Who could hate a face like that? Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images

Some people deride the US presidential campaign as a popularity contest, but they're wrong. For one thing, both of the likely major party nominees are incredibly unpopular.

As longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio noted in RealClearPolitics on Sunday, "As far back as I can recall, the presumptive GOP and Democrat nominees have never been in such bad shape image-wise with the voters as Trump and Clinton find themselves." A recent CNN poll found that 56 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, and 67 percent didn't like Donald Trump; other polls show similar results. Registered Democrats and Republicans support Clinton and Trump respectively, of course, but Americans as a whole can't stand either of them. And unless something unexpected happens, one of them is going to be president in 2017.

Part of the problem is that neither candidate is "likable" in a traditional sense. Trump is a loud man with bad hair who says racist things and brags about his money constantly; Clinton is disliked by liberals for her Wall Street ties and by conservatives for whatever they think happened in Benghazi. But this trend goes deeper than just the people at the top of the ticket: 2016 will go down as one of the most depressed, hateful election seasons of the modern era.

Campaigns, even the most contentious ones, usually contain a dash of uplift, something to make voters feel good about putting a check mark in the box. In 1984 Ronald Reagan reassured folks it was "morning in America"; Bill Clinton adopted Fleetwood Mac's upbeat "Don't Stop" in 1992; Barack Obama brought us "change we can believe in" and "yes we can" in 2008. In 2016, we have the muted, almost resigned "Ready for Hillary" on one hand and the snide "Make America Great Again" on the other. Trump is going around saying that the US is a "poor country"; Clinton's latest speech, in Wisconsin, focused on the calamity that would result if Trump (or any Republican) were allowed to pick the next Supreme Court justice. The message based on the speaker and the audience, but over and over, the core theme is the same: Imagine an America run by the other team. Imagine the racist riots a fascist Trump would inspire, or the unchecked corruption and socialism a Clinton presidency would bring. The country is on the brink, and only our side can stop it from going over.

Make no mistake, the general election will be another "lesser of the two evils" sort of choice. Some people are genuinely excited, not just ready, for Clinton (or at least the prospect of a female president), and some Trump fans are looking forward to him building the wall and banning Muslims from entering the country. Most of us, though, will be voting against a catastrophic future, and the two campaigns will anticipate are anxiety. "The Only Strategy for Hillary Clinton Is to Scorch the Earth" read a February Buzzfeed News headline topping an article by Ben Smith, the gist of which is that 2016 is a "contrast election," a.k.a. a mudfest.

"It will be her versus a fucking asshole in almost any scenario," an Obama supporter told Smith. "It's going to be a lot of fear, but she's going to have a lot of room to run, and she's not going to have to destroy the other person, because the other person is going to be so eminently destroyable."

Trump, of course, will be in the same spot—he's already made an art of insulting nicknames like "Lyin' Ted" and "Little Marco," and the broader themes of his campaign are all negative: America is weak, America loses, Americans are getting screwed by immigrants, ISIS, and even our allies—and obviously Obama, and by extension Clinton, are responsible.

Blaming the candidates for not being positive gets this phenomenon backward. GOP voters had their choice of over a dozen candidates and picked the loudest, most abrasive one of the bunch. Their second-place candidate, Ted Cruz, is a universally disliked Tea Party senator who came close to calling Trump a "ratfucker" last week; John Kasich, the only one who tried to mount a positive campaign, is a hopeless afterthought. The Democrats have Bernie Sanders, who is inspirational in the way he enumerates exactly how we are screwed, but he has yet to catch Clinton, and he's running out of time. Sanders and Kasich, by the way, generally have net positive ratings in the polls, but haven't scored the votes that Trump and Clinton have. People seem to like them, in other words, but not enough people like them enough to actually put them in the country's highest office.

It's hard to predict how all this hatred will impact the final result. "The other side sucks way worse!" is a shitty rallying cry, and both Democrats and Republicans will have some tough decisions to make in the solitude of the voting booth. Will right-wingers who have despised Clinton for decades really cast their lot in with a candidate whose persona is basically "Rodney Dangerfield with a racist streak"? Will Sanders supporters hold their noses and back a candidate they think is the embodiment of what is wrong with the Democratic Party?

Anecdotally, there are GOP diehards who hate Trump too much vote for him. And there are Bernie fans like Susan Sarandon who feel so deflated by the prospect of a Clinton presidency that they wonder if Trump would be that much worse. These people are not going to be energized by months of vicious attack ads and take-no-prisoners debates. Some will cast third-party ballots, or wistfully write in "Bernie Sanders" or "Barack Obama." Others will give up on the prospect entirely—come election day, they'll turn off their phones, ignore the news, and drive and drive and drive until they reach a place where they don't see any candidate yard signs.

In the end, of course, someone will have to be president. And next January, that person is going to face the prospect of running a country that probably doesn't like him or her all that much.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: I Lived on Trump Products for a Week to See if It Would Make Me Great Again

Donald Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been charged with simple battery for allegedly grabbing and bruising Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields earlier this month. The police in Jupiter, Florida, issued the controversial campaign operative a "notice to appear" for the misdemeanor on Tuesday, as the New York Times reports.

The charges stem from an incident at a Trump event back on March 8, where Fields says Lewandowski grabbed her arm as she approached the candidate to ask him a question. According to POLITCO, Fields filed a police report with the Jupiter PD, claiming Lewandowski left her with bruises. Along with three other employees of the conservative outlet, Fields then resigned from Breitbart, which seemed to side with the Republican frontrunner.

Trump flatly denied Fields's claim during a GOP debate, saying she made it all up. The Trump camp backed Lewandowski again in a statement released Tuesday, saying he plans to plead not guilty and is "completely confident that he'll be exonerated."

Norman Jayden. Screenshots from the PlayStation 4 version of 'Heavy Rain,' via SCEE

To many latecomers unsure of purchasing the PlayStation 3 prior to 2010, Heavy Rain served as a decider. It was a justifiably hyped noir thriller from the mind of video gaming's answer to David Fincher, Quantic Dream founder David Cage. His Paris-based studio had already delivered a critical hit with Fahrenheit on previous-gen consoles, but the power of the PS3 enabled Cage and his team to realize an interactive drama like gaming had never seen before. Heavy Rain proved to be a commercial success, pulling in $112 million by the third year of its release against an overall development, distribution, and marketing budget of $45 million. It was also well received critically, being named IGN's PS3 game of 2010, and winning three awards at the 2011 Gaming BAFTAs.

With the benefit of hindsight, Heavy Rain's shortcomings are clearer to see. Its reliance on quick-time events soon got repetitive. Then again, in what other game would you be faced with cutting off your own finger to save a loved one? But with a remastered version of the game now available for the PS4, it's equally apparent that Heavy Rain has aged well in several respects. Its story of a serial killer on the loose, and that situation's connection to one of four playable characters' missing son, remains Quantic Dream's (and by extension Cage's) best, while the game's multiple endings drove home the mechanic of key narrative decisions really mattering.

A game like Heavy Rain could only have emerged from a mind as offbeat as Cage's. He's a truly polarizing figure whose recognizable tropes leave no gamer in the middle ground of opinion. From Fahrenheit to 2013's Beyond: Two Souls, Cage has never really set out to make "traditional" games—for him, gameplay is really only there to serve the narrative.

Raoul Barbet is the director of Life is Strange, a hit for another Parisian studio, Dontnod, in 2015. Barbet worked on motion capture for Heavy Rain, and told me about Cage: "I think sometimes games miss the vision of a director. And it can become more like a publisher's or producer's game, or a gathering of designer ideas without a real heart or direction. With David, there is definitely a vision."

Madison Paige

In conceptualizing Heavy Rain, Cage asked himself: "Would you kill someone innocent to save your son? Would you be prepared to give your own life?" He was fascinated by the difficult moral choice, telling me "only a video game could ask directly, and let players face the consequences of their decisions." You feel invested in Heavy Rain's story because of the complex choices you have to make.

Starting out as a video game composer, Cage eventually decided to develop the filmic stories that were running around his mind. It's interesting that he never pursued film directly considering the common criticism that his games may as well be movies, for the amount of gameplay involved in them. He says that he's more interested in "the strange relationship that can be created between the player and their character in the context of a story, and the very emotional bond that can be established."

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary, 'Walking Heavy'

The story of Heavy Rain weaves a surprisingly dense tapestry of twists. Four characters are playable, and every one of them can buy the farm depending on your choices (and quick-time efficiency). There's Ethan Mars, a father still grieving the death of one son, and now trying to retrieve his other one who's been kidnapped by, it's later revealed, the Origami Killer. Scott Shelby is a gumshoe detective investigating the killer, or so it seems. Madison Paige is a photojournalist whose path crosses Ethan's, and for a time, they find comfort in each other's company. And finally there's FBI agent Norman Jayden, who's addicted both to drugs and an augmented reality.

These characters interact with one another in dramatic and mundane ways, sharing moments that can be either banal or surprisingly real. As Ethan, you'll sword-fight with your kids in the garden; later, you'll use the game's initially odd controls, all holding this and twisting that, to have him undo a bra. There are scenes of relatable vulnerability in Heavy Rain, scenes no other games of the time were going near. Says Barbet: "You have to remember how the market was in 2010. There weren't so many narrative games, and a lot of people were saying that this genre was finished."

Scott Shelby

The visual influences for the game are definitely subtle nods to Cage's own tastes, with the films of Fincher and M. Night Shyamalan well represented. There's also a dash of James Ellroy's Black Dahlia and, adds Cage, "a Korean film called Memories of Murders, dealing with an unresolved case." It's not an obviously blockbuster mix, but while it swings from total nihilism to being hilariously camp in a heartbeat, Heavy Rain somehow achieves not only coherency, but also an affecting hold on its player. Get through the whole Jason Thing, and into the real core of the story, and it becomes tough to turn the game off for the night.

One of the more controversial aspects of the game, though, is the portrayal of Madison. Aside from being Ethan's love interest, she doesn't have a great deal of narrative relevance, and Cage inserts both a shower scene and an uneasy strip-tease section for her to quick-time her way through. Mike Thomsen wrote about her portrayal for IGN: "she's a male fantasy and doesn't seem to have any concept of her own sexual interests or wants unless they're in the context of the men who surround her... I think Madison feels like a concept of a human, more than an actual human."

