All photos courtesy of the Hernando County Sheriff's Office

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On Tuesday night at around 10 PM, parole officers set out to serve Nickcole Dykema warrants for violating probation. When the 47-year-old Florida woman saw the cops outside her Brooksville home, she told them to leave, prompting a radio call for reinforcements.

The extra help proved necessary. After Sergeant Chris Calderon of the Hernando County Sheriff's Office forced his way inside, Dykema tried to stab him in the head, only missing by inches, according to his account. Cops later found her hiding behind a blanket with her feet sticking out as she waved a long, shiny sword, according to a local CBS station.

After shooting her with a beanbag to no effecttwicethe cops eventually took Dykema down with a Taser. Throughout the ordeal, they were given a tour of a house that sounds and looks like the set of a Rob Zombie movie.

In total, 3,714 bladed weapons were removed from the residence during a police inventory. Deputies also found pentagrams, an altar, and some mysterious bones. It's believed that the house and the surrounding yard was "booby trapped," according to a press release from the Sheriff's office.

"I think most people would look at that and would come to the realization that it does appear to be at least mimicking satanic worship," Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis told CBS.

As you might imagine, Dykema was also not the best neighbor.

"My family has been through hell for two years with this woman," Paula Deford, the woman's neighbor, told the station. "It's just been torment, torment."

The CBS station released footage that appears to show Dykema wearing all black and attacking Deford's home with a knife.

According to Hernando County court records, Dykema had previously been arrested on two separate occasions for three charges: carrying a concealed weapon, giving a false name to police, and resisting arrest. In December 2014, she was suspected of stealing knives from a Dollar Tree store, a local ABC affiliate reports.

Now she's charged with violating probation, property damage, resisting an officer, criminal mischief and battery of a cop. She's currently being held without bond.

"I'm lucky to be alive is how I feel," Deford, her neighbor, told CBS. "That's exactly how I feel."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Hitler, possibly on Eukodal. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Norman Ohler's latest book, Der Totale Rausch (Total Rush), tells the story behind the Nazis' "performance enhancing" drug habits. It turns out that many of those involved in Hitler's party, from the Wehrmacht all the way up to top-tier leadership, were massively into their chemicals. Ohler got his hands on the records of Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theo Morell, and was able to determine that the fhrer himself received 800 injections over the years.

We sat down with the author to find out more about what sort of gear the Nazis were into, and why so few historical books have written about the subject.

Read on Munchies: Hitler's Booze Stash Was Just Found Under a German Restaurant

VICE: Hi, Norman. So Hitler and others in the Nazi Party were really high all the time?
Norman Ohler: That's what my research suggests. But you have to differentiate. Each of them had their very own predilections and addictions. Not all of them took every drug. Some more, some less. Some of them were on methamphetaminefor example, Ernst Udet, the Chief of Aircraft Procurement and Supply. Others were on strong anesthetics, like Gring, whose nickname was actually "Mring," from morphine. And it's proven that Hitler took Eukodalthe German brand name for . And the Americans, for example, haven't ever given that up: they administered massive amounts of speed to their pilots in the Korean War.

What about the German armed forces?
They've used Modafinil, a wakefulness-promoting agent, in Afghanistan. It keeps you awake and pushes you and supposedly has no side effects. The military medicine advisory board is currently deliberating whether so-called performance enhancing substances should continue to be distributed in large quantities.

Why has this subject of Nazis and drugs been neglected until now? Is it because it's taboo?
It's because of the National Socialists' own concept of "fighting narcotics," which established state control over substances and, in doing so, made drugs a taboo in general. This caused the subject to be dismissed by the sober sciencescomprehensive studies are still avoided by universities today.

How does your personal drug biography compare to Hitler's?
I haven't tried every drug that I talk about in Der Totale Rausch. Especially because if I tried to get anywhere close to Hitler's consumption levels, I wouldn't have been able to write a book. Really, nobody could take that amount.

Thanks, Norman.

Vintage picture of Jimy Sohns and the Shadows of Knight performing live. Photo courtesy of Jimy Sohn

In just over two and a half minutes, the Shadows of Knight's version of "Gloria" sums up pretty much everything about rock 'n' roll of a certain erathat sweet spot between the genre's rise from juke joints to the pop charts and its evolution in the late 60s into "serious" music. "Gloria" was the product of a group of white teenagers in the Midwest bashing their way through a cover of song by a group of white teenagers in Northern Ireland who were themselves attempting to sound like an American black soul and blues band.

It's a chain of influence and mimicry that was pretty typical of the time, and the story of the Shadows is pretty typical as well. After "Gloria," they rubbed elbows with the Stones and the Who, but gross mismanagement ground the band down until they eventually split, their handful of hits seemingly consigned to the cutout bin of history alongside the rest of the garage rockers they came up with.

Frontman Jimy Sohns was never willing to accept a civilian life, though. After the original Shadows split, he scored another hit with the bubblegum-flavored "Shake" before starting an offstage career in the rock biz that found him road-managing Chicago punks Skafish. According to Skafish lore, Jimy would occasionally close out their shows by joining the band onstage and singing "Gloria."

In the early 80s, Jimy was busted for felony drug charges and spent three years in prison, where he formed a prison band called Jimy Sohns and the Cons. "We were actually quite good because there were a lot of musicians who played too near the flame, shall we say," he told me.

A recent shot of Jimy performing live. Courtesy of Jimy Sohns

Ever since he got free, he's been leading an all-new Shadows, playing for a growing audience of garage-rock obsessives. Earlier this year, Sundazed released Live 1966, which captured the band playing one of their regular weekend gigs at the proto-DIY show space they ran, blasting through a noise-drenched set that sounds less like the relatively clean-cut recorded version of "Gloria" and more like a Midwestern answer to the Velvet Underground. Between working on his memoirs and taking part in an upcoming television documentary on Chicago rock, I got in touch with Jimy, a voluminous talker who'd already started his spiel before I could start recording.

Jimy Sohns: I've never lived in Chicago proper. I've always been from the suburbs. When you're in a small suburb like Prospect Heights, Illinois, where I grew up, you always say Chicago so you seem like you're part of something bigger and more important.

VICE: I lived in Chicago for a while.
I lived in Florida for 11 years. I've been around. I lived in Europe for a while. I lived in New York a couple times when I was in the studio recording for Kasenetz-Katzthey had the Ohio Express and Fruit Gum CompanyI did a lot of studio work for them. And I lived out West for a while.

You really got around.
Yeah, well, 50 years in rock 'n' roll, you tend to travel a lot.

I just checked out the Live 1966 record that was recorded at the Cellar, where you guys had a residency.
When the Cellar first opened, there weren't teen clubs. They were just starting that scene. We got together with our original manager, Paul Samson, and we'd pick out storefronts and rent them for a month or two at a time. We'd go in there, clean them up, make a stage, play there a while. I think the stage was five inches high, which at 5'7" makes me barely visible. The Cellar got so popular that we had to have two shows a night. That was the screaming era, where the kids would charge the stage and that kind of thing, and we got to be big enough to where it would disrupt the headliner coming on after us, because they'd charge the stage when we ended, and it would mess up the show. It was a really happening period, the whole British Invasion taken back over by us Americans. One thing we didn't figure... We'll get into the "Gloria" thing now, I guess.

Sure.
Yes, Van Morrison wrote "Gloria." It was the B-side to "Baby Please Don't Go," and I don't think it was meant to be an A-side because it was so long. It was three-and-a- half minutes long, and that was just unheard of back then. Anything over two minutes and 30 seconds got faded . Ours was 2:38, and at first at least a few places faded it. Van Morrison's "Gloria" was choppy. It had some mistakes in it. There's about 20 seconds before the solo starts where they're just doing the chorus with no words. We got it sent to us from my cousin, who was in the Army, stationed in Germany, and he sent me a whole bunch of records. So we kind of had a jump on stuff. And as a Chicago-based band, we kind of jumped into the Chicago blues scene early. We were the first white blues band. You know, all of us white kids were kinda playing a really white version of the blues, but at least we were trying, you know?

Six months before we recorded "Gloria," we knew it was going to be a smash hit. We had no doubt that we were going to be rock 'n' roll stars. Years later, in retrospect, you realize what a minute chance we had to pull that off. All the hundreds and thousands of bands who ultimately were probably better than us that never made it. Because half this business is being in the right place at the right time. The fact that we were pretty good didn't hurt. When you go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, they had a little pamphlet they handed out called "The 500 Songs That Shaped Rock 'n' Roll," and "Gloria" is in the top 100. Our "Gloria." They don't mention Van Morrison, Patti Smith, the Doors, Hendrix, nobody. I'm very proud of that fact.

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You became a rockstar when you were 19. What was that like?
I remember the first time I was ever in New York City in my life. It was about 11 o'clock at night that we were getting in there, and we flew over the Statue of Liberty, and I thought to myself, What the hell am I doing here, man? I'm 1,000 miles from home, nobody knows who we are, nobody's gonna come to see us play. I was wrong. We played 21 straight nights, the same set three times a night, and that was really when I found out what a groupie was. There was a whole network of New York groupies that was very sophisticated compared to what we had in Chicago.

A lot of people ask me, when was the first time you realized you were a rock 'n' roll star, and it was the first time I heard "Gloria" on the radio. There was a girl at McDonald's that we all hung out at down the street from the Cellar, who, let's say, had god-given assets that were overly abundant. We'd always say, "Hey Bonnie, get in the car," and she'd say, "Nuh uh." We recorded "Gloria" and three days later, before there were any records pressed, they played it on the radio, on WLS at 3:10 in the afternoon. I was in McDonald's eating a double cheeseburger, and all of a sudden... I thought I was hearing things. I had my radio on and I thought I heard "Gloria," so I turned it up a little and my hormones and my adrenaline were raging, and I thought, Oh my God, they're playing my song on the radio. Just then, here comes Bonnie with her assets pressed on my window saying, "I'll take that ride now."

What did you get up to after the band?
I wound up as a sound engineer and on tour, managing people. I toured with Skafish in the late 70s opening for Iggy Pop. The last date of the tour, we were in New York City playing at a club called Hurrah, and about halfway through the set I saw a big confrontation from the stage and I thought, Oh no, Skafish probably got into it with somebody. It wound up that Patti Smith's brother Todd, who was engaged to the drummer, got into a thing with Sid Vicious. I was probably the only person in there who didn't know who Sid Vicious was. I got over there and this guy, who turned out to be Sid Vicious, spit on me. So I did the all-American thing and beat the hell out of him. The next day, the Post had a picturethat I wish for the life of me that I hadon one of the pages with the caption, "Old punk teaches new punk lesson."

What else were you up to?
There was about a four- or five-year period where I stopped playing because I wasn't making enough money. Then I got busted. We do a great version of Uriah Heep's "Stealin'," except we call it "Dealin'": "I made my break and a six-year mistake dealin', when I should've been buyin'." I went to jail, at which point I was in the only other band I've ever been in in my whole 50-year musical career: Jimy Sohns and the Cons.

We actually won the Mississippi Blues Festival two years in a row. We did a lot of charity events, because of course we weren't allowed to keep any of the money. That was OK because I got to go in and out of prison, and I guess I'm not breaching any Department of Corrections things now. I got to be with a girl once in a while, and that worked for me.

I remember we were in Davenport, Iowa, playing a gig, and the guard said, "Get in the van. You've got seven minutes, Jimy. Is that gonna work?" And I said, "Seven minutes? What am I going to do after the first three? I've been locked up a year!" And away we went.

I did that, came out, got the band back together in '86, and started playing all over again. And I've been playing pretty much straight through ever since. I'm averaging 35 or 40 gigs a year now, which is good for what it is. I just turned 69. I never thought I'd get past 30 back in the old days when I was burning the candle in the middle and at both ends and upside down. I thought, Great, you fade to black and then you're out.

Follow Miles Raymer on Twitter.

Interim Georgian President Nino Burjanadze, right, and the President of the US Committee on NATO, Bruce Jackson, talk to the press at a joint press conference after their meeting in Tbilisi in November 2003. Photo by BESO GULASHVILI/AFP/Getty Images

Last September, a man named Bruce Jackson hosted a party for his vineyard's 2014 wines at his 18th-century Chateau Les Conseillans, which sits in the rolling hills of Bordeaux. The afternoon before the party, he took some guests, among them a documentary filmmaker and a former colleague of mine, for a tour of the estate ground, wearing a bland blue suit that matched his mild, drab persona. With his short, carefully combed gray hair, he resembles the conservative columnist George Will, or any number of the people floating around Washington DC's interlocking social circles of foreign policy think-tankers, defense contractors, and lobbyists, which are in fact the exact circles he moves seamlessly in.

There was a smell in theair of grass, lilacs, and grapes from Jackson's vineyard, which includesa Merlot plot dating back to 1953. Much of the chateau itself was erected inthe 1700s, but it now boasts haute bourgeois furnishings with a2,000-square-foot kitchen (with brand new steel sinks and Swedish faucets). Theproperty includes a pine forest and an impeccable pool whose water appears adark, warm blue.

For the guests thatevening, there would be duck confit, crawfish canaps, and a three-piece jazzband.

