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Though President Barack Obama announced the US would send 50 special forces troops to Syria in October, and though America, along with several other NATO nations, has stepped up anti-ISIS operations in the region, many Americans still aren't satisfied. The Republican candidates have called out Obama as being weak when it comes to the Islamic State (without having much in the way of concrete policy alternatives), and a new poll released Monday found that a majority of Americans want to send ground troops to Iraq or Syria to fight the terrorist menace occupying so many minds. But what would that look like?

To find out, VICE reached out to Michelle Benson and Jacob Kathman, both PhDs and political science professors at the University at Buffalo. Benson studies international conflict, intergovernment organizations, and international relations. Kathman studies international relations, civil war, and violence against civilians. According to them, most Americans want ground troops in Syria because most Americans don't really know what that means.

VICE: What would sending troops to fight ISIS look like, and do you believe it could be effective in the war on terror?
Jacob Kathman: The size and type of intervention with ground troops would depend entirely upon the goals of such a mission. If the goal is to weaken ISIS, then such a mission could come in many forms. If the goal is to dismantle ISIS, the type of counter-insurgency campaign that would need to be waged by the US via an intervention with ground troops would necessitate a very large force, one that I would imagine most Americans to be wary of deploying. For this reason, I don't find simple poll questions about the preferences of Americans for ground troops to be all that informative, as they don't often consider the mission goals and the hypothetical costs that may be required to achieve those goals.

ISIS aren't centrally located like other, more traditional enemies we've fought in the past. Because they're not just in Syria, but spread out, what does an attack against them look like tactically? Would this sort of thing be more the purview of special forces operations?

Michelle Benson: It is important to remember that ISIS's geographic strongholds are largely, but not completely, associated as much with its desire to be a state/caliphate. Destroying ISIS's holdings is Raqqa , for example, does not destroy their ability to plan, sponsor, and support terrorism.

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How many ground troops would it take to wipe out ISIS?
Benson: No one really knows how many ground troops it would take to wipe out ISIS. If there were an easy answer to this question, the battle against ISIS would be much easier—that is why it is so challenging. The US and its allies would have already used any obvious tactic to wipe out ISIS if there was one. The problem is, that ISIS, like al Queda, is not an actor that is solely associated with one geographic area. That is the major issue.

Kathman: By "wipe out ISIS" I assume you mean to destroy the group and create an environment in which it (or a group like it) could not reconstitute at a later date following an inevitable pullback of the intervention force. It is this second part, the reoccupation of territory currently held by ISIS that would require a large number of troops. At the moment, Iraq and Syria have a very limited ability to hold and govern that territory, even if ISIS was removed from the equation entirely. In Iraq, the Iraqi military, with heavy American assistance, may be able to move into the vacuum left by ISIS once it is destroyed. In Syria, which group would the US prefer to fill the political void? This is not an easy question to answer. However, in both Syria and Iraq, it is hard to believe that the local populations would welcome American forces readily given past experience in the region.

"Contrary to common perception, ISIS is not a terribly powerful organization in any military sense, at least not as compared to a force that the US could put on the ground."

How long would military operations take?
Kathman: I can't imagine an intervention to destroy ISIS and reconstitute the physical and political space left by it would be anything short of a long haul. Contrary to common perception, ISIS is not a terribly powerful organization in any military sense, at least not as compared to a force that the US could put on the ground. However, ISIS's weakness should not be interpreted to mean that the US could defeat it easily. As with any insurgent organization, material weakness is not the equivalent of tactical weakness. The group's ability to blend into the population, hide from an intervening force, engage in hit-and-run terror tactics, and slowly bleed an interventionist force are strategic advantages of ISIS if a large US force were to arrive. The success of such an intervention in destroying the group would likely have more to do with the political will of the US.

This would include surviving the costs in lives and treasure that ISIS could more readily impose upon the US once an interventionist force arrives. And the US would be accepting far more in terms of a responsibility to protect vulnerable populations by intervening, which is not likely to be something that the US can positively contribute to (at least in the short-term) through intervention.

Obama's said ISIS wants to see American boots on the ground in Syria. Is he right?
Kathman: It depends on what perspective the observer has of ISIS's goals. A literal interpretation of ISIS's rhetorical/political message might be seen by some as being some type of suicidal devotion to achieving the end of days. I tend to be rather skeptical of these accounts. In many ways, ISIS and its tactics are not all that different from other violent insurgent organizations that use violence to acquire resources, hold territory, cow the people into submission, and hold onto power. Another perspective would hold that tempting the US into the fight is likely to degrade ISIS militarily and reduce the ability of ISIS to hold territory and consolidate its hold on power. I tend to think that the political power afforded to ISIS by its military successes is more important to the group than whatever radical religious goals it promotes.

Benson: President Obama is definitely correct when he says ISIS wants to see American troops on the ground in Syria. American troops would be the preferred target for ISIS in Syria and the Levant.

The ceasefire Secretary of State John Kerry was pushing for between the Syrian government and some insurgents has begun. How does that factor into whether the US should send its own troops there?
Kathman: If a ceasefire holds, and that is a big "IF," then ground troops can play an important security role. Although it is likely not useful for the US to perform this function, at least not on its own. Given the US's clear preference for a Syria that does not include Assad, ISIS, and several other rebel factions, it is not likely that parties see the presence of American soldiers as a stabilizing force toward peace. However, the UN has a long history of peacekeeping that has been far more effective in stabilizing active- and post-conflict environments than it is often given credit. There's a good amount of scientific research that points to the UN's usefulness in such environments, and the UN often does not bring with it the geopolitical baggage that the US and other third party countries do.

On Sunday Obama addressed the nation, saying that we will continue to defeat terrorism abroad by giving aid to local forces fighting ISIS, cutting off financing, interrupting plots, and preventing recruitment. That seems fairly thorough. What more does sending troops get us?
Kathman: Again, I think it depends on the goal of sending troops. Reconstituting the political status quo of the region would require troops. Ensuring that a particular rebel faction is to defeat Assad and ISIS may also require a large number of troops. I imagine that President Obama has rather limited political goals that he is seeking to achieve, thus justifying the limited means. More comprehensive goals could require greater military commitments. Unfortunately, many observers seem to forget that achieving sweepingly comprehensive goals also comes with a heavy burden. I imagine that it is this that President Obama seeks to avoid.

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Images courtesy of David Mattingly

To attend Loscon is to travel from the present to a simpler time, before the ascension of the all-swallowing marketplace-slash-cosplay-orgy that is Comicon. Run by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society—the oldest continuously operating science-fiction club in the world—Loscon found a gaggle of nerd lifers wearing an assortment of commemorative jackets and button pins, wandering in and out of musty, 80s-era conference rooms at the LAX Marriott.

It is here that I met David Mattingly, who was at the convention to speak on a sparsely attended panel of illustrators discussing the question of how artists can make a living in the age of piracy and low publishing sales. Throughout the conversation onstage, Mattingly—who sported a goatee and a thicket of hair tied at the nape of his neck—seemed relatively unworried about the future of his profession. This is not because his own illustration business is still booming, but because Mattingly goes to sleep every night contented with the knowledge that because of Animorphs, his legacy will last into perpetuity.

Oh, yeah. David Mattingly is responsible for 50 of the 53 illustrations covering K.A. Applegate's bestselling Animorphs series.

Launched in the summer of 1996 and carrying on until 2001, the Animorphs franchise—which included a frankly ludicrous TV show on Nickelodeon starring the actor who would go on to play Iceman, and also that dude who would go on to be the dude from Royal Pains, and also (god help us all) a new film rumored to be in development—swiftly became a super-successful staple of 1990s pop culture (not to mention Scholastic book fairs) with its portrayal of five teens who'd been given powers by aliens. Specifically, the power to transform into any animal they touched to fight other aliens threatening to enslave the human race.

That the series attained such heights is thanks in part to its immediately recognizable covers, each of which featured a series of photos of a teen transforming into an animal. Though Mattingly wasn't the original Animorphs artist, his covers—starting with #4, The Message, and continuing through the final, 54th book and onto the auxiliary Megamorphs spinoffs (don't ask)—would end up constituting some of the first major computer-based "morphing" art. On top of that, his work ended up embodying the exact type of creatively adventurous and genuinely groundbreaking work that, impressive as it was in the 90s, looks hilariously, almost iconically insane today.

After the panel, camped out in a lounge area upstairs, Mattingly and I chatted about his claim to fame, as well as his bonus resumé items, his teaching career, and his uncommonly progressive views on the state of science fiction today.

VICE: How did you get into illustration?
David Mattingly: As a kid I was very influenced by comic books, and I originally thought I wanted to become a comic book artist, but I've never been terribly fast. I figured out that, as a cover artist, you're able to work longer. I think to make a living as a comic artist, at least in those days, you had to do at least a page a day, and that was still slow.
Yeah. It's like, come on, we live in an era where we're dealing with important issues of race rights and transsexual rights, and those are incredibly important issues. Of course those would be the books that would be honored!

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It seems like you have a very optimistic view of your industry.
Part of the reason I love teaching is because I have contact with young people. I think, as you get older, if you don't present yourself with opportunities to have contact with young people, you'll want the old way, the way things were, to remain. I see so many kids with so many successful solutions. They are not my solutions, and I don't feel like I really need to hang on to those solutions. I thought some of them were great, and I'm happy I worked during that time, but there are lots... The whole thing about DeviantArt and how you can be discovered through these new mechanisms—20 years ago, they didn't exist at all.

Does it make you sad?
The state of art shows and conventions makes me sad because you can no longer see originals. There was so much emphasis on seeing artist originals. It was the way that I could learn about new artists that were up and coming that I really wanted to follow. Now everyone's working digitally. I still have all my old paintings at home, but they're a pain in the ass to haul around. This weekend, I brought my lenticular 3D paintings, which are a unique item. They can't be reproduced, so if you want to see them, a convention is the only place you can see them.

I appreciated what you were saying about your students. What do you see as how the state of your industry, I guess, the state of matte painting, the state of book cover illustration, what is it like? What does it look like if you're a young person who is getting out into those fields? What can they expect?
I think books will have much less of an impact on your generation than it had on my generation. I think that will increase. I think the number of people that will read books is going to go down, and that's sort of sad. But we live in a visually dazzling world, and if you see the new Michael Bay movie, are you then going to come home and read a print book? Even if it's on a Kindle, that's a pretty boring activity.

I think our brains are getting wired for more stimulus. The magic of reading a book, when your brain goes to that special place—it's going to get harder for young people to get into that place. Is that good or bad? I don't know.

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As a skinny goth Jew growing up in SoCal, all I knew about Christmas I learned from the movies. Life is precious (It's a Wonderful Life); air rifles are precious (A Christmas Story); booby traps are useful (Home Alone). Through the middle-school pageants, department-store muzak, and neighborhood light shows I passed like a ghost—a nebbishy ghost in combat boots—the Ghost of Christmas Not to Come.

When Christmas finally came around, Chanukah had come and gone. The mishpachah would eat Chinese and maybe catch a matinee. It's not that I envied the Christians and their day. At its height, it would strike me like some mass possession—Jonestown or the Salem Witch Trials. People wore these crazy smiles, their eyes fever-bright while their throats warbled song. My family found itself content to be marooned on a holly-less, jolly-less outpost.

The so-called anti-Christmas movies always better embodied my holiday spirit: a drunk Margot Kidder feeding a little boy booze in proto-slasher flick Black Christmas (1974); Bill Murray ordering a wary PA to staple mini-antlers to a mouse's head in Scrooged (1988); Phoebe Cates telling her grotesque Christmas story to her cringing teenage boyfriend in Gremlins (1984); and a wasted Dan Ackroyd in a putrid Santa suit, lolling on a city bus, pulling a whole salmon out from the fringe of his coat and biting into it at the end of Trading Places (1983). These movies were emblems of my lifelong alienation.

