Photo via Flickr user Mike Mozart

A woman has filed a class action lawsuit against Costco that claims the retail giant's most popular seafood product—shrimp—was caught by slaves in Southeast Asia.

The 54-page complaint filed in federal court Wednesday by plaintiff Monica Sud relies heavily on information reported in by the Guardian last year and the Associated Press this past March in the two outlets' blockbuster stories about the Thai fishing industry. Sud claims that Californians who bought shrimp from Costco in the past four years are owed refunds because the store did not disclose the source of the product.

On Motherboard: By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean

In 2014, the Guardian revealed that men are "bought and sold like animals and held against their will" to catch shrimp that end up in Walmart, Costco, Carrefour, and Tesco. These men would pay brokers to help them find work but would instead be sold to boat captains. Once on a ship, they worked 20-hour days, endured regular beatings, and sometimes died in execution-style killings.

The Associated Press talked to slaves—mostly from Burma, one of the world's poorest countries—being held in the Indonesian island village of Benjina. The journalists there eventually followed the fish they caught to places like Walmart and reported how it ended up in products like the cat food Fancy Feast.

"California consumers are unknowingly supporting slave labor," co-lead attorney Niall McCarthy said in a statement. "The level of abuse is unspeakable. The truth needs to be exposed so consumers can make informed decisions."

According to the complaint, the shrimp at Costco is labelled as "Product of Thailand," which is unsurprising. After all, the country exported $7.3 billion of seafood in 2011, according to the U.S Department of Fisheries, which makes it the third-biggest producer of that product in the world. Sud is seeking an injunction that would require Costco to either label the shrimp as a product of slave labor or to stop selling it.

"Plaintiff and other California consumers care about the origin of the products they purchase and the conditions under which the products are farmed, harvested or manufactured," her complaint reads. "Consumers do not expect the products that they purchase to be derived from, manufactured or otherwise created or made available through the use of slavery, human trafficking or other illegal labor practices."

On its website, Costco says it prohibits human rights abuses in its supply chain: "Practices such as human trafficking, physical abuse of workers, restricting workers' freedom of movement, confiscation of passports and worker documentation, unsafe work environments, failure to pay adequate wages, excessive and/or forced overtime, illegal child labor, and many other aspects of worker welfare are addressed by [a Code of Conduct,]" Costco says in a statement there.

"Allegations concerning issues in the Thai seafood industry have been well publicized for over one year," a representative for the store told VICE in an emailed statement. "Costco Wholesale has been working with and will continue to work with various stakeholders (including the Thai government, other retailers, and Thai industry) to address the issues that have surfaced. In the meantime, all of our customers know that if they are dissatisfied with any purchase from Costco Wholesale they can return the item for a full refund."

This is the first class action suit against any of the retailers that sold seafood allegedly caught by slaves. It's unclear who Monica Sud is, or why she's taking the lead in forcing Costco into action. There's no listed contact information for her on the complaint, and her counsel did not immediately return request for comment.

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Class Action Complaint Against Costco

On the corner of Rogers Avenue and Crown Street in Brooklyn sits the hulking skeleton of what will soon be a five-story, 165-unit hive of fancy apartments. The decadent development is among the first of its kind to be built in the part of Crown Heights that lies south of Eastern Parkway. Nearby, snaking well into Bed Stuy, a trail of gray, glassy apartment complexes and upscale cafes interrupt the landscape of sandy brownstones, Caribbean restaurants, and bodegas.

In the last few years, a burgeoning coffee house culture, economic transformation of adjacent neighborhoods like Prospect Heights, and developers' plans to build upwards of 1,250 new units in some two dozen residential undertakings (including several condominiums) have made Crown Heights a hot new locus of gentrification. The result? Bloomberg News reported that the medium price of Crown Heights homes climbed 58 percent in the first seven months of last year. In July 2014, rent in the neighborhood—where the medium individual income hovers around $40,000 per year—averaged $2,110 per month, up 18 percent from a year earlier.

What sets this particular development apart is not the building itself, but the land on which it sits, which was occupied by a since-demolished Jesuit church for more than a century—and before that, a prison called the Kings County Penitentiary.

Now a small group of community members and leaders are trying to halt the development, arguing that it sits on hallowed grounds. Perhaps, they say, the physical remains of inmates still lie buried on the property. Even if that isn't the case, they believe the earth attests to a racist history that the developers of this country have often dampened in order to keep the land profitable.

In 1846, nearly two decades after the full abolition of slavery in New York State, the Kings County Board of Supervisors bought an empty section of scrub land on which to build a penitentiary and workhouse, the latter for those who committed minor offenses. According to a Brooklyn Public Library history of the facility, the bounds of the penitentiary stretched roughly between Nostrand and Rogers avenues, and between Crown and President streets. The few hundred inmates locked in the penitentiary at any given time were serving sentences from between 30 days and ten years after new rules were set in 1875.

The prison ledger presents no record of the convicts' race, only their names and towns of residence (nearly all of them were from Brooklyn). What is known is that at the time, Crown Heights was called Crow Hill, a name some sources attribute to the birds that settled on the hill, but the derivation of which likely lies in the neighborhood's robust black population at the time ( crow was a slur for black people that originated in the early 1800s—hence "Jim Crow"). An 1873 Brooklyn Daily Eagle unearthed by the Brooklyn Public Library quotes a white policeman responding to the question, "How did their settlement get to be named Crow Hill?" by saying, "Well, they had to live away from the white people, and they got up there in these woods. The woods were at the time full of crows, and it was called Crow Hill, partly because there were a great many crows there and partly on account of the people nicknaming the darkies 'crows,' too."

Crow Hill Penitentiary was the lesser-used name of the prison. Articles written about it during the time it was operational refer explicitly to there being African-American inmates, as well as Irish immigrant ones.

"There's the connection of forced labor, the connection of African Americans who died here, who labored here, who still live here." -Maria Molina

From its inception, the Kings County Penitentiary confined both male and female inmates, making it one of the first in the nation to incarcerate women. In 1872, the facility announced plans to construct an additional wing to house female inmates. Children were held there too, as revealed in an 1870 Eagle article: "At the further end of the wing is a room used for ironing, and as a nursery, and three or four little babies give proof that children must be born, even in the Penitentiary," to which the reporter somewhat disdainfully adds, "but they are not necessarily criminals."

For the first few decades of its existence, the prison operated with rampant corruption and violence against inmates. In 1865, the New York Times reported on charges presented before the Kings County Board of Supervisors against the head keeper of the prison, after an investigation found he had employed prisoners in his personal business matters, even going so far as to send prisoners to work on his own property. The investigation also turned up regular whippings of prisoners, both men and women, a practice a local investigative body referred to as a "relic of barbarism."

By the 1870s, however, the penitentiary had reinvented itself—at least in the eyes of the media—as some kind of pinnacle of well-managed incarceration, according to the Brooklyn Public Library's account. This meant the prison switched over to an "anti-punishment system" in which inmates were kept in line through forced labor, some paving roads still trafficked in Crown Heights today, others working for the Bay State Shoe and Leather Company, which leased the convicts' labor. The reason for the prison's closure is tricky to divine, but a strong possibility is that the neighborhood was changing and the penitentiary was viewed as a "barrier to further growth." After all, "fine houses are not likely to be erected in the presence of such a forbidding neighbor."

As the public library's account put it, "What was originally built far outside the main city in a African-American neighborhood found itself in the middle of an up-and-coming white neighborhood full of mansions and tree-lined streets."

Henry Goldschmidt explains in his book Race and Religion Among the Chosen People of Crown Heights that sometime in the 1910s, Crow Hill was reborn as Crown Heights. "The area's real-estate developers and middle-class residents seem to have felt that the name 'Crow Hill'—with its connotations of African Americans, prisoners, and underdeveloped woodlands—would not do to describe their new neighborhood."

If you've been in New York City for more than a minute, this should all sound familiar by now.

Like many Brooklyn real estate projects, the one that sits on land once encircled by the Kings County Penitentiary's prison walls is colored by twisted technicalities and sharp silences.

This winter, construction workers dug a deep pit on the old prison grounds—where there's no record of archeological work having ever been conducted—to make way for a 35-unit underground parking garage.

The developer on the project is Heights Advisors, or "1267 Rogers Avenue LLC" as they list themselves on the construction site. The sleek design firm Think! has been brought on the team as well.

Heights Advisors is run by Alain Kodsi. Kodsi's wife, Rachel Foster, signed as a managing member of 1267 Rogers Avenue LLC on a different document, which leases the land to her for 49 years with the possibility of two 25-year extensions. In other words, the church still technically owns the land, but the developers won't lose any sleep over that for another 99 years.

It's worth mentioning that Kodsi's record is not exactly spotless. In 2002, Alain and his father Elias Kodsi settled Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges of insider trading to the tune of $3.2 million without needing to admit to any wrongdoing. In 2006, Kodsi got in trouble for insider trading again, and this time he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to eight months in prison for the felony and was disbarred from practicing law. (Heights Advisors did not return a request for comment.)

"How could people ignore it? Now one wants to realize that this used to be slave mountain. Crow Hill. Slave Hill." -Richard Hurley

Since the church leased the land at Rogers and Crown to the developers at Heights Management, it has become more valuable. According to city records, the market value of the plot where the Church of St. Ignatius recently stood more than doubled this past year, despite suffering a nearly $969,000 blow to its value after the church's demolition. And though the record clearly stated that the NYC Department of Finance will use the new market value to determine property taxes, there's a good chance those taxes will be low, since the land is still owned by the church. (A request for comment from the finance department was not returned before press time.)

This is what today's Crown Heights gentrifiers might call ironic. It's also a historical fact that in Brooklyn, the longtime landowners are not always the ones who dramatically profit off it.

Of course, what's happening on the old penitentiary grounds is happening in one form or another all over Crown Heights and other "choice" Brooklyn neighborhoods.

According to Thomas Angotti, a professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, "What happened in Crown Heights and many other places is investors move in, they buy up occupied buildings, they do everything legally and illegally to get the tenants out and convert the buildings to condos."

The city government has argued that if developers are given incentives to create affordable housing, new building projects can decrease income inequality. In May 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan to spend $41 billion on 200,000 units of affordable housing, nearly half of them new, over the next decade. The crux of the proposal is a requirement that developers set aside a certain percentage of units for New Yorkers with low-to-moderate incomes, in exchange for generous rezoning. (As of Wednesday, the developers on the Rogers Avenue project had not filed any papers with the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development indicating that the new building will contain affordable housing units.)

But Angotti argues that when big developers sweep into a neighborhood, the community can suffer. "The logic is the more housing you build, the better everything is, but that... [can] lead to the displacement of people of color who have been there for generations and have roots in that area."

Maria Molina, who wrote a book about gentrification in New York City, recently met me in a conference room at Medgar Evers College, which borders the Rogers Avenue development. Her family has lived in Crown Heights for 50 years.

Upon returning to the neighborhood recently, Molina said, "My obvious first question was 'Where have all the black people gone?'"

Suddenly it seemed the neighborhood she grew up in—the "Crown jewel of Brooklyn," as she calls it, with its library, park, museum, and gardens—had experienced a huge demographic shift. She argues that so-called affordable housing units will do little to reverse the trend of white wealth pouring into Crown Heights.

"If we're being honest, we have to say that racism still exists and it affects all levels and all areas of society whether it's income disparity or housing," Molina said.

Molina sees the gentrification of Crown Heights in 2015 as inexitrcably linked to the penitentiary and the forced labor of black residents in Crow Hill, both during slavery and after. "There's the connection of forced labor, the connection of African Americans who died here, who labored here, who still live here," Molina told me.

Richard Hurley, president of the Crown Heights Community Council and a practicing lawyer, has been actively resisting the development since he found out about it—and its connection to the Kings County Penitentiary—last July. Since then, Hurley has appeared on local television to discuss the matter and has helped facilitate conversations about the development's particular historical significance at council meetings.

"How could people ignore it?" he asked me. "Now one wants to realize that this used to be slave mountain. Crow Hill. Slave Hill."