Ethan Mars

Cage denies that Madison is simply a sexual object. "I don't think she is 'sexualized,' although she definitely has one sensual scene. Love or sex in video games is still very challenging. Heavy Rain deals with this matter in a very soft way compared to many mainstream films, but we chose not to ignore this aspect of human nature. That is, in my opinion, a legitimate decision in the context of any mature story." Perhaps that's a reason to ridicule Cage, but you can't criticize the man for trying to portray emotionally resonant scenarios in big-budget video games.

Play the PS4 version of Heavy Rain, and you can see how more recent titles, like Life is Strange and Until Dawn, have taken cues from it. They're riffing on formulas found in what remains Cage's best game to date, but shifting them into different genres and new narrative experiences. And more than just a product with deadlines to meet and money to make back, Heavy Rain was a significant labor of love for its director.

"Heavy Rain was my baby, my reason to live, and my oxygen for four years," Cage concludes. "And seeing the successful release of the game has been the most extraordinary reward I could have dreamt of, after years of working in the dark."

Heavy Rain is out now for PS4, via PSN, and available in just about every second-hand games store in the world for PS3.

Follow Dan Wilkinson on Twitter.

I've seen and loved Pee-wee's Big Holiday three times now, the new comedy co-written by and starring a still-energetic, 63-year-old Paul Reubens as his famous alter ego, Pee-wee Herman. In the film, the red-bowtied "boy" treks across the country to meet up with his best friend (played by Magic Mike's Joe Manganiello) in New York City, which ultimately brought happy tears to my eyes. The other reviews have strangely been mixed, but I'm convinced that the film's feverish imagination and uniquely timeless humor will be studied in years to come.

Annoyingly, when I tell people this, everyone feels the need to make some joke about whether or not I jerked off while I watched. If you know the character, you likely know the context: In 1991, Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure in a Florida porno theater, a victimless crime in an appropriate masturbatorium during the pre-internet age. The media-driven circus that ensued effectively derailed his career for the better part of a decade.

It's all distant history, so let's try to have more respect for a man who's not just an artist but an auteur. As Manganiello told me, "Paul brought weirdness and a unique brand of comedy to the mainstream. He's very meticulous. That world is very clear to him, but there's a playfulness to him, and he's super calm. I was wondering when I got to set, Was he going to be Pee-wee now, or is he, Paul, wearing the suit? But it's just Paul. I'm hanging out with my friend."

Wonder Showzen co-creator John Lee, who directed Big Holiday, agreed on whose vision took priority: "I thought, I'm here to make his movie better. He knows the character better than any of us, down to the cut of a suit. You can't disagree with that; he's living in this. The gleefulness of the character in this situation makes it seem so unique and from another time, but not. You're swirling in this weird feeling, and that's what I studied from his movies."

During this month's SXSW Film Festival, where Big Holiday made its world premiere, I sat down to chat with an articulate if understandably reserved Reubens, as himself. We spoke about collaboration and the eternal if demanding art of being Pee-Wee.

VICE: With each new project, Pee-wee Herman hits the reset button. In Big Top Pee-wee, he was a farmer-inventor. In Pee-wee's Big Holiday, he doesn't seem to remember ever traveling to find his bike in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Why is he a continual work in progress?
Paul Reubens: That's a good way to put it. I wonder if some of it doesn't go back to being obsessed with The Loretta Young Show when I was little. I have no idea what the show was really like—this is my four-year-old memory of it—but I feel she came down a staircase, there were doors that opened, she would walk out and go, "Hello, I'm Loretta Young, and tonight I'm the farmer's daughter." Every episode was a self-contained, one-hour story that was reset every week, and the only thing in common was Loretta Young playing a different character.

I wonder if that influenced me in some way. I remember in Big Adventure thinking that if I make another movie, they're all going to be completely different and not informed by any of the other ones. They will all have the word "big" in the title, and that was it. No other rules; it could be anything. I always felt like it was retaliation to you gotta make a sequel to everything. Big Adventure was what they called a sleeper hit at the time, meaning no one thought it would do anything, and it did something. Everybody I spoke to wanted to make a sequel, and I was never interested in that.

A lot of children's stuff was also reset, like Harold and the Purple Crayon, which I loved. Comic book characters were like that, too. Here are all the Peanuts characters, but what they're doing isn't related to anything . It's a definite choice, and it unnerves a lot of people: "But you rode a motorcycle before!" Some of that's a mistake. Somebody said to me the other day, "When he asks, 'Ever had two women fight over you?' You did have two women fight over you in your circus movie." Oh my God, I forgot. My answer to that is this is a prequel.

"The more far-fetched you make something, the more reality-based it is because life is totally like that."

The through line between all the Pee-wee movies is the universe you've built, which is somewhat realistic but also half-dreamt.
I am constantly in situations where I'm meeting or hanging out with somebody, and the whole time I'm going, You could not make this up. Yet you could. The more far-fetched you make something, the more reality-based it is because life is totally like that. Something happens to you, and you're like, This couldn't be real. And yet, it's real.

You didn't direct the film, but this is your creation. How does it work? Did John Lee, producer Judd Apatow, and the whole team look to you first in artistic choices?
Yeah, to a degree. Judd sat down at the very beginning and said, "I get it, it's you. You created it. I'm helping you." He said the same thing to John Lee. All the way through this movie, I tried as much as I could to speak up in a scene, or I would say, "John, you make this decision." If it was something I felt strongly about, I would still go like, "Can you live with this?" Or, "Can we talk about this?"

Film is collaborative. You're just forced to collaborate, and I love to... I say that, and I'm not really sure if that's true or not. I'd love to just do it all, but I've been the director, and it's too much. Part of what's stopped me is you can't get enough sleep while being the director and the star. For the first time, that doesn't matter now. I always felt like the bags would be way too big under my eyes. Now we can take them out . I wouldn't get any less sleep as the director, and I don't have to worry that I'll look too dragged out. I don't know, you want someone else watching who has perspective that you don't have.

You may have utilized digital makeup to appear more boyish, but you're in your early 60s and still doing frenetic physical comedy. Can you feel age creeping into your work as the eternally youthful Pee-wee?
Absolutely, I did on the set. This happened to me more on my Broadway show than in the movie, but it is a way to reinforce your good qualities. I would constantly be like, Why am I doing this? The alarm clock would go off, and I'd wake up and laugh out loud: Four hours again? I'm too old, I can't pull this off. Then I'd jump in the car and go be Pee-wee all day, and make it work.

Pee-wee Herman has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in Big Adventure, stars as himself. I'm curious what it's like to be known more for an invented persona, like Elvira, than as the artist Paul Reubens.
It doesn't bother me because I strived for that for so long. Part of the reason for that was that I helped perpetuate that myth about it all. So I'm happier when people think that. I just assume that it doesn't have a bunch of baggage attached to it, it has lots of baggage attached to it. I don't have much control over it.

John Lee jokes that Pee-wee's Big Holiday is the first thing he's made that his kids can actually see. Why did you want him in the director's seat?
He has a sweetness and an authenticity that you can see right off the bat. I was a huge fan of Wonder Showzen. He's got a devilish glint in his eye. You can tell he's bent a little bit, and he's funny. I am a purist in a lot of ways, but not there. It's a good idea to mix it up and have somebody that's dark and light. It's a lucky outcome that he was as good as he was. When people show you their best side in a meeting and they're trying to get the job, it's fifty-fify. I'm a terrible auditioner and a good actor, I think, and if you give me the job, then I'll step up to the plate. I loved John Lee and thought if he delivers forty percent of the vibe I'm getting, we'll be golden. He was, like, two hundred fifty billion percent of what we thought and that was luck because he could've just been terrible and gone, "It's my movie, fuck you."

"I went to art school, and I consider making movies art."

Was there a moment in the making when you realized that Big Holiday would actually live up to your high expectations?
First day. I mean preproduction, before we started shooting. John Lee is a person you can come up to like, "I'm melting down about this and that," and he'll be like, "Alright, don't worry. Let's figure this out because this has an answer, and here's how we'll do it." The most seasoned directors in the world aren't like that. They lose it every day with somebody, or multiple times.

John is super creative and arty, which is another thing that pushed me over the edge. He used the word "art" in our meeting, and that's not a word you hear often in show business. People don't throw that around, but it's a word I respond to. I went to art school, and I consider making movies art. I try not to hang too much on it, but I take it seriously, so I appreciate it when somebody else comes in the room and has that "simpatico-ness." That's not a word, but we'll make it one.

Has Pee-wee evolved for you personally, as far as your own artistic fulfillment?
I'm on the fence about how to answer that. What's my real gut feeling about it? Part of why I don't feel like there is that big of a change is because everything I just said to you about art, I felt that thirty years ago when I made the first one. I always thought if I have to share my process, it's super pretentious and corny. If you read it, you'd think, Oh, this guy is an asshole. But I stand by it all and take it really seriously. I love classic screen comedy and people like Buster Keaton. If in any way I took a grain of that and put it into what I do, I would die a lucky man.

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

Not recommended. Photo via Flickr user Elvert Barnes

Manspreading can get you arrested on a New York City train, but a few researchers out of California seem to think that lacking a sense of personal boundaries can also make men more attractive.

Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk, research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, led a two-part study on how posture affects romantic interest online and in person.

Her team looked at videos of speed dates and dating app profile photos and found both men and women were rated more romantically desirable when they needlessly stretched out their legs and arms.

"Expansive posture" was particularly effective for men in the study—87 percent of men who scored second dates were 'spreaders.

The researchers say perceived "openness" and "dominance" were what drove men and women to like potential mates who take up more space than everyone else. Spreading predicted attractiveness better than smiling or laughing.

Thankfully not everyone in the academic world is recommending manspreading as a winning pickup routine. University of Notre Dame anthropology prof Agustin Fuentes told The Atlantic today he thought the connection "superficial" at best.