"I like the quiet ofthe Bordeaux and the pace of the wine growing," Jackson said when asked about his new hobby while strolling through the $4 million estate, which is surrounded by springs and woods that are on France's list ofecologically protected sites (he purchased the land in 2011). "It's aslower-paced environment, and you get actually more thinking done."

My former colleague, hoping to prod Jackson on foreign policy, turned theconversation to Iraq, where that very day 17 people had been killed in bombingsand shootings and a mass grave containing the bodies of 15 truck drivers hadbeen discovered. That sort of bad day has been horrifically common since UStroops deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003, with the Islamic State recentlybeheading American journalists, conducting mass executions of Iraqi soldiers,and attracting recruits from across the West with horrific propaganda videos.

On VICE News: Syria and Iraq Are Disintegrating, US Defense Intel Chief Says

Jackson has more historywith Iraq than your average rich-guy dilettante grape grower. The year beforethe US invasion, Jacksonthen a Lockheed Martin executivefounded, with encouragement from White House officials, a group called the Committee forthe Liberation of Iraq, which helped advocate for the war. He agreed to serve as the chairman of the board of the Committee, even though he lateracknowledged, in a 2007 Playboy interview, that at the time he"knew nothing about Iraq."

In the run-up to the IraqWar, top advocates forecast that the whole thing would be a"cakewalk" and swore up and down that they were motivated by aheartfelt desire to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people. SaddamHussein's ouster would only be a first step in "the reconstruction of Rumsfeld run the damn thing," he said. "He didn'ttalk to anybody, didn't talk to our allies."

UnlikeRumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other high-ranking officials whohave been blamed for the disaster of the Iraq War, no one has ever protestedagainst Jackson. There are few pictures of him online, and hardly anyone outside selectcorridors in DC seems to have paid him much mind. But the man has had a long,cushy career circulating in the halls of powerbanging the drums of war,profiting from foreign adventures, and playing a key role in NGOs that havepaid him and his loved ones generous salaries. He's a sort of neocon ForestGump who's been hanging out in government circles for decades, assisting withthe expansion of the ever-larger military industrial complex while amassing thekind of fortune that allows him to buy a vineyard in France and maintain anestate in DC.

He'snot uniquely rich or uniquely powerful or uniquely evil by the standards of thecrowd he runs with, but it's worth looking at the life and times of BruceJackson to see how one maintains power in DC, and what one does with thatpower.

Bruce Jackson's father wasan investment banker and senior CIA official who specialized in psychologicalwarfare; his mother was a socialite who would later marry a US Senator. Jacksongrew up thoroughly inside the Beltway and came of age during the Reagan years.By 1986, he was a military intelligence officer working in the Pentagon onnuclear weapons policy and renting a modest apartment at 1711 MassachusettsAvenue NW, according to public records and that year's DC White Pages. Fouryears later, he left his government job to take a position in New York withLehman Brothers, where he was a strategist for proprietary trading.(Basically, that's the often shady practice where a bank or financial institution trades on its own account or money rather than that of a customer.)

He returned to Washington in 1993 to work as an executive at Martin Marietta, which merged with the Lockheed Corporation two years later to become the defense contractor behemoth Lockheed Martin. In 1997, Jackson was put in charge of finding overseas markets for the company's military toys.

A decade later, it wouldn't be controversial to argue that both the US and Iraq came out as losers in the war, but it was a win-win for Jackson and Lockheed.

One useful tool was the Committee to Expand NATO, an NGO that Jackson had formed in 1996. He never disclosed who funded ithe's claimed that he paid the bills himself with the money he made on Wall Streetbut a few news reports have said that arms manufacturers backed the organization.

That a weaponsmanufacturing executive headed the committee led to some skepticism inCongress. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa called NATO expansion "a MarshallPlan for defense contractors" and a Republican aide on Capitol Hill joked that arms dealers were so intent on lobbying for expansion that, "We'll probably be giving landlocked Hungary a newnavy."

The Senate approvedNATO admission for Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1998, and for tenother former Soviet Bloc states later, exactly as Jackson's group proposed.This was probably one of the biggest arms deals of all time, since new NATOmembers were required to junk their old Soviet military hardware and replace itwith Western armslike the stuff made by Lockheed Martin.

Meanwhile, Jackson waspushing for war with Iraq in his capacity as executive director of the Projectfor the New American Century (PNAC), the neocon think tank that was created in1997 and called for a return to "a Reaganite policy of military strengthand moral clarity." Its other members included subsequent Bushadministration officials like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and war hacks like WilliamKristol and Richard Perle. In 1998, PNAC wrote a letter to Congress callingfor Hussein's ouster and laid out what became the blueprint to achieve it. Nine days after 9/11, thegroup issued a public letter, addressed to President Bush, calling for regime change in Iraqwhether Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacksor not.

In late 2002, Jacksonfounded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the request of then-deputynational security advisor Stephen Hadley (who was later the author of a 2014 WallStreet Journal op-ed, "Americans Can Be Proud of What Was Achieved in Iraq"). The Bush administration had already decided to go to warit but it was still "struggling with a rationale," Hadley told him,according to the Playboy article.

US Army personnel pose under the "Hands of Victory" in Baghdad in 2003. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The rest is literallyhistory: The White House won that struggle with rationale, the invasion waslaunched, Poland sent 2,500 troops to support it, and in exchange the formerSoviet state was able to buy $5.5 billion worth of Lockheed's F-16 fighters, inwhat Euromoney later revealed to be an "off-balance-sheet deal" arranged by JPMorgan and guaranteedby the US government.

A decade later, it wouldn'tbe controversial to argue that both the US and Iraq came out as losers in thewar, but it was a win-win for Jackson and Lockheed. The company's stock price more than doubled inthe first five years after the invasion, and in the summer of 2006, Jacksonbought a property in Northwest DCassessed at $1.95 millionwhich has fivebedrooms, a fireplace, and a deck.

Since then, Jackson has runor had a key role in three entities, all registered to the address of his DCestate: Bruce P. Jackson Consulting, the Project on Transitional Democracies (PTD), and We Remember Foundation. It's impossible to know allthat much about his private consulting business, but the PTD and We Rememberare nonprofits, and are therefore required to file annual IRSdisclosure forms that offer some information.

The mission of We Remember,which operated as a tax-exempt 501c(3) between 2002 and 2009, was tofight for "justice" for dissidents disappeared or murdered by thegovernment of Belarus, such as the first husband of Jackson's second wife,Irina Krasovskaya, who was the group's president.

The PTD's stated mission hasbeen to promote "democratic change" in Euro-Atlantic governments,primarily the former Soviet bloc. According to its 2012 IRS disclosure forms,it "provided multiple briefings" on Russia and Eastern Europe to theObama White House, State Department, and National Security Council, and Jacksonregularly met with foreign and US officials. According to 2013 disclosureforms, the group devoted a notable chunk of its time to Ukraine and hasapparently prepared "numerous policy briefing papers" on thecountry.

IRS-designated nonprofitsare supposed to have independent boards that provide oversight and make surethat they don't misspend their tax-free money. But Jackson was on the board ofboth nonprofits, and the other members have been his friends and loved ones.

The PTD's original boardfrom 2002 was composed of Jackson, Randy Scheunemann (a former Rumsfeld adviserwith whom Jackson founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq), and JulieFinley, a major Republican fundraiser. She had been a founding member of the USCommittee on NATOin 2002, she and Jackson met with a senior Vatican officialto ask for the Pope's endorsement of NATO expansionand of the Committee forthe Liberation of Iraq.

These nonprofits brought in serious cashabout $6 million forthe PTD and $500,000 for We Remember. Of that, Jackson saw about $1.2 million, and his wife nabbed another $200,000. The PTD spent nearly $2.6million on travel, of which a good amount seems to have been primarily used tofly Jackson around the world first class and put him up at luxury hotels whilehe spoke at conferences, according to sources with knowledge of his activities.His destinations in recent years have included Montenegro, Germany, Belgium,Poland, Slovakia, England, Morocco, Wales and Bordeaux, his second home, wherehe claimed to have lectured at a "Georgian seminar."

"You have an influential person who founded a nonprofit and lines up friends and they treat the nonprofit as a spending pool." - Notre Dame Law Professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

The nonprofits alsoapparently served as personal piggybanks. The PTD once fronted Jackson a$150,000 advance on salary and on another occasion offered him a $70,000 interest-freeloan. In 2008, We Remember loaned him $25,000 for "home officeconstruction" at his DC estate and in 2006, PTD signed a lease that paidJackson $36,000 annually to rent the space with tax-exempt money. The PTD alsoagreed to pick up 38 percent of the Jackson family's utilities, insurance, maidservice, property taxes, security, and maintenance.

Check out the award-winning VICE News documentary on the Islamic State.

Jackson's wife receivedapproximately $130,000 in salary from her role as president of We Remember, andwhen the group dissolved as a 501c(3) in 2009, it transferred its $146,000 inremaining assets to the PTD. But We Remember didn't completely ignore victimsof government repression in Belarus: During the course of its existence it made three grants totaling about $5,0001 percent ofthe $500,000 it raisedto "families of political prisoners and those thathave disappeared."

When I described the waythese nonprofits operated to Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor and associatedean at Notre Dame Law School, he said, "What you're describing is not uncommon.You have an influential person who founded a nonprofit and lines up friends andthey treat the nonprofit as a spending pool. They pay themselves a nice salaryand travel. But it's supposed to be a charity, and the government has aninterest in how these nonprofits are run. There might not be any red flagshere, but there is definitely a perception problem. There are at least yellowflags and maybe more, it would depend on getting full information. And even ifthis doesn't violate tax law, that doesn't mean the public shouldn't beconcerned about this type of thing."

Nonprofitsdon't have to disclose their donors, but We Remember's 2005 filing to the IRS thatincluded a list of contributors appears to have been accidentally made public. Byfar the biggest donor to We Remember, which had begun the year with $358.97 incash, was a company controlled by Ukraine oligarch Rinat Akhmetov that kicked in $300,000. Akhmetov, who has a fortune estimated at $7.6billion, "is reputed to have emerged from a bloody power struggle amongorganized crime groups in the 1990s that sought to control the mighty coal andsteel assets of the Soviet Union," according to the NewYork Times.

Fordecades, Akhmetov supported the fabulously corruptViktor Yanukovych, the two-time Ukrainian Prime Minister who was electedpresident in 2010. Yanukovych was forced from power by popular protests inFebruary of last year, which triggered near civil war in Ukraine and an ongoingconfrontation with Russia. Soon thereafter, in a move rather obviously requiredby political realities, Akhmetov broke with his former beneficiary.

Jackson hasbeen periodically identified in US and Ukrainian press accounts as an adviserto Akhmetov, Yanukovych, and their shared political party. In 2007, Jackson andPaul Manafort (a lobbyist whose other clients have included two of the mostcorrupt rulers of modern times, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and FilipinoPresident Ferdinand Marcos) arranged meetings for Yanukovych in DC with USgovernment officials, including then US Vice President Cheney. Two years ago,after Yanukovych's election as president, Jackson set up DC appointments forthe Ukrainian foreign minister, who "kept interrupting everybody" during meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.(It should be noted that Yanukovych's opponents are reportedly as corrupt as he is andhave paid millions over the years fortheir own American lobbyists.)

At around the same time, areliable source told me, Jackson was holding court at a private club inWashington and loudly boasted, while drinking scotch and smoking a cigar, thathe and Manafort were working together on Yanukovych's PR efforts, but thatJackson himself was the real brains behind the operation.

All of which may explainhow Jackson's views on Ukraine have shifted over the years.

Back in 2002, theAssociated Press reported that Jackson, who was identified as "aWashington-based political adviser," had recently met with a pro-Westernopposition leader and criticized the first Yanukovych government. Three yearslater, during February 2005 testimony before the Senate Foreign RelationsCommittee, Jackson said Russia had spent $300 million "to basically rigthe outcome" of an election that Yanukovych had won the year before andhailed the "OrangeRevolution"that swept aside his "autocraticregime."

We Remember's 2005 IRS form doesn'tprovide a date for Akhmetov's contribution, but by the following year Jackson was introducingYanucovych to Cheney and other Washington VIPs, and has never, as far as I cantell, had a bad word to say about him since.

In a March 2010 speech to the US-UkraineBusiness Council, Jackson said the Obama administration should"wholeheartedly engage" with Yanukovych, who had been inaugurated aspresident the prior month. Whereas in 2005 Jackson had urged the US Senate toshun Yanukovych's "corrupt business allies," he now declared thatengagement needed to include "the so-called oligarchs."

Islamic State fighters are all over Iraq and Syria. Photo courtesy of VICE News

A story the following yearin a pro-government Ukrainian newspaper said Jacksondescribed as a"renowned American expert"considered Yanukovych to be a determinedreformer who was "really tormented by the corruption that is killing hiscountry." Jackson said that people in Yanukovych's administration"aren't really bad people... They are not stone-cold killers."

Jackson was still onYanukovych's side early last year, after his government killed dozens ofprotesters and he'd fled to Russia. "What worries him, Mr. Jackson said,is that the new government is too beholden to the people's movement on theMaidan," the New York Times reported in March 2014.

