Nawal El Saadawi. Photo courtesy of Zed Books

"We're not living in three worlds, we're living in one," says Nawal el Saadawi in front of a rapturous crowd at a poky radical North London bookshop. One of the Arab world's most important living thinkers, Saadawi has a talent for seeing things holistically. She does not, for example, delineate between her professional roles: a doctor, an author, and an activist. Nor does she extricate women's rights (or lack of) in her home country, Egypt, from the neo-colonial imperatives of Western powers. She sees religion and politics as two sides of the same coin, since both are instruments of control. And she believes that we are all—from Egypt to the UK to India to America—subjugated within one big fat "postmodern slave system."

At 83 years old, Saadawi has spent her entire life laboring these points. Her literary output spans 56 books—books that have unceasingly challenged the status quo of patriarchal, religious, and capitalist power structures. Her 1972 manifesto, Women and Sex, was a revolutionary questioning of the double standards in certain Arab cultures that legitimize honor killing, genital mutilation, and various other types of violence. When the book was published, Saadawi's life was threatened by Islamists. She was also dismissed from her post as a doctor and member of the Ministry of Health for the Egyptian Government. And so she just carried on writing and questioning.

How, asks 1974's God Dies By the Nile, has Islam come to be so widely corrupted and misread? Why, asks her 1975 novel, Woman at Point Zero, are women treated like objects to be owned and fucked and debased by their husbands, pimps, and employers? Should, asks 1977's The Hidden Face of Eve, Arab women be made to wear the veil, expected to uphold monogamy and be silenced, but all the while treated unequally under law?

I meet Saadawi while she's over in the UK to promote the republication of these three books translated into English—a book tour that she begrudges. "I am here for the market," she tuts. "I am marketing my books. I'm not here for the ideas."

In reality, Saadawi is here for both—something that becomes obvious at her Q&As, where she invites audience members on stage to join her in discussion. Particularly welcome are people who disagree with her, mostly—it seems—so she can beat them in an argument. However, for someone who obviously loves sparring so much, and flies off the handle easily, Saadawi is extremely sweet; she writes down the names of everyone she meets on a small piece of paper to help her memorize them and grips your arm tightly while she speaks to you, as though (a little hard of hearing now) she is trying to channel what you are saying through touch.

Five minutes into our first meeting, Saadawi asks me whether I am happy. She doesn't mean right at that moment, but generally. It's a big ask. "I don't know about the UK, but I closed my clinic in Egypt recently because of how many young people come to me and say they are depressed," she interjects, after I've paused too long on her question. "Young people are all unhappy. Do you know why? Because the system is bad, not you. Capitalist, patriarchal, religious systems kill people. We are living in a jungle, not a human society. We are still slaves to the nuclear military power. To the market. We are all in the same boat; men and women, the poor, young and old. We need a revolution."

That revolution very nearly took the form of the Arab Spring—although Saadawi won't call it that herself: She prefers "Egyptian Revolution," "Tunisian Revolution," and so forth. As one of Egypt's most defiant left-wing voices, and as someone who firmly opposed President Hosni Mubarak, Saadawi went out and protested in Tahir Square back in 2011. However, she now concedes that the Arab Spring did not have the effect it should have. Sure, Mubarak was deposed, the Muslim Brotherhood were ousted, and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—who she seems to support, or at least prefer to past leaders—came into and remains in power. But the Egyptian people were not emancipated from the chokeholds of religious fundamentalism, nor the West.

READ ON VICE NEWS: While the West Resumes Business As Usual With Sisi, Egypt Arrests Prominent Journalist

"What's the result of the Arab Spring? Chaos!" says Saadawi, banging her fist on the nearest surface. "The fragmentation of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Who is benefitting from that?" This fragmentation, says Saadawi, was all part of a plan: "The US-Israeli plan. Forged with the European Union." According to Saadawi, these are the three powers that work together deliberately to suspend the Middle East in an ongoing state of conflict. "All governments collaborate; the governments don't work for us—they work together against us. They divide and rule. They inherited it from the British. From the end of 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the British colonial power wanted to divide Egypt by religion—Christian versus Muslim. It's a tactic that today's American neo-colonialists inherited."

If the US is the world's biggest superpower—one that has colonized the Arab world over the last 50 years through privatization, free markets, and the guise of "global development"—Saadawi maintains that we can't possibly take this out of the wider context. "We have to look at history to understand what is happening now—that's why I studied religion," she tells me. "It is how the patriarchal, feudalist class was able to emerge." Saadawi says she spent 15 years of her life learning about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. "I wanted to know: what is this male god saying? I compared the Qur'an, the New Testament, the Torah, and the Gita—and what did I find? Slavery! Religion is slavery to women and the poor. It is the basis of capitalism and feudalism. And now all religion is based on money and the market." She slams her hand on the table again. "Ridiculous!"

"Would you call yourself an atheist?" I ask tentatively. "In order to be an atheist," says Saadawi, "you are refusing religion. I'm not an atheist because although I am outside of religion—I don't believe in them or not believe in them—I look to them as a social phenomenon like medicine." And a Marxist? Would she call herself a Marxist? Saadawi positively explodes: "This Guardian journalist made an interview with me recently... she was talking more about herself... she called me a Marxist! I don't like these labels because they put me into a box. A patriarchal box. Marx was a man and he was very patriarchal. He was progressive in relation to capitalism, but he was blind to gender. So how can I be Marxist? How?"

READ ON BROADLY: The Forgotten Feminist Architects Who Changed the Face of London

We settle on "anti-capitalist" and revisit the time that Saadawi lived in America as a professor at Duke University in North Carolina. This was 1988 and she had wound up on a death list of radical figures who threatened Mubarak's regime. She claims she went to America in exile. "How did you fair in the world's most hyper-capitalist culture?" I wonder. "America is not the government. It's like the UK... you are not the government. I am not the government of Egypt. The American people are wonderful people and some universities are very progressive. In America you find everything: the ultra-Marxist and the feudal capitalist." She hesitates, then grins mischievously: "But, yes, some universities confiscated my contract because I was teaching creativity and dissidence."

Saadawi returned to Egypt in 1996. "I cannot live anywhere except Egypt because I have to change things from inside, and also it is my home," she says. "In my country I have a role." She ran for presidency against Mubarak in 2004, mostly just to make a point—as a woman and as someone on the left-wing—but was forced to stand down after she received threats. On the subject of whether she is still in danger in Egypt, Saadawi says, of course. "All my life, I was either in exile or at prison or shut at home—I am always marginalized, even today. But now I am supported by the young people more than ever. Before the revolution, people used to read my books and come to me. Now even more do."

Nawal smiles again, and this time I ask her if she is happy. "Of course I'm happy!" she says. "I'm happy because I'm doing what I want. When I don't like you, I tell you! When I want to quarrel with my publisher, I quarrel. That's why I'm happy: I have no secrets. I am happy because I express myself. I am a psychiatrist. Do you know why people become depressed? Because they cannot say what they believe."

Saadawi's books are available to buy on Zed Books.

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

Vincent Asaro surrounded by cameras after being acquitted on all counts at Brooklyn federal court. Photo by the author

As the verdict rang out in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday, Vincent Asaro looked stunned.

In what was easily one of the most dramatic trials in recent American mafia history, the 80-year-old reputed mobster was acquitted of all charges related to the 1978 Lufthansa heist, as well as the 1969 murder of a suspected informant. Fourteen counts in total, gone; life in prison, evaded. The only mobster ever to face trial for the biggest cash heist ever—one that was dramatized in the 1990 Martin Scorsese flick Goodfellas—is a free man.

With a look of exuberance on his face, Asaro slammed his hands on the table, fist-pumped to himself, hugged his defense team, and then whispered out loud, "I can't believe it."

Neither, it seemed, could anyone else in the courtroom.

The verdict was the culmination of a month-long trial in which the US Attorney's office tried to use years worth of surveillance and days of testimony from former mobsters and FBI agents to paint a picture of the "the ultimate tough guy," as lead Prosecutor Nicole Argentieri put it. The majority of the prosecution's argument hinged upon the account of Gaspare Valenti, Asaro's cousin and a former mobster who wore a wire for the FBI in an attempt to record his relative dishing about past glories.

But in less than ten seconds, all of that work—a case nearly five years in the making—against the alleged Bonanno crime family associate evaporated. The prosecutors, almost as visibly shocked as Asaro was, left the courthouse without saying a word.

It's unclear what went wrong for the feds. In fact, throughout the trial, Asaro's defense team did a pretty mediocre job in cross-examination, barely asking the witnesses anything substantial and generally failing to get the attention of jurors. They even passed a clear opportunity to go after an integral piece of evidence: a piece of tape where Asaro is heard telling his cousin, "That fucking Jimmy kept everything," referring to Jimmy "The Gent" Burke, the mastermind of the heist played by Robert de Niro in Scorsese's gangster classic.

Instead, the defense saved its heaviest blows for the end.

While the prosecution spent an entire day on their closing statement, the defense lawyer, Elizabeth Macedonio, limited her shtick to about two hours, in which she assailed Valenti for not being a credible witness. She argued that there were blatant inconsistencies in his detailed account of the heist, and used his own financial missteps to paint him as money-hungry and willing to misconstrue the truth to get more cash. (Valenti lived off an FBI stipend after he voluntarily pleaded guilty to several crimes and began spying on his cousin.)

Now, Valenti will be the one spending time behind bars.

The minute Asaro walked outside of the courthouse, the man who had spent most of the past two years in jail exclaimed "Free!" Cameras swarmed, and he struggled to wade his way through, lawyers by his side.

"Even John Gotti didn't get this much attention," Asaro joked.

What did he have to say, someone asked. "A huge thank-you to my lawyers and to the US Marshal's Office. I can't say the same about the FBI."

What would he do next? "Have a good meal with my family."

Finally, a reporter asked what has surely been on Asaro's mind for the past two years: What would he tell the cousin who tried to land him in prison?

"Honey, you don't want to know," Asaro replied, before taking off in a white Mercedes.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

What you learn in your early twenties is not to waste time with people you don't like. I barely see anyone anymore. I think I should spend more time with people my own age. I think I watch too many cartoons. It's weird how many dead people I know.

Bars with DJs are all too loud. The quiet places are all full of yuppies. The nice bars are all full of kids. Remember when you were that age, and you drank like you were trying to win a contest, and you were comparing notes with your roommates to see who had the highest blood-alcohol percentage, which involved looking at a chart and saying stuff like, "I'm experiencing stupor and slurred speech," and, "We should be dead"?

If I have more than two tonight I'll wake up with a hangover. I have to wake up early or I'll get stuck in traffic. I have to wake up early for a meeting. I have to wake up early because we're going away for the weekend.

Sometimes I wish I could drink more.

I like my job. I thought I would like my job more than I do. I thought when I woke up every morning, I'd be in a perfect, tidy, organized little oasis of my own design, but my apartment still looks like a young person lives there. I thought I would reminisce less than I do. I thought I would feel like more of an adult. I thought at least that I would turn out to be a nicer person.

I kind of miss indie rock. Remember when you would download a new album and listen to it those first three or four times it takes to get really into it, and when you put in your earbuds and walked around town with that music in your ears, the chorus on one of those songs would kick in like an opiate, and you felt like you owned the world? I wish I listened to more new music.

I never imagined I'd still live here. I never imagined my relationship would end. I never imagined I'd watch a guy walk around the natural history museum with his four-year-old daughter, answering her questions about the planets and the big bang, and actually walk in a different direction so I could follow them for a minute and listen, and go back and forth in my head between thinking, Oh come on, that guy just won the kid lottery and got a really bright one, on one hand and thinking, No, actually kids are all excited about the universe like that, and being a parent is really where my life is going, on the other. If I had the money, maybe I'd have a kid by now. Being an adult basically means having enough money to do adult things.

I'm OK with turning 40. I think.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of John McManus

John McManus is a reluctant interview subject. Before we started talking in earnest, he warned me, "I'm pretty terrible at this. I'll just let you know in advance. You might ask me questions and there will be dead air as if the call had been dropped." But he's not terrible. You'll see.

Unlike his purported interview style, the stories in Fox Tooth Heart, his fourth book and third story collection, have no space for dead air. If McManus's stories start with Fourth of July fireworks, they end with everyone going to bed drunk except one person, who has realized that he will never be able to live life the same way again. They're tales of guilt: "Elephant Sanctuary" shows us a rockstar after he's killed his girlfriend; "The Gnat Line" is about a group of pedophiles on the edge of conviction. They're stories of young, confused love: "The 95th Percentile" is about a teenager's romantic self-discovery through fast cars. And more than anything, they're stories of excessive strangeness: "Cult Heroes" shows a famous mountain biker before his conversion to Christian Science; "Gateway to the Ozarks" is the story of the first genetic clone of Thomas Jefferson's adolescence.

