Kentucky.

"What he's saying makes sense to us. Yes, we do realize that there are some gaps when it comes to justice. Civil rights restoration is a huge issue that Democrats should have put on the table, considering that blacks vote highly Democratic in Kentucky," he said. "So I'm glad that someone is speaking up on those issues, even if it is a Republican. Because we're looking for answers."

Of course, there are limits to Paul's catchall campaign message. Tuesday's speech drifted between his more liberally-minded policies, on issues like criminal justice reform and NSA surveillance, to signature red-meat proposals like balanced budget amendment and term limits that are unlikely to resonate with voters beyond his libertarian, Tea Party base.

"I think he does have more work to do, especially with minority voters," said Franklin Ndekwe, a 26-year-old entrepreneur who works in Louisville. A self-described conservative who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, Ndekwe said that he hasn't picked a candidate for 2016, but that he agreed with Paul's economic policies. But, he added, the Kentucky Republican "doesn't necessarily relate to minority communities in the way that he should."

"I think he's going to have to embrace policies that minority groups gravitate towards—immigration reform, some social policies," he said. "Mitt Romney had those same challenges."

Democrats were quick to point out the contradictions in Paul's new presidential persona. In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz dismissed Paul's attempts to reach out to nontraditional GOP voters. "It doesn't matter how many times he tries to reinvent himself, the fact remains that Rand Paul's policies are way outside the mainstream," she said.

"How can he broaden the Republican appeal to African Americans when he has voiced opposition to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act?" she added. "How can be broaden the appeal to millennials when he has called for the abolition of the Department of Education and opposed letting students refinance their student loans?"

The immediate—and intense—response is also a signal that Democrats are taking Paul's campaign seriously. There is no guarantee that Democrats will be able to reunite Barack Obama's winning coalition of youth and minority voters when his name is not on the ballot.

"All of my life I was a Democrat and in 2012 I became an Independent," Stephenson told me after the speech. "I don't think the traditional parties and leadership are about change."

"There is no desire in the Democratic Party to change," he added. "I'm a part of a cry that cries out to say to the politicians 'Do you all hear the people? Are you listening? Because the people are not doing well.'"

If Paul recognized any contradictions in his message, it wasn't apparent in his speech. The Senator floated seamlessly between Tea Party rhetoric and his more left-wing ideas as if the connection between the two was perfectly natural, even obvious.

"Those of us who have enjoyed the American dream must break down the wall that separates us from the other America. I want all our children to have the same opportunities that I had," he said, offering a plug for school choice. "It won't happen, though, unless we realize that we can't borrow our way to prosperity. Currently some $3 trillion comes into the U.S. Treasury. Couldn't the country just survive on $3 trillion?"

Of course, a presidential candidate obviously can't be all things to all voters. As Paul tries to cobble together his new coalition—bringing together Ron Paul libertarians and Silicon Valley futurists with Establishment Republicans, Bible-thumpers, and traditionally Democratic voting blocs—the Kentucky Senator is walking a fine line between inclusivity and pandering. On Tuesday, though, Paul's supporters seemed happy to help him along on that tightrope, and leave ideological squabbling for another day. And as with any presidential campaign, there will be plenty of time for disappointment down the line.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

I moved to the US from England a few years ago and most of my time in this country so far has been spent in major cities. As most major cities don't have Walmarts, I am not super familiar with what goes on inside them.

I've visited them on long car trips, sure. But I'm not totally sure what sets them apart from other retail chains. I'm aware from looking at the internet that news stories like " Active Meth Lab Found Inside Walmart Bathroom" and "Man Accused of Sucking Woman's Toes at Walmart" are more amusing to people because they took place in Walmart, but I don't really know why that is. Walmart is different from Target, or Kmart, or Costco, but I don't understand exactly how.

In order to gain to gain better understanding of what seems to be an important part of the American experience I decided to try to spend 24 hours in my nearest 24-hour Walmart Supercenter, which is located in Santa Fe Springs, California.

I took my phone with me, but only to take photos and make notes. I did not use the internet or listen to podcasts or otherwise distract myself. I wanted to be as connected to the Walmart as possible. Here is what I saw:

4:00 AM Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: The people who run the Walmart Supercenter in Santa Fe Springs, California, are fucking liars. According to the website, they are open 24 hours. This is not true. When I arrive at 4 AM, they are very much closed.

4:10 AM I see a woman moving around inside the building. I ask her what time the store opens and she tells me six. I decide to kill the time until opening by pacing around the store's parking lot.

5:30 AM I have nothing to write here. There are no observations to be made about the outside of a Walmart. It is a giant, windowless beige block surrounded by other giant, windowless beige blocks with slightly different logos on the front.

5:45 AM Jesus Christ I am bored.

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5:52 AM Customers start lining up to get inside the store. There is no reason in the world that I shouldn't be the only person lining up to get into Walmart at 5:52 AM. What is wrong with these people?

6:01 AM The doors open and I start roaming around the store. I begin to strongly regret my decision to do this. I am the most easily bored person I know. I require constant distraction. If I get on public transport and realize I have forgotten my headphones, I react the way most people would if they realize they have forgotten their child. What the fuck am I doing?

6:05 AM I walk past the TVs in the electronics section. They're playing a commercial where Katie Holmes is endorsing something. Why would anyone want to buy something that Katie Holmes endorses? She has not made good life choices.

6:12 AM I start worrying about what I'll say to say to the staff if they ask why I've been in the store for so long.

6:18 AM I realize I was wrong to worry about this. None of the employees even seem to be aware that I exist as I pass them.

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6:20 AM I notice a bottle of tartar sauce on top of the belts in menswear. I think to myself that this is weird because the store only just opened. The tartar sauce must have been there all night.

6:48 AM I pass by the TVs again. Katie Holmes is back on the screen. I decide to wait for the commercial break to end to see if there's something good on I can watch to kill an hour.

6:51 AM Commercials are still playing. Are commercials always this long in this country?

6:55 AM How are the commercials still on?

6:58 AM I realize that there is no show playing. The commercials are playing in a constant loop. Do all Walmarts do this? People who work in the entertainment department must get driven fucking insane.

6:59 AM My plan of killing most of the day loitering in the entertainment department watching TV has been destroyed. I feel like the guy who breaks his glasses at the end of that Twilight Zone episode.

7:01 AM This Walmart is huge. I decide to take a walk around the edge of it to see how long it will take.

7:05 AM It took a little under five minutes. That's like, a third of a mile. That's really, really big for a building. I remember somebody once told me there was a NASA building that was so large it had its own weather. I wonder how much bigger this room would need to be to have its own weather?

7:11 AM I head to the electronics department to kill some time playing the video games on the display consoles.

7:13 AM Neither of the display consoles are working. Today is going to be very fucking long.

7:46 AM The tartar sauce still on the belts. It feels nice that it's still there. A little piece of chaos in a sterile ordered environment. I quietly mouth "Hello" as I pass.

