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The Australian Crime Commission (ACC) believes dozens of vulnerable Australians have been coerced into carrying drugs through Asia into Australia for West African syndicates with bases in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide over the past two years.

Speaking to ABC's 7.30 Report, ACC national manager of investigations Richard Grant said, "Since 2013, there's been 39 people arrested at the [Australian] border who have been clearly groomed by these syndicates that are operating offshore." The individuals, who are largely elderly, mentally ill, or underage, are believed to have been lured via email scams into becoming mules for millions of dollars worth of drugs.

The couriers, reportedly carrying large amounts of Methamphetamine (commonly known in Australia as "ice") through China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Of these countries, China and Malaysia have the death penalty for drug trafficking.

In many cases, contact was initially made via email. Father John Wotherspoon is an Australian prison chaplain who regularly visits Australians in Hong Kong jails. Speaking to the ABC about victims' similar experiences with online scams he said: "Some of them were in contact with internet people for more than a year...and eventually tricked into coming to Hong Kong, and then tricked into carrying a bag back to Australia. Nearly all of them have the same story: that they were given the bags at the last minute before they had much of a chance to check."

In a case typifying their methods, one woman was told by a man claiming to be a Nigerian banker to travel from New York, via Hong Kong, to Australia where she would be given a multi-million-dollar compensation payment. In Hong Kong she was handed a backpack to carry into Australia. It was only after she was searched on arrival that she realized the bag was lined with drugs.

Of the cases where arrests were made in Australia, and cases finalized in Australian courts, two-thirds of the mules were cleared of any wrongdoing. The most immediate concern is for the 26 Australians targeted by the group who are being held in China on smuggling charges, nine of whom are facing the death penalty.

The Australian Federal Government and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have each made appeals to China, presenting concerns that individuals were tricked into becoming unwitting traffickers.

Adding to their consternation is that many claiming to be scam victims are disabled. Last year disability pensioner John Warwick died in a Chinese prison hospital while detained for smuggling 1.9 kilograms of ice. The unlikely criminal was partially blind, had a heart condition, type 2 diabetes, and gout. He claimed online scammers lured him to Guangzhou, where he was arrested. (Guangzhou is considered the ice capital of the world, and a base for West African drug operations.)

It's believed Australians and New Zealanders are often targeted because their passports—which allow easy travel throughout the Asia Pacific. In June of this year, the Australian Federal Police detailed their efforts to prevent Australians falling victim to these schemes. They reported that since late 2014, they had intercepted 43 people traveling overseas who had been contacted by the scammers. Thirty-six cancelled their flights, while the final seven made the trip despite warnings.

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Still from 'I Am Chris Farley.' Farley at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel Shoot in 1994. Courtesy of Michael Grecco Photography, Inc.

Amid all the recent civil rights landmarks, it'd be easy to overlook the quietly vogue moment we're experiencing with fatness. Starting from, perhaps, the death of James Gandolfini—that undisputed heavyweight—to Meghan Trainor's fat-positive anthems, the size-22 Tess Holliday's Tess Holliday's People Magazine cover, and an increasing acceptance of heavier celebrities: Melissa McCarthy, Jonah Hill, rapper Rick Ross, Lena Dunham, Gabourey Sidibe, Zach Galifinakis, and dozens of other celebrities whose talents might have gone underappreciated in another time.

And now there is I Am Chris Farley, Spike TV's new documentary about the deceased comedian. Produced by director Brent Hodges (of A Brony Tale) and Derik Murray (Facing Ali), the film consists of interviews with Farley's close friends, interspersed with photo montages, home videos, and career highlights. Its lineup of talking heads delivers a soft-kill shockwave of 90s nostalgia: David Spade, Christina Applegate, Jon Lovitz, Bo Derek, Adam Sandler, Jay Mohr, Bob Saget, and even the elusive Lorne Michaels.

Watch an exclusive clip from 'I Am Chris Farley' here:

Though still fondly recognized and widely quoted (usually by deeply unfunny guys, thought it's not his fault), Farley isn't often included among the great innovators of comedy like Bruce, Pryor, Rivers, Carlin, Radner, Cosby, Kaufman, Hicks. Whether that will change over time is anyone's guess, but in the meantime this documentary places him in a sub-lineage of fat male comedians, noting that he idolized Jackie Gleason, John Belushi, and " the fat kid from Meatballs." Considered alongside his SNL contemporaries, we can see that Farley was a gentle iconoclast: The earnest, bear-hugging innocent playing off the twin avatars of Gen-X dudeness: the affable slacker Adam Sandler, and the withering sarcast David Spade.

There are no curveballs in I Am Chris Farley, no skeletons uncloseted. "We just wanted to tell his story. There's no odd angle," Hodges told me over the phone. We learn that he was a deeply, earnest Catholic, and that his "motivational speaker" character is based on his former rugby teammate (a hilariously serene Catholic priest). But for the most part, his early life was Americana by-the-numbers: happy Wisconsin family, Catholic school, summer camp, class clown, football, beer. His path to fame was similarly conventional: a Second City stint under Del Close, SNL, then Hollywood. We come away with the sense that he was an earnest, well-liked guy with some self-esteem and addiction issues, the sort of guy who took his clothes off in public for laughs. "You don't see that many people hating him— everybody loved Chris Farley," Hodges said.

Unlike most comedians who get the biographical treatment, Farley is known more than anything as a performer: "He didn't write, or read, or really do anything, but he was funny, and that was more important," David Spade remembers. And more than anything, his comedy was physical, and just hearing his name brings to mind his flushed face, his strangled shouts, and flailing bowl cut, the nimble herky-jerkiness of a Pixar character.

Still from 'I Am Chris Farley.' Chris Farley, Jill Talley, Bob Odenkirk, Holly Wortell and Tim Meadows perform at Second City in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Virgil Films

Which is all just a way of saying that his comedy was deeply rooted in the fact of his weight. Just shy of 300 pounds at the end of his life, all of his best-known bits are about his weight, whether it's Matt Foley crushing a coffee table, the Chicago Bears superfan pounding his chest to decongest his heart, or the striptease with Patrick Swayze. This is reflected in his friends' probably unconscious tendency to use size metaphors when describing him: There was "always something massive he was doing, something big, something huge," he had a "big appetite for life," he played the "biggest" characters, he was a "giant" star, his talent was "huge," his money was "huge," his laughter is "huge and thick and long" (Adam Sandler—go figure).

Why do we laugh when fat people get hurt? Why are comedies so packed with collapsing chairs, torn trouser seams, popped shirt buttons, objects bouncing off of bellies with a kettle-drum sound effect? It's even true in cartoons: Think of Ren slapping Stimpy, or Homer Simpson tumbling down the Springfield Gorge. Perhaps the overweightness helps us maintain the illusion that they feel less; that any pain, physical or emotional, gets cushioned and absorbed.

That's plainly not how it was with Farley: His pratfalls always looked pretty painful. Apparently they were—his castmates claim that he never broke his fall with his arms or stage props. Also notable is the fact that his comedic injuries were usually self-inflicted. "Chris was just taking it as pain," says Lorne Michaels. "He wasn't paying close enough attention to see that there was a way to do it and not hurt yourself. His commitment was total." Compare that to Jim Carrey, the only comparably famous slapstick comedian of the time, whose characters were always cheerfully invincible: Ace Ventura, Fire Marshall Bill, and the Mask never winced.

Still from 'I Am Chris Farley' from Farley's time at Marquette University. He graduated in 1986. Photo courtesy of Mark Hermacinski/Virgil Films

"His vulnerability was what made him unique," Hodges told me. "We saw what made him happy and we saw what made him frightened and scared." In other words, Farley was a fat guy with thin skin, for whom comedy was a form of self-mortification. He was aware of the double bind that the source of his appeal could also be cause for ridicule—in his first Letterman interview, he recalls his principal telling his mother, "You know the students are laughing at Christopher, not with him." And Tom Arnold confirms: "Chris was acting like he was embarrassed about playing the fat guy, but on the other hand, he fucking loved it, and that's the contradiction he was."

That goes a little way toward explaining his competing impulses. He didn't interview much, and those he gave were essentially comedy performances. (In the Letterman appearance, he comes out cartwheeling and head-banging, but then writhes uncomfortably in his seat like an injured soccer player.) He constantly called attention to himself—dick-flashing in typing class, chugging a Diet Coke to impress Glenn Close—yet kept his personal life private. He would declare that he was going to be a huge movie star, but was painfully self-deprecating. Despite being titled I Am Chris Farley, there's actually only one moment in the film where Farley speaks candidly about himself outside of a stage or set, in a behind-the-scenes clip from Tommy Boy: "I think when fatty falls down, everyone goes home happy," he mumbles shyly, and then twists the knife: "It's easier than dialogue. I don't have much brain."