At the sort of cocktail parties where lots of writers talk about writing, you'll hear McManus get compared to Denis Johnson, but that's not quite right. Sure, his characters are junkies and derelicts, but McManus doesn't have Johnson's affinity for the divine. His are the down-and-out heroes of George Saunders or John Updike, captured just before their fall. They're people struggling for their place in the world or who must settle for something less than they've hoped for.

It's been ten years since his last book—Bitter Milk—and 15 since McManus published Stop Breakin Down at the geriatric age of 22, a book that made him the youngest-ever winner of the distinguished Whiting Award. McManus seems more than conflicted about the material in his first book, but acknowledges that he can't imagine life without it. Whereas Stop Breakin Down was material written by a "drunk 20-year-old," Fox Tooth Heart is the work of an older man still grappling with how we come by the beliefs that define us.

VICE: It's been ten years since your last book. And they were coming pretty quickly before that. What happened? Why the delay?
John McManus: One of the reasons is that I have two novels-in-progress that are both close to completion. One that I've been working on since before Bitter Milk came out and one I started worked on some version of in 2007. I've spent a significant part of the last ten years working on those two novels. I started working on the stories in Fox Tooth Heart in 2009 and finished the last story in 2013. I think probably after Bitter Milk came out, I waited until I had finished and published a second novel before I returned to writing stories. I was wildly underestimating the amount of time that it would take me to write a novel. At some point I realized how much I missed writing stories. And being able to actually have the satisfaction of finishing something more often than once in a decade.

Do you feel like your writing process differs from writing a short story to novel?
Yeah. Writing a novel can make me feel like a moron. Sometimes it can be so complex that my brain crashes like some overworked computer. I can't keep it all in my head at once. When I'm writing a short story, whether or not it ends up being successful, I feel like I have a handle on it. I feel like I have some sort of control over the direction of the writing of it. It proceeds in a way that feels natural and right to me. Writing a novel feels like endless trial and error for years and years until I finally figure out something that I can produce.

You're into your 30s at this point. Many of these stories are about youth. What is it that drew you to that age of late adolescence?
It's hard to generalize and pin down a single reason why I keep writing about children and adolescents. I guess one thing is I've always been interested in the weirdest things that people believe and how they came to believe those things. Whether it's religion or just wildly irrational or illogical notions about how the world works. Sometimes I try to trace those beliefs back to their origins. It seems to me like a lot of deeply held beliefs and ideas come to us in adolescence. Maybe that's the kind of coming out of childhood. That's one reason. I'm also always interested in what characters yearn for most deeply. What the fear most, what they want most. I suppose that yearning and desire and fear are things fraught in adolescence. At least for me when I was a young kid. I don't know maybe it just comes more easily about a 15-year-old than about a 40-year-old.

It's much more reasonable to have really intense feelings coming from an adolescent character.
Yeah, yeah.

On VICE: Norwegian literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Do you feel that you're writing especially guilty characters or characters that have come through trauma? Or do you think that's just what story is?
I guess I believe that a short story presents a character in a few moments of their life. That's the only existence they're ever gonna have in the world. If it's gonna be fair at all, you've got to dramatize a few of the most important moments. Moments that offer in some way an extrapolation of what they were like before and after the story. The story is likely to be towards the end. To do that, I feel like I have to get at what they want or what they fear most. And also what they feel most guilty about. What they feel most ashamed of. I feel interested in what my characters are most ashamed of. Shame is a pretty interesting dramatic force. It pushes characters towards dramatically interesting situations.

What do you find draws you to shame?
It's the most powerful and the most revealing emotion. It reveals so much about a character. It shows who they want to be, who they wish they were not. I don't know if that makes any sense. I warned you I'm terrible at this. I'm really the last person to ask about why my stories are written the way they are.

It seems like obviously you have a command of your stories. But maybe you don't have the language to talk about them?
I've never felt comfortable talking about them. I don't necessarily know why that is. I certainly talk about the narrative structure of other people's stories a lot. I'm a professor of creative writing down here in Virginia. That's why I live here instead of New York—I got a job teaching creative writing. That's how I've spent a fair amount of my career. I have no problems analyzing the mechanics of narratives, but when I start answering questions about my own stories, it makes me really self-conscious to the point of panic. I have a couple events coming up next week, and I was apprehensive enough about that to go get a prescription for Xanax yesterday in case I have a complete panic attack and stop being able to breathe as I'm answering these sorts of questions in front of an audience. This is actually easy. No audience at all until you transcribe the stuff I say and put it online. I guess maybe I became a writer because I feel far more articulate expressing myself in writing than I do in conversation.

Read on Broadly: Valeria Luiselli—the Novelist All Your Smart Friends Are Talking About

In middle and high school, they told us, "Perfectionists procrastinate." And writers have reputations as procrastinators.
This may have something to do with my publication history. My first book was the stories that I wrote in my undergraduate creative workshop when I was a senior in college. My writing teacher, Madison Smartt Bell, sent some of my stories to his agent during the fall semester of senior year when I was 21. I didn't know he was doing that. One day his agent called me up and said she liked some of my stories and would I be able to send her more. Of course, I frantically wrote more stories and sent them to her. She got a book contract for my first collection, Stop Breakin Down , which was 15 stories. Very little revision was done to those stories beyond the revision that I myself did prior to showing them to Madison and my workshops and the infinite thesis hours I was taking with him. Picador, to the extent that they marketed the book, marketed it on the basis of it being edgy and raw and visceral. It was very rough around the edges because I was 22 at the time of publication. It is excruciating for me to imagine opening that book up and seeing what's in it. I haven't looked inside it in many years. It fills me with dread to imagine my students reading it and seeing, I don't know, the 500 different things in those stories that I'm now telling them not to do. Eventually, I learned how to revise my own work. So maybe I'm erring in the opposite direction these days. Revising for ten years instead of ten minutes.

Do you feel traumatized by that first brush with success?
It's a little overblown of me to say traumatized. It's obviously an unadulterated good thing for my career for that book to have come out. I won a couple of awards in the wake of it. It worked out. I'm glad that the book got published when it did, overall. It does sometimes sound nice to start over from scratch with a pen name and publish everything under a new name from now on and developed a new identity as a writer.

Do you like Fox Tooth Heart?
This one I'm happy with. March 30 was the day that I made the final change to the manuscript during my last round of revisions so it's been seven-and-a-half months. Talk to me in another year, I might be appalled by it.

Do you think that dissatisfaction with your earlier work keeps you going? Maybe. Like, an impulse to correct prior mistakes?

Yeah.
Maybe, to a certain extent. I guess also it feels fairly natural, once the deadline is passed, for me to be able to make changes to it, there has to be a mental break. As I keep changing as a writer and as a person, the relationship in my head keeps changing. And I want it to change forever and ever. I want to have some kind of clean break and have the process of forgetting about it.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

Photo via Twitter user @_megol, who would like you to know this is not her tattoo

lf you get a tattoo, the general wisdom is that you'll regret it later. Especially if you're the kind of weirdo who wants to decorate themselves with some political message. People tend to get more conservative as they age; the red fist that shines from an angry teenager's bicep doesn't look as good when it's sinking into the rubbery rhytides of a numbed and defeated 50-year-old loan manager. Don't do anything permanent, for the sake of the callous old cynic you'll inevitably become.

Like most general wisdom, this line neatly skids over a mess of buried presuppositions. Why shouldn't your future self have to suffer constant embarrassment if they're going to grow up to be boring? And in any case, sometimes a political tattoo exists so you can have a chance of getting old at all. In the 1930s, Soviet prisoners (mostly gangsters or petty thieves) would commonly get Stalin's face tattooed on their chests. This wasn't out of any particular adherence to the doctrine of socialism in one country, but because they thought that if they ever faced a firing squad, the executioners would be too afraid of the consequences to shoot at an image of the General Secretary. Body modification has existed in just about every human society. It's stupid to think that it can only have one meaning.

Related: Watch 'The Sacred Art of the Japanese Tattoo'

Usually, shocking tattoos are only reported on in the kind of outlets that find it necessary to arrange any information into numbered lists. The exception is the tattoo that has something to do with electoral politics: get one of those, post it on Facebook, and within an hour the journos will be stampeding to your house. Case in point: This week an 18-year-old from York named Kieran Horsfield got Jeremy Corbyn's face inked on his back while traveling in Australia, and now seemingly half the country is gawping at it.

It's shocking to some, because the Labour leadership is temporary—this one especially, if certain pound-shop Illuminists in the parliamentary party get their way—and a tattoo, as everyone keeps repeating, lasts forever. (Someone really ought to tell them about the horrible fate that awaits all living flesh.) Those notoriously reliable opinion polls suggest that even if Corbyn hangs onto his job for another five years, he doesn't stand a chance of winning the next election. What could be more embarrassing than walking around with a failed politician's face indelibly grafted onto your back forever, carrying the burden of a moment's youthful stupidity until the end of time, trudging disfigured as the stars in the sky chortle themselves nova, a shame that could outlive the universe itself?

Actually, the embarrassing tattoo of a political failure is the only one that deserves any respect. America has plenty of these. In 2008, non-negligible numbers of Ron Paul cultists had his 'R" target="_blank">supporting any Romney campaign.) For most people, those defeats happened once. For a few, it happens every time they look in the mirror.

In Nietzsche's moral philosophy, the sole ethical command is the doctrine of eternal return: If you would affirm something, you should affirm it to eternity. You should want it to repeat itself, without any variation, over and again for an infinity of consecutively identical universes. If something is good, it should be good enough for the infinite. In this repetition, the thought of eternal return is transformative. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze notes in Nietzsche and Philosophy, "laziness, stupidity, baseness, spitefulness, or cowardice that would will its own eternal return would no longer be the same laziness, stupidity, etc." This is what tattoos, the ink that touches eternity, manage to do.

Watch on Noisey: From South London to South Africa

Paul, Palin, and Romney are, frankly, awful people, their electoral platforms based on varying combinations of fear, greed, and idiocy. There's not much that's good in the world, but it's good that they didn't win. But when they're stuck forever on someone's skin, they turn into something else. (You could say something similar about the woman who had Nigel Farage's face done on her arm, or—despite the very different in politics—all those who got tattoos of the Yes logo during last year's failed Scottish independence referendum.) That tiny instant of real hope, when you could almost think that everything would actually get better, when you believed in something so much that you changed your body to say so to the world—the hope died, it always does, and maybe it deserved to, but though ink might fade that bittersweet moment remains, unsullied by the disappointments of victory, suspended into timelessness.

If you're going to get a political tattoo, make it a stupid one. Who'd want a winner? Back in 2008, along with the Paul and Palin designs, plenty of people had Obama tats—his O symbol, or the famous HOPE poster. According to the general wisdom, they made the better choice; their guy won, and so they won't look so stupid in old age. But because he won, that moment doesn't have the same meaning as it once did. It doesn't stand for positive transformative change any more. It means a massive expansion of the drone killing program, rocketing income inequality, death by cop, and ISIS closing on Damascus. Nothing kills hope more thoroughly than its realization. So if that teenager from York wants to avoid regretting his choice of tattoo, he should pray that Corbyn loses the next election.

Follow Sam on Twitter.

VICE's resident amateur tattoo artist, Bob Foster, is still offering free tats of stuff like John Prescott as a Boxer, or "Illuminati Ed Miliband" to anyone stupid/cool enough to want one.