Hurley is also hoping to gain enough support to take legal action against the developers, although the grounds for a suit are unclear. "I want to begin a lawsuit, we just can't finance it, because if I start this thing I'm going against developers' law firms."

Check out our documentary on gentrification and the fight for housing in London.

Juan Blanco Ruiz, a local architect who has taken a vigorous interest in the case, was the first to tip Hurley off about the development. The two have taken their cues in part from the success of the campaign to build a monument to the African burial ground in lower Manhattan, which succeeded in 1993. During the construction of the General Services Administration building on that land, hundreds of bodies were discovered beneath the earth. It's now estimated that 15,000 men, women, and children were buried there over the course of nearly 200 years until the gravesite closed in the 1790s.

"That was a case of a federal building being built on a site that had been a burial ground," Angotti, the urban affairs professor, says. "But there was never any attempt to acknowledge or preserve it. It was a neighborhood of slaves and freed blacks, so there was no value place on that until people organized. It was the organizing that turned people around, got elected officials to promise a certain portion of the site as the African monument and a museum."

Likewise, some Crown Heights residents have been organizing to stop the construction of the Rogers Avenue development, which, as Molina points out, looks a bit like a prison itself, with its five boxy, glassy stories. At the very least, the apartments are likely to impose upon the landscape of shorter row houses that surround it and typify the neighborhood's architecture.

Instead of being another monument to the Luxury City, Molina, Hurley, Ruiz, and others want the land to return to the community that has lived around it for decades.

"I want a memorial there, maybe a garden," Hurley says. "But simply an acknowledgement."

Follow Hannah K. Gold on Twitter.

This journey into the life of Walter Pearce, the coolest 21-year-old photographer we know, centers on two guys in Harlem who have become his muses, Jacuzzi and Hirakish. Mixed in are more photos of his girlfriends, guyfriends, and all the people in Walter's life who don't stop chopping.

For previous installments of Walter's diaries, click here.

Walter Pearce is an NYC-based photographer. Follow him on Instagram for more dry moments from exciting places and plenty of selfies.

Back in 2000, Sam Koutouzis bought a vineyard along the Murray River, in a part of South Australia known as the Riverland. He was going to grow grapes, just like his brother, and like their parents before them. In the late 1990s the US got a taste for Australia wine, and the Riverland, which produces nearly a quarter of the country's commercial grapes, was absolutely booming. Wine families who'd been doing it tough for years had suddenly become millionaires. And at the time, there was a sense anyone could get a cut.

When Koutouzis bought his farm, wineries were paying $900 a ton for chardonnay grapes. This was what he got the first year, until a drought hit in 2001 and the price of grapes dipped. By 2006, they had fallen to $400, which was tailed by the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. A lot of the world stopped buying wine while the Australian dollar rose off the back of the mining boom. A year later, Australia had such a backlog of grapes that wine was selling cheaper than soft drinks.

To pay his bills, Sam had to look around for other ways to make money, so he did like everyone else and sold off his water allocation, leasing back what he needed to irrigate his vines. It was only meant to be a stopgap until things got better.

But things didn't get better. Now Koutouzis, 41, has four kids, a debt that keeps growing, and this year the wineries were paying around $230 a ton for his fruit. "It's gone down again," says Koutouzis. "It keeps going down, this year it went down by 15 percent. They're telling us to diversify, grow something different. But people don't have the funds. You can't just go to the bank and grow something different. You got to go to the bank, take out a loan, and wait four years to get a crop. If I have one bad year, that's it. If something goes wrong, if we get a bad weather event..."

Koutouzis doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't have to. His story is the same for many other growers in the region. Everyone who could, sold up years ago, while those left behind have watched the value of their property drop to below what they paid. Over time, the area has built the kind of social pressure associated with drought-stricken Queensland. As a local ominously inferred, "people keep it pretty quiet when someone commits suicide."

Image via

Instead they talk about the boarded up shops in town, how house prices have fallen to where they were at the start of the 90s, or how there's no future for their kids in farming. Above is a photo of the old Renmano cellar door. Renmano was once one of Australia's largest family wineries, until the company was merged out of existence in 2003. Ownership of the building was transferred time and time again until it fell into disuse, and served to remind people of the area's downturn.

If you buy wine from a bottle shop and spend less than about $80, there's a very good chance the grapes are from the Riverland, and especially if the winery is in South Australia. But as Chris Byrne, Executive Officer of Riverland Wine explains, the number of Riverland grape growers has actually fallen from 1300 to about 300.

Byrne says that despite the decline, the average size of each holding has grown and this kind of restructuring has put the region in a better position to take advantage of the next "wine renaissance." And while this may have been good for the region's industry, it's been hard on its people. It's gotten so bad that a Senate Committee has been established to look into the wine industry's profitability.

Wine is worth about $1.6 billion to Australia. Across the country it employs about 16,000 people directly, across 2,400 businesses with flow on benefits for anyone with anything to do with wine.

Just last year, Sam Koutouzis' brother, John, dumped his worthless grapes on the steps of parliament house to make a point.

Almost half that industry operates out of South Australia. The state makes everything from cheap goon right up to the $100 bottles high rollers buy at white linen restaurants. This is also why the state's Premier Jay Weatherill has made the industry a centerpiece of his plan to save South Australia from rusting when the car factories close in 2017 and a projected 23,903 people are put out of work.

Catch is, for the last half decade, the Australian wine industry has been working to pull itself out of a rut after years of downturn which has seen growers sell their fruit at cost, meaning it was cheaper to let their fruit rot on the vine. Just last year, Sam Koutouzis' brother, John, dumped his worthless grapes on the steps of Parliament house to make a point.

And according to this year's vintage report, things are still pretty bad with 85 percent of Australia's vineyards, and 92 percent of warm inland vineyards, considered unprofitable. However not everyone agrees with these figures. Some say it is just a snapshot or an indicator of the overall trend. Others reject the result entirely, pointing to how they are based on averages. If it were true, they say, Australia wouldn't have a wine industry at all.

Which is also why it is hard to get a clear picture about what is happening on the ground. There are different regions, producing different types of grapes, in different climates, with different access to water. There are different personalities and operations within these regions, each with different levels of debt and different methods of doing business. What's true for one, is not always true for another.

"Many people talk of two industries," says Paul Evans, CEO of the Winemakers Federation. "You've got the fine-wine industry which represents about 15 percent of what we produce. And then you got the commercial end of the market which is quite large. The business models between fine wine and commercial are very different." Yet despite these differences, he concedes that, "it's a very, very difficult time ahead with our commercial segment."

A vineyard in Renmark, one of the largest Riverland towns. Image via

And as the country's single largest producer of commercial wine grapes, the Riverland is at the heart of the commercial sector in South Australia with almost 60 percent of the region's local economy tied to wine.

Still, change may be on its way. Hope lies in export dollars and lately, the Chinese middle class are buying more wine than ever. Australia looks like it will sign a Free Trade Agreement with Asia, while the Australian dollar continues to fall. On top of this, the Barossa has seen good prices for Shiraz grapes this year and is punching well-above its weight in exports. As the industry's flagship wine industry, where the Barossa goes, other regions tend to follow.

For more on wine, watch our doc on the unique concoction known as 'Korean Poo Wine':

The biggest unknown, however, is the 85 percent chance a "Godzilla" El Nino event will hit and last until at least next April, leading to drought conditions. A drought in the Northern Hemisphere would mean good things for Australian wine, just as the Californian drought has done good things for South Australia's almond and citrus industries.

But a drought closer to home may push many grape growers like Koutouzis over the edge. If it gets to that, he says, he doesn't know what he will do. He's already looking for an opportunity to walk. All it would take is one more bad year.

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Of all the Trump-level crazy shit The Donald has said since launching his presidential campaign, none of it has streaked across the internet quite like his opinions about immigrants, specifically those from Mexico. And if Trump is the Kim Kardashian of the 2016 presidential campaign, the immigration policy plan he unveiled earlier this week was his bare ass on the cover of Paper magazine.

The problem is, most of what Trump has said about immigrants has been wrong. For starters, his contention that Mexico—as in the actual Mexican government—is "sending" immigrants to the US is patently absurd, but that's small potatoes. More alarmingly false is his tired old slander about immigrants stealing welfare benefits and committing more crimes than native-born Americans.

In fact, implying that immigrants have any group tendencies at all can be deceptive. Nothing—from speaking a language other than English, to being poor, to even wanting to be here in the first place—is inherent to the immigrant experience in the US. If I cast a net wide enough to include every immigrant in the country, it would cover the guy who drove me home in an Uber last night, most of my editors at VICE, and about a zillion people in between.

But while the immigration landscape is complicated, there is data out there. It's just that immigration hawks—and would-be reformers—mostly tend to ignore it when it doesn't fit their arguments. So to try to shed some light on what's really going on, we took nine common claims about immigrants, and did our best to determine their veracity—even if we didn't like the answer we found.

1. Immigrants bring infectious diseases

Screencap via YouTube user The Savage Nation

Last year Fox News medical correspondent Marc Siegel, MD, told his cable-news viewers that swine flu transmitted by illegal immigrants amounted to "a public health crisis on a grand scale," and insisted that "the Centers for Disease Control needs to be directly involved" to save American lives. Sounds serious, right?

The reality is, almost all legal immigrants and refugees are required to get thorough medical examinations before they arrive in the US. Of course, illegal immigrants who sneak across the border skip that process. But do diseases carried into the US by these immigrants constitute some kind of public health menace?

According to Jeffrey Klausner, a physician and professor in global health and infectious diseases at UCLA, the answer is no.

"A statement saying that a tremendous burden of infectious diseases is from immigrants is a gross exaggeration, and it comes from someone not familiar with the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the United States," Klausner said in an interview.

In the case of Mexican immigrants—the ones whose germs Trump seems to fear most—there doesn't seem to be a huge problem, thanks to rising vaccination rates in Latin America. As of 2013, 95 percent of people in Mexico were vaccinated against measles, which is comparable to the vaccination rate in the US.

"Increased vaccination coverage has produced dramatic declines in the incidence of some infectious diseases, such as measles and hepatitis A," the CDC states on its website. The agency's fact-sheet on immigrant and refugee health does provide doctors with guidance on how to deal with diseases coming across the border. But to a public health professional, the danger of immigrants transmitting infectious diseases is barely a blip on their radar.

"It's probably over 1000-to-one, the number of commonly acquired infectious disease that people are exposed to on a daily basis from fellow Americans compared to the number that might be considered a concern because they're imported," Klausner said.

2. Undocumented immigrants do all the shitty work Americans don't want to do

The idea here is pretty apolitical, and has been perpetuated by people on both sides of the immigration debate. Immigrants have it so rough, the thinking goes, that they'll take any menial job—no matter how hellish—and do it without complaint. "Americans will always look to a fresh wave of immigrants who are leaner, tougher, younger, and more willing to sacrifice their bodies to do the work that we can't or won't do," journalist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote in 2013, summing up the argument in a reverent New York Times op-ed.

Kelly Osbourne recently echoed these sentiments, blurting out in a now immortal episode of The ViewThe View: "If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?"

But is the characterization accurate?

Well, it was,at least as recently as 2009 when, according to data from the Pew Research Center, undocumented immigrants in the US were overrepresented in shitty jobs like farm work, where they were 25 percent of the workforce. Overall, 66 percent of undocumented workers were employed in menial labor that year, compared to 31 percent of native-born Americans.

But more recently, the idea that immigrants do our dirty work has been complicated by more recent data. According to a Pew study published in March, since the Great Recession the US has seen a 3 percent increase in undocumented immigrants holding down management jobs; meanwhile, the number of undocumented workers in construction or "production" jobs has fallen 5 percent.

3. Immigrants are rapists and murderers

"The Mexican government is much smarter, much sharper, much more cunning. And they send the bad ones over because they don't want to pay for them."
-Donald Trump, Fox News Presidential Debate, August 6, 2015

"If you don't want to be killed by ISIS, don't go to Syria. If you don't want to be killed by a Mexican, there's nothing I can tell you."
-Ann Coulter, interview with Fusion, May 26, 2015

It's become common for Americans to be told that immigrant criminals are likely to rape and murder them but as the chart below indicates, that's basically hogwash. It's one of those Malcolm Gladwell-level discrepancies between the oft-repeated myth, and the crazy, counterintuitive truth.

