Gold! Photo via Bullion Vault Flickr account

"You could buy baked beans, you could buy shotguns," says Daniel Ameduri, who runs futuremoneytrends.com, an investing tips site. "And those would both be handy things to have, but really, we don't foresee martial law lasting more than a fortnight."

The conventional narrative is that we're "out of the woods." Kinda. That the trillions national governments borrowed in 2008 to rescue their drowning banks have done just about enough. Growth has returned. Unemployment is pushing toward pre-crisis levels. Nothing very good is going to happen for a while yet, but far more importantly: nothing too bad, either.

But what if the acre of dry land we thought we'd found was just the back of an angry turtle with daggers for teeth? What if, rather than making us better able to face and predict the next crisis, the last crisis just stored up a raft of unfixably large problems? What if we shot the '08 monster with our biggest bazooka, and now have nothing big enough to defend ourselves against the next one?

We may soon find out. This month, a full seven years on from the Lehman bust, the anxiety around another monster event suddenly seems to be hitting red alert. The Dow has been in freefall all week—it's had its worst January so far since records began. Worse than 2009. Worse than the previous record, when it unexpectedly fell off a cliff in 1950.

All of this driven by a Chinese stock market that has fallen down a flight of stairs since August of last year. Chinese growth is weakening—only to 6.9 percent—but the developing world is dependent on China to sell raw materials into, and any slowdown there would flatten the already teetering likes of Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia. Along with the oil price tumble, the pieces are all up in the air, so it's not too surprising that The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) recently issued a statement announcing that it saw no prospects for investor growth this year, openly encouraging its clients to sell up, get out of the markets, seek higher ground.

In 2015's Academy Award-nominated The Big Short, various "outsiders" (read: millionaire Yale-educated traders with goofy hobbies and glass eyes) predict the financial shitmageddon of 2007 on the basis of a few canny calculations. They're heroes because they noticed. "They could see when all around them were blind" is the moral subtext. What Michael Lewis's book says is actually true: at the time, the likes of Michael Burry really were a tiny fraction of the market bulls piling into the mortgage Ponzi scheme.

But since 2008, an entire sub-stratum of professional Jeremiah has grown up to tell us about the next monster event, the next Black Swan. The next crash won't be like the last one. A) It never is. B) There will be hundreds of people trying to figure out how to profit from it.

This new school of Shitmageddonpreneur has taken as his baseline the idea that the next crisis won't be houses, it'll be national debt. Greece, but on the scale of America. They've spotted something very true: that the US has enormous debts (as does Britain, as does France and Japan). And that we're one unknown event away from being pushed into a sovereign debt death spiral.

Hence why Ameduri is right now building up a portfolio of gold and precious metals, encouraging his readers to buy shares in companies that make emergency-ready medical supplies like syringes, or simple, apocalypse-proof companies, "like York Water, which has produced a dividend every year since 1823."

For America, he points out, regardless of your views on a Chinese slowdown or a Eurozone breakup, the math doesn't work—end of story. "The US takes in $2.2 trillion in taxes annually. It spends $3 trillion. We're at the point where—especially if interest rates rise, we'll even be borrowing to pay the interest on our debts. And—the things that most people seem to have lost sight of—the math can never come back into shape. We've outrun that point. Now, even if you taxed the wealthiest Americans at 100 percent of earnings, you'd only have enough money to pay for 14 days of US government spending."

Arguing with the raw figures is one thing, but what happens next is far more up in the air. "I don't buy into the whole Mad Max scenario," says John Rubino, of dollarcollapse.com, a site charting the decline and fall of the greenback while offering investment advice. "I think the big systems will continue to work fine. I just think we have created a lot of policies and institutions which have run their course. But democracy being what it is, we'd need to have a huge crisis before those in charge actually got together and revised those institutions."

Rubino is another prominent collapser voice, author of The Coming Collapse of the Dollar, and The Money Bubble . "I would've thought 2008 was the end for this system. To me, it wasn't clear we'd be able to borrow and print our way out of it. In the end, we did, but if we do that, it just sets the stage for an even bigger crisis."

Related: Watch our documentary about Eddie Davenport 'The Wolf of the West End'

John Paulson isn't featured in The Big Short, but he made far more for his Advantage hedge fund by shorting CDOs (collateralized debt obligations—the bonds banks issued that were backed by a toxic mince of hundreds of premiums on mortgages that were, in the main, destined for default by homeowners, rendering the bonds themselves useless junk).

He made the biggest bucks of them all: $20 billion, and starred in Gregory Zuckerman's 2009 book: The Greatest Trade Ever. Since he stacked those greens, he has concentrated his hedge fund's firepower on effectively shorting the dollar by buying mountains of gold. For many of the same reasons: the numbers just don't add up. The US is going to have to keep printing more dollars and issuing ever-riskier bonds in order to service its colossal national debt, and at some point—even if the system may look rigged now—that's going to make the dollar worth a lot less. When inflation returns, he contends—and with the Fed's December interest rates hike, we're at the jump-off of that—everything is going to get increasingly wacky.

Unfortunately, since Paulson started making this bet in the early 2010s, the needle has barely moved. King Dollar is still high on his throne, and in fact has strengthened in the recent round of anxieties.

All three could, at heart, be described as "Sound Money" guys. "Goldbugs" is the more pejorative term. To many, they're cranks who have a lot in common with the likes of Ron Paul—believers that the basic ability of the Fed to print money without backing it up is bunk and will kill us all.

Most mainstream economists would accept that listening to them would have saved us from the banking collapse of the last crash. But that they would also have restricted growth in a way that would have been like walking with our legs tied together: like if America became the USSR.

Since the crash, though, there's been a huge upshoot in the belief—mirrored in the conspiracy world's growth since 9/11—that the smartest guys in the room may not actually be in the room most of the time. They have gone from a few disparate yappy noises in the distance to something of a community, trading ideas, reinforcing each others' perspectives, conferencing, and always and everywhere, buying gold in anticipation of Armageddon. After all, there's something very sexy about being the prophet crying in the wilderness.

"Goldbugs" is the term used against them, because they believe rare metals will be the only thing left standing when the system drives itself off the cliff for the last time. Buy gold. Buy silver. You will need them to barter with local trappers and foragers in the Manhattan of 2020.

The End doesn't have to happen one way, Rubino points out. Any number of events could trigger it—the coming Chinese slowdown, the Eurozone starting to break apart. Even just a dramatic fall in the value of the yen. The system is now so inherently unbalanced that the trigger could be anything that had big knock-on effects, that could cause enough uncertainty to breed into contagion. In that scenario, as bankers lost faith in the system, America's colossal need to finance its national debt through borrowing in the bond markets would mean paying higher and higher interest rates to finance that debt, leading the world's largest economy into the exact same death spiral of unaffordable repayments as the Greeks.

We are now a full seven years on from the last recession. Which means that, without ever feeling like we were letting the good times roll, we've arrived at the point where, historically, it would probably be time for another downturn.

Dry, cautious, sharp, Rubino is nobody's idea of a frothing prepper. It's just that these things aren't sci-fi, he points out. They can happen. They've actually happened before – America has effectively been through four different monetary systems in the country's lifetime. They have already been right up to the rim of any sci-fi economics: "In 2008, the big bankers told George W. Bush that if they couldn't get funding, we were one day away from martial law," Rubino insists. "In the last seven years, China has borrowed an amount of money bigger than the US economy... Midnight is coming. We're getting closer and closer all the time. Sometime, in the not too distant future, there's going to be a reckoning."

"When it turns, it'll be sudden," Ameduri says. "It's going to be like birds on a telephone wire. One will go, then they'll all go. When that happens, we don't know what will happen. The US still has a lot of options on the table. They could even start a war to distract people from the currency crisis..."

"When you and I talk about this, the subtext is that yes, this is all going to happen," says Rubino. "But if you invest correctly, you can make a fortune. There are ways to come through this and have it be the best time of your financial life."

Not that living in that post-collapse world wouldn't require a lot of compensation. Like the guys who bet against the housing market, the uncomfortable fact is that these guys are spending their lives hedging against a future that's best bleak, thorny, and odd.

"I'm a millionaire now. Would I be worth $50- or $100 million if it does happen?" Ameduri ponders. "I don't know. But I can honestly tell you I'd be much happier as a small millionaire going on a Disney cruise next week than a bigger one living in a structurally unsound US."

Doomy as it may be, their dark realpolitik is that if it does happen, you need to be the guy taking potshots at the starving masses from behind your gold-embossed mansion gates, not the zombie pauper staggering the streets in search of rat-gnawed bread crusts.

"You can choose to prepare how you want," as Ameduri puts it. "But 30 years from now, would you rather be holding a shoebox full of gold, or a shoebox full of euros?"

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter.

The new VICE special "Fighting ISIS," which first airs at 10 PM EST this Sunday on HBO, is an hour-long deep dive into the current state of Iraq. The current state of Iraq is not good. Since the US invasion toppled Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished," a series of mistakes made by both the US and local authorities turned the country into an incubator of extremism and violence and led to the rise of ISIS.

In the documentary, VICE reporter Ben Anderson embeds with various groups fighting ISIS, interviews captured jihadist fighters, and investigates the troubles that have led to the region's destabilization. We won't give too much away here—you should really tune in this Sunday night—but suffice it to say that the soundbite solutions offered by some bloodthirsty American politicians isn't going to make things better.

Recently we sat down with Anderson ahead of the special to talk about the challenge America faces with ISIS, and what it was like to sit across from a man who wants to kill you.

VICE: Iraq right now is one of the most dangerous places on earth for a reporter. Did you feel that danger on a personal level?
Ben Anderson: For foreign reporters, Syria still feels more dangerous. For local reporters, Iraq is hideous. But yes, even away from the frontlines we visited, there is an awful tension in Iraq, a feeling that anything could happen at any time, anywhere. It's a feeling you get in few other places around the world: Gaza, Helmand , Eastern Congo. It's a feeling that everyone is so tense the tiniest things could spill over into major incidents, or that a bomb could go off, or an attack could start, at any point.

