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The VICE Guide to Right Now: Canadian Gets Five Years for Stuffing 51 Turtles Down His Pants

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Imagine 51 of these little fellas down your pants. Photo by the author.

A Canadian man who systematically smuggled thousands of turtles from North America to China was sentenced to five years in US federal prison Tuesday.

According to the Associated Press, Xu had been smuggling turtles to China from Canada and the US, both by himself and with the help of others he had paid off. Authorities estimate that Xu may have smuggled off at least $1 million worth of turtles, based solely on the packages of turtles intercepted in the past.

Xu reportedly told US Judge John Corbett O'Mearaprior to the ruling that he was sorry for what he did and that he was happy border agents stopped "the darkness of my greed and ignorance." Xu's defense attorney, Matthew Borgula, said that Xu was not a "sophisticated international dealer" and that hiding turtles in his pants was "not a good way to get them across the border."

Assistant US Attorney Sara Woodward said Xu's regret for his actions was real, but pressed for five years due to how large the smuggling operation was. O'Meara expressed sympathy for Xu—making note of his good behaviour for the 19 months he was held in prison—but ultimately agreed to Woodward's sentence without explanation.

"We don't have a whole lot of cases exactly like this every day," O'Meara said.

That being said, earlier this year, an Ontario man was fined $3,500 for smuggling 38 turtles in his pants, and placed on a two-year probation.

Xu's defense attorney called the verdict "very severe" and asked O'Meara to hear testimony on Xu's behalf. Xu and his attorney are reportedly planning to appeal the verdict.

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.



Why You Should Care About Big Banks Cutting Deals with the Feds to Avoid Prosecution

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Goldman Sachs Group headquarters stands in New York. John Taggart/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Monday, Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs agreed to shell out more than $5 billion for deceiving investors and contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. The settlement, which was brokered by several state attorneys general as well as the feds, is supposed to provide $1.8 billion in relief to distressed homeowners, along with a hefty civil penalty. In a statement, US Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner of the Eastern District of California said it shows that the United States "remain committed to pursuing those responsible for the financial crisis," while Acting Associate US Attorney General Stuart F. Delery said it "makes clear that no institution may inflict this type of harm on investors and the American public without serious consequences."

But while $5 billion seems like a sizable punishment, it's really just a drop in the bucket for a global player like Goldman.

Dennis M. Kelleher, CEO of the non-profit financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, tells me that in the last four years, Goldman's revenue has been more than $135 billion. In other words, the penalty will affect them about as much as a Nerf dart gun might upset an NFL linebacker.

Monday's announcement is particularly glaring because after other majors like JP Morgan and Bank of America struck deals of their own, Goldman was the last of the big banks facing scrutiny over the meltdown. That means it's safe to say some the more notorious swindlers in American history have officially gotten off scot-free.

The statement of facts in the settlement tells a story familiar to anyone who followed the financial crisis or saw The Big Short. Like the other big banks, Goldman Sachs peddled residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), which is another way of saying they put bunches of crappy loans into bundles. They then sold those bundles to investors while vouching for their quality, when in reality they hadn't bothered to look into borrower's ability––or even desire––to repay them. As laid out in the settlement, between December 2005 and 2007, Goldman's practice was to spot check various loans to see if they met underwriter's guidelines. In many cases, 80 percent of the loans went unchecked. In fact, in numerous loan pools, more than 20 percent of the loans were graded as "EV3," which is shorthand for saying they carried an unacceptable level of risk and were basically doomed to fail.

Even when shit started to hit the fan in 2006, Goldman did not take its foot off the pedal. Fremont Bank was a top-priority client and originator of many of these bad loans, and in the middle of that year, Goldman found out that the smaller bank's rate of early payment defaults was increasing in a way that should have set off an alarm. But at no point did Goldman put Fremont on their no-bid list, even while the client had unpaid claims from the defaults they had yet to even settle. Around the same time, an outside analyst gave a positive report on the stock performance of Countrywide, another Goldman client that specialized in subprime mortgages. "If they only knew," wrote the head of due diligence at Goldman Sachs, referencing the report.

Well all know what happened as a result of this cavalier indifference. People lost their homes and the country spiraled into an economic recession unlike any since the Great Depression––one that left people feeling so hopeless that thousands in North America and Europe committed suicide. And while the too-big-to-fail banks continue to operate largely as they did, the rest of the country is still cleaning up the mess. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the gross negligence and misrepresentation Goldman Sachs (and other banks) engaged in cost American homeowners $9.1 trillion on paper, and the broader recession cost the economy $22 trillion.

Brad Miller, a former North Carolina Congressman who worked extensively on financial regulation in Washington and now litigates against big banks, says that the fees do very little to actually help the people banks hurt. That $1.8 billion in relief from Goldman that's supposed to help homeowners in distress? Miller says that in these cases, the terms are kept vague, and Goldman can use that money to do things that are in its best interest anyway, like writing off debt that's obviously not going to be repaid, demolish foreclosed upon houses, and modify mortgages that are in distress.

"It would be like me agreeing to be right handed all day today or to wake up tomorrow morning and have coffee," Miller says of the settlement agreements. "Those things are going to happen anyway."

He also pointed to something critics have called the "bullshit-to-cash ratio" as one indicator of how little the penalty will affect a giant like Goldman. Basically, it's important to note that only about $3 billion of the $5 billion will be paid out in cash. On the other hand, about half is tax-deductible and will be placed on the backs of taxpayers––even though the median American family lost about 40 percent of their wealth during the worst stretch of the crisis.

What's more, the New York Times notes that after incentives and tax credits, Goldman can chop about a billion dollars off the total penalty. According to a chart attached to the settlement, for every dollar Goldman puts into community investment in New York, they get a $2 tax credit.

Oh, and there's also the glaring fact that not a single person will see prison time, including Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs CEO and president through the financial crisis, who hauled in $157.3 million between 2006 and 2008. "The banks are released from all liability for their illegal conduct, but DOJ always says that no criminal charges or charges against individuals are released," notes Kelleher. "However, no prosecutor has then gone after individuals criminally. So they say it, but it's meaningless."

In other words, this is a darkly comical disaster. When former Attorney General Eric Holder dished out similar slaps on the wrist, at least there was some context: his tenure as our country's top crime-fighter was bookended by stints with a white-collar law firm whose client list includes many of the big banks he had the opportunity to truly punish. Goldman is the first big bank to ink an agreement with his successor, Loretta Lynch, helming the ship. And because it's the last of the majors, it's clear America is stuck with the status quo of basically doing nothing and then writing self-congratulatory press statements about how justice was served.

"There's very little in the settlement that will deter bad conduct in the future," Miller, the former Congressman, tells me. "Investors appear to get nothing out of this. The employees involved not only didn't have to worry about how they would look in orange jumpsuits, but they get to keep the bonuses they got paid a decade ago. There has been very little justice."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Trump Is the Next Reagan, According to Paper Owned by Trump's Son-in-Law

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Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: Trump's Kids Can't Vote for Him in New York Because They Screwed Up

On Tuesday, the paper that most of America probably knows for giving birth to Sex and the City joined the National Enquirer as the only prominent publications to openly endorse Donald Trump. The New York Observer declared its allegiance to Trump in a long editorial that declares in its first line that its endorsement has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that publisher and owner Jared Kushner happens to be married to Trump's daughter Ivanka.

The Observer—famous in New York media circles mostly thanks to the late influential editor Peter Kaplan—has been vaguely in Trump's camp for a while. Its editorial staff has helped Trump with speeches in the past, though when that came to light it vowed not to give the billionaire's campaign any more "input." It also recently ran an op-ed from a professor running through hypothetical scenarios where terrorists would have to be tortured a la 24, Muslims would be "preemptively" spied on a la Minority Report, and immigration would be restricted due to fears of "Islamic terrorists." "Maybe Donald Trump has a point" was that article's subtitle.

But the endorsement makes the Observer's support clear, and positively gushes over Trump. "Throughout his career, Donald Trump has demonstrated real leadership," it says, citing his "great skyscrapers and gem-like skating rinks" and the jobs such projects produced while dismissing the failures (and the resulting lawsuits) of "Trump University, Atlantic City casinos, Trump Airlines and branded products such as vodka and steaks."

The Observer thinks it doesn't matter Trump only has vague half-ideas on policy, writing that making America great "depends not on 14-point proposals or an SAT-like cramming of policy details. It depends on faith and leadership." It also criticizes the Republican establishment: "instead of monomaniacally focusing on tearing him down, those who care about the future of the party should reach out to Mr. Trump and help him grow as a candidate and a leader."

Trump is expected to win the primary in New York state, but beyond that, he is fantastically unpopular. The Observer is unconcerned with numbers, though—it has Trump fever, however the paper contracted it. By the end of the endorsement the Reagan comparison are flowing more freely than Trump Wine:

"In 1980 Ronald Reagan said, 'The time is now for strong leadership,' and by 1984 was able to declare, 'It is morning again in America.' Today, Donald Trump says it is time to make America great again. We agree."

Stop Rebooting TV Shows, You Lazy Assholes

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Image by Alex Reyes

Living in our fancy Golden Age of TV means we get to watch a lot of great shows, but mostly it just means we get a lot of shows. A Real Housewife in every zip code, a single-camera Netflix show for every comedian, and a reboot for every show that was ever canceled.

Resurrecting the dead and buried has always been part of television's business model, but in the past few years, the grave-robbing industry has blossomed, mostly thanks to Netflix. Since Arrested Development was exhumed in 2013 for a fourth season, the movie Wet Hot American Summer was brought back as a series, Full House was zombified as Fuller House, Mr. Show was reincarnated as W/ Bob and David, Pee-wee Herman was given new life in Pee-wee's Big Holiday, Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback came back, and The X-Files was summoned from the great beyond for a tenth season. There are more walking dead on the horizon, including The Magic School Bus, Baywatch, Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (possibly), Twin Peaks, Deadwood, The Gilmore Girls, Xena: Warrior Princess, and the recently announced MAD TV.

The drive to bring back a long-lost piece of pop culture for nostalgia's sake should be familiar to anyone who's attended one of the seemingly thousands of rock reunion tours currently circling the globe. The endearingly desperate impulse to capture a bit of that old magic, to be a kid wrapped in a comforting media cocoon again, is universal enough that every reboot or revival is met with a burst of meme-based enthusiasm. Enough people remember what it was like to snuggle on a couch with their not-yet-divorced parents taking in the cheesy soft rock that announced the beginning of another episode of Full House. The Olsen twins! Bob Saget! Uncle Jesse!

Except your memory is a liar. Full House was a bad show. Fuller House was worse—the AV Club called it "a porn parody without the porn." Most of the current crop of secondhand shows are similarly lacking. Netflix's version of Arrested Development seemed lifeless and flat compared to the original; they couldn't even pull the cast together for an actual on-camera reunion, instead giving each character their own episode. The tenth season of The X-Files or W/ Bob and David couldn't live up to their predecessors' reputations either, despite the positive press the announcement of those projects earned.

A glance at any listicle of TV reboots reveals the obvious truth, that most of them fail and fail for good reason. (I'm talking about straight reboots, not shows translated across the Atlantic, a practice that has a long record of success that stretches from Sanford and Son to The Office to House of Cards.) One reason for this is that throughout history, the great majority of television shows have been pretty crappy, with hits resulting from some alchemy of star power and unexpected cultural pull, not brilliant, renewable premises. As the people behind the short-lived 2008 version of Knight Rider found out, "hey what if a car could talk and it fought crime" is not a universal theme that appeals across generations. (That flame-out is apparently not stopping something called Knight Rider Heroes from existing.)

Here is a complete list of the successful reboots in television history:

  • Battlestar Galatica, which took a pretty boring old sci-fi show's conceit and ran with it, becoming a cult classic.
  • Hawaii Five-0, which fits nicely into CBS's lineup of interchangeable cop shows starring square-jawed white guys.

You can make the case that shows like Deadwood and Gilmore Girls deserve a revival, since neither had altogether satisfying endings and both are being overseen by showrunners with distinct visions. David Lynch fans will rejoice at a third season of Twin Peaks, just as Pee-wee fans celebrated the character's recent Netflix show. And let whomever among us that doesn't think new MST3K episodes will be worthwhile cast the first stone.

But Jesus Christ, MAD TV? The unfunny, frequently pretty racist offshoot of a decades-past-its-prime magazine wasn't even beloved in its time—alum Bobby King once admitted, "Half of it was good, half of it was the worst sketch comedy you'd ever seen." The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was only tolerable because of a young Will Smith, and I doubt the producers will be able to capture that kind of lightning a second time. Baywatch was a shitty show about hot people running in slow motion—surely Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron can find better reasons to take their shirts off on camera. If the TV industry is going to engage in such obvious necrophilia, shouldn't they focus on better looking corpses?

There is a lot of good TV out there already, some would say too much. We've got sketch gems like Inside Amy Schumer and Key & Peele (the latter from two MAD TV alums); offbeat comedy like Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; hefty prestige fare like The Americans , Mr. Robot, and Fargo; too many dark "slow procedurals" to count; whatever the hell is going on on Adult Swim; the much-beloved "tits and dragons" of Game of Thrones; and a glut of well-crafted superhero shows, including the actually really good Jessica Jones. Fans of old shows can, thanks to the magic of the internet and Netflix, watch the entire runs of classic series like Cheers and Star Trek.