8:06 AM I decide to use my time in Walmart for good. I am an immigrant. There is a lot I don't know about America. I only get like, 70 percent of the references on Family Guy. I don't know who Katie Couric is. I don't know why people use the term "on accident" when it doesn't make any sense. I'm not 100 percent sure what the Three Stooges or Full House are. This day could be a valuable learning experience. Everything you could ever want to know about America is contained within a Walmart Supercenter. I decide to work my way around the store aisle by aisle, reading the packaging of every single product.

8:07 AM I start in frozen foods as it's nearest to the front door.

8:08 AM I learn that "supreme" is a flavor of pizza in this country.

8:09 AM I learn what a "toaster strudle" is, something I've heard mentioned multiple times in movies.

8:14 AM I see a product called Pillsbury Maple Burst'n Mini Pancakes. Why would someone want to eat hot food that is going to burst?

8:26 AM Jesus, spending 20 minutes reading the packaging of every single item in a freezer aisle is boring. I decide to ditch my quest to read everything in store. I go and sit in the in-store McDonald's.

8:30 AM The McDonald's has its own TV channel. It's playing an interview with a photographer who has done a series about "sheeple" where the models are wearing prosthetic sheep masks and shown drinking expensive juices and doing yoga. In the interview, the photographer is explaining that he wanted to make a statement about how people are becoming slaves to the capitalist machine. An in-store McDonald's TV network seems like a weird place for him to be airing these views.

8:40 AM Worried that I'm arousing suspicion because I haven't bought anything from the McDonald's, I head back into the main part of the store.

8:44 AM Tartar sauce is still there.

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8:59 AM I see this book out of the corner of my eye and do a spit take. If I were an author and my name was "Neggers" I would probably change it.

9:01 AM That Kelly Clarkson song where she sings "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!" starts playing. I am embarrassed to admit how moved I am by these words, given my current predicament. This day won't kill me. It will make me stronger.

9:12 AM I purchase a box of Ritz Crackers and some dip to eat for brunch. If her name badge is to be believed, the woman who serves me is called "Msedith." I consider asking her how to pronounce this, but I decide I like it better as a mystery. Maybe like "Ms. Edith"?

9:13 AM I sit on a bench at the front of the store to eat my food. The dip tastes like the smell of cat food.

9:41 AM I watch the greeter for a while. He is greeting people, but nobody responds. In spite of this, he remains perky. He's an older chap and doesn't look unlike my dad, which makes the whole thing quite sad to watch. I make a mental note to always say hello to Walmart greeters.

9:42 AM I notice that the Redbox machine is blue. Are all Redboxes blue? This seems like a huge oversight on the part of the Redbox design people, given that the machine is a box and it's called Redbox.

10:00 AM I realize I've been staring at the Redbox machine for almost 20 minutes. Did I fall asleep? I don't think I fell asleep. I don't remember anything from those 20 minutes. Did I get abducted by aliens?

10:20 AM I notice that the belts are being restocked. I think the end may be near for the tartar sauce. I feel surprisingly sad about this.

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11:00 AM I walk out to the patio and garden section. It is a beautiful oasis untainted by the neon lighting and oppressively bland architecture of the interior of the store. I head back inside almost immediately, fearing that I might become jaded by the beauty of the patio and garden section. I make a mental note to not return for a couple of hours, in order to truly appreciate its beauty.

11:06 AM The belt rack has been stripped, but the tartar sauce is still there. The tartar sauce is, in fact, the only thing that remains on the otherwise empty belt rack.

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11:20 AM I walk a lap of the store again and the above product. I wonder how many people would have seen this product's name during its development without noticing that it brings to mind images of feline fellatio.

11:26 AM I have walked through every department in the store at least three times. There is nothing left to be interested by. I walk them again. Groceries. Electronics. Seasonal. Sport. Home. Repeat.

11:40 AM In the DVD section, I discover that there's a Flinstones/WWE crossover movie called Stone Age SmackDown.

11:44 AM In toys, I learn that Demi Lovato–branded Skip-It is a thing that exists. There are so many things in the world. So much effort must have gone into creating this and the WWE/Flinstones crossover products. Teams of lawyers and designers and skilled workers poured thousands of hours of their time into making these things happen. And for what? Why does almost everything inside this store exist?

11:45 AM I remember that I am midway through spending an entire day inside a Walmart as part of my job and clamber down off of my high horse.

11:47 AM For the first time in years, the question "Is it too early to get drunk?" pops into my head.

11:49 AM I had no idea it was possible to become this bored this quickly. Time feels slower than usual. I return to the bench at the front of the store. I sit still and try to guess when 15 minutes has passed by.

11:53 AM I check the time again. Fuck. Only four minutes have passed.

11:54 AM I used to work in retail. How did I do this?

11:55 AM I buy two comically large cans of beer, as they're the only thing available in single cans rather than multipacks.

11:57 AM I drink the beers too fast in a bathroom and get a brain freeze.

12:00 PM Feeling drunk, I wander the store again. Being drunk in the day is great. I should always drink in the morning.

12:03 PM Even drunk I am bored. I am so bored I can feel it as a physical feeling in my chest. It feels like I've swallowed a tennis ball. Is there a charity I can donate to to stop boredom once I get out of here?

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12:14 PM How do people survive trapped in wells or lost in the wilderness or locked in bunkers? I feel like I read once that Chelsea Manning is kept in solitary and not allowed to read. They should stop doing that to her.

12:23 PM I head to the cosmetics section with the intention of testing every single tester they have.

12:25 PM There are no testers. Shit.

12:45 PM I notice the tartar sauce is no longer atop the belts, and my heart sinks. Then I realize it's simply been moved into a shopping cart of junk a few feet away, presumably to be taken back to the sauce aisle. Feeling drunk and brave, I quickly grab the bottle of sauce and place it back on the belt rack. It is the most thrilling thing that has happened all day. I have a legitimate adrenaline high.

12:05 PM Over in the video game section, I find that cheat books and walkthrough guides are still a thing that exists. Do these people not have the internet?

12:11 PM I start to dig a hole in the $5 DVD bin to see if there's any hidden gems at the bottom.

12:12 PM There are five Beethoven movies????

12:13 PM There are four Garfield movies????

12:14 PM Chloe Grace Moretz's Carrie is in the $5 bin? It feels like this came out last week. Where does the time go? Am I old?

12:15 PM I wonder when I'll die.

12:16 PM I wonder when Chloe Grace Moretz will die. I wonder if it will be before or after me.

12:17 PM I realize it's impossible to get to the bottom of the $5 DVD bin. Every time I dig out a Mean Girls, a Joyful Noise slides right back in to fill its place. I try and think of some way of making this into a metaphor for my time in Walmart for the sake of this article. But I can't.