Could Romney make a comeback? (Photo via)

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

• Romney to Return?
  The Republican party's upper echelons are so worried about Donald Trump and Ben Carson, some have suggested drafting Mitt Romney to run for president again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a dramatic late entry to the contest. —The Washington Post

• Jihadi John Drone Strike a "Clean Hit"
  The US launched a drone strike aimed at killing Jihadi John, a British member of the Islamic State believed to have beheaded American hostages. The Pentagon said it was still assessing the operation, but one official said it was "a clean hit". —ABC News

• Death Penalty Upheld in California
  A US federal appeals court has overturned a 2014 ruling that declared capital punishment in California unconstitutional. Executions in the state remain on hold, however, due to separate legal challenges about lethal injections. —Los Angeles Times

• Sanders Gets Postal Workers Union Endorsement
  Bernie Sanders has been boosted by the endorsement of the American Postal Workers Union. It has been viewed as a big vote of confidence as the Vermont senator tries to capture other major labor unions ahead of the —VICE News

International News

• IS Claims Beirut Bombings
  The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed at least 41 people. More than 200 others were injured when the blasts when off in a busy shopping street. —BBC News

• Russian TV Accidentally Airs Torpedo Plans
  Diagrams showing plans for a giant nuclear torpedo appeared briefly on Russian TV news, but only by accident, claims the Kremlin. Some Russian commentators have suggested the torpedo system leak was deliberate. —CNN

• It's Official: NLD Win Majority
  With 80 percent of seats now declared, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party has won a majority, ending decades of military rule in Myanmar. Under the constitution Suu Kyi cannot become president herself. —Reuters
• South Koreans Sue Over Slavery
  Eight men held as slaves at South Korean salt farms have taken their own government to court. The men claim official negligence and police inaction prolonged their ordeal at the hands of salt farm owners. —AP

Vincent Asaro leaving the Brooklyn federal court. (Photo by John Surico)

Everything Else

• Spooky: Space Debris Arrives Friday 13th
  A unidentified piece of space debris called WT1190F is expected to enter Earth's atmosphere today. A no-fly zone order is in place in the sea south of Sri Lanka where the chunk of whatever it is will probably land. —USA Today

• Judge Shakes Off Swift Suit with Puns
  A California judge used Taylor Swift song puns to throw out a lawsuit lodged by a man claiming Swift stole his lyrics. Judge Gail Standish said the case was a "blank space". —The Huffington Post
• GIFs Can Get You Arrested
  A man from Ohio has been charged for allegedly inciting the murder of US military personnel with a GIF. He is accused of re-blogging an Islamic State GIF on his Tumblr. —Motherboard
• Goodfellas Heist: Not Guilty
  The reputed mobster charged with the 1978 robbery at Kennedy Airport has been found found not guilty. "Even John Gotti didn't get this much attention," joked 80-year-old Vincent Asaro after the verdict. —VICE

Done with reading today? That's alright—instead, watch the new episode of our skateboarding series Epicly Later'd, about rising star Chima Ferguson.

Two hours into Rise of the Tomb Raider, San Francisco developer Crystal Dynamics' follow-up to its series reboot of 2013, and I'm genuinely thinking: This is game of the year material, right here. Everything I'm seeing, hearing, doing, it's amazing. It's singing to me like so few triple-A titles do, keeping my attention on the razor's edge that separates predictability from unplayability. I've survived an avalanche down the side of an impressively snow-crested mountainside, explored a beautiful ancient Syrian tomb while warfare raged on a horizon-hugging cityscape, and picked myself up from being knocked down like only Lara Croft can. In her previous outing, she learned to be a survivor. Here, she begins as battered, bruised, and bloody before growing into something else: a hard-shelled ice queen of ask-questions-later ruthlessness, a frozen-hearted killer with an appetite for destruction.

Which is where that magic hold on the senses breaks and one quickly realizes that Rise of the Tomb Raider isn't an outstandingly exceptional game, operating at a level where only 1 percent of mainstream releases ever get close to, but is "merely" a very, very good one. It's a great one, a lot of the time, full of riveting action likely to keep your ass at the edge of your sofa, and wonderfully original puzzles to crack when you're not encouraging Lara's red-eyed bloodlust.

Which is not to say that the progressively intensifying firefights aren't well orchestrated. Once Rise... loses its innocence and goes for the jugular, arming its iconic lead to the pearly white teeth and sending forth a legion of AI-backwards enemies to slaughter, it remains a ton of fun, an explosive adventure on a par with much of what Hollywood can chuck out come summertime blockbuster season. But it loses some of the personality that comes through in its opening hours, where we see Lara not as a vessel for extreme violence but as a psychologically wounded daughter cracking under the pressure of preserving her family's reputation.

You do what you can to avoid conflict—several areas where enemies lurk can be navigated stealthily. But take one wrong step and the situation escalates rapidly. Lara's no bullet sponge, so you'll always have to seek cover once the weapons are out. But she's fleet-footed, and mashing the dodge button while sprinting towards an attacker with shotgun armed is sometimes the best approach to take rather than sit tight in the bushes and pick off your head shots. At least, that's the case on the game's regular difficulty level—which isn't particularly tough at all. Finishing the game's campaign unlocks a "survivor" mode, though, where the opposition is rather more demanding, and close-quarter confrontation is a one-way ticket to greyed-screen death (generally less gory than 2013's brutal scenes).

'Rise of the Tomb Raider,' release trailer

The Lara of Rise... is the same one we saw in 2013, but ever so slightly tweaked by my reckoning. Still voiced (and mo-capped) by English actress Camilla Luddington, her appearance this time around seems to combine the looks of her performer proper with those of Gemma Arterton, someone who's long been suggested as a solid shout for the Lara role in the next Tomb Raider movie, whenever that comes along. Lead writer Rhianna Pratchett does a fine job of connecting us to the Lara beneath the always-immaculate hair (how does she do it?) and quiver full of gassy arrows, joining the dots between her hunger for adventure and childhood influences, and her love-hate relationship with the woman who moved in after her mother's (assumed) death. I'm not about to get into plot line nuances, but the wicked stepmother figure, Ana, has a very significant part to play in the story here.

Which, keeping things as loose as possible, has Lara searching for a supernatural MacGuffin that grants "eternal" life. She discovers that it's somewhere in Siberia, so off we go to a more varied landscape than you might have anticipated, with a geothermal valley of verdant greens striking a life-abundant line through the icy extremes. Alas, Lara's not alone in desiring this shiny trinket, with an ages-old organization called Trinity also on the case—with more bombs and bulldozers and heavily armed attack choppers than they have navigational sense. It's these antagonists who serve as the game's primary cannon fodder, though there's another force to be reckoned with, too, as you reach the campaign's final stages. Might be that they're pretty old. Might also be that while their name implies immortality, it's amazing what an axe to the head can do for anyone's health, be they 20th century born or from a time when Constantinople was the center of the world.

Much of the background to Lara's quest comes through collectibles—audio logs and diaries can be found all over the game's expansive world (fast travel is a must for post-completion relic sweeping), filling in the gaps between why she is doing this, and why she should. There are also endless crates and lockboxes and plants and animals to reap resources from, which can be used to upgrade weapons and equipment at save-point campfires scattered across the game. Quite why these fires are always alight before Lara reaches them, though, is a strange quirk of the game's presentation. Surely some hostile or other would have ventured over to see who was sniffing around their territory, toasting marshmallows, and crafting hollow-point bullets from old junk, and stamped the flames out as well as anyone they found resting beside them.

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The campfires are but a small moment-breaker in comparison to some other only-in-this-medium instances of logic failing to keep pace with emergent gameplay possibilities. You can't open locked crates until you have the right tool; but you find a handgun long before you do a lock pick, so why can't Lara simply shoot the locks off? Spiked rope traps will swing down into your path in places, requiring a swift shot to a brick-like mass to bring the deadly points crashing down before impalement—but the ropes themselves are weirdly bullet proof. I caught the occasional glitch as I played, too, at one point seeing Lara leap straight through what should have been a solid metal tank and into a bottomless abyss below. Jumping from one point of safety to the next isn't always clear, actually, so don't be surprised if you lose a life or two in sections that should be simple, since you're not being shot at.

Outside of the campaign there is Expedition mode, where you can replay stages competitively, using modifiers unlocked by flipping over cards—some of which you can buy through microtransactions, others you earn simply by playing the game. My favorites: chicken bombs and arrows. In a quiet moment of the campaign I realized you could grab village-dwelling poultry and chuck it around the place, but little did I know than that you could, in Expeditions, use them as arrows, Hot Shots-style. You can also make Lara's head, or those of enemies, massive; turn off melee attacks entirely; switch what weapons work and which don't; activate perks for making it through a level unscathed; and so on. There's a lot of play potential in this mode, but whether you'll want to pay for any of it is up to you. Personally, I'll make do with what I've collected across the campaign.

New on Noisey: Watch MOBO-winner Stormzy travel to South Africa to discover Zulu culture alongside producer Muzi

Reading my play notes back, I've actually scribbled down a fair few criticisms with Rise of the Tomb Raider, which extend to bizarre enemy placement (if I've had to scramble up a wall of ice, swing over a chasm, and shimmy along a ledge to get here, how the hell did you get here?) and the constant clicking of the right stick to activate "survival instincts" to identify all the things Lara can pick up for processing—they glow bright yellow as the rest of the screen becomes washed out. Keeping the often-fiendish challenge tombs "optional" still feels somewhat counter-intuitive given these are the areas in which Lara actually raids tombs. But for the most part these are niggles, nothing that we don't actively expect from video games. If everything in games was just as it is in real life, I don't think they'd hold the same appeal—we need a little dissonance, a little disconnection, to qualify these distractions as entertainment, experiences beyond our potential. And Rise of the Tomb Raider is never not entertaining, even when it's trading singular charisma for gaming clichés and transforming a twenty-something archaeologist into a lethal chimera of John Rambo, Katniss Everdeen, and Sarah Connor.

This is the bona-fide Uncharted rival that Microsoft needed, although what its timed Xbox exclusivity will do for the game's overall commercial performance remains to be seen. It isn't without the occasional blemish, a misstep or three, but when assessed as a complete package Lara's latest stands with its head above against most major-studio releases of 2015—not quite GOTY material, but strongly recommended. And it could yet prove the better Indiana-Jones-'em-up when measured beside next year's Nathan Drake swansong, A Thief's End, should Naughty Dog's release rely too much on snarky quips and canned cutscenes over franchise progression. Rise... most definitely is progression for all things Tomb Raider, and Crystal Dynamics aren't finished yet—keep watching until the end of the (Karen O-soundtracked) credits, is all I'm saying.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is released today, November 13th, for Xbox One (version tested) and Xbox 360. A PC port is due early next year, and a PlayStation 4 version will follow in late 2016.

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A bottle of Buckie. Photo by John Beck

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Fans of Buckfast can sleep easy tonight. A mammoth crusade by Scottish Labour to effectively ban Buckie fell apart this week, after Scottish Government ministers flat out rejected moves from an MSP that would've seen imports of the tonic wine halted at the Scottish border and, presumably, returned to the Devon monks who famously produce it.

Not that sleeping is ever easy after drinking Buckie's heady combo of caffeine and 15 percent ABV, and that's precisely why there's been a clamor among Scotland's political class, the police, and polite society to do something about the drink and its "wired awake drunks" for so long. But Buckfast seems safe for now, and the SNP are its unlikely saviors.

Recently, the Health and Sport Committee at the Scottish Parliament has been considering legislation from a Labour backbencher, Dr. Richard Simpson, that would see a legal limit introduced on the amount of caffeine allowed in alcoholic drinks. His proposed limit of 150mg per liter is less than half of the 375mg in every liter of tonic, meaning the Benedictine monks of Buckfast Abbey would either be forced to adapt their long-established recipe, or Scottish shops would simply have to stop selling it. Fears of a cross-border black market in illicit Buckfast have been swept aside, however, after the SNP Government confirmed they won't be supporting any aspect of the Alcohol Bill. This means it's doomed to fail even if it makes it beyond committee stage and reaches a vote in Parliament.

It's a famous victory for Buckfast and another bad moment for Scottish Labour, who've spent the last few years stumbling between various crises in the face of an ascendant SNP. Yet strangely, the SNP's usually formidable media operation hasn't swung into action here; there's been no overconfident press releases about Sturgeon Standing Up For Buckie or the usual tsunami of cybernat memes ridiculing Labour on the issue. It's unlikely that Buckfast will prove to be the defining issue of next year's Scottish elections but even so, there are surely some votes to be won in having secured the future of a drink affectionately known by its admirers as Wreck the Hoose Juice? Does saving Buckie in a nation of Buckfast lovers count for nothing?

Instead of trying to win (or perhaps lose) votes on the issue, the Scottish Government opted for a far more boring strategy of pointing out actual flaws in the plan to limit caffeine content, including the unclear evidence surrounding it, and have said that EU trade legislation might make such a ban impossible anyway. The official response doesn't even mention Buckfast by name, although when it says that "focusing on only one product misses the real problem," there can be little doubt about what "product" is being referred to.

This isn't the first time Labour in Scotland have tried to push through a law limiting the amount of caffeine in alcohol. In November 2010 the issue came to a vote in Parliament, although with only Labour and the Greens supporting the Buckie ban, it never came to pass. Still clinging on to the policy, MSP Richard Simpson launched another motion in 2012, that was finally thwarted this week. But the reasoning behind their continual efforts goes back a decade earlier, when Labour were in power in Scotland and waging a self-proclaimed "war on neds," via hysterical tabloid headlines, throwing around ASBOs, and getting into a war of words with, predictably, the producers of Buckfast.