With all that going on, who wants to sit down and watch actors reprise decades-old roles or writers assemble tributes to pop-culture touchstones? Seriously, who is Fuller House suppose to be for? Are any fans honestly looking forward to CBS's upcoming Star Trek revival, given that every Trek series has been worse than the one before? Even if Netflix brought back Firefly, which has long been the Smiths reunion of hoped-for-but-probably-not-gonna-happen TV events, would it actually measure up to that one-season wonder's best episodes?

The good news is that inevitably these reboots will collapse under the weight of expectations and their own flimsy construction. Sooner or later, even TV executives will recognize a bad idea—NBC stopped short of green-lighting a why-would-anyone-want-that Coach reboot. And remember that Home Improvement revival Netflix was considering? It turned out to just be a joke. Thank God.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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The FBI reportedly paid professional hackers to break into the San
Bernardino shooter's iPhone

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

US News

FBI Paid Professional Hackers to Crack iPhone
The FBI reportedly paid a fee to a group of professional hackers to break into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. The hackers allegedly contacted the FBI to offer a previously unknown method of exploiting iPhone software. The bureau did not tap Israeli firm Cellebrite for help, as previous reports suggested. —The Washington Post

Chicago Police Must Accept Racist History, Says Report
A Chicago Police task force will release a report this week recommending sweeping reforms to a "broken" system of handling complaints against cops. A draft submitted to Mayor Rahm Emanuel says the department won't be able to reform unless it "acknowledges what it has done at the individual and institutional levels and earnestly reaches out with respect." —Chicago Tribune

Uber Shared Data with Government Agencies
Uber has revealed that it provided data on more than 12 million riders and drivers to US regulatory agencies between July and December of last year. The company also gave information on 469 users to state and federal law agencies, mostly related to fraud investigations. —Reuters

$1.6 Million in Meth Found Hidden in SUV Tires
A Dallas woman is accused of trying to smuggle more than $1.6 million worth of methamphetamine into the US in the tires of an SUV at a Texas border crossing. Matilda Perez, 46, was detained on drug smuggling charges after US customs officers found more than 50 pounds of meth in the car. —NBC News

International News

Mossack Fonseca HQ Raided in Panama
Police officers in Panama have raided the headquarters of Mossack Fonesca, the law firm at the center of the massive leak known as the Panama Papers. The country's attorney general's office said the aim of the raid was "to obtain documentation linked to the information published in news articles." —BBC News

Turkish President Files Case Against German Comedian
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan filed a legal complaint against a German comedian who read a satirical poem about Erdogan mistreating minorities on German channel ZDF. German prosecutors are now investigating the TV host for "offending foreign states' organs and representatives." —Al Jazeera

South Korea Votes for New Assembly
Voters in South Korea head to the polls today to elect a new National Assembly. President Park Geun-hye and the governing Saenuri party hopes to win the three-fifths of seats needed before bills can be more easily passed by parliament. At the moment the party only holds a slim majority. —The Straits Times

Syria Violence Threatens Peace Talks
A surge of fighting in Aleppo province threatens a truce in Syria that has largely held since February. Pro-government forces advanced on the town of Al-Eis, held by fighters from Al-Nusra Front and allied rebels. Peace talks are set to resume in Geneva today, but Iran and France voiced concern over escalating violence. —Reuters


Ben Affleck will start and direct the new Batman film. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Ben Affleck to Direct Next Batman Movie
Ben Affleck will both direct and star in a new, standalone Batman movie, Warner Bros' chief has confirmed. Kevin Tsujihara said it was one of ten DC Comics movies Warner plans to release over the next five years. —Variety

Harvard Club Blames Women for Sexual Assaults
The Porcellian Club, Harvard's oldest club, broke 225 years of public silence to explain why allowing female members would be a bad idea. A leading member said it would "potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct." —The Crimson

Sean Parker Gives $250 Million to Cancer Research
The Napster founder and tech billionaire has made a record $250 million donation to six US cancer centers to work on immune therapies, currently only used as last-resort treatment. "I want to make it a front-line treatment," said Parker. —USA Today

Facebook Has Become Your Grandma's Chatroom
A new study by Penn State researchers reveals the relationship seniors aged 60 to 86 have with Facebook. It found older people are now using it in the same ways and for the same reasons as everyone else. —Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our new film 'Inside the Strange, Psychic World of Indigo Children'

Why Young Sex Criminals Get Locked Up Forever

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Gilbert Greenfield sits upright in the chair, his body tense, a blood-pressure cuff attached to his left arm. A sensor is strapped around his chest, and two more cap his fingertips to measure how much he's sweating.

The polygrapher asks a question: "During the past year, have you fantasized about inflicting pain while having forced sexual intercourse with a female?"

"No," Greenfield responds.

The polygrapher prompts Greenfield again: "During the past year, have you masturbated to sexual fantasies about forcing a female to have sexual intercourse with you?"

"No," he replies.

When the test is over, Greenfield can breathe a sigh of relief—he passed. A court has ruled he's a sexually violent predator, and to go through the rehabilitative program, his treatment team must believe he is being open and honest about his deviant fantasies.

Greenfield is locked up in New Jersey for sex offenses he committed as a young man. At 14, he raped a woman by knifepoint, and at 20, he reoffended with a perhaps even more brutal crime. Armed again with a knife, he kidnapped a woman and raped her in the woods, then tied her to a tree, stabbed her, and sped off in her car.

During years of treatment, Greenfield has been taught various strategies for reconditioning his sexual fantasies. When he was a child, the neighbors who lived next door had a house fire, according to Greenfield, and he has never forgotten the stench of burned flesh. "You could smell it in the air," he told me over the phone, the memory still sufficient to make him gag. Now whenever a violent fantasy pops into his head, Gilbert wills himself to return to the fire.

Though the 51-year-old finished serving a 30-year prison sentence in 2004, he remains in confinement under the state's civil commitment statute. New Jersey isn't the only place with such laws: In 20 states across the country, as well as at the federal level, sex offenders labeled high-risk can be detained indefinitely upon completion of their criminal sentences. By one count, nearly 5,400 sex offenders are civilly committed across the country.

Civil commitment raises a host of legal and ethical issues. Lawyers contest its constitutionality. Treatments tend to focus on how detainees should manage or change their "deviant" tendencies rather than advancing a more holistic approach to rehabilitation, an approach some experts say is ineffective and inhumane. But for men like Greenfield, the question is how to make sense of the logic that runs their lives. Despite his progress and good behavior, Greenfield has been told he will likely die in detention—not because of what he's done in the past, but because of what he might do in the future.

"I always analogize this to the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise," said Heather Ellis Cucolo, a former director of the online Mental Disability Law Program at New York Law School and an attorney who once served as a public defender for those facing civil commitment, including Greenfield. "It's the idea of projecting what future events are going to happen."

"We don't have a crystal ball."

Watch 'Institutionalized: Life Behind Bars' from VICE News

In the 1980s and 1990s, Americans were gripped by high-profile media coverage of brutal sex crimes against children and young women, sometimes by men who had been previously charged with sex offences. New Jersey was not insulated from the rising panic about the sexual threats that might be lurking next door. The 1994 rape and murder of Megan Kanka in New Jersey spurred the passage of "Megan's Law," a series of bills mandating public sex offender registries nationwide. New Jersey's civil commitment legislation followed four years later, taking effect in 1999. Today, about 480 offenders are housed in the Special Treatment Unit (STU) in Avenel, New Jersey, an inconspicuous suburban town located about 50 minutes north of Trenton and just west of Staten Island.

(New Jersey's Division of Mental Health, which oversees the STU in Avenel, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

Civil commitment permits the indefinite detention of people who are found by a court to be "Sexually Violent Predators" (SVPs). That typically requires prosecutors to demonstrate to either a judge or jury that the individual has a "mental abnormality" or personality disorder that impairs their ability to control themselves, and that they would therefore be likely to engage in violent acts if released.

Ever since those first civil commitment statutes were passed, scholars and lawyers have debated whether the laws infringe upon fundamental constitutional rights, including due process. Some have also argued that the laws violate protections against ex pose facto punishment and double jeopardy (the legal principal of not being able to be charged with the same crime twice).

But in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of such law. In a five-to-four decision written by Clarence Thomas, the court decided that SVP hearings in Kansas were distinct from criminal trials, and therefore did not violate constitutional protections against double jeopardy. The Court also found that provision of treatment was a key part of civil commitment's constitutionality: If people were being given an opportunity to be rehabilitated, even if they didn't or couldn't get better, then their detention was distinct from a criminal sentence.

All that doesn't mean much to Gilbert Greenfield. New Jersey, like several other states across the country, actually houses civil commitment programs in former prisons. Avenel's STU is located next door to two state prisons, and its main building was originally used as an administrative segregation facility, meaning the cells were designed to hold people in long-term solitary confinement.

Visitors to the STU are greeted and patted down by Department of Corrections (DOC) prison guards, then led through a series of locked doors and past a 15-foot high chain-link fence that borders the outdoor recreation area. (Although the Department of Human Services provides treatment for the offenders, the DOC runs the facility.)

On a recent visit, Greenfield, who describes himself as interracial, had his black and gray hair pulled back into a ponytail. Seated in a maroon plastic chair just a few feet away from me, his large frame might have been imposing were it not for his warm body language and soft-spoken tone. Other family members and residents sat in pairs around us. Everyone spoke in hushed voices.

Residents are locked into their cells for various periods of the day, including from about 10 PM to 6:30 AM. "When we step in our rooms, the metal doors slam closed," Greenfield had previously told me over the phone. His narrow window lets in only a sliver of daylight.

The STU is supposed to make rehabilitation happen. But in New Jersey, like states across the country, questions linger about just how much treatment is enough.

"There is no credible evidence that arousal reconditioning is an effective long-term treatment for sex offenders of any sort." –Dr. Fred Berlin

Andrew Harris is the associate dean for research and graduate programs at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and has written about civil commitment in the past. "There's a whole debate: Are the people who are providing the treatment in SVP settings simply just doing it so that its kind of window dressing so they can justify the commitment?" he asks. "Or is this actually doing something and moving people towards rehabilitation?"

When I asked Greenfield about one treatment module offered at the STU called arousal reconditioning, he responded, "Do you know what Pavlov's theory is? It's kinda like that."

During arousal reconditioning, detainees at Avenel are first asked to write a "deviant" scene—a fantasy or scenario that is especially arousing. Then each participant is asked to identify an "aversive" scene— a memory, or image, that is a particular turn-off. Greenfield's aversive scene is the fire.

Gilbert believes arousal reconditioning has been effective for him, but the treatment is relatively controversial; it's reminiscent of gay "conversion" therapy, a practice mostmedical professionals now consider unethical and inhumane.

"There is no credible evidence that arousal reconditioning is an effective long-term treatment for sex offenders of any sort," Dr. Fred Berlin, a leading expert and consultant on the treatment of sexual disorders, writes in an email.

There are other approaches to preventing harm, like Virtuous Pedophile, an online pedophile support group. Users say the site improves their self-esteem while reducing their sense of isolation. It provides a space for people to open up about their attractions, without reducing them to that one facet of their lives. But the site also nurtures and enforces strict standards of accountability for behavior in the real world.

If the nature of the treatment at Avenel is controversial, so are the ways in which treatment "progress" is measured—like the polygraph about sexual fantasies, which Greenfield said he most recently took in 2008. (In Greenfield's latest annual review, his treatment providers state he has never taken a polygraph while at the STU, but documents provided by the resident and authenticated by the polygraph examiner say otherwise.)

The February 2016 guide to the STU instructs residents that "the polygraph is used as part of treatment to gauge how you are dealing with especially uncomfortable issues such as your current sexual arousal pattern."

Polygraphs are highly controversial tools for measuring truth, especially in the civil commitment context. About 15 years ago, Dr. Stephen Fienberg chaired a committee charged by Congress to examine the polygraph's validity as a lie-detecting device. The team ultimately concluded that the polygraph could be useful in deterring and possibly detecting deception, but only when it came to specific kinds of information.

While polygraphs are generally considered too unreliable to be admissible in court, they are still used in civil commitment programs across the US.

"One needs to be really careful about distinguishing between questions, at least that relate to something factual that happened before about which one could, in principle, have real knowledge, versus states of mind or future events, where the polygraph essentially has no value," Fienberg tells me.

"I want to make it very clear that I think the law needs to be very harsh with sex offenders," adds Fienberg, now a professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. "But I don't think we should use a tool that has essentially no validity in assessing whether or not someone is or is not releasable to the community given whatever standards we set."

Galen Baughman, the only person in Virginia's history to beat a civil commitment jury trial, describes the use of the polygraph as totalitarian. "It's just like Brave New World, where the government is allowed to interfere in the intimate realms of a person's mind," he argues. Baughman served nine years in prison for having sex with a 14-year-old boy when he was 19. He is now a prominent speaker and writer on civil liberties issues faced by convicted sex offenders.

While polygraphs are generally considered too unreliable to be admissible in court, they are still used in civil commitment programs across the US. According to the 2014 annual survey of sex offender civil commitment program, nine out of 15 participating states reported utilizing polygraphs to evaluate disclosure of sexual fantasies.

Other states show residents sexual images or describe "deviant" scenarios, then use a device called a penile plethysmograph to track blood flow into the penis and measure arousal. (Although a handful of states civilly commit women, the vast majority of people detained under SVP statutes are men.)

