A pharmacist and his tech in Neosho, Missouri. Laurie Sisk /The Joplin Globe via AP

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In an unprecedented move intended to help ease America's opioid overdose epidemic, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy sent a letter to every physician in the United States last month, urging them to follow Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines by avoiding prescribing opioids for pain whenever possible and treating addiction like a disease. The problem on Murthy's radar isn't exactly a new one, but over the course of a single week in August, some 225 people overdosed on opioids in four counties across four states.

It's increasingly clear, however, that the federal government's emphasis on cutting the opioid supply is failing to stem the tide of opioid overdose—and might even be making the problem deadlier.

Since 2012, opioid prescriptions have fallen by 12 percent, according to data from IMS Health, which tracks pharmaceutical sales; another, similar database operated by Symphony Health Solutions puts the drop at 18 percent. But overdose rates are still climbing. Meanwhile, many pain patients are losing access to the only treatment that works for them, with doctors fearing loss of their license—or worse—if they don't follow the newest guidelines, released in March. One online survey of more than 2,000 chronic pain patients taking opioids found that since then, two thirds had either had their dose reduced or their medications cut off entirely. At the same time, key steps that could be taken that require little in the way of new government funds continue to be ignored.

The most important of these measures consists of expanding access to maintenance treatment with methadone or buprenorphine, the only medications proven to cut the death rate from opioid addiction by 50 percent or more. Further reductions in prescribing opioids risk simply raising the death toll by shifting users from legal meds with standardized content and dosing to far more dangerous illegally manufactured ones, like super potent fentanyl and its derivatives. But in a testament to the toxic legacy of the war on drugs—and despite a kinder, gentler rhetorical approach—supply-side battles are still engrained in American health policy.

"I have deep respect for the surgeon general and his efforts," Dr. Stephen Martin, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, told VICE. "We have been hearing for years about safer prescribing practices. My state of Massachusetts, where opioid overdoses are still increasing, is in the lowest quintile of opioid prescribing. recommendations as the basis for policy in 2016 can be seen as an example of generals fighting the last war."

Martin treats both addiction and chronic pain and told me that what has happened to pain patients and their doctors since the new CDC guidelines dropped has been "chilling." Basically, doctors know that if they are targeted by prosecutors for overprescribing, failing to follow the CDC's voluntary rules could put them in legal jeopardy. In fact, the DEA once set guidelines to help physicians understand what practices would keep them safe from arrest—before withdrawing the guidelines when it seemed like they might be used as a legal defense.

When the goal is cutting supply, keeping docs scared of prescribing at all is the best way to drive it down fast.

"We've been fielding desperate, predictable calls from people who have been abruptly cut off or sharply tapered down on opioids that were successfully working for their chronic pain in the wake of the CDC guidelines and accompanying rhetoric," Martin told me.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has kept in place (while slightly relaxing) a hard limit on the number of patients a doctor can treat with buprenorphine—a cap not backed by any research at all. (One independent research group, the Pew Charitable Trusts, recently wrote Congress and labeled the limits "arbitrary.") But since the patient cap is enforced by the DEA, doctors who ignore it risk not only their licenses but their freedom.

To be sure, at least when it comes to how they talk about the problem, the feds have adopted a modernized approach to addiction—a sign of progress in the national dialogue, if nothing else.

"Having the surgeon general ask physicians to step up to the plate... is hugely significant," said Dr. Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorder Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital. "His call to arms explicitly acknowledges that this is a disease, and it is unacceptable for doctors to simply opt out."

Unfortunately, according to Dr. Martin, only 4 percent of all doctors have completed the required training to allow them to treat addiction with buprenorphine, and there's that pesky patient cap for those who do. The Obama administration has also done little to cut regulatory barriers to access to the other key lifesaving drug, methadone—and in fact, US officials have traditionally stressed that both medications should only be provided in the context of counseling and monitoring of urine tests for other drug use. This is at odds with the science.

"There are many paths to recovery and counseling can be very helpful to people with opioid addiction," said Dr. Robert Schwartz, medical director of the Friends Research Institute in Baltimore. "But the balance of research data does not support making counseling a requirement to receive potentially life-saving treatment with methadone or buprenorphine."

What's perhaps most frustrating is that the current crisis might have been averted with more recognition earlier on that cutting supply doesn't end existing addictions. Far from being an unpredictable result of the crackdown on use of medical opioids that started in the early 2000s, the rise of street heroin markets where they had never previously existed and the subsequent use of fentanyl to boost potency are classic examples of two widely recognized phenomena in drug-policy history.

The first is known as the "iron law of prohibition," which I've written about previously. Basically, the idea is that because illegal drugs need to be kept hidden, harsher laws will tend to promote the spread of more potent and dangerous drugs, simply because smaller quantities are easier to conceal and smuggle. Alcohol prohibition, for example, favored whisky over beer. The rise of illegally produced fentanyl and its derivatives— overdoses of which increased 79 percent between 2013 and 2014 alone—seems an apt illustration of this principle.

The second phenomenon is called the "balloon effect," which occurs whenever supply is interrupted in one location or via one major route. Like pressing on a balloon, cutting the supply simply makes the air bubble pop up somewhere else, rather than eliminating it. So the shutdown of pill mills and increasing pressure on doctors not to prescribe legal opioids has almost certainly been a key driver of America's heroin problem. (The trend toward marijuana legalization, as some have bizarrely suggested, almost certainly has not.)

What's saddest about the situation is the bevy of missed opportunities to help: Medical records at those mills tend to include names of everyone who receives a prescription. (Given that these prescriptions are for controlled substances, real ID is needed to fill them.) Though some clients certainly resell the drugs, a large share are likely themselves addicted. And every time a "doctor shopper" gets caught and arrested or dismissed as a patient, another treatment opportunity is missed.

If the government had offered immediate access to maintenance meds to every patient at every pill mil, and referred people with chronic pain to other doctors immediately, the market gap opened by the supply cut might have been dramatically reduced. Left in withdrawal, it's unsurprising that people are turning to street supplies. But research shows that providing buprenorphine access to patients in medical crisis like overdose dramatically increases the odds that they will enter treatment and also reduces relapse.

In commemoration of International Overdose Awareness Day on August 31, the Obama administration reported adding $53 million in funds towards dealing with the crisis. Just $11 million of that, however, will go to maintenance treatment. If America really wants to reduce the death toll from its opioid crisis, we need to focus on reducing demand, not supply.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

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To this day, it's unclear who first had the idea to nuke the moon. As with a lot of ideas hatched at the height of the Cold War, it seems like a fever dream from the 50s, an era when humanity was simultaneously on the brink of destruction and the discovery of the next frontier of human existence: outer space. No one now thinks nuking the moon is a good idea, and US officials kiboshed the notion relatively quickly. But you can easily imagine some Pentagon suits looking up at the moon, looking at America's newly acquired nuclear arsenal, looking back up at the moon, and thinking, What if we... ?

The details of the program, dubbed Project A119, were first made public in 2000 by Leonard Reiffel, the physicist in charge of looking into the possibility of detonating a nuke on the moon's surface or just above it. Reiffel told the UK paper the Observer that Air Force officials had told him to look into the idea in 1958. The previous year, the USSR had launched Sputnik, the first manmade satellite, into orbit, and Reiffel said that the military brass he spoke to were worried about the Russians beating the Americans in the space race.

"It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship," Reiffel said. "The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth."

Though nuking the moon is inconceivable now, back then the men who ran America were excited by the possibilities nuclear technologies offered and eager to play with it.

"Just the same way we are playing with wacky ideas about hypersonic missiles and RAM jets , back then, atomic energy was a new thing," Omar Lamrani, a military analysis at the think tank Stratfor, told VICE. "It was still something that was being discovered."

Military planners of the era were brimming with wild schemes—around the same time Project A119 was being studied, the Army came up with Project Horizon, which would have put a military base on the moon at a cost of $6 billion. And the Soviets were reportedly considering nuking the moon as well, prompting fears in at least one US newspaper that the "warhead could boomerang to Earth." At the same time, scientists were toying with ideas that included everything from nuclear-powered submarines (which became a reality) to nuclear-powered spaceships (which did not). Whatever the US or USSR thought of, there was always the worry that the other side had thought of it first and better. "If you're going to have to think outside the box to get an advantage, that's what you're going to have to do," Lamrani said.

In June 1959, Reiffel and his team produced a now unclassified report titled, benignly, "A Study of Lunar Research Flights." The largely technical document doesn't betray the batshit premise and is free of Cold War hysteria. Instead it goes into minute detail of every aspect of nuking the moon—including the remote possibility that such a detonation would wipe out any traces of life up there.

Reiffel told the Observer the scheme was "certainly technically feasible" and hitting the moon with an ICBM wouldn't have been much of a challenge. Arguably, it would have been more difficult to land instruments on the moon prior to the detonation, which the 1959 paper recommended. But what would have happened if they had gone ahead with the idea?

Though nuking the moon in 1959 would have likely given scientists a trove of interesting experimental data, like much of the space race it would have mainly been about showcasing US superiority over the USSR. "Obviously... specific positive effects would accrue to the nation first performing such a feat as a demonstration of advanced technological capability," Reiffel's paper noted. "It is also certain that, unless the climate of world opinion were well-prepared in advance, a considerable negative reaction could be stimulated." In other words, you'd have to announce what you were gonna do before you nuked the moon, or everyone was going to freak out.

Given the PR aspects of the mission, US officials likely would have wanted to make sure the nuclear reaction was visible from Earth, and it likely would have been, according to Areg Danagoulian, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. Though a lot of the effects of a nuclear detonation on the moon depend on a host of factors—including how big the bomb is and how far above the surface it goes off—Danagoulian was willing to speak in general terms about what might happen if Project A119 had become reality.

Since the moon lacks an atmosphere, a nuke there wouldn't cause a blast like it would on Earth. (If a nuke falls on the moon and no one is around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound.) The nuclear reaction would produce a flash of light that might be visible on Earth, but mostly what Earthlings would notice would be the rising of dust from the moon. Radiation from the nuke would heat up the lunar surface, Danagoulian told VICE, resulting in dust being cast off in a massive cloud. As this dust rose above the surface, at least some of it would be illuminated by the sun, an effect that you could see from Earth, especially if the dust was rising off the dark part of the moon. Some of this dust would be traveling fast enough to escape the moon's gravitational pull and would wind up in open space.

If all that had happened, would astronauts have to worry about nuclear fallout when they landed on the moon? The answer depends on a myriad of factors, said Danagoulian—such as the type of the bomb and the way its detonated, the time between that and the arrival of the astronauts, as well as the selected landing spot. However, the moon itself is already very radioactive; since it doesn't have an atmosphere or a magnetic field, its surface is bombarded by far more cosmic radiation from space than the Earth is, resulting in radiation levels much higher than the ones we deal with on Earth. As a result, hanging out for long periods on the moon is already pretty dangerous, and the residual radiation from Project A119's nuke might not be a top concern for future manned moon missions after all.

Reiffel told the Observer that he wasn't sure why Project A119 never came about, but he was "horrified that such a gesture to sway public opinion was ever considered." More than likely, the Pentagon realized that sending a man to the moon was inspiring, but sending a bomb to the moon would have been deranged. In any case, in 1967 the UN Outer Space Treaty banned the use of nuclear weapons in space, making any study of nuking the moon a moot point. We're never going to see moon dust fly into space within our lifetimes unless something goes very, very wrong.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

'Ace Attorney—Spirit of Justice' artwork courtesy of Capcom

Nobody really knows what to call it; according to the New York Times, imperfect approximations include the "chunk-chunk" and the "dun-dun." Regardless of its name, the thumping audio flourish that accompanies scene transitions in Law & Order has proven to be one of the most iconic sounds in television, its popularity outlasting even the famously resilient show that birthed it.

It could certainly be argued that games have a clip of equivalent stature; perhaps the "ting" of Mario collecting a coin, or the rhythmic "cock-click-cock-blam" of Doom II's monstrous super shotgun. But while perhaps the longest-running video game procedural's signature sound can't quite match L&O's in style, it at least earns points for consistency. For 15 years now, pressing the New Game option in most every Ace Attorney game produces a slight, pixelated knock of a gavel hitting home, including the series's tenth and latest entry, Spirit of Justice, now available worldwide following its June Japanese release.