This line of attack has rarely stopped since, with numerous attempts to connect Buckie with the idea of "youth crime." A freedom of information request revealed that over the three years to 2010, Buckfast was cited by Strathclyde Police in "5,000 crime reports", while a 2009 study said that 43 percent of young men in a Scottish young offenders institution had been under the influence of Buckfast while committing their offense.

The result of all this? "My view is that the discussions around tonic wines may in fact have made things worse," said Dr. Peter Rice, an NHS Consultant Psychiatrist, while giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament health committee a few weeks ago. "They may have established a reputation for a particular product that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

While it's hard to believe that the only reason people drink Buckfast is to stick it to the politicians, it's probably true that constantly telling everyone how bad it is has consolidated its cult status and gifted it an iconic position in popular culture. In effect, Buckfast doesn't need an advertising budget when Scottish Labour are prepared to do the job for them.

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It's likely also true that just because there's a correlation between young people drinking Buckie and committing offenses, it doesn't mean that tonic wine is actually creating a nation of caffeine-frenzied criminals. It could­ just be that people like drinking Buckie, and that deep seated reasons for crime and anti-social behavior—like, I don't know, social alienation, mass deindustrialization, and ever rising inequality—are harder to explain than an extra 200 mg of caffeine.

The SNP are probably not going to launch into next year's Holyrood election with billboards of Nicola Sturgeon downing Buckfast, particularly when it's not been that long since the party was proposing to ban under-21s from liquor stores. But tonight, this evening, this afternoon,—because it's always a good time for some tonic—Scotland's Buckie aficionados can raise a glass to the SNP, reluctant defenders of Buckfast tonic wine.

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Wow, William H. Macy is looking rough. ... Oh no, that's Brian Jean. Photo via Flickr user 5of7

A few days ago, the Wildrose Party—Alberta's Official Opposition—posted a seemingly innocuous picture on its Facebook page of a big-ass boat leaving a harbour with vague phrases typed on top like "I support the Northern Gateway pipeline" and "tell to secure our economic future." It was autographed by Brian Jean, a full-time William H. Macy cosplayer who also happens to lead the ultra-conservative party.

That was all mostly par for the course. The Wildrose Party (WRP), inaugurated in 2008, loves Alberta's tar sands. They've gone so far as to "reject" facts about the emissions intensity of extracting bitumen and suggest that Quebec's ability to ensnare the Energy East pipeline in a barbed-wire tumbleweed of bureaucracy should be revoked because Montreal is dumping literal shit in the St. Lawrence River. This is an assertion which seems to more-or-less reject the fundamental tenets of federalism. The WRP also sports an intense fondness for shitty posters and memes and straw man arguments.

But there were a few out-of-the-ordinary issues with the recent Facebook post that seemed to represent a slight aberration in Wildrose messaging and hint at a much deeper plot: a) the premier's last name was spelled incorrectly ("Notely" instead of "Notley"); b) the aforementioned big-ass boat was a container ship, not an oil tanker; and c) the container ship was depicted leaving Vancouver, not Kitimat (where the Northern Gateway pipeline would conclude if completed).

Now, it would be very simple to dismiss this as yet another instance of stunning levels of ineptitude in the Wildrose ranks. But that would more than miss the point. Such a conclusion would ignore what is almost certainly to be the a desperate attempt by 22 parodists masquerading as Wildrose MLAs with the intent of creating a caricature of conservative politics that far exceeds anything hatched from the imagination of Stephen Colbert.

Albertans have, until now, mostly missed the cues. To be fair, such hints were fairly subtle until 2014's Week Before Christmas, when then-leader Danielle Smith took a flaming axe to the TAXATION IS THEFT-emblazoned hull of the ship by crossing the floor along with eight of her fellow MLAs to join the then-ruling Progressive Conservatives. It was a daring but ultimately doomed move, one which seemed to represent a tactical fracture in the pinko thespian collective: Smith and Co. seemed convinced their work of sabotaging of the Wildrose was complete and moved on to body the PC behemoth. As we now know, the move backfired horribly and injected the Ayn Rand-adoring fanbase with exceptional levels of energy, consequently cursing the remaining members to many more years of potentially unrecognized satire.

That's why the now-deleted Facebook post matters: It seems to represent the breaking point for the more devout members of the comedy troupe, who spiked the levels of absurdity to new heights in a hope that people will finally decipher the joke and fulfill the destiny of an astonishingly long con and let them visit their actual families for the first time in years.

But this didn't come from nowhere. Over the past few weeks, there's been a steady rise in incidents that, when compiled, should help prove the Wildrose Party is in fact an impressive crew of performance artists who are trying their very best to KO Alberta's wounded conservative movement and make way for a full-blown socialist utopia.

1) Two Wildrose MLAs are currently impersonating Harry and Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber. Meta satire.

Why do I feel like the #WRP consulted with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels on their seating plan? #ableg pic.twitter.com/ie1z9wjhOz
— Bill Fortier (@BillFortierCTV) November 5, 2015

2) Strangely, rhetoric about the Media Party (a hilarious trope deployed by far-right activists that asserts, in spite of all available evidence, that media outlets are explicitly working against conservative causes) has been mostly absent from Alberta politics. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Earlier in the month, Derek Fildebrandt, the parody all-star who performs as finance critic, was directly quoted in the Globe & Mail as stating, "The NDP platform was never intended to ever be implemented. The NDP platform was a hard-core ideological document." It was a carefully curated statement of ridiculous proportions, designed to draw a shit-ton of attention.

Upon receiving criticism for the silly statement, Fildebrandt doubled down and called veteran journalist Carrie Tait a "B-list reporter" who "intentionally torqued a story." On Oct. 27, when the budget was released, Jean and Fildebrandt took questions from reporters about the budget. Obviously, they weren't fans of it, as the Wildrose project mandates they exclusively advocate for the erasure of all tax mechanisms and subsequent dissolution of governed civilization. Tait asked Fildebrandt a question. Having perfected the role of the manchild, Fildebrandt refused to answer the question, stating, "I'm not taking questions from people who don't conduct themselves professionally, thank you." A real politician would know how important it is to place nice with a huge newspaper like the Globe and would love the opportunity to get an anti-tax message out there. Fildebrandt, realizing the opportunity to soil his alleged ideology's reputation, didn't have time for that. Ku-fucking-dos.

3) For almost six months, the party—represented mostly by Fildebrandt—whined about how long it was taking for the NDP to publish its 2015-16 budget and the fact it would likely include borrowing money to plug the gaping fiscal hole created by crashing oil prices as opposed to firing all the doctors in the province or something. It was was a mighty fine showing.

That's because these artists know that conservatives offer only two options for budgeting—cut spending and cut taxes—so it was important to play the part and bleat such rhetoric for a while. But if the Wildrose was comprised of legitimate conservative politicians who care about money-related stuff, it would have countered the release of the NDP budget with a "shadow budget," or a proposed alternative for how the government should raise and spend money. But, for completely unexplained reasons, the Wildrose did not. Meanwhile, the Alberta Party—represented by a single fucking MLA—released its own. It's lunacy to think an actual Official Opposition would spend half a year complaining about the lack of a budget and not release its own. Some political watchers were very confused. But we should know better: refusing to release a counter-budget was when the Wildrose parodists fired off its second emergency flare to try to get our attention.

4) Fildebrandt recently misspelled the word "conservative" in a tweet and a few days later simply posted "tomorrow?" as if he was musing to himself about when he would break character and return to being the soft-spoken bike-lane boosting vegan Trotskyite we all know he is.

5) Then came the slam-dunk moment, when the Wildrose performed a very flaccid filibuster of the legislature because the NDP wanted sessions to begin at 9 AM instead of 10 AM. The NDP suggested a tweak to the rules so that evening sessions could be avoided in order for MLAs to go home and chill with their families. Seemed reasonable enough. After all, as pointed out by a fair few commentators, most people in the province start their workdays at 9 AM. Especially rural Albertans—the demographic the Wildrose almost entirely represents—who often brew their morning coffee at, like 4-in-the-fucking-morning. Also, there's that whole family values shtick the far-right likes to boast about: someone has to remind us all of what an adorable 1950s nuclear family looks like, and it seems fair to think Wildrose MLAs would be up for the task of serving as role models. But that's assuming the Wildrose is actually composed of conservative politicians and not methods actors, who wake up for pour-over coffee at noon.

Instead, the apparently legitimate caucus went batshit, pulling cards like "if I have a technological problem , you all know IT isn't going to be there to give me a hand and I am technologically illiterate," which is a real-life quote. Six parodists playing Wildrose MLAs who have watched too much C-SPAN footage of Ted Cruz then took turns over the span of an hour of talking about why they don't like waking up early or something along those lines. Graham Thomson, political columnist for the Edmonton Journal, suggested "Wildrose picks wrong hill to die on." But that's the thing. This feeble-ass filibuster, triggered over a legislative technicality that literally no voter cares about, makes the Wildrose look like a pack of moody toddlers who don't want to follow a good suggestion solely because someone in authority made it. The party was skewered by people across the political spectrum, including Wildrose supporters. It was a masterly executed plan.

What's next: The WRP's AGM takes place today in Calgary. While it's unclear if any of the pseudo-MLAs will break character in public, it seems reasonable to conclude the troupe will have to re-evaluate its strategy in coming weeks and months. After all, the PC Party has been decimated, leaving the Wildrose as the lone right-leaning entity in the province. Given that two-thirds of Albertans favour conservative politics, the crew could ostensibly consider holding the line on its performance until the next election, at which point it could bait-and-switch voters, continuing to promise tax cuts and service cuts while actually plotting to nationalize the oil industry and create hundreds of small-scale, worker-owned cooperatives that grow organic veggies and play Ultimate Frisbee against each other on weekends.

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Still courtesy of Drafthouse Films

If Dangerous Men were a competently made film, it would be nightmarish and grim. There are half a dozen attempted rapes during its 80-minute runtime, and pretty much all of the male characters who aren't cops are ready to sexually assault vulnerable women at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile, literally every woman who appears onscreen is defined by her sexuality, whether she's a prostitute, rape victim, or biker girlfriend—the only exceptions are a convenience store owner who gets shot by robbers a few minutes into the movie and a female cop who has no lines. Despite all that, it's probably possible to read Dangerous Men as feminist, since one of the main characters is a woman who spends her time stabbing, shooting, and threatening to cut the penises off of men.

But trying to ascribe meaning or a message to Dangerous Men is like talking about whether a bowl of soup supports civil rights—this is not a remotely competent film, and its real subject is its own failure. People who will seek it out it will watch it for the same reason people gawk at memes of poorly designed objects. It's fun and even sort of cathartic to mock someone else's mistakes, and not necessarily mean-spirited. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that we're all fallible and we all fuck up, even when we try our best.

And oh man, did the auteur behind Dangerous Men try his best. It took him a reported 26 years to put the film together, and he didn't have much help: IMDB lists him as the film's writer, director, producer, music composer, editor, production designer, and set decorator. He went by John S. Rad, though he was born Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad. Not much else is known about him. He once told an LA Weekly writer that he was a millionaire architect and filmmaker in his native Iran before fleeing the 1979 revolution and that he had written thousands of songs and poems and made a pair of English-language films called Under the Skin of Night and Tough and Restless. (He is listed as a writer for Under the Skin of Night , which was directed by Iranian filmmaker Fereydun Gole.) Dangerous Men came out in 2005 in a few LA-area theaters and was noticed only by a few film fanatics. Rad died in 2007, so he never got a chance to see Drafthouse Films give his magnum opus a wide release this week.

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I don't know how Rad would feel about his movie being embraced for its sloppy amateurishness, but that's the only reason to see it. Its schlocky no-budget lineage goes back to Ed Wood, but it probably most closely resemble's Tommy Wiseau's The Room in that it putters around aimlessly and pretty much plotlessly while dropping a few bizarre non sequiturs on its audience, who are hopefully high or drunk enough to find them funny. It's a movie meant to be talked back to and mocked by groups of trash connoisseurs.

It's probably even worse on a technical level than The Room. The dialogue is mindless and badly recorded; there's also a curious number of exchanges about renting a car or ordering drinks or dinner. (One scene centers around the heroine picking up her debit card from her dad.) The characters' motivations are unclear and so is the expected audience reaction—things just sorta happen, and then we move on. At one point, a police detective is called up by his girlfriend, who complains that she's on vacation and he should come have sex with her. Then he goes to her place and they have sex. This is not connected to anything else in the movie.