Related on VICE Meets: 'Talking to the Director of the Amy Winehouse Documentary About Her Life and Death':

But this isn't to imply that his comedy schtick was some telling symptom of his premature death by overdose, at the thoroughly Catholic age of 33 (the same, mind you, as Belushi). His death was not a pratfall. Anyone watching the film for sensational details and explanations about Farley's death will come away completely ungratified. In fact, what's remarkable is how little adversity he seemed to face: His childhood was happy, his fame grew swiftly, he was widely liked and admired, and the only real kink in his career was the critical response to his films.

Why did it happen, then? Really, don't ask. Comedy is notorious for these kinds of tragedies, but addiction is common everywhere, and in Farley's case, it wouldn't be fair or accurate to trot out the clichés: the price of fame, the shame of obesity, the demon of addiction, the tears of a clown. "We always want a reason, we want to blame someone, but it doesn't have an answer; addiction doesn't make sense," Hodges said to me. "He's the only guy who knew what he was going through."

So I Am Chris Farley is best watched with the expectation of revisiting his best bits, and hearing his family members, close friends, and famous collaborators remember him fondly, in a van down by the river.

I Am Chris Farley is now playing in select theaters and airs Monday, August 10 on Spike TV. The film will be widely available on August 11 on VOD and DVD.

Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens, a novel forthcoming from William Morrow in 2016. Follow him on Twitter.

A local sheriff's office attributed a murder in Pensacola, Florida, to a practitioner of the Wicca faith, whose adherents are not psyched about the allegation. Photo via Flickr user Verbena Stevens

This week, people across the country have been freaking out about a crime story that sounds like it came straight out of the good season of True Detective. A sheriff in Florida's panhandle, which is also known as the Redneck Riviera and characterized by conservatism and religiosity, announced at a press conference that a ritualistic triple-murder took place in Pensacola last week.

When pressed for specifics, Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan cut right to the chase. "It's witchcraft," he announced Tuesday. "I'll say that right now."

There's a few reasons to be skeptical, of course. For one thing, you might argue Morgan is a backwoods sheriff who's been whipped up into a religious fervor over a gruesome crime, the details of which we still don't know. There's also the fact that Morgan's spokesman name-dropped a religion, Wicca, whose followers generally say they're dedicated to peace, suggesting he might not know what he's talking about at all.

But is it possible that we should be taking the allegedly ritualistic part of this tragedy more seriously? Dawn Perlmutter, an expert on ritual killings and former director of the Institute for the Research of Organized and Ritual Violence, says her phone has been blowing up since the news of the murders broke. (I managed to catch her 20 minutes before she took the stage at the International Association for Identification Crime Scene Conference, where she was giving a lecture on—you guessed it—ritual murders.) Apparently, these kinds of crimes are more prevalent than people might think. "I've worked on cases in Ohio, and Florida, and New York," Perlmutter said. "They're international, and not specific to either rural places or cities. They can happen everywhere."

VICE: Hey Dawn. First off, what makes something a ritual murder?
Dawn Perlmutter: What distinguishes a ritualistic killing from a standard homicide is that it goes beyond what's necessary just to kill someone. There's overkill or mutilation. But even more than that, it;s usually some kind of symbolic evidence. For example, either symbols carved into the body, there can be symbols painted on the floor, it can be the positioning of the body, the staging. These are your pretty standard signs. They tend to be multiple homicides also. And then you get into other types of things, like significance of dates, or significance of holidays specific to different ideologies.

Sheriff Morgan said the killings were linked to the Blue Moon. Have you ever heard of something like that?
Astrological events definitely have significance in a number of traditions, and the Blue Moon would have a particular meaning, although the Wiccan aspect is odd. They are non-violent. When someone who practices Wicca conducts a ritual homicide, then they're no longer practicing Wicca—they've crossed over to the dark side, which would be Satanism. They definitely would not be accepted in that tradition if they were doing this. That's odd that they are attributing it to that. So they might be misinterpreting what they're looking at.

People seem very riled up by this—understandably. But how common is ritual murder?
I've worked on dozens of ritual murders and testified on them. In terms of statistics, I don't think they're as common as bank robberies, but they're certainly more common than serial killing. They occur. They definitely occur. A lot of people don't believe that they happen, but I just testified in two cases in LA, one last month, that was a ritual killing by a couple. And one was by a young Satanist in LA who murdered his mother. In both of those cases, there was severe mutilation and positioning of the bodies, so there was no doubt they were ritual murders.

What's the most interesting case you've worked on?
I don't know if interesting is the right term. One of the cases that was very disturbing to me was one in Toledo, Ohio, that involved a priest who ritually killed a nun in the sacristy of the chapel on Easter Saturday. It was a 25-year-old cold case, so it was nice that we could still solve it, and he was convicted. But that was disturbing because so many victims came out saying that had been done, and it was actually horrifying in a number of ways that it had gone on for so long.

What's the motivation for someone to do this? Is it like a sacrifice that's required as part of certain religions, usually?
It depends on the ideology or the psychology of it. In general, if they're a true believer, they will do it because it's required as part of their belief system, like a sacrifice that's required on a Blue Moon. Or they may feel they have to target a certain person that day. If it's a true criminal, they might be doing it because it satisfies other needs and they're using it as sort of an excuse. But most of the time, the motivation is they think magically and they think it's gonna give them power or protect them. They believe that by doing that, it will give them more control over their life.

You keep mentioning Satanism. Are there any other groups who do this?
Technically a serial killer can commit a ritual murder and he's not connected to any subculture at all. It could just be something he's making up in his mind. So the term ritual murder can apply to a serial killer, it can apply to a Satanist, it can apply to a Mexican cartel killing, it can apply to a beheading. It's really defined more by the act, and the trauma, and the evidence. It certainly helps if you see certain types of symbolism specific to a certain group.

Is Satanic Ritual Abuse real? Many people are skeptical, but some argue that you can't risk dismissing it entirely.
This comes up often. It's not really my area of expertise. I do not work with the victims. I don't like to comment on the Satanic ritual abuse, because i think there are victims, but there are also issues with contaminating evidence. There are definitely murder victims tied to Satanic ideologies, so it would make sense there's ritual abuse also.

Is there a danger to what the Sheriff said? Is he fear-mongering? Is this going to be another West Memphis Three situation?
I think unfortunately when there's a triple murder like this, [people] are so limited in knowledge, that most people in the West only think of Satanism. They don't know there's other types of ritual murders. I think there's just not enough information for them to understand. Satanism is what everyone thinks because that's just what's been in the media a lot.

What other ideologies do this?
There's all kinds. International populations in Africa, they have what's called Muti murder where people are killed for their skin, which is a ritual kind of murder. You have Palo Mayombe, which they won't kill them but they'll take the human bones and human skulls, you have Mexican cartels that are now worshippingSanta Muerte, and they do ritual murders and put the heads on the altar. You have Jihadist murders where throats are cut and they are beheadings. There are really quite a number of things there can be.

I would think especially in the South, which is full of Evangelicals, people would be quick to point a finger at Satanism.
Again, I think with Christianity, the dark side is Satanism. And I don't think it's specific to the South, because I've seen other people misinterpret this in other parts of the country. Even attributing it to Wicca is a misconception, because if a Wicca did this, they are no longer a Wicca—it goes against their entire ideology. It sounds to me more like someone was doing their own types of rituals or taking it in their own direction.

What do you say to people who have laughed at this news story and implied that the Sheriff couldn't possibly be correct that this was a ritualistic killing?They better not be joking about this. These ritual murders happen a lot more than people realize. I guarantee if that Sheriff is saying it's a ritualistic killing, he has good reason for saying that. They know enough to know if a body's been positioned a certain way. I'm sure that Sheriff has good reason to call it a ritual killing, and I doubt very much he would be exploiting that case in any way whatsoever. We're not going to have a Satanic panic here. I think what's happening is Wiccans are probably feeling persecuted and immediately say, "Oh, he doesn't know what he's doing." Well, he knows enough to know a ritual murder when he sees it. I'm sure of it.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Look at Tyler Boss's website and online store. Also check out the series from the beginning: Part one and two.

Photos from TeddyBär

A number of vintage photos featuring Germans, including Nazis, posing with men dressed up as polar bears have been circulating around the internet lately. They're silly, mysterious, slightly unnerving, and are just some of Jean-Marie Donat's 10,000-strong collection, which she has been amassing over the last 30 years.

Named TeddyBär, the collection provides a weird snapshot of German history. While the bears themselves look bizarre, when you put the 200 or so images side-by-side, it's the characters hugging them that begin to stand out: two Nazi soldiers grinning, an angelic-looking blonde child with a swastika on her vest. Soon the unchanging bears perversely become the one constant, as a parade of idiosyncratic figures from the 1920s through the 1970s come and go beside them.

