Screenshot via Vimeo

April Fools' Day is the best holiday. Despite what some killjoys would have you believe, for the most part, it's an excuse for a bit of good-natured ribbing amongst friends, family, and co-workers. Brands get in on the action, too, using the day as an excuse to imagine hellish creations like a chicken fries shake or a line of WiFi-enabled pants. And while successful pranks are fun, a prank gone wrong is always better.

Take, for example, Google's misguided "Minion Mic Drop."

For the fourth graders in Fool's Day, their prank's failure will stain their memories just as their prankee's blood and guts stained their clothing. Cody Blue Snider's short film focuses on a class of kids who accidentally off their beloved teacher after putting a cocktail of pills, dirt, mouthwash, and God knows what else into her morning cup of coffee. It's not just any ol' manslaughter, but one in which her head explodes, Scanners-style, hurling chunks of brain and buckets of blood all over the classroom. Although the kids are shocked at what they've done, they're more desperate to not get caught by the school's rent-a-cop. What ensues during their mad dash to cover (and clean) up the murder is 19 minutes of pure, black-comedy bliss.

Snider's subject matter—exploding heads, death, drugs, blood, and rejecting authority—isn't terribly surprising, considering his father is Dee Snider, lead singer of Twisted Sister. Regardless, with Fool's Day, Cody has stepped outside of his father's permed shadow. After premiering at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, Fool's Day played the circuit for a while, but sat dormant for the last couple of years due to music license issues. Here's to hoping we get more from Snider, preferrably as soon as possible.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Stephan James plays rising hockey star Mattie Slaughter in Across the Line. Circle Blue Media/Dan Callis.

Stepping into a West Indian restaurant in Toronto during a weekday lunch hour, Director X tells me, is the best way to sample the ethnic mishmash synonymous with the city's identity.

"You're gonna see white people, Indian people, black people, old people, cops, construction workers. It might as well be the lineup from McDonald's—it's completely diverse," he explains, perched in the lounge at Creative Soul, his downtown Toronto office.

"That's a big city thing... In other parts of the world, the only people you're going to see at West Indian restaurant are West Indians. There's racism but it's not the same kind of racism."

The other "kind of racism"—palpable, tense, and sometimes violent—is what X, the director behind Drake's "Hotline Bling," one of the versions of Rihanna's "Work," and too many other influential music videos to list here, explores in his feature film debut Across the Line.

Set in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia—the real-life home of Sidney Crosby and a bunch of other white hockey stars—and based on true events, the story follows black teenager Mattie Slaughter (played by Toronto's Stephan James), a book smart hockey star who has NHL aspirations. Mattie comes from the primarily black community of North Preston and lives with his parents and his brother, who, with flashy cars paid for by pimping, serves as Mattie's foil.

Mattie's unlikely success, and a love triangle involving a classmate and her white boyfriend, become a source of tension in the highly segregated Cole Harbour High School (the white kids all live in a different part of town), eventually culminating in an all out brawl. In reality, racially-motivated riots amongst students at Cole Harbour District High forced the school to shut down in 1991. The violence has repeated itself over the years.

We sat down with X to discuss small-town racism and the challenges he faced making his first movie:

VICE: So Across the Line, based on true events, a story of racial tension on the east coast of Canada. How did this story come your way?
Director X: The producer and writer of the movie, Floyd Kane, actually went to Cole Harbour High when this happened. So it's something he's been living with for a long time and thinking about making this into a film.

The main character, Mattie, he's based on a real person?
He's based on Floyd, basically. But Floyd is a smart guy and his escape was his brain but we turned it into sports.

Why?
Sports is something where we can all understand very clearly what that means—if you get drafted. Getting into law school, it's not as dramatic and it doesn't provide the type of tension. We needed something that said to the audience very clearly: "This will change things. I'm getting out." Hockey fit. And in its own way, hockey fits with this being a Canadian piece. We all understand that black folks out there are a new thing to them. We've all heard stories that small town hockey fans weren't exactly the most accepting of dark skin.

Do you think in Toronto we're kind of sheltered from the types of racism exist in smaller towns in Canada and particularly on the East Coast where it's predominantly white?
Completely. This is a black neighbourhood at the end of a road, at the end of another road, that is very far away from the city. You're not going there unless you have to. And then the white community is a blue-collar community that's very far away from where North Preston is. So you have these very separate neighbourhoods that have been feeding each other ideas about each other's communities and then you put these kids together in high school. And that's when everyone starts smashing into one another. But yeah, everywhere you go, any time you find a good bunch of racism, I guarantee you the people who are mad at the other people don't know the other people.

Did you personally relate to any of that?
To a degree. In high school, we got cliquey, the blacks kids were here, the white kids were there, the skinheads were there. So we see we are a tribal animal, so we congregate amongst people that think like us, look us, somehow connect with us. We feel, whether they look like us because we all dress the same or we racially are the same, somehow there's a connection, this is my tribe. So I've been around the tribalism of it. But no, I did not grow up in a world of proper segregation, 'We don't know one another.'

There was one quote about stereotypes in the movie, 'Stereotypes are comfortable. You keep that balance and all is right in the world.' What does that quote mean to you, or how does it speak to some of the issues we see in this movie or in society?
You've got Donald Trump whose power is coming from people's stereotypes that they feel comfortable with, they don't want it to change. If we all just stay in this nice comfortable position, I'll be happy. And they're fighting to conserve the conservatives, they're fighting to conserve the status quo. If you wanna get deep about it, it doesn't come from a healthy brain. The people that think that way, the region of their brain that deals in fear is overdeveloped, where the liberal mindset, is much more accepting and wants things to change.

You just mentioned Trump. Obviously, politicians who harness that fear can do a lot of damage. Were you hoping that people would take something away from this movie?
I don't know if I really have an 'Oh boy, I hope you leave the theatre and think this way.' My concern when I first got the script was actually making something even-handed. The third act of the film, how things all go down, I was looking to make something where you'd have to sit back and say 'Hmm, that was wrong but that was also wrong.' It doesn't tie up nice in a bow where white people are bad and black people are victims. You have to sit back and go 'the black kids, that was outta line what they did too.' So it's dealing more in real life. That's what I liked about this film. The school itself explodes. The structure that we've been fed so long, that you would expect, wasn't there.

This being your first feature film, what were some of the challenges?
This was a lower budget movie so we had 15 days, we didn't have any overtime. So it's a matter of getting it shot and getting what you need. So it creates an urgency that you cannot fake and you can't force when everyone on the crew knows 'we're gonna be done in two minutes and we have to get three shots.'

Talk a little bit about the score and also just how your experience as a music video director impacted your approach to this.
I wanted something that would make you feel uneasy, I wanted something that would engage some primal instincts. Core functions, things that we share with the animals about protecting yourself, protecting other people, protecting your property, and what that does. So the music was meant to speak to that and we meant it. And that became a theme throughout the picture. It has a voice. I wanted the voice of the movie to be electronic, where characters, their music speaks to them, the friend plays his rock and roll, the brother plays hip hop, where the music of the film, when you hear that sound, when you heard these things going on, you knew the movie was talking to you.

How do you feel about the finished product?
I'm good man. We got some interesting stuff going on. It's interesting with story structure and playing with how we know an antagonist to be how we know a protagonist to me.

Was there anything you were trying to avoid?
The third act, I wanted it to be more grey where it just fucks everything up. No one walks away clean, no one gets to say 'I was right.'

Do you want to keep making movies?
Of course. I love telling stories, I like working with actors, it's a progression now into a different medium.

Across the Line is playing in theatres in Vancouver, Nanaimo, Kelowna, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Kingston, St. Catharine's, Whitby, Hamilton (April 12), Toronto (April 15), Halifax (April 15) and Peterborough (April 16).

This interview was condensed for style and clarity.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Paul, shitting at the top of the Shard (all photos via Paul Silver)

You take shitting out your arse for granted, is the thing. A normally functioning healthy bowel should take no more than a few minutes to flump something out, and then you can get on with your day. Unless you have Crohn's, and things aren't so simple. "Basically, for me, I swing between being really constipated to being... really at the opposite end of things," says Paul Silver, who's been suffering with Crohn's since he was 12 (he's now 32). "It's never in the middle, I'm always one or the other." That means debilitating cramps and subsequent pain, two-to-three hour fragmented toilet trips every morning, urgent can-I-use-your-toilet-please bolts into shops and restaurants, and a looming sense of anxiety when using public transport. "Every time I'm on public transport, I'm conscious that I could get in trouble needing to go, so I don't go out as much," he says. And that's not to mention the operations: a visit to a doctor a good once a week, and procedures to shorten his bowels once every few years. "What happens is, because of all the pushing and pulling and all the inflammation, my bowel is fucked basically," he says. "You get narrowing, and you get stretches, and in my experience every 8 or 9 years you need the bad bits removed, the bits that are not working any more."