Other bizarre moments include an extremely long sequence where a biker gang leader and his girlfriend watch a belly dancer, then go have sex; a scene where a blind woman with a gun (!) attempts to kill a home invader; and a moment when our man-killing heroine pushes a car down a hill, where it explodes for no reason. My personal highlight concerns a Englishman who vaguely resembles a poor man's John Cleese getting stranded naked in the wilds of California after an attempted rape (of course) goes awry. He wanders through the bushes cursing himself, trying to figure out how he'll explain his situation to his wife, and insulting his penis for getting him into trouble. That's the only time we see him.

You can call Dangerous Men a bad movie, and you should, because it is, but how could a movie be entirely bad when it includes moments like this?

Or this?

Or this?

Or this?

As those shots show, this is a movie with a lot of nudity mixed in with the violence. All of it is slapdash and vaguely pathetic, but you can see the outlines of an actual film here, a B-movie wrapped up in themes of violence, revenge, justice, and the horrible things men are capable of doing to women. Instead, what we get is kind of a vague impression of a film, a imitation of an idea placed in Rad's head by countless hours of action movies and cop thrillers. Dangerous Men obviously wants to be dangerous, but it can't quite get there. Instead, it's something more interesting, a piece of outsider art that's more about the attempt to make a movie than anything else. You can't watch it without thinking about what it's doing wrong, and that experience of seeing the film fall apart into utter incoherence quickly becomes more entertaining than anything onscreen.

In one of his only interviews, Rad described watching the movie in theaters in 2005 and being mystified by the audience's laughing at scenes that he never intended to be funny. But he sounds happy that his film got a response of any sort, that his movie is appreciated for its singular nature, if nothing else.

"I create differently," he told the LA Weekly. "If it is bad, it's a bad different. If it's good, it's a good different."

Dangerous Men is out today from Drafthouse Films. Find out where it's playing here.

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Photo via Flickr user Tassilo von Parseval

I was in the audience for an experimental puppet show when I got the text. My dad had been in an accident. He had taken our dog for a walk and he didn't return. Someone found him lying face down in the park by our house.

Later, the doctors explained that dad had suffered an aneurysm. He wasn't responding to outside stimuli, but they were doing their best to make sure that he was comfortable. People came and visited in the hospital room. There was a lot of crying. Two days later dad was taken off life-support. He was 56.

I was in my last year of university when my father died and was wholly unprepared for what life would be like without him. Everything lost its meaning. I got fired from my part-time job. I had difficulty sleeping. I dropped two classes and about 15 pounds.

While I had experienced bouts of depression before, this felt different. The sadness was acute. I knew the reason I felt like I did, and I knew that there was nothing I could do to change it. These feelings were exasperated by the fact that the person I usually turned to for advice was my pops. And clearly he couldn't help.

It's been five years since dad passed, and during that time a number of my friends have also lost parents. At first I thought we were just unlucky, but after a depressing Google search I came across a stat that said one in seven Americans lose a parent or sibling before the age of twenty. I was slightly outside that age bracket when pops had his aneurysm, and I couldn't find corresponding data for Canada, but I think the point still stands. This is more common than you'd think

Recently I interviewed some of my friends about their parent's death. My idea was that I'd pull some quotes and put together a primer on dealing with the loss of your mom or dad. I wanted to write an article that was glib and funny, and at the same time offered real advice. Something like: The top ten things you didn't know parental death or I couldn't stop crying at my father's funeral and you'll never believe what happened next.

After the actual conversations, however, that idea seemed ridiculous. My friends were honest and vulnerable and our talks lasted a lot longer than I thought they would. What I realized is that we were all desperate to share our stories, but rarely got the chance to broach the subject. It's not something that really comes up on dates or at dinner parties, and despite the fact that for each of us the loss has completely reshaped how interact with the rest of the world, none of us had really talked about it much.

The interviews felt raw, and sad, and I wanted to preserve as much I could of that in the writing. I figured the best way to do that was to get out of the way and let them say it for themselves. Below are excerpts from the interviews.

Mina - 26, actress

My Mom was a single parent and an immigrant to Canada. She was also a survivor of domestic violence at the hands of my father. To say my Mom was fierce would be a large understatement. She was stubborn, intense, and relentless in everything she did. Something I have, for better or worse, inherited.

She had the Indian hospitality thing down, too. She expected you to eat her food and hang out in her dining area. She opened her arms to all of my friends, even if she was worried they were turning me into an art loving, atheist, hippie.

When she passed she was visiting my uncle's home in Alleppey, Kerala, which is a southern province of India. She was praying. Mom was super religious. She was like a superhero for Jesus. She was doing the rosary while sitting up in bed. My sister and brother were in the same room with her, but they had fallen asleep. She apparently had trouble breathing. She woke up my brother and sister and started to panic. My sister escorted her downstairs. Everyone in the house woke up. They helped mom into my uncle's car to drive her to the hospital. They barely got out the driveway before she took her last breath. This was all recounted for me by my sister and brother. We believe it was a heart attack induced by her diabetes.

The death was overseas, so... complicated. My uncle pretty much took care of everything immediate, but when I got home to Canada I had to deal with cancelling credit cards, trying to find a will, cancelling and freezing her bank accounts, paying bills. It was overwhelming. My mom had nothing prepared. She was old school, never wanted to talk about her death, or wills, or what our life would look like without her.

Even though I didn't really like my childhood home, cleaning it out of the possessions our mom valued was horrible and sad. It was really final. It actualized that she was never coming back. This feeling was compounded because she was buried in India. I have no real place to visit with her or just sit and miss her. The estate home/family home was the last place for me and my siblings to do that.

Normally I'm a very social person. One of the biggest changes since she passed is that I've become incredibly internal. I never really want to go out and see people, even though I know it's good for me to probably do that. I don't really feel like myself and I haven't for most of these past eleven months.

If I had to offer any advice I would encourage people to actively (but gently) ask their parents if they have thought about what happens after they pass. Having those conversations with all children present, while awkward and morbid, will allow everyone to be on the same page.

Also, get a therapist.

Ron - 44, producer

My parents split up when I was two, and their differences meant that my dad kept his distance. I got a present in the mail most Christmases and a letter or two a year, but that was it. I didn't even hear his voice for the first time until I was 12, when he called out of the blue to say he wanted to come see me and be my dad. I was nervous to meet him and it was weird, but he was really nice and he was trying really hard. We saw each other several times over a year and he and my mom seemed to be reconciling. But then that fell apart and he took off again.

I only saw him once or twice as an adult, although there were more calls and letters. He stood me up one time when I was about twenty five and I decided that I'd had enough of getting jerked around by Occasional Dad, so that was that.

I was headed into a matinee showing of that stupid movie with Marky Mark and his talking teddy bear when I found out. I'd missed a bunch of calls from my mom. I called her back with that sense that something was wrong. She was crying. She kept on saying that he'd died completely alone. We're not entirely sure what killed him, because he was dead in his apartment for quite a while before anyone found him. They think it was a heart attack. The neighbors smelled the rot.

He'd made me executor of his will, which was perplexing. We hadn't spoken in over a decade, but I guess if not me, then who? Sometimes I think it was out of a kind of spite. Deal with me now. Here's my life. Surprise.

His papers were in disarray and it was a bit like a detective story, having to piece his life and affairs together from scraps of paper and little journals. I found out at the end of his life that he'd been something of a hermit who just continually passed on seeing and socializing with people. He stayed home and listened to Jays games on the radio. He went to church, but apparently he didn't talk to anyone.

It scared me a lot because I have that hermit in me as well, along with a series of failed relationships, so I could easily see myself winding up the same way. I'm inherently bad at a lot of the same things as him, but I'm trying to conquer them.

I'm not sad because I miss him. I'm sad because he blew it and I was deprived of a dad for most of my life. I'm sad because of the way his later life went and how he ended up. When I was first back from the whole experience of sorting through his affairs and laying him to rest. I kept on saying to everyone: "We have to keep each other close. These relationships won't tend to themselves, and they'll crumble if you let them."

Martha - 28, inventory specialist

My dad died in early September of 2003. He had pancreatic cancer, but we only found that out a week before he died. He'd been feeling like shit all summer. He'd been seeing his doctor, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong. One morning my mom finally decided that she was going to take him to the ER. They weren't going to leave until they'd figured out what was going on.

I remember Dad coming to my room at around six in the morning and casually saying that he and mom were going to the hospital. I started to get out of bed but he insisted that I should keep sleeping. I was 16, so I did. I'm forever kicking myself for not just getting the fuck up and giving him a hug since that was the last time we would speak while he was fully conscious.

Mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer three years later, while I was finishing high school/starting university. I was super confident she wasn't going to die. The universe had already taken my dad, so losing her couldn't be in the cards, right? I swear I was sure of that even when she was in the ER, she'd get better, we'd get through this hump, and she'd be around. I kept thinking I'd have more time to become her friend when we got older. The joke's on me.

There have been times when I've felt that I should feel sadder and I'm not. Then there are the times when feelings come up out of the blue years later. It's hard to explain. People tend to have less patience for the dead-parent blues after a year, which is kind frustrating, but understandable. That shit doesn't get sorted out in 365 days, it's ongoing. It just manifests differently.

I don't feel it quite so much in my day-to-day, but I also find that as I get older in some ways it's gotten worse. I feel like I'm so convinced that nothing good can stay and that people will always leave me because I have no evidence to the contrary. I'm sadder and more pissed off that neither of them are here. I just wish I could show them that I've done ok and I just wish I could know that they're proud of me.

I miss my family. I miss the familiar physicality of my parents. I miss my mum crawling into bed with me on a Saturday morning because she was awake and wanted to hold her baby. I miss that I can't just hug my dad and hang off him like a weird jungle gym. I miss the safety net of them both. Even my dad's hands were like these massive baseball mitts that made my own hands feel so tiny but protected. I don't know. It's funny, even after all this time I don't know what to say or to tell people.

Graham (the author)

Your parents are going to die. On a broader philosophical level, this is something that all of us understand, but for obvious reasons it's not something any of us really like to think about. This is going to happen regardless of what you think of them, and whether or not you're prepared. The last conversation I had with my Dad was at a sushi restaurant. It was lunchtime. I don't remember what we talked about, but I know at the end of the conversation he asked whether I wanted to join him for a couple of beers later that evening after he had finished his conference. I lied and told him I was busy. I spent that night watching reruns of South Park by myself.

I don't know if there is a bigger lesson to learn from that, and anything I could come up with borders on cliché, but I think about the decision a lot. There is a lot of things I wish I could have done differently, but lately instead of dwelling on those, I've been trying to call my mom more often.

Graham Isador is a writer living in Toronto. You can follow him on Twitter.

Meet Linkle screencaps via Nintendo

The first Nintendo Direct to be broadcast since the sad passing of company president Satoru Iwata in July hasn't disappointed, with a handful of exciting announcements.

The 45-minute show, streamed simultaneously around the world and presented by Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime and Treehouse's Bill Trinen, revealed an official female Link, called Linkle, for the 3DS version of Hyrule Warriors, releasing in early 2016. VICE might just have called that back in the summer. Linkle wields two crossbows and looks entirely bad ass.

Also confirmed was the introduction of Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife as a playable character in the current iteration of Super Smash Bros., for both Wii U and 3DS, complete with the classic battle music from Square's legendary RPG. More information on Cloud's appearance will follow in a special Smash Bros. broadcast in December.

You bet he does

As well as confirming an HD version of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for a March 4 Wii U release—a new amiibo of Wolf Link comes out at the same time, naturally, while pre-orders are rewarded with a copy of the game's soundtrack—Nintendo teased us again with the next properly new Zelda title, stating that it would be "heading to Wii U."

What if, and bear with me here, but what if the Linkle reveal is warming us up for the Wii U Zelda offering selectable male or female heroes, eh? What about that? Wouldn't that be rad? Yes. Yes it would. Very rad indeed.

New on Motherboard: Someone Made the Flaming Sword from 'Fallout 4', for Real

A Splatoon update—new stages, new gear, new reasons to play what's probably the best multiplayer shooter of 2015 in its own special way—is imminent, with Nintendo promising to support the game into 2016. We also discovered that there are now 3.3 million courses available to play in Super Mario Maker. I've uploaded a whole three of those, so accept my apologies for slacking.