Photos from Blackface

If TeddyBär shines a light on a strange and slightly sinister facet of German culture, Donat's collection Blackface does the same for America and then some. Dating from the 1880s to the 1960s, the photo series depicts a variety of white men and women in blackface, some posing as publicity for traveling minstrel shows, others amateurs who have blacked-up for reasons unknown.

The two collections are being shown at Arles photography festival in France alongside a third of Donat's, Predator, a series in which the photographer's shadow can be seen in the frame, always wearing a hat. Coupled with the collection's title, it's playful and eerie in equal measure, as if the subjects of the photos are being surveyed and followed by a shadowy cadre of hat-wearing G-men—or maybe always the same guy.

I spoke to Donat about his finds, and got the impression of a man less intent on collecting historical oddities than using them to shed a new light on the past.

VICE: Hi, Jean-Marie. First off, tell me about TeddyBär.
Jean-Marie Donat: I've had my first photo from that collection for 30 years. The first was an exchange with a German collector; that was the beginning of the story. I'm an art director for a French publishing house, so I've always collected a lot of images. Not just photos—newspapers, paintings, and drawings. I really began the TeddyBär collection when I found the second photo. The first one was in my books for one year, two years, ten years. When I found the second photo, I remembered I had it.

What about the first photo stood out to you? Why did you trade for it?
It was the surrealism: a businessman, just after the Second World War, with an enormous bear in the street. I didn't know the story behind it, the big polar bear. It was just surreal—the kind of image I like.

In the beginning I didn't know it was a German image, until I found the second photo. It's an incredible photo. You can see in my selection, the teddy bear with the German soldiers—that was the second photo. It's incredible, Nazis with a teddy bear in a friendly pose. What was this?

I began to find the story behind this strange tradition. I know a friend, a German, who explained the backstory. At the beginning of the 1920s, two polar bears came to the Berlin Zoo. Many families go to the zoo to see the bears—they're in fashion—and all of the children want photographs in front of the zoo with these guys in bear suits. It's a huge success in Berlin. And after, throughout Germany for the next 60 years, there are lots of these teddy bears. In my collection I have 30 different bears.

How does Teddybär connect to your other collections, Blackface and Predator? Is there one big theme here?
I'm not a classic collector. For me what's important is showing a story from history, and what you can learn about history when you see a number of the similar images. When you see one image of blackface for example, you think: OK, it's blackface. It's a man in show-business. After 300 or 500, you have a story.

In Blackface, what people are seeing is history: you're seeing racism, segregation in America—it's a report of the old time relations between black and white people.

Photos from Predator

What about Predator? What's the story there?
That was a little different. Really that one's my interpretation, a type of artist's intervention. Actually a lot of collectors collect this type of photo, where a shadow is in the shot.

Really?
Yes, but for me what's important is the hat in the shot. Because you end up thinking it's the same person—the same man in every photo. You lose, after the fifth or sixth photo, the idea of the photographer. And the name of the series, Predator, suggests a type of suspense movie.

Film Noir?
Exactly. So in this series the story is my invention. When you see TeddyBär or Blackface, it's the story of the world, not mine. It's different.

Are you excited to show your photos at Arles photography festival?
This is the first time I've exposed my collections to the public. It's the first time people will see these stories. But it's also the first time I've seen my collections in a complete series. In my house, I have a box with the photos inside, so when I see them I see one photo, then another photo, then one more, you see? Seeing all the photos at the same time, for the first time, I feel like the idea of a story works, and that's what's important. It's like journalism. I spoke to an American recently, who said American families throw away their family photo albums now. All these photos go in the garbage. Blackface, photos of the Ku Klux Klan... All of these photos of American history, gone.

Thank you.

Donat is exhibiting his work at the Arles photography festival in France, which runs until September 20. They will also be the subjects of three limited-edition books published at www.innocences.net.

All photos by Jake Lewis

The past, they say, is a foreign country. This is especially true of the UK. For example, in the four or so generations since the subjects of the Black Country Living Museum were in their prime, a lot has changed. Homosexuality is no longer illegal, the concept of the weekend is a thing, and the country is no longer divided into sections that are either filled with crying, evacuated children or on fire. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

But there was another time to be alive, namely from 1890 to 1935, the era replicated by the Black Country Living Museum. Located in Tipton outside Birmingham, the museum itself is a sort of small town in which aspects of the past are lived out. There are old-timey buses, old-timey sweet shops, old-timey men dressed in old-timey clothes saying old-timey things, all woven into educational exhibits about the time between world wars.

The museum is laid out in a little village, with its own little roads for old men to drive their old-timey cars around on. The only place that admits to being modern is a functioning garage, where a gaggle of silver-haired mechanics laugh like maniacs as they fix up the old cars and drive them around town for the entertainment of the visitors. It's the sort of thing that would make a certain kind of dad's heart sink if he were to see it, as he realized it's what he was meant to do in life rather than procreate, wiping the tears away before buying his kid its third Cornetto.

Weirdly, the place wasn't the exploding fireworks factory of excitement you'd presumed it would be. Beforehand I thought it would be like one of those living cowboy towns in America, where men in Stetsons wander around saying stuff like: "Boy howdy, what do we have here! Look at that, a colored glass telephone! What's that, sir? An 'eye-phone' you call it? Well ain't that the darndest thing I ever done saw!" It was more just some older men and women from the local area in period dress, describing their surroundings in slightly rehearsed speech.

This woman, for example, told us about how the washroom in one of these houses also acted as a kitchen. It was kind of interesting, but at the same time, it totally wasn't. I felt for her, as probably only one in 20 visitors to her little den will be engaged enough to make her talking about it worth anyone's time.

It appeared that the main industry in the little town of yesteryear was metal works, namely chain making. There were chains of all shapes and sizes here, from those terrifying giant chains you see keeping ships moored, to the cutesy little chains that would've been used to keep a vagrant hanging from a wall in the clink.

Nevertheless, as I decompressed with a pasty in the canteen, I was starting to suspect the past wasn't as exciting as I thought it'd be.

I wanted to come away from the Black Country Living Museum rejecting the present, running home to swap my MacBook Pro for a penny whistle or some shit. But my surroundings just looked like a lazy war memorial set in a one-horse town, and that horse was dead, the gas escaping from its rotting body making the sound of an uninteresting monologue about ironworks at the turn of the century.

But I turned a corner away from the Worker's Institute and, all of a sudden, it began to make sense. On this small stretch of road was a tobacconist, a motorcycle shop, a radio repair store—this was the past I wanted. This is where I wanted to be.

Around the back was a quaint little 1930s-style house. There was a radio lightly playing the popular music of the day, a hat, coat, and umbrella rested gently on the sofa, black and white photos of family members sitting near chintzy crockery on glass cabinets.

My heart yearned for the simplicity. It yearned for not having the anticipation of looking at my phone and seeing 20 people talking about how the new Marvel film is problematic, or distant relatives lying to themselves about the evils of immigration. I feel that in this time, in this day and age, I know too much about too many things. It's not valuable information and knowledge I'm accruing daily from interactions online, but irritating minutiae about people and things I do not care about. I wanted to be back there, in 1930, listening to the radio and looking out of the window, with nothing to worry about but rickets and the wunderwaffe.

Inside some kind of shop, an old man stood behind a giant metal till. He had a little plastic bag with old coins in, which he poured on the table. He tried to get me to understand how to add half pennies and crowns and stuff to each other, somehow resulting in a price with three decimal points. I felt my brain turning into a lump of dog shit inside my skull, not helped by a gentleman behind me loudly proclaiming how easy it was.

Outside there was a Charlie Chaplin impersonator who was pretty good. In any other setting he'd get knocked out but everyone around me was loving it. It was at this moment I realized the sheer number of people with walking sticks I'd seen throughout the day. I thought about how Black Country Living Museum seems to act as a kind of nostalgia hotspot for the older generation, and it's incredibly sweet to see. Elderly men and women walking around, smiling, remembering what shops used to sell, how people used to be, what things used to look like. It's a safe space for war babies, a place in which the scary exponential speed of the modern world can be halted, fled from, even if just for one day.

Though perhaps not the interactive live theater experience I had originally envisaged, I was sold on Black Country Living Museum's more sentimental aspects. The soft glee it brings to those of an advanced age, in a time where they're being increasingly sidelined and forgotten about, is lovely. It's a shame, I think, that my equivalent in the future will not be pokey, friendly sweet shops, but more likely an echo chamber in which columnists are told to kill themselves by otherkin teenagers for time immemorial. Nightmare.

Follow Joe Bish and Jake Lewis on Twitter.

All photos by the author

I first discovered the Montana Testicle Festival in 2005, via an old VHS tape I bought at a thrift store. It came in a bright red case with a simple black-and-white label that read "The 16th Annual TESTICLE FESTIVAL©, Volume II, 1998. 16 Years of Having a Ball!" Then, in smaller type, "WARNING: Contains frontal nudity and lots of balls."