Casual observers might balk at this number—surely there aren't ten of these things clogging store shelves all over North America. (Indeed, there aren't, as only eight of the games have managed to make it to Western territories, despite the series's considerable sales.) And one could certainly forgive some confusion regarding the particulars of the individual games, since each features four or five discrete "episodes" that only occasionally depend on or add to the series's already convoluted continuity. But while there's no denying that 15 years of existence is a remarkable achievement for any franchise, the facts of this particular case reach even beyond that, bordering on utter impossibility.

Considering the enduring popularity of police procedurals and legal dramas in popular culture, the formula behind Capcom's Ace Attorney might read like a sure-fire money-maker—a game where you play as a rookie defense attorney named Phoenix Wright who shields his obviously innocent clients from the wrath of increasingly aggressive prosecutors by pointing out the holes in the state's case, inevitably producing the real culprit just in the nick of time. Or, in other words: You might not have played these games, but you've definitely flipped past this show in one of your 2 AM post-bar hazes.

Despite this, few expected the series to make inroads worldwide, least of all Capcom. Because while the game's concept might read as American as apple pie and clogged arteries, the titles themselves are essentially a novel meld of point-and-click adventure games and Japanese visual novels. And while both of those modes have enjoyed a considerable resurgence since the rise of the indie game, they were considered niche at best, and commercial anathema at worst, which is part of why the first installments of the series didn't make it to other territories until 2005, nearly four years after their original release.

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Related: Watch 'Rebel Rabbis,' our documentary about the ultra-orthodox Jews who want to see Israel dismantled

Once the games arrived stateside, however, they moved units, and have continued to grow in popularity ever since. It turns out that the very traits that made the series's appeal seem limited on paper have allowed it to thrive, even as the mobile-phone market has cannibalized the handheld consoles that have historically hosted them. (Previous games have slowly made their way to iOS, though Spirit of Justice is currently a 3DS-only title).

Perhaps the most indispensable aspect of the series's success is its trademark sense of goofy humor. Sure, plenty of video game heroes crack wise, but it usually takes the form of Joss Whedon–like gallows quippery that customarily follows a headshot, or perhaps a good knuckle-cracking. They're the kind of jokes that rely on a tacit assumption that the situation is very serious, that the world is totally fucked, and all our intrepid hero can do in the face of such unfathomable adversity is try to draw a funny face on it. While this humor is ostensibly included to give these works a temporary air of breezy amusement, such as the films of Steven Spielberg, the effect is generally the opposite—it highlights the ponderous, self-serious worldview that most video games above a certain budget (for example, Gears of War or Call of Duty) are required to exhibit.

Unlike those games, the fun in Ace Attorney isn't relegated to a single source—it emanates from every pore. Protagonist Phoenix isn't the jokester here, though he certainly isn't above the occasional jibe—instead, he plays the straight man to nearly every other character in the series. No matter their role—prosecutor, killer, or even judge—they all exhibit a wide array of flamboyant, erratic, and/or just plain bizarre personalities that reflect the wild imagination of series creator Shu Takumi.

At first, the series's signature strangeness can come off as a bit garish. For example, the opening case of Spirit of Justice has you facing off against a mellow musician monk named "Pees'lubn Andistan'dhin" who speaks in rhyming couplets and allegedly witnessed the crime. When accused of being the real killer, he—in a long-standing series tradition—drops his chill façade and shifts his personality completely. In this case, it turns out to be a Gene Simmons pastiche—he hooks up his guitar to a massive sound system that literally comes out of nowhere and starts shredding and belting out lyrics that describe Phoenix's untimely death. Soon enough, the gallery is screaming for blood.

While at first it may grate, over time one begins to realize that the weirdness that defines Ace Attorney is no mere affectation. From stem to stern, the entire game is designed around it. Where so many other games are gray and stolid, the world of Phoenix Wright is all color and movement—a baroque counterpoint to the gritty naturalism displayed by the larger medium. And once you're acclimated to it, it can be hard to go back. The characters that Phoenix meets might be exaggerated, but they're unapologetically human at their core, with real desires and real problems. One need only look at fan-favorite plotlines like the fate of Godot and that of the Fey family to see that, especially in the series's original trilogy, which ends up having an emotional heft that one might not expect.

Of course, no matter how good the recipe, the chef might get tired of making the same thing every night, and such is the problem facing Ace Attorney. The series has faced accusations of staleness since at least the third entry, 2004's Trials and Tribulations, and the cries have only grown louder as the series has gone on, and justifiably so. While it's true that the games have evolved their mechanics very little as the franchise has continued, such complaints largely miss the point; the simple logic games that make up the bulk of the courtroom action have never risen above mere competency, and frequently fall below it, even in the better entries.

Instead, the main issue facing Spirit of Justice is the virus that infects almost every large media franchise—the series's own weighty continuity, which occasionally threatens to pull the viewer into an exposition vortex that only a lengthy visit to the Ace Attorney Wiki can allow you to escape from. To be fair, Takumi saw this problem coming and tried to give the franchise a fresh face by retiring Phoenix and introducing newcomer Apollo Justice, but fan backlash prompted his return shortly after. (It's worth noting here that the one non-Ace Attorney game that Takumi has directed in the past decade, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, which flopped in the United States, remains arguably his best work.) With three different player characters and a bevy of returning sidekicks, it's fair to say that the Spirit of Justice expects you to do your homework. Worse still, it can sometimes neglect to develop these characters, assuming that your preexisting experience with them can be enough to make you care about their various fates.

Still, when you return to that courtroom and hear the sound of Phoenix bashing that table as he screams "OBJECTION," it's hard not to be taken in all over again. Traditional procedurals like Law & Order are basically just justice porn: The police investigate, find damning evidence, and arrest the bad guy; the bad guy hires a slimy, charismatic attorney to throw the proof out of court; Jack McCoy growls at the defendant until he gives it up on the stand; and the jury dutifully throws the book at him. Case closed, see you next week.

Ace Attorney offers an alternative—it's a game series where the bumbling police always arrest the patsy, and you have to prove that the obviously guilty mustache-twirling witness, is, in fact, the true culprit. Maybe it says something about the world we live in—or me—but that struggle seems a lot more relevant to all of our lives than whether or not Captain Shooty and the Boys manage to save the world from the latest alien invasion. I don't know what it's like to exhibit that kind of superhuman competence, but I think all of us know what it's like to try to shield someone from the incompetence of others—ourselves included.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—Spirit of Justice is out now for the Nintendo 3DS.

Follow Steven T Wright on Twitter.

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Still from 'The Eric Andre Show,' courtesy of Adult Swim

Fifteen years ago, on September 2, 2001, Turner Broadcasting Systems launched a late-night programming block of cartoons for grown-ups on the Cartoon Network. Opening with an episode of the now cult-classic Home Movies (co-created by Loren Bouchard, who went on to create Bob's Burgers), the network was rolling the dice on an odd idea that blossomed into an unprecedented experiment in absurdist comedy.

That gamble panned out pretty well for everyone involved. The time slot that we now know as Adult Swim has been a consistent ratings juggernaut, and the shows, voices, and surrealist tones featured on the programming block have influenced comedy and pop culture in profound ways.

To commemorate Adult Swim's 15th anniversary, we reached out to some of the comedic royalty that's appeared on Adult Swim over the years to look back on the best moments from a decade and a half of strangeness. Here's what they had to say.

Still from 'Rick and Morty,' courtesy of Adult Swim

Adult Swim's Impact on Television

Sally Skinner, host and creator of Stupid Morning Bullshit: Adult Swim paved the way for a certain kind of voice—one that cares very little about much, yet cares very deeply for the small list of things. Viewers of the network happen to be on that short list, and it's always been evident from the other side of screen. Those bumps always felt like they were speaking directly to me! Adult Swim always seemed less packaged and more honest, and I think a lot of networks are just now picking up on that tone.

Dan Harmon, creator of Rick and Morty: Adult Swim saved TV animation from being a "format" for families, restoring it to its rightful place as a medium without limitation. Its minimalist branding also lit the path for a post-DVR wasteland in which TV would have to live with less control over its audience. These days, even hacks know content needs to be addictive, personal, and omnivorous to survive the post-internet wasteland, but Adult Swim was Mad Maxing that apocalypse before the bombs even finished dropping.

Seth Green, creator and executive producer of Robot Chicken: Adult Swim was the first network since MTV to really create a versatile and inclusive culture. By tuning in, you knew you were getting a particular POV that was both young and a little dangerous. I think that's why teens and college kids made it theirs.

David Willis, co-creator/writer/EP of Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell,Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Squidbillies: Adult Swim introduced a little more absurdity into the mainstream, proving that you don't always need story or structure or compelling characters or animation or dialogue or moving pictures or bright colors to fool people into watching television. I feel like a lot of current ads rip off the black-and-white bumps and the surreal tone of the shows.

Eric Andre, creator of The Eric Andre Show: Seeing Space Ghost for the first time blew my mind.

Erinn Hayes, star of Childrens Hospital: Someone has to give the truly weird a voice. The truly weird and the thoroughly stoned.

Still from 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force,' courtesy of Adult Swim

Adult Swim's Best Moments

Dan Harmon: When Mazzy Star, playing as Morty, is taught how to bury a dead version of himself in his own backyard before continuing the rest of his life as a biological imposter. I can't think of a better metaphor to prepare millennials for their 30s.

Matt Harrigan, writer and EP of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Adult Swim VP of Digital Content: When Space Ghost tells William Shatner that "outer space shows are for children and stupid people," George Lowe's voice breaks just a tiny bit, and it always kills me for some reason.

Seth Green: It's hard to pick a favorite, but I've always felt having Voltron lose a break dance battle was defining for the show.

Sally Skinner: Notorious pharma-bro Martin Shkreli phoned into the show and called me a bitch three times. He just got in a Twitter argument with Patton Oswalt, so I'm honored to be in such esteemed company.

Erinn Hayes: There are so many favorite moments, but there was one that stands out as particularly Childrens Hospital. We shot the final dance sequence to our "Do the Right Thing" episode, "Hot Enough for You," as the last thing of that season. The whole crew was outside behind the cameras, and one by one each cast member came out, did their solo dance in front of everyone, and was wrapped for the season. I remember we were all so nervous to get up in front of everyone. I'm not the best dancer, but I was backing my shit up, throwing in some running man, adding kicks, just really fucking going for it. They finally call cut, everyone cheers, I take a breath, and then they tell me that someone pressed record twice, and none of that was actually shot. Could I please do it again? So I did, but it wasn't as good. I think I might have been slightly pissed for a few moments, but now I'm actually pretty happy that all my best moves were just for our incredible crew.

David Willis: I'm proud of how we ended Aqua Teen. When Carl says, "It don't matter. None of this matters," it's pretty much the closest thing to being my personal worldview. But I also have fond memories of foleying meat-squish sound effects with a fistful of raw hamburger. Watching a rough cut of the fourth episode, laughing with Matt Maiellaro and our editors, and knowing it was going to work. Jim Fortier and I watching "The Possum" George Jones record the Squids theme song. Seeing Gene Simmons walk past my office in a trenchcoat and feeling a horribly cold wind whistle through my soul. Receiving an email from Wolf Blitzer saying that no, he was not at all interested in playing himself in an episode where he bites Meatwad and turns him into a wolfwad. It don't matter. None of this matters.

Still from 'Childrens Hospital,' courtesy of Adult Swim

What It's Like to Work at Adult Swim

Sally Skinner: We work in a super old building. There's the main Turner campus, where all the other networks live, and then there's our tiny brick outpost, across the highway. The power goes out a lot, so every time the power goes out, we all just run around like first graders.

Lake Bell, director and star of Childrens Hospital: Every year at Comic Con, Adult Swim allows me to live out my fantasy of being told it's OK—nay, encouraged—to drink beer and jump on an adult bouncy house.

Erinn Hayes: I don't quite get it, and to be honest never asked, why we were ever invited to participate in Comic Con for so many years, but man, am I glad we were. The panels were some of the strangest, most surreal moments. One year we ruined what was left of some kid's childhood when the entire room full of 1,500 people started chanting, "Show us your dick." The next year, Lake and I made our way through the Adult Swim Funhouse, crawled out through the huge balloon vagina, and I almost peed myself laughing trying to pull her back up a giant fun slide unsuccessfully.

