VICE is on City again tonight, and this week it's a heavy one. We examine the ineptitude, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and corruption of the Afghan security forces following the height of the US-led war in Afghanistan, as well as the reduced role of US Marines.

It's long, dark, and disturbing, but very worthwhile. Tune in tonight at midnight to see it.

All photos by the author

I was sitting in my car in a parking lot in Palmyra, New York, listening to a man shout accusations against Mormons into a megaphone. The man had been shouting for hours, from the late afternoon all the way into the evening, because of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a production put on every year by the Church of Jesus of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormon Church's annual pageant is a big, flashy spectacle complete with pyrotechnics and dramatic fight scenes. And every year, the LDS followers gathered inside are matched in vigor by the anti-Mormons outside, many of them evangelical Christians, trying almost as hard to convince people that Mormonism is a lie.

I heard the man with the megaphone shout, "Why would God appear to a perverted farm boy? A man who translated a book through a peep-stone? A man who, before he was 37, married 40 wives?"

I leaned forward, suddenly alert. Buried in his hate speech, the man with the megaphone had hit on a nugget of truth, a controversy that is quietly rippling through Mormonism. I got out of my car and headed towards him.

I know the Hill Cumorah Pageant well, because I was once an insider. I was raised in a Mormon family, and I went through all the rites of passage, striving to believe and to be a good person according to the tenets of Mormonism, only to have my faith crumble as a teenager. I ended up leaving Mormonism, although with my family still practicing, I can never be entirely free of its influence.

I came back to the pageant for a specific reason: I was searching for the memories of fear that shaped my upbringing. As a young child, I used to come here with my family. We'd spread blankets on the grass and I'd watch, transfixed, as the Book of Mormon stories I learned about in primary school came alive before my eyes. Then, as the pageant died down and we trailed our way back to the car, our feet trampling the grass beneath us, we'd pass some blank-faced people holding up pieces of paper. My father warned us in the strongest of terms never to take any.

As we walked past these people, I always looked sideways in fear. These were the "anti-Mormons" I had heard so much about. I knew, without even needing to look, that those papers contained nothing but the vilest of lies, full of Satan's trickery designed to lead us away from the one true church.

When I left Mormonism, I had to confront the fact that I had become the person that I once feared, that my family and friends still feared. The one inviolable belief of my upbringing was that "The Church Is True"—a phrase we repeated constantly and organized our attitudes, thoughts, and actions around. And so, if a member ever left like I did, it could only be because they were full of pride, or deluded by Satan, or wanting to sin. After I left, people probed at my individual circumstances, asking questions until they found whatever evidence they needed to place me into one of those neat categories.

Related: VICE travels to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to visit the Mexican cartels at war with a group of Mormons.

It's obvious that I don't fit in anymore. When I first drove into the parking lot of the visitors' center next to the Hill Cumorah, the attendant on duty took one look at my sleeveless shirt, the coffee cup in my car (coffee is forbidden in the LDS), before gently explaining to me the religious nature of the nearby sites. When I talked to the performers who were milling around interacting with the audience, they too assumed that I was a curious non-member. I let them think this. After all, my outfit was a deliberate choice; one that clearly signaled the fact that I was not wearing the undergarments—the magic Mormon underwear, the Jesus jammies—that faithful Mormon adults are supposed to wear.

When asked if I'd been to the pageant before or if I knew about the Mormon religion, I said no, because I didn't want to go through the pain of explaining that I'd left the church long ago. Performers dressed in colorful costumes pressed religious pamphlets into my hands. Two missionaries, dressed in long flowing dresses and sporting black nametags, gave me a Book of Mormon, bearing a teary-eyed testimony that this was the true church.

I didn't like this dishonesty, but I knew it was necessary: I can no longer fake being a Mormon and I know, from years of experience, that the truth of my Mormon background will only invite pain. To be a non-Mormon is one thing—you still have time to discover the one true church—but to be an ex-Mormon means that you already found the one true church and rejected it.

I found a chair and sat down, looking at the crowd of people at the pageant, about a third of whom were costumed performers. With 650 performers, all of whom were volunteers, they seemed almost as numerous as the audience. The performers were all dressed in a weird mixture of ancient Jewish and Native American attire. They were supposed to represent a version of history where American civilization descended from Jews, although the costume designers didn't have much actual history to base their garments on.

I wondered what would happen if I started talking about the controversial aspects of Mormonism—the uncomfortable nuggets of truth that, as a faithful Mormon, I dismissed as Satan's attacks against the Mormon Church. Things like the fact that Joseph Smith, who I was raised to revere as a prophet of God, had a habit of marrying the wives of other men and teenage girls. The fact that the Book of Mormon describes civilizations, supposedly the descendants of settlers from Jerusalem that existed here in the Americas, for which there is no archaeological or genetic evidence. The fact that Joseph Smith wrote multiple conflicting accounts of the First Vision, which is considered the cornerstone of the Mormon religion.

Within the past few years, Mormon leaders have been quietly releasing letters, couched in careful language, that address these uncomfortable facts. These letters strive for plausible deniability, twisting these facts into a message about the trials and tribulations of faith, but the facts are still there. These facts still push at the boundaries of belief. My sense of the controversy, based on the zone of silence that seems to surround these letters, is that most Mormons either don't know about these letters or are making an active effort not to think about them too carefully.

I was wondering what would happen if I started probing, but I also remembered the weird skipping habit that my brain developed as a by-product of growing up as a Mormon—a habit that persisted long after I left the church. This mental skipping caused me to dismiss out of hand most of the weird rumors I heard from outsiders.

What could outsiders possibly know about Mormonism that I didn't? I dismissed the mention of secret handshakes as myth. (That's actually true—I just never went through the temple ceremony, so I never learned the handshake.) I vehemently denied the crazy-talk about blood oaths. (Unfortunately, that was also a part of the temple ceremony, at least up until 1990.) When I first read Jon Krakauer's book Under The Banner of Heaven, I skipped over the history section, completely missing the mention of Joseph Smith's polygamy and the doctrinal basis of polygamy. When I saw the South Park episode about the Mormons, I thought the scene of Joseph Smith putting his face into a hat to translate the Book of Mormon was an over-the-top parody. (Nope—also true.)

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And so, sitting at the pageant, I tried to reconcile these two parts of me: the part that knew the truth, the part with logic; and the part that had spent so many years clinging to my unwavering faith. I was reminded of this when a middle-aged married couple from Utah, who came over to talk to me. The husband was wearing a yellow headdress and fake beard, while the wife was wearing a red turban with tinkling metal charms hanging around her forehead, which I guess is what passed for the fashion of the Jews-who-created-ancient-civilizations-in-the-Americas.

"Do you know much about the Book of Mormon?" she asked me.

"Most of what I know about Mormons comes from South Park," I replied, smiling with what I hoped was charming sheepishness.

Their faces were blank. Then recognition dawned on Jeff's face.

"Oh, the cartoon," the husband said. "Don't worry, we're not offended." His words sounded a little slow and carefully cheerful.

And once again, I retreated. I've been down this road a hundred times before. I could push. I could make South Park jokes and be my usual profane self, but the truth is that I wasn't there to argue or offend. The conversation moved on. I listened politely, trying to keep a smile on my face as they explained the Book of Mormon stories that I already knew so well. Lara told me that when I watched the pageant, I should listen to my feelings. She compared listening to the Holy Ghost to a conducting a science experiment.

"It's a test," she said, "like when you're testing..." and she fumbled for the correct words.

"Like when you test a hypothesis?" I asked. I remembered telling another performer about my training as a scientist. Jeff and Lara had probably been told that the blonde woman sitting alone was a curious non-member with a background in science. But Jeff and Lara still seemed like nice people, even if it their efforts were suspicious.

These were the people of my childhood. I know them, I understand them, and I love them, even though I am no longer one of them.

And then, as the sun set and the sky deepened into dark, the hill came alive with the light and noise of the pageant. This was the same pageant of my childhood, with the script and the props almost an exact match for my memories. The gray stage set, which in the daylight looked odd pressed up against the steep hill, turned into an old-fashioned Biblical city, lit with a number of colorful lights. The costumed performers who had been wandering around earlier trying to convert me crowded the stage.

The story played in the pageant was a re-enactment of the Book of Mormon. The actor-version of Mormon prophet Lehi, who in real life was an actuary, shouted hellfire and damnation to a skeptical Jerusalem. Then he left Jerusalem, traveling with his family by boat to the Americas. Once in the America's, Lehi's children split into the factions, into the "good" Nephites and the "bad" Lamanites. More prophets came, all sounding, as Lehi did, like crotchety old men shouting eternal damnation into the empty air. Jesus made an appearance, along with a bunch of trumpeted angels. The performers reenacted huge battles, their metal swords flashing against the colorful lights of the pageant. And then the pageant ended with one last battle, with a prophet burying a record of their people into the Hill Cumorah, with the final scene ending in Joseph Smith digging up this record and translating it.

The story was all black-and-white—the bad people all bad, the good people all good. The noise and color was over-the-top: the director must have been obsessed with pyrotechnics, as flames leaped up on the stage for any excuse. Flames backlit Jesus on the cross and jumped up as Lehi preached hellfire and damnation. The contrarian in me started to root for the "bad" people, as the "good" people were just too pompous, their prophets angry and querulous.

Which brings me back to sitting in my car, after the noise and pomp of the pageant had ended, I found myself listening to the man with a megaphone shout accusations against the Mormons. There was that nugget of truth—Joseph translated the Book of Mormon from a hat, Joseph and his many wives—that as a Mormon, I had learned to dismiss unequivocally. When I was a Mormon, there were no gray areas.

I got out of the car and approached the protesters. By now, the man with the megaphone had gone quiet and was speaking to another man, so I started talking to the kid next to him. This kid was sturdy-looking and blonde, and looked far too old for his age, which I estimated to be about 12 or 13. I started asking him about why he was here. He told me he was home-schooled and that he traveled around the country with his family, picketing events. As he pointed towards the white van his family traveled in, my heart broke. He was too young: just as I had once been afraid of him, he was now learning to fear me.

Then a woman came over, who seemed to be the kid's mother. She introduced herself as Stephanie.

"You a Mormon?" she asked.