It's also worth noting the findings were "nonverbal" and "at zero acquaintance." In other words, these extra-seat-takers weren't tested on their winning personalities.

Since no woman ever would agree with these findings, let's pray "manspreading" doesn't take up any more space in the internet hype cycle.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

This what we've come to in America. Photo courtesy of Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz graduated from the prestigious University of Chicago and made his name in New York City as a freelance illustrator with gigs at the fanciest magazine in America. Today, he lives in an 8' x 4 1/2' "pod" inside his friend's San Francisco living room. But he claims the move was fueled by neither poverty nor desperation.

"It doesn't sound appealing to say, 'I'm gonna build myself a box,'" Berkowitz tells me. "The ideas people conjure up don't sound nice, and I don't blame them for that."

So why, then, would an adult human being choose to live in a place so cramped that he can't even stand up to put on pants? The 25-year-old is actually just the latest example of people willing to go to extremes just to be in a city where the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment is $3,670. The head-spinning rapidity of gentrification in the Bay Area has forced homeless people into tent cities, but it's also inspired a Google engineer to live inside a truck to save 90 percent of his income.

Berkowitz, who grew up outside of New York, decided to move to the West Coast to be near his brother. He was originally in Oakland, but kept poking around on Craigslist looking for something across the bay. That's about when he was struck with the idea for the box, and asked a friend if he would float it to his three roommates. They all said yes, agreed on $400 for the rent price, and Berkowitz took his first foray into woodworking––ultimately spending $1,300 to erect the miniature domicile. The walls just went up two and a half weeks ago, and today he basically lives in an IKEA bed frame that extends to the ceiling.

Meanwhile, the man's possessions have been dispersed between his parents and his brother.

Berkowitz, who is single, swears it's nice in there––and soundproof, too. "If I meet someone and that person is disgusted by the idea of a box, then maybe I should be spending time with someone more akin to myself," he says. "It's not a disgusting place to be. I'm not being unreasonable when I say it's nicer than most people's bedrooms."

In true San Francisco spirit, Berkowitz is already turning his idea into a startup. The goal is to help people avoid paying almost $900 to live in a tent, and to help renters supplement their incomes by hosting their own box-dwellers. Berkowitz promises a reasonable price for the pods, because he's more focused on honing his craft than making a ton of cash.

Presumably, that same mentality landed the guy in the pod in the first place, but he's far from alone. Homeownership is but a distant dream to most millennials. And the places they can afford are far from desirable to most of the educated young people who think life is a brunch-fueled quest to "find themselves" rather than a rat race to make money. According to a Zillow report from last year, the best places to live when it comes to both affordable rent and job growth include Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Jacksonville, Florida. But when was the last time you've heard of anyone moving there?

It seems like we're moving toward a future in which many educated young people are crowded into three or four cities, scratching one another's eyes out over limited real estate and cobbling together freelance jobs to make ends meet. But when you see people moving into boxes and tents and trucks to make it work, an actual apartment in an allegedly bland city like Houston starts to seem more palatable.

So what do these kinds of stories tell us about the changing dynamics of class in America? Now that people at the top of their fields willingly subject themselves to such cramped quarters just to be in a trendy city like San Francisco, does that mean the definition of "upper class" will soon be determined not just by your neighborhood or block but by the spatial dimensions of your living capsule?

Berkowitz says this is probably not a sustainable living solution, but that he's totally fine with it for the foreseeable future.

"I don't think I'll raise my family in a pod," he tells me. "But I'm not ruling it out."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Steve DeAngelo. Photo by Nick Carew

Tuesday's episode of Weediquette on VICELAND opens with host Krishna Andavolu talking through the dicey future of California's small-scale cannabis growers with Steve DeAngelo, founder and head of Harborside Health Center, the nation's largest medical marijuana dispensary. DeAngelo began his cannabis career decades ago as an underground retailer and a fiery political activist, then moved "into the light" by opening a licensed medical marijuana store designed to serve as a model for the industry.

His flagship shop in Oakland has helped transform the popular conception of retail cannabis from something shady to a showplace. In that capacity, DeAngelo tells VICE, his enterprise has "worked directly with more small cannabis growers than any other organization in the state of California, and perhaps the world."

Since the Weediquette episode was filmed, the state legislature in California has passed a landmark piece of marijuana legislation—the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA)—that will create statewide regulation of medical marijuana cultivation, distribution, and sales for the first time. And this November, voters in the Golden State will very likely decide on full recreational legalization via the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA), a ballot initiative bankrolled by tech billionaire Sean Parker. So we caught up with DeAngelo to see how these profound changes will affect the fate of small-scale weed farmers already struggling to survive the coming age of corporate cannabis.

Related: Watch our Weediquette documentary, 'The Cannabis Republic of Uruguay'

VICE: California has gone through some seismic changes in terms of cannabis regulation in the last few months. How do you see things shaking out, particularly for small growers?
Steve DeAngelo: I'm terribly concerned about the state's medical marijuana regulations, which we call MMRSA. If some key provisions of this legislation are not changed, it threatens to destroy the entire legal cannabis distribution system in California by imposing a novel framework that no other state that has regulated cannabis thus far has imposed. And that is a mandatory distributor level. This means growers would have to sell their cannabis exclusively to a licensed distributor, which would then handle and transport the cannabis at each intermediate step in the supply chain.

What happens now in California is that a grower can bring cannabis directly to a dispensary, an extract maker, or an infused-products manufacturer—one step in the supply chain. But under MMRSA, the grower has to supply cannabis exclusively to a distributor, and those distribution companies—I know because I've talked to them—want to be paid fifteen to thirty-five percent of the value of the product every time they transport it. So at the very least (grower to distributor, distributor to testing lab, testing lab to dispensary), you're talking about adding forty-five percent on to the cost of the product. Then the dispensary keystones that forty-five percent price increase, turning it into a 90 percent price increase. Which means, at a bare minimum, the medical cannabis sold under MMRSA is anticipated to be almost twice the cost of what we're selling now.

Well, we happen to have a very robust underground market here in California that already underprices the legitimate market—at current rates. So if there's a doubling of prices in the dispensaries, there will be massive outflow back to the illicit market, and dispensaries (and the growers working with them) will either go out of business or get forced back into the black market.

How did California end up with, in your view, such an unworkable system?
Southern Wine & Spirits and the Teamster's Union wielded their political influence with California's legislature and executive branch. This is a power play by the liquor lobby and the union that supports it, neither of which have ever lifted a finger to help medical marijuana patients suffering under these unjust laws. They're attempting to parachute in and extract something like half the value of the state's entire medical cannabis supply, even if it means doubling the cost of this vital medicine to patients, just so they can go from rich to even richer. It's a travesty.

Do you think the specter of "Big Marijuana" has distracted people from these types of large outside interests moving in?
There is no Big Marijuana in California. It hasn't been allowed to exist because twenty years after passing Prop 215, we still haven't implemented statewide regulations. So what's happening is that Big Alcohol is now filling that vacuum and trying to grab a big chunk of the market.

Are the same mandatory distributor provisions in AUMA?
No, but here's how it's all connected. AUMA wisely removed the mandatory distributor provision, except for the highest volume level of cultivator. And that's a good thing, but AUMA also gives the state legislature the power to change that, and require the mandatory distributor for all cultivators, including on the smallest scale. So the strategy of the liquor lobby is to get this distributor system in place now through MMRSA, and then when AUMA passes in November, it'll go back to the legislature and try to convince them to edit the adult use initiative to its liking.

The Teamsters and Southern Wine & Spirits rank among the largest political contributors to the legislature, so unless we organize some pretty intense opposition—something I'm working on now—it's very possible that the legislature could over-rule the will of the people and allow these guys to come in and take a huge chunk of the market for adult sales, just as they have in the medical market.

And in exchange for all that market share, they'll provide no real value. Keep in mind what we're talking about. You've got a pound of cannabis that's worth let's say $2,000 wholesale and fits in a box that's one foot square. And these distributors—who don't know a thing about cannabis—are expecting to get fifteen percent of that—$300—every time they move it from Point A to Point B?

Are you organizing opposition to MMRSA entirely or just these provisions?
Just these provisions. They were passed literally in the dead of night, at the very end of the legislative session, by lawmakers who did not read them. There was no opportunity for stakeholder input, and it is an unworkable system that will crash legal cannabis in California. Because these distributors, who are operating out of blind greed, don't understand that since there's a parallel, unregulated underground market for cannabis, their avarice is going to collapse the very market they're trying to hone in on.

Is this going to affect small growers disproportionally?
It's gonna wipe everybody out because there's not going to be a viable legal market. If these provisions go forward, something like eighty percent of small growers won't even make it into the MMRSA system, for a variety of reasons. If they're growing on land where the landlord isn't aware of what they're doing, that's not going to work. Or they could be on land that does not meet environmental standards, or they're not on land zoned for commercial agriculture, or, and this is a huge number of people, they may have felony convictions. The biggest hurdle is that MMRSA will impose regulatory costs, meaning growers will have to hire lawyers and accountants and install security equipment and seed-to-sale tracking to comply. That's serious money. Even for a small grower it could be $100,000 or more.

And then the small growers who get through all that will be beholden to the distributors. We don't know how many will be licensed, but if the people responsible for putting this provision in the law have their way, there would be very few of them. And so the distributors will control shelf space, and the small growers will be transformed from farmers into serfs. If you talk to any independent winery in the state of California, who also suffer under a mandatory distribution system, they hate it. It's the bane of their existence.

In the Weediquette episode, you advise small growers to focus on producing the highest quality cannabis possible. Why?
Small growers just can't compete on price with larger growers, because of economies of scale, so they need to conceive of themselves and market themselves as artisan producers of a very high quality special product. One of the things we see in food production is that it's very difficult to maintain the highest quality when you expand past a certain level of output, and that's true with cannabis as well. Which creates a viable niche for small growers.

Overall, my message to anyone looking at these transitions in the market with a sense of dread is to please come in to the light anyway. Because this industry desperately needs people whose value system reflects the collaborative, cooperative values the cannabis plant has taught us. It can be irritating, frustrating, and even dispiriting to deal with all of the laws and regulations that are coming our way, but if we don't do that, then people like the liquor lobby—who know nothing about cannabis, and care nothing about cannabis—are going to be the ones in control.