Which is why when I first saw the trailer for Krampus, a yuletide horror-comedy which opened last weekend, I got that familiar, fuzzy, anti-Christmas feeling. The film begins with a well-to-do family in a comfortable state of anomie, with parents Tom (Adam Scott) and Sarah (Toni Collette), and kids Max (Emjay Anthony) and Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen). Mom and Dad's marriage is down-at-the-heels ("I miss us," maunders Toni Collette), Beth is dating a stoner and Max's lost his Christmas. None of this gets better quick when their Pennsyltucky relatives roll into town in Uncle Howard's (David Koechner) Hummer, pitting left-wing in stark opposition to right, those who drink scotch against those who drink beer, because family isn't, like, perfect, you know?

A disappointed Max shreds his letter to Santa, which balefully flurries off into the wind, causing a dark force—Krampus—to muster in the cosmos. Over all of this broods stoic soothsayer Omi (Krista Sadler), Dad's Teutonic grandma, who is frequently found throughout the film stirring the fire, brewing hot chocolate, and whetting a cleaver. She explains in a heavily German-accented English why a freak blackout storm has enveloped the suburb, allowing a beardy pagan demi-god called Krampus to leap over roofs in a clamor of hooves. (The very metal-looking Krampus is a real thing in Austria and Bavarian Germany, where Krampus cos-players run drunk through the streets whacking children with sticks to exalt Krampusnacht.) He is "Santa Claus' shadow," she informs us by firelight – a horned colossus dripping with chains and black robes.

We get Omi's own childhood encounter with Krampus in an animated shadow play midway through the film. People in her village in Germany are starving. It's the mid-20th century; we see bombed-out buildings. When Krampus arrives in the wake of the famine to stoke the destructive impulse of mankind, historically speaking, it's clear what he stands for. According to Omi, he left her alive "to remind me what happens when hope is lost, when belief is forgotten, and when the Christmas spirit dies."

Anti-Christmas movies may not be game-changing, but they're still the most inclusive in the greater yuletide genre, because they embark on its signature theme with an irreverence that both Jews and gentiles can appreciate.

But the nuanced allusions stop there. Krampus is best when it's just being Krampus, a middling anti-Christmas flick. Its allusions to the movies that precede it are many: The family's crude, eggnog-swilling Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell) recalls the alkie sorority mother (Marian Waldman) from Black Christmas; Krampus' legion demonic familiars skitter and cackle like Joe Dante's Gremlins. The creature effects are the highlight of Krampus, boasting "elves" in carven masks, an unholy Christmas angel with a very long tongue, and a flesh-eating jack-in-the-box that slithers along like Poe's Conqueror Worm.

While Krampus and company besiege the house, relationships heal and alliances form. In PG-13 ways, folks die. I won't spoil the end, but I will spoil the moral: The Christmas spirit never dies. All you need is something bad like, say, a heinous pagan demi-god, to realize what matters. When Krampus departs, so does disillusionment.

As I watched the final few minutes of Krampus, I realized that this anti-Christmas movie was really just a Christmas-Christmas movie in disguise. With their moral, somewhat schmaltzy endings, these films aren't nearly as transgressive as they hold themselves to be. Instead of the subversion I had wanted to witness as a mostly-recovering goth and a Jew, what I had really been watching was a hidden affirmation.

By nature, Jews are fatalistic. My family is no exception. Daily aches and pains spell doom. Meat, when undercooked, is fatal. There's an old Jewish joke by 50s comedian Alan King that I can't get enough of: "A summary of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat."

Basically, this is what happens in Krampus. It's not a good film, but it's got a dark heart. Anti-Christmas movies may not be game-changing, but they're still the most inclusive in the greater yuletide genre, because they embark on its signature theme with an irreverence that both Jews and gentiles can appreciate.

Like so many good Jewish boys before me, I married an Irish-Italian woman. These days, Christmas with her family is a past time I've come to enjoy. Once, this took place in a house in New Hampshire—a state not exactly a stronghold for Jews—and the pre-Christmas hours had us handcrafting ornaments to bedeck a fir tree we had cut down ourselves. (Oi vey, my mind reeled. I hope someone yells timber.) Some made angels, others elves. I made what I described to my wife as a "golem"—a Jewish mud monster of Talmudic derivation, the closest thing we have to Krampus—though to her it resembled a humanoid frog in a pink leotard, which was generous, probably.

Her family smiled. Then they topped the tree with it. Monsters help us understand the things we feel we'd rather not.

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Photo via Flickr user kl801

Even before he started running for president, Donald Trump based his entire public persona on saying shocking things, then sitting back and smiling at the sputtering reactions he produced. Pretty much anyone who doesn't support him has at best dismissed him as a troll and at worst fears he may be a fascist. But either way, it's been safe to assume that nothing Trump says could surprise anyone anymore.

Then on Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)

As is often the case with official Trump pronouncements, there's a great deal left unsaid.

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?

Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.

(UPDATE: Shortly after the statement's release, a spokesperson for Trump clarified to the Hill that this ban would hypothetically extend to current Muslim-American citizens who were traveling abroad.)

The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.

While barring Muslims from coming to the US is probably the most extreme form of anti-immigrant sentiment endorsed by a major candidate this cycle, Trump is not a radical outlier on the subject. Last month, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush suggested the US only accept Syrian refugees who are Christian, and similar ideas have been banging around right-wing blogs like RedState.

Before Trump's press release, the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump. It's worth noting that though the campaign has been going on for months and no ballots have been cast yet, so Trump's support remains mostly hypothetical. His latest utterance shows why a lot of people in America and around the world hope it stays that way.

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Donald Trump. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

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

US News

Trump Wants to Keep Muslims Out
Donald Trump has called for a "total and complete" halt to Muslims entering the US, an idea swiftly condemned by other Republican presidential candidates. Jeb Bush said Trump was "unhinged", while Marco Rubio said it was "offensive and outlandish". —CNN

San Bernardino Killers Practiced on Shooting Range
According to FBI officials, the couple carefully prepared the attack on an office Christmas party that left 14 people dead by visiting local shooting ranges. Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik had both been radicalized for "quite some time", according to officials. —The Washington Post

Syrian Refugees Arrive in Texas
Two Syrian refugee families are to be resettled in Texas this week, despite efforts by the state to bar their entry with a lawsuit filed in federal court. The outcome of the case could determine whether any state can legally bar Syrian refugees. —VICE News

T-Mobile Ads Under Scrutiny
The wireless carrier is being investigated for false advertising after promising to rip up potential customers' existing service contracts. The New York Attorney General is examining complaints, as consumer rights groups allege the claim is "deceptive marketing". —USA Today

International News

Yemen President Wants Ceasefire
Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadihas has asked the Saudi-led coalition to start a 7-day ceasefire on December 15 to coincide with peace talks aimed to end fighting that has killed 6,000 people over the last eight months. The talks will take place between Hadi's Saudi-backed government and Houthi rebels. —Reuters

Beijing in Partial Shutdown
Half of Beijing's cars have been ordered off the streets and many construction sites and schools remain closed after the Chinese government issued a red alert on pollution. Today's haze of smog has reached above 300 micrograms per cubic meter. —Al Jazeera

Pope Launches Tenderness Revolution
Pope Francis pushes open the huge Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican today to launch his Holy Year of Mercy, something he describes as a "revolution of tenderness". Some 10 million Catholics are expected to walk through the door over the next year. —AP

Pistorius Granted Bail for $688
Oscar Pistorius has been granted bail for 10,000 South African Rand ($688), but will be electronically tagged as he awaits sentencing. His lawyers will appeal a decision by the country's Supreme Court finding him guilty of murdering Reeva Steenkamp. —NBC News

Eagles of Death Metal. Photo via Flickr user Paul Hudson

Everything Else

Eagles of Death Metal Return
The band have played live in Paris again, only weeks after the Bataclan theatre attack. They joined U2 on stage to play Patti Smith's "People Have the Power" and their own song "I Love You All the Time". —The Guardian

Chicago Rappers Find Spike Lee Film "Offensive"
Chance The Rapper says Lee's latest film "Chi-Raq", which focuses on gun violence within the city's black community, is "exploitative". Chicago rapper King Louie dropped a new track simply called "Fuck Spike Lee". —Esquire

World Trade Centre Bomber: "Put Yourself in Their Shoes"
We spoke to Eyad Ismoil, convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, about the Islamic State, San Bernardino and the Paris attacks. —VICE

Inside Rachel Dolezal's Skin
In an exclusive interview, the woman made famous for identifying as black tells her side of the story. She discusses painting her face different colors as a child, and why she's naming her baby after Langston Hughes. —Broadly

Done with reading today? Why not watch our new video 'The Real 'X-Files''

Photo via For The Love Of The Force's Facbeook page

People are really mad at a Star Wars convention in Manchester, England, which, frankly, is brilliant. If you do not enjoy grown adults being furious at corporate accounts because they didn't get to meet Greedo in a warehouse one Saturday then sorry, you have insufficient joy in your heart. So look at this, from the Facebook page for three-day fan-created unofficial Star Wars convention "For the Love of the Force," and let your soul sing high notes from a roof above the city. Look at the state of these:

"Not a cock pit in sight." Photo via Facebook

"Think my bottom hit the chair for 5 seconds." Photo via Facebook

Photo via Facebook

"Ewok village should of been free." Photo via Facebook

The main complains seem to be about the VIP tickets—that fans paid £60+ ($90+) to meet Greedo, eat a bleak pie, get a photo with an actor, and go to an Ewok village that only had two huts in it, and then when they went outside threatening-looking children had stolen their hubcaps, a heartwarming Manchester tradition—but fundamentally they are mad that Star Wars isn't real. "Only complaint was paying £9 all-in Star Wars experience? Do you expect to have a go on a functioning jetpack? Do you expect to go into space? Do you think the Force is real?

We love complaining about things because we all have such arrogance that we expect perfection: when we go to a warehouse in Manchester and pay kids with their hair shaven off due to lice a fiver to not fuck with the the Citroen, we somehow literally expect to walk into Naboo and have R2-D2 greet us with a hologram when, instead, it's just seasonal-work actors in off-brand Jedi outfits and full Manc accents saying "EY UP THERE'S A RIGHT MITHER UP IN'T ENDOR GET THA SEN DOWN THERE WI' ONE OF THEM SLIGHTLY BATTERED PROP LIGHTSABERS." Once you pass the age of about 12, nothing is ever magical again, and every attempt to chase it is just going to leave you poorer, hollowly disappointed, and more furious. Anyway: life is hard and Star Wars is not real. Anything above $8 is fundamentally too much for a Wookie burger.

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After illegal butchers filleted this horse, its remains were dumped near a residential cul de sac in the Kendall area of Miami-Dade County, Florida. Photos courtesy of Animal Recovery Mission

Sometime between the evening of November 21 and the pre-dawn hours of November 22, thieves quietly whisked away Thunder, the largest horse grazing the pasture of a ranch in Homestead, a mostly agricultural city roughly 40 miles southwest of Miami. Investigators later discovered someone had cut a hole in the property's fence big enough for the 23-year-old gelding to fit through, according to a Miami-Dade County Police incident report. They also observed fresh tire marks on the dirt road near the spot where the fence's woven wiring had been gashed.

It didn't take long for detectives to surmise Thunder had become the latest victim of illegal horse butchers. Sure enough, they found the horse's remains a day later, across the street on a neighboring property underneath a crop canopy, according to Sergeant Deborah Puentes of the Miami-Dade Police agricultural patrol section.