"No," I said, honestly. I told her I was a writer, that I had cousins who lived nearby, that I wanted to write about the pageant—all true. But when she started probing about my beliefs, I started evading her questions. Just as the Mormons would have been offended by my former Mormon status, I figured Stephanie, a devoted Christian, would be offended by my agnosticism.

When I told Stephanie that I'd been following the controversy about Mormon history, her response was sharp and immediate.

"You be careful," she told me, gesturing with her hands. "I don't know what it is but there's something compelling about the Mormons."

And there it was: the fear, which had also been my own fear for a long time. Inside Mormonism, I had been afraid of the outside world. Outside Mormonism, my fear turned into nightmares where I returned to church. Even though I never had the personality or temperament for Mormonism, I was still heartbroken when I realized that I would never fit in again. And so, for years after leaving, I was afraid of the possibility that I might feel compelled to force myself back into the painfully narrow mold expected of me.

As I look around at the Christian activists, their voices slowly cracking from a long night of yelling, and at the detritus of a pageant based on simplistic stories that have no basis in physical reality, I felt completely foreign. So I returned to my car and left, my headlights sweeping past the crowds, and drove back to the life of gray areas I'd created for myself.

Thumbnail photo of the Hill Cumorah Pageant by Krishna Kumar.

Follow Rachel Velamur on Twitter.

Mug shot via Lexington County Detention Center

More on Dylann Roof:
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Today, Dylann Roof, the alleged perpetrator of last month's shooting spree at an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, is being indicted for 33 federal crimes, the New York Times reports. In addition to a hate crime, the charges include "obstruction of persons in the free exercise of religious beliefs," which could prove to be the legal lynchpin that places the 21-year-old on death row.

South Carolina's lack of hate crime legislation has made Roof's case frustrating for the community that's still recovering from the loss of nine citizens. Charleston's police chief, Greg Mullen, told reporters soon after the racially motivated killing spree, "In this case, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is a hate crime."

Roof already faced nine counts of murder in the state of South Carolina. However, federal investigators told the Times last month that leaving the racial component of such a horrific crime unaddressed was not going to fly. One law enforcement official said Roof's alleged crime "directly fits the hate crime statute," and added, "This is exactly what it was created for."

A formal grand jury indictment in federal court could come as soon as this afternoon, according to the paper. A federal hate crime, however, does not necessarily mean eligibility for the death penalty—thus the importance of the obstruction of religious practice charge.

If the end of the road for Roof really is federal death row, that would put him in league with some of the America's worst criminals, including convicted Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Look at all that water you can't drink. Photo via Flickr user faungg's photos.

Metro Vancouver's water struggle worsened this week, and they've tightened their water restrictions, as the reservoir water storage continues to drop during one of the worst droughts the region has experienced.

Metro Vancouver's three reservoirs, which were, on average, 100 percent full in May, are down to a new low of 69 percent. And the levels continue to drop.

On July 20, the region was put under Stage 3 water restrictions. Stage 3 is the second highest restriction for drinking water, which prohibits watering lawns, washing cars, and running public watering fountains. Other places such as pools and spas remain under special restrictions.

Last week, the city also raised their drought level to the highest category, Level 4, which describes "extremely dry conditions."

As the city starts to move into more serious conditions, they are also starting to crack down on violators of the water prohibitions. Vancouver city has handed out almost 1,500 warnings and issued 30 tickets at $250 each to anyone who has violated the water restrictions.

Metro Vancouver said that the last time they implemented the second stage of the water shortage response plan was in 2003 during an unusually hot and dry summer.

Reservoirs in the Metro Vancouver area averaged capacity at an alarming 69 percent last week

Metro Vancouver Board Chair and Port Coquitlam mayor Greg Moore told VICE that this year has been extreme for the region, and although they are cracking down on violations, their main goal is to educate people. The message that officials are trying to send to people in the region is that "we're all in this together and we all have to work to reducing our water right now."

"Here in metro Vancouver, we've had little to no rain for May, June, now into July and when we work with environment Canada there's little precipitation forecast for the next two and a half, three months actually," Moore told VICE. "Normally we would be at 69 percent at the end of august so the fact that we're there now is a concern for us and that's why we moved to a stage 3."

"When we were in Stage 1 we were consuming about 1.6 billion liters of water a day, which is quite high, Stage 2 brought it down to about 1.4 billion liters," he said. "But we need to get to less than 1.2 billion liters of water a day for us to stay at Stage 3 and not go to a Stage 4."

Due to this drought, British Columbia has also seen massive amounts of wild fires, and the province could set a new record for how many hectares have burned so far this season. Earlier this month, Motherboard reported on the fact that the wettest place in North America—Vancouver Island's rainforest—was burning, explaining that these dangerous dry seasons might become the new norm.

VICE also spoke to BC's chief fire information officer, Kevin Skrepnek, about what he's seen.

"It's been a fairly hot and dry year so far. We had an early start to the season had some major fires in early may," Skrepnek told VICE. "We didn't see nearly the amount of precipitation in the spring that we usually would have."

Many fires have been caused by lightning, and with the lack of rain, the areas are more susceptible to fire than normal. Since April, he explained that there has been around 1,300 fires and that 250 are burning today.

"In 2014, by the end of season, we had burned about 360,000 hectares, which was the third worst on record. We're currently at 295,000 and we still have probably at least six weeks," he said.

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter

Pete. Photo by author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Standing with his arms folded in the drab administration room of the London School of Business and Finance (LSBF), Pete Nguyen cuts a despondent figure. Just two months ago he was busy studying for a masters at St. Patrick's College—a for-profit business school which works with LSBF. His aim was clear: The 22-year-old international student from Vietman wanted to stand out from the crowd with an extra degree, find a company willing to sponsor his visa and stay on in the country he had made his home since 2009.

Today, half-way through the two year course in management, his plan lies in tatters. On February 19, St. Patrick's had its license to sponsor students from countries outside the EU taken away after an investigation from the Home Office. An appeal was made by the institution but two months later, on April 20 the decision was upheld.

Pete's attendance on the course has now stopped, the money he paid up front for two years of classes taken away without full compensation, and from the Home Office—the people he hoped might help him—he got a bleak and bureaucratic letter instructing him, and every other international student at the college, to find a new visa-sponsor within 60 days or get out the country.

In the college's office, a glum looking staff member stares down at his computer screen as Pete asks for guidance.

"It's a compliance issue," the administrator says coldly. "You need to ask them."

Though non-EU students make a clear contribution to the UK economy, the pressure to reduce net migration means they are now increasingly unwelcome. Just last week the Home Secretary Theresa May announced harsh new measures for international students as part of a crackdown on "visa fraud." Non-EU students will be banned from working while they study and forced to leave the country the moment their courses are over.

London Met students protesting against foreign students having their visas revoked, back in 2012. Photo by Henry Langston

"Economically it makes more sense to have international students but what's happening at St. Patrick's and elsewhere is driven by fear," Pete tells me, just outside the building his classes were held in. "When the economy is not doing very well they like to point figures at foreign people."

Though illegal immigration does take place through the student visa system, most of the UK's 121,000 international students come to the country legitimately to study. It's the colleges that are often at fault when things go wrong and they lose the right to sponsor visas.

But as Stephan Sangare—another St. Patrick's student—tells me, it's the international students who feel like they're being punished. "I had to pay £6,000 [$9,300] in advance for the course and I got £1,250 [$1,950] back. It's not the fault of the students. We've paid the fees, we've attended the right amount of classes," he says from his family home in the Ivory Coast, where he has been forced to return.

The precise reason St. Patrick's has lost its license remains hard to establish. A report by the Public Accounts Committee published just before the decision found nearly £4 million [$6.25 million] in public money had been claimed from the Student Loans Company by "ineligible EU students" studying at various alternative higher education providers. But neither the college or the Home Office were willing to confirm the cause of the problem in this case.

Related: Watch our film about the student protests in 2010, Teenage Riot

Over the last few months, St. Patrick's has been stung by a number of different complaints and allegations. In February an investigation by BBC Face The Facts found evidence of overcrowding, poor facilities, and students enrolled solely for the purpose of accessing public loans. A further investigation by the Quality Assurance Agency, the higher education regulator, found many of the same issues as well as high withdrawal rates, recruitment through cold-contact, and advertising non-existent courses.

Critics argue that many of these problems stem from the institution's status as a for-profit college. Back in 2012 David Willetts, then Minister for Universities and Science, opened up the loan and maintenance grant funding system to private providers. Since then the sector has grown dramatically, often by abusing the funding system. At St. Patrick's—which receives more money in student loans than any other private college in England—the number of students enrolled on Higher National Courses rose from 50 to 4,000 in just 12 months.

Management see this as a clear sign of success. In a statement a spokesperson for the college said "St. Patrick's College is focused on expanding access to higher education in the UK and has been successful in doing so in the past few years."

But according to Pete, it's failure to properly accommodate this rapid expansion that has failed him. "They take in as many students as they can, make as much money as possible, and when it goes to shit we have to bear the burden and the leave the country," he says. "The college promised to offer us education and the right to live in the UK, then abandoned us when business went bad."

LSBF. Photo by author

On their letters from the Home Office, the students of St. Patrick's have been offered just 60 days to find a new college to sponsor them. A spokesperson for the college told me its students were being "supported" throughout the process with help offered to "find other sponsors."

"St. Patrick's College has gone to great lengths to support students affected by the Home Office's decision and ensure they were able to complete their studies and acquire their qualifications," the spokesperson said. "We employ robust procedures to train our staff and strive to provide our students with the best possible service at all times."

But Pete says he has been offered "nothing." After applying for a refund, he claims it took 45 days to receive a response, after which he was left out of pocket by over £2,000 [$3,100]. Without the money, and with the 60 days rapidly expiring, his chances of a finding a new college remain uncertain.

"I desperately need that money to pay for new tuition," he says. "If I'm going to enroll on a new course I'm going to need that whole amount of money to pay for it. Thankfully there is a college willing to sponsor my visa but I'm running out of time to stay in the country."

A spokesperson for the college said their refund policy follows "published guidelines." "Those who decided to withdraw from their course were given the option to apply for a refund," the spokesperson said. "Any request for a refund must comply with a number of conditions and, as such, fees paid for modules that have already been completed may not be subject to a refund."

On Munchies: Eggs Are Now More Expensive than Chicken

Even with a full refund, finding a new institution can still be difficult for international students. With the Home Office monitoring colleges and universities so closely, many are reluctant to take on students from institutions that have lost their licenses.

