By law, super PAC's aren't allowed to coordinate with the political campaigns that they support. The law has produced a number of absurdities in the campaign finance system, one of which is the campaign practice of quietly uploading raw footage of the candidate onto public sites like YouTube, so super PACs can legally use the material in their own ads. The hope, of course, is that no one will notice the videos. But CNN's Chris Moody did, stumbling on hours raw footage from a Ted Cruz campaign ad shoot.

Moody then did God's work, combing through take after painful take of Cruz and his family trying to get through the shoot with a tiny shred of dignity intact. In the video above, CNN has edited the footage down to the most cringeworthy, embarrassing moments, revealing "a rare peek behind the scenes of the strange world of political ad making."

Election Class of 2016: Ted Cruz Is Crazy Like a Fox

The video exposes what everyone has known for a very long time: that damn near every single moment of a presidential campaign ad—every prayer, hug, casual stroll, and solemn promise made into the camera—is a meticulously crafted nugget of inauthentic garbage. This four-and-a-half minute gem is a long look into the sad, dark heart of the average political campaign ad, exposing the humiliation presidential candidates put themselves and their poor, exasperated families through in their bids for the highest office in the land.

In the footage, Cruz is noticeably irritated, grimacing every time someone off camera coughs or clears a throat; pushing family members through countless takes to get the dinner prayer right; and pestering them to tell stories they don't deem appropriate.

In one of the most awkward scenes (really, they all belong in the Awkward Hall of Fame), Cruz can be heard off-camera, chiding his mother Eleanor to tell a story she clearly doesn't want to make public.

"That's too personal, Ted. I don't want to tell it," she says.

"Well I want to tell that and you're the best person to tell that," Ted replies.

"Well," Cruz's mother says, pausing momentarily at the sad prospect of letting her son down. "They're some very personal details that I don't want to get into."

Ted Cruz's cousins Audrey and Diego Loyola make an appearance, and clearly don't know what the hell it is they're supposed to be doing or how they can be of any help. A conversation between the two sums it up the whole process quite nicely.

"I don't know what else to say," Audrey says.

"I don't know," Diego agrees. "Just keep talking. Just keep talking."

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

The author with his baby

Said it before, I'll say it again: your baby is wild smart. Matter of fact your baby is a genius. They used to say "nobody love a genius chile," but now they say "everybody love a genius chile" because love is genius and genius is love and genius begets genius and love begets love.

The baby knows that existence is a paradox, both coincidental and inevitable, that everything is mostly nothing and the difference between everything and nothing is functionally negligible. The baby knows that the difference between everybody and nobody is nobody. The baby knows that nobody is nobody. The baby also knows that nobody is everybody and that if nobody is everybody then everybody must be nobody, too. The baby knows that everybody is everybody and by way of, or as an extension to that, the baby knows that everything is everything. Everything is everything is the grand unified equation. E = E. That's the formula. The baby is working off these figures.

The baby, like many a great philosopher, is highly dubious of object permanence, or even objectivity for that matter. The baby is born of love consciousness, and is therefore love consciousness actualized and realized. We all are. Sometimes, or even often times, we simply don't realize it. We all are the baby and the baby is us. Nobody knows this more deeply than the baby. The baby knows love deeply because it is close to its own temporal root; any human transgression is a forgetting of the love at our root. It's hard for a baby to forget the love at its root because that love was some mere months ago, hella recent, so that's where the myth of childlike innocence finds its a priori, solidifying it as one of the more bulletproof myths of human thought.

The baby is your beacon, your book of changes, your never-ending dice game in the hall of mirrors that winds through your heart, soul, and mind.

The baby's power is mythical, mystifying, smoky, at times opaque, post-rhetorical, hyper-semiotic. The baby's genius is natural, intuitive, automatic. The baby's apparati are oblique but urgent, primal. The metaphysics of the baby are quantum, highly spiritual. The baby's geometry is sacred. The baby's poetics are light speed, unapologetically and unforgivingly beautiful, terrifyingly and reassuringly perfect. You can, may, and should put all trust in the baby.

The baby is your beacon, your book of changes, your never-ending dice game in the hall of mirrors that winds through your heart, soul, and mind. The metaphysics of the baby are labyrinthical, unfurl fractal-like, swirling flowers of human consciousness. The baby is you and you are the baby. See the world again, as if for the first time, with brand new eyes, blood of your blood, flesh of your flesh, an extension of your consciousness that will inform and expand your consciousness, teach you about you, teach you about the world. Be thankful for the gift of the baby. Do whatever the baby says. Do anything for the baby. Let the baby lead the way.

Also remember that you are the baby flesh of your familial flesh, branching from the great ancestral tree trunk. You are the baby and the baby is you, a sprig off that branch, branch off that trunk, a trunk out them roots, a big ancestral tree, a Pando forest of interlocking root systems.

The baby is the guru emanating love's light through you. The baby echoes your love back to you. Tickle the baby and the baby will laugh and then you will laugh and then the baby will laugh some more and then you will laugh some more and so on in an unending Möbius strip of laughter. The baby is a prism of joyous light. We are the rainbow. The baby has given birth to us. Trust, believe, and know these truths to be self evident, baby. You, baby! You are the baby and the baby is now. Now is yes. The truth, affirmative. Yeah, baby, yeah. Now baby, go baby, yeah! YEAH, BABY!

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

This story appears in the December issue of VICE magazine.

A comandante had told us someone would pick us up in front of the pool hall, but we arrived two hours late. Now we didn't know if they were still coming. We waited through the afternoon and night and, after crashing in a cheap hotel, through the next morning, too. That's when a woman wearing a black cap and a too-tight blue shirt with a small green parakeet on her shoulder pulled up on her motorcycle in front of the tienda where we'd been told to stay put. She eyed us suspiciously and left without saying a word.

We watched her—and farmers and shopkeepers and everyone else—for a signal, any signal, that they had come for us. That was the agreement we'd made with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's oldest communist guerrilla organization. The group has been waging war against the federal government since 1964, in a conflict that has caused at least 218,000 deaths. If we showed up in this tiny village, on the outskirts of a huge swath of FARC-controlled territory called Llanos del Yarí, they had promised to take us deep into the bowels of their jungle hideout.

The day prior, we'd set out on our journey from Bogotá, the country's capital. The route is one of rolling hills haloed by mist, and snakes and howler monkeys seemingly hide in every tree and valley. The FARC, which has about 8,000 members today, has managed to control the territory for more than three decades. Farther along, the journey toward the FARC's headquarters starts to feel like a trip through Colombia's history. Ramshackle villages tell the story of the abysmal inequality between the country's center and its forgotten periphery. A two-lane highway gradually transforms into a muddy and solitary road. The farther you are from Bogotá, the poorer the infrastructure becomes. Toward the end of the journey, just before you reach FARC territory, guerrilla graffiti vandalizing government buildings begins to appear.

"Did you get here unarmed?" asked a wide-eyed young National Army soldier. He was manning a Brigada Móvil checkpoint, located on the peak of a mountain in the Andes just before the roads slope down into Caquetá. Here, many National Army checkpoints dot the periphery of FARC's territory— this, after all, is the front line of the civil war. When the soldier saw that we were just carrying tripods and cameras in our truck, he relaxed—somewhat.

"You should go back," he said. "If you keep going you'll find El Paisa, a guerrilla commander. Have you heard about him? He's a bloodthirsty man, and he's against all of the peace negotiations. Please, you really shouldn't go that way."

Eventually he let us pass, and two hours later, the night had already fallen upon us as we continued driving. Then the lights of our truck suddenly illuminated a man in the middle of the road, the muzzle of his rifle pointed directly at us.

"Turn off the lights and get out of the truck!" he screamed. The man was a young guerrilla dressed in civilian clothes. He was flanked by two more armed men.

"Where are you coming from?" one of them shouted. We had apparently passed into FARC territory at some unknown point. "Don't you know that it's forbidden to pass through here after 18,00?"

We explained that we'd come from Bogotá to make a documentary, although we did not tell them that we had permission from a FARC commander to be there. We weren't sure if this FARC battalion was friendly with the commander who had given us permission to visit.

"Which way did you come from?" one of the guerrillas asked.

"Bogotá, Girardot, Neiva..." our fixer answered.

"That's it?"

"And through an Army checkpoint up there..."

Then there was silence. He was testing us. If we hadn't admitted that we had talked with the military, we would have been in trouble.

"Leave then," he said. "You can't stay here. You will get shot, bombed. Go back and remember that you can't travel through here at night."

Civilians run community meetings and participate in government, but everyone in the region knows that the guerrillas have the last word.

We turned around. After a short drive, we passed through another Army checkpoint in San Vicente del Caguán. In a tent nearby, a small light bulb illuminated the faces of 32 members of the FARC depicted on a wanted poster issued by the government. At the top of the spread was a picture of El Paisa, who has a $5 million bounty on his head. REPORT AND GET THE MONEY, the sign said. WE'LL GET THE PEACE WE ALL WANT.

We hadn't come to Llanos del Yarí just to meet Colombia's most important guerrilla fighters—we'd also come because, after two years of dialogues in Havana, Cuba, the FARC and the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos were entering the final stage of a historic peace process. On July 20, 2015, FARC leaders had announced a unilateral ceasefire. This had been tried four times since the dialogues started, and each time it failed. In April 2015, in fact, a previous ceasefire had unraveled after four months, when FARC fighters stormed an Army platoon while troops were sleeping, killing 11 soldiers. A month later, government troops retaliated and killed 26 guerrillas. Would this time be different? We wanted to find out.

We slept that night in a primitive hotel a few blocks away from the Army checkpoint. The next morning, in the daylight, we drove on along a muddy and winding road toward Llanos de Yarí and the FARC.

There we were, still waiting in front of the pool hall. The surrounding village was a shoddy little dump of a dozen huts—a vegetable stand, a school, a beer shop. A FARC commander had promised to pick us up, but still no one had come, except some farmers and the random woman with the bird on her shoulder.

Finally, after more than 24 hours of standing sentry in front of that pool hall, and just as we were about to give up, a man in civilian clothes got off a motorcycle and called to us. He had a stern grimace on his face and told us to follow him. He guided us through the Yarí plains and then led us to a few solitary houses at the base of the hills. As I scanned a crowd of some FARC militiamen gathered in front of one of the houses, I noticed a familiar face—the woman with the green parakeet. Seeing her made me realize that FARC members had been there, watching over us, the whole time.

She waved and smiled. Then, quietly, she led us to a big house in a deep valley. In front of the red wooden hacienda were at least 20 men, many wearing fatigues, some holding automatic rifles. They were members of Frente 63's Combatientes del Yarí, the eastern front of the FARC. From a pole on one side of the house flew the group's flag—two rifles crossed in front of Colombia's national colors: yellow, blue, and red. On the other side was a white flag signifying their commitment to the unilateral ceasefire.

A chubby and friendly-looking woman walked in our direction from the property's entrance and greeted us warmly. She wore a green uniform and combat boots. Everything happened so quickly. It wasn't clear at what moment we had stopped being among civilians and joined the guerrillas. We were now, without a doubt, standing in the heart of FARC territory.

The friendly guerrilla woman got on her motorbike and guided our truck through hidden roads that ran behind the pastures, through forking paths, and little by little, three hours later, she brought us deep into a desolate savanna with no fences or livestock or houses or roads. All around us were jungle corridors and mazy paths that led to the Putumayo River and up into the mountains, virginal and immense. At the end of each of these paths were more guerrillas, waiting to see what would come next: peace or more war.