Anyway, good news: Paul is scheduled in for a permanent ileostomy on the 21st of April, a procedure that will see his large bowel removed entirely, his bum sewn shut like a Ken doll, and his small bowel attached to the side of his torso and a stoma structured. It means he goes from sitting in the bathroom in agony for a few hours every day to emptying a little baggy into a toilet every now and then. But also, crucially, means he'll never do a shit out of his butt ever in his life.

As you can understand, this is a conflicting time. On one hand: a permanent end to years of pain and discomfort. On the other hand: never do a shit. What would you do?

Turns out never doing the shit is by far the more viable option, so Paul's on a sort of turd marathon, where he does a few of his final meaningful shits in various palatial bathrooms. He's already shat at the top of the Shard, and is on a sort of half spiritual, half very necessary journey to do notable shits before his arsehole's closed for business forever. I spoke to him about Crohn's, buttsex, methadone, and people who turd all over bathrooms and just leave it there for someone else to clean up.

VICE: Hey Paul. So what's going on with your bum?
Paul: I've got Crohn's disease. I'm having a permanent colostomy on April 21st, basically that means that they're removing my large bowel, and I'll be a Ken doll from behind, and I'll have this new thing that I've nicknamed a bionic bumhole, which is a little stoma that sticks out the side and they attach a bag to me. It will kind of give me a new life.

And what's with the poo marathon?
On Facebook someone posted a picture of the view from the Shard, and I kind of joked to myself that I'd like to have my final poop there – because obviously the view is absolutely magnificent – and that joke turned into a thing.

So that was the first one. It's actually quite awkward doing a photo opportunity poop: I had my trousers down and my pants up and a photographer with their lens out, and then a cleaner just walks in and goes, 'No, no, no! You don't do that in here!' It took me 15 minutes to calm her down. And then I had to explain to management afterwards what we were doing.

The next ones I'd love to do are: apparently the Queen has a personal lavatory in the Royal Albert Hall which is one I'm aching to get on, and places like Buckingham Palace, and Number 10. I'm up for anything really: I'm looking for historical places, or theatres, or posh places like Harrods and Selfridges – I'm pretty sure the management there would have a really grand loo, I'm picturing, but I have no idea.

Someone handing you towels, that kind of thing?
Yeah, exactly. In Harrods I think they have an attendant and stuff like that, so that would be quite cool. And also I'm quite into restaurant as well. I'm not talking about like McDonald's, or anything like that: fancy thrones.

It's about spreading a message, too. I just want to get out there, like: 99.999 etc. % of the world is at some point in the day sitting on the toilet, it's normal to go to the toilet. People shouldn't be embarrassed about having to ask if they can use the toilet, if you need to go and you're walking past a restaurant, just go.

What about messy toilets?
Yeah mate, especially with bloke's toilets, they can be rank. Basically: you are a complete dickhead if you mess up a toilet intentionally. Leave it how you want to find it. Because someone on minimum wage has to clean that up afterwards. It's not always drinking where it's an excuse, either, because I've been to places like the supermarket in the middle of the daytime and seen wrecked toilets, and they clean that thing every hour, so for that to happen regularly there must be quite a lot of dickheads out there doing that sort of thing. I really think badly of anyone who ruins a toilet that's not their own.

So, forgive my ignorance, but I'm not too clued up on what Crohn's is and how it affects its sufferers. What is it?
Basically, for me, I swing between being really constipated to being really at the opposite end of things, it's never in the middle, I'm always one or the other. It's an extremely painful condition, I'm even on methadone for the pain, I take a morphine and methadone combination. The problem is, because my bowels have been shortenened, long-acting morphine doesn't work on me, so I take Toradol, it is really high-end when it comes to the pain side of things. But hopefully afterwards I should be able to cut down on them. I'm a little bit worried about the whole dependency on painkillers. But basically that's the sort of pain levels you get. Also when it gets worse you can get blood in the stool – sometimes I've looked down, and I don't mean to be graphic, but literally you can only see a centimetre down it's so red.

Christ.
Yeah. It's never been great but basically I don't know what 'normal' is. In the same way that you don't know what it's like to fly, but a bird might say 'oh poor you, you cant fly', but it's something that you've never done, and it's the same with me with going to the toilet.

I'm lucky because my job is flexible, but, I couldn't, for example, work in a shop where I have to be at the till for a certain time, because I'd run off to the toilet and someone would rob the shop. Or people can't rely on me to be 100% at a specific place at a specific time, because I never know when it's gonna hit. I have held down fulltime jobs making websites in the past, but thankfully again they're forgiving if I turn up at 12 o'clock.

And your drug dependency?
Well, I've always been on painkillers since I was about 12 years old. I started off on codeine, then over the years it's gone up: it started with a little bit of codeine, then a lot of codeine, then Tramadol, it's gone up and up and up. Right now I take methadone: relatively low amounts, but a strong enough dose for someone who doesn't touch other drugs.

Earlier this year I did try cannabis for the first time, for the pain. It didn't work for me as a painkiller, but it's well-documented in its effectiveness for other Crohn's sufferers. So when I saw the debate that went on last year I was absolutely disgusted. There's evidence after evidence after evidence about how it affects people who are ill. And the Tory guy just said: 'No'. That's the end of it. They argued that cannabis had, and I quote, 'no medicinal value', yet Savitex is a cannabis derivative – so how can it have no medicinal value? I think what they're trying to say is that it's un-patentable.

Yeah. Are you going to miss your bumhole?
From what I gather, they're literally sewing it up shut, so I'll be a Ken doll from behind. From the front I'm 100% normal and functioning.

So just to confirm: they're sewing your arse shut, but they don't intend to sew your dick closed?
Yeah. Dick/piss/sex, should be 100% the same as before. But one of my weird thoughts is: I'm a straight bloke who's never tried anal sex, but that door will never be open again. What if I'm missing out on an amazing experience? This whole thing would be much tougher on a gay bloke, in that respect.

Are you going to miss pooing at all?
Yeah, I really do have a love affair with the toilet. It's one of those places where I go, not only for my Crohn's but for my anxiety – it's where I go to escape. I'm the only one who lives in my flat so I can go anywhere I want in my flat, but I actually go to the toilet to think and when I want to read that's where I go. It's like the little fortress of solitude – my own little world where no one can contact me, I can just press the pause button. So it's a love-hate affair with that room: I used to have five flatmates to one bathroom, and the arguments that caused in the morning got out of control. In the end I actually got a little bucket and went in my room, waited till everyone went to work and then just ejected it, that means everyone in the morning could get ready for work.

What happens if you're out and you need to go? Do you ever have problems with the staff and stuff like that?
Thankfully there's normally a restaurant nearby where I am, and I prefer restaurants to pubs, but sometimes when they say 'for customer use only', I kind of have to beg and plead. I say: 'Look, I don't mind buying a drink or leaving a tip, I don't have time to talk to the manager. Just let me go.' Some places are fine, some aren't, and there's a card you can get which says 'please, I can't wait', but by the time you've got it out and they've checked it's legit you may as well have bought a drink and gone. I find Pizza Express are very accommodating, they're always fine.

So I guess it's going to be a whole new thing in about a week's time.
Yeah, that's why I'm on this poop quest. It's made the next three weeks, which was going to be filled with anxiety and uncertainty, a bit of fun. I know a lot of people are laughing at me as well as with me, but I try and make it so you're not laughing at me too much. I look at it like this: I lost my dignity a long time ago; I've had all these procedures done to me, like colonoscopies, and when it comes to this activity I don't have any dignity left, and I'm glad that's gone because I can have fun with that now. And it's something that everyone does too, with today's pictures that I've taken, I've taken pictures of myself trousers down, pants up in the toilet for social media, which is a position that everyone's in at some point in the day, so there shouldn't be any surprises there.

Thanks, Paul.

You can follow Paul's progress here. You can give to his JustGiving page – he is pooing for charity – here.

@joelgolby

Piercer Matt Day-Holloway says he's 'never regretted' his 3/4-inch lobes for a heartbeat. All photos by the author

"Is it bloody?" asks Joel Sheffroth, unaware the dark red gore streaming from his earlobe has soaked through a bunch of wadded paper towels and a protective mat, and is now pooling under his hair. "I feel like there's sweat on the back of my head."

How can you mock this man, Brazil??? Photo via Facebook

If there is one thing to be said about Canadians, it's this: we take great pleasure in aggressive self-deprecation—but will not put up with a single bad word said about our home-and-native-land from outsiders.

Well, there's that. You could also say: we have taken shitty American country music and perfected it. Or: we won't shut the fuck up about the weather. Or maybe: we get really pedantic when measuring how long it takes to drive from one city to another. (Oh, it's four-and-a-half hours to Moosejaw, but it's only four hours when you drive it? Super helpful, asshole.)

But mostly, it's the thing about criticism.

So when Brazilian columnist Vilma Gryzinski wrote a scathing takedown of our prime minister in Veja magazine—which sounds like the name for a fancy vagina—I knew this could not stand.