12:30 PM "Rosanna" by Toto plays. This song is fucking great. The Walmart DJ is fucking great. I have been consistently unoffended by the music for the last six and a half hours. I wonder how they managed to find this much inoffensive music. I wonder if they focus-group this.

12:50 PM The tartar sauce is still on the belts. I feel irrationally happy about this. The bottle of tartar sauce is my personal Wilson from Castaway.

12:49 PM I notice that there is a machine to check your health over by the pharmacy.

12:52 PM The machine checks my blood pressure. It's 105/70. An onscreen message tells me this is good.

12:59 PM The machine tells me that my BMI and vision are also good. Boring.

1:08 PM I drink another beer.

1:36 PM I check my health again. Still fine. The beer has not affected my blood pressure, vision, or BMI.

1:44 PM "Drops of Jupiter" plays. God this song is fucking great.

2:18 PM A hangover is starting to set in.

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2:36 PM I see an unsupervised child who seems to be attempting to open a register. I watch and silently hope that he succeeds. But unfortunately, someone moves him along.

2:59 PM Though I had been happy that I was able to walk around the store anonymously, I start getting offended that no one seems to remembers me. I have been in the store for nine fucking hours and a grand total of one person has made eye contact with me. Maybe I should start wearing snappier clothes.

3:43 PM The alcohol has almost totally worn off. I feel way too hungover for 3:43 PM in a Walmart.

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3:50 PM Hangover increasing, I decide to see if there's somewhere in the store I can take a nap. I remember a little while back I read a news story about a teenage boy who ran away from home and lived in a Walmart. He was sleeping in the stroller aisle behind a row of giant boxes when he was caught.

3:51 PM I head to the strollers and look for a place to climb behind the boxes, but they're pushed all the way back. I do a lap of the store looking for boxes of a similar size that could make an acceptable temporary bedroom. I find nothing.

3:55 PM I decide to try to take a nap on a swingy chair in the patio furniture section.

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3:59 PM I come to the conclusion that, despite almost overwhelming boredom and an increasingly miserable hangover, I am not able to nap in full view of everyone in a Walmart. I start walking again.

4:05 PM In the toy aisle, I press the tester button on every testable toy. The sounds that come out are, without exception, incredibly fucking annoying. People who have kids are insane.

4:16 PM Kelly Clarkson comes back on and I realize the playlist has reset. That's a ten-hour playlist. As Kelly reminds me that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, I feel myself well up.

4:17 PM Embarrassingly, by the end of the song, Kelly has given me a second wind. I feel rejuvenated.

4:25 PM I realize that at least 20 percent of the products in this store feature the Minions from Despicable me, something from Frozen, or something from Duck Dynasty.

4:30 PM I decide to count how many products are in this Walmart with Minions on them.

5:00 PM I find 33 products with Minions on them. Including pajamas, backpacks, rugs, graham crackers, shirts, toys, Blu-rays, yogurt, cupcakes, Easter products, and towels. This is less than I thought there would be.

5:10 PM I once read that Dolly Parton wrote the songs "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same day. I think about how I just spent 30 minutes counting every Minions product in a Walmart. What the fuck am I doing?

5:23 PM What do people do in jail all day? Jail must be so boring.

5:25 PM I head to the books to see if they have any about people in jail for inspiration on how to make the time move faster.

5:40 PM There are no books about jail. Just romance novels and Spanish-language books about religion.

5:42 PM After spending some time thinking about how people pass time in jail, all I come up with is finding Jesus (nope) and Linda Hamilton doing chin-ups on her upturned bed in Terminator 2 to get buff. I decide to use my incarceration to get into shape.

5:43 PM I download a pedometer app to my phone and start power-walking laps of the store, mixing my route up as to not arouse the suspicions of staff members.

6:00 PM The pedometer app is somehow able to tell me how many steps I'd taken even before I downloaded it. It says I have burned 22 calories. I don't know what this means, really, but it doesn't sound very impressive.

6:20 PM I head to the section of the store where all the exercise equipment is and lift some of the various dumbbells and kettlebells the store stocks. After several minutes, I worry that I might be drawing attention to myself, and stop.

6:30 PM Trying to exercise unnoticed in an enclosed space is impossible. I decide to get back on the learning grind. I realize I know nothing about lightbulbs. And there is a whole aisle of them here! I decide to read the packaging of every lightbulb.

6:39 PM After reading the entire lightbulb aisle, I still don't know anything about lightbulbs.

6:41 PM I move on to the tool aisle as I also know nothing about tools. After reading everything in the tool aisle, I still know nothing about tools.

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6:49 PM I think to myself that maybe I could make a music video starring myself like that guy who was trapped in the airport overnight. But then I remember how much I hated that music video made by the guy who was trapped in an airport overnight and change my mind.

6:50 PM So. Bored. So. Bored. So. So. So. Bored.

6:57 PM Tartar sauce still there.

6:58 PM Being the guy in 127 Hours would suck so bad.

6:59 PM I see an employee whose nametag reads "Joshebed." People here have weird names.

7:00 PM Thinking about time makes time go slower. I need to become distracted. Or maybe drunk again? The thought of being drunk again makes me dry heave.

7:05 PM I start hoping I'll be thrown out and decide to start smiling at staff members as I pass them in the hopes that they'll recognize me and make me leave.

7:07 PM Jesus, the people that work here must think I'm a fucking loser.

7:09 PM I try to make rude words out of the wooden letters in the craft aisle, but there aren't any that are possible due to the selection of letters. Maybe this is deliberate? The best I can manage is "KKK."

7:30 PM I notice that the store sells sympathy cards in packs of 12. Who experiences death regularly enough that they have to buy their sympathy cards in bulk?

7:38 PM Realize that everyone experiences death that regularly once they hit a certain age. Oh God.

7:44 PM I am going to die one day.

7:50 PM Everyone I know and have ever met is going to die one day.

7:55 PM With this in mind, is spending an entire day and most of a night in a Walmart the best use of my time?

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8:16 PM Still walking in loops around the store. In the baby aisle, I discover Nick Lachey has an album of music for babies out on Fisher Price records and get a little sad for him.

8:18 PM Then I again remember, once again, that I've been in a Walmart for over half a day as part of my job and feel less sad about where Nick Lachey is.

9:19 PM I look back at my notes from the last hour and see that I have written four words: nausea, walk, toothache, and Target. I am unable to think what any of these relate to.

9:30 PM The staff have started to do double takes as I walk past them, but none of them ask why I have been in the store since the start of their shift. This is really, really embarrassing. They must think I am insane.

9:43 PM I see a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. It has a pronunciation key on the bottle: "(wus-te(r)-sher)." I try to remember if that's how we say it in England, but I can't figure it out. I miss home.

9:54 PM In the toiletry aisle: What the fuck is any of this shit they claim is in their products? "Marula oil," "yoghurt proteins," "omega packed sea Berries," "diamond dust." This is nonsense.