Seth Green: One year, Adult Swim hosted a "shrimp boil" for creators and producers—kind of a social mixer, so all the show makers could meet and hang out. It was a great trip and really amazing bonding experience for the entire company. Then we all got stranded by a horrible ice storm and couldn't fly out for 14 hours, taken on and off four planes before we finally got in the air. Weirdly, all that drama only made the trip more memorable. Plus, we were all in it together, so it actually was bonding.

Matt Harrigan: The other day one of the FishCenter fish died suddenly. There was a surprising outpouring of commiserations from this unseen community that obviously felt something. That was kind of a nice experience, and definitely new.

Dan Harmon: Being flown out to attend their upfronts and seeing a giant inflatable Rick above Nicki Minaj's head was definitely an upgrade from five years of not being invited by NBC. Same size audience, very different network relationship.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

On this episode of Black Market: Dispatches, we investigate the poaching of pangolin—the world's most trafficked animal—and look into the systems that force people to poach for a living.

Black Market: Dispatches airs Tuesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

Images courtesy of CD Projekt Red

That headline is no joke. Even though I "beat" The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt last year, I've spent the last two weeks returning to CD Projekt Red's big, beautiful open world and falling in love all over again. If you, like me, accidentally passed over the game's two expansion packs, preferring to move onto a brand-new game, it's time to fix that mistake.

It's a slower time for games right now, the calm before the fall's blockbuster storm—a perfect time to look back at the games released earlier in the year, find a good sale, and play what you might have missed. I'd downloaded, deleted, re-downloaded, and hovered my mouse over The Witcher 3's two expansion packs several times in past months but never clicked play.

Boy, I'm glad that's changed.

As I wrote about in our monthly feature about the games we're playing, the birth of my first child provided plenty of downtime. (They sleep 16 hours a day, at least when they're not crying bloody murder at four in the morning.) The prospect of hours with few commitments to the outside world seemed like the perfect time to see what Geralt—the titular Witcher—was up to in Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. The former released last year, the latter arrived back in May, and though Hearts of Stone is great, Blood and Wine is truly special. (That said, you can't go wrong by playing both.)

Blood and Wine transports Geralt to Toussaint, a land torn from the pages of King Arthur. But while classically inspired, Blood and Wine subverts expectations in the same way that made Wild Hunt so special. A pretty princess reveals herself to be a smart, capable fighter, not just a token beauty. A knight looking to rescue his one true love from a terrible curse is actually an asshole who can't accept that maybe he's not wanted. All the while, the charmless but empathetic Geralt of Rivia finds himself in the center of things.

One reason open world games can get on my nerves is that it can be tough to find the best stuff ASAP. Though my taste in games ranges from Spelunky to Rocket League, in my heart of hearts, I want to experience a good story. I truly enjoyed the 60-plus hours I spent with The Witcher 3, but sometimes, it felt like I was plucking through mediocre quests to find the really good ones. These expansion packs are beefy (with Blood and Wine basically qualifying as its own video game), but greatly benefit from an increased focus. Tracking every side quest and contract is worthwhile because there aren't an overwhelming amount of them, which allows the expansions to avoid the content bloat that often plagues games like this. As I near the final quests in Blood and Wine, I find myself seeking out the "meaningless" filler, hoping it will put off my desire to finish off the expansion. I just don't want my time with The Witcher 3 to be truly over.

Maybe Bethesda games are no longer for me. That happens. (My revulsion to Fallout 4's base building, which others found wholly satisfying, might be an indication that's the case.) But when you lose something you love, your first response is to find a replacement. For me, and maybe for you, that's looking like CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk 2077, the next project from the developers behind The Witcher 3, is due out in the next few years. It can't come soon enough.

Follow Patrick Klepek on Twitter, and if you have a news tip you'd like to share, drop him an email.

A pair of Ku Klux Klan members at a rally at the South Carolina State House protesting the removal of the Confederate Flag in July 2015. (Photo by Seth Herald/NurPhoto via Getty)

No matter how many times America has a national conversation about race, the topic of actual racists rarely seems to come up. That is, racism is usually regarded as a major challenge facing America, but since no one will admit to being a racist and calling someone the R-word is regarded as the gravest possible insult, politicians generally shy away from calling out specific people or groups as fomenting prejudice.

In that context, it's pretty startling how much time Hillary Clinton has spent lately calling Donald Trump's supporters racist. At the end of August, she gave a speech dedicated to denouncing the "alt right"—a loosely associated set of white people who love Trump and embrace white nationalist views that most Republicans would reject. Then, during a Friday speech, she went further, saying that half of her opponents supporters should be in a "basket of deplorables." She went on: "The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up."

Trump has responded by denouncing Clinton's "low opinion" of Americans, and Clinton did apologize for saying "half," though she stood behind most of the substance of her speech.

It's clear that though many, many Trump supporters are fine, hard-working, etc. Americans, there are also some who are outright racist shitbags. But how many fall into that latter camp? Is Clinton's basket size that far off? How do you count racists in America, anyway?

In an attempt to answer at least some of those questions, I called up Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. He explained the results of a recent study he conducted about the correlation of what people in the field call "racial resentment" and support for Donald Trump, and told me that Clinton's original comments weren't far off.

VICE: In your research, were you able to conclude that half of Trump supporters are racists? Was Clinton right?
Jason McDaniel: I do think that based on the analysis I've done and based on some analysis more recently, there's no doubt that Trump supporters are more motivated by racially resentful views and negative racial views than Hillary Clinton supporters or previous Republican candidates. That was stuff I started analyzing in the spring during the primary. The people that supported Donald Trump, their views on negative racial stereotypes towards blacks, and negative views of Muslims, and negative views of immigrants was just off the charts. That's a new thing this election cycle.

What percentage of people had those views?
It depends on how you look at it.

Well, how do you determine who's a racist based on polling?
It is hard. I think in the post–Civil Rights era, it became harder because it became clear that there's a very strong consensus in our country that racist views are not good and not allowed. So people are hesitant to express those. When we studied this, we looked back at the history, and you can see the decline. We asked people, "Do you think black people are more violent than white people?" or, "Do you think 'lazy,' 'violent,' or 'unintelligent' describes black people or white people or Latinos?" We ask those kinds of things. In these polls that I looked at, if you asked how well the word violent describes Muslims as a group, Trump supporters were much more likely to say it described them extremely well. If you compare the way they rate white people on those questions with the way they rate the other groups, that's how I get a sense of what I would call negative racial stereotypes––what we would call old-fashioned or explicit racism.

So people are returning to old-fashioned racism.
We've seen those kinds of measures rise since Obama's election in America. So they had kind of gone away or dissipated after the 1960s to the 2000s, but with the election of Obama, we started to see explicit, old-fashioned racism reemerge in American politics and become politically salient. And it was much more likely to be true of Republicans than Democrats. People who hold those racist views would also be more likely to think negative views about things like the economy when weren't true objectively.

The other thing we started doing as a discipline in the 80s and 90s as explicit racism was declining in American society, we started asking questions that focused on what we called "racial resentment." And so racial views were not about characteristics or individual traits of black people or immigrants or what have you, but rather about how much they deserve benefits, if they should work harder and not blame society for their troubles, if they're being discriminated against. It was this idea to connect it more to government policy. And there's some debate, with some people saying that's not racism, it's political ideology. But I think the results are pretty clear, it's connecting politics to the color of people's skin and judging them as not worthy because of whatever. It depends on the scholar, but people call that symbolic racism or racial resentment.

Well there's a lot of racism in America and not a lot of avowed racists. It seems like you might have to trick someone into saying what they really mean in these polls.
I wouldn't say they're tricking them. We put four or five questions together to measure this thing called racial resentment. We're getting at another dimension of what we call racial attitudes.

This is 25 years worth of research that went into testing these And now they're asked on every one of our major national election surveys. So we can track this over time. This is why I can say Trump supporters were off the scale––we have data to compare it to going backwards. And the parties are dividing on this issue. That didn't used to be the case. Now it's pretty clear that one of the major factors that split Democrats and Republicans is their views on racial resentment. If they're more racially sympathetic white people, they're gonna be Democrats, more likely. If they're more racially conservative or resentful white people, they're gonna be Republicans. And that's a key divide.

How did political scientists come up with a set of questions that have been determined to identify racists?
It's a science and an art. You use language that doesn't unintentionally measure or evoke something else. They are refined over time as part of the peer-review process. As a discipline, that's what we've agreed on. Sometimes there's a fifth one we ask, which is, "How much discrimination is there in the United States today against blacks? A great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, or none at all?" But I trust these questions and that they get at something real.

A while back, did polls just ask, "Are you racist?"
There were a lot of different ways. But I think the main one was asking something like, "Would you describe black people as hardworking?" and you give them a four- or five-point continuum scale and ask them to rate that association. There's also an old thing people used to do call social distance. That's where you ask how someone might feel about a black person living in the same country as them, or same state, or same city, or same neighborhood. Then it's, "What if they moved in next door?" and, "What if your child married a black person?" In really old surveys in the 30s and 40s you could get people to explicitly say all kinds of stuff. But you couldn't ask it that way after the 60s because people knew it wasn't acceptable as much anymore.

So do people feel compelled to lie in these polls and how does that affect their accuracy?
This gets complicated because people will give some different answers based on the race of the person interviewing them, and if it's a computer survey we get some differences, but lying? Yeah, but when you ask it enough and do it right over time, it's not about lying. Most people aren't thinking about this all the time.

Are Americans getting more or less racist?
There's this thing happening or this thought process that if you talk about race or racism that's racism. So if you're calling someone racist, you're being the bigot, to use Donald Trump's phrase. And this is a very common belief. White Americans typically are uncomfortable talking about race, so if you are, you're the one that's judging people by the color of their skin. Now, that's incorrect and wrong, because you're judging them by their views. But that's the idea that Donald Trump and Republicans in the past are trying to play on, saying that moderates or Democrats are trying to call you racist. That's the political play they're going for, and I don't think it's working.

I think that one of the defining characteristics of the Obama era of politics is that racism and racial attitudes have reemerged. But then again, I wouldn't say that Americans are more racist than they were prior to the Civil Rights movement. But the voices of those who are racist are being amplified in ways, especially by campaigns like Donald Trump's, in a way that we haven't seen in many decades. I don't think that more people hold explicitly racist views, but it's more likely that those messages are getting out and being amplified by politicians. I think we are seeing a emergence of something that's scary and that we should be worried about.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Michael Nicholson

Michael Nicholson is a 75-year-old man who loves college. To date, he has earned one bachelor's degree, two associates degrees, 23 master's degrees, three specialist degrees, and one doctorate. He was enrolled in school for 55 years straight and has 30 degrees in total. Here is his advice to the class of 2020.

I get up at four in the morning and I walk two miles at that hour. That doesn't mean everyone has to get up at four in the morning, but you do have to have some kind of a routine. If you sleep through your morning classes, you'll be running around trying to make up for lost time.

When I was in seminary school, we had to wear shirts and ties and suits. It's not like that anymore. What I see in the classrooms of today—frankly, I'm embarrassed. Everyone look sloppy. They don't know how to dress. When I go to class, I wear khakis and I wear sport shirts. I would not wear a T-shirt, I would not wear Levi's, I would not wear shorts, and I would not wear sandals, like all the girls do. Fifty and 60 years ago, girls wore shoes and socks, skirts and dresses. They did things with their hair.

These days, a lot of eating goes on in class, during the lectures. People come with their lunches, their bottles of pop and water, everything. A whole spread, along with their computers. They seem to have a good time. I usually sit in the last row myself, and I can see what they're looking at on the computers. I can see why teachers get frustrated. They're lecturing and giving material out, and the students are looking at their computers, looking at a whole lot of other things at the same time. Back in my time, you didn't dare fool around. Today, anything goes.

I was in school for 55 years straight. I liked it, and I was getting credentials—so in that sense, I was accomplishing something. I got used to being in school, and I wanted to keep going for as long as I could. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I'd love to be in class right now, starting this week. But a couple of years ago I got shut down. As one doctor told me, "You're getting old." I'm trying to adjust to that, I guess.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life when I took my first college course, but I had general ideas about what I needed to know. I went to Detroit Bible College and every year, the president of the college would give the students a message entitled, "Don't quit too soon." He was trying to keep us all in school until we graduated. That would be my message to any young folks: Don't quit too soon.