"Narcissism and boutique leftism are the basis of Justin Trudeau, the beautiful," writes the magazine, according to Google Translate.

Hey, assholes, making fun of The Selfie Prime Minister and his stupid hair is our thing. If anyone is going to say that our leader is like a grad student with a toupee and a half-decent tailor, it's going to be us. If some shitty magazine is going to write that our head of government is living proof that a handsome face and a famous dad can get you anywhere, it's going to be one of our shitty magazines. If it's going to be proclaimed that PMJT is a human meme, it'll be some bitter dick in Winnipeg—not some right-wing columnist in São José do Rio Preto. If it is to be said that our peacekeeper-in-chief is a walking jawline with with an unbearable communications strategy, it's going to be someone in a Nordiques jersey and an Expos hat who doesn't speak French.

Image via Wikimedia

Earlier this week, the Swedish Tourist Association decided to honor the 250th anniversary of the Swedish abolishment of national censorship by creating a phone number for the whole of Sweden. If you call that number, you're connected to a random Swede, and you can have a chat.

So now we have the opportunity to really get to know Sweden, and finally, once and for all, figure out what exactly is wrong with it. Because you can be sure that a country that's so much like one big life insurance commercial is hiding something.

To get to the core of things and understand what Sweden is about, our different European VICE offices called the Swedish number to ask the Swedes their burning questions.

UNITED KINGDOM

VICE: Hi! Why does everyone in Sweden love dill so much?
Torgny from Gothenburg: Oh yes, dill—very popular in Sweden. Well, it's tasty! We use it in salad, you can use it in fish in the oven—but not on meat. It doesn't go with meat. But it's excellent!

Is the aesthetic of dill as appealing to you as the flavor?
Yeah, but it depends what you do with it. If you cook it, it doesn't look appealing, but if it's fresh—for example, in a salad—it looks excellent.

In the UK, we consider Swedish food to be mostly dill, meatballs, and salmon. Is that correct?
No, no, no. A typical Swedish dish that we would have on midsummer, Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter would definitely be meatballs, different kinds of herring, boiled eggs, caviar, lots of salad, and lots of bread, of course—rye bread usually.

ROMANIA

VICE: Hello Sweden, here's a question: There's this legend that in Communist times in Romania, blond and tall Swedish women came here to have fun and drink whiskey and take drugs and have affairs with Romanian men. Do you know if there's any truth to this legend?
Sam: No, that can't be true. Why would Swedish girls want to go to Romania? It's a poor country. It's not nice there.

No, it's nice here, and cheap. If you bring money, you can have fun.
Spend money on women?

Wait, how old are you?
I'm sixteen.

OK, never mind. Thank you very much.
Have a good day lady.

Image via Wikimedia.

SPAIN

VICE: Hi Sweden! You've been spending your holidays in Spain for the past fifty years, and there are around seventy thousand Swedish people living here. Why?
Andreas from Skåne: I don't really know much about Spain. I've never been there, but I think Swedish people go to Spain because it's warm and beautiful. There's good food and great culture. I've heard Mallorca will be the place where more Swedish people will go on holiday this summer. I'd completely understand if you're not a fan of us being there, though. We just go there to enjoy our holidays, so we don't get the see the whole picture. We don't have to deal with your politicians or their policies.

GERMANY

VICE: Hi Sweden! Who really killed Olof Palme in 1986?
Roger from Haninge, Stockholm: Well, this year, the media paid a lot of attention to the case. I personally don't have an opinion on the matter. I've been following the case, but it is confusing. There is this one guy who was accused of the murder. He was declared guilty, but that was in a lower court. So he appealed. The case went to a higher court, where they reversed the verdict, and he was declared not guilty. In the media, they said it was because of the lack of evidence. I trust the Swedish judiciary, but there are a lot of people who think there's some kind of conspiracy going on. I cannot speak for everyone here, but I think they know what they are doing here.

GREECE

VICE: Which country is Sweden's mortal enemy?
Anonymous: I would say Norway. If we're talking about hockey, it's Finland. If we're talking about football, it's Denmark. But overall it's mainly Norway.

SERBIA

VICE: So, Sweden, are your prisons really as amazing as we think they are?
Marianne from Malmö: Yeah, I haven't ever been in one, but I can imagine that Swedish prisons can be a kind of heaven when compared to the ones in the US or other Western countries. Some people in Sweden say prisoners here are better off than pensioners, and that their conditions should be harder. But this country is built on social democracy, and it has been that way since the 1920s. The basic idea is that no person is a hopeless case, and that everybody can become a better person. It's been that way for the past fifty or sixty years.

DENMARK

VICE: With your stance on gender equality and refugee discourse, Sweden might just be the most politically correct nation on Earth. Is it hard for you to live up to that in your everyday life?
Martin Page from Sundsvall (a UK native): I'm aware of the fact that the Swedes are like that with their politics, but I don't think most people find it a problem in their daily life. It's just something they're used to here in Sweden. Everyone tries to do their best with helping refugees, and I think the Swedes are pretty high on the list in that respect. I don't think I differ from Swedes in terms of what I consider to be PC. In fact, most people think I'm Swedish.

Image via Flickr user Håkan Dahlström

FRANCE

VICE: Do you know why there are so many handsome Swedish guys studying in Paris?
Anonymous from Malmö: It's hard to say, but I really think it's because we consider Paris the "City of Love." I've been there numerous times, and it never bores. You know, more and more Swedish students are learning French at school, so it's easier for us. In fact, we love to go abroad to study and work, so it's not a big surprise to find plenty of people from Sweden in Paris.

THE NETHERLANDS

VICE: Bars in Sweden are supposed to ban people from dancing unless they have a special license. It looks like that's now going to change, but do you think this law is typical for Sweden?
Peter from Umeå: I guess it's just one of the many bureaucratic rules we have. But this law says that you also require security if you want people to dance in your bar. That's necessary because when people want to dance they drink a lot, and when people drink a lot, there are also a lot of fights. When I'm in Stockholm, I see this sometimes. It's not like Amsterdam, where you also use other stuff that makes you more calm and peaceful—if you get what I mean.

SWITZERLAND

VICE: Hi Sweden. Do all of you have an elk in your garden?
Anonymous: I live in an apartment in the city of Malmö, so I don't have a garden and no elk. But mythologically speaking, it's true that every Swede has an elk, at least in his attic. We have to put porridge for Santa Claus in the attic on Christmas night—that's a tale we tell our children. So I guess the answer is yes and no.

Just some cool stock photo Millennials chilling around bein' political. Photo via Joos Mind/Getty

A simplistic but not exactly wrong, way to think of politics is as a collection of interest groups playing a many-sided game of tug-of-war. The gun lobby wants to make it easy for people to buy guns. Abortion rights groups want to make it easy for women to access abortions. Many conservative Christians want to make it hard for some people to use the bathroom. But one player stands out above all others, one interest group truly terrifies politicians, one lobby rules them all: old people.

Old people's dominance in politics is so ubiquitous that it usually goes unremarked upon, just like fish probably don't talk a lot about water. But the older-50 crowd and their premiere lobbying group, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), is a behemoth. In 2014, Al Jazeera reported, AARP had 38 million members and a budget of $1.8 billion. As a result of AARP's efforts—and the tendency of older Americans to vote in large numbers—talking about cuts to Medicare or Social Security has become the most electrified third rail of American politics.

All of the major candidates for president support leaving those entitlement programs intact—when Ted Cruz discusses reforms like raising the retirement age, he's careful to emphasize that these changes won't affect today's seniors. Even Donald Trump, who has joked about killing someone and has no problem suggesting that the US military should be allowed to commit war crimes, won't say anything controversial about Social Security.

You can look at an organized effort like AARP's as emblematic of what's wrong with American democracy and the lobbying culture that's attached to it like a giant remora on a particularly dim-witted shark—or you can say, I gotta get me some of that.

That's what motivated Benjamin Brown, 26, to start the Association of Young Americans (AYA), a group that he hopes one day will rival AARP in power and clout but will use its heft on behalf of 18-to-35-year-olds.

The germ of the idea was planted in Brown's head in 2012, when he read an op-ed in the Washington Post about the problems facing younger Americans: failing schools, the rising cost of college, a national infrastructure on the verge of collapse, and the massive cost of those untouchable entitlement programs that benefit the elderly. The piece concluded with a quote from former Senator Allen Simpson, which said that politicians wouldn't listen to the concerns of Millennials until someone could walk into their offices and say, "I'm from the American Association of Young People. We have 30 million members, and we're watching you, Simpson. You us and we'll take you out."

"For two or three years I really have not been able to stop thinking about that," Brown tells me. "It's kept me up at night. Why don't young Americans have a lobbying group?"

Well, they do as of two weeks ago, when Brown's AYA kicked off its self-described "soft launch." It's still in its infancy—it has only "hundreds" of members, according to Brown, and just over 200 Facebook likes, but Brown's ambitions are big. There are an estimated 80 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 35, making Millennials the largest chunk of the voting-age population in the country.