9:58 PM I wonder how long I'll have to be in this country before I stop finding it funny that it says "gel douche" on all shower gels.

9:59 PM Also businesses that have "lube" in their name.

10:01 PM I sat in a corner and stared into space, then felt embarrassed when a staff member smiled at me and moved on.

10:10 PM My boyfriend texts me to tell me that, as a surprise, he is going to come to the Walmart to do his grocery shopping and see me. I well up again.

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10: 41 PM I become restless with excitement about seeing another person and begin to wander aimlessly. I just move forward and read things as I pass by. This product almost has "boner" and "hard wood" in its name.

10:47 PM I try the display laptops to see if they're connected to the internet. They are not. Manage to keep myself occupied for approximately 30 seconds on an internetless computer. I used to spend hours and hours every day on the computer before my parents got internet. What was I doing?

10:56 PM I read every item in the tool aisle in an effort to learn about tools. Once I finish doing this, I realize I have done this before.

11:00 PM My boyfriend enters the store. I have never been so excited to see another human being. I feel like one of the freed Iranian hostages stepping off of Freedom One and into the arms of my family.

11:30 PM For my final hour of the store, I follow my boyfriend as he buys groceries. I feel mentally and physically exhausted. Every time I try to talk to him, my voice comes out sounding hysterical.

11:59 PM My boyfriend pays for his groceries and it's time to leave.

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12:00 AM Before we exit the store, I check on the tartar sauce. It's still there. As we make our way through the lobby, my boyfriend stops at the key cutting machine and says he's going to copy a key. I try to tell him we should do it another time, but, overcome with emotion, I accidentally blurt out, "nopleaseIreallyreallydon'twanttofuckingdothispleasepleasepleasecanwejustleavepleaseIcan'ttakethisanymore!" We leave the store with the same amount of keys as we entered with.

12:01 AM I realize that I have almost been completely mentally broken by what many Americans would consider merely a long day at work. I feel very grateful that I no longer work in retail and also sad that I'm such a wimp.

12:02 AM Sitting in the car on the ride home, I try to think of what I've learned in the last 20 or so hours spent in and around the Walmart. I have nothing. As a writer, it's always a worry that, when putting yourself into a situation, you will come out with nothing. No conclusion or insight. No epiphany to tie the whole experience together and make it somewhat interesting to the reader. I guess I can conclude that spending an entire day in a Walmart is about as boring as I had suspected spending an entire day in a Walmart would be? Sure. That'll do.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

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Image via Organisation Intersex International

Last week, the tiny nation of Malta passed an internationally groundbreaking new law: the "Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sex Characteristics Act." The law offers a host of new and powerful anti-discrimination protections and eases the process of gender identity change and administrative recognition for transgender, genderqueer, and intersex individuals. But most significantly, the law bans the performance of non-vital gender assignment surgeries on intersex children before they're old enough to consent to the procedure—a global legislative first.

One of the less visible gender identities in the modern world, intersex (medically known in the US as Differences of Sex Development, or DSD) refers to the 0.1 to 0.2 percent of children born every year with genitalia, reproductive organs, or chromosomal patterns that don't fit traditional gender norms. This umbrella categorization covers a host of genetic and medical phenomena (from micropenises to undescended testes that turn out to be ovaries to partially fused labias).

Starting in the 1950s, it became standard practice to perform surgeries on infants to make them better fit traditional genders based on whatever the presiding doctor thought their genetalia resembled the most—ostensibly to save them from strife and confusion later in life. However in the 1990s, intersex people, parents, and advocacy groups started to come forward with stories of the emotional, physical, and mental trauma caused by these involuntary surgeries, often concealed from them and others in their lives. Yet despite growing consensus that such knee-jerk surgeries are unethical, the procedures are still regular and legal in most of the world.

This already makes Malta's law revolutionary (even if it still seems to assume that a child should eventually choose to fit into the male-female gender binary). And it's even more revolutionary considering Malta's firmly Catholic, conservative background—the constitution recognizes Catholicism as the state religion and divorce was only legalized in 2011 by a narrow margin. Yet the tiny island's been on a tear of gender and sexuality reforms since the ruling Labour Party came to power in 2013—they began consultative work on this legislation last October.

To get a better sense of the meaning of this new law for the intersex community, VICE reached out to Hida Viloria, the chairperson of the Organisation Intersex International and director of Organisation Intersex International-USA. We asked Viloria, a prominent intersex advocate and the first openly intersex person to speak by invitation at the UN, about the magnitude of Malta's legislation, why this revolutionary advance occurred in Malta, and what prospects for similar intersex-related legislation might be in other nations, including the US, in the near future.

VICE: How radically new is this legislation compared to existing laws and norms?
Hida Viloria: It's the first government ban on what many of my fellow intersex advocates and I call Intersex Genital Mutilation, because of its similarity to Female Genital Mutilation. So in that sense it's very radical as any first legislative human rights reforms are.

However the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture first recommended that all nations ban [these non-consensual surgeries] in the beginning of February 2013. It's been debated and discussed for almost two decades in the media. So the topic is old, but governments stepping in to support our demands for a ban on these surgeries is new.

Does the Malta legislation have any shortcomings?
I've read the policy several times, and honestly the only shortcoming with the legislation itself that the OII-USA has is that the terminology still puts the impetus on the intersex child to refuse these surgeries. It's worded that they must be postponed until the child is old enough to consent.

I tell people: Imagine if we wrote about reparative therapies for homosexuals in that way. The similar phrase would be: Reparative electroshock therapies for homosexual youth must be postponed until those individuals are old enough to give consent. It's easier to notice, when you think about it with a different population group that's less stigmatized today, that the statement implies that these procedures will happen. In that way, it doesn't entirely refute prejudiced perspectives against intersex traits and intersex people needing to be fixed in some way.

Legislatively, though, the law works perfectly to meet our demands, which are that we are the only ones that have the right to make decisions over our genitals and our reproductive sex organs, which is known as "bodily integrity," which was also called for by the European Council. It's something we've been fighting for as a community for decades. It's the one thing that we all agree upon globally: that these surgeries should be banned.

As someone whose parents gave me the right to bodily integrity and self-determination, I can say from personal experience that I feel incredibly blessed that this was the case, and that the decision to ban Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) and give us the right to be who we are is the sound, ethical, humane way to treat intersex people.

You've mentioned organizations that promoted this idea in the past. But have any other nations or legislative bodies come up with anything close to the Malta legislation?
Well, in 1999 Colombia had legislation which outlawed in one case surgery on an infant until they were five years old. It was one case, which does set precedent, but is very different from a nationwide ban. Again, [that's] still problematic because at five years old the parents can take the child in unless the child really puts up a big fight. As everyone in the intersex community knows, and many in the LGBTQ community know, we're pressured into things in youth. So I think we need to be careful that these surgeries are still not suggested and that children and parents are not pressured to go through that.