It doesn't really matter what you study, but you should study something that truly interests you. Otherwise you'll probably drop it along the way. The important thing is to get a degree. Then you have the option of going to graduate school, or you can start a career that has nothing to do with your major. Like my wife: She's educated as a teacher, and she did some teaching along the way, but for the last 37 years she's been working in data processing.

I met my wife when I was at bible college. Then I went away to Dallas, to seminary, for three years, while she was up in Detroit going to school. We wrote letters, and there was the occasional phone call. We were married between my third and fourth year.

Michael Nicholson with his wife, Sharon. Photo courtesy of Michael Nicholson

Seminary was my favorite degree program. That's where I really learned to be a student. I was away from home, on my own, and I had to produce good work to be able to go home with some self-respect. That meant that I couldn't leave my assignments to the night before. If I had to write a term paper, I had to start three weeks in advance. It made a student out of me.

I didn't get along with my roommate. He was very expressive, very emotional, and I've always been a quiet person. He always had a lot to say about a lot of different things, but he showed me a lot of good things. He had been there for two years before me, so he passed off some of his books to me, some of his old assignments. Don't battle with your roommate if you don't like them; they probably have something that they can teach you.

It's amazing what you'll learn if you can keep your mouth shut. Most people want to talk. If I listen to people, they actually pay attention. And I ask questions. I don't try to tell them everything I know, because usually they know more than I do anyway.

You can learn quickly from the other students when you're in a classroom; you can get their view on things. Find out where they come from, what their backgrounds are, what they have to bring to the class. And the teacher can talk about his experiences rather than simply feeding you lecture notes on the computer.

That's the purpose of college, after all—to get a job, of course, but also to broaden your horizons, expand your view of the world. You learn what's going on in the world. How did the world originate? Where are we headed? What are the interrelations of people on this earth?

You should listen to your professors, too. It's the professor's class, so don't look to be challenging him. But if you strongly disagree, talk to him. For example, in order to graduate with my degree in criminal justice—my 30th degree—I had to write a final project of at least 75 pages. Because of my Christian background, I chose faith-based prison ministries as a topic. In my research I came across some information about a man who had turned toward Jesus Christ in prison. This man, I believe, is the person who fired the fatal shot from the grassy knoll during the Kennedy assassination. I have visited him in prison on two occasions in the past couple years, and I have 27 letters from him.

I had a number of conversations about this with the professor who was supervising my paper. We would talk about the Kennedy assassination, and I had to say, "My view is that it happened this way." If you come right out and say, "You're wrong, you don't know what you're talking about," well, you're looking for trouble. But if you tell the professor, "Here is my view, and here is the evidence"—and I always had some evidence to show him—you can at least discuss it.

I concluded my paper with a presentation of my view of the Kennedy situation, and his killer's turn toward Jesus Christ in prison. And my professor signed it. He was one of four PhDs, including one lawyer, who signed the paper, even though none of them agreed with me. That's because I made a convincing case, a case they couldn't disagree with. So that's how I go about dealing with professors.

I'm not in any debt. I started delivering the Detroit newspaper when I was 11 years old, and I kept that same paper route for 11 years, all through college. That's how I got through the first four years: delivering newspapers, every day of the week. Of course, back then, college didn't cost as much as it does today. But tuition has never been a problem. I had several teaching positions along the way, and I wrote parking tickets at one university for 11 years—but all the time that I was working, I was in school as well.

I know that the average student debt is $30,000 after four years of college. Is it worth it? I don't know. I'm afraid of debt. I never like to owe anybody anything. When you owe somebody something, you're under their control. But I don't know what else you can do, because you can't get the jobs you once could. I mean, I worked in the factory a couple of summers, but you just can't get those factory jobs anymore. The summer I worked at Chrysler, I just walked in. That was the 1960s. If you want those jobs now, I guess you have to go to China or someplace.

I would keep going for more college degrees if my physical condition didn't slow me down. So that's my advice: Stay in school. Stay in for as long as you can.

As told to Emma Collins. Follow her on Twitter.

Twice each year, the bravest men among the Gurung villagers of Talo Chipla suit up in makeshift protective gear, like the netted hats worn above, for a traditional hallucinogenic honey hunt. All photos by Igor Kropotov

This story appeared in the September issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Every year, for centuries in Nepal, members of the Gurung ethnic group have climbed down the sides of cliffs amid swarms of bees—putting their lives on the line—to collect wild honey. It is not just any honey, of not just any bee: Nepal's Apis dorsata laboriosa is the largest honeybee in the world, and in the Himalayan hills, its nectar boasts hallucinogenic properties. Those effects are documented from 401 BC—when Greek soldiers, traveling through modern day Turkey near the Black Sea, indulged in a similar honey and were debilitated with intoxication—to today. I'd heard some fascinating but vague stories about this custom, and I'd seen amazing photos and videos of past hunts. Intrigued by this ancient culture and the mysterious psychedelic effects of the honey, I joined the Gurung in their excursion last spring.

It took nearly two days for me to get from Katmandu to the village of Talo Chipla in the foothills of the Annapurna Himalayan mountain range, where villagers welcomed me with flower garlands and an orange Buddhist prayer scarf. The Gurung know the honey to be a powerful medicine that alleviates joint pains, and if taken in small doses, to also produce mild highs. In larger doses, ingesting the honey can send you on a toxic, cold-sweat trip of hallucinations, vomiting, and diarrhea that can last for more than 24 hours.

There's a lot of talk these days of the global depopulation of bees, and its implications for the environment have recently become a concern among international conservationists. Data on current populations of these Himalayan bees in Nepal are scarce, but contrary to the last government survey conducted, which showed a slight population decline, men and women in Talo Chipla told me that their bee populations are actually thriving, and so the biannual quests for their honey—once in late fall and once in late spring—continue. The Gurung's honey-hunt tradition plays a central role in the cultural identity of those in this region, and they welcomed me warmly when I arrived.

"At first, I am very scared going down the ladder," Tulsi Gurung, one of this year's hunters told me. "But when I see the hives, I get filled with power and become fearless."

The rhododendron is Nepal's national flower, and its pollen, picked up by these gigantic bees, contains the chemical grayanotoxin, which can infuse their honey with its drug-like qualities. In spring, the pink flowers blanket the hills, at altitudes too high for domesticated honeybees to fly, so to harvest honey that contains grayanotoxin, locals have one option: to scale the cliffs. There's no way to control the amount of rhododendron pollen consumed by the bees, so the potency of the high-inducing honey varies from season to season, if there are any effects at all. Still, come spring and fall, the harvests continue as they have for centuries. To the Gurung, hunting for honey seems to be as much about passing on tradition as it is about the honey itself.

Most of the villagers come from families that sustained life through agriculture for generations, but these days, many in Talo Chipla are employed to maintain a hydroelectric dam that was installed nearby. Each year, an increasing number of Nepalis leave rural villages to work abroad, and honey hunting has become a way for the villagers to maintain a connection with their ancestors.

"Only those who can control their fears and remain unflinching in the face of death can be a honey hunter," said Bais Bahadur Gurung (all of the villagers in the region go by the last name Gurung), the 65-year-old chief of the district. The role comes with great risk, but it's matched with equal amounts of respect and honor. Many of the senior hunters in Talo Chipla no longer collect honey today, but the villagers have faith in the upcoming generation. "Old men may have experience," Bais Bahadur explained, "but the young men have balls."

The hunters empty baskets of hives and honeycombs, knocked from the cliffs, onto tarps. Once the bees are removed, the honey is strained and divvied into containers, and then it's ready to be consumed.

The night before the hunt, I laid in my tent thinking about the bees. Their hives are giant disks, the size of coffee tables, and hang from the cliffs in colonies of more than 50 hives. I drifted to sleep envisioning swarms of bees flying into my esophagus and making a hive in my hollowed-out chest cavity.

The next morning, I downed a cup of instant coffee and hiked an hour farther into the jungle with the villagers. We assembled in a small nylon camping tent for a breakfast of chicken and frog-leg soup for good luck. A bundle of dead frogs hung from the pole above our heads as we ate. About 30 hunters dressed in whatever protective gear they could find: Despite the heat, some wore winter coats to cover their forearms and torsos; some covered their heads by wrapping mosquito netting around plastic construction helmets and separated the mesh from their faces with beaks of bamboo.

From what I could tell, the ancient method for the collection is as makeshift as the hunter's outfits. I watched cautiously as the men anchored an enormous ladder constructed out of strands of bamboo and wooden rungs to the trunk of a tree on top of the cliff. Below, two men lit a massive fire of freshly cut wood and green leaves that created clouds of smoke that filled the hives and subdued the bees. In teams of two or three, the Gurung men descended the ladder. Others, using a rope, lowered a wooden basket lined with plastic, dangling them below the hives. Then, one by one, the hunters attempted to dislodge the hives from the face of the cliff, knocking chunks of honeycomb into the suspended basket beneath them. Nearly half of the hives whizzed past the baskets and exploded as they crashed onto the rocky crags below.

Sadly, in years past, some of the hunters have met the same fate. "Thirty years ago, when one of the hunters was on the rope, the fire below somehow made the ladder catch fire," recounted Yaocho Gurung, one of the village elders. "This man fell from the cliff, and his body smashed onto the rocks of the river."

This year's hunters returned safely, but the tragic stories linger. "At first, I am very scared going down the ladder," Tulsi Gurung, one of this year's hunters told me. "But when I see the hives, I get filled with power and become fearless."

They may be fearless, but the brave men don't go unscathed. When the Gurung emerged from the cliff, their hands were swollen with bee stings and looked like they'd been inflated with pumps. But the same wasn't true of their egos: The hunt is not a pissing contest, and the men were humble and nonchalant in their victory.

The Gurung use the honey they collect primarily as a sweetener or mild painkiller to dull the aches of agricultural work and alter their moods slightly. But recently, a large market for the nectar has opened up throughout northeastern Asia. There are buyers in China, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea (Nepal's Maoists have strong political ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), where the honey is believed to promote erectile function.

Once back on top of the cliff, men sifted through the baskets of honeycomb with their bare hands. I watched as the hunters used sticks to mash their slurry of wax, honey, and half-dead bees through a bamboo filter and into a large metal pot. Wild Himalayan honey is darker and runs thinner than the honey produced by farmed bees, and as I swallowed the dose the hunters offered me, I could feel a tingling sensation in my throat. I ate two teaspoons, the amount recommended by the honey hunters, and after about 15 minutes, I started to feel a high similar to weed. I felt like my body was cooling down, starting from the back of my head and down through my torso. A deep, icy hot feeling settled in my stomach and lasted for several hours. The honey was delicious, and though a few of the hunters passed out from eating a bit too much, no one suffered from the projectile vomiting or explosive diarrhea I'd been warned about. Roughly 20 minutes later, still a little buzzed, we hiked back to the village with our spoils for a celebration.

When we arrived, the rest of the village was waiting, eager to hear about the hunt. They sacrificed a chicken, which we ate with dhal bhat (a rice and lentil soup), and performed traditional dances, fueled by endless cups of local firewater called raksi. We partied late into the night.

The next morning, I was groggy from the day's excitement and a night of raging. The hunters got to work dividing the honey among themselves and the rest of the community. Those who'd come from other villages to help asked for a little extra for their aging parents, to treat the aches and pains caused by arthritis. Each year more of the honey makes its way out of the village—nearly the entire stock of a recent hunt was sold to a Japanese man who brought the honey back to his home country.

As the season's collection came to an end, some villagers I spoke to said they fear that, like the declining populations of honeybees globally, the forces of modernization might threaten the Gurung honey hunters' traditions. Suresh Gurung, who at age 19 is the youngest hunter of the village, is not among them. "Those who are devoted will remain or return," he said. "Our culture will stay alive for many years to come."