"I think that if a lobbyist walked in supported by tens of millions of young people, it would change the game," he says, and provide so much force that it might even overcome Congress's notorious tendency toward gridlock and stonewalling that has made legislation on the national level nearly impossible in recent years.

The top issues for AYA, which Brown determined through surveys of young people, are the high cost of college and student loans, the way the very wealthy control the political process through campaign donations, and racial bias in the criminal justice system.

The focus is on inequality in its various forms, which isn't exactly surprising—though Brown emphasizes that AYA is nonpartisan—as any collection of Millennials is probably going to lean leftward. However, polls have found that although the generation doesn't like to identify with a political party and is split on a few social issues (primarily abortion), the majority lean Democratic, and as Bernie Sanders's candidacy has shown, a lot of young people are eager to back a candidate who speaks the language of economic and social justice.

Identifying these priorities, though, is the easy part. The difficulty comes in the nuts-and-bolts of organizing and administration. Brown has ideas for that, too; he wants to "pull the veil back on what our lobbyists will be doing" and give members the chance to interact with the lobbyists directly, making the normally behind-closed-doors aspect of the process a bit more open.

Members pay $20 a year to support those lobbying efforts—in exchange, they get perks, as AARP members do. Currently the only benefits listed on the site are $75 off on a mattress delivery from a company called Tuck and 15 percent off purchases from Zest Tea, but Brown says there will be more deals on everything from streaming services to travel.

"Those two pieces—the lobbying and the deals—means that we can help young people save money every day," Brown says, "and it means we can work to solve the long-term problems holding us back."

But there's another problem holding young people back: Unlike the AARP's membership, they don't vote. Though Millennials have enormous potential political power, it mostly goes unused—in the 2014 midterm elections, only 21 percent of voters under 30 cast ballots. Naturally, Brown thinks AYA can bridge that enthusiasm gap between the young and the old.

"The list of reasons why young people don't vote is long but not particularly complicated," he says. "Young people don't vote because they feel like they have no power and it doesn't really matter. But what AYA is doing is it's giving them their power immediately... Once they have ownership of the process and they're plugged into it they'll be more engaged."

Unfortunately, that's the catch-22 baked into every effort to get young people energized about politics: If they aren't already engaged, it seems unlikely they'll cough up the price of a gram of weed a year to join a group like AYA. And until AYA is big and strong like a grown-up person, it won't be able to engage anyone.

Most efforts to get young people excited for politics are cringefests. Rock the Vote's video of Lil Jon voting in the 2014 elections did not exactly set the world on fire; Lena Dunham's stumping for Hillary Clinton failed to get her fellow Millennials Ready for Hillary. AYA's approach is largely devoid of the sort of in-your-face, celebrity-based selling that some people assume will appeal to kids. Will AYA's fairly serious, staid, policy-based approach be enough to excite potential members?

But it seems unfair to judge AYA before it's truly off the ground (it hasn't yet actually hired any lobbyists). Every big dream starts small—when AARP was founded by a retired principal in the 50s, Medicare didn't even exist. Only time will determine whether AYA is something Millennials will actually glom on to, a la Facebook, or whether it will wind up in Ello-esque obscurity.

"Right now we're really focused on outreach and membership," Brown says. You can't lobby for no one."

David Cameron and Vladimir Putin, two rich men implicated in the Panama Papers. Photo: kremlin.ru via

If you're not simmering with rage at the Panama Papers revelations, you probably should be. The Mossack Fonseca leak has laid bare how the rich operate with impunity when it comes to taxation. David Cameron has admitted to benefitting from his dad's tax-avoiding offshore fund, while the papers revealed that six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs, and several donors to British political parties have all avoided tax via offshore funds. Confirmation that the world of the super-rich is, if you ever doubted it, a festering abyss of hypocrisy and greed.

But what about your mate who does a bit of painting and decorating for cash-in-hand and doesn't declare it to the government? Isn't that the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale? Or is the fact that we live in a time of record-level wealth disparity—a time when 8.1 million people in the UK live below an income level regarded as the minimum needed to participate in society—license for those at the economic bottom to even things out a bit?

Aaron from Watford, England does ground work on building sites. "Last summer I was earning, like, £120 a day, and that was all going through the books," he says. "But then I started working for myself, and people were chatting to me saying, 'How shall I pay you?' So, for the first few months, I was like, 'Cash is king,' which was obviously really handy because I didn't have to pay 20 percent on it.

"But there's another reason—it was also because it's so competitive in the building game, so instead of saying to someone, 'The job's going to be £1,400 cash.'"

Aaron thinks the focus should be on corporate tax avoidance: "If you take Starbucks, for example, what they do is fucking bang out of order. If those big firms were to put money in the pot, you might find that our 20 percent VAT went down. You've got all these bigwigs all doing it, but I think if you're earning your money in the UK, you shouldn't be able to send it here, there, and everywhere."

Chris from Bristol is an artist and photographer, and works at festivals in the summer. "I've scribbled an income out of what I've been doing for years," he says. "I earn £50 here and £50 there. It just wouldn't be worth it if I had to pay tax on it. I don't make the minimum threshold anyway, so paying tax just to claim it back is pointless."

The Panama Papers, Chris says, are probably the tip of the iceberg: "We're not getting the full picture. My point of view is that austerity is an excuse to disempower people and put in place power systems to extort money from people. The destruction of the social contract is quite unbelievable. You pay tax to fund healthcare, education, legal advice—all things that are being taken away from the people who pay for them.

"Listening to Cameron say he's not benefitting from if his dad wasn't running an offshore company."

Luke is a relief chef and event worker. Last year, he made around 30 percent of his income in cash. Of this, he says he'll declare a third. This is justified, Luke says, by the fact that he worked a PAYE (pay-as-you-earn) job for ten years previously and paid over the odds in tax.

"I'm still declaring more than I've earned in a PAYE job. I've been in position where I'm paying £500 a week income tax, and what do you get out of it?" he asks. "I've never been in a position where I can sign on, as I've always left jobs, and you can't sign on unless you've been fired or made redundant."

Luke says he's made extra money through doing lots of overtime: "In the ten weeks leading up to Christmas I was working 120 hours a week. No one expects you to do that, no one allows you to do that, so if I take it upon myself to ruin myself by working that damn hard, why should I just hand 40 percent of it to the government?"

What's different about those whose offshore assets were uncovered in the leak is the scale, Luke believes: "It's just another whole level of people doing what we all know is happening. The question is: are they going to prosecute people and dissuade people from doing it in the future? If they recovered the tax avoided by the largest companies, it would offset all the benefit cuts. That's ridiculous."

Rich earned extra money on the side while he was a student last year. "When I was studying I did a cash-in-hand job delivering junk mail," he says. "I wasn't getting enough money otherwise to live on. I didn't declare it, because if I had declared it, it wouldn't have been worth doing it.

"While I was delivering I'd see these posters up everywhere saying, 'If you're working and not declaring, we're onto you.' It seems unfair to target the people who are most in need. They should be going after the people with lots of surplus wealth who can afford to pay taxes."

None of the people I spoke to for this feature have savings, none of them own property, Rich still lives with his parents. None of them went to Eton, none of them are going on vacation this year. So yes, from a coldly analytical point of view, avoiding tax is avoiding tax, but when one in five millennials lives in poverty and when the share of income going to the 1 percent is rising, it's not hard to make a distinction between making a bit of cash-in-hand and creating an offshore fund in the Virgin Islands.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

Aidan Gillen plays Paul Serene, both in the game itself and its accompany live-action show. pictured here

We're no strangers to the concept of the sympathetic villain in video games. Mass Effect's Illusive Man was a cold, calculating bastard who would stop at nothing to put humanity on top of the galactic food chain. But, despite that, I wouldn't consider him evil. He took no pleasure in the awful acts that his Cerberus organization had to enact—he believed that he had no choice, that fate had forced his hand.

Likewise, if we look over to Rocksteady's Arkham games, and the wider Batman mythos at large, we find a multitude of villains who aren't that way just for the sake of it—like Mr. Freeze, who just wants to save his dying wife. These characters remain villains though, because while they believe their actions to be following the only path left open to them, the heroes of the stories ultimately show that there is a better way. Remedy's new Quantum Break has once again highlighted that the antagonist of any given piece of fiction need not be A Bad Guy, because, basically, I agree with its villain, Paul Serene. Ergo, I'd have rather played as the villain in Quantum Break.

Okay, here's your spoiler warning. If you haven't played Quantum Break, and don't want its plot ruined, click away now.

The story opens with Paul Serene and the player-controlled "hero" character, Jack Joyce, performing a time-travel experiment that literally blows up in their faces, causing a fracture in time that will ultimately lead to the end of time. Think of it like a crack on a windshield, growing in size until the whole thing shatters; or, as Jack's brother Will so fantastically puts it: "If time is an egg, then that egg is fucking broken. The time egg is fucked." Almost immediately after the explosion, the private security troops of a company called Monarch Solutions raid the facility. Jack escapes with his brother, while Paul proceeds into the time machine, and into the future.