Whoever killed the animal, Puentes explained, had expertly cut away most of the flesh from Thunder's front legs, upper torso, and hindquarters."I have seen butcheries where you can tell the people didn't know they were doing," Puentes told me. "But on Thunder, the cuts were precise. It was professional."

The crime has a tight-knit community of horse owners in Homestead and neighboring rural communities on edge. "It's scary," said Christina Bowden, president of the South Florida Horse Show Association. "Everyone is on alert."

Thunder's gruesome death came less than a month after the still-unsolved death in Palmetto, Florida, of Phedras de Blondel, a strapping jumping horse that belonged to American equestrian Debbie Stevens. The brazen slayings of Thunder and Phedras are strong signs the black market for horse meat in Florida—which had the fifth-largest horse population in America as of 2012—continues to flourish despite efforts by law enforcement agencies and animal rights groups to crack down on shady butchering.

In Florida, killing a horse with the intent of selling its meat for human consumption is a felony, as is possessing said meat, but these offenders are slipping through the cracks at a time when local police departments are focused on stopping everyday crime and increasing accountability. According to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez's 2014-2015 budget proposal, his primary goal is putting more officers on the streets and equipping 1,000 cops with body cameras.

Sharon Monzon, the purchasing manager for Robbie's Feed & Supply Store in the Redland, another farming community near Homestead, said she's aware of at least 18 horses that have disappeared from ranches and farms in the southwest Miami-Dade area since January. "I'd say half of them have been found butchered," Monzon said. "It's been going on for quite a while, but the thieves are getting more bold."

She noted the ranch where Thunder (whose owner, Sandra Fobb, declined to comment for this story) was stolen from is near US-1, a well-traveled road that connects the Keys to Miami. "That's a very busy area," Monzon said. "Before, they target horses on more secluded properties."

The charred, decapitated head of a horse found in a field in Homestead, Florida

Puentes, the Miami-Dade Police sergeant, said her department's agricultural patrol section has cases open on 16 slaughtered horses found this year compared to 13 in 2014. In one case, five carcasses were discovered on a southwest Miami-Dade property owned by the South Florida Water Management District, Puentes said. An additional seven horses were reported stolen in the last 11 months in the county, compared to 13 last year. Of the 20 horses reported stolen, seven have been found slaughtered.

But cops in Miami-Dade have not been able to make any arrests connected to the thefts and deaths of horses. The department simply does not have the manpower to penetrate the black market horse-meat industry, Puentes told me, noting her unit patrols an area that covers 440 square miles. "Everyone is short-staffed," she added. "It's not just Miami-Dade Police."

Once concentrated in south Florida, the illegal horse-meat trade is now a statewide epidemic, warned Richard "Kudo" Couto, founder of Animal Recovery Mission, or ARM, a Miami-based organization that conducts private investigations of illegal animal slaughter. Since 2010, ARM's band of 15 volunteers have infiltrated dozens of open air slaughterhouses and farm where livestock are butchered illegally, they say.

Using hidden cameras and pretending to be customers, ARM members have recorded pigs being shot at point-blank range with shotguns and goats getting their throats slit while suspended from their hind legs, among other gruesome footage turned over to local police agencies. Since 2011, ARM has documented 236 cases of illegal horse slaughtering in Florida, according to its website.

"This is going on as far as Ocala and Jacksonville," Couto said, referring to a pair of cities in northern Florida. "We're currently undercover at two farms where they are butchering around 25 horses a week."

Watch our documentary on the struggles of being LGBT in Albania:

Typically, stolen or unwanted horses end up at illegal slaughterhouses after they are purchased at horse auctions or from Craigslist, Couto said. A quick search of the online classifieds website's south Florida farm and garden section shows that some horse owners are selling their ponies for as low as $500.

"Someone who buys the horse with the intent of selling the meat can make $1,300 to $1,500 off just one horse," Couto said. "The profit margins are so high, it's a no-brainer why these guys get into the horse meat trade."

Differences in culture are also a significant contributing factor, explained Laurie Waggoner, ranch operations director for the South Florida chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "We have a lot of people in Miami who come from places where it is OK to eat horses," she said. "It doesn't matter to them that it is illegal here."

The trend is further complicated by the clandestine nature of the criminal horse-meat industry. Despite ARM's undercover investigations, as well as long-term stings conducted by some law enforcement agencies, there have been few arrests, and even fewer convictions, of suspected horse-meat dealers and buyers due to a lack of evidence. A review of Miami Herald archives since 2010—the year then-Governor Charlie Crist signed the law that elevated horse-meat dealing from a misdemeanor to a felony—suggests only four individuals have been convicted for crimes connected to the illegal sale of horse meat, but not for the crime itself. For instance, Santiago Cabrera and Luis Cordero pleaded guilty in 2011 to armed burglary after they admitted to breaking into people's farms to steal and kill horses for the meat. Cabrera was sentenced to five years and Cordero was hit with a four-year sentence.

In other parts of Florida, two major investigations in Hillsborough and Palm Beach counties in the past three years resulted in only two people getting arrested for possessing horse meat with the intent to sell it. One individual pleaded guilty but got no jail time, while charges were dropped against the other suspected dealer.

"It is hard to do undercover buys," Miami-Dade PD's Puentes said. "Everyone in my unit wears uniforms and drives police trucks. know who we are, but we don't know who they are."

Even when law enforcement agencies devote massive resources to investigating horse killings, they often come up empty.

For instance, in the summer of 2011, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, along with US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors, launched a probe after Couto informed detectives that "thousands of horses were being slaughtered and the meat sold for human consumption," according to a December 2012 department press release.

Roughly 18 months after initiating the investigation, sheriff's deputies arrested one person. According to the press release, an undercover detective bought horse meat from then-26-year-old Jose Felix Ortega at Georges Farms in Tampa on February 19, 2012. He was not formally arrested and arraigned until November 6, 2012. According to Hillsborough County criminal court records, Ortega pleaded guilty, but he completed a pretrial intervention program in 2014 to avoid having the felony conviction on his record, an option afforded to first-time offenders by Florida state courts.

The same year he pleaded guilty to three separate federal charges related to his illegal slaughter operation. According to a March 2014 indictment, Ortega knowingly killed pigs in an inhumane fashion and sold meat that had not been inspected by the USDA and that was decomposed and unfit for human consumption on October 27, 2011. Last May, he pleaded guilty and five months later he was sentenced to three years probation.

Investigators also bought meat from an unidentified woman at another Tampa farm, but the local state attorney's office declined to file charges against her.

The investigation was further hindered by a spat between the Sheriff's office and Couto. According to the release, Couto failed to provide any "surveillance video or photographs of horses being slaughtered, killed or butchered for any purposes." Furthermore, Couto attempted five or six times to set up horse meat deals that fell at the last minute, and on August 30, 2012, he stopped cooperating with detectives, the press release claims.

For his part, Couto says cops took their eye off the ball. "Instead of making arrests and bringing these guys to justice, they tried to discredit our investigative work," he told me.

Bags of horse meat purchased by undercover Animal Recovery Mission investigators

Detective Larry McKinnon, the Hillsborough Sheriff's spokesman, said the department tried to do the exact opposite. "We can't prosecute people simply based on theories and conjecture," McKinnon told me. "We did a very thorough, extensive investigation. Nothing was ever found."

More recently, an ARM undercover investigation led the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office to raid three farms in Loxahatchee, recover 750 animals. and arrest six men on various animal cruelty charges on October 13, according to sheriff's spokeswoman Therese Barbera. "This was the first of its kind for us," she said. "With the evidence Mr. Couto gave us, we were able to obtain the search warrants."

Undercover video footage taken by Couto and his ARM investigators shows pigs, fowl, and goats being inhumanely slaughtered, but no horses. In one clip, though, Couto displays finely cut filets of meat he claims came from a horse that was butchered at one of the illegal slaughterhouses, Garcia Farms.

However, Barbera said deputies "found no evidence of horse slaughtering" and only one of the suspects, Rafael Ramirez, was charged with possessing horse meat with the intent to sell. According the Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts website, Ramirez's case was dismissed last month.

Nevertheless, ARM is performing a job that should be handled by cops, advocates say. "We need a statewide task force set up by law enforcement officers that sets up stings," Waggoner of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said. "It is the only way to infiltrate these groups."

Unfortunately, police agencies don't seem to have the resources to keep up.

"With the manpower shortage, it's simply not realistic," Sergeant Puentes of Miam-Dade PD told me. "I don't see ever stopping, but the community needs to be more alert and more cognizant of what is going on in their environment."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

Sek Loeung, the widow of Hem Ty, breaks down in tears. All photos by Jens Welding Øllgaard

When 83-year-old traditional healer Hem Ty attended a funeral of a 17-year-old girl in the central province of Kompong Thom, he left followed by rumors that he'd cast spells on the village locals. They even began to suspect he was responsible for the teenager's death.

"I heard from the father of the victim of the girl that he came to her funeral and lifted a sheet covering her body and touched her foot," said Hun Soeun, the police chief in rural Prasat Balaing district's Doung commune. "That's why they accused him of being a sorcerer."

A dog walks across a road cutting through Doung commune

Opinion was split among villagers as to why Hem Ty touched the feet of the dead teenager. Some believed he was simply checking to see if the girl was definitely deceased. After all, he had been a well-respected member of the community, said Sek Loeung, his 69-year-old widow.

Hem Ty began practicing traditional medicine at the age of 24 while he was living as a monk in a nearby pagoda. After leaving the monkhood, he married Loeung, a distant relative, and settled down and had ten children. As well as farming, for decades he had a steady stream of patients visiting him for a wide range of illnesses.

Sek Loeung inside her home

"He would treat children who would cry at night. He would put water in his mouth and then spray it in their faces to bless them," Loeung explained last month from their traditional stilted home. "He would also make medicine from the bark of a tree for women who had just given birth. He believed that when they would take this, the bad blood inside the woman's body would be released."

Despite this, others in the community had different ideas. Among them were those who suspected Hem Ty touched the girl's feet in an effort to steal her spirit. The father of the deceased girl had already decided his daughter must have fallen victim to black magic as doctors in Siem Reap City could not cure her of her illness, described only by villagers as a "disease of the bone."

Rumors of Hem Ty's behavior at the funeral set off a chain of acts of sabotage against his family. The family's dog was poisoned and a large stockpile of wood planned for a building a new house set on fire. Then on November 4, Hem Ty failed to return from his cashew plantation for his evening meal.

Hem Ty's daughter Ty Luon speaks with a young neighbor inside her father's former home.

"After we couldn't find him the information spread and others came to help," said his daughter Ty Luon. "Six of us were looking around the cashew nut plantation."

After around two hours, they made a gruesome discovery.

"By 7 PM, we could still not find him so we put a fishing rod into the pond and it hooked onto a shirt, then we pulled it up and his body appeared. He had been chopped five times on the head with an axe," said Ty Luon. At this point, the police officer produced photos of the bloody corpse on his smartphone.

Hem Ty is the latest in a long line of people killed after being accused of sorcery in Cambodia. In April last year, a 600-strong mob in Takeo stoned a man to death. It was alleged that he'd caused the deaths of several elderly people. In July, three men in Mondolkiri admitted to murdering a man they suspected of sorcery. A few days later, a traditional healer was beheaded in Kompong Speu.

Pictures of Hem Ty's sons inside his former home

According to Ryun Patterson, a journalist and author of Vanishing Act: A Glimpse Into Cambodia's World of Magic, long-held superstition mixed with the harsh lives of so many rural Cambodians creates the "ideal climate" for sorcery killings.