The practices of certain states have come under court scrutiny in recent years. Last June, a court found Minnesota's program to be unconstitutional. At issue in the ruling was not civil commitment in and of itself, but the fact that Minnesota had never fully discharged anyone placed in its detention facilities.

"The overwhelming evidence at trial established that Minnesota's civil commitment scheme is a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without the safeguards of the criminal justice system," wrote Judge Donovan Frank.

Other states' programs face similar legal challenges, including Missouri.

Whereas indefinite detention has been a certainty for people civilly committed in Minnesota, the same actually hasn't been true in New Jersey. As of December 2015, 214 people had been discharged from New Jersey's civil commitment program, out of the 731 committed since the statute was brought into force.

Greenfield faced repeated sexual and physical abuse from her until, at age seven, he asked child protective services to remove him from the home.

Although it was far from perfect, Greenfield told me that the decade of sex offender treatment he received during his criminal sentence helped him assemble a narrative of why he committed his crimes.

Over the phone, he explained that it all began when he was five, when his dad passed away, leaving his mom as his primary caretaker. He faced repeated sexual and physical abuse from her until, at age seven, he asked child protective services to remove him from the home. He bounced in and out of foster homes, institutions, and juvenile detentions centers throughout his teenage years.

Charles Whittud, 47, is also a repeat offender and has been civilly committed at Avenel since November 2013. Both of his crimes were against girls under the age of eight. Whittud told me that he was raped as a child and that his own unresolved pain and trauma were the root cause of his crimes. "The biggest thing is just understanding my past," he said.

Likewise, Greenfield believes his experiences of sexual trauma, and lack of family life, left him completely unable to interact with women—to communicate interest or nurture a relationship. "I wasn't able to do that," he said. "I wasn't socially capable, and so I did what happened to me—I just took it. I wanted it, I took it."

He has never been in touch with his victims, and he doesn't think there would be much purpose in it, either.

"One of the things that allowed me to look at my victims as human beings, was that realization that—it's 30 years later," Greenfield said over the phone, "and let me tell you something, she could look in the mirror, she could hear a sound, she could see something—a shadow, and it could bring everything back to her."

"That's fucked up, that it's not going to go away," he told me.

On my visit to Avenel, Greenfield told me that he gets triggered, too. His mother once stabbed him in the face, he claims, and the betrayal and fear he felt then was absolute. Even now, when he looks in the mirror and sees the scar, Greenfield sometimes feels like he's that child again.

When it comes to sexual violence, cases like Greenfield's and Whittud's are exceptions: The overwhelming majority of acts of rape and child abuse are not committed by a stranger lurking in the shadows or next door, but by a friend, acquaintance, or family member.

Perhaps more important, as a group, sex offenders have one of the lowest rates of recidivism of all crime categories. According to research produced by the US Department of Justice in 2012, "the observed sexual recidivism rates of sex offenders range from about 5 percent after three years to about 24 percent after 15 years."

"The truth of the matter is you're nothing more than that same, 18-, 19-, 20-year old kid that came to jail 35 years ago." –Gilbert Greenfield

At Avenel, what residents say in process groups or modules is subsequently used by treatment providers to argue for continued detention—or treatment progress. Which means detainees may be more inclined to approach therapy strategically instead of honestly. The trust and confidentiality that normally shapes therapeutic relationships is undermined.

Yet sometimes, even a deep commitment to treatment and rehabilitation is not enough to earn freedom from the STU. "Mr. Greenfield continues to be very active and productive in treatment," his treatment team noted in his most recent six-month review. "He actively engaged in his process group, was generous with feedback to others and was able to accept feedback as well."

But the treatment team added that due to several factors, Greenfield is largely unable to change—like high scores on risk-assessment instruments, diagnosed "psychopathy and sexual sadism" and "a markedly high victim impact of his crimes"—he will likely never get out of the STU.

According to New Jersey's Office of the Attorney General, since the statute was brought into force, 58 people have been discharged to hospice care or died while at the STU.

Greenfield is worried about the prospect of never getting out, and not just for himself. In 1995, a fellow prisoner introduced Greenfield to his sister, Jamie. Greenfield was immediately struck by her honesty, and the fact that they could talk openly about his crimes. The two were married in 2008, and speak on the phone every day. Jamie has two children, whom Greenfield considers his own.

He believes the message he's receiving from his treatment team is crystal clear. "What you did, the schooling, the education, the cleaning yourself up, making yourself a better person, getting married—all that stuff was a waste of your time and a waste of everybody else's time," is how he described it. "'Cause the truth of the matter is you're nothing more than that same, 18-, 19-, 20-year old kid that came to jail 35 years ago."

Do people think that criminals like Greenfield are unsalvageable?

"I think they do," Whittud said when asked that question. "I think it's a very visceral reaction, when you hear someone doing something with a child. I think it just shuts people down from wanting to hear anything else."

In 2010, civil commitment programs for sex offenders cost American taxpayers close to $500 million—eclipsing the $413 million or so spent on domestic and sexual violence programs in fiscal year 2012. Canada and the UK have embraced a different approach for managing high-risk sex offenders, a model called Circles of Support & Accountability (COSA). Under COSA, when the offender is released, a team of professionally supervised volunteers is assigned to meet with him or her to provide sustained support. Initial research suggests that COSAs are both effective and cheap. The programs have been implemented in a small number of US jurisdictions.

Instead of indefinitely locking up men like Greenfield and Whittud, advocates like Heather Ellis Cucolo believe states should use their money to provide assistance for victims and develop prevention and outreach programs in schools and communities. "The steps that we take to restrain these person's liberties in the community, and to constantly make them pay for a crime that they committed in the past—that won't keep us safe," she said.

"We want to pretend that we're safe. But the fact is that we don't know—and we can't know."

Follow Aviva Stahl on Twitter.

The Chosen Ones: Inside the Strange, Psychic World of Indigo Children

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In the 1990s, a number of American psychologists started to classify children that they felt had special psychic powers as "Indigo Children." Though many of these children were subsequently diagnosed with ADD or ADHD by healthcare professionals, some parents maintain that their children do not have these conditions, but instead possess supernatural traits and abilities. Critics argue that not treating children with ADD and ADHD can lead to long-term social and behavioral health problems.

VICE's Gavin Haynes heads to New York to meet with grown Indigo Children born in the 1990s to understand more about the movement and to find out how they feel about their unorthodox upbringing and perceived psychic gifts.

On his journey for answers, Haynes has his aura read, undergoes a holistic dentistry examination by a mother and daughter Indigo pair, and meets the rap duo The Underachievers, who preach Indigoism as a way of life through their music.

Meeting the Man Who Brokers Celebrity Sex Tapes For a Living

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According to his Twitter profile, Kevin "KB" Blatt is "the world's only celebrity sex tape broker, and Scandal Specialist". He's the Hollywood sex tape middle man who has helped promote videos featuring everyone from Colin Farrell to Verne "Mini Me" Troyer. Basically, if you've watched a celeb sex tape, you've probably come across Blatt's work.

His first gig was the Paris Hilton/Rick Salomon tape 1 Night in Paris in 2004. He got hold of the tape when he met a roommate of Salomon's called Donald Thrasher and eventually, with legal help, got clearance to put the tape out with Red Light District Video. As a result, Blatt became what he likes to call "an accidental pornographer". A very rich man. I called him to find out what his job actually involves.

VICE: Hi Kevin. In your mind, how did the celebrity sex tape thing really kick off?
Kevin Blatt: It really dates back to Larry Flint and Hustler, who printed naked pictures of Jackie Onassis years ago. I think that's what fuelled the insatiable interest in celebrities being nude. After the Pamela and Tommy Lee sex tape and the success of it , it all really began with the film I had a part in, 1 Night In Paris.

I was living in California at the time, a very preppy golfing community; nobody knew what I did for a living until there were news trucks outside of my place a mile long. All the interviews and all the press relating to the Paris Hilton sex tape all of a sudden made me a target or, as I like to call it, an accidental pornographer. It kind of opened the floodgates for all these different tapes.

How were people getting hold of these tapes?
I found that a lot of people were coming to me with ill-gotten tapes that somebody found on a computer on Craigslist, or that had been stolen from an airport. People would say, I have a sex tape of Tila Tequila or someone, and I would have to do some vetting, and find out how they got the tape, and were they legally entitled to it? In most cases people were what you would call a 50 percent copyright holder, meaning that they had sex with the celebrity on the tape and they owned and shot the tape. This usually happens when you slept with someone who became famous later on in life.

Back then, a lot of people didn't understand the rules of putting out a sex tape and there was a law that was just put in place called USC22457, a California law stating that to put out any type of adult product commercially, you have to have two signed documents, proving that you are over 18 years of age and that you would like it to be disseminated. You're giving the authorisation for the rights of publicity and for your license.

So if both people didn't sign off on the tape, what did you do?
I turned it into a business when I partnered up with several lawyers. They said, "Well we can always approach the celebrity about copyright access and see if they would like to purchase their copyright back or their 50 percent and they could do whatever they like with it."

Still from Verne Troyer's sex tape, all thanks to KB

Hmmmm.
I know that sounds kind of murky, and it sounds like extortion and a lot of people call me an extortionist, but no, I'm not. I'm kind of like a modern day Robin Hood – I'm really a celebrity's front line of defence, because if you have endorsements that are in the $15-to-20 million range, wouldn't you rather be the celebrity that cut a cheque for $100,000 to make it go away? At least that way the person could never put it out and if they did, you'd know who did it.

So you almost always walk away with money?
Exactly. My business is like owning a junkyard. You get salvage in and you try to sell that salvage. All the stuff that I get is of value, and sometimes you have celebrities who are more than willing to pay you a finders' fee to get it back.

Maybe one or two times, a deal has gone south, where the lawyers for the celebrity tell you that they want to do a deal with you, then string you and your lawyer along for many months. They give themselves enough time to come up with a story to go to the media with about why this tape is out there, and then you're left high and dry.

How many big-name tapes were you getting?
At least once every two weeks. Crazy stuff. You would not believe goes on here in Hollywood every day. I can't really tell you the celebrities that I saw because I have signed off on confidentially agreements, but very straight male actors engaging in very gay sex acts with men... I've seen very successful Hollywood directors who are into foot worship, I see stuff with funnels.

If Paris Hilton was the beginning, has the industry changed since then? When do you think that happened?
After the Kim Kardashian sex tape, the landscape of what we now call the celebrity sex tape totally changed. That became a business model for all these people I like to refer to as D-lebrities - D-listers, people who have reality shows, they are people who are trying to become famous just to be famous.

All of a sudden, young people are looking at Kim having sex and they are going, 'Oh my god, all you have to do is sell your body and you can become famous.' It sent a really strange message to the youth of America and elsewhere and is an amazing phenomenon, still.

After that, you suddenly got the bullshit stories that people contrive with these tapes. They'll release their sex tape and then put out a story with it about how it was ill-gotten, when in reality they have already signed off and we have both signatures. In actuality, they're sending over lighting teams and putting them in locations to have sex like Farrah Abraham. With Farrah, they did such a piss poor job of concocting a good story that they got caught in their own lie. Look at the Kim Kardashian story. If the general public really believes that, then the general public are dumber than I think they are.

Still from the Kim K sex tape

When the Fappening happened, were you concerned for your business?
My business is one where I have a code. The code is usually: if the celebrity filmed it themselves, or they knew they were being filmed, I will get involved with it. If it is a clear invasion of privacy like the person didn't know it was getting shot, or the Fappening, I won't touch it.

With the Fappening they were stolen, so there was no 50 percent copyright holder or permission either from the sender or receiver of those images. I always need that for what I do. When I vet people who bring me tapes I'm very much like a private eye. Sometimes I'll question them to death to see if their story changes. When I realise that they are 50 percent copyright holders or that it was given to them, and it was all kosher, well then we'll go forward and we'll make the deal happen.

What do you see for the future of your industry?
I've had more tapes out in this last year than in the last ten years. I see my business only getting bigger and better. If you'd asked me that ten years ago, I would have told you that after Paris Hilton, it was going to dry up and nobody's ever going to shoot themselves having sex again, and nobody's ever going to put something out commercially.

But people still want to watch that stuff.
I think what people love about a celebrity sex tape is that it humanises the celebrity, it brings them right down to our stature. Let's face it, we all shit, we all piss, and we all have sex. When you can see the president or a huge celebrity naked and having sex, you go 'Oh my god, I'm not supposed to see this.' That's entertainment.

@hannahrosewens

More on VICE:

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'High-Rise' Makes Class Warfare Sexy

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If Brazil, Lord of the Flies, and Snowpiercer were stuck in a blender, the result might look something like Ben Wheatley's strange and stylish new film High-Rise, which makes its US premiere April 20 at the Tribeca Film Festival. An adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1975 dystopian novel famous for its canine-eating upper classes, High-Rise has polarized audiences and critics, hailed by some as "the social-surrealist film of the year," dismissed by others as "a bit of a dog's dinner." The film takes place in an impeccably ruined residential skyscraper, the high-rise of the title, seemingly beset by dysfunction and outright war amongst its residents, who are arranged vertically by a caste system that is very British, yet uniquely tribal.

"We wanted to make something that was not totally recognizable," the 43-year-old director told me last fall at an impossibly chic hotel bar in the Old Town section of Zurich, where the filmed had screened. The picture has a take-no-prisoners verve and sardonic humor to spare, but one leaves it as if having been bludgeoned with a hammer, unsure of up or down, left or right, teetering on collapse. How did we get here? What are the rules of this place? Wheatley and his collaborators, screenwriter Amy Jump and European mega-producer Jeremy Thomas, seem unwilling to offer anything that resembles traditional exposition or human motive throughout High-Rise's near two-hour running time.