Ben Anderson in Iraq. Screenshot from the HBO special

Did you ever feel like your life was in danger while you were making the special?
The fighting there is awful. Often victories are followed up by looting, torture, executions. And everywhere we went either came under attack while we were there, or was attacked just before or after we were there.

When we were with the Shiite militias, Qassem Suleimani walked right past me. Luckily he didn't see me, but when he did hear that we were there, we were told to leave immediately. Not under his orders, but because people we were with thought he'd have us taken or killed.

Photos by Jackson Fager

A captured ISIS fighter told you that he would kill you if he captured you. What was that moment like?
I had no doubt he was totally genuine. Everything he said, he said with utter conviction. I have no doubt he'd have stood by that and not doubted his actions for a second. It was my last question to him, kind of a throwaway, and afterwards, he got up, shook my hand, and said he wished we had more time to talk. I think he believed he could have convinced me more if he had enough time.

For more on the doc, check out Ben Anderson's Ask Me Anything Q&A on Reddit, starting 1 PM EST on Friday (today)

What did you learn on the ground that ordinary people couldn't learn from reading coverage of Iraq?
Just how far away the goal of the Maliki government was hell. That's why many welcomed ISIS when they first appeared.

Speaking of Maliki, his name comes up when one of the diplomats talks about what went wrong in Iraq under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Can you explain that?
He says Bush's original sin was invading; Obama's was allowing Maliki to have a second term, despite not winning the second election and having an awful sectarian record. I'd add the post-invasion plan, or absence of one, to Bush's original sin, and Obama's withdrawal being based on the calendar, not conditions on the ground. Although, in fairness, didn't support the invasion. And I'm not sure anyone in the US supported an extended US presence when the withdrawal was under way.

When you talked to the captured ISIS fighters and they tell you things like, "For every ten of us killed, 100 more join," did you get the sense that there was some truth in that or they were engaging in some good old-fashioned propaganda?
There was plenty of propaganda, of course. But these claims that we are killing our way to victory are absurd. We heard the same thing in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, and elsewhere. Yet these groups continue to grow. You can't defeat an insurgency, or a group like ISIS, with bombing alone. And while it's encouraging to see many Muslims now challenging or mocking ISIS across social media, they remain attractive to too many people.

When you hear tough talk from folks like Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and Donald Trump, who say they'll make it a top priority to destroy ISIS the moment they come into office, what do you think?
It's astounding. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still raging, and people like Ted Cruz—who I'm constantly told is the smart one—seem to believe there is a simple solution to this. Sadly, there isn't.

Is there anything the candidates aren't saying about ISIS that they should be?
That the government the Bush administration installed in Baghdad laid the conditions for ISIS to spread so quickly and so easily. And that the vast majority of Muslims absolutely reject its interpretation of Islam.

In your opinion, what was the worst move that America made after the invasion?
De-Baathification and disbanding the military—ensuring 500,000 largely Sunni people and their families were jobless and angry, for no good reason. Then installing a sectarian government who made life for non-Shiites hell. By the time ISIS came along, they were often welcomed because anything was preferable to the government.

Watch the HBO special Sunday night at 10 PM EST and 1 AM on the West Coast.

I first heard about Paul Hallam's photos of the early-80s mod scene while making the documentary series Street, Style & Sound. Ewen Spencer, the creator of the series and a many-time VICE interviewee, told me there was a guy who had obsessively documented the scene for a few years, and that he wanted to put a book of his photos out.

That book is now out. Called Odds & Sods, it's a vivid, primary account of a time in which revivalism meant so much more than it does now.

I caught up with Paul to talk about the book and his experiences in the scene. Seeing as he talks about a thousand words a minute, I decided not to interrupt him too much.

Mods at the first Hayling Island weekender, 1985

VICE: How did you first get involved in documenting the scene in the early 80s?
Paul Hallam: In 1981 I went on an a ski trip and took an old Olympus Trip with me. I thought I took some pretty good pictures with it, so the next year, when I was 17, at the height of the mod scene, I started taking pictures again. There are a few from '82, but the bulk are from '84. There are no pictures from '83 because I bought a proper camera and had no idea how to use it.

And now all those photos have made their way into a book. Why put that together now?
I'd put them all in tins, just for whenever people wanted to see them. But last year I started scanning them, putting them out on the ol' social media. Then Ewen turned up with a film crew and filmed me talking about them in my shed.

What was beautiful for me is that I publish books—pulp fiction books, like the old Richard Allen skinhead books—so it was lovely to have somebody else publish it. A guy called Greg Faye wrote the foreword, who was this young kid on the peripheries . There are a few faces in it—there's Andy Farley, who was a massive house DJ, and Andy Drake, who trained the Olympic walking team. Plus, there's Jim Masters, who toured the world with Carl Cox.

Can you remember your first impression of the mod scene?
I was obsessed with it. I was too young for the mod scene in '79, plus I lived in Sunbury , which ain't exactly the center of the world. End of 1980, I went to my first club, which was Feltham Football Club. It was a really scary experience. I went down with all the Ashford mods. I borrowed a Fred Perry. It was a scary time; all the old subways were full of skinheads. We were going to walk, but I bottled and got in a van. I remember it stinking of cheap aftershave. I went to this club, really excited—I was 15. This Asian kid in a boating blazer came up to me saying the same thing over and over again; I later realized he was on speed.

A year later Ronnie the Mod Plumber—who's still my plumber—and I went to this mod club in Richmond called Cheeky Pete's. His real name is actually Ronnie Diamond—what a name. Then we started going up to Shepherd's Bush on the bus.

There was a book I was obsessed with, Mods, by Richard Barnes, who was an old mate of Pete Townsend's from art school. In 1979 he wrote this seminal book. A lot of the photographs are of the "hard mod" element, but the words were just amazing; I read the book over and over again. He talked about rare R&B, and I got into this music rather than the commercial northern soul all the clubs in west London were playing at the time.

So I went back to Feltham Football Club, where I'd been two-and-a-half years earlier, and I opened my own night playing rare R&B. Of course, nobody was fucking interested in it, and every night there'd be a fight there. I did it for about four months, which is a big thing to do at 17—I wasn't even old enough to be there.

At the time this organization called the Phoenix Society started, which was supposed to be the top mods, who would meet and discuss what should be done. So I got invited to come along to this meeting above a pub called The Griffin, which recently shut down. I'm in there telling them that I thought the music that was being played wasn't good enough—I thought they were gonna fucking hit me.

People started wearing smart clothes; people were traveling all over London to buy a pair of shoes. A guy called Mick Franti used to go to old shops round Whitechapel and Aldgate, and he'd go along and ask if they had any old stock, and of course he'd go upstairs and find boxes of old Levis.

Mod girls at Sneakers, 1984. "Notice the matching material on the scarf, skirt and handbag."

Yeah, dressing absolutely right quickly became an obsession for a lot of people, right?
There were a couple of guys from Cardiff who used to travel up . They maintained that they'd stand up all the way from Cardiff to Paddington because they didn't wanna get creases in their trousers.

The door policy at Ben Truman Southwark, 1985

Why did you end up falling out of love with the scene?
I did it till about '86, but then I had to grow up. I got engaged, discovered acid, found the Beastie Boys. Who wants to dance to John Lee Hooker if you can do all of that?

It's funny, I stopped doing the mod thing, but it was still in my heart. I'd go to acid house clubs and see a load of old mods, dressed down a bit. It's almost as if, for a while, the hard mods went toward football violence, the others did the revivalist thing, and then we all met up at the end of ecstasy.

It's funny, I used to go down to Carnaby Street and park up my scooter, and somebody would've kicked it over. People hated mods then, but now everybody's a mod. Fucking Bradley Wiggins is a mod, the bloke off Gavin and Stacey's a mod. Everybody in Shoreditch is a mod with a beard.

Hanging around outside the Marquee club in Wardour Street, 1985

Do you still consider yourself a mod, even in your middle age?
That whole clean living under difficult circumstances thing is true. When I get up in the mornings I've probably got a pair of old tracksuit bottoms on, and a Millwall shirt. But if I'm gonna get something from the car, or get something from the post office, I won't do it unless I've brushed my hair.

It's about having a bit of pride in everything you do, in the clothes you wear, the records you play. A friend of mine from Watford was a road digger, but he was always a road digger in a clean shirt.

Thanks, Paul.

Buy Odds & Sodshere.

Follow Clive on Twitter.

One of the hardest-to-shake images you're likely to see in a film this century is a shot found in The Birth of a Nation, the feature filmmaking debut of actor, and now writer-director, Nate Parker. In this 19th-century story of slave and insurrectionary leader Nat Turner, the camera tracks its way across a scene where an expressionless black boy holds a hand-painted sign that reads "Slaves for Sale." This stark moment has the common-sense clarity seen in the Depression Era photography of Gordon Parks, whose dignified yet often deeply ironic portraits conveyed the everyday tragedies of the black working class.

These tragedies are also a motif throughout Parker's film, which draws a line in the sand with its title. Because of that weighted title, Parker goes toe-to-toe with D. W. Griffith's legendary 1915 racist classic of the same name. In Gospel terms, Parker's Nation is the full-bodied response to Griffith's call, a piece of incendiary cinema that created an image of African-Americans that this country, and much of the movie-going world, has been grappling with ever since.