"Other universities have become aware of St. Patrick's," Stephane tells me. "When the license of your university has been withdrawn it's difficult for students to find anywhere else. They don't want students from other bad places in case they lose their own license."

When Theresa May unveiled her new plans for foreign students last week it was "nothing new" to Pete. From racist abuse on the London underground to scores of failed job applications because of his visa status, any hope he had in the UK as somewhere viable for students like him has long since disappeared. Though he hopes to find a new college to complete his management degree, he says his long-term plans now lie elsewhere.

"I've been here for six years now and I've kind of had enough. If the country doesn't appreciate my presence I'll take it elsewhere."

With 870 "bogus colleges" having lost their sponsorship licenses since 2010, and various publicly funded colleges and universities being caught up in the crackdown, it's not hard to imagine that many others feel the same.

Follow Philip on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Jason Meredith

Read: My Autism Doesn't Make Me a Robot

Since it was discovered in the mid-1900s, autism has increased exponentially. In 1974, autism affected a scant one in 5,000 children in the United States. By 2010, that number was one in 68, or about 1.5 percent of children in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the rate of autism increased threefold.

This "autism epidemic" has been falsely explained by things like circumcision and vaccines. Some parents are so afraid of autism that they've refused to vaccinate their kids; others have tried to "cure" their autistic kids through extreme measures like bleach enemas. But according to a study published today in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, autism isn't actually on the rise. It just looks that way because of the way autism is diagnosed.

A team of researchers at Penn State University looked at 11 years worth of enrollment data from special-education programs, covering over six million children. In that time frame, researchers found no increase in special-ed enrollment—just a shift in the number of students who had been diagnosed with autism. Children who were more likely to be classified with other intellectual disabilities in the past are more likely to be called "autistic" today, making it look like more children have autism.

Autism diagnosis is tricky, since it's based entirely on behavior. The symptoms of autism can be diverse and generic—things like arranging objects in linear patterns or performing repetitive behaviors are considered symptoms. When the condition was first named by Leo Kanner in 1943 (the same dude who invented the term "refrigerator mothers"), autism was considered rare and specific. Today, autism is known to exist "on a spectrum," appearing in many different forms and with much greater variability.

This can make it easy to conflate symptoms of other intellectual disorders with autism, according to Santhosh Girirajan, the leader of the research team. In a press release, Girirajan explained, "When individuals carrying classically-defined genetic syndromes were evaluated for features of autism, a high frequency of autism was observed, even among disorders not previously associated with autism, suggesting that the tools for diagnosing autism lose specificity when applied to individuals severely affected by other genetic syndromes."

In other words: The increase in autism is because of how the condition is diagnosed, not how the condition itself is caused.

For younger kids, the researchers found that about 59 percent of the increase in autism was accounted for by reclassification from other neurological disorders. By age 15, reclassification accounted for 97 percent of the increase in autism.

This is the first study to show direct evidence against the idea that autism is on the rise. It's not something in the water, or in the vaccines we give to children, but rather the way doctors handle autism diagnoses that's responsible for the increase in autistic children.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

'Grand Theft Auto V' on PC just received a patch to "fix" a lower frame rate—not that the issue prevented millions from enjoying the game.

Every time I've been to a preview event over the past year, had an interview with a developer, or reviewed a game, there's been an elephant in the room. But it's not the question of if releases should always run at 60 frames per second, as is increasingly the demand of the vocal minority of gamers who seem to think anything less is a slight against their loyalty to a particular system or studio. It's more that I don't really give a shit about what the frame rate is, at all, unless it adversely effects the experience. I am the elephant, and I'm not alone. Very few who really love the gaming medium care a toss about which new title is locked at 60fps and which isn't, like that's the factor in telling right from wrong—all that matters is, is it any good?

It took me the best part of half a day to complete the final level of BioShock Infinite on its hard difficulty because the amount of entities and effects going on was too much for my poor old Xbox 360 to handle, and so the frame rate suffered. But did I lose my shit? No. Back in the mid-1990s, one of my favorite games was Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix II, a Formula One racing sim highly regarded as one of the best ever in its genre. Its exceptional array of cars, setups, and graphics were astounding for the time, but everything was running at a phenomenal 10fps, a fact I've never even thought to check until writing this. Did it make the game unplayable? Did it hell.

PC games, when appropriately optimized, have been able to nail a consistent 60 frames per second for years now, and the general thinking when it comes to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is that these new consoles should be able to match that performance. And yet, taking this perspective leaves one blinkered to the realities of the not-yet-behind-us previous console generation, and how hard it was to get some games running at 30fps, let alone anything more. The Last of Us, for example, pushed the processing power of the PS3 to its absolute limit, and was locked at 30fps. Fans of eSports-friendly titles, and first-person shooters, need their games running as responsively as possible, and demand that developers meet their frame rate predictions, even when the end results are far from promised. But the reality is that a lot of today's console games simply cannot run that fast, which has led to an abundance of post-release patches and fixes.

Playing The Evil Within straight out of the box was atrocious, but its day one patch sorted it out, although problems persisted on the Xbox One version. The perk of console development is that everyone who owns a PS4 has the same fixed-spec machine beneath their TV—which puts PC gamers at a slight loss when it comes to studios "guaranteeing" performance quality, as set-ups are subject to personal tastes (and budgets). A $3,100 gaming PC is sure to exert more grunt than a laptop costing a fraction of that sum. What this means is that big, cross-platform games are often made with a focus on the lucrative console market—we saw it with Grand Theft Auto V, where the PC release trailed long behind versions for current- and past-gen consoles, and just recently with Batman: Arkham Knight, which was so bad on PC that publisher Warner Bros. took it off the market.

When a game works at 60fps it is pretty special, and such smoothness definitely has its place in the competitive multiplayer space, in racing games, space simulators or any kind of artistic concept game (think Journey or Flower) so long as it's fixed and constant. But, and here's a shock, not all games need or even require that frame rate. And even those that might stutter a little because the ambition is too great for the architecture, it's not like I get pissed when I'm playing them. If I like the game, I like the game, and whatever its frame rate might be becomes a tertiary concern at best.

Related: Watch VICE's documentary on eSports

Gamers demanding that 60fps should be "industry standard" don't see that the chase for such a uniform achievement is damaging to the entire gaming experience. Look at the coverage Eurogamer's Digital Foundry provides, and you'll soon enough see that it's not the number of frames per second that matters, but how fixed the frame rate actually is. Take the forthcoming Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, due out on PS4 in March 2016 and shown off at this summer's E3 conference. That gameplay footage was running at 30fps, leading Eurogamer's writer to note: "By conceding to a 30fps lock, the team is at least able to go all out with this set-piece; a preference compared to a theoretical 60fps that just can't be sustained."

I don't know about you, but I translate that as Uncharted series developers Naughty Dog caring more about their game being a quality, reliable, smooth, and consistent experience over one that runs at a frame rate that might be achievable, but at the risk of compromising the player's enjoyment. A fluctuating frame rate can be a right ball ache. I don't suppose Star Trek quotes make regular appearances on VICE, but this one feels appropriate, from 1991's sixth motion picture: "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean that we should do that thing."

Progress in the gaming industry has happened fast. It doesn't feel like all that long ago that I was playing games in BASIC, or updating the drivers on my Intel 200MMX Packard Bell. Computer-generated imaging and processing has come so far, in such a short space of time. But just because technology tells us that our televisions are 1080p with a 60fps frame rate, games shouldn't feel bound to those standards. Just as in film production, the aesthetics of any game should be an artistic choice. Twenty-four frames per second is the cinematic norm, while television broadcasts in the UK are displayed at 30fps. Peter Jackson experimented with 48fps for The Hobbit, which didn't go down particularly well but nevertheless shows that it's up to the man, not the machine, to decide how any piece of media, of art, should appear. Think, too, of the movies that are 3D just for the sake of being 3D, without that feature being of paramount experience importance: it feels tacked on, needless, distracting, and usually shit.

'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End' ran at 30fps at E3 2015 and looked fantastic

I don't think the vast majority of gamers care that a developer's hope for a pure 60fps end product falls a little short of reality, or that a new release is purposefully locked at a lower rate to ensure a richer, more rewarding experience. Unfortunately though, when such "broken promises" or deliberate caps become public, they comprise astounding effective troll bait. "Popular YouTuber" Totalbiscuit has taken it upon himself to tag all PC games on Steam that play at 30fps with a little curator logo stating as much. Because when your very existence is reliant on remaining active on the internet, the real world, full of common sense and bigger picture perspectives, becomes a strange and faraway place.

Totalbiscuit's "policing" of 30fps games might be a mostly humorous exercise for him and his fans, but inevitably there are idiots of the internet who have failed to see the funny side and have taken things too far. The maker of card-based game Guild of Dungeoneering, Colm Larkin, received actual threats from people because his title was not instantly listed as a 30fps affair. Totalbiscuit, for the record, did denounce the behavior.

Have the trolls trolling for trolling's sake actually played the games they're trolling their makers about? It's unlikely. But that's not the point. The 60fps-or-bust campaign, such as it is, has become just another battleground for idiots to rally against... Oh, it's hard to keep up. Female characters. Product placement. Anything that isn't all bullets and blood, bombast and bikini armor; or every now and again the dropping of a single frame per second in a dramatic, level-ending explosion.

Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao recently wrote a piece for The Washington Post saying, basically, "the trolls are winning." Reading her comments, it's hard to disagree that the rise of abuse from online trolls is actually a side effect of our own naivety when given an open platform of free expression. This duplicity of the power of the internet as a tool for good and evil has seen everything from victimization, harassment, sexism, invasions of privacy, bullying, a deconstruction of civility, threats of harm, and even death and suicide. It's safe to say that on the scale of issues, a game that isn't hitting or hasn't bothered with attempting 60fps isn't exactly right up there.

On Motherboard: Ellen Pao Quits, and Reddit Stays the Course

Video games are a medium that has rarely explicitly cared what color, race, age or gender you are—and when it has, those games are best forgotten. It's an interactive and inclusive way to share stories and enjoy puzzles, to captivate and educate, and in recent times to get the best out of the internet's connecting of likeminded people, sharing common interests, based around the world. It has created great communities for people to share their loves and their lives in a constructive and positive way. Arguing about frame rates? Threatening people because of anything to do with it? What is that non-issue achieving, really, other than becoming just one more foundation for online harassment? Most of the time, video games are made to make their player feel good, for them to be fun. It's amazing how easy it is for the faceless, nameless, loudest users of the internet to forget that.

