It's the morning of Friday, January 20, 2017, and it's Inauguration Day. Donald John Trump Sr. has his hand on a Bible, and America looks on, agape, as he swears to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

How we got to this point isn't important. The question now is, what the fuck is about to happen?

To come up with even the vaguest answer, we have to look back at history. Because as British TV science guy James Burke once said, "Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look." If that sounds a little ominous, that's because we're talking about the presidential administration of the "You're fired" guy from TV.

University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh was game to talk to us about whether a Trump presidency is really the doomsday scenario it sounds like. Why should you listen to Balogh? Well, for one thing he's an expert in 20th-century American politics, and hosts a pretty popular radio show about history called Backstory With the American History Guys. And when I emailed him to set up an interview, he made a prediction about Trump that has already come true.

In an email on Friday, Balogh wrote that while the Donald's tendency to shoot his mouth off seemed to be working for him so far, "Trump would soon use it on a person or organization that the broad majority of the public admires, respects, [or] pities, and it would work against Trump."

The very next day, Trump went off the rails, disparaging Senator John McCain's war record during a speech at a Republican candidates forum in Iowa. "He's a war hero 'cause he was captured," Trump said of the former POW. "I like people that weren't captured, OK?" (McCain, as you may remember, was held captive in Vietnam for five years, refusing early release even after repeated torture and beatings.)

Predictably, the remark earned Trump some third -degree burns, including from Republicans, who had been reluctant to speak out against the party's clown candidate.

While it didn't take a psychic to know Trump's own gigantic mouth would be his biggest obstacle this election, Balogh's remarkably spot-on prediction suggested he was every bit the perspicacious historian I'd hoped he was. His thoughts on the topic might help us imagine what it'll be like in a couple years when we all live in Trump's America.

For more on people who don't know when to shut up, check out 'Slut-Shaming Preacher.'

VICE: Pretend Trump is president. How might this hypothetically have happened?
Brian Balogh: I think Donald Trump—like conservative talk radio which, exploded in the 1990s with Rush Limbaugh—reminds us that there is a solid percentage of Americans out there who feel utterly ignored and neglected by the candidates that both parties have put forward to date... But Republicans and Democrats alike would be making a mistake if they assumed that nobody was listening to a guy like Donald Trump, or [that] nobody was listening to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s. These folks tap into a kind of frustration that comes back to a really basic question, which is: How can a country as militarily powerful and economically successful as the United States be in such a state? And then you can fill in the blank for what you think "such a state" is.

What would be in Trump's inaugural address?
First thing you [would] hear ironically is: "The nation needs to come together." He's gonna reach out to every American. I think that you're gonna hear that because—for one thing—I think that he will have reached out to more factions if he makes it to a general election, which he obviously would have to if he's [being] inaugurated.

I do think he will have toned down a lot of his divisive rhetoric. But I can't think of any inaugural speech, no matter how divisive the election—take a look at [George] W. Bush, obviously [that was] a bitterly fought election, one decided by the electoral college—and if you look at Bush's inaugural speech, it's all about being a president for all Americans.

Are you saying he'll reach across the aisle?
I think he's gonna have to do some of that. Specifically, he's going to have to win independents. There are just very few Democrats that I can imagine Trump winning over; so if he wins the election, he will have reached out to independents. A lot of those folks are moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, and what they dislike the most is the partisan rancor and the divisiveness of politics.

So how exactly will he appeal to independents?
I think balancing the budget is one that he's already talking about in his campaign. I think a lot of independents are fiscal conservatives, although they're not necessarily social [conservatives]. So I think that balancing the budget, going after entitlements are the kinds of thing that could help him bring together different factions within the Republican Party—writing off, of course, lots of Democrats.

Do you think being a billionaire will have an effect?
Yeah, and it's not just being rich. It's his entrepreneurial bent, his deal-making, which usually entails what some people want [in a president]: driving hard bargains. The candidate—not a president, but a candidate—who came closest to being that entrepreneurial, surprisingly, was Mitt Romney. He also ran big organizations and that kind of thing. But, you know, Romney got in a lot of trouble for closing down American factories and laying off American workers as a result of his deal-making. That was the business that Romney was in, and what I'm suggesting is that there are very few entrepreneur deal-makers who haven't made the occasional deal that really skirts the edge of the law.

What will be some of the challenges for Trump when he tries to govern?
The place where I predict he'd have the most trouble, oddly enough, is with business. Business doesn't like presidents who are provocative and rile people up. I'm obviously grossly generalizing, [but] in general, big business likes predictability and stability. Wall Street, the stock market, they like to know where a [president] stands. I don't think any politician who is all over the place is going to be embraced by big business.

But that might make him a maverick. Don't people like that?
However much of a maverick Trump might be, I assume he's going to be dealing with, if he wins, a Republican majority in Congress. The Republicans are gonna want to pursue a whole set of issues, not just pick and choose what Donald Trump wants; they're going to want to horse-trade.

Will Trump be able to make good on his tough talk about immigration?
Ultimately, real immigration reform—whether it's the Immigration Act of 1965, or the original immigration acts and restrictions going back to the 1920s, or Ronald Reagan's immigration reform in the 80s—real immigration reform has to happen in Congress. And, you know, I think Republicans during the primaries—and surely somebody like Hillary Clinton—are going to ask Donald Trump exactly how he plans to deal with Congress.

This might be a dumb question, but is there any possibility that voters might go easy on him?
If you are an extraordinarily unifying and popular figure, like FDR or Ronald Reagan, then they'll kind of give you a pass—they won't take you on initially. Obviously it's conceivable for me to imagine Trump being president, but it's hard to imagine him arriving in office with that kind of popularity.

Does President Trump have the biggest mouth out of all the presidents?
I think the closest we would get is the president who had some of the lowest approval ratings at the end of his presidency: Harry Truman. During his first term, nobody could believe he was going to get re-elected, and that's where we got the phrase "to err is Truman." So people hated him.

You said before that there were other parallels with Truman, right?
He's a guy who—in a way that is similar to Trump—knew who his constituency was, and he was re-elected by rallying that base. [Truman's] constituency was labor; it was middle-class, lower-middle-class ethnic groups. Of course, organized labor was much stronger in those days, but regardless, he's a guy who talked to his people. And that really was a little like Donald Trump when I think about it. He didn't care what wealthy Republicans in the boardroom thought about him, and, for that matter, he didn't care as much about the intellectual liberal Adlai Stevenson types in the Democratic party either.

So he pissed people off Trump-style?
No one is like Donald Trump when it comes to pissing people off, and that's because that is his modus operandi. That's why we're talking about him. We're not talking about him because of his accomplishments. We're not talking about him because he's demonstrated political skills or leadership, for that matter. We're talking about him because he knows how to get attention by saying outrageous things.

OK, so like with Truman, we've just endured four years of Trump and now...
Now you're gonna have me talk about his re-election campaign? [Laughs.]

Well, if it worked out for Truman...?
I was not going out on that limb with you. I was suggesting that Truman was talking to a base that happened to be in a general election campaign.

What kinds of presidents do "dealmakers" like Trump make? Being a tough negotiator could be good, right?
Well, I think a dealmaker is very personalized—it's a guy who holds all of the chips, quite literally, in his hands. He's going to sit down with another person and make a deal, let's say for a piece of real estate. He's got his lawyers and accountants, though, don't get me wrong. But he holds a lot of the resources, the assets needed to make that deal right in his hands. And presidents are rather famous for at least feeling like they hold very few assets in their hands.

What about "dealmakers" who lead other countries?
A lot of Americans admire Vladimir Putin because he gets things done. He gets things done because he controls all of those assets politically—totalitarian government under Stalin got a lot of things done too. That's what totalitarian government does. You know the phrase: "Mussolini made the trains run on time." Well, in the United States, at least so far, we would rather that the trains be a little later (in the case of Amtrak) than sacrifice having a say in government. Having a say means multiple players. You can put together coalitions and come up with agreements—don't get me wrong—but it's very different from the way businessmen think of making a deal.

We've had an actor president, but never anything like a reality TV star, right?
I thought about Huey Long, a very colorful governor of Louisiana who ran for president on a Share Our Wealth program. He had a very personalized approached to governing, and his positions were all over the place. You know, he was a staunch segregationist. He was a traditional Democrat in some ways, but he did advocate a kind of radical reform in the income tax in order to "Share Our Wealth." He was big, and part of his popularity in Louisiana was his road-building and what he did for the people.

George Washington had kind of a personality cult, didn't he?
He was on the tip of my tongue! And that was probably a good thing because he was able—at least in his first administration and for much of his eight years—he was able to stand above the fray as an admired war hero, a general leader. But there was a cult of personality for George Washington. That's a good comparison.

I just don't think the comparison to Washington tracks...
I don't think so either. I think the presidency is pretty different now. Back then, people deferred to George Washington—they didn't expect to be entertained by George Washington.