It turns out the future isn't all it's cracked up to be, what with time itself having broken down. After being hunted down by a mysterious woman and other horrors at the end of time, Paul escapes to the past, 17 years before his experiment with Jack, and begins trying to prevent the fracture from ever happening. Part of this involves founding Monarch Solutions (which explains how they were there, so fast, after the accident). And it's here where things get interesting, as Paul runs into something known as the predestination paradox.

Gillen's Serene beside Monarch Solutions' Martin Hatch, played by Lance Reddick

The predestination paradox is a casual loop, that is to say, a series of events that lead to their own beginning. Confused? Don't worry, paradoxes are meant to mess with your mind, and are by their very nature paradoxical. But what this all means, basically, is that any attempt to go back in time and prevent an event from happening will either fail, or inadvertently lead to said event happening in the first place. Paul tries to stop a man committing suicide, someone he and Jack saw when they were younger; but his presence there startles the man, causing him to fall from a building and to his death. He couldn't stop it from happening, because his future self had already failed to prevent it. I know, my brain is screaming too. In summary: you can't change the past, at least not following the rules laid down in Quantum Break.

Paul eventually comes to accept that he is bound by the laws of predestination and that he can't stop the fracture in time from occurring, whereupon he comes up with the frankly astounding idea to circumnavigate the problem altogether. He can't stop the end of time, but he can survive it and then restart time afterwards. It's fucking brilliant and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for that meddling idiot Jack Joyce.

Article continues after the video below

Related; Watch VICE's new film, 'Walking Heavy'

Now, I like Jack as a character, but he doesn't exactly put a lot of thought into his plan of action, his own attempts to rectify the damage done. He witnesses (what appears to be) the death of his brother at the hands of Paul, and sets off on a revenge-driven murder spree that would make even Uncharted's Nathan Drake blush. Jack risks everything, and eventually destroys Serene's Lifeboat Protocol, the project set up to protect people from the breaking down of time. He does so despite everyone else in the story, including his own brother, who turns out not to be dead and who invented the game's means of time travel, insisting he cannot ultimately succeed, and that time will undo itself, no matter what.

Will helps Jack with the plan to stop the fracture, but does so not knowing that Paul has already seen the end of time, which proves that their plan will fail before it has even begun. Still with me? Good, good. Will doesn't know that the plan is doomed to fail, but Jack does, yet he ploughs ahead with it anyway, ignoring all the evidence that the end of time can't be stopped. He represents the very worst excesses of stereotypical heroes: the idea that a can-do attitude and a blissful ignorance of the facts can lead you to victory. The worst thing is that many people will come away from Quantum Break thinking the fool gets away with it, but he doesn't.

Jack Joyce, the hero/humanity-threatening idiot of the story, is played by Shawn Ashmore

By Quantum Break's conclusion, all Jack has done is delay the end of time; Paul saw it happen and it is still going to happen. Throughout the game, we're told that Paul didn't expect the fracture to happen so soon, that they'd have years before they reached the end of time. It's an inevitability, but all Jack's actions have guaranteed is that there's no life-preserving Lifeboat Protocol to shelter in, deep underground, when everything up top goes to shit.

Even with the player making the most ruthless decisions at the game's "Junction" points, in which we control Paul to determine his own course of action "against" Jack, he never shows malice or evil. He regrets the price that must be paid to save the human race, but make no mistake: he respects that it needs to be paid. He's the one person in the story who's trying to do the right thing. He's the one person who's fully aware of what's about to go down. He's the real hero, whose attempts to preserve the human race are ruined by a gun-toting dude driven by vengeance. I'd rather have played as him, as the "villain," than a guy cathartically carving up the place with nary a thought for the consequences.

Quantum Break is out now for Xbox One and PC. Visit the game's website for more information.

Follow Ian Stokes on Twitter.

I don't like to define my style; I just go out and take pictures. I don't often know what I'm going to photograph because I work aesthetically and instinctively.

People are often suspicious or wary of me if they spot me standing in the corner taking their picture. I don't want to interfere with the scene, so it's important to be inconspicuous. Sometimes I sit down, talk to a few people around me and gradually warm myself into the scene as a way to validate my presence. Once they've unconsciously recognized I'm not a threat, I shoot.

What I'm really looking for is to get people questioning what they're seeing. I'm not interested in definitively telling people what to see, or choreographing a set of photographs into a concept; I'm looking for possibilities and for implicit stories. Psychology has a huge impact on how people perceive a photograph. People's brains trigger different things, so when looking at the same image, some may come away feeling claustrophobic. It might remind someone of something, like of their father or of a film they watched last week. Some might see a story about love in an image, while others may interpret it as domestic abuse. Some may find pleasure in the aesthetic coherence, and some might feel indifferent. It's open to interpretation.

There's definitely a surrealist feeling to my pictures, which is mostly achieved aesthetically, yet combining surrealism with street photography sort of opens up a portal to a dreamlike landscape, where multiple narratives are possible and your psyche can take you anywhere. It's like making fiction out of reality.

Lighting is so powerful. From where I'm standing and from where the light naturally falls, the light can highlight certain elements in the scene and disregard others. This definitely encourages the surrealist aesthetic, and it works hand in hand with obscure angles, layering, reflections, and colors. What's most interesting to me is that, although I try not to meddle in the scene to preserve authenticity, by definition it can't be real, because it's only my way of seeing; it's real for me.

As told to Francesca Cronan.

See more of Giacomo's work below and on his website, and check out Eyegobananas, the street photography collective he's part of.

Photo via Flickr user Cannabis Culture

Back again with your weekly weedy roundup of Canadian cannabis news. So first off, STOP THE PRESSES!!!! One of Canada's most active cannabis activists and fan favourite of this column has been arrested. On only the second stop of his cross-country OverGrow Canada tour, Dana Larsen was busted by the Calgary po-po. Larsen was working on giving away one million free seeds to Canadians to help them grow cannabis legalization "Victory Gardens." The Calgary cops charged him with trafficking, seized 1,097 grams of marijuana seeds as well as some weed, oil and the group's van. Dana was released on bail and ordered back to court on May 18th.

Very sad man! Photo via Flickr user er madx

It is a pretty ballsy legal strategy to attach naked pictures of your ex-wife to a legal application in family court.

And, yet, that's what one Ontario man tried last month.

The judge was superduper not impressed.

"Do nude pictures of parents help judges decide who should get custody?" asked Justice Alex Pazaratz in his March 29 ruling. " A silly question? Why then, on this motion for temporary custody, has the Applicant father attached to his affidavit a series of sexually explicit 'selfies' of the mother, retrieved from her discarded cell phone?"

The answer, it seems, was: This was a dick move.

The 10-page ruling does consider the welfare of the couple's two children, but also spends quite a bit of time wondering what the hell the dad was thinking when he attached "full page colour photographs of the nude mother in sexually provocative positions" to his custody application.

"If the objective was to humiliate the mother, undoubtedly the father succeeded," Pazaratz wrote.

The legal fight was what you'd expect. The father contended that the mother was unfit, couldn't support the children, and was preoccupied with her new boyfriend. The mother countered that she's a stay-at-home mom and is doing perfectly fine at looking after the two—an eight-year-old boy and 16-month-old girl—and that the father is inventing problems in order to win custody.

But that regular bullshit, with the kids caught in the middle, wasn't enough for the dad.

So how did he get the nudes?

"In mid-November 2015—after separation—the parties were living under the same roof but in different units," the judge writes. The eight-year-old son went down to his visit his dad's apartment who, then, "suddenly heard the boy screaming in the bedroom. The boy was very upset because he had come across sexually explicit pictures of his mother while playing with her cell phone."

Worst. Nightmare.

The dad "filed the pictures with his affidavit, so the court would understand how badly the child had been traumatized by the images."

Uh huh.

"He blamed the Respondent." (The mom.)

Of course he did.

The judge, obviously, had none of this.

In what has got to be one of the most sarcastic legal rulings I've ever read, Pazaratz writes:

"The nude photographs and salacious texts submitted by the father merely confirm what I would suspect of most other adults on this planet: The mother has a sex life. Big deal."

The dad also submitted 89 pages of her text conversations ("Light on grammar. Heavy on anatomy") which the judge called "the litigation version of 50 Shades of Gray."

Here's the kicker: saddad's lawyer "speculated that the for the child seeing nude images of his mother, there was no need to actually attach colour enlargements to his affidavit. He could have summarized his version of events in a single paragraph. All he had to do was refer to them as 'nude selfies,'" the judge wrote. "I think most judges would have understood."

The judge (who is awesome) had the files destroyed. And while he did order the mom to give the dad more visitation time, he also forced the dad to hand over the cell phone and forbid him from sharing the images.