If you're young, the media will tell you that you're impressionable. But don't be persuaded by people on the internet, people who you don't know, telling you that video games that don't perform to their own often impossible standards are in any way inferior to those that are locked at a very particular set of specifications. That kind of chatter does not matter—unless it does, and it breaks the game, but nine times out of ten that is not the case at all. Take a step back from the screen, and think about your own greatest gaming experiences—how many of those memories are running at a frame rate you can remember? There you go.

Follow Sean Cleaver on Twitter.

Screenshot via Ai Weiwei's Instagram. Thumbnail image via Wikimedia Commons

Read: An Interview with the Persecuted Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei finally has his passport back after the Chinese government banned him from traveling internationally in 2011, CNN reports. The news broke this morning when Weiwei posted a photo to Instagram with the caption, "Today I got the passport."

The Chinese government initially confiscated Weiwei's passport four years ago, following an arrest and subsequent charge for tax evasion. The artist, who is best known for designing Beijing's Bird Nest stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics, has claimed that the government's case against him had more to do with his activism than back taxes.

Weiwei continued to put on shows around the world during his time grounded in China, working remotely to put on @Large show at Alcatraz last year and a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2013. He is unsure why the Chinese government has decided now is the time to give him back his passport.

"They have promised for the past four years to give it back," Weiwei told the New York Times in a phone interview. "Now finally they gave it to me."

Reuters says that the 57-year-old artist plans to travel to London in September for an exhibition of his previous works at the Royal Academy of Art. But first, he plans to visit Berlin where Ai Lao, his six-year-old son, and Ai Lao's mother have been living for the past year.

This image might represent "homelessness" to you, but there are thousands of other homeless individuals who blend into society. Photo by Flickr user Garry Knight

I was at a bar awhile back with some of my university friends, sharing beers and relaxing, when a homeless man approached us. He had a deck of cards, and was trying to entertain us for money. Everyone laughed him off, making the usual jokes about homeless people trying to bum change for drugs. I didn't say anything. After a few beers, I quietly excused myself. I had a curfew that night at the homeless shelter.

I was used to making exits like this. For almost a year prior, I had found ways to delicately balance my social life in college with the restrictions of being homeless, often leaving early from social outings with the excuse that I was tired or had to study, so that I could secure a place to sleep that night.

It's hard to know exactly how many college students are homeless, but an estimate from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) suggests that there are about 58,000 homeless students on college campuses in the United States. The actual figure is probably much higher, since many homeless youths try to keep their situation a secret. We are "invisibly" homeless, sleeping on friends' couches or falling asleep in the library, and staying at shelters and on the streets when there are no other options.

I became homeless during spring break of my sophomore year, when many of my fellow students were partying on campus or vacationing with friends. I was 20 years old at the time, an honor roll student studying philosophy and political science. I had been living with my grandparents, who took me in when I was a teenager so that I wouldn't go into foster care. But when my grandfather passed away and my grandmother fell ill, I had nowhere to live. I had no other family, and no money to pay for rent.

I go to a relatively small, public university in the Vancouver area. There are no dorms on campus, and rent in the area is steep (homes in Vancouver are among the most expensive in North America). Later, I would realize that my university offered emergency bursary for students in my situation—but at the time, I didn't know what my options were, and I was too embarrassed to ask.

Plus, becoming homeless in college was not a major shock to me. I had been homeless off-and-on during my early teens, before my grandparents took me in, and had learned how to hide my experiences. I would crash on friends' couches when I could, or sleep in parks. These bouts of homelessness were episodic, and I never knew when I would need to find a new place to stay, but I always made it work.

I figured that I could cope with homelessness in college the same way, and that I could easily hide it. I was wrong.

Watch: Why Is College So Expensive? on VICE News

In the beginning, I lived in a facility with social workers; then later, in a homeless shelter. I would wake up early for class, take the bus onto campus, and spend the day studying and working. I worked hard during the days, because at night, neither quiet time nor internet access were guaranteed.

Eventually, I moved into a transitional house, a special type of shelter that prepares people for permanent housing. Transitional houses are supervised, and the rules are strict: Drugs and alcohol aren't allowed on site, there are no visitors allowed, and there's a curfew at night. In order to live there, people have to be actively seeking employment or enrolled in school. The monthly rent at my transitional house was $375, more than half of the income assistance I received each month. That left me with about $5 per day to spend on food, school books, and incidentals.

Watch: Death of the American Hobo

The rooms in the transitional house were sort of like college dorms—there was a bed, a shelf, a set of drawers, and we all shared a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom—but the building was old and crawling with spiders.

When you're in the system, you don't get to choose who interferes with your life. You sleep wherever you can.

We each had a transitional worker assigned to us, who met with us periodically to check in on our housing and employment goals. There was also a property manager, who lived below us and made sure that we followed the rules of living in the building, sort of like a residential advisor. The property manager of my transition house went to the same university as I did, and she was studying for the same degree—we even had a class together. We had the same career goals, but starkly different paths. This was her job; this was my life.

Most university students live with roommates, some who party too much, sleep in too late, or prevent you from studying. But when you're in the system, you don't get to choose who interferes with your life. You sleep wherever you can.

Photo via Flickr user Kevin Coles

Since I'm studying political science, the topic of homelessness comes up every now and then in my coursework: What do we do about the "homeless problem"? How do we change policies to improve conditions for the homeless? When this happens, I try to offer my opinion, but I choose my words carefully, to give myself distance from the subject. Most of my classmates have no idea the "problem" they are talking about was me at one time.

Great things happen in college. For most students, it's a whirlwind of drinking, partying, living without consequence. I will never know what it's like to experience it that way. Most university students aren't sure what they want to do after graduation, but there's something sexy about not knowing about your future when you're in your 20s and 30s. There is nothing sexy about not knowing where your next meal will come from, or where you'll sleep.

On Motherboard: Stop taking selfies with the homeless.

There are so many stereotypes about what it means to be homeless: People assume the homeless are lazy, strung-out, irresponsible, and incapable of leading normal lives. I've found the exact opposite. Being homeless forced me to work ten times as hard for my goals. While I watched other students absentmindedly scrolling through Facebook or shopping online during lectures, I had no choice but to focus. There was no internet in homeless shelters; I didn't have the luxury of studying whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted, and failing was not an option.

My best memories in college are the times when I saw friends who lived in the transition house with me on campus. Together, we laughed off the stereotypes, and we felt indestructible by managing our double-lives.

Eventually, I pulled my way out of the system: I got a job working at the university's student union, which paid $400 each month. I finally asked for financial help, and learned about emergency bursary and student loan options. Now that I'm in my final year of university, I work two jobs and live in an apartment with my boyfriend, who just graduated from the same school, and I hope to continue my education in law school.

When I was still living in transitional housing, I was elected to a position on student government. I didn't think I could have possibly been the right person for the job, but there is hidden value at being your weakest when opportunity strikes. One of my goals as a student leader is to give hope to other students who are without a home—because no student should have to go through what I went through without the proper support, inclusion, and resources.

If you are homeless student in the US, visit HUD.gov for information on federal resources and assistance.

Okay... just look at the following words: Grexit. Syriza. Tsipras. Merkel. Austerity. At first glance they don't even look like words; they resemble, I don't know... launch codes—or maybe they're the names of recently FDA‑approved osteoporosis medications—and yet at the moment these words are some of the most freighted in the language, and unlike most new words, they have the potential to demarcate the end of one era and the start of another.

Let's have a quick peek at the Greek economy. Greece is odd because it's an ostensibly middle class place with a twist: it's a warmer, slower paced version of other middle class societies in the liberal democratic west. Miami? Not quite. Santiago? Too young. San Antonio, Texas? Nope. Greek citizens still pretty much do normal middle class things and they live middle class lives and yet... when you look at the Greek economy overall, it turns out Greece doesn't really do anything. There's no tech or manufacturing or large scale agribusiness... it's just islands and hotels and many, many people with pensions and ATMs that only dispense cash to non-Greeks. This is not meant to be disparaging, and if you read further, you'll understand this. It also makes you wonder, Well then, just how were these people filling their days?

Hi! I'm Greece! I'm the happy sunny Shirley Valentine country where the living is easy and your days are filled with nothing, if not the absence of labour. There's Ouzo. There's outdoor chess. And as a tourist there's an ever present whiff of the possibility of sex with people out of your league.

Okay then... Greece doesn't really make or do anything the way other European nations do... but there's definitely large scale tourism, and a bit of agriculture. And what's wrong with having only that? Light drinking. Outdoor chess games. Sun. Life in Greece has always sounded great, and when we think of retirement, Greece's dolce far niente is often what springs to mind. Doing nothing all day? Life in Greece isn't even utopia; it's heaven. So then, what's the problem?

During Argentina's 1998-2002 financial crisis, vast chunks of its middle class were violently burped out of the nation's economy, except at the time it happened, these people didn't realize that they were being permanently burped out of the middle class. The years rolled on and all those Brooks Brothers button-down shirts from the 1997 trip to New York grew ever more threadbare. The leather Coach handbag from the 1996 trip to Miami faded. And eventually: Honey, I think it's over.

And it was.

The social devastation in Argentina never fully registered in the northern hemisphere, but now Greece is one Grexit away from Argentinian-style demiddleclassification, and this time it's registering the world over. Greece is sort of like a social terrarium from which all the money like oxygen, is being extracted. The folks putting the lid back on top of the terrarium are giving each other guilty looks while hoping that the ensuing slow protracted death of Greece's financial ecosystem won't be overly filled with audible screams of angry dying little Greeks.

Another metaphor: Greece is a financial car crash that's blocked traffic for miles, so when you finally drive past, you've earned your right to rubberneck, and in your head you're also thinking, God, I'm glad it wasn't me. And a seemingly inevitable Grexit makes us all ask ourselves, "Who's next?"—but not just in a short-term Portugal/Spain/Ireland domino effect way. Our pondering is existential and more like, when does the overall system that supports middle-class democracy eventually end? Just why is it that only the existence of a large complacent middle class represents both the health and validity of a society? We seem to equate middle-class existence with existence itself.