But even a Trump presidency could be boring, right?
Here's my one-liner on a Trump presidency: We should amend the Constitution to change the two-term limit to "canceling" the presidency. That's just because if there's a Trump presidency, people will get bored with it the way they get bored with a TV show. So why shouldn't we cancel it like a TV show? It'll be subject to ratings. Gallup and Nielsen can make a deal on what point the Trump presidency gets canceled. And trust me, it'll be real popular on re-runs. There'll be a real following.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Author Harper Lee and her novel 'Go Set a Watchman.' Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Courtesy of Harper Collins

In 1957, Nelle Harper Lee, a young, unpublished Manhattan resident and native of Monroeville, Alabama, completed and submitted a draft manuscript of a novel to the J. B. Lippincott Company. Set chronologically not long after the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the semi-autobiographical text explored its 26-year-old white protagonist Jean Louise "Scout" Finch's trip—from New York City—to visit her elderly father, distinguished attorney Atticus Finch, who was still living in her childhood hometown of semi-rural Maycomb, Alabama. Among those Jean Louise encountered once back home were lifelong friend and suitor Henry "Hank" Clinton, her father's devoted mentee and law-firm heir apparent; her snobbish aunt Alexandra "Aunty" Finch Hancock, who after being abandoned by her husband had moved in with Atticus; her eccentric uncle, Dr. John Hall Finch, a retired physician and bibliophile; and Calpurnia ("Cal"), the retired black woman who had reared her after Jean Louise's mother's early death.

The draft of the novel showed considerable but inconsistent literary skill in its depiction of Maycomb's middle class milieu and mores, its characterizations, its humor, and its overall prose style. It also reflected modernist influences in its intermittent use of stream-of-consciousness narration, interior monologues, and perspective shifts. Its plot, however, was no more elaborate than that of a short story: Once home, the liberal narrator quickly learns that her father, aunt, and potential fiancé, like most white people in the town and region, hold deeply racist and segregationist views, provoking her personal loss of innocence, to the point of physical discomfort, and an existential quandary about whether to sever ties to Maycomb and the South altogether.

The draft's emotional fulcrum lies in the narrator's utter disillusionment with her father, whom she has revered all her life as if he were a saint. Not only is she shocked to find in his possession a virulently racist tract, but she eventually happens upon his—and Hank's—attendance at and active participation in a local gathering of Maycomb's (white) Citizens' Council—a socially upscale version of white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. As Jean Louise witnesses, the Maycomb Citizens' Council, like similar groups, serves as one of the key foundations for maintaining white resistance to federal intervention and black dissent, while upholding and advancing white economic, political, and social domination through oppression.

This draft novel, called Go Set a Watchman , its title drawn from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, was not, however, the book that J. B. Lippincott published. Instead, three years later, To Kill a Mockingbird, a substantially revised version of Lee's original submission, appeared to widespread public and critical acclaim, including the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, followed by an Academy Award–winning film starring Gregory Peck. The revision has continued to enchant readers, in part because of the significant editorial changes from the initial draft. In addition to polishing the draft novel's prose and refining its pacing, in To Kill a Mockingbird , Lee moved Jean Louise's story back two decades, before the US civil rights movement had gathered its midcentury momentum, and situated it firmly in the child narrator Scout's voice; she transformed the father's defense of a black man, incidental in Go Set a Watchman, into a major plot point; she restored two characters, Jean Louise's brother Jem and close friend Dill, whom she had effectively erased from the earlier version; and she left the draft novel's initial depictions of liberal innocence and Atticus's nobility, still touchstones for readers today, unchallenged.

Go Set a Watchman has finally been published nearly 60 years later, by Harper Collins, and despite its aesthetic flaws, it feels imaginatively and politically ahead of its time. More specifically, Go Set a Watchman offers a realist account of the limits of the white liberal imagination in the face of Southern white supremacy during the 1950s, in distinct contrast to Mockingbird's far more palatable and appealing if better-written fairy tale. In Watchman, which reads like a sequel though it predates Mockingbird, Lee dramatizes the crucial fact that racism is not simply an interpersonal problem, reducible to spectacular incidents like the brutal 1955 murder of Emmitt Till (which Lee obliquely references), or to the actions and rhetoric of white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (which, we learn, Atticus Finch had once belonged to). Rather, Watchman suggests, racism is an elaborate system of interlocking structures enabled by the participation and indifference of the white majority, including liberal middle-class whites like Scout Finch herself, to ensure white dominance and privilege, which is to say, white power. It's a provocative indictment of the system that remains difficult for many in the media to grasp and still all too absent from many public conversations about "race."

In as much as Go Set a Watchman dramatizes Jean Louise's revulsion at white supremacy's manifestations in the pamphlet, or the hate-filled tirade by an arch segregationist Grady O'Hanlon—"essential inferiority... kinky woolly heads... still in the trees... greasy smelly... marry your daughters... mongrelize the race... mongrelize... mongrelize"—what most upsets and offends her is her direct, personal connection to it in the form of her family members' support for it. While Jean Louise harshly critiques racism in her argument with her father—"You neglected to tell me we were naturally better than the Negroes, bless their kinky heads"—she never contemplates more radical action, including forms of social or political activism, let alone active cross-cultural solidarity in Maycomb. Instead Jean Louise retains her option of flight back to New York, and views herself as "colorblind" while also partially accepting her father's arguments about black inferiority ("They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman"). She parrots states' rights arguments, though she at least acknowledges that the NAACP is not the bogeyman her father and others claim it is, but a response to the racist system already in place. When she goes to visit Cal to inquire about her former caretaker's grandson, who has run over an elderly drunk white man, she transforms the encounter in Cal's house into a performance of her own importance and recognition—"I'm your baby, have you forgotten me?... What are you doing to me?" rather than addressing the looming extrajudicial danger Cal's grandson faces.

Check out our documentary 'Black, White, and Greek,' on race and Greek life at the University of Alabama:

As a counterpoint and complement to the compelling fantasy of Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman possesses real value. What was often latent in the later novel is on full display here, ranging from the middle-class whites' classism, self-absorption, and entitlement to a racial-epithet-packed screed that would not appear out of place on a forum like Stormfront. Reading Go Set a Watchman also made me wonder how it might have been received by critics and the public if it had appeared in the late 50s, and whether there exists another work of fiction from these years by a young white Southern writer that so baldly lays bare the complicity of the mass of white Southerners, particularly the social elites and middle class, in maintaining white supremacy.

In its focus on liberalism's limitations, and its conclusion in Jean Louise's sentimental emotional accommodation with her father's and family's views—"I can't beat him, and I can't join him"—the book also feels very contemporary, since we still encounter unironic invocations of America as a "post-racial" society in the public discourse, despite constant indications to the contrary.

Certain moments in Go Set a Watchman read as if they were written last week: When Atticus and Jean Louise rail against the Supreme Court and the federal government, they sound uncannily like Republican politicians denouncing this year's SCOTUS rulings on same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act. Compare this passage in Go Tell a Watchman:

If you think I for one citizen am going to take it lying down, you're quite wrong. As you say, Jean Louise, there's only one thing higher than the Court in this country, and that's the Constitution.

And Antonin Scalia, dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges:

The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court's claimed power to create "liberties" that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention.

Go Set a Watchman's arrival in bookstores in 2015 raises a host of questions, including basic ethical ones. Did Harper Lee, who for decades after Mockingbird's publication has refused to issue any longer works of fiction, actually and fully consent to the publication of this work? Why now, and why only after the death of her sister Alice, who had been a careful guardian of her work and legacy? The clunkiness of the novel's organization and its periodic slides into stage-play-like dialogue made me feel as though I were reading a posthumous work rather than one by a living author, in the twilight of her career, who had green-lighted a lesser work she knew might benefit from even a little more editing. Did Lee recently read through this text and approve it, and if so, how will we ever know? While I understand her ongoing desire not to grant interviews or meet with reporters, I nevertheless felt it would assuage many readers' concerns, including my own, to know beyond a doubt that she was truly behind it.

In the end, despite its attendant controversies, Go Set a Watchman is more than a historical curiosity. It breaks a silence its non-publication five and a half decades initiated, and in so doing calls for an engaged reading.

Go Set a Watchman is available in bookstores and online.

John Keene is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer . He teaches at Rutgers University–Newark.

Over the weekend Reclaim Australia held a bunch of rallies around the nation to "reclaim" the country from the "Muslim Oppressors" who secretly run the place. Or something.

Not to be outdone, counter-demonstrators turned up to make sure Australia's far right wouldn't get to parade itself unopposed. Five people were arrested in clashes in Sydney, one in Adelaide, and protesters were maced by police in Melbourne.

But what the weekend's events showed us wasn't that Australia's homebrew far-right movement was on the rise. Instead, we learned that a fractured assembly of agitated individuals can struggle to communicate a coherent message, let alone the same message.

This was highlighted in a very public split in Brisbane where organizers announced they would be breaking off to form Australians Against Islam, which isn't the first schism to hit the movement. Back in May, a new group calling itself the United Patriots Front (UFP) appeared after a spat between Reclaim Australia organizers Sherman Burgess and Monika Evers, the Bendigo-based businesswoman behind the campaign to ban the Bendigo mosque.

As this seems to be an ongoing problem, let's take a look at how the split between the two Reclaim leaders undermined the latest protest in Melbourne.

All images of the Melbourne protest by Nat Kassel

As mentioned, Burgess was the former leader of Reclaim Australia and has a somewhat colorful background. His résumé as an organizer for the far right extends back before his time with Reclaim. A council worker from New South Wales, he has been a long-time member of the Australian Defence League and the Australian neo-Nazi metal band Eureka Brigade.

Earlier this year, he made an effort at rebranding himself as the "Great Aussie Patriot" to great effect. To anyone who asked, he promised he was not racist, even though there are videos online where Burgess calls Aboriginal people "mostly dickheads" and says he'd like to "bump off" lefties.