The date was July 21—just one day after the FARC began its sixth unilateral ceasefire since the peace talks began in 2012. In Havana, the Castro administration and Norway had served as a mediators between the FARC and the Colombian government. As part of the negotiations, the FARC had made pledges of peace multiple times—but each time, they'd done so without actually agreeing to stop fighting. In past negotiations, during the 1980s and early 2000s, the FARC had exploited truces to strengthen their military positions. This time, the government wasn't willing to let this happen. Thus the rules were clear: While the two sides talked about peace, they continued to fight.

Because the National Army continued to attack the FARC's campsites while they negotiated, the guerrillas directed us to stay in the home of a peasant family, who were unlikely to be targets of government violence. It was there, in a wooden shack with no energy and no running water—but with a DirecTV satellite—that we spent the next few days.

I asked Laura if she thought peace was possible in Colombia. "Yes," she answered without any trace of doubt. "Because the Bible tells me so."

Following the orders of the FARC, Granny Laura, a wizened peasant woman, welcomed us to her house. She was hunched and fragile, and she walked slowly. When she spoke, her voice broke so much that it seemed as if it were going to completely disappear with her next words. She shared the home with her husband, Cruz, and their son and daughter, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren. While we spoke, the kids chased one another around the house with homemade, wooden toy rifles.

The children weren't attending school this year because, their mother explained, the nearest school didn't have any teachers. The family couldn't afford to send the kids to the next-closest school—a public boarding school run by the Catholic Church—so the kids were helping their grandmother with work on the hacienda and, in their spare time, pretending to be guerrilla fighters.

Laura was ill. She had diabetes and suffered from chronic dizziness and nausea, but she didn't have regular access to a doctor. Traveling to San Vicente de Caguán's hospital would cost her about $100, which is half her monthly earnings. Instead, Laura got her medication from a bus that drove by her home every two weeks. Sometimes she had to let the bus pass by because she didn't have enough money to pay.

Like most farmers in the region, Laura and her family lived under the FARC's rule and followed their laws. "It's better this way—whoever kills or steals, they have to ," another farmer had told me. "Of course we need to pay them a tax. Every sale, every livestock head has its price," he explained. As in the rest of the country, local juntas composed of civilians deal with everyday problems and solutions for the community—housing, public services, making demands of local officials. The taxes had made life more difficult for poor peasants, but the ones I spoke with believed the FARC's laws were as fair as the federal government's. Civilians ran the community meetings, locals told me, giving people an opportunity to participate in government— though everyone in the region knows that the guerrillas have the last word.

Chepe, a large, shy man, was in the company of 30 guerrillas when I met him for an interview. We were at a FARC camp that had been temporarily constructed out of rough-hewn tree trunks and huge green leaves, a few miles away from Granny Laura's house. Even though he spoke quietly, I could detect in his accent that he had grown up in a wealthy family in Bogotá. Chepe had been born in the jungle of Caquetá, but he was raised in Colombia's capital from a young age. He went to the Colegio Claretiano primary school and then Colegio San Viator, an upper-middle-class high school. He was called Jorge Suárez then, sharing a surname with the FARC commander Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas—his father. The elder Suárez died on September 22, 2010, after seven tons of government explosives fell on his guerrilla camp.

"The comrades wanted me to study in the city and then to come back here to help with the revolution," he told me. "When I was in ninth grade, the government started to apply pressure, and the paramilitaries were looking to make us disappear. So I studied up to ninth grade and then came back here with my dad. I spent eleven years with him.

"I wonder about my friends from back then," he said. "What would they think if they knew that I'm here? They are probably doctors, politicians, engineers. I didn't have the chance to go to university, but I studied the revolution."

His father was a famous man—or, rather, an infamous man. Also known as Mono Jojoy and Jorge Briceño, he led the FARC's Eastern Bloc, which kidnapped dozens of people in the 1990s and early 2000s. For more than a decade, kidnapping rich people for ransom was one of the FARC's key sources of income. Many people died in captivity during those years. What would have happened if any of Chepe's schoolmates ended up as secuestrados, kidnapping victims?

Chepe said he always knew that at school what he was studying was his classmates—"my enemies, the sons of the bourgeoisie." He knew that he needed to fight for the "common good. Their ideals weren't an influence on us," he said. "We were already formed as individuals."

Across from Chepe, sitting on beach chairs, the guerrilla fighters listened to their comandante. Chepe opened his laptop and started the meeting that all guerrilla units conduct at the beginning of their daily routines. They sang "The Internationale" (a classic revolutionary song that's almost as old as Karl Marx), and then Chepe read "Al Filo de la Navaja," an opinion column written in Havana by comandante Carlos Antonio Lozada. The text commented on the previous six months, a period in which the guerrillas had declared a ceasefire that was broken when a military patrol entered their territory. For Lozada, a member of the FARC delegation in Havana, it was important that the National Army reduce the intensity of its attacks in order to make the ceasefire more than just talk.

After Lozada was finished reading, the guerrillas got up to sing a song honoring Manuel Marulanda Vélez, one of the men who founded the FARC in 1964 with a group of communist peasants:

I sing to Manuel, that old dear friend.
Manuel, who one day had the courage of daring to dream.
Manuel, who bad tongues say is a bandit
And whom they used to compare to the devil.
All the love that is in his whole being will flourish.
Like Fidel, history will absolve you too, Manuel.

Afterward, eight guerrilla fighters raised their hands to comment on the column from Havana. Each expressed the exact same opinion and the exact same vision. They all blamed the Colombian oligarchy and American imperialism for the conflict. But they all emphasized how much they trusted their commanders in Havana and said they were willing to lay down their arms and pursue revolution through elections. Their accounts varied only in their eloquence. They seemed to believe in their own ideas so deeply that they nearly vibrated with epiphanic intensity.

"It's so beautiful," said Luisa Monserrat, a young guerrilla from Bogotá, as she smiled with the spiritual drunkenness of a worshipper who closes her eyes to see God. "It's so beautiful to be the owner of the truth."

All guerrilla fighters are members of both a military (the FARC) and a political party (Partido Comunista Clandestino Colombiano, or PC3). They knew that once they joined, the revolution would become their life. According to the FARC's official statutes, those who willingly join have to serve for an indefinite amount of time. In other words, they commit to being professional revolutionaries until the revolution triumphs. Desertion is a crime that is sometimes punished with execution.

Of the 218,000 people who have died in the war between the FARC and the Colombian government, nearly 80 percent of them were civilians.

To reinforce solidarity and collective identity, the guerrillas hold these meetings every day. The reading material varies, from the basic principles of Leninism, to Simón Bolívar's Cartagena Manifesto, to classic Russian and Colombian novels.

One of the women at the meeting was named Antonia Simón Nariño. She grew up in Bogotá, like Chepe, and attended the National Pedagogic University. She began reading the guerrillas' political writings about a decade ago, she told me, and she was recruited soon afterward by the Movimiento Bolivariano: a first step for any young student interested in joining the FARC. Her boyfriend was a militiaman. For three years she snuck away from her parents' house to attend training sessions held at camps in Caquetá. She told her family that she was giving catechism lessons in the Sierra Nevada. One day, her father went to her university to ask how the young instructors in the Sierra Nevada were doing, and he discovered his daughter's lies. She never found the courage to tell him that she was a guerrilla fighter, instead saying that she had joined the Communist Party, which, unlike the PC3, is a legal, non-subversive organization in Colombia. Not long after that she left for the jungle. She arranged for her boyfriend to tell her family the truth.

She finished her tearful story by singing "Todo Cambia," by Mercedes Sosa:

My love doesn't change,
No matter how far away I am.
Nor does the memory
Or the pain of my people.

The camp doesn't exactly feel like a war zone. During my time there, the guerrilla fighters passed the day by watching American TV shows and Katy Perry videos on Chepe's MacBook. Some dug trenches, others cooked cancharina, a fried pastry made with corn flour.

The FARC has fought this conflict for more than 50 years. First, it was a struggle between communist peasants and the American-backed wealthy elite in power. But in the 1980s, the FARC became involved in the drug trade to help fund the war, and the surge in narco-traffic gave rise to new paramilitary armies that fought the guerrillas for control of drug territory. Fighting intensified during the 1990s, and all sides' tactics reached newly inhumane levels: The FARC kidnapped and planted bombs that targeted civilians; paramilitaries perpetrated massacres in hundreds of villages; and National Army members murdered thousands of innocent young Colombians, claiming they were "positivos," an Army term for guerrillas killed in combat, in order to make it look like they were winning the war against the FARC.

The facts and figures are gruesome. According to the National Center for Historic Memory, nearly 80 percent of the 218,000 casualties that have resulted from the civil war were non-combatants. The UN calculates that during the past decade, 4,716 murders of innocent "false positives" were committed by the Army, while the think tank Cifras y Conceptos estimates that the guerrillas kidnapped 9,447 people. The paramilitaries were demobilized between 2004 and 2005, under the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, and though many paramilitaries regrouped to form new criminal bands that traffic drugs, their role has been diminishing.

Six miles from our camp, however, the conflict was still simmering. There, in an expansive valley, FARC units were set up to stop the advancing Army, which had just landed nearby, an action that many guerrillas considered a provocative gesture.

"At the moment I can't even imagine the process of abandoning armed struggle," Chepe said.

Chepe allowed us to walk around the camp. We saw the guerrilla troops doing exercises with their rifles still hanging over their shoulders. At noon we had lunch, then a bath in the river, where the guerrillas stripped down to their underwear, not looking beyond their own bodies. Many rested with their "bed companions," or lovers, in shacks they had built out of lumber and leaves (40 percent of the FARC are women, and many guerrillas have romantic partners).

"The jungle is our home," said Jineth, a 26-year-old woman holding a handmade notebook in which she writes Marxist reflections and poems for the FARC founders in childlike handwriting. When she was nine, Jineth saw a man murder her mother in front of a store her mother owned in the city of Villavicencio. "I was sent to a therapist," she said.

Jineth was then raised by her uncle. When she grew up she discovered that her cousin was a guerrilla fighter, and she asked him if she could join the cause. He said yes.

"Where would you go if the war were over today?" I asked her. "Our home is tied to our backs," she answered, referring to the 90-pound backpack she's carried ever since she joined the guerrillas a decade prior.

What would happen to the region if a peace treaty were signed? What would happen to the farmers, to the local militia, to the guerrillas? Jineth, Antonia, Chepe, and Luisa all agreed that they'd dedicate their lives to their political party, that their cause would never be over, that they'd have to search for the revolution by other means. Chepe and Jineth wanted to study; Antonia said she would teach. They all seemed tired of war, though they also didn't seem to really know any other way of life.

"At the moment I can't even imagine the process of abandoning armed struggle," Chepe said. "Around these areas, regular people come to tell us their problems, like a stolen cow or a fight that they had with a neighbor. We are an armed party. When we leave the arms we will continue to be a party, and we will continue our political struggle."

"And how would you prevent a new massacre of your people?" I asked. "How would you avoid the return of the drug traffickers and paramilitaries?"

"It all depends on the government," he said. "There should be some guarantees that verify that the agreement is being followed. That's why many countries will have to be involved in this."

At five o'clock in the evening on our last day in the FARC territory, we were about to go back to Laura's house when one of our fixers approached me. "You must leave now," he said. "You've been asking the wrong questions."

Someone had told the comandante that I was asking guerrillas and civilians if they were hiding kidnapped people in their homes. He gave an order that we were to leave that night. It was just a misunderstanding. One more misunderstanding in a series of five decades of misunderstandings.