Looking forward to the 2016 elections, can the next president possibly roll back the progress of the last four years, or have we reached a tipping point?
As much of a disappointment as Obama has been on this issue, things could be a lot worse in the next administration. If we don't pass an adult use cannabis law in California this November, we could easily see a revival of the kind of enforcement actions we saw here in 2011, when US Attorney's across the state vowed to wipe out medical cannabis distribution. They closed over six hundred dispensaries, including many that were raided.

I've been through enough political campaigns to know that no piece of legislation—AUMA included—is going to make anybody completely happy. There's always something you don't like and something you wish were in it. But until we pass it, we're going to live in the shadow of ourselves or our family members having their lives ruined through arrests and incarceration. Maybe some people would rather keep cannabis prohibition in place, so they can go on making millions, but I think that what serves the cannabis community best is having this plant finally be liberated and legal. And so I can't imagine anybody who loves and cares about cannabis not embracing this initiative. Because we could be in terrible trouble if we don't have this shield going into the next presidential administration.

WEEDIQUETTE airs Tuesday nights at 11PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Follow David Bienenstock on Twitter.

Every year, for Poland's National Independence Day, tens of thousands of citizens attend a nationalist march in Warsaw—one of the largest in Europe. Since its inception, a cell of far-right soccer fans—or "ultras"—in attendance have clashed with police, and the demonstration has turned into a ferocious battle between the hooligans and the state.

This year, however, Poland elected a right-wing, socially conservative government on the eve of the march. We went to Warsaw to see how the far right Law and Justice Party would affect the traditionally hostile event.

Photos via mtlurb.com

Snapchat has really grown from the days when it was used primarily to send nudes: take, for instance, when Montreal teenagers allegedly used it this weekend to document their participation in committing arson.

Montreal police say there are three underaged suspects in the arson case—two of whom they have identified. They believe the teens may have participated in a fire set at Snowdon Theatre, an abandoned, deteriorating two-floor cinema that was built in the 1930s. At different points in its history, the theatre showed both X-rated and Charlie Chaplin films.

At 4:30 PM on Saturday, which is kind of early to be committing arson if you ask us, 90 firefighters responded to smoke coming out of the back of the derelict theatre, located on Décarie Boulevard in the neighbourhood of Snowdon.

''For now, we will put our efforts into questioning the two minors, extract as much information as we can," said Abdullah Emran of the Montreal police told CBC.

In one of the Snapchat photos in question, which were also posted on a Montreal real estate forum, someone stands over a pile of foam blocks perched on a makeshift platform. In another, the pile of foam shown in the previous photo is on fire. And in a wide shot taken from further back, the fire appears to have grown amongst the numerous graffiti tags and red Solo cups littering the decrepit theatre floor.

The theatre sustained heavy damage. Police currently are still trying to confirm if the photos are authentic, but say that the fire was "suspicious" due to the fact that there were no utilities in the building, which had last been rented in 2013 when its tenants were evicted because of structural safety concerns.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Video games may have once been considered a useless hobby, placed in the same category as things like comic books and cartoons. Now, everyone plays games, and everyone is a gamer. Your mom playing Dots on her phone is a gamer. That precocious four-year-old blazing through Super Mario on her 3DS is a gamer. So are your teachers who play Words with Friends and your cousin who plays the weekly Nightfall Strike on Destiny. If you're reading this, you're probably a gamer, since about 155 million people in the US play video games regularly.

This is all to say that "gamer" isn't so much a demographic anymore as it is a description. So for our look at gamers' personal spaces, we chose people—a photographer, academics, musicians, programmers—who've incorporated gaming seamlessly into their adult lives.

Nathan Bajar, 24, photographer:

VICE: What game are you playing the most right now?
I've started getting into playing Super Smash Bros more competitively. I go to this place, Action Burger, on Mondays. It's really nice, and there's always someone to play with. I have my console setup back in Jersey, so it's nice to have a place to play here in the city. I mostly play as Mario and Corrin. Can I show you one of my most prized possessions?

Yes.
I got this Pikachu card from one of my oldest friends. He had it signed for me by the voice of Ash. It's pretty sweet. Oh, and the shiny Charizard. From that same friend. One day we were playing Pokemon in my parents' room with my cousin. He always had the coolest cards, and so he surprised us with this shining Charizard. We play really dramatically too, with an emphasis on playing the cards. So it was like POW shining Charizard. And I was like, "Dude, I fucking need that card," and he gave it to me.

What was you first memory playing a game?
My older cousin had a Nintendo, and we played it at his house. The first game was Street Fighter, and I begged my parents to get me one. But they got me a SEGA Genesis. I played that Power Rangers game, and this weird game called Tinhead, but Pokemon's pretty prominent in my life.

Do you still play games back home in Jersey?
My room back at home is always the gaming den. When we have these big parties with like sixty of my cousins and family, all the kids come into my room, and we play card games and fighting games. Fighting games are really important to me—they're something I hold dear to my heart.

Do you play with your girlfriend?
Yeah! She's a big gamer too. But she lives in DC. So most of the time we just FaceTime each other while we're playing games.

Mike McKeever, 27, Musician:

This is how I see my future. Photo via Fallout Wikia

I ask because I am decidedly not. I am a miserable bastard. I walk around the city in a slow-cooker of scorn and misanthropy, deriding and criticizing what I see as stupid or, at best, deluded. It's partly because I'm a stand-up comedian but also because, from the sociopathic mass-capitalism on display at the Eaton Centre to a Blundstone-infested, self-serving, upper-class farmers market, all I see is a society gleefully jerking itself off into oblivion.

Illustrations by Ella de Souza

This article originally appeared on VICE Poland

"Here you will learn everything you need to know about gambling, prostitution, battery and extortion," my boss, Józef, told me while staring at the fruit on the slot machine. A cherry, a cherry, a cherry, and a strawberry. His hand – a hand as wide and fat as a bear's paw – bashed the side of the machine. It was 5 o'clock in the morning, and I had been working since 6PM the day before. I took some breaks – a couple of minutes here and there which I spent hiding in the bathroom, trying to relax a little. It was my first day working at Yangtze as a waiter, and had told myself it was going to be the last. But I ended up staying for a few months because the tips were good, and I wanted to save so I could go on holiday and never return to that shithole.

Józef was nearing 50 at the time. Over six feet tall, he had the face and body of a gorilla – short legs, enormous shoulders and a small, round belly. The look in his small, dark eyes was one of indifference and emptiness. Emptiness and indifference are a part of everything Józef – or "Matador"*, as he is known in the Polish underworld – does.

In 2007, I had just graduated from high school. My first girlfriend had dumped me three months earlier, which I responded to by linking sad songs as status messages on Gadu Gadu – the Polish chat service that was popular at the time. I needed a job, so I took my pathetic CV to the Yangtze restaurant, situated in Warsaw's market square.

The place was always full of customers and decorated with a couple of bamboo sticks and fake plant leaves. Faux Chinese pictures hung on the walls. Aside from the cheap decor, there was clearly money invested in this place. That's the first time I saw Józef, standing next to the bar, looking like a rather busy businessman and host – greeting customers and filling in shipment forms. He seemed like he could be a lovely family man. I obviously had no idea what I was getting into. Here are some of the things that I experienced and some of the characters I met while working in a restaurant owned by a Polish gangster.

THE PACKAGE

One evening, a well-dressed middle-aged couple ordered a tiramisu for dessert. "That's not on the menu," I replied. My boss appeared out of nowhere, hands folded, his air uncharacteristically gentle. "Please don't worry, we will bring you some tiramisu from our other restaurant," he said to the customers. He told me to go to his other restaurant, La Fortuna*, and ask for tiramisu. "You'll get a bonus if you hurry," he added. I walked through the crowded market square to La Fortuna, which looked like the Doge's Palace on the inside. All 50 tables were fully set but there was no one there, except for the chef who was sitting at one of the tables. He was sipping whiskey and reading a newspaper.

La Fortuna has about three to five customers a day, but the restaurant was not established to make money any way – it was supposed to impress the business partners of Matador's father, a well-known Polish "businessman". Every now and then, he invites a group of Warsaw's major league gangsters to gamble and have dinner there. They'll have lobster or beef and sweetbread and sip on the most expensive whiskey around. Once they've digested, they'll go meet the prostitutes waiting for them in Yangtze and keep the party going to the wee hours.

The tiramisu was waiting for me, in a neat little package. I took it to the kitchen of the Yangtze and asked the chef to prepare it – take it out, split it in two and powder it a little. He looked at me and smiled but he didn't touch the package. Józef came in, patted me on my arm and told me to clean up the now empty table of the people who had ordered the tiramisu. It turned out they'd given me a 150 zloty (£28) tip.

Józef put his enormous hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. "If you keep performing like this, you'll get some nice side jobs," he said. The cook would later tell me that I transported a very expensive tiramisu package from one restaurant to the other and had basically become a drug mule.

THE CAMERA

One night, I was standing outside the Yangtze, waiting for the boss and his cronies to pay their prostitutes and finally go home, so I could close up and go to bed. It wasn't looking like that would happen soon, because they'd lost a couple of grand that night and were trying to win the ladies' rewards on the slot machine. Józef knew that the girls were upmarket professionals working for one of the most important people in town, so his usual approach of giving someone a beating and telling her to get the fuck out, wouldn't have worked in this case.

I was also waiting for him to win something, because he'd lost so badly that he'd borrowed some money from my tips. If I didn't stay around, he wasn't going to remember anything the next day and I would never get my money back. Suddenly, the slot machine played a song and spit out a ton of coins. Józef gave me a handful without counting. It must have been about 200 zloty, and he owed me a hundred.

- "How much do you know about computers?" he asked, suddenly in a great mood.

- "As much as anybody else," I replied.

- "Come on, help me out. You're smart, these fucking idiots don't know shit," he said, pointing at his helpers. We went upstairs, while the prostitutes got ready to leave.