After splitting from Reclaim in May, Burgess gathered himself a merry band of race warriors, including personalities such as Blair Cottrell, who once served 19-months for arson, wants Mein Kempf taught in schools, and dislikes women in leadership roles because they do their job. If you're a little puzzled by what that means, read the thread below.

Cottrell's social media profile has grown since joining the UPF, and in one YouTube series he can be seen using a whiteboard to rail against public schools, effeminate men, and the one-world government, essentially making him the Dark Malcolm Turnbull.

Another wildcard Burgess recruited for the UPF is Neil Erikson, who in February last year was convicted for stalking and threatening a rabbi with the Melbourne City Synagogue. Only last week, he appeared again in newsprint when a video surfaced with the audio of his laughter at the stabbing murder of a 16-year-old protester on a Spanish train. Erikson denied authorship of the video and claimed he had been hacked, the video doctored, and insisted it showed a good "patriot" taking on "left-wing filth." The murder, he said, was "obviously self-defense."

Since then, Erikson has effortlessly made the transition from harassing Jewish people to bullying Muslims. This also reflects a broader realization among the far-right about how targeting Muslims means they can evade the "racist" tag by pointing out how Islam isn't a race. Which is mighty convenient, because the face of Islam so often happens to have a brown complexion.

In the weeks leading up to last weekend's rallies, Erikson, Cottrell, and other UPF grunts were busy churning out videos where they talked tough and told the world how they were ready for a fight. Erikson can be seen in one talking about how mosques are secret staging posts for a coming invasion of Muslim terrorists.

The catch is, the majority of terrorist attacks across the Western world are not committed by Muslims. The New America Foundation has been tracking the number of those killed by terrorism in the US since September 11. By their count, killings by far-right extremists outnumber those killed by jihadists almost two to one.

It's a similar story in Europe, where in 2013 only two out of 158 terrorist attacks were "religiously" motivated. The rest were committed by various nationalist and left-wing groups trying to make a point. Worldwide, terrorism has an equally well-documented history among Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians.

In the weeks leading up to the weekend Melbourne protest, Monika Evers, the woman behind the anti-mosque push in Bendigo, switched the time of the Reclaim Australia rally to earlier that day as part of her ongoing spat with Burgess. Burgess called her a traitor, but the effect wasn't clear until the UPF turned up at 1 PM, after which Reclaim had already been at it since 11 AM. With their allegedly different message lost in all the noise and media attention on Reclaim, the UPF reportedly left after 12 minutes.

In the aftermath, the group tried to stay positive. A message posted to their Facebook page applauded the turnout, even as their own members pointed out that only a fraction of those they expected to turn out actually did.

Which is a happy close to a sad story about a group who genuinely believe they are valiant heroes who, alone, are standing against a sinister cabal of vaguely defined Muslims threatening to take over the continent using food classification to deliver Sharia law to Australia.

Outside, in the real world, Australia isn't holding its breath.

Follow Royce on Twitter.

Check out Julian's Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

Like many of its Asian neighbors, the Philippines has been site of rapid economic growth over the past two decades. Following a period of martial law and strict control over rural provinces, peasants and farmers began moving to the nation's capital, Manila, in the 1980s looking for better lives. However, many of these people remained on the margins of both society and the city itself. As the population boomed, slums began cropping up.

VICE Japan traveled to Manila in order to investigate conditions in one such slum inside Navotas Cemetery, where 6,000 men, women, and children currently live amid the graves and excavated human bones.

A Facebook profile of someone who is, as far as we can tell, still alive. Photo by Flickr user Bev Sykes

In June, Jillian York began to notice that her father's Facebook profile, which had been dormant for some time, began "liking" things again. This didn't make much sense, as her father had died four years earlier.

York notified Facebook of her father's death and the odd online behavior in an effort to investigate. After confirming her suspicion that the account had been hacked, Facebook told her that the profile would have to either be "memorialized" or deleted. Access or changes to the account would no longer be possible. She was shocked: What began as a request for technical assistance had brought an abrupt end to the way her family had been using social media to mourn her father.

According to a cached copy retrieved via the Internet Archive from the end of May, Facebook's Help section used to read: "We'll memorialize the Facebook account of a deceased person when we receive a valid request." Given that wording, it's easy to understand why someone might think that memorializing a profile was optional. The text has since been changed to read: "If Facebook is made aware that a person has passed away, it's our policy to memorialize the account." It's a quiet update that illustrates the challenges Facebook faces in communicating its strategy for ensuring the harmonious coexistence of its users—both living and dead.

There are several (sometimes competing) factors involved in striking this delicate balance. On the one hand, Facebook wants to ensure dormant accounts don't become targets for hackers, as was the case with York's father. On the other hand, some people use Facebook profiles as a way to mourn, sharing messages of love and grief with the deceased person's Facebook friends. With a memorialized account, this is no longer an option. The memorialized account fixes other things, though—you won't get birthday reminders for the deceased person, or see their profile pop up under "People You May Know," which many people found upsetting. Until fairly recently, though, the one factor that wasn't being taken into account was the wishes of the decedent.

According to Vanessa Callison-Burch, the Facebook product manager for the feature, memorialized profiles have been around since 2007 (she's been working on them for close to two years). The company originally erred on the side of discretion: Profiles of the deceased would be deleted after 30 days. Then, after the Virginia Tech shootings, parents of some of the students killed created petitions asking Facebook to not delete their memorialized profiles—a request that the company honored. Facebook created the memorialization option, which originally reverted the profiles to friends-only and contact information and status updates would be removed in order to "protect the deceased's privacy."

On Motherboard: A detailed look into the history of Facebook's privacy settings.

Callison-Burch's first big change to the feature was implemented about 18 months ago. Rather than defaulting to friends-only, the memorialized profiles would inherit the last privacy and audience settings the user had while alive. This was done after examining user feedback that showed many people who weren't Facebook friends with the deceased would be distressed at being shut out from a previously more public profile.

It's tricky to decide what should happen to a Facebook profile in death, in part because there's so much personal information on Facebook. Callison-Burch told me that when she's examining product enhancements for memorialized profiles, she rejects thinking of them as strictly digital assets: "This is a really important part of people's identity and it's a community space. Your Facebook account is incredibly personalized. It's a place for people to assemble and celebrate your life. So as we were designing this, it wasn't a model of, 'I'm going to give my account to someone else.' It was that there are certain things that that community of people really need to be supported in that we at Facebook can't make the judgment call on."

Someone's Facebook is a representation of their personhood and to 'mess' with it after they have died is somehow a betrayal. – Heather Servaty-Seib

In a February presentation, Callison-Burch gave an example of one of these judgment calls that the company often gets asked to make: in this case, an elderly father who had heard that his dead son's friends were sharing memories on his son's profile. He started a Facebook account in order to see and read them, but couldn't because the profile's privacy settings were friends-only. Another example was a mom who wanted to change her daughter's profile picture to the something less fleeting than the image of a fish that she'd chosen before unexpectedly dying. For the vast majority of memorialized accounts, even seemingly simple requests like these are turned down because the company has no way of knowing for sure what the decedent would have wanted—no matter how sincere the anguish of the person asking.

According to Heather Servaty-Seib, a Purdue University professor who researches adolescent grief and social support, Facebook is right to be cautious in allowing changes to people's profiles after they die. Through her conversations with grieving people, she found that Facebook profiles were considered in many ways autobiographical: "Someone's Facebook is a representation of their personhood and to 'mess' with it after they have died is somehow a betrayal; it somehow messes with how the individual person chose and wished to represent themselves to the world."

Servaty-Seib has also heard stories of parents that decided to delete information the deceased wanted shared but which they didn't like—things like images of alcohol consumption or being open about being gay. Granting outright control of an account has consequences—like one mother, who creepily posted from her dead son's profile, "Thank you to whoever put the flowers on my grave."

Watch: What Happens to a Family When Their Child Is Struggling With Severe Mental Illness?

Facebook's first step in trying to remedy this came this past February with the introduction of legacy contacts. This was the first time that users themselves could give Facebook some guidance on what to do in the event of their death. Previously, next of kin would be allowed to notify Facebook of a user's death and decide whether to memorialize or delete the account altogether, but this could only be done after the fact. A legacy contact is selected by the user while alive and can perform certain functions on a memorialized account; they can also download someone's data if the deceased pre-selected that option. Finally, users are now given the option to direct Facebook to delete their profiles upon notification of their death.

In cases where a legacy contact has been chosen, both of the requests mentioned by Callison-Burch can be accommodated in a way that is mindful of the wishes of the deceased. Now, a trusted third party can approve a new friend request by the distraught father or get the mother's input on a different profile image. The person can also add a pinned update on the decedent's profile as a way of signaling their presence.

This unique approach came from more than just examining user feedback: Callison-Burch also consulted a network of hospice staff that she knew, as well as the research of Jed Brubaker—a PhD candidate with extensive research on how people interact with the dead on social media.

Screenshot from Facebook.com

One change that also occurred in February that was informed by this research was the addition of the word "Remembering" above the names of all users with memorialized profiles going back to 2007. Brubaker's research found that people will flock to someone's Facebook profile upon hearing of their death, often unsure if what they've heard is true and wanting confirm. Other times, they want to find out the cause of death or information on services. Subtle changes like the "Remembering" banner give people ways to grieve while also not altering the profile it often took a person years to build.