That sign-holding child—as stunning an example of self-abnegation made concrete as I've ever seen—is a running visual touchstone throughout the film, the straitened circumstances of black children of the period, whose days have been seized by white landowners before they were born. We're introduced to the story seeing the everyday terror under which Nat, as a little boy, lives. Parker shrewdly deals with slavery by making a movie not about the archetypal—and perverse—imagery of, say, a ripped brother stripped to the waist, but cannily uses children as a way to show how deeply ingrained the institution of slavery was. The sheer number of atrocities that the movie depicts may be something some can shrug off because they're so often a part of movie slave narratives, but Parker makes us dizzy, consistently uneasy because of the specter of black kids existing without prospects and growing up without light, which is reflected in the color scheme, dirty and sunless browns and grays.

The beauty, and occasional lumpiness, of Parker's vision grows out of the fact that this is a film brimming with grim-visaged vigor. It's so jam-packed that you sometimes smile despite the awful truth of the story because it's apparent that Parker, after a career that so often saw him under the hands of directors that didn't know what to do with him, was going to cram The Birth of a Nation with more thoughts, flourishes, and ideas per square inch than any ten films because God knows when—or if—he'd ever get to do it again. You end up suspecting that Parker connected with Turner's story not only because it needed to be told but, more importantly, because grinding out the kind of acting work Parker had to accept must've been akin to de facto slavery.

The audience reaction at the first Sundance Film Festival screening earlier this week—the only time in the 16 years I've been attending that I've seen a standing ovation before the movie started—was tribute to the pride and emotional investment this project demanded from its star and singular driving force. That the screening came less than a week after black America was roused from its general indifference to the Academy Awards through the organization's resumption of Do the White Thing tradition gave the audience reaction a special power. It felt to me (happily, as a person of color) as a convergence on Park City by most of the black people in the tri-state area, a rare instance of people of color having a moment of pleasure that doesn't often happen at film festivals, where often the only black thing is the artful India ink splash that's almost always used in festival introductory trailers.

A gentle, charismatic, but sometimes blank actor, Parker comes to life in this movie. I often found he was banking his fires in movies such as Red Tails because something in him refused to unleash his full resources as an actor in material that strained, and failed, at being even two-dimensional. Parker isn't a glib presence. Rather, he's someone who's able to punch up the second-rate material that has been given to him, transcending the cliché or retrograde roles with sly cool. It's not as if he's had much choice: This is, after all, a decade in which Star Wars: The Force Awakens diminishes its embrace of "diversity" by resurrecting the Scared Black Janitor as a central figure.

Unlike Force, in the story of Nat Turner, we get to see what it's like when people of color grasp their destiny with both hands. Turner brings his nation with him in a slave rebellion that wakes the country up. And like many African-American figures that instigated a call for liberation, Turner was treated as a terrorist. Yes, he led slaves into killing their masters, which strictly speaking was a crime. But then again, weren't the masters who thrived off slave labor and its rotten garden of earthly delights truly the guilty ones? Nation is sure to suffer from racist sorta-reviews on the right—Fox News could almost set up a Film Review Network just to pound this movie like a piñata on an hourly basis, and get in a few kidney punches at Black Lives Matter in the bargain.

The historic deal made by Fox Searchlight is totally exciting, and slightly inspiring—every black film success is treated as a fluke. If you think enormous critical and audience approbation mean something, just ask yourself what the folks behind Straight Outta Compton thought as they watched Brooklyn push past them for Oscar nods.

Whether the 2017 Oscars see Nate Parker garnering a few deserved nods remains, of course, to be seen. But either way, there's a glorious irony in The Birth of a Nation—it took the story of a slave to set its star, writer, and director free.

Elvis Mitchell is an American film critic and host of KCRW's nationally syndicated pop culture and entertainment show, The Treatment, since its inception in 1996.

NYC first responders stage an 'active shooter' counter-terrorism drill on Manhattan's Lower East Side. (Photo by Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

With the release on Sunday of a video purporting to show nine of ten known Paris terrorist attackers training in Syria and Iraq, national security agencies across the world are likely doubling their efforts to identify ISIS sympathizers within their own borders. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has already suggested terrorists planned to carry out another mass attack on the streets of Paris; at the same time, he defended his government's plan to extend the state of emergency imposed after the prior attacks.

Meanwhile, it looks increasingly plausible that foreign-trained ISIS fighters might eventually return home to attack the United States.

In the case of the ISIS Paris attackers, one alleged militant, fugitive Salah Abdeslam—whose brother Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up in a Paris café during the attacks—is not seen in the video and remains on the run, having reportedly fled for Belgium. It is likely that he not only fears capture by European intelligence agencies, but also retribution from ISIS for failing to carry out his mission by either getting killed or committing suicide during the attack. If the latter is true, Abdeslam would be a prime target for capture and debriefing, as he may fear his old friends more than he fears French authorities.

During a 28-year career with the FBI, where I worked both counterintelligence and counterterrorism, evidence of clandestine tradecraft—foreign-trained terrorists returning home to enmesh themselves in society—was rarely seen in domestic terrorism cases. Prior to the attacks by al Qaeda on 9/11, alleged foreign terrorists were not suspected of receiving extensive training in secret intelligence methods and underground cell dynamics.

The primary attribute required of an international terrorist was simply a willingness to die.

After the attack in San Bernardino by US citizen Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani-born wife Tashfeen Malik, investigators from the police, the Department of Homeland Security, and FBI were initially concerned that the attacks were directed by ISIS from overseas. However, according to David Bowdich, the assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles office, the Bureau did not "...see any indication of a foreign-directed terrorist attack."

Still, this latest video serves as the surest indication yet that the Islamic State was responsible for both the planning and execution of the Paris tragedy. More importantly, it suggests that ISIS is actively training and sending clandestine cells of foreign fighters back home to engage in domestic terrorism. This development, while not entirely unexpected, ratchets the battle against Islamic State terrorists to another level—and has to send a shiver down the spine of all US law enforcement.

Since the death of Osama bin Laden, the primary international terrorism threat addressed by the FBI within the United States has been from homegrown ISIS aficionados who had not travelled to Syria or Iraq, but who were nonetheless inspired to the engage in terrorism by videos similar to the one released. This may be changing. Indeed, whether or not the FBI continues to pursue the possibility that Farook and Malik were acting on orders from ISIS, the existence of underground cells of ISIS foreign trained terrorists inside the homeland is the ultimate investigative nightmare for the United States.

Historically, the Bureau has been unsuccessful in infiltrating clandestine terror groups or in the development of informants within existing terror cells. The Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, FALN, and the United Freedom Front existed freely and operated underground for years without any significant infiltration or impediment by the FBI. Similarly, closed cell criminal enterprises like the Mafia or violent street and prison gangs have long resisted the placement of undercover agents within their midst. One reason is a criminal enterprise's very strict vetting, up to and including participation in murders. (The cases of the penetration of the Bonnano and Lucchese crime families by FBI agents Joe Pistone—a.k.a. Donnie Brasco—and Jack Garcia are among the notable exceptions.) Deep long-term undercover work infiltrating terrorist groups is not something that most FBI agents or law enforcement aspire to do.

Check out the trailer for our upcoming HBO piece on the fight against ISIS.

The recruitment of informants and assets as "flies on the wall" sources of information have been much successful in targeting clandestine cells, whether criminal, terrorist, or hostile foreign-intelligence driven. These types of human intelligence, or HUMINT sources, often lead to much more productive electronic surveillance and wiretaps of clandestine cells. Retired Chicago FBI agent Bill Dyson is one of the few I personally knew who successfully employed the technique. But the identification, recruitment, and development of access by these types of informants is notoriously difficult. The hours are long and the rewards limited unless you get really lucky.

It is only a matter of time before the FBI is confronted with a video similar to this one, which targeted the British government specifically. When that day comes, will US officials stick their heads in the sand, like the British did earlier this week when a UK spokesman said, "We are currently examining this latest Daesh propaganda video—another desperate move from an appalling terrorist group that is clearly in decline"?

If and when Americans execute a Bataclan-style attack on their own country directed by ISIS terrorists abroad, my hope is that the FBI and local law enforcement will respond as they have in the past: with skill, professionalism, and a fair amount of good luck.

David Gomez is a retired FBI agent and former counterterrorism executive in Seattle, Washington. He is currently a Senior Fellow at George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. Follow him on Twitter.

Some people—Zoella, for example—feel required to make some kind of mouth noise almost constantly, even if they have nothing to say. That's why we have mumbling; it's a vocal fart that provides the scent of speech without containing any actual content.

Mumbling has come to a head in the past week with the release of the new Rihanna single "Work." The chorus goes: "Work work work / You seee me do me / Duh duh duh duh / Aosomaba ugh ugh guh lugh guh."

With all the fanfare surrounding the release, many people felt shortchanged by the lack of a central thesis to the three-minute pop song by an artist who had, in her previous work, spoken more clearly on issues such as finding love in a hopeless place and owning a useful rain protection apparatus. Twitter was quick to take Rihanna up on her poor diction and use of patois, comparing her to everyone from Jamaican dancehall star Vybz Kartel to 30 Rock's Jenna Maroney in 'The Rural Juror.'

Really, though, Rihanna was just doing what she always does: exploiting trends already long-present in music. For the last few years, hip-hop has been overrun by the mumble, with nearly all of its biggest stars basically unintelligible to the casual ear. Fetty Wap, Young Thug, Gucci Mane, Future, and Rich Homie Quan are all proponents of a style of rap which is about 80 percent vowel sounds, best exemplified by rap agitator Hopsin in this parody video.

It's known that lean—the codeine-based cocktail favored by many of these artists—makes you slur your words, but it's not just in hip-hop that mumbling is an issue. Hoity-toity costume dramas are also suffering from a bout of the incomprehensible. The recent adaptation of the BBC's War and Peace was beset by claims that the actors are indecipherable. The BBC's 2014 series Jamaica Inn received over 2,000 complaints about bad diction, including one from the director general, who said he couldn't understand what people were saying in some of the corporation's dramas.

It's not just a BBC phenomenon, either—the late Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain and Kristen Stewart in the Twilight movies were also widely accused of being basically inaudible.