The attic was basically one big pile of red armchairs, bar a table on which sat an old PC. Józef asked me to copy his birthday pictures from a camera to the computer and email them to somebody. He sat next to me, extremely excited, like a little boy who is about to show his father a prize. When I clicked "copy", his dark eyes begun darting between the screen and my face.

There were 15 pictures, all taken in a large living room. A couple of passed-out naked women, empty bottles, lobster and pieces of what looked like to be a roasted pig were scattered around the room. All the pictures were a variation on the same theme; A bunch of half-naked guys, threesomes, details of male genitalia, a smiling face of a woman with a black eye. One picture stood out: Józef, naked, is standing next to a friend – both smiling at the camera. Two women are going down on them, while Józef is holding a large pork leg and his friend's is holding a Kalashnikov.

I attached the pictures to the email and said nothing. Józef grinned and said: "I had a party, for my birthday."

PATRYCJA

Patrycja* was 18, had brown, shoulder-length hair, the body of a model and slightly crooked teeth. She wasn't too bright but she was alright. She was the first to realise that nobody was getting a proper wage and very boldly shared these suspicions with the boss. She would get aggressive and demand money from him in front of customers. Whenever that happened, Józef would take her upstairs and they would disappear for about half an hour. She would always return relaxed and a bit ruffled. After every one of these private sessions she would forget all about the financial injustice.

She was one of the few women who got some respect from Józef, instead of punches. Sometimes, he would pick somebody and be alright to them. But his soft spot for certain people didn't stop him from raping waitresses or smashing his girlfriend's head on the hood of a taxi. Most girls, like Patrycja, resigned after a month or two – sometimes after one of Józef's gross friends or business partners put their hands on them. And after a while, they'd become managers of other bars. They knew what they wanted and what they had to do to get it.

KAROL

Karol* was a boy from a small town – a total simpleton, but with a kind heart. He worked as a kitchen porter. One time, he took his break in a bar next door, but he stayed out longer than he was supposed to, because there was an important match on. When he came back, the boss and one of his cronies dragged him out of the kitchen and beat him like a dog in front of all the customers. They took care to hit him without leaving any marks on his face, though. I had never seen anything like it before, and I had no idea what to do. I didn't stand up for Karol, nor did any of the customers or the rest of the staff.

Karol apologised to the boss and returned to work. "Report it, get the fuck out of here, do something," I said to him – careful not to be overheard. He refused because apparently he wanted to get somewhere in life and Józef had the connections to help him get there. "He's like that, it's no big deal," he said. "And anyway," he went on, "the police chief drinks coffee here on the house, so who am I supposed to report it to?"

It was a fair point: The police never touched Józef and neither did the city government, whom he owed several hundreds of thousands. That debt had somehow escaped their attention, while the boss gladly complained to the local press about rents ruining him financially.

THE CUSTOMERS

The Yangtze attracted a lot of interesting customers, of course. Like Jarek* – a thief who'd always have a brand new designer jacket for you, for a special price. 'The Gypsy King'*, the boss of the local Romani underworld, would also pop in every once in a while. Over 6 foot tall and at least 25 stone, he was decked out in golden chains and always wore a tracksuit and a cowboy hat. He'd always have four to seven shifty-eyed boys between 12 and 17 years old with him too. Their hair always shined with hair gel, while they all wore Lacoste shirts they might have bought from Jarek. The boys were much shorter than The King, and whined a lot.

We also had some lame popstars come by, and local pseudo-celebrities who appeared in shitty reality TV shows. They were all proud to know Józef but to me, it didn't really make a difference whose sick I was cleaning from the toilet. I just wanted to be able to go on holiday.

§

Józef never hit me or really threatened my life. But what surprised me were the moments when he yelled at me and returned after a couple of minutes to apologise. He would sometimes explain his behaviour, praise me or stop his cronies from mocking me. He probably had serious mental problems and some kind of manipulative disorder. Add insane amounts of drugs, brutality and lawlessness to that cocktail and you get the idea.

The Yangtze and La Fortuna don't operate in their old form anymore, because Józef is in prison for battery and attempted rape. The names and the interior of the restaurants that came in their place have been changed, but it's clear that the same kind of people are behind them. I see them on the streets sometimes, high fiving each other, parking their yellow Hummers illegally and laughing in eveyone's face. They might be looking for new kitchen help soon.

*The names of the author, the people and the restaurants in this article have been changed.

@ella_desouza

Then-US Attorney Kendall Coffey talks with reporters in front of federal court on Friday, May 17, 1996, in Miami. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Donald Trump isn't running a traditional campaign, and he doesn't surround himself with traditional, or even experienced, staffers. One of his top foreign policy advisors cites a stint in Model UN on his résumé, and Trump's most prominent spokesperson to date is a 26-year-old working her first political job. Then, of course, there's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with simple battery on Tuesday for grabbing a female journalist who was trying to ask the boss a question at an event earlier this month. But even by Trump standards, Kendall Coffey, one of the attorneys reportedly representing Lewandowski, seems like a strange choice.

As Salon reported in 2000, Coffey was once the US attorney in southern Florida, a plush gig as a federal prosecutor where he focused on drug cases, immigration violations, and fraud in the healthcare system. But after losing a case against two alleged drug traffickers in February 1996, he apparently went out on the town, shelling out $900 for a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne at a strip club called Lipstik. According to the Miami Herald, when he began dishing out another $200 in "Lipstik money" for a private dance with a performer named Tiffany, Coffey got frisky, kissing her on the lips (a real no-no) and, when she pulled away, biting her arm.

"He bit her, but not like a crazy man,'' the woman's husband told the Sun-Sentinel in 1996. "But he did break the skin."

The prosecutor drew blood too, according to the Herald, and an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice in Washington was enough to send Coffey packing. (Coffey denied ever going to the club, much less biting the woman, that March, but he did resign a day after being summoned to Washington over the probe.)

The attorney's career wasn't over, though. He later got involved in the Elian Gonzalez custody fiasco, and was even retained by Al Gore's recount legal squad in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 election. Now Coffey is once again squarely in the thick of a heated presidential election, another sideshow in a country full of them.

Although news of the hijacking of EgyptAir Flight MS181 from Alexandria to Cairo terrified people when it was first announced in the wee hours of the morning, by now it's turned into something of a joke.

The hijacker, Seif Eldin Mustafa, diverted the plane to Cyprus, where he held it for several hours under the threat of a suicide belt. Aside from a demand to see his ex-wife, his requests were bizarre and incoherent. And when he finally surrendered himself (after posing for a photograph with a passenger), it was determined that his suicide belt was a fake. Cypriot and Egyptian officials alike have dismissed Mustafa as an unstable individual, while social media has turned him into a (rather divisive) joke.

While Tuesday's episode turned out to be a bungled mess, the reality is that being aboard a hijacked plane is one of the more terrifying things most people can imagine. To better understand the experience of living through a hijacking, VICE reached out to Michael J. Thexton, a survivor of the 1986 Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking.

In that event, four men from the Abu Nidal Organization, a Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist splinter group, disguised as security guards stormed a Boeing 747-121 on a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan, en route from Mumbai to New York. The pilots escaped, grounding the plane, but the hijackers took 361 passengers and 19 crew hostage for 16 hours, singling out Thexton to be held at gunpoint for about 12 hours before ultimately opening fire on everyone. They killed 21 people and wounded 120 more that day. But Thexton had no idea how deadly the hijacking would be when he saw the first gunmen. He didn't know how anything would play out. VICE spoke to him about that uncertainty, and the psychology of hijackings, during and after the event.

VICE: When did you first realize that you were in danger?
Michael J. Thexton: I hadn't even sat down. I'd just put my bag on my seat, and then I saw a man struggling with the flight attendant... and he had a pistol in his hand of some sort. My first thought was just bewilderment, really—I just stared at him. Then there was a noise in the front door that I had just come in, and there was a man in uniform with a big rifle. I thought he was a security guard come to deal with the man in the second doorway. somebody said, "This is a hijack, put your hands up." We didn't know what was going to happen. It was a feeling of terrible uncertainty.

There'd been plenty of hijackings before this, but did you have a mental frame of reference at the time for what was happening to you?
In the early part of the hijack, I just kept telling myself, People get off. Because at that stage, I'd never heard of a hijack where everybody died. We were stuck on the ground in basically a friendly, reasonably well-organized country. So I thought that it would be OK.

The flight attendants were by all accounts pretty heroic. How much of a role did they play in keeping everything calm and orderly in the cabin?
They were all very dedicated—they were just brilliant. Never a tremor in their voice. They would say, "Ladies and gentlemen, please stay in your seats, or you'll be shot," in the same way that they would say, "Ladies and gentlemen, there's a short traffic delay, we apologize for the inconvenience." I'm sure it kept everybody thinking .

What about the hijackers themselves? What were they like, and how did their demeanor influence you?
At the beginning, they were obviously quite jumpy. They'd just taken over a plane—they didn't know how that was going to go. Then we had passengers in the back three cabins of this jumbo jet being supervised by two hijackers. And because it was before 9/11 that was all they needed. I think we were all convinced that there were more of them—I was paranoid that there was actually one of them standing behind me. I don't think that would work for them now, because somebody would have a go. But on that day, they kept control very easily.

Photo by Kraipit Phanvut via Getty

Did it ever cross your mind to stand up and do something?
I don't think it did, really. When I was with a mass of people, I felt that it would be OK—that somebody might get hurt, but I would be alright. Safety in numbers. By the time I was singled out, there was nothing I could really do. I was unarmed and terrified.

I've thought about it a lot since 9/11. I think that now I probably would have attacked them, and a lot of people would have attacked them. I would have expected I was going to die anyway. That's what you all expect after 9/11. But on that day, I just felt that there was nothing I could do.

How long did it take for them to single you out? Were you aware of why they were doing it? And was that the first point that you really started fearing for your life?
At the beginning of the hijack, I was looking at the two people sitting next to me. They looked to me to be Americans, and I remember thinking in a rather brutal fashion: They'll be in front of me. The Americans are more unpopular than the British. I think everybody was trying to find someone who was in a more miserable position than them. It's a rather unpleasant human .