"Periods don't necessarily look like themselves," he remarked, a riddle for sure, but one that makes sense somehow coming from Wheatley, a portly, blued-eyed, shaggy-haired Brit who has become one of the isles' most lauded young directors in less than a decade of feature work. The director's surreal rendering of Ballard's class-oriented societal meltdown is set in an alternate-reality version of the late 1970s. The clothes and records and decor evoke the period without ossifying us there; the world has progressed in ways that it didn't in our times, but perhaps reasonably could have.

Although there are no poor people present, working- and lower-middle-class stiffs reside on the bottom levels while higher-income professional types such as our hero Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) live on the middle floors below the haute bourgeoisie at the top. Dr. Laing, who has the style and sophistication of those living on the upper floors, draws the interest of the Architect (Jeremy Irons), a mildly disabled schemer who lives at the top of this Grand Guignol with a diabolical, sexually charged redhead (Keeley Hawes) who tends to horses on their rooftop terrace.

The two men begin playing squash in between Laing's trips to work and an eerie grocery store where the clerks only speak French. The Architect clearly wants something from Laing, but what remains just out of grasp, like so much of this movie's narrative. Hierarchies of all kinds, not just class, come to the fore in mysterious ways the film isn't quite prepared to be frank about either. The one constant is that, as in our own time, unchecked prurience, a sense of irreparable civic decay, and an unwinding of whatever social contract that once existed between the haves and have-lesses, seem to be the tenor of the times.

Watch VICE UK's interview with Ben Wheatley:

As Laing becomes embroiled in an escalating series of indiscretions, including several affairs, kidnappings, and a murder, an increasingly violent tribalism takes hold on the residents in the building. One begins to wonder where the picture, and its all-too-relevant themes of consumerism and class anxiety run amok, will land. Although it loses focus in the end, the sense of impending social disruption remains potent. It's fitting that Margaret Thatcher, a woman who didn't believe in "society" and brutally led Britain out of the difficult era that inspired the movie, is the last voice on the film's soundtrack at picture's end.

"The films I've made have always been connected to the current situation," Wheatley explained. "The state can break the law and justify it by saying, 'Oh, we thought we were doing the right thing,' whereas if I go rob a bank because I think money is free, they tend to put me in jail for it."

"Is the class war going to start soon?" I asked. It's not the sort of question one generally issues shortly after meeting someone, but the director seemed like the type who wouldn't flinch. The fancy bar we were in gave my question some bite—we were in one of the most expensive hotels in the capital of the country with the highest standard of living in the world. Five-hundred-dollar shoes were everywhere I looked at the foot of the bar. I was the only person of color in sight.

"It's started, isn't it?" Wheatley replied, a watery twinkle in his blue eyes. The auteur nursed a hangover with an iced seltzer and some nuts he was mostly ignoring.We shared a grim laugh. If High-Rise is any indication, those are Ben Wheatley's favorite kind.

Follow Brandon on Twitter.

High-Rise makes its US premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York on April 20.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Can Bernie Sanders Win Without God?

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Last month, during a CNN primary debate in Flint, Michigan, Democratic presidential candidate fielded a question from the audience that people in his position don't get asked very often: "Do you believe that God is relevant?"

It's pretty hard to imagine any American politician answering that question with a "no," and Sanders didn't surprise. But he also didn't respond with a personal anecdote about his own faith, as Hillary Clinton did a moment later. In fact, he didn't mention himself at all, instead waxing poetic about what the world's religions have in common.

"What we are talking about is what all religions hold dear, which is to do unto others as you would like them to do unto you," Sanders gruffly told the audience.

The moment, though largely unnoticed, was a strange one in American politics. We don't blink when Ted Cruz makes an impassioned defense for school prayer and displaying the Ten Commandments on public grounds, but it's distinctly strange to watch a presidential candidate get all hand-wavy when someone asks him about God.

And yet, the Sanders approach to religion may be part of his appeal, at least among a significant bloc of voters backing his presidential campaign. A new report published by the Pew Research Center this month shows that nearly half of Sanders's support comes from Americans who are not affiliated with any religion—a group that pollsters and election experts commonly refer to as the "nones."

"The nonreligious population is exploding in this country right now," said Greg Epstein, executive director of the Humanist Hub at Harvard University. "We're in the middle of extraordinary growth, and it makes tremendous sense that you have a major political candidate basically running on a platform of what I would call humanism."

To be clear, Sanders says he believes in God—though he has also admitted to being "not particularly religious." Aside from the Flatbush dialect he shares with Larry David, Sanders's Judaism is barely noticeable in his politics. When Sanders talks about his faith, Epstein noted, he says things like "all life is connected" and "we're all in this together"—phrases that fit nicely into the progressive secularism that characterizes humanism.

Sanders's markedly irreligious campaign comes at a time when the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans is rising fast. In 2007, Pew estimated that 36.6 million American adults identified as atheists, agnostics, or "nothing in particular." By 2014, that number was up to 55.8 million—or nearly a quarter of the US adult population. According to that survey, younger Americans—a group that has overwhelmingly supported Sanders in the Democratic primary—are more likely to fall into this category, with 35 percent identifying as "nones."

"We're seeing a trend that is not going to be letting up any time soon," said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. "It's reminiscent of the 80s, when the moral majority was rising," he added. "They weren't the difference-makers, necessarily, in Ronald Reagan's election, but people thought they had a big role to play. Because of that, they were courted for the next two decades."

The analogy to the Christian right is interesting. Religious conservatives have gained such leverage over American politics, particularly on the right, that the public debate over questions of morality and faith still tends to center on flash points like gay marriage and abortion.

Of course, the "nones" remain a clear minority in the US, and as such are unlikely to swing any election, especially on a national stage. Still, Speckhardt notes the group's potential influence is sizable, especially when its numbers are set alongside those of other religious groups.

According to Pew data from 2014, less than 2 percent of the US population identifies as Jewish, around the same number that identifies as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; Catholics, by comparison, make up 21 percent of the population. That same Pew survey found that "nones" who identify as distinctly irreligious account for nearly 16 percent.

"We think of this as still a small group," Speckhardt said. "It's not, especially when you think about how politicians court other religious minorities."

Whether intentionally or not, Sanders seems to be courting these voters, even among some unlikely audiences. In a September speech at Liberty University, conservative Bible college founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the Vermont senator quickly offered a statement about the secular realm in which his moral compass lies.

"There is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little," he told students, "when the top one tenth of one percent... owns almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent." It's the message Sanders has been repeating for more than a year on the campaign trail, and the one he's likely to repeat again when he visits the Vatican later this month.

"A lot of people who are in the 'none' category, I think, would agree with that," said Gary Smith, a historian who has written several books about religion in American politics. "Even though they're not very religious, they're very social-justice oriented."

On the other side of the party line, the rise of a twice-divorced, abortion flip-flopper is raising questions about the power of religious voters in Republican politics. According to another Pew survey released in January, Sanders is actually second to Trump when it comes to the number of voters who see him as religious. But while the "nones" seem to be supporting Sanders en masse, just 20 percent of voters supporting Trump identify as religiously unaffiliated—far less than the 34 percent of Trump voters who identify as evangelical.

So while Trump's success may similarly reflect some kind of drop off in the influence that religion plays for American voters, Smith noted, unlike Sanders's supporters, Trump voters seem to support the reality-TV star in spite of—rather than because of—the candidate's perceived lack of faith.

"I think that people have been willing to overlook Trump's lack of religious involvement, particularly the evangelicals who voted for him, because they like other aspects of the man," Smith said.

Follow Livia on Twitter.

Why Iceland Swapping Out Its Prime Minister Won't Change Anything

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Illustration by Ella Strickland de Souza

The video of reporter Sven Bergmann questioning then-Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson about his offshore accounts is a fascinating document. If you watch it closely enough, you can see the exact moment the hidden truth about Iceland emerges from under the sheen and the fluff. It's written all over Gunnlaugsson's face as his slick populist rhetoric gives way to the stuttering, indignant anger he's become better known for in his homeland.

Before Bergmann pops the big question, Gunnlaugsson is the model Nordic statesman: tactful, erudite, and well-spoken, offering platitudes about restoring trust between the government and the populace—which is actually pretty funny in retrospect.

"In all Nordic societies, I suppose, we attach a lot of importance to everybody paying his share," Gunnlaugsson patiently explains to Bergmann, who remains expertly poker-faced under this barrage of hypocrisy and condescension. "Society is seen as a big project that everybody needs to take part in."

When asked if he has assets hidden in offshore accounts, Gunnlaugsson, clearly pushed outside his comfort zone, mumbles something about labour unions before uttering these words: "It's an unusual question for an Icelandic politician to get. It's almost like being accused of something."

I cannot stress enough how significant this response is. First off, it's just not true. For weeks, Gunnlaugsson had been fending off reporters asking questions about his recently uncovered offshore shenanigans. On top of that, he and his entire cabinet had been under fire from various Icelandic media outlets for their actions and decisions ever since assuming office in 2013. They'd been dodging questions—and accusations—exactly like this one for three years.

So if he was going to lie, why pick this particular aside to throw in there? Because Bergmann is a foreigner and the eyes of the world were on Gunnlaugsson. It's vitally important for the Icelandic Right to maintain to the outside world that the people of Iceland likes them—that they're happy with their government. They control the courts and the police, and have, through a combination of stubborn refusal and bald-faced pandering to special interest groups, kept Iceland out of the European Union. In short: there is no real authority powerful enough to stop what they are doing, save for maybe the court of international public opinion. So the Icelandic Right has, in its decades of near-unrivaled power over the country, found that it's in their best interest to fall in line with the image most of the world has of Iceland: a happy little Scandinavian country full of forward-thinking artists and warm, level-headed businessmen and politicians who care about their populace, a place where a journalist would never even insinuate that a politician has done anything untoward.

But the crown jewel of that video is without a doubt when Gunnlaugson is ambushed by the Icelandic reporter Johannes Kr Kristjansson, who had been investigating the matter for months. Even as Bergmann's questions began to become more probing, Gunnlaugsson maintained his calm, civil demeanor. But when suddenly presented with a known face from the Icelandic media, Gunnlaugsson becomes dismissive, curt, and full of righteous indignation. He shows the world the face he has consistently shown Iceland for three long years, and will probably continue to show, since he's made it clear that while he might have resigned as prime minister, he's not retiring from politics. The interview subsequently degenerates into a repeat of pretty much every other serious confrontation Gunnlaugsson's administration has had with the media: angry obfuscation and claims of victimization, followed by feigned shock and abrupt dismissal. No straight answers are given.

The video so perfectly captures the dichotomy of "Icelandic politician speaking to a foreigner" versus "Icelandic politician speaking to a local" that it should be shown in lectures on political science and journalism throughout the world. The video is a small triumph of journalism, and in any sane world would signal massive change. The lies have been laid bare, and on several levels.

But will it actually change anything in Iceland? I doubt it. The resignation of the prime minister is actually an insultingly small bone that the right-wing parties have thrown the people. Two other cabinet ministers are also implicated in the scandal, both of whom are not resigning, and Gunnlaugsson has been able to hand-pick his successor: former Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson. The resignation last week was the smallest of victories, pretty much the definition of "too little, too late."


The entire cabinet needs to resign and new elections need to be held—elections that properly reflect the will of the people and not the empty campaign promises that put the right-wing coalition in place. Support for the PM's Progressive Party was estimated at 7.9 percent after the Panama Papers story broke. They've been hemorrhaging support for nearly a decade now, and only just managed to snatch the last election with bogus promises of canceling household debt incurred when the bank crash left thousands of families insolvent. I cannot overstate how hard these people have been screwing Iceland, and they've been doing it for decades.

The parliament building has now been swamped with protesters every day for a week, and what does Iceland have to show for it? Nothing, save for one knucklehead prime minister being replaced by another. The government appears to be defiantly sailing on as if nothing has gone wrong, speaking ominously of "unfinished business" that it apparently needs to conduct, leaving it no time to listen to the angry rabble howling for its resignation.

Similar protests followed Iceland's economic collapse in 2008 (which we now know happened in part due to the transactions of shell companies exactly like Gunnlaugsson's) and brought about the end of that right-wing government, so many naturally assumed that history would repeat itself. However, it seems that the current government learned an important lesson from the 2008 protests, even if the electorate did not (they voted the right-wing parties back into power in 2013), and that lesson was: no retreat, no surrender. All they really have to do now is stick their fingers in their ears and wait for the protests to die down, and then it will be business as usual. After all, they have banks, hospitals, and energy companies to privatize, and an electorate to misinform in time for next spring's elections.

Follow Sindri on Twitter.

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A Mission to Mars in the Austrian Alps

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This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

It's been a while since man was last on the Moon, and we have never set foot on another planet either, so I guess it's about time. Fortunately, a trip to Mars might be on the horizon soon, so we'd better start preparing for that.

Last year, the Austrian Space Forum simulated a mission to Mars in the Alps, and that mission was captured by Dutch photographer Jurriaan Brobbel. If only Mars had as many cows, swing sets, and ski lifts as the Tyroler mountains—it'd be so much more fun up there.

Scroll down for more pictures.


