Photo via Flickr

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

I trudged home half-drunk last week after having a few drinks with my mates. Climbing stairs, as I'm sure you know, becomes a much more stressful undertaking when you're hammered, so I figured I'd treat myself to a trip up in the lift. This turned out to be a very terrible idea: after a few seconds, it jammed and I got stuck.

It wasn't particularly dramatic. There were no sparking wires or screeches as I plummeted towards the ground—the lift just slowed down and gradually came to a halt between the third and fourth floor. Still, being stuck there freaked me out. I successfully pried open the door to the lift, but didn't have as much luck with the doors that opened out onto the third floor. So doing what I'd so far tried to avoid, I pressed the emergency button.

Nothing happened.

Resorting to my last option, I called the emergency number next to the button. A guy called Francis picked up and promised me that someone would come to my rescue within a half an hour. While waiting for the guy to arrive, I couldn't help but wonder what sort of calls Francis must get. The next day, I decided to give him a ring to ask how it feels to chat with audibly distressed people for a living.

VICE: What's your job all about?

Francis: Basically, people call me when they get stuck in elevators. We get a lot of people panicking and thinking they're going to die. It's my job to tell them they won't, and to reassure them. I get a lot of abuse, insults, and threats. Luckily, most people remain relatively calm.

What's the worst situation you've found yourself in?
One guy was so freaked out he threatened to punch the technician when he arrived. By law, we need to get people out of the lift within one hour. But even when we tell them we'll be there in 15 minutes, they still complain. You know, threaten to file police reports and that sort of thing.


Image via Flickr

What happens if people are claustrophobic?

It's rare. Like my colleague always says: "People who are actually claustrophobic wouldn't take an elevator to begin with." I always try to reassure people anyway and make them feel at ease. I have a few things I always say: "There's plenty of air," "The lift can't fall down," "You've got nothing to fear," "It's OK, the technician is on his way." Folks can press the button as often as they want; we'll always answer. It's our job.

When I was stuck in the elevator, I figured out that it was possible to open the interior door but not the one out to the third floor. How come?
You really should't do that. Imagine climbing out of a lift and all of a sudden the power came back on—it'd be butchery. The person would be cut in half. It actually happened in Japan. If you take that into account, spending an hour trapped in there is much better. The technicians or firemen will get you out eventually. If we can't provide a technician within the hour, we'll call the fire station.

Watch our documentary, 'A Good Day to Die: Fake Funerals in South Korea':

How many calls do you get a day?

Most of the calls we get are from technicians testing the system, wrong calls, or alarm malfunctions. Honestly, that accounts for about 80 percent of it. The remaining 20 percent is from people who are actually stuck. On average, an operator will deal with about ten serious calls a day. My company employs about 30 people, so that means that about 300 people get stuck in elevators every day [throughout France]. We deal with 100,000 elevators in total.

The worst night of the year is definitely New Years Eve—people get so drunk and end up getting stuck in lifts all across the country. We always put extra staff on that night.

When we talked, I knew that you were trying to reassure me, but you were actually making me more scared.
"Don't be scared, you aren't at risk in the elevator."

Exactly.
Once I said that to a guy and he replied, "Fifteen years ago, my wife died in an elevator. The lift fell to the ground." I felt so stupid. Nowadays, that can't happen, but it could in the past. These days, there's a law that all lifts need to be checked regularly. Now, brakes get stuck too, which means that as long as the mechanism hasn't been turned back on by machinery, the lift can't move. Lifts can't just fall like they do in movies.

Well, that's a relief. Thanks, Francis.

Follow Pierre-Eliott on Twitter.

Winnipeg's Red River has long been thought of as the unofficial graveyard for the the city's criminal underbelly. But when the body of a 15-year old First Nations girl named Tina Fontaine was pulled from the river wrapped in a garbage bag in August 2014, it shocked the city and the country as a whole. A group of volunteers decided to take to the water to do what they say police won't. VICE embedded with the crew of "Drag the Red" ground searchers checking the banks of the river for fresh bodies and with a boat crew who use fish hooks to search the river for bodies that may have sunk to the bottom. VICE also interviews the local police division about why they refuse to drag the river themselves and what is going on with the unsolved cases for missing and murdered aboriginal women.

'FIFA 98,' on the N64

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If there's one common theme among annual sports games like FIFA and NBA 2K, it's that every year they get bigger: more complex, with more features, and more bewildering to outsiders. But sometimes they lose stuff, and one fan favorite from the old days is long gone from FIFA. And no, I'm not talking about the shove button—as much as I'd love to see that return.

FIFA's indoor matches disappeared in 1999, resurfacing only once to date, in the 2011 iteration of the game for the Nintendo Wii. But the six-a-side, boxed-in, basketball court-sized mode has remained an absentee on all other releases across all platforms—something of a shame, given its popular 1997 introduction. But the story of how it came to be is perhaps even more interesting than the mode itself.

"NBA Jam was kind of taking the world by storm," explains former EA Canada producer Marc Aubanel, who led the FIFA team from 1993 to 2002. "It was outselling EA Sports games [by maybe] five to one, or ten to one."

The idea, then, was for EA to create the NBA Jam of football before anyone else did. But that didn't immediately translate into an indoor mode. First, the company chased the coin-op market.

'FIFA 98' on the PlayStation

Arcades were still a big deal in the mid 1990s. In the US alone, arcade revenues tallied several billion dollars a year. Good arcade-to-home ports sold consoles, and new systems like the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn were touted for their ability to handle near-perfect arcade conversions.

Eager to own the whole sports gaming market, top to bottom, EA began work on an arcade FIFA. The plan was to use 3DO hardware with a laserdisc. They already knew the 3DO's processor could do the job because Aubanel and his team had released a stellar fast, fun, and 3D FIFA for the 3DO console in late 1994. A 3DO-powered arcade FIFA could blow people away with speed and style, even if the official license forbade NBA Jam-like balls on fire. But there were two problems.

First, the laserdisc jumped whenever it was shaken. "Imagine an arcade where you're pulling on the controller and shaking the machine," Aubanel explains. "The laser would skip. Audio would stop. Gameplay would pause." And after a few months the game would break.

Watch a complete (and very one-sided) indoor match on 'FIFA 98' for the PlayStation

The solution was to jump from a cheap laser that cost maybe $20 to one that was five or six hundred dollars, which tripled the overall manufacturing cost. But what really killed the game was business culture.

"For FIFA (at home), we just decide to ship FIFA," Aubanel explains. The console manufacturers have to approve it, but basically it's EA's decision when, why, where, and how to ship. "In the arcade, no one's going to buy your game unless you pass the coin drop test."

This is where you sneak a game into some random arcade, totally unannounced to its patrons, and then count the coins in the machine at the end of the night. "If you don't make X number of dollars, you will never sell a unit," Aubanel says. So basically you can't ship until you hit that mystical X value. It could take months, maybe even years. EA management didn't like that. FIFA arcade was canned.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the rivalry between Glasgow's biggest football clubs, Rangers and Celtic

But the desire to take on NBA Jam remained. While the FIFA license was important, simulations weren't "sexy" enough for the big bucks. Only EA couldn't go all the way to the other extreme. "We weren't going to be able to go to FIFA and say that we're gonna do arcade FIFA with giant heads and players who would light on fire, balls that would light on fire," says Aubanel. "I think FIFA would have had a heart attack if we came to them with that."

Indoor football was the happy compromise, and circumstances fell in their favor to make it an easier sell to world football's governing body. "The American soccer league, NASL, had shut down," Aubanel says. "There was no [professional] American soccer, and MLS was just set to begin." Most US-based pro players were competing in indoor leagues to stay fit. This was all the justification EA needed.

FIFA 97's six-a-side indoor mode proved a breath of fresh air. Matches became chaotic free-for-alls of end-to-end panic. With no offsides or throw-ins to worry about, you could focus your energy on putting the ball in the net—which was enough challenge in itself with the game's many bugs and awkward, unresponsive controls.

Indoor mode gameplay from 'FIFA 97' on the Mega Drive

The walls were the raison d'être for indoor mode, though. They added a whole extra layer of depth and strategy and unpredictability to proceedings, which the computer invariably used to its advantage better than most human players.

"We can imagine kicking a soccer ball in the top corner of the net," Aubanel explains, "but we have a hard time going, 'I'm gonna kick the ball into a wall, it's gonna bounce off the wall and hit the top corner of the net.' But for a computer, it's dead simple. Just a single angle to figure out, right? Like yep, boom."

New on VICE Sports: Should Diving in Football Be Considered an Art Form?

'FIFA 97' on the Mega Drive

Indoor mode made an excruciatingly dumb AI seem smart. It was the great equalizer in multiplayer, too. It made FIFA accessible to people who don't know anything about football, and it leveled the playing field in head-to-head living room matches just enough to make things competitive. And it was just so much fun—especially in FIFA 98, which switched down to five-a-side and made basic moves like dribbling and passing less ungainly.

Even so, the FIFA development team never felt any pressure to keep indoor around. "We would do detailed customer feedback on features for the game," says Aubanel. "What worked, and what didn't work. And I don't think indoor mode ever came back as something people wanted to see a lot more. So I think we just let it die on the vine."

Not enough players spoke up, than, and the mode went away as other priorities took over—more clubs, more leagues, better fluidity and graphics, and preparations for the engine technology upgrade that would come with the next console generation: onwards to the PS2, and beyond.

'FIFA 98' on the N64

EA tried to scratch its indoor itch with the FIFA Street series, which currently numbers four entries spread over a decade, but it wasn't the same. FIFA Street spent too much time trying to convince you it was edgy and hip, and nowhere near enough time on actually being a fun simulation of football in a confined space.

That's all the original indoor mode was ever about. Not cool cred, just fun in a walled, shrunken arena. It was football stripped back to its fluid, joyful, energetic core—where the only rule that matters is kicking a round ball into the goal. And one day, hopefully, it will return to the FIFA series proper.

FIFA 16 is released on September 22, and its demo is downloadable now for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.

Follow Richard on Twitter.

The SWAT team arrives in Leith. All stills from 'Welcome to Leith.'Photo by Not in Our Town. Courtesy of First Run Pictures

What do you get when you combine gun-toting neo-Nazis, frightened townspeople, and the battle for control over a small town in North Dakotan oil country? That's what the documentary Welcome to Leith, now playing at IFC Center in New York, explores with terrifying intimacy.

Filmed over the course of eight months in late 2013 and early 2014, Welcome to Leith chronicles infamous white supremacist Craig Cobb's attempt to take over the tiny hamlet of Leith, North Dakota (population 24, including children), by buying up properties, beckoning like-minded supporters to join him, and generally pissing off everyone who stands in his way.