It's easy to assume that this poor diction is just a way of fudging half-baked lyrics or poorly-written scripts, and it's certainly true that there are times when it's obvious rappers have found a lazy shortcut that means they don't have to really say anything. Mind you, when you consider how bad the quality of some contemporary rap lyrics are (listen to this clearly-enunciated but utterly meaningless bit of dreck from Ty Dolla $ign and ILOVEMAKONNEN, for example), you can see why rappers might not want people to know what they're rapping about.

More often, though, it's a way of involving you in a world that goes beyond just the meaning of the words. For instance, Young Thug's lyrics are a kind of weird batshit poetry: "I'm an earthling in disguise" or "My bitch a stallion 
/ Breath smell like Italian / Birds in Atlanta, no falcon." Delivered by, say, Example, those lyrics would fall hilariously flat. To get the message you kind of have to be brought into his lean-infused slurred fantasy land.

Similarly, the mumbling in costume dramas often isn't there to purposely make the speech unintelligible, but to create a feeling of naturalism: Not everything said in real life is delivered as a knockout line. Most of our conversation trails off and is incomplete. Marlon Brando famously put cotton wool in his mouth when playing Don Corleone in The Godfather so he couldn't be heard as well, because the vibe of the character was more important than the lines he spoke.

In the early 2000s, a new film genre started to emerge in response to the overly staged nature of most Hollywood movies: "mumblecore." All of these films seemed to hang around the loss and eventual return of a treasured childhood object, or a dramatic scene involving shouting and a glass smashing at a busy party.

The proponents of mumblecore, like Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass brothers, used broken, highly naturalistic language—and often big bouts of improvisation—to create films that told stories in a more meandering, atmospheric way. Because that's what life feels like—you don't leave a dinner party bummed out because someone threw a plate of food at you; you leave it bummed out because you were ever so slightly excluded from the conversation in a subtle, just perceivable way.

More than just a way of expressing things without language, mumbling can also be a way of making language more effective. Last year linguistics professor Julie Sedivy wrote a piece defending mumbling against claims that it was an affront to proper language. She suggested that mumbling is a way of compressing speech, giving the same amount of meaning in less space.

"Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, dropping, or reducing sounds displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs," she wrote. "These algorithms trim down the space needed to digitally store sounds and images by throwing out information that is redundant or doesn't add much to our perceptual experience—for example, tossing out data at sound frequencies we can't hear, or not bothering to encode slight gradations of color that are hard to see. The idea is to keep only the information that has the greatest impact."

So basically, what might seem like Rihanna saying "dur dur dur dur" is really the result of linguistic fine-tuning and the principles of method acting. "Work" is a song about sex and its role in a fraught relationship, and those mumbles combine patois, the rhythms, and repetition of sex, and the frisson of being too fucked up to care—and the atmosphere that all that conjures says more than any verbose description of a sex act ever could.

Image via

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Ted Cruz said some egregious things about Australian gun law earlier this month on conservative political commentator Hugh Hewitt's podcast.

Things were going fine for the first five minutes. The boys talked Obama, Cruz's eligibility for president (he was born in Canada), and terrorism with the level of insight only two men with the same point of view can offer. Then the conversation turned to Australia. Our gun laws have become a point of reference as America debates tightening its own.

Here's how Cruz thinks our laws factor into America's conversation: "Australia confiscated handguns, the president wants to confiscate handguns." It's unclear which of our buybacks Cruz is talking about. The first, in 1996, didn't actually include handguns. And the handgun buyback of 2003 only applied to those with certain specifications. I'd say Cruz doesn't know which buyback he's talking about, and someone even more skeptical might say he doesn't know what he's talking about at all.

The next statement Cruz made certainly lends credence to the latter theory. "As you know, Hugh, after Australia did that , the rate of sexual assaults, the rate of rapes, went up significantly, because women were unable to defend themselves." Let that sink in.

Cruz's take on sexual assault is basically a lie, but there's no one study we can point at to prove him wrong. That sort of magical bullshit is Cruz's specialty. Instead, we've got to amalgamate a range of different data to get a straight answer.

The Washington Post set out to do exactly that: test Cruz's statement. It compiled data from the ABS and spoke to Australian gun law experts to create a graph that showed a very gradual increase in sexual assaults since the gun buyback. Here's that graph.

Graph courtesy of The Washington Post

There are two important things to consider when looking at this graph. First, it doesn't differentiate between men and women. Second, it's compiled from police reports. When VICE spoke with Dr. Kristin Diemer from Melbourne University, she painted us a very different picture of sexual assault post-buyback.

She told us that when you actually look at women's self-reported instances of sexual assault, the numbers have gone down since the buyback. Self-reporting denotes women telling the ABS about assault when surveyed, but not necessarily going to the cops. "In 1994 and 1995, 1.3 percent of adult women had reported experiencing sexual assault in a 12-month period," Kristin explained. "Then in 2011 through to 2012 that decreased to 1 percent."

The only thing going up—and this is what it looks like the graph shows—is the number of people going to the police. Kristin suspects this is because "we've done a lot in Australia to encourage women to report sexual assault, and the whole justice system is getting better at supporting women when they do report sexual assault."

In short, it's got nothing to do with guns.

The lie itself isn't really the worst part of this Cruz debacle. To me, it's the fact that Cruz doesn't actually care about the women he's talking about. The irony of the comment is that if the same women he wants to protect from assault were actually raped, he wouldn't want them to have an abortion. In fact, he's going out of his way to make it impossible. One of the main pillars of his campaign is defunding Planned Parenthood. He's actively pushing to make it happen right now.

There's also a really good chance he knows he's lying. As Jeb Lund wrote for Rolling Stone, "Ted Cruz knows exactly what he's doing... He is gaffe proof because the gaffes are not arrived at by error." Lund cites Cruz's book as pretty clear evidence of this. It's littered with doctored accounts of the recent political past. That is to say, Cruz's track record suggests he doesn't misspeak: He knowingly misrepresents.

The Australia comments are a prime example of Cruz's signature lies: difficult enough to prove wrong that Cruz doesn't look like a liar––at least to conservatives whose votes he wants. That's why Cruz's comment isn't just dumb; it's a little scary. But hey, so is the GOP.

Follow Isabelle on Twitter.

Just who is this guy, anyway? It's Chibi-Robo, obviously.

In an interview with US Gamer in September 2015, Chibi Robo! Zip Lash assistant producer Risa Tabata talked about the decision to turn the game into 2D side-scroller (for the 3DS, of all systems) rather than a 3D platformer, like the preceding titles in the series:

"A 3D landscape would allow you to do more, but would also make controls and aiming more complex and the game harder overall. Chibi-Robo is a character who's beloved by a lot of small children as well, so I wanted this game to be accessible to that audience too."

The problem here is that said audience of small children have probably never played the previous Chibi-Robo games, and quite possibly haven't heard of the titular character at all. The first game in the series, Plug into Adventure, came out for the GameCube in 2005, before many of them were born. No domo arigato, Mr Chibi-Robo.

Tabata's statement sounds an awful lot like Nintendo cutting off its nose to spite its face. It published a game aimed directly at an audience the company isn't the master of anymore, while simultaneously alienating Chibi-Robo's original and older fans. And as Nintendo moves into 2016, with the launch of its new smartphone titles, and probably a new home-and-handheld hybrid console in the form of the NX, it needs to realize the contemporary needs of younger fans. If it doesn't, it risks losing them further, no matter how many cute games with Mario dressed up as a cat it lines up. Sometimes, pandering to a market backfires.

According to the NPD Group and Consumer Tracking Service, for the 12-month period ending December 2011, 63 percent of Nintendo DS users were in the 2–17 age range, and 19 percent were 18–34. In the 12 months ending September 2015, the same age ranges for the 3DS were 51 percent and 39 percent, respectively. Wii U demographics have remained pretty constant—but you could argue that Wii U sales are so small that breaking them down into age brackets doesn't provide much in the way of useful data, anyway. (Nintendo's own eShop data shows a much more drastic cutoff, with only 6 percent of Wii U eShop consumers in the 0–17 range, but the average age skews higher due to the digital distribution method more accessible to credit card-owning adults.)

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the world of competitive gaming, eSports

Nintendo is slowly starting to lose the young audience it once dominated, and while it hasn't lost it as fast as conventional wisdom might suggest—it's not just selling games to a bunch of retro-heads in their 30s and 40s, despite the protestations from frothing fanboys of other console manufacturers—it still needs to appreciate a coming shift in its market share, and change the way it approaches appealing to kids.

Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash is just one example of where Nintendo has undercooked its products by naively assuming "kids" don't want fuller games. Splatoon lacked voice chat to combat "online negativity," but having the option to better communicate with teammates would have provided it with an additional level of appeal; even The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, a game built specifically for online, co-op play, only allowed players to communicate with emojis because its developers were afraid better players would boss other, less-experienced partners around. But if you look at Minecraft, a game that revolves around online interactions, you see voice chat fully supported—and that's a game that has under-15 as its largest demographic. Clearly, today's younger generation isn't afraid of the online experience, but actively craves it.

'Tri Force Heroes' was a co-op game that really didn't make the most of online play

Nintendo is being too protective of the kids that use its systems, and as a result risks losing them completely. Such policies run against the very grain of the demographic Nintendo is trying to attract, while also alienating the graying crowd that's still buying its systems. The company needs to better understand the technology and culture that kids today are a part of. We live in an always-connected world, and Nintendo needs to embrace that, not thwomp it.

These policies are for the same generation that is used to not only watching YouTube videos about the games they play, but also recording and posting those very videos themselves. Instead of trying to protect and coddle kids, Nintendo needs to tap into the very things that younger gamers are active in. They've grown up with iPads in their hands and Minecraft in their hearts, and they are more connected and tech savvy than the generation before them. It's time for the Baby Mario gloves to come off, and Nintendo to treat their customers—even its youngest ones—with greater respect for their digital maturity.