The April Issue of VICE Magazine Is Now Online

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Welcome to the Holy Cow Issue. To learn why we named it that, check out our travel story about a farm in Virginia, where a rare breed of cattle now roam the hilly pastures and eat foraged greens. Considering them a national treasure, the British shipped these animals to the US during World War II, fearing the Nazis would blitz the creatures out of existence if they stayed in the country. (One of the cows graces the issue's cover as well.)

Plenty of other stories pack the issue too, such as a profile on up-and-coming visual artist Chloe Wise and a Q&A with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, who's campaigning to become the next mayor of Baltimore.

You can also learn how the lack of anti-venom continues to create a health crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, putting the hundreds of thousands of annual snakebite victims in danger; get schooled on the history of Ponzi schemes; navigate the shadowy process behind the release rulings of Guantánamo Bay detainees with investigative journalist Jason Leopold; and explore how (and why) people with different relationship models make them work, in the first installment of our sex column.

Plus, for this month's feature section, Nathan Schneider traveled to Jackson to see what a grassroots campaign can achieve when given real power and how the movement continues even after losing its leader, black nationalist activist Chowke Lumumba. And after spending several weeks at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge during its occupation by a Mormon militia group, James Pogue left on a road trip to Salt Lake City with Wes Kjar, Ammon Bundy's bodyguard, to explore the radical ideology behind armed Western "patriot" movements.

Or if you just want to skip all of that reading and learning stuff and stare at some beautiful and bizarre photos, we have portfolios by Keisha Scarville, Tim Schutsky, and Namsa Leuba.

And don't forget: You can get the magazine (100+ glossy pages) delivered to your doorstep each month by subscribing.

Ammon Bundy's Right-Wing Crusaders Will Liberate the West or Die Trying

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Photos by Shawn Records

This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Wes Kjar rode shotgun as we drove away from the standoff, over the Stinkingwater Mountains toward Idaho. He was riding in a white Excursion filled with strangers, and worried about being arrested as soon as we hit a town, but he was glad to get away from the pressure at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He had spent almost every minute of the past week at the side of the movement's leader Ammon Bundy, watching from the center of the storm as guns piled up, volunteers rolled in, and the occupation headed down a road from which it would be very difficult to return peacefully. He was going home to take a break, but he wouldn't be gone for long. "I'm not an absolute person, I'm not religious," he said. "Just someone who's willing to die for something he believes in."

"But are you willing to live?" Steve Maxfield, the driver, asked.

Wes went quiet and looked out the window. A snowstorm set in, and Maxfield put on the four-wheel drive as we headed over a pass, high beams cutting only a few feet ahead into the dark.

Wes hadn't expected to end up at the center of something like this, his image appearing at the top of wire stories sent around the world, on the evening news, and even as the butt of jokes on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He was 31, from Manti, Utah, and when he heard about the standoff, he quit a gig on an oil rig in Colorado, where he'd been making nearly six figures, to drive his brand-new Jeep Wrangler through the night to Oregon. He had quickly been anointed Bundy's bodyguard, and in all of the pictures he stood with his sidearm like a lifelong acolyte next to a man who said his Mormon faith was what had led him and his followers to this point.

Everyone in the inner circle of the occupation was united by faith of some kind—to Bundy, it was a shared sense of a spiritual cause, and not Bundy's intense personal charisma, that explained his followers' loyalty and willingness to risk death or prison by his side. But Wes didn't think he still believed in God, and his relationship with the church was strained—he'd been engaged once, he said, only to have the Manti church hierarchy refuse to marry the couple in the local temple, because he and his fiancée had fooled around. So when Bundy and the rest of his inner circle bowed their heads to pray before every meeting, Wes stepped away. Yet he was there by his side at every press conference, guarding the door to the little office that had become the occupation's headquarters, and standing watch at night—waiting up, imagining federal officers battering down the door, and trying to think of what he would do when they came. "I will not point a gun at a federal officer," he had said, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen. But he was terrified about what violence would be unleashed if Bundy were killed. "They said, 'Will you catch a bullet for Ammon?' And I said, 'Sure, I can be a bullet-catcher.'"

The three other men in the car were all, like Wes, Mormons from small, insular towns in the red expanses of Utah. They had all met the Bundys and knew their faith and fervor. They had driven to Oregon to try to deescalate the situation, and possibly save the life of their friend and Bundy family loyalist Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, who by then had become famous for talking live on MSNBC about how he would rather end the standoff dead than in prison. Maxfield, a manic truck-builder, had loaded up his custom six-door Excursion and brought Jon Pratt, a tall, dark, and laconic former saddle-bronc rider whom Bundy respected a great deal, and Todd MacFarlane, a genial country lawyer who represented the Finicum family.

They had stayed for a few days, did what they could, but Bundy and Finicum could not be persuaded. When they first met Wes—who, though he was balding under his ever-present camo ball cap, seemed much younger than his 31 years—he'd been at the refuge for five days, and seemed to be straining under the pressure of guarding a man who had suddenly become the country's most conspicuous outlaw. "Man," he said, "you don't know what the stress of being around Ammon constantly is." On another day at the refuge, I'd overheard Wes talking to his father on the phone: "I'm doing good," he said quietly. "It only gets a little hairy at night, when the drones are flying around and stuff." He passed the phone to Bundy, who was standing in the doorway of a museum they'd commandeered as a meeting place, bearded and wearing the same flannel jacket and brown cowboy hat he wore every day of the standoff. He moved with the ease of the high school boxer he'd once been, and always spoke in the quiet, measured voice of someone who takes it for granted that he'll be listened to.

Ammon Bundy speaks to a group of local ranchers inside an office on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

"He has a good heart," Bundy told Wes's father. "You should be proud."

Now Maxfield, MacFarlane, and Pratt were heading home, and Wes had hitched a ride. He relaxed as the storm cleared and we came out of the mountains into a valley of potato fields, putting more and more distance between ourselves and Harney County. He wanted to "spend the night in Salt Lake, go country dancing, drink some beers, meet some girls," he said. "Just unwind a little before we go back to all the paranoia and shit." We drove through the night, Pratt lying quietly in the back while the rest of us talked about trucks and horses, until we settled on the subject of armed politics. "So how did they know the American Revolution was justified?" Wes asked.

"It was about rights, but people lost their rights," Maxfield answered swiftly. "It's all in the Declaration of Independence." To him, the need to rebel then had been, as they say, self-evident, not a cause brought into existence by a magnetic leader, which is what the standoff at the refuge increasingly looked like. "The difference is the Mormon obsession with prophets!"

"I don't know if he's set himself up as a prophet," MacFarlane demurred, talking again about Bundy. "But this has been my issue all along. I never drank the Bundy Kool-Aid."

"He's set himself up as a prophet," Maxfield said, shouting now. "He is talking to God and he thinks that's what gives him the right to risk the lives of everyone who follows him."

At some point over the last hundred miles, Bundy had sent Wes a text. "Miss you already," it read. "Hope you're safe."

Ammon Bundy had been a hero to people like Wes long before he led the takeover of the Malheur refuge—and long before he was brought to a Portland jail, in late January, to await an array of federal conspiracy and gun charges, where he remains today. In April 2014, during a standoff at the Nevada ranch where he and his 13 siblings had grown up, his father, Cliven, had thundered about revelations commanding him to storm the gates of Lake Mead and seize the weapons of federal agents. Bundy, less publicly, had taken charge of giving earthly shape to those visions, marching with hundreds of armed protestors straight toward a defensive position held by a heavily armed federal tactical team. "You are on Nevada state property," he told the special agent in charge, echoing his belief that the federal government has almost no right to possess land. "The time is now. You leave." They left, with the world watching, and suddenly the family's divine mission became an underground movement.

Bundy—a rancher's son who was very much at ease around armed militants—was the perfect man to unite hard-line patriot militia groups, cowboys, and country folk who saw their way of life disappearing and blamed the federal government for it. Wes, like many of them, had been casting about for a cause: He regretted sometimes that he'd given the years he might have spent in the US Army to the church, serving as a missionary in Argentina, and he had for a while considered going to Syria, to volunteer with Kurdish forces fighting ISIS. Now Bundy had given him a chance to be a freedom fighter at home. "People back east, man, they don't understand this shit with the BLM," he said, talking about the Federal Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for management of much of the Western range. "For us out here, it's like our whole lives. And I just thought that if here he is finally making a stand, I would make a stand with him."

On the refuge, Bundy and his closest followers had settled into a tightly controlled little stone office building, where they prayed together, set up laptops to edit videos and broadcast messages on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page, and held heated strategy meetings—surrounded by dried snakes, Paiute artifacts, and books on lacustrine ecosystems left by the wildlife managers they'd evicted. Here, mostly outside the eye of the media and the other occupiers, the atmosphere was often fervid and paranoid. "We will keep him safe no matter what," I heard one of Bundy's longtime associates whisper into the phone one day. "We will keep him safe so that he can tell the world the truth."

"We don't believe that Ammon talks to God directly," Mel Bundy, an older brother of Ammon's, told me. "What we believe is that if you're living a lifestyle that is worthy enough to receive the inspiration of the Holy Ghost—that's what will lead you to make good decisions for the benefit of man."

Bundy spent most of his time building this movement. When I met him, a few days into the occupation, he was standing in the office leading an informal meeting with a group of sympathetic local ranchers, ranging in age from an 11-year-old redheaded boy in a Stetson and Wranglers to a crusty old cowboy with a big hat who kept interjecting to complain about how the media had made it look like no one in the county supported the occupation.

Bundy stood in front of a whiteboard diagramming his theory of government and God-given property rights. To him, God and the land were always linked, and a federal official who interfered with a citizen's right to use the land was breaking a law older than any government. "What happens when an individual goes up against the federal government?" he asked.

"They lose!" a woman called out.

"Exactly," he said. "You know, my dad says that going to federal court is like a man walking into your house and beating up your wife and children. And so you take him to court. And a man walks into the courtroom in a black robe, and they say all rise for the honorable judge, and it's the very man who beat up your wife and children." They nodded along solemnly.

Bundy insisted, following a long Mormon tradition, that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document. To him this meant it should be read literally, like scripture, and that a single paragraph of Article I restricted the federal government to owning land only in Washington, DC, and in a few other instances of lands deeded by the states. Their eventual goal was for all 28 percent of the American landmass currently managed by the federal government—including 47 percent of the contiguous West—to be "returned" to the people, and be governed by a frontier-era system of claimed property rights. This literal reading of the Constitution was shared by more secular-minded militia groups, and had provided a bridge between the Bundy cause and militias across the West. Bundy refused to recognize case law, and wasn't bothered that the Supreme Court had ruled on this question before, when in 1976 justices unanimously rejected an argument by the state of New Mexico that federal wildlife policy exceeded the government's legal authority. "Congress' complete authority over public lands," Thurgood Marshall wrote in his decision, "includes the power to regulate and protect wildlife living there."

From afar, and in news reports, the seizure of the refuge appeared to be a more or less random act of anti-government provocation. But for Bundy and his inner circle, the occupation had started a process that was carefully planned and almost unimaginably grand in its conception. Bundy had visited the county, and a 32-year-old Montanan named Ryan Payne had allegedly cased the refuge weeks in advance, choosing it "because it was far away from everything," Bundy told me. (Payne's lawyer did not respond to our request for comment.) The takeover, when it happened, divided the more organized and better-armed groups outside the immediate Bundy circle. "I was pissed, man," Brandon Rapolla, a former Marine and a leader of a militia umbrella group known as the Pacific Patriots Network, told me a few days after I arrived at the refuge. "Our rule has always been that we engage in defensive actions. We don't do offense: taking over buildings, endangering lives, things like that. But you know Ammon—he does things his way."

The refuge would be used as a base to create overwhelming armed resistance in Harney County. They would painstakingly persuade ranchers like the ones visiting the office to tear up their contracts with the BLM, as his father and LaVoy Finicum had already done. In their conception, the defiance would spread to neighboring counties and then across the West, until the BLM's back was broken and the entire federal range management system collapsed. From there, he envisioned an entire reordering and deregulation of American life. "I believe that the Lord didn't want man to be able to hoard land," he said after the ranchers left that afternoon. "And so he set these natural laws up where if you have land you have the right to it. But you have to use it and defend it."

Even skeptics who approached him could come away converts. One afternoon, a rancher named Buck Taylor approached Bundy, demanding an audience and wanting to persuade the occupiers to go home. Bundy agreed to talk. "That rancher is fucking going to tear into him in there," one of the occupiers told me. They talked for a while, and the next time I saw Taylor he was helping to shout down a man who questioned Bundy's interpretation of the Constitution, at a community meeting far from the refuge. "I'm drinking the Kool-Aid," he later told a reporter. People brought up Kool-Aid very often, in reference to Bundy. "We don't believe that Ammon talks to God directly," Mel Bundy, an older brother of Ammon's, told me. "What we believe is that if you're living a lifestyle that is worthy enough to receive the inspiration of the Holy Ghost—that's what will lead you to make good decisions for the benefit of man."

Wes Kjar worried as much about an attack on Bundy by an agent provocateur from inside the movement as he did about a raid by the FBI.