The chart shows that among both native-born Americans and immigrants, crime spikes at age 16, with the top line representing native-born Americans, and the bottom one representing immigrants. And the gap in between shows that native-born Americans commit more crime by far.

Of course, some immigrants are violent criminals—a small slice of every population commits serious crimes. But opponents of immigration always seem to be armed with a new number that proves that by admitting immigrants, the US is just asking for more crime.

For instance, earlier this year, Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas went around citing a catchy statistic that supposedly proved illegal immigrants were committing one murder every day in the US. Sessions was referring only to the undocumented immigrants who had been released by ICE under Obama's new policies such as his 2014 unilateral effort to shield five million undocumented immigrants from deportation. But Sessions was still pulling the number out of his ass. Last year, former Texas governor and perennial Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry told Glenn Beck that illegal immigrants committed nearly half of the murders in Texas. He too was pulling numbers out of his ass.

But Breitbart News wasn't simply pulling numbers out of its ass last month when it pointed out last month that undocumented immigrants received 36.7 percent of federal prison sentences in 2014. The number sounds startling—but as Pew pointed out in a report last year, undocumented immigrants have been subject to a surprising number of federal prosecutions since 2005, when the US shifted its immigration enforcement policy to emphasize charging border-crossers as criminals, rather than simply sending them home.

According to a 2008 study by the Public Policy Institute of California, immigrants at the time were underrepresented in California prisons. Foreign‐born people make up about 35 percent of California's total adult population, but only about 17 percent of the prison population. However, the same report does point out that among foreign-born criminals, there does appear to be a greater proportion of violent offenders than among native-born criminals.

But that survey only covers California, and it's far from conclusive. The idea that illegally being in the US is somehow tied to criminality is neither supported, nor refuted, by data. The conservative Center for Immigration once bemoaned this back in 2009, writing, "The overall picture of immigrants and crime remains confused due to a lack of good data and contrary information."

Speaking of Mexico, check out our documentary about the Mexican town that fights to summon rain:

Still, based some of this admittedly out-of-date evidence, Jason Reilly, from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal called the connection between immigration and crime, "mythical" last month.

The problem for opponents of immigration seems to be that they believe immigrants should be better behaved, because they're supposedly uninvited. Ann Coulter acknowledged this during a recent TV interview, telling Geraldo Rivera: "These are not people who have a right to be here, so I don't care if there are [only] two rapists."

4. Immigrants breed like rabbits

"Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families."
- Jeb Bush, Faith and Freedom Coalition, June 14, 2013

When Bush, a Republican presidential candidate uttered the above remark, he was begging to be taken out of context, making immigrants sound like prize livestock. In Jeb's defense, he's sired three kids with an immigrant, his wife Columba, who is originally from Mexico, so maybe he innocently thinks Columba has some kind of special Mexican uterus.

But if Bush is talking about the statistical "fertility rate"—the average number of children borne by women in a particular demographic—he's actually not off base. For whatever reason, immigrants do have more kids than people who were born in the US. The most recent Pew numbers show that while 13 percent of the total US population was foreign-born, a whopping 23 percent of births that year were to foreign mothers. The majority of those mothers were Hispanic, at 56 percent.

So, thanks to the crude, mathematical language of averages, Bush is basically right, even if he sounds like a douche. Which brings us nicely to the next myth.

5. The US is being overrun by immigrants

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"The 'browning of America' is not a natural process. It's been artificially imposed by Democrats who are confident of their ability to turn Third World immigrants into government patrons."
-Ann Coulter, July 18, 2012

Right-wingers like Ann Coulter aren't the only ones who use the term "browning of America." It meant something different, for instance, when VICE's friend Toure said it on MSNBC. But is America really "browning"? That depends what you mean.

According to Pew, the wave of undocumented immigrants in the US peaked in 2007, at about 12.2 million. But ever since the housing crisis and the ensuing recession, those numbers have fallen off a bit, holding steady at around 11.3 million.

By my calculations, that's about 3.5 percent of the total population. Also by my calculations, the number of illegal immigrants is very similar to the number of Americans who own boats. Personally, it makes me very uncomfortable to imagine all these boat owners overrunning my America.

The fact is, the US already is overrun with immigrants. Not to be pedantic, but let's not forget: humans aren't a naturally occurring species on this landmass; they wandered in thousands of years ago when the Americas and Asia had a natural land bridge. Then those residents were overrun by immigrants from Europe. So you might say this continent has seen an impressive amount of demographic variety.

As for the undocumented immigrants ostensibly overwhelming the US today, Pew reports that Mexicans (many of whom claim indigenous American nationality) make up about 52 percent of the total undocumented immigrant population in the US. Sixty percent of those undocumented immigrants are in California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, which are also, incidentally, the country's densest population centers.

But when it comes to the US being overrun with non-white immigrants in general—including the documented ones—that is, arguably, happening. Fewer of those immigrants than ever are flooding in from Mexico and Latin America though. According to a USA Today comparison of the most recent immigration numbers from the census, 338,000 Asians immigrated to the US from July 1, 2012 through July 2013, an increase of about 68 percent since the recession; 244,000 Hispanic immigrants arrived in that same period.

Chart courtesy of the Brookings Institution

A report published earlier this year by the Brookings Institution, titled "The Changing Face of the Heartland," is a pretty good read on the topic. It projects that in 2044, white people will become a minority in the US—at 49.7 percent, compared to 25.1 percent who will be Hispanic. So white people trembling in fear that they're being overrun can rest assured that they'll still be the largest minority.

6. Immigrants don't integrate

One way or another, most of the Republican presidential candidates would like immigrants to be more American. Marco Rubio has pushed for tougher English language proficiency standards for people pursuing green cards. In his 2013 book Immigration WarsJeb Bush claimed that the citizenship test is too easy, and it needs to include tougher questions about "the crucial role of a market economy in promoting freedom and prosperity," and the "importance of civic participation." And at least five of the candidates, including Trump, Ted Cruz, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have suggested the US might need to examine its policy on birthright citizenship, otherwise known as the 14th Amendment.

"They should adopt our values," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal says in a video put together by the Super PAC supporting him. "They should learn English."

There are, however, obstacles in the way of assimilation. For instance, immigrants tend to live in segregated communities. And while Hispanic immigrants could dutifully watch English-language news to brush up on their language skills, according to a 2009 Pew study they typically opt for Spanish-language TV—which might explain why Univision often ends up with higher ratings than its parent network, NBC, as recently as February of 2015.

It also helps explain why immigrants are having a little bit of a hard time with English. According to the most recent census numbers on this, from 2012, 20 percent of immigrants in the US reported speaking English "not well" and 10 percent said they speak it "not at all." So around 70 percent of immigrants in the US can speak passable English, down from 85 percent in 1900, according to a census data comparison by researchers at Purdue University.

And since language is the only useful metric I could find for measuring integration, then yes, immigrants may just be integrating less than they used to a century ago.

7. There's really no such thing as an "illegal alien."

"You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is illegal."
-Attributed to Elie Weisel (undated)

"The term illegal immigrant is actually factually incorrect."
Jose Antonio Vargas, speaking to Slate's Mike Pesca, February 24, 2015

So far, this has been a list of conservative talking points. But the notion that there's "no such thing" as an illegal immigrant is a somewhat iffy claim perpetuated by those on the left of the political spectrum.

When the journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas spoke to Slate earlier this year about illegal immigration, he claimed that, "the term illegal immigrant is actually factually incorrect," adding that, "to be in this country without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal one."

True enough, but it still takes a logical leap to say the word "illegal" is somehow inaccurate. There's a parallel in the language we use around contracts. A contract is considered "legally binding," not "documented." A contract can have an "illegal clause," without the police showing up. If your immigration status is not legal, then to distinguish you from someone who is in the US legally, the term "illegal" is useful.

But the distinction between "illegal" and "criminal" is not trivial. As immigration lawyer David Leopold pointed out in the Huffington Post back in 2013, given that Vargas didn't cross the border illegally—which is a felony—he's not a criminal. Consequently, when immigrants overstay their visas and the government finds out about it, the first course of action isn't to kick down your door Elian Gonzalez-style—at least not on paper.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services website claims that even after you appear before an immigration judge, they might just ask you nicely to leave before forcibly booting you from the country. But like it or not, USCIS does still use the term "illegal alien."

Still, the terms "illegal alien" and "illegal immigrant" hurt people's feelings, which seems like a perfectly good reason for the Associated Press to remove them from their style guide. Sure, if you grab a dictionary, "illegal," and "alien" aren't technically incorrect terms, but "undocumented immigrant" gets the point across.

8. Immigrants come to the US to leech off The awesome welfare system

Image via Wikimedia Commons

"If they want to come because they hear we have free food, free education, free healthcare, [...] oh, and by the way if they'd like to do some criminal activity we'll allow that too, well that's a whole different issue. That is the reason we need to control our borders."
Mike Huckabee on Fox Business, July 9, 2015

It would be absurd to argue that no immigrants ever collect welfare, but it's worth asking whether immigrants manage to use some disproportional amount of America's social safety net?

First of all, undocumented immigrants can't collect most forms of welfare—they typically don't meet those eligibility requirements. But plenty of undocumented residents have kids who are US citizens, and those kids may qualify for some government benefits. In fact, according to the USDA's non-citizen's guide to food stamps, no one will check your immigration status if you apply for benefits on behalf of your kids. And no one is going to police your house to make sure an undocumented immigrant never eats a bowl of federally subsidized Cheerios.

But there's still the question of just whether legal immigrants collect a disproportionate amount in taxpayer-funded benefits. The libertarian-leaning Cato Institute explored the issue in 2013, with a study called "Poor Immigrants Use Public Benefits at a Lower Rate than Poor Native-Born Citizens." As the title suggests, they found that among applicants who were able to collect benefits from Medicaid, food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Supplemental Security Income, immigrants more frequently opted out of taking the assistance than native-born Americans.

And why do documented immigrants collect less welfare? It probably helps that according to the most recent US Census numbers, 68 percent of eligible workers who were documented immigrants participated in the workforce, compared to 64 percent of their native-born counterparts. Put another way, it appears most immigrants are coming here to work, not to live off government cheese.

9. Immigrants are taking American jobs

"So essentially the H-1B visa program brings in cheaper workers that are highly qualified that will take the place of current American employees."
-Rush Limbaugh, March 20, 2015

If you're a Republican running for office, promising to "protect American jobs" seems to be the bare minimum of opposition to immigration you have to blurt out. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, for example, despite once voicing a very laissez faire attitude about immigrants—he even supported a path to citizenship back in 2013—said in April that any immigration policy should be based "first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages." And of course, the Trump immigration plan would limit even H1-B visas for skilled workers, forcing companies to prove that they had tried to hire Americans first.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative policy group, is tireless when it comes to this issue. In 2010, it published a report with some pretty damning findings: Immigrants really were taking your job, if you were a teen in 2009. During that year—the worst in a larger trend—despite 45 percent of teens wanting a job, only one-third actually got one. An addendum to the report adds that some of the decline was likely caused by summer school enrollment.

Other CIS reports feature similarly dramatic snapshots. In December of last year, the center calculated that post-recession job growth had still not returned to pre-recession levels for native-born workers—there was still a 1.46 million decrease in jobs held by native-born workers compared to the level from just before the housing bubble burst in 2007. That employment comparison also found that in that same time period—between 2007 and 2014—immigrants had not only reached returned to the 2007 level, they'd taken on two million additional jobs.

What the CIS reports demonstrate is that immigrant laborers—including documented immigrants, and even naturalized citizens—are on the favorable side of some inscrutable divide in employment. But given the roller-coaster in employment numbers over the past decade, it's hard to look at the chaos and definitively say that immigration is a drag on US employment, or that it has no effect. That makes this a job for economists.