It was about three hours into the hijack... the leader came into the aisle and picked somebody up from an aisle seat. He was an Indian, but he happened to be an American passport holder. And he shot him and threw him out to mark how serious they were. But I was unaware of that because I was minding my own business, and the plane must have absorbed the sound.

Then they announced that they were going to collect the passports. Thinking sensibly, you don't hand your passport in. You just get rid of it. But I was so under their control that I just handed my passport to [the flight attendant] still thinking that there would be Americans, and they would be in front of us. She, despite being Indian, had come to the same conclusion. So with extreme bravery, she removed all of the Western American passports from what she was given. When she went back with this bag full of passports, the only American passports in it belonged to Indians and Pakistanis, and she was able to persuade my name was called. I couldn't understand why they would have picked me.

They didn't communicate to you clearly what they wanted, but you assumed they had a political motive, targeting Americans. How did you glean that?
When they took over the plane, I thought it was possible that they were Pakistanis—that it was some sort of Pakistani revolution. I'd been reading a magazine in the departure lounge, and it talked about Benazir Bhutto being allowed back into the country that summer and starting up a political opposition to the rather dictatorial government. Which was partly trying to persuade myself that, if it was a Pakistani problem, they wouldn't be so worried about the foreigners.

It was only much later that I was up at the front of the plane, and the leader sat down in a chair opposite me, and said to me, "The Americans and Israelis have stolen my country," at which point I finally gleaned that he was a Palestinian of some sort.

You were chosen about four hours in, but this hijacking went on for sixteen hours. Tell me a little bit about your experience over those next twelve hours.
I was just kneeling there at the front door while the hijacker made his demands and wondering if they would be met. I said prayers and thought about all the people I would leave behind. I thought about all the people in the mountaineering expedition who I hadn't gotten on with. I decided I didn't want to die angry or afraid. And I was determined not to be angry with the hijackers or afraid of them. Once I decided that, they were much less frightening. I was pretty sure they were going to shoot me eventually. But that's what they were going to do, and they weren't going to make me hate them. It wasn't going to change me.

This hijacking ended in a particularly violent way. How did that unfold for you?
For twelve hours, there were maybe five or six incidents where something happened. Most of the time I was just sitting there. I actually was asleep, dozing by the door . I could tell that it was darker and hotter... something must be wrong with the electrical system. I sat there thinking, I'm back with the others. I stand a chance of getting out of this. But it was obviously about to kick off in a minute because it was getting dark, things were getting tense, and the hijackers were all taking up position around the plane.

Then, when it was completely dark, what I remember was a single bang. I remember crouching on the floor. Then there was automatic gunfire from just a few yards at the front of the plane. And then more automatic gunfire from the back of the plane. And that sounded like it was from another country; it was so far away. They just emptied into the passengers.

Then I remember it being quiet. Which is a strange thing because it can't have been quiet. There were people dead and dying. But it'd been so very, very loud, and then it wasn't loud anymore. I could see on the far side of the plane had not come down on the wing... but I wasn't getting back on the plane for anything. So I slid off the wing onto the ground, which is a long way down, I have to say. But I had to be getting off that wing.

Did you pay closer attention to hijackings after this?
Yes. And other similarly dramatic things tend to affect me more.

How do you process them?
What we went through was nothing like 9/11. They're all awful in a completely different way. I think about the unfortunate people and often how much worse it is for them than it was for me. It strikes me sometimes it's much worse for people on the outside than for people on the inside. You worry about all sorts of things. At least if you're on the inside you know what's happening.

Donald Trump recharges his batteries on stage during a commercial break at the CNN town hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Tuesday. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"How many times can the same people ask the same questions? You just get tired of it."

Donald Trump has said a lot of things over the years—about banning Muslims from entering the US, about deporting undocumented immigrants en masse, about how he could have had sex with Princess Di—so it was inevitable that he would one day say something that everyone could agree with.

It came well into the second hour of a Republican town hall event Tuesday night, in which CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and a cast of carefully curated ordinary Americans got a chance to ask each of the three remaining GOP presidential candidates questions, one by one, and those candidates each got the chance to completely ignore those questions and spray clouds of rhetoric like startled, flailing squids. It was a rerun, in other words, of the same episode that's played out over and over again during this interminable primary campaign.

The night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, began with Cooper asking Texas Senator Ted Cruz about his suggestion that US law enforcement should patrol "Muslim neighborhoods" as a way to combat terrorism; a plan that has been roundly condemned by New York City law enforcement officials who tried monitoring local Muslims and realized it didn't help anything. Cruz shrugged off the criticism, calling New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio a "left-wing radical," and raising the specter of Europe's Muslim-dominated "no-go zones" where the police fear to tread, a fairly common myth floating around the far-right wing.

The exchange set a pattern: Someone would ask Cruz a question and he would either avoid answering, or find a way to bend it to his purpose. A job interview-style query about Cruz's biggest weakness prompted a monologue about how dang much he loves the Constitution. A father asked Cruz if he would support a bill aimed at stopping the Department of Veterans Affairs from overprescribing drugs—a measure named after his son, who died of an overdose while in VA care—and the Senator just repeated vague platitudes about VA reform and the War on Drugs.

A woman asked what Cruz would do specifically for women and he rambled about how great his mom and wife are (in other words, he isn't going to do anything in particular for women). When Cooper brought up the ugly campaign fight over a National Enquirer story accusing Cruz of infidelity—a story that Cruz has accused Trump's campaign of planting—and asked whether the Texan would support Trump as the party's nominee, Cruz hemmed and hawed for long minutes, then basically refused to answer the question.

Trump was even more difficult to pin down during his hour onstage, though you can't fault Cooper's efforts. The CNN host naturally brought up the day's biggest political story, about Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski getting charged with battery after grabbing a reporter's arm at a campaign rally. Trump insisted that the journalist, Michelle Fields, had changed her story; then, after being presented with the evidence, he showed a Torah scholar's appetite for parsing whether she actually "fell to the ground" or "almost fell to the ground."

The implication was that Fields is lying—not about being touched, as Lewandowski and the Trump campaign initially claimed, but about the severity of the touch. Later, when Cooper brought up a spat the two candidates had over Trump's retweeting a nasty photo of Cruz's wife, Trump replied, "He started it," and the CNN anchor shot back, "That's the argument of a five-year-old."

When it came to foreign policy, not day-to-day Twitter spats, however, Trump seemed less prepared. The most substantial exchange came when Cooper challenged the candidate to clarify some of his statements about nuclear proliferation, since Trump has said he's worried about more countries acquiring nuclear weapons, but also OK with Japan, South Korea, and maybe Saudi Arabia getting nukes. Trump's response was, basically, Whatever, if it means the US does less to police the world, fine. Later, he pulled the same light-on-details act when he said the US government should provide healthcare and education, and then said no, the states should, or the private sector should get involved, or something.

We've seen this all before—the avoidance of questions, the pandering, the almost pathological focus on talking points. The latter was most grossly displayed Tuesday when a police officer who'd been shot 15 times while fighting a white supremacist who was attacking a Sikh temple asked the Republican frontrunner what could be done to combat prejudice. Trump had a chance to soften his tone, to look presidential while interacting with a man universally regarded as a hero. Instead, he trotted out some stuff about Muslim terrorism, and once again, completely ignored the question.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, it must be said, actually did answer questions, including those about unpopular stances he's taken in the past. As the campaign's third wheel, he doesn't have the luxury of ignoring the queries of interested voters. He won't be president no matter how well he performs at events like these.

Kasich's hopelessness, like Trump's bluster and Cruz's smarm, was nothing new. When Wisconsin primary voters cast ballots next week, they'll be choosing from the same menu they faced before the town hall; the same spread of squabbling and half-truths will be laid out, growing increasingly stale for the next few months, until the Republican Party finally lands itself a nominee. In that sense, Trump's complaint about being tired of debates was the truest moment in a night that was short on them—he's as eager to see the end of this as voters are.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

When Jon Gomez needed some quick cash to fix a cooling fan in his 2007 Toyota, the 38-year-old delivery driver relied on a popular financial service offered by Amscot—The Money Superstore. The Cuban-American says he took out a $400 payday loan at one of their locations in Hialeah, Florida, where he lives.

To get the four Benjamins, all Gomez had to do was prove employment and write out a personal check from a valid bank account post-dated by 14 days, at which time he was set to receive his next paycheck. He agreed to pay back the full amount, plus a $41 finance charge, Gomez recalls.

"I paid back the $441, but the next day I took out another $400 payday loan because I needed the money," he tells VICE. "I was in this vicious cycle for three months."

It got to a point that the man didn't have enough money to cover one of his payday loan checks, and it bounced. Under Florida law, Gomez cannot obtain another payday loan until he settles the outstanding one. "That turned out to be a blessing in disguise," he recalls. "I won't put myself in debt like that again."

Gomez is among the tens of thousands of cash-strapped Floridians whose financial misery has helped payday lenders like Amscot rake in billions over the last decade, according to a study released last week looking at payday loan transactions in the state between September 2005 through May 2015. The report was assembled by the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocacy organization for low-income people, as well as the National Council of La Raza, the Florida Alliance for Consumer Protection, and Latino Leadership Inc., a nonprofit agency based in Orlando. Critics say payday lenders are preying on poor African Americans and Latinos in an era of spiraling income inequality—and in spite of a state law that supposedly already controls the industry.

"A lot of these businesses are flourishing by taking advantage of people's %7D&resultIndex=1" target="_blank">a bill that would delay the Bureau's new rules for two years, and give states with payday loan laws on the books already wide latitude to do their thing. The bill is backed by a generous slice of Florida's congressional delegation, some of whom were state legislators in 2001, when the Florida law setting restrictions on payday loans was passed.

"This legislation would limit the bureau's ability to protect consumers against high cost payday loans," Torres said on the call. "It would allow the industry to avoid federal regulation all together."

Executives for some of the largest payday loan providers in Florida, of course, believe the state already does a fine job of regulating their business. "They are suggesting the state law hasn't worked," Amscot's CEO Ian Mackechnie told me. "I take issue with that. In the last 15 years, it has proven to be successful."