Bundy saw no difference between politics, faith, and daily life. Before Wes caught his ride out of the refuge, we'd spent the morning in the office with Bundy's wife and children, playing and joking with the kids as visiting militiamen and cowboys knocked on the office door, trying to get some face time with their leader. "I don't care about their backgrounds," Lisa Bundy, his 37-year-old wife, told me when I asked how she felt about a stranger serving as her husband's bodyguard. "If they're willing to give their life, I trust them." She was worried, but only for the family's safety—she had no doubt about the calling that had brought him to seize the refuge. "Before I came out here, I prayed a lot about what to do," she said. "I was going to come out myself just to get a feel for it, but Ammon was like, 'I need to see my family.' And of course, I trust him.

***

We crossed into Utah just before daybreak. "Hope you boys don't need beer," Maxfield said. "Because now we're under the Zion Curtain."

It may have been lack of sleep or the constant worry that federal investigators might well have already been at work building a case against him, but the interrogation from Maxfield had worn Wes down, and he began to question the justice of the standoff. "So what am I supposed to do," he said, talking to himself as much as to us. "Like, I left the church, I'm trying to do what's right in my own life, and now, I'm spending every minute with this guy who is basically acting like Joseph Smith."

This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

We came into Salt Lake City, and Wes began to experience something like a premonition. He started to sweat, his hands shook, and he seemed unable to talk about anything but the possibility of the standoff ending in blood. "I know I've only known him for a few days," he said. "But I've seen him in the darkest night, you know? I know how far he'll go."

He brought up something that surprised everyone: "And, like, even when the church called him, he was certain." He sketched, hazily, the details of a phone call he alleged he'd heard about, between Bundy and a representative of the Mormon Church, supposedly asking him to end the standoff. Pratt, whose great-great-grandfather had been an apostle of Joseph Smith and one of the grand figures of the early Mormon Church, spoke up. "I'm not saying we know," he said. "But maybe based on that call, he's thinking he's going to be excommunicated." The church had already issued a statement condemning the occupation, and maybe Bundy thought the church would abandon him, too.

Wes paused, trying to think things over from Bundy's perspective. "So if we could get a message to him from the First Presidency," he said, referring to the highest governing body in the church, "just to say, 'We love you, Brother, you aren't excommunicated, and we want you to resolve this before anyone gets killed'—you think that would help?" It seemed a very improbable idea—to arrive unannounced at dawn on a Sunday and ask to meet with representatives of a global religion—but they all thought it was worth a try.

"We just show up and say who we are," Pratt said. "You would be surprised at how closely the church is following this thing."

Maxfield, still driving, turned to Wes. "OK, so are we taking you home to Manti to get your stuff?" he asked. "Or do you want to go to Temple Square?"—the headquarters of global Mormondom.

Wes set his jaw. "Let's go to Temple Square."

The story of the church has often been one about control of the land, ever since Pratt's ancestor Orson led the first Mormon scouts into the Salt Lake Valley, in 1847. Three decades later, when Ammon Bundy's ancestors ventured down the Virgin River into what is now Nevada, they did so as a part of the project of building both a greater Zion for the religion and the hoped-for state of Deseret—which would allow the church to exercise temporal political power without the interference of federally appointed territorial governors. At the time, Mormons in the West were living through a period known as the "Raid," a quasi-invasion by federal authorities that had the effect both of quashing polygamy in the Utah territory and of breaking the church's ability to govern a society outside the stream of American life. Apostles and bishops were arrested or fled in advance of US Marshals, and the political offices they held were filled by federal appointees intent on breaking the political power of the church.

At the Malheur refuge, trucks commandeered by occupiers sit outside the room used by Robert "LaVoy" Finicum as his office.

Two generations of Mormons were raised in the belief that service to the holy mission of the church was synonymous with defiance of federal authority. Statehood finally came, in 1896, but the Mormon duality between mistrust of federal authority and a deep belief in the divine mission of the United States is something church officials have had to deal with ever since. After the fight over polygamy, Mormon leaders reversed their approach, and have since worked determinedly to build an unobjectionable, mainstream church. The Bundy style of spiritual defiance is now a fringe element, but it's part of a history that no Western Mormons have forgotten, and that a few continued to embrace long after the church moved into the American mainstream. "There are some citizens whose patriotism is so intense and so all-consuming that it seems to override every other responsibility, including family and church," Dallin Oaks, one of the church's senior apostles, told a Brigham Young University audience at the start of a wave of anti-federal militia activity in the 1990s. "I caution those patriots who are participating in or provisioning private armies and making private preparations for armed conflict. Their excessive zeal for one aspect of patriotism is causing them to risk spiritual downfall as they withdraw from the society of the church."

We parked the rig just off Temple Square, in the gray, frigid Sunday morning silence. The spires atop the gigantic rectangle of the temple itself were still lit, the three closest to us representing the First Presidency, the battlements surrounding them symbolizing, as the church put it, "a separation from the world." Everything, down to the paving stones, was neat, modern, and tidy—an incongruous place for five grimy men in cowboy boots to show up expecting an audience with anyone.

We walked over to a monument where, on giant slabs, the church had inscribed its principles. Wes nudged me and pointed up to one with the heading liberty. We read an inscribed quote: the laws and constitution of the people, it said, should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh according to just and holy principles. that every man may act... according to the moral agency... given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.

"How did we just walk here and that's the first thing we read?" Wes asked. Belief, for the moment, came alive in his eyes. "That's not like a coincidence."

Pratt asked Wes to lead a prayer. He nodded. "Well, that'll be the first time in years," he said. Wes, who always seemed less free of the faith than he was defined by his rejection of it, teared up almost immediately as he spoke, his voice cracking on "Heavenly Father." It went on a very long time. He prayed for the safety of everyone at the refuge, for Bundy's family, for the success of what he'd now taken on as his mission, and "that you can heal the hate people have for one another in this country."

Pratt approached a pair of security guards, and he told them we were looking for an audience with the First Presidency. He was asking to meet with the highest authority in the complex hierarchy of the Mormon Church, a sort of triumvirate made up of a president and two counselors chosen by his divine inspiration. The guards, all older men in gray suits and severe haircuts, looked at him like he was insane.

"We are coming to you straight from the Bundy standoff," Pratt said, slowly. "And I know that's something the church cares a great deal about." (The church declined to comment directly for this story.) The security guards acknowledged the truth of this immediately, and we were suddenly surrounded. The guards took names, phone numbers, addresses, and information about their church membership, and the group stood massed in the cold, while well-adjusted-looking young families in their church best filed onto the square for Sunday services. One of the guards, the youngest, was clearly a fan of the Bundys, and had a hard time concealing it—asking which militia groups we'd had a chance to see up close, and saying, "You know we've got problems like they have in Oregon down here too." The others glared at him. They radioed urgently to church officials trying to figure out what to do.

Internet radio host Pete Santilli, pictured here with a companion, also faces conspiracy charges for his activities on the refuge.

"You have to understand, son," an older, balding man who'd come to take charge of the situation told Pratt. "There's a chain of command. You can't just show up and ask for a meeting."

"That may be," Pratt said. "But I'm pretty sure you're going to figure something out."

The bald man looked overwhelmed. "Can you at least help me out? Put a request through your stake president," he asked. "That'll get the ball rolling."

Wes nodded, declining to mention the issues he'd had with the church in the past. "I can try him." The bald man found the number to call. The request went from the stake president to the higher reaches of the church.

"I just have to ask," the bald man said. "Are you armed?"

"I have a knife I forgot about," Wes told him, feeling his pockets. "I'm very, very sorry."

"That's OK, son," the bald man said, and smiled. "I wasn't asking about a pocket knife."

They encouraged the group to sit through the weekly broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Wes sobbed in the pew while we listened to a homily on the virtues of humble leaders. "That theme wasn't a coincidence either," Maxfield said, as we walked out.

"I was just thinking about all the people I knew who could end up dead," Wes said.

After a few hours, we were eventually called up to an opulent, empty, and silent floor of the Joseph Smith Memorial office building. We were met by two extremely slick church officials who preferred not to be named or quoted directly. They were more at ease with the men in cowboy boots fresh from a range war than might be expected, and they spoke to Wes indulgently, like to a lost boy. Their clear preoccupation seemed to have been to get Wes, who they might plausibly have assumed was under federal surveillance, away from Temple Square as quickly as possible, but they sat with us for an hour and a half. They refused to involve the First Presidency directly, but they agreed to contact Bundy's stake president. The situation was very delicate, the contact to be made in secret. "He doesn't know that Wes is here or has done anything," MacFarlane said, talking about Bundy. "Do not screw this up," he told them, "because there will be consequences."

Outside, Maxfield was circling the square in the giant Excursion, growing more and more paranoid, texting pictures of a row of white vans that had massed a few blocks away. It now seemed likely that the FBI had been contacted, and by the time we left, Wes had resigned himself to being arrested. Maxfield brought the truck out front, and we hustled out the door and inside the car while it was still rolling.

We spent the night in a lonely motel attached to a gas station in Kanosh, Utah. Wes was unsettled, sure the church had put the police on his tail, feeling foolish for having entertained a rapprochement with the faith he'd tried so hard to reject, and torn up about what would happen when he saw Bundy. He was clearly worried that when he was looking the man in the face he wouldn't be able to frame the words. "You have to understand," he said. "I was his line of defense."

When the violence he'd anticipated finally hit the refuge, Wes seemed to unravel.

***

The next day, Wes asked Pratt to come back with him to the refuge. He wanted to say his piece, and get out of the situation before the violence came. In two weeks of spending time in the little stone office, I never saw any of Bundy's other followers challenge him, and no one was sure how he'd take it. Pratt had work to do, and a sick child at home, but it was the sort of request that couldn't be refused—a question that, if shots really were going to be fired, could turn out to decide whether Wes lived or died. He and MacFarlane exchanged a silent look, and he agreed. We rented a car in Orem, Utah, stopped at Sportsman's Warehouse to buy a locking case for Wes's AR-15, to be sure he'd be legal driving it home, and put Willie Nelson on the stereo. "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" played as we drove back up I-15.

Back at the office in the Malheur refuge, the room had been cleaned up, as though to show the occupiers were preparing for the long haul. Bundy and the rest of the core leadership had just finished their morning meeting, and the usual crush of hangers-on was trying to gain his attention. "Can we get some privacy in here?" Wes asked. He and Bundy went upstairs. After a few minutes, they thumped slowly back down. Wes looked disconsolate and exhausted. "All he said was you have to have faith," Wes said. "And you can't live in fear."

He left to pack. But the conversation had clearly had an effect on Bundy, too. He sat slumped over his desk, his big brown cowboy hat perched on his knee—the first time I'd seen him without it for more than a moment. He called Pratt and me over and asked what had happened. Pratt sketched the details, and Bundy smiled. "You went to church?" he asked me, seeming surprised. Pratt told him about Wes's premonitions of death and fear about how the occupation would turn out, but by the time we'd finished, he was back to his usual certitude. "We could stick our head in the sand and live happy," he told us. "Or we stand up and deal with it now when we have a chance. The Lord wanted us to do that, and that's what we're doing."

Wes got his AR-15, loaded up his Jeep, and went back to Utah.

When the violence he'd anticipated finally hit the refuge—when, on January 26, LaVoy Finicum was shot after he'd tried to run a roadblock and flee the FBI operation in which Bundy and his inner circle were arrested—Wes seemed to unravel. He was shaken by the thought that if he'd stayed he would have been in the convoy when Finicum was killed, and convinced, like many of the people who'd come into Bundy's movement, that the federal government had set out to deliberately murder a harmless cowboy. "I never intended to do a political thing like this," Finicum had told me a week before the shooting. "My dream was to ranch quietly up there with my children," he said. "And when the whole world goes under because it's going in the wrong direction, I'm going to be sitting pretty, because I'm out here with my cows, my family, my wife. And now, I'm one of the biggest targets in the United States—I don't know how many names you can call a person that's bad, but I think I've got 'em all."

This was the image of Finicum that Wes had in his head, and he began to talk in a way he hadn't before, about dark plots and government conspiracies. He seemed to regret leaving the spiritual fellowship Bundy had created. "People have the ability to say they want to be here, and whom they want to follow," Bundy had told me, talking about his influence over Wes. "And when there's that brotherhood and that agency, that's what keeps you caring for one another." Now he was alone with his rage.

Day breaking over Mud Lake in the Malheur refuge

Bundy and his followers were charged with an array of federal crimes, from gun charges to orchestrating conspiracies in both Nevada and in Oregon. Many of them face decades in prison. Cliven Bundy, who was arrested after he flew to Portland to attempt to visit his sons in jail, faces charges that could keep him in prison for the rest of his life. A thousand well-wishers and supporters from militia groups around the country showed up for Finicum's funeral, in Kanab, Utah. It was a Mormon ceremony, and Wes walked in the horse procession. MacFarlane, Pratt, and Maxfield were all there to pay respects. "It was I went up there to save," Maxfield told me. "But he thought Ammon was some kind of prophet."

A week after the funeral, Wes was arrested in Salt Lake City. He was driving a five-ton military truck towing a 53-foot trailer, containing rifles, camo gear, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, though he says he was moving apartments and that none of this was out of the ordinary for a country boy from Utah. He was charged with the same conspiracy crime as Bundy, and with bringing a gun into a federal building. He'd texted me about the church earlier that day—the faith that had been briefly reawakened on Temple Square had turned to a fury so deep he found it hard to express. "It's like I said," he told me the last time we talked about it. "I called, and ye answered not."

