Photo via Flickr user R S

I grew up in basements. Eating pepperoni Hot Pockets and playing SEGA Dreamcast. Staring at buddy lists and Kazaa progress bars. Waiting for nine-minute scenes of Jenna Jameson, blonde and smooth and ferocious, a carnivore and an angel simultaneously, crawling toward a hard dick, mouth half-open, sweaty hairs stuck to her temples, giving orders and begging for more, wiping cum off of her eyelids.

My friend’s dad worked late at a factory that manufactured tampons. Sometimes we took lacquer from the garage and poured it into his dad’s empty beer bottles. We took off our socks and shoved them into the bottles and lit the socks on fire. Sometimes the bottles were the Smirnoff Ice his stepmom drank. My friend said only pussies and girls drank Smirnoff Ice. I wondered if there was an identity one could have in high school besides pussy or girl or god or janitor. I wondered if I would like Smirnoff Ice. Then we threw the bottles against the stone wall behind the house and watched them explode.

I went home and fell asleep on the couch. The next day I told people I’d been reading something by a dead guy who was Danish or Russian or had a mustache. Usually I was still eating Hot Pockets. Here was high school: shameless deception; processed carbohydrates; surrendering to beautiful women; destroying things simply to be reminded that I was not the only thing that could be destroyed.

And I listened to Tupac at high volumes. 

Rap was to me a means of sublimation—my fantasies of saying outrageous things to men of authority in a filled auditorium; holding a girl by the waist and telling her to meet me somewhere after class. But it was also insulation from the mundane, from my impotent, microscopic existence in a suburban sprawl. It was invincibility and a jetpack. Rap did not need a greater purpose aside from making me feel transported; alive simply because it took me out of my own frail body.

Tupac was himself a prompt, he was Tupac: The Dichotomy. The thug and the poet; the lover and the lothario