Facebook hasn't made exact numbers public, but in her presentation, Callison-Burch said that "hundreds of thousands" of people had assigned legacy contacts in the first two weeks after the option became available to users in the US and Canada. When taken as a percentage of the 160 million or so daily active users in these countries, it's a drop in the bucket. For the families of people like York's father, who died many years ago, the Legacy Contact option isn't available at all.

Related: Is There Anything Facebook Could Do to Make Us Leave?

Given the initial numbers, it's safe to say legacy contacts probably haven't yet achieved universal acceptance—but neither have the memorialized profiles in general. When I queried the members of a grief support group about how they incorporated visits to the profiles of dead loved ones, a few people told me it was helpful to their grieving process. These people hadn't reported their loved ones' Facebook profiles as belonging to someone who had died. In York's case, this was primarily due to not wanting to relinquish control to Facebook—even though no changes were being made to the account.

For Servaty-Seib, the most important thing that Facebook can do for the bereaved is offer flexibility in the face of what are very distinct approaches to grief. "All people grieve in unique ways. We would like to believe that it moves in stages or that there are clear steps that are universal, but the research just does not bear that out—neither does clinical work with grieving people." She gave me an example of a woman who would hide her sister's posts about their dead father "because that is not the way that she needed to grieve." Other tools on Facebook, like Groups and Pages that can be set up to memorialize someone in ways specific to a group of people, are designed to help people grieve in their own ways.

What might the future hold for the dead on Facebook? When I spoke with Callison-Burch, I offered a recommendation of my own: Give users the ability to create an advance directive. Rather than assuming the user's last settings on their memorialized profile, give people the opportunity to decide what should be done with their profile—who should be able to see it, who should be able to send friend requests, and even what kind of profile picture or banner image the person would want displayed after death. We could let people design their post-mortem Facebook profile much like commissioning their own gravestone.

Will Facebook adopt my suggestions? We'll see. For her part, Callison-Burch says legacy contacts are "just the beginning."

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A great white shark surfaces in New Zealand. Image via

The dramatic close shave between Australian surf star Mick Fanning and what was probably a great white shark, live on TV, is just the latest event in what's been a terrible year for shark attacks. Australia has been victim to 13 recorded attacks already this year, while in the US, beachgoers in North Carolina have been subjected to eight since the start of June. This record-breaking spike has been attributed to a "perfect storm" of conditions conducive to shark attacks.

But it seems no one is 100 percent certain what these conditions are. Why are so many sharks killing people? There's talk of overfishing and global warming, and the notion that sharks are attracted to increased shoreline activity. But in order to push past hype, and tell shark-head from shark-tail, we decided to put some of the most widely touted theories to Dr. Mark Meekan, a shark expert at the Australian Government's Institute of Marine Science.

VICE: Hi, Mark. First up, the "over fishing" argument. People claim that fishing is reducing available food and sharks have been forced to try other foods that include humans. Does this stack up?
Dr. Mark Meekan: I don't give this argument too much credit. From a science point of view, there are a lot of links in the chain for that to be true and we've got no evidence for them. The shark's prey would have to be overfished and there would have to not be an alternative prey for them to switch over to in order for them to turn to humans. You need some good hard data to support that argument.

That's one of the big problems with white sharks, and sharks in general, there's very little hard data about populations and how they've been changing over time. Yet people like to spout these sorts of theories and the arguments tend to be very, very emotive. And without any real data, they're given airtime.

A bull shark. Image via

What about the "fishing beside beaches" argument? This purports that fishing from piers close to beaches is attracting sharks, as they can smell blood and come to beaches to attack people?
You certainly raise your risk of shark attacks in an area where you have blood and dying fish in the water. If you go spear fishing, for example, you're presenting sharks with signals of distressed and dying fish in the area. And you have to be more aware of the risks of that activity than you do if you're just wading in knee-deep water. They're two different activities that give you two different risk profiles. But does that explain the high rate of shark attacks? I don't think so.

Do you accept the "global warming" argument, which claims rising sea temperatures are causing sharks to inhabit areas they hadn't previously and are now attacking people in these areas?
Well, first we need to understand where these animals are, how many we've got and where they're moving. These are all key research projects that we're currently involved in.

We know that there are just three species that are attacking humans and they're bull sharks, tiger sharks, and white sharks, of course. And these sharks all move huge distances. We have tiger sharks moving up and down the coast of West Australia, going as far as Indonesia and South Australia. This is mirrored by white sharks that inhabit cold waters in Tasmania and South Australia in the summer months but then during the winter head north to West Australia. Similarly, there've been white sharks tagged off California that spend winters out in what they call "The White Shark Café" off of Hawaii. And bull sharks tagged in the Great Barrier Reef have been seen in Sydney harbor. These animals are moving very large distances across waters off different temperatures.

But the problem is that we have such poor data on the distribution and abundance of most shark species that we couldn't tell whether this is being changed by global warming. The data we have is just so poor at the moment that we don't know how many sharks we've got.

A great white in Baja California. Image via

OK, it seems to me that we don't know a lot. Is it even true that we're seeing more shark attacks than we used to?
The real problem with rates of shark attacks is that you're trying to take statistical trends on very rare events. Shark attacks, although they make the news, are extremely rare events. And the problem with trying to create statistics about rare events is that they rapidly become meaningless.

We can't tell if shark attacks are increasing or simply more people are getting in the water. The only thing we can conclude is that an increasing population puts more people in the water, so you're likely to have an increase in shark-human encounters.

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The federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana where Patrick Roberts got the good news. Photo via Bureau of Prisons official website

Last week, President Obama commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders. Among them was Patrick Roberts, a 65-year-old African-American man from Detroit who was serving a life sentence for a drug distribution conspiracy involving crack cocaine, among other substances.

"On Monday morning I was in my cell and I heard the CO [correctional officer] calling out my name," Roberts recalled in an exclusive sit-down interview with VICE inside the Federal Correctional Facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. "But there are two of us named Roberts in my cell block (J unit), and I was told it was the other guy."

A short time later, Patrick learned that he was, in fact, the Roberts they were looking for, and was ordered to report to his captain's office. He knew something was out of the ordinary: Generally speaking, when inmates are summoned by the captain on their compound, it's not a good thing—a stay in the hole (a.k.a. solitary) could be in the works. But according to Roberts, he was greeted by Warden Leann LaRiva and a few other staff members.

"'President Obama gave you a pardon,' is what she told me," Roberts said. Initially believing that he was granted immediate release, Roberts thanked her and turned to leave, intending to walk straight out the front door of the prison without giving a single thought about returning to his cell to collect his personal belongings.

But that's not quite how it works.

"The Warden said, 'Wait, wait... not right now.' " Roberts says. "'You're leaving on November 10.'" She proceeded to ask a few questions; namely, did he have any family? What about a place to go? As he made his way back to the unit, Roberts asked himself, Who should I call? Family? My girl? Friends?

"I didn't want the ones I didn't call to say, 'Why you didn't call me first?' and all that," he said. Ultimately, Roberts decided the simplest thing was to tell no one. "I had to go back to the unit, sit down, and think. The truth is you have to take it all in spiritually, breathe in the air, and take it all in. I had 120 days to figure things out, and I didn't tell nobody in the unit nothing when I walked in."

Alone in his cell, Roberts first thanked his Creator.

"I thanked my Maker for 16 years of asking him to be my bail bondsman—to help me get out, to help me with my law work, to help me with my sentence commutation." Next, Roberts thanked God for bringing Barack Obama into existence to change a system that he says may be "more divisive than the system that was here during the time of Noah." After much reflection, Roberts then walked into the J unit TV Room where the inmate computer system is located, logged onto the messaging system—which includes email—and sent everyone on his approved contact list the same message:

Hope that I find everyone doing great in health and spirits. I will see everyone Nov. 10th with love/peace/ best wishes.

For the rest of the day he kept quiet, telling only one other inmate in his unit about his good fortune, before later telling a friend of his who lived in another housing unit. Although LaRiva explained to him that the press would not be releasing any information about "Obama's Lucky 46"—as they have quickly become known within the confines of the federal prison system—a prison reform advocacy group called Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) released a three-page list of all the names of the federal prisoners who had been granted commutations that same day, and the White House put out its own release, too.

"That's when everyone started to wanna know who Patrick Roberts is," he says. Laughing, he adds, "It's like I was becoming a celebrity or something. A lot of people were saying I'm even more blessed than the Pope is."

Roberts says that he had to stay on board and act like he didn't care—didn't want to get a big head—because if he did he would be putting himself above his Maker. "I guess He got tired of me begging him so he was like, 'Well, OK, here you go!'"

Of course, Roberts also kinda feels like he won the lottery. And although he does feel extremely blessed, he reflects back to 1999, when he entered a guilty plea pursuant to a plea agreement that he was told would land him in federal prison for 15 years.

"There was 17 people in my indictment, and I might have known five of them," Roberts said. "They said I was number two in the conspiracy, but it wasn't no big drug ring or anything like that, just a bunch of different people selling drugs." At Roberts' sentencing hearing, he says, the judge made his decision using the "preponderance of the evidence standard," and calculated Roberts' drug weight using the more severe crack-cocaine drug table—which made his penalty 100 times greater than it would have been had he been charged for the powder cocaine, another drug he was accused of distributing.

"The crack cocaine back then was more serious, you see. So the judge gave me a life sentence," Roberts recalled. It should be noted that Roberts was a repeat drug offender who had four prior convictions. But a review of his pre-sentence report—used by judges to determine the length of prison stays—reveals that, according to the probation officer who prepared it, the "defendant does not meet the criteria set forth in 4B1.1 to be considered a career offender."