I wasn't quite prepared for what I saw, despite the clearly printed label—the "Itty Bitty Titty" contest, "Big Dick" competition, and bull testicle eat-off that soon appeared onscreen were branded into my brain for years to come, not unlike a propriety tag burned into a cowhide.

Flash-forward to 2007, when I decided to attend the five-day festival that's been happening in Clinton, Montana, since 1982. I piled three girlfriends into a rental car and the four of us drove seven hours from Seattle, across the state of Washington and a small chunk of Idaho, into western Montana for the event that had haunted my dreams ever since picking up that VHS. That year, we watched not only the Testicle Festival's main event—the competitive eating contest of bull balls (a.k.a. "Rocky Mountain Oysters") —but also a women's hot oil wrestling contest, a women's wet T-shir event, and a men's "big ball" competition (basically a "wet underwear show" with dudes).

"If I see another naked nudist wearing a cock ring, I am going to barf," said one of my pals. We left before I had the chance to try the "oysters," and my curiosity wasn't sated—there was something uniquely surreal about a festival where a bunch of bikers gathered to eat fried cattle genitals. Last weekend, I finally went back to Montana for the 33rd annual festival to properly document the strange spectacle and eat bull balls for the first time.

Watch: The Man Who Eats Roadkill

At high noon on Saturday, August 1, in 97-degree heat, I arrived at the Rock Creek Lodge near Interstate 90, Exit 126. The area was surrounded by dozens of motorcycles, RVs, tents, and attendees ready to munch on some nuts. I got some beer and took in the scenery—bikers, locals, and noticeably fewer naked people than my last visit. Two people hauled out what the cook would later tell me were 30 pounds of sliced and fried cow testicles. They smelled good, even with the sun beating down on them. I guess anything battered and fried kinda smells good. Two women and seven men sat down on some picnic tables outside the lodge. After a proper countdown, a four-minute timer was set, and real Testicle Festival began.

Competitive eating contests are always brutal to watch, but knowing that this one spawned out of a tradition of ranchers meeting up in the area to brand and castrate their cattle together made it even harder to digest—literally and figuratively. A biker named "Big Daddy" stripped off his T-shirt that just said "VIKING" on it, and went hard on his paper plate over stacked with steaming hot cow balls. At the end of the first plate, he noticeably looked nauseous. Another women took a ball break, and quickly took a hit of weed, likely for the same reason.

On Munchies: This Portland Bar Won't Let You Tip for Drinks

In the end, Matt Powers, owner of the lodge and of the festival, won, eating two plates (over two pounds) of cow testies in under four minutes. He smiled through some visible discomfort for some photos.

Matt Powers, center, winning the bull ball eating contest

"Out of ten competitions, in ten years, I've lost twice," Powers told me. To win you have to eat "at least a half pound in a minute." Powers stuck up for the health benefits of bull balls, saying, "They do a body good—a great source of protein, omega 6, and fatty acids." He'd even eat them if they were roasted rather than fried. He's not the only one who thinks so. The festival cook told me that attendees had gone through 600 or 700 pounds of balls last year.

When he's not organizing the Montana Testicle Festival, Powers is the head coach of the state's number-one fight team, the Dog Pound. He also coaches wrestling and is in the works of organizing the Montana State Hempfest in September.

"Between Testy Fest, my fighters, and my efforts to legalize marijuana, some might say I'm Montana's most hated man," he said. "But I'm really a nice guy! I'm just trying to make a living, you know?"

Guy, a.k.a. Big Daddy

Guy, a.k.a. Big Daddy, a.k.a. the Shirtless Viking, a regular attendee of the Testy Fest, told me that they don't, in fact, taste like chicken. "No, ma'am!" he said while pulling on his suspenders. "They taste like balls. Breaded balls." He told me that no two balls are the same, and some of the treats on his plate in the eating competition were soggy, while others were crispy. Another participant added that he thought they tasted like chicken gizzard, and I overheard another woman tell her boyfriend, "They taste like chicken nuggets—the cheap frozen ones, like what we get from Walmart."

I tried one myself—"Suck it down, girl! It's good!" Big Daddy shouted as I chewed—and underneath the breading, it reminded me not of oysters, but of geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck")—the penis of the sea. Maybe I just had genitals on the brain—and, well, in my mouth.

"I'm so fucking full right now. I can't even drink a beer," said an attendee named Cecil the Red. "That's bad, if I can't even fit a beer in there among all the balls." When I asked if he'd be interested in trying the balls if they were prepared differently, he thought about it for a minute before answering, "I kinda wonder what they'd taste like on a barbecue. That might not be so bad."

"When I was a kid, I worked near a farm that would cut the young cows balls off and slice 'em thin, and serve them with eggs," he added. "They called it a calf scramble."

Cecil the Red

Sean, a festival organizer and the MC of all Testy Fest's events, told me the Undie 500 event is now almost as popular as the ball-eating competition and the ladies wet T-shirt contest. I find it a little hard to believe that watching some grown-ass men and women race around on oversized tricycles in their underwear is entertaining, but you could say the same about watching people eat bull balls.

"Our contests are crazy, but people wanna participate in something and be silly and have fun," Sean says. "Most of the contests involve nakedness and alcohol. Because of this—the nature of the festival—the authorities aren't always too happy about us, but we do everything we can to keep everyone safe. We have free bus rides home, tons of security, and we really do everything we can to make sure no one gets hurt out here. We also donate to charities—this year and last we gave around $5,000 to a charity benefitting testicular cancer."

Scroll down for more photos.

Follow Kelly on Twitter.

Right now, in early August of the year 2015, Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president. Remember this moment: treasure it. Because we may never again have the opportunity to put a stranger, crazier, and less plausible candidate into the White House . An abrasive, racist, xenophobic, and bizarre real-estate magnate, surrounded by lunatic lawyers and bag-holding yes-men, Trump couldn't look less like an average politician if he were actually a dog.

At this point, Trump is mostly famous for being famous—one of those only-in-America figures whose reputation seems to rest in his reputation, like a machine that powers itself. But it wasn't always this way. At one point, Donald Trump was not famous. Depending on your own personal values, his road to becoming one of the best-known—and perhaps most-envied and-or most-hated—men in the Northern Hemisphere is either a true story of the American Dream Realized or an indictment of corporate capitalism and celebrity greed.

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Either way, Trump's fame—and by extension his 2016 candidacy— demonstrates the ways in which, at a certain point, power in America is interchangeable. If you are rich and famous enough in the United States, it doesn't necessarily matter how you got that rich and famous—you can trade on that wealth and celebrity in nearly every aspect of American life, including a presidential campaign.

Now, as Trump tries to turn the presidency into another market he can bully his way into, it's natural to wonder how American politics arrived at this juncture. But first, we have to understand how Donald Trump became Donald Trump—and how we, as a country, helped him do it.

Ties for days. Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic via Getty

The first thing to understand about Donald Trump is that he is not the first Trump. His father, Fred Trump, was a real estate mogul in his own right; his father's father, Friedrich Trump,was an immigrant from Germany who, you guessed it, worked in real estate. But the difference between the Donald and his forbearers was that where Fred was content to work in the outer boroughs of New York, building out impressive holdings in Brooklyn and Queens, from an early age Donald zeroed in on Manhattan, and the tabloid visibility it could provide.

In his first book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, which he co-wrote with business writer Tony Schwartz in 1987, Trump talks about this fixation on New York's glittering metropolis: "I had my eye on Manhattan from the time I graduated from Wharton in 1968," he wrote. "One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive."

This obsession with fame and fortune—and a city that promises both—has become a central element of Trump's cosmology."My father was a Brooklyn builder, and Brooklyn and Queens. And I said, Pop, I really want to go to Manhattan," Trump recounted to Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough this Tuesday. "And he said, son, that's not our territory. We should stay here. That's not—you know nothing about that. But I want to build big building, Pop....And I went into Manhattan and I did phenomenally in Manhattan. And now we are all over the world."

Donald Trump at the opening of his Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, April 1990. Photo by Gamblin Yann/Paris Match via Getty

Of course, Trump's only interest in having been an outsider is to make his success look more impressive. He's been on the inside since the 1970s, when he purchased the Commodore Hotel and turned it into the Grand Hyatt, his first "big building" in the big city. A crumbling hotel on 42^nd Street, the Commodore was old, derelict, and generally gross to look at—a symbol of the financial and social turmoil that was eroding New York City at the time of Trump's purchase.

But Trump, being Trump, saw an opportunity to turn shit into gold—and get a first-class ticket out of Brooklyn and into the high-powered world of Manhattan real-estate.

"When [Trump and Hyatt officials] reached a preliminary agreement," journalist Gwenda Blair wrote in her 2001 book The Trumps, "The New York Times announced it with a full-page article—remarkable given that Donald Trump had never built anything, had obtained neither the tax abatement necessary for the financing nor the financing itself, and did not even have a final design for the hotel. Nonetheless Trump told friends he was disappointed because the article was not on page one."