Several donuts were harmed in the making of this Nintendo Direct

In Pokémon news, old-school Game Boy titles Blue, Red, and Yellow are headed to the 3DS via Virtual Console, a new free-to-play game called Pokémon Picross is also bound for the handheld early next month, and arcade brawler Pokken Tournament will make the leap from the coin-op world to the home console market in spring 2016.

There was news of a shedload of indie titles coming to the eShop, Star Fox Zero's release date is set as April 22, there was a really detailed thing about Fire Emblem Fates that I sort of got baffled by, and Mario Tennis Ultra Smash got a minute or two of attention. I've been playing it a fair bit recently—it comes out on November 20 and will be reviewed on VICE Gaming soon. Assuming I've not been entirely consumed by Xenoblade Chronicles X, given it's meant to be set in a bigger open world than The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 combined.

Watch the November 12 Nintendo Direct in full here.

Read more gaming articles on VICE, or follow @VICEGaming on Twitter.

Illustrations by Michael Hili

Joko Widodo, a.k.a. "Jokowi" made it big because he was an honest man in a landscape of cheats. He was supposed to be a man of the people who began in poverty and worked his way up from local-level politics to the national stage. He was expected to take on Jakarta, tear up red tape, and get shit done. Above all else, he was going to clean up corruption.

This was huge in a country of 249.9 million people used to watching the place be run like a cartel. Politics in Jakarta is a dirty business where officials make their wage in bribes and patronage networks decide who gets what job. Without the right friends in the right places, it's almost impossible to get anything done.

So when Jokowi was elected on 22 July with 53 percent of the vote, he became the first Indonesia president in a long time to come from outside the military and outside Jakarta. He was easygoing and mild-mannered. The guy even listened to heavy metal.

But his victory didn't come easily. The day after the election, Jokowi had to survive a constitutional challenge to his right to form a government. After that, his first serious move as leader came when he scrapped fuel subsidies as of January 1, 2015. Fuel subsidies may seem like a dull topic for most, but in Indonesia, it's the kind of thing that could cause a revolution. Prior to 2015 the Indonesian government was chewing through one fifth of its budget subsidizing fuel but past efforts to do the same ended in protests. It was largely seen as political suicide.

Not for Jokowi. He cut back on subsidies and freed up billions to spend on healthcare, education, and infrastructure spending. While the move was met by some protests in regional areas, and Jokowi's popularity dropped sharply, he was saved when world oil prices started to tank, cushioning many Indonesians from the sudden price rise in their petrol.

This was a brave first step welcomed by the business community and foreign investors, but what everyone was waiting for was the showdown between Jokowi and the old guard. Everyone knew Jokowi didn't stand a chance. His is a minority government ruling in a Coalition, but Indonesians still hoped for a new kind of leader who would make a stand. At best a political rebel, at worst a noble loser.

Budi Gunawan, the general appointed police chief by President Widodo, was immeditely subjected to corruption charges.

What they seem to have gotten is a sell-out. That much became clear when Jokowi appointed Budi Gunawan as national police chief in January to appease the country's political elite. Budi was a three-star general and by most accounts a suspiciously wealthy man. Those suspicions were enough to attract the attention of the Corruption Eradication Committee (KPK) who immediately named Budi as a suspect in a bribery investigation.

It's fair to argue that the KPK is Indonesia's only institution trusted by the people. Ordinary Indonesians have little love for the police, which is an institution that still performs a " two finger" virginity test on its female members. Comparatively the KPK seem like a beacon of hope, with enough grunt to bring down cabinet members, police generals, and lawmakers. So this is why when the KPK called out Budi, the police came for it with knives.

Jokowi dropped Budi in February and the police responded over the next few months by charging members of the KPK with a series of largely invented offenses, forcing them to follow custom and step aside. Sadly those who have replaced the fallen officials are not considered crusaders for public justice.

"This was one institution Indonesians had a lot of trust in," said Aaron Connelly from the Lowy Institute. "And the police basically destroyed it as it existed."

This was only the start. In April, Jokowi was forced to sit by and watch as members of his own party tore him to pieces. Party matriarch Megawati Soekarnoputri raged against Jokowi during a fiery speech at a party conference that was then met with thunderous applause. For all the promises Jokowi made about making a fresh start, this moment showed the battle ahead.

It also happened to coincide with the execution of drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran who were anchored to a post in a jungle and shot. Australia reacted with fury, as did the Brazilian, French, Dutch, and Nigerian governments when their citizens had been executed. At this time Jokowi was at the lowest point in his first year. He's been weakened and needed to show strength, which meant upholding the rule of law even if it upset foreign powers.

The first ten months in office saw the Indonesian parliament only pass three laws. Key infrastructure projects are also yet to begin.

By August, Jokowi was looking for allies to balance the growing willingness of the police to challenge his authority, so he started buddying up to the Indonesian army. It was a logical political move given the rivalry between the institutions, but somewhat problematic in a country that has only elected two civilian leaders ever, Jokowi being one of them. This is why images of Jokowi in khakis hanging out with generals during a military training exercise in July were enough to make some Indonesia watchers twitchy.

To make matters worse, the Chinese stock market's fiery crash in mid-June and the grinding onset of El Nino have sent Indonesia's economy into a slide. A chance at dealing with this lies in Jokowi's apparent plans to make Indonesia a "maritime nexus" by building ports and shipping infrastructure across the archipelago. The basic concept is the same as building roads in land-based countries to connect distinct peoples and bind them to a national identity, opening up economic opportunities and curbing social unrest. But then the first ten months in office saw the Indonesian parliament only pass three laws. Key infrastructure projects are also yet to begin.

Jokowi has now moved into his second year without realizing many of the changes he promised. In spite of this there's a theory things may get better from here on. As proof some commentators cite a relatively recent cabinet reshuffle and the appointment of an anti-corruption campaigner to Chief of Staff. Jokowi was only just finding his feet, the theory goes, and now he has a grasp of the political system, maybe things will be different. Maybe he still has some fight in him. Maybe the man they sent to live in Merdeka Palace hasn't been lost to the streets of Jakarta.

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Malé city, photo by Shahee Ilyas via Wiki Commons

JJ Robinson was the editor of the Maldives' first independent English language news service. The following is adapted from his book,'Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy,' a first-hand investigation of the seamy, dangerous, and greedy politics that underpin the globally renowned tourist destination.

Few places in the world see celebrity soccer players, Russian oligarchs, arms dealers, Madonna, and the Taliban occupying the same stretch of sand, let alone infinity plunge pool. But the Maldives is where the rich, famous, and notorious go for their private romantic getaways, and the isolation, unique geography, and no-questions-asked visa policy of the Indian ocean archipelago offers rare freedom from prying eyes.

Predictably, the Maldivian regime's declaration last week of a state of emergency (which has since been lifted) triggered another wave of "Trouble in Paradise" headlines. But this is a misnomer: paradise in the Maldives is strictly reserved for tourists, the resorts demarcated from the rest of the country. Few tourists looked up from their daiquiris amid a week of presidential assassination plots, exploding yachts, bomb threats, internecine political battles, pro-democracy protests, and illicit extraditions, just as few did during the 2012 coup that toppled the country's first democratically-elected leader. The resorts might as well be in a different country.

The Maldives as experienced by most Maldivians is quite the opposite of paradise—but "Trouble in Trouble" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Half the population of 350,000 live in the capital city of Malé, a congested concrete jumble of candy-colored buildings barely 2.2 square kilometers in size. Alcohol is banned, entertainment options are limited. Sixty percent of the population is under the age of 25, preyed upon by violent gangs and Islamic radicals, and crippled by drug abuse and boredom. A blackmarket bottle of vodka can cost up to $140 USD; brown sugar heroin can be at the door faster than a pizza.

The constitution nonetheless mandates that 100 percent of the population be Muslim, a facet of life strictly enforced both by the authorities and the threat of extreme social ostracism. Tourists on romantic resort getaways blissfully sun themselves on beaches a few hundred feet from "local" islands where Maldivian women are routinely sentenced to 100 lashes for the crime of extramarital sex. Last month a woman was sentenced to death by stoning, although fortunately, this was later overturned.

Maldivian rulers have often exploited Islamic nationalism, inventing threats, and unifying the population under the banner of "defending Islam" from other religions. But it is the criminalization of extramarital sex rather than proselytizing that undoubtedly contributes to one of the Maldives' more surprising statistics: the world's highest divorce rate.

The reasons are complex—and a fascinating example of a people and culture adapting to suit enforced conservatism.

"It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the dowries and the pleasures of society which the women offer," observed the famous Islamic explorer Ibn Battuta, writing in the 14th century.

"Most people do not even fix any dowry. When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave, they divorce their wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage (muta). I have seen nowhere in the world women whose society was more pleasant."

High praise indeed from one of the most traveled explorers of all time.

Related: Watch 'The Cost of Dying in Greece'

Unlike the rest of South Asia, weddings are not considered a big deal in the Maldives. I've been two minutes late to a Maldivian wedding and missed it. The couple stand up, exchange rings and a token dowry of several rufiyaa, the imam gives some wholesome family planning advice, and if it's particularly lavish, there might be a tray of hors d'oeuvres to eat on your way out the door.

Just as weddings are considered somewhat arbitrary, so is divorce. While a man gets a three month "probationary period" on marriage and can always divorce his wife simply by saying "I divorce you" three times, a woman has to go through the court system. All the same, there is no social stigma around divorce for women. I recall one recently married fisherman boasting that his new wife had been married six times; this, he explained with a sly wink, meant she was experienced. The figure was about average for a woman in her forties.

Despite the emphasis on conservative appearance and the vicious social ostracism of anyone caught with their pants down, many Maldivians were surprisingly liberal in their views towards sex. Extramarital sex might have been a crime, but other people's wives and husbands were fair game.

For their part, Maldivian women had been pressured into wearing the headscarf—a recent innovation—but compensated for this with tight skinny jeans and tops that looked like they had been sprayed on. The effect was somehow more revealing than the Western casual dress that so offended the mullahs. Female clothing shops in Malé had shop dummies in the window with revealing strips of fabric, cocktail dresses of the kind a teenager might wear to distress her parents. To be fair, a 16-year-old girl who bought and actually wore one of these in 2013 was swiftly taken into custody under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act, but not before she had drawn a large crowd of men concerned for her lax morals.

"The societal norms and values of Maldivian culture were violated," the police spokesman advised us. "Police officers explained to her about how her dress should be as well as called her parents and advised them regarding this."

"She was very, very, very, very naked. Her dress was transparent," he added.

The capital city of Malé even had a sex shop, although it was relatively tame by Western standards. The owner of "G-Spot," Mohamed Nizam, had endless trouble with the Ministry of Economic Development over his registered business name, which he insisted stood for "girl"—going so far as to scrawl the extra letters on the shop hoarding. The case eventually ended up in the civil court, the state attorney alleging that the name was "inappropriate for viewing by women and children."

Nizam defended himself, producing as evidence printouts of articles from the Times, BBC, and CNN stating that the G-Spot did not exist, and how could he therefore be found guilty of using the name inappropriately?

"What Nizam has failed to comprehend during all the legal wranglings is that even if he does get permission to continue to trade under said name he will still struggle for custom as most men will almost certainly not be able to locate it," suggested one commentator on the article.

Whether due to prohibition or the heat, sex was on brain in the Maldives. The lack of cognitive dissonance meant as long as the illusion of Islamic conservatism was maintained, as long as the boat wasn't rocked, as long as nothing was stated, written down, admitted, or confessed to, as long as you weren't caught—ordinary people could be surprisingly accepting.

The lack of stigma surrounding divorce did not extend to having a child out of wedlock, which showered not just the woman but also the child in shame. This was why women were overwhelmingly the victims of flogging convictions: a bump was as good as a confession, while the men rarely showed up to court to confess their own, less obvious involvement.

High promiscuity and high rates of unprotected sex (90 percent, according to one study), coupled with the threat of Sharia punishments and social ostracism, meant a culture of horrific covert abortions. These stories were among the bleakest we covered. A particularly horrible two weeks in early 2011 turned up a premature baby thrown into the water at Malé's outdoor swimming area, another hidden inside an empty Coast Milk tin. Another had been thrown into the bushes, strangled with a pair of black pants.

In another instance the local newspaper, Haveeru, carried a picture of a discarded fetus in a bucket. For some reason they had chosen to mask the fetus's identity with a tiny black strip where the eyes presumably were.

"Look at this!" said one of our journalists excitedly, brandishing the photo. "It looks like a frog," observed another.

The fundamentalist Adhaalath Party called for the mothers to be found and sentenced to death. Abortion was an issue that should concern all Maldivians, the party declared, and people should be "very afraid" given the "rising popularity of fornication."