My alleged offense had occurred two days before, as we were talking with Laura and her family at their dinner table. Night had fallen, and we sat next to a window through which we could see the stars. A candle illuminated our faces and projected shadows onto the wooden walls. Next to me there was a woman who looked like a regular farmer eating a delicious dinner. She told me that she was a guerrilla fighter. She had been one for years. She didn't speak much, but I took the chance to ask her the same question I'd posed to Chepe.

"Have you ever had to take care of kidnapped people? I imagine that they used to be kept in farmers' houses like this one. You've never had one here?"

"No, never," she answered me.

The conversation drifted to Laura and her kids, and I didn't broach the subject again. Laura told us about her health, about this one herb that helped her with her dizziness, about her childhood in Tolima, about her family life in Huila. We were still talking when the conversation was interrupted.

"Look, they've turned on the camera once again," said Laura's son, a day laborer just like his father, pointing to a distant light shining outside in the pitch-black sky. It looked like a satellite or a cellular tower.

All of a sudden it disappeared.

"A camera?" I asked.

"Yes, that's the Army. They are watching us," he said.

"Of course they are watching us," Laura said with her breaking voice. "The Army arrived to our house once. One of the soldiers, thinking that I couldn't see him, hid a device on top of our door. A few days later he quietly came back and took it with him."

It was a warm night. Laura rambled on from story to story. Then I asked her if she thought peace was possible in Colombia.

"Yes," she answered, without any trace of doubt.

"Why are you so sure?"

"Because the Bible tells me so. It says clearly that communism will arrive to our world even if it's just for one day."

Laura stood up in the dark and went to pick up her Bible with a lamp in her hand. Standing there, small and trembling, she pointed the light at a passage from Revelation 18–19, about the fall of Babylon.

Two months later, long after I left Laura and Chepe and the others and drove out of Llanos del Yarí in the middle of the night, the FARC would violate their own ceasefire six times. The Army attacked them another 76 times. A guerrilla fighter from the Daniel Aldana column, which operates on the Pacific coast, murdered the Afro-Colombian politician Genaro García, a peaceful man whose only transgression was opposing the FARC's rule in his impoverished community.

Today, the ceasefire negotiations continue, as does the war.

WhenEpicly Later'd started, one of the first things I wanted to do was an Ali Boulala episode. I imagined doing a whole season just on him. He was the perfect subject for the show—hilarious, amazing at skateboarding, infectious to be around, yet also a bit of a mystery. Where and how did he become how he is? There couldn't be anyone else on Earth quite like him.

This was before the drunk driving accident that killed Australian pro Shane Cross and put Ali into a coma. At the time, that was all way too dark and depressing for us to cover—back then, we were doing episodes about Dustin Dollin shopping for pants.

Fast forward to a year or so ago. I posted a photo on my Instagram of Stevie Williams, where Stevie said "I want to do an episode of your show, but I don't want any of that depressing bullshit..." Ali Boulala commented on the photo, "I'll do an episode, but I'm sure it will be all depressing."

I contacted Ali to see if he was serious, and was soon on a plane to Stockholm to visit him. He hasn't done too many interviews since the accident, so I wasn't sure what I would find—but staying with Ali for a week was nice, and most of the trip was full of laughs and good food.

You can see that he has not shut the door on the past, though. There is a picture of Shane Cross on his living room wall, and the incident always hangs in the air. But Ali is moving toward putting his life back together, and I'm proud of him for that. This is a heavy episode, and I want to thank Ali for his honesty.

–Patrick O'Dell

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan. Image via Flick user Renegade98

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

US News

• San Bernardino Attack Suspects Dead
  Two suspects have been killed after a mass shooting left 14 people dead and 17 injured at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. The couple, named as Syed Rizwan Farook and his partner Tashfeen Malik, were shot dead by police officers following a car chase through the city. —NBC News

• Texas Sues Federal Government
  Texas has filed a lawsuit against the federal government in an effort to block the resettlement of two Syrian refugee families. Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton has argued that the government violated its own law by not consulting the state. —The Texas Tribune
• Secret Service Crisis
  The Secret Service is an "agency in crisis", according to a bipartisan House report released today. The claim follows a string of humiliating security lapses, including an incident where two people strolled unnoticed into White House grounds. – The Washington Post

• Pentagon Wasted Millions on Afghan Villas
  A Pentagon business advocacy agency spent almost $150 million renting private villas in Afghanistan, according to an inspector general's report released today.The report says using military accommodation could have saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. —USA Today

International News

• Turkey Accuses Russia of Lies
  Russian accusations that Turkey is trading oil with the Islamic State have been dismissed by Turkey's prime minister as "lies" similar to the "Cold War-era Soviet propaganda machine." Ahmet Davutoglu insisted his country was trying to control its border with Syria. —AP

• UK Joins Bombing of Syria
  British warplanes carried out airstrikes in Syria, hours after the UK's Parliament voted to authorize attacks against Islamic State targets. The first strikes hit IS-controlled oil fields in eastern Syria, according to the British defense secretary. —BBC News

• FIFA Officials Arrested
  Two top Fifa officials have been arrested, suspected of accepting bribes of "millions of dollars" by US authorities investigating world soccer's governing body. Swiss police made pre-dawn raids at a luxury hotel in Zurich. —The Guardian

• Pistorius Now Guilty of Murder
  The supreme court of South Africa has upgraded Oscar Pistorius' conviction for killing his former girlfriend from culpable homicide to murder, following a legal battle by prosecutors.The minimum sentence for murder is 15 years in prison. - Reuters

Caitlyn Jenner. Photo via Flickr user Alberto Frank

Everything Else

• Downing Death Star a Bad Idea
  According to a financial engineering professor, destroying the Death Star would have had a terrible effect on the fictional universe of Star Wars. Defaulted bank loans would amount to $500 quintillion, according to numbers he made up in his own head. - TIME

• Caitlyn Billboard Prompts Complaints
  New Zealand advertising company Cranium has apologized for a transphobic billboard. It featured Caitlyn Jenner in a Santa hat with the slogan: "I hope your sack is fuller than mine this Christmas". —The Huffington Post
• Why I Hacked a Toy Company
  An anonymous hacker explains why he breached the servers of toymaker VTech, exposing the personal data of millions of parents and children. The aim was to expose "shitty security." —Motherboard

• NYC Officials Rip Off Food Stamps
  A ring led by a New York State bureaucrat came up with a way of ripping off $2 million in food stamps. They used the tokens to fund a Red Bull wholesale enterprise. —Munchies

Done with reading today? Watch our new film 'The Hunt for Shale Gas on Quebec's Deer-Infested Island, Anticosti'

Photo via @ShomrimOfficial

On Wednesday a circumcision ambulance was stolen in London in a violent carjacking, with thieves making off with an estimated £30,000 circumcision-themed emergency response supercar. Again: circumcision ambulance. An ambulance for circumcision. Circumcision ambulance.

The vehicle was a private ambulance used by a home circumcision service. The driver was too shaken up by the carjacking to speak, but a friend told the Standard: "He believes they were waiting for him. They pounced on him, they ripped off his keys off his belt, and also stole his watch, before driving off with his car."

Now I am thinking basically the same thing as you, here, mainly: yo, what is a circumcision ambulance? Who needs to irreparably alter the end of his penis so desperately that an ambulance—and this is an Audi TT, this thing can move—has to race through traffic to show up at the front door of the patient's house for an ASAP snip?

"Hello, 911? Yes, my husband is having a heart attack. Convulsing on the floor in agony, shock turning him blue. Can you send someone immediately to cut the tip of his penis skin off?"

"Hi, 911, emergency: I'm stuck in a tree and I was hoping a medical professional could come and cut the last 20% or so of my penis away."

"Emergency services please, thank you. Hi, emergency, help: the tip of my dick needs severing or I will die."

I mean the police are on the case, anyway. People are sharing this photo of the ambulance on social media because that's how justice works now. But you've almost got to feel for the thieves, don't you? I mean, yes: they pounced on an innocent medical worker and stole his livelihood and his watch and left him so shaken up he can't speak, but you can't really move a TT that says 'Emergency Response' on it, can you? Quite hard to avoid the police in London traffic when you're in an extremely cognito ambulance with an overwhelming vibe of dick-chopping about it. "Hello Sir, it's me, the police. Can you tell me where you got this Audi TT that says 'ambulance' on it, please? Can you explain to me why you have a trunk full of foreskins, and where you are taking them?"

I just like to imagine the thieves waking up this morning and going to their lock-up under an arch in Brixton. "We stole something last night, didn't we?" They were high on those party drugs we talk so much about, they don't remember. And then they pull the tarpaulin off and whoomph: there's a badged-up Audi TT, £30,000-worth of immoveable vehicle, with an icebox full of dick tips and a load of extremely sinister tiny knives in the glovebox. "Ah," they are saying. "Shit." Sometimes crime doesn't pay, is the moral of the story here. The moral of the story is: do not steal an ambulance that is primarily designed for detipping the end off a penis.

HAPPY ENDING: They just found the ambulance in a pub car park in Newham.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

In today's episode of Daily VICE, we meet Colombia's guerrilla fighters, go courtside at the Davis Cup, catch up with party monster Michael Alig, and head to Brazil for a pageant in a women's prison.

The war on abortion is not an abstract or symbolic war. It's real. Last week's attack on a Planned Parenthood in Colorado was just one of countless violent incidents aimed at abortion providers over the years since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalized the procedure. According to statistics compiled by the National Abortion Federation, since 1977 there have been eight murders and 26 attempted murders of abortion providers and their assistants, 42 clinic bombings, 186 incidents of arson, and thousands of other incidents targeting clinics and doctors.

This is terrorism. Politically motivated violence against civilians meant to scare lots of people, and shape their actions. The list of victims of this kind of domestic terrorism is long. It includes those who work in the abortion industry. It includes women who want to access their right to an abortion. And it includes men who are involved with those women. Yes, men have a stake in this debate. I felt that acutely when I got a girlfriend I was close to leaving pregnant. Let me tell you the story.

It was a couple of decades ago. We lived in New York. I was a twentysomething writer. She, a very bright, pretty twentysomething girl. We were living together but by this point, our relationship had already begun its downward spiral. The first year together was thrilling, but six months into living together, I could see it wasn't going to work out. There was too much fighting, and while I know couples fight, the frequency and intensity of our battles was just too much for me. I think we both knew it wasn't going to work out, but like most couples who reached that realization, we didn't break up right away. We kept hoping against hope, kept trying. But before the year was over, we had both moved out of the apartment, fleeing on the same day as if it were the apartment, too, that we had to break up with.

The story really starts six months before we fled, in the middle of our argument-filled annus horribilus. She got pregnant. (We knew we weren't right for each other but we still wanted each other.) After months of drifting apart, we'd suddenly come to a major fork in the road of life. I was terrified.

I've always felt that family is critical to building kids into strong, productive adults. I would not be who I am today if not for growing up under the watchful eye of two parents who'd wanted me, planned for me, and loved me. Parents who loved each other. The relationship I was in was never going to be that. It was not going to lead to a lasting family. We needed to split up—it was inevitable. But when she got pregnant, we faced the possibility of being stuck together forever.

She told me on the couch and I remember feeling scared for my life. It was as if the words came out of her mouth and I was suddenly staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. But she just told me that she was pregnant—she didn't say anything about what would come next. I could tell she wasn't sure what came next. She knew that things were bad between us, but she didn't take the idea of getting an abortion lightly. It was a brief conversation in which much more was inferred than actually said. And we retreated into our respective corners.