Trump and MJ practice pointing. Photo by Donna Connor/FilmMagic via Getty

Trump didn't exactly fit in with the Manhattan crowd. In an industry filled with conservative builders in blue suits and white shirts, the budding real-estate mogul was known for his flash and excess, dressing like a French Formula One driver and strutted around New York in a very visible way. And as hard as it might be to believe now, Trump was actually a handsome dude in those days, six feet tall with a head of blond hair, and apparently, women flocked to him.

"He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid 70s, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock," Marylin Bender wrote in wrote in the New York Times in 1983. She continued:

"Senior realty titans scoffed, believing that braggadocio was the sum and substance of the blond, blue-eyed, six-footer who wore maroon suits and matching loafers, frequented Elaine's and Regine's in the company of fashion models, and was not abashed to take his armed bodyguard-chauffeur into a meeting with an investment banker... 'At 37, no one has done more than I in the last seven years,' Mr. Trump asserted."

He also started to get a reputation, in certain circles, for being a first-class asshole. Blair tells a story of when Trump, upon seeing Hyatt founder Jay Pritzker with a beautiful woman at a party, decided he would steal said woman and arranged a meeting— but when he found out she was just a friend of Pritzker's and not his date, he lost interest.

Of course, the Grand Hyatt wasn't enough for Trump—The Donald, as you are no doubt aware by now, is never satisfied, and anyway, the hotel didn't even have his name on it. According to a story published by theTimes in 2000:

"Trump grumbled that the name 'Hyatt' covered what he called 'my building,' settling for a restaurant called ''Trumpets'' instead. But he fixed that slight with Trump Tower, the glitzy peach-colored Fifth Avenue confection where, as his architect joked, Trump's name was large enough for passengers flying into New York to see."

Don't like Donald Trump? You're just jealous, says TIME magazine. Cover from January 1989

But while Trump was the toast of the business world, he wasn't quite the ubiquitous celebrity we know him as now. The real infamy began with his marriage to Ivana Zelnicekova Winklmayr, a Czech model who Donald spotted while out on the town one night, and then aggressively courted, although she was still living with her Czech skier boyfriend. The couple got hitched on April 9, 1977, at which point Ivana quickly settled into the task of re-doing Donald's wardrobe. She wasn't just a wife—she was a business asset, a totem he could use for publicity and tabloid-fantasy-fulfillment.

Trump and Ivana. Photo by Time Life Pictures via Getty

In the meantime, Trump was building his flagship Trump Tower, the 58-story skyscraper topped by a luxury shopping center that would make his name shorthand for wealth and excess in New York City. What Trump would also discover is that once you've outfitted your yacht with a disco that flashes huge pictures of your face on the ceiling, it gets much harder to pretend you're an outsider. Americans love an upstart, especially one that tells them how to get rich themselves, but Trump was finding that they don't love a ruling party nearly as much.

In 1979, the Village Voice came at Trump hard with a profile claiming that Trump's success was mostly the result of family connections and political favors; that he had tried to bribe the Voice's reporter, Wayne Barrett; and that, fundamentally, Donald Trump was a liar, a fraud, and an asshole. It was the beginning of a major shift in the way the public thought of Trump, and it also preceded his first near-downfall.

Which brings us to Marla Maples. For those of you who weren't yet sentient in the 1990s, Maples was a 22-year-old former beauty queen from Georgia, whom Trump met at his Art of the Deal book launch party—a star-studded affair attended by an assortment of 80s-era celebrities like Joan Rivers, Michael Douglas, and Norman Mailer. He began lavishing Maples with attention, putting her up in his various far-flung properties and generally trying to keep her hidden from public view. Ivana, meanwhile, was being pushed out of Trump Inc., upgraded like the business asset Donald saw her as.

Donald and Marla. Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage

"After her husband complained that she looked old and haggard, she had extensive plastic surgery and emerged looking at least a decade younger, but he seemed unmoved," Blair wrote. "He had refused to have sex with her for more than two years and complained that she was flat chested; after she made her entire body over, he recoiled from the sight of her implanted breasts."

The situation peaked when, on the ski slopes in Aspen, Ivana and Marla literally got into a fight. According to a New York Times report, Marla reportedly berated Ivana, "Are you in love with your husband? Because I am." And tabloid history was born. People magazine ran news of the Trump divorce under the headline, "The Biggest! The Flashiest! The Most Public!" Liz Smith, the New York Daily News' famed gossip reporter, covered the story relentlessly, as did the New York Post's Page 6.Even the Chicago Tribune suggested people should watch the sagaas a replacement for the hit show Dynasty. Trump, who had once wished that news of his Grand Hyatt deal had made the front page, now had his Day-Glo face plastered regularly on A1.

Trump's midlife crisis. People magazine cover, July 1990

Trump did not come off well. "However unlikely it seemed, Ivana was now considered a tabloid heroine, and her popularity seemed in inverse proportion to the fickle city's new dislike of her husband," Vanity Fair's Marie Brenner wrote in 1990. Citing a Daily News story, Brenner added that Trump tried to be philosophical about the whole thing. "'When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.'"

Trump's problems weren't contained to his love life, or even his public image. By the early 1990s, his business bets on casinos, including the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, began to fail. Spy Magazine reported in 1991 that Trump had lied about the prices and income of nearly every one of his properties, and that the press had, for whatever reason, failed to call him out on those lies.

This also marked the beginning one of the business world's favorite games: trying to figure out how much money Donald Trump actually has.At the time, while Trump was claiming to be worth something like $1.5 billion, Spy wrote that his bankers put the number "between $282 million and negative $295 million."

Trump being Trump at the US Open in 1992. Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage via Getty

In 1990, Forbes tried to pin the mogul to the wall, with a cover story headlined "How Much Is Donald Trump Really Worth?" that claimed Trump was down to his last $500 million. (Forbes has kept on that beat, claiming that Trump's recent estimate of $9 billion, which he gave out freely around the time of his 2016 presidential announcement, was about twice as high as his actual net worth.)

Trump filed for bankruptcy in 1991, and his name was taken off the Forbes 400 billionaires list from 1990 to 1995. His relationship to Maples, whom he'd married in 1993, crumbled soon after. But that divorce was far less of a big deal than Ivana's. Because by that point, Trump had started another public transformation: from Donald Trump, the Human, into Donald Trump, the Brand.

Trump shaves WWE owner Vince McMahon after winning their 'Battle of the Billionaires' match in 2007. Photo by George Napolitano/FilmMagic via Getty

By the end of the 1990s, Trump was back on the Forbes billionaires list, with his net worth climbing slowly from $1.5 toward $2 billion after selling off assets, taking his companies public, and diversifying into golf courses and other luxury pursuits. and he was back on their billionaires list. When the New York Times continued to claim, in 2005, that Trump was still overestimating his net worth, the resurgent Trump responded, with characteristic color: "You can go ahead and speak to guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I'm a great builder."

The truth was, Trump had moved away of the building business, and into the Business of Donald Trump. As Wayne Barrett, the former Village Voice reporter, wrote in the Daily Beast in 2011, Trump was making much of his money by licensing his name, putting it not just on hotels and casinos, but on beauty pageants, mattresses, perfume, and basically any other consumer item that could fit a bold-faced letter T. In other words, Donald Trump was—and still is—making his living off of simply being Donald Trump.

All this culminated with the first season of The Apprentice. Produced by Mark Burnett, the man behind Survivor and a billion other reality TV hits, the reality game show took the already-cartoonish Trump, with all his braggadocio and aggression, and turned him into a fetishistic hyperbole of the American businessman, passing judgment on aspiring moguls, firing one at the end of each episode. The first season was an enormous hit, averaging 20 million viewers a week and becoming the most popular new show of the year.

The success of The Apprentice meant that Trump was finally immune to the kinds of squalls and turmoil that had hurt him in the early 90s. His celebrity was so complete and impregnable that just his name alone generated money. And because he was doing less actual building and business, he was less at risk for the kinds of debacles that sunk him in the early '90s.

Blame it all on this guy (who appears to be a Hare Krishna in some kind of Game of Thrones costume). Photo by Jemal Countess/WireImage via Getty

He still had to deal with bankruptcies and restructuring —his companies went bankruptin 2004 and 2009—but as a TV talking head and blustering Twitter mouthpiece, rather than an actual businessman, these types of failures hit him less hard. By the time he put a bounty on President Obama's birth certificate, Trump was more of a symbol than an actual person—almost like performance art designed to show the absurdity of American capitalism. But real.

Some of this helps explain the strong reactions people are having to Trump's presidential campaign—including why he's polling near 20 percent among Republican voters, and why Democrats, liberals, and plenty of Republicans are acting like he's going to take down the Republic.

Because Trump is, in many ways, a referendum on ourselves. He doesn't represent a system of politics or beliefs so much as he does a version of what it means to be successful in America. Trump is very successful in America. Now, how does that make you feel?