"As with witch hunts around the globe, this goes back hundreds of years, and I think it's tied to basic human psychology. Our brains work really hard to find patterns in things, to find causes for the effects we see everyday," Patterson said. "When we can't see the cause, or if we're completely powerless to change a bad situation, I think our brains look for connections that might not actually exist."

Vong Sotheara, an expert on Cambodian culture, epigraphy, and history thinks ancient beliefs around black magic can be traced back more than a thousand years. But like Patterson, he believes sorcery killings can as much be blamed on economic and political factors as superstitious.

"Most of those people are poorly educated," he says. "When they become hopeless in finding the solution by physical or scientific ways, they always turn to back on the magicians."

One month after the killing of Hem Ty, there have been no arrests made in the case, although on Thursday district police chief Chhin Chhum said his officers had identified one suspect. Commune police chief Soeun said that he did not personally believe in black magic and sorcery, claiming that he "believes in the law" and that he has made efforts to "educate" locals to avoid pointing fingers at alleged sorcerers.

Sek Loeung

Back at their simple home, Ty's widow Loeung flipped through a small picture book containing the only pictures of her husband."I'm worried that someone who beat my husband could attack me, too," she says, fighting back tears."I'm so regretful. I don't understand why people put the blame on him. My husband was a good person, he never wanted to cause harm to people."

Where is this school bus going? Nowhere! Photo via Flickr user Kurt Bauschardt

A number of Alberta school boards have cancelled all trips to foreign countries for the next year, citing safety concerns, particularly in relation to threats from ISIS and recent mass shootings in the United States.

The Edmonton Catholic School District (ECSD) and the Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD)have both cancelled all trips for the next year, with the ECSD singling out terrorism as a cause for concern when sending students abroad on field trips.

The Canadian Press reports that a memo was put out Monday notifying parents and students of the cancelled trips, which includes about 20 over the next year.

The memo makes note of both the Paris attacks and recent statistics that show there have been 355 mass shootings in the last 336 days in the US.

"With recent events in Paris and California, and heightened concerns in other cities, we feel it best to limit our travels to within Canada for the remainder of this school year," the memo reads.

An insurance company that umbrellas a number of school districts in Alberta is also calling for all school boards in the province to suspend their trips, specifically pointing out the increasing threats from ISIS as a cause for worry.

"The unpredictability of ISIS as to where these extremists will hit next is a concern, as they have supporters throughout the world," a message sent from Alberta School Boards' Insurance Exchange to schools in the province reads.

The CCSD also suspended all trips until September 2016, when the board will "reevaluate" the threat level. The board made no mention of terrorism specifically, but it's pretty clear the school board thinks the rest of the world is just way too cray for Canadian children right now.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Marine Le Pen. Photo via Flickr

Led by Marine Le Pen, the Front National (FN) won around 30 percent of the votes in France's regional elections on Sunday. That makes the party, which most observers consider to be far-right extremist, the clear winner—over Nicolas Sarkozy's Conservative Coalition (27 percent) and the Left Alliance led by French president Francois Hollande (23 percent).

These elections are not France's last word, though: This was only the first round, and less than half of French voters bothered to show up to the polls. It's therefore not unlikely that the FN's opponents will rally their troops and combine their forces in the second round of elections this coming weekend—just to prevent the Front from carrying the victory home. This is pretty much what happened in the presidential elections of 2002.

Still, this first victory has given people all over Europe a jolt. Some observers already imagine a future in which Marine Le Pen becomes president of France and subsequently engineers France's withdrawal from the European Union of which the country is a founding member. But how did we get this far? What made 30 percent of French people vote for a party whose founder thinks that Auschwitz is "a detail of history"?

To find out, I got in touch with my colleague, Julien Morel, who is the Editor in Chief of VICE France.

VICE: How much of the outcome of the election was influenced by the recent terror attacks in Paris?
Julien Morel: It's hard to know precisely as there's no numbers, but I would say: Yes, it did influence the results. If you take polls before and after the Paris attacks, I'm sure you will see a rise in attitudes of the "I'm gonna vote for the far right because of those terrorists" sort. But the FN's rise in France actually began 30 years ago. In the early 1980s, there was a cover of Liberation—one of the biggest left-wing newspapers here—with Jean-Marie Le Pen on.

The first factor of the recent and unprecedented ascent of the FN is, of course, the global financial crisis. It strongly impacted Northern France, which is the industrial part of the country. Those regions used to vote for the Socialist and the Communist Parties, but now they are all FN. Secondly, people generally feel disenfranchised with traditional left or right wing values. The third factor is abstention: Yesterday, half of French citizens didn't vote.

The FN is usually described as "far right" or "extremist" by international media. Would you say this label is justified, and if so, what are some FN positions that justify it?
Of course it's justified. Historically, the party was created by a guy who tortured Arab combatants during the War in Algeria: Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the 1980s, the same guy said that "gas chambers are a detail of our history." It's a party that actively fights against the building of mosques. It's a party whose demonstrations are run by skinheads.

His daughter, Marine Le Pen, has tried hard to make the party look acceptable in the last five years by firing some of the better-known racists of the party—her father included—and hiring some new heads who are openly gay. But in the end, it's the same narrative: Islam is a problem, the suburbs of Paris are a problem, the left and the right are the same, and voting in the FN is France's only real chance of change.

Has the party modified any of its positions since it's gained a wider following? Is old Le Pen falling out of favor a good sign?
Not really. It's more about making the party look less dangerous and politically correct—that's all. Because in the 1980s and the 1990s in France, they were clearly seen as neo-Nazis. Marine, because she's a woman and because of her more open-minded ideas in terms of the economy and homosexuality, is way more acceptable than a one-eyed guy who used to beat up Arabs and used to call himself "the French Ronald Reagan." So I don't see this as a good sign at all: Marine is their best chance of getting into power. They took it, and if you look at the results, it's working.

Do Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen still talk to their father?
Judging by their respective Twitter accounts, I'd say it would be impossible. The old man is full of anger and most of it is directed at his daughter who fired him from the party earlier this year. He's a ranting old man now—saying the most racist, nonsensical things you can imagine in order to embarrass Marine. Which, actually, is quite hilarious.

Has the FN's ascent to power led to a polarization of French society? Is this a country versus city thing?
More or less. But it's not that simple and there are many exceptions. If you take Brittany for instance, those guys voted left like they always did, even if they were probably affected the most by the economic crisis. Meanwhile, the Provence region in the South East, which has been an NF stronghold for the last 20 years, is full of cities: Cannes, Nice, Toulon, Marseille. That is a financially strong area, largely because of tourism.

Photo by Andy Hay on Flickr

What would the FN's ascent mean for Europe?
Firstly, the EU as we built it doesn't work like we thought it would. Secondly, every financial crisis throughout history has led to political catastrophes or wars—which is what's happening now. The best way to stop the rise of the far right in the continent would be to stop the crisis. For instance, let's maybe not destroy Greece, but try to work together to find a solution that benefits us all.

Is there a real chance of Marine Le Pen winning the next presidential election?
I don't think so, no. Everyone will vote against the FN on the second round—just like in 2002. We're not that dumb. But the real problem here, and it's hard to explain exactly how bad it is, is that Nicolas Sarkozy might become our president for the second time in 2017. You can almost smell it already. It's like having Bush again—or Reagan. A nightmare, really. And a big shame for France. Weren't we supposed to be the great nation of human rights, resistance, and literature or something?

What do you think could or should be done to combat the rise of the far right in France?
First, President Hollande should actively think of making a proper left wing program before he leaves. It's not gonna happen, I'm quite sure, but if he achieved say 40 percent of what people expected when they voted for him in 2012, maybe the left can make sense again. But he's too busy throwing bombs at the Islamic State at the moment.

Secondly, he needs to find a way to speak to young people. The number of kids who voted for the FN yesterday is insane—more than one in three of people aged between 18 and 30. If the left could get young people interested in politics again, the future wouldn't seem so grey. For now though, our future seems to be Sarkozy.

Alex Cox (center) playing a drug lord in the 2005 film 'Rosario Tijeras.' Photo via his website.

Acid-warped, apocalyptic, and frequently bizarre, the films of Alex Cox are idiosyncratic in the extreme. He influenced the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez with a wild deconstructionist take on hoary genre tropes and the sheer joy of celluloid chaos, and today he remains a warped visionary—still intent on sharing his unhinged take on life, art, sex, and death.

Perhaps best known for cult favorite Repo Man (1984)—a tale of auto destruction and anti-establishment fury set among the flotsam of the early 1980s LA punk scene—the forward thrust of punk has been a frequent inspiration. Sid and Nancy (1986) told the story of the doomed chemical romance between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, evoking the squalid Lower East Side surroundings and stumbling hopelessness of their last days. Straight to Hell (1987), meanwhile, cast Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, and The Pogues in a fucked up desert frontier where the locals were highly caffeinated and trigger-happy.

His films were perhaps always destined to attract the ire of the Hollywood machine, due to a frequent and overtly anti-establishment bent. It was a situation that led to his being unofficially "blacklisted" by the major studios; 1987's Walker—which tracks the journey of William Walker in his botched attempt to stage a military coup in 19th century Nicaragua—was the one that did it, a thinly veiled critique of 1980s American interventionist foreign policy at the time of the Oliver North/Contra affair. Cox has worked free of major studio interference ever since.

Currently crowdfunding a new Western, Tombstone Rashomon, and lecturing in film at the University of Colorado, I caught up with the director to talk three decades of underground agitation.

VICE: Hi Alex. Tell me about Tombstone Rashomon.
Alex Cox: The idea of Rashomon is that it's a sequence of events described by four different people; different every time. That is the concept. It's essentially a version of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral but in the manner of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon—it tells the story from different perspectives.

And you're crowdfunding the film?
It's a really good way of raising money. The other project I did recently was a science fiction film that I made with my students from the University of Colorado. With that, we raised $114,000, which probably makes it one of the more lavish student movies ever made.

Perhaps it was counterproductive to put the word "Rashomon" in the title for this film, though? How many people actually know the original movie? You know, they used to say you should never put the word "death" in the title of a movie because it would "kill" it at the box office—but obviously that was nonsense, because you had movies like Death Wish or Die Hard, or whatever.

Joe Strummer in 'Straight to Hell'

You've explored the western before. Straight to Hell was a hugely original film, a postmodern take on the genre. Was it an anarchic shoot?
It was an anarchic shoot, to an extent—the script changed a fair bit. We didn't really play close attention; lot's changed. New scenes got added randomly, like the "Danny Boy" song, so in that sense it had an anarchic aspect to it. It was done in four weeks. Probably now I could do it even faster than that . But it was shot like a regular movie; You get it finished because you need the discipline of that schedule to make sure that you've shot everything you need by the end of the day. But I suppose that anarchy can be a discipline of its own, too.

Tell me about working with Joe Strummer. He really looked like a classic 1950s movie star in that film.
He does! He looks like a young Michael Caine, or something like that.

What was your relationship with Joe?
He'd done the soundtrack to Sid and Nancy—I knew him from that. He was marvelous. Very talented, very generous. He was credited with two, but actually contributed five, songs for Sid and Nancy, which appeared under pseudonyms. He had tremendous energy. He wanted to know what we were going to do next; what was happening.

After Sid and Nancy we were planning a big rock 'n' roll tour of Nicaragua with the Pogues, him, and Elvis Costello. He was going to be part of that, but we couldn't raise a budget for it. We would have had to have brought a large number of people over; the Pogues were always a rather large number...