The same can of worms about consent would apply to Malta's law too, wouldn't it?
That is the one general limit of the Malta legislation. It can't really do that. It says, until the child is old enough to give consent. You could have cases where the parents are pressuring the child. I would prefer something that says, unless the child requests such procedures. However, even that, how easy would it be to lie in court that, yes, the child requested this, but changed their mind later, for example.

So legislation can only do so much. But [Malta] is a fantastic victory for the community.

How did this world first happen in Malta, of all places?
Malta had a unique situation where one of the members of their government, Slvan Agius, is a tremendous intersex ally. Before he started working [as the Human Rights Policy Coordinator at the Maltese Ministry for Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs, and Civil Liberties in 2013], he was with the International Gay, Lesbian, Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex Association, and they have been very intersex inclusive. He, as a representative of the organization in Europe, organized the first international convention of intersex advocates called the International Intersex Forum. He helped bring together a global [intersex] community. And in its third year, he brought the Forum to Malta. (I organized that Forum along with him and Ruth Baldocchino, another tremendous ally) We had the world's top intersex advocacy leaders there, and [Agius] invited Helena Dalli [the Minister at his Ministry in Malta], to meet us and attend the forum.

She heard about our need for bodily integrity firsthand. I think this kind of hands on connection between the community and government legislators in Malta is what really allowed this. Just like Obama's daughters had two friends with gay parents who helped him to understand gay marriage, she had a personal opportunity to connect with intersex people that helped her to understand the need for this legislation.

You're US based and have some media visibility. So why don't you get the same sort of access or connections to the government here as the community did in Malta?
One advantage that the community has in Europe and also in Australia over the US is that neither Intersex Genital Mutilation nor our pathologization originated there. We were pathologized in the US in 2006 as Disorders of Sex Development (DSD), which became our official medical label (and still is) rather than just intersex, or looking at each variation separately and by name. That didn't happen in Europe and Australia, where the majority of organizations rejected the DSD label.

In Europe, the intersex movement bonded with the LGBT community. In the US, the first organization [the Intersex Society of North America], did not want to work in alliance with the LGBT community, where LGBT leaders were told that they should not add the I to LGBT.

In my opinion, that has slowed us down, because, as you can see, the needs of the trans and intersex community are very similar in certain ways. We both have gender recognition issues that sometimes come up as adults, such as changes on our IDs, and being targets of discrimination if we look gender variant. There's an issue of having choices and being allowed to make choices over our bodies that we share. In our case, it's mostly that we get treatment we don't want and for trans people, they sometimes are not given the right to get treatment that they do want.

How are you trying to address those problems now?
Right now, we're building alliances with the LGBTI community in the US, and others, as well as continuing to advance intersex visibility and dialogue with US government officials. OII-USA initiated conversations with the US State Department in 2012 (and is still in conversations) on the need to have LGBTI inclusion and the fact that we're not yet included in any anti-discrimination legislation, for example—even in the rhetoric of it. You have sexual orientation and gender identity, which don't cover intersex people, in existing legislation.

Malta added sex characteristics to this. Australia added intersex status to this. We need something similar to that in the US. But the framework of intersex people needs to change from this medicalized view that's been so popular—we're often talked about even in advocacy organizations as patients. Or simply the children's issue is the only issue that gets looked at, but we're actually real, live adults with real human rights needs. The whole community needs to be looked at. And LGBTI inclusion is helpful with that.

If ISNA had to tell LGBTQ leaders to include intersex years ago, what's the resistance now to including an I in the acronym when you're asking for it?
[It's] the same argument as when the T was added: That not all trans people are homosexual. It's not a sexual identity, so why add it? Well, what we all have in common is that we're discriminated against because we break sex and gender norms. And the more visible that is, the more we're discriminated against.

I often say we're on the frontlines of homophobia and transphobia, because whether or not we grow up to be LGBT, it's assumed that we will, and there's a false belief that these surgeries will stop that. So in a sense these surgeries are trying to prevent LGBT adults. They're incredibly homophobic and transphobic as well as interphobic, and that's why I really believe that we need to be included in the community. And doing so will make it very easy for legislators to understand what the real human rights situation is here.

Are you hoping that the Malta legislation will help you get recognition in LGBTQ communities and in legislative circles in America?
I think that's already happening. Every civil rights movement has a difficult initiatory period and we're in ours right now. So the only reason it's not moving faster is just because we're in the early phases. But given that, I think that this [Malta] ban is an incredibly positive development.

What incentive do you think the US has to follow Malta in its intersex rights advances?
The United States has been a leader in civil rights and social inclusion of people that fall outside sex and gender norms. And OII-USA encourages the US government to continue to be a leader in LGBTI equality by supporting its intersex citizens' right to be who they are by enacting a ban on Intersex Genital Mutilation.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Photo via the New York Times

If you thought a months-long spectacle of police violence against men of color from Ferguson to New York to Los Angeles had changed the national climate so much that cops might hesitate before using lethal force, you were wrong.

A white police officer is being charged with murder in South Carolina after a video surfaced Tuesday in which the cop can be seen shooting an unarmed—and fleeing—black man eight times in the back.

The video, first obtained by the New York Times and filmed by a bystander, makes for harrowing viewing. But this seems to be what it takes for a cop to face criminal charges—there must be a video of him shooting at, and killing, a suspect who clearly represents no threat.

On Sunday around 9:30 AM, Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston Police Department pulled over a Mercedes-Benz for a broken taillight. The driver, 50-year-old Walter L. Scott, allegedly took flight. Slager, 33, apparently gave chase, discharging his Taser before radioing in.

"Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser," the officer said, with police reports suggesting he feared for his life.

Eighty percent of North Charleston cops are white, despite blacks comprising nearly half the city's population—a ratio of the sort that is also found in Ferguson, where the feds found systematic bias against blacks by a white-dominated law enforcement apparatus.

After felling Scott with the last of his eight shots, Slager approached to handcuff the dying man—and appeared to drop the Taser near the body. According to police reports, officers then attempted to resuscitate Scott, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

Scott had a history of minor legal troubles, having been arrested ten times, mostly for failing to pay child support and appear in court, the local newspaper Post and Courier reported. According to Slager's former attorney David Aylor, who dropped his client late Tuesday, "When confronted, Officer Slager reached for his Taser—as trained by the department—and then a struggle ensued. The driver tried to overpower Officer Slager in an effort to take his Taser."

Scott is survived by four children. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the FBI, and the US Justice Department are all reportedly investigating the shooting. In the meantime, Slager, who was arrested Tuesday, remains a member of the force, albeit in an administrative capacity.

This post has been updated.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

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One person at the protest sported a patch that reads "SPVM [Montreal police] in the service of the rich and fascists." Photos by Alex Bailey

Tuesday was, in many ways, a very normal night in downtown Montreal.

About a thousand young people blocked downtown streets, protesting against the provincial government's budget cuts.