For the two days after, I felt as if I was falling backward through space with no way to stop myself. I felt powerless. And I didn't feel like I could say anything without coming off like an asshole. And because our relationship was so bad, I didn't have any trust or love built up to make my opinion really matter to her. This was entirely her decision, which meant the shape of the rest of my life was in her hands. My future was out of my control—all the work, all the planning, all the decisions I had made in an attempt to build a life could be upended.

I had always said I would never be one of those guys who live apart from their kids. My father's daily presence had meant so much to my life, and I felt I had to give that same paternal stability to my kids. But now everything was up in the air. What if she wanted to keep the kid and raise it without me, screw you, goodbye? Or what if she wanted to keep the baby in an attempt to hold onto me as a boyfriend, allowing me to stay close to my child at the cost of enduring a broken relationship? Add to all that the fact that at that moment in my life, I was not ready to raise a child, not even close. We were surrounded by bad options and she alone would choose which one we would take.

The number of unintended pregnancies in America is very high. According to a report by the Brookings Institute, "nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended." The study finds that American taxpayers spend over $12 billion a year to help those with unintended pregnancies—through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Plan (CHIP), the government spends about $6 billion on women delivering those babies, and another $6 billion to take care of them when they're infants. And children of unplanned pregnancies are more likely to drop out of high school, setting themselves up for a host of other problems and challenges.

I remember the night Susan finally sat down on the other end of the couch—we weren't really touching each other much any more—and said she wanted to end the pregnancy. I exhaled like never before. I felt like a gigantic iceberg in my path had suddenly melted away. I could see a future I wanted because we were not going to have to live with the mistake of sleeping in the same bed after we knew we weren't going to make it as a couple. And no one else would have to live with that mistake, either. I felt like I got back the power to shape my life.

A few years later I met another woman, fell in love, and got married to her. Through our first years of marriage we had many productive conversations about children and our readiness for them. And then one day we talked, and together decided to pull the goalie. She was pregnant a day later. We were both thrilled. I went to all of her doctor's appointments with joy, excited to watch that boy grow inside her.

I remember watching my son wriggle around on a 3-D sonogram, and right there in the doctor's office it dawned on me just how very human an unborn baby is at that early stage. At that moment my long-held belief in abortion rights was shaken—my belief system collided with life. Now that I could see the humanness of an unborn baby how could I support the termination of a pregnancy? It was something I had to think deeply about.

Eventually I looked at my wife and her growing belly and I realized this: How could I tell her what she can or can't do with her body? How could that be right? The first time, I had known instinctively not to tell the woman what to do, and she was someone I was growing to hate. Now I was standing beside someone I loved, knowing I couldn't ever tell her—and by extension, millions of women like her—what to do with her body. I re-committed myself to my pro-choice views because I believe in, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course."

Seven in ten women who get abortions are mothers—meaning that the vast majority of abortions are performed on women who, for emotional, temporal, or financial reasons, want to maintain the family they already have. It makes sense, then, that sociologist Richard Florida found that the higher a state's abortion rate, the lower its rate of divorce. Unplanned pregnancies can be a blessing, but they can also put tremendous stress on a family.

And over the long-term, 95 percent of women who have abortions do not regret the decision to terminate their pregnancies, according to a Harvard Medical School study. If, over the long-term, women who have abortions are overwhelmingly comfortable with that decision and if they almost unanimously don't think they've made a mistake, then who am I to say those women are all wrong?

I thank God that when I fell into a bad situation, abortion was available as a safety net, allowing me to stay on the path to building the strong family I have now. People who have children when they're prepared tend to be better parents, which leads to stronger families, and their best chance at raising adults they can be proud of.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

Image via Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On Wednesday, after a marathon 11-hour debate, MPs in the House of Commons voted in favor of joining military action in Syria. Hours after the vote, RAF warplanes were in the skies above Syria, targeting ISIS-held oilfields in the east of Syria with the aim of destroying the terror group's financial infrastructure.

Now that Britain is a part of the coalition currently bombing ISIS in Syria (including the USA, France, the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain), British planes will take part in joint air operations that target ISIS's infrastructure around strongholds such as the city of Raqqa.

A political shitstorm accompanied Wednesday's debate, amidst allegations that Cameron described Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a "terrorist sympathizer" to a private meeting of the right-wing backbench 1922 Committee, leaving him looking about as statesman-like as David Brent. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, was left bruised by the vote. His opposition to airstrikes was well known, but 66 Labour MPs rebelled against him after a pro-bombing speech from Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn which was either hugely rousing, or disingenuous bullshit, depending on your perspective. Outside the House of Commons, anti-war protesters made their feelings known by staging a die-in.

To find out whether Britain's decision to bomb ISIS in the hope of bringing peace to the region will solve everything, or is a seriously bad idea, we spoke to Ghadi Sary, a Syria expert with foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, to get his take on what British air strikes might actually mean.

VICE: Can you tell us what Britain joining the anti-ISIS coalition will achieve?
Ghadi Sary: Britain's involvement is important on a moral level, because Britain should be seen to be cooperating with its allies, whether it's France or the US. The problem is that airstrikes are not successful without a force on the ground. For example, in Iraq the US-led airstrikes have been backed by the Kurdish Peshmerga, which has been able to recapture territory. In Syria, however, the rebels are already over-stretched, and they're less capable of doing that on their own. They've not had proper training and support, and because their calls for air strikes have been ignored for the last four years, they might be reluctant to move to places like Raqqa, in the center of the country, where the airstrikes would be concentrated.

There's been a lot of talk about how many moderate rebels there are, and even if they're really moderate. Would airstrikes help them?
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was originally made up of civilians who took up arms when Assad cracked down on peaceful protestors, alongside army deserters who ran away with their weapons. But because of the lack of structure and command they've split into more than a hundred factions across Syria, and in some situations the rebels are dependent on more radical groups for logistics and support. So it's not an army of 70,000 men united in a fight against Assad; it's 70,000 men divided into many factions with competing aims.

A lot of people are concerned that air strikes would just pave the way for British ground troops in Syria. Is this "mission creep" likely?
What Cameron has promised today in Parliament is airplanes and money pretty much. But he's leaving further details of British involvement open—not specifying how far it could go. The main thing to avoid, if we don't want to escalate the Syrian quagmire, is to have a partner on the ground, and it's worth pointing out that Cameron's said he knows the 70,000 fighters aren't ideal.

Why aren't they ideal?
These are 70,000 men who've picked up weapons against Assad and aren't jihadis or foreign fighters. They do exist. But many of them are simply defending their homes. They may not be willing to go and fight somewhere else. There's a big difference between saying there's 70,000 individuals who are moderate and fighting ISIS, and saying there's an army of 70,000 men who are willing to advance. If that existed we wouldn't need airstrikes at all.

Will Britain's involvement even change anything, given that the US is already leading the airstrikes?
The airstrikes are already happening, and as this is a tag-team operation, Britain's involvement won't make a huge difference. Whatever targets the coalition had planned to attack would still have been struck—it's just the question of whether it's US or British planes in the air.

Related: Watch VICE News's 'The Battle for Syria's South'

Is there a chance that this could encourage ISIS to commit terrorist attacks in Britain?
Britain has already been in the crosshairs of ISIS since we started launching raids against them in Iraq. But because of the nature of this vote, there's a possibility that ISIS could use it as an opportunity to show they're able to hit hard when they want to. The vote itself could actually cause that, because just the act of having a debate is what ISIS hates—democracy in action.

And what about in Syria—is there a risk the airstrikes will make the situation worse?
It's hard to imagine a scenario worse than what Raqqa's going through. There is a possibility that civilians could be caught in the airstrikes. Another possibility is that what happened in Libya happens in Syria, which is that air strikes clear out one group and then another moves in. Let's not forget that there are groups like al Qaeda in Syria who are also standing by and willing to move in.

Is there an alternative to airstrikes?
One effective way of tackling ISIS would be to target their sources of revenue. Following the trail of where their money comes from and where it goes. Because often when you follow the money, you also find the networks that facilitate the transfer of jihadi fighters. We also need to revive the Vienna peace talks, and help support the Syrian opposition from a political point of view. We've got to remember that the Syrian opposition wasn't allowed to practice politics for 40 years by the Assad regime. We need to aid them to envision a democratic Syria for all.

It sounds like a really messy, complicated situation. Can we actually drive ISIS out of Syria?
It's really tough. We all want to see the suffering of the Syrian people end, and we want to see ISIS out of Syria, but at the same time we know that's not going to work just from bombing.

There's something missing in the equation, and that has been the structure that will replace ISIS, because ISIS has filled that power void. And we still have failed to agree on what is going to fill that void. Until we do that, ISIS will continue to prosper.

Follow Sirin Kale on Twitter.

The UK has the best club culture in the world. That might sound biased, considering I'm from the UK and grew up on speaker stacks and squat, stocky men eyeballing my fake ID and 45-year-old divorcee pillheads losing half their body water in sweat at drum-and-bass parties... But it's true. Germany might have Berlin and the States might have Miami, but the UK's got London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, and, if you're into really gabber and/or not paying very much for alcohol, Glasgow.

Tomorrow, London's theprintspace are launching Lost in Music, an exhibition that charts the history of dance music and club culture with a collection of 500 images. They're kicking everything off with a party at Shoreditch's Village Underground, which is completely free; all you need to do to get in is register for tickets here, or just turn up after 9 PM for one-out, one-in.

The exhibition will span a number of countries—basically anywhere a culture has developed around clubbing, but theprintspace kindly sent us the photos below that show the many eras of British nightlife over the past 40 years.

A Northern Soul dancer, Wigan Casino, Wigan, 1976 © Red Saunders

Shades Disco, Manor House, London, 1978 © Jill Furmanovsky/PYMCA

Eric's, Liverpool, 1978 © Kevin Cummins

Mod girls, London, 1980 © Peter Anderson/PYMCA

Three skinheads drinking, with one showing his "Kill Mods" tattoo, 1980s © Peter Anderson/PYMCA

London, 1980s © Ted Polhemus/PYMCA

A group of breakdancers, London, 1983 © Clare Muller/PYMCA

Fordham Park free festival, London, 1983 © Martyn Goodacre

Fordham Park free festival, London, 1983 © Martyn Goodacre

New Romantics outside Alice in Wonderland, London, 1984 © Hartnett/PYMCA

Dynamite 3 MCs at Brixton Fridge, London, 1985 © Normski/PYMCA

Hacienda, Manchester, 1988 © Kevin Cummins

Ravers outside "The Trip," Astoria, London, 1988 © Marcus Graham/PYMCA

Hacienda, Manchester, 1989 © Peter J Walsh/PYMCA

A B-boy, Bournemouth, 1990 © Guy Isherwood

Goldie at Metalheadz, London, 1994 © Eddie Otchere

Pushca white ball party in a warehouse, West London, 1995 © Daniel Newman

Freedom at Bagleys, London, 1998 © Dave Swindells

Northern Soul fans at Mousetrap Club, London, 1998 © Rebecca Lewis/PYMCA

Gatecrasher's seventh birthday, 2001 © Tristan O'Neill

Cameos Nightclub, Peckham, London, 2003 © David Titlow

The BBC Asian Network tent at the London Mela, mid-2000s © Jocelyn Bain Hogg/VII

MC Tempo at Once Upon a Grime's fifth birthday, 2015 © Wot Do You Call It

The "Lost in Music" show opens on Friday the December 4 and runs until Wednesday, February 17 at theprintspace gallery, 74 Kingsland Rd, which is open from 9 AM to 7 PM, Monday to Friday.