The American Enterprise Institute tried to look at the issue in 2011, studying employment and wage data from four decades. Boringly, the American Enterprise Institute researchers found that as a rule, foreign-born workers have neither a positive, nor a negative effect on employment for native-born Americans.

Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of The Hamilton Project at Brookings took a look at the same problem in 2012, and came to a similar conclusion: Immigration doesn't increase unemployment for native-born people. As an explanation, they cited the complementary roles for immigrants and non-immigrants, which lead to greater productivity, and the effect that immigrant population numbers have on the customer bases for local businesses. Consequently, they wrote, businesses can hire more workers, and in the long run, "immigrants slightly raise the average wages of all US-born workers."

§

But fact checking numbers and trends leaves out the tiny narratives that provide what the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the "misleading vividness" that stems from anecdotal evidence. Vividness comes from specific examples.

Here's some actual nasty shit undocumented immigrants have done or have been accused of doing: In March, a guy in Alabama allegedly raped the ten-year-old daughter of the people who were giving him a place to stay. In June, 250 workers at Disney World got fired to make room for their cheaper Indian replacements on H-1B visas, whom the fired workers had to train. Back in 2013, an undocumented immigrant in Wisconsin was convicted of $25,416 in welfare fraud according to the local news radio station WTAQ.

None of these examples proves anything, but they certainly rile people up. Judging from lengthy comment threads, stories like these catch fire in the conservative social media echo chamber, but are largely ignored by liberals.

In a June article on Newsbusters, the blog run by the Media Research Center, a conservative think tank that opposes liberal bias in media, author Jeffrey Lord decried liberal ignorance of the real stories that prove Donald Trump is spouting "Inconvenient Truths." From time to time, illegal immigrants smuggle drugs, and commit murder and rape, Lord pointed out, adding that "if the liberal media, not to mention Hillary Clinton, are going to take Trump on, they should probably have a grasp of whether what he says is factually true or not."

But the fact is that even when armed with solid data, people will still return to their basic assumptions. If it turned out that 80 percent of undocumented immigrants who've been in the US since they were babies love Nickelback, that wouldn't mean a damn thing about whether they deserve a pathway to citizenship, but it sure would piss people off.

Credit where credit is due: The Pew Research Center, the Washington DC think tank that tracks demographic trends, publishes an astonishing volume of data on this topic, and writing this piece would have been impossible without it.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Anuj Biyani

Related: You May Finally Be Able to Get Drunk in Taco Bell (Legally)

You just spent all day at the Daytona 500, screaming your fucking head off at NASCAR drivers while they whipped around a racetrack at about 200 miles per hour, and you're wondering what to do next. You're hungry, and after a long day in the hot sun, you could use a drink. But you can't shake that adrenaline. You want to do something badass, something loud and fun as all hell. You want to shoot some guns.

Now, thanks to a few entrepreneurs out of Daytona Beach, Florida, you don't have to choose between grabbing a beer and going to the gun range—but you will have to wait to start drinking until after you're done shooting.

On Wednesday night, city commissioners in the coastal Florida town approved a measure that'll allow a combination 12-lane shooting range and restaurant to serve booze to its patrons, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reports. While some commissioners were worried about promoting the use of guns and alcohol under the same roof, as well as the nightmare of monitoring who might be a possible felon, only one voted against the proposed gun range, which should be open for business sometime in the next few months.

Ron Perkinson, the entrepreneur behind the operation, explained to commissioners that he's opening a restaurant at the indoor range, not a bar, but argued that the establishment wouldn't turn a profit unless it serves alcohol.

Perkinson's safety plan is not to allow customers to go shooting after they've had a drink. When someone buys liquor from the restaurant, a waitress will scan their ID as well as everyone at that table. Every customer looking to use the gun range has to have their ID scanned beforehand, and if they've already had a drink, the system will notify a clerk not to let them shoot.

"To the critics, I say, you're right," Perkinson told a CBS affiliate in June. "I'm not trying to mix the two. I'm trying to give you a nice meal before you go home. If you choose to have an alcoholic beverage and go home, that's on you. It's no different than them leaving here and going to Outback."

Meanwhile, a combination bar and pawnshop is set to open in Dallas, Texas this September, and we're anxiously awaiting the opening of the first Taco Bell to serve alcohol in Chicago, because this is America and selling your old crap, eating stale tacos, and being at a gun range is always better after a few drinks.

Photo courtesy NDP

As the federal campaign enters its third week, all three major parties still have a fighting chance at forming office, either alone or via coalition. But in what is quickly turning into one of the most competitive races in recent memory, one thing stands out more than any: Tom Mulcair's got a beard. A chin curtain. A great, big, hairy face toque.

In a different line of work, it might seem a trivial detail. But as enduringly trendy as it is in the world at large, the beard—and facial hair more generally—still holds a negative connotation in Western politics, and is seen as one of the surest steps toward electoral failure.

In his seminal 2001 beard book One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, author Allan Peterkin suggests that this is because the bearded look is still widely associated with hippies, dead-beats, and dictators, and adds that"the beard has been the kiss of death for Western politicians."

Ohio councilman Phil Van Treuren, a former political consultant and field director for the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign, put it more bluntly to VICE: "Generally speaking, if you have two identical candidates, the guy with the beard is gonna pull in a few less votes."

History would tend to agree. There hasn't been a bearded prime minister for 121 years, when Mackenzie Bowell took office—and he wasn't even elected, having been handed the role after Prime Minister John Thompson died unexpectedly. South of the border, the story is much the same: William Howard Taft was the last unshaven American president when he was elected just over 106 years ago. The few North American politicians who have managed to be elected to high office while sporting some sort of facial hair often do as Stephen McNeil did in 2008, shortly after being elected premier of Nova Scotia—shave, shave, shave.

A number of studies show that beardos are generally perceived negatively by voters. In one recent study, political scientists asked people to choose the likely political stances of similar-looking politicians, with and without chin whiskers. They found that a significant number of people felt that facial hair made candidates appear overly masculine, and that some groups of voters—particularly women and self-declared feminists—were more hesitant to vote for the candidate with facial hair. Rebekah Herrick explains, "Based on our research, if you want to go after women or the feminist vote, you'd be wise to shave the beard and 'stache."

Clearly, Mulcair is bucking this trend, and for some, the alarm bells have been ringing for a while now. Back in 2012, when he was still running for the leadership of the NDP, commentators assumed that his look would cast a shaggy shadow on his leadership chances. A year later, Ottawa-based media consultant Barry McLoughlin commented that if Mulcair was his client, he'd have recommended a shave, and added that even handsome, well-groomed facial follicles can create a (hairy) barrier between the voter and the candidate.

"People don't logically say, I won't vote for somebody who wears a beard. It's more of an instinctive, visceral, can't-quite-verbalize-it thing," McLoughlin said.

But far from heeding this advice, the NDP have positioned Mulcair's beard front and center of their campaign. On pins, on posters, and on placards, the beard has become a sort of furry mascot at the core of the party's broader promotional strategy. All of which prompts the question: what the hell are they thinking?

"Beard" a part of it, indeed. Photo courtesy NDP

In this crowded threeway race, even a slight miscalculation could have enormous costs. But as unconventional as it is risky, the beard may ultimately prove a critical part to the NDP's chances at success.

Here's why.

One of the most consistent criticisms of Mulcair concerns his bellicose, stern nature in debate period; when handed the floor in the House, he's about as gentle as a Rottweiler. It's a trait which could easily drive voters away.

But by making his beard a central part of their campaign, the NDP is re-appropriating the very thing that might otherwise be associated with his less desirable traits. Van Treuren explains: "He's using it to make himself more relatable, more fun. He's having fun with it, and he's using his facial hair as a unique part of his own personal brand. I think it's brilliant."

Highlighting the beard also gives the NDP a simplified means of playing up their underlying (albeit vaguely defined) promise of "change": While the Liberals struggle to articulate how, exactly, their policies would be much different from those of the Conservatives, the NDP's messaging has been effective at setting them apart from the rest of the pack. A recent Leger poll found that the NDP continue to be seen as the party which "most embodies change."

If a bit of scruff will help drive that point home, so be it.

The beardy playfulness should help Mulcair battle the younger, baby-faced Justin Trudeau for the change/urban lumberjack vote, especially since Trudeau's facial hair made him look like he should be swashbuckling off the Spanish Main in the 1700s.

Beyond that, the beard-forward strategy will have the effect of making Mulcair easier to remember, like an annoying jingle that reminds you of your hometown's used-car dealership.

"Anything that can make him seem more fun, less threatening, more trustworthy and genuine is going to help him with anyone who votes more emotionally," Van Treuren says.

Sure, there are those who will register Mulcair's beard as uncouth, and others who will see it as little more than a hiding place for the hammer and sickle with which he will dismantle the Canadian state and impose a thousand years of forced labour. But Mulcair has never lacked for confidence, and the hirsute look will at the very least endear him to some for being a symbol of authenticity and individualism.

Whatever the outcome, the beard clearly plays to the NDP's strengths, setting Mulcair as a leader willing to buck conformity before even getting into office.

Besides, if he shaves that beard he looks like this.

Photo via Facebook

Follow Tomas Borsa on Twitter.

Painting via Wikimedia Commons

In 1979, two thirds of newborn boys in Western countries were circumcised, but rates of circumcision plunged in the ensuing years. In 2010, 58 percent of newborn boys underwent the procedure. That number might be on its way further down as well, because there's a whole grassroots movement aimed at changing what we (in the US, at least) consider normal.

Intact America is the group formed in 2008 by so-called "intactivists," aimed at shifting the norm away from the procedure. They were at perhaps their most active earlier this year when a woman in Florida named Heather Hironimus, took the case to save her son's foreskin all the way to Federal Court (and lost.)

But while the cultural consensus on circumcision is changing, there might be nothing more change-averse in the world than Jewish tradition. The Old Testament couldn't be clearer about what you do to a new baby boy: "On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised." So for 3,700 years or so that's been the Jewish way to go, with very few exceptions. Most Jews really aren't the people to talk to about shifting a norm, because we don't do it to be normal; we do it to be Jewish.

Still, tragic, circumcision-related deaths among certain Orthodox communities in the US have pulled Jews into the debate about foreskins. During the ceremony rabbis at the center of the debate put their mouths on babies penises, and risk giving them fatal herpes. Personally, I don't know any Jews who do that, or even approve of it, but upon reflection it's a little weird that we nonetheless let religious functionaries perform a life-changing medical procedure. Just what exactly are these non-doctors doing to all these baby penises? And where do they stand on intactivism?

To find out, I chatted with the popular Los Angeles-based Rabbi Meir Sultan, who works as a full-time mohel (which is the Hebrew word for "ceremonial foreskin-slicer.") Sultan, who has developed an impressive reputation for someone who is only 32-years-old, was kind enough to pull back the tallit and let us know how a modern bris goes down. Rabbi Sultan is a pretty colorful speaker, and when he wasn't sticking up for his very specific technique, he filled me in on what's been happening in the foreskin business lately. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Interested in religion? Check out our documentary on teenage exorcists:

And if you liked that, here's one about a place called New Jerusalem... in Mexico.

VICE: Hi Rabbi Sultan! How do you perform a circumcision?
Rabbi Meir Sultan: I happen to have a very different technique from other mohels in the city. What I do is that I have a special bandage which I call the "wonder bandage." It's a bandage which we wrap around the penis following the circumcision, and it clots the wound within a matter of two to three minutes.

How's that different from other methods?
Well, you see, there are a few different methods that you can go about getting a circumcision: You're either going to go through the clamping system—now there are clamping instruments that are used, whether it's the Mogen clamps, the Gomco clamp, or the plastibell. These are all types of clamps that grab on to the foreskin and clamp on it hard enough that it stops the blood circulation.

I usually leave it at 'It's my wonder bandage.' And when people ask me, I say, 'Well listen. The chef never gives out his secret recipe!'

Oh my...
Until you get the blood circulation to stop. It takes a good couple of minutes. A couple of minutes for a baby is an eternity. So it's a cleaner job. There's a little less blood, which is why doctors like to use these types of instruments. That's one way of going at it. And then you close the wound up right away, you don't need much of a bandage. The other way of doing it is doing it the traditional way and, you know, using a shield. After you remove the foreskin, you place a bandage and then the mohel comes back 24 or 48 hours later and removes the bandage.