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.

The vertical y-axis ranges from integrated (bottom) to angry (top), the x-axis goes from evil (left) to good (right). Screencap via politiken.dk

A version of this article originally appeared on VICE UK. And has been modified by the VICE US staff.

Last Saturday, Danish broadsheet newspaper, Politiken, decided to print a graph rating iconic African Americans on a scale ranging from "integrated" to "angry," and from "good" to "evil." Apparently, nobody even batted an eye until it came online on Tuesday, igniting a social media shit-storm. The brief description accompanying the rating system said the following:

"Two black celebrities have dominated America's public consciousness this week: Bill Cosby, who revealed himself to be an even stupider pig than we thought, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who just wrote the angriest book in a long, long time. Let us present the definitive barometer when it comes to the USA's black icons."

That was it—the whole explanation. The "barometer," as they call it, clearly depicts human rights activist Malcolm X as being both America's angriest man and equally as evil as Bill Cosby—the previously adorned TV-star, who recently admitted to coaxing women into sex with sedative drugs and then paying them off to keep quiet. The only person on the graph who scores top points in both goodness and integration—which is a pretty gross category—is fictional character Uncle Tom, a black slave from Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1851 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.Of course, "Uncle Tom" is used as a pejorative for blacks who buy into the idea of white supremacy and willfully betray the efforts of other blacks who are fighting against oppression.

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The journalists behind the graph later tried to clarify that the barometer was in fact an attempt at satire. However, they failed miserably, considering so many people took the scale at face value. They mistook the graph's alleged intentions for good reason: It was too close to the nasty truth of America's modern race relations.

One of the core elements of satire is exaggeration, but there is absolutely no exaggeration in the idea that a vitriolic graph like this could be published on the internet in our current, contentious racial climate. Not to mention, it's not obvious who the barometer is intent on lampooning. Regardless of what Politiken may have been going for, this graph does little in the way of actually exposing or criticizing racism. Instead, it could easily be used to promote ignorance and hurt those who are already the victims of racism.

Rune Lykkeberg, the newspaper's culture editor, told us the scale was specifically inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates's notion that identifying oneself as African American is a political issue rather than a racial one. But since that is a complex idea that one of the smartest people in America today spent thousands of words dissecting, it's laughable that Lykkeberg would try to explore it in a scatter plot that reduces some of the most important black heroes down to reductive, racist ratings. Not to mention, this slightly confusing context for the graph was totally absent from the original publication of the graph. How could anyone reasonably take this barometer for anything else other than a vehicle to demean black celebrities and heroes? And even if they did recognize the feigned satire, that's certainly not a license to propagate hate without being rebuked.

Confused about what Politiken was going for, we reached out Lykkeberg to get his side of the story.

VICE: What's this graph all about?
Rune Lykkeberg: Firstly, we do these "barometers" every week. One week it could be about Woody Allen movies, for instance: which ones are good, which are bad, which have a lot of ladies, who ones have fewer ladies.

Secondly, we've been covering the race debate in US very closely. We were also really enthused by Ta-Nehisi Coates's latest book, we even put it on the cover of the first section. In the book he says and I'm paraphrasing, that Americans are obsessed by race, they believe that race exists and is something very real and defining for people. The book says that as long as you have this basic belief that race is something real then you'll have a problem with racism. I did a couple of pieces about the book so I know quite a bit about explaining black anger. I really liked bringing that point to the Danish audience.

We also had another piece that covered the whole debate around the book, about how difficult it was for white people to criticize. So, Tarek (Omar, Politiken's debates editor) and I thought we'd make this juxtaposition between being angry and being integrated. We wanted to show a picture of America's public reality to a Danish audience. It was never intended for an international audience.

Surely, you must've known that it'd cause a bit of a stir amongst people?
Not at all. Our newspaper have 350,000 readers on Saturdays and we didn't receive one complaint when we printed it. Perhaps, everyone who saw it in the newspaper understood the context? Satire is often difficult online, because you lose the context. We were trying to be ironic, like: This is a map of black icons, you get placed there whether you like it or not. If you're an angry person and you're black, then all of a sudden you're an angry black person. We tried to make this point vulgarly obvious so that people would see that race obsession was ridiculous.

But can you see why some people might find it quite racist?
Well, you know, I'm sure you have had similar experiences at your media. You receive a lot of reactions from people, and you should always take them seriously without taking them literally. If people take offense, then we haven't done our job well enough. If people think we're racist—and I certainly don't hope I need to emphasize that we're not—then naturally there is a problem with the context. I think one lesson that we learned is that when we take something from the print issue and then put it online, we need to establish more context. We actually wrote a response to the criticism, maybe we should have put that out with the piece.

Do you think that your decision to publish a graph like that has anything to do with the fact that you live in Denmark—a predominantly white country? Do you think that you would have printed something similar if you lived in the States, for instance?
For me, this isn't about the color of people living in the country. They have one way of dealing with things in America, we have another way of dealing with it here. For me this isn't about race. This was intended for a Danish audience, but even here people misunderstood it. This is part of a critique of racism and the whole obsession with race. The fact that it was perceived as being racist is quite surprising to me. Listen, the guy that I did it with is from Palestine. I'm married to an Iranian woman, my kids are half Iranian. It's not like we're two white people sitting on an island full of white people, not thinking about people of color and ethnicity.

Being married to an Iranian woman or having a Palestinian friend doesn't absolve you of racism... How come you decided to say that Malcolm X is as evil as Bill Cosby? That's a rather strange alignment, isn't it?
Look, we're not the ones judging who is good and who is bad. We're trying to mimic a dominant social discourse and say that they are both seen as criminals. People are afraid of Malcolm X, afraid of Bill Cosby, but they think Uncle Tom is a such a good character because he sacrifices himself. We're not in a position to pass any final moral verdict. We wanted to comment on how people are perceived and the fact that people see Malcolm X, Mike Tyson, and Bill Cosby as the same kind of evil.

Considering almost all successful satire is underpinned with subjective judgement or morality, your unwillingness to take a stance probably contributed to people taking your graph as sincere... After all the criticism you received, are you still happy that you went ahead and printed the graph?
I mean, it's not like we were trying to offend people. If people get offended by something you've done, that wasn't meant to be offensive, then you should learn explain yourself in another way. Like I said before, we should have given it more context, even for a Danish audience.

Or, just leave the satire to smart people.

Walter Palmer (left) with Cecil the lion. Image via YouTube

It's now been three weeks since a Minnesota dentist named Walter Palmer was accused of illegally shooting Cecil, a beloved Zimbabwe lion. There's been a frenzied reaction internationally, with the story still outraging people across Facebook and Twitter. And while the non-hunting public are angry for a few reasons, it seems most people are simply shocked to learn lion hunting still exists.

Personally, when I see that photo of Palmer, I just wonder what's going through his head. I have the same question for all trophy hunters generally. How do they see their sport? What part of shooting big animals do they actually enjoy? So I made some calls to find out.

For more on messed-up relations between humans and animals, watch this doc on the exotic animal trade in the Middle East:

Markus Michalowitz runs a hunting tour company called Downunder Taxidermy and Hunting.

VICE: Why you think people have been so upset about this?
Markus Michalowitz: I think it's because people aren't in touch with reality about what helps animals. Namibia was on the brink of losing its wildlife 40 years ago. Farmers were raising cattle, and they were shooting the local lions to protect their herds. But then trophy hunting came in. As soon as there was money to be made, farmers turned their properties into wildlife reserves. Now they make money from protecting the local wildlife. People don't realize this.

That sounds reasonable, but what sort of person wants to shoot a lion?
What sort of person wants to shoot a cow? What sort of person would eat a steak? People say the difference is cows that are bred to be killed. Well, I don't know how the cow would feel about that.

So you don't feel lions are special?
No. The issue is that most kids grow up in the cities and all they know about lions is from the Lion King.

So how would you justify killing a lion?
It's very hard to explain, and I think about this when I see Facebook messages comparing us to psychopaths. When I kill an animal, I feel a lot of remorse. I'll always walk up to the animal, give it a pat, and say thank you. I thank it for having been alive and providing me with its meat. And I say sorry for ending its life. To me this feels very natural. All cultures throughout history have revered the animal they hunt. They respect them.

Would it be justifiable to kill a person if you respected them?
No because it's a person, not an animal. You have to make that distinction. Humans have a soul and we should, in some respects, be above animals. Making analogies between animals and humans, that's where the Lion King has gotten us. Animals don't talk. They can't reason and understand.

So do you think animals cherish their lives less than people?
Yes. Animals only understand danger, not death. When a gazelle runs from a lion, it's not running from death. It's running because a program in its head tells it the lion is dangerous. That's the same as a baby reaching for a teat at birth, it's only programming.

Image via

This woman, who I'll call Penny, runs a hunting company in Queensland, Australia.