At the Village Underground party in Shoreditch this Friday, there will be DJ sets from photographer Dean Chalkley, World Dance's Simon Kurrage, photographer Gavin Mills, the Balearic Queen Nancy Noise, acid house pioneer Danny Rampling, and Ministry of Sound's Shea Burke, along with performances throughout the night from special guest Shovell, The Drum Warrior.

Image via Facebook

Read: Rapper and Senior VICE Parenting Columnist Kool A.D. Released a New Video, 100-Track Mixtape

This week, New Zealand company Cranium Signage came under fire for their offensive use of Caitlyn Jenner's image in their annual Christmas billboard. The sign featured Caitlyn, photoshopped to be wearing a santa hat, next to the text: "I hope your sack is fuller than mine this Christmas. Merry Christmas from Cranium."

Not surprisingly, the image and text quickly drew criticism from the local community as it was shared on social media. Rebecca Jones, a mother of a nine-year-old transgender son, became aware of the sign when it was brought up at a LGBT support group she leads. She emailed the company expressing her disgust and highlighting the pain comments like this can cause trans individuals. While Cranium Signage director and owner Phillip Garratt replied and apologized for any offense, he was less gracious in an email to one of her friends who had also complained. In that exchange Phillip commented, "I think you may need to take a look at yourself and relax a bit and not take life so seriously. I was referring to a santa sack, your sick mind is the problem."

While Jones was making her feelings clear, more and more members of the wider community also began getting in contact via email and on social media. Finally sensing the weight of their fuck up, Garratt posted an apology on behalf of Cranium Signage, saying: "It was not our intention to offend any people in the community/world. I as the owner have no feelings of discrimination to the gay or transgender community and if one of my family was I would love them just the same. Cait is more then welcome to stay at my house with my family any time. I will have a wine or a beer with her quite happily and it would be an honour."

Clearly familiar with the sight of someone trying to weasel out of a media shit-pile, Jones replied: "Caitlyn might be busy, my 9 year old transgender son might be free if you want to invite him to your house and explain why you thought it was funny to ridicule a transgender person since he has been trying to raise awareness since he was 6 years old!"

Image via Facebook

Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Hello, potential listener. Here's the first VICE Gaming Podcast, entirely willing to find its way into your ears. So, please, allow it—it's a friendly little thing, and you may even find it informative and/or entertaining. That's the point, at least.

For this debut episode, we're focusing on the best video games of 2015, the ones we've really loved, and a handful of titles that warrant discussion but perhaps aren't Actually All That Brilliant. Joining me around the microphones are freelance games writer Emily Gera (cider and Undertale) and videogamer.com deputy editor Steve Burns (lager and Metal Gear Solid V).

Stream the podcast below, or download for offline enjoyment, the choice is yours.

Why do a podcast? Fair enough, as it's not like every other gaming site out there doesn't already do one. The problem I've long had with my favorite gaming podcasts, though, is that they go on too long. So the intention for the VICE Gaming Podcast is to keep things snappier. This first episode is about 40 minutes long—future installments, with a clearer focus on fewer topics, will be shorter. There will also be different voices every time, always experts in their fields, and always guests who I feel are thoroughly good people (who you'll like to listen to). That's the plan.

This podcast does contain swearing. Just so you know. Don't act like you weren't expecting any. I'd really appreciate your feedback on this—what you like about it, what you think we could do differently next time, and even conversations we should be having about video games in 2016. You can tweet me directly, send a message to @VICEGaming, or comment below.

Find our guests on Twitter and follow them, too, because they both crave your attention and are worthy of it: @twitgera and @thesteveburnio

The Police General Hospital in Bangkok. All photos by author

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

It's a sunny day in Bangkok. The wet season has finally made way to the dry and warm Thai winter. The city is calm, awaiting the herds of tourists who will arrive in December. It's even quiet at the normally buzzing Erawan shrine, in the center of the city. This was where a bomb went off last August, killing more than 20 people. Since the attack, the shrine has become even more popular with tourists.

On the opposite side of the road, Dutchman Johan van Laarhoven, 55, enters the Police General Hospital. Two weeks ago, the Thai criminal court found him guilty of money laundering and sentenced him to 103 years in prison (he'll be serving sentences concurrently, however, so he'll spend a total of 20 years inside). Johan claims to be innocent.

In 2011, Van Laarhoven sold the Grass Company—his chain of four coffee shops in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. At the time of the sale, Van Laarhoven was already living in the Thai city of Pattaya with his wife Tukta and their two young children. Not long after that, the Dutch prosecutor's office (Openbaar Ministerie) launched an investigation into the Grass Company for money laundering. During years of investigation, no evidence was found that could convict Van Laarhoven or his business partners in the Netherlands.

Van Laarhoven and the Openbaar Ministerie agreed that if they ever again wanted to interrogate him about the case, he would report to the Netherlands within five days of their request. It wouldn't come to that: As Dutch regional network Omroep Brabant reports, after a request from a Dutch lawyer working for Openbaar Ministerie, the Thai authorities launched their own investigation into Van Laarhoven. Several days later he and his wife were arrested at their Pattaya home.

Fifteen months later, Van Laarhoven has been convicted for spending money in Thailand that he earned by selling cannabis in the Netherlands. It should be noted that the sale of cannabis in coffee shops is legal in the Netherlands and the Dutch "gedoogbeleid" policy ensures that authorities turn a blind eye when coffee shop owners buy stock from illegal dealers. The Thai court's verdict, however, ignores that policy, concluding that money earned with the sale of drugs has to be illegal money. Therefore, spending that money is a crime.

That's the story that got me to Bangkok's Police General Hospital, which Van Laarhoven visits weekly due to his deteriorating health. I had attended the sentencing of Johan and Tukta at the Bangkok criminal court as a reporter for a Dutch network the week before. Since I was the only journalist there, Johan's family approached and asked me if I'd like to interview him. They are desperate for media attention, because they feel abandoned by the Dutch state. They told me that Johan would be visiting the hospital on a given day and that it would probably be possible to speak with him for a while without having to first submit an interview request to the Thai authorities.

And so I find myself sitting next to Johan in a hospital waiting room—my recording device hidden underneath a notebook. I start with the question that I feel makes the most sense given the setting: "How are you doing?" But even a simple question like that seems a bit much given the circumstances and Van Laarhoven needs some time to find the words. After a while he says: "I wouldn't know. As long as I don't think about it, I'm OK. Then I think about my wife and children, about my 83-year-old mother, my entire family—my life has been ruined. And for what?"

Van Laarhoven's wife has also been convicted—she's looking at 12 years in prison. Tukta's signature is on the contracts that bought them their property in Thailand. As a Thai citizen, she had to sign because Thai law doesn't permit foreigners to purchase land. "If I had known I would be charged with money laundering, I would have never let her sign those papers," he says. "We decided to go to Thailand in 2008. My wife was pregnant and I didn't feel the need to become the richest man alive. I had plenty of money—more than I could spend. We chose to live in Thailand, because we thought it was a place where we could spend all our time with the kids. When the banks in Europe collapsed, I thought I'd be better off moving and investing my money in land. I thought that would be a smart move."

Below is the rest of our conversation.

Johan van Laarhoven and his lawyer at the Police General Hospital in Bangkok

VICE: A week ago, a Thai court sentenced you to 20 years in prison. Were you prepared for that outcome?
Johan van Laarhoven: No. I was convinced we would be going home. That's because I know I'm innocent, but also because there simply hasn't been any evidence that we did something wrong. Even the prosecution witnesses said they didn't know what law we had broken in Thailand and what it is that we supposedly did wrong in the Netherlands.

Then why do you think you were convicted?
From the start I got the feeling we were being heavily screwed with. But I don't know why. I didn't do anything wrong. If you look at my chain of coffee shops, our business model was built in such a way that it could be applied in the Netherlands and abroad. The police visited our shops when they gave tours to foreign police forces or government officials. We were heralded as a positive example. I'm still using the term "we," because despite selling I still see the company as my life's work.

You've been convicted for money laundering.
No money has been laundered. And even if everything the Dutch prosecutor suspects us of was true, my lawyer says I would be facing a year in a Dutch prison at the most. But most of what they accuse us of would have happened after I sold the company. I have nothing to do with any of that. And how could I have been laundering money if I was paying my taxes over it? If a crime has been committed in my case, then the Dutch tax authority is an accomplice. The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that income earned from the exploitation of a coffee shop is legal, even if there is too much cannabis in stock. If you look at that jurisprudence, it's clear that this is definitely not a case of money laundering.

But that didn't stop the arrest of you and your wife in the summer of 2014.
That's when I realized the Dutch prosecutor screwed up this case big time. All of a sudden, 120 cops and every journalist in Thailand were on our front lawn. The officers were very friendly after the arrest. They even said we would probably be going home on bail in a couple of days' time. But that didn't happen and it slowly dawned on me that this might be more of a political case for Thailand, than an actual punishment for anything.

Related: Watch our documentary 'The Real Nancy Botwin'

After your conviction last week you got transferred to a different part of the prison from where you spent the last 15 months. Had you made any friends in your previous cell?
I talked to a couple of people, yes. Most of the convicts are murderers, rapists, and gang members, though. Some have tattoos all over their faces. There were some foreigners in my cell and we talked a lot, mostly about our cases. But now that I've moved, I have to start all over again. I share a cell with 40 other men. One is from England, but he's in for selling amphetamine—not really my kind of guy, I don't like hard drugs. The rest are all Thai, and a lot of them are political prisoners.

That sounds like people you wouldn't mind sharing your cell with. Better a white-collar criminal than a murderer, right?
Yes, of course. There are some former policemen in the cell too, but it's all political bullshit. Many of them are so clearly wrongly convicted. Sure, they may have been involved in some mild corruption cases but if that were an offense, everyone in Thailand would be in prison.

How did the transfer happen?
It was the morning after the verdict, so it was one big shock after another. They didn't announce it, they just came by and took me away. When I didn't get my stuff fast enough the guards' helpers threw my stuff in a bag. And there I went.

You have decided to appeal the verdict. Was that your only option?
It wasn't really a choice, because it's the only way to get an acquittal. But it's a fucked-up system, designed to let the government win. If you accept a guilty plea, you automatically get 50 percent off your sentence. That means a lot of people plea guilty even when they aren't.

The same goes for an appeal. The king pardons prisoners every year but you can only be considered for a pardon if there isn't an ongoing case. And in order to have a bigger chance of a pardon, you have to work on your ranking, which can be "medium," "good," "very good," or "excellent." If you have an excellent ranking, the time after which you can apply for a pardon is half as long. But as long as the appeal is under consideration, I'm not allowed to work on my ranking.

Would you transfer to a prison in the Netherlands if the opportunity arises?
I have no clue. I don't think so. I can't leave my wife and kids behind.

The last days in court were the only moments you could see your wife—while your hands were tied to hers with a pair of handcuffs. What were those moments like?
Very intense. You try to talk to each other but it's nothing resembling a real conversation. But it's better than nothing. I always look forward to seeing my wife, even if it's for a very short time. Last week was ridiculous: Five minutes after the sentencing we were separated. We were both in shock. I have no idea when I will be able to see her again.

Johan van Laarhoven

The appeal will be done in writing, so no more moments in court.
Yes, and the appeal can take from one to three years. If it really does take three years, that means I'll be in prison for almost four and a half years. For what? I'm innocent.