That meant he should not have been eligible for the mandatory-minimum life sentence, absent a judge basing his decision on the weight of crack cocaine. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened to Roberts.

"I should have never got no more than 15 years in the first place, and I would have been home about four years ago," Roberts says. "But I ain't mad." He added that this experience has given him the time to heal his mind, body, and soul. "If this sentence wouldn't have happened, I don't know what would have happened to me. I might have went out and done it again, I might be dead, I just don't know."

His future is, of course, wildly uncertain. Although Roberts is scheduled to be transferred into "community placement"—or a halfway house—any day now, he said, "There are so many people that have different agendas for me that I am completely confused. So my next choices will be the best ones to fit my means—which is 15 more years of life, living a life legally!"

When asked if prison officials had prepared him for reentry into society, or offered any guidance or suggestions other than a halfway placement, Roberts replied, "What would be the pre-release preparations? You have to look at my age. I am not in the greatest health, but I am not in the worst of health either. I could probably hold a night watchman job or whatever, but what else am I prepared to do except stay out of the way?"

Roberts concedes that he is a career drug dealer who's never had a real job. But there is no way that he'll ever go back to dealing drugs. "Fifteen more years legally," Roberts repeated. "Fifteen more years legally is all I want."

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In this episode of VICE Talks Film, we sit down with Asif Kapadia, director of the new documentary, Amy.

Research psychology was a wilder and woolier discipline in 1971, the year a 38-year-old professor named Philip Zimbardo built a mock jail in the Stanford University Psychology Department and stocked it with guards and prisoners drawn from young male respondents to a newspaper ad. It took only five days for that nondescript hallway in the basement of Jordan Hall to become a crucible of psychological abuse so powerful that it would one day be cited as a point of reference during the court martial of the ranking non-commissioned officer supervising the "hard site" at Abu Ghraib.

The shocking results of the Stanford Prison Experiment have been a staple of undergraduate psychology textbooks for decades now. However, the first detailed explanation of how a pile of khaki suits, mirror shades, night sticks, and white cotton smocks turned a couple dozen Palo Alto youngsters into guards who thought they had license to abuse and prisoners who thought they couldn't get out only appeared in 2007, in Zimbardo's bestselling book The Lucifer Effect. The tale has now been brought to the big screen in Kyle Patrick Alvarez's dramatic reconstruction, The Stanford Prison Experiment, whose masterfully claustrophobic rendering of the interior of the experiment imprisons the viewer just as thoroughly as the subjects.

Watch an exclusive clip of 'The Stanford Prison Experiment':

It all begins in a spirit of playfulness. Hanging around a mock jail for two weeks at $15 per day (good money at the time) seems like a pretty decent summer gig. Role assignments are made at random, though everyone hopes to be a prisoner—as one unwitting guard-to-be put it in the intake questionnaire for the real-life Stanford Prison Experiment, "people resent guards." At first, guards and prisoners alike giggle at the awkwardness of their new jobs. Tension begins to mount as the prisoners find themselves denied basic privileges they thought they would receive, including access to their medications. Then a guard reflexively clubs a prisoner to the ground during a lighthearted scuffle, an act whose undeniable reality appears to shock the perpetrator just as much as it does the victim and the audience. From there things only get scarier.

Any of the thousands of students who have encountered Dr. Zimbardo as host of the Discovering Psychology series of introductory video lectures will do a double-take at Billy Crudup's dead-on impersonation, but the real standouts are the experimental subjects themselves. For a gaggle of young men in identical white smocks with no backstories, the prisoners pop out as surprisingly vivid characters, responding with a range of resistance, confusion, and submission to the nightmare in which they find themselves. The standout is Ezra Miller, who plays rebel leader Daniel Culp with smoky intensity. Michael Angarano is brilliant as a sadistic guard nicknamed "John Wayne," whose Southern accent and Cool Hand Luke -inspired guard persona melt off with uncanny speed as soon as he leaves the Stanford County Jail, revealing a polite, even nebbish young student. Most disturbing of all are the guards who follow his lead. Their incremental shift from playacting to enjoyment of their abusive power is frightening to behold—and frighteningly relatable.

I sat down with Alvarez in the lobby of the W Hotel in midtown Manhattan to talk about when role-playing becomes reality, what standards of historical accuracy might obtain in reconstructing a science experiment, and the lessons he has drawn from the Stanford Prison Experiment.

VICE: How did you get involved with this project?
Kyle Patrick Alvarez: It's been kicking around for a long time, arguably since the experiment happened. Each decade, it kind of took a different form. In the 90s, DiCaprio was in it. In the early aughts—is it OK to call it that now?—it was the Chris McQuarrie version, which he and Tim Talbott wrote. That was the version that shifted over to what became this film. When the script came to me, I had never read the script before, but I knew it existed and I certainly had studied the Stanford Prison Experiment, as probably most people do.

I think that's why it sticks with people: You are talking about people from primarily white, privileged, upper-middle class areas who did this, not troubled kids or inner-city kids, so you can't make the kind of excuses the media makes for criminal activity. –Kyle Patrick Alvarez

So did you read The Lucifer Effect ?
Oh yeah. Dr. Zimbardo was heavily involved in the movie. The Lucifer Effect was being written at the same exact time the script was being written, so Tim and Phil [Zimbardo] were passing each other notes and research. Phil was recollecting a lot of stuff, digging back through old notes, putting everything together and creating the book, which to me is the foundation of the legacy of his work and the experiment and what it means. Phil was an integral part of the movie. What I liked about the script is we didn't have to embellish it. Of course there are things in there, just like in any movie there are. But we [were able to] get access to all this raw footage and audio, and talk to the people who were actually there, Phil and the people who were his grad students, and try to make a film that I think, in many ways, is more accurate than your usual "based on a true story." I was even trying to think, like, Is there some other phrase? Because "based on a true story" now means nothing. I remember a year or two ago, there was a movie where Eric Bana is a cop in New York fighting demons [2014's Deliver Us From Evil], and it was "based on a true story." So I think the ideology of what that means has kind of gone away. And for me, I wanted to make a movie that—I'd make a documentary if I wanted it to be totally factual—but that could at least feel like it existed in a context of Phil's work, like you could watch this and it wouldn't feel like you were watching something that came from totally out of left field. Because that's been done already with Das Experiment.

Billy Crudup as Dr. Philip Zimbardo and cast in 'The Stanford Prison Experiment.' Photo by Jas Shelton. Courtesy of IFC Films

There's been all this controversy around Selma, its departures from historical accuracy. Do you anticipate any kind of controversy around the minor departures that you guys made?
Controversy, I don't think so. I'm sure people who were involved in the experiment—I've never met any of the subjects—I'm sure they'll see the movie, and they can say, "Oh, it didn't play out anything like that." All I can say is we watched raw footage, and it was always from that hallway where most of the movie takes place, and we legitimately rebuilt it. We went to Stanford, measured it, and we rebuilt it. You can't really tell the difference between the photos from our movie and the photos from the experiment. The scene when Ezra [Miller]'s in the closet, where he's like, "I'm burning up inside" and hitting the walls—that's a real audio clip. Ezra listened to it. The goal wasn't to mimic this character that he was playing and created, but the manner and the style of it. I think that's the truthfulness that we were trying to achieve. Like, the escape is a real thing that happened. Two guys tried to escape. I think they got the lock undone and maybe stepped out, but they never made it out into the hallway. So there's things like that, but none of it broke the fundamentals of what the experiment was or what happened. And it was important, but to say, "Oh, was it 100 percent truthful"? I mean, there's no way. The Selma thing I think was inspired by a different kind of vernacular that was less about historical accuracy.

I mean, look, no one was upset that they changed the American voting record to create more suspense in Lincoln. That's actually recorded fact, and they changed it. It didn't bother me. It didn't bother anybody else. Yet Selma, they were upset about idiosyncrasies of conversations. Well, they were more than idiosyncrasies—it sounds like I'm trivializing it. But it felt like that backlash came more from people concerned about its Oscar campaign. Usually, that's where that stuff comes from.

I'd make a documentary if I wanted it to be totally factual. —Kyle Patrick Alvarez

Over the course of the film, the prison becomes more real to everyone. In the beginning, prisoners kind of laugh at what they're made to do.
And I pushed really hard for that. It was really important that the first hour of the film or so is actually kind of fun in a weird way because I feel like, A) it gets so miserable. You can't do two hours of that. And B) when I watched the footage they really are laughing.

So when does it turn for you? When does the prison become real?
I think Ezra's character is kind of the one that turns it. He's the rebellious one who's like, "This isn't what I signed up for." That's what I think is kind of interesting, that his character starts to instigate a little bit more.

Do you think by the end the prisoners really thought they couldn't get out? Yeah.

Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez with cast. Photo by Steve Dietl. Copyright Stanford Prison, LLC. An IFC Films Release.

One of the things that really impresses me about the film is how incredibly frightening the violence is. For a modern moviegoer, it's a lot less violent than a typical movie. There's no shooting, there's no stabbing, there's very little in the way of physical violence. And yet it's an incredibly violent film.
One of the things that I'm really proud of and happy with is that no one does die. There's no blood in the film, there's no real what we call "violence" in the movie, but it feels very violent because we don't want to accept that these things happen in this kind of environment. People are like, "That wouldn't have happened at Stanford." I think that's why it sticks with people: You are talking about people from primarily white, privileged, upper-middle class areas who did this, not troubled kids or inner-city kids, so you can't make the kind of excuses the media makes for criminal activity. I think that's why it's still very upsetting to people. Before you saw the film, when you heard the story, maybe you would say, "Why would this have gone so bad? People would never really do that." By the end of the film, my hope would be that you would look at yourself a little bit and be like, "Well, I don't know how I would be. I've never been given that role."