Going where the kids already play is a good first step. But the delay of Nintendo's Miitomo smartphone game—developed in partnership with DeNA—isn't an assuring sign. And the nature of the game—it's a super weird-looking social networking app—doesn't seem to be the sure-fire mobile hit Nintendo should be leading with, relying on the faded popularity of the Wii-era Mii branding.

The throwback Mii visuals of 'Miitomo' might not be what the younger market wants

The launch of the NX, most likely later this year, is going to be an even bigger tell for the future of the company. Nintendo needs to court fresh blood, young blood. It needs to do what it did for me: bring kids into gaming young and convert them into lifelong fans.

Splatoon was a start, an inky tide of freshness for its makers. Nintendo needs more new IPs like it as early in the NX's lifespan as possible, and new characters that kids can connect with and take ownership of, not just new titles for characters older than the audience they're aimed at. I think it's a safe wager that it's older fans camping out for Captain Falcon amiibo figures, not the under-17 crowd.

Bringing the role-playing game Yo-Kai Watch to the States in late 2015 (it's out in Europe later in 2016), albeit over two years after its Japanese release, was a good move—the Level 5-developed adventure was well reviewed in the East, and more importantly it's a big seller, too. Porting Minecraft onto the Wii U in December 2015 was a big step, but one that came way, way too late. Super Mario Maker, riding on the craze of user-generated content, was also late to the party—its launch in 2015 came years after other titles, like LittleBigPlanet, had been offering the same thing. Nintendo should have bet huge on collaborations with games like Skylanders—where the Wii was once the console of choice for players—or Disney Infinity, and done everything it could to attract the younger demographic. Nintendo isn't used to seeing other companies outperform it, historically, but partnerships are one way to stop some of its waning relevance, even if it requires a little swallowing of its pride. Its mobile venture with DeNA can certainly be viewed as a mellowing of previously held values of doing things entirely their own way, the rest of the industry be damned.

On Motherboard: The NX Will Not Be Another Wii U, Promise

If Nintendo wants to be successful in the future—both within the dedicated console gaming space and mobile—it needs to embrace the way today's kids play, communicate, and game, and create software that actually appeals to this generation of young gamers, with new characters, not those from decades ago. Give today's younger players some credit and don't limit online interactions. Don't make games easier, and then sell that as a positive. Impress with new ideas and IPs that that nascent gamers can call their own by reaching out to them, not bowing down to them without appreciating their actual demands.

Mario and Link get my attention; I grew up with them. But there's a generation of kids growing up with Steve from Minecraft on their T-shirts and Skylanders book bags, the new Marios and Links. Nintendo needs to react to that, get creative with its own original brands and treat all players with the same respect, or else its growing pains could well do for it completely in the next console generation.

Follow Willie on Twitter.

Read our profile on Martin Shkreli here.

Martin Shkreli is a 32-year-old entrepreneur. A modern day Horatio Alger story, Shkreli grew up the son of two janitors in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, hustled his way into the hedge fund game, and is now worth at least $45 million. Although he made his money betting against the pharmaceutical industry, Shkreli switched to running drug companies in 2012.

In August of last year, one of his companies, Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired the rights to a drug called Daraprim that treats an infection called toxoplasmosis. The disease affects pregnant women, AIDS patients, and others with immunodeficiencies. When Turing raised the price of the pill by more than 5,000 percent overnight, Shkreli became the poster child for capitalistic greed.

While most pharma tycoons would slink away from the spotlight after a flogging like Shkreli endured, he took the bad-boy image and ran with it, flaunting his trollish behavior in the media. Over the past year he has funded an indie record label, claimed he would bail Bobby Shmurda out of jail (but only if Shmurda recorded some tracks for him), and purchased the singular copy of a legendary Wu-Tang Clan album with no immediate plans to let anyone outside of his apartment hear it.

In December, Shkreli was indicted on securities fraud charges and is now under investigation by Congress and the Federal Trade Commission for price gouging, so his time in the spotlight is not over yet.

I caught up with him at his Midtown apartment to meet the man behind the headlines.

Marissa Shephard, above, is wanted for first-degree murder and arson. Screenshots via YouTube

The RCMP have released a YouTube video of a young New Brunswick woman wanted in an "extremely violent" murder.

Marissa Shephard, 20, of Moncton, New Brunswick, has been missing since the charred remains of 18-year-old Baylee Wylie were found in a burned-out triplex in mid-December. Shephard has been charged with first-degree murder and arson under a Canada-wide arrest warrant.

This week, New Brunswick RCMP released a video compilation of photos of Shephard in which her appearance varies dramatically. Some show her fresh-faced and without makeup, her hair naturally brown; in others, she is wearing heavy contouring makeup, and her hair is straightened or curled and mostly blonde.

"We know she is capable of changing her looks and could be just about anywhere," said Inspector Jamie George in the video.

Wylie's body was discovered December 17 of last year, and two men, Devin Morningstar and Tyler Noel, have since been arrested and charged with first-degree murder and arson. But Shephard's whereabouts remain unknown.

Her dad, David, told Global News he hasn't seen her since December 12 and fears that she is dead.

Shephard is five-foot-five and has naturally brown hair, according to police. She also has a tattoo of the name "Stephen" on the back of her neck and a crown tattooed on her chest.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo courtesy Lisbeth Nova

"It's one of the few jobs where it has no wage gap, we set our own hours, we work independently, and we basically operate our own small businesses. We aren't given credit for that, though, because people think that if you sign up for this you're somehow doing something wrong," Olivia Grace, a Toronto escort, told me over the phone when I spoke to her about the nature of being an independent escort in Canada.

VICE travelled to First Nations communities with long-standing boil water advisories to meet with residents who have spent their whole lives without accessible clean water. Still via Canada's Waterless Communities: Neskantaga

On this week's Best of VICE Canada, airing Sunday, January 31, VICE heads to the remote Neskantaga First Nation in Northern Ontario where, after 20 years under a boil water advisory, they have slipped down the federal government's priority list for safe drinking water from four to nineteen, with no explanation.

Tune in this and every Sunday at 10 PM for more.

Photo via Flickr user Jody LaFerriere

Walt Disney has become many things to many people: He represents a hallmark of growing up, his films and theme parks a staple of childhood. He's been called a racist, a dictator, and a misogynist. And now, author and filmmaker Christian Moran is bringing another dimension of Disney's personality to center stage: his obsession with the future.

Moran's new documentary, Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: The Futurism of Walt Disney, focuses on Disney's advancement of technology and his vision for a better, brighter world.

"We live in a very cynical era and I think a lot of people today love the idea that a man like Walt Disney, who created wholesome, family entertainment, may have been a bigot," Moran said, addressing Disney's reputation. But Moran says there was much more to the man than either the sanitized films or the "fascist-caricature people have turned him into."

In 1966, during one of his final television appearances, Disney outlined his vision for a futuristic city in EPCOT/Florida Film. He described a city that would "never cease to be a blueprint of the future," which would contain an industrial park, a green belt, and an urban center, where people would live. This utopian world, as Disney saw it, would have begun with his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, to be built in Orlando, Florida.

"The EPCOT film was the piece that really got me interested in Walt Disney as a futurist," Moran said. "Seeing that he had intended to build a city and wanted to combat the various problems of contemporary urban life really made me want to dig deeper into who he was as a person."

Disney's vision of EPCOT was intended to be free of traffic congestion from cars; visitors would use a monorail and walk freely in the streets. The residences would be designed with state-of-the-art appliances, which could be easily replaced when new technologies surfaced. "A project like this is so vast in scope that no one company alone can make it a reality," Disney said at the time. "But if we can bring together the technical know-how of American industry and the creative imagination of the Disney organization, I'm confident we can create right here in Disney World a showcase to the world of the American free enterprise system."

Disney died before the city could become a reality. In 1982, 16 years after his death, the Walt Disney Company developed the Epcot Center—a section of the theme park devoted to future innovation, but hardly Disney's vision of a prototypical futuristic city. What could have been the biggest achievement of the man's life was never realized.

Still, technological daring took Disney from one advancement to the next throughout his career. In his lifetime, the patriarch of animation pioneered sound (Steamboat Willie, 1928), color (Flowers and Trees, 1932), multi-plane (The Old Mill, 1937), and feature-length cartoons (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937). While producing the feature film Fantasia in 1940, Disney spent an estimated $200,000 to develop the first theatrical, stereophonic sound system to better the audience's viewing experience.

These advancements did not come cheap, but he pursued them in order to separate his product from the competition, and to further the artistic and technical merits of film. Moran believes that for Disney, "the point of making money was to spend it working on bigger and better projects. Many futurists like Walt, Howard Hughes, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk were willing to bet everything on an idea that no one else believed in. Typically those ideas involved promoting or using new technologies that most people didn't understand."

"If we don't have people using their money to push the limits, then we don't go anywhere. A futurist is someone who believes in pushing society forward regardless of profit." — Christian Moran

After revolutionizing the industry of animation, Disney turned his attention to reinventing the theme park industry. He wanted to create a theatrical and clean venue for families where visitors could interact with Disney characters and relive moments from the Disney Company's animated films—and he did so, against the wishes of his accountants, bankers, brother, and wife. Inspired by his experiences at the Griffith Park carrousel in Los Angeles and Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, the creation of Disneyland was also influenced by Disney's trips to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Michigan and nearby Knott's Berry Farm amusement park, which at the time was still a literal berry farm with a themed Ghost Town.

As much as Disney (and the many talented men and women who worked for him) borrowed from each of these recreational environments, his vision was also modeled on the movie experience. Each of Disneyland's themed lands related to a popular film genre: adventure, western, cartoon, and science fiction. Sam Gennaway, an urban planner and author of several books on Disney, including Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City, compares Disneyland to a movie backlot. "It was like a movie set that one could walk on and be completely immersed," he said. "And then the use of movie techniques, film techniques applied to three-dimensional design, has now been used time and time again in commercial developments around the world."