But unlike most nights, everyone there was a woman and/or transgender.

It was no statistically improbable coincidence—men were "forbidden" from taking part in Tuesday night's march for a whole bevy of reasons.

"OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICES! Let's be numerous and fearless in the streets at night!" read the event's invite. "Cisgender men not welcome."

Organizers say some women are more comfortable protesting without men in the crowd, even if that means going chest-to-chest with an overwhelmingly male set of riot police.

They also say larger, louder men can drown out the voices of their female counterparts.

Organizer Catherine Fournier-Poirier explained that it's generally men at the front of the protest lines and men who are more confident.

"We need spaces where women can speak and women can empower themselves and be in front of the line for once," she said.

They also argue Philippe Couillard government's ongoing effort to cut $3 billion in provincial spending—mostly in health care and education—would disproportionately affect women.

Meanwhile, they say some of the province's current investments—like the Plan Nord, which would see mineral extraction in the northern part of the province—will give more jobs to men.

On top of that, critics say restructuring the province's health care system will make it harder for women to access abortion.

So, for protesters like Florence Dancause, showing up on Tuesday night was mostly about speaking up for women.

"This is for us: we are women, we're protesting for ourselves, for our own interests."

Perhaps sensing there might be some political debate over whether men should be allowed to march with women for women's issues, the event's Facebook page shut down its wall in advance of the protest lest the MRAs get their undies in a bunch.

People still found ways to weigh in with generally sexist comments.

"There's a bunch of people over at the #manifencours who should go back to their kitchen and make me a sandwich," wrote one guy, stealing his grandfather's joke.

Y'en a un maudite gang à la #manifencours qui devraient retourner à leur cuisine pour me faire une sanwich
— Conrad le barbare (@ConradLeBarbare) April 8, 2015

In the end, no men showed up, or if they did, they didn't cause trouble. Fournier-Poirier said that if men did come, they wouldn't encourage it—but they also wouldn't tell them to leave.

"I invite people to not politicize people during the protest. It was advertised that men are not welcome, but it's not our job to say who is a man and who is a woman."

But as the protest took over downtown Montreal streets, an American tourist—who happens to be a man—was accidentally swept up as riot police blocked all directions except that of the protest.

Thorn Capron didn't really know what was going on, or why women were yelling at him.

Once it was explained to him, he was cool with it.

"I have nothing against it, People seem very passionate about it. I just hope it doesn't get bloody," he said.

It didn't get bloody, but police seemed to be fairly equal-opportunity in their handling of the protest.

As usual, scores of riot police lined the protest route wielding shields and batons. Undeterred, the crowd screamed at them to move, and chants of "fuck the police/no justice/no peace" broke out.

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Riot police lined up to cut off protesters

When police blocked their path, chants changed to "It's not up to men to tell us what to do."

A Montreal bylaw requires protesters to give police a protest route, but organizers of the protest didn't bother, causing police to scramble to catch up with the crowd.

About an hour into the march, the police declared it illegal, claiming someone assaulted an officer.

That's when things deteriorated: police kettled protesters into a smaller side street, set off sound grenades, and pepper sprayed protesters.

Ikram Belbahri, a woman in her 20s, was walking to the Metro with her friend while police were aggressively trying to break up the crowd. She said she wasn't surprised when they grabbed her, hit her with their shields, but she was upset because she wasn't part of the protest.

"I'm honestly more pissed [about that]," she said.

One woman was arrested and people hit by tear gas tended to their swollen faces in the Metro after police eventually dispersed the crowd. But it was, all-in-all, a typical Montreal evening protest.

For men sour about missing out on the march—fret not.

The student protest movement resumes all week, as organizers try to re-create the 2012 "Maple Spring" protests that saw the fall of the provincial government. There are about two protests per day planned for Montreal.

Follow Kate McKenna on Twitter.

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Whether it be through a genuine interest in surrealist cinema, morbid curiosity, or from that stage in your life when you start Googling Pixies lyrics, it seems that a lot of people have seen Simone Mareuil getting her eyeball slit open.

This, of course, is the gory money shot that concludes the two-minute opening scene of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou, and the image that burns itself most intensely into the depths of your brain.

Not so deep that it can't be dug up, mind; that sharpened razor and the leaking optical goo will inevitably resurface, unsolicited, years down the line, courtesy of the same cruel and self-hating part of your brain which has you remember 2 Girls 1 Cup every now and then.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/BIKYF07Y4kA' width='560' height='315']

'Un Chien Andalou'

It's the eye of a calf, apparently, that actually gets the blade taken to it, not that this retrospective knowledge goes any way toward shaking the scene's uniquely unsettling feeling. What always got me about it wasn't just the natural eww, gross reaction to an eyeball being cut open—although, admittedly, that is a strong impulse—but rather the perverse wrongness of it all.

The victim of this assault isn't screaming, or running upstairs to hide, or skinny dipping in the lake where the previous batch of sexy teens were found dead 20 years ago tonight. Instead, completely calm, she barely flinches. It throws out the rulebook.

It's perhaps unexpected, then, that this most artsy video nasty has been adapted into the realm of the video game—a creative medium which, traditionally at least, thrives on logic and rules. But that's exactly the gap that The Tender Cut, a creation described as "a first-person interactive installation/exploration game" inspired by the classic scene, attempts to bridge.

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It's been made at a two-person indie studio based in Saint Petersburg, known as No, Thanks Games. And, as you'd expect of any faithful homage to the 1929 film, it's not the most pleasant experience. However, the development duo behind it—Ilya Kononenko and Yuliya Kozhemyako—are keen to assure me that The Tender Cut is about more than re-creation:

"There was not a goal to translate the movie to an interactive realm," they tell me. "It is a brand new experience inspired by the movie. It was born as a result of our reflection on the scene. An interactive format makes you an actor instead of a viewer, making it possible to experience the scene from the other side and get another dimension of the emotional message."

Like the film, the world of The Tender Cut is presented entirely in black and white. You find yourself in a recreation of the room from the film's opening, sitting in the same chair as Mareuil's character, around which are scattered various significant odds and ends from the scene: most notably the cigarette and lighter as famously used by Buñuel on the balcony, the offending razor blade, and the strop on which it is sharpened.

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Only here there's a television playing the infamous scene on a loop.

Perhaps it's the ingrained, "watch and learn" pattern of video game tutorials that drove me to this conclusion, but there's a definite sense that this looping segment of film is telling you what to do. In implying that re-enactment of the scene is the goal, and surrounding you with all the tools with which to do so, the game does the mechanical equivalent of holding your head and forcing you to watch something viscerally repulsive over and over, to ensure you hit the correct sequence of processes.

It's in first-person, but your perspective here is unclear. You're both part of the scene and an observer of it, both the perpetrator and the victim of an act that you're steered toward at every turn. I also noted that the menu screen of The Tender Cut uses the verb "Watch" rather than "Play" to initiate the experience, a move which speaks to the stark sense of powerlessness throughout.