And that's not good?
The problem with that is that I've found, often times, babies who end up with a bandage for 24 to 48 hours are more susceptible to UTIs—urinary tract infections. If the bandage just sits there, it gets dirty, and it can attract bacteria, and that's an infection. So, you know, I've never liked the clamping system because I've found it too painful for the baby.

So what do you do?
I use this method where I actually apply some anesthetics to the area. Very strong topical anesthetics. I don't inject because injecting is a lot more painful. But I apply very strong topical anesthetics so the baby doesn't feel anything. I place a shield in between the foreskin and the penis, and I remove that which I feel is necessary to remove. Right after that, I apply pressure with my wonder bandage for a matter of two to three minutes, and when I remove my wonder bandage, the wound is completely closed up and there is no more bleeding anymore, miraculously.

What's your wonder bandage?
There are different types of bandages which can help. I usually leave it at "it's my wonder bandage." And when people ask me, I say, "Well listen. The chef never gives out his secret recipe!"

How'd you develop this method?
Well, I'll tell you what. I grew up in a family of circumcisers. My dad was a rabbi and a circumciser for 45 years. So I lived it and I breathed it. I saw the way my dad did circumcisions, and he used to use a clamp, and I was never a fan of it. So as soon as I found an alternative, I said "OK, let's go." I tried it, it worked, and boom, I went along with it.

Do you also have a medical background?
Well, I studied in Israel. I was a mohel in the hospital over there. And then I furthered my studies in England where I made sure to get a lot more exposure to botched circumcision, and adult circumcision. So that's where I furthered my studies. But am I a doctor per se? No, I am not a doctor.

For example, we got this call when I was studying there. It was this child whose penis hole closed up.

Can you tell me about studying botched circumcision?
I get probably, every week, one to two phone calls about botched circumcision. Now what is a botched circumcision? Basically, usually the phone calls I get is that the doctor or the OB did not remove enough foreskin—that's usually what I end up getting. Then you have just circumcisions that just don't look nice. They're circumcised, but they don't look nice. Just aesthetically, they're very ugly. And I explain to the parents...I say, "Listen, your child is circumcised. He very much is, but, you know, it's an art, and you have to know how to cut right and measure right. And there needs [to be] just a little bit of trimming because there's thick skin," or whatever it is. I mean, you know, you've got to do this job but you've got to do it right. Often times, you'll have a lot of medical professionals who will just do the job very quickly—very, very quickly. And that's the result. If you do it very quickly and you're not a perfectionist, chances are it's not going to come out so nice.

What were the botched circumcisions you studied in England like?
For example, we got this call when I was studying there. It was this child whose penis hole closed up. No, not completely, because that's obviously dangerous. But it had closed up a fair amount. It was minutely open. And that was an interesting experience, learning how to open up the pee-hole, which really has nothing to do with the circumcision whatsoever. But usually, for a child who's circumcised, they'll always come back to the one who circumcised them, and anything that's wrong in that area of the body, they'll always return to the mohel or to the doctor.

And when they see that blister, they're not looking at a blister. They're looking at, in their eyes, a circumcision which went completely wrong.

How would that happen?
Now, that baby in particular... The way that his penis was sitting on his diaper or the position, it sort of put two skins together for a long time and held those two skins together so that it eventually closed a nice part of the penile hole. So we had to open it up a little bit.

Has anything ever gone wrong with your circumcisions?
I tell parents that it's really important—as part of my aftercare instructions—to make sure to change the baby's diaper every two hours, which is when you pee, is why. Because when you pee, the diaper gets heavy and gets tighter, and around the frenulum area, it's a lot more sensitive. So if his penis is going to rub against a tight diaper, it'll create a blister—a big, fat, ugly blister. And I tell them, "Be very careful." [...] And when they see that blister, they're not looking at a blister. They're looking at, in their eyes, a circumcision which went completely wrong.

Do you study the attributes of each penis in advance?
No, everything is a surprise. I see the baby for the first time when I'm going to circumcise him. There has been times that I've shown up to a circumcision and the baby was completely circumcised, and I don't know why the parents never told me. But, you know, I told them, "Listen, there isn't much work for me." There have been times where I've showed up and the baby was half-circumcised already, which is a little more complicated—but you know, you've got to do it.

Why would a child be half-circumcised?
Well that's how they're born. You know, babies are born in many different shapes and forms. Big penises, small penises, a lot of foreskin, and maybe not that much foreskin. It just depends on the baby.

So, size of the penis manifests itself that early in the life of the infant?Absolutely. You never know how much it'll grow. But definitely at that age, small, big, absolutely.

Is there misinformation out there?
I asked [a group of intactivists in Venice Beach], "Well, what is it about circumcision that bothers you so much?" And all they could really say was the following two things. Number one: you're taking away from their sexual pleasure—which, by the way, is arguable. There are many adults who will tell me after you circumcise them that their sexual life is actually a lot better now that they're circumcised. (Note: The Intact America website provides a longer list of reasons)

And the second reason?
The second reason [they gave] is trauma. It causes trauma to the baby. You know, long-lasting, psychological repercussions [...] What I said back to them at the time was, "You know, there's so much child sex slavery happening right now, trafficking in third world countries. There are people who are adults who are suffering as we speak [...] Do you not think that that is a lot more of a serious issue to address than to assume and presume that there are psychological repercussions to people getting circumcised?" So I say back, "You know, why don't you do your studies as well to women who have gotten their ears pierced? Maybe they are also traumatized from that and it leads to psychological trauma as well later on in life." [Note: Baby ear piercing is also controversial.]

There are plenty of people who are not circumcised and live a very fine, long life, and are just as healthy as people who are circumcised.

Is it something that you recommend necessarily across the board?
Oh, absolutely not! I'll tell you what. I once met this cop [who] asked me what did I do for a living and I told him that I'm a mohel. He asked what is that, and I told him. He said "That's so funny," because he actually had this argument with his wife—one believes that their child, which they're going to be having in a few months, should be circumcised, and the other one believes he shouldn't be.

Were they Jewish?
Both this cop and his wife are not Jewish. He asked me, "What do you think?" I said, "although the CDC came out with that official diagnosis, so to speak, that the positives override the negatives (Note: The CDC issued a proposal for a possible recommendation late last year), [...] if you ask me my personal opinion, I say absolutely not." I'm Jewish. The reason why we circumcise—and there are a lot of medical advantages to circumcising—but the reason why we circumcise is not because of that. The reason why Jewish people have been circumcising at 3,700 years and continue to circumcise is because of this real deep relationship that we have with God that sets us apart.

What would you say to Heather Hironimus? Her boyfriend took her all the way to Federal court over their son's circumcision.
In these types of things, who am I to recommend? I'll tell you personally what I told this cop: "If this is what you're fighting with your wife over, let go!" There are plenty of people who are not circumcised and live a very fine, long life, and are just as healthy as people who are circumcised. I don't think that a medical study is a reason to fight over it. A deep religious reason? I can see why there would be so much tension.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Mistermuckle

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Even in a year that's seen labour actions at some of Canada's largest universities and the unprecedented unionization of several new media organizations, what's happening in Windsor is unusual. A group of panhandlers and street performers there have decided to unite, calling themselves Street Labourers of Windsor (SLOW).

Andrew Nellis, one of the organizers, told Postmedia they "are members of the public just like anybody else. We don't want extra rights. We just want the same rights that everybody else has." Nellis organized and represented a similar effort in Ottawa, the Ottawa Panhandlers' Union (OPU), when he lived there, but relocated to Windsor in 2011.

Among the group's complaints is that the Downtown Windsor Business Association (DWBIA) has paid for iron spikes to be installed on the cement planters many panhandlers use as seats while asking for money. There have also been attempts to put time limits on panhandling downtown, according to panhandler and organizer Richard Dalkeith.

SLOW intends to join the International Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union that doesn't require its members to be employed; the OPU is also an IWW shop. Panhandlers and other people on the streets of Windsor are being asked to sign membership cards right now. Nellis wouldn't tell Postmedia how many had already signed up.

Perhaps surprisingly, both Windsor's mayor and the chairman of the DWBIA have come out in support of the move. Mayor Drew Dilkens said he hopes buskers and panhandlers get "on the same page where they agree to something reasonable to behave accordingly," while Larry Horwitz said street performers "can be a strong addition to the city core" and that "you can see where people feel they are disenfranchised."

Horwitz also said he is "sympathetic" to what he called Windsor's "mental health problem," and acknowledged that just hoping panhandlers and other people on the street disappear is not going to do anything, either to move people off city streets or to deal with the underlying issues that bring people to the streets in the first place.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

At this point, Black Lives Matter could be a historic civil rights movement that significantly changes America. Or it could fizzle out like Occupy Wall Street, an exciting and disruptive political force that briefly rose to prominence and then flamed out without leaving an indelible mark on the political landscape. Or it could go in another direction entirely. The Black Lives Matter movement is at a crossroads, and how it spends its growing political capital will determine everything.

The movement has acquired that political capital because of the moral importance of its cause. New stories of shocking and deplorable police behavior, and the dead black bodies left in its wake, seem to emerge weekly, faster than the media can absorb them. So before America has finished processing the tragic death of Sandra Bland, it's suddenly forced to work through what happened to Sam Dubose before blam! it's on to Christian Taylor. Then the prosecutor from some previous saga, maybe Tamir Rice or John Crawford, pops back into the news again, saying that another killer has been arrested or indicted—or, more often, that they're free to go.

So far this year, at least 742 peoplehave been killed by police. According to a Washington Post analysis, blacks are seven times as likely as whites to be the victims of police violence. In the past five months alone, at least 14 cops have been charged with committing murder, homicide, or manslaughter while on duty, according to an informal tally by informal tally by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf .

Related: A Year After Ferguson, There's Still No Piece

It's emotionally and spiritually exhausting, and the Black Lives Matter movement's controversially disruptive tactics have flowed out of that exhaustion—flowed from that sense of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Because the murders by police brutality is nothing new. Our parents and grandparents have their own stories of unarmed lives lost. The big difference today is technological—the ubiquity of cameras has made the stories undeniable and revealed just how often cops are lying.

The disruptive tactics are appropriate given the dire nature of their cause, aimed at hijacking and redirecting a conversation that would not otherwise be about dead and endangered black bodies. They recall, for me, the ACT-UP protests of the late 80s, when gay-rights demonstrators disrupted all sorts of events in order to get the nation to focus on the AIDS crisis. To fixate on these tactics is to ask why communities that have long been ignored are being so impolite in the way they demand to not be unjustly killed. If you're a so-called Black Lives Matter ally who has a problem with the movement's tactics, then you're not really an ally at all.

In recent weeks, some have questioned why Black Lives Matter has focused so much on Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate who would like to be an ally of the movement. In an op-ed for the Washington Post this week, Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter founder, explains:

"Agitating a perceived political ally to the Black community is strategic. For far too long, the Democratic Party has milked the Black vote while creating policies that completely decimate Black communities. Once upon a time, Bill Clinton was widely perceived as an ally and advocate for the needs of Black people. However, it is the Clinton administration's Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act that set the stage for the massive racial injustice we struggle with in law enforcement today... The Clinton administration gave birth to the very era of mass incarceration that current Democrats are renouncing with great emotion and fervor."

At the end of the piece she writes:

"Our role in the current election cycle is accountability. We know by centering conversations on the most disenfranchised among us, we ensure true liberty and justice for all. We will disrupt presidential candidates and all elected officials, we will move towards bold and creative action to deliver the ideals of democracy for ALL people inside of this country."

The reality is, Black Lives Matter tactics are working. So far, this young group has shaped the Democratic presidential race more than any of the left's old-guard special interest groups. Black Lives Matter activists have been extremely effective at forcing their concerns to the top of the Democratic agenda, forcing Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O'Malley to take meetings with them and release policy ideas that address the movement's concerns. But Black Lives Matter is poised to accomplish more.