Now that I've spent a lot of time with it, I can with all humility say I'd probably be one of the really passive people who would just let time pass and be like, "Let's just let this go and it'll work out. It'll be OK." Being a filmmaker now for like six, seven years, it's been the challenge of working against that natural part of me, because you can't be passive as a filmmaker. Filmmaking is really hard. You bring 100 people together that have never worked together ever, who suddenly have to work together for four weeks incredibly quickly and effectively. It's designed for conflict. At some point you have to be confrontational or set things right—not to be a difficult person, but to be more demanding or exacting. That's not in my nature. The challenge of making movies is challenging myself to be more like that.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is now playing at the IFC Center in New York and theaters nationwide.

Ben Blum is a writer and data scientist. His first book, a nonfiction account of a bank robbery conducted by Army Rangers in Tacoma, Washington, in 2006, will be published by Doubleday in 2016. He lives in Brooklyn.

Canadian soldier Patrick Cloutier and Indigenous man Brad Laroque come face to face in a tense standoff at the Kanehsatà:ke reserve in Oka, Que., Saturday September 1, 1990. Photo courtesy The Canadian Press/Shaney Komulainen

Twenty-five years after the Oka land dispute in Quebec turned deadly, Indigenous leaders from coast to coast tell VICE it could easily happen again.

In the middle of the hot summer of 1990, Quebec police tried to enforce a court injunction to remove a Mohawk blockade so the construction of a golf course and 60 luxury condos could proceed on top of disputed territory that included an Indigenous burial site.

Tensions escalated, and on July 11 of that year negotiations went sour. Both sides opened fire, and a police officer, Marcell Lemay, was shot dead by a bullet of unknown origin. And the day the dispute ended, on Sept. 26, 1990, a soldier stabbed a Mohawk teenager, Waneek Horn-Miller, with a bayonet, nearly killing her.

Today, three Indigenous leaders who are battling three separate pipeline projects tell VICE the same tension exists at the front lines of the Energy East, Trans Mountain, and Line 9 proposals. They say the federal government is attempting to push the projects through the energy regulator without consulting First Nations communities.

Myeengun Henry outside court for the appeal of the National Energy Board Line 9 decision. Photo by the author

Myeengun Henry, band councillor for the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation that is currently fighting the National Energy Board's approval of Enbridge's Line 9 pipeline expansion in their Southern Ontario territory, told VICE an Oka-like land conflict could "easily, very easily" flare up again.

"We're on a tinder-box across the country now," he told VICE over the phone last week. "These pipelines could be something that could strike that again."

Across the country, First Nations have told VICE the Crown is not fulfilling its duty to consult with them on pipeline projects that run through their land.

Last month, Henry and other Chippewas of the Thames members asked an Ontario court to overturn the NEB decision, which they say was made without any consultation with the First Nation. The community says oil spills could threaten their land and water.

Signs outside the Unist'ot'en camp, set up to stop pipeline construction on unceded Indigenous territory. Photo via VICE Canada Reports: No Pipelines

In New Brunswick, the Wolustuk Grand Council has spoken out against TransCanada's Energy East pipeline for the same reason.

"We strongly oppose the Energy East pipeline because of the fact that it will cross our main river, the Wolustuk river, and tributaries numerous times, and the possibility of spillage into the rivers, lakes, streams is really high because of the past historical events through Canada and the US that pipelines do leak and do burst," Ron Tremblay, member of the Wolustuk Grand Council, told VICE in May.

When I called up Tremblay a week ago to ask whether he saw parallels between the Oka land dispute and his community's fight against the Energy East pipeline proposal, he said he had recently thought of writing about exactly that.

"We have not been consulted or even asked to sit at the table when they're discussing the pipeline," he said over the phone. "The parallels are that, again, the government is bullying and pushing through whatever initiative they're putting forward."

A national day of action against pipelines in Kanehsatà:ke, in 2013. Photo via Flickr user Howl Arts Collective

That's exactly how the Mohawk community of Kanehsatà:ke viewed the government's response to their Oka blockade in 1990.

According to their narrative, they first blocked the Mercier Bridge and later erected a second barricade on a dirt road to stop bulldozers from clearing the way for construction on land they believed was theirs, and which included a sacred burial ground. According to CBC, the graveyard held the body of an Indigenous man who fought against the development of a railroad through the land in 1911.

The municipality of Oka and the community of Kanehsatà:ke disagreed on whose land it was, and on July 11, 1990, on orders from Oka's mayor, about 100 Quebec police with tear gas, grenades, and rifles showed up at the blockade to enforce a court-ordered injunction. Negotiations broke down, and Kanehsatà:ke says police opened fire on them "without provocation." Both sides fired guns, and police officer Lemay was shot dead. No one has ever been charged with his death.

At that time, Tremblay travelled with a busload of people to Oka and camped just outside the blockade. What he saw changed him. Before, he considered himself "Joe Canadian" and a proud New Brunswicker. After the Oka crisis, he told reporters he would tell his kids not to stand for the national anthem because the country wasn't respecting Indigenous rights.

Today, Tremblay believes a similar situation could happen again, but it might not be as extreme. "There's been a lot of Okas since then," he told VICE.

He was at the anti-fracking blockade in Elsipogtog, New Brunswick in the summer and fall of 2013, and he remembers it had the same tone and feeling as the Oka protest. The Mi'kmaq people in Elsipogtog blocked hydraulic fracturing trucks and machinery from entering their territory due to concerns fracking could pollute their land and water.

But Rueben George, member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation outside Vancouver, British Columbia, believes Oka couldn't happen again in the same way because First Nations like his have public support and legal backing.

Police form a line at a Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline protest. Photo via Flickr user Mark Klotz

Tsleil-Waututh is battling Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline project because a report they commissioned concluded a worst-case oil spill could pollute the Burrard Inlet, kill as many as 500,000 birds and make one million locals sick.

"When we have a cultural, spiritual connection to what we love, we're going to protect it," George said. "Just like everybody has a love for their children, and they'll do anything to protect their children, that's the same way we feel about our lands and our waters."

That's what's happened on the Oka territory, he said.

"For a conflict to happen like Oka, I don't think it would," he said of the Tsleil-Waututh pipeline dispute. "...How it happened in Oka, it wouldn't happen here. With our legal strength of our Canadian Constitution defending our legal rights, we're winning, and I believe we'll win that way."

In 2014, a historic Supreme Court of Canada ruling upheld the Tsilhqot'in First Nation's title rights to 1,700 square kilometres of land in British Columbia. The decision is expected to have legal implications for First Nations from coast to coast.

Oka was one of the darkest moments between the federal government and First Nations in a long time, Tremblay told VICE. He says Canada still needs to learn to honour its treaties with Indigenous communities.

The Oka dispute ended in September of 1990 with the Mohawks surrendering to the Canadian army, which was brought in when the Quebec police couldn't resolve the dispute. The federal government bought the disputed land to prevent the condo and golf course development, but the land was never transferred to the Mohawks.

"What I want Canada to learn, especially on the east coast, is to honour the treaties," Tremblay said. "...We just want the treaties honoured, and we want to get some sort of payback for the land and resources that's been stolen from us."

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London does look bloody lovely in 'Syndicate.' All screens courtesy of Ubisoft

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Where do you go from Unity? When the Assassin's Creed series reached the French Revolution last year, it was evident from the outset that the power of current-gen consoles could create environments to astound. Ubisoft's army of artists vividly brought to life Paris in the late 18th century, making locations like Notre Dame look so realistic, it was easy to briefly believe you were looking at a big-budget movie, not a video game. Atmospherically, the eighth major Assassin's Creed game was a triumph. Unfortunately, it was a let down in several important aspects.

Yes, there were the (mostly amusing) graphical bugs—characters falling through floors, their faces loading incorrectly, bizarre body contortions. That's forgivable, and besides, who doesn't love it when their game freaks out in funny ways from time to time? But the game played so tediously, which is where it truly fell down.

The game's predecessor, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, was, by most critical accounts, a rip-roaring pirate adventure that made great use of its setting and framed its swashbuckling combat and treasure-hunting side-quests in childhood fantasies-fulfilling style. It went on a bit, but what modern open-world game doesn't? Unity, by comparison, felt claustrophobic, its tight streets collapsing onto each other, a lack of verticality giving the impression of a much smaller game. Enemy AI was average at best, mission design depressingly repetitive, and the introduction of a "proper" stealth system half-hearted in comparison to titles that prioritize the need to sneak your way forwards. It was met by average reviews scores, and I wasn't alone in thinking that the series needed to take a year off.

You'll control Evie, as well as Jacob, in the final game.

But here we are, less than 12 months later, with Assassin's Creed Syndicate imminent. The Victorian London-set game releases for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in late October, and having had my hands on a very short preview of it, I can't shake the opinion that Ubisoft might have been wise to pause the franchise a while, to take stock of its strengths and weaknesses and really deliver an experience as memorable as the first game's Crusades-era adventuring and the second's exploits in Renaissance Italy.