Tensions escalate as an armed patrol—led by the wild-haired Cobb and his associate Kynan Dutton, a former Iraq veteran with a Hitler 'stache—gets into it with locals. "You fucking kike Jew cocksucker," Cobb shouts, assault rifle in hand. "I'm not shooting you, am I?" Eventually the sheriff's department is called in, and the incident leads to their arrest and Cobb's eventual guilty plea to one count of felony terrorizing and five of misdemeanor menacing and effective removal from the town.

Watch an exclusive clip of Cobb and Dutton's armed patrol from 'Welcome to Leith':

From the Cobb's initial arrival to city-council meetings aimed at driving the white supremacists out, to the confrontation, to the literally scorched-earth fallout—filmmakers Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker provide uncommon access to longtime residents and white supremacists alike for a bracing look at rural Midwestern life confronted by racism and armed threat. Incorporating visual and musical cues from Westerns and horror, the Brooklyn-based Nichols and Walker have created a gripping, stylish, and very scary feature documentary that also feels like a genre film, with beautifully desolate b-roll, gripping narrative, and a dread-ratcheting minimalist score.

I met Nichols and Walker last week at the VICE office in Brooklyn to talk about what drew them to Leith, the intersections between documentary and horror, and what it was like to meet "one of the most famous racists in the world."

Craig Cobb posing with a photo of Adolf Hitler and sons. Photo by Josh Simpson. Courtesy of Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker

VICE: I read that you became aware of the situation in Leith through an article in the New York Times. What first interested you about the story?
Michael Beach Nichols: It was just so bizarre, and it was happening in such a small place. So to us, as filmmakers, it just felt like we could go there and cover everything, and we could talk to everyone. It just seemed like this little bubble of a conflict happening, that you could just document the entirety of it.

I'd been to South Dakota before, so I knew what it looked like in the region, and it's just cinematically incredibly striking. Also, I think it's rare in documentary, that you get a so-called "villain," and a so-called "hero." And that was what this story presented in a lot of ways, and obviously we like the shades of gray––no one's a clear hero, no one's a clear villain––but this story had that.

Kynan Dutton, Craig Cobb, and Debra Thompson on patrol in 'Welcome to Leith.' Photo by Gregory Bruce

[Christopher] emailed me the article, and my first response to it was, I wonder if Cobb would talk with us, and that morphed into: We really only want to make this film if he will, and if we can have both sides. Because we've all seen documentaries about white-supremacist hate groups, and it's all one-sided, and they're not really included or given a say in why they believe what they believe.

Christopher K. Walker: Or it's all them.

Nichols: Or it's experts telling you why they are [racist]. I mean, we do have some of that, but it's all in context, because the Southern Poverty Law Center went there, and broke the story.

Watch another exclusive clip from 'Welcome to Leith':

You've described Welcome to Leith as "kind of like a Western." The film has an impressively strong sense of structure: I really felt the building sense of conflict toward a kind of final showdown, like in a western—or even a horror movie. How important was it to you to have a sense of drama and tension to the documentary?
Nichols: I think it was unavoidable. And building on that idea of us being able to cover everything, we also arrived in town to find that the people who live there had been documenting each other the entire time, and were very eager to share that footage with us as proof of being antagonized, by [whomever] was on the other side.

Walker: There was a very natural editing process, in the way that everything was laid out chronologically, which is very rare for a documentary. It just seemed to have event after event after event, it kept unfolding, and it was interesting.

Nichols: After our very first trip there, we wanted to use the tropes of horror films, and of Westerns, to make this almost a genre film, because it felt like that. So that's why we used the glidecam, and the Evil Dead sort of perspective of the patrol, sort of weaving and floating around, all the slider stuff, just to create this ominous...

Walker: We're very into this sort of movement in documentary, of breaking away from the talking-heads explanation, and allowing more cinematic language to be used. So we were fortunate enough to be able to utilize that for this film.

"[The residents] really felt like the police would take a long time to respond, and so they had to take matters into their own hands." —Michael Beach Nichols

Who are some of the filmmakers you see as part of that movement, or that you look to as influences?
Nichols: I think the Ross brothers films have a great, pure verité approach. Rich Hill... yeah, this idea of the ecstatic truth rather than the documentary where every fact is laid out for you. Just being open to ambiguity, and more of the emotional truth, rather than the didactic truth.

[At first] we tried to do that Errol Morris-style, very wide interviews, where you can see all the environment, where they're located. And so that was our thought—let's do this very Errol Morris-like short on this town, because we had no idea where it was gonna go. And then, obviously, everything exploded and it became a feature. But then, when we edited it, we also had this conscious decision, like, "OK, we're gonna start it off like your typical documentary, with interviews, and talking heads, and they're all explaining it." And gradually, after the first ten minutes or so, that's completely shed. Except, I guess, with Cobb in jail.

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Could we talk a little more about the horror element? The writer from the Southern Poverty Law Center describes Leith "like B-roll to The Walking Dead." Was horror a significant influence to you both on the film?
Nichols: Yeah, the horror elements came out, especially in how we shot all the B-roll. It was more how we decided to use the cameras to film what already looked very desolate and abandoned. When we first got to the town, we got stuck in this ditch on our way to interview the mayor—we were stuck for, like, three hours. We couldn't figure out where we were, and we had to call him to pull us out. And that gave us the introduction to [the fact that] if we mess up out here, it can take a really long time to get help. Which is something, obviously, that's true for all the people who live there. They really felt like the police would take a long time to respond, there weren't that many police, and so they had to take matters into their own hands.

So Chris and I went into that environment... it's like, there's no paved roads, there's one business––it's a bar that opens at three or four. But if you're there before that, there's nowhere you can really go in the town and know if someone's going to be in their house or not, or even if the house is inhabited.

We just wanted to do these very 70s-style, controlled, slow push-ins, slow back and forth, almost Ti West style, like in House of the Devil. And then all the glidecam stuff, that was super Sam Raimi. We were really excited to be trying to do that stuff, cause it just looked so creepy and first-person POV.

Walker: That was a big, big part of that. But once we were in the action with people, it was just verité. Whenever we could control a situation, as far as how it was shot, we would try and make it look kind of creepy. Which was not hard.

Leith mayor Ryan Schock and his wife Michelle. Photo by Michael Beach Nichols

There's an amazing moment where Craig Cobb brags that he's "one of the most famous racists in the world." What was it like to meet him for the first time?
Nichols: I called him on the phone, before we went out there, to ask if he'd be willing to speak with us. We were pretty nervous that he would say no, but talking on the phone, he was absolutely polite. He said he was going to be out of town the first time we went, but might be open to speaking to us at a later date. And after that first trip, less than a week later, that patrol [where he and Kynan Duggan were arrested] took place. When we actually met him face to face it was through glass, in the jail. He was shell-shocked, almost. He seemed very meek, and very polite, and sort of deferential, in a strange way.

[He was] just incredibly different in his persona than what we'd been reading about and seen footage of, this sort of confrontational guy that wanted to instigate these sorts of conflicts. And we didn't experience that at all with him when we were interviewing him in jail, [but] we saw sparks of that once he was released again.

In the process of making this film, were there things that you were surprised to find out about Cobb, about the mindset of him and his allies?
I think something that was unexpected was this idea of victimization. It seems like what the white-supremacy movement is sort of built around right now, is this idea that the white race, the shifting demographics in the country are changing in a manner such that whites will no longer be a majority. There is this sense of wanting to protect their culture. So, that was sort of interesting, because when I was coming into it, [expecting] the old white supremacy was about slavery and the subjugation of others, and now has become this sort of defensive thing.

I think that's been a lot more successful in terms of getting people to embrace this ideology, that, "No, this isn't a hate movement—this is a white civil rights thing. This is about protecting your family, and just being separate." The whole separatism thing, I think is kind of fascinating too, how they want to be called "white separatists" in a lot of instances, instead of "white supremacists."

"The ideas and the visuals are scary enough." —Michael Beach Nichols

Are you worried that Leith residents such as Lee Cook and Mayor Ryan Schock might be, as a result of the film, on the receiving end of further antagonism from Craig Cobb, Kynan Dutton, or their sympathizers?
Nichols: Ryan came out to Sundance with his family, and Lee Cook and his family have also seen the film. They definitely are the targets of a lot of antagonism online from the white supremacists anyway, just because Cobb was arrested, and spent a lot of time in jail. As far as the film opening them up to more? Yeah, I think it will. Unfortunately, I think that there's probably some white supremacists in the country who haven't heard of the Cobb thing. It was pretty big, so I would think a lot of people would have heard about it, but I'm sure the film will expose some people who maybe didn't know the story, and those people will be upset about what happened.

It's always kind of a terrifying experience to show the film to people that are in it. Cobb has not seen the film yet, and neither has Kynan. So that's something that is going to happen at the end of the month, when we go back out to Bismarck and the film opens there.

What do you think the Bismarck screening is going to be like?
Nichols: I'm sure some people are going to be frustrated with the film because Cobb and Dutton have a lot of screen time. So I think that will trigger a lot of things for people that lived there and went through it. They could definitely accuse us of giving him a platform, whereas we view it as, "You should know what these people are thinking, and what they're saying." Being more informed is a lot more powerful. And also it heightens [the residents'] experience, what they went through.

Do you think Cobb and Kynan will like it?
Nichols: I think so, yeah. I think they'll appreciate the fact that we let them speak. A lot of filmmakers wouldn't do that. We tried really hard to not use sinister music, if it was directly playing off a scene of something that Cobb was doing or what Kynan was doing. The ideas and the visuals are scary enough.

On Motherboard: Can You Be Outed as a White Supremacist on Twitter?

This film feels particularly contemporary, not only because of the Charleston shootings and the rise in white supremacist-linked violence, but also in the way so many citizens are self-documenting events with cell-phone videos, laptops, and the like. How much has the public's increased accessibility to technology influenced your own documentary-making process?
Walker: We wouldn't have been able to make this film without it. Straight up. It's not something that we seek out as something that we would want to have, if we were making another film, but if it made sense to help fill in the story.

Nichols: Chris and I are a small crew. We go to a place and start filming. Obviously, people are not naïve enough to assume that everything is just happening as if we weren't there. We have an effect on what's transpiring. And I think when people are documenting themselves, that's become so ubiquitous, so people are very used to that. I think you can get at something that's perhaps closer to the truth if it's that sort of amateur documentation. And that's why found footage horror films are so scary... and we have a found-footage horror element too, with [footage of] that patrol. You start watching something that you can immediately tell is hand-held, and lower quality, and it feels more real... it feels scarier, in a way. So I think that it allowed us to get scenes that, had we filmed them ourselves, would have been really strange to film.