What do you think of this controversy?
Penny: I think it's gone viral, or whatever the hell it's done, because it's not a very nice story. But what doesn't go viral is how the revenue from hunting helps endangered species.

I think the reason it's gone viral is that lion hunting appalls people. Do you think lions are sacred?
They're not a sacred animal and neither, it seems, are people. And lions take people too. Would people be so outraged if there was a story of a lion killing a child?

Is the life of an animal different to the life of a human?
I think it is. I come from the land; I've raised cattle and sheep that go to abattoirs so people can eat. Lions are nice, but people have a romantic perspective on them that just isn't logical. They're not any more special than a sheep or any other animal.

What, to you, is the philosophical justification for taking a life?
I'm not sure what you mean. I just think people have lost perspective. The loss of a life is always sad but that's life. There are a lot more sadder things in the world.

A trophy hunter with a hippopotamus. Image via Wikipedia

John Hossack runs hunts with Big Game Hunter Australia

Hi John, has anyone ever been angry with you for hunting?
John Hossack: It happens all the time. I'll post a picture and suddenly I've got all these people hoping my whole family gets cancer, or that an animal kills me. Some of those posts are really quite violent.

What do you think inspires this?
Stupidity. It's like the people who stand outside abortion clinics and attack doctors. I just don't think like that.

What is it that you enjoy about hunting?
It's not the killing I enjoy, it's the hunt. I enjoy trying to outsmart deer, and if I'm successful I'll get about 200 pounds of meat, a nice skin, and a nice rack. But it's pursuing the animal that I enjoy. I think there's something about it that goes back to caveman days.

How do you feel when you kill an animal?
Sad on the one hand, but then I also rejoice. The creator, if you want to call it that, has given us something. Then I imagine it's very quick. Most times I don't believe the animal knows what's going on. So then I've taken that life but that's OK, I'm at peace with it. It's a sad moment so I like to sit there for a moment and reflect on it. But it's part of life on Earth.

How do you feel about lion hunting specifically?
There's nothing wrong with lion hunting. They're not endangered all over Africa and you'd absolutely never get a permit in a place they were. You can only hunt if there's sufficient numbers. If someone wants to go legally hunt in an area and pay large amounts of money that will go to the local community, good on them. I don't have that kind of money myself.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Photo illustration via Sierra Bein

Stephen Harper, who has tightened Canada's drugs laws throughout his nearly ten-year reign, has taken out an ad to sing the praises of Breaking Bad, a show about how awesome it would be to quit your day job and start cooking and distributing meth in America.

Yes, ostensibly, the ad is about Harper's displeasure with the so-called, currently non-existent "Netflix tax" which was invented by the Conservatives as a shot at the Liberals and the NDP. (Both parties are also against the non-existent, non-proposed tax but have yet to take a position on killing puppies. Just saying.)

"Something you might not know about me is that I love movies and TV shows," Harper says at the beginning of the ad, confirming he is, in fact, a human who lives in the 21st century.

"One of my all-time favourites is Breaking Bad, it's even available on some online streaming services, if you've never seen it," he says in front of a large Netflix logo.

He then says some other boring politician stuff in the minute-long video. Moving on.

Harper's newfound love of Breaking Bad comes several weeks after VICE published an 1,875-word exposé on his relationship with his previous favourite show, Murdoch Mysteries. There are no coincidences in 11-week long election campaigns.

As Jordan Foisy pointed out in that 1,875-word article, Harper's inner-being, a mysterious, unknowable beast, becomes a lot clearer when you close watch Murdoch, a show about a early 20th century detective. But what are we supposed to learn about candidate Harper from his love of Breaking Bad, AMC's groundbreaking series about how sweet and consequence-free it is being a badass chemistry teacher-turned-meth-cook-turned-meth-kingpin.

First, there is the character of Walter White. In the pilot episode of the show, he's a brilliant but dorky middle-aged academic, who feels deeply underappreciated at his job and by his wife. Moving on.

White eventually turns into Heisenberg, a self-made badass with a penchant for being manipulative, controlling and occasionally a crybaby, but still manages to make it to the top of the drug heap while dealing with lesser villains like a guy with great hair and another guy with facial hair.

Then there's Jesse Pinkman, the lovable fuckup, whom White has a father-son/frenemy relationship with. Pinkman is young and naive but willing to do whatever it takes to stay in White's good graces. He literally shoots a really, nice guy in the face for White, so he'd probably be willing to stand up and say some rather inane things from time-to-time for his boss, much like Pierre Poilievre.

Of course, Pinkman kinda hates himself and is full of sorrow for his actions, so I'm sure this comparison is waaaay off-base. Moving on.

Then we have Gus Fring, the cool-as-frozen-ice-cream chicken-meth lord of the southwest.

As a drug lord, he rules with a cool, dispassionate iron first and has a small army of loyal guys willing to take a bullet for him. But Fring's public persona is friendly and philanthropic and he's even a big supporter of the DEA. You know who else is a big support of the War on Drugs—Stephen Harper.

In his nearly 10 years as prime minister, Harper's Conservatives have taken numerous stabs at tightening Canada's drug laws. They recently passed a law to make it harder to open safe-injection sites, increased mandatory minimums for minimum drug sentences, doubled the penalty for making Schedule II drugs, spent millions of taxpayers dollars on anti-drug ads that everyone knows was a shot at Justin Trudeau, played tough with medical marijuana users and has kept a hardline on decriminalizing drugs while other Western governments have begun relaxing them.

Anyway, Fring totally had a hidden agenda for his War on Drugs. Moving on.

And lastly, we have DEA agent and Walter's brother-in-law, Hank Schrader. He's a total bro, brash and outwardly over confident, and to government types, the hero of Breaking Bad. Many viewers of the show had conflicted feelings about Hank, who much like Skyler White, was always trying to ruin Walter's fun times of murder, mishaps and general mayhem.

But can't you all see that Hank is just doing what is right for you by taking the drugs away? Beers and barbecues in the backyard, why can't you be happy with those pleasures, dear viewer?

Hank know's best, OK. He deserves our love for his tough love! Love Hank, Canada, he totally is not a stand-in for Harper in this convoluted metaphor. Moving on.

So there you have it: last night, in that one-minute Twitter ad, Harper bled for you. He showed you his soul via Breaking Bad. Now excuse me while I start a rewatch, I haven't been able to figure out a decent "he's just not ready" joke about Saul Goodman.

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In June 2012, the creator of the Free Saudi Liberals blog, Raif Badawi, was accused of apostasy and insulting Islam, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes by the General Court of Jeddah.

VICE meets with Badawi's wife, Ensaf Haidar, who sought refuge in Sherbrooke, Quebec, with her three children in 2013. They discuss the message her husband was trying to get across in his writings, the efforts made by both the Quebec and Canadian government to secure Badawi's release, and the life she left behind in Saudi Arabia.

Image via Wiki Commons

Australia's The Age is reporting that a 2012 Defense Intelligence Organization leak (DIO) has been traced from its source, a then 21-year-old graduate with Australia's Department of Defense, to the imageboard 4chan, where the documents were allegedly live for approximately one hour.

The alleged whistleblower, named Michael Scerba, is said to have downloaded a DIO assessment, burned it to a CD, and then uploaded it to 4chan with a note that Wikileaks' Julian Assange was his hero.

If you know anything about 4chan, this was not a good idea.

Several days after Scerba had posted the documents, a naval officer browsing 4chan found posts he'd created referencing the original leak. In the posts, Scerba apparently complained that his leak failed to gain traction among the often abrasive and brusque users of the site. The Age reports:

A user, who prosecutors allege was Scerba, complained that no one had believed the documents were real.

"Plus to my dismay I just got a bunch of 'fake and gay' remarks and the secret documents went 404 [website not found] about 4 comments 1 hour later," he allegedly posted.

"So... any other suggestions on how to minimize getting caught by authorities?"

A link to The Age's story was posted on 4chan itself (view an archived version of it here). The site's users seemed generally pleased with their actions.

Five In-Depth Stories About Leaks

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5. Anonymous Vows to Keep Leaking Canadian Spy Secrets

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It's finally here. After months of build-up, America will finally get to meet the Republican presidential candidates tonight, when they descend on Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena for the first debate of the 2016 primaries. And while there will be at least eight more debates this election cycle, there's really nothing like the first to get you revved up for what is already promising to be a very long and very crowded race.

If you've been following the frenzied media coverage these past few weeks, you might think that Donald Trump is the only guy running for president this year. In fact, there are a bunch of other candidates, and they have all been dying to get your attention—so much so, that they've started taking out chainsaws and beating the shit out of cellphones just for a few of your measly clicks. So let's humor them already, before Ted Cruz assaults another defenseless breakfast food with his machine gun.