This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

We Spoke to the Artist Who Walks Vegetables

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All photos by Shahid Tantray

For decades—basically since the 1947 partition—India and Pakistan have been fighting over the ownership of Kashmir, a region that straddles the two countries' northernmost parts. Caught between two nuclear-armed nations, the disputed territory is now one of the world's most militarized zones, with no resolution in sight.

The numbers are hard to pin down, but in the past 25 years, it's estimated that tens of thousands of people been killed or displaced.

To protest the constant threat of violence and to raise awareness of the struggles faced by the area's residents, a group of Kashmiri artists have begun to stroll through the capital with vegetables on a leash. These acts of protest are based on the work of Chinese artist Han Bing, who started stringing vegetables along back in the early aughts to challenge social conventions and materialism.

VICE reached out to one of these cabbage walkers, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity, to talk about origins of cabbage walking and the human cost of this conflict.

VICE: What can you tell me about yourself and about the inspiration behind this performance?
Kashmiri Cabbage Walker: What I can tell you is that I'm Kashmiri, was born in Kashmir, I am a person of the soil, I can't say son or daughter. It's been more than 25 years since we've had military occupation, and i just thought to myself wow, another 25 years might pass by, so I wanted to do something different.

I'd heard of Han Bing, the Chinese artist and his work, his "walking the cabbage" performance. So I started to do research, then I got to meet him, eventually, and decided to do this seemingly absurd art performance.

What I wanted to do basically is juxtapose the absurdity of this performance with what was happening around—the structures of violence that I was seeing around me, the barbed wire, the military centres, the army camps, the bunkers, the check posts. All these structures of violence that have taken over the Kashmiri landscape.

I wanted to do something countering that, so I decided to walk a cabbage. I decided to take Han Bing's performance — I had seen his interviews online, the New York Times did a whole feature on him, and in it he talked about questioning normalcy. It clicked in my mind, and I thought to myself this is a perfect opportunity to raise awareness of this issue of living in a conflict zone, the world's most militarized zone, with this seemingly absurd and childish act of walking the cabbage.

Tell me about the current situation in Kashmir?
We are stuck in a stalemate situation where basically all the parties who claim to have a stake in the conflict—namely Pakistan and India—for years and years of wanting to talk, of trying to establish talks, have time and again failed. And what has happened is that instead of a diplomatic solution being offered and instead of Kashmiri people being considered part of these talks and considered actual stakeholders in this conflict, the two nations of India and Pakistan have nuclearized.

The civilian population feels like they've been held hostage. We all walk through the markets, through the public spaces and there are men in uniform, the Indian soldiers with their guns, ready to attack if anybody makes any sort of remotely suspicious move.

You don't know how the state and its enforcers, its agents of violence—which is what they are to us Kashmiri—how they will react. It's hard to trust a person when they have a gun in their hand. In 2010 we had more than 120 youngsters shot dead for protesting on the streets, you can't even protest, you can't even congregate in a crowd and march in a peaceful protest.

Why is it important to hide your identity? Would your life be in danger?Potentially, I could be in danger but it's mostly that if I put a human face on this, it will be attributed to me exclusively, the whole "Walking the cabbage" movement in Kashmir, and this figure will become whoever it is that is behind this mask. Then, everybody will say oh, that's the Kashmiri Cabbage Walker, and I don't want that. I conceive this to be a collective identity. There are other Kashmiri cabbage walkers, we're about four people. And so far two of us have done Han Bing's Chinese performance in Kashmir.

More and more of these performances are due to show up. That's the beauty of it. Anybody who picks up a cabbage or any vegetables grown on the Kashmiri soil and does this becomes an artist, that's the beauty of Han Bing's work. I personally think Han Bing is a genius in that sense because when he introduced this performance, 15 years ago, he said the meaning was open to all, that anyone could make of it what they like. I thought this was a perfect opportunity to do something very very absurd in the face of war, in the face of nuclearization, in the face of violence.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm just a civilian and so are all the others doing this. We just want to raise awareness on this fact that there are millions and millions of people stuck under military occupation.

When you walk the cabbage, what kind of reaction do you get?
There are many but the first reaction is that people start laughing, they start smiling and they're very very perplexed by seeing a person just walking a cabbage, they start staring and they can't take their eyes off it. It makes me really happy when I see people just paying attention to this. It's been taken well.

I really enjoy being able to do this but at the same time one gets very nervous doing something like this. One always has the fear, what will they think, how will they react, and the fear of authority. What if you run into a soldier or a figure in uniform, how will they react to what you are doing? You have to be careful.

So how have the soldiers reacted?
We have tried to be as non-confrontational as possible. The first performance was done within the city centre. So we knowing beforehand that there would be soldiers in the place—and there were about eight to ten army officers there—we had to be very careful. So I went in my Kashmiri sari, which is a traditional garment, and went and sat in the plaza with my cabbage on my leash ready to go.

I sat there for about half an hour, with a friend, and we just talked and talked and the soldiers looked at us and would not take their eyes off us. They were perplexed, wondering, what is this person doing with a cabbage on a leash?

So once this sight of me with a cabbage on a leash was habituated, that's when we decided to act and start the performance and walk the cabbage. We did this for 15 minutes because it was a tense situation.

Why is art a good weapon against war?
Art can deconstruct and dismantle weapons and render them to be physical objects. The entire occupation of Kashmir by military forces is one that is operational at a physical level.

It's really powerful, at least to me, that I can just walk a cabbage and basically laugh at the world that I was raised in and born into. I think art has that potential because it's very rhizomatic and comes from all directions, it can incorporate every single thing. What I've been doing with this performance is interrogating the world that surrounds me, the world of occupation, the world of militarization, the world of living between bunkers and living between army camps and what used to be torture centres

Art is so polymorphous, if someone wants to call this protest art, sure they can call it protest art, people can call it whatever. It's not really my art, it's a performance from a Chinese artist that I borrowed.

I'm just somebody who wants to walk a cabbage and reflect on what is happening around me and there are many others in Kashmir who feel the same way and will probably at one point or another will walk the cabbage.

Follow Brigitte on Twitter.


The Dangers of Being an Undercover Journalist in Iran

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The author in Iran. All pictures courtesy of the author

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Early last year, I decided to go to Iran for a while to work as a journalist. I didn't know much about the country, except for some basic information I had learned in high school—and through watching Argo. I had just been dumped and had thrown myself into studying philosophy at the University of Nanterre. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, so I wanted to get away and travel the world.

I arrived in Iran in early August of last year. I went on a tourist visa because it's relatively easy to obtain but also knew there were considerable risks, especially if authorities found out I was a journalist. I did some reading on the subject and learned that getting the wrong visa could qualify me as a spy and get me sent to jail. Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, for example, was at the time spending time in an Iranian prison on charges of espionage. Not that the two really compare.

I tried to make sure that I had several alibis for my stay in the country. I registered with a college I never attended, but I made sure I always carried my student card on me. I also started a blog about sports, which I updated daily. I even had business cards printed out for that blog, which was actually just really handy—I handed them out to people I interviewed and potential sources.

I've always been fascinated with shows and movies about spies, so I have to admit that I enjoyed my ruse a little bit. And it fed my sense of paranoia: When I arrived in Tehran, I looked in the rear-view mirror of the taxi to make sure I wasn't being followed. When I walked the street, I zigzagged. My photographer and I would discuss an article in the bathroom. I was really overdoing it at that point.

After working in the heat of the Iranian capital for ten days, the photographer I worked with and I headed north to Tabriz—the capital of East Azerbaijan Province, about 400 miles away. We were supposed to investigate a separatist movement with a young fixer.

To find out if we were being followed or not, we used a technique I learned from Le Bureau des Légendes—a spy show on French TV channel Canal+. It's simple: You take a pile of blank papers, write coherent bullshit on a page and cover that with another page, while sticking small pieces of rubber between the pages. If the pieces of rubber are gone when you come back, you know someone has searched through your stuff. We did it, but when we came home, all the little pieces of rubber were in place. We weren't being followed, apparently.

But our fixer had told us that there were a lot of spies and informants in the area, and we were interviewing a lot of different people, investigating an extremely sensitive issue. On the third day, we decided to go to a soccer match—the stadium being a separatist stronghold, according to my fixer. Coming in, we noticed cops and soldiers circling the entrance. There were a lot of them.

Right after we had bought our tickets, a few undercover cops took us aside and asked for our passports. My mouth was dry, and I felt extremely weak. One of them had a brightly colored shirt and an imperfect set of teeth, and he asked how come we were in Tabriz, if we were really tourists. "You don't look like a tourist," he said. That day, though, I was wearing a New York Yankees cap, so I objectively did look like a tourist. But this guy's piercing eyes sent a chill down my spine anyway. I started yapping about how I was a massive soccer fan, that I was a Manchester supporter. I was being pretty annoying, and after another quick glance in my passport, he let me through. My photographer was held up a while longer.

When I went in the stadium, I lost sight of the fixer. I walked around, and after about 15 minutes, one of the guys who had held me up came up to me and indicated that I had to follow him. I acted like I didn't see him. The fixer had told me earlier: "These guys don't let you know when they arrest you. They lead you to a corner where nobody can see you, put a bag over your head, and take you with them."

He had told me he had been arrested a few years back because of a protest tweet, so I trusted him. Apparently, that time he had been approached by about ten men, who asked him to follow them. They put him in a car with a bag over his head and took him to a tiny jail—a kind of cage—where they kept him for two weeks. They gave him one small meal a day, and apparently he was also tortured. He returned to his home a zombie—13 pounds lighter and his face swollen.

I finally found him with the photographer—they had both been allowed to go through. We decided not to interview anyone during the game, so we just sat down and watched it. It was pretty terrible. When that was over, we were arrested.

A guy ordered us to follow him under the pretext that he wanted to check our passports a second time. As we were walking behind him, I shot a quick glance at my fixer. His face had turned red, so I was pretty sure this wasn't standard procedure. The guy was soon joined by his undercover colleagues, who escorted us into a building to be interrogated.

I had agreed on a made up story about our friendship with the photographer, but that didn't seem to do much good. About ten crazy faces were staring at us as we entered a small room. The questions came in a flood: They wanted to know our age, our name, our surname, our address, our job in France, our religion, the reason for our trip to Iran and Tabriz. The exact names of the monuments we visited. There had been no way to plan and anticipate these kinds of questions. Their curiosity would always be bigger than my imagination.

I knew that I had to have absolute control of my body language. I couldn't scratch my head or rub my ear during my answers, because they'd read it a certain way. Anything coming out of my mouth was carefully written on a piece of paper, so I knew that if I contradicted myself, my photographer or my fixer, we'd be done.

After me, our fixer was interviewed in Farsi. His eyes were watering throughout the ordeal, so I imagine they were a little bit more honest and direct with him.

In my stupidity, I still had two or three issues of Charlie Hebdo in my bag, thinking I would read them before leaving them somewhere on a plane. And I had printed a series of articles on de Pasdarans—also known as Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution—a brach of the Iranian army, who have been accused of smuggling alcohol into the country through a secret airport. On an insane impulse, I asked if I could be excused to use the toilets for a minute.

A few guards accompanied me to the doors of a set of filthy toilets. I rolled up my sleeves, tore up dozens of pages and buried the balls of paper as deep as possible in the shit heap that had cumulated in the toilet. It didn't flush, of course. I washed my hands with a water pipe and got out 20 minutes later praying that nobody suspected anything. I was made to return to the interrogation room. A couple of hours later, our passports were given back to us, and we were free to go.

They promised that they'd be back though, and I didn't doubt it. Once we had gotten as far away as possible, my photographer and I asked the fixer what they had said about us to him. He mentioned that my trip to the toilet had seemed suspect, and that soldiers would be searching the septic tank in order to find information. And he mentioned that nobody believed that we were actually tourists. "They accused me of hiding spies and threatened I would go to jail. They are disgusted that you're atheist. They think you might rape my mother."

A few weeks earlier, I had been lying beside a swimming pool in Cannes. Now I was facing being kidnapped by the Iranian secret service. Our pragmatic fixer said that they would probably come get us that night and explained to us what kind of torture methods the security forces use if you're not complying: First, they put your head in a toilet. Secondly, they electrocute you, and thirdly, they just beat you up.

He tried to make us feel better by telling us that he had went through that at 15. "If that happened to me at fifteen, it won't be hard for you to get through now." I sent my father a coded email asking him to contact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs if he wouldn't have any news from me by 7:30 the following morning.

To keep my mind off of things and not seem suspect, I played a game of soccer with my fixer's brother. When we arrived on the field, a car stopped next to it, and a man inside observed us for over two hours. He left when we left. I was now completely convinced that they would come for us that night. I decided to type out all of my notes and burn the notebooks. I didn't sleep that night, worried about how I could have made such a stupid mistake—unintentionally putting our fixer and his family in danger. Hours passed by, and nothing happened. I sat on my bed all night with my bag packed, jumping at the slightest noise. Around 3 AM, all the mosques of the region called to prayer. A little later we ran away to Tehran.

There, we finished the projects we had been working on—likely while being followed and tapped. We disconnected the batteries of our smartphones and tried to look as much like tourists as we could. The fixer had warned us that our freedom would be fragile for the rest of our stay. But aside from the fact that we were being tailed, nothing big happened. We had the chance to leave the country just like we had arrived, by plane.

I'm not proud of my story, far from it. But it opened my eyes to possible dangers of the job, and I'm definitely not as naïve as I was before I went. Overall, it has strengthened in me the idea that you can learn a lot from sitting down and watching a great spy show.