What's your daily life in prison like?
It's not really a life. I don't know how to describe it, exactly. There is no place to lie down, it's always hot, there is nowhere to sit, the food is terrible. In the cell I was in before, I was allowed to see a visitor every day but that has been cut down to once a week now. The only thing to do is wait until the day is over, and then there's the next day.

I can imagine that makes a hospital visit the highlight of your week.
That is true. At least here I can talk to someone without having bars in between us.

Your eldest son is allowed to visit you. Do his visits help keep your spirits up?
Yes, but tears build up when I think about what this does to my children. My two younger kids still don't know where their parents are. And what can we tell them—"Mummy and daddy are in jail"? If they ask why, we can't even explain it. We always thought we'd be released soon and that's why we didn't say anything to them. But time goes by and we're both still behind bars.

Your brother, Frans, said on Dutch TV last week that it would be more humane if they had given you the death penalty.
If I didn't have any wife and kids, I would've taken care of that myself. But I can't do that to them. And I still expect and hope that something or someone in The Netherlands will save us from this. That's where it all went wrong—the Dutch prosecutor gave the Thai court incomplete information. I hope some Dutch politicians will have the guts to finally put an end to this.

Illustrations by Michael Dockery

When I rang up futurist Ross Dawson—an Australian guy who basically predicts the future for a living—to ask what the next century of employment holds, I didn't expect him to say that robot writers were already starting to phase me out, and cyborg brain implants might only be ten years away. But he did, and I panicked.

Thankfully Ross assured me things weren't going in a Bladerunner direction, and so long as I'm any good, I'd keep my job. Since he's a nice bloke, he also suggested plenty of alternative careers that don't even exist yet. Potentially, in ten years, I could be living a dream I didn't even know I had.

The future of jobs, in Ross's eyes, is bright and full of robots—less Terminator, and more Tamagotchi. Here's what we talked about.

VICE: Ross, let's get right to the point. Are we going to lose our job to robots in the future?
Ross Dawson: That's a big question. There are many jobs of today that will be replaced by automation. The big question is: Will we be able to create new jobs as fast as we are losing them? Throughout the history of humanity, we've destroyed jobs and we've created new ones. Now, the pace of job destruction is increasing.

Related: Watch 'The Life and Sad Demise of a Party Robot'

What jobs are we losing?
Straightforward mechanical tasks, mainly. We've already lost a lot of blue collar work to automation, though more skilled trades are safe for some while. Now, we're starting to see white-collar middle manager jobs replaced.

OK. I'm a writer, am I safe for the next decade?
There are jobs being lost in journalism, because the shape of journalism is changing. We're seeing the rise of algorithmic journalism. Simple stories in sport and business reporting are being written by automated systems. We will, absolutely, see more of what is currently done by journalists done by machines.

What are some of the new jobs we'll need to create?
There are three domains where humans continue to beat machines: expertise, creativity, and relationships. So, we're going to see more jobs in design, because design is a combination of expertise and an understanding of people and creativity. As we have more and more wonderful machines, we'll need people to design better and better ways to use them. We'll see more jobs focused on user experience, to make sure these machines serve the people who create them.

Let's say my job title is "user experience designer." What am I actually doing?
One job like that would be an emotional interface designer. So you'd design a robot that will respond to us emotionally. We've made a lot of progress in designing systems people will respond to emotionally.

So basically making the movie Her come to life.
Well, yes. It's only a matter of time until we have something which not only has the capabilities of the operating system in Her, but also has a visual representation that is essentially indistinguishable from a real person. It is very feasible; we're already on the verge of systems that are emulating Her. Not to the quality depicted in the movie—for now. But there's a lot of value in those systems, and we need humans to create them.

If that's something we're already working towards, what's a job that doesn't exist yet, but will?
A brain implant surgeon. When the technology is advanced enough, more and more people will choose to have implants in our brains so we can more directly interface our minds with the technology around us. That's an entirely new industry. People will need to create the interfaces, to implant them, and to train people to use the technology. That's another entirely new job: brain interface trainer. Those that are more skilled at using these brain interfaces will be better at their work, so we'll have trainer to help us use the interface.

That sounds very sci-fi.
Not really, people are already using brain interfaces. We've only just begun, but think of the emotive headset for controlling games. That's a brain interface.

So brain interface training will be like the future equivalent of learning to touch type. What's the time frame on this?
Certainly within the next ten years we will get strong emotional engagement with the technology around us. Not just with emotional interfaces, but things like robotic pets. Just the other week, Hasbro released a robotic pet to keep elderly people company. We're going to see significant improvements in the quality of those pets. That's one example of how we'll engage with the technology.

That technology actually sounds really nice.
As a futurist, I believe we need to be very aware of the power and the ethical implications of the technology we have. But certainly, there are many way this technology could be extremely beneficial. Really, the possibilities are limitless.

This article is presented by Melbourne Polytechnic—Enrolments now open for courses in 2016. To find out more visit melbournepolytechnic.edu.au/

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On December 1, HBO premiered Countdown to Zero, VICE's hour-long special report about the progress of HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment. During our investigation, we traveled to Sub-Saharan Africa to see the impact of international relief efforts like those coming from George W. Bush's PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) program.

During those efforts, the medical professionals in Africa who were treating HIV and AIDS in women had made a shocking discovery: There is a connection between HIV and cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer, while common and treatable in countries such as America, has only a 20 percent survival rate in Africa. What this means is that while global relief efforts to battle AIDS and HIV are making good progress, the international community also needs to address this newly-discovered complication to fully curb the number of HIV-related deaths.

In this web-exclusive clip, VICE sits down with an architect of PEPFAR and former president George W. Bush—whose Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon alliance is dedicated to bringing women in Africa cancer treatment and preventative care—to learn more about this new crisis.

"Currently, cervical cancer is killing more women than die of childbirth," said PEPFAR's Mark Dybul, "and a lot of it in Sub-Saharan Africa is related to HIV. Cervical cancer is a complication we didn't think about. The really tragic thing is that cervical cancer is completely preventable."

Photo by Ray Forster

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

London's Metropolitan Police have sacked a grand total of one officer for allegations of sexual assault since 2006, despite receiving 459 complaints from the public.

Just four allegations of sexual assault were found to be "substantiated" by the Met's internal investigations, which works out at as less than one in 100.

Here's how those number look:

Graphic by Georgia Weisz

This new data was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and runs from January 1, 2006 to August 15, 2015. It poses more questions about the way the force investigates its own abuses of power, coming weeks after VICE revealed that ten officers had been dismissed from the force after more than 22,000 claims of assault in nine years. When I got those statistics, they came with an asterisk saying "*including sexual assault," so I went back and asked more specifically for the data on sexual assault. The results were pretty stark.

Two of these cases saw formal action taken, with one officer sacked and one receiving a final written warning. Another faced "management action," while in the remaining case no action was taken. To reiterate, that's a written warning and "management action," and no action at all—for sexual assault.

A Met Police spokesperson said that a criminal prosecution was brought in one of the four substantiated cases, but failed to state what the outcome was in that instance.

Related: VICE Data Reveals Virtually No London Cops Get Fired for Allegations of Sexual Assault

More than half of the 459 allegations made—256 cases or 56 percent—were found by internal police investigators to be "unsubstantiated."

Sexual abuse has been an issue for the police for years. Three years ago, Dame Anne Owers, chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), spoke out against sexual abuse by police in England and Wales and warned: "It is essential to ensure that systems are in place to prevent, monitor, and deal swiftly with any individual who exploits that trust." This new data suggests that the warning wasn't heeded by the Met.

In 2011, Northumbria constable Stephen Mitchell was jailed for life for a number of serious sex attacks against women he met through working as a police officer. A year later, Trevor Gray, a detective sergeant with Nottinghamshire police, was jailed for eight years for raping a mother in her own home.

Dame Owers used the 2012 IPCC investigation into sexual abuse to call on: "senior leaders in the police service to be alert and determined to root out this kind of abuse of power. All cases of serious corruption cases should be referred to the IPCC. That includes all cases involving sexual exploitation by officers or police staff, which the IPCC will prioritize and investigate independently wherever possible."

The Met's record investigating its own officers for sexual assault has similarities with national figures for achieving convictions in rape and sexual assault cases in society at large.

Data published earlier this year by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) showed that the number of reported rapes that led to convictions in England and Wales fell from 17 percent to 12 percent in 2014/15.

In London, 3,742 adult rape cases were reported as well as 1,337 child cases in the financial year of 2014/15. Just 188 rape convictions were bought in the calendar year of 2014.

Harriet Wistrich is a lawyer at Birnberg Peirce who is representing eight women who are seeking compensation claims against the Met, after they became involved in long-term relationships with undercover officers who had been tasked with infiltrating activist groups they were involved in.

"These numbers are alarming, and speak to a lack of ability and willingness at the Met to hold officers to account," she said.

"It's a grotesque abuse of power. It's hard to believe that only four cases have been substantiated by the Met in nine years. Any officer found to have sexually assaulted members of the public should be prosecuted and any officer having sex with a member of public during the course of their duty should as a minimum lose their job.

"The police have had a poor record pursuing rape and sexual assault cases and historically there is a culture of sexism in the force. Given the apparent impunity police officers who are accused of sexual assault enjoy, it looks like that culture is ongoing."

Related: Watch 'Life Inside Japan's Aging Biker Gangs'

The spokesperson from the Met stated that the force take allegations of sexual assault against officers "very seriously."

"The MPS treats each occasion when an allegation of misconduct is made about a member of its staff very seriously and fully investigates in every case to determine whether a criminal offense or a breach of the standards of behavior has taken place," they said.

"Where, on examination of the available evidence, the conduct of our officers is found to have fallen below the standards expected, the MPS will take robust action, either by pursuing criminal prosecution, misconduct proceedings, or both. All MPS employees are expected to conduct themselves professionally, ethically, and with the utmost integrity at all times.

"Where, a misconduct investigation finds sufficient evidence to suggest misconduct may have occurred this is recorded as 'substantiated/case to answer.' This is not in itself a finding guilt and the officer will have an opportunity to present their own counter-evidence at misconduct proceedings before a determination is made as to whether the allegation is proven."

Of the cases that didn't fall into the categories "substantiated" or "unsubstantiated," 25 were dealt with using local resolutions—a mechanism where the complaint is resolved using an agreement between the member of the public and the police. 47 cases were withdrawn by the complainant before the case could be investigated.

A further 52 cases are still awaiting any kind of result, including two which date back to 2012.

11 investigations were discontinued by the force, due to a lack of cooperation from a complainant, according to a Met definition. The remaining 58 cases were not investigated before they could be found to be substantiated or resolved using local resolution, with reasons such as more than 12 months have passed in between the alleged assault and the complaint being made, or failure to ascertain the name or address of the complainant.

The spokesperson confirmed that all officers involved in unsubstantiated, withdrawn, or locally resolved allegations are free to return to work once the cases are concluded.

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One male and one female suspect are dead in the southern California city of San Bernardino, where 14 victims were killed and 21 more injured on Wednesday in America's deadliest mass shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

At a press conference on Thursday morning, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan indicated that officers fired some 380 rounds and sustained about 75 more from the suspects, 28-year-old American Syed Farook, a county public health worker, and Tashfeen Malik, a 27-year-old woman. They possessed 1600 rounds of ammunition of their own, and all four guns used in the attack were purchased lawfully, while a search of the suspects' Redlands home unearthed 12 pipe-bomb-style explosives, thousands of additional rounds, and the makings of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Federal law enforcement is currently probing the attack for connections to terrorism, which President Obama said were possible in an Oval Office statement Thursday morning, the New York Times reports. Farook had communicated with extremists and terrorism suspects in the past, according to the FBI.