Through it all, Jackson haskept coming back to his French chateau. "We've done pretty well; these areall are Bordeaux trees," he told his guests as he led them through hisvineyards. "We... went back to indigenous stuff." He even dreams thathis estate might eventually be the site of a famous international declaration."It's a little pretentious, but someday we'll write a treaty here onsomething," he said. "And actually, the 'Treaty of Les Conseillians' has a nice ring to it."

When I called Jackson forcomment on the nonprofits in February, he declined to give any, other than tosay that he was in the process of shutting down the Project on TransnationalDemocracies.

"We haven't had agrant in two years," Jackson told me before hanging up. In a follow-upemail conversation in late April, he said the nonprofit was dissolved.

"It had not receivedany contributions for at least a couple of years and has not paid salariessince the early years of the last decade," Jackson wrote.

And by the way, a warning aboutthe wine Jackson produces: It's pretty shitty, I'm told by one person whosampled it, so whatever you think of the Iraq War, don't buy itor anythingelse he's selling in the future.

Follow Ken Silverstein on Twitter.

Welcome home, kid! Make the best of it, because you might never live in a house this nice again. Photo via Flickr user dedhed1950

There is a common misconception that living at home with your parents during university means that you are also missing out on university life, ie. growing as a person, eating residence food trash, and using weird codewords when trying to score drugs off your campus dealer. You will be missing out on certain experiences that you've seen in the movies, like being able to easily perform the one night stand, or being able to come home late without dealing with an authority figure.

But in this economy (this awful, student-hating economy) there is one very solid reason to stay home, it's hella cheap. Shacking up with your folks means you'll save on rent, you probably won't have to pay for food and, depending on how little you care about dignity, you can probably even raid their liquor cabinet. People live longer now so you can always grow as a person later on.

With that in mind, here's our A-Z guide on living with your parents and the shitty shit to expect and deal with during the next four years of lying and degrading yourself.

Mmmmm, allowance. Photo via Flickr user rick

Allowance

WIlliam S Burroughs' parents gave him a weekly allowance well into adulthood, which provided him with the means to all manner of debaucherous behaviour and regular flashes of pure literary brilliance. You're likely no Burroughsmore like one of those unfortunate souls whose parents stopped the allowance thing after they turned 15, or never had one in the first place. But your parents still foot the bill for something every now and then, so if your mom ever pays for the odd night out or an occasional bottle of booze, you should embrace the Burroughsian freeloader vibe and enjoy that shit full on.

Basement

This dank, crap-filled space that terrified you as a young'un is now your BFF. It is your one reprieve from your parents' naggingor, in my case, incessant queries on how to use email. The spot where you can smoke weed indoors and it (probably) won't get noticed. The place where you can bring back a babe and have awkward, standing-against-the-laundry-machine sex. Carve out some space amongst dad's prized used car parts collection for a futon, beer fridge and a crappy TV, since your parents are footing the cable bill. For the next four years, the basement is your lifeline. Own it.

Chores

Trashing my parent's house during parties made me an expert cleaner. I'll never forget that sinking feeling I had when my dad walked in the door at 5 AM on New Year's Day, following his graveyard shift, and was greeted by pee in the kitchen fridge and a massive hole in the bathroom created by someone who thought fire extinguishers were meant to be bashed into walls. When he peered outside, he noticed my dickhead friends had poured chocolate syrup all over the neighbour's vintage white Cadillac. Dealing with that mess was hell and, by comparison, made vacuuming everyday, non-bodily-produced stuff such as dust seem like child's play.

So look, I know you'd rather be playing video games and jerking off than doing the dishes but the truth is, even your parents have a breaking point. If mopping the floor once in a while keeps mom from having a Charlie Sheen-level meltdown, it's worth it. Play some music while you're cleaning, time will fly.

Drugs, drinking

It's a known fact that getting fucked up is infinitely harder/lamer when your parents are around. Now you're at an age where you can legally drink so your parents shouldn't really care, but deep down they still do. Either way, you can't let your parents find out that you get half-comatose on your weekends out.

For shenanigans at home, there are some widely accepted tricks. Everyone should know the smoking "spoof" tool by now: laundry sheets inside a toilet paper roll (although this does NOT work for cigarettes). If the spoof doesn't do the job, you can always light some incense as a cover up. Telling your parents that there's a skunk outside might work once, but they're (hopefully) not complete idiots.

If you think you've found a way to smoke cigarettes in secret, you are mistaken and your parents actually know that you smoke. Sorry. If you're drinking in secret at home, you should probably be less concerned with tricking your parents that you're drinking "water" and not straight vodka, and instead asking yourself why you're drinking alone at home and not at a bar with people your own age.

Explanations

I once came home hungover as shit at noon on a Friday, right in the middle of history or political science 101 (something useless, anyway), and my mom greeted me as I was parking the car. "Why are you skipping class?" was her first question, the most common one among parents of university kids living at home. "Urgha urgha urgha," I mumbled, my brain unable to process an answer that wasn't "I puked on the sidewalk so class seemed like a bad idea." It would have been fine there but then my mom had to come over to the car to scold me, noticing a frilly woman's dress in the backseat. Now, as a good Christian woman, she was very unhappy to see this. She demanded to know what happened and unable to process a good lie I went with the truth: "My rugby team initiated me at a party and I wore that all night." (Not the most original or progressive group, those lads were.) She just stood there, saying nothing, thinking of how it felt like only yesterday she had a sweet little boy and not some loser half-man.

The moral of this story is that if you live at home, you are going to learn whether you are a good liar or not.

Thanks, mom and dad. Photo via Flickr user kaizen.nguyn

Food

Food is expensive as fuck. Lucky you, you only need to buy it when there isn't any at home. As an aside: savour the shit out of that kitchen pantry, because once you leave the nest, there's no way you'll be buying grain-fed chicken and organic blueberries, or any fruit, tbh. As for grocery shopping, in addition to being straight-up boring, it forces you to abandon your principles when you realize that cruelty-free meat actually costs more than your monthly income. In short, living solo will mean a steady diet of gas station cup noodles and chips.

The only real problem with having an endless bounty of free food is that you have to carry it everywhere, which means you need to start thinking about what a good mobile meal is made of. Harder fruit with a peel, like apples, oranges, and pears are good to usually survive the trek. Sandwiches are easy to make and carry but could get soggy. Once you start wanting to get fancy and bring your fucking soups, stews, and chilli to school, your load gets a bit heavier. If you've got optimum space and strength, go for it. Or maybe just learn to exist on coffee and street meat.

Getting some

Getting any is hard enough on its own without the added challenge of finding a decent location in which to get it. Parks aren't ideal, and you will literally freeze your dick/tits/whatever off in winter, which, for some of us, is like half the year. Sure, there are probably staircases around that you can use but let's face it, it's hard to get turned on with hard wooden edges digging into your spine. If you and your fuck buddy both live with your parents, you'll have to seize the small windows of opportunities you'll be granted. Parents going on a short trip? DON'T GO. You have things to do at home. If your parents can't go on vacation, because they have to work overtime to support their bloodsucking offspring, you have a couple other options. Play music in your room while you're having sex. I recommend playing "Drunk in Love" on a loop, which is not only loud, but crazy hot 'cause you can actually picture Jay Z and Bey going at it. To that end, STFU when you're having an orgasm. It's bad enough you're doing it with your parents in the next room, they certainly do not need to hear anything more than what's absolutely necessary. If you have an actual boo, the two of you could save up with the money you're not wasting on basic necessities, and go on a weekend trip. Hotel rooms = sex all day erryday!

Holidays

Students who go home for the holidays are treated like gods, showered with attention andmore importantlyexempt from having to help out with any of the boring tasks that make up 99 percent of festivities. You, on the other hand, home dweller, are little more than a work horse. Whether you're celebrating Christmas, Eid, or your little brother's bar mitzvah, if you're living at home, your services will be called upon. This means: idling in the kitchen while pretending to help mom cook turkey (pro tip: offer to help peel something and take three hours doing it); wrapping presents; smiling politely as your relatives comment on your weight/skin problems as if you hadn't notice that huge breakout on your forehead or the fact that you're kind of chubbs now; pretending to like children, because, as the young person who ostensibly has the most energy, you will be expected to play with them. It's all good though, because the holidays only last a couple of days and there is plenty of booze around to help you muster up the requisite enthusiasm.

Internet (data plan, etc) or Incognito mode

Mooching internet is less fun when your history can be viewed by your family. Unless you want your parents to know about your creepy belly-button fetish (it's a thing) educate yourself on using Incognito Mode (which we're sure you have) if you must share a family computer. If your parents are paying for your data via a family plan: 1) you should never leave home, 'cause that is saweeet; 2) they might for some reason feel entitled to hear from you more often as well. Like, when they ask you how you are and if you ate dinner, answer right away or else you might end up having to pay for that sweet, sweet cyberspace on your ownthen you might not be able to afford dinner.

Jobs

My college job was at a large chain bookstore, which I assumed would be super laid-back and, you know, bookish. It wasn't. Somewhere along the way (I guess when people stopped buying books), the company started going super hard on things like scented yoga mats and knitted pashminas for dogs, thus attracting a mix of insufferable mom bloggers and, because of our central downtown location, drunk homeless people, all of whom demanded lightning-quick service. I started showing up to shifts wasted just to get through the Christmas rush. My friends hosted an intervention. Shit was bleak. Which leads me to my next point: bar jobs are a much better way to go when you're in school. You have flexible hours and pocket lots of tips, and, after your shift is over, you can just stay there and spend all your money on disgusting shots of Jger. If you do land a paying gig, treat your parents to dinner or something every so often (once a semester is enough). It will give you the feels and also keep up the illusion that you are in some way contributing to the household.

That is a real-ass keg stand. Photo via Facebook

Keggers

Unless you're an Italian man, living with your parents as an adult is inherently uncool. The only way to make it okay is to take advantage of the situation and throw a party. I'm not talking about sneaking into your dad's liquor cabinet (see: below), or having a few pals over for a polite barbeque, I'm talking about throwing a rager. The kegger is the single most important tradition for house parties in the modern world.

Think big. You want it to be epic enough that on Monday kids will come up to you and say things like "Dude! I heard a kid broke his leg kicking six cops at your party!"

Your parents want you be responsible. What teaches responsibility more than rushing to clean more than one pile of vomit on the carpet before your parents come home from their holiday?

Liquor cabinet

When I first started drinking, I would refill whatever I stole from my dad's stash with water. Even when I did score my own booze, I was unnecessarily sketchy about it, hoarding all my girlfriends into my brother's room to down shots and then making my exit falling down drunk, leaving the empty bottle of Bacardi in plain sight. Neither strategy worked very well, and the result was one pissed off dad. Depending on how cool your parents are, things should be better now that you're legal age. They might even Here's a quick guide:

Chill parents: The liquor cabinet is a blessing.

Not chill parents: The liquor cabinet is a trap.

Worst-case-scenario parents: The liquor cabinet doesn't exist.

Masturbation

You're not 14 anymore... by now you should really have mastered the art of covertly jerking off while your parents are around (and have figured out a way of dealing with the ensuing shame spiral). Just make sure to clean up any banana mess.

Nightlife

Admittedly, you're a little more limited when you live at home cause you don't have the benefit of having debaucherous roommates on hand to go get fucked up with you. But, your living sitch has its advantages. You can pre-drink for free at home, ideally with your dad's cheap vodka (see: above). And, because you have extra pocket money, you can afford to get so wasted that you idiotically buy all 15 of your homies a round of tequila shots and not have to wake up to the realization that you just spent your rent money in one night. On some losers from your philosophy class. Also, when you get back home, you have an unlimited supply of munchies. Forget the nasty $1 pizza, y'all got leftover butter chicken.

Orgasms (specifically your parents')

If you have not yet borne witness to the act of your birth-givers fornicating, consider yourself lucky. Although they have probably had plenty of practice trying to keep quiet, I guess sometimes the power of the orgasm can just take over vocal chords and genitals alike. Accidentally hearing your parents having sex even has a name, according to Urban Dictionary: "accidental incest." Everyone remembers the moment when they realize that their parents still have sex anddear lord it's been happening meters away from you for your entire life. When listening to a roommate have crazy kinky sex, you can kind of brush it off and know that it's something you can hold against them when your times comes for equally crazy kinky sex. Not so much with mom and dad. Ew.

Thanks for being prescribed Percocet and deciding it "makes your head too fuzzy," mom! Photo via Flickr user e-Magine Art

Prescription meds

As semi-old people, your folks will have more serious medical problems, so when it comes to prescription drugs, they'll get the good shit. Dad's hernia removal = weeks of T3-induced blackouts. If your parents are anything like mine, they'll have a brilliant assortment of meds tucked away in their closet, enough not to notice if you snake a few pills here and there. Why fuck with Melatonin when you can have a Xanax?