It's silly to theorize or speculate, but what do you think, if you were there, you would have done?
Nichols: I'm glad we didn't have to make that decision. We would have filmed it, but it would have felt really uncomfortable, and it probably would have been really tricky to figure out the editing of something like that. And the questions we'd be facing about filming something like that. If we had been filming it, it becomes this very ethically shady area where, we're excited about the footage that we're getting... but are we becoming accessories? Luckily, that stuff was filmed for us.

Follow James on Twitter.

Welcome to Leith is now playing at IFC Center in New York. The directors will be in attendance during 7:45 PM screening on Thursday, September 10.

Jimmy Carter in 1980. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko via the Library of Congress

Jimmy Carter's announcement last month that he was battling cancer was widely covered in the media, with most retrospectives of his life hewing to the same line: extraordinary post-presidential career, less-than-stellar time in office, Iranian hostages, cars lined up for gas, etc, etc. But history books cannot convey feelings; politicians are more than the sum of their accomplishments and defeats. I'll say this: Alone among American politicians, Jimmy Carter made me want to be a better person.

This is not to say Carter, Politician, was a rare and delicate bird, beautiful and free of sin; Zbigniew Brzezinski and Hamilton Jordan do not get hired by men without ambition and a rap sheet. It's extraordinary, though, when you trace Carter's life and career, to witness an ambitious American's evolution into a more modest and compassionate man. As his presidential term spun out and came to an end, Carter's growing alienation from the usual mores of American power would produce an extraordinary third act.

I'm not sure that the governors and senators who run for president ever really want the job; often it seems like they've just wasted their lives scrambling upward, and don't know what else to do. Is it any wonder that once out of office, ex-presidents often appeared baffled by life, lapsing either into greed or senility (or both).

Carter was plainly different. The normal path to the presidency involves carefully saying and doing nothing that could offend anybody, but his speeches reveal a defiant streak, a willingness to swim against the current. No less a figure than Hunter S. Thompson would, in stunned disbelief, record Carter in 1974 delivering the "Law Day" speech at the University of Georgia, telling a roomful of judges and lawyers that they were corrupt cogs in a racist system. He would campaign for president using terms scarcely believable today, admitting "we are ashamed of what our government is as we deal with other nations around the world" and decrying the Cold War as a shell game in which extremism was a two-way street.

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Talk is cheap, but there was something to this. Stinging from Vietnam and Watergate, this was a time when Americans were doing some very fucked-up things—such as electing a lay-preaching peanut farmer and ex-Navy man from Plains, Georgia, to lead the country. The qualities of Carter's uniqueness are evident in many of his administration's achievements—the Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, arms control agreements, his prescient alternative energy advocacy, his cutting of defense budgets and military aid to many foreign dictatorships.

These are not small things. But Carter—like, I daresay, Lincoln—seemed to fire some synapses rarely found in a political mind. Disabused of many of the ambitions of the American president, Carter was the kind of person rarely found at the helm of American political power. Indeed, social critic and author Morris Berman identifies Carter's true significance as existing beyond the realm of politics:

Throughout our history we marginalized or ignored the voices that argued against the dominant culture, which is based on hustling, aggrandizement, and economic and technological expansion. This alternative tradition can be traced from John Smith in 1616 to Jimmy Carter in 1979, and included folks such as Emerson, Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Vance Packard, and John Kenneth Galbraith, among many others... who argued for the need for organic communities with a spiritual purpose, for work that was meaningful rather than mind-numbing.

But perhaps nowhere is this quality of Carter as a dissonant voice more evident than in his July 15, 1979, "Crisis of Confidence" speech, a speech singular among twentieth-century presidential addresses. "Speaking with rare force, with inflections flowing from meanings he felt deeply," as a former Carter speechwriter would write later, the president confronted not merely the political and economic degradation of America, but the spiritual death experienced by so many Americans.

While the immediately preceding inspiration for the speech was America's then-interminable energy crisis at the hands of OPEC, Carter's speech is far more expansive than a mere policy address. I can't recall a presidential speech in my lifetime where I thought the speaker meant a single word. Once you've heard them a few times, it's easy to spot the repertoire of tricks Reagan or Obama employs. The usual dreck makes the "Malaise" speech, as it came to be known, all the more remarkable; the crushing truth of what Carter is saying is too palpable to be rejected as being cynical or contrived.

Watch the VICE interview with New York Senator Chuck Schumer:

Carter speaks genuinely, using the language of the heart, with humility and without embarrassment, to describe "the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation." The speech is a deeply moving meditation on the destruction of community in America, a spiritual death suffered at the hands of unenlightened self-interest and materialism, a struggle waged in the heart of every citizen. It begins with something anathema to any of the candidates currently running for the presidency this year—a confession of American vulnerability and weakness: "I realize more than ever that as President I need your help."

Describing the crisis of confidence then afflicting Americans, weary of stagflation and gas shortages, Carter speaks in prophetic terms:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Carter identified the basest impulses stamped into the American character; he saw, finally, through the chimera that passes for the good life in America, and with a startling urgency begged his countrymen to reject selfishness in favor of sacrifice. The alternative he describes seems all too familiar:

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

Having identified this empty materialism as not only unsatisfying, but ruinous, Carter then asks the unthinkable: that Americans conserve energy, obey the speed limit, try to fucking carpool once a week. In other words, sacrifice so that a tragedy of the commons might be averted. As Carter puts it, "every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense—I tell you it is an act of patriotism." The myth of American individualism is just that—it is only through cooperation that America might prosper:

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

It is hard, in 2015, to read of the loneliness and frustration Carter described in 1979 and imagine it could have perhaps been averted. Carter was rewarded for his candor in demanding Americans lift a finger to avert their own psychic and moral destruction by being swept out of office. He was replaced by a psychotic old liar who won voters over by babbling saccharine myths about "morning in America." Reagan demanded nothing and promised everything; in exchange, Americans (or at least non-rich Americans) got nothing. This pernicious snake oil has been peddled, in one guise or another, by every president since then, and the results have been predictable.

While the office of president looks increasingly threadbare, Carter has devoted the interceding years to eradicating disease, building affordable housing, and monitoring elections. The legalized bribery and non-functioning democracy he has decried, and which will entangle whoever is eventually elected in 2016, are no impediment to living a life of modest devotion and usefulness to others, whether in the community of the world, or in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday mornings. If Carter failed as a president, he did not fail as a leader; he heeded his own warning.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

(via)

A couple of days ago the BBC published a story debunking a photo that claimed to show a refugee in Europe was a member of the Islamic State (IS). The before-and-after photo, which went viral after previous reports in the media of IS using the "migrant crisis" to smuggle militants into the European Union, turned out to be false. The man shown in the image – shared tens of thousands of times – was not an IS militant but a former commander in the Free Syrian Army who had been profiled by the Associated Press only last month.

That wasn't the only meme of this sort. There are tonnes of them doing the rounds on social media, sometimes being shared by people you perhaps thought better of. A lot of the people sharing them must just be easily led, but presumably at the heart of it are some racist jerks cranking up the meme generators and knowingly filling the internet with lies.

Keen to know how many more memes have been faked, cropped or taken out of context by those who want refugees kept outside of Europe, I spent yesterday evening wading through the horror of far-right Facebook. Here's what I found:

REFUGEES ARE IN FACT HULKING BODYBUILDERS

(Left image via, right via)

A particularly bizarre trope is that refugees are not victims of war but are in fact all body-builders who are going to come over here and stomp around British towns inflicting their severe roid-rage on everyone. They should obviously take those bulging biceps and punch Assad's barrel-bombs out of the sky.

Photographs like the ones above are being circulated on a number of far-right Facebook pages including the EDL (shared over 3,000 times), South East Alliance (a far-right EDL splinter-group) and Pegida UK.

The pictures have, unsurprisingly, been taken out of context. A quick reverse image search on the photos above and below shows they were taken back in 2013 by a photographer in Christmas Island off the coast of Australia. This becomes all the more clear in the picture below:

See that yellow writing on the blue uniform? It says Australian Customs and Border Protection.

REFUGEES ARE COWARDLY MEN WHO HAVE LEFT THEIR WOMEN AND CHILDREN BEHIND

(Image via the EDL Facebook page)

Quite a few of the memes I found try and dehumanise refugees in Europe by claiming they are all cowardly men who have left behind women and children in war-zones. The photo above, for example, shows a bunch of men being welcomed in Germany, after arriving last week on special trains in Munich. The first place I found the original photo – taken by a Reuters journalist – was on the CBC News website, on top of a video shot from the same station in Munich.

Screenshot of the CBS website.

Male refugees are obviously no less deserving than anyone else, but keen to get a sense of who else was in the crowd I decided to click and watch the full video. Here are some screen-grabs I took that surprisingly didn't make it into the meme:

REALLY OBVIOUSLY FAKE PHOTOS

(Image via Pegida UK Facebook page)

I found the above image posted on the Facebook page of Pegida UK, the British offshoot of an Islamophobic street-based protest movement, which first formed in Germany last year. It accompanies an invitation to protest outside Downing Street on the 19th of this month to oppose Britain being given to "complete strangers". You might have thought someone who really hates refugees would have a good idea of where they're actually coming from but apparently not. The ship photographed – with comments calling for it to be "torpedoed" – is actually from 1991 and shows several thousand Albanians leaving for Italy.

This photo obviously looks old – taken on film. Are these racist-meme mongers even trying any more? You have to wonder if the people sharing this one just want to believe it.

Watch: Hanging with the People Who Ritualistically Suspend Their Bodies from Hooks

ISIS ARE INVADING RIGHT NOW

ERMEGERRRDDDD!!!! It's happening RIGHT NOW! (Screenshot of the Britain First Facebook page)

Here's one from Britain First, the far-right group with an influential web presence and memes that your grandma is highly likely to share on Facebook. According to the group the image above shows 2000-odd Isis fighters heading, as we speak, to your pokey little English town.

In fact another quick reverse image search reveals the photo was taken back in 2013 by a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and shows displaced Syrians crossing the Tigris River into Iraq.

IMMIGRANTS ARE HAVING A GREAT TIME IN PLUSH HOTELS

Last month, after the number of refugees trying to reach Britain from Calais  rose sharply, a bunch of reports surfaced in the media about reception centres becoming full and refugees that had made it over temporarily staying in British hotels.

The thought of asylum seekers staying in two star B&Bs in Wigan was too much to handle for some racists who believe people fleeing Syria and Eritrea should be punished for the government's poor track record on homeless veterans. A few weeks ago one far-right group called the Pie and Mash Squad — a bunch of football hooligans linked to the EDL – decided to take action by encouraging its Facebook followers to leave fake reviews on TripAdvisor slandering the refugees and criticising the hotels for having them.