Greek society is intricate and complex, and it would appear one must be born into it to comprehend its intricacies, but it is a society nonetheless, and just because it can't meet fiscal benchmarks established in Brussels, that doesn't make it less of a society. Since when is the value of any society judged almost solely by the robustness of its capitalism? Why can't we look at Greece's reasonably comfortable mildly underoccupied life as a sort of utopia instead of The Death of Western Society? Maybe what we see in Greece is actually a dark precursor to what we envision for ourselves down the road.

To be discussed.

So OK then, Greece leaves the Euro, or the Euro leaves Greece. In that scenario would Athens become the new New Delhi? Would everyone have to hand in their Lacoste shirts and iPhones to receive a box of Nestle tinned meal substitutes and sit in communal theaters watching TED Talks projected onto bedsheets? Does Greece enter class warfare? But wait—Greece doesn't really seem to be a one-percent‑y country; Greeks seem to more or less all be in the same boat, so there aren't that many heads you can chop off and put onto stakes.

And what would it mean for Greece to no longer be middle class? It wouldn't be really blue collar or working class now either—because there's no work available in which to be working class. Would everyone sit around all day nursing a single cup of coffee while discussing Marianne Faithfull's vocal tracks in Broken English? Would everyone go out and riot? But riot for what? More money? There is no more money. More respect? You've got respect... you just don't have any more money. Do you put your entire country up on eBay? Do you Airbnb every single residence in the country? Emigrate to England or Denmark where they still have a Middle Class Classic™?

The global middle class, just like Alaskan glaciers, is melting away at an extraordinary rate, and we very much need to rebrand the successor of the middle class society as utopian—or at least suck the dread out of it and strip it of horror vacui. Greece is telling us this. Greece is the new template for the rest of the Western world. Greece forces us to worry about the new world order where an invisible high-tech conveyor belt relentlessly replaces formerly middle-class workers with machine intelligence, taking us all into a world of perpetual clicking, linking, embedding, and liking. Greece forces us to worry about the abrupt vanishing of a social structure so old, we don't even see it as a social structure but, rather, a universal right, but it's not. It's as artificial as aspartame.

The Greeks are now involuntarily moving from the position of being a society of tacit, off the books Eurosubsidized leisure, into a culture of borderline mandatory inactivity. That's a subtle shift. Until recently Greeks were able to spend their days doing nothing, which was nice; now they have to spend their days with nothing to do, which is scary. Greece is beginning to feel, if anything, like a JG Ballard novel about a dystopian future in which leisure becomes a cruel monkey's paw curse. You're still doing basically the same nothing as before, except now, instead of being pleasant it becomes terrifying. I mean, really, how it is that something as wonderful as life in Greece has somehow become a new definition of societal hell? The Adriatic weather's great, and potatoes and lamb ought to reasonably be cheap and readily available. Add booze and it's fantastic. Do you really want a massive Siemens optical fiber facility in your neighbourhood? And would Siemens ever conceive of building one there? I mean, really, think about it. Would they? And would the Greeks in-their-bones actually want it?

Let's discuss doing nothing. Doing nothing means doing nothing. It means being offline and walking down a street and... simply walking down the street. Sitting on a bench for ten minutes or however long without crumbling and looking at your latest electronic whatever. It sounds simple, but almost nobody does nothing any more, in fact the hallmark of our age is the impossibility of doing nothing. Our attention spans are so thoroughly colonized by the cloud that even brief separation from the linked universe causes dread and something akin to homesickness. Maybe 20 years ago, people were very good at doing nothing. These days people are hopeless at it.

Now let's discuss "having nothing to do." It means waking up, thinking about the day to come, and realizing that you have, well... nothing to do. No job. No way of earning a living. Maybe you'll go out with friends in similar straits, and maybe you'll do a massage for a foreign hotel guest at the Athens Marriot. Torch an Uber Mercedes. The night goes on. You have a drink back in your apartment. Then maybe some Netflix.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Until recently you either had something to do called a job and you did it—or you were unemployed and had nothing to do and you more or less meditated all day, possibly about being unemployed, but also maybe wondering about the seagull that just flew over your head, or maybe about the meaning of the end of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being unemployed 25 years ago wasn't so much a capitalist state of being so much as it was an existential state of being... "Hi—I'm unemployed, and because of this I'm probably more contemplative than people who are employed."

Enter the cloud.

Let's discuss earthly paradise. Let's discuss utopias. Utopias don't have to be all about comfort and luxury. Growing up on the west coast of Canada, I saw group after group of hippies head up the coast to create utopian communes, which almost always went kaput the moment the women figured out they were doing all the work while the guys were out smoking weed in the hammocks. Or look at ISIS. They took a desert where there's very little for most of its citizens to do, and instead rebranded the place as a form of utopia, generating meaning in a place where little existed before. It's hardly life onboard a Carnival Cruise liner, but people are seem to be flocking to join. Meanwhile, migrants are swarming the Chunnel entrance at Calais, Africans are drowning trying to reach the Sardinian coast, and people are walking thousands of miles to reach the cabbage fields of Hungary—their jumping off point into the rest of Europe. Most of the world still sees Europe as a utopia, but the Europeans don't. They see themselves as stagnant and somewhat rudderless, but at least they've got something to do.

Having something to do seems to be an important aspect of a utopia being a utopia, whether it's building Airbuses or beheading people. At least you know what you're doing when you wake up in the morning. British novelist Susan Ertz said, "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon." It's true. Busy is better.

Tourism, which is an engineered short-term utopia—as well as Greece's strongest business card—now also fosters a great irony for the Greeks. It enforces confrontation between people who come to the country to do nothing, and those locals who now have nothing to do—which can only be galling. But remember, Greece is just now reaching a place where we're all going to be sooner or later, a world of massive labour obsolescence where unless you actually know how to do something useful, you'll just become one more piece of middle-class space junk. And don't forget, while people in the West see the erosion of the middle class as downward mobility, for most of the world, getting online with Android devices to comparison shop for Martha Stewart towels is proof positive they're on the way up. It's just that everyone on Earth is reaching a new middle, and we're still unclear where that middle will be and what it will look and feel like.

Rich people especially want to know what the remains of the middle class will morph into, but in the end they won't get there first because they have and process the same information that you and I do. If Bill Gates can be blindsided by search engines and mobile devices, then anyone can be blindsided by anything.

Modern people are largely incapable of doing nothing the way we discussed earlier—walking down the street and simply looking at the world around us. People are incapable because doing nothing means not being electronically connected, which is an unsettling state of mind that becomes intolerable after even a short hiatus. Omnipresent cloud-fueled devices devour our attention spans. We're all deeply, deeply into the shredded attention span paradigm and let's face it: it's not going to go away, and nor do we want it to.

At the same time we inhabit an age of massive and extreme unknowns, lurking in time and space both nearby and far away. Look! Mr. Putin is dangling a clump of grapes over the mouths of austerity weary Athenians. Look! China wants to turn Greece into a Double Lucky Golden Prosperity Node. Look! Global warming just destroyed this year's grape crop.

Our new world is defined by a duality of fear and diversion. Non-stop online diversion is palliative; it manages to make a world of extreme unknowns bearable. Diversion in turn makes having nothing to do OK. Diversion has become our new solace.

And all those tourists who came to Greece to do nothing? They're not doing nothing. They're just as trapped in the new duality as anyone else. It's irony squared.

The twentieth century? Those were the days, my friend. Enter, please, the twenty-first century schizoid man.

Douglas Coupland, one of Canada's preeminent authors and artists, has been relentlessly chronicling the future of mass culture for 25 years and has usually been right. He is currently Google's Artist in Residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.

Follow Douglas Coupland on Twitter. Lead image by Ben Ruby.

Paul Rudd as Scott Lang/Ant-Man in 'Ant-Man.' Photo courtesy of Marvel Films

Most of the best-known legacy superheroes are white. Ant-Man is too, and for the same reason. He was created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby in 1962, a time when pulp media rarely featured heroes of color. But does that mean he has to be white forever, even in the new Marvel film?

Ant-Man isn't that well-known, after all—and the Scott Lang, ex-con version of the character (created by David Micheline and John Byrne in 1979) is even less well-known than that. In short, Ant-Man is not an icon. Surely it shouldn't be too hard to change a character that few people know about?

An Ant-Man of color would seem to be in line with recent superhero diversity efforts on the big screen. Admittedly, those efforts have been tentative and conflicted at least since the first Blade film, starring Wesley Snipes, unexpectedly demonstrated the viability of Marvel properties onscreen. But there has been some progress. Fox's Fantastic Four has cast Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, a move that prompted both praise and backlash. Fox's X-Men: Days of Future Past included black heroes Storm (Halle Berry) and Bishop (Omar Sy)—but both characters were basically used as cannon fodder.

In Marvel's own cinematic universe, Nick Fury has been portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson, and other black superheroes have appeared here and there like War Machine (Don Cheadle) in the Iron Man films. And of course the Black Panther is scheduled to get his own movie in 2018. So there have been some efforts to include black heroes, though those efforts, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, have mostly fallen short of the comics—and the comics were never that great to begin with.

So it's not exactly a surprise that the makers of Ant-Man settled on a white protagonist. And yet, it's something of a disappointment, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, again, Ant-Man isn't that well-known, so all things being equal, why not challenge the tendency to, by default, make heroes white?

The second reason is that in the movie, the guy who becomes Ant-Man, Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd) is a recently released prisoner. In a nation that disproportionately imprisons non-white people—in 2013, America's male prison population was 37 percent black, 32 percent white, and 22 percent Hispanic—if Ant-Man is going to be an ex-con, he's twice as statistically likely to be black or Hispanic as he is to be white.

Obviously, there are a lot of white people in prison, too. It would be wrong, and offensive in its own right, to suggest that all ex-cons have to be played by people of color. But the fact remains that race is central to the institution of prison in this country, and one way or another, the filmmakers need to deal with that. They chose to make Lang white, which would not in itself have to be a problem. Unfortunately, though, they don't just keep him white. They use his race as a way to underline his exceptionalism compared to other prisoners, and his ultimate superiority.

Take, for instance, the first time we see Scott Lang onscreen, when he's fighting an enormous unnamed black man, in the prison yard. It turns out to be a friendly fight, but the scene emphasizes Lang's underdog status and scrappiness in opposition to his physically overpowering, intimidating opponent of color. When Lang is later freed, he's picked up by his former cellmate, Luis (Michael Peña). The apartment Luis finds for Lang is in a rundown, mostly non-white neighborhood.