At his final press conference late Wednesday night, Burguan identified the shooters, who according to family members were married and had a young child that they left with Farook's mother on the morning of the attack. Both young parents were killed in a dramatic shootout near their SUV following a lengthy police pursuit that left two officers with minor injuries.

Farook's coworkers at the San Bernardino County public health office, who were attending a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center, appear to have been the primary targets. According to law enforcement officials, he was employed as an environmental specialist, and had worked for the department for five years.

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan. All photos by author

Earlier Wednesday, there had been talk of a third suspect, and officials said someone had been taken into custody, but at the end of the night Burguan downplayed the possibility of an additional shooter. He said he was confident that the Redlands neighborhood where the suspects were initially found was now safe for residents, and seemed to suggest that the third person had just been picked up as a precaution.

"Other responding vehicles that saw this person fleeing from the scene stopped him and detained him," Burguan told reporters.

There has been widespread speculation that Farook was a disgruntled employee. Burguan told the press that the suspect had been at the party, but had stormed out "under some circumstances that were described as angry, or something of that nature."

But why Farook and Malik decided to open fire on a conference room full of public health workers is still very much unclear. When I first arrived on the scene Wednesday, an hour or so after the shooting, a witness named David Johnson, a life coach who had heard some of the gunshots from several blocks away, declared in an interview that the shooting proved "terrorism is real!" although at the time police had not yet found any suspects, let alone killed or identified them.

Terrorism may be real, but at press time, it was by no means clear that Wednesday's attack was an act of terrorism, or, for that matter, that it had any ideological motivation.

"I'm really being careful, because when these types of things happen—we've seen it happen time and again—a lot of information comes out in the first day or couple days, but that information changes in the days that follow," Burguan said Wednesday.

In his various briefings, Burguan has doled out carefully-worded quotes, taking the utmost care not to share details that aren't ironclad. When asked late Wednesday if the event the shooters attacked was a Christmas party, for instance, the police chief said he'd heard it described as anything from "a meeting to a Christmas gathering-meeting-luncheon."

According to representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the suspects used two assault rifles: a DPMS and a Smith and Wesson M&P15, along with semiautomatic pistols. At least two of the guns were apparently purchased legally. Following the shootout with law enforcement, officials discovered that the suspects were also in possession of at least one device believed to be a pipe bomb.

The tragic shooting, and the ensuing manhunt turned the city and county into a confusing mess. Although San Bernardino is by no means a stranger to gun crime, the normally quiet suburb doesn't see giant shows of police force very often.

Inland Regional Center, a nonprofit social services center for people with disabilities, is a place where, for instance, the parents of someone with autism can sign them up for one-on-one assistance. The idea of planning a mass murder at a spot with such an unimpeachable mission adds an extra layer of horror to Wednesday's tragedy.

And plan it they did, according to Chief Burguan, who believes "there had to be some sort of planning that went into this," deadpanning, "I don't think they just ran home, put on these types of tactical clothes, grabbed guns, and came back on a spur of the moment."

Unmarked law enforcement vehicles raced through the streets in every direction for hours Wednesday afternoon, and bewildered crowds of bystanders—along with members of the press—stood on sidewalks outside of police corners until well into the chilly night. As reporters waited for the final police press conference around 10 PM local time, the grassy area designated for media updates became a swamp after sprinklers suddenly turned on.

At the soggy late-night news conference, Burguan declined to provide any details about the victims. "We are just now getting in there and starting to process the crime scene," he said. "I don't have identification on any of the victims at this point."

Image via Google Street View

According to Burguan, the possible presence of explosives slowed down officers' ability to access the scene. He explained that the site had to be rendered safe for law enforcement before anyone could be allowed near the scene of the shooting. The Inland Regional Center occupies a massive piece of property, and as of late Wednesday, several blocks in every direction were still marked off as the crime scene.

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This post has been updated.

Nothing! Photo via Sugarquotes

Read: Owner of Sign Company Apologizes for Transphobic Caitlyn Jenner Sign, Invites Her to Stay at His House

Going on Facebook and looking at your feed is a masochistic tic that all too many of us are plagued with; at its worst, it's a somber reminder that, at one point in our lives or another, we were a poor judge of character and befriended dumbasses. Admittedly, there are days when I scroll through the wall of my former best friend from middle school and cackle maniacally in response to her constant stream of memes about how nice pit bulls are, nostalgic 90s posts, and of course, profound quotes about life: "'You have permission to rest. You are not responsible for fixing everything that is broken. You do not have to try and make everyone happy. For now, take time for you. It's time to replenish.' —Unknown."

According to a new Canadian study from the University of Waterloo, my ex-best friend, and others like her, are actually rather stupid. In the research paper, "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit," PhD candidate Gordon Pennycook and four other researchers assert that there is a link between low intelligence and being impressed by seemingly profound quotes.

In the study, the researchers used a website called Sebpearce.com, which generates random statements meant to sound profound like, "This life is nothing short of an ennobling oasis of self-aware faith," or, "Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is guidance."

Nothing!!!!! Photo via Flickr user seaternity

"I came across the website, I just kind of thought about if there was any research on this; I wanted to know if people thought those statements were profound," Pennycook told VICE. "I often see quotes that are maybe not quite as egregious, but you see a lot of motivational ones... there's quotes and a picture of somebody who obviously did not say the quote—you come across that quite often."

In the study, nearly 300 participants were presented with various statements, including those of the "bullshit" variety, and asked to react to them by rating their profoundness on a scale of one to five, classifying quotes as either profound, bullshit, or mundane. They were also given tests meant to measure their cognitive ability and personality.

The paper gave the following as an example of a statement participants were asked to respond to: "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty."

Those who were unable to detect the bullshit and rated the pseudo-profound as actually profound were determined to be lower in intelligence, less likely to engage in reflective thinking, and more likely to hold conspiratorial or paranormal beliefs.

In other words, these types of people are, as Nietzsche once said, "Locked in the glass cabinet of the mind's self-reflection."

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A man who goes by the screen name Ronald Reagan is having a spectacular 2015. He hasn't masturbated once and it shows: By the time you read this, he'll likely have shattered his all-time annual wet dream record, set last year, of 47.

Early on the morning of November 10, he dreamt about a girl who was giving him a tour of a high school band program. "She or someone else played an instrument called a "nutmeg" (like a bassoon)," he wrote in his wet dream log. "At one point she took off her shirt to show off her boobs. She was performing oral sex on somebody. At some point I came."

The incident is marked "WD #45 of 2015" in his log. It was 170th since he started keeping track in 2011.

Ronald Reagan's log is among hundreds posted to the Wet Dream Forum, a nearly 4,000-member community website where men trade tips, chronicle their wet dreams, and discuss personal anecdotes about having wet dreams. There are pockets of wet dream fanatics elsewhere—a handful of Reddit threads, for example—but the Wet Dream Forum, which has been ongoing since 2003, is the movement's mecca.

While none of the forum's members agreed to speak on the record about their experiences, the thousands of posts provide a window into the world of wet dreamers. One user, Dreamito, wrote in response to my request for comment, "WDs are the ultimate, unalienable fortress of freedom and self-affirmation, and this forum is all you will get (and it is enough)." And he's right—the Wet Dream Forum is the most exhaustive wet dream resource online.

According to Gender in Medieval Culture by Michelle M. Sauer, people in medieval times believed that wet dreams meant they had been seduced by a succubus—a demon taking the form of a woman. The Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius, just before the birth of Christ, wrote lyrically about coming in one's sleep in On the Nature of Things. "Tidings of glorious face and lovely bloom," he wrote, "which stir and goad the regions turgid now with seed abundant; so that, as it were with all the matter acted duly out, they pour the billows of a potent stream and stain their garment."

There are mentions of wet dreams in the Bible; there's a record of both Saint Augustine and Martin Luther struggling with nocturnal emission; even Gandhi wrote about coming in his sleep, which he said felt like he "was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness," according to Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India.

From a scientific perspective, though, the phenomenon has largely gone unresearched. Freud, as obsessed as he was with both dreams and sex, barely touched the subject. It wasn't until Alfred Kindsey's 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that wet dreams were fully addressed.

"It is more tenable to think of nervous tensions which are built up until, periodically, they precipitate an orgasm," Kinsey wrote, "but again, the physiology is not understood. We are, in consequence, almost completely in the dark as to the possibility of a biologic mechanism which could force nocturnal emissions when other sexual outlets were insufficient."

In 1988, William Masters and Virginia Johnson theorized that the wet dream occurred as a natural reflex in response to physiological tension experienced by men who became aroused but had not ejaculated. "Nocturnal ejaculation provides a physiologic 'safety-valve' for accumulated sexual tension that has not been released in another fashion," they wrote in Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving.

Dr. Calvin Kai-Chung Yu, of Hong Kong Shue Yan University, is one of the only researchers who has broached the topic in recent years—and even he isn't sure why exactly people have wet dreams.

"I would not say we know for sure what cause wet dreams or nocturnal emission," he wrote in an e-mail to me, "but my findings show that the more sex you have in the daytime, the less likely you will have wet dreams. Age seems to be another factor: They decrease with age. However, this is debatable since sex libido also decreases with age."

Read: The Sexologists Who Turned Sex into a Science

The overwhelming lack of research meant that wet dreamers had to figure things out for themselves. In early 2003, a handful of men who were having wet dreams posted to a forum on the now-defunct TheMensCenter.com. They were looking for advice about how to stop having them until one user, Texanguy, 49-years-old at the time, flipped the script. He explained that he actually wanted to have wet dreams and he was searching for the similarities (primarily: not masturbating) among grown men who still have them.

Within a month, the thread exploded, with a handful of men corresponding daily about their lives, abstinence, and desire to come in their sleep. The topic began to dominate the forum and, by September, they had built a new home at wetdreamforum.com.

"It's pretty incredible that we are declining sex in pursuit of wet dreams. That speaks a lot for how good wet dreams can feel, and how badly we want them." — Focus

Focus, a then 29-year-old virgin and self-identified "talented auto-fellatioist," started posting on the forum because he was interested in the collection of data. He and Texanguy are the only two original members who still regularly post today. Despite his dedication to the forum, Focus (whose avatar is now, fittingly, a GIF of his own sperm under a microscope) has not had a single wet dream over the more than 12 years he's been active on the site.

"It's pretty incredible that we are declining sex in pursuit of wet dreams," he wrote in 2003. "That speaks a lot for how good wet dreams can feel, and how badly we want them."

If you're trying to have wet dreams, you're probably not watching porn—but you can still watch our interview with porn star Kimberly Kane.

Why do these men want to have wet dreams so badly? Dr. Gloria Brame, a clinical sexologist and author, told me that one explanation could be male performance anxiety or a desire for sensuality.

"With men, it's not only about, I'm so horny I need to come," she said. "For some men, it's also stress-free, guilt-free, and sensual. You wake up and, though you've lost your dream, you have the reality that you came, you're wet—it's the sensuality. It feels squishy nice. We all know that male behavior solo is very different from male behavior with a woman, particularly if they feel they have to be the masculine one and act like a man, whatever that means, socially to them."

There's also the shame culture surrounding sex, which Brame said can make wet dreams more appealing.

"They have an orgasm, but they can't be blamed for it," said Brame. "It wasn't their fault. There's great wisdom from bondage: Why do people find bondage so sexy? Because when you tie them up and do sexy things to them, they can't help it. They have their orgasms but you made them have an orgasm. So in a sense, a nocturnal emission is like non-consensual consensual sex."