Quarter-life crisis

At the height of my quarter-life crisis, I came home after a night of partying and discovered that my mom had removed and hidden all the stove-top elements because she didn't trust me to cook mac and cheese without burning the place down. I was 24 and she was literally baby-proofing the house. To be fair, I had passed out drunk with the stove on twice, setting off the smoke alarms. But still, it felt patronizing. At the time, I also had a dead-end job and was in a mediocre relationship, so, perfect quarter-life crisis trifecta. If you're in a similar boatlike you're almost done your archaeology degree when you realize it's a lot of goddamn boring lab work and there are zero situations involving stealing religious relics from the Nazisrelax. The fear that comes with having no financial stability, nothing and no one to call your own, might just be the kick in the ass you need. Stop stress-crying in the public bathroom and use the time you have left in school to build contacts (aka kiss ass to profs who can help you get a job later). You probably won't end up a failure, but even if you do, at least you're in good company these days. Blasting Taylor Swift's "22" on repeat will help, too.

Rent

Rent, aka the act of paying cash money for housing, is still a foreign concept to you. Perhaps not as foreign as the actual musical Rent, but still way outside of your wheelhouse. Once you leave the house, you will be rent's bitch, probably for the rest of your life. For now, you can breezily spend that few hundred dollars a month on crap like: a new video game console, tickets to a sports game, a premium porn subscription, grillz. But the smart thing to do is save that cash for when you eventually move out of the house: you'll need it to pay the rent.

If you're one of those unfortunate people whose parents are charging you rent because they're trying to teach you a lesson, the lesson is this: "Get the fuck out of our house." And you should heed it, because why pay rent and live at home?

Spoiled

Even if you're one of those weirdos who, like, listens to your parents and "pulls your weight" around the house, living at home means you're somewhat spoiled. Your parents can't help it, you're their baby and they're going to treat you like a baby. Yes, it's suffocating at times, but try to enjoy it. In my case, my mom did everything for me. I mean, she actually transported my dirty, blood-stained clothing to my dad's place, because he has a laundry machine and I didn't want to pay for the coin-operated ones, and then my dad would do said laundry and fold it, and my mom would pick it up and bring it back to our apartment. My parents aren't even togetherthey're just really shitty friends. Point is, no one is ever going to treat you as well as your parents do, unless you pay them handsome amounts of money. Bask in it.

Television

It is 2015, and we are experiencing Peak TV. But with the exception of the Oscars, sports, and Game of Thrones finales (Jon Snow lives!), there is no goddamn reason in the world to actually sit on a couch around a television with your family. That being said, this is a good time for bonding (bad Game of Thrones sex assault scenes aside). Talking to your mom about sports or the Oscars requires virtually no cognitive effort on your part ("Those Blue Jays sure hit the biscuit right good, mom.") and will make your parents feel good about your "relationship" because you are "communicating." Why not do this, it might get you out of doing chores on Saturday morning sometime because they don't think you are literally a garbage person.

Uncle Hugs

More commonly known as that family member (usually uncle) who embraces a little too tight and a little too long for comfort. You'll have to deal with these more often when you live at home, close to you family. If it's not your uncle, it's your residence advisor, so it's a wash.

Vehicle

Having access to a car is definitely a plus, especially if you live in a city where transit is less than useful. But that convenience often comes with a price, like pairing your drive home from exams with picking up your dad and his retired work buddies from their annual Christmas season get-together at their divey local, where they think they can still pound pints like in the good ole days. Get ready for dumb jokes, excessive chortling, and more than a few questions about "the girls at school" as you try to discern ever-shifting verbal directions for where you need to go to drop the crew members off. Almost makes you want to consider a metropass, or at least having a little more sympathy for cabbies.

Take Amber Rose's sage life advice and turn your walk of shame into a walk of no shame! Walk Of No Shame with Amber Rose from Funny Or Die

Walk (home) of shame

Speaking from experience, the walk home of shame is about 35,948,732,803 times worse than if you were walking home to your parent's home shamefully (This is only funny if you are old and home for Christmas holidays.) Parents wake up early, always early enough to watch you take your first steps through the thresholdwhether there are shoes on your feet or not. Neighbours judge you and there's probably a rumour going around the hood that you aren't aware of. With your now-greasy hair, tired eyes, and slouchy walk, it's pretty obvious. This might explain the glances that you've been getting on the way home from your late classes. Old people on porches are terrible things.

Xenophobia

All parents are racist. Some more than others, but they all are to some extent. You can't teach an old dog new tricks and you also can't teach your parent to be politically correct and to stop referring to your friends by their ethnicity. Your newfound inner political justice warrior from the clubs at school won't take any effect on your parents, or aunts and especially grandparents. Home is where the lost cause is.

YOLO

While the tenets of YOLO, the most important new religion of the 21st century seem contrary to living with your parents, just remember that your parents are TOLO (They Only Live Once). Soon they will be dead and you could be left with the memory of being an asshole to the parents who raised you and, more importantly, allowed you to live with them long after you could have been expected to get the hell out. YOLO's second commandment is "Don't be such a shitbird."

Zoophilia

Stay away from your pets, kids!

John Keene. Photo by Nina Subin/courtesy of New Directions Publishing

In an era whenso many books and films seem concerned with the self and the now, John Keene's recentstory collection, Counternarratives,opens a vast and vital eye toward the past, while charting inspired new imaginedterritories.

Encompassinghundreds of fictional and historical characters over several centuries, and utilizing a mesmerizing array of stylesincluding slave narrative,historical document, stream of consciousness, fever dream, diary, field manual,concrete poetrythe book amasses a vision of epic capacity. In magic-like language, Counternarrativesexplores the experiences of rebel slaves and slave women, and features a reimagining of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer years in the future (which appeared on VICE.com), as well as the secret love life of Langston Hughes.

Of the scope of William T. Vollmann or Samuel R. Delany, but with a kaleidoscopic intuition all its own, Counternarratives is very easily one ofthe most vividly imagined and vitally timed books of the year. I haven't feltso refreshed in quite a while as a reader.

I spoke last month over the phone with John Keene about narrative, history, empathy, racism,and a lot more.

VICE: Your book has so many threads anddirections and stations, and yet they fit together so satisfyingly I keptfinding myself reading it as a novel.
John Keene: The writer and writer-critic Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook that she read it that way too, as a kind ofexperimental novel, and I'm a huge fan of her so I took that as the highestcompliment. But I really was thinking of it as intersecting in a formal,dramatic, philosophical way, as intersecting but non-directly connecting stories.But every story has a parallel story. And there are all these interior connections,interior architectures that reveal themselves.

The first storyout of all of these that I wrote was "An Outtake from Ideological Origins ofthe American Revolution." I was in grad school when I wrote that. I was tryingsomething different from the things I had been writing at the time. I wassitting in a classroom in New York thinking about how all of New York City hadslavery before the Civil WarI mean well into the 1800sbut there were no physicalsigns of that past. So I was interested in thinking about how I might animateand dramatize that hidden past. Once I finished that story and it wasworkshopped and I discussed it with my professor, who was E. L. Doctorow, then Iactually wrote a second section that I saw as in conversation with that firstsection, and then later, the final story of the collection, which is in acertain way the culmination and response or colloquy with the proceedingsections.

why do you think this term appears in here andwhat does it tell us about the moment, the era, the time in which it waswritten?"

I think this is actually very, very powerful for students. But it'sthe role of the teacher to contextualize and assist the students inunderstanding why a book reads the way it does. This is not just in the matterof race and racism, but gender and misogyny, and homophobia and classism incertain kinds of books. Because if a book is a very good book on most levels, wewant to understand not only why it's a good book and its successes, but alsowhat are its failures? What is problematic about it? Not just a book, but anywork of art. What is succeeding in it, and also what isn't succeeding?

As an author, particularly in a time like today, do you feel a responsibilitya historical responsibilityto yourreader or to history?
I do. And Ithink some of the stories more clearly lend themselves to certain kindsof readings, such as in thinking about the boundedness of black bodies and ourunderstanding of freedom and democracy in the United States today and thelimits of liberalism and ideologyand how we might think about moving forward.

But I do feelthere's a continuum between the past and today, and it really is important thatpeople think about what was happening then because we don't operate in avacuum. So much of our discourse today is still informed by our history, inthis country and this hemisphere.

Watch: VICE Meets Norwegian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

I've always had problems with a lot ofrealistic fiction because it so often seems to bemissing so much of the magic and sensuality that your work is able toaccomplish. I wonder how much you consider that condition and your viewpointamongst it as an eye that integrates so much musicality and imagination intofact.
I think a lot ofit has to do with the economics of publishing, and the kinds of expectationsthat people have for the workwhat people want to read, what people areinterested in. Part of it is a product of the institutional forces that manywriters now engage with, not just in publishing but with MFA programs. I don'tagree that those programs ruin writing, and in fact there's much one can say topraise them.

But alongsidethat, there is this long tradition of experimentation, of play, of doing thingsthat aren't the expected things. And when we look back on the history ofliterature, and think about writers that we return to again and again, they arepeople who are the embodiment of their time in certain ways, but quite oftenthey are people who are writing not against the time, but against the tide. Youlook at someone like Whitman or Dickinson or Faulkner or Langston Hughes orGwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and you see a whole onslaughtof interesting approaches.

That isn't tosay someone like Edith Wharton isn't importantshe's a great writer, and wereturn to her for what she wrote and the way she wrote it. But I do think I wasvery conscious of the fact that in certain ways this book, Counternarratives, doesn't look like most of the books that are outthere right now. But it is in conversation with those texts. It comes out ofthe same political and economic forces. But it is different. And I think that'sa good thing.

Though I dothink, in trying to find a publisher, writers internalize this. They see whatgets praised and what gets championed, and then they think, I have this story Iwant to tell, and I have all these ways I could tell it, and so what ways willmost probably lead me to seeing it in print? We're really sort of socialized tosee the world in certain ways. And I think that does affect how people write. Maybeyou write the tamer fantasy, make it more polished, and you win the PulitzerPrize.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

Counternarratives by John Keene is out now from NewDirections Publishing.

MATTE magazine is a photography journal I started in 2010 as a way to shed light on good new photography. Each issue is devoted to the work of one artist, and the magazine is printed in full color with no ads and sold for the cost of production. MATTE is collected by the libraries of MoMA, ICP, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As photo editor at large of VICE, I'm excited to share my discoveries with a wider audience.

^{Photo by Michael Northrup from MATTE magazine no. 40: Homeless}

When I approached photographer Curran Hatleberg about dedicating an issue of MATTE to his photographs, he suggested I instead should let him curate an issue. I said yes, and that's how we got MATTE's first-ever group issue, featuring 20 photographers who each submitted pictures and text.

Curran chose to turn the issue into a place where "homeless" imagespictures that are valuable but don't fit into a particular series, or for whatever other reason haven't found a place within the scope of their author's workcan coexist without necessarily having to relate to one another directly. It's a home for wayward photographs that contains everything from photos Katy Grannan took of her friends in the sixth grade to George Awde's intimate Polaroids from Egypt to Justine Kurland's pictures of people who are without a permanent home.

The photographers represented here mostly live in America, and these are mostly pictures of the real world. But this isn't an impression of United States today so much as it is a look at contemporary artists who are committed to the medium of photography as a life's pursuit and a lineage to work within. These pictures are the surplus of an intuitive and sincere approach to the medium: Taking photos based on impulse, searching for something that resonates, working ahead of what can be understood or explained.

Below is a selection of images from MATTE magazine no. 40: Homeless. The magazine was launched today at Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair at PS1 MoMA. Copies will be available there all weekend.

Photo by Dru Donovan

Photo by Vanessa Winship

Photo by Justine Kurland

Photo by Gregory Halpern

Photo by Ed Panar

Photo by Matthew Booth

Photo by Susan Lipper

Photo by Kate Greene

Photo by Elaine Stocki

Photo by Curran Hatleberg

Photo by George Awde

Photo by Whitney Hubbs

Photo by Fisher and Leonard

Photo by Matthew Leifheit

Photo by Jason Fulford

Photo by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Photo by Rory Mulligan

Photo by Irina Rozovsky

Photo by Katy Grannan

Photo by John Divola

Purchase copies of MATTE magazine no. 40: Homeless here, and find out more on mattemagazine.org.

Photos via Wikimedia Commons, JeremyCorbyn.org.uk, and Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On Tuesday, in the second weirdest example of the press losing their shit about Jeremy Corbyn (the first being the Telegraph calling his Shadow Chancellor a "nut-job") this article in the Times described Jeremy Corbyn's bike as a "Chairman Mao-style bicycle."

Ah yes, a Chairman Mao-style bicycle. Like those bikes that Chairman Mao famously used to ride to military displays.

I get what the journalist was going for. It's another example of the micro-scrutiny of the UK's new Labour leader. You know, stuff like: He wears clothes like a geography teacher and has a beard like a socialist student. But those are references that people understand. I've just never heard of a Maoist bike.

To find out if I was just being stupid and naive, I called up some bike shops to see if I could find myself a bike worthy of a Communist despot.

Jeremy Corbyn speaking to some people, not on a bike. Photo by Henry Langston

The Red Bike Shop

VICE: Hello, I was wondering if you could help me. I'm looking for a Mao bike?
The Red Bike Shop: A Mao?

Yeah, M-A-O.
I don't know it I'm afraid. Sorry, say that again?

I think it might be a Chinese bike?
We certainly don't sell them or stock them. What do you need, are you looking to buy one?