This story appeared in the September issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

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

Colin Powell photo via Wikimedia Commons

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Guccifer 2.0 Releases Tim Kaine's Cell Number
The hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 has released more Democratic Party documents, including the cellphone number of vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine. Interim DNC chair Donna Brazile blamed the Russian government for the latest hack, which includes the cell numbers and emails of White House officials. —NBC News

Chelsea Manning to Receive Gender Reassignment Surgery
Chelsea Manning, the former soldier jailed for passing data to WikiLeaks, says she has ended her hunger strike because the army has agreed to provide gender transition surgery. Manning said the US military "is finally doing the right thing." A ban on transgender people in the armed forces was lifted in July.—ABC News

NY Attorney General Opens Trump Foundation Inquiry
New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has opened an inquiry into the Trump Foundation after reports the organization may have broken financial rules governing charities. Schneiderman, a vocal Trump critic who is suing Trump University for fraud, said he was concerned that "the Trump Foundation may have engaged in some impropriety."—Politico

International News

Emergency Aid for Syria Expected Soon
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North Korea Able to Make Six Nuclear Bombs a Year
North Korea will have enough material for about 20 nuclear bombs by the end of this year, according to new assessments by weapons experts. A group of experts on the North Korea's nuclear program said the country's uranium enrichment facilities allow it to produce around six new nuclear bombs a year. —Reuters

Two Protesters Killed by Police in Kashmir
Two protesters have been killed and dozens of others wounded in clashes with Indian security forces in Kashmir, as a security lockdown prevented Eid festivities. One protester was killed after he was struck on the head by a tear gas shell, and another died after being hit by pellet ammunition fired from police shotguns. Protests against Indian rule—long a point of contention in the region, which is split between India and Pakistan—have been ongoing for more than two months after a rebel leader died in a shootout with authorities on July 8. —Al Jazeera

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The cover for Young Thug's latest mixtape, 'JEFFERY'

Last month, when the rapper Young Thug released his latest mixtape, JEFFERY, it wasn't his singsong "post-verbal" hooks that got all the attention, nor its celebrity-studded track list, in which each song is named after his idols. Instead, it was the ruffled, periwinkle Alessandro Trincone gown and cocktail parasol hat he modeled for the cover that went viral.

It wasn't the first time Thug donned women's clothing for catwalk-inspired style. Since his rise to popularity, he has made flirting with gender fluidity and androgyny central to his image, going so far as to say he believes "there's no such thing as gender" in a recent Calvin Klein ad spot.

Fans and critics responded with starkly contrasting opinions. To some, Thug's gender-bending style was groundbreaking, especially in an industry defined by hyper-masculinity. To others, he was appropriating queer culture. (The latter is not an unfounded accusation, given some of the rapper's lyrics.) But the knee-jerk reaction of some social-media users was to question the rapper's sexuality, which raises a larger—and more interesting—question: Why do so many people label a man wearing women's clothing "gay" in the first place?

To be sure, Thug is far from the first male musician to wear a dress—the legacy of cross-dressing rock stars stretches back decades, from David Bowie to Prince. He isn't even the first rapper to play with gender expectations in his style. But examining the reaction to Thug's apparel choices underscores a specific fact: that a man who transgresses the arbitrary rules of what "masculine clothing" can be still spurs controversy in 2016. This stems from the fact that gendered clothing relies on the rigid constructs of masculinity and femininity. A man veering too far in the wrong direction on this binary is pejoratively deemed "gay," for example, not conforming to the relatively strict visual codes associated with "real men," a conclusion that seems to spring from the same fallacy that says gay men exhibit feminine characteristics, and that any man demonstrating effeminate qualities must be gay.

If the whole scenario sounds childish, that's probably because it's rooted, at least partially, in the recent origin of markedly distinct clothing for boys and girls.

Clothing historian Jo Paoletti, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, has spent nearly four decades researching gender difference in fashion. In 2012, she published a history of children's clothing, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, which chronicles the decline of gender-neutral apparel for babies and toddlers and the rise of highly gender-specific clothes in the mid 80s, explaining how consumerism helped drive the rapid move toward gendering clothing for young children.

In seeing the social-media response to Thug's apparel, she questions whether there's a childhood connection there.

"I wonder how much of that is us going back to how we were at four or five years old," Paoletti told VICE, explaining how toddlers acquire enough cultural capital to know whether they're something called a boy or a girl.

Children from the age of two to around six rely on cultural cues; they don't yet understand biological sex, Paoletti explained. "At that age, what makes a little boy a little boy is what he's wearing, what his hair looks like, what he plays with," she said. "And if he has long hair, wears something different or plays with something a girl would play with, that makes him a girl in their minds."

"We've got a whole generation of people—anyone born after 1985—who, from their earliest years, were surrounded by these very binary representations of gender," she added, more or less describing the vast majority of Thug's millennial audience.

Looking at how those listeners responded to the "JEFFERY" cover art makes clear a longstanding double standard: that women can openly wear men's clothes, as long as they don't go too far, but a man wearing a dress remains a social taboo. In fact, in female fashion, "tomboy" looks are more than acceptable—they're downright stylish. A number of brands, like WILDFANG, capitalize on the connotation.

That's not to say women who wear "masculine" apparel are completely within the bounds of social norms, but they're generally more accepted than a man who may wear "feminine" looks. Vera Wylde, the cross-dressing persona of a straight man in Vermont, believes the contradiction is rooted in sexism—toward women.

As a drag performer and vlogger, Wylde—who uses feminine pronouns when in character—often fields assertions that she must be gay. "People question my sexuality all the time," Wylde told VICE. "The popular belief is that men who dress as women, particularly if they perform for the public in drag, are attracted to men.

"I think this comes from the still deeply set belief that men are somehow superior to women," added Wylde. "If a woman wants to look more like a man, that might be odd, but it's almost aspirational. A man wishing to appear and behave more like a woman is seen as a downgrade, as the man choosing to be less than he is."

Some may think this issue is insignificant, but these power dynamics don't seem trivial when examined among children.

"This is why a girl dressing up as a pirate or a cowboy is just adorable, and a little boy wanting to dress up as a princess is shocking, scary, and grounds for beating the little kid — which happens," said Paoletti. "Maybe if people stop thinking the way they're thinking there will be fewer two-year-old boys who get beat up—by their parents, in many cases."

Indeed, in an interview with Billboard published online last week, Thug spoke to the ways in which his own parents could react to style that misaligned with gender: "When I was 12, my feet were so small I wore my sisters' glitter shoes. My dad would whoop me: 'You're not going to school now, you'll embarrass us!' But I never gave a f— what people think."

As society increasingly wrestles with the tangible influence gender and sexual binaries have in our lives, it's a good bet that musicians will continue to see how challenging these constructs prompts heated discussion. And whether you consider it expedient art or internet trolling, this won't be the last time we see a dude wearing a dress set on riling the masses.

As questions continue to swirl about whether Thug's fashion choices signify progress or exploitation or something else entirely, the incident makes one thing clear: "We are totally confused and misinformed," says Paoletti, "and we're still acting like a bunch of four-year-olds."

Follow Jon Shadel on Twitter.

Dorob YANs in the video for "Wolf Side"

Tajikistan's rap scene has had a turbulent couple of years. Since 2014, hip-hop has been banned from buses, minicabs, public spaces, and state TV and radio, and the country's few private stations refuse to play it for fear of losing their licenses. Performers whose music is "alien to national and universal human values," as the mayor of the Tajik capital Dushanbe put it, are also barred from holding concerts, with authorities refusing to issue the necessary permits.

While many have fled the country, complaining of persecution, others have found a way around the media blackout: Just praise the president. Parading in front of the capital city Dushanbe's phallic flagpole, stars such as Boron now rap about how President Rahmon is "God's shadow paradise on Earth."

In this authoritarian nation, where any lingering idea of freedom of speech is fast disappearing, despite having been president for a quarter of a century, Emomali Rahmon is in no hurry to relinquish power. In a dubious referendum held in May this year, Rahmon secured 94.5 percent of the vote in favor of his being able to run for unlimited terms, as well as making his family—who own nearly all of the businesses in the country—permanently immune from prosecution.

A billboard of President Emomali Rahmon. Photo by the author

I spoke with a UN elections observer in Dushanbe about a video that had surfaced of Rahmon at one of his sons' weddings dancing drunkenly and performing karaoke. Gray cronies spinning around him like some nightmarish boy band on a reunion tour, a clip of his antics became an internet sensation. "So Rahmon banned YouTube from Tajikistan to 'prevent the misconduct of the people,'" the observer explained. "The site was down for three weeks while the president's gofers worked out how to remove the offending material from Tajik cyberspace."

I asked David Lewis, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, why free speech is seen as such a threat in Tajikistan.

"Although dissenting voices might not seem to have much support, they undermine the model of a highly controlling but popular regime that President Rahmon has developed," he said. "Even a few voices disturb the self-image that the political leadership has developed, and the government is concerned that criticism can quickly develop into wider political opposition. Most alternative voices end up in emigration, one way or another. The regime has been very active in pursuing dissenting voices, both at home and abroad. It has tried to use Interpol to track and detain political opponents and radical Islamist activists alike. There have been credible allegations of violence against émigrés and cases of forced returns and imprisonment of Tajiks in Russia."

Born in the Tajik city of Khorog, rapper Dorob-YAN's family was forced to flee the country after the civil war of 1992.

"My father was a rebel, and he fought for the people, so he began to receive threats from the government," YAN's told me. "I lived in Kyrgyzstan until 2005, and then I moved to Russia, where rap has amassed a huge listenership."

Falling afoul of the security services in Moscow, YAN's was apprehended after releasing a track criticizing the Tajik president, "Do Not Be Silent," which features lyrics like:

Politicians with full stomachs / never get tired of the money in their bank accounts / Meanwhile, the people remain silent and believe / that one day the feast will come to their streets / I am the son of this city and of this poor country / and who, if not we, will be able to escape this darkness?

We are surrounded by construction, hotels, and boutiques / while our homes have no water or electricity, and all without reason / Why do our people have to be slaves in a foreign country? / My motherland gently weeps and waits, waits / to be liberated by its people.

"The people who detained me were employees of the Tajik law enforcement agencies, together with the Russian authorities," YAN's said. "They detained me three times. With the third detention, they began to threaten me: that they would put me away for a long time, that I would never have any chance to be free again, that I should not have put out the track, and also that they could just eliminate me—for example, have me murdered—and that's not even all the threats. At the same time, they wanted to open a criminal case against me and have me extradited. When they released me, they said, 'We're not saying goodbye.' They blocked my pages on social networks. I began receiving threatening phone calls, both from Russian phone numbers and Tajik ones. I realized that I had to lay low for some time, and I flew to Kyrgyzstan."

I spoke with rapper SOR—a resident of Dushanbe—about the problems inherent in being a musician in Tajikistan. Having raised the money to make his first record by carrying sacks of cement around a market, he spoke not just about the politics but also the economic dimension.

"I've been doing music for about 15 years," he said, "but from the beginning, it was very difficult as there was no studio. In music, especially with rap, it's impossible to live, impossible to earn money. Old school rappers aren't making music anymore, the reason being so they can live. You have to work because there are hungry people in the house. It's very important that there's an alternative scene, but unfortunately, no one will say that, and no one supports rap artists, including the Ministry of Culture. The 2000s were a different time; that was the time of real underground rap."

With freedom of expression and youth movements under fire, an oppressive air hangs over the streets of Dushanbe. There's little to engage young people. Blocking the road with whistles to their lips, by day the militsiya stop motorists every 50 yards along the main drag, grimaces followed by the presentation of bribes. By night, the city screeches, boy-racers revving their engines. In a country with extremely narrow perceptions of what's considered a good job, for many a career as a musician is a choice that falls beyond the pale. In this climate, some rappers have taken to pleasing the powers that be.

Outfitted in the national colors, posturing as they dance around heritage sites, the video for "Tajikistan" by Adaba, Mr. Skap, and Sam Salamov plays out like a tourist board advert, celebrating everything from the national airline to the Tajik soccer team. Interspersed with shots of the president, the track asks listeners to raise the flag and celebrate independence, achieved with "God's"—aka Rahmon's—help.

Taking this logic a step further, the video for Boron's "Dear Motherland" sees the rapper inspired by the words of the president, "leader of the Nation, Grandpa Emomali." The platitudes clearly worked; in April 2016, Boron's track became the first rap video featured on state TV for more than two years.

"In Tajikistan, there's a big industry of festivals, where people celebrate holidays, birthdays, and weddings together," explained an NGO source who wished to remain anonymous. "These artists that sing about 'sun' and 'God,' they simply want to be invited to these events. Government officials may well organize these festivities, and if they invite a singer, they'd like to listen to a 'proper song,' if you know what I mean. I think those singers are just following an economic perspective; they simply want to get a job."