So there you go, sad middle aged men. Don't go sharing photos of your naked ex-wives with judges. Just go back to listening to that Phil Collins tape.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Image by Adam Mignanelli

Read: A Bernie Sanders Victory Just Got a Little Less Impossible

Jewish presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will be hopping a flight to the Vatican right after his April 14 debate with Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post reports.

On Friday, Sanders accepted the Vatican's invitation to take a quick break from the campaign grind to speak at a conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences about social, economic, and environmental issues facing the world.

"I am grateful to the Vatican for inviting me to talk about an issue that is very dear to my heart, which is how we create a moral economy that works for all of the people rather than just the top one percent," Sanders told the Post.

"I think the Vatican has been aware of the fact that, in many respects, the pope's views and my views are very much related," Sanders continued. "He has talked in an almost unprecedented way about the need to address income and wealth inequality, poverty, and to combat the greed that we're seeing all over this world, which is doing so much harm to so many people."

Unfortunately, Sanders isn't currently scheduled to meet directly with Pope Francis, so the two may not get a chance to talk about their complementary views or their various forays into the music world.

Donald Trump may be soldiering on as the Republican presidential frontrunner, but a new poll from the Associated Press and survey outfit GfK shows that a strong majority of the country is not feeling his vibe, the AP reports.

According to the poll, seven out of ten US adults have an unfavorable view of Trump. We're talking all Americans, here—men and women of all races, ages and political views.

Since Trump released his insane plan to force Mexico to build a border wall, saw his campaign manager get get arrested, and made bizarre comments about women being punished for abortion, the guy's unpopularity with Americans has risen at least 10 percentage points.

"He's at risk of having the nomination denied to him because grassroots party activists fear he's so widely disliked that he can't possibly win," former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer told the AP. Even his own party is deeply divided on the guy, with nearly half of Republicans and plenty of Southerners giving him a thumbs down.

While Trump may be the most reviled candidate out there right now, his rivals aren't doing so well, either—59 percent of people think Ted Cruz also sucks, and 55 percent are down on Clinton. The results offer more evidence that Americans are going to wind up electing whichever presidential candidate they hate the least.

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Drugs are great when everything's going according to plan. But an altered state of mind can also make it harder to roll with the punches when things go completely tits up, and in those times, nothing seems as sweet as being sober.

I asked people about their worst drug experiences—not just stories about getting too high, but also stories of the times life threw them for a loop they could barely handle because they were high. What ensues is better than any DARE commercial.

"Once I took MDMA and forgot to put my mouthguard in that night. I wound up sucking on my lips all night to such a degree that when I woke up, my lips were so grotesquely misshapen it looked like I'd just received a back-alley collagen injection. I had a flight to Denmark that morning, and my lips were still so swollen by the time I got to the airport that I was pulled for extra screening because the TSA people thought I was trying to use someone else's ID." — Kathleen, 26, New York

"Last year at Coachella, I took some bad acid—or maybe just some really potent acid—at half the dose I normally take. All of a sudden it hit me like a goddamn Mack truck. I was the kid rolling around in the dirt trying to hide in the crevices of different installations. After a while, I couldn't stop projectile vomiting. It came in waves, so every time I thought I was OK to stand and be human again, nope, got knocked straight on my ass, throwing up like a human fountain. I basically rolled around in my own bodily fluids in the grass like a fucking rookie for six hours." — Christina, 27, California

"The year after high school, I went to a concert at the Red Rocks, an open-air venue in Colorado. We drove down from the mountains in a limo drinking champagne with molly in it, just getting super messed up. When we got to the parking lot, I got into my friends pickup truck to do a line of molly off his center console. Then I hopped out and slammed the door to realize my finger was still in the door. I was so fucked up and so shocked that I stood there for like thirty seconds before I started screaming. My friend unlocked the car and pulled my hand out and blood was gushing everywhere.

We booked it through the ticket line toward the EMT station, while I'm simultaneously spraying blood and rolling balls. The EMTs were like, 'Your finger is broken, and you need stitches. It's highly suggested you go to the hospital, but since you're eighteen, we can't force you to do anything.'

I was like, 'Yeah, can you just wrap it, and I'll stay at this concert because I'm on drugs, and I don't want to go to the hospital.'

So I'm at this show with this massive wrap on my hand, with blood seeping through, and every person coming up to me is like, 'OMG! What happened? Here, have some drugs.'

I had so many drugs that night that I'm sure I was one minute away from overdosing. When I got back home, still high, I told my mom I broke my finger. She immediately drove me over to the ER, and I had to get stitches while still rolling." — Ellie, 25, Colorado

Watch: The Westminster Dog Show... On Acid!

"I used to run a warehouse where we threw illegal warehouse parties. I took acid one night, and then I realized everyone at the party was wearing red. I don't know for sure if they were in a gang, but it was either that or it was a party where everyone specifically wore red. I don't want to assume.

Right around the time the acid kicked in, a gun fight broke out, and the cops came in in riot gear. I locked myself upstairs in a room and was looking out through the window assuming I was about to be arrested. Then all of a sudden, I thought I was a garden growing.

Obviously I wasn't a garden, and I didn't get arrested, but I feel like it would've been a great acid trip were it not for all the gang violence." — James, 25, California

On The Creators Project: The Photographer Capturing People on Drugs

"I took shrooms and went to a Korn and Limp Bizkit show. Every time I do shrooms I get all philosophical, so I was standing there at the back of the pit thinking about how many people there were at the show and how each individual person has hopes and dreams and goals and struggles... and how they're all fans of Limp Bizkit." — Patrick, 28, California

Related: How Parents Talk to Their Kids About Drugs in 2016

"While home over spring break one semester, I went to a house party close to my hometown. Besides drinking a ton of SoCo, I took a pill of something or other, and the next thing I knew, it was the next morning, and I was waking up in the back seat of my car. The keys were on the front dash by the windshield, so I convinced myself I hadn't driven, but I quickly discovered I was missing one of my shoes, had two black eyes, and after surveying the area a little, realized I was two states away from where I started the night before." —Chase, 25, Pennsylvania

Follow Justin on Twitter.

Image by Sarah MacReading

The leak of the so-called Panama Papers was big news, but the main takeaway from the stories circulating about offshore accounts and shell companies is what you always suspected is true: Rich people play by different rules than plebs, stashing their cash in hidden accounts, often to avoid paying taxes like the rest of us.

For most of us, the idea of putting money in an account in a bank located in some out-of-the-way island country is intrinsically shady, but as many news stories have taken pains to point out, not all offshoring is evil. An FAQ from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists even says outright, "There are legitimate reasons to create a company in an offshore jurisdiction, and many people declare them to their tax authorities when that is required."

But what are those "legitimate reasons"? Is there any reason to create an offshore company that's not, "I'd like to not pay taxes, please, thank you"? Seeking answers, I called up Clinton Wallace, an international tax law expert at New York University. He told me that if someone's using a foreign bank, that doesn't mean he or she is automatically a piece of garbage. He divided the reasons one might have one into the categories "nefarious" and "practical." For instance, he pointed to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was implemented in 2010 and requires storefront banks to report customers from the US who use them.

"One of the effects is that it makes it more expensive for foreign banks to have US customers," he told me. "So many of those banks aren't interested in setting up a checking account for US employees working there, because it's created some hurdles for them." In essence, that means your friend from college who moved to Panama to "find herself" after graduation–– but also needed a checking account there to buy drinks served inside of coconuts and pay rent––is an example of someone not-sketchy who might have an offshore account.

There's one other reason that is "practical" but not necessarily illegal, like hiding money anonymously so that if you get sued in civil court, no one can take it from you. You might argue that if you're anticipating doing something that gets you sued you're involved in something on morally shaky ground, but some sites that specialize in offshore banking market their services to physicians, the logic being that they are often subject to frivolous malpractice claims. And in fact, a Harvard study from 2006 found that 40 percent of malpractice suits are groundless.

J.F. Morrow, an expert banking trial witness whose former clients including Bank of America and Fannie Mae, told me that you can report your offshore account to the IRS while having it shielded from suits if there isn't a reciprocal relationship between your home country and whatever country you're banking in. In other words, you can pay taxes on the account without danger of having it seized by the US, as long as American courts don't have jurisdiction over your money.

To see how easy it would be to set up an offshore account, I called Offshore Company for a consultation and spoke to a man named Tom, who offered to set one up for $750. However, setting up an offshore account is borderline pointless if you don't also set up a shell company to go with it; Tom described it as a "second layer of protection." With that in mind, he offered to set up a corporation, an office program to receive mail and calls, as well as a bank account for a grand total of $4,745. When I asked where all of this would be located, Tom told me "Dominica" but was quick to make sure I knew he meant "not the Dominican Republic." When I asked where that was, he laughed heartily. I'm still not really sure where that is, but I do know I don't have $4,745.