Reviews quickly began appearing online. I found one user called Natalie S who had written two posts on the same day for two different hotels: one in Stockport and one in Cardiff, both extremely hostile to the refugees staying there.

TripAdvisor reviews of the hotels which have accommodated refugees.

Was Natalie S a follower of the Pie & Mash Squad? Or was she a concerned British hotel guest that had recently stayed in both Stockport and Cardiff? It's hard to prove for sure but the Daily Mail certainly seemed convinced.

Screenshot from MailOnline.

REFUGEES ARE TERRORISTS

(Image via the EDL Facebook page)

The BBC may have debunked the first viral photo but you can expect to see plenty more. I found this image posted on the EDL website.

Let's put aside any doubts about whether that's even the same guy from left to right. Given the EDL's usual schtick, the clear implication is that this guy is a jihadi terrorist. However, there's no real evidence to say who he was fighting with when this photograph was taken. If anything, his uniform suggests that he could be a former fighter for the YPG – a Kurdish, non-Islamist group battling the Islamic State in Syria. It's not cut and dry, but if anything Isis fighters might be more likely to wear black and cover their faces.

The image was also tweeted out by the editor in chief of a Lebanese radio station – Radio Sawt Beirut International – who claimed he was a Kurdish militant.

(Image via Twitter)

In short, you should probably double check before you believe any anti-refugee memes that might float into your feed.

More from VICE:

We Asked an Expert Whether Britain's Secret Anti-Isis Drone Strike in Syria Was Legal

How to Flat-Share with a Refugee and Crowdsource the Rent

Why David Cameron's Pledge to Take 20,000 Syrian Refugees Is Pathetic

Have you heard of this show Mr. Robot? If you like this post you'll probably want to watch it. Screenshot via YouTube

Bad news, average Canadians: the economy is shit and it's treating you like shit. Of course, you already knew both those things, but maybe you didn't realize most of the rest of us are also in that boat. A new poll by the Canadian Payroll Association found that nearly half of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque, and that more than one third of Canadians feel "overwhelmed" by debt.

The findings of the CPA survey are bad enough on their own (and there's more where those two facts came from), but consider a Globe and Mail story from last week about household savings. The average amount of savings per household in Canada was $41,694 in 2014 even though less than half of Canadians have saved more than $10,000.

Of course most households have no savings, you may be thinking. How are you going to keep the cost of a low-end Rolex lying around when you wouldn't be able to make one paycheque stretch an extra week in a pinch? And, yes, I have to agree. That is obvious. But what the Globe piece refrains from saying outright is that averages come from somewhere. In order to have an average of just over $40,000 when half the group is clocking in at one quarter of that, tops, that means there's a small group saving (and, it follows, earning) vastly more than the rest of us.

Again, perhaps you're sitting on your couch (your dirty third/fourth/fifth-hand couch that came with your apartment because the friends whose lease you took over couldn't be bothered to move it and there was no way you could afford a proper second-hand one from Craigslist) reading this and thinking, yes, duh. But look, here's the thing: the economic landscape is terrible, and it's not getting better any time soon.

As we all remember, the entire global economy almost collapsed in 2008, and things were touch-and-go for quite a while after that. Greece is still slowly imploding as a result of that collapse. People have stopped worrying about Spain and Italy following suit, but maybe that's just because the thought is too terrifying.

The whole thing was caused by rampant greed, stupidity, and ego on the part of bankers. And all of that—the disappearance of trillions of dollars, another $16 trillion (or more) spent bailing out banks, the destruction of Iceland and Greece's economies—wasn't enough to cause more than a blip in the continual chugging of the global capitalist machine. Occupy came and went, bringing to the fore a wider class consciousness, and still aside from one guy from Credit-Suisse, not a single one of the 2008 crash's principal architects has spent a day in jail. Not even Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein, and there's a better chance than not that those two are directly descended from Satan.

But the problems we're facing today didn't begin in 2008, and they haven't gone away with the gradual recovery from that recession. The deregulation of the banking sector that led to the subprime mortgage crisis was just one part of a neoliberal agenda that eroded employment security, benefits, and the stability of the entire economy. Anything to feed the beast, and the beast demands quarter-over-quarter growth!

Income inequality is still growing. Precarious labour is still rapidly replacing jobs with any semblance of security. People are working harder and longer for less money and fewer benefits. As ever Canada isn't doing quite as poorly as America, which has ten times the population and the world's largest economy, but that doesn't mean we're doing well here.

At least, as the payroll survey shows, we now recognize this. Two thirds of Canadians have little faith in the economy improving over the next year and more than three quarters of respondents said they've saved less than 25 percent of what they need to retire. The other quarter probably answered all questions about retirement with a hearty, mirthless laugh.

The only thing for it, until we're all mad and broke enough to start toppling governments and occupying bank headquarters, is to keep talking about the awful capitalist hellscape in which we live, reminding each other that we all have it roughly as bad as the next person. We need to stoke each other's anger and camaraderie, and most importantly, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not alone. We are in this together. Except for Chad. Chad's making $150K at his PR job, rapidly moving up the corporate ladder. Chad is preparing to take a junior VP role as soon as he manipulates the higher-ups into firing the woman who has the job now. And worst of all, he thinks it's because he's smarter than us rather than because the otherwise cruel gods of the market happened to smile on him.

Chad will be the first to go when the revolution comes.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Photo via Twitter/Calgary Transit

Read: Woman Who Wakes Up Each Day Believing It's October 15, 2014 Is 'Fit to Work'

You gotta hand it to Kyle McKee: he's a man of principle.

With his shaved head and penchant for going to court for defending Hitler, McKee, 29, is somewhat of a neo-Nazi fixture in Calgary. Years ago, the self-identified "National Socialist" founded the Aryan Guard, a group that hosts White Pride parades and recruits like-minded folks (i.e. racists) to the city.

But it seems McKee's dirtbag friends have left him hanging, because he's now asking the public to help him pay the fine for his most recent display of douchebaggery.

McKee heard about a local transit driver who was refusing to drive a rainbow-themed bus during Calgary's Pride parade this week. In a show of solidarity, McKee rolled up to said bus during the festivities and stood in front of it for "around 20 minutes," according to the Calgary Sun.

Several cop cars showed up and McKee was handed a $5,000 penalty—the maximum available—for interfering with the operation of a transit vehicle.

McKee quickly took to social media to rant about the injustice of it all.

"This was about $4,750 more than I expected to get. So I am asking for donations to help pay this ticket earned by peaceful protest for our rights!" he wrote on both Facebook and a GoFundMe page.

As of Thursday, the crowdfunding page had been removed, though apparently it had only earned about $60.

McKee's court appearance is Nov. 3. He's promised to donate any leftover funds he receives by then to a group that shares his views.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

I suspect G-Man is very disappointed in me, right now. Screenshot from 'Half-Life.'

Do you know how many games come out every year? I'm not even talking about the ones that make the App Store every single day—well over 400, since you asked. I mean titles for home consoles and computers, sometimes heavily marketed affairs that you might see an advert for on late-night TV, or perhaps even an Underground poster in support of; and indie releases that tend to come out through strictly digital distribution means. Bloody loads, is the answer. Too many. Wikipedia reckons there are already over 700 games available to play on the PlayStation 4 alone. That's a console that launched in November 2013. Get your head around that. Nobody can play all of those games.

Not even professionals.

And professionals are guilty—if guilty is quite the right word—of missing out on what the wider industry, players and programmers and publishers alike, considers to be "the classics." As the words below, from a clutch of confessional critics, will imminently make crystal.

A screenshot from 'Final Fantasy 7'

Keza MacDonald, editor of Kotaku UK and once of IGN, has never played Final Fantasy VII (1997)

This is because in the 1990s, when it came out, I was a Nintendo kid and my parents thought the PlayStation was for adults, which says a lot about the success of Sony's mid 90s marketing campaign. Whilst others had their formative gaming experiences racing Chocobos and weeping over the death of [redacted], I was collecting Stars and Jiggies and injuring my hand from button bashing in Mario Party. (Seriously, I still have a small, visible piece of grey plastic from an N64 analogue stick embedded in my palm.)

I feel like I know everything that actually happens in Final Fantasy VII, just through osmosis. I've tried to play it probably ten times and there's a single reason why I never succeed: random battles. I cannot stand random battles. I played Skies of Arcadia for 65 hours in about 2002 and by the end of that I never wanted to see a random battle again. Apparently, the director Tetsuya Nomura is considering ditching them for the game's upcoming PS4 remake, as was the case for the iOS release. When that comes out, I really will have no excuse.

Follow Keza on Twitter.

A screenshot from 'Dark Souls'

Chris Schilling, a freelance writer for VICE, Edge, the Telegraph, Eurogamer, and more, has never played Dark Souls (2011)

The vagaries of life as a freelance critic can mean you end up reviewing game after game without much of a break in between. And the need to keep money rolling in means it's often hard to justify time spent on games you're not getting paid to write about—at least not without being permanently nagged by guilt. And when you've got a kid in the house who enjoys watching you play games—or, preferably, playing alongside you—then a dark, violent fantasy action-RPG renowned for making its players invent fantastic new compound swear words isn't exactly the most feasible leisure time option. Not least when everyone keeps telling you to set aside 60 hours plus to play it.

That's one of the two main reasons I haven't played Dark Souls. The other is Dark Souls fans. Now, don't get me wrong: It's great to see people passionate about the things they love. But Dark Souls fans take it to another level of evangelism. I've rarely encountered a fan base that so regularly and delightedly informs you that Dark Souls will ruin other games for you; that once you've played it you'll immediately think less of anything else that isn't Dark Souls. I quite like other games, as it happens, and the idea of playing something that will cause me to drastically reconfigure my opinions of my personal favorites puts me off. Unless someone fancies paying my mortgage and utility bills for the next couple of months, of course.

Follow Chris on Twitter.

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Related: Watch VICE's documentary on competitive video gaming's highs and lows, eSports

A screenshot from 'Super Mario 64'

Carolyn Petit, formerly an editor at Gamespot and now a contributor to VICE and co-writer of Feminist Frequency's Tropes vs Women series, has never played Super Mario 64 (1996)

I remember standing in a video game retailer in a mall in the summer of 1996, watching demo footage of Super Mario 64. To see that footage at that moment in time was to understand that video games were about to change forever. And I yearned to go along for the ride, to explore Peach's castle and wander around its worlds in every direction, where previously I'd been stuck moving left to right.