Currently blacklisted from entering his homeland, YAN's remains a firm believer in the power of music to effect change.

"Without the youth, there's no future," he said. "The government doesn't pay attention to them, and this is their mistake, the effects of which will be felt later. Out of boredom, many have already gone off to fight in Syria, but don't even know what they're going to be fighting for. I'll continue to make political tracks to address the government of Tajikistan. When my father was 92 years old, he defended his people. Now it's our time. But our fathers had to protect their people's interests with guns, while today we only need a pen and paper."

Follow Stephen M Bland on Twitter.

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This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

The Harris County Jail in Houston is among the nation's largest, and it's also one of the most deadly. Within the last decade, scores of inmates have died, often from a lack of prompt medical care or staff misconduct, according to several independent investigations.

One report, by the Department of Justice, targeted poor medical and mental-health care as factors in a string of deaths. "he number of deaths related to inadequate medical care... is alarming," said the department, which also found excessive force by guards and safety lapses in the violent and often overcrowded facility.

But it's hard to fix a troubled jail.

That report was issued in 2009, and in the seven years since, inmates have continued to die preventable deaths in the Harris County Jail, despite the Justice Department's efforts to negotiate improvements. Sometimes the obstacles are local, with politicized budget battles and the effects of the way police and courts deal with arrest and detainment. But an undeniable part of the problem is also the department's chief weapon—a 36-year-old law with a cumbersome title: the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, or CRIPA.

Enacted during the waning months of the Carter Administration, it was designed to be a state-of-the-art tool to help the federal government to protect people in state or local jails and prisons, as well as institutions designed for the elderly, the disabled, and the mentally ill. It focuses on allowing state and local governments to fix problems voluntarily, through negotiations with the Justice Department, rather than with the blunt force of federal lawsuits or takeovers.

So the result, at the Harris County Jail, which has a population of about 9,000, and at some other large facilities, has been lots of talk, less action and, in some notable cases, scant sustainable improvement.

While the Justice Department is well-known for routinely using its power to step in and force police agencies to change their ways, its power to fix prisons and jails is more limited under CRIPA. Department lawyers can sue and try to force change through court order, but each step of the process triggers additional periods of review that can prolong the initial effort by months and even years. CRIPA is the only civil rights statute that requires the attorney general to personally sign off on a complaint, while department lawyers on other civil rights matters have more autonomy. In 1996, Congress further restricted the DOJ by making it easier for resistant prison and jail officials to get Justice Department cases dismissed. (Two years into a court order, a defendant can move for dismissal, unless the Justice Department can prove the constitutional violation has continued. This forces federal officials to defend older lawsuits instead of working on fresher enforcement efforts.)

In Washington, government lawyers have found that the tendency for prolonged negotiations can wear down an office that barely has enough staff to keep up.

Jonathan Smith, who was chief of the special litigation section of DOJ's civil rights division from 2010 to 2015, said, "When I took over, we had something like 500 open matters and fewer than 50 lawyers." Over his five years there, he said, a hiring freeze reduced his staff, and at the same time, there was a push to make police-department reform a priority.

With CRIPA, some matters can stretch on for decades. An investigation at the Los Angeles County Jail began in 1996, and at the Baltimore City Detention Center in 2000. At both jails, reports of abuse and inhumane conditions continued. Justice officials eventually changed their approach in Los Angeles and Baltimore from one that relied on cooperation, to one that had an enforcement mechanism by taking both jails to court.

Smith said that during his tenure, the department's strategy shifted to more reliance on court-sanctioned agreements, and less on voluntary resolutions, as in Harris County. However, even going to court doesn't guarantee a jail or prison will change. "There's not a great track record that litigation is a huge success," said Smith. "Fixing a jail takes a long time. The jurisprudence is hostile."

There are other places, similar to Harris County, where federal interventions have remained in the negotiation phase despite continuing problems. A report about federal jail oversight in Grant County, Kentucky, by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, recently found that "inmates have died needlessly, have been raped, abused and neglected... Meanwhile, the Justice Department responds with rebukes but no show of force, no push for a consent decree or a lawsuit to compel compliance." In Orange County, California, federal officials warned for years of "poor supervision," repeatedly putting jail administrators on notice that security at the jail complex needed to be tightened, yet the matter was kept out of court. In January, three inmates, all charged with felonies, escaped, but their absence wasn't noticed for about 16 hours.

Still, there are success stories. The power of CRIPA was apparent this April, when the Justice Department closed an investigation into Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections after the state agreed to stop putting those with serious mental illness into solitary confinement.

Many of the conditions uncovered in jails and prisons over the years have been caused, at least in part, by pressures that are outside the Justice Department's authority, such as overcrowding. In Harris County, a lawsuit filed this spring alleged that hundreds sit in the jail on minor charges, simply because they can't raise bail. The jail is also seriously understaffed, pay is low, and there's been a high turnover rate, so staffers tend to be less experienced.

"In some places you go, the warden or the sheriff has been asking for extra money for medical care or other improvements for years, and isn't getting it," said Robert Driscoll, a former senior Justice Department official under President George W Bush. "That becomes a political question."

While it may be hard to assign blame to any one agency or person, it's undeniable that scores have died in the Harris County Jail as these negotiations have dragged on. According to a November 2015 investigation by the Houston Chronicle, 75 people have died since the Justice Department's 2009 intervention, and 19 died from medical issues that were "either treatable or preventable, or in which delays in care, or staff misconduct, could have played a role in their deaths."

For some, patience with Harris County's slow progress is wearing thin. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Houston, has written to Attorney General Loretta Lynch twice this year, asking that the Justice Department return "to take immediate action and to conduct a thorough investigation" at the jail. In an emailed response to the Marshall Project, a department spokesman, David Jacobs, said that there remains an "open investigation into the Harris County Jail that focuses on their mental-health care and use of force... Jail officials have worked cooperatively to implement corrective action plans that the Civil Rights Division helped develop. The department remains actively engaged in the reform process."

Ryan Sullivan, the public information officer for the Harris County Sheriff's office, said that over the past year and a half the jail has overhauled many of its practices. The minimum age to work at the jail has been moved from 18 to 21 years old; training for staff has gone from a two-week online course to a six-week academy; and the jail has doubled its capacity for those in acute mental crisis, from 200 beds to 400. Additionally, just this August, the jail finished installing $5 million in surveillance cameras. "It's a long ship to turn course," said Sullivan, adding that in the past year, jail administrators have become more aggressive in making changes, which he said have gone above and beyond the recommendations made by DOJ. "The wheels are turning, it's just a question of how quickly it will have its final impact."

The Harris County Attorney's office said the Justice Department is due back for another visit in a couple of months.

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

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The Statue of Liberty is one of America's most famous icons, with a famous origin story: It was a gift from France, given to the United States around the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Many people today think the purpose of 305-foot statue, which is planted on Liberty Island in the New York Harbor, is to welcome incoming immigrants. This is bolstered by the Emma Lazarus poem engraved on its pedestal, which reads," Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."

However, according to Ed Berenson, a New York University professor and author of The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, there's a lot more to the origin of the Statue of Liberty that speaks to America's original sin. In the early stages of its creation, the initial intent for the building of the statue was to celebrate the emancipation of enslaved African Americans after the Civil War.

Bartholdi's design patent

Edouard de Laboulaye, French abolitionist and president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, is the undisputed "Father of the Statue of Liberty." After the United States's Civil War, Laboulaye conceived the idea of a gift to the United States to memorialize President Abraham Lincoln and celebrate the end of slavery. He enlisted sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who took an unused design he had created for a lighthouse near the Suez Canal and turned it into a monument for America. In the 20 years it took between the conception and the statue's dedication in 1886, as part of the effort to re-unify the country after the Civil War, the statue grew to take on the centennial symbolism and broader meaning it has today.

In an ironic twist, the Statue of Liberty has became a painful symbol of the rights and freedoms denied to the people whose liberation it was initially supposed to celebrate. Legendary black historian and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois wrote in his autobiography that when he sailed past Lady Liberty on a trip returning home from Europe, he had a hard time feeling the hope that inspired so many European immigrants because as a black man, he didn't have access to the freedoms she promised. And with so many people today asking out loud whether or not black lives actually matter, it's clear that the liberty celebrated by the statue continues to evade African Americans, even though their emancipation was a catalyst for the statue's creation.

I called up Ed Berenson, who's also the director of the French Institute at NYU, to talk about the Statue of Liberty's origins and why he thinks this history has been forgotten or ignored and what that says about America today.

VICE: How did Laboulaye conceive of the Statue of Liberty?
Ed Berenson: During his time, Laboulaye was the leading French expert and admirer of the United States. He felt more sympathetic to the American version of liberty than the one that came out of the French Revolution, which he thought was too radical and violent. And he wasn't blind to slavery, because Laboulaye was also the head of France's abolition society. So Laboulaye thought that the victory of the North in the Civil War was a great development because it abolished slavery once and for all.

The tragedy was that the architect of that abolition, Lincoln, had to sacrifice his life. And so when these two things happened—the assassination of Lincoln and the end of the Civil War—Laboulaye came up with the idea of giving the United States a major gift that would commemorate Lincoln and recognize the abolition of slavery.

Laboulaye was also an opponent of his own government, which he thought was very undemocratic. One of his objectives was to criticize his own government, but to do it in a way that wouldn't get him into trouble. So he was able to kill all kinds of birds with one stone. He was able to say, "What a great thing the abolition of slavery was." "What a wonderful thing American liberty is." And then, by implication, "What a terrible thing the lack of liberty in France is."

What happened next?
Laboulaye got together with a group of people who included Bartholdi and said, "Let's kind of think together about what form this gift should take." In June 1865, they all met at Laboulaye's house near Versailles. Because Laboulaye invited Bartholdi, it was pretty clear that Laboulaye had in mind some kind of sculpture.

Bartholdi got involved in other projects, and the main one was the Egyptian project at the Suez Canal. That project fell through because the Egyptian Khedive went bankrupt. So Bartholdi got the idea, I'm going to repurpose this Egyptian project and make it into the great American gift. And by this point, it's close to 1870, so that means we're just six years from the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Laoublaye and Bartholdi got the idea to shift from the original goal—which was to commemorate the abolition of slavery and the martyrdom of Lincoln—and move toward commemorating the 100th anniversary of American liberty.

In the summer of 1871, Bartholdi traveled to the United States. He brought with him some sketches of a new statue that were loosely based on the Egyptian sketches, but were more Greco-Roman since that was more appropriate for a Western country like the United States. And he had a couple of small clay models that he put together. Those early statues still had the original idea, because there were broken chains in the hands that symbolized the abolition of slavery. And as those sketches evolved, the chains shrunk until all that's left of them is what we see today, which is a chain under the Statue of Liberty's foot. So you get a morphing of the Statue of Liberty from mainly being about the abolition of slavery to now being more generally about American liberty.

When the statue was dedicated in 1886, did any of the original abolitionist symbolism remain?
No. It fell away party because a lot of time had passed. Now we're in 1886—more than 20 years after the end of the Civil War—but also it has to do with the way the Reconstruction period turned out. It's not likely that website is a very incomplete version. It deprives the history of its richness.

When the Statue of Liberty was unveiled, African American–run newspapers were not very sympathetic to it. There was a lot of commentary about why black people should be overjoyed about this symbol, supposedly of American liberty, when they never had it. So there's a fair amount of hostility on the part of black Americans—not exactly hostility, but a sense that the Statue of Liberty isn't their statue, because most American blacks didn't feel like they really had liberty.

But, in a sense, it originally was a statue for African Americans.
Yeah, absolutely. The original meaning of the Statue of Liberty was very favorable to the situation of African Americans in this country, to their future, to their membership in the nation. It really is, in a lot of ways, a symbolic celebration of their liberation. And most of that symbolism has gotten lost.

With all the racial issues we're having today, how do you think this would impact our current society if the Statue of Liberty's true origins were more widely known? 
I think it would be a really good thing. I think it would be consistent with the symbolism that most of us understand that the Statue of Liberty now to involve. With all of our controversies over immigration, with our racial animosities and racial conflict, I think that if the three important meanings of the Statue of Liberty—liberty, abolition, and welcome to immigrants from around the world—if all of those things were remembered more explicitly, it might be a way of injecting something positive into our political situation that has become so troubled today.