A spokeswoman for Congressman Ross did not respond to a phone message and a pair of email requests for comment. And Sean Bartlett, a spokesman for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, argues the state was successful in reigning in the payday loan industry in 2001. "The State House and Senate voted unanimously at the time to make reforms that, 15 years later, better protect consumers while still preserving access to credit for working families who need it," Bartlett said in a statement on behalf of Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz. "Her goal has been and remains balancing access to capital while protecting consumers."

Under Florida law, every lender has to input each payday loan transaction into a database maintained by the state's Office of Financial Regulation. (A spokeswoman for the financial office declined comment on the critical report.) Companies like Amscot, which operates solely in Florida, can only provide loans for up to $500 and are only allowed to tack on a finance charge. A borrower can return the money within a 24-hour period without penalty, and if a borrower can't pay the money back after 14 days, they are entitled to a 60-day grace period that includes a meeting with a financial counselor, who helps come up with a repayment plan. Further, if a person has an outstanding payday loan, the borrower cannot take out a new loan with another lender.

"The first thing we do is check to see if a person has an open transaction," Mackechnie says. "It's a mechanism that prevents people from going from one loan shop to another taking out multiple loans and getting over their heads."

The problem is that the mechanism is not working, according to Delvin Davis, a senior research analyst for the Center for Responsible Lending. His shop obtained payday loan records for the ten-year period beginning in 2005 by submitting a public records request to the Florida's Office of Financial Regulation. Now Davis says his team's analysis shows that 83 percent of the state's payday loan transactions were generated by borrowers who had taken out seven or more loans in a one-year period. The average loan size in 2015 was $399.35, and the average finance charge was $42.73, according to the report.

Davis argues that taking out a new payday loan simply covers a budget shortfall caused by a previous loan. "In other words, payday loans do not alleviate financial burdens," he said on the call. "They create new financial emergencies every two weeks."

This business model has allowed payday loan providers to grow exponentially, according to Davis, who notes there are 1,100 stores offering the service in Florida—nearly double the number of Starbucks locations in the Sunshine State. The annual volume of payday transactions increased from $1.73 billion in 2005 to $3.13 billion in 2015, the report says, and during the same time period, total annual fees collected by payday loan companies went up from $186.5 million to $311 million.

Amscot's Mackechnie concedes payday loans significantly contributed to his company's growth from 18 locations in the Tampa area in 2001 to 241 throughout Florida today. "It's a little more than half our business," he tells me. "In terms of volume, small dollar lending represents about $1.5 billion of our total transactions annually."

But the report's authors determined the addresses for every single payday loan location in Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, and found that a majority are concentrated in African-American and Latino communities.

"Neighborhoods where over 50 percent of the population is black or Latino you have payday loan store concentrations that are twice as large than neighborhoods where less than 25 percent of the population is black or Latino," Davis said. "Also low income communities that are 80 percent below Florida's median income level have four times the concentration of payday loan stores than communities that are 120 percent over the median income level."

Jamie Fuller, public affairs vice president of Advance America, one of the nation's largest payday loan providers, disputes all of that. "Payday lenders, like many other businesses, locate in population centers where our customers live, work and shop," she tells VICE. "Our customers are middle-income and educated, and value the simplicity, reliability and transparency of the loans; a recent national survey found more than nine in ten borrowers believe payday loans are a sensible option when faced with a shortfall."

Fuller also cites recent studies finding the payday loan industry is providing a valuable service to consumers. For instance, the industry trade group Community Financial Services Association of America commissioned a nationwide survey of 1,000 payday loan borrowers, including 621 African Americans and Latinos, back in January. The results show that "nine in ten borrowers agree that payday loans can be a sensible decision when consumers are faced with unexpected expenses" and that 60 percent of borrowers "believe that payday loans are fairly priced for the value they provide."

But Floridians who've been in the thick of it think government officials need to do more to clamp down on predation by payday loan companies. Advocates say the simplest and most obvious fixes, as proposed in draft rules by the CFPB, would impose limits on the frequency of borrowing. And new loans should be tethered to a borrower's ability to pay it back—without getting stuck in a whirlwind of new loans.

"I know other people in the same boat," Gomez says. "Without regulations that truly protect people, we are not going to see progress."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

Apple is taking on the FBI to find out how it hacked the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone. Photo via Flickr user Gonzalo Baeza

US News

Apple Takes on FBI Over San Bernardino iPhone Hack
Apple wants the FBI to reveal how it hacked the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. The company's lawyers are now looking into a legal strategy to compel the government to hand over details of its iPhone hack, an action the company deems important to protect consumer privacy in future.—The Los Angeles Times

Trump Revokes Pledge to Support Republican Nominee
At a CNN town hall event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Donald Trump has said he no longer promises to support the Republican nominee if it is not him. Trump also pledged to stand by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who has been charged with assaulting a female journalist at a campaign event in Florida. "I don't discard people," said Trump. —USA Today

US Orders Military Families Out of Turkey
The State Department and Pentagon have ordered families of American diplomats and military personnel to leave posts in southern Turkey because of security fears. It was accompanied by an updated travel warning advising US citizens of an increased threat of attacks in the country. —The Washington Post

US Student Pleads Guilty to Supporting Islamic State
Jaelyn Young, a 20-year-old from Mississippi, has pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide support a terrorist organization. Young admitted to trying to join the Islamic State by going to Syria and faces up to 20 years in prison for the offense. She converted to Islam while studying at Mississippi State University. —CBS News

International News

Brazil's Biggest Party Quits Government
The largest party in Brazil's ruling coalition, PMDB, has voted for an "immediate exit" from President Dilma Rousseff's government. The move is expected to bring on impeachment proceedings against Rousseff, who faces claims she manipulated accounts to hide the country's deficit. —BBC News

EgyptAir Hijack Suspect Appears in Court
Seif Eldin Mustafa, an Egyptian man accused of hijacking EgyptAir flight MS181 after using a fake suicide belt, has appeared in court in Cyprus. The court in Larnaca has ordered Mustafa be detained for eight days, and possible charges include air piracy and kidnapping.—BBC News

Russia Shipping More to Syria Than It's Removing
The movements of Russian supply ships in the past two weeks indicates Moscow has shipped more equipment and supplies to Syria than it has brought back in the period since Vladimir Putin announced a withdrawal. "Supplies for the Syrian army remain significant," said Mikhail Barabanov of the CAST military think tank. —Reuters

Myanmar Swears in Civilian President
Myanmar's new president Htin Kyaw has been sworn in as the country's first democratically-elected civilian leader in 50 years. Colleagues from the National League for Democracy (NLD) have also been sworn in as cabinet ministers, including Aung San Suu Kyi. —CNN

Two NASA scientists holding a batch of funghi that will be sent into space for drug research. Photo: Gus Ruelas

Everything Else

Trump Campaign Turned into Children's Book
Comedian Michael Ian Black has written an illustrated children's book about Donald Trump. Set for release in July, A Child's First Book of Trump has a Dr. Seuss feel. The synopsis describes a Trump as a "curious creature." —The Wrap

Jupiter Slammed by Giant Space Rock
Two amateur astronomers have captured footage of a large, unknown object slamming into Jupiter. NASA later confirmed the collision and said it was likely an asteroid rather than a comet "simply because there are more of them." —The Huffington Post

Conservative Blogger Charged with Murder
A South Florida political blogger, well-known in the state for the Shark Tank blog, has been charged with the attempted murder of his sister's boyfriend. Javier Manjarres is accused of attacking Jason Holowinski and firing gunshots as he drove away. —NBC News

Researchers to Grow Drugs in Space
Scientists will be sending a batch of fungi to the International Space Station (ISS) for the purpose of drug development. The NASA project's goal is to grow compounds that can be used in pharmaceutical treatments like antifungal medicines. —Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our new film 'Poland's Independence Day March Was a Right-Wing Victory Parade'

Screencap via IndieGoGo

You can make beer out of anything. Beard yeast, moon dust, frankincense and myrrh—fuck it. Life's a rich tapestry, and there's a bottomless demand for novelty ales.

But a Polish man named Wojciech Mann is promising a new beer, a beer that will evoke the "quintessence of femininity." He's launched an IndieGoGo campaign on behalf of his company Order of Yoni to fund this brave new product. It's called Bottled Instinct, and if he gets his desired 150,000 euros (about $168,000), it will be the first-ever beer made from the lactic acid bacteria "from vagina of a unique woman." (The IndieGoGo page and the Order of Yoni site are both written in broken English.)

The unique woman in question is a Czech model named Alexandra Brendlova, "the kind of a female whose pheromones will stay with you after the meeting for the following week long."

To his credit, Mann realized that people would have questions and created a handy FAQ to address them. Yes, he reassures potential Bottled Instinct drinkers, this is entirely safe. As for the model's "history," Mann says, "Yes, every model in the beer project has to sign the contract with high penalty for working in adult industry, sex industry, as adult actress, escort, prostitute, etc., etc., etc."

And if you are worried that this beer––with its main selling point being that it once made contact with a lady's genitals–– is sort of gross, the Order of Yoni wants you to know that it is unconcerned about "feminists' attack":

"Firstly, Yoni is a sacred Hindu name of vagina and it symbolizes our respect to vagina as a sacrum. In Indian and many of other cultures sexuality including vagina are parts of sacrum, are respected and we are convinced such respect should be also present in our modern Western culture. Secondly, vaginal lactobacillus bacteria are transferred from a mother to a child during childbirth, so mother's Yoni bacteria are becoming part of child's immune system. The Order believes the beer is a tribute to our mothers and a tribute to the act of childbirth. It is far, far from disrespect for a woman."

Anticipating its first product will be a hit, the Order has listed some plans for future beers, including BDSM ale, "made with smoked plums and vaginal lactic acid bacteria of red-head or brunette model" and a "sour ancient wheat ale with roses" that the company will call "Isis."