I Reviewed My Coworkers' Tinder Profiles

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The things we do on company time

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Ah, love. It really makes you want to kill yourself, doesn't it? It also might be the only thing that can save humanity, so I can't blame anyone for trying to find it, somewhere out there on the poisoned shit heap that is this dying earth.

Or, at the very least, we'd like to get our respective dicks and clits wet. And who could blame us? Nobody. Not one single person could, because there is not one human being on this planet who is any better. We're all sniveling primates looking for love.

But without social skills, how do we get this? Tinder. That's how. We look to an app—nothing more than a string of code—for salvation. Some of us do it better than others. My co-workers don't do it very well.


Micah, Ad Sales
There's something suspicious about people who use all six photo slots. It's like they're really trying to prove a point. Don't argue your case too hard. Never use all six photo slots. Never. Also, your bio is too long. We're here to fuck, not summarize ourselves in 15 emojis or less

Best Feature: Your fourth photo. Cute.
Worst Feature: That ridiculous daisy chain of emojis.

Issy, THUMP Editor
Ha. Issy's profile is very funny. Something tragic is going to happen to Shane Warne in the coming months. That's the kind of bio I like to see—same goes for the photos. You've kept things low key. Those three photos tell me everything I want to know: The first photo says you're funny, the second's like, "no but really, though, I'm very attractive," and the third says, "I dislike seafood but will eat it anyway"? That's cool. I like people who can surmount their fears. It's hot to be brave.

Best Feature: Your astute yet humorous bio.
Worst Feature: Including your college. Nobody really cares.

Greta, Intern
Greta's profile looks just like every other cute normie girl's. She seems like she'd enjoy a nice brunch. She seems like type of person who orders cocktails, not pints. She seems like she could fill out her own tax return. It all feels pretty cut and dry, until you read her bio. Right as you you're about to swipe left, she hits you with this: "I also skate so..." That ellipsis man. What a mysterious ending. What are you implying, Greta, you little minx? You expecting me to go for a roll with you? I will. Do you want me to think of that age old adage, "Girls who skate are better at grinding..."? Because I did that too.

Best Feature: You might be Tony Hawk.
Worst Feature: Mentioning coffee. I take it you also like music, yeah? How 'bout breathing? Air? You like those too?

Kat, Staff Writer
When Kat sent me this, I thought it was a fucking joke. One photo? You only have one single photo: ONE PHOTO. And it's of a painting. IT'S OF AN OIL PAINTING??? It's not even something you painted? I was baffled. "This is what I use to find cute arty boys," you told me. "They love the mystery." Apparently it works, so I guess you've actually got it all figured out.

Best Feature: That one photo.
Worst Feature: That one photo. Best, worst, and only.

Steph, Ad Ops
Delete your last three photos buddy. Like I told Micah: Six piccies just doesn't feel right. You've conveyed everything you need to in the first three photos, leaving the rest looking like a bad sequel: None of the original actors signed on to the project, just their shitty doppelgangers, and the first director didn't want to come back either, so they've got some young gun who had one big film at Sundance but doesn't know what he's doing in the major league.

Best Feature: The deep satisfaction it looks like you're feeling in the third photo.
Worst Feature: Everything that came after that.


Julian, VICE Editor
Julian, I reckon you're a pretty interesting guy. Bit weird, but overall, you're great. That's why I'm wondering how you managed to make yourself seem so boring. I know you've done bizarre things; I know you've got stories. You're acting like the craziest thing you've ever done is eat an ice cream at work—"Just to spice up the action." This conjures a really sad picture in my mind: you, getting ready for work in the morning, taking an ice-cream out of the freezer and putting it into your bag, looking forward to the spicy moment you reveal it. You know what would have really spiced up the action, Jules? Literally anything else.

Best Feature: The ice cream tryptic is almost funny.
Worst Feature: The joke you made about said ice cream tryptic.

Nobody in the office wants to talk to me anymore, so please follow me on Twitter.

We Spent a Day at a Laser Tattoo Removal Clinic to Talk About Why People Get Rid of Their Shitty Ink

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All photos by the author

I have seen a lot of shitty tattoos in my life: a friend of a friend of mine in high school had a blurry script tattoo of "c@rl" on their hip. They told me they had got it while they were drunk—they didn't know a single "Carl" in their life, but they liked the @ sign. I too have a shitty tattoo: my left arm has a signature from LA rapper Dumbfoundead that simply reads "Dumb." Thankfully, most can't understand what it says due to the graffiti art style but to me, the meaning will always hold a tinge of regret mixed with a pool of teenage sentimentality.

If most people could take back their bad ink with ease, they probably would, but the reality of the matter is that there is no easy way to get rid of tattoos. In the past, skin grafts and cryogenics were used to replace and freeze tattooed skin off. These days, whether people want to cover up ex's names with a flaming phoenix (not like this terrible thing on Ben Affleck's back) or get rid of that shitty portrait of their childhood dog, laser removal is the way to go. That's where Faith Kapalko, a laser technician in Toronto, comes in.

"The kiss of death for a relationship is getting a tattoo with your significant other, no matter what it is," she told me. "Even if it's not their name, getting a tattoo with someone kills it. Most tattoo shops won't even do it anymore. It's pretty much an immediate end to the relationship, and then you have to come and get it removed."


Rebecca

Kapalko has been working at Tattoo Removal Canada for around two years, and in that time, she's borne witness to the worst decisions in many people's lives. Ugly sleeves, random flash pieces people got while high, stick-and-pokes, religious icons, and unrecognizable portraits. Most of these mistakes happen while people are young and dumb, but many just happen at what Kapalko describes as a "weird point in their life."

Daniel Brennan, 25, is a freemason, and because of that, he got a very large and very unappealing all-seeing-eye on his shoulder when he was 19. He now has a handful of tattoos on his body, but this is the only one he says he regrets, mostly because he got it from a buddy (who he notes was "not a professional") while sitting in his living room.

"I definitely regret this one, I can't really think of a good reason for having it anymore," he said. "It was a total miscalculation on my part. Definitely something I wish I could time travel to fix."

The client Kapalko was working on when I visited the shop is actually her wife Rebecca—a piercing artist in the city who is a connoisseur of body modifications and tattoos, not all of them welcome on her body anymore. She grew up in Moncton, NB, and started working at a tattoo shop at the age of 17. Completely free of ink at that time, she told me that she got that tattoo she's getting removed today—a medieval gauntlet that stretches onto her hand—because she wanted to fit in with the veterans at the shop.

"Tattoos have evolved so, so much. People tried to jumble too many styles at once and no one really specialized in anything back then. This piece is just sub-par," she told me.

"It's not the content of the tattoos, I just wish it was executed differently. Back then, I wish I would have had the knowledge to check portfolios, I wish I would have been more educated, I think I just wish I would have taken my time and found the right people to the job. I don't think I would have got anything removed in that case."

The removal procedure is an effective but painful process. A laser, built to specifically target tattoo ink (and not the actual tissue around it), causes the pigment to heat up and break down into a form that the body can absorb. The result is a bruised, blistery mess—the ink, as Faith tells, essentially "pops like popcorn" and causes a disgusting effect on the skin that can only be likened to a terrible sunburn or (what looks like) a flesh-eating disease.

Every session will take a few weeks until fully healed, but most tattoos, depending on the density of ink and colour, take anywhere from four to 12 sessions before disappearing fully. Despite her tattoo looking only slightly faded, Rebecca has already had two sessions under Faith's laser. Rebecca tells me she's not as nervous as she was the first time, where, despite having a number of of ridiculously painful piercings, she tells me her palms were sweating and her heart was beating out of her chest.

Within minutes of talking, we were in the room with the machine fired up. As soon as it hit Rebecca's skin, the laser made a crackling sound—like gigantic pop rocks were exploding out of her dermal. Seconds later, the stomach-turning smell of burning flesh had made its way to my nostrils.

Not everybody can deal with the pain. Faith tells me that, on a number of occasions, clients have quit only a minute or two into their procedure with tears in their eyes. The thought of having to not only face excruciating pain for 30-45 minutes, but also come back and do that up to a dozen times over the course of a year, is enough to turn everyone but the most desperate and patient away from getting their bad tattoos taken care of.

There's also the cost factor. Faith's clinic charges $120 per session, with a discount for people who buy in bundles and commit to the full removal. I asked Faith how much it would cost for me to get my tattoo removed totally, and the number was kind of shocking. A medium-sized dark tattoo can cost thousands to get rid of, and full removal from my skin would be $2,000.

Faith emphasized that everybody's body is different and that some are more efficient at clearing out the ink. With that said, she noted that even the smallest fuck-ups can take a serious amount of cash to remedy. And with that, she made a point to drive home how important it is to think before you ink.

"The best thing I recommend to people who want to get a tattoo is simple: take the image and put it right beside your bed for a month. If you can wake up, see it every morning, and not be bothered by it, then you're probably OK. That's not a case for a lot of these removals."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Ted Cruz Once Fought to Keep Dildos Illegal in Texas

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Photo via Flickr users Gage Skidmore and Whitney Waller

Read: Dear Straight Guys, It's Time to Start Putting Things in Your Butt

Before Ted Cruz became a Texas senator, Tea Party champion, and 2016 presidential candidate, he was the Texas solicitor general—a position that meant that he once fought to keep the sale of dildos illegal, Mother Jones reports.

In 2007, an Austin sex toy seller challenged a state law that outlawed the sale and promotion of "dildos, artificial vaginas, and other obscene devices." Violators could be punished by up to two years in prison. This law was still on the books despite the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Kansas, which said that individuals were mostly free to do sex in private.

But Cruz's office fought back with a brief arguing that Texas needed to defend "public morals" by "discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification, combating the commercial sale of sex, and protecting minors," arguing that buying a sex toy was just like hiring a prostitute or engaging in bigamy. There may be a constitutional right to use a dildo, the argument went, but you don't have a right to buy one.

In 2008, an appeals court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and against Cruz, and though Cruz and then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (now the governor of Texas) considered appealing all the way to the US Supreme Court, they decided against it, sparing the world the image of Cruz talking about sex toys in the nation's highest court.

This Is What Happens if You Don't Pay Your Taxes in America

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The IRS HQ in DC. (AP Photo/J. David Ake, File)

For decades, Ruth Benn has tried to avoid giving the government any of her money. It hasn't been easy: She started brewing her own beer to avoid paying taxes on booze that would go to fund the Vietnam War. In the 80s, she didn't make any long-distance calls to avoid the telephone excise tax, and she decided she would never own a home. Today she's the coordinator of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, a group that is so opposed to war that it refuses to comply with the IRS, lest some of its payroll taxes fund bombs or tanks.

Every year, Benn files a tax return, but doesn't pay what she owes, making her tax resistance clear. Still, she mostly doesn't get hassled by the IRS—she makes so little money as a full-time peacenik that she's not a juicy audit target. "I don't live too high on the hog," as she tells me.

Benn's situation is pretty rare, though. As millionaire tax evaders like Wesley Snipes and Lauryn Hill have found out, if you owe the government enough money, eventually its agents will come knocking. But what happens to run-of-the-mill people who fail to file? If tax day—April 18 this year, FYI—comes and goes, and you do nothing, will there be serious consequences?

Read: I Asked an Expert How I Could Stop Screwing Up My Taxes

According to Rus Garofolo, an accountant in Brooklyn who caters to the creative class, if you don't pay what you owe, you will receive a letter. If you ignore it, the government will put a lien on your property, which means that if you sell it, what you owe goes to them first and you second. If you aren't a homeowner, the IRS has plenty of other ways to collect, up to and including skimming your paycheck.

Garofolo remembers being shocked the first time he found out that the feds can go into your bank account and seize your money, but now says that the collection powers of the federal government are enormous. "I'm fairly confident that it's not a lot effort for them," he tells me. "They're allowed to just take it."

Benn says she's only had $800 taken out of her bank account, but since then has not kept a lot of money in there. And in 2009, she was given a summons to answer questions about where her money was so the IRS could take it. "I answered all the questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment," she says. "In that case, they don't pursue it."

If you try to keep your money away from the government—whether on behalf of principle or greed—you'll wind up being on the hook for more than you owe. There's a penalty for failure to file, and then there's 3 percent interest tacked onto your debt. That can lead to a vicious cycle: If you can't afford to pay your taxes, you'll wind up owing more, and then you really can't afford to pay.

Garofolo's advice for someone trapped in tax debt is to pay something––anything––to show that you're working in good faith to settle up. The IRS has a reputation for being easy to work with in terms of repayment plans, but is also an agency you don't want to be on the wrong side of. "If you ignore them completely and don't pay anything," Garofolo says, "they can blow your mind with the level of their authority and power."

If you have the money and the smarts, there are legal ways to dodge taxes—most popularly, you could set up an offshore shell company to hide your money from the government. Enough people take advantage of that and other loopholes that over 50,000 New York households suspiciously reported negative income in 2013. Offshoring cost the US a reported $100 billion in tax revenue a year; from 2000 to 2010, tax evasion and avoidance added up to over $3 trillion.

Benn insists that it's easy to get away with not ever paying taxes––you just have to be willing to live without a credit card or any real assets. It also helps, she thinks, that the government may not want to get into a public fight with people refusing to pay taxes for moral reasons.

"I think i have been somewhat lucky, but it's possibly because I've been so public with it," she says. "Sometimes I think the IRS doesn't want to bring attention to this."

Follow Allie on Twitter.

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