Read: The Punks of Disneyland

In the park, Disney popularized the use of monorails and PeopleMover systems, which he envisioned as the future of transportation. (Monorails existed before Disneyland, but had yet to be used widely in the United States.) At the 1964 World's Fair, Disney unveiled a new technology—audio-animatronics—with Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, a robo-tribute to the president. He also implemented the technology into Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, a Disneyland attraction where colorful audio-animatronic birds sang and danced to entertain visitors as they dined. The audio-animatronic birds were financed out of Disney's own pocket.

"Futurism and sound economic practices can absolutely go hand in hand," said Moran. "If we don't have people using their money to push the limits, then we don't go anywhere. Some companies will fail in these attempts, but others will expand our reality in new and surprising ways. In the end, a futurist is someone who believes in pushing society forward regardless of profit."

Disney's massive advancements in robotics were displayed simply for fun, as educational childhood amusements, but they changed the theme park industry forever. Disney also used the park's Tomorrowland section to inspire a bigger picture of the future with exhibits like the fiberglass-and-plastic House of the Future, built in 1957, which offered a vision of life in the future (1986, specifically) complete with a microwave oven and ultrasonic dishwasher.

"The world would be a much different place if it weren't for Disneyland," said Gennaway. And if he'd had the change to inaugurate his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—a new, idealized American city—who knows how the world would look today. Using his company's numerous of advancements in engineering, robotic, and transit technologies along with his well-connected, corporate support structure, Disney's EPCOT could have changed the world. Yet we'll never know for certain to what degree.

You can watch Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: The Futurism of Walt Disney for free on YouTube.

J. Eric Lynxwiler is the author of two books on Los Angeles history: Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles and Knott's Preserved: From Boysenberry to Theme Park.

Find Eduardo on his website and Instagram.

The 2016 presidential campaign has been going on for so long that it's easy to forget that not a single primary vote has been cast—until now, the race has been purely hypothetical, played out in polls and pundit arguments. That changes, finally, with the Iowa Caucuses on Monday.

Maybe after that, things will calm down. So far, the campaign has been a funhouse reflection of politics, with Donald Trump proving that Republican voters don't like Republicans all that much and a self-described socialist challenging Democratic heir apparent Hillary Clinton. The absurdity is only amplified by the inherent weirdness of the Iowa Caucuses themselves.

Most Americans accept that the presidential race begins in a otherwise forgettable state with more pigs than people, and a voting system culled from the opium-addled brain of Lewis Carroll. But the reasons for this—and what it means for the presidential election—tend to be less understood. Below, we've broken down some of the things you should know about the caucus before it's all over Monday night.

Iowa farmers Adeleine Gutz and Donna Lott learn how they can help Donald Trump. Photo by Pete Voelker

White People

Iowa is full of them. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of Iowa voters is their translucence, a ruddy, corn-fed pastiness shared by virtually every resident of the Hawkeye State. A full 92 percent of the population here is white, according to the latest US Census data, the fifth-largest majority of any state in the country. Naturally, this overwhelming lack of color is reflected in the state's presidential politics: Whites made up 99 percent of Iowa Republican caucus voters in the last two presidential elections; Democrats were only slightly more diverse in 2008.

If nothing else, the numbers should dispel any lingering fantasies that see Iowa as somehow representative of "Real America." In addition to being whiter, Iowa is older than most states; it's also overwhelmingly rural and has a negligible foreign-born population. The demographic shifts taking place across the rest of America, by and large, haven't hit home here.

Civil rights leader Dr. Cornel West visits Iowa for the first time to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Photo by Pete Voelker

Democrats seem reluctant to admit that the votes they're competing for here are so lily-white, given how important winning minority voters will become more important in future primaries. Still, you can't help but cock your head in amusement when aClinton ally accused Bernie Sanders of putting too many white people in his Iowa campaign ads.

For Republicans, the effect of all these white Iowans has been more sinister, providing a subtext for the endless campaign speeches and ads mythologizing Iowa as the last bastion of Agrarian Democracy and Family Values. At the same time, conservative flashpoints like mass deportation and Muslim immigration bans remain mostly abstract concepts in Iowa, allowing the candidates to ramp up their nativist rhetoric in front of an audience that's likely had limited interaction with the real-life people those policies might affect.

Voters line up to watch a Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Pete Voelker

Caucus "Voting"

To truly grasp the weirdness of the Iowa Caucuses, you have to understand what the hell a caucus is in the first place. Instead of just stepping into a booth and pulling a lever like normal voters, Iowans prefer an arcane, gratuitously quaint system in which likeminded partisans get together at a meetinghouse to chase each other around and fight about politics. In Iowa, members of each party do this with neighbors in their respective precincts; each of Iowa's 99 counties has a handful of precincts, and most of these hosts their own caucus party on Election Night. That's a lot of parties.

What goes down after the doors close at 7:00 PM varies by party. When Republicans get together on caucus night, they all sit in a meeting room—at a church, maybe, or in a high school auditorium—and those attendees who feel compelled to speak up on behalf a candidate are invited to address the group. After that's done, the voters each write their favorite candidate's name on a piece of paper, and then someone puts all the names into a bag. The votes are counted right there in the room, and then reported (via app!) to county and state party officials. The winner is eventually declared—though the candidates who aren't crowned the winner are still awarded delegates proportionally, so in effect there are multiple winners.

Bernie Sanders supporters cheer on their candidate in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Pete Voelker

The Democratic caucus system is much more chaotic, with a lot of standing, and even walking around, involved. After some attendees give speeches on behalf of their favored candidates, the participants congregate into human blobs that represent support for a particular candidate. It's not over then though: After the initial blobs are counted, any candidate who gets less than 15 percent of the vote basically ceases to exist as an option, and the voters in that blob suddenly become free agents, with a chance to join another, more successful, blob. So begins the fun and tedious democratic process by which supporters of the bigger campaigns try to physically absorb the newly available voters.

In an election with a large Democratic field, this process can go on for hours. But it's not likely to last too long this year—the Martin O'Malley blobs will form, then dissipate, and be absorbed, and fought over, by the Sanders and Clinton teams. Then the final votes are tallied and sent to party officials via the Democrats' own custom app. Democratic delegates are also assigned to multiple winners, but how exactly these numbers are tallied, though, is too complex of a process for any living human to understand.

Members of the media get ready for Donald Trump in Ottumwa, Iowa. Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

The Media

If you're wondering how this ridiculous system came to play such an outsized role in presidential races, you have to go back to the mid 1970s, when savvy Iowa politicos and business types realized that holding the nation's first presidential voting contest could be a boon for their otherwise tourism-deprived state, and convinced both parties and the national news media that the place was somehow a bellwether for the country's political sentiment.

The fact that anyone is still buying into that line, even as Iowa becomes less and less representative of the nation at large, is largely the fault of the political press corps. As reporters here regularly remind passersby, the significance of the caucuses isn't so much which candidates actually win the state but who wins the "momentum," aconcept invented by the press to justify which candidates get serious coverage after Iowa. And the media's ability to influence the outcome of the race—particularly when there are large fields of candidates—in turn justifies even more coverage of the caucuses.

As a result, the caucuses have become an infotainment circus, turning the hordes of cable news pundits and embedded reporters into political monsters in their own right, drunk off their power to determine the "narrative" of the presidential race. Democracy!

Volunteers make a final push for Texas Senator Ted Cruz at his campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"Ground Game"

Absentee voting is very limited at the Caucuses, so generally speaking, if you want to vote, you have to physically show up on caucus night. Almost no one does this: Only about 20 percent of Iowa's registered party voters—about 300,000 people in total—actually participate.

Whether it makes sense to let this tiny group of voters essentially anoint America's presidential nominees is obviously open to debate, but it does make close caucus races almost impossible to predict. This invariably leads to an endless debate over what political reporters smugly like to call "ground game"—the tactics used to turn campaign fans into such ardent supporters that they're willing to run around a gym or talk politics with strangers.

Though it's not always clear what these tactics actually entail, there appears to be a consensus that Donald Trump's ground game is chaos, run by eager fans and lunatics who have, for the most part, never even seen an Iowa caucus. By contrast, Ted Cruz, Trump's chief rival, is alleged to have excellent ground game built around a slick network of pro-life activists, Christian homeschoolers, and assorted faith-based reality television stars that have endorsed his campaign. Clinton, too, has poured tons of money into her Iowa operation, dispatching union organizers and other progressive minions to make sure she doesn't embarrass herself with an Iowa loss like the one she suffered in 2008.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, both past winners of the Iowa Republican Caucus, have been reduced to Trump set pieces in 2016. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The "Winners"

As seemingly ridiculous as the Iowa Caucuses are, they do have a big impact on the party nominating contests. This is particularly true on the Democratic side, where the past three candidates who won Iowa—Barack Obama in 2008, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000—went on to win the party's nomination. Losing in Iowa has also proved fatal to several Democrats, including Clinton, who never really recovered from her third-place finish here last time around.

On the Republican side, the Iowa results are less predictive. This is in part because evangelical conservatives play a much larger role in the Caucuses than they do in the overall GOP primary race. The last two Republican candidates to win in Iowa—Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012—did so with overwhelming support from Christian conservatives, but were unable to translate that into broader support among Republican voters nationwide. Nevertheless, the caucus has served to winnow down the GOP fields, precipitating a dramatic drop-off in the number of Republicans running for president, and is likely to do the same in 2016.

Only nine more months to go before the general election.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Just next to a Starbucks in downtown Los Angeles's Little Tokyo sits a bronze statue of a man in a suit holding a small piece of paper. On the base is a phrase from the Talmud: "He who saves one life, saves the entire world." The memorialized man is Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara, often referred to as the "Japanese Schindler." A Japanese diplomat tasked with opening a consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939, Sugihara ended up defying his own government and put his family at risk by issuing 2,139 transit visas to some 6,000 Jews who had migrated to Lithuania after the Nazis invaded Poland, and again needed to migrate or else face execution. In Los Angeles, thousands pass this statue each day without knowing anything about the man who saved thousands of lives roughly 70 years ago.