"Powerlessness was certainly one of the reasons for that," the developers tell me. "We wanted players to dive into a surrealistic dream. And we wanted to translate feelings you get when you cannot affect that dream—you may see, or hear, or even do something, but you can't escape and break the dream's rules. The dream begins to control you. A movie may give the same feeling; it makes you feel like you've been placed inside its reality, and are unable to get back."

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As they go on, Ilya and Yuliya's focus veers increasingly toward an innovation that would not only make the cut itself all the more startling and realistic, but also make that oppressive dream-world feel all the more inescapable: virtual reality.

"We thought about something like this with major applying of augmented (or even virtual) reality technologies—a real room with virtual stuff," they explain. "Maybe one day we will release it.

"The big advantage of video games is the new technologies and fundamentally new experiences they can give. We think the first well-modeled gutted corpse a player will meet during a walk in VR glasses will affect him or her at least as strongly as Un Chien Andalou's original eye-slicing scene."

"We want to experiment with virtual reality in our next project," they add, confirming the apparent creative interest they share in the technology's potential. "We have a bunch of ideas. One of them deals with the paintings of Max Ernst and Joan Miró, another based on experiments with properties of VR as an expression tool. We also have a plan to port The Tender Cut to Oculus Rift."

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Feeling my way through The Tender Cut has to go down as possibly the most unsettling ten minutes of gaming I've ever experienced, and that was with everything contained well and truly within the two-dimensional confines of my laptop screen. I'm not convinced that an Oculus Rift version would be something I'd personally like to experience.

But, at the same time, it does feel like it's set up pretty perfectly for VR. There is, and probably always will be, a woozy disconnection with reality that occurs with headsets such as the Oculus Rift, an unavoidable kink in the human-tech interface which would actually complement the nightmarish experience in this case.

While we wait for that nasty, sweaty future, you can have your very own short surrealist nightmare—with the additional comfort of not having it strapped to your face—free of charge.

The Tender Cut can be downloaded and played for free on its official website.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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Rows of F-4s lay idle at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. All photos by the author

The United States currently boasts 5,448 active aircraft, giving it the world's largest air force by far. Russia comes in second with what is generally estimated to be a bit less than half that number, but that's still fewer planes than America has stashed in its maintenance and regeneration facility. I visited what is affectionately known as "the Boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, to see what amounts to the world's second-largest air force.

"We have around 4,000 aircraft here," Public Affairs Officer Teresa Pittman told me, "though that number changes every day."

The Boneyard emerged after World War II as the stash spot for a massive surplus of planes. Some of them have been baking in the Arizona desert for over half a century. The perfect climate, as well as the dedicated work of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, keeps most of them in—or somewhere close to—flying condition. Now, in the wake of military withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Boneyard is again crowded with aircraft waiting to be scrapped, mothballed, used for parts, turned into museum pieces, or sold to foreign allies.

I stood with the cheerful Pittman on the tarmac, holding onto my cap, as the most recent arrival touched down. Like 98 percent of the aircraft there, the helicopter came in under its own power. It was an HH-60H Seahawk, but the men just called it a "Hotel."

This particular Seahawk was special. "It has more combat hours than any aircraft in the Navy," the pilot, a Navy lieutenant commander, told me. (Pittman requested that I obscure the pilot's name for reasons of personal security.) The pilot and crew bringing it in were the same crew that had flown the Seahawk in battle. They were from the Red Wolves Squadron, one of two in the Navy dedicated to supporting the Special Forces. I asked the commander about some of the missions he recalled involving this craft.

"Typically, we'd have between two and eight aircraft, rotor wing. We'd have AC-130 gunships supporting us, Apaches. We'd carry assaulters in. Sometimes, we'd land a little distance away from the target, and they would sneak in. Sometimes, we'd land right on top of the target, and they'd go in—snatch and grab guys. Sometimes, you'd have targets that would start running away. We'd track them down, and talk the ground troops onto them."

When asked about the mission that had meant the most to him, the pilot recounted an operation he had led on September 11, 2009. "We got a high-value al Qaeda operative who had been known as a bad guy," he replied. "He'd done some things to injure and kill US and coalition troops. It was fitting that it was the anniversary of the World Trade Center attack."

Like many of the aircraft here, the Seahawk had been written on with markers by the crew to commemorate its final flight. "Unfortunately," the pilot added, "due to sequestration, both squadrons are getting cut. That's the reason we're flying in this aircraft, shutting it down. It's a sad day. I understand they're replacing them with newer aircraft, cheaper to operate and maintain. Progress, I guess. It all has to happen."

The almost anthropomorphic bond the crews have with their aircraft was evident everywhere. The messages written on the various fuselages said things like: "Thanks for the good times!" One simply bore the phrase "Last flight" with a name and a date. Occasionally there was something cheekier, like a reference to the "Mile High Club."

Pittman spoke of the calls she regularly receives from former crew members who want to visit their old birds. "I see more attachment by the crew chief that gets her ready to fly," she noted. "I get a lot more calls from crew chiefs who want to see their old planes. Sometimes we can help them, and sometimes we can't."

We left the tarmac to wander among the seemingly endless rows of aircraft in tidy lines. Everywhere we looked, there was a story. In the nose art, there was a definite drift towards political correctness as time advanced—there are no more scantily clad girlfriends and buxom Dolly Partons these days. Grinning skulls, though, are still Kosher. There were the big "Let's Roll!" eagle and American flag decals on some of the transports from the feverish weeks after 9/11. There was President Eisenhower's old Army One helicopter rusting away in a corner. There were fields of cut up and demilled B-52 bombers. At one time, they had been America's first line of defense against the Soviet Union; now they are casualties of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Their dismemberment is accentuated so Russian satellites can confirm their destruction.

Several F-15s sported kill markings from earlier wars. Beneath one of the cockpits, a small Iraqi flag was painted, overlaid with the words "MIG-23 KILL JAN 28 1991." The fighter had been flown by Captain Don "Muddy" Watrous in the early days of the first Gulf War. He had been separated from the other aircraft in his squadron when he engaged an Iraqi MiG near the Iranian border. The bandit apparently dodged three of his missiles before the fourth hit home.

Like "Muddy," just about all the pilot names stenciled beneath the cockpits were some kind of nom de guerre , like "Wig," "Cheese," and "Snap."

"The names are a rite of passage," one of the pilots explained, adding that the best and most beloved ones are deprecating in nature.

We moved on past a couple of crated F-16s bound for Indonesia to a hangar where similar fighters were being turned into unmanned drones. The radio played country music as the mechanics moved gracefully beneath the glossy fuselages.

Next, we visited a pair of techs working on an A-10 warthog. One of the jovial mechanics recalled having seen some of these birds in action knocking out tanks during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The A-10s are known for their extreme robustness, and yet, with their innards exposed, they seemed rather delicate. The tech pointed out a long, thin wire winding through a mass of machinery. It looked insignificant, but he explained it was a kind of Achilles heel. If that little wire were to be severed, the plane would be incapacitated.