Yeah, basically I've heard it's the one Jeremy Corbyn has actually, and that's why I'm looking for it. Someone said it was a Mao bike?
Have you had a look online? How do you spell it?

M-A-O. Is anything coming up? It might have been another famous dictator actually?
Wait, there's a picture of him OK, here we go. Images. Oh, it's a Dutch-style bike. Yeah, if you look up "Dutch bike"we don't do it. Just look up "Dutch bike."

Is that a socialist bike?
Erm... Not really, it's just a bike. I don't think bikes are really defined by their political persuasion.

OK. Yeah, that's what I thought. I guess it's just the Times being weird. Thanks anyway.

Follow Sirin on Twitter.

Look at Berliac's website and Tumblr, and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Adam Waito

The stereotypes of LA are real. Everyone is skinnier, blonder, and richer than you. You drive everywhere and the traffic sucks. But there's no better stereotype than walking into a commercial callback for a beer spot and being told to strip down to a bikini. I remember it like it was yesterday. I just signed with my commercial agent and I wasn't booking anything. I was walking dogs to make a living and I was desperate to get any sort of acting work to validate my move to America. I wore a bathing suit instead of a bikini as some sort of passive aggressive protest against this humiliating romp. My classical theatre training was being disgraced and yet, I still showed up.

My heart was racing. I knew going into the audition I was going to have to strip down, but something about being there made it so much worse. Maybe it was the fact that I had no lines of dialogue in this commercial? Maybe it was the fact that we waited outside for an hour like a herd of cattle? Maybe it was the fact that I knew if I got the job, it was because my body was "hot enough" for the brand and if I didn't, I wasn't? My self-worth was riding on this job, I knew it and it felt terrible.

Either way, I took off my clothes and a wave of shame washed over me. The beer dudes stared through me and I felt my knees buckling. I was throwing myself under the bus and I knew it. I'm better than this, I thought. But I was there openly being critiqued, voluntarily.

I remember running to my car and crying. I felt so ashamed for degrading myself to allowing my literal body to be the judge of my work. And yet, acting is a visual medium. It comes with the territory. I thought if this is the type of acting work I came to LA for, maybe I made a huge mistake.

I moved to Los Angeles from Toronto, Canada about six years ago. I still say Toronto, Canada, assuming people still don't know where Toronto is but since I've left, Rob Ford became America's sweetheart and Drake made Toronto "The 6ix." I left when it was still just T Dot. You've now likely seen me on one screen or another. Canadian casting directors who wouldn't see me when I lived in Toronto, now offer me roles without even auditioning for them. It's very cliche, but once you get noticed in the States, Canada follows suit. So I would say, all in all: I made a positive life choice. (Albeit, I have to live in America, which is... for another article.)

I left when I was in my early 20s. And I mention that because I still think of them as my golden years. The years when I thought I knew everything and didn't know enough to be afraid or insecure about anything. I was confident enough to pick up my entire life (which honestly wasn't very much at the time) to make a name for myself in Hollywood. To give you some context, I knew a grand total of three people in LA. I had no talent representation. I was being actively discouraged by every entertainment professional from whom I sought advice. Everyone said you need to make it in Canada and get "invited" to the States. And I said, "fuck that."

I wasn't entirely interested in any of the television shows I was auditioning for in Canada. Everything felt too safe and frankly, too government funded. I wanted to follow the people whose careers I admired; Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn... Paul Rudd. I wanted to be in a town where my favourite movies and TV shows were being made. I wanted to be in the center of the storm. I made a decent living off of commercials in Canada at the time, but I heard you could buy a house making commercials in the States. (I've since done the math and it is true if you book exactly 18 commercials a year, save every penny, and eat dog food for dinner.) That was alluring at the time.

As luck would have it, I booked my first studio movie right before I was set to move. A small part in a big action film. I was on set for 25 days, always hair and makeup ready, but they never wanted me on camera. I made about 20K and I was in the movie for 0.3 seconds. After that experience I realized I was hired as a Toronto local hire. Which is a rule the studios make with the Canadian film industry because they hire the lead talent from LA or NYC. And I knew I wasn't interested in waiting to be invited. Especially not if this was how it was going. And that's how it was going.

So I moved. I moved just after the housing market crashed. I moved when they reversed Prop 8. I moved and Griffith Park (a hiking refuge for unemployed actors) was on fire for two weeks. I woke up every morning and there was a veil of soot covering the entire street. There was smoke in the air every day on top of the smog. I was very close to suffocating to death and even that wasn't enough to send me packing back to clean Canada. No. I came with a dream and going back with my tail between my legs was a non-starter. Especially because I had a "See You Fuckers Later" party, which was a big farewell bash that implied I'm not coming back until my rider only lets me fly private. So going back at any point would be the ego injury of the century. Despite my incessant loneliness, my binge eating, my desperate nights at bars trying to make conversation with bartenders who didn't have time for me, I stayed in LA. I stayed because I was beautifully delusional and naive and my hope to "make it in this town" was, just like everyone else's, extraordinarily powerful. Self will is a majestic creature.

I bought my first car in LA a few weeks in. It was a white Honda civic coupe and it reminded me of my late grandmother's white Buick. It felt like a poetic purchase. What I didn't know and what no one told me was that it was lowered to the ground and had very expensive shiny rims. It was four years old and was potentially an extra in one of the Fast & Furious movies. Without friends or a career, most of my first few months were spent driving around trying to understand my now-terrifying decision to live here. I remember driving and looking at all these new streets and buildings and thinking to myself, I have no associations with ANYTHING here.

One night I found myself driving along Western Boulevard, which is a street that runs north-south through Hollywood all the way down to Inglewood. There isn't one point along this massive strip that feels hopeful. Western is a street with dead vibes. It's littered with liquor and mattress stores and deep potholes. And driving in my car particular car added a special kind of fear factor to the natural bumps of the road. As I drove, I remember cruising by a nice Korean boy and hearing him call out, "Sweet ride!" Somehow the compliment didn't resonate positively and I felt paralyzed. I looked around and I thought to myself, Everyone has guns here and anyone could kill me. That was the only thought that went through my (Canadian) brain.

There was no reason to think this other than the basic fact that guns are a popular thing in the US and they aren't where I come from. He didn't look violent but I was completely panic stricken. I thought, I could die and no one here knows me and then I'll be the girl in the Fast & Furious car dead on the worst street in the world. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I drove home and started to hatch some sort of plan to make something of myself in this city.

Sometimes when I think about that Korean boy who liked my car I remember him with a combination of shame and gratitude. His kindness terrified me. Him seeing me made me feel like I existed in a place where I felt completely invisible. I couldn't conceal myself in my car or my apartment. I couldn't pretend I was doing better than I was. People saw me, even when I was trying to hide. I was there. I was living in Los Angeles. I did what I always dreamed about doing. I bought a ticket and a car and went to Hollywood. Just like they do in the movies.

That moment of being seen was in strict opposition to when the beer commercial bros were intently checking me over. But sitting in that car, I figured, I'm still here and I have a roof and a car and a dream.

*Julia Mistflower is a writer, performer and Torontonian living in Los Angeles. This is a fake name so that she can be as real as possible with you, cuties. She likes vintage cars, dope shoes, and smart human brains. She'll be writing for VICE Canada about acting and living in Hollywood and will remember to use her u's.

More of VICE's coverage of the GOP debate:

Who 'Won' Wednesday's Republican Debate?

Ben Carson Is V. Chill

The Most Surprising Moment from CNN's GOP Debate

If America learned one thing from CNN's three-hour-long Republican presidential debate Wednesday, it was that Republican presidentialdebates definitely shouldn't be three hours long. Sweaty and blinking underblazing lights in the Ronald Reagan presidential library, the 11 candidates lookedmore like the shipwrecked survivors of a corporate plane crash, dazed after being hauled out fromthe ocean and forced to give a press conference in front of the giant jet thatrescued them. By the end of the night, Chris Christie was beet-red, Scott Walker had turned an alarming shadeof pale green, and Jeb Bush looked around like he was surprised to be alive. Eventhe tirelessly high-energy Donald Trump was keeling over, clutching his podium for support.

Later, cornered by an eager reporter who asked whatsurprised him about the night, Trump responded matter-of-factly, "I wassurprised I could stand up for three hours. Seriously, it must be some kind ofrecord." It was not the answer the young man was expecting, I'm sure, butnonetheless an apt summary of the night. Three hours is too long to expectanyone to maintain a coherent narrative, let alone a bunch of sixty-somethings armed with talking points that weren't all thatcoherent to begin with.

In general, though, the debate went as everyone expected itwould. Panicked by their flagging poll numbers, and desperate for a littleairtime, candidates went after Trump like kamikaze pilots, only to be thrownoff course by The Donald's one-liners and bored eyerolls. Trump kicked off thebloodbath when, asked to respond toCarly Fiorina's shot at his ability to handle the nuclear codes, he insteadtook an out-of-nowhere shot at Rand Paul from which Paul never reallyrecovered. When Walker tried to hit Trump with a bad joke about not wanting an Apprentice in the White House (get it?), Trump reminded theWisconsin governor that he has driven the state's economy into the ground.

Bush tried the hardest, dragging Trump into a prolongedback-and-forth that included a demand that Trump apologize to Bush'swife, who was sitting in the front row. Trump declined, and eventually shut itdown with a casually back-handed, "High energy tonight, Jeb, I like that." Inthe end, the only candidate who managed to get the upperhand on the frontrunnerwas Carly Fiorina, knocking the slow pitch Trump threw with his comments abouther face out of the park.

From there, though, the night got blurry. Questions blendedinto one another, setting off a chain of rebuttals that tended to end with thecandidates shouting over each other. Sensing that the three debate moderatorswere out of their depth, the inmates eventually took over the asylum, and thewhole event devolved into a soupy morass of war declarations, tax plans, and Reaganfellatio. By the end of the night, Bush and Trump were giving eachother low-fives, Rand Paul was calling himself "Justice Never Sleeps," and multiple candidates had declared that they'd like to puttheir female relatives on US currency.

The countervailing narrative going into the debate was thatthis was going to be a fight between the political "outsiders"Trump, Fiorina,and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, none of whom have ever heldelected officeand the eight professional politicians on stage with them. Inthe six weeks since the first presidential debate, the former group has shown any momentum in 2016 polling, while the rest of the field has seen theirsupport drop, or, in Walker's case, completely flatline. Most politicalhandicappers have attributed the shift to voters' dissatisfaction with theRepublican Party, and the political system in general. The latest New York Times/CBS poll, released the day before the CNN debate, bears out this theory,showing Trump and Carson leading the rest of the field by more than 20 points.

After watching Wednesday's debate, though, these numbersmake more sense. While no one can actually "win" a clusterfuck, Trump, Carson, andFiorina seemed to be the only one's who came out unscathed, and not simply because they lack political experience. In a debate thatdemanded no policy substanceor substance in generaland that turned spatsabout job numbers and casino permits into RealHousewives-style brawlsthe candidates who win are the ones who the viewerslike watching.

A decade of NBC ratings have already told us that Republicanvoters like to watch Donald Trump. And the fact that those voters rather watch abusinesswoman and a very chill black neurosurgeon than a herd of slippery white politicians bragging about how they shutdown the government or Planned Parenthood suggests that perhaps these voters have better judgment than we give themcredit for.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

Look at all these dudes who want to run the country. Photo via The Canadian Press

Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV, Canada's three main political dudes took over the boob tube to scrap over the state of the economy and how much two-thirds of them hate Stephen Harper.

In the Globe & Mail-hosted debate, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau traded barbs over the budget, social spending, infrastructure, and whatever else their handlers told them to talk about.

We (Parliamentary Correspondent Justin Ling, VICE.com Managing Editor Josh Visser, VICE News reporter Hilary Beaumont, Social Media Producer Navi Lamba and random blogger Seb FoxAllen) wrote this live blog as we got a little drunk (on politics).

Archived blog begins now!

9:57 - It's all over. Final analysis. Whatever you thought about the candidates before this debate, you still think the same thing. Only 32 more days. May God have mercy on our souls. - JV

9:54-

9:51 - The Jays won. - SF

9:45 - Walmsley: I'm sure you'd agree we had a debate tonight. A highly anticipated, extraordinary debate debate. -HB

9:44 - Wow is it just me or was that just an absolutely extraordinary exchange of ideas. - SF

9:44 - DING! - JV

9:41 - 'They cut seniors!' - Stephen Harper. - JV

9:40 - Here's the 2015 election in one image. - SF

9:37 -

9:36 - Anyone know how Elizabeth May's doing? This was quite the claim. -HB

Photo via Flickr user utcomm

In early February 2014, an exhausted 17-year-oldnamed Sujon Alom was arrested in Texas after illegally crossing theborder from Mexico. In the children's detention facility where he was held,Alom's fellow inmates were mostly Central American. He was from a littlefurther afield: His journey began in Noakhali, a rural district in southeasternBangladesh. It had been a long, dangerous, and difficult trip.