So far, the IndieGoGo campaign has raised 11 euros in six days, though Mann is clearly prepared for some major donations: The reward for donating 10,000 euros is 60 bottles of beer made from your girlfriend's vaginal bacteria.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

(Photo via @Journo_Paul)

Banter courses through our veins, swishes through our hearts. Our ventricles heave and pulse with banter. Every nerve, from the tips of our fingers to the base of our feet, is ensconced in bants. Hair follicles crackle with it. Banter excess streams from our noses and our ears. Cut me and I bleed banter. Drag me along raw concrete and I will drip with it. Slice an artery and I will squirt out banter like a hose. Listen closely to my chest and hear as my heart beats and murmurs "BENTEKKERS" like a rhythmic drum. We – we fine upstanding British citizens, Queen-lovers, Europe-dislikers, biscuit-dunkers, tea-opinion-havers – are made of banter, spun from it, forged in it. Arguably it is our greatest export. Banter is more precious to us than gold is, than platinum. Give a man some banter and he can eat for a day. Add him to a 'LADS ON TOUR // JONNO IS A SCROTE 2k16' WhatsApp group and he can feed himself for life.

On MUNCHIES: Angry Farmers Are Marching Cows and Sheep Through Central London

Sadly, though, banter is now over, because of this. All of the piss has been taken. This man. This man took all the remaining piss. There is no piss left to take. Our piss reservoirs have run dry. This town will die without piss. But someone took it. Someone took it all. Don't bother looking in that well, Little Timmy. There's no piss down there. And without it, your family is doomed to die. Because Ben Innes from Leeds took all the piss, took it all for himself:

This is the high watermark of banter, and banter has only one way to go now, and that is down. There will never be a moment that is more banter than this. Consider the photo, of cheery hostage Ben Innes, thirty minutes into a six-hour ordeal yesterday when Seif Eldin Mustafa forced a plane to land in Cyprus and threatened to detonate (what turned out to be a fake) bomb belt if police didn't let him speak to his estranged Cypriot wife, the most 'yer da' terrorist incident of living memory, like literally that time yer da took over the announcement mic at big ASDA and shouted, "SHEILA I STILL LOVE YOU!" at your mum before security escorted him back to the Vauxhall he was living in at the time, only a hundredfold – but look at cheery Ben Innes, not a care in the world, casually destroying the very concept of banter with a rigid arms-by-his-side pose 'n' grin, Seif mentally a hundred billion miles away, a man who has never posed for a photo in his life, distantly thinking of his wife, and how she hates him, how long it will be until someone notices his bomb is just a few hand grips and a bit of a cheap bike lock stuffed into a money belt, about how shot he's going to get if he escapes this plane, how he didn't think it through, really, did he, how this method of estranged wife-impressing has literally never worked, ever.

Still:

I mean, just look at that. Just look at that image. Flawless in every single way. A snapshot of banter. Scientists with hundreds of millions of dollars and endless resources and time to play with could not synthesise even one-tenth of the banter visible in this photograph. Remember where you were when we all had this realisation: this moment will never be topped. You will never out-bant this. Banter is over. All there is now is emptiness.

A university friend described Ben to the Telegraph as being "very into his banter", which as potential post-terrorist attack eulogies go, is right up there with there very best. Here's what Ben has to say, when quizzed by The Sun on Tuesday, sweating through his Ralph Lauren still, slamming like a train into the Cypriot duty free: "I'm not sure why I did it, I just threw caution to the wind while trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity. I figured if his bomb was real I'd nothing to lose anyway, so took a chance to get a closer look at it.

"I got one of the cabin crew to translate for me and asked him if I could do a selfie with him. He just shrugged OK so I stood by him and smiled for the camera while a stewardess did the snap. It has to be the best selfie ever."

On NOISEY: If Anyone Deserved a BAFTA Nomination, It Was Kurupt FM

Theory: Ben Innes describing a photograph that he literally just said was taken by someone else as a 'selfie' is actually some sort of next level meta-bant on the exact sort of person who gets mad when a non-selfie photograph is described as a 'selfie', Ben Innes actually some sort of high wizard of banter, Ben Innes bantering on different levels, on radio waves you can't even detect, Ben Innes a sort of noble banter master, bantering in front of you and behind you, bantering at a microscopic level as well as with simple Duplo blocks, Ben Innes is... hold on. Ben Innes. Banter. Seventy five percent of the letters in Ben Innes name are also in the word 'banter'. This is not a coincidence. We've been played.

I think what has happened here is, thanks to the serendipitous nature of the universe, is that Saif Eldin Mustafa came up against something more than he could have ever expected, a high priest of banter when all he wanted were pliant hostages, a hyperevolved banter monk who spends his days in sacred silence studiously reading WikiHow links about how to order off the Nando's secret menu, who plots the sun and the moon on a special chart to know exactly which day in March is acceptable to wear shorts and go topless out in the street, a sort of lad alpha, a man who steals traffic cones with the grace of David Copperfield, a man who knows every single paedophile-related football chant in the known universe, a man who can shout "wahey" so loudly mountains tumble down into valleys, can hold back an angry sea by waving a laminated '4' placard and flashing the dick-shaped suntan mark he has on his back. Ben Innes is the king of banter, and this photograph is his ascendant crown. Nobody needs to ever bother doing a banter again. We will never touch the Ralph Lauren-clad cloth of greatness. It is all downhill from here.

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE:

Banter: Some Important Lessons

The Banter Generation Have Started Having Kids

Talking Booze and Banter with the Writer of Viz's Drunken Bakers

Photo by Bruno Bayley

This article originally appeared on VICE France

When I mentioned to some male friends that I was working on an article about what happens to the male libido after the age of 30, all of them assured me that they weren't having any problems at all. They had no idea what I was talking about. None at all. But when we got further into it, it turned out things were a little more complicated than that.

I initially wanted to explore the subject and talk to my male heterosexual friends about it because I noticed a shift in the way they talked about sex—and in how and how often they did it, too. I found that men tend to gradually produce less testosterone after 30, which in extreme cases can lead to a decreased sex drive or even erectile dysfunction. Of course, there are more factors that determine why a man's testosterone levels can decrease after 30—like his lifestyle, weight, or mental health—but given that we're a generation of eternal adult children, I was wondering if a declining sex drive is a thing now that we're getting older, and how we're dealing with that. And is it a biological thing, or are there other, sociological reasons?

I spoke to Yvon Dallaire, a French-Canadian psychologist and author specialized in relationship issues, who doesn't think it's a testosterone thing per se: "Thirty is a little too young to talk about a significantly decreased libido. In general, men's testosterone levels are at their peak between 14 and 40 years old approximately—when it starts to slowly but steadily decline over time. But men in their thirties tend to have sexually experimented more, which makes them better at managing their libido. They're not as dependent on it." To put it bluntly: Boys think less with their dicks as they grow older.

I used to be the person asking for sex all the time. My balls would often ache, because I constantly needed to masturbate. I don't miss those days at all.

Julien* is 32. He's been my friend since college, which is also as long as him and his girlfriend have been together. "I'm truly relieved to think less with and about my dick," he explains. "I used to be the person asking for sex all the time in the relationship, and when she wasn't in the mood it would really frustrate me. These days, she's often the one who takes the initiative—and I really like that. Puberty was a particularly difficult time: My balls would often ache, because I constantly needed to masturbate. I don't miss those days at all."

As expected, the change in his behavior affected his girlfriend, Solange. "I kinda freaked out—I'd gotten so used to him always wanting sex," she says. "It's better this way—saying no to him because I wasn't in the mood could make both of us uncomfortable. For a while, I thought he'd lost interest in me or that he was cheating on me, even. But he wasn't—I think."

Eliot is 32, and used to be my boss. He says he doesn't feel less like having sex, but blames any change in how often it happens for him in having "less time." He adds: "Fifteen is the worst age; your hormones explode and the women you like are only interested in older men." I'm having a great time picturing him as a severely confused and hopelessly horny teenager.

Louis is 38, married and recently had his first child. He agrees with Yvon Dallaire. "I'm less obsessed with sex than I used to be. It feels like I've gotten enough experience to take it a little bit easier," he tells me. He used to watch a lot of porn when he was younger but that has changed over the years too. "I don't feel like watching porn and I don't need it anymore. I've gotten a bit harder to please; if I do watch porn, I need the kind that is a bit more suggestive."

"I watch way less porn than a couple of years ago," 30-year-old George agrees. His most defining feature, to me, is the fact that he always wears a beanie that his mom knitted for him. "I used to watch porn every day—I needed it. I just had the urge. But I'd feel a bit hopeless and guilty about it—especially when after, you end up feeling like a sad sack with your dick in your hand and the video still running. I still watch porn but only two or three times a week. The kind in which a woman seems to enjoy herself too, if possible."

Because of their expanding sexual experiences, girls apparently become less of a mystery for guys by the time they've reached their thirties, and vice versa. "With time and age, I think relationships between men and women become more honest, which opens up our sex life and makes it more interesting," says Eliot.

Photo by Penelope Kolliopoulou, from When Love Sucks, Why Not Date Yourself?

A lot of the guys I talked to wholeheartedly agree that they're a lot less selfish in bed than they used to be, but if I'm honest, I think some were bullshitting me. Mostly because one of them stood very closely next to me in a club at 4 AM, trying to sexily yell in my ear while resting his hand on my shoulder as he did so. But in general, it makes sense—less urgency, less pressure, and a better connection should make for better sex. Most of the guys I talked to basically came to the same conclusion, which Eliot summed up perfectly: "I largely prefer my sexual life at 32 to what I had at 22."

That's all lovely, but what about women? Well, heterosexual women's sexuality tends to evolve in a different way: Some might need a moment to get over their insecurities, accept or understand the fact that they themselves are more bothered about their mismatched underwear and droopy asses than their partners. But once they get over themselves, great things can happen. As Yvon Dallaire told me: "For a lot of young women, sex is at first about the potential. Once a woman has learned what gives her pleasure, her sexual desire increases, up until she's about 45. A woman can be at the peak of her abilities at that age."

Or, according to my friend Zoé: "I have the impression that you spend years trying to get rid of those complexes and moral constraints so you can finally just enjoy yourself." So maybe, we could generally say that heterosexual men and women follow a different path but end up at roughly the same place in the end: less obsessed with ourselves and better suited for some festive fornication. Isn't that what life is about in the end?

* The names in this article have been changed.