Who are all of these other non-Donald Trump Republicans vying for a chance to be the next leader of the free world? Well, there are 16 of them, but because putting 17 people who think they should be president of the United States on one stage at the same time would be mayhem, Fox News, which is hosting tonight's debate, has broken them into two groups. The A-Team will go on stage at primetime, and includes the 10 most popular candidates, as determined by Roger Ailes and Fox's polling analysts. The remaining seven were relegated to a 5 pm kiddie table debate, where they presumably banded together to form a plan to knock off Trump and the Supreme Leader of Iran in one clean hit.

But because 17 is too many Republicans for anyone—including Republicans—to keep track of, let's stay focused on tonight's Top Ten. Below is a guide to each of the candidates, so you know what to expect from the guys getting behind those podiums at 9 pm tonight.

DONALD TRUMP:
The real-estate-mogul-slash-reality-TV-star will be the 800-pound orangutan in the room at Thursday's debate. But unlike most proverbial primates, Trump will be very, very visible—as the current Republican frontrunner, he will be front-and-center on stage tonight, blinding Fox viewers with his iridescent orange glow. What he will do once he's up there, though, is anyone's guess.

Trump, being Trump, has apparently decided to wing it during his first debate, at least according to one campaign aide, who told VICE that while Trump's staff has compiled briefing memos and talking points, the candidate himself hasn't done any formal debate prep. He has, however, suggested that he will play nice, at least to a point.

"I'll have to feel it out, see where everyone else is coming from," he told the Washington Post."I'd prefer no conflict, no infighting, but if they hit me, I'll hit them harder. It's all going to depend on the moment."

As for the rest of the Republican field, they appear to have spent the past few weeks fretting about just how to handle a candidate who, on the one hand, seems to have strong support from their party's voters, but who also has a tendency to alienate entire demographic groups—and major US trading partners—with his casual racism. John Weaver, a campaign advisor for Ohio Governor John Kasich, has perhaps described this process best:

According to media reports over the past few days, the prevailing strategy among the Republican candidates seems to be to be to simply ignore Trump—setting up a potentially bizarre scenario in which Trump says ridiculous things and the rest of the people standing near him pretend not to hear him.

As for the moderators, they claim they're prepared for whatever crazy Trump throws at them. "We have a plan," Megyn Kelly told Politico, "but we're not going to share it with you."

Related: Why Donald Trump Is Better Than You

FORMER FLORIDA GOVERNOR JEB BUSH:
Bush, who's presumed frontrunner status has been derailed by The Donald, will likely use Thursday as an opportunity to set himself up as the anti-Trump—the reasonable, level-headed executive who Republican voters can turn to when their fling with the billionaire madman has ended. Theoretically, this shouldn't be difficult for Bush, whose positions and general demeanor tend to be relatively more moderate than the rest of the Republican field.

But recently, Bush has shown an unfortunate tendency to serve up Romney-esque sound bytes that Democrats can gleefully dine out on for months. To wit, he spent days trying to come up with an answer to whether, in hindsight, he thought it was the right call to invade Iraq; suggested that Americans need to "work longer hours," and said that "immigrants are more fertile." Just this week, he mused that "I'm not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women's health issues."

On top of that, while other Republican candidates are busying ignoring Trump, they're going to need to find another target for their ire and attacks. And who better to target than Bush, the squishy centrist claiming to be the party's Establishment pick. Trump, in particular, has shown a remarkably strong disdain for Jeb and the entire Bush political dynasty. So the youngest Bush scion could be in for a very rough night.

WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER:
If you've followed politics at all over the past few years, you already know who Walker is, and have probably figured out how feel about him. Do you like things like unions and public schools and campaign finance reform? Than you probably feel a little like these guys. Like guns and deregulation and anything that includes the word "voucher"? Then Scott Walker is your man. Either way, nothing Walker says tonight is likely to change your mind.

FLORIDA SENATOR MARCO RUBIO:
Like Walker, Rubio is young. Like Bush, he's from Florida. And like Trump, he loves the cameras, and performs fairly well in front of them. Unlike all of them, though, Rubio is handsome, and also Hispanic, which means that he's constantly being referred to as the "new face of the Republican Party." As such, he will likely spend Thursday night dropping casual Pitbull references and promising something he calls the "New American Century." He probably won't explain what any of it means, or what it has to do with why he should be president, except that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are old, and he is young and shiny and exciting and you should vote for him.

KENTUCKY SENATOR RAND PAUL:
Six months ago, Paul looked like the promising future of a different kind of Republican Party—an anti-war conservative whose libertarian leanings might appeal to a broader audience beyond the GOP's old, white voter base. But recently, the buzz around Paul's candidacy has flamed out. His fundraising has been disappointing. Last week, Politico reported that his campaign team is crumbling, fatigued and beset by infighting. Then, on Wednesday, the US Department of Justice announced it was indicting the head of Paul's Super PAC on charges stemming from his father's 2012 presidential campaign. So needless to say, things aren't going great.

Thursday night is Paul's chance to turn things around and save his campaign (and perhaps his political career). On Wednesday, he told Breitbart News that he plans on "mixing it up" and "standing his ground," which presumably means trying to cause cranial explosions by suggesting that perhaps negotiating with Iran isn't the worst idea President Obama has ever had.

TEXAS SENATOR TED CRUZ:
A former Ivy League debater, Cruz has been waiting for this moment his whole life. "Ted Cruz was a king in Parliamentary Debate Land," a former collegiate debater who competed against Cruz wrote in the National Journal this week. "In that environment," another debater remarked, "he was cool, spectacular, a god." Which is to say, Cruz will be more insufferable than usual when he gets on stage tonight.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOVERNOR MIKE HUCKABEE:
This is the second goat rodeo for Huckabee, so he knows what he's in for. But while the Huckabee of 2008 was cast as a cozy conservative populist with a pastor's heart of gold, the Huckabee of 2016 is a little bit richer—and a little more alarmist, unhinged by political developments like the legalization of gay marriage, and the pending nuclear deal with Iran. Discussing the latter last week, he said that by signing the deal, Obama "would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven." So Huckabee could certainly make Thursday's debate more interesting.

BEN CARSON:
A former pediatric neurosurgeon who was the first person to ever separate conjoined twins from the head, Carson's turn toward politics—and his popularity among Republican voters—is one of the most enduring mysteries of the 2016 election so far. He got off to a bit of a rough start, with some startlingly horrible comments about homosexuality, but now seems to hve realized that people get uncomfortable when he talks about gays. And as the only non-Trump candidate on stage tonight who has never had a career in politics, he may turn out to be the most reasonable option of the bunch.

NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE:
Once considered a leading contender for the Republican nomination, Christie just barely made the cut for Thursday's debates, having struggled to overcome his reputation for political bullying and the general dislike he has seemed to inspire among Republican voters. But he'll likely be the only guy onstage tonight with the balls to take on Trump, so for that we welcome him. And anyway, there's really only room for one brash and vindictive Northeastern conservative in this Republican primary.

OHIO GOVERNOR JOHN KASICH
The white guy on the end. Feel free to ignore him—he probably won't be around much longer.

The debate starts at 9 pm Thursday. Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter for live updates.

Frame from the only known footage of The Day the Clown Cried via YouTube user Unclesporkums

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Jerry Lewis, the mid-century comedic actor who supposedly used to say "Froinlaven!" and "Nice lady!" keeps the only copy of his bizarre 1972 holocaust movie, The Day the Clown Cried in a vault, and away from possible viewers, because of its reputation for being the shittiest movie of all time. But the government has reached into Lewis' vault, and pried out The Day the Clown Cried. Now, anyone who plans to stay alive for ten more years just might have a shot at actually seeing it.

The Los Angeles Times broke the news in a piece about the Library of Congress' Packard Center, which curates Congress' collection of culturally important motion pictures. The Jerry Lewis collection is apparently culturally important enough to become a new acquisition. The trouble is, there's a ten-year embargo, meaning you'll have to wait until 2025 before the safe has a shot at being unlocked.

If it were screened, we know basically what we would see, because the screenplay, which includes original material by Lewis, is available online. Give it a read if you like your sadness laid on thick and heavy.

Not sure if I need a spoiler warning here, but SPOILER ALERT: In the script, Lewis' character, Helmut, a clown known for his juggling routine, is tasked with pacifying children with his antics as they're being led to their deaths at Auschwitz. In the film's final moments, he's surprised to find himself locked in the gas chamber with some of the kids. He nearly panics, but then he starts juggling and laughing, and all the kids laugh too, presumably as the gas starts leaking into the chamber. The end.

But much like the film, this story may have a bleak ending. There might be further obstacles blocking it from being screened.

According to film professor and cultural historian Shawn Levy, the trouble is that the producer of the film optioned the rights to the screenplay, and then let them lapse without notifying Jerry Lewis. When the screenwriters saw the film they were so unimpressed with it, they told Lewis he would never actually get the rights.

So a public screening might still never be possible until the screenplay passes into the public domain, or the screenwriter has a change of heart.

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