"I knew that I was going to come to Americaby road, that I was going to cross different countries," said Alom, who hasbeen released while his asylum petition is pending.Speaking through aninterpreter in a cramped tutoring center in Jamaica, Queens, he recounted indetail the remarkable and often hellish overland odyssey that he had taken toreach the United States. After flying from Bangladesh, Alom's land journeybegan in Bolivia. Traveling via various forms of transportation includingbuses and taxis, he had been smuggled north through Peru, Ecuador, Colombia,and on to Panama, across Central America. He had hiked for days through theEcuadorian and Panamanian rainforests, rarely stopping to sleep. At one point in Mexico, he and 12 others spent three days locked in a semi trailer with nofood. When he reached the US border, which he said he crossed in a small boatalong with about 20 other migrants, it had been three and a half months sincehe'd left Bangladesh. He had traversed 11 different countries by road and foot.

He hadn't seen a bed in 4,000 miles.

On VICE News: 'I'm Doing it to Survive': Crossing the Croatian Border with Hundreds of Migrants

Alom's story, if incredible, is not unique. As Europe grapples with a catastrophic migrant crisis, and as the USheads into a presidential election in which immigration is set to become acentral issue, an overlooked but growing group of undocumented migrants, mainlyfrom South Asia, has forged a preposterously circuitous corridor through SouthAmerica in the hope of reaching the United States. Thousands of people fromBangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Nepal are traveling up to 10,000 overlandmiles from as far south as Bolivia and Argentinaa trip that can take anywherefrom three to six months. Along the way, migrants endure kidnappings, longdetentions, hunger, and sickness. The harrowing details of this long South Asian marchthrough South America offer a particularly dismaying illustration of theincreasingly extreme risks that some are taking in the pursuit of a better life.

So far this year, there have been 2,988 apprehensions of Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Nepalis, compared to 924 in the whole of 2012.

Fahd Ahmed, a staff member at DRUM NYC, alarge union for documented and undocumented South Asian migrants, first heard reportsof Indian and Bangladeshi individuals showing up at the US-Mexico border in2010. Before that time, "Usually people would come here on a visit visa andoverstay," explained Ahmed, who is now the director of DRUM. It was discoveredthat immigrants from Asia, particularly South Asia, had been flying toGuatemala, where they joined the stream of Central American individuals headingtoward the US. Some news outlets reportedthat small numbers of migrants were thought to be arriving through SouthAmerica, though these cases were never confirmed in the press. In the followingyears, as international focus on migration into Guatemala intensified, landfallpoints were pushed much farther south. It was only a year and a half ago thatAhmed began to hear stories of DRUM members who had traveled from Peru,Bolivia, and Brazil. He now hears such stories with increasing frequency.

This route, which could be up to threetimes as long as the journey from Guatemala, appears to be the new norm. JohnLawit, an immigration attorney based in Texas, told me that in the past 18months he's interviewed 70 people from Bangladesh and India who wereapprehended at the Mexico border. Every single one of them, he explained, hadmade the overland journey through South America. According to Lawit, roughly 50people in that group signed affidavits affirming the details of their journey.

Lawit, who has since left that law firm, described one man's account from an affidavit that he wasworking on at the time of the interview. "He left Bangladesh in August of 2014,"he said. "He then went to Dubai, then to Brazil, then to Argentina, then toBolivia. From Bolivia he went back to Brazil. Then he went to Venezuela, thento Colombia. Then to Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, drove to El Salvador, thenon to Guatemala. Took a bus to the Mexican border. He was arrested and jailedfor 13 days in Mexico, then he was given a 20-day visa to leave Mexico andreturn to Bangladesh. And at that point he came to the United States."

He paused. "That's prettytypical."

The migrants who spoke to VICE were oftenkept in the dark about where exactly their smugglers were taking them, so it'sdifficult to estimate exactly what kind of distances they covered. By road, thejourney from La Paz to El Paso, Texas is roughly 6,000 miles. But these migrants often cross borders between South and Central Americancountries illegally by foot and take long detours in order to evadeimmigration authorities and police, so their actual routes are probably much longer.

"For many people in Bangladesh, life is just unbearable, because they have to choose the right side, and if they don't choose the right side they're persecuted." John Lawit

One Bangladeshi crosser, Akash, whose real name I have withheld because he is undocumented, began his overland journey inPeru. He described various multi-day treks through difficult terrain, includingsteep mountainous areas and thick jungles. He was taken from Colombia to Panamaby boat, probably across the Gulf of Urab, which has, according to theColombian Navy, become a busy transit route for migrants from many different countries, such asCuba and Haiti. Akash, like others, described being held in safe houses alongthe route, sometimes spending weeks in unfamiliar towns and cities, the namesof which they were often never told. Detentions and kidnappings are common.

Official figures reflect a significantspike in South Asian overland migration into the US since 2012. According to statisticsprepared for VICE by Customs and Border Protection, yearly border apprehensionsof South Asians have more than tripled between 2012 and 2015. So far this year,there have been 2,988 apprehensions of Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, andNepalis, compared to 924 in the whole of 2012.

Watch our interview with Senator Chuck Schumer:

Asylum statistics also suggest thatundocumented South Asian crossings into the US are on the rise. In December 2013,Rezaul Islam approached the American border at Tijuana by foot. When a Customsand Border Protection officer asked him for his documents, Islam, who is middle-aged, said that he didn't have any, and that he was seeking political asylum.He had left Dhaka three years earlier. A member of the Jamaat-e-Islamipolitical party, Islam had seen how fellow party officials were being picked upin a spate of arrests under the new ruling party, the Awami League. He hadflown to Ecuador, where he lived and worked illegally from 2010 until 2013,when he joined the ever-growing stream of his countrymen who were passingthrough Quito en route to the US border. While his application was processed,he claims that he was held for 180 days at the Tacoma Northwest DetentionCenter, in Washington State.

Like Rezaul Islam, those who areapprehended often petition for political asylum. "For many people inBangladesh, life is just unbearable, because they have to choose the rightside, and if they don't choose the right side they're persecuted," Lawit said.Asylum statistics also reflect the likely surge in South Asian bordercrossings. According to figures released by the Department ofJustice, the US government received over twice the number of asylum petitionsfrom people of Indian and Bangladeshi origin in 2014 than it had in any of thefour previous years.

Of course, apprehensions and asylumstatistics only represent part of the picture. No official estimates have yetbeen produced for the number of South Asian migrants like Akash, who were ableto evade authorities and who chose not to file for asylum. Fahd Ahmed has heardanecdotal evidence, through DRUM's members, of dozens of cases of bordercrossers who began their journeys in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. However, manycrossers are reluctant to speak even to him, given their undocumented status.Rezaul Islam claims that he knows hundreds of South Asians living in the US whomade the journey through South America. He says that while living in Quito forthree years, he saw thousands of migrants passing through en route to the US border.

The passage of such large numbers ofmigrants across such vast distances is enabled by a complex intercontinentalcriminal network. In migrants' home countries, so-called "agents" will offerprospective migrants passage to the United States for anywhere between $15,000and $30,000. Once in South America, migrants are received by a string of localsmugglers, who relay their human consignment across thousands of miles.

"There may be six or eight different peoplethat they meet with in order to get to the US," Lawit told me. Sujon, Rezaul,and Akash all confirmed that they were ferried along their routes by acoordinated network of local smugglers, who communicated by cell phone. Migrants"pay the money to an agent in Bangladesh, the agent gives them a number for allthe countries," said Islam, who did not arrange his journey through an agent inBangladesh. "This is their business." At several points, Akash, who wasdefrauded by the original agent he contracted in Dhaka, stayed in safe housesalong with other migrants. On at least one occasion, he spent several days at asmuggler's house.

"By zigzagging all over the continents, and changing the pattern every time," Lawit said, "it makes it very hard for the US government to pick up the routes."

"They have figured out multiple points,they have contacts at multiple points," said Ahmed, who described how previouslyagents would help produce fake documents, or secure tourist visas. "Thecomplexity of it, the depth of it is much greater." In order to evadeimmigration enforcement, smugglers vary their routes, sometimes drastically. "Byzigzagging all over the continents, and changing the pattern every time," Lawitsaid, "it makes it very hard for the US government to pick up the routes."

The authorities of Colombia, Ecuador, andPeru now find themselves playing the role of immigration enforcers. In 2010,the year that Rezaul Islam landed in Quito, Ecuadorian officials noticed a striking spike in the number of Bangladeshi and Pakistani citizensentering the country on tourist visas, only to then disappear. Ecuador hadnever been a popular destination for Bangladeshis: In 2002, not asingle Bangladeshi citizen entered the country's borders, accordingto the BBC's Spanish language service. In 2009, 821 Bangladeshi andPakistani citizens landed in Ecuador and obtained tourist visas. Of thoseindividuals, a majority never registered as having left the country.

Local authorities have struggled to keep upwith the smuggling networks that sustain the transit of South Asians acrosstheir borders. According to the Peruvian newspaper El Comercia, in 2013, the Peruvian National Police arrested two men, a Nepali and a Bangladeshi, who allegedly orchestrated thetransportation for dozens of South Asians toward the United States. There havebeen multiple reports of police in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia discovering holding houseswith dozens of undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.

"If I had known, I never would have come. Everybody was cheating me." Akash

The journey is, by every account, extremelydangerous.

When Akash, who said he left Bangladeshafter receiving death threats from men associated with a property developmentcompany engaged in a protracted dispute with his father, arrived in Ecuador, hewas abandoned by his Bangladeshi agent, who had received $15,000 to arrange thejourney to the US. For the 18-hour trip across the Gulf of Urab, Akash and 25others were packed into a boat that was just wide enough for two people to sit,pressed against each other in the fetal position. He described how the boat'sengine cut out several times. Once he reached the Panamanian Isthmus, he walkedfor six days through the jungle, contracting a severe skin infection that madehis skin bright red.

During a seven-day trek through the samearea, Rezaul Islam saw a fellow traveler drown while attempting to cross ariver. He said that meals consisted of a single mouthful of raw rice, once ortwice a day. His legs are covered in large scars from cuts and insect bites thathe says he acquired during his various overland treks.

In Mexico, Akash was forced into a semitrailer, like Sujon Alom, with around 20 other migrants. After being detainedby Mexican immigration officials for just under a month, Akash said he waskidnapped and held for ransom by a coyote called "the Tiger," to whom he had alreadypaid $5,000 to smuggle him into the US. By the time he reached New York City,he had been traveling for six months; he claims that the journey had cost hisfamily $33,000.

Nobody in Bangladesh had told him about therisks involved in taking the South American route. "If I had known, I never would have come. Everybody was cheating me," he said.

Even the dismaying stories of thosemigrants who make it to the US likely do not really reflect the full extent ofthe risks of the journey. "It's a self-selecting sample," Fahd Ahmed explained."The people who didn't make it, who took the really risky routes, those peoplearen't here."

"I have two contradictory feelings," FahdAhmed said when asked what he thought about the South American odyssey that hismembers had taken. "The first one is a desire to say, 'Why would you do this?'And to encourage people not to do this.

"On the other hand, the stronger feeling isthat migration is natural to human beings," he continued. "We need to be a lotmore concerned about addressing the root causes of why people are being forcedto migrate in the first place." He explained that DRUM channels the experienceof it members into tangible demands. As a result, it maintains a strong anti-immigrationenforcement stance, and demands policies that address the forces that motivateillegal migration from South Asia in the first place.

Sujon Alom, for his part, is glad to be inAmerica. "I am safe, so I am happy," he said. But he also wonders whether therisks that he had endured were worth it. In the tutoring center, he reflectedon the harrowing experience in the truck.

"No, they didn't open it," he said. "Theygave us no food. They only gave us water. If we needed to pee, they gave us bigempty water bottles." When one of the men lost consciousness, the driverinstructed Alom and the others to dump him by the side of the road (theyrefused). He says he still hasn't fully recovered from the physical strain andmalnutrition that he experienced on the trip. "I heard that this was adangerous way to get to America," he said, "but I had no idea what type ofrisks or what type of danger I'd see. Every single second we had no guaranteethat our lives were safe." He continued, "I want to say: Don't try this. It'svery dangerous."

He turned from his interpreter andrepeated, now in English, "Very dangerous."

Image via Flickr user Mike Schinkel

Two months ago, the Huffington Post made a gimmicky declaration: The news site would berelegating news of Donald Trump's presidential run to its "Entertainment"section. Back then, Trump's candidacy was a joke, a "sideshow," as HuffPo's editors put it. Today, it doesn't seem quite so funnyat least not to the 11 million people living in America Trump says he wants to deport. Fuckface von Clownstick could still very wellflame out before a single primary vote is cast, but there's no getting the toothpaste backin the tube: A major presidential candidate waged a virulent, unabashedcampaign of incitement against Latino immigrantsand was greeted with rabidadulation from millions of Americans.

Trump's candidacy did not grow in a vacuum. That a rival likeJeb Bush, a Spanish-speaking gringo with a Mexican-American family, would mimic Trump by repeating some diluted swill about "anchor babies," speaks to the pervasive nativism nativism in American politics today. Over the past decade, the anti-immigration wing of the far-right fringe has reemerged from the shadows, led by armed vigilante groups like theMinutemen. With the passage of state laws like Arizona SB 1070 and Alabama HB 56legislation that have terrorized Hispanic communities and empowered coercive police action against themthefringe is no longer the fringe. Nativism is as robust in America today as ithas been in decades.