The trailer for Sid and Nancy

I can imagine the insurance quotes for that would have been interesting.
It was a regular movie insurance policy, if I recall and I wrote the script. Straight to Hell was Joe's idea.

At what point did you realize that he could really act?
The part of Simms was always written for Joe. Dick had written the part of Willie for himself, then we had Sy Richardson as Norwood and Courtney Love as, um, Courtney Love —these people were in our heads when we wrote the film, y'know.

It's nice when you can cast in advance like that; it saves time, you can visualize them, create a character around them. I think Joe always wanted to be that young amoral 60s movie hero guy. And he just did it, didn't he? He did it really well. He was a force of nature in his black suit and his shoulder holster. He'd sleep in it, napping until he was needed.

Read on Broadly: An Exclusive Interview with Rachel Dolezal

Can you tell me a bit about the re-release of Straight to Hell a few years back? You added some new scenes, right?
Well, they put the scenes back in—the missing scenes. I'd always regretted having them out because I wanted all of the scenes to be included in the movie and I liked the new color scheme as well, which gives the film a kind of pumpkin color. There is more bloodshed; more nozzle flashes; more boys' stuff like that.

Do you feel Straight to Hell ever got the dues it deserved? It is a totally unique movie; something like Desperado would have been unthinkable without it, I reckon, but it remains relatively obscure.
Well, if it was super obscure, you and I wouldn't be taking about it all these years later . But I borrow from other filmmakers too; I borrow from other directors, other actors; I think that is just the nature of the medium. It flows along.

Punk has been a recurring theme in your work as a director; I'm thinking particularly of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. Can you tell me a little about the influences?
I was into the scene, properly; I liked the music a lot, back in the late 1970s and early 80s. I think the punk thing was rather like the surrealist movement; the dadaists. It wasn't just a style of painting or a style of music. It was an attitude: there was a rebellious thing to it that gave it the quality of a movement.

The trailer for 'Repo Man'

Are you really "blacklisted" by Hollywood?
Yes. It happened after Walker. Things are often done via proxy; the real villain of the piece in Walker was the bonds company that kept hassling us during the shoot. I'm still not really sure what crime I was accused of. We were shooting battle scenes and really dramatic bits and pieces with lots of multi-angles, and if we had a second camera in the truck we'd get it out and use it to shoot horses galloping by, as you would on any movie. But the bond company took this as an indication of my unsuitability as a director; they tried to shut the film down, but they ultimately failed.

They seized a load of equipment; the crew were held up for about a week, during which time the cast just waited. We didn't know what to do—we were thinking, Shall we make another movie in the meantime? We could make a movie about the missing equipment; make a movie about waiting for it to turn up.

But the idea was so exhausting and we were struggling to keep the thing afloat. But they failed. It was ultimately pointed out to them that nothing was going wrong, that everything was fine, and that if they pursued the aggressive tact that they were taking that it would end up in litigation—and that they would lose and that it would cost them a lot of money.

And so we were able to finish the film. But that was the last film I made like that; after that point I realized that this is some kind of gangster operation, y'know? These financier companies kind of set themselves up and say they'll step in and take over if the director or producer "can't finish the film." But for fuck's sake! How many times has that happened? That the director or the producer were not able to finish it? It's a little gangster operation created in order to harass the filmmaker.

And did that signal an end in terms of working under that system?
Oh, I wasn't able to work in Hollywood after that. I was essentially blacklisted. After Walker I was never able to get a film made in a major studio again, hence the films that I made after, which were independent. But this is what is so exciting about crowdfunding movies: it is not about the peripheral stuff—there are no gatekeepers or studio heads or any of that; the people involved genuinely want to see a great film get made.

Follow Harry Sword on Twitter.

All illustrations by Michael Dockery

At a superficial level, sexual jealousy is arguably one of the most counterproductive emotions we have evolved to experience. Think of all the hours we humans waste pining over stolen partners or unrequited love, not to mention the devastation caused by crimes of passion. Plus, from an evolutionary perspective, surely more people having sex would mean more people, period. So why do we get so upset over what someone else does with their naughty bits?

The answer to the question is complex and still being investigated, though many theories have been posited around how sexual jealousy may have provided an advantage in our ancestral environment. What we do know is that while females and males are equally jealous creatures, the trigger points for jealousy differ greatly between the sexes.

According to decades-old research by psychologist David M. Buss, men are hardwired to feel jealous over a partner's sexual infidelity, while women are more likely to feel jealous when a partner is emotionally unfaithful. If we look back at our ancestors this kind of makes sense, and has led to what is known as the parental-investment model. From an evolutionary perspective, men needed to make sure their sexual partners were faithful so they didn't waste time and resources raising children that weren't theirs. Women didn't need to worry about that, but they would have had to depend on their male partners for resources while they raised children. A woman would therefore feel more threatened by emotional infidelity, as it could result in a partner giving his resources to another woman and her children instead.

This dynamic obviously isn't in place in relationships where pregnancy and childrearing isn't a factor, but our emotions remain the same when it comes to online relationships, for instance. Research published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 2010 found that men are more likely to experience jealousy at the prospect of their female partners having cybersex than the thought of them forming an online emotional attachment. Women, on the other hand, found the idea of their male partner's forming emotional relationships online more threatening.

While the sex differences in jealousy have been replicated in multiple studies, the theory is not without its critics. Many of these studies involve asking subjects whether hypothetical sexual or emotional infidelity would distress them more. It is widely known that humans are bad at predicting their future emotional reactions, which throws the validity of these results into question. But, even studies that have observed actual jealous behavior (such as a 2011 study by Barry X. Kuhle that involved coders analyzing episodes of the reality program Cheaters) have reported findings that mirror this theory.

However, gender doesn't absolutely explain everything. In 2010, psychological scientists Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly focused on the types of attachment people display in relationships in a study and found that rather than being hardwired in us, attachment style is shaped in our formative years by parents and caregivers, and in later life by friendships and intimate relationships. Levy and Kelly found that people with "dismissing" attachment (those who value autonomy in relationships over commitment) are more likely to be distressed by sexual infidelity, and that this attachment style is more common in men. By contrast, men and women who have either "secure" or "anxious" attachment styles (the latter of which is slightly more common in women), find emotional infidelity more upsetting.

Like most of the other research in this field the work of Levy and Kelly has not been immune to critics. These include the authors of a 2015 study published in the Human Ethology Bulletin who showed that, in a sample of 88 men and 170 women from Chile, sex differences in jealousy were not explained by attachment style. In fact, gender was again the only predictor of the type of jealousy that was most distressing. (Perhaps the conclusion there is that Chilean relationships don't hinge on such predictable attachment styles?)

Like everything else in evolutionary psychology there's a number of factors at play, with varying levels of influence from our genes, our upbringing, and our environment. Still, there is evidence that men tend to get angry about sex, while women tend to get upset about emotional intimacy. And none of this is likely to change anytime soon.

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith

I've had "chemistry tests" with a nice handful of leading men in Hollywood. Not to lump them all together, but they have mostly been dicks. Unfortunately, it's a good chemistry test that generally leads to fame and fortune (if you don't create your own work).

Let me break down the scenario for you: Chemistry tests happen after (pat on the back) actors do well after initial auditions, and have made it through the callback with the director and creators. Then you're trapped in a room with 18 pairs of eyes waiting to critique the connection between you and the leading man. Chemistry is that intangible thing that exists when you lock eyes with your next fuck buddy or future mate or here, your colleague. Maybe it's pheromones, maybe it's a twinkle in the eye—whatever chemistry is, it exists beyond us.

Long ago, Hollywood found a way to monetize and abuse this perfectly natural and unquantifiable thing. (See: every movie involving any sort of love interest, requited or otherwise.) Still, without giving the system too much credit, it does make sense. When two people are on screen and they have no chemistry, it's like paying $15 to watch a bad Tinder meet-up for 90 minutes. When the chemistry is good, they are Brangelina and everyone leaves the film eager to adopt a small army for a family.

The process of attaining the aforementioned ideal is far more difficult, however. And the experience of testing is not a whole lot of fun for the female actor. I can't speak for the male actors experience, but I'll go out on a limb here and say: it's probably less traumatic an experience for men because of, well, a patriarchal society that forces women to adhere to male forms of beauty and to never intimidate a man in a power position, etc. You get it. You've read a history book/been on the internet.

I'm assuming it's a mostly pleasant experience for the dudes on the opposite side of the frame though. They get to see women walk in, usually wearing something revealing, and they are in the power position. It's a fantasy suite for anyone who is wildly insecure and overly confident (read: all people in this industry). My experience has been generally quite bleak. Here are a few encounters I've had.

Tall, famous Canadian comic actor

Hey, he's Canadian, I'm Canadian, I'm thinking chemistry is for sure in our future even though they had me waiting for over two hours and I'm feeling dizzy from lack of sugar. I walk in, he is more spray-tanned orange than a Miami tangerine and taller than I ever imagined. I'm dumbfounded. The entire room of six or seven white males ignore me for the first five minutes while they continue to discuss what color their various Teslas are. (Not a joke.) I'm too hungry (for food and a job) to play nice at this point so I get my phone out and start checking it. It was part of the action for the upcoming scene, if they ever shut up about their Teslas, so I could have argued it was for my character. But truthfully, it was a dick move in response to their small dick moves. They commented about my phone play and I respond that I have nothing to say about cars. Tension is tangible at this point. The actor then decides not to read with me. So the gay casting director and I have a chemistry read. We were incredible. We should be dating. I leave and get myself a burger. It was fine.

Indie comedian turned rom-com star with an annoying voice that he somehow makes adorable

I recently did a chemistry with this comedy bad boy. Went in thinking "I would 100 percent sit on this man's face, we will for sure have chemistry." Walked out thinking FUCK that GUY.

The chemistry read went like this: I walk in, dude says he isn't shaking hands today because he's sick. I make a bad joke about sickness, the room falls quiet. Moving on to the audition. In comedy, we like to improvise and, based on the fact that I improvised in my three previous auditions for this role, I wasn't going to tinker with something that had already worked. Except, right off the top of my improvisation, the guy says "Hurry up!" He literally told me to "hurry up" with my comedy gold. I checked out after that, hating him, because that is an improv and life NO NO, even if you are sick. Who knows if that was him improvising with me, but since it was a phone scene and I hadn't yet answered the "phone," I was given the impression that he just wanted to get it over with. It wasn't that long ago that he was just another no name actor trying to sell a TV show. I expect more from comedians because they are supposed to get it. I should mention casting did call my agent to apologize on behalf of the actor, which felt good. Like, casting is worried about my feelings? This feels powerful. "My feelings are valid!" I guess in a small way, it's a win. Look, we actors have to take what we can get.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith again

Former teen crush

This guy is an upstanding man and he deserves applause for treating me like a human not just a body. Thank you! OK, so this CT was not a terrible experience. For me at least. He's a gentleman and before we begin the read, he says "Hi, I'm _____, and I'm going to kiss you in this scene." To which my reaction, for WHO KNOWS WHAT REASON is to make fake gagging motions. (I was nervous and had no idea how to act like a person.) As if the idea of kissing him makes me ill! Au contraire! Weird, bad jokes are my sweet spot. Guy, blessed be he, joked to the producers that the idea of kissing him makes me sick. He made the room comfortable with my discomfort. I tried to backtrack ... long story short: The guy is a great kisser and I didn't get that part. He's exceptional.