I was a broke college student then, though, and a few years later, when I was scrounging by working in video stores and coffee shops, it was the real racing simulators, epic JRPGs and tactical espionage action games of the PlayStation that won my hard-earned money. When the DS launched in 2004, I picked up Super Mario 64 DS hoping to finally go on that journey I'd once viewed with such wide-eyed wonder. But after spending a little time with the game, I felt like it was too late to go back to that moment in time. Early 3D games haven't aged well in my eyes; where their worlds once seemed full of possibility, they now look stark and simple.

So today, Super Mario 64 is a game that I can love more in the act of not playing than in the act of playing. I can remember how magical it looked to me all those summers ago, and appreciate what a huge leap forward for video games it will always represent.

Follow Carolyn on Twitter.

A screenshot from 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time'

Ed Smith, columnist at Kill Screen and contributor to VICE, has never played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)

I resist the word boring because I like to think that every experience, no matter how seemingly mundane, is enriching, but when I played parts of Ocarina of Time on a friend's N64 back at university, boring was all I found it. I haven't returned to the game, let alone made an effort to finish it since then, because Nintendo's style of simplistic, childish wonder is patronizing and insincere. Unlike the majority of the gaming industry, I don't wish to return to childhood, nor do I believe that the perspective of a child, or any appropriation of childlike innocence or naiveté, can provide valuable insight into adult lives or emotions.

The fairy tale aesthetic, like in Ocarina of Time, allows game-makers to do their favorite thing, tell an insouciant story then claim it valuable because it gives players access to cheap, temporary, and vaguely pleasant feelings. I'm baffled by the thought that any adult who's read books, or lived a day in his life, could play Ocarina of Time and consider it substantive enough to be called "classic." I haven't finished it because I consider it a waste of time, a response I don't have even to the worst of video games.

Follow Ed on Twitter.

New on Motherboard: How Do Professional Game Designers Feel About 'Super Mario Maker'?

A screenshot from 'NiGHTS Into Dreams'

Steve Burns, deputy editor at VideoGamer.com, has never played NiGHTS Into Dreams (1996)

Growing up, I never knew anybody who had a Saturn. Every single person I hung around with or borrowed games from or thought was a colossal dickhead but quite enjoyed swapping Resident Evil strategies with had a PlayStation, and rightly so. There was one guy I went to school with who had one, but I didn't know him that well, and it should also be noted he got his accidentally, after his mom ordered a kettle from Littlewoods and they sent a Saturn instead. Still, he never played it, which tells you about as much as you need to know about the perception of SEGA's machine back in the mid-90s.

Anyway, despite its unpopularity the console did have some good games, and I'm reliably informed that NiGHTS is one of them. The Saturn press of the day loved it, of course, and even the multi-format boys thought it lovely. I recall looking at screenshots of it and thinking, "Yeah, looks kinda cool, but where is the new Sonic?" To me the Saturn seemed utterly exotic, an oddity with weird games (like this one) and weird pads (the "fat controller") and weird ads (but then all ads were weird then). In a way, it still does: I've never owned one. When people ask me why I've never played NiGHTS, I shrug and say it just passed me by. A fitting epitaph for the Saturn as a whole, thinking about it.

Follow Steve on Twitter.

Another screenshot from 'Half-Life'

Mike Diver, editor of VICE's video game section, has never played Half-Life (1998)

When this first came out, I didn't own a PC, because PCs were incredibly expensive and I worked a part-time job in a bakery paying somewhere around the £3-per-hour mark and all of that money needed spending on two-for-one bottled beers and compact discs. A computer was not on the cards (at least, a new one, as the family had an Amiga which mostly had a Sensible Soccer disc wedged into it). When Half-Life was ported to the PlayStation 2, three years later, I didn't own a PlayStation 2, because... Well, again, did you see what those things cost back then? By the time I did have a PS2 to call my own, several years later, all I wanted to play was Resident Evil 4, Ōkami, and GTA: San Andreas. I eventually bought Half-Life from the little games shop up the road that probably still flogs PS2 titles at four for a tenner, when they're halfway decent. I think I picked up Tomb Raider: Anniversary in the same transaction, and that disc has never been snapped free from its box either.

Time's moved on, opportunities to look back have closed, and here I am: in 2015, with a copy of one of the most celebrated video games of all time (which still rated highly in its lesser-revered PS2 form) collecting dust because I'd rather play the new Mad Max and satisfy my reduced retro-gaming wants with Super Mario Maker. What can I say? I am a sucker for the pretty shit, the shiny and new high-definition things, and Valve's supposedly seminal first-person shooter is just so... square. Time is incredibly unkind to video game visuals, unless they're Tetris, and I fear that if I started Half-Life right now I'd only wind up writing an article about the minor flaws it inevitably has, completely forgivable in the bigger-picture appraisal (and probably fewer than most new games), and enraging a community of die-hards. Not that I've done that before.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Photo by Wikimedia user Gage Skidmore.

The endless reign of Trump atop the Republican polls may be evidence of the lunacy of some of our fellow citizens, but it's also more than that. There are some very rational reasons why so many Americans are so fed up with the political system that they are fervently supporting non-politicians like Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina or politicians who have made attacking government their brand like Ted Cruz. Those very rational reasons are the end result of a chain of events that has been moving through our political system for decades. And this chain of events is not at all accidental, it's part of a political strategy meant to make you so disgusted with politics that you don't want to participate in the system at all. Allow me to explain what's been going on.

Throughout the Obama administration the Republicans on Capitol Hill, both in the House and the Senate, have tried to obstruct everything that the President wanted to push through—from critical things like Obamacare, appropriations, and who will lead the ATF to small things like renaming post offices. The point was to make the business of Washington seem so ineffectual and the gridlock so intractable and disgusting that voters were turned off. And it worked. People are fed up with Washington. You see it in the success of Trump et al in the polls, you see it in Congress's historically low approval rating which in 2014 averaged 15 percent, up a bit from 2013's 14 percent.

Important within all this is that the so-called objective media (ie, mainstream media, not right or left wing media) reports on gridlock and obstruction as a "both sides are to blame" situation, thus cloaking the real roots of the problem in a veil of false equivalence. In that environment, voters find themselves disillusioned with both parties—as Jay-Z said, "don't argue with fools cuz people from a distance can't tell who is who." When people are mad about Washington, they fall into a "throw the bums out" mentality—but, paradoxically, they still tend to retain affection for the local official who they feel they know personally. So they are mad at Congress but re-elect their own Congressperson—Congress's incumbent re-election rate was 96 percent in 2014. The job that is most endangered by all of this is actually the Presidency. That the President was able to overcome this in 2012 is beside the point—Republicans are obstructing the legislative process in order to make it harder for the President to win re-election.

President Obama speaks with VICE News:

Republicans block Obama from action on important issues and then, at election time, accuse him of being ineffective and incapable. They say he's done nothing on this and that, knowing that they are the reason why. They accuse him of being unwilling to reach across the aisle when they've bitten his hand every time he's tried. It's an insidious game. Decades ago, there was campaigning and when it ended there was governing and compromise. Nowadays, the campaigning never stops.

I learned about this game, this way of using obstruction to attack the President politically, in one of the greatest books about modern politics, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism by Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann. Ornstein and Mann are longtime non-partisan observers of the political system and because of that their argument was extremely well received when the book came out in 2012. But I was wondering, how are things now and have they gotten better or worse? I called Norman Ornstein to find out.

VICE: Since you wrote the book have things gotten worse?
Norm Ornstein: In most ways, yes. I did some show with Barney Frank and he said my next book should be It's Even Worse Than It Was When It Was Worse Than It Looked . There's a lot of truth to that. But there are some mechanisms here and there to ease the pressure and keep things from becoming completely disastrous. It's kind of interesting that Bob Corker [Republican Senator from Tennessee] worked with Ben Cardin [Democratic Senator from Maryland] to devise this process that let the Republicans have their cake in a sense by letting them all vote against the Iran deal and say how horrible it is, but also kept them from being blamed for the disastrous consequences if the deal was voted down by basically letting it go through.

That seems like slight progress.
But look at where we are in Congress now that Republicans have taken over both houses and the obstruction and the ruthlessly pragmatic choices of trying to block everything has led to a big gain for them in the House and a Republican Senate. And yet we're heading for another confrontation and potential government shutdown in October, another confrontation over the debt ceiling.

I think the House has become even more out of control. Then you look at how this has played out on the presidential campaign trail and they're moving further and further into crazy land. It's hard to say that things are getting better. You have a country that has grown more polarized and a Congress that have grown more tribal in nature. It's become tribal and almost sectarian. Part of what's generated that is that Republicans, going back to [Newt] Gingrich [Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999] and all the way forward to [Mitch] McConnell [current Senate Majority leader] and [John] Boehner [current Speaker of the House] and [Eric] Cantor [House Majority leader 2011-2014] et al, made deliberate decisions to get their party to unite like a parliamentary minority against Bill Clinton in the first instance and Barack Obama in the second and it worked like a charm.

You say the right wing media is a problematic part of all this—but the left wing and objective media are also part of the problem?
Yeah, the objective media are culpable here, too. There is this deep-seated unwillingness to suggest that the polarization is asymmetric or that one party is more to blame than the other. The need to be even-handed or say both sides do it is so deep it is really hard to shake no matter the evidence to the contrary. I had an email exchange with a veteran Washington Post reporter who said our job is to report both sides of the story and I wrote back no, your job is to report the fucking truth. Sometimes that truth will have two sides. Sometimes it'll have ten sides. But sometimes it won't have two sides and the idea that your job is to report two sides of the same story is like saying about a hit and run accident, "The victim was unavailable for comment, the driver said it was all his fault, he stepped into the crosswalk."

Some people feel like there's a racial component to why this level of obstruction happened to this president. But my feeling is that this is the outcome of a historic trend that began with Gingrich and manifested in a potent level in 2008. If it had been Hillary or some white male in the White House, we would have seen a similar outcome. What do you think?
You're fundamentally right. You look back at Bill Clinton becoming president and the effort to demonize began immediately. The Wall Street Journal ran editorials suggesting Clinton had been an accessory to murder when he was governor of Arkansas. There certainly was a conscious effort to do that and there's little doubt in my mind that if Hillary had won the election we would've seen a similar process at play. But you can't deny that race is there because it's always there.