We are in an era of deep partisanship, in which the presidential race no longer boils down to a battle for the middle. There is no longer a persuadable center in American politics any more. Nowadays, elections are not about persuasion, winning over independent or centrist voters. They're about motivation—turning out the people on your side, instilling voters with a sense of urgency and importance that forces them to show up to the polls.

Democrats know that if too many black people stay home next November, the party could lose the White House. And in this election, the black vote cannot be taken for granted because Black Lives Matter has sharpened black political power to a knife's edge.

Now, finally, Democrats are calling for criminal justice reform, no longer afraid that it will come across as evidence that they are "weak on crime." So the moment is ripe to shove the Democratic establishment as far leftward as it can on criminal justice reform. The moment is ripe to change Black America's relationship with American police. The political system may or may not respond to specific demands—but as Occupy Wall Street learned, the generalized message of a need for change can be easily shoved aside.

Watch VICE News' documentary on mental health behind bars:

So what specifically should Black Lives Matter demand? That's a complicated question because Black Lives Matter is both a network with 26 chapters and a grassroots movement that includes people who don't officially belong to those groups. It's decentralized, viewing local leadership as paramount to achieving its goals. But America's policing problem can also be—and I think, needs to be—addressed by a national policy approach.

Of course, Black Lives Matter's leaders understand this. "The goal of Black Lives Matter is to transform America's systemic hatred against Black people," Cullors writes in the Washington Post. "Yes, we will fight for policy reform, but we know that every gain in this area can be retracted if we do not change the anti-Black culture in this country."

But policy reform will be critical in making concrete gains—the killings can be stopped by changing deeply-held racial biases, but that will take a long time. I hope Black Lives Matter will put its muscle behind one particular idea and try to force that idea into the political conversation in 2016. An idea that I believe is at the heart of our policing problem—the reason why police are positioned as occupying forces in so many working class communities of color, why some young black and brown people end up working in an underground industry that inevitably leads to police confrontations, fueling suspicion and fear. To me, the core of our policing problem is the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs helps fuel the illegal drug trade, making drugs more lucrative and thus making that industry valuable for economically devastated areas where people need jobs and, and are also looking for ways to help soothe soul-deep pain. The failed War on Drugs positions America to see all black men as potential criminals, and positions the police to play whack-a-mole in the hood while getting lots of federal money in return, despite doing little to actually curb the drug trade. The War on Drugs, as Michelle Alexander explained in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, positions black people as resources to be used—mass incarceration has allowed police, prosecutors, judges, politicians, prison operators and others to make money from black bodies.

The only thing that could fundamentally damage the illegal drug trade is to end the War on Drugs by creating a legal option to buy and sell drugs. Allow the private sector to sell drugs in a way that is organized and taxed by the government like almost any other product. Without that we cede control of drug trafficking to the most dangerous members of society and forfeit billions in potential taxation. Without that we continue to hold out hope that prohibition will work, when it hasn't for decades.

So, some of you might be asking, should we just let people do drugs? Yes. Why are we criminalizing the choices people make about what they put in their own bodies? In what other capacity do you like the government serving as a nanny state, telling you what's best for you? Several state governments are already getting out of that business, either legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana.

Prohibition will never work. We know this because we've tried. The US government has spent decades and trillions of dollars, and quintupled its prison population without lessening the availability of drugs. But what if we give drug dealers real competition from the private sector? It would make the entire arrangement less attractive, taking a significant swath of customers away from the underground economy, thus making the costs of smuggling and dealing drugs less lucrative, thus damaging and shrinking that industry and giving us a chance to refocus our policing. Ending the War on Drugs is essential if we are going to change the way the police interact with black men and women.

Black Lives Matter could, in this political climate, with its current level of power, demand Democratic candidates start talking about ending the War on Drugs. If Sanders makes it a big part of his platform, then Clinton will have to discuss it, too. And if that happens then we may be on the way to seeing Black Lives Matter fundamentally change America.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

I know you don't need me to tell you this, but America has a lot of fat people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2012, 69 percent of Americans were overweight or obese. That was up from 45 percent in 1962.

Some more recent studies suggest that the size of Americans has reached a plateau and that obesity rates are no longer getting higher. But one thing is for sure: There are currently a lot of big people in this country. And wherever a group of people are, you'll find a business trying to figure out a way of making money off of that group. Below are some ways in which American businesses are cashing in on plus-sized Americans.

Joey Conzevoy, of ABC Caskets in Los Angeles, places a dust cover on an oversized coffin.

"People are getting bigger," Joey Conzevoy explained to me on a recent visit to ABC Caskets, the casket factory he owns in Los Angeles, before outlining the difficulties associated with burying a deceased person of size.

Once a person gets to a certain weight—250 pounds is where Conzevoy says people start getting into trouble—they will need to go into an oversized coffin. As burial plots are only large enough to house a standard casket, people in oversized coffins require multiple burial plots. With plots starting, generally, at around $1,000—at least in the Los Angeles area—this can get very expensive. Most large people, Conzevoy explained, end up going with cremation as it's a cheaper option (though it should be noted that funeral directors in Scotland recently complained that people there were getting too big to cremate as well).

There are also logistical difficulties that funeral directors face when burying a large person, with everything from the size of the doors that the bodies have to be taken through, to the amount of space available in the hearse having to be considered.

A 2009 article in the funeral industry trade publication Funeral Home & Cemetery News gave this advice to funeral directors: "The easiest way to handle an obese funeral is to refer the family to your competitor."

Riders pass through It's a Small World at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California.

In 2008, Disneyland closed the It's a Small World ride for 1 months for refurbishment. According to a report published on the Disney blog Mice Age, this was done because the increasing weight of park guests meant that the ride's boats were frequently hitting the bottom of the artificial river and getting stuck. (A spokesperson for Disneyland I spoke to declined to comment on this.)

Other parks are also retrofitting existing rides to accommodate larger riders. Speaking to Theme Park Insider in 2007, Damon Andrews, a spokesperson for SeaWorld Entertainment, which operates the SeaWorld and Busch Gardens theme parks, said, "Depending on whether the ride manufacturer allows it, we've made accommodations ranging from extended seat belts to adding extra-large seats on some rides." Universal Studios Orlando also recently added larger seats to some cars on the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride.

In addition to modifying old rides, theme parks are now building new rides with larger people in mind, too. "Every new coaster I've seen in the past several years either has special seats or rows for larger riders, or extension options so that the restraints can hold larger riders," Robert Niles of Theme Park Insider told USA Today back in 2011.

Additionally, most theme parks have introduced "test seats"—a sample of a ride's seat that guests can try for size before lining up for an attraction. The idea is to save larger patrons the inconvenience and humiliation of being turned away from the ride while attempting to board after waiting in line for a long period of time.

A diner prepares to eat an "Octuple Bypass Burger" at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas.

The Heart Attack Grill is a hospital-themed restaurant in Las Vegas where people who weigh over 350 pounds get to eat for free. The restaurant gained international media attention when it opened in 2006, for serving food that the owner, Jon Basso, described as "so bad for you it's shocking."

Which is a pretty accurate statement. Everything in the restaurant is fried in lard, milkshakes are made of butter, and the "vegan menu" is just a list of cigarettes.

"It's a place where you really don't have to be insecure about anything at all," the restaurant's manager, Rikii Ogawa, told me, although she did admit that some customers get embarrassed while being weighed in the center of the restaurant to determine if they qualify for free food.

More mainstream restaurants have also made concessions for fat people. Since the late 1980s, Olive Garden has been providing customers with "Larry Chairs"—a larger, armless chair that's rumored to be named after a customer named Larry who struggled to fit into the chain's regular seats.

A sponge on a stick (for washing difficult to reach places,) an extra wide umbrella, and an extra long tape measure from Amplestuff.com.

Amplestuff.com is an online plus-size retailer that's been operating since 1988. In a recent phone interview, Bill Fabrey, the founder of Amplestuff, explained to me why he started the company. "My wife at the time was a very large person and we decided to sit down and make a list of things that could make her life easier," Fabrey said. "We came up with over 70 items, so we decided to start a company."

In addition to the obvious products—seatbelt extenders, oversized blood pressure cuffs, etc.—Amplestuff also stocks a host of items you wouldn't necessarily think of. Like extra large coat hangers, anti-chafing bra liners, and miniature steering wheels designed for people with bellies too large to fit under a traditional steering wheel.

From left to right: Angus Maple, Jade Rose, Erin Green, and Tim Von Swine.

I recently visited the house of porn producer Tim Von Swine as he filmed a BBW porn scene for the mature, chubby porn site ChubOld.

In between takes on the set of the shoot, one of the BBW performers in the scene, Jade Rose, told me that, in recent years, she's noticed a rise in the amount of people looking at—or at least admitting they look at—porn featuring fat people. "There's a huge fan base for it," she said.

In an analysis of their data released last year, the porn site PornHub revealed that "BBW" was the 13th most popular porn category among male viewers, beating out "Asian" (14th), "Creampie" (15th), and "Threesome" (16th).

Rose said that, though there has always been a small niche market for plus-size porn, mainstream porn companies are slowly starting to come around to the genre. "Hustler made a BBW DVD for the first time last year," she told me. "Jessica Drake did a guide to BBW sex that was a huge hit. Evil Angel have started doing BBW, too."

Sara Viola, the manager of Della Curva poses with a size 24 wedding dress.

Della Curva, a plus-sized bridal boutique in Tarzana, California, was started in 2013, after Lisa Litt and Burt Warner, who own a nearby bridal store that carries "straight sizes," noticed an increase in demand for larger dresses.

"The store is a safe place where women are not judged," the store's manager, Sara Viola, told me. "They can feel very free and be themselves without worrying about judgement from other people."

According to Viola, at the time it opened, Della Curva was the only plus-sized bridal store in California. There is at least one other one now, Viola said, and she expects more to follow.

An outpost of the plus-sized women's clothing store Lane Bryant in Los Angeles, California.

Stores selling everyday plus-sized clothing are getting more popular, too. Whereas in the past, plus-sized clothing was drab, basic, and aimed to cover up the body rather than enhance it, recent years have seen a shift towards cooler, more modern designs.

In recent years, H&M, Target, Michael Kors, Forever 21, Mango, and a bunch of other brands have released trendier plus-sized lines aimed at a younger market. Celebrities are jumping on the bandwagon, too. The actresses Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson both recently announced that they are launching lines of clothing aimed at larger women.

A study released last year by the market research company NPD Group found that plus-sized fashion sales generated $17.5 billion in sales between May 2013 and April 2014. This was an increase of 5 percent on the previous year.

Speaking to the New Yorker last year, André Leon Talley, a former editor at Vogue (and, presumably, someone who knows a lot about fashion,) said he'd noticed a difference in the way larger ladies are dressing. "The big girl rocks. The big girl is dope," he said. "Walking down the street, all the big girls are looking and thinking fashion. They're on point with the fashion trend."

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Acid Nerve's 'Titan Souls' of earlier this year began as an event-winning Ludum Dare project

"If you want to make games, you have to make games. If you need help, we're there to be your excuse."

Mike Kasprzak is telling me about Ludum Dare, which he has been involved with for a good 13 years, and has been in charge of fully running for at least six of those. It's an international game jam event that runs three times a year—voting for the theme of LD 33 is happening right now. Participating developers from around the world are given three days to make a game based on the theme in question—and it's really as simple as that. However, actually running the event isn't so easy.

"Ludum Dare was started by Geoff Howland, and it began as a game development forum," Mike says. "The idea to make his forum stand out was, 'Let's have a contest where we make games from scratch in 24 hours.' That would sound pretty crazy today, but this was way back in 2002, so it was extra crazy. Practically overnight it went from Geoff's forum to a team of four organizing and running this unusual new event."

"The prize is your product. Being able to say 'I made this' is pretty amazing."
–Mike Kasprzak

Over time, Mike took on more and more responsibilities. "Finances, hosting, support, until about six years ago when I had kind of taken over. (Developer) Phil Hassey did a lot of great work building us a site. I kept us on schedule, Phil would sometimes come and fix things, and for a time it was just a matter of running events every four months. And then it got popular!"