Guy who used to be one of the biggest stars on the planet

What is it like to do a chemistry test with "Famous TV Character?" Honestly? A dream. Especially when he tells you at the read that "you obviously already have the part." So, here I am, wearing a dress that shows too much leg and too much boob and even though it feels like I'm selling my soul to the devil by wearing it, it feels worth it because I'm going to be employed. (Also to note: he too is very orange. Am I supposed to be getting more spray tans? is all I can think while writing this by the way.) While I was waiting to audition, Famous TV Character came and sat beside me and made some jokes about his chakras and meditation (a practice we both do) and I knew the man wanted to fuck me. So I'm thinking, Oh, I'm absolutely getting this part/this is mine to lose/this is my moment. Not so much. The network didn't care for our chemistry and chose some other leggy blonde instead of me. Famous TV Character started following me on Twitter and direct messaged me that he didn't get what he wanted but as a consolation asked to take me on a date. I was in a relationship and had to pass. And as I found out later, he too was in a serious relationship at the time. That's Hollywood.

The final act

Hollywood is like a bad boyfriend. You either have too much chemistry and the system wants to fight it, or you have no chemistry and you're a garbage person making bad jokes.

I'm desperately looking forward to the day where I can audition young, leggy men while discussing my expensive, luxury hybrid to a bunch of other powerful women.

The future is female. God bless America.

Ingrid Haas is an actor, writer, Torontonian living in Los Angeles. She has a German name with no German heritage and is neither a dog nor cat person. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Image via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Right now, there are approximately 200,000 children affected by parental imprisonment in England and Wales. Couple this with around 1,500 on any given day in Northern Ireland and 30,000 in Scotland and it's a substantial figure. When you take into account that around 65 percent of boys with a convicted father will go on to offend themselves, and that an estimated 45 percent of prisoners lose contact with their families once they're inside, these figures raise an important question: how are families of prisoners treated by those involved in the process?

Last week, the British charity Barnardo's released Locked Out, a report detailing the experiences of children visiting a parent in prison. Conducted by Dr. Jane Evans, Locked Out examines how families are treated by prison staff and how intimidating these visits can be for them. One element of the report looks at the intrusive searches performed on children (for example, newborns are strip-searched and have their diapers searched) before they enter the prison, which appear disproportionate to the security risks posed.

"Guards are on the lookout for drugs and contraband," Evans says, when I speak to her about the protocols involved. "The search is normally a pat-down and a dog circles 'round you to see if they can smell drugs. That's fine for an adult—this dog can sniff up to about waist height—but you can imagine if you're a child of about five or six, they're going to come right up into your face. The other thing is, for girls undo their hair ornaments or their braiding and take them away. A lot of the kids, they'll dress up because it's a special occasion to see their dads and so they'll do their hair special and then they take that stuff away."

When asked about the atmosphere of these visits, Kate*, 20, whose stepfather is currently serving a three-and-a-half year sentence for drug-related offenses, says: "It does all depend on what the staff are like. Obviously it's not nice to go through and be searched, but you can understand why you have to. But if you've got someone who's doing it with a smile, it's much nicer than someone that is scowling at you."

Helen*, 27, whose husband served a seven-month term of a two-and-a-half year sentence last year, tells me the weekly "normal visits" were just too much for her two young daughters.

" my children—one had just turned four and the other was coming up two—it was very scary, very daunting. All the different searches—they go in different rooms and then one door is shut so another can open. My eldest daughter was expected to stand on the red square on her own, stand still and have this dog come up to her face, so for her it was very intimidating."

Instead, Helen and her husband opted for the specific "family visits" the prison offered each month, where a charity working within the prison would train volunteers to become guards for these visits.

"It's a voluntary system," she says, "so the guards wanted to be there. They did all the processes a lot quicker, the searches much quicker and in a more child-orientated way. From the word go the guards were much more animated. It was just a lot easier."

Kate says the guards in the various prisons she's visited across the country (her father has been moved six times so far in his sentence) are both "really intimidating" and "really abrupt most of the time," adding, "it's as if I feel like I've done something wrong. That's how they make me feel."

This attitude of placing blame on those related to inmates is reiterated by Helen in describing the "normal visit" guard's interactions with her daughters. "They didn't speak to them, basically," she says. "Very rarely you'd get a prison officer interacting with a child. It almost felt like you were the prisoner, like you'd done something wrong, not that you were visiting somebody in prison."

When I ask Dr. Evans what improvements might be made to this visiting process, she is adamant: "I think are saying is that alright, search the child, but do it in a way that's friendly. Young children need to know what's going on and why it's going on."

On VICE News: VICE journalist Mohammed Rasool has been in prison for 100 days without trial

The Incentive and Earned Privileges (IEP) system currently employed in UK prisons divides prisoners into four categories: Entry, Basic, Standard, and Enhanced. This means that visiting hours can be controlled as a means of reward or punishment for a prisoner. Since the scheme was changed in 2013 (the coalition government made significant reforms to the policy stating that in order to earn privileges prisoners will not only have to avoid bad behavior, but will now have to actively work towards their own rehabilitation and to help others do so too), this regulation of visiting allowances is being increasingly used to punish prisoners.

While the number of prisoners awarded the "basic" status of two hours has risen by 52 percent since the scheme was changed, prisoners awarded the "enhanced" status of four or more visiting hours has fallen by about 16 percent.

Weekend visiting rights and family visit days, available largely only to "enhanced" prisoners, have also been affected by this newly-changed system, meaning that it is becoming more and more difficult for children to spend quality time with their imprisoned fathers (notably, this policy is not applied in women's prisons, where visiting hours remain untouched by the IEP scheme).

In the UK, there's an underlying stigma attached to family members of prisoners, as if somehow crime's inherent in their genetic make-up. It's an issue that crops up regularly when talking with the families of inmates.

I ask Kate whether she experiences this kind of reaction from having a parent who's still in prison. "Oh yeah definitely," she says, but points out that she doesn't really talk about the situation much with anyone outside her immediate circle. "There's a few friends that sort of know about it, but it's not something that comes up in common conversation."

Inevitably it's a situation that has affected her everyday life. "I think I've had to do things differently than I would've done," Kate says. "So say like for example my stepdad not being there: I've got two young brothers, and at 18 years old I wasn't expecting to help look after them. I've had to take on additional roles to fill his space."

With the statistic that 65 percent of boys with a convicted father going on to offend themselves ringing in my ears, I ask Kate what her stepdad says to her two younger brothers when they visit, if he's worried that they might go down the same route.

"Yeah," she says, "and he's very much, y'know... he doesn't want that to happen."

Speaking about the time her husband was first arrested, Helen says: "Where we live is a very small community and everybody knows your business, so everybody did find out and both me and the girls were very much judged, kind of put in a box. We're a good family, but as soon as people found out where he'd gone... when I took my daughter to school it was very, very difficult. It was almost like they didn't want to talk to me, didn't want to associate with me. People who I thought were friends all of a sudden disappeared."

Barnardo's Chief Executive Javed Khan has stated: "Children with a parent in prison are the innocent victims of someone else's crime. They struggle with the heartbreak of having their parent suddenly taken away. Intensifying that loss by taking away precious hours with their parent, or making visits unnecessarily uncomfortable, will only punish the children. It's time for a sea change in the way these overlooked and isolated children are treated."

I ask Dr. Evans what this "sea change" would mean for the UK prison system.

"One of the big changes Barnardo's would like to see effected in all prisons is to use this family intervention approach for children's visits," Dr. Evans says. "We want to see visits taken away from the IEP scheme that people are entitled to visits because they've got family who want to visit them and not because they've behaved in a certain way.

"We started from the basis that children have a right to have contact with both their parents as long as that's not going to be a risk to them; that's basic children's rights in the UN convention."

Before ending our conversation, I ask Helen whether she has any advice for young people who might be facing a similar situation.

"When you're visiting somebody in prison," she says, "take what's happening on the chin and don't take it to heart. Don't think there to be intentionally horrible to you, because I don't think they are... At the end of the day they're doing a job, and I think they get too involved in the job to realize that the people visiting are just human beings."

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity

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Cándido Figueredo Ruíz in midtown Manhattan, New York, near the headquarters of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Photo by the author

Journalist Cándido Figueredo Ruíz woke in a panic, windows shattering all around him. Automatic weapons fire was raining down on his house. The bedroom of his Paraguay home was riddled in lead. One bullet struck his bed, centimeters from where he'd been sleeping moments earlier.

It was about 3 AM.

"I threw myself under the bed and I prayed to all the saints," the seasoned reporter said in an interview with VICE on a recent visit to New York. "It looked like that shooting would never stop. I was terrified."

When it was all over, Figueredo was unscathed by the rapid fire drive-by even though 35 bullets had punctured his home. This was the mid 1990s, the first time Paraguay's drug lords tried to murder Figueredo for stories he published about them. The man's work paints a chilling portrait of organized crime and political corruption in Paraguay, offering a glimpse into the perils and consequences of documenting South American drug lords.

Figueredo was born and raised in Pedro Juan Caballero, a small city near the Brazilian border, where he's still based. In 2003, the journalist discovered traffickers were purchasing funeral homes for the purpose of concealing and transporting cocaine in corpses. His investigation forced police to take notice. The smugglers lost thousands, perhaps millions.

Figueredo's house was promply shot up again.

Five journalists have been murdered in Paraguay since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; some of the killings were reportedly orchestrated by politicians. Out of 180 countries, the World Press Freedom Index ranked Paraguay 109th this year. It's a state of affairs that requires many journalists to censor themselves to survive.

"Paraguay, like many countries in Central America, are countries where journalists are facing very, very serious and real risks," said José Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch's Americas Division. "Every time that they work, they expose issues related to abuse of power, human rights abuses, corruption—those are very dangerous activities for any journalists in those regions. Most journalists that investigate these types of issues suffer threats on their life."

But the constant danger hasn't been enough to keep Figueredo away from his craft.

"I always wanted to do journalism," said Figueredo, who was visiting the United States to accept an award from the CPJ. "I didn't study journalism. I didn't have that opportunity because I was born in a family that was poor, but I have the virus of journalism in my blood."

It's a burden he bears selflessly with hopes of one day catalyzing change in Paraguay.

"My city was always controlled by the mafia," he said. "When I was a kid I went to school very early in the morning and we encountered bodies of people that have been killed. Everybody knew who were the masterminds of those crimes, but nobody dared to give their names because they were afraid. Anyone could be killed. I wanted to expose these people."

His home in Pedro Juan Caballero is like an army bunker of sorts, equipped with 16 cameras and seven police-trained bodyguards—armed with submachine guns—who patrol the place on a 24-hour basis.

Photo by Luz Patricia Bellenzier, courtesy of the Committee to Protect Journalists

Unless it's reporting-related, Figueredo rarely goes outside. And neither does his wife Luz Patricia Bellenzier , a psychologist, who can barely practice her profession. Haunted by countless—possibly hundreds—of death threats over the years, Figueredo has lived under police protection for decades now.

"My house is the regional newsroom," he said. "But it looks more like a police station than a newsroom. Police are everywhere. I feel totally isolated. We are never alone, only when we are in our bedroom."

Figueredo brandishes firearms for protection almost as routinely as most journalists tote notepads. It's a remote and paranoid existence—except for the company of his bodyguards.

"Sometimes, I like to have a glass of wine and cheese —but if I'm going to do it, I have to in front of all the policemen. I won't be able to be in my underwear," he joked. "And it's going to be very expensive for me to feed all of them."

Figueredo disclosed that he earns about $1,200 each month working as a correspondent for ABC Color, one of his country's largest national dailies.

"He lives like a prisoner—he can't go out to restaurants, he can't have a normal social life," said Carlos Lauria, senior program coordinator for the Americas at the CPJ, which monitors press freedom conditions around the world.