The film recognizes that prison and poverty are institutions that disproportionately affect and shape the lives of people who are not white. Moreover, Lang is essentially treated as an honorary person of color. His association with non-white people paints him funky, cool, and "real" in comparison to elite upper-class boardroom guys like Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), the scientist who recruits Lang to be Ant-Man. And, Lang's association with people of color is used as a way of showing how Lang is down on his luck as he struggles to find a job as an ex-con.

[The filmmakers] use his race as a way to underline his exceptionalism compared to other prisoners, and his ultimate superiority.

But while Lang is an honorary POC when compared to the stuck-up rich white folks, his own whiteness is crucial in defining his character against actual people of color in the film. In particular, his half-comic, half-dramatic performance is pitched as a compromise between the uptight white suits and the frankly comic, less law-abiding people of color. In that introductory prison-yard scene, the film takes care to show that it's the big, menacing black guy who insists on a friendly fight before Lang is released—Lang himself finds the ritual odd and unnecessary. After he gets out, Luis is the one to push Lang to get back into a life of crime. But Lang insists on going straight in the name of his young daughter, his estranged wife, and what appears to be their thoroughly-bourgeois former life together.

When he's in prison, or when he's hanging out with people of color, Lang, in short, is slumming. Even the reason he's in prison is fairly honorable: Lang, a systems engineer was convicted for electronically burgling a shady conglomerate and returning funds to people who had been ripped off. Unlike Luis, who is a straightforward burglar and thief, the film tells us Lang is more of a misunderstood hero, a white-hatted Robin Hood, resetting the scales of justice.

This is the dynamic that sets Lang apart from his rag-tag criminal gang, which includes Luis, a black man named Dave (Tip Harris), and Kurt (David Dastmalchian), an Eastern European with a thick accent—white, but still othered in this instance as non-American. The heist team is portrayed as funny, comic, and slapstick—they're clearly subordinate to Lang, who is both the brains and the ninja-like physical talent of the outfit. When executing their break-in, the ethnic hangers-on all gasp as one when Lang smoothly leaps over an exterior wall. Monitoring Lang from the safety of a van parked outside, they then provide an amazed audience for a white hero figuring out how to get through a series of security measures.

Lang is essentially treated as an honorary person of color.

Similarly, for his first real battle as Ant-Man, Lang ends up taking on the black superhero, Sam Wilson, the Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The battle is as much farce as adventure—the tiny Ant-Man bounces around and thumps his oversized opponent, who spins and thrashes haplessly. The scene recalls the first introduction of Sam Wilson in Captain America: Winter Soldier, where Captain America literally jogs circles around him. "In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, viewers experience the white protagonist's superior physicality in contrast to a Black inferior," critic James Lamb writes at my site, the Hooded Utilitarian. Falcon serves the same purpose here: His inferiority (and the inferiority of the heist team) underline Lang's awesomeness—an awesomeness which is not incidentally linked to his whiteness.

Ant-Man's race, then, isn't an accident. The film wants to tell a story about a lovable rogue—a criminal who doesn't really deserve to be a criminal, a man who has made bad choices and is unfairly stigmatized for doing so. It adamantly does not want to think about actual inequities, or how prison for many isn't a poor choice, but is instead the result of the ways in which widespread systemic injustice, poverty, and joblessness close down options.

Watch our documentary 'The Real Superheroes of Montreal':

Ant-Man is designed to show the little guy rising above his circumstances. So to rise above those circumstances, to heroically transcend them, the film presents Lang as a white man who walks among people of color, but is not of them. This dynamic is perhaps in part why Rudd's performance comes across as so raffishly smug. He's ebulliently hip for the squares, but too self-consciously self-confident to seem convincing as an ex-con. It would have been nice to see what Michael Peña could have done with the lead, if given the chance to mix his comedy with some straighter dramatic moments. Or to see Wood Harris (who plays a bit part in the film) bring some gravitas, depth, and perhaps bitterness to the part. Instead, Rudd coasts somewhere in the middle, a bland default—which is presumably what the director was going for.

Casting a person of color as Ant-Man could also have ended up in stereotype, of course. To make it work, the film would have had to thoughtfully address issues of injustice and racism, and there's no evidence the director or the studio had any interest or ability to do that. Still, even if the film overall might not have been any better, it would have been a nice change in Marvel's lineup to have a superhero film helmed by a person of color now, rather than waiting until 2018.

Instead, Ant-Man is white—and he's white for basically the same reason he was white back in 1962. The default assumption in pulp entertainment remains that protagonists will look a certain way. Certain people control their own destinies; certain people rise above their milieu; certain people are the good guys. Even in prison, Ant-Man tells us, white people can be heroes, and all the heroes are white people.

Ant-Man is playing in theaters nationwide.

Follow Noah Berlatsky on Twitter.

Wanted poster via the FBI

They just don't make weapons of mass destruction dealers like they used to.

Back in the 1980s, men like Pakistan scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull set the benchmark for how much unfettered, globe-shaking damage can be done when engineers go rogue. Khan sold nuclear weapon blueprints to Muammar Gaddafi and centrifuges to Iran and North Korea through a network of flabby white-collar criminals from Germany and South Africa. Bull tried to build Saddam Hussein a "supergun" capable of lobbing large projectiles into orbit before being shot in the back of the skull by assassins as he fumbled for his apartment keys in Brussels.

Those two particular malfeasants exemplified the zero-morals glamour to which most arms dealers must surely aspire. When Pakistani authorities finally caught up with Khan in the early 2000s, he was placed under house arrest in one of his Islamabad villas. Echoing some sort of Bond villain, Bull's pre‑Saddam days reportedly involved setting up an experimental artillery piece on the tropical island of Barbados.

The WMD proliferation scene these days doesn't quite have the same level of intrigue. In fact, the closest there is today to an active WMD proliferators' hall of famer is a slightly pudgy Chinese businessman named Li Fang Wei (also known as Karl Lee) who's been irking the US government for much of the past decade.

At first glance, Li could well pass as one of the world's most boring people: He's believed to trade vegetable oil and graphite from a nondescript office block in the smoggy Chinese city of Dalian, and his most distinguishing feature, according to the FBI, is a mole on his upper lip.

Li's side gig is what makes him interesting: For the past ten years, he's allegedly supplemented his income by selling millions of dollars' worth of embargoed goods to Iran's UN-outlawed ballistic missile program. Pick any Iranian missile at random and open it up, and there's a good chance you'll find a part inside that was supplied by Li Fang Wei. From high-strength metals to gyroscopes, the dude supplies it all—and thanks to a weak Chinese legal system and the fact that his goods theoretically could be used legally, it's tough to envision Li going down any time soon.

On Motherboard: The Obsessive World of China's Amateur "Sherlock" Subtitlers

Despite his alleged role in keeping Iranian missiles flying—New York prosecutor Preet Bharara's office has described him as a "principal contributor" to Iran's missile program—Li's exact whereabouts remain a mystery. Indeed, he has kept a lower profile than AQ Khan or Gerald Bull ever did. As Matthew Cottee, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told VICE, "Li is well known in nonproliferation circles for his chameleonic qualities. Despite sanctions restrictions and a significant bounty on his head, he has managed to adapt and continue supplying ballistic missile parts—a sensitive issue in the current Iran deal."

Li's sales to Iran have caused no end of annoyance in Washington. Various tentacles of the US government have taken increasingly aggressive measures to try to stop the guy from doing business with Tehran. The US State Department has added several Li-affiliated companies—as well as Li himself—to its sanctions lists. The Treasury Department has seized millions of dollars from Li's bank accounts and outlawed him from doing business with US companies. US diplomats have made a number of appeals to Beijing to demand that Chinese authorities investigate Li's companies and their alleged violations of US export control laws.

Last April, the FBI raised the stakes, putting an unprecedented $5 million reward on Li's head. That's the most significant bounty ever offered for the capture of a WMD proliferator, according to Cottee. An arrest warrant was issued after Li was indicted, the feds charging him with one count of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, two counts of actually violating the Act, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, one count of conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, and two counts of wire fraud.

Apparently unfazed by those measures, Li has taken the legitimate side of his manufacturing business online. Delve into the world of Chinese e-commerce sites and you'll find that Li-affiliated companies are openly advertising many of the commodities like graphite that his Dalian factories churn out. Last year, e-commerce giant Alibaba.com swiftly removed one of these listings after it was discovered by researchers. Several other e-commerce sites, though, have been more reluctant, and VICE emailed one of them—GongChang—to find out why they continued to host a Li-affiliated company. A spokesperson replied via email, "We cannot consider the company [to be] illicit...the contact person is not Mr Li Fang Wei. Their products are not illegal too."

That's one of the brilliant things about the Li business model—his products don't scream illegal in the same way an AK-47 or a bag of MDMA might. Li specializes in trading "dual-use goods," which are things that could plausibly be used both by the public and by the armed forces (and are generally thought to carry military-grade price tags for shady buyers in Iran). Conveniently, they can be explained away as intended for boring industrial purposes if an e-commerce site ever asks any questions, or if the authorities come knocking. Li has long been believed to be the owner of a large Dalian factory that produces graphite, a material in hot demand in China's aluminum smelters that can also be used to make missile jet vanes, which help steer a missile by altering its thrust.

Aping the profit-maximizing methods of AQ Khan, Li has apparently moved into the even more lucrative business of developing and manufacturing his own high-tech missile parts. Researchers at King's College London (disclosure: one of us co-authored the report) have discovered that a business associated with Li, Dalian Xinhang Electromechanical Equipment Company, appears to be producing fiber optic gyroscopes, highly advanced components used in aerospace and missile guidance systems. These difficult-to-manufacture devices would be extremely sought after by Iranian missile-makers. After all, leaked cables show that Iran's missile industry has been sourcing gyroscopes from abroad for years, and fiber optic versions are some of the best available.

There is additional, anecdotal evidence that this gyroscope biz may be expanding. VICE has come across job advertisements for engineers with fiber optic-winding expertise that have been listed online by Li-affiliated companies over the past year. There are also indications that the US government may have already tried to take action to thwart this potential proliferation threat: in April 2014, the US Commerce Department blacklisted a Chinese scientist specializing in fiber optic gyroscope design, apparently on the grounds of his ties to Li Fang Wei.