"What's going to happen to this A-10?" I asked.

"It's headed for the shredder," Pittman replied. "It could become a car or an aluminum can."

Our last stop was an open-air hangar where fighters were being repaired and outfitted with onboard oxygen generators. Up above, a family of owls had built a nest. The technicians had constructed a box around it to keep the chicks from falling out. We spotted the male perched high above on a steel beam. He was a perfect mascot for the Boneyard—another fine example of historical flight technology.

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Mohamed Fahmy in court with colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, Mohamed Fahmy went to the Canadian embassy in Cairo to get a replacement for his Canadian passport that had been seized by police during his arrest in 2013. Rather than being given the customary application papers, he was instead handed a sheet of paper stating that he would be unable to receive an official passport until his travel restrictions, imposed by the Egyptian courts as part of his bail conditions, had been lifted.

"The passport is needed for marriage, for security purposes, and my daily life—renting a flat, staying in a hotel, to travel within the country, to even provide a power of attorney," Fahmy said in an interview with VICE Canada. "Right now I am walking around with an A4 paper that the police don't recognize."

NDP MP Paul Dewar raised concerns in parliament in regards to Fahmy's predicament, asking what Ottawa has been doing to provide him a passport. The minister of state and consular affairs, Lynne Yelich responded that "when Mr. Fahmy is able to travel, we have a travel document ready."

Fahmy, who was working as Cairo's Al Jazeera English bureau chief, was arrested and jailed in December 2013, alongside journalists and colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed. In June 2014, an Egyptian court handed him a seven-year sentence with charges that included "conspiring with terrorists," "producing false news," and "using unlicensed equipment." The charges received widespread international condemnation, while the Canadian government came under fire for its lukewarm response.

The court of cassation ordered a retrial for the trio on January 1 of this year, with the first session to begin on February 12. In the interim, however, Greste was deported back to Australia under a decree from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el Sisi that allows foreign detainees to be repatriated following clearance from the prosecutor general and the Egyptian cabinet.

Fahmy's own deportation to Canada seemed not only probable, but was heavily anticipated. Fahmy gave up his Egyptian nationality earlier this year to be eligible under the deportation decree. Soon after news broke that Greste was on a plane home, former Foreign Affairs minister John Baird stated that the Canadian journalist's release and return was "imminent."

Fahmy, who still had not been repatriated back to Canada nearly two weeks later, stood alongside Mohamed in court, where after over 400 days in prison, the judge ordered the two be released on bail. In response, Yelich, who took up the file after Baird stepped down from office, said that Ottawa welcomed the news of the bail, but that "the prospect of Mr. Fahmy standing retrial is unacceptable," adding that Canada would continue to push for his "immediate and full release."

Fahmy told VICE Canada that the judge presiding over the case had specifically advised him to try and retrieve his Canadian passport from a police station, and in the case that it was lost, to seek assistance from the Canadian embassy.

When he did go to the police station, Fahmy was told that his passport had indeed been lost by the authorities, and so he pursued attaining a new passport with the Canadian Embassy. There he was given the letter that cited Article 9 of the Canadian Passport Order, "that requires that court-imposed mobility restrictions are respected."

However, according to Gary Caroline, one of Fahmy's Canadian attorneys, the letter misinterprets the article. "What article 9 says is that the minister may refuse to issue a passport, subject to certain limitations," said Caroline. One of those limitations is: if the person "stands charged outside of Canada of any offense, that in Canada would be considered an offense."

But Baird had already stated publicly that Canada would not recognize the charges brought up against Fahmy," Caroline said. Given the legal structure of the Passport Order provision, "it is still under the minister's discretion," he added.

"We thought the judge was the one making obstacles at first—both Canada and my attorneys had asked for them to release a passport to me," said Fahmy.

"Canada has imposed a condition that the Egyptian authorities themselves haven't imposed," said Caroline.

When asked whether there has been a shift in Ottawa's stance since February for pushing for Fahmy's immediate release, Erica Meekes, Yelich's communications director stated, "We respect the judicial process of the host country," and maintained that the "travel document" would be available from Fahmy once his "travel restrictions" are rescinded.

Police presence has risen under el Sisi, and while having a passport could seem trivial without travel plans, showing proper identification is a reality in a city where security and police checkpoints are peppered throughout the place. "I spent half an hour at a police checkpoint, and the officer asked 'aren't you the journalist from the Marriott Cell?' So this brought up more suspicion."

Given the notoriety of the Al Jazeera trial, the fact that he has given up his Egyptian citizenship, and not having a proper official documentation, Fahmy said he felt that he could face complications from the police. "I was lucky, because it would have been likely that any other officer would have taken me to the police station."

Fahmy added that not having a passport was affecting those around him, "The situation is so sensitive and I'm already under the microscope. My mother and fiancée are paranoid I could be arrested at a checkpoint."

Fahmy has also been planning to marry his fiancée Marwa Omara for months. Once he was released on bail, they went to the foreign marriage office and were told that without a passport Fahmy was ineligible to be wed. According to Fahmy, the Canadian ambassador even accompanied them, to guarantee that Canada had no problems with the proceedings. Still, they were refused.

"The justice ministry basically said that Mohamed doesn't have rights. And if the embassy can't get an exception get us married, how will they help get him out of the country?" asked Omara. She said that Baird had also told her that her she could expect her fiancé to be released. "I depended on the Canadian government. I was very disappointed. I feel they over-promised us."

Fahmy maintains that Canadian consular services have been helpful.

"They visited me while I was in prison, they kept in contact with my family, they checked in on my health." But he says, "it seems they [consular services] are getting orders from Canada."

"I think Ottawa has shackled the Canadian ambassador's efforts in Cairo and that their hyper conservative approach has manifested a political blockade that left me behind after I renounced my Egyptian citizenship in order to be deported. And once again and for a matter that should be a purely Canadian decision," he told VICE.

"This is not good for Canada's reputation. They are setting a precedent and it gives the impression that Canada cannot take care of its citizens," said Fahmy. Rights groups and Fahmy's supporters have criticized Canada's response to the situation, calling Ottawa's handling of the case overly mild, delayed, and ineffective. Fahmy's family launched a Twitter campaign #HarperCallEgypt, to encourage the prime minister to engage more directly in discussions with the Egyptian government.

"My lawyers requested that I speak to Mr. Harper directly to clarify the situation, and said that it would be a confidential conversation. However, he refused," said Fahmy. He added that Baird had also turned down a request from his lawyer, Amal Clooney, to discuss his situation back in January.

"I intend to start a constructive debate in Canada, and I will speak publicly about the shortcomings of the Harper government in this regard, so that in the future, someone else won't end up in this horrific situation."