Pedro Juan Caballero, where Figueredo's based, is a narcotics corridor, rife with cocaine smugglers importing product coming from Colombia and Bolivia. Its sleepy backdrop make for an ideal port of entry and exit. Paraugay is also a cannabis machine, and one of the largest producers of weed in the world. For drug runners on either side of the border, Pedro Juan Caballero is the smuggling superhighway, the ultimate gateway to South America.

" is a lawless place—it's very violent," Lauria explained. "There's smuggling of everything, plenty of drug traffickers, politicians who work in collusion with organized crime. There are very few reporting on these issues. It's almost impossible to be a journalist without facing risks in this area."

In November, Brazil extradited Vilmar Acosta Marques, the former mayor of Ypejhú, who fled Paraguay last year for allegedly plotting the slaying of journalist Pablo Medina Velázquez , a colleague of Figueredo's at ABC Color. While at the wheel of his vehicle, the reporter was shot four times in the face and chest by two masked gunmen on a motorcycle. Medina was documenting the country's thriving cannabis industry.

In 2012, Brazilian police learned of a cross-border criminal conspiracy to murder Figueredo through wiretap surveillance on a phone call placed out of a heavily-guarded prison in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The man is wary—but resigned—that any moment he could be assassinated. Yet he continues to poke and prod at Paraguay's seedy underworld, unmasking the gears of drug-related organized crime layer-by-layer, even if it beckons his demise.

"One day at a time," Figueredo said calmly. "Of course I'm afraid one day they could get me. If I said, 'No,' I'd be lying. I'm fully aware they can kill me whenever they want. I hope they don't."

Dorian Geiger is a Canadian multimedia journalist, photographer, filmmaker, and freelance crime contributor for VICE. He's based in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him on Twitter.

This article contains plot spoilers

Just Cause 3, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and Mad Max have shown to me this year that the old model for open-world games is dead, or at least should be. They have no surprises, no heart, no vim—if the sandbox genre continues on with the usual framework of missions, side-missions, and collectibles then pretty soon even rabid consumers are going to get tired.

Similarly, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the latter of which was re-released in July for the PS4, make the established tropes of the unfortunately termed "walking simulator" feel intensely worn out. To me, these are dull games with dull imagery and insipid stories. So when it comes to throwing out their stratifications, creating the next wave of walking and exploring games, developers are lucky to have Soma, by Swedish studio Frictional and one of VICE's top games of 2015, as a benchmark.

Games like Rapture, Carter, Journey, and Dear Esther arose, I think, in response to several other models of game making. The precedence developers give to action, violence, spectacle, and excitement is answered by these ostensibly more sedate, introspective games—they might not be in direct protest, but they're definitely contrarian, and as such are often praised for representing what games "can be" or what else they "can offer."

Soma unites both worlds. It's filled with violence, spectacle, and excitement but still considered and cerebral. And I'm not talking about its existential investigations or humanist posturing, which I think are quite basic and rote. I'm talking about it as a narrative whole, a game where, without devolving into either sheer display or ethereal wandering, characters, plot, and mechanics all serve one another, and everything you do, say, and hear has a purpose.

'SOMA,' creature trailer

A great example comes right at the beginning of the game when you encounter a communications system that needs to be rebooted. You're alone at this point and totally unsure of what's going on, but you know that, in order to get some answers, you need to open comms with another survivor who's elsewhere on the same underwater base. The terminal, however, is connected to a dying robot—and once you unplug its charge cable, and stop it draining the power, it starts to scream and then shuts down. You've solved a puzzle and progressed the game, but also learned that there's something wrong with the robots here, and that the machinery and the world around you isn't precisely as it may seem.

And in that small moment, Soma deftly achieves dozens of things that games generally struggle to do. The mechanics are simple and accessible: you just walk, look around, and tap a button to yank the cable. You're also solving a puzzle—in a very traditional, ludic sense, you're playing a game. But out of those basic and game-unique actions, you get a sense of place, horror, and story. And it's not a gaseous, nothingy story like Rapture or Carter, which, in pandering to the player and their own interpretations, end up feeling empty. It's solid and strong and grubby. Instead of pursuing pretty balls of light to determine what once happened in an English village, you're pulling out power cables to move yourself forward.

Related: Watch VICE's film, 'LARPing Saved My Life'

That's what separates Soma from its contemporaries. The central hypocrisy in walking simulators is that although their loose mechanics and broad stories are supposed to leave room for your interpretations and input, you have basically zero agency—you always arrive after the fact, and do nothing but stare at and read the scenery and inanimate items the game-maker has left for you. It's like ambling, without a guide or much idea about why anything is important, around a museum. You're semi-certain that you're learning something and the experience is maybe partly valuable, but it's so disconnected and vaporous that whatever you felt or gleaned quickly washes away.

In contrast, Soma gives you a narrative through line—beyond just gazing at things and making up your mind about what they could mean, you and your character have a concrete purpose in this game. And out of that comes a much more involved and long-lasting understanding. You can still amble through and simply imbibe the world of Soma—its long underwater sections are as meditative as anything in Rapture or Journey—but you appreciate the environment and the dramatic occurrences much more because you actually have a purpose, and things to do. Where other exploration based games have you either staring through glass at scenery or solving intangible puzzles in some kind of ethereal way, in Soma you turn levers, pull switches, and regulate gauges to push yourself onward. These are simple, accessible mechanics that anyone can comprehend, but they add to the game a fundamental and much more engrossing sense of tactility.

New on Motherboard: Earth's Deepest Lake Is 'Seriously Ill'

And it's violent and bloody and sweary. Ignoring debates about mechanics or the nature of video games, the championed crop of walking simulators disinterests me because they're all so slight and timid. Again, I think that stems from that slightly demurral air that they all have, this idea of protesting video game violence by cutting it out completely. But that makes for a pretty neutered and unadulterated experience. As a grown-up, I'm not excited by pretty scenery and faint, philosophical musing—I want writers and designers to get their hands dirty. Above other exploration-based games, Soma understands that violence and viscera belong in drama and horror, that the way to countermand this industry's preoccupation with gratuitousness is to not to ignore mucky subject matter but handle it intelligently. As well as building on the model for exploration-based games and demonstrating what they could all do better, Soma represents how violence and adulteration, often treated like toys and decoration by the big, boxed releases, can be gracefully written, and have an effect above mere spectacle.

Bloodshed is never disposable in Soma—it's dramatically imperative and narratively justified, with the scene where you kill your old body in order to transfer into a new one being a great example. Because of that, and its deft marriage of simple, game-y mechanics to a driven, concrete story, it shows not just how walking simulators can improve but how two sensibilities in game-making, which until recently seemed almost willfully at odds with one another, are in fact compatible. Independent and triple-A games, and the creative propensities behind them, are not diametrically opposed. Soma proves they can both cross over.

Soma is out now for Windows, Mac, and PlayStation 4, and was voted VICE Gaming's tenth-best game of 2015—read our full top 20 here.

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Maybe don't call these people when you want to buy heroin. Photo via Flickr user waferboard

Read: Alberta School Boards Declare Rest of World Too Dangerous for Canadian Kids

An alleged Alberta drug dealer was busted last week after his clients kept calling a similar but wrong number that tragically happened to belong to an RCMP officer.

Trevor Dennis, 41, was arrested after the police pieced together enough information to ID him thanks to an increasing number of calls to an RCMP officer's phone, many of which involved various people using codewords for the types of drugs and amounts they wanted to purchase.

The officer in question, RCMP Cpl. John Spaans, started receiving anonymous calls,most of which were from the Athabasca region, sometime in 2014. However, it wasn't until a few weeks ago that he began to become suspicious of the calls, when one person kept calling back even after Spaans identified himself as a wrong number. The caller also would have heard Spaans' voicemail, including his name and info, which, y'know, is a big tip off that you called a random guy instead of your drug dealer.

"I really think they felt I was playing hard to get," he told the National Post.

Spaans reportedly then started receiving texts that included codewords for drugs. While Spaans wasn't sure what they meant at first—with some texts asking for "boy," a street term for heroin—the internet was able to help him decipher the lingo.

"Thank you, Urban Dictionary," he said.

When he finally asked the person on the other end who they were looking for, they said they were looking for Dennis, which led the RCMP to raiding his apartment Friday.

Spaans said that he never told the callers on the other end that he was a Mountie, noting that he'd rather not have them knowing that they just unwittingly busted their dealer.

Dennis is charged with possession and trafficking of marijuana and cocaine. He is set to appear in court Dec. 14.

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Donald Trump is a human foghorn forever screaming laughable nonsense and legitimately hateful rhetoric into the spheres of both social media and mainstream news networks. He is a walking, talking, embarrassingly influential reminder than human brains can exist in a slurry state, sloshing around skulls with few coherent thoughts but a lot of offensive stink. He'd be funny if he weren't so utterly terrifying.

I appreciate that you don't come to VICE's video game pages to read about politics—not usually, anyway. But bear with me here, just for a couple of minutes, because in 2002 gaming witnessed Trump's unlikely arrival into the medium—and how that title played is very evocative of the place we find ourselves in today, watching him march to Republican leadership.

It made sense for this cash-rules-everything-around-me son of a New York real estate developer (and alleged KKK member) to enter the gaming market—global revenue was consistently up year over year and a new generation of high-definition, multimedia consoles was imminent. It was a prime time to get into the games business. Trump knew a thing or two about buying and selling property, the fourth main SimCity release was set for 2003, so the presidential candidate—please, don't laugh—made his move, and the Activision-published Donald Trump's Real Estate Tycoon was born.

Trump's board game, simply called 'Trump,' was completely terrible—a bit like 'Monopoly,' but so much worse, with his face on every banknote.

And it wasn't totally awful, at least not to some critics of the time—a notable change in fortunes from his woeful Milton Bradley-made board game of the late 1980s, Trump. Gamespot gave Real Estate Tycoon a respectable 7.2 score in 2004, when it was ported from PC to Nokia's disastrous N-Gage, to capitalise on Trump's starring role in the stateside Apprentice. "Players will eventually tire of the monotonous gameplay," warns the review's conclusion, almost as a premonition of the hope that many hold that Trump's run for the White House will eventually troll itself into a brick wall. But Amazon's buyer reviews are more portentous than anything in Gamespot's write-up.

"You are battling against Donald and no matter how much you paint him into a corner the man will not lie down," reads one (five-star) review from 2006. "Donald refuses to concede defeat and hides behind the 'time's up' rule when it is clear he is being beaten completely."

A screenshot from 'Donald Trump's Real Estate Tycoon.'

There are more fawning words posted, from Apprentice fans and (OK, this was nearly a decade ago) real-life people who openly admit to being fans of "The Donald," as if the man himself was ever going to read them. But isn't that something? Even the virtual version of Donald Trump refuses to accept when he's done for, when his opponents have the better of him. Worse, he cheats.

Since Real Estate Tycoon, a shameless attempt to capitalize on the SimCity series' popularity (incase I failed to make that clear), the only video game that Trump's appeared in has been Trumpealo, a mobile title made by Mexican studio Karaokulta, in which the player can beat up the wannabe president while he's dressed as a chicken. Seems like a laugh. But violent video games aren't amusing to Donald, who tweeted his thoughts on bloody beat 'em ups and shooters in the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook massacre of 2012.

Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2012

The Sandy Hook gunman, Adam Lanza, did play some violent games—but his favorites also included Super Mario Bros. titles and Dance Dance Revolution. No conclusive link was made between his actions and the games he enjoyed—as has been the case whenever investigations have sought connections between interactive and real-life violence (although 2015 studies revealed they might increase aggression, there's no evidence to suggest that going on a Grand Theft Auto killing spree will convince you to do the same for real).