Beijing's stated position on Li Fang Wei, unsurprisingly, is that it "resolutely opposes the US citing domestic laws to unilaterally impose sanctions on Chinese companies or individuals." US officials think that Beijing has not done enough to investigate Li, and therefore is not taking seriously its nonproliferation commitments. Chinese officials in turn resent what they think is Washington's heavy‑handed approach to the issue, and allege that the information the US has provided them about Li is incorrect or incomplete.

The fact that Li is still in business has led to allegations that he's being protected by the Chinese government, or else is exploiting Communist Party connections to stay afloat. "That's the biggest puzzle of what's left in the case," according to one Chinese-speaking analyst based in London who has been closely following Li's activities and is skeptical of the idea that he's working for paymasters in Beijing. "Li's operational security is so bad. Li leaves so many traces online that the idea that he might be working for the Chinese government is inconceivable."

A 2008 leaked US cable suggests that he may be a former government official. Newsweek has suggested he enjoys good family connections, with his grandfather reportedly having been a "legendary colonel" in the People's Liberation Army during the Korean War.

The most likely explanation for why Li remains free, however, is that his actions—despite being in breach of UN resolutions and US law—fall into a legal gray area in China. At least from the information available on the public record, it is not clear that Li's purported activities have crossed any Chinese laws, as opposed to US ones. The Chinese legal system is still coming to grips with cases involving exports of dual-use goods, and might not yet have the tools in place to prosecute someone like Li. A senior US State Department official hinted as much at a May hearing, where he said that the US and China's longstanding dialogue on Li has involved seeking to "understand better each other's information and the capabilities in our legal system—for example, why we are able to indict him in the United States and whether the Chinese would be able to do something similar in China." And Li is well-placed to exploit these legal loopholes—as another official stated bluntly at the same hearing, "Mr. Li has money and lawyers."

In any case, if Chinese authorities ever had gone after Li in earnest, he would likely have tied their investigations into knots with his tricky business practices. In an ongoing game of whack-a-mole, nearly every time the US government puts one of Li's companies on its sanctions lists, it seems like he registers a new one. A look at Chinese commercial and tax databases suggests that when these companies are not held under Li's name—or one of his many aliases—they been held under the name of his presumed siblings, and even his deceased mother.

For now, Li most likely remains in Dalian, building his business empire and taking advantage of the limits of American power. Unless he decides to take a holiday in Miami—or starts testing missile components in Barbados, Gerald Bull–style—there is little that the United States can do to punish him. One Chinese official rather hopefully suggested to VICE that Li has fled to South America, where presumably he would be living the lifestyle of some sort of 1950s Nazi fugitive. Unfortunately for China, though, Li isn't a character from a Tom Clancy novel, and Beijing retains the responsibility to deal with him.

Li cannot escape justice forever. As his business interests get more expansive and more audacious he will continue to attract attention from authorities around the world. The past has a habit of eventually catching up with these serial proliferators—and some, like Gerald Bull, don't always see it coming.

Nick Gillard and Daniel Salisbury are researchers at King's College in London. Follow Nick and Daniel on Twitter.

The author at age 15. Photo courtesy Christian Picciolini

When I was 18 years old, I stood on stage in a cathedral in Germany, cries of "Heil Hitler!" punctuating the roar of thousands of European neo-Nazi skinheads who were also shouting the name of my band.

At that very moment, I was responsible for the electricity in the air, the adrenaline coursing through throbbing veins, the sweat pouring down shaved heads.

Absolute devotion to white power pulsated through the crowd on that misty March night in 1992. I was leading the first American white power skinhead band to ever venture outside of US soil to play in the Fatherland, in all of Europe even. History was being made. I imagined then it must have been how Hitler felt when he led his armies on a mission to dominate the world.

I sang about how laws favoring blacks were taking white jobs, and how whites were overburdened with taxes used to support welfare programs. I believed that neighborhoods of law-abiding, hardworking white families were being overrun with minorities and their drugs. Gays—a threat to the propagation of our species—were demanding special rights. Our women were being conned into relationships by minorities. Jews were planning our demise. Clearly, the white race was in peril.

Or so I was taught to believe.

It all began in 1987, when I was barely 14. I yearned to feel something more, to do something noble. I sought a deeper meaning for my life, outside of the mundane existence I witnessed many of the working-class adults in my neighborhood struggling with. Rather than succumb to the doldrums of comfort, I wanted to matter. And a twist of fate presented me with a convenient way to fulfill those needs.

My youthful innocence screeched to an abrupt end the night I met Clark Martell.

I stood in my alley zoning out, high on weed, when the shotgun roar of a car bursting down the backstreet broke the calm. A primer-black 1969 Pontiac Firebird screeched to a skidding halt in the gravel beside me. With the amber glow of the streetlamp lighting the car from above, the passenger door snapped open, and am older dude with a shaved head and black combat boots headed straight toward me. He wasn't unnaturally tall or imposing physically, but his closely cropped hair and shiny boots smacked of authority. Over a crisp white T‑shirt, thin scarlet suspenders held up his bleach-spotted jeans.

He stopped just inches from me and leaned in close, his beady, ashen eyes holding mine. The whites surrounding his granite pupils looked old, timeworn, intense. Barely opening his mouth, he spoke softly, with a listen-closely-now attitude. "Don't you know that's exactly what the capitalists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?"

Not knowing exactly what the hell a capitalist was, or what "docile" meant, my nervous instinct was to take a swift draw from the joint and involuntarily cough smoke straight into his face.

With stunning speed, this guy with the penetrating gray eyes smacked the back of my head with one hand and simultaneously snatched the spliff from my lips with the other, crushing it with his shiny black Doc Marten boot.

I was stunned. Only my dad had ever hit me like that.

The stubbly, sharp-jawed man straightened up and gripped my shoulder firmly, drawing me in toward him. "I'm Clark Martell, son, and I'm going to save your fucking life."

Frozen, I stood there and admired him in terror—the man with the shaved head and shiny tall boots who was going to save my life. This man was America's first neo-Nazi skinhead gang leader , and before my eyes, the white power skinhead movement was being born—right there, in the same dirty suburban Chicago alley I'd ridden my bike down a thousand times.

As quickly as he'd arrived, Martell climbed back inside the roaring beast and tore off down the alley like a burning phoenix, leaving me surrounded by a cloud of exhaust and wonderment.

Watch: The KKK and American Veterans

It didn't take me long for me to decide that I wanted to trade my teenaged, low self-esteem and weakness for power. A month later, I was pedaling home from a pickup baseball game and three black kids from the other side of town stopped me and beat me up. They stole my brand new black and red Schwinn Predator with mag wheels that I'd just bought a few weeks before with my birthday money. I don't remember much from that day, except I was angry and disappointed in myself for not doing more to protect my new bike from them. Rage swept through me that someone could come into my neighborhood and take what belonged to me.

And, like a lion, there was Martell again to pick me up. To save me. When he invited me come to a "party" soon after, I leapt at the opportunity, fresh black eye and all.

Close to 30 people, most of whom were in their early 20s, had already packed the cramped apartment by the time I arrived: skinheads from Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, and Illinois. Several people from the neighborhood, whose faces I vaguely recognized, were also there, but I was the youngest by far at 14.

Somebody handed me a cold can of Miller High Life. I was already high on the thrill of being there, but even if I was underage, I wasn't about to say no to this display of acceptance. Everywhere I looked were shaved heads, tattoos, boots, and braces. Nazi battle flags doubled as window curtains. Armbands with swastika insignias were plentiful. Some tough-looking girls hung on to the arms of some of the bigger guys, making it easy to tell who the key players were.

Before I finished my first beer, a muscular skin with a pockmarked face and a thick swastika tattooed on his throat brought the meeting to order. Rising, standing in the corner of the living room, he offered a simple statement, one I would know by heart by the end of the night—a creed I would live by for the next seven years of my life.

"Fourteen words!" his voice thundered.

Immediately, everyone in the room turned to him, stopping mid-conversation to yell in one voice, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

All around the room, arms shot out in Nazi salutes. I haphazardly threw my own arm out, too.

For over an hour, my heart pounded with purpose as I stood mesmerized, listening to fiery words I would soon be able to recite in my sleep.

An upside-down and partially charred American flag hung on the wall beside the speaker as he gripped a beer can firmly and spoke loudly. "Our traitorous government would have you believe racial equality is advanced thinking, brothers and sisters—that all races should live in peace and harmony. Bullshit! Take a look around. Open your eyes and refuse to be fooled. What do you see when niggers move into your neighborhoods? You see drugs and crime pour into your streets, not equality. Your gutters fill with trash. The air starts smelling foul because these porch monkeys don't do anything but sit around and smoke crack and knock up their junkie whores all day. Can't bother to clean up.

"Only thing they're cleaning up on is all that hard-earned money you and I pay in taxes. Living off welfare. Unemployment. First in line for every handout the government can offer. Section 8 housing. Free lunch programs at school. The only reason those little nigger babies go to school is to get those free lunches and welfare checks. All paid for by us white people—by hardworking white Americans who'd never dream of having our kids eat free meals because we take care of ourselves.

"And while you and me work our fingers to the bone, these racially-inferior scumbags are out selling drugs to your little brothers to make them stupid. Selling them junk so their teeth will rot and they'll look 60 by the time they're 16. Getting caught in gang crossfire and dying at the hands of these criminals.

"Making them dependent on drugs so our innocent Aryan women will fuck them for a taste of whatever vile substance they've hooked them on. You think they're selling this garbage just to get rich and buy their Cadillacs and gold chains? Get your heads out of your asses, brothers and sisters. They're selling this poison to make white kids as stupid as their mud kids. They want our people to become so dead inside they'll smoke and snort everything in sight. Shoot drugs into their arms and between their toes. They want to see our people destroy their brain cells and end up in jails where they'll get violated by wetback gangbangers who are locked up for murdering and raping innocent young white women.

"And who is leading these degenerate animals in the destruction of our race? The Jews and their Zionist Occupation Government. That's who!" The speaker launched into a tirade against Jews that I'd hear at every rally I attended from that moment on, but never with as much fervor. The cords on his neck looked ready to tear, spit foamed in the corners of his mouth. His eyes were ablaze with anger. Self-righteousness. Indignation. Truth.

He ended as he began. "Fourteen words, my family! Fourteen sacred words."