On VICE News: Video Shows Cops Wrestle a Black Teen to the Ground for Walking in the Street

And why shouldn't it be? "When the perceived primaryenvironment in which a person lives is directly threatened," academic David H. Bennett wrote in his 1995book The Party of Fear: The American Far Rightfrom Nativism to the Militia Movement, "then individual lifestresses can no longer be handled; peculiar and disruptive forms of stressdemand new forms of resocialization and adaptation... frequently they focus onelimination of alien elements and influences."

Unsurprisingly, in the wake ofdislocating economic crises, widening inequality, and rapid social upheaval,white Americans are spoiling for a scapegoat. It's easy to seehow they could see the mainstream media dismiss Trump as ridiculous anddraw comparisons to the way their own concernsmany of which are legitimateare dismissed by"elites" and ignored by the powerful.

The grievances and resentments Trump exploits in hisspeeches, as pioneered by segregationist George Wallace and perfected by Nixonwhose "Silent Majority" Trump is now invokingbubble just below the surface of polite discourse. And what better way tounderstand the grievances than by diving into the political cesspool, as itcoheres online?

Screenshot via Facebook

Myth #1: Undocumented Immigrants Are Murderers,Rapists, and Drug Dealers

A constant strain in American nativist rhetoric is the claimthat undocumented immigrants crossing the Mexican border into the United Statescomprise a sort of criminal fraternitya constellation of rapists, babysnatchers, drunk drivers, dog killers, and throat-cutters eager to find theirway to a leafy "sanctuary city" where they can shoot mailmen and firebombnursing homes with impunity. In the hands of nativists, several high-profile crimes committed by undocumentedimmigrants have coalesced into an all-out assault.

Most of the nativist rightwith some significant exceptionsdoesn't wantto talk about race outright, so instead they talk about crime, about how dangerous the Mexicans and CentralAmericans fleeing desperate poverty are, about how there's no difference between narco-gangsters and economic migrants. That's how you get racist Facebookgroups entertaining their followers with the simple charms of badly photoshopped moonlit border fences.

There are, of course, some minor issues with the theory of aLatino crime wave sweeping north; for instance, it's not true. To wit: According to the Wall Street Journalno pinko leftie rag"numerous studies going back more thana century have shown that immigrantsregardless of nationality or legalstatusare less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes orto be incarcerated." The national crime rate has dropped bynearly half since 1990, even as the undocumented population in America tripled.

Watch: The Disturbing "Spitman" Urban Legend

As for the flow of drugs across the borderwell, cartelswouldn't smuggle drugs by whatever means necessary if there weren't a lot ofAmericans who wanted those drugs. The forces of supply and demand tend to bemore powerful than any border, no matter how high the wall: Witness the way Second Amendment-sanctioned guns drift south, where they're used to maim and kill thousands ofinnocent Mexicans each year.

Screenshot via Facebook

Myth #2: Undocumented Immigrants Get UnfairAdvantages

The obsession in nativist circles with "illegals" gainingunfair advantages from the statewhether via welfare checks, Social Security payments, in-state tuition rates, affirmative action policies, or other meansisnot an original grievance. Ronald Reagan's laughable fiction about welfarequeens driving Cadillacs constituted a publicly acceptable way of signaling tovoters that resentment and hatred of black peopleand in particular, blackmotherswas as American as apple pie.

The durability of this myth, and its reconstitution for useagainst immigrants, actually has very little to do with black and Latinocommunities. Undocumented workers, like everyone else, pay into Social Security, to the tune of $100 billionsince 2004but being undocumented, they have little hope of getting that moneyback. Such immigrants do not qualify for most forms of welfare, evenas they pay taxes; if their children do, it is as US-born American citizens.

The fears of stolen benefits are spuriousbut the white working-classanxieties at their root are not. Most Americans, particularly on the right,don't usually talk about economic class, but this fixation with unwashed hordesconning the government, and getting one up on all hard-working white taxpayers,is a notable exception. As Bennett argues in Party of Fear, the nativists of the 19th century found prejudice tobe a powerful escape from their problems:

Unwilling to acceptthe dark side of their American experiencethe wages of slavery, the stressesof a competitive culture, the crisis of communitythey struck out at the mostvulnerable group within their midst... in a nation in which nativists were inthe forefront defending the individualistic ethos, the rise of nativism becamea monument to the desperate desire for community.

We see that dynamic echoed today: Beset by economic instabilityand unable to reach the grand promises of prosperity which dominate our culture,many find it easier to transfer that pain to a defenseless victim in thetradition of modern-day suck-up, kick-down American conservatism.

Screenshot via Facebook

Myth #3: Undocumented Immigrants Plan toInfiltrate and Take Over America in a Grand "Reconquista" of Little Babies

These smaller grievances lead nativists with paranoid tendenciesto a dark conclusion: Immigration poses an existential threat to America. Thissuspicion was crafted into high art by truly deranged anti-immigrationactivists like Glenn Spencer and the late Barbara Coe who, looking at a 1969 radicalChicano student statement called the "Plan Espiritual de Aztln," saw a blueprintfor the eventual revocation of all territory gained by the US in theMexican-American War.

This concern with land and the race of those who inhabitit leads one to perhaps the most frightening plank in the nativist platform:the proposal to revoke the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitutionoriginallyinstituted to protect the citizenship of emancipated slavesand thereby denythe children of undocumented immigrants birthright citizenship. GOP candidates besides Trump are triangulating on the issue to determine how best to capture this bloc. It is insane andnauseating.

The most revealing summation of nativist thought comes from aline that Trump frequently spouts in both interviews andstump speeches, when he's explaining why he wants to erect a massive wall alongthe US-Mexico border: "We don't have a country without a border. Without aborder, we just don't have a country."

If a country can be destroyed simply by the flow of human beingsacross its terrain, then it possesses no special fate, no exceptional statusandAmerica is nothing without its claims to being a "shining city on a hill." If Americais a polity, and nothing more, than it will be no more resistant to the ravagesof time and decay than any other empire swept away by the normal course ofhuman history.

Despite the grandiosity of generation after generation ofself-proclaimed American patriots, who for 400 years have beaten and disparagedand harassed and killed any people who came in the door after themdespite allTrump's superlative descriptions of himselfnativism springs from a place ofinsecurity and weakness. It never emerges from a place of strength. As anideology, it is ultimately hollow and self-defeating. It is designed topreserve a place which never existed.

May the reconquista come tomorrow. God Bless America.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

Photos via DAILY VICE

Lisa Klapstock claims her new art exhibit VOTE isn't targeted at ousting Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but the displays speak for themselves.

"My Prime Minister Embarrasses Me" is the slogan on one tote bag, while a red T-shirt that says "Stop Harper," inspired by former senate page Brigette DePape, hangs prominently in the all-white gallery. Painted block letters on the wall spell out the message "Oh Canada, I miss you. It's been 9 years but to me it feels like an eternity. Please come back. Xo."

Klapstock, a Toronto-based artist who owns a space on Dundas St. West, told VICE she threw the exhibit together last minute, putting out the call to artists across Canada. Part of an umbrella project, "Something to think about," its purpose is to get people to vote, she said.

"The main goal was to inspire people to participate because that's something that I think the current government is trying to limit."

Almost every piece carries an anti-Conservative sentiment. Klapstock's own contributionessentially a wall covered in strips of black duct tapeis meant to mimic a redacted government document about the Northern Gateway pipeline project.

"I am very concerned about the environment because it affects all of us... I feel that the pro-oil agenda of the current government is unbalanced and short-sighted."

Pascal Paquette, creator of the aforementioned tote bag, said that as a Christian, Harper has a "restrictive perspective."

"I think this is a government that has tunnel vision. It doesn't make sense. It's weird. We should have someone who is incredibly open."

Come Oct. 19, Klapstock wants to see a coalition government form between the NDP, Liberals and the Green Party. Mostly, she's hoping Canadians will be able to embrace the motto adorning one of the walls in her gallery: "Fuck the past. Live in the present. Plan for the future."

VOTE is on display until Oct. 18 at 1518 Dundas St. West.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

All photos by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I'll admit, this edition of Britain Is a Weird Place is a bit of a nostalgia trip for me. In my youth, I got to ride all the way to France on the great white vessel known as "the Bretagne" at least once a year. The smell of the oil and petrol on the car gangway up to the parking levels, the deafening hum of the ship's innards adding a weird heat to the odors, making it feel like you were trapped in a sauna for carsI have a lot of strong memories bound up in the cross-channel ferry, maybe because it's so intense. Half a day in the middle of the sea, while everyone around you drinks their weight in gin and tonics, is quite full-on for any child whose gray matter is still a mush of jelly and strawberries.

But more than that, the point of this column is to explore the quirks of British days out, what makes them special, why they exist, what they say about how we, the inhabitants of a tiny island nation that has always punched above its international weight by grafting its ass off, choose to spend our free time. The overnight ferry, to me, is more than just a journey to somewhere else, it's a day out in and of itself. Spending eight hours anywhere can be considered an activity. And activity abounds on these ferries. I have fond memories of being a child and watching magic shows in the ferry bar while my entire extended family all got absolutely shit-faced and smoked their lungs dry.

But does this ship still represent, to me and many others, the best continental pre-lash that sailing has to offer? I was going to find out, though first I had to journey to the port, which, sadly, was in Portsmouth.

Portsmouth. If ever there were a place that was grossly unwelcoming, aesthetically nauseating, and desolately, malignantly depressing, it's this southern port town. It's a Hampton Court maze of brown block buildings; winding, dead roads; cars in a rush to nowhere. It's the nightmarish moldy crust on England's ham sandwich and I hate it with all my soul. But it's where the ferry port was, so I had to trudge through it towards the check-in desk.

The departure lounge was deserted. Most people drive onto the ferry because the offload point, St. Malo, is more a place to drive away from than to remain in. As I remember it, the dockside paddock where the cars wait to board acts as a kind of highly concentrated version of England: dads smoking en masse as they proudly guard their family saloons; kids with their hands lodged permanently in packs of Monster Munch; moms, uncles, dogs, and nans queueing quietly even though they're desperate for a piss; everyone seeming to want to wallow in and fortify their own Englishness before braving foreign terrain.

None of that for me, though. I was going to spend 24 hours on this boat with not a motor to my name. I joined the small crowd of people in the outside pedestrian area (which, bizarrely, you weren't allowed to smoke in) and we just stared silently out to sea, hands in pockets, as if we were waiting for a ghost ship holding some dead beloved to moor.

And in a sense, we were. I walked out onto the reception deck and all the childhood memories started flooding back. The duty-free shop; the little kiosk selling magazines, 'papers and, weirdly, Tamagotchis; the smell of sausages and cheese in the self-service canteen; the dance floors I'd skidded across on my knees and more things that sound like punchlines from a 2005 Peter Kay stand-up set.

I went to my cabin on deck two of eight, which, I suspect, was underwater. Not having a window was a bit of a bummer to be honest, I felt like I was trapped in some nightmarish hinterland between Butlins and Das Boot, perhaps not a perfect vibe for all the knackered/drunk parents trying to sedate their sugar-crazed sprogs before settling down for the night.

That wasn't my plan, though. I was ready to hit the tiles, or, rather, the soiled carpet.

I went straight to the arcade, the kid's casino, the little Las Vegas that gets rid of all the change your mum picked up from the bowling. I dropped a quid into the Terminator shoot-'em-up machine and picked up the gun. It swallowed another three quid before registering any of my money and after five more minutes trying to start the game, it transpired that the reload button didn't work. I died and I could do nothing about it.

No matter. There was still the air hockey. Another dubloon was dropped into the game slot. Only a light breeze came from the perforated surface and the puck barely moved. I hoped that the machines the captain was using to steer us to the mainland were better maintained than these.

I went outside into the pitch-black night. I felt better out on the deck but the nagging inside remained. Could it be that Britain's seaborne playpen had been neglected over the years? How long has it been since love was lavished on its chugging entertainments? I started to fear that this floating Butlins had gone the way of the land Butlins, consigned to a retirement spent as whipping boy for stuck-up comedians on crap panel shows. Surely the magic showthe peak of wonder aboard this shipwould still be enjoyable?

Instead of being full of jovial families drinking too many brandies, the bar was sparsely occupied by a smattering of grey-haired couples, silently sipping small white wines.

The magic show was in full swing, and the magicians, a female duo called "Illusioness," did a valiant job of trying to engage a crowd that was largely unmoved, bar a crew of dirty old men in one corner being weird. Guffawing at each other in a circle, pints glasses touching, it felt like a grim metaphor for the disgraced era of British light entertainment, or like being at a working men's club in the 70s. I was half expecting Bernard Manning to waddle out and do a joke about watermelon.

The show ended and I applauded extra hard; regardless of how many people are on the boat, they have to perform the show every night. I felt for them, no one had even bothered to remove the Jack and the Beanstalk sign from the pantomime that had been on earlier.

Having gone quite late in the summer season, it's understandable that the night boat wasn't teeming with life. In my memories the ferry had always been a place of hothoused familial hedonism but most people on here seemed to be either lorry drivers or couples in their twilight years who can, at their leisure, fuck off to France for a few days. I guess that doesn't exactly read back like the guest list to Warehouse Project.