Sugihara's largely overlooked story is now being told on the big screen in the form of an emotional and sweeping biopic directed by Japanese-American filmmaker Cellin Gluck. Persona Non Grata, which premiered in Japan this past December and will be released in the US at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on January 31, tracks the man's moral awakening and heroic acts during World War II. Unlike Oskar Schindler, the famed German industrialist whose motivation for saving the Jews was initially profit-driven, or the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who was sent to Hungry with the explicit purpose of saving Jews, Sugihara had no motivation or directive to help them other than his own empathy and decision making.

It's estimated that 40,000 descendants of the Jews who received Sugihara's hand-written visas are alive today. After ultimately being dismissed by the Japanese Foreign Service, Sugihara lived a quiet life in obscurity. It wasn't until he was tracked down by one of the Jews he had saved that he was eventually brought to Israel and given a hero's celebration. He is the only Japanese person recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government, an honor bestowed in 1984, just two years before Sugihara passed away.

Gluck, who has worked as an assistant director on Hollywood blockbusters such as Contact, Remember the Titans, and Transformers, and also directed the Japanese version of Sideways in 2009, deftly directs an international cast that includes Japanese Academy Award-winning actor Toshiaki Karasawa, as well as Koyuki, Borys Szyc, and Agnieszka Grochowska. On its opening weekend, Persona Non Grata topped the Japanese box office, bringing in $1.2 million (USD). VICE spoke with the director about empathy, directing a multilingual and international cast, and how he imagines Sugihara would respond to a film being made about his life.

Cellin Gluck on the set of 'Persona Non Grata'

VICE: When did you first learn of Sugihara's story?
Cellin Gluck: After Schindler's List came out, there were reports of other Schindlers around the world who had gone above and beyond to save Jewish refugees who were seeking to get out of German-occupied territories. I had heard of "the Japanese Schindler," but it wasn't until a friend of mine gave me a copy of Marvin Tokayer's The Fugu Plan, a book about the Japanese and Jews during World War II, that I really put the name Sugihara to the story.

What moved you most about his story?
I was moved by the fact that Sugihara seemingly did everything out of his own volition and without any recompense, except that to his conscience. He didn't set out to become or prove himself a hero—he just did all that he could and felt was right for his fellow man.

What do you imagine he would think of his life story being told on the big screen?
I believe that were he here today, he would have graciously accepted any accolades sent his way while simultaneously marginalizing any attempts to put him on a pedestal.

In the film and in real life, he had a relationship with a Russian woman named Klaudia, prior to meeting his Japanese wife. Aside from being unusual at the time, how do you think the relationship helped inform his worldview?
I believe that the time that he spent in Manchuria studying at the Harbin Institute, and his time with Klaudia, helped him to at least grasp the idea that though there may be differences in culture, ultimately we are all the same.

Sugihara issued as many visas as he could, even up until the last moments before he was forced to evacuate the country by train. And he wasn't sure the visas would guarantee safe passage. Where did the Jewish refugees go after leaving Lithuania?
With the help of the Polish Ambassador in Tokyo and several Jewish relief organizations, many of the refugees were able to get visas to the United States and Canada, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and to the British Mandate of Palestine. Many Jews who were left were eventually deported to Shanghai, which already had a substantial Jewish population and by then was under Japanese control. There were those who also stayed in Japan.

Is Sugihara's story widely known in Japan?
Most people in Japan are not aware of the name Sugihara or of his exploits. I've heard that some students in Japan read a story about him in English class, but except for the Gifu Prefecture area, where Sugihara was born, he's not really talked about that much.

Prior to being sent to Lithuania, the Russian government declared Sugihara persona non grata, citing intelligence activities, making it impossible for him to assume his post at the Japanese embassy in Moscow, which was his dream. Why was this significant for the film's title?
Our producer actually came up with the title early in the process and thought it appropriate that a man who had himself been ostracized for reasons greater than himself, would, in the end, empathize with others who were trapped in a situation beyond their control.

Can you tell me about what it was like to direct such an international and multilingual cast?
I am thankful that my producer, Kazutoshi Wadakura, enabled me to shoot in Poland, where I was truly able to get the best of both worlds. That is, I was able to bring some of Japan's top actors to Poland, and also choose the European country's best. Although much of the actual events took place in Lithuania, it made perfect sense to shoot with Polish actors as the majority of the refugees Sugihara gave visas to and subsequently saved were from Poland.

How did your background as someone of Japanese and Jewish descent inform the telling of this story?
I felt that I could empathize with both worlds having been exposed to them while growing up. But more importantly, there was something within me compelling me to tell his story.

The film is premiering in the US at a time when many people are feeling like a "persona non grata," even in their own homeland. What can Sugihara's story teach us about the past, present, and where we are headed in the future?
I believe that people should at all times do what they believe to be the right thing to do, rather than standing around hoping that someone else would step up to the plate. The prevailing feeling that it's all right to ostracize a group of people simply because of their beliefs or where they come from needs to be eradicated.

Watching the film, I couldn't help but relate it to the current refugee crisis and lack of empathy by so many individuals and nations. How can films like yours help create change?
I would hope that if nothing else, films have the power to cause people to reexamine their beliefs and, thereby, even their actions. If Persona Non Grata could make people take pause and reflect on the way they feel, I would be incredibly satisfied.

Persona Non Grata premieres in the US at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, January 31, 2016.

Follow Victoria on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Imagens Evangélicas

There are 20-30 million victims of human trafficking living in the world today. These modern slaves cost an average $90-a-head. The term "slave" implies many forms of exploitation, including, but not limited to, sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, domestic servitude, and unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers. While 510 trafficking flows have been detected since 2012, the global issue isn't slowing down. Today, human trafficking is the third largest international crime industry, generating profits of around $32 billion each year.

When the US Department of State released its annual "Trafficking in Persons" report this past summer, Cuba and Malaysia were both "upgraded" from the list of worst offenders, while countries in South and East Asia, as well as Northern Africa, remained in the lowest category. Belarus, Belize, Burundi, Comoros, the Marshall Island, and South Sudan were all bumped down to red-alert status. This January was National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, in which President Obama asked us to "recognize the victims of trafficking, and let us resolve to build a future in which its perpetrators are brought to justice and no people are denied their inherent human rights of freedom and dignity."

Though the annual report and statistics are important, human trafficking is not going to end just because the President calls attention to the issue. To learn more about the state of modern slavery, we asked three organizations fighting trafficking about how things have progressed over the last few years, as well as what steps we can take to actually eradicate the practice. Andrea Matolcsi, Program Officer for Sexual Violence and Trafficking at Equality Now, Rebecca Clarke, spokesperson for Hope for Justice, and William Hassall, International Human Trafficking Institute (IHTI) Program Coordinator, all shared their thoughts with VICE over email. The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

VICE: Since your charity formed, what's changed the most about the fight against human trafficking and what are the biggest issues or conflicts your organization is combating?
Equality Now (Andrea Matolcsi): The biggest change has been the increasing global trend towards enacting laws which target the demands that fuel sex trafficking. This has only happened over the past 15 years or so—within the lifetime of Equality Now. The biggest challenge is the scale of trafficking and exploitation in the sex trade and getting people to understand the realities of the sex trade and the gender dimension of prostitution and sex trafficking.

Hope for Justice (Rebecca Clarke): The biggest change has been a real upswing in political focus in the last two years. In the UK, where we're headquartered, we've seen the creation of a Modern Slavery Act (2015) and the appointment of an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. The press and the public sector listen, so this issue has got onto the radar of Police and Crime Commissioners nationwide. That's something we've been working at behind the scenes for a long time and the spotlight has helped our continuing efforts to bring the plight of victims into the public sphere. We're seeing increased political focus in the US, too, with Senator Corker's End Modern Slavery Initiative Act.

IHTI (William Hassall): Since our inception in 2014, IHTI has been able to empower more youth organizers to action on the issue of human trafficking. Our organization takes a holistic approach to combating human trafficking, so at any given time we are working to address both labor and sex trafficking both domestically and abroad.

Can you tell me some information about human trafficking that the average person probably doesn't know? How can we actually help fight human trafficking?
Equality Now: Most people do not seem to know that anyone who is under 18 in the sex trade is by default considered to be a victim of trafficking under international law. However the police continue to arrest these victims in many countries—including in the US. This needs to be stopped immediately. One of the best ways of fighting human trafficking is to help change attitudes towards the sex trade and communicate that information.

Hope for Justice: Most people think of human trafficking as a far away problem. Even if there are victims in the UK, they're not from here, right? Wrong. At Hope for Justice, we believe every life is worth the fight so, no matter where you're from, if you've been a victim of modern day slavery we'll fight in your corner, but it is powerful to realize that anyone can be tricked, trapped, or victimized.

Here are things you can do today: Get educated. Learn to identify trafficking in your community. Take a stand. Current victims and recently rescued survivors need professionals with serious experience and training, and the best thing you can do is support them, which we help facilitate through our Pledge Your Birthday campaign.

IHTI: The most common piece of information that we share is that human trafficking doesn't only mean sex trafficking, or sex trafficking of minors. Additionally, even when individuals are aware that human trafficking consists of both labor and sex trafficking, many don't realize that labor trafficking is more prevalent than sex trafficking. IHTI believes that the best way to combat human trafficking in all its forms is to take direct actions in addition to raising awareness. Legislation, protests, and letter-writing campaigns are some of the ways that people can get involved.