You can buy Ed Berenson's book on Amazon and follow Zachary Schwartz on Twitter.

A young man at Tesagan Gin Je in Phuket. All photos by Giselle Natassia

The Nine Emperor Gods is a nine-day Taoist event, celebrated every year across Southeast Asia during the ninth months of the lunar calendar. In Phuket, Thailand, it's honored as Tesagan Gin Je or the "vegetarian festival."

According to the festival's legend, a Chinese group occupying these parts once fell prey to a deadly epidemic. But upon adopting a vegetarian diet and praying to the nine gods, the group was cured. In commemoration, people today adopt a vegetarian diet and adhere to the festival's ten principles. These include abstaining from sex, alcohol, and dressing only in white clothing.

And then there is the impaling. Photographer Giselle Nastassia traveled to Phuket last September to experience the festival. Her images capture these "mason"—those who pierce their cheeks, tongues, and bodies. By inviting the spirits of the nine gods to possess their bodies, it's believed the gruesome body-modification rituals draw little blood and leave few scars.

The common belief is the impaling helps the individual obtain pure peace of mind and good health. Locals also told Giselle that inflicting pain on oneself takes away the sins of the community and transfers them to the individual. An altruistic act, if you will.

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Nepal's Gurung people live mostly in small villages in the country's vast Annapurna mountain ranges. In this remote region, they practice an ancient tradition of honey hunting where they descend towering cliffs on handmade ladders to harvest honey nestled under jagged overhangs.

During the spring, the Gurung's honey contains a rare substance called grayanotoxin, which is known for its intoxicating effects. While some say it's a deadly poison, others refer to it as an aphrodisiac, a powerful medicine, and a hallucinogenic drug.

On this episode of VICE Specials, we travel deep into the Annapurna mountains to join a Gurung village on its spring hunt and explore the honey's effects.

To read more about the Gurung honey hunt, check out our feature in the September issue of VICE Magazine

Donald Trump laughing on the campaign trail in April. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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One of the prerequisites for running for president is having a lot of money. Even Barack Obama, one of the least wealthy presidents of the modern era, was a millionaire by the time he ran for the White House in 2008, and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both make him look like a pauper. Americans are fine with being ruled by the rich—not that we have a choice, lol—but there's understandably a lot of interest in how these rich people choose to spend their money.

Politicians generally being public-minded sorts, presidential candidates tend to give large chunks of their fortunes away. According to Hillary and Bill Clinton's tax returns, the power couple gave away $23.2 million from 2001 to 2015, or about 10 percent of their income. The 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his wife had them beat, giving away almost 30 percent ($4 million) of their income the year before his failed bid for the presidency. Proving charitable giving is normally just a box to check off for candidates, a way to signal that they're one of the good One Percenters.

In that context, Trump's history of charity is especially bizarre. As with so much else about the self-proclaimed billionaire, Trump talks big about his generosity but can't or won't go into specifics. Investigations by journalists into Trump's family charity, the Donald J Trump Foundation, have turned up little in the way of recent donations from the candidate's own pocket, and uncovered one case of an illegal gift to a politician who at the time was weighing whether or not to sue Trump University for fraud. Especially now that the foundation is itself being investigated for wrongdoing, it's worth taking a closer look at what the hell is happening with the Donald J Trump Foundation.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he's given more than $100 million to charity, and earlier this year, his campaign put out a list of nearly 5,000 donations he supposedly made. But the tireless work of Washington Post reporter David A Fahrenthold, who has called more than 300 charities individually to ask if Trump had ever given them money, shows that it's actually very hard to find incidences of the man himself giving away any cash, at least not in recent years. In an article published in June, the Post found that the supposed billionaire had given away less than $10,000 from 2008 to 2015.

How is that possible? It turns out that a lot of Trump's gifts to charity—including gifts he publicly promised to contestants on The Celebrity Apprentice—came from the Donald J Trump Foundation, to which he's donated nothing since 2008 and is instead stocked with other people's money. Other gifts his campaign referenced came in the form of rounds of golf on Trump's golf courses that were given to charities to be auctioned off; that list of donations, the Post reported, also included arrangements called "conservation easements" that involve a real estate developer agreeing not to use land for certain purposes while still owning it and making money off of it.

Trump has given millions to charities over his lifetime, though that amount isn't all that significant given how much money he says he's worth. Since the Post has started chasing this story, Trump has given $1 million to a veterans' charity (months after promising he would, and only after being questioned about it), and gave $100,000 to a Louisiana church last month following the floods that decimated the state.

But the Donald J Trump Foundation has its own problems separate from the lack of proof of Trump's personal giving. GuideStar, a nonpartisan group that evaluates nonprofits, published a blog post Monday comparing the Trump Foundation to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton's organization—which itself is controversial due to so far unproven allegations major donors essentially bought access to Clinton while she was secretary of state—is much bigger, much more transparent about what it does, and has more of its eponymous founders' money.

The Trump Foundation has also allegedly engaged in what's called "self-dealing," or using a charity's money for personal gain, which is usually against IRS rules. For instance, the foundation spent $20,000 on a giant portrait of Trump himself, and $12,000 on Tim Tebow memorabilia.

Oh, and then there's the alleged bribe the Trump Foundation paid to Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. This was a $25,000 donation that the foundation made in 2013 to a Bondi-aligned PAC, which was problematic for a couple reasons. First, charities can't give to PACs—Trump's campaign said that the charity had given the money to the PAC by mistake, then screwed up again by telling the IRS the money had gone to a different group (whoops!). When this came to light this year, Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty and reimbursed the foundation for the $25,000 gift. Second, just days after that gift, Bondi reportedly decided not to join a lawsuit against Trump University filed by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. (Bondi's spokespeople deny her office was ever considering the lawsuit, contradicting newspaper accounts from that time.)

Speaking of Schneiderman, in 2014, the Trump Foundation gave $100,000 (a sizable sum by its standards) to Citizens United, a conservative group that was then suing the New York AG over his efforts to get them to disclose their donor list. Citizens United said the gift wasn't related to the lawsuit, but a Schneiderman spokesperson didn't agree, telling Yahoo News, "Funding a meritless lawsuit against this office would be nothing new for someone like Donald Trump, who has filed baseless ethics complaints, planted bogus stories, and tweeted a steady stream of incoherent insults just to make himself feel better for being exposed as the fraud he clearly is."

Trump has called Schneiderman a "lightweight hack" and "a low-life, a sleazebag," and the evidently personal battle between the two men seems bound to continue—on Tuesday, it was reported by the New York Daily News that the AG's office had launched a probe "to make sure complying with the laws governing charities in New York." The Trump campaign responded by calling the AG a "partisan hack who has turned a blind eye to the Clinton Foundation for years."

It remains to be seen if Schneiderman's probe will result in any charges. But the legality of some of the Trump Foundation gifts aside, there are more basic questions about Trump's personal acts of charity that he refuses to answer, namely: What and when have you given to charity?

When BuzzFeed News looked into Trump's charitable giving in June, campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks told them, "He makes contributions personally, and there's no way for you to know or understand what those gifts are or when they are made." But no, there is a way to know what those gifts are—Trump could just release his tax returns, which he has refused to do. (Trump claims he can't release them because he's under audit, though Richard Nixon showed his returns to the public while being audited. This week, VICE News filed a lawsuit with the IRS seeking to gain access to the audits of Trump's returns.)

In the past week, even as the media has started to zero in on all this, Trump's campaign keeps sending out surrogates to proclaim his generosity in the broadest, least fact-checkable terms. Deflecting questions about their boss's activities is by now standard operating procedure for people on Trump's payroll, but the more important question has nothing to do with shady individual gifts. If Trump is willing to obfuscate and mislead about something as simple as which charities he gives money too, what else is he refusing to tell the truth about?

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Over this past summer, customs officials at the Hong Kong harbor made a grim discovery. Hidden inside a shipping container were 4.4 tons of pangolin scales—the remains of between 1,100 and 6,600 African pangolins that were poached in Cameroon and shipped for consumption to China, where the scales are used as a cure in traditional medicine.

The pangolin is a harmless anteater who wobbles around the dense equatorial forests of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; it inspired the creation of the popular Pokémon Sandshrew, but the pangolin's funky appearance might result in its tragic demise, too. In the last decade, more than one million pangolin were taken from the wild, according to the United Nations Environment Program; this figure makes the pangolin the most trafficked mammal on the planet. A staggering number—but even with trafficking on the rise, information about the illegal pangolin trade remains hard to come by, since elephants and rhinos are the focus of most conservation efforts.

In the last few years, however, a pattern has emerged: As Asian pangolin populations have been driven to the brink of extinction, traffickers are now turning to the African pangolin population to satisfy the Asian market, where prices for pangolin scales and meat have soared.

Bushmeat has traditionally been part of the local diet in Cameroon, and pangolins are considered a delicacy. They can often be bought alive at roadside stalls and markets, or served in restaurants. In Djoum, a small town on the edge of the Dja Faunal Reserve, the local economy is entirely based on the bushmeat trade. Markets and restaurants sell all kind of game—from pangolin to elephant meat—which is consumed locally or exported to bigger cities. Since 1994, hunting for pangolins without a permit is illegal; for small hunters, however, the cost of obtaining the document is prohibitive, so with few other alternatives, many have decided to stay outside the law.

While there exists a rationale for people to keep hunting for subsistence, globalization has brought the illegal wildlife trade to a higher level in places like Djoum. "One day, I was about to burn the scales of a pangolin I had caught, but a kid told me not to," Jean, a poacher, told me while investigating the people behind the pangolin poaching for an episode of Black Market: Dispatches. "He told me there was someone in town who was buying pangolin scales. That's how I first started selling them." Later, I met a poaching middleman who wore denim dungarees and spoke with a thick, slow voice; he explained that he'd been approached a few years back by a Cameroonian woman working with a Chinese patron.

Pangolins have become a prized good in China and Vietnam, where the scales used in traditional Chinese medicine can easily be imported in containers. Pangolin prices on the black market have increased from around $300 to over $1,000 per kilo in just five years; at times, they can fetch nearly $3,000 per kilo. "The amount of illicit profit that can be made from this trade helps explain its alarming growth and is deeply concerning for the future of these species," Inger Andersen, director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, said in a statement after 4.4 tons of pangolin scales from Cameroon were seized in Hong Kong this past June. The seizure represented the biggest of its kind in the last five years.

China became Cameroon's primary investment partner after the latter country launched an investment appeal in 2010, investing more than $400 million per year. China's also controlled a large part of the country's infrastructure projects; at the end of 2015, China's investment portfolio in Cameroon was an estimated 1,850 billion CFA francs (around $3 billion).

The Chinese presence can be felt throughout the country, but the investment has been associated with an unsustainable rise in the exploitation of natural resources. "Clearly, the Chinese have been largely responsible for the massive surge in pangolin trafficking," said Francis Tarla Nchembi, coordinator of the Progress on Pangonlins MENTOR program. The program's run by a trans-disciplinary team based in Cameroon, and supported by both the US Fish and Wildlife Services and the Zoological Society of London. "There was a time when scales were thrown away by poachers—now they're being stocked, and we see scales shipments seized in Hong Kong and know that only Chinese boats are leaving the harbor in Douala."

"But it seems unlikely the 4.4 tons of scales seized in Hong Kong came from just the additions of small poachers' hunts," Nchembi adds. "Some people in Cameroon are getting their hands dirty."

In Djoum, the Cameroonian poacher Jean explained the poacher hierarchy: Subsistence poachers like him mostly trade in bushmeat and live animals, while the grands chasseurs ("great hunters") exclusively deal with ivory. Similarly, two kind of traffickers buy from the poachers: those who specialize in ivory and rhino horns, and traffickers who deal in the live animal trade. Their primary skill is to have a large network of contacts in villages where they can collect and export monkeys, birds, and snakes.

"When the pangolin scales trade shifted to Africa, the live animal traffickers began dealing the scales because they had the local networks to gather them from the small poachers in villages," explained Ofir Drori, director of wildlife law enforcement network EAGLE (Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement). "But dealing back to traffickers in China has exposed them to new people, allowing them to build the necessary networks to move up and start trafficking ivory. The pangolin scales trade is bridging the gap between these two groups and reinforcing traffickers' capacities."