Trump's kneejerk tweet of 2012 illustrates the behavior he continues to exhibit in 2015: He's a sound bite generator, knowingly pumping first-impressions naivety towards the public and accepting that while millions will call him out for being, for want of any better expression, an all-you-can-eat buffet of balderdash (at his best, anyway, since he's also given off all the signals of an abject racist and might possibly be a fascist), others will wave their flags of support and continue to fight his corner.

New on VICE News: Donald Trump Just Called for a 'Complete Shutdown' on Muslims Entering the US

Trump's bewildering promise of December 7 of a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the USA, covering refugees, immigrants, and tourists alike, is the stuff of horrific dystopian fiction to many—and yet he's leading some Republican polls in Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada. This is a man that hundreds of thousands of American citizens are actively rooting for. This is a man who has been questioned about ties to the mafia, and investigated due to possible racketeering and bribery activity. This is a man who'd be a cartoon villain in any other dimension but this one.

But no matter how much anyone else attempts to paint him into a corner, this is also a man who will not lie down. And that's scary on a scale that no video game, or any work of fiction, could ever be.

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Read more about Donald Trump here

Photo via ACT for America's Facebook

On the day of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, across the country in a town called Hauppauge on Long Island, New York, roughly 45 people had gathered inside a conference room to talk about the problem with Muslims. It was a local chapter meeting of ACT for America, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called an Islamophobic hate group.

Inside the Matrix Corporate Park, a glassy office building where the meeting was held, a banner hung front and center with the chapter name: Alert Long Island. I took a seat behind a man in a camouflage Oath Keepers hat and his friend wearing a gun T-shirt that said: "Come & Get Them!"

The theme of tonight's discussion topic: "Who is the enemy and what is the enemy's 'Threat Doctrine?'" It's phrased as a question, but everyone gathered here knows "the enemy," and most of them have made up their mind about how to stop it.

ACT for America was founded in 2007 by Brigitte Gabriel, a conservative journalist best known for her anti-Islamic extremism. She's regularly featured on FOX News as a "national security expert," where her advice tends to be "get rid of the Muslims."

Gabriel rocketed into the media spotlight after publishing two books that portrayed Islam as a threat to America—They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, and Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. Founding an Islamophobic hate group was the natural next step.

Since 2007, ACT for America has grown into a massive group, boasting nearly 300,000 members nationwide, according to its website. The purpose of the group is to " terrorism"—two goals which are, in the group's view, intrinsically threatened by the Islamic faith. The rhetoric of their meetings doesn't suggest that the problem is radical Islam, but Islam itself.

In a year when terrorism plays out on the news every week, anti-Islamic sentiment has gained an even greater foothold. In the past five years, the ACLU has charted a major rise in vandalism and violent threats made towards North American mosques and other anti-Muslim hate crimes. Just hours after the attacks in Paris, a mosque in St. Petersburg, Florida received a voicemail from a man who said he planned to shoot all Muslims, including children, in the head.

It's in this environment that Act for America has flourished, focusing on Sharia Law—the basic doctrine of the Quran, which is a personal, moral code for Muslims—as a threat to American security. It doesn't matter that the majority of American mass shootings are committed by young, white males (and often fanatical Christians), or that gun regulations play a role in terrorism-related events. Here, the group's mission is to "educate and effect change"—meaning, the Muslims have to go.

Watch: Journalist Graeme Wood on the Islamic State

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ACT for America has 573 chapters across the nation. The closest one to me was the chapter in Long Island, which cost $20 to attend. The money goes toward a keynote speaker, who on the night I attended, was a man named David Yerushalmi. Yerushalmi is an attorney and political activist who co-authored a study that suggested most mosques in America were incubators of hate and violence.

"In 2006, we began a study called Mapping Sharia," Yerushalmi began. He was speaking to us through a Skype call, which was projected onto a screen near the front of the room. It wasn't clear why the meeting didn't have an in-person speaker.

Yerushalmi claimed that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are "strictly Sharia," which he equated to Muslims following the same dogma as Al-Qaeda terrorists. "The core doctrine is still orthodox Sharia. It still utilizes the key methodology to achieve the end—or jihad."

Like ACT for America, Yerushalmi is also on Southern Poverty Law Center's watch list, in part for his anti-mosque study, in which he stated "the mythical 'moderate' Muslims who embrace traditional Islam but want a peaceful coexistence with the West is effectively non-existent."

Photo via ACT for America's Facebook

"The problem we face is global and it's local," Yerushalmi continued. By his logic, when a Muslim attends an American mosque, he is not only learning a violent doctrine but is also susceptible to be recruited by ISIS. "The ability of Islamic terrorist groups to recruit will continue. Until there is some kind of internal reformation in Islam—to create an institutional counter to Sharia—they will always be able to reach into any Muslim community, anywhere in the world, and recruit."

Unwittingly for Yerushalm, extremist groups like ISIS thrive on alienation and anti-Muslim rebel-rousing. "This is precisely what ISIS was aiming for—to provoke communities to commit actions against Muslims," said Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland who studies how people become terrorists, in a recent article in the Washington Post. "Then ISIS will be able to say, 'I told you so. These are your enemies, and the enemies of Islam.'"

Meanwhile, Yerushalmi was suggesting further alienation. "Syrian immigrants, when they come here, where are they going to go to those mosques; the reservoir of support is there."

"The threat is real!" Yerushalmi concluded. "Sharia is not a peaceful, feel-good Islam."

A flier for a related group called Conservative Society for Action, which the author received during the ACT for America meeting on Long Island

As part of his bid to run America, Donald Trump has floated the idea that there should be a complete shutdown of Muslims entering this country. Trump believes these drastic measures need to be taken because of Muslims' "great hatred" for America; he's also suggested a national Muslim registry.

It's not just Trump, or the Republican party. Anti-Muslim sentiment in America are running pretty high on the heels of tragic events like the Paris attacks, the Chattanooga shootings, gunmen at the Draw Mohammad contest in Texas, and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Pair that with Obama's plan to allow Syrian refugees to resettle in the United States, and you've tapped into a wellspring of growing racism against an entire faith of people.

On VICE News: Anti-Islam Protesters Swarm Muslim Conference in Texas

"Shame!" cried an older woman who stood up to address the room. "If we know these mosques are radical—shame, shame on us!"

"Well, we didn't all know for sure until recently," said the moderator, sounding like a voice of reason.

"If my Roman Catholic church was preaching death to Muslims, Jews, everyone else, I'm sure it would be closed down with a blink of an eye," she continued. "So this is where we have to stop the growth of mosques!"

The rhetoric resembles that of a century ago when immigrant Jews were seen as a direct threat to Western values. A recent Al Jazeera article drew the comparison: "A religious minority is seen as a dangerous underclass destroying society from below with their alien values, as well as a hidden force secretly controlling the world from above, through their infiltration of centers of power."

Here, the comparison is even drawn into the highest levels of government, as some members believe that the White House "is controlled by Muslims."

"They don't want peace and prosperity. They want to live by Sharia," said an angry old man.

"What 'peace' means to them? When they take over the world. That's peace," added the moderator. "When they say 'protection of the innocent,' they mean only Muslims. When you translate it from what they mean, it's like 'kill the infidels and we're taking over!"

After the meeting, members of ACT for America mingled amongst each other – sharing ideas and expressing feelings. As I headed to the cookie table, I was handed a flyer with bold red lettering, which read: "TAKE YOUR COUNTRY BACK!" I winced slightly.

"This will still be going on long after I'm gone," an old guy near me said with resignation. "But maybe I can take a few of them out with me." He repeated this twice.

A few days after the meeting, President Obama delivered a speech responding to the San Bernardino shootings, calling for religious tolerance. He harshly condemned those who wish to discriminate against others based on their religion and addressed the plight of Muslim Americans who are currently enduring the ongoing Islamophobic backlash.

But as I walked out of the ACT for America meeting and got into my car to drive home, I turned on the radio and listened to the developing news about the shooting. I heard a breaking report that the shooters had been identified. They were Muslim radicalized terrorists. I looked back at the Matrix Corporate Media Center in my rearview mirror, knowing there was a room full of angry citizens ready to take action.

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Photo by Adam Barnett

Finland is looking to scrap individual welfare benefits and replace them with a universal basic income available to all Finns, regardless of how much they earn.

Although the details haven't been ironed out yet, a pilot scheme would see Finns receive a payout of 550 euros per month (while still receiving some other benefits). If the pilot is a success and the scheme is rolled out nationwide, Finns would receive 800 euros a month tax-free, replacing the range of other benefits they receive at present.

Here in the UK, a basic income was proposed by the Green Party in their 2015 General Election Manifesto, with the claim that it would save the UK £163 million annually in terms of welfare payouts.

Before you start planning your move to Finland to be showered in free cash, however, it's worth pointing out that the basic income proposal will be officially prepared by the government by November 2016, so it's still some way off, according to Finnish press reports.

Although socially liberal, Finland has struggled economically in recent years, with rising unemployment and limited growth. While this may seem counterintuitive, some economists argue that giving everyone a basic income—regardless of need—would actually save the taxpayer money in the long term.

VICE spoke to Professor Guy Standing, an expert in labor economics at the University of London. Co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, he's been advising the Finnish Government on their proposals.

VICE: Hi Professor Standing. Why do people want basic incomes? Surely we should only give people benefits if they're in need?
Guy Standing: What you're describing is means-testing, and evidence shows it's a weak system. You have to measure someone's income, check it, and all sorts of errors creep in. For example, people don't know what to count as their income, or their income last week might be different from their average of the last three months.

Who would benefit most from the introduction of a basic income?
Firstly, the people who traditionally are disadvantaged by means-testing, because they don't know how to operate the system. So vulnerable people—those with addiction problems, or migrants. Secondly, the precariat class. These are the people that existing social welfare policies fail to reach. They're in and out of casual jobs, their incomes fluctuate all the time, and by moving towards a basic income you provide them some degree of certainty.

If you give everyone free money, won't everyone just stay at home watching whatever the Finnish version of Jerry Springer is all day?
Evidence suggests basic incomes increase the incentive to work. When you have means-testing, and you only receive benefits if you're on a low income, then when you improve that income through extra work you end up losing out. So people end up stuck in a poverty trap.

When you have a basic income, you remove the poverty trap effect and you incentivize people to earn more income, because they get to keep the extra money.

Aside from saving money from the welfare bill, what are the other benefits?
An Indian trial found benefits such as reduced healthcare costs, because people had access to better nutrition. When you shift more income to low income groups, they spend it on basic goods and services that stimulate economic growth. So you increase tax-paying revenue.

Isn't it weird to give people on high incomes state funding they don't need?
It's easier for the government to give everyone the money universally, rather than trying to work out who's poor and not poor, and then tax the money back from higher earners, who'll be paying a higher tax rate in any case.

What are the downsides?
Well, there is always an upfront cost to introducing major welfare reforms. In this case, when you introduce an integrated tax benefit system, there are certain costs involved with the electronic administration of such a system. Another argument I've heard in the past—particularly from trade unions—is that if people have a basic income they wouldn't lobby employers to raise wages.

How likely is it that we'll see other countries move to introduce a basic income, like Finland?
If you'd asked me ten years ago, I'd have said the costs of transition would have made it difficult, particularly in larger countries like the USA. However nowadays the costs are less. We know there have been trials in Africa and India, and there are talks about doing pilots in Canada. And there have already been pilots taking place in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

There's been a remarkable change in recent years in terms of countries putting basic income proposals on the table in a legislative sense. The hope is that introducing basic incomes will have an emancipatory effect: helping more people to feel in control of their lives than ever before.

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