Like Unity, Syndicate looks incredible—I get to see the area around St. Paul's Cathedral, and it's most certainly London, from the rain-slicked cobbles at ground level to the terracotta tiles of the so-easily-scaled roofs. Horse-drawn carriages trundle through the streets, which are appropriately much wider than Unity's Parisian thoroughfares. Everything's taller, too, basic housing bearing the mark of the industrial revolution, rising upwards to escape the East End's warring gangs. The level of detail is astounding—you could spend a long time just looking over all the billboards and fly posters that bring life to the static bricks and mortar.

Related: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

I play as Jacob Frye, who heads up the Rooks alongside twin sister Evie. I slug back a cutscene drink in some unremarkable watering hole or other and then it's onto the streets, my first objective to assassinate several members of a rival gang, the Blighters. There's a twist, though. They're holding two of my mates hostage, so if they see me coming, they're sure to kill them. I use Jacob's not-quite-like-Batman grappling hook to quickly get up beside the chimneys, and head towards the waypoint. A lookout makes me, though, and before my hands can properly get to grips with the controls, I'm surrounded by thugs and beaten into unsynchronized submission.

I try again, and this time I get to the lookout first, silencing her warning. I drop down to where more of my enemies await, but while I successfully beat them black and blue, they've already done away with their captives. A third attempt: the lookout's dealt with, and rather than wade in fists flying, I use a hallucinogenic dart to turn friend against friend beneath my lofty perch. The Blighters attack each other, and all I need to do is descend when the last one's unconscious. My colleagues are safe, and it's onto stage two of our little soiree around EC4—a carriage race through the streets leading to a gang war sequence where Rooks and Blighters collide, at which I need to knock down ten of their men and women. Somewhere among the blows is the enemy's leader, Bloody Nora. She's soon enough beneath my feet, flat out, conquered, and the preview's finished, its a violent crescendo lasting for less time than it takes to down a half. Evie joins Jacob in telling the Blighters that they now work for them. Fade to black.

Jacob's handy with his fists, which is useful when his controller (that'll be me) is inept at sticking to stealth play.

What I'm seeing is examples of the variety of gameplay on offer, but nothing feels particularly progressive. Ranged weapons, like darts and knives and your more standard bullets, can be used to combat foes just as readily as your own knuckles and knees. Knock your top hat off and whip your hood up and you're in stealth mode—enemies are less likely to spot you, hunched down and light of foot. Jacob can commandeer a horse and cart to get about quicker, but much like the relationship between the Batmobile and the Dark Knight's gadgets-aided aerial prowess in Batman: Arkham Knight, it's going to be up to the player whether they prefer to travel on wheels or across rooftops. It all works, but where's the hook, the line, the USP that sinks me into Syndicate like Unity couldn't?

If it's there, I'm not seeing it yet. We're all familiar with the "it's like Grand Theft Auto, but..." sales pitch, and Syndicate is a GTA game in Victorian London right now, albeit with the standard Assassin's Creed lore draped atop it—you either dig the Abstergo stuff or you don't, and I've never been overly enamored with it. Being beautiful, which it is even at this stage, might be enough to have series fans handing over their pre-order cash, but what I play just isn't exciting, and that's a worry. It's competently structured, controls easily and it doesn't bug out once, but offers not nearly enough to whet my appetite for more.

On Motherboard: The Art of Video Game Photography

The run-up to Christmas is a busy time for major new releases, with Halo 5: Guardians, Guitar Hero Live, Fallout 4, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Star Wars: Battlefront, and Call of Duty: Black Ops III all out around the same time as Syndicate. That's some significant competition, against which I can't see another Assassin's Creed that plays much the same way as so many installments before it truly shining. A change is as good as a rest, so the proverb goes, and swapping 18th century Paris for 19th century London has resulted in a visual delight. But if those shimmering puddles are turning stagnant just a few hours into proceedings, it'll vindicate my feeling that this series should have taken a sabbatical.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate is released for PS4 and Xbox One on October 23, with a PC version also planned for an autumn release. More information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Babies and money: finally the two best things in the world join forces! Photo via Flickr user John Althouse Cohen

If you own one or more babies, you probably just made some serious coin.

That's because the prime minister decided to pay you based on how many offspring you can pump out and/or acquire.

You may already be aware of this, because the government won't shut the fuck up about it.

Over the past few months, Conservative wunderkind and jobs minister Pierre Poilievre has skulked around the country, searching for families not signed up for the Universal Child Care Benefit like he's playing the world's lamest game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, tagging it all with #YourKidsYourWay, which sounds like a demented advertising campaign for cannibalism.

ICYMI @Justin_Ling I'm back on the search today – this time in Saskatoon. Working to sign up 2600 families for #UCCB. pic.twitter.com/MujP6FKJYn
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) May 29, 2015

The UCCB, a.k.a. the First Annual Stephen Harper Procreation Award, rewards families with a cash prize. That started in 2006, at $100 a month for each humanoid investment you parent under the age of six. Recently, the government announced that it was upping that amount to $160 for the toddlers, and chipping in an additional $60 per kid aged seven to 18. A bunch of that money was backloaded from Jan. 1, meaning families are getting fistfulls of fuckmoney in their mailbox right about now.

That means your July babyprize is either $420 or $520 per kid, regardless of your income and if you need it or not.

So let's say you're like the deranged sociopaths from 19 Kids and Counting, during season three (the best 19K&C season.) At that point, they had four children six years of age or younger, and ten who were between seven and 18. Because benefits from January to July are lumped into one fat cheque, that means if they were in Canada right now, they would get...

[math break]

$4,900.

Now you may be asking: What? Why?

And you would be right.

Say what you will about Stephen Harper, but the man knows what he is doing and doesn't really care how it looks.

His point of view hasn't drastically changed since he was elected: You give the government too much money, the government is sort-of terrible with money, here's a cheque for some money.

What has changed is that an election is in a couple of months and the government is sending people money in hopes that those people will vote Conservative. Which is gross.

The whole thing is going to cost about $2.5 billion per year.

Attention Parents:Watch now for a special message from Prime Minister Stephen Harper:
Posted by Stephen Harper on Monday, July 20, 2015

That $2.5 billion might seem crazy, especially as the Canadian economy coughs twice and keels over like an asthmatic horse, but the point of this program isn't practical, it's ideological, especially when report after report identifies chronically underfunded services like healthcare, or dangerously unsafe infrastructure like pretty much all of Montreal's bridges and tunnels.

Shocking as it may be to hear, the prime minister is the closest thing we've got to a radical anarchist as we're going to get in the Prime Minister's chair, and he's determined to take the bloated Canadian social state and turn it into a little tiny government. An itty-bitty government. A government so small it is staffed by adorable little mice.

To get there, Harper keeps grabbing things and selling them, kind of like a meth addict house-sitting his parents' place. If you don't bolt down the goddamn chairs, they'll probably wind up on Craigslist within a few days.

So you anarchists should be happy, because you have one of your own in office.

Yes, that means you, you Che Guevara-t-shirt-wearing 20-something with a questionably obtained medical marijuana license, dragging on a Djarum Black and carrying a book of Emma Goldman essays that you half-read and quarter-understood. You should be signing up for the Conservative Party of Canada and giving them all your money, all $67 of it.

Because creating dedicated payments to individuals is the best way to bleed a government dry of its kitty and downgrade a full-staffed public service to an automated phone line that uses MIDI files of early '90s Bryan Adams slowjams as its hold music.

Both the NDP and Liberals have basically endorsed the whole thing—although the Liberals want to send more money back, but proportion it to families based on their income instead of just indiscriminately mailing out cheques to anyone with kids like they're coupons for Dominos. The NDP, though, also wants to create a big national daycare program that is supposed to offer families an affordable alternative to putting your kids up at the Ritz-Carlton while you're at work, or whatever they're doing now that costs, on average, between $500 and $1,700 a month (except in Quebec, the archetype for the NDP's plan, where those costs are limited to $152). That will be very expensive.

Part of the headache of all this is that, while sending people cash is politically gangbusters, it might not actually be good economics. Right now, jobs are being cut left and right as low growth, cheap oil, and a lack of investment are hobbling businesses across the country. Meanwhile, many families are actually squirreling away money at a relatively high rate. So taking money away from investment programs and giving it to the Canadian version of the Duggar Family and their cult-like baseball team of children might not actually be the smartest economic driver.

The program can't even really be lauded as much of a benefit for low-income families. At $25 a week for your kid's first six years of life, then $15 a week for the 11 years after that, it's hard to argue that the UCCB is really keeping families afloat. Raising the minimum wage, lowering the lowest marginal tax rate, reducing prescription drug costs, spurring job creation—all are almost certainly more effective ways to fight poverty and lift the lower and lower-middle income brackets.

Nevermind that the UCCB is taxable, meaning you don't even get to keep the whole damn thing.

But maybe, philosophically, you agree with a government that just paves roads, fights wars, takes care of sick people, and then sends all the money back to the hardworking population. Maybe you're one of those monsters with a "Don't steal, the government hates competition" bumper sticker. Or maybe you think the government is shit and, as such, it oughta stop trying to do things. If so, you should ask: why is it only families that are receiving this cash, regardless of how badly they actually need the money? Why isn't this money being sent back through tax cuts, which would probably do more to stimulate the economy at large?

The simple answer is that people who don't have kids aren't real people and should be used only as incubators for tax revenue that can subsidize the existence of families.