On Motherboard: I Have Sexsomnia, and I Can't Be Cured

A user called Ronald WDM (stands for "wet dream mentor,"), is a single, middle-aged guy from Utah, who abstained from masturbation for religious reasons but had wet dreams, which he called "guilt-free enjoyment," about every three weeks. During first months of the Wet Dream Forum, Ronald WDM was the only one who could have wet dreams and the other users, desperately trying to induce their own, hung on his every word. The content of his dreams were strikingly innocent—a female co-worker would give him a ride home and they'd hug. He'd wake up "shooting."

Ronald was highly active on the forum until 2013, when he fell in love and got married—something he'd longed for.

"I don't post here much after getting married, but I thought I'd let you all know that I had another wet dream this morning," reads one of his last posts, from 2003. "I dreamt I was holding my wife tightly, then I had several ejaculations. So I guess I can still get them, even though I regularly have sex with my wife now."

"This charged-up feeling while waiting on a wet dream is a constant companion, which makes me feel alive as a man from my head down to my smelly white socks." — Socks

Dickensen, an 18-year-old heading off to college at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, posted regularly with updates personifying his penis, referring to it sometimes as "Him" with a capital H, the way pious people describe God. He wrote about his sexual frustration, and although he vehemently identified as straight, nearly every fantasy he described was about a man or a penis. Even in 2015, when many openly gay men use the site and are welcomed by the other users, it's still fairly common to see straight-identifying men report dozens of homoerotic dreams.

"It's not so much that they're all gay, but rather that they're all struggling with their own sexual identity," Brame explained. "I know plenty of guys who have bi-fantasies but in the cold light of day they don't want a dick staring them in the face. It's very different when you're scripting it. That's the power of fantasy."

A user called Socks, a playful 38-year-old who only briefly contributed to the forum, said he enjoyed the abstinence as much or even more than the wet dream it induced. After 21 days without masturbation (abbreviated on the forum as MB), Socks compared his penis to a garden hose surging with water while the nozzle is turned off.

"Not only does the 'plumbing' in my groin area feel backed up, it also seems as if the entire head of my penis is a lightning rod drawing stored up male energy from the electrical powerplant of my testicles to the tip of it, heh," he wrote. "This is what it's all about gentlemen. The BUZZ. Many would not understand why I choose to remain in a condition often labeled as uncomfortable and frustrating. All I know is that this charged-up feeling while waiting on a wet dream is a constant companion, which makes me feel alive as a man from my head down to my smelly white socks, hah hah. I'm going to the basement to lift weights now."

This archetype is particularly common on the modern Wet Dream Forum. Today, men describe a T-buzz (T for testosterone) that comes from having abstaining from masturbation. It makes them feel confident at work and when speaking with women. They report that their penis feels larger, more frequently filled with blood, and many describe the constant nagging arousal as more fulfilling than ejaculation.

Other men, who feel they are addicted to masturbation, treat the wet dream as an incentive to encourage prolonged abstinence. For these men, the forum is a support group. So many logs are filled with despairing men who've once again broken their fast, yelling, sometimes directly, at their penises, which they view like syringes permanently attached to their bodies.

"In a sense, we may be participating in something unique in the world," Texanguy wrote in the summer of 2003. "The internet is new enough that this may be the first time such a group has spent this much time communicating about this topic... I expect that we will all succeed in our quests for wet dreams. But whether we succeed or not, we are in a sense 'guinea pigs' in an historical event."

In 1852, Philip C. Van Buskirk, a 19-year-old sailor and drummer in the US Marines, began keeping a meticulous diary of his every ejaculation. Despite the fact that Van Buskirk left behind volumes of journals and recorded 244 wet dreams over half a decade (including an unmatched 69 in one year) he never wrote about the specifics of those dreams, according to B.R. Burg, who wrote the 1994 book An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk.

Dreams in the Wet Dream Forum are, similarly, less important than the ejaculation itself. It's not uncommon for the men to describe their dreams, but they regularly go unmentioned, forgotten, or are vaguely recounted. Often, men describe dreams in which they're pissing—sometimes accompanied by a lucid thought that they're pissing the bed—but wake up realizing they've come. Others are strange and abstract: "I was a humongous fountain with a vertical tower (which was my penis). I saw the liquid coming out from the fountain, rhythmically," said Brahms, a Venezuelan living in London, who described wet dreams as the equivalent of a monogamous partner.

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Rarely do the dreamers describe sex with an otherwise unobtainable woman. I ran searches for mentions of the top Googled female celebrities during the years in which the forum has been active: No mention of Kardashians, Jenners, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Megan Fox, Jessica Alba, Natalie Portman, Halle Berry, or Kate Upton and dozens more. Beyoncé, the only exception, appears in only one dream.

Instead, the bulk of forum users focus on the physical act of coming. Congratulations, coupled with dancing smiley faces, come pouring in after any reported successful wet dream, and there seem to be a handful of users who are turned on by the act of wet dreamers describing the mess. More common than dream descriptions are pictures of cum-stained boxers.

When these first started appearing on the forum, users waxed poetic about them like blood-spatter analysts. Other forensic questions flood in after a successful wet dream. What position were you sleeping in? What did it smell like? Did you taste it? Was it sticky? Did it shoot out or just dribble? How much pre-cum do you produce? Did you "edge"—masturbate to the edge of ejaculation—before bed? What was your diet like the day before? What type of underwear did you have on? Are you circumcised? Polls about the sizes of one's cock pop up every few months. To my knowledge, none of these data points have led to any great revelations yet.

User Traveling Guy compiled data from users and found that dreams most commonly occur after about a month of abstinence. Many men, however, report hundreds of days of abstention without ever having a wet dream.

"Day 92... nothing," wrote Applesap, who's still never had a wet dream, in 2011. "And it makes me sad."

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In 2009, Jamie, a prolific poster since 2006 broke new ground: He captured his wet dream on video. By his account, it took hundreds of hours over dozens of nights to pull it off. In the video, he's wearing boxers, he pitches a tent, and then the boxers get increasingly wet. The forum went wild.

"You're a pioneer and a hero, at least among this forum," Focus wrote. "I know you may feel alone in this frontier, because it has never been done before, which also means you are the only person who has done it so far."

The post has garnered hundreds of replies with scrutiny rivaling the footage of the Kennedy assassination.

"The main ejaculation looks to start at 3:26, with large amounts of semen visibly flowing right through the underwear fabric," Focus wrote. "I counted an amazing 15 contractions and 15 spurts of ejaculate during the main ejaculation event, which mostly ended by 4:00. This was visibly a very large amount of semen, far more than the average man's ejaculation volume which is approximately 3 mls. I would estimate this was on the order of 8-10 mls."

"I thus still retain my prejudice: Underwear have affect on your ejaculation during a dream," Unionac wrote in one post.

"The duration of the main ejaculation, 34 seconds, was more than triple the length of the average waking orgasm, which is 10 seconds," wrote Focus.

Texanguy wrote a rousing speech, filled with his typical passion for wet dreams, explaining that it would serve as a recruiting tool for the uninitiated.

"All of this might help a guy start to see MB as inadequate and as impossible to give a truly good experience," he wrote. "If you want your body to go through the process of a WD, if you want the dream and long intense orgasms that go with it, if you want large amounts of semen to come out like that, if you want to wake up wet, happy, and excited with a smile on your face, if you want to happily think about your WD during the day, if you want to look forward to your next WD and many more after that, MB simply doesn't hack it."

Jamie was a little freaked out by everyone putting him "under a microscope" and generally unimpressed with the actual content of the footage.

"I don't even know if it was worth it after going through all that," he wrote. "I mean I kind of figured that the penis got erect and I already knew what that looked like and so add to that some wetness and that's about it. Not sure what else I was hoping for. I guess it was one of those things where you set a challenge like climbing a mountain and once you finally get there you think, Now what? and climb down again."

"Whether we succeed or not in our quests for wet dreams, we are in a sense 'guinea pigs' in an historical event." — Texanguy

When I first joined the forum, AGT, the admin, told me about an Active Members Private forum, for which a separate application had to be made. After reading literally thousands of posts in the general forum, which detailed how heavy everyone's balls felt, the slip-ups that led to masturbation, and rejoices for those who experienced their first wet dreams, I still felt as though something was lacking. Where was the concrete analyses of the cause and purpose of the wet dream? After more than a decade of data, there must be some distilled set of facts. I began to assume that those secrets were being discussed in the Active Members Private forum.

I considered creating a fake account and requesting access, but I didn't want to be skeevy, and maybe AGT could see my IP address. So I held off—until one day, apropos of nothing, AGT sent me a message: "I have added you to the AMP forum. It may help you in your quest."

The Active Members Private forum has 82 threads. In the first, AGT explains that it allows for more explicit content than the general forum: "Chaps, let's please try to keep this forum all about wet dreams as much as possible," he wrote. "I realize that some guys like showing their equipment, and would like to do so here, and I have no problem with showing, but let's not turn this part of the WDF to 'just another porno site.'"

Far and away, the most popular thread is Equipment Check v3.0, more than 100 self-portraits of cocks. The "biggest bush competition" is also popular. There are numerous posts about foreskin restoration, auto-fellatio, coregasms, and spontaneous ejaculations but very little additional knowledge about wet dreams. An exception are a handful of pretty incredible videos that capture what a penis looks like during a wet dream: It resembles one of those waving inflatable men, placed outside of car dealerships, that's been shot by poachers.

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After reading dozens of wet dream logs, I had to wonder if these men, whose fantasies were so unobtainable that they had to retreat to dreams to fulfill them, would further retreat into themselves. Was the Wet Dream Forum leading these men toward solitude, and away from healthy human interactions?

"I've met many men who were unhappy bachelors—after failed relationships, or losing a fiancée under some tragic circumstance, or it's never worked out for them and they retreat from sex in relationships," Brame said. "Because their comfort zone and what actually feels comfortable and makes them happy is being on their own. Is it wrong? Why?"

Ronald Reagan, for one, seems substantially more confident since joining the forum in 2011, when he was perennially late for work and second guessing his consumption of any remotely sexual content. Now, he's putting up numbers that are unprecedented in the modern wet dream era. He's having lucid wet dreams that involve partners—his early wet dreams, he complained, were lonely. Fans of his log come to gawk at his fecundity.

Very few men on the site have the same self-discipline. For the most part, they're single, masturbating every couple days, and starting over, frustrated.

There are a handful of cases who fall outside of the normal archetypes. There are the guys who come to the site because they can't stop having wet dreams and they're hoping to get advice. Instead, they get bombarded with questions about their diet, sleeping position, and choice of undergarments. One guy claims he is strapped into a chastity belt until he marries his fiancée. Another man, who asked that I not reveal his handle, is a "celibate, out boy-lover," and while that creeped me out, it's easy to imagine worse possible outcomes than using dreams to achieve some fulfillment of a fantasy that's completely unacceptable otherwise.

One man, Marriedbutnosex, loves his wife but—as his handle suggests—she's no longer interested in sex. It's not an overstatement, he said, to suggest that wet dreams have helped keep his marriage intact.

"After years of infrequent and disappointing sex, we mutually agreed to remove sex from our marriage," he said. "It has helped us grow closer and more intimate (kissing, hugging etc). Wet dreams provide me with a sexual outlet that is enjoyable and guilt free."

As Brame sees it, if it's inducing orgasms, it's a good thing.

"For now, all we know is that it's great to have orgasms," she told me. "If this makes you happy and you're handling your life, and you're not hurting anybody, then fuck the critics."

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