To do some comparison shopping, I visited the website of Harbor Financial Services. After filling out a ten-question survey about why I wanted to set up the account, if I wanted a debit card as well as online banking, and how quickly I needed it, I was given a quote of $2,850. My account would be at Loyal Bank in St. Vincent, with a corporation formed in Belize and a trust located in the Bahamas. It would only cost $1,000 per year to renew, and my name wouldn't be attached to it at all. It was remarkably simple, and it took about four minutes to submit my request.

The second offer was quite the deal; after all, three grand isn't very much to a fictional doctor looking for protection against malpractice suits, and the upfront cost would provide more benefits than just privacy in case of a lawsuit, according to Jay Dahya, an economics and finance professor at Baruch College I spoke to. We imagined my fictional physician opened a shell company in Belize and then had that company invest in a practice in the United States. Dividends would be paid out to the "company" that invested (but is really just an account controlled by the doctor), and taxes on those dividends would be less than taxes he or she would have to pay in the US by double-digit percentage points.

"There is also the issue that wealthy people don't want to attract attention," Dahya added. "One one way to do this is to hold income in overseas entrepôts. It's well-known that high-profile investment bankers have offshore accounts so that their colleagues can't figure out how much they received in bonuses."

So offshoring can hide you from lawsuits, help turn your money into more money, and conceal your wealth from your "friends" in finance. All that is legal, but is any of it ethically dubious?

In The Con Men: Hustling in New York City, authors Terry Williams and Trevor B. Milton argue that swindlers often justify their actions by claiming that their marks are bad people who don't deserve their money––in other words, by taking on an air of moral superiority. By the same token, a website called SovereignMan says anyone not taking advantage of offshoring is a fool, and even suggests that people who have the means to do are inherently better than people who are poor. "Some say this is unethical and cheating, but not surprisingly, those who say this are most often not the same people as those who create value in society," the site reads. "If you've found your way to this page, chances are strong that you're a value creator and want to keep more of the money you get back as a result of creating value."

Randy Cohen, former ethicist of the New York Times Magazine, says that this instinct to hold on to the money you make isn't necessarily moral, even if your methods are legal.

"Every member of a community has a duty to contribute his or her share to the needs of that community, and the wealthiest members of a community have an even greater obligation, not just because they can shoulder such a burden, but because it is the resources of the community that made them wealthy: schools to educate workers, highways to carry goods, air that's clean enough to breathe," he said. "What's more, it is the wealthiest members of a community who have the most influence in shaping the very laws they now use to justify their contemptible behavior."

Getting an offshore account is a matter of pure economics; the arguments against are a little more complicated. There's a reason tax loopholes are looked down upon, and it's the same reason being named in the Panama Papers forced Iceland's prime minister to step down and British PM David Cameron is facing protests over his links to an offshore account. Moving your money out of the country, even when it's legal, seems to represent an abandonment of your homeland and its laws; it puts a barrier between you and ordinary people and aligns you with everyone else who has a reason to hide their money.

As Cohen put it, "It's pretty simple stuff, something our parents taught us: Do your share. Even when you can weasel out of it."

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My name is Nicholas Gazin and I am VICE's art editor. On top of being addicted to beauty I am also a total eataholic. I've been teaching myself to cook since December and I'm getting really good at it. Cooking food means spending a lot of time trawling the grocery store for food to cook. I start my grocery store visits in the produce aisle at the left of the store and inevitably navigate my grocery cart to the right-most aisle, where the frozen food is kept.

For months, I would peer through the glass freezer doors at the cold cardboard boxes looking furtively at the frozen food like a kid glancing at the dirty magazines at the top of the newsstand rack. Again and again I would gaze upon the frozen delights only to roll my cart to the checkout aisle with my grown-up non-frozen food selections. During a recent and very dark depression I finally acted upon my desire. Frozen food combines two of my favorite things: eating and mysteries. Could the beautiful pictures and alluring cartoon mascots on the boxes be telling the truth about the deliciousness within? I decided that I could no longer let the quandary and icy foods torment me.

I have loaded my grocery cart and freezer and myself with all the highly salted frozen foods that my mother was always responsible enough to keep me away from. I'm now on a sacred quest to taste all frozen foods and to test the truthfulness in their marketing. I've eaten a lot of frozen food in the past month in order to gain frozen wisdom and I can now share that deep knowledge with you. This week, I'm reviewing frozen fish sticks.

Gorton's Fish Sticks

These are made from minced pollock meat, breaded and frozen. After 17 minutes in the oven you get 12 perfect food sticks.

Fish sticks were my favorite food as a four-year-old and now I remember why. Fish sticks are delicious and have lower caloric content than the other frozen foods I've reviewed so far.

I will definitely be sampling more of Gorton's wonderful fish products and incorporating fish sticks into more dishes. I plan to use them as a garnish on salads.

GRADE: A

Mrs. Paul's Crunchy Fish Sticks

After falling in food-love with Gorton's fish sticks I was tempted by the fish-fruit of another. I had to know how the competing fish sticks measured up.

Mrs. Paul's Crunchy Fish Sticks' major selling point is that their sticks are sealed inside a plastic pouch within the cardboard box. Their website boasts, "Fresh Taste Sealed in Freshness Pouch." I didn't notice the frozen fish bars tasting noticeably fresher than Gorton's, which just rattle around in their cardboard containers like fishy Good 'N Plenty candies.

Mrs. Paul suggests cooking her fish sticks for a full eight minutes longer than Gorton does, which is probably why her sticks boast of their crunchiness. Gorton's fish sticks have a more consistent shape, so I prefer them.

I seasoned these sticks with cayenne, black pepper, and garlic powder.

GRADE: B+

Pacific Sustainable Seafood Gluten-Free Fish Sticks

Despite the outside of the box showing a total of seven fish sticks the amount inside totaled only six. The box was $7. I paid over a dollar per fish stick and that is some goddamn garbage is what I thought as I shoved the frozen fish bricks into the pre-heated oven. They also fell apart when i attempted to flip them halfway through cooking them.

Despite all these detractors, Pacific's fish sticks are probably the best fish sticks I've eaten all week. The sticks are larger than the competing brands and the fish meat retains some of the texture of its fish flesh. It doesn't feel like it was minced and reconstituted. Its lack of gluten neither helped nor hurt the food.

Despite the superior quality I intend to remain a Gorton's man. They're cheaper and they give you a higher quantity of fish sticks per box. Also I notice that all brands of fish sticks brag how crispy their fish sticks are. Anything you shove into an oven at 475 degrees becomes crispy.

GRADE: A

Mrs. Paul's Beer-Battered Fillets

I don't mean to brag but I eat a lot of fish sticks. Fish sticks are made from a weird looking fish called a pollock. One day I would like to meet a live pollock because I'm such a big fan.

These fish things are like giant fish sticks but more like the fried fish that you get in an order of fish and chips. One package will easily feed four lucky people.

GRADE: B+

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(Photo: Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

Hugh Hefner isn't dead yet. It feels as though he's been about 76 years old for the past 30 years, perpetually curving his spine into a stoop while shuffling through his mansion in satin slippers and that smoking jacket. His whole post-1980s schtick always relied on the assumption that he is creakily, comfortingly old.

Some would argue that Hefner isn't even really going to die once he physically isn't "with us" anymore. "Within a few years of starting Playboy on a shoestring after begging and borrowing a few thousand dollars, Hefner became a serious, influential figure in modern culture," wrote academic and Hef biographer Steven Watts, in 2010's Mr Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. "From the beginning, his enterprise was about more than dirty pictures, more than a girlie magazine hastily slipped under an overcoat by a guilty purchaser. It was a historical force of historical proportions."

I mean ... I guess. For anyone who went through puberty after porn mags were usurped by online videos as a sexual rite of passage, it could be hard to square an interpretation of Hefner as an all-powerful media and business mogul with the old guy we now see. Most of us weren't alive to experience a company buoyed by profits from the magazine and the London Playboy Club's massive casino earnings. And since Playboy went private in 2011 then axed full nudes earlier this year, it's felt less relevant and more like a caricature of the glamour that first gave it potency in the 1960s.

But hey, Hef's 90 today so I spoke about his legacy with Susan Gunelius, a branding expert who devoted an entire book to Hefner's timelessness as a "brand champion." She told me about whether the only way we can still measure his value is in the double-talk jargon of marketing and branding, and why people think he matters.

VICE: Beyond knowing that people like reading about sex, why did you pick Playboy to write about?
Susan Gunelius: It started with the reality TV show The Girls Next Door: watching it, and seeing how women were connecting to the brand. I started to think about how Playboy's brand has transcended so much over the years, despite the fact that its had many problems, too. I remember sitting watching the TV show with my husband, and talking to him about how I thought that Hugh Hefner was the perfect example of a "brand champion"—which is basically the living embodiment of a brand.

What are some of the biggest factors that made you see that in Hefner?
Well, there aren't a lot of great examples out there. You could say people like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, they're good examples too. But Hugh Hefner is such a good example in a way that goes back to the very beginning of the Playboy brand.