Afraid they were. Most often the mothers were caught, quickly confessing under police interrogation. I still remember a series of haunting mugshots sent to us by police of a pair of teenage girls barely out of puberty. One had tried to help her friend dispose of a premature infant and had been stopped by somebody on the island. Her frightened face and trembling lip barely made it to the bottom of the police height chart.

Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy by JJ Robinson is out on November 23.

Photo via Flickr user Andrew Bardwell

Earlier this week, the Intercept ran a story about how 70 million inmate phone calls were tracked by Securus, a company in Texas that provides phone service to 2.200 jails and prisons across the country. Of course, most prisoner phone calls are monitored—everybody inside knew that already. But this cache of calls, which may have been acquired by a hacker last year—the company is suggesting they were leaked—included thousands of recorded conversations between inmates and their lawyers. Those communications are supposed to be protected under attorney-client privilege, and while Secarus is insisting it only recorded calls with consent, if true, the allegations show how impossible it is for America's prisoners to enjoy protection before the law.

As the opaque veneer of America's prison-industrial complex is slowly stripped away, people in the media and in society are increasingly outraged at apparent civil liberties violations. But to convicts doing hard time in our nation's correctional facilities, this is nothing new.

As a former Bureau of Prisons (BOP) inmate, I know.

The BOP Program Statement 5264.07 explicitly states that "inmates are afforded the opportunity to place an occasional unmonitored call to his or her attorney." But the Secarus leak reinforces my own sense, along with that of other former and current inmates, that this just isn't the reality. Worse yet, the Intercept points out that Securus regularly sells their phone records to law enforcement customers. (Congress is considering protecting inmate emails, which are often monitored by federal prosecutors.)

For now, it appears that talking to your lawyer confidentially from inside the belly of the beast remains something of a pipe dream.

"If this is the case, that means that there are no checks and balances and that every idea, conversation, strategy is being recorded," Walter Johnson, a prisoner serving life at FCI Otisville for a three strikes violation, tells VICE. "They can predict the outcome of your fate because they have the ability to undermine and manipulate any means or process that is being utilized to assist our liberation."

Prisoners generally feel like they're in a no-win situation when going up against the government. Not being able to talk to your lawyer in confidence compromises your chance of beating a bad case, and mail from attorneys routinely gets opened on the way in, according to inmates. Complaining about it often just results in your cell getting "hit," or searched. Even if you do file a formal grievance, it can take years before its gets in the courts.

Many prisoners have given up hope of anything even resembling fairness. Inside, you just develop an attitude of rolling with the punches. You can't fight the man, so why even try? The ACLU and other organizations that advocate for prisoners might cause a fuss in the media, but it's hard to envision the system changing in the near future. Certainly, prisoner confidentiality isn't featuring prominently in any of the criminal justice reform bills floating around Congress.

"Our chance of actually having a fair shot when we are going through our pretrial step has been stripped away yet again, giving the government even a bigger chance at getting a conviction over us," Angel Ocasio, who's doing time at FCI Danbury in Connecticut for a drug conspiracy, tells VICE.

Some lawyers in the know actually warn their clients to be careful what they say over the allegedly unmonitored attorney-client phone calls, suspecting foul play.

"My attorney David E. Vandercoy told me at the beginning of my direct appeal that he don't like talking on the phones because he don't trust them even though they say call through the counselor," Robert Booker, who's doing a life sentence for a drug conspiracy and is incarcerated at FCI Milan in Michigan, tells VICE. "Now I saw this, I believe every word of it. How can a man win if all the cards, the dealers, and the house is against him? The government cheats at everything it does and that's sad. But what can we do about it? No one cares about prisoners."

Out of sight and out of mind—that is the maxim in prison. Despite the recent push for reform by President Obama, much more needs to be done, whether the public is outraged or not.

"It's sad that there are millions of people out there right now that probably agree with the government's move to listen in on attorney-client calls, thinking that we have no rights simply because we find ourselves incarcerated," Ocasio tells VICE. "It will take generations to fix the mess that they have done to the federal justice system."

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Simon "Stinky Feet" Coutu wades into the murky Saint Lawrence waters. Image via VICE du Jour

The VICE Montreal office is a block away from the Saint Lawrence river, which means that a five-minute walk from where this is being written, eight billion litres of steaming raw sewage are flowing into one of Canada's most important waterways.

Thankfully, we can't smell it from here, but a brief stroll near one of the dumping sites earlier this week confirmed that this whole mess is one foul-smelling, shitty deal.

Watch more: Daily VICE, November 12: GSP Karate, Montreal Sewage, Rich Aucoin

A bit of context: in late September, Radio-Canada revealed that the city of Montreal was planning to quietly unleash a torrent of wastewater into the Saint Lawrence in order to conduct major repairs on a large chunk of sewage network. Apparently, this kind of dump is done everywhere all the time, it's NBD, and the belugas won't even notice. But the news generated international attention and condemnation from environmental groups, prompting Environment Canada to step in and temporarily put the brakes on the whole operation .

Eventually, after much pleading that this was "the only option," (another idea, involving 37,000 tanker trucks, was deemed unfeasible) municipal officials were given the go-ahead to flush, and the weeklong crapshoot launched on Wednesday at midnight. (Happy Remembrance Day!)

The ensuing #flushgate media chaos has been quite the shit show. Journalists reporting on the issue have been using drones and helicopters to check out the damage, providing sprawling, scenic vistas of the feces-filled river.

Some reporters, like VICE's very own Simon Coutu, waded right into the stench to check out Montrealers' soggy Q-tips and used tampons. Others, like this intrepid soul, even used a fishing net to give cameras a real good look at one the many soiled condoms now bobbing out into the Atlantic Ocean because #News. (What a scoop!)

Hygienic products aside, the dump also contains heavy metals and even some arsenic. But the impact of these harmful substances, city reps say, will be negligible as they become diluted in the quick-flowing Saint Lawrence waters.

Image via Twitter user Dario Ayala

Image via Twitter user Loulou

In an attempt to calm the masses, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre opted to get very hands-on. Dressed like a safety-conscious Minion, he was lowered down into the sewer tunnel in order to check out the repairs and proclaim the operation a success.

Image via Twitter user Marie-Lise Rousseau

Image via Twitter user Jeff

For the time being, Montrealers are being told tap water is safe to drink, a claim supported by Minister of Health Gaetan Barrette who qualified the dump as "quasi-homeopathic." For the next week, however, officials have issued a strict warning against flushing things like diapers (???) and medication down the toilet, lest you want to feed that junk directly to the whales.

Follow Brigitte Noël and Simon Coutu on Twitter.

Donald Trump in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: This Kid Tattooed British Left-Wing Heartthrob Jeremy Corbyn on His Back

It looks like the grind of the campaign trail is starting to wear on short-fingered reality TV star Donald Trump, who, despite his best efforts, is still slipping in the polls to Ben Carson. That's perhaps why Trump unleashed a full-on tirade Thursday night at a rally held in Fort Dodge, Iowa. On stage for 95 minutes, Trump was, by all accounts, a hot mess of anger and insults directed toward Carson, who Trump compared to a child molester.

Trump's attack on his fellow GOP candidate centered around the increased scrutiny Carson has recently faced about his accounts of his past. In his memoir, Gifted Hands, the former neurosurgeon wrote about how as a child he had violent outbursts—attacking his mother with a hammer, trying to stab a friend with a knife—until he was able to quell his anger with the help of Jesus Christ. Carson's mother confirmed his account in an 1997 interview, but Trump is apparently among those who still think he's lying. The real estate mogul told his Iowa audience Carson has a "pathological temper" and "pathological disease" that couldn't be cured. "A child molester, there's no cure for that. If you're a child molester, there's no cure," he told the crowd, according to the Washington Post. "They can't stop you. Pathological? There's no cure."

Trump took particular umbrage over the story of Carson's almost-stabbing his friend, which ended with Carson's blade being stopped by his buddy's belt buckle. Trump questioned whether or not this was even possible, and even stepped around the podium to mockingly ask if anyone in the audience had a knife, and would like to give his own belt buckle a try. "How stupid are the people of Iowa?" Trump asked the crowd, clearly indignant. "How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"

The Post reports that the Midwestern audience did not warm to an angry New Yorker berating them for being morons. "As Trump attacked Carson using deeply personal language, the audience grew quiet, a few shaking their heads," reporter Jenna Johnson wrote. "A man sitting in the back of the auditorium loudly gasped."

Carson's response to the insults, through his business manager: "Pray for him."

It was just after 5 PM, when we heard our shark expert, Rochelle, call out "Hammer." She had spotted a hammerhead shark about 15 feet off the ship, and we had only a few fleeting seconds to get ourselves and our cameras into the water to capture the moment.

I scrambled to grab my scuba gear while across from me three men hurriedly helped Daniel Ennett into his wetsuit and scuba tanks and gingerly lowered him into the water. (He needs two people to lift him over the sides because of his disability.) Behind me, I heard a splash: A member of our group had jumped into the water wearing just his swim trunks and started toward the shark in what looked to be a hurried dog paddle.

"He's going to get himself fucking killed," I heard someone shout from the boat.

I threw on my mask and hopped into the water to catch up and send him back to the boat. Somewhere not all that far below us, an extremely agitated seven-foot hammerhead shark was attacking the chum line.

This was the moment we were waiting for, the very reason we'd travelled from Alberta to the Florida Keys: to bring Ennett face to face with a shark. But it was also the moment that our dive master, Ken Holliday, had feared.

You see, Ennett has no arms no legs. He's essentially just a torso.

"Honestly, it freaks me out a bit," Holliday said the day before, while we sat around a Florida pool. "He looks like a chum bucket."

Ennett overheard Holliday's remark, then lowered his head and took a sip from the straw stuck in the beer balancing on his powerchair.

"He's got a point," Ennett replied, and broke into a deep laugh.

Videos by Mack Lamoureux

'SCUBA DIVING IS NOT A WHEELCHAIR SPORT'

A 22-year-old from Edmonton, Ennett has lived almost his entire life as a quadruple amputee. When he was five, he was diagnosed with Meningococcal Septicemia—a combination of Meningitis and Sepsis. The sepsis bacteria were making their way from his extremities toward his torso and if they'd reached his vital organs, the condition most certainly would have killed him. There was no real choice: To save his life, all four of Ennett's limbs had to be amputated.

Ennett has a shock of dark hair, an unkempt beard, and is perpetually sporting a pair of dark sunglasses. He's currently enrolled in his second year of psychology—focusing his research on perceptions of disabled people—and hopes one day to get his PhD. It only takes a few words with Ennett to realize that his disability isn't even close to being his defining characteristic.

One of the things that stood out to me during my time with Ennett was that he never passes up an opportunity. The plane scheduled to take Ennett to Miami was delayed by a day, so he used that free time to get to a skydive centre and make his first jump. He's an intense guy. He enjoys himself some metal and is quick with a joke and a laugh; he reads philosophy (especially Jung, Carl and Rollins, Henry) and has an immensely dark sense of humour. When told that I would be outside the shark cage and for the dive, Ennett immediately perked up.

"If you lose a limb, I've got some tips for you."

His cousin, Jerimiah Harris, would be coming along as his full-time helper. Family is important to the two of them, something they told me time and time again. Watching the two of them interact on the trip was like watching a buddy cop movie. Harris would ask Ennett a question and it would almost always end in an inside joke.

Ennett has been working with Frederick Kroetsch and Kurt Spenrath at Open Sky Pictures for a few years now. The two produce an on-demand show called Invincible that finds Ennett regularly heading out of his comfort zone—the show has taken him skiing, mountain climbing, painting, curling, the list goes on. It's meant to show that adventures are still easily attainable by the physically challenged. By far the most popular episode was the one in which Ennett went scuba diving in a pool with the help of three other divers. This Florida trip would take that concept and run (or swim, as the case may be) with it.

Ennett in the water. Photos by Mack Lamoureux

"We thought it was kind of funny. It started as a joke," said Kroetsch. "He's a badass, but the idea of someone with no arms and legs swimming with a shark is a little absurd. It's a funny visual."

Ennett, ever up for a challenge, wholeheartedly agreed to the idea early this year and after consulting Ken Holliday, a renowned diver in Edmonton, Open Sky put together a team to try and pull off the arduous and seemingly bonkers task of getting a quadruple amputee open-water scuba certified and then tossing him into the ocean with a shark.