But thanks for coming out.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

A young lady in Ibiza. Screen shot from our documentary Big Night Out: Ibiza

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's always easy to predict the response to the statement: "I grew up in Ibiza." The most common presumption is that I spent my teenage years chewing rocks of MDMA whole, sipping sangria outside Amnesia, and generally living like some marauding, indestructible party phoenix, rising each day from the flames blown on beaches and outside bars by those women in sweaty leather corsets and impractical hair jewelry.

"Oh, your parents still live out there?" they ask. "Do they own a club?"

The reality couldn't be any further from all that: my mom's a teacher and my stepdad's a lawyer. There's life outside San Antonio, where the majority of clubs are located: People have normal jobs; people own vehicles; people buy orange juice to drink in the morning, rather than to mix it with a bottle of Glen's; people go to school and, if they're me, get bullied mercilessly for their surname, pallor, and penchant for outfits that fall outside the narrow boundaries of acceptability on an island that is, in essence, a bunch of small insular towns that the Mediterranean successfully segregates from the real world.

The harbor in Old Town. Photo by David Sim via Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Armstrong wrote The White Island: The Extraordinary History of the Mediterranean's Capital of Hedonism in 2005, when Ibiza already had a reputation as Europe's number one party island, but before the recession hit Spain with such blunt force that unfinished building projects lined the streets and the rate of unemployment soared to over 25 percent—and double that for young people.

"Ibiza's changed a lot, but I still find it a magical place," said Stephen. "It's hard to define, and I'm not a religious man, but there's a certain feeling I get as I drive into the island from the airport which makes me feel at peace. It's like I can feel the island. People go there to find themselves, to enjoy the inclusiveness and open-mindedness."

It's fascinating to hear this perception, and something I can empathize with completely—though not in relation to the place I was raised. The feeling of freedom, of being able to be who you are without judgement, of feeling an overwhelming sense of belonging, of knowing that you've escaped the shackles of your youth—that was the feeling I experienced when, at 18, I left Ibiza for London.

When I was a teenager, I detested the small town mentality of my Ibicenco peers, longing instead for the day that I could be in a city of excitement and culture, where I felt I belonged.

Lidia is 25. We went to primary and secondary school together and parted ways when she went to Barcelona to go to university. Now, for the third year in a row, she is working full-time during the summer at the airport, living with her mother, and hoping she can save enough money to pay her way through a Masters degree—almost a prerequisite for young Spanish graduates looking to work in their chosen field. She is an incredibly talented woman, bilingual, driven, and hard-working—yet the jobs are simply non-existent, and more importantly she lives in a place where it's perfectly acceptable—if not expected—to live with your parents in your twenties, until you find a man to marry (and cook and clean for). If my description makes the society sound reactionary, that's because it is: a reality completely at odds with the life portrayed in coffee table books and on BBC3's Booze Britain documentaries.

Ibiza is a fantastic place to go on holiday, but real life there is neither a paradise for lonely souls nor a haven of cheap alcohol and narcotics. Steven gave me his take on why our generation has such polarized views of Ibiza. "It's become an expensive place to go on holiday, which means that much of what the island has to offer isn't accessible to young tourists," he offered. "But more importantly, it's where your parents went to get fucked—and why would you want to go there?"

He has a point. When I was at school, most of my classmates had parents who had experienced the first wave of Ibiza hedonism. Those who weren't born and bred on the island had arrived in the 60s and 70s to experience the dream. When I was growing up, that lot still wore ripped jeans and tribal prints and smoked weed in their well kept gardens. The coolest thing to be among their 13-year-old kids? A prim, sleek-haired, polo shirt-wearing caricature of a young Conservative. Rebellion comes in many forms.

Related: Watch our film 'Big Night Out: Ibiza'

Antonio runs a small bar called Jazz in Figueretas, one of the busiest and most touristy beaches on the island—but also an area where a lot of low-income families live. The bar is dark and quiet, with football on the wall-mounted screen, cheap beers, and a host of regulars who Antonio will walk outside to have a cigarette with, chatting about the weather and enquiring as to the health of children and pets.

His business is a far cry from the bars of San Antonio, which are all about recreating a British strip under the sun, with cheaper booze and fewer clothes. It bears no resemblance to the vast buildings built alongside motorways that house the clubs Ibiza became famous for. He sees the real side of the island, and thinks that unless something changes, Ibiza could lose the only financial lifeline it has left.

"Politicians need to get more involved if they want to improve the face of tourism," he said. "Get back that perception of the ocean, the beach, the flamenco. Make it less elitist by increasing cycle lanes—people think motorbikes are better because they're faster, and perhaps that's part of the problem: they just want to keep making everything faster, rather than taking a step back."

READ ON THUMP: Carl Cox and Eats Everything's Guide to Getting Ibiza Right

Slowing down would be no bad thing, but the way in which we travel is so far removed from our parents' experiences that perhaps there'll never be another place that will unite a generation in quite the same way. We can get return flights for a pound, stay in Airbnbs for a fraction of the cost of even the cheapest of hostels, and find out everything there is to know about a place before we even plan the trip. There are 340 million people on TripAdvisor every month, finding "hidden gems" and Street View-ing their journey from the airport.

"Maybe there's just nothing left to discover," said Steven, when we talked about my peers and our view of our travels. This is true of many places, but interestingly not of Ibiza—some of the best aspects to be discovered are hiding in plain sight, but if you find them and you love them, save them for a holiday. Spend a few weeks a year enjoying the beauty, culture, food, and peace. Don't move there.

Living in Ibiza means living on an island with incredible scenery and a vibrant summer, but it also means spending winters aching for culture or entertainment, worried about the security of your job and bereft of the ability to hop on a train or a bus anywhere beyond a few towns away.

Follow Sirena Bergman on Twitter.

As much as the ever-expanding tire-fire that is Donald Trump seems to have sucked the oxygen from the Republican primary room, it's important to keep in mind that there are other men (and one woman) vying for that party's nomination in 2016. In fact, as of this morning, there are now 16 Republicans running for president, with Ohio Governor John Kasich becoming the latest to look around the GOP field and think, "If these clowns are running, why not me?"

Compared to Trump—the Looney Tunes standard by which all other candidates are now judged—Kasich is both a serious person and a serious politician (like Trump, though, he seems to be kind of a dick). Kasich has been the governor of Ohio, a crucial primary state, since 2011; before that, he hosted a Fox News show called From the Heartland.

More relevantly, he worked in investment banking at Lehman Brothers until the firm came crashing down in 2008, sparking a global economic meltdown. Before that, Kasich spent nearly two decades as a Republican congressman. He also briefly ran president in 2000, before realizing that he couldn't beat George W. Bush.

Of course, "serious" is not the same as "smart" or "good" — the DNC is already gleefully sending out emails highlighting Kasich's years at Lehman Brothers (which he has rather tone-deafly described as "a fantastic time"). But on paper at least, Kasich bears some resemblance to someone who could feasibly run for president of the United States.

Unfortunately for Kasich, however, the ways in which he resembles a presidential candidate are exactly what make him such a bad one in 2016. He's basically unknown among Republican voters, with polling numbers somewhere between one and two percent. Right now, that puts him squarely on the B Team for the first presidential debate, relegated to a 5 pm sideshow with the rest of the Republican try-hards who didn't make it into the GOP's top 10. And while he has been in Republican politics for decades, Kasich's experience probably won't trump (LOL) his biggest problem in a GOP primary: The dude is just not that conservative.

To wit, while his 2016 Republican rivals were shutting down the government to stop Obamacare, Kasich actually embraced the law, expanded Medicaid access in Ohio through the Affordable Care Act. He also supports both the Common Core, and immigration reform that would open up possible pathways to citizenship for undocumented workers—both big no-nos for the die-hard right-wingers who vote in Republican primaries. And unlike most of the party's other White House hopefuls, Kasich believes that climate change is real (although he doesn't want to do much about it.)

He does have some points in his favor, as far as conservatives go. As DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote in a statement on his candidacy, "As governor of Ohio, Kasich has cut taxes for the wealthy while placing stress on local governments to clean up his messes. He's cut almost $2 billion in education funding and signed some of the most restrictive women's health laws in the country."

If you're a Republican, of course, that sentence reads more like an endorsement than a criticism. As the National Review points out, Kasich has turned Ohio's $8 billion budget deficit into a $2 billion surplus—although local newspapers are filled withaccusations that he accomplished this only by shortchanging things like infrastructure, education, and other basic services.

How Kasich plans to play all of this in 2016 remains to be seen. His campaign announcement, like all campaign announcements, was light on specifics, and heavy on platitudes, including, "The sun is going to rise to the zenith in America again," "The light of a city on a hill cannot be hidden. America is that city and you are that light," "I do believe in the power of big, bold ideas," and, "I have to humbly tell you, I believe I do have the skills."

Should he choose to run as the moderate's moderate, Kasich will obviously have to outpace Bush in a race to the center. Critics on both sides of the aisle are already casting Kasich as this year's Jon Huntsman—which is to say, a Republican who thinks Republicans have lost their minds, and was therefore phenomenally unsuccessful as a Republican presidential candidate.

But whether Kasich is another Huntsman—or, as he likely believes, another Mitt Romney or John McCain—his candidacy raises the same Sophie's Choice that's always hung over the Republican 2016: Will the GOP try running the same campaign it did in 2008 and 2012, and hope Hillary Clinton's no Obama? Or will it finally let the Tea Party take the wheel and drive the party straight out of orbit—and into the welcoming arms of one Donald Trump.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.