The final insult came when a packet of Maltesers got lodged behind its impenetrable glass case. The universe was conspiring against me, and I was drunk, bored and tired enough to let it win.

I wandered into the lift with a small wine of my own, down to my underwater bunker in the bowels of the boat, and called it a night. Perhaps the 45 minutes I had to spend in St. Malo would reinvigorate me. I had my heart set on a ham and cheese galette complet.

I was to again have my heart broken. I shouldn't have been surprised; anyone who knows anything about the French knows they don't get up for shit. They close shops for hours at lunchtime and they don't open up their creperies until midday. I sat in the cold outside a caf, drinking an apple juice. For fuck's sake France, you just couldn't give me this one thing, could you?

And then it was time to re-board the boat. I walked up the Everest-like gangway, back to the desecrated waterborne cathedral of my childhood memories.

I sat and ate a fry up looking out of the window. How could I have gotten it so wrong?

Then the biggest smack in the mouth of all came hurtling towards me: the boat was absolutely teeming with children. Hundreds of little Joes from yesteryear laughing and clapping and dribbling and running around and shouting. It was absolute hell. 'Why do they have to run everywhere?' I thought. 'Where are they going? What's so important that it requires them to be at a constant level of high speed?' At one point I heard a small boy demand of his dad that he be allowed to "buy some money." Truly, I was in several different circles of hell all at once.

A few hours into the journey home I went out onto the deck. It was a sunny day and a couple of the dads had their shirts off. I looked out at the sea, which was reflecting the strong sunlight. And though I was in the middle of the channel, I felt strangely at home.

That was the real beauty of this trip. Seeing the sunlight bounce off the waves, and the moonlight the night before, was so calming. I had to fight back the constant urge to dive into the giant foamy layers of surf and float away in silence to nowhere in particular.

It may sound clichd, but standing there facing a disappearing Europe, until it just becomes a wobbly, solitary marine plateau is a more powerful experience than it's given credit for. Britain has a long and illustrious history with the sea, and that relationship seems to endure today, even if like my own love affair with the channel it's one formed mostly of memories. I guess the difference is that while the country remembers taking to the waves to colonize continents, smash armadas and bring cigarettes and spices ashore, I remember watching magic shows and my mom get hammered before making a three-units-over-the-limit early-morning drive to some crumbling gte in the middle of nowhere. I guess that's what makes us islanders.

It was good to see you again, Brittany Ferries. Perhaps we'll reconvene when I have some ankle biters of my own, pestering me for money and chocolate and absolute tat like this surely-destined-for-a-copyright-lawsuit "daft cat" T-shirt.

Follow Joe on Twitter.

Photo by Miki Yoshihito via Flickr

Read: How to Have One-Night Stands in Your Twenties

A countrywide alert has been triggered following an outbreak of drug-resistant gonorrhea in the north of England. The Guardian reports that the super-strain was first detected in Leeds in March, with all of the cases involving heterosexual patients. So far, 15 cases have been identified, including patients from Macclesfield, Oldham, and Scunthorpe.

Peter Greenhouse, a consultant in sexual heath, warns: "It doesn't sound like an awful lot of people, but the implication is there's a lot more of this strain out there and we need to stamp it out as quickly as possible. If this becomes the predominant strain in the UK we're in big trouble, so we have to be really meticulous in making sure each of these individuals has all their contacts traced and treated."

Public Health England is taking the threat very seriously. The association said, "An outbreak control team meeting has been convened and STBRU is currently performing next generation sequencing on these strains to better understand the molecular epidemiology."

So, basically, if your junk's looking a bit gross and you've been hanging out in the UK, go to a doctor. And be sure to make those very awkward phone calls to recent sexual partners, because it's a massive dick move not to. And, from then on, just make sure you wrap it upit really is that easy to avoid inflamed genitalia.

Outside Tripoli's port, groups of Syrian families sat around plastic tables beside a makeshift coffee shop. A small mountain of suitcases was piled close by.

Between 2012 and 2014, the frequency of gun battles in Tripoli between armed groups cast a shadow over the city. Focused in the neighborhoods of Jabal Mohsen, an Alawite community that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Bab al-Tabbaneh, a Sunni neighborhood opposed to Assad's continued rule, inhabitants soon found their hometown cast as a haven of support for the Islamic State in local press leads and headlines.

Gun battles in Tripoli have since all but ceased, following raids conducted by the Lebanese army late last year. However, Tripoli is now synonymous with another phenomenon linked directly to Syria's civil conflict: it's increasingly becoming a transit point for a growing Syrian exodus from Lebanon.

There are over one million Syrian refugees registered with the UNHCR in Lebanon, accounting for a staggering 25 percent of the total population in a country that also hosts over 450,000 Palestinian refugees. Currently, over a thousand Syrian refugees depart on ferries from Tripoli's port to the Turkish coastal city of Mercin almost every day. A one-way ticket costs around 80 journey to the Lebanese border with her husband and two young children before settling in Qobbeh, an impoverished neighborhood in central Tripoli.

Hiba said that the World Food Program's lowering of monthly food tokens from $30 to $13 per person, per month, has made it increasingly difficult to keep food on the table.

"There are no work opportunities here, and my children are not enrolled in schools. My husband has an eye infection but we cannot afford to pay $50 just for a doctor's appointment," explained Hiba, who declined to reveal her family name, placing a couple of bottles of water and a packet of biscuits for the ferry journey in a rucksack. "Ideally I want to go to Germany," Hiba continued, before admitting that neither her nor her husband were sure of the exact route they planned to take upon arrival in Turkey.

Related: Watch Ground ZeroZa'atari Refugee Camp

On Wednesday, riot police in Hungary fired water-cannons and tear-gas at Syrian refugees attempting to enter the country from Serbia after the border was closed on Tuesday night. Syrian refugees have since begun to explore alternative routes to reach Western Europe via Croatia. But even Germany, the most welcoming European nation to Syrian refugees, has now re-established national border controls along its border with Austria.

European governments are currently discussing the prospect of tightening access to Europe for refugees, as well as imposing restrictions on asylum applications among plans to build camps outside the EU, pointing to the failure of Gulf Arab states to welcome more Syrian refugees.

While 22 European nations have agreed "on principle" to share 160,000 refugees across at least 22 countries, a formal decision that would make such a scheme binding was notably postponed during a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels on Monday.

As Hiba spoke, a young boy with scruffy hair ran up to the table. It was one of Hiba's children. Hiba ruffled the boy's hair for a second before he darted off to play once again. Watching her son chase a couple of friends around the trunk of a nearby tree, Hiba repressed a giggle before breaking into a smile.

"We still have hope."

Follow Martin Armstrong on Twitter.

This week, the most beloved video game of all time, Super Mario Bros., turned 30 years old. Nintendo celebrated with a web video project called "Let's Mario" that took loving tributes from fans all over the internet, and edited them into one big heartwarming montage. I celebrated by digging up a somewhat less-loving tribute to the Mario franchise: Super Hornio Brothers, a porn parody from 1993 starring porn megastar Ron Jeremy.

In the film, Jeremy plays a computer programmer named Squeegie Hornio. He and his brother Ornio Hornio, played by T.T. Boy, are zapped into a computer game during a power surge, a la Tron. Instead of a world of Goombas and puffy clouds, they find themselves in a black void where they meet a very non-dinosaur-ish villain named King Pooper, played by Buck Adams, the director of the film. Pooper kidnaps Princess Perlina, and our heroes, Squeegie and Ornio have to prevent the villain from teleporting himself to the real world with a jizz-powered machine. There are also several prolonged sex acts sprinkled in, because it's a pornographic film intended to be masturbated to.

Though it's not hard terribly hard to find on the internet, any version you come across is likely to be some kind of bootleg: According to Ron Jeremy's website, Nintendo bought the rights to the film to prevent it from being released in any format. I can't imagine why.

"While our kids are drinking beer, and playing video games, Asians are getting high SAT scores." Ron Jeremy

We got ahold of Ron Jeremy to find out if he remembers the film, and to learn a little more about what happened with Nintendo. He didn't seem to mind that the film was never officially released or that it was now online, but he did tell us that video games are "boring" and making American kids stupid.

VICE: You've done thousands of movies. Do you remember Super Hornio Brothers?
Ron Jeremy: Yeah! Buck Adams did a great job. He wanted to simulate the actual show. I had never seen the video gameI don't play them at all, except when I go to Hugh Hefner's mansion. He has some video games in the back room. Other than that, I never play video games ever. I think they're boring. As a former schoolteacher, Asians are kicking our ass! While our kids are drinking beer, and playing video games, Asians are getting high SAT scores. If you look at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, it's almost all Asian and Scandinavian. of course they did! "You can't say all of our cheerleaders sucked dick! What are you, nuts?" So they did sue them. But they publicized the lawsuit, and that became one of the biggest-selling films of all time.

Would it bother you if someone pirated Super Hornio Brothers? Because I found it online.
I don't care. It doesn't affect me one bit. We were all paid, and we signed releases. The release I signed didn't include future technology. It's non-union so there's no residuals. My friends get hurt on stuff like that, but it doesn't affect me. I was paid for the job when it happened.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This interviewed has been edited for length and clarity.

Pierre George. Photos by Colin Graf

Aboriginal residents along the Lake Huron shore north of Sarnia, ON, are voting today on the future of the land where Aboriginal protester Dudley George was killed 20 years ago this month. A yes vote on the deal between the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point and the federal government will bring the First Nation $95 million in federal money, plus the return of around 1,000 hectares of land and a former army base established during World War Two by removing native families.

The dispute in the Ipperwash area has seemed frozen solid during the years since George's death from a bullet fired by a police sniper. George, 38, became the "first Aboriginal person to be killed in a land-rights dispute in Canada since the 19th century," according to the commissioner who led the inquiry into his death.

Occupiers who moved on to the site before the 1995 confrontation between protesters and a police tactical squad still live in the ramshackle, deteriorating army camp buildings. Some have come and gone over the years, past the lifting barrier arm where other band members, employed by the Department of National Defence (DND), control access to the fenced-off land from the old guard shack. Arguments and bickering between the occupiers and the established band have continued at a low level, as Stoney Point (locals spell it with an "e") remains a no-man's land where direct conflict has been avoided but it's hard to see if anyone is really in charge.

Now that years of on-and-off negotiations have produced an agreement to return the disputed land, some band members welcome it as a historic breakthrough, while others feel the deal with Ottawa will only further divisions in the area.

Dudley George's brother Pierre won't be supporting the 145-page agreement, seen by this writer.

"It's a big scam," he told VICE, saying he and other descendants of the 15 families forced off Stony Point feel the land should be returned only to them, not to the Chief and Council at Kettle Point, where the Stoney Point families went after their eviction in the 1940s.

George, diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after the desperate nighttime drive to a distant hospital with his dying brother in 1995, lives at Stony in a small home he built himself with materials salvaged from the old army buildings.

"I've had 20 years of freezing my ass off, but I've finally insulated it, " he said.

If the band accepts the historic deal, the First Nation council promises to use the money for development of the army camp lands and individual compensation, according to the agreement. However, there are no written guarantees of compensation directly to Stoney Point heirs in the document, and George doesn't trust he'll be treated fairly.

A CBC story says that descendants of those who lived on the land before the government expropriated it could receive $150,000 each.

With Kettle Point Chief Tom Bressette promising all band members $5,000 each from the agreement money if the deal is accepted, George says Bressette is just "buying votes" to get the deal passed. That pledge, made at band information meetings this summer, was confirmed by councillor Marshall George. The band will also give $10,000 to seniors who lived at Stoney Point, the councillor added. Chief Bressette won't be commenting before the vote is complete, his communications officer said.

The Kettle and Stony Point First Nation has about 2,400 members, of which about 1,300 live on the reserve.

The vote is really a chance to bring his people back together, says Councillor George. He says many of his people, including himself, have parents or grandparents descended from both communities, and a yes vote will cement their heritage and provide economic opportunities in the future.

There are, however, possibly a host of small, but literally explosive problems that will delay development in and around the former military lands for up to 20 years. The fields, bush, sand dunes, small lakes, and beach are hiding unexploded munitions (UXOs), according to a DND email. Military explosive teams have responded to over 100 UXO calls there since the 1980s and have disposed of 13 UXOs, including rocket and grenade components, and pyrotechnics since investigation began in 2007, a spokesperson said.

Some disposals are remembered by Mike Cloud, a Kettle Point member who helps run the guard house. Demolition experts, including Cloud's brother and daughter-in-law, have blown up UXOs several times, including an explosion that "shook all the buildings on the base," when workers detonated rockets uncovered by a backhoe in the unoccupied bush area, Cloud says.

There is still a risk more UXOs will be found, DND confirmed.

Bombs and grenades aside, there may be other worries ahead at Ipperwash, even if the deal passes. Chief Bressette said last February that he hopes to build a cultural heritage centre near the spot where Dudley George was shot.

But he shouldn't expect the camp occupiers to move out of the way.

"We're not handing it (the land) over," says Pierre George. "This could be a stand-off situation."

Follow Colin Graf on Twitter.