The Ludum Dare "season" lasts for eight weeks. Five leading up to the event where theme voting begins and real-world arrangements are made (although you don't have to attend an event to participate in it—this being the internet age and everything). Each event takes place over a weekend, after which comes three weeks of judging. Everyone who has submitted a game gets to play and rate everyone else's. At the end, the votes are tallied and the winners declared.

There's no actual prize for the winners. "The prize is your product," Mike says. "Sure, we could have prizes, but being able to say 'I made this' is pretty amazing. And it doesn't hurt that since we've become more popular: 'I made a top game in Ludum Dare' is now something to brag about."

The maker of 'Minecraft' gained inspiration from participating in a previous Ludum Dare event.

It's especially something to brag about when you consider the sheer number of games that are submitted. The most recent event, Ludum Dare 32 (theme: "an unconventional weapon"), saw over 2,800 different games made over just one weekend. Going up against so many talented developers—Markus "Notch" Persson was a regular before Minecraft came out and ultimately made him a multimillionaire—must be a daunting task, but the number of entrants keeps on growing, year on year. "Ludum Dare didn't inspire Minecraft," says Mike of Notch's earlier participation; "but it inspired him to make stuff. So at the very least, that's our legacy."

I got in touch with some more of those people who have been inspired by Ludum Dare, and gone on to make something successful, guaranteeing their own place in the video gaming world.

Article continues after the video below

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Mark Foster is part of British indie studio Acid Nerve, the team behind Titan Souls, released earlier this year. It's received a lot of praise, and it all started as a Ludum Dare game. The theme for LD28 was "you only get one," and in Titan Souls you have to beat a series of bosses using simply one arrow. To make things even harder, you can only take one hit before dying. Titan Souls beat out 2,063 other entrants to win that particular event.

I wondered what, if any, the benefits were of squeezing in a whole game's worth of development into such a short period of time. "You strip off stuff you think you won't be able to get done in time," Mark says, "and focus on the core aspects of getting something complete together—general mechanics, interactivity, and win conditions—and then polish those down. You focus more on the importance of gameplay rather than anything else."

Evoland was the winner of LD24 with the theme "evolution," and Nicolas Cannasse of its makers Shiro Games agrees with Mark. "The time limit is a great way to remember the essentials when it comes to making a game fun. You don't have time for all the small details, so you have to understand what is important and what will be a waste of your precious time."

A screenshot from 'Evoland,' winner of Ludum Dare 24

They both agree that Ludum Dare is an incredibly important event within the indie development scene. "For me, personally, Ludum Dare has been massively important and actually life changing," Mark tells me. "It is quite an important thing in connecting people and growing the developer world." As for Nicolas, LD provides the perfect opportunity to try out new things. "I think it's really important to be able to try new ideas, as in the professional world you're often very busy with your daily projects and lack the time to fully dedicate yourself to trying out something new."

Those new ideas aren't fully formed from the start though, especially since the theme is only announced at the very beginning of the event. "I usually don't try and think about the game I want to make beforehand," says Nicolas. "That's because once I have an idea in mind, it's hard to tear it down in the case that it doesn't match the theme." So before developing Evoland, he had no idea what the ultimate result would be, just that he "didn't want to follow the things you immediately think about when you hear 'evolution.'"

Mark Foster had a basic idea in place before the start of LD28. "The day before the jam I said, 'Maybe we should do something with boss fights,' but that was pretty much it. The theme for the jam shaped the game entirely. With the seed of boss fights already planted it kinda just came together with the one-hit mechanics and single arrow."

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Having a theme set for you is something that every creative person craves once in a while. "The theme solves the 'blank sheet of paper' problem," says Mike. "It focuses your brainstorming on a subset of ideas. Often you think of things you wouldn't have otherwise. And knowing that thousands of people from around the world are also doing it is encouraging. The excitement is infectious, and you want to be a part of that."

He admits that it's not for everyone, however. I posit that Ludum Dare must turn the occasional developer grumpy, to say the least, after three days of them bashing their head against a project. "Of course, we can't make everyone happy, but we can make like 95 percent of them happy—and a few even happier." Mike believes that for most people who take part, it's all about the personal challenge rather than competing with others. "Making a game in a few days is an accomplishment. And if you know others have played it, that's exciting, too."

'The Rock, the Paper, & the Scissors' was the overall winner of LD's "an unconventional weapon" jam.

"As I see it, a very big part of the indie game development culture is rooted in game jams," Mike continues. "We don't even think about it anymore, it's just normal for us. A common question game makers are asked is: 'Where do you get your ideas?' And today, a lot of people say, 'It started as a jam game.' Besides being one of the largest jams, people think of us as the 'home' of game jamming, and our community is one that people gravitate towards. We have an IRC channel that's 200 strong all year round, we have sizable Reddit and Steam groups, and an outrageous amount of Twitter followers."

This year Ludum Dare is taking on this responsibility and pushing it even further. "It will be expanding to better be the home of game jamming that so many people want us to be," Mike says. "Of course we'll continue to keep running our events, but we'll start collecting other game jam projects, too. Your portfolio of Ludum Dare games will soon be your portfolio of jam games. I'm digging up history, too. Our own history, as we're missing data from our first ten events, as well as some historic but forgotten jams. And that's pretty exciting."

"As I see it, a very big part of the indie game development culture is rooted in game jams." –Mike Kasprzak

Both Mark Foster and Nicolas Cannasse are working full time in video game development now, and although they have busy schedules, both have pledged to participate in future Ludum Dare events. Evoland was successful enough for Shiro Games that the studio is now working on a sequel. "I hope to have everything done with Evoland 2 by August 21, so I can fully enjoy LD33!" says Nicolas.

"Hopefully we'll be able to make something else for one in future just to get back to that fun game-making binge we love so much," Mark adds. "During Titan Souls' full development we didn't really have the time to do game jams... technically we were still working on one!"

Ludum Dare 33 begins on August 21 (or 22, depending on your time zone), and theme voting is currently underway. I'll leave you with a few words from Mike on why you should think about participating, even if you've never done so before. "If you like a challenge, know how to make things appear on a screen, or are willing to learn, and you have a couple of days, you might just enjoy yourself."

Follow Matt Porter on Twitter.

A hypothetical rendering of the thing Glendon Scott Crawford wanted to build. Screenshot via ABC News

Glendon Scott Crawford was a man with a dream: He wanted to build a mobile radioactive ray gun to kill Muslims in the US.

One problem with that dream was the only people who offered to help him were FBI informants and undercover agents.

Crawford is currently being tried in federal court in New York State, and faces at least 15 years if found guilty of terrorism charges. On Tuesday the jury heard recordings of conversations between him and Chris Barker, the Imperial Wizard of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and an FBI informant, who was taping the call.

"First, the Mexican invasion, now the Muslim invasion. They are trying to strike the death blow to American culture," Crawford tells Barker on one tape, as the Albany Times Union reported. "Technology is such that you can build a (device) and put it in the van... a couple of Klans, a couple of chapters, would have to get together."

Barker, as VICE has previously reported, is a rogue white supremacist with a long record that includes multiple DUI charges, numerous arrests for violence, and such a loathsome reputation that even other Klansman regularly denounce him. In fact, Barker was a key suspect in a 2011 defacing of a church, an incident that led to him getting kicked out of one Klan group. Yet the North Carolina man was a key component of an FBI investigation into Crawford, a complex operation that shows the drastic lengths the authorities will go to bring terrorism charges—even when their targets have little chance of following through on their hopeless plans without the financing, prompting, and encouragement of the FBI.

According to Crawford's defense attorney, the 51-year-old wasn't anywhere near creating the fantastical weapon of his dreams; all he had was a "piece of paper and an idea." (Crawford's alleged accomplice Eric Feight pled guilty in 2014 to providing material support for terrorism.) Federal agents have acknowledged in court that they didn't know whether Crawford was serious about his outlandish scheme at first—and in any case experts have said the ray gun would have been impractical even had it been constructed. Still, undercover FBI operatives kept stringing Crawford along, offering to buy him equipment so he would continue corresponding with them.

When asked by Crawford's lawyer whether the FBI encouraged Crawford to commit a crime, an agent answered, "I don't think encourage is the right word. We would allow him to do that."

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The authorities had been watching the would-be supervillain since 2012, when he approached the Israeli embassy in New York City, showed up at a synagogue and Jewish community center, and called his Congressman asking for support for his plan to build a deadly X-ray device. All contacted law enforcement. Later that year, he reached out to Barker with the idea that the KKK leader could help him.

Crawford emailed Barker, "unbeknownst to the government," according to the FBI, and the two began to collaborate. Barker became so involved that on July 27, 2012, Crawford told an undercover FBI agent he was in contact with to call Barker, according to emails obtained by VICE. "The knights [Barker's group] may have the resources to invest and bring the project to fulfillment," wrote Crawford.

Then, on August 7, Barker was arrested on unrelated federal charges of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to Forsyth County, North Carolina, law enforcement officials and sources close to the investigation against Crawford.

Three days after he was arrested, he told the cops about Crawford's scheme. "While sitting in the can, on August 10 he called the FBI and sold the government this ridiculous story about how he had information of a plot with enough explosives in New Jersey to blow up New Jersey and New York together," said one source familiar with the case against Crawford.

On August 13, the same day he was released from federal custody, Barker, while wired up by the FBI, placed a call to Crawford, and invited him down to North Carolina. (According to the criminal complaint filed by FBI Special Agent Geoffrey Kent, Crawford made this trip "unsolicited and without any government role or direction.")

The two men met—while Barker was wearing a wire—on August 24. "Everything went well hope things are good on your end... great plan," Barker emailed Crawford on August 28. " Would love to see this once great nation in our hands again. Back in the hands of White Christian Americans just like our founding fathers planned it to be. Take care Brother keep in touch Hail Victory."

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In the following weeks, Barker recorded multiple conversations with Crawford, and then arranged for Crawford to meet with two men he said were wealthy KKK members who wanted to finance the nuclear weapons plot, but in fact were undercover FBI agents. In the following months the agents provided cash, bought components, and even constructed a fake terror device, according to court documents.

"Chris Barker gives the Klan a black eye." –KKK Leader Billy Snuffer

Barker apparently remains in the FBI's good graces, even though he is the chief suspect in the painting of a swastika on a synagogue in Southeastern Virginia in July 2011—a hate crime has gone curiously unpursued, according to local and federal law enforcement, KKK members, and synagogue officials.

On that Independence Day weekend, four members of the Rebel Brigades of the Ku Klux Klan attended a cross burning in rural southeastern Virginia, got drunk, drove to Danville, and desecrated the Beth Shalom Synagogue by painting a swastika on the front door.

Danville residents placed an American flag to obscure the vandalism, and local police opened a criminal investigation; the FBI was notified immediately that a hate crime had occurred.

"Chris Barker has been very high on the list of suspects for the synagogue incident since the get-go," said Danville police chief Philip Broadfoot in an interview in July.

Multiple Klan officials, others with knowledge of events that night, and four law enforcement officials confirmed to VICE that Barker was the ringleader behind the hateful vandalism. Two months after the incident, one of those who committed the crime confessed to the Rebel Brigades of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard and named the people responsible. The KKK group promptly expelled the four members, including Barker and his wife.

"You do not deface houses of worship—ever," said Rebel Brigades leader Billy Snuffer. "We kicked them out in the third week of September, 2011 when we found out. Chris Barker gives the Klan a black eye."

No one has been arrested for the crime, though in July 2015 the FBI listed the case as "investigation closed," according to public records.

Members of the congregation remain upset about the lack of communication on the part of the feds—the FBI did send a document to the synagogue on March 6, 2013, but it said that "a criminal investigation can be a lengthy undertaking and, for several reasons, we cannot tell you about its progress at this time."

"If the FBI told me, 'We can't do anything with it, but I can't tell you why,' as a taxpayer I would find that less objectionable than what appears to be the case that the evidence is being ignored," said Peter Howard, a longtime leader of Beth Sholom. "How much patience should I have before I conclude I am being ignored?"