But Mitch McConnell and John Boehner...
The driving force for them isn't race, it's winning. But I think there's another component here. The driving force of the Republican Party, the single largest component, is the South. And the South is different. It's different culturally. One of the issues that's much stronger in the South is this anti-immigration nativism and that along with Obama being black and the sluggish economy has meant that the Democratic party has been losing ground with working class whites while the Republican party has come close to shutting the door on expanding the base to any minorities. We're moving towards having one party be an overwhelmingly white and the other party becoming a predominantly minority. So you take race and overlay it on top of partisan and ideological tribal factors and it's dangerous as hell in a world where you're not just viewing the other side as an adversary you want to beat, but as the enemy.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

Just before 8:30 Eastern Time tonight, tens of millions of Americans will gather in front of millions of TVs inside millions of bars, apartments, and houses to watch the largest, most athletic men in the country run across a carefully demarcated field and collide with one another. This is the most popular pastime in the country—32 percent of American sports fans say pro football is their favorite sport. To put that in perspective, 25 percent of Americans are Evangelical Protestants, the country's most popular religious denomination; 23 percent of Americans identify as Republicans and 32 percent as Democrats; 32 percent have a gun in the house; 5 percent are vegetarians. The second most popular sport is baseball—but when people are given the choice between watching a World Series game and a regular-season NFL game, they watch the NFL game. The NFL is, by far, the most-watched thing on television. This season the NFL is offering fans the chance to watch old games for $99 a year, and a bunch of people will probably pay for that. I'm thinking about paying for it right now. It's a passion that stretches across all demographic lines—small Texas towns with three churches and two gas stations worship football, and so do blue-state enclaves like San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle. I watched the last Super Bowl at a Seahawks bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that serves vegan food. Americans may hate one another, but we love ourselves some football.

On VICE Sports: How the NFL Brands Itself in American Classrooms

The problem with the NFL, as by now everyone knows, is that when those large, athletic men collide with one another, they hit each other's heads, and repeated blows to the head over the course of years can cause something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Discovered in 2002 by a neuropathologist named Bennet Omalu, the condition can cause "memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia," according to Boston University's CTE Center. In other words, sufferers lose control of their own actions and lives, often when they're only in their 40s. The only way to diagnose it is to dissect the brain of a sufferer after his death; in 2011, Dave Duerson, one of many notable former NFL players who committed suicide, shot himself in the chest rather than the head so his brain could be studied. He had CTE, doctors discovered. So did Junior Seau and Ray Easterling and college player Owen Thomas, all of whom took their own lives.

Fans know about CTE, they know about the dementia and the suicides and the horrible, invisible consequences of the game, they know that for years the NFL tried to cover the existence of CTE up and discredit Omalu—that's the subject of Concussion, a new Will Smith movie coming out this Christmas. We know that football players are being tacitly asked to not just give up their bodies for the sake of the game but their minds as well. Even the NFL admitted that concussions can cause permanent damage in 2009. But we still watch. You might ask: Why? Or you might ask: Can we come up with an excuse that makes it OK to watch in time for kickoff?

Am I supposed to feel good that the players I'm watching are suffering a lower rate of brain damage than before?

Firstly we should note that things have gotten better. The NFL now makes it harder for concussed players to return to the field too soon; announcers are less likely to react with delight when a big hit drives a player into the turf; people are writing and talking about safety, building technologically advanced helmets, and teaching kids proper tackling techniques. But helmets can't make football risk-free—and even if concussions were wiped out from the sport tomorrow, there's evidence that subconcussive hits to the head contribute to CTE too. The NFL says that "football has never been safer," but that's some chickenshit moral calculus—am I supposed to feel good that the players I'm watching are suffering a lower rate of brain damage than before?

Watch: Meet Mr. Cherry, Japan's Leading World Record Holder

Another argument is that modern life is full of compromises with evil, that we're almost always doing something Wrong. Driving a car requires consuming gas, which means giving money to oppressive Gulf regimes and making it that much more likely climate change will consume humanity. Buying a T-shirt or a pair of sneakers may mean supporting sweatshop labor. Eating a hamburger means contributing to the factory farming industry. Yet in most cases there are ways to reform our consumption habits if for no other reason than to settle our troubled consciences. Cars can run on electricity. You can buy clothing from brands that pay their workers well. Meat can come from animals that were treated with kindness before they were butchered.

But there's no such thing as Free Trade Football. The NFL is a machine that produces pain, money, and entertainment: The fans get entertained, the league makes most of the money (Commissioner Roger Goodell made $35 million in 2013, more than any NFL athlete), and the players get some of the money and all of the pain. Get rid of any of those three components and the other two disappear as well—if the league banned tackling in favor of two-hand touch or flag rules, the fans wouldn't watch, and the money would evaporate.

You like to imagine that the players go into the machine knowing the consequences, and that they're choosing to risk destroying their brains for the chance to make millions and be the most famous person in any given room they enter. You want them to be motivated by a pure love of the game and have no regrets. Like Jim Otto, the Raiders center from the 70s who, as Kevin Cook recounted in his book The Last Headbangers, went through so many knee surgeries after retirement his leg was amputated, and when it was he had his prosthetic replacement adorned with his former team's logo.

While we're willing to watch football, anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer people are willing to let their children take up the game.

But you have to wonder how many players are trapped—either by being born into poverty or by not having learned any other skills—into accepting a Faustian bargain that has them trading their mental and physical health for potential glory and riches. Not everyone has an array of employment opportunities staring them in the face. The only budding NFL star to quit the game explicitly over health risks, Chris Borland, told ESPN, "I've got the luxury of choice just with the way I've been raised and the good fortune of growing up in a middle-class family and having my college degree... I think there's guys who don't have that choice, but that's not a reason to shirk the issue or avoid addressing things."

If you want to, you can imagine a future where more and more potential All-Pros follow in Borland's footsteps and quit while they're ahead, where football becomes regarded as a disreputable bloodsport and gradually falls out of mainstream favor much as boxing has. Football's popularity declined slightly this year, which might be a meaningless blip or might be the start of a trend. And while we're willing to watch football, anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer people are willing to let their children take up the game—high-profile former players like Terry Bradshaw, Bart Scott, and Troy Aikman (and other athletes like LeBron James) have said publicly they wouldn't want their sons to play football. What if the NFL slowly dies off because thousands of young world-class athletes turn their back on the sport and go into something less trauma-inducing, like baseball or basketball or American Ninja Warrior?

You're not a world-class athlete, and you don't need to decide whether to risk your health for a chance at becoming the next Russell Wilson. You just need to turn on the TV or not, and either way your support or disapproval of the NFL will be a drop in an ocean. When I watch tonight, I'll likely comfort myself by saying I really don't do much to line the NFL's pockets—I generally get my football fix via shady online streams or sports bars, I don't buy merchandise from the league, and I never go to games. I'll tell myself that the game has actually gotten safer, and that if fans continue to care about these issues it will get safer still. I'll also remind myself that the players are better compensated and more aware of the risks than they used to be, and that many of them love the game honestly and unequivocally. I'll do some mental gymnastics to separate my enjoyment of the sport from the league that showcases it—a league whose default mode in the face of scandal, as we saw from ESPN's report on "Deflategate," is obfuscation and outright lying.

I won't really believe any of that, but what's the alternative? Not watching at all?

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Image via Flickr user iprimages

Read: Here Are the GOP Political Candidates Circling Their Wagons Around Anti-Marriage Clerk Kim Davis

Bernie Sanders is—ever so slightly!—leading Hillary Clinton for the first time in Iowa, according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University. Nationally, however, the former Secretary of State is still the democratic favorite.

Still, the new poll puts Sanders at 41 percent among likely caucus-goers, just one point ahead of Clinton. Vice President Joe Biden, who recently said he'd consider a presidential run—if he and his family have the emotional bandwidth—came in at 12 percent. Former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and former Virginia Senator Jim Webb got 3 and 1 percent, respectively, and Lincoln Chafee got less than 1 percent, trailing "don't know/no answer" :(.

Two months ago a similar poll found Sanders lagging 21 points behind Clinton.

"Sanders has seized the momentum by offering a message more in life with disproportionately liberal primary and caucus voters," Quinnipiac University's Peter A. Brown told CNN.

The poll also found that just 4 percent of people don't find Sanders trustworthy, compared to 30 percent who distrusted Clinton. The former Secretary of State has been dogged by questions about her storing State Department emails on a private server, and issued a formal apology to supporters two days ago, both via email and an interview with ABC News.

"I wanted you to hear this directly from me," read Clinton's email blast. "Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department. Not doing so was a mistake. I'm sorry about it, and I take full responsibility."

Last week Clinton gave a one-on-one interview to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, who repeatedly asked her about the emails, privacy, and questions surrounding her likability and trustworthiness.

Although she never explicitly called out Sanders or Trump, she made remarks about candidates who draw large crowds.

"You can wave your arms or give a speech," Clinton said. "But at the end of the day, are you really connecting with and really hearing what people are saying to you or wishing what you would say to them."

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Great advice. Photo via Flickr user torbakhopper

As Paul Rosenberg, the founder of Seattle's Rain City Jacks, explains to me what exactly a jack-off club is, I am immediately intimidated. As a woman, my imagination planted itself in the middle of the scenario where 60 naked men in a room, walked around with erections, jerking and playing with themselves and one another, and it felt more like a nightmare than a dream. Of course, if I really was in the middle of one of Rain City Jacks' popular jack-off events, the men there would hardly notice me or even be interested. Men go there to be with other men. To explore masturbation in a male environment.

"The energy at jack-off clubs is inevitably very focused on physical pleasure and the penis specifically," Rosenberg tells me. A prepress manager for a large in-house design group by day, he's been running Rain City Jacks since 2005. "The power of the experience lies in the exposure of what is routinely hidden and the sharing of what is almost universally private: our masturbation practice."

Rosenberg grew up outside of Chicago and was a professional actor and singer for most of his life. He first became aware of jack-off clubs in 1985 when he found a fictional article in a Honcho magazine describing an organized masturbation party. "The article turned me on in a big way," he says. Like any handsome gay man, Rosenberg had a ton of sex in the '70s and '80s. He also smoked a lot of weed and took acid on the regular, but in 1991, after a year of 12-step sobriety, he met his husband. They eventually migrated to Seattle for work. They had both been into the experience of the jack-off clubs in Chicago and were disappointed to find there was not one in Seattle, which put a damper on the open-relationship he and his husband had decided to embark on.

"Bathhouses and hookups were easy to come by, but finding even one jack-off buddy, much less a club was really difficult," he says. "So, I started one myself."

Paul Rosenberg. Photo courtesy Paul Rosenberg

Rosenberg started a Yahoo group (which is still active today) and found the response to be huge. The first jack-off club he hosted happened in a hotel room, seven guys crammed in a room, eventually the demand helped it grow into an actual organization. Today, Rain City Jacks is a premier jack-off club that has hosted over 300 events, averaging about three a month with 60 men showing up regularly. There are fewer than ten clubs operating in North America and, according to Rosenberg, only a small percentage of men even know they exist.