The film team consisted of Kroetsch, Spenrath, and Rebecca Campbell, a producer. Then there was the dive team, which consisted of three expert divers; Ken Holliday and Darrell O'Donnell, two good ol' Albertans boys; and Mark "Slinky" Slingo with Disabled Divers International. For Slingo, getting Ennett certified was a personal goal. When Slingo was a young man he fell three stories while drunk and broke his back, rendering him a paraplegic.

"Scuba diving is not a wheelchair sport. If you're a diver you're a diver," Slingo told me. "Disabled diving, yeah, you might need help to get on the boat and get off the boat but apart from that, you're in the water, you're a diver."

The group met in full for the first time at the Miami airport in late September and promptly headed down to the Keys. Palm trees lined a white sand beach, the ocean stretched out like infinity before us, and, for some reason, there were iguanas aplenty. A few rooms down from me, Slingo was hanging out in his wheelchair taking in the sights.

"Just another day at the office man," he told me. "Just another day at the office..."

INTO THE DEEP

We made our way to Key Dives, a shop staffed by a man named Jason, who is, simply put, the best. Jason, who has a little dog that would ride on the back of his motorcycle, would say things like "alright, alright, alright" with a South Carolinian accent in complete sincerity. He would be our dive guide on Alligator Reef for the next two days.

Key Dives outfitted us as we made our first attempt to get Ennett certified. They had prior experience with physically challenged divers, and had certified a triple amputee some years ago, so they had the proper equipment and a handicap-accessible dive boat named the Giant Stride. As we made our way into the Atlantic I asked Ennett how he was feeling. He was uncharacteristically quiet for the boat ride there and looked almost pensive as we pulled up to the reef.

"I'm ready, strangely enough," he told me before turning to Holliday.

"Alright, let's get wet."

I threw on my gear, sank into the deep, and held a spot approximately 20 feet below the surface, looking up at Ennett as he entered the water. Up on the boat, Harris and a few helpers hoisted Ennett up and essentially dropped him into Holliday and O'Donnell's waiting hands. From there, the two would get Ennett in his full face mask and the rest of his equipment before slowly sinking lower into the water.

Everything seemed to be going well until Ennett got extremely sea sick. Like The Exorcist sick.

Initially, the sickness stemmed from being off his chair and on the boat, where he couldn't steady himself against the rocking motion, which was compounded by the fact that he couldn't equalize (pop his ears) underwater. Essentially, he couldn't go any lower than ten feet, and at that depth the surf is still relatively powerful, so he was being tossed around like a rag doll while the other two divers tried to stabilize him.

The sickness was viscous. But Ennett kept his nausea in check until Kroetsch got out of the water and steadied his camera so it could film him violently vomiting into a trash can.

"Apparently I'm the type of douche who gets seasick," Ennett said as we headed back to port, the day basically a bust. "That was the most nauseous I've ever been, and I've had some brutal hangovers. My body just started going numb, and I was actually having problems talking. I thought I was getting the bends. My jaw was locking, and my tongue wasn't working."

As we set out for the next day, the crew was worried: If Ennett couldn't dive here, he couldn't be certified, and if he wasn't certified, then there would be no shark dive. But Ennett was confident that they would get it done. It was all going to rely on the jerry-rigged nose plug they made in the pool the night before that would plug Ennett's nose, allowing him to pop his ears.

The day started as the last one had, with everyone getting in before Ennett and watching him get in the water. This time, the workaround worked and I watched as the three divers slowly sank to the reef and proceeded to swim towards the brightly colored fish and the muted coral. I swam up to the three and grabbed a picture of them. I saw Ennett 's face and he looked happy taking in the sights, and then he started mouthing something.

"This is fucking rad."

I turned and got out of the way as the three embarked on what would be a history-making dive. Although not the first quadruple amputee to scuba dive, Ennett is the most severely physically challenged person ever to be certified by Disabled Divers International. Disability is a strange thing to quantify, but both Slingo and Holliday told me that no one like Ennett had ever done something like this.

"In the pool, all I was looking at was the bottom of a pool," said Ennett of his previous attempts. "And the first time in the ocean, I was just trying not to die. we saw a moray eel—that was badass. Saw a few barracudas. It was like a guided tour, and I was just being dragged along. It was cool not being super paranoid about my head exploding, lung overexpansion, or some shit.

"You get under there, and it's a whole other world."

Once we all pulled ourselves out of the water, we were jubilant. Everyone congratulated Ennett, and one of the dive masters from the other group diving that day came over to Ennett and told him he was "an inspiration."

Ennett cringed when he heard those words, but still smiled and offered a thank you.

'I'M JUST OPERATING HERE'

All his life Ennett has been called "an inspiration," and because of his show, he is hearing the term more than ever these days. That's thanks in no small part to the proliferation of what is known to some as "inspiration porn." The most common form is a well-intentioned meme or a brief viral video about someone with a disability overcoming some sort of adversity, typically packaged with nauseatingly sweet music that swells toward the climax.

The late Australian comedian, journalist, and disability advocate Stella Young wrote about the phenomenon in an essay for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"Let me be clear about the intent of this kind of inspiration porn; it's there so that non-disabled people can put their worries into perspective. So they can go, 'Oh well if that kid who doesn't have any legs can smile while he's having an awesome time, I should never, EVER feel bad about my life.' It's there so that non-disabled people can look at us and think, Well, it could be worse... I could be that person."

There is a weariness in Ennett's voice when he talks about people calling him an inspiration. He told me about a time about where a young woman came up to him and said, "Oh you're that inspirational young guy, aren't you?"

"I kept waiting for her to say that she saw me on TV or in one of the interviews I've done for a magazine," he said. "And she was like, 'No, you were walking down Jasper Ave.' I thought, what the fuck. I just get attributed with that even though I'm just functioning day-to-day and people are like 'you're an inspiration.'

"I'm like, 'Nope, I'm just operating here. Heart's continuing to beat.'"

Ennett told me that it's difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes when the jump is so massive. It's easy to look at someone with a disability and overlook the fact that there is a person there, that each and every disability and person has a unique back story and perspective. Ennett has learned that this is something he has to take in stride.

"It's not exactly insulting. It's endearing in a strange way," he said. "I mean, there's no basis for it, it's uncalled for, but I'm not going to lose it on them. I count my lucky stars that I never lost in an IED explosion or something. 'War veteran' is infinitely more tragic than my case, when it happened really young.

"I had the time to adapt to it, whereas if you're a soldier, and you're used to functioning with your limbs properly and one day when you're without. It's just a different situation."

But he is inspiring. And it's because he constantly pushes the boundaries of both himself and other people's perceptions. Early on in the trip I asked Ennett what he wanted to do in future seasons of the show.

"I just want to see how far we can take it," he said.

"How far people will let us take it."

'WE'RE GOING TO NEED A BETTER BOAT...'

The day after Ennett's certification, we all found ourselves sitting around a table trying to plan how the hell to get Ennett in the water with some sharks. Who would have thought that getting someone to take a limbless man out on a shark dive would be so difficult?

The dive that we booked seemed to have some issues. The biggest and most pressing was that the cage was too small, and everyone other than Ennett and his dive team would simply have to be outside of the cage. I would be shark bait. Nevertheless, we headed out before daybreak and early the next morning found our guides Bryce and Rochelle waiting next to a boat that gave off the aura of the ill-fated fishing boat the Orca, from Jaws. It was just decrepit enough to feel like the proper boat for a shark dive.

Bryce, the ship's captain, talked in a deep baritone and looked like he had just finished chucking some weight to the sky, but I think that's who you want to have your back during a shark dive. His boat didn't have any sort of handicap accessibility, so Ennett and Slingo were ungracefully thrown from the edge of the dock onto the bow of the boat. After a few moments, we all got settled and started the journey that would take us three miles offshore, where it was legal to chum for sharks.

"There's a hurricane in the Bahamas," bellowed Bryce as we broke out of the marina. "So shit's going to get rocky, but we're just going to break right through it."

We made it through the intense waves to get to an area overtop a massive drop off—an area of the ocean where the land ends and the deep sea begins—and proceeded to fill a milk crate up with dead fish and their innards, attaching it to the boat via a string in the hope of attracting sharks. This was when we all got a good look at the cage. It was tiny and had a "viewing" hole on one side of the cage, and by that I mean the side of the cage was more or less not there. I'm no cage expert, but in my limited experience a three-sided cage is more of a holding pen.

All of that seemed neither here nor there as the majority of the day proved relatively uneventful. Bryce and Rochelle did their best to attract the sharks, crinkling a water bottle underwater and slapping their fins against the surface to sound like a seal—but to no avail. There were other problems as well. The biggest was that the "cage" floated at the top of the water and tossed Ennett and the two divers around. Shortly after the first dive, O'Donnell, the man in charge of Ennett's buoyancy, got extremely ill and had to bow out. So this left Holliday as the sole diver with Ennett, who wasn't too happy with being kept in a cage while everyone was outside.

"That cage was a joke," he said after the dive. "The minute I heard everyone else was going to be snorkeling I was like, 'fuck that, this is bullshit.'"

So Holliday and Ennett abandoned the cage for the rest of the day but it didn't change the rotten luck. The group was minutes away from calling it a day when we heard Rochelle make the call that would define the entire trip.

"Hammer," she yelled, and we all proceeded to lose our shit in the least dignified way possible.

Hammerheads are a notoriously rare species of shark to dive with. Slingo has participated in over 4,000 dives and had never once seen a "unicorn of the sea." So when we heard that we might have the chance to dive with one, chaos erupted. There was no planning for an event like this. Tanks were knocked over, fins lost, people scrambling to get ready.

It was anarchy on our little boat.

Our videographer was in the water first, followed by Ennett and Holliday. Everyone made an effort to enter the water slowly and gracefully, so as not to spook the shark. But when the videographer popped up saying his camera was dead, I heard the splash. Kurt Spenrath, the co-director, plunged into the water holding a camera, sans fins or a mask, desperately trying to get footage.

"Jesus Christ," Bryce yelled to me. "Go after him."

I threw on my mask and hopped over the edge, quickly catching up to Kurt. I took the stills camera out of his hand and sent him back. I turned and started my way toward Ennett and Holliday. I glanced back to see if Spenrath had made it and saw the hammerhead smoothly gliding along behind him. I don't know what the shark would've done if it caught up, but the thing did breach the water at the back of the boat moments after Spenrath was safely aboard. Bryce, the boat captain, shark expert, and dive guide, didn't get into the water.

The shark spent about five minutes with us, close as can be, just circling and hitting the chum line. It was graceful. It was powerful. It was—as hammerheads are—extremely goofy looking. But overall it was, as Ennett said, "the coolest fucking thing in the world."

"Time was indiscernible to me because it was so fucking cool," he said. "There was a point when I was, like, four feet away from the thing. It was circling with us, and Ken kept pitching us towards it and I was looking this beady eyed bastard in the eyes."

After hitting the chum line one last time, the shark swam downward into the black until it disappeared. Ennett, Holliday, and I hit the surface at the same time, and I swam over to the two of them. Both Ennett and I had big, stupid smiles on our faces.

"Fucking rights man, fucking rights," Ennett said.

I hit one of his stumps as a fist bump.

On the way back, while talking with Ennett about the experience as the sun set and the boat smashed over waves that had carried themselves to Florida from the destruction in the Bahamas, the two of us agreed that this is how schmaltzy-ass movies end.

The next day, however, came with some sober second thoughts. "That was extremely dangerous, you guys; we very easily could have died," Rebecca Campbell explained, after spending the night plagued by nightmares.

She was the only one on the trip with shark-dive experience. And according to her, the shark was clearly agitated. It was hunting—evident from the fact it was by itself; they only stray from the pod when they're hunting—and likely coming up from below to attack. In the footage, you can see the shark come up from below Rebecca, and she starts to scream before it turns away at the final moment.

In the background, you can see Ennett and me bobbing up and down in the surf a few feet away—gleefully oblivious that we narrowly avoided a shark attack.

EPILOGUE

We celebrated with some amazing stereotypical partying in Key West (including drunkenly visiting Ernest Hemingway's house), but it wasn't until a few weeks later when I met up with Ennett back in Edmonton that we really got to decompress.

He called the trip the best time of his life.

"It really opened my eyes to the world," Ennet told me. "It really showed me the expanse that is travel. Kind of turned me into an adrenaline junkie. I'm seeking out experience more now."

He's thankful to the group he describes as the "best-worst rag-tag band of Robin Hood-esque fuckwits that manage to fail forward" for the experience. On his back, he now sports a tattoo of a skydiving hammerhead.

"I guess now I have something to point to when someone calls me an inspiration," he said.

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