Detailed messages about the 2011 incident were left with several different FBI agencies but went unreturned. It seems clear that in the years since the swastika case, Barker has become valuable to the Bureau—even if no one else shares the Feds' high opinion of him.

"God said you should always find something good in someone, but I don't think God has ever met Chris Barker," said Snuffer.

Nate Thayer is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist and correspondent with 25 years of foreign reporting experience.

Sir Ben Kingsley as Darwan and Patricia Clarkson as Wendy go for a drive in 'Learning to Drive' (2015). All photos courtesy of Broad Green Pictures

Whenever there are upticks in Islamophobia, Sikhs feel it too. Three years ago this month, a member of Hammerskin Nation, a white supremacist group, walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and killed six worshippers. Whether this act was directed at them as a minority group, or a misguided characterization of their religion because they wear turbans, is unclear. In the years since 9/11, a Sikh on the street in America might be called a raghead, Ali Baba, Gandhi, Muhammad, Saddam, or any other racist epithet used to describe Middle Easterners. This name-calling discounts the fact that Sikhs are a separate and distinct culture: not Muslim, not extremist, not Hindu.

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The new movie Learning to Drive serves, in part, to educate viewers about what it means to be a Sikh while telling the story of Patricia Clarkson's Wendy, a book critic whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. As part of her recovery, she initiates driving lessons from Darwan Singh, a taxi driver played by the legendary English actor Sir Ben Kingsley—representing the first time in history a Sikh character has been placed in a leading Hollywood role. The community's response has been ecstatic.

"It is incredibly meaningful for the Sikh community to be featured prominently and positively on the big screen," said Simran Jeet Singh, an assistant professor of religion at Trinity University and senior religion fellow for the Sikh Coalition. "Sikhs have been here in America for more than a century now, and they have been targets of ignorance and hate violence since that time. I am hopeful that sharing the stories, struggles, and contributions of Sikh Americans will help people of all backgrounds better connect with this community and, ultimately, make our nation a more accepting and understanding place."

For accuracy, Kingsley's people approached Harpreet Sing Toor, chairman of public policy and external affairs for the Sikh Cultural Society in Richmond Hill, Queens, to help show the English-born actor the intricacies of being a Sikh American living in New York, a neighborhood that's home to 40,000 or 50,000 Sikhs, and where parts of Learning to Drive were filmed. Like Kingsley's character, many in the community work in the transportation business, although cab driving is not always a first choice.

According to the Sikh Coalition's Bay Area Civil Rights Report, 12 percent of Sikhs acknowledge they have been refused employment because of their identity. Many Sikhs with advanced degrees looking for other types of work are told to shave their beards, cut their hair, and drop their accents or else they won't get hired.

Last week VICE spoke over the phone with Kingsley about his groundbreaking new role and tapping into "collective rage."

VICE: Hi, Sir Ben, lovely to talk with you. I'm actually calling from a Buddhist Abbey in Canada. The monks and nuns here wanted me to tell you that they love all your movies—especially Gandhi.
Sir Ben Kingsley: Oh, how beautiful. Where are you calling from again?

Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia.
One of the most exotic phone calls I've ever taken.

There has been a huge response to news of the movie in the Sikh community. On the internet, many Sikhs are saying things like, "I'm really excited to see this film come to the big screen and to have our community humanized for people around the world." As a storyteller, what influence do you expect, or hope this story will have on your audience?
Well, Pilar, let me simplify a huge question and not try and predict or preempt or persuade anybody to react in anyway. But let me simply say that I hope that we will provoke thought in people that they would not have had, had they not seen the movie.

I think that's all an artistic gesture of any kind can offer—[whether it's] paintings, choreographed dance, opera, sculpture—that you stand in front of it, or sit in front of it as it is the case with the movie, and thoughts pass through your mind that wouldn't have passed through your mind had you not been sitting or standing in that particular place, being part of that situation.

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So it's going to provoke so many different thoughts on so many different levels about friendships about relationships—mother and daughter and family—culture, separation, loss, and exile. So many thoughts are going to pass through people, and I'm delighted that there is an enthusiastic response from the particular community that we are exploring. And we've had terrific support from the community in Richmond Hill. Even to the extent of allowing us to their temple to film, and I think... You've seen the film haven't you?

I have—it was wonderful.
Oh, good. Well, you'll see that in the temple scene, it's like an island of peace in the midst of a crazy, thriving, sometimes neurotic metropolis. It was wonderful that they let us film in there. It was very steadying and informative for not only myself, but the crew. Many of the members of the crew took away their little Patkaa that you wear around your head in the temple. It was a lovely, lovely day—great bonding.

"I do believe that storytelling is profoundly healing."

Wendy, Patricia Clarkson's character, is full of defense mechanisms that lend her protection. She hides behind her work and isolates herself. And, giving her the tools that your character gives her, lends to her own development. It all ties in to this kind of warrior-like characteristic that is reflected in Sikh culture. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that.
It's my duty and my job to create the finest and most accurate portrait I can, and I based it on observation of the Sikhs that I have met and worked with. Not only in the UK and America, but also my experience of the culture working in India, playing Gandhi [where I had] a Sikh bodyguard-driver. He was with me four or five months, every day, at the wheel of my car. And I would sit behind him and he would be very still—immensely protective of me, hugely respectful. When it came my turn to read Darwan Singh's wonderful character and my turn to portray a Sikh, it had to come from my observation and my appreciation of that man and those like him.

So, in a sense, my character has to come out of me, and I should really take very little away from the character. It's not entirely a one-way street, but the bias is very much towards what I can give to my character rather than what I can take away. I have to leave everything on the set, on film. If I were a painter, I'd have to leave everything on the canvas.

What I do take away is the joy of being a storyteller on their behalf. It is my role as a storyteller to hopefully enhance people's lives by telling stories, by being an actor. Because I do believe, Pilar, that storytelling is profoundly healing.

So there were some instances in the movie where your persona is treated in a typical stereotypical fashion that kind of manifest everyday for some residents of New York—being called names like Osama, Muhammad. As someone who grew up in a dominant colonial society with a mixed heritage, did you face any stereotypes when you were younger?
No, I didn't. [My family] was a middle-class family. My father is a doctor; my mother was English. I went to a great school. No. I've explored horrific European anti-Semitism. I explored it in Schindler's List , my portrayal of [Nazi hunter] Simon Wiesenthal [in Murderers Among Us], and my portrayal of Otto Frank, Ann Frank's father. And of course I spent time with Holocaust survivors.

"It's not entirely a one-way street, but the bias is very much towards what I can give to my character rather than what I can take away."

[The Holocaust] is the extreme example of horrendous bias and prejudice, ignorance, and misunderstanding. And as a result, two-thirds of Europe's Jews disappeared. It is unbelievably shocking and still can't be quite comprehended and digested by the rest of the world. It will remain utterly incomprehensible, and yet it happened so very recently.

It's tapping into that collective rage that I feel against the perpetrators of the Holocaust that fires me up in certain roles that I play—which goes way beyond any personal experience that I might or might not of had. To portray that hell in the middle of so-called civilized Europe is a real eye-opener.

Harpreet Sing Toor informed me that he wanted me to call you Sir Ben.
Aw, that is very sweet. I think that also is a kind of cultural respect because it's very British. It's very English, and I am very touched by that.

Learning to Drive premieres in New York and LA today.

Follow Pilar on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Fotos GOVBA

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about death and the process of dying. I know, not the prettiest of thoughts; there are far nicer ideas to be contemplating than your own demise. It's a tough subject. We all know it's out there, lurking somewhere on the horizon, but many of us find it extremely uncomfortable to talk about.

Medical students don't seem to have that problem, though. They are reminded of death on a daily basis and seem to be able to laugh it off with their own unique brand of macabre humor. I sat down with a few of them to ask about that very matter and find out how it feels to spend so much of your time with corpses. After our chat, I'm having a hard time imagining myself ever donating my body to science.

Raisins

"Sometimes you'll get emotionally attached to a particular cadaver. After having seen it so many times during the semester, you begin to hope you'll get the same one for your practical exam. Some of the corpses I've seen had their eyes wide-open but they hardly looked like eyes anymore—they looked more like raisins. Life is a fragile thing, really. After you die, there's most likely nothing else."

– Alina, fourth-year student.

Laying Off The Rice

"My anatomy teacher once told me that they preserve bodies by casually hanging them from ropes in a formalin pool in the university basement. I always wanted to see it but I have never been allowed in.

"One time, we got a body that had his dick cut off. It was pretty awkward to look at, especially for the guys. The worst thing I've witnessed is armpit fat. It looked so similar to rice that I couldn't eat the stuff for about a year."

- Alin, third-year student

A cadaver dissection table. Image via Phyzome.

Cold As A Corpse

"Most of the corpses we get have already been dissected. Even so, rummaging through the bits and pieces is extremely beneficial because there's a world of difference between what you see in your illustrated anatomy atlas—with all those bright colors and clear lines—and the real deal.

"I actually think a lot about death. It used to mostly be about my loved ones dying, but these days I think a lot about my own death. Unfortunately, we're all going to experience it—some more brutally than others. Last winter, I saw one of my classmates get hit by a truck and it made me realize that, as medical students, we're way too superficial and we don't pay nearly enough attention to those right next to us. At school, we've been taught to joke about death and to eat next to corpses and all that. I think that, in many ways, it's made us become just as cold as them."

- Adelina, third-year student

Salted Cadavers

"The smell of formalin (a.k.a. formaldehyde)—the stuff that preserves bodies—always makes me hungry. There's a certain flavor to it. To stop corpses from rotting, we sprinkle them with salt, which, mixed with the formalin, gives the corpses this weird food-like smell.

"Sure, I'm scared of dying, but it's going to happen to all of us whether we like it or not. I'm just grateful I've been given the chance to learn about so many things. That's what keeps me going."

- Andrei, fourth-year student

Pretending to Wank Corpses Off

"I'm quite fond of corpses because, unlike living people, they don't speak. When I started dealing with dead bodies, I found it hard to believe they'd ever actually been alive. A live human and a dead human felt like two different things.

"One time, a colleague dared me to make a cadaver smile, so I pulled at its cheeks and did it. My colleague then took the corpse's hand and made it look as if he was jerking himself off. It was fun, especially because our teacher was laughing as well."

- Cristian, third-year student

Angle Grinders

"Once, two teaching assistants were struggling to remove a brain from a corpse's skull so they called me in to help. After about half an hour of cutting away at it with an angle grinder and hitting it with a chisel, we made it through. Trust me, it's uncomfortable to hear a man's skull crack in your hands.

These days, death in society is viewed as a tragedy even though it's the most natural thing. That said, it's terrible to witness someone have a heart attack. Or to see a 30-year-old with a pregnant wife being told he has pancreatic cancer."

- George, fourth-year student

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Corpse Selfies

"People take selfies all over the place, so why shouldn't they do it at medical school too? Taking a selfie with a corpse isn't any more complex than a window washer taking a selfie while cleaning windows. The only real difference is that a board of ethics could give you a hard time for the former. According to current regulations, corpse selfies are forbidden.

"Lab jokes are usually pretty macabre—the morgue is not really a space for political correctness. That said, I'm yet to meet anyone who's bothered by it or doesn't appreciate the funny side of dealing with dead people. You know that game, "Marco Polo"? One time, I hid my mate's pen in a cadaver and we played that. Another time, right around Christmas, one of my mates dressed a body up like Santa Claus."

- Bogdan, sixth-year student

Missing Penis

"Once, a teacher told us about how a body's penis simply vanished. Seemingly, someone cut it off and took it home. There's plenty of necrophilia jokes floating about, typically between alpha males. Stuff like: 'If you need a shag, there's plenty of fit birds in the lab.'"

- Ciprian, first-year student

Spotting a Corpse on the Bus

"A week or so after dissecting a woman, I thought I saw her next to me on the train. She looked exactly the same. I stared at her for a while to see if it was actually her. I wasn't scared or anything—that sort of stuff doesn't worry me. School has shaken me up a bit, though. It's forced me to think a lot more about the process of dying—mostly about things like, how the body degrades and decomposes."

- Paula, third-year student