On our feet, we shouted those 14 words over and over and over.

Adrenaline burned through me like fire, nervous sweat extinguishing it, spreading from head to foot as the caustic smoke of racist rhetoric filled the room. I was ready to save my brother, parents, grandparents, friends, and every decent white person on the planet. How could white people not see what absolute and utter despair they were facing? It was going to be up to me and those like me. It was a huge mission, but I had no doubt where my loyalty would be.

Watch: Inside a Biker Gang Full of Former Nazis

While that night was the most alien and intense thing I'd ever experienced, I was instantly hooked. This white power skinhead culture appealed to me, even though I knew I wasn't exactly like the others in the room. I didn't come from a family down on its luck. I hadn't been brought up to hate people different from me or with any us-against-them mentality. But my heart beat hard in my chest. More than ever, I wanted to be part of this. It was overwhelming.

For the next seven years, I became a recruiting wunderkind, indoctrinating crop after crop of young white extremists. I started two white power bands—White American Youth and Final Solution­—and music became my primary propaganda tool to lure more soldiers.

It took little skill to spot a teenager with a shitty home life. Somebody without many friends. Picked on. Marginalized. Feeling lonely. Angry. Broke. A crisis of identity. Looking like he—or she—had never had any luck. Strike up a conversation; find out what they were feeling bad about. Move in.

"Man, I know exactly how that is. If your dad hadn't lost his job, it wouldn't be like that. But the minorities get all the jobs. They catch all the breaks. Move into our neighborhoods and start getting handouts. Our parents go to work every day to put food on the table while the lazy blacks and Mexicans are cashing welfare checks in their sleep."

When I look at old photographs of my former self, I see a hollow shell of a man—a stranger—filled with all of those same noxious elements, staring back at me.

Because I was so blind, too wrapped up in my own bloated ego to pay attention to my own basic emotional needs, I ended up blaming others—blacks, gays, Jews, and anyone else who I thought wasn't like me—for problems in my own life they couldn't possibly have contributed to. My unfounded panic quickly, and unjustly, manifested itself as venomous hatred—I became radicalized by those who saw in me a lonely youngster who was ripe to be molded. And because I was so desperately searching for meaning—to rise above the mundane—I devoured any crumbs I was fed that resembled greatness, made them my identity, overshadowing my own character. The same one that I'd grown weary of as a kid. Through my misguided animosity, I'd become a big, fat, racist bully—morbidly obese from the countless lies I'd been fed by those who took advantage of my youth, naïveté, and loneliness.

For one-third of my life, almost every single one of my formative teen years, I chewed and swallowed gristly bits of each one of those twisted beliefs. And when I finally found the balls to realize that every single "truth" I'd been fed—and, in turn, force-fed to others—was a complete and fucked-up lie, all I felt like doing is jamming my fingers down my throat and vomiting them all up into the nearest toilet.

Even now, 20 years after I left the hate movement I helped create, memories of those seven dark years still flash through my mind and they make me angry. When I look at old photographs of my former self, I see a hollow shell of a man—a stranger—filled with all of those same noxious elements, staring back at me. But because infected weeds are still sprouting from the many toxic seeds that I planted all those years ago, I've made it my duty to yank 'em as I see them begin to germinate.

The author as an adult. Photo by Mark Seliger

Like most people who are caught up in someone's charisma, when I was told these "white lies," I looked for evidence that my recruiter was right, not wrong. When I look back on that time, I can barely breathe. How could I have been so stupid? So gullible? So unfeeling about the pain I so readily inflicted on innocent people? I'd traded my natural empathy for acceptance. I confused hate and intimidation with passion, fear with respect.

Once I finally made this stark realization, it was the beginning of a new life for me. Once I reached the point of finally letting go completely of all the lies I'd let in, that's when change began to take hold. When I reconnected with the empathy I had as a child and accepted compassion from others when I probably least deserved it, the hate disintegrated and my warped ideology stopped making sense. After seven years of not being honest with myself, I grew too tired to juggle the lies and hide the fears. It was time to face the real truth. So I stepped hard on the gas and drove off that metaphorical cliff. I floored it, content that the demons inside of me were falling to their death. And only then, when I finally allowed that painful, symbolic death to occur—the rusted hunk of my former self burning on the sharp rocks below—could I stand and watch the renascent phoenix raise itself up from the wreckage and spread its wings.

Adapted from Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead by Christian Picciolini. Picciolini is a former neo-Nazi skinhead extremist turned peace advocate. In 2010, he co-founded the nonprofit Life After Hate, which educates individuals and organizations on issues of racism, extremist radicalization and de-radicalization . Follow him on Twitter.

Greek riot police in action as a new round of austerity is met with angry protests. Photo by Panagiotis Maidis

More on the Greek crisis:

I Spent an Extremely Stressful Night in the Greek Parliament

Social Instability Is Driving Greeks Insane

A Brief History of Greek Debt

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's difficult to watch Greece being plunged into turmoil without imagining the country's issues being theoretically transposed to the UK. After all, we're going through our own austerity trauma, though admittedly it's not that often we see people throw flaming bricks at walls of riot police. But what would happen if things escalated and all of our money did run out?

James Meadway is an economist and co-author of Crisis in the Eurozone with Costas Lapavitsas. The UK has long excelled at having financial meltdowns, from the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 to the 2008 crisis, when bailing out banks pushed the country's national debt up by a third. We asked James to explain how the UK would cope with a Greek-style financial crisis.

VICE: Could a Greek-style debt crisis happen to Britain?
James Meadway: We are a massively bigger country than Greece. In the event of a crisis, what we could do immediately would be to get the government to spend like crazy, and that's what happened from 2008 to 2010. Secondly, we could borrow loads of money. We've got the Bank of England, so we always repay it; it's our money. And the third one is you can do quantitative easing. You can say immediately, "Right, we're just gonna print a load of cash." If you do all that you can stop the collapse being too big.

If you are in the Eurozone, at least one of those things and quite possibly all three of those things suddenly become impossible. If Greece weren't in the euro, it would be much easier for the Greek government to try to fix the situation.

So what would have happened in 2008 if Britain was in the Euro?
Assuming things ran as they did, Britain would have hit the financial crisis in a spectacularly bad position. The reason the crash wasn't worse was because the government was able to allow its own spending to rise, relative to taxes, to cope with the sudden collapse in people buying stuff after the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy.

This meant the British government set a "floor" to the recession, which stopped the effects becoming so dramatic. The state also provide immediate bailout assistance to banks, up to and including actually nationalizing some of them. The total cost of all this was, according to the IMF, £1.2 trillion [$1.9 trillion]: the largest bailout, relative to the size of the economy, of any developed country.

Finally, the government was able, in early 2009, to launch "quantitative easing." This means it created new money to pump into the financial system as a form of additional support. This now stands at £375 billion [$583 billion] in total.

So what would happen if there was a financial meltdown and we couldn't bail ourselves out? What if we got cut off from the global financial system?
That's an enormous question. Currently, we import a shitload more than we export and we finance it, collectively, by selling off assets and borrowing more and more from the rest of the world. As a result, the UK has one of the largest external foreign debts, relative to GDP, of any developed economy, at over 400 percent of GDP. If there's no access to financing, then funding all those imports becomes difficult [and you start to become cut off].

But it's hard to see how or why Britain would simply get disconnected [from global finance] in this way. It's a major financial center, arguably the most important financial center in the world, and if it were cut off it would imply that there'd been an extraordinary shock to the global financial system. Of course, the size and centrality of that financial system creates other problems—not least of which is the expectation that the immense costs of cleaning up after it crashes will be borne by the rest of British society, as happened in 2008.

So it's unlikely that Britain would ever find itself unable to pay its debts, having creditors tell us what to do, and making our government impose austerity?
Britain is a little impervious to these sorts of threats. Party because it has its own currency, partly because it's such a big financial center.

Greek Prime Minsiter Alexis Tsipras. Photo by Panagiotis Maidis

In Greece at the moment, a left-wing government is basically being forced into abandon its own plans and push through austerity. Could that happen in Britain? Say Jeremy Corbyn became PM and he was trying to push through a socialist program, would that be scuppered? Who would stop it and what tools would they use?
The ones you'd anticipate are the ones that have been deployed in the past. The civil service might refuse to act, delaying policy. Secondly, you've got to consider the role of the media. Finally, the secret service.

We know that the last time a more left-wing government was in power here, in the late 1970s, right-wing sections of the security services at the time worked to undermine it. The revelations from Colin Wallace about Operation "Clockwork Orange" [a security services plot to smear left-wing politicians], and subsequent investigation by the BBC and others, have revealed deliberate attempts to undermine [Labour's] Harold Wilson as Prime Minister through smear campaigns, spreading of rumors about an impending "coup," all originating in a section of MI5 that viewed Wilson as little more than a crypto-Communist.

Related: Watch our documentary about Greek austerity's drug of choice,'Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor'

We had a massive financial crisis in the 1970s. There was "rubbish in the streets and reports of bodies lying unburied in mortuaries." That looked a bit like Greece does now—the IMF was telling the government what to do.
In the 1970s the UK was running a big current account deficit and the government wasn't able to finance its own operations properly. There were wider fears, too, that the labor movement by this point had simply got too powerful—that workers were claiming an unacceptably large part of the pie. The share of national income going to wages and salaries peaked in 1975. High inflation was partly a manifestation of those distributional struggles.

Anyway, by mid-1976 James Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister, thought the pound sterling was going to crash in value. So the Labour Cabinet took the decision, opposed by left-wingers like Tony Benn, to invite the IMF in. This was the first time the IMF has intervened in a developed economy, and they provided a foretaste of the medicine they were going to apply to the developing world throughout the 1980s and 1990s—the imposition of austerity, just as Greece is forced into today. So Labour was compelled, under the conditions of the loan, to start imposing spending cuts—the first major cuts really since 1948 or so, and pre-empting Margaret Thatcher by a few years.

Could another crash happen? What would that mean for Britain?
Britain remains uniquely exposed, among the larger economies, to financial risks. It has an extraordinarily large and vulnerable financial system, even with the pretty feeble reforms brought in since the crash. Household debt is expected to rise to record levels over the next few years, and it's this that is fueling the recovery. The risk of a future crash is what lurks behind the drive to austerity—it's the desire to clear some "fiscal space" in case another crash and recession hits.

Follow Bernard Goyder on Twitter.