Although it's assumed that jack-off clubs rose to popularity in the wake of AIDS in the '80s when there was a heightened fear of infection through intercourse, Rosenberg says this sort of play had been going on since early history because of desire, not fear of STI's or contracting HIV.

"We do this because we want to jack-off together, not because we're scared of getting sick," he assures me.

"Jack-off clubs are a pretty small piece of what I would call gay male bonding," Rosenberg explains. "I find more non-gay-identified men at jack-off clubs than in any other venue where men are sexual with each other. While some of these guys are certainly either closeted or just starting to explore their sexuality, I've come to believe that many are indeed straight men, predominantly heterosexual guys with a desire to enjoy recreational penis play with other men... so I hesitate to call this 'gay.' Most of the men who attend clubs identify as gay but many do not. It's a uniquely open and non-judgmental space that straight guys feel free to explore and intersect with gay and bi men."

Rain City Jacks is a top-tier jack-off spa. He says that there is always a line-up of men waiting to get in and there are always newcomers. Each member (it's a $25 annual fee) either flashes their card or pays a first-time entry charge. There is a locker room to safely store your clothes and belongings as well as an orientation for rookies. Usually, an experienced member will sit down with a newcomer for 15 minutes and show him the ropes. Rain City Jacks also provides a system of wristbands to let everyone in the jack-off party know where everyone stands when it comes to interaction.

"A red silicone wrist band signals, "Don't touch my dick." A green wristband means, "Don't bother asking. Everyone may touch my dick," and no band at all, which is how most member play, just means, "Ask before you touch my dick." The basic rule is get consent, but the bands provide a permission shorthand."

The room is fully equipped with comfy furniture covered in canvas tarps and beds with clean linens, while oil-based lube, baby wipes, paper towels, and trash cans are carefully placed around the room to maximize comfort. The lights are dimmed to a mild level while instrumental or electronic music plays over the speakers (preferably no female vocals, Rosenberg says).

"Couches will have two or three or six men seated side by side, legs draped over one another, with everyone playing with themselves or their neighbours," he says. "And the energy is not rushed at all, but intensely focused and chill. The great majority are not into a fast orgasm but want to make the time last. Nobody leaves in that first hour."

The bathroom showers are stocked with skin care and clean-up products. Even the bathrooms have mouthwash on hand. There is never a shortage of fresh, clean towels. It's basically male masturbation heaven. With a situation this lush, inviting and pleasure-based, why aren't more men doing this?

"Younger guys still associate fucking with conquest, with rites of passage, with achievement of adulthood," Rosenberg explains. "Our culture is still incredibly biased against masturbation. It's referred to as 'not real sex,' 'practice sex,' even 'failure sex.' The stigma is absolutely pervasive and I think that is the first assault we make on a child's sense of sexual identity and physical self-worth, even if it comes via a benign diversion from self-exploration and stimulation, the message is always, 'Don't do that.' Obviously, we do it anyway, but the stigma has already been attached to masturbation from infancy. As long as a guy thinks that this is masturbation, he attaches negative associations to it. The younger he is, the more susceptible he is to that judgment."

While that stigma does exist for men, it is still sided with an expectation that "boys will be boys" and that masturbation is a part of their sexual exploration. While things are changing, females have been taught a very different narrative about how to relate to masturbation. I couldn't even imagine a female jerk-off club rising to even a fraction of Rain City Jack's popularity—and Rosenberg agreed. Was it a biological determination? Men walk around with an appendage that rises, signifies arousal, and can be grabbed, while a woman is constantly assumed to be in the state of arousal (or the opposite, never at all).

"Maybe it's just a natural expression of our sexual reality—much more visual and genitally focused—but 'Jill-off' clubs don't really exist," he says. However, there are couples clubs, but according to Rosenberg, those still end up with an 80 percent male attendance. "I think there is a lot of value for women in group masturbation."

"One thing that always strikes me is the happy peacefulness of these guys. There is a remarkable absence of rancor, unwelcome aggression, competition. It is extremely obvious to me that when men are getting the sex play they crave, they lose their tension. It's very intense and then it's relaxed and content," he says.

"I just encourage everyone to try it if they have any interest at all. Only experience can really tell the story of what a jack-off club—or anything else—has to offer, and people walk in with a lot of preconceived notions."

Follow Mish Way on Twitter.

Last week, California settled a class-action lawsuit brought by inmates alleging heinous abuses of solitary confinement in the state prison system. Spearheaded by a jailhouse lawyer and alleged Aryan Brotherhood gang member named Todd Ashker, the suit focused on how anyone even suspected of being in a gang could be locked in solitary—a.k.a. "the hole"—indefinitely, often for years at a time. Now the state will limit use of solitary to prisoners who commit egregious crimes or can legitimately be suspected of endangering other inmates, and there are rules to prevent inmates from spending absurd amounts of time in hellishly close quarters.

Current and former inmates are psyched about the victory—which still has to receive final approval from a judge—even as they're haunted by time spent in security housing units (SHUs), the official moniker for the hole.

"I spent five years in SHU," Stone Ramsey, who authored several urban lit novels while on lockdown in the California state prison system, tells VICE. "It was so crowded they didn't have bed space. I spent two and a half years waiting for a cell in Pelican Bay or Corcoran [state prison] to open up. They had slammed so many people in the hole because of this [gang validation process] and everyone basically had life or indeterminate SHU time, so no one was moving. The only way you could get out of the SHU was to die or rat or parole. Most of them dudes were stand-up acts [i.e., not likely to rat] and most of them had life sentences, so it was at full capacity."

Thousands of prisoners have been confined in the special units, some for decades, and as part of the settlement almost 2,000 of them will be moved to mainline yards and reenter general population, the LA Times reported. Some of those inmates are likely to be what they call the "big homies" in the Cali system—upper-tier members of the Big Four prison gangs (the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Black Guerrilla Family, and La Nuestra Familia). Other inmates are looking forward to their arrival on the mainline.

"The yards expect more regimented structure `to be forthcoming, and the 'convicts' are looking forward to it!" PG, one of Ramsey's friends who's in the Cali prison system right now, tells VICE. "Prison will be more structured, as people will now be held accountable for their actions or inactions. Those dudes being released from the SHU are natural and learned and Machiavellian, with decades of stratagem under their belt. Those dudes are legends, and they'll basically get a jailhouse hero's welcome!"

Getting out of solitary obviously isn't the same as tasting freedom, but it can be damn close.

"Its like a quasi-release for these guys," Ramsey says. "It's like being released to the streets, because none of these dudes are going to see the light of day, so just being able to get on a yard, being able to hug your family, hug your kids [is huge]. Some of those dudes were up there for decades with no phone calls and no contacts. In Pelican Bay, you don't get direct sunlight. It's gonna be a culture shock to those guys."

Of course, the release of the gang leaders could spark violence as they battle for position and resources in an environment where scarcity is the name of the game. As theLA Times reported, the man held in solitary the longest in California prison history—Hugo Pinell, who was in there for 43 years—got killed during a riot just days after his release this summer. But big names can actually decrease violence if they demand respect.

"One thang fa'sho tho, their presence will add an abundance of diplomacy to the yards that they get acclimated to, to the point of voicing their opinions and what not, hence that is where respect begins," a convict named Mac tells VICE via text. "Cats respect individuals on a personal level by the way they carry their self, the way they talk and express their self."

Still, some prisoners inside doubt legit gang leaders will even hit a compound.

"The buzz I'm hearing is that the big homies are getting out, but some people don't think the big dawgs will get out because to the police, they're still a threat," Twin, another one of Ramsey's friends doing time right now, tells VICE. "They have a lot of respect, they're the real big homies who control everything. Strong, powerful people who can touch people wherever they're at."

Watch our documentary about late VICE Prison Correspondent Bert Burykill trying to keep it on the straight and narrow after getting out of prison.

The solitary rule changes will resonate outside prison walls and barbed wire fences, too, as regular inmates can often obtain cell phones these days.

"It's not only going to be sweeping changes, movements and structure on the prison yard, but it's also going to hit the streets," Ramsey tells me. "A lot of the dudes who are back in the hole are some of the most intelligent motherfuckers you will ever meet, and you bring that back to the prison circle and the whole makeup of a 'pound can be changed. One dude can come to the yard and the whole mentality changes. Think when these sharp dudes get a hold of all these youngsters."

Therein lies the problem: How much security is too much? It seems clear that what California has been doing to anyone they suspect is affiliated with a gang is excessive, but is a victory against barbaric prison conditions also a victory for the prison gang leaders who could get released from 24/7 lockdown?

"Lots of heavy dudes have been getting on yards out there...you probably heard about Hugo Pinell, [notorious Aryan Brotherhood leader] John Stinson is on a yard. Policies are all different now," a source close to inmates in the California system tells VICE. He explained how a good friend of his who is an Aryan Brotherhood leader just beat the gang validation process. "Good news...dude's on a yard, even has a cellie, so it looks like he beat the gang validation... I' m sure I don/t have to tell you they watch him like a hawk."

It's clear that the big homies are still being watched, and maybe law enforcement is giving them just enough of a leash to hang themselves. But the settlement suggests some of them will be able to walk a yard while they are in prison, and taste a semblance of normal life.

"All the movement, being able to walk around on grass, going into the chow hall and going to commissary, it's going to be a sensory overload," Ramsey says of those poised to get released. "In the SHU they squeeze all the toothpaste out and don't even give you the tube, so they are going to get a lot of little stuff that they wasn't privileged to get. It's going to be Christmas for these dudes."

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You might take the zoom feature in Metal Gear Solid V for granted. It's an easy thing not to pay any mind to, despite being impossible to miss in either Ground Zeroes or The Phantom Pain; a weird and relatively unexplained trick that lets you quickly push the camera in on Snake no matter what you're doing, complete with fourth-wall lens whirring. It takes a steady hand to use it while doing much of anything outside of standing still.

At a glance, that this is included in MGSV's controls (and serves as the only type of "interaction" in Hideo Kojima's defunct Silent Hills teaser P.T., for that matter) is funny. Outside of the occasional peek past a corner, zooming in doesn't really add much to the act of infiltration—though The Phantom Pain will half-heartedly try to argue this point—and yet it's so emblematic of Kojima's creative sensibilities it's a wonder the idea wasn't added to active gameplay years ago. (Besides the director's unmistakable love of cinema, you've been able to zoom during cutscenes in every Metal Gear since MGS2.)