What's the current state of human trafficking on a global scale and what are the biggest hurdles we're still yet to overcome?
Equality Now: Sex trafficking happens around the world and is one of the most lucrative global trades. The cost is enormous to individuals and to society, yet it continues as it's extremely profitable and perpetrators are not being held accountable. We have to ensure good laws to end trafficking are in place, but we also need to update attitudes towards how the sex trade operates, who benefits and how much inherent violence there is within it.

Hope for Justice: There are an estimated 20.9 million slaves in the world today. One of the big barriers to reducing this number is the lack of successful prosecutions. Right now that sends the message to traffickers that they can still get away with this crime so long as no one notices. To them, it's low risk and high profit. Until we start creating serious judicial consequences, they won't be discouraged.

The key to securing prosecutions is making sure victims can get back on their feet and maintain a stable living environment—not just for the few weeks after their rescue, but for years. If survivors, still struggling with their trauma, are left without practical support after spending a few weeks in a recovery program, they'll likely fall back into vulnerability. When you lose your witness, you lose your conviction, and the whole cycle can continue.

IHTI: Human trafficking is a global problem that needs to be addressed at a global level. While we are seeing more efforts in the United States to address sex trafficking, more needs to be done to address labor trafficking as well. The largest hurdle to action on labor trafficking is creating a political will to take on an issue which involves immigration.

For more information on human trafficking, as well as how you can get involved to combat it, visit the websites of Equality Now, Hope for Justice, and the International Human Trafficking Institute (IHTI).

Photo via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

At a first glance, Pizzaphone in Kiskőrös, Hungary doesn't seem much out of the ordinary. Like many pizzerias, it has a number of dishes named after fittingly cheesy celebrities: a Seagal, a Pamela Anderson, a Schwarzenegger, and a Pizza Gibson. But Pizzaphone's made Kiskőrös—a quaint, one-horse town midway once best-known as birthplace of revolutionary poet Sándor Petöfi—the talk of Hungary for a different reason.

Diners can now choose from its new "immigrant" pizza range: the Terrorist, Syrian, Ahmed and Immigrant. Inside the pizzeria, 39-year-old restaurant owner Imre Rózsa is organizing his employees for another day at the business that he established 17 years ago. He came up with the new additions to the menu. But why opt for clearly inflammatory names, likely to piss people off?

The idea was "possibly a little bit mismanaged" he says. "I do not want to make excuses here, but I think that, for example, one internet comment that we should advertise the terrorist pizza menu with a Bomba energy drink—well that is a marvelous idea, too. The role of this campaign was that if somebody reads such names, then they would find them funny, or ridiculous. It's certainly funny for us, but obviously not everybody has found it that fantastic. But the menu's primary role has been to attract attention." Mission accomplished.

A look at the new menu: the migrant, terrorist, Ahmed and Syrian pizzas

Sitting in a booth at Pizzaphone as two waitresses set up the bar behind him, he smiles nervously about the media attention around his small pizzeria. He asks for my position on the refugee crisis on three occasions, deflecting the conversation from the menu itself. His employees are guarded too. "Now he's collecting evidence from the crime scene," one of the waitresses mutters to her colleague in Hungarian, as I take pictures upstairs.

Later in the day I meet Ahmed, a pizza namesake who spent more than a year in refugee camps in the Hungary's east provinces. He says he can't tell me his last name, to keep his family safe, but sitting on the friend's couch that has been his temporary bed since December, he talks about the impact of ignorant statements on race. "They can be harmful, in my opinion: today anything can trigger racism or discrimination." Rózsa sees things differently. "To me, there is nothing wrong with this whole thing. This is an absolutely simple, apolitical, attention-hunting menu." He adds that "the migrants avoided Kiskőrös, luckily. Here you could absolutely not see any immigrants, so locals got their information about the refugee crisis only from the newspapers and from television."

But Hungary's government has been accused of overseeing biased TV coverage of the migrant crisis, and criticized for state-funded anti-migrant billboard campaigns that ran such slogans as "if you come to Hungary, you must respect the laws of Hungarians," and "if you come to Hungary, you should not take Hungarians' jobs."

That the billboards were written in Hungarian—a language many refugees wouldn't be able to read—led many to think prime minister Viktor Orbán deliberately stirred up anti-immigrant sentiment to divert attention from massive government corruption cases. It looked like a classic case of dog-whistle politics.

Daniel Fazekas is CEO of the qualitative social media intelligence startup Bakamo Social, which has analyzed the effects of hate speech on public sentiment towards the migrant crisis in Hungary. "The Hungarian population displays similar fears to citizens in other countries," he says. "The difference in Hungary is that the government ran a full-blown anti-migrant campaign inciting and legitimising the hateful sentiment."

Government spokesperson Zoltán Kovács argued, however, that "it is an elementary interest of the European Union and Hungary to relay the government's message to those already on their way to Hungary, the vast majority of them prove to be mere economic migrants and could not expect to be granted asylum."

"I didn't understand those billboards or the propaganda," Ahmed says, "but I did experience the neo-Nazi demonstrations. Everyone in the refugee camp always knew, and news would spread: 'Beware, this weekend the neo-Nazis are going to be around the camp for a demo.'"

Ahmed said he also saw the different attitudes exhibited towards foreigners, in Hungary's provinces versus in the capital, Budapest. "It's a cultural issue and mostly educational. In the countryside, which might be of less interest to foreigners, people are not used to seeing many people from abroad or hearing every other word in another language." On the other hand, "Budapest is crowded and full of people from all over the world," he added.

The writer, Dan Nolan, tucking into Pizzaphone's terribly named Ahmed pizza

Either way, a lack of exposure to refugees doesn't look likely to make Rózsa think twice about his terrorist menu. "To me there is nothing wrong with this whole thing," he says "There has been negative feedback in Hungary, but I think we have profited a great deal from the advertising. Many have said that we are stupid, but this is not a problem if they also said that our pizza is tasty."

"It is true that Ahmed probably would not touch the Ahmed pizza, but it is not made for him anyway. It is not named Ahmed to invite Ahmed to dinner. But if Ahmed pays us a visit, we will welcome him anyway."

For the record, Pizzaphone's Ahmed is indeed light and fluffy with a ham topping, with its tomato sauce served in a separate jug. The ham, though delicious, is probably not halal.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

The Wednesday before last marked the fourth anniversary of the Costa Concordia shipwreck. On January 13, 2012 the Italian cruise ship, which was carrying 4,200 people, collided with rocks just off the coast of the Mediterranean island, Giglio. The impact tore a 230-foot gash into the ship's hull, eventually making it capsize. Thirty-two people died in the disaster, while the others were successfully evacuated. On February 11, 2015, the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, was sentenced to a prison term of 16 years and one month for, among other things, negligent homicide. He's currently appealing the sentence.

The Costa Concordia disaster and the complicated legal mess it left behind captured the media's and world's attention. So did the costly salvage of the gigantic wreck, which could only be brought back to the surface with the help of a complicated maneuver involving a custom-built platform, air-filled tanks, and months of sustained labor. It wasn't until the end of July 2014, more than two years after the disaster, that the wreck could actually be moved. Since then, it's been docked in the port of Genoa, where it will now be gutted and sold for scraps over at least the next year.

Photographer Jonathan Danko Kielkowski snuck onto the ship to have a look around when it was resurfaced. He brought back a series of intriguing pictures from the Costa Concordia's interior, in all its beautiful devastation, and told us how he got the idea climb aboard—and what it feels like to be on a ghost ship.

VICE: How did you get the idea to photograph the Costa Concordia?
Jonathan Danko Kielkowski: I've been fascinated by it since the disaster happened—how such a giant thing could be taken down by a stupid mistake and some rocks. And I was also really into the salvage process; the technical effort put into getting the wreck off the rocks and upright again, the manpower and the money that went into it. It cost over half a billion euros. When the ship arrived in Genoa to be scrapped, I thought I'd take a look.

And then you could just walk on board?
It didn't work out the first time. I got caught by the coast guard and had to turn back. I tried again two weeks later, and then it worked.

How did you do it?
So the ship was fixed to a jetty in the sea. It's only about 200 meters away from the shore at one point, so I just swam over. I had a little kid's rubber dinghy that I put my camera and clothes in that and then just swam behind it.

And you didn't get caught?
I swam over at night on a Sunday. Nobody was around. I waited outside for the sun to come up, and then I went in. I thought I would get caught. But nobody came. I was inside the ship until that afternoon.

What was your first impression upon entering the ship?
It was pretty surreal. I was focussed on my photography, since I thought I would only have half an hour to, maximum, an hour in there. I had gotten floor plans of it beforehand and had picked out a few spots that I wanted to see. Then I just went to work on autopilot. After an hour or so I really realized that I was really in there.

What was it like? You weren't scared at all?
No, I wasn't scared. It was really peaceful but it was also extremely nightmarish, because you could sense the panic all over the place. The passageways are really narrow and the ceilings low. You walk down a hall and there's luggage and strollers and wheelchairs thrown about everywhere. People packed up their stuff and headed for the life boats. But at some point they just dropped everything and started running. Just imagine, all the lifeboats are on the deck and 4,000 people are all squeezing onto them. You could sense the panic everywhere somehow.

Did you have any reservations about doing it? You know over 30 people drowned during the disaster.
It was important to me to document the visible traces of the disaster, while they're still tangible, before they're disposed of. I had tried to get official permission to do so before but through the back and forth I was told that they didn't want to have it documented, they wanted it to be forgotten. I thought thought that it needed to be documented. Many questions have yet to be answered.

The pictures document the disaster, but they're also aesthetically pleasing. Do you think the decay is beautiful in a certain sense?
It was important to me to counteract the cruise ship industry's silence. There's always a lot of décor, illusions and glitz. By trying to show it this way, I wanted to expose it as fake by showing this setting that you know from glossy magazines completely wrecked.

Jonathan's pictures have been published by White Press. You can order his book, CONCORDIA, here.

Check out Cecilia on her website and Facebook.