Its promise was of a specific lifestyle. A lifestyle that a lot of men in the 50s aspired to—you know, you're educated, you're intelligent, you're surrounded by beautiful women and all of these cultural people. Then there's the magazine, with awesome articles and big writers. It wasn't just the pornography; the pictures were secondary in a lot of respects.

What's made its influence stick?
That was the brand promise at the core of Playboy. And Hefner lived the lifestyle that was the brand promise—the TV shows, the Playboy clubs, the ways you could experience the brand how you chose—so it was just this perfect marriage of the Playboy lifestyle and its biggest advocate being the actual brand. You felt like you could become this person too, if you experienced Playboy in all these different ways. It was brilliant.

There's been plenty written about the tension between Playboy as a massive objectifier of women's bodies and as a progressive force in the sexual revolution. How did you chart that?
First they started building all of these different brand experiences, as a very smart move. In the 60 and early 70s the company was doing really well. But then they started to have some outside influences, certainly the government, and drug and sex scandals. Negativity started to build around it.

But at the same time, which was unfortunate, the brand started losing focus. It started expanding too far. In 1973, they had pre-tax profits of about $20 million. But by 1975, it had dropped to $2 million. The company had grown with no focus; it just kept expanding. By the mid-70s, the only parts of the company that were still profitable were the magazine.

And the London Club, right? I understand that before UK law had it shut down in the 1980s, the original club at 45 Park Lane was basically bankrolling the whole company.
Yes, the London Club and casino. Everything else was doing really poorly. There was economic slowdown of the 70s, and Playboy had built this $28 million resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey that hadn't broken even and was a huge mistake. So that's when things started going badly. That was the beginning of the problems.

And then each decade after that, there was a different set of problems and so, a continued loss of focus. When his daughter Christie Hefner came in in the 1980s, she tried to rein things in, and bring back some of that focus. But it was too little too late. Because at that time, her attempt to bring back focus was to home in on the pornography aspect. And the internet was just starting to explode, so that was kind of a doomed decision.

Some Playboy Club bunnies looking really enthusiastic (Photo: GillyBerlin via)

Yeah, that clearly didn't work out for them.
But you know, hindsight's 20/20. Who would have known at the time how pornography would become socially acceptable? If we go back to what Playboy originally meant, it was a lifestyle. And they continued to focus on that throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. When they lost that focus they started to pivot towards pornography, trying to compete with Penthouse and then compete against free pornography on the internet in recent years. Had they not done that, had they stuck with that original focus, would the story have been very different?

Hefner famously wrote up a sort of manifesto, the Playboy Philosophy, with the help of the magazine's readers in the 1960s. But increasingly Playboy hasn't felt like that, like a mate you can speak to.
In the beginning years it was a very inclusive brand. Everyone was invited to the party. And like you said, it was about building this philosophy, not just sitting behind closed doors and saying, this is what we're going to do. When people become emotionally connected to the brand, it becomes 10 zillion times more powerful. As the years went on, it became more and more exclusive. And I'm not saying exclusive like luxury, like a good thing, I'm saying exclusive like fewer people were invited to the party.

I would have assumed that in a way that having introducing a male-focused readership to porn would have felt natural. How much did it end up putting people off?
Instead of continuing to focus on what they were doing with their lifestyle brand, they started to see some of their market shares get stolen and changed to compete more directly with these new competitors, like Penthouse and Hustler. It started to feel like they were shifting ot revenue-generating potential. And when you step away from your brand promise, and try to chase down someone else's, you're setting yourself up for failure.

It feels as though people are becoming too cynical too buy into that original story. They're seeing through the promise of luxury and finding something tackier beneath that.
That's exactly it. People are gonna dig in deeper to make sure that it actually matches its fantasy. And that's just the world we live in today. You go over to a country like China, where obviously pornography is illegal, the Playboy brand is more like Hello Kitty. And the majority of consumers are women. Now merchandise has become what carries the company. What's going to matter in the future is whether they can increase the interest in whatever lifestyle they decide to make their aspirational promise next.

Thanks for that, Susan.

Susan's book Building Brand Value the Playboy Way is out now.

@tnm___

More Playboy stuff on VICE:

I Went to the Playboy Mansion (and It Was Kinda Depressing)

What Some of the World's Biggest 'Playboy' Collectors Think of Its Nudity-Free Rebrand

Everything I Learned Working as a Playboy Club Bunny

A woman at the protest in March, outside Yarl's Wood (Photo: Chris Bethell)

It's been almost a month since coachloads of protesters from around the UK headed to a barbwire-ringed complex on a Bedfordshire industrial estate, for the biggest-yet demonstration outside Yarl's Wood, Britain's most notorious detention centre. With their placards, noisemakers and feet banging against the centre's metal fence, the protesters demanded the release of the women asylum seekers currently being held indefinitely.

We spoke to some of the women currently stuck in Yarl's Wood, and those supporting them, to see how much things had changed since we last reported on particular cases of vulnerable women affected by a life trapped in the scandal-hit immigration detention centre.

Carol Namuzira, 27, from Uganda claimed asylum in the UK based on her sexuality. Back home she says she would face a sentence between 14 years imprisonment and the death penalty, for being a lesbian. "My visa was running out and I tried to kill myself because of the fear of going back. So I turned to the Home Office for help to claim asylum—but instead I was taken into detention and locked up, despite my suicide attempt."

Carol was at the protest at Yarl's Wood in March—her first time back at the centre since she was released in 2012—and says detention has left her traumatized. "I saw women in there who had been in Yarl's Wood so long they were broken. Women who'd lost their hair; women on suicide watch who had given up on life."

A year ago VICE spoke to former Yarl's Wood detainee Aderonke Apataa about what she described as "fearful" experiences in the centre. Since then Serco, the company that staffs the centre, commissioned a report by barrister Kate Lampard on the culture of staff behaviour and detainee wellbeing inside the detention centre after staff were dismissed in relation to allegations of sexual misconduct with detainees in 2014. The report found "the majority of staff appear to be sympathetic to the concerns and needs of residents and to deal with them in a caring and supportive manner."

But UK Home Secretary Theresa May responded to concerns about the state of the UK's 10 detention centres with a January 2016 report of her own, by former prison ombudsman Stephen Shaw. The review found the system an "affront to civilized values," and called for a drastic reduction in the 30,000 people detained each year, a ban on detaining pregnant women and a "presumption against detention" of victims of rape and sexual violence, people with learning difficulties, and those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Mabel Gawanas, 42, from Namibia who says she was tortured and raped before seeking asylum in the UK, has so far spent 22 months in Yarl's Wood. "We are so happy about the demonstration," she says. "To know there are people supporting us outside although we are locked up—it's a great feeling."

According to Mabel, there were instances of women being held only to be later released. "We protested when a woman who was tortured in Kenya, and all her family tortured or dead, was due to be deported," Mabel recalls. "Ten of us filled her room with furniture so she missed her flight. She was later freed; we saved her that day."

Not all women held in the centre leave unscathed. Theresa Schleicher, acting director of Medical Justice—a charity that monitors healthcare provision in detention centres—spoke about how mentally ill women are allegedly mistreated. "For some the effect is catastrophic. We have some people who we do not know if they will ever recover—whose lives are literally destroyed by it." A woman from Guinea, whose name has been withheld since a High Court case, spiralled into a depression after being detained for 17 months. She'd flown to London Heathrow with a family reunion visa to join her husband, who was in the UK with refugee status, and went from being questioned to spending more than a year in Yarl's Wood.

A Yarl's Wood detainee waves a banner during March's protest (Photo: Chris Bethell)

She repeatedly self-harmed, including cutting her face and strangling herself with phone cords, according to the High Court judge. Doctors examining her warned that detaining and repeatedly segregating her in handcuffs was causing her mental deterioration, and she was eventually assessed as lacking capacity under the Mental Capacity Act, with an official solicitor appointed to act on her behalf. The court found her detention "inhuman and degrading treatment" in 2014.

Theresa said that Medical Justice charity treats pregnant women and survivors of abuse—none of whom should be detained according to the Home Office's own guidelines. After an unannounced visit HM Prison Inspector's report in August 2015 found 99 pregnant women held in one year, of whom only nine were ever deported, and criticized the indefinite detention of vulnerable women in what Shaw's report deemed a "place of national concern."

"We take the welfare of our detainees very seriously," a Home Office spokesperson told VICE, when we asked if the Shaw findings would be acted on. "As a result of his findings, we are adopting a policy whereby all decisions on immigration detention will consider whether an adult is at risk. We are also publishing a mental health action plan and will implement a new approach to the case management of all those detained.

"We expect these reforms—and broader changes in legislation, policy and operational approaches—to lead to a reduction in the number of detainees and the length of time they spend in detention before removal."

@bengelblum

More on VICE:

Protests and Hunger Strikes Are Breaking Out at Immigration Detention Centres All Over the UK

I Spent a Fearful and Lonely Night on the 'Immigration Train'

Photos of Saturday's Loud, Colourful Protest Outside Yarl's Wood