It's a great addition, and not just as a Kojima signature. The close-ups and depth of field made it possible to take worthwhile pictures in the absence of a true photo mode, for one. There's nothing quite like orchestrating a memorable situation by manipulating the game's design (much harder than you might think), then hitting the PS4's share button to save it at just the right moment.

There's another way to look at it: as Kojima giving you control over the camera. Letting you be your own director. He initially relinquished this in the relatively scant enclosure of Ground Zeroes' Camp Omega, where replays and experimentation were encouraged by necessity of it being a single level, and The Phantom Pain is 200 times the stealth space Omega was. Its wide landscapes and deep design provide the perfect backdrop for your off-script experiences.

Of course, Kojima has his own unshakeable vision that can butt up against your choices. It's this unexpected duality that runs throughout MGSV, proving to be an itch I couldn't quite figure out how to scratch when I returned to the former Kojima Productions LA studio last month. I've been reflecting on it ever since. As it turns out, documenting that dichotomy makes for some interesting departures.

MGSV's mainstream approach is one of the most notably strange things about it. Default settings dot the screen in video game-y UI bits, markers and waypoints, surrounding players in a shroud of open-world information. Narrative is delivered through short-ish (for MGS) sporadic cutscenes, with Kiefer Sutherland's take on Snake often little more than a cipher.

You get used to it—Kiefer is a different Snake because The Phantom Pain is built as something else. It both is and is not Metal Gear Solid; its non-linear, episodic mission structure favors a form much closer to noted free-roam design than the series' aggressive take-it-or-leave it linearity of the past.

It's a paradox. There are a number of established elements you expect from MGS, from experimental tweaks for sneaking to Kojima's bizarre, self-aware sense of humor. Emphasizing the broad array of player choices makes MGSV simultaneously the purest, most complex stealth sim and the least identifiably Kojima-styled entry ever.

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Yet nearly the first image of The Phantom Pain commands authorial intent. On a small shelf of what looks like a washing station, a Sony cassette tape is sitting alongside pills, medical tools, and other assorted items you might find on a military base. (And is that a tiny FOX-emblazoned PS4 on the left?)

The cassette, whose label reads "From the Man Who Sold the World," is taken from the shelf and placed in a Walkman smudged with blood. The camera pulls in to the player as the distant sounds of war are drowned out by recorded silence. Fade to black, to Midge Ure's cover of Bowie's original track playing to opening credits to first-person framed narrative with Snake waking from a nine-year coma.

It's the kind of controlled narrative set-up that MGS is known for, Kojima's imprint all over it. The context of the cassette, bloody stereo, and framing device create mysteries straight away. Transitional editing and audio makes the Fox Engine appear more like a movie camera. There's a subtle joke here, too—is Kojima, always the trickster, hinting at a plot point with the tape's label, or is its description no more than a wink to the track's origin on Bowie's 1970 album of almost the same name?

Either way, in this teaser and beyond, cassettes are The Phantom Pain's soul.

In the old days, a great deal of exposition was handled through codec calls. A lot of it was optional and a lot wasn't (at least insofar as you had to skip through it). Quietly stripped away, beginning with 2008's MGS4 (and further reduced in 2010's Peace Walker), it's since been replaced by cassettes.

Past the first hour—a tightly choreographed, hallucinatory nightmare in a veteran's hospital—Kojima's directorial hand seemingly falls away. You're calling the shots now, moment-to-moment and in how you approach an area of operations. If you want, you can blaze through without listening to any of the cassettes fleshing out the plot, often culled from major cutscenes and awarded after watching chopped-down versions at turning points in various story missions.

It strikes as a bit off-kilter to long-time fans who expect a certain grandeur and cadence in Kojima's storytelling to have to go outside of The Phantom Pain's linear path to find that crucial bit of MGS flavor, almost like deleted scenes that KojiPro doesn't expect the majority of players to really bother with. At least here (unlike in Peace Walker) you can choose to soak in conversation on everything from the chemical make-up of yellowcake uranium to Kaz's thoughts on hamburgers at just about any time outside of a cutscene.

And yes, it's true: Kojima's name is plastered all over the opening television-like credits of every mission in The Phantom Pain. It's further bookended during at the end of each episode by KojiPro's logo, previously slated for removal from the final product.

In some ways it feels like a reminder: "I'm still here." Kojima won't let us leave MGS for the last time without remembering him (as if we ever could forget—no game creator has ever been so autobiographically tangled up in his own series). He's especially present in episodes where he's given writing credit, and in fairness when it comes to the major narrative flow he maintains that control throughout.

It all comes back to the cassettes: if the sheer volume of The Phantom Pain is a deterrent to finding Kojima amidst the countless hours spent simply exploring and fighting in the field, the fastest way to make MGSV a more "proper" Metal Gear is to pull out your iDroid and take a listen. I only wish there were more.

This shouldn't keep anyone—let alone an MGS vet—from playing The Phantom Pain. More than most, Metal Gear Solid has been a series that significantly evolves and changes over time, introducing new ideas and concepts into how you slither through battle zones as console technology has continually improved.

Running down the series, the list of improvements and changes that have marked its progress is impressive. Squad-based AI and tactics, interchangeable camo patterns, OctoCamo (maybe one of the most fascinating and frustratingly underused ideas ever to appear in a stealth game), robot scouts and Fulton extraction, to name just a few. With each passing entry these have felt like the missing piece. How could you ever have played MGS before without this?

It makes MGSV's R&D closet a Pandora's Box—a kitchen-sink monstrosity bursting with new toys, special uniforms (which can make Snake look oddly like an egg) and other equipment, including some new developments for your comically versatile cardboard box.

"Afghanistan is a big place," Ocelot remarks when The Phantom Pain drops you into vast mountainous region for your first real open-ended mission. To his point (and with your R&D), it's in these tracts of land that you'll lose track of Kojima, often for hours on end.

There's just too much ground to cover. The Phantom Pain's evolution isn't so much that it takes place in open environments—it's how its soldiers act and react within them. Guards adapt to your tactics, switching up gear and behavior depending on your preferred method of confrontation. They radio in the slightest deviation from the norm. They work in divisional teams, flank, call in reinforcements and vary unit specialties.

Every MGS player knows the pain of making a small mistake deep inside some enemy stronghold, and then having to gun their way out before limping on to the next objective. It's not these parts that we typically remember so much. Instead, MGSV's systems make experimenting and discovering its many hidden elements, activities, and permutations the main narrative course, such as it is. There's so much that KojiPro would have had to record a hundred hours of voice work for cassettes to balance things out.

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It is admittedly the best kind of problem to have, but even it comes at a price: making your own memories versus remembering great moments from an auteur's hand. Directing your own story rather than watching one Kojima crafted. Creating an album of hundreds of snapshots.

You want to ignore that critical mission so that you can capture bears? You can. Would you rather see how, as Kojima has personally encouraged, taking a different buddy on an op changes the situation? Please do. Just keep in mind at some point—if you're not careful—it can feel like you've swapped KojiPro for Rockstar. The Phantom Pain, unlike so many games these days, is best taken on slowly. It's something to be savored. There won't be another.

No matter the year, MGS has always felt like Kojima's personal vision of the future. 1998's Metal Gear Solid is set in 2005 and acts more like actual sci-fi; Peace Walker's 1974 featured a host of nuclear deterrence AI robots that likewise will probably remain impossible for at least another decade or two. This has never been an issue. To wholly enjoy MGS is to accept Kojima's fiction on its own terms, and MGSV proudly continues in that tradition. This isn't 1984 as much as it's the year it says it is with an asterisk.

You get the feeling that The Phantom Pain is more of an era than other entries because of Kojima's age. No doubt you've heard about his splashy playlist of early 1980s favorites hidden throughout Soviet base camps and the like. That's just one part of it—just look at his fondness for Joy Division.

Snake also wears an LCD Seiko watch around his bionic arm, modeled after the one that Kojima himself wore in 1984, right down to the design of the display. The supporting character Dr. Huey Emmerich (who played a small role in Ground Zeroes after constructing Metal Gear ZEKE in Peace Walker) uses an "I ♥ Diamond Dogs" mug, after Milton Glaser's iconic 1977 logo made for New York City, which somehow doesn't seem like a stretch to picture tacked up in Hideo's room as a young man.

And think about Diamond Dogs itself. The name of Big Boss' military organization is a straight-up pop homage to the title track from David Bowie's 1974 concept album (partially about Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, no less)—Kojima has stated he originally wanted the game to open with it. In any case, much of The Phantom Pain's essence may essentially be a love letter from the director to his youth.

MGS has flirted with evidence of the "real world" in the past, mostly with product placement (Apple, Sony, and Playboy have all made cameos) that's rarely felt like more than a meta-injection of the present. Even MGS3's plot was built around gaps in the Cold War.

Here you're dropped into thick of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which saw Russia attempting to maintain a socialist presence in the region. It lasted a decade, beginning in 1979. Tensions in West Africa come into play later as well, though Kojima's theme of "race" isn't so wholly localized.

Still, when you're fighting Russian soldiers that aren't part of some fictional outfit and then escaping by a chopper blaring A-ha, you're reminded The Phantom Pain is Kojima's game, too.

There are some narrative chokepoints embedded in The Phantom Pain. Usually they're identifiable by you suddenly getting funneled into places with more immediately detailed set direction.

It's frequently a good sign. These scenes can rival the best MGSV memories you've made out on your own, and it's satisfying to let Kojima (and art director Yoji Shinkawa) take back control every so often as the game's plot gradually thickens.

A surprisingly horrific incident some 20-25 hours in will likely linger, leaving you wondering what could have been had Kojima been able to finish the ill-fated Silent Hills (at least P.T. lives on in a cameo). Any appearance from Skull Face works in a similar fashion.

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A kind of character vestige of MGS's old guard and a great foil to Snake, his performance is punctuated by that combination of dramaturgical delivery, menace, and elocution that's propelled so many of the series' villains into the pantheon of video game history. You might argue he's Kojima's last hurrah. And if you don't love how over the top that mask is, you're probably playing the wrong series.

Thanks to his own meta-admission hidden in Ground Zeroes, we now know that Kojima was well aware that MGSV would finally mark the end of Metal Gear Solid. There may be a good chance he realized it even earlier. He knew he wouldn't be around any longer to carry on the series.

It makes sense, in a way, that he would want to go out on such a brazen, audacious, ambitious note as The Phantom Pain—to give players a chance to make their own stories, individually woven into the fibers of the one he shot. Perhaps he thought that easing out of the director's chair for Snake's final mission might somehow make it easier to cope. To say goodbye. Kojima will undoubtedly return, but MGS will live on only in memory.

Our own phantom. You're the Boss, now.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out now. Read more about the game and the series here.

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