Increasingly, Jean says the grand chasseurs have been dabbling in pangolin hunting as well. "We're seeing more seizures containing a mix of pangolin scales and ivory, which didn't happen before," said Chris Shepherd, Southeast Asia Regional Director at wildlife trade–monitoring organization TRAFFIC. "It used to be different sets of people involved in these trades."

Just as the illegal ivory trade has been grabbing headlines, the ongoing spike in pangolin scales trafficking from Africa serves as a good reminder that communities are interdependent—and that ignoring one species, whether in the wild or on the black market, could lead to the collapse of entire ecosystems. Considering the alarmingly high figures associated with pangolin trafficking, it might finally be time to focus on combating the illicit trade with the same passion that fuels efforts to stop other, more high-profile animal trafficking markets.

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You can catch Black Market: Dispatches on VICELAND. Find out how to watch here.

David "Cuba Dave" Strecker posing with two sex workers. All photos courtesy of David Strecker

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When police handcuffed David Strecker on September 4 in a Costa Rican airport, the 66-year-old American remembers thinking he'd only have to answer a few questions before he could board his flight back home.

But Strecker never made it on the plane. He's been behind bars ever since after being accused of violating Costa Rican law by promoting prostitution. Now, Strecker—a Florida resident who ran a popular blog about his sexual exploits abroad, mainly in countries like the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Costa Rica, where prostitution is legal—will be the first person ever tried under the law in the country's history.

The statute Strecker is being charged under is part of a 2013 human trafficking law that, among other things, prohibits the use of any media to promote the country as a "tourist destination accessible for the exploitation of sexual commerce or for the prostitution of persons of any sex or age."

Fernando Ferraro, a former Costa Rican justice minister who sponsored the law, told VICE that it was designed to prevent illegal dealings, like sex slaves and child sex workers. A 2016 US State Department report found that child sex tourism was a "serious problem" in the country and that it remains a common destination for trafficking victims.

"Certainly the country has to protect its image as a tourist destination," Ferraro said. "But it's not just a matter of image. A lot of times criminal organizations, or human traffickers, are connected to the prostitution industry."

Strecker is an unabashed fan of the prostitution industry, but he claims that all he does is run a blog devoted to advising sex tourists like himself, not telling people to become sex tourists. Likely the most famous john on the internet, Strecker has whitening hair and tanned skin that has begun to sag from his once-defined arms. He's a former softball player and a diehard Yankees fan who freely quotes George Steinbrenner and has a tattoo of the Yankees logo on his right shoulder. In Costa Rica's La Reforma prison, where he's being detained, he's the lone American inmate and regularly wears muscle tees and sandals—about as gringo as gringo gets.

Strecker first made a name for himself on sex tourist forums and internet groups, where he detailed his experience touring the brothels and bars of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. He would later come to be known as "Cuba Dave" and would co-author a book called Cuba Dave's Guide to Sosua, Dominican Republic, which has since been banned from Amazon.

Once it became apparent that there was interest in the Cuba Dave brand, Strecker began documenting his sex-fueled travels through Costa Rica with suggestive blog posts, trip report videos, and photos with his girls. (He claims the women were always clothed and consenting when he photographed them.) He soon developed a following of horny male travelers by sharing his stories from the legal prostitution scene and imparted wisdom on "how not to fall in love" from his more than 40 trips to Costa Rica alone.

"Over the course of those years, I came to realize this is not real," he told VICE in a recent phone interview. "This is fantasy. This is entertainment. A 60-year-old man sleeping with 20-year-old women and believing that they really like them is crazy. So the majority of stories and videos were to explain that."

In Costa Rica, he focused his efforts mainly on an area of bars and hotels frequented by prostitutes in downtown San José known as "Gringo Gulch."

One 2010 post from his blog, which has been taken down since his arrest, read: "Miriam likes to have fun, and she is my girlfriend every day for an hour when I am in San Jose. She understands what I like, and I understand what she does. My advice is to remember what you are here for in Costa Rica, and don't question your (Costa Rican) girlfriends so much."

Strecker maintains his site was nothing more than a travel blog created to advise the single male tourist, but prosecutors say he was purposefully promoting the country to fellow gringos to come and take advantage of the legal pay-for-sex industry.

"The criminal case began after various publications were found on the internet made by the suspect in which he was apparently inviting other North Americans to visit Costa Rica, indicating that prostitution services in the country were easy to find," a spokesperson from the prosecutor's office told VICE via email.

Costa Rica—where prostitution is legal but pimping, or soliciting clients for a prostitute, is not—has long been considered one of Latin America's most popular destinations for sex tourists. Author and researcher Jacobo Schifter estimated in his book Love and Lust: American Men in Costa Rica that up to 10 percent of Costa Rica's tourists are there to have sex with prostitutes—which adds up to as many as 80,000 sex tourists per year.

Aware of that reputation, authorities are working to clean up that image and help the tourism-dependent economy come off more like Disneyland and less like Thailand.

In recent years, Costa Rican police have worked to break up organized trafficking groups and pimps who take advantage of sex migrants and child sex workers. An annual report from the US State Department said that over the previous year, officials here conducted 25 raids where sex trafficking was suspected. The State Department noted that Costa Rican government was making considerable efforts to turn around its historically poor track record when it came to fighting trafficking.

While it's not clear that Strecker was involved in any such activities, prosecutors have requested that Strecker serve 12 years of jail time for three counts of violating the statute against promoting prostitution—one count each for his CubaDave.com website, Facebook page, and a YouTube video.

The prosecution is reportedly honing in on specific photos published on the pages, as well as certain passages from the blog posts. One such entry, which Strecker said prosecutors had harped on zealously during preliminary hearings, includes the sentence, "Your pleasures are only dictated by the size of your wallet."

Strecker's lawyer, Luis Diego Chacón, said he's confident that the case will be dismissed in the trial set to begin November, since the sex tourism law was meant to combat organized human-trafficking groups, not bloggers.

"This law wasn't intended for people who have a travel site," he told VICE. "If you looked at his website, you wouldn't have seen any language deemed inappropriate in his home country in the United States."

If the trial drags on, Chacón may try to convince the judges (Costa Rican trials are decided by three judges rather than a jury) that because the domain's server was located in the US, then it should be US laws that apply.

Since the Costa Rican law hinges on promotion, Strecker's defense will also try to argue that he was merely informing readers about the country's prostitution scene, not advertising it to them. Strecker claims that before he started his blog, he received hundreds of emails from travelers asking for advice on the best prostitute-friendly hotels and the safest neighborhoods for gringos. So rather than answer each one, he doled out his advice from his web page.

"Every single thing I'm being charged with is legal," he said. "They should actually be patting me on the back for warning some of the guys about this stuff."

Now, though, he's on the verge of a trial that could end with him being sentenced to more than a decade in prison. It's been that kind of dramatic fall for the pseudo celebrity, who said his yearlong stay in preventive prison has forced him to think about why he was targeted in the first place.

All he can come up with, he said, is that he's the piece at the center of a government "ploy" to send a message against sex tourists like him.

"This is a country where if you happen to say the wrong thing, you're going to end up paying for it," he said. "I really believe I'm just being made an example of."

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After decades of supplying stoners across America with primo weed, outlaw farmers in Northern California are bracing for what now seems almost inevitable: legalization.

The Golden State is set to vote on a Sean Parker–backed initiative to tax and regulate weed this fall, an effort that has raised plenty of cash and appears, at least according to most public surveys, to have the popular support needed to pass. Meanwhile, legislators have already transformed the state's half-baked medical regime into a coherent system, one that's on track to approach a record $1 billion year in taxable weed sales, according to numbers provided to VICE by California's Board of Equalization. Big business, along with Silicon Valley–tied venture capital cash, is beginning to pour into the sparsely populated rural region, long renowned for off-the-grid personalities—and of course off-the-charts weed.

It's tough to say exactly how much pot farmers grow in Northern California, though according to DEA data, about 60 percent of the nation's illegal weed is seized somewhere in the state. Given estimates of 4,000 to 10,000 farms in Humboldt County alone—out of what the California Growers Association suggests are perhaps 50,000 statewide—it's fair to say the area known as the Emerald Triangle (Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties) is producing a significant chunk of America's bud. And interviews with growers, experts, and activists suggest that even if legalization does pass, outlaw growers will hold out as long as they can.

"Obviously there is a financial incentive to stay in the black market," one grower who has been in the Triangle for more than three-quarters of his life—and requested anonymity for fear of law enforcement reprisal—told VICE. "Financially, it makes sense to stay in it, if you're not paying fees, and eradication budgets are stretched so thin. For a lot of people, it's a numbers game, and a lot of my friends, the people I talk with, are going to stay in it."

For many farmers, growing on the sly—and without pesky limits on production, as called for in the ballot initiative—is a way of life that they aren't willing to give up. There are perks, after all, and not just the lack of a boss or taxes. "We were outlaws for a long time," said another farmer who's been in the game for more than 30 years. Even after California granted patients limited protection from criminal prosecution in 1996, farmers were still leading clandestine lives. "We chose to live a lifestyle. For a lot of us, it was more about camaraderie, and the us-versus-them mentality. The money, when there was money, was spent locally, saved locally. We were the dopers up in the hills."

Indeed, that Northern California weed life rests on the threat of arrest and prosecution—a threat that has been baked into local wisdom. As another source put it, "We've been dealing with CAMP were to pass, what are regulatory agencies going to do with grows up north? Turn a blind eye, or ramp up enforcement?" wonders Beau Kilmer, senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

When asked about proposed changes in the state's pot laws, DEA spokeswoman Casey Rettig told VICE in an email, "Outside of DOJ's priorities, our directive is to rely on state and local law enforcement agencies to address marijuana activity through their own regulatory structures to prevent the illegal diversion of product, along with the enforcement of their own narcotics laws." (CAMP, the umbrella statewide entity for illegal marijuana enforcement in California, did not respond to requests for comment.)

As November approaches, ignorance among farmers about legalization is a factor, too—willful or otherwise. "None of them really seem to give a shit. The attitude is like, 'They're not going to bring the National Guard, so who cares,'" one source connected to dozens of clandestine grows who identified himself only as "D" told VICE. D estimates that maybe 70 percent of farmers he comes in contact with, especially "old school ranchers, and some of the biggest growers, have no fucking clue what's going on. No idea, and I don't know if they care."

Veteran farmers aren't the only ones who either hope or expect outlaw grows to persist, of course. "Legalization in California is not going to mean anything to outlaw growers because their markets are not here," Paul Trouette, CEO of Lear Asset Management Corp., told VICE. Lear is a private security company that works with local, state, and federal law enforcement to eradicate illegal marijuana grows. "There's going to be an increase in production by California outlaw growers after legalization," Trouette added. "The only thing that's going to be affected is that they're going to shift their grows into private properties, and that will overwhelm law enforcement operations. They're going to continue the game and hide the product among legal production."

To be sure, some farmers and industry leaders think the romanticized life of the outlaw grower is an anachronism, and that legalization spells serious trouble for them. "I came out and endorsed Sean Parker," founder of the annual Emerald Cup cannabis competition, Tim Blake, told VICE. "We might as well legalize it. We are over the top of the roller coaster, but the black market is going to have two or three more years and then dry up."

Blake has his reservations about the legalization. "When you get into politics, you find out that it's all about compromise," he said. But the activist thinks the writing is on the wall. In fact, a segment of farmers is already calling for appellations—that is, fancy, hyperlocal names—for weed, which they hope will protect small farms. Justin Calvino, one of the appellation effort's organizers, told VICE that farmers are moving toward responsible water and environmental use, and perhaps more importantly, that the black market is already showing signs of evaporation. "The world as we know it has gone away, and we have to change," he said.

Still, Calvino acknowledged, "I think I'm looking at the majority of farmers that aren't willing to wake up and play the game, especially farther north."

So even as some voices in the community are calling for growers to go legit, farmers insistent on doing their thing unmolested by New York bankers and Silicon Valley tech bros are edging minute-by-minute toward twilight.

"It's not like in the future it's going to be a helicopter, or a raid," the farmer "D" told me. "Fish and Wildlife or the Water Bureau are going to fine you for water, for permits, and soon you'll owe a quarter million in fines. Then they'll take your land."

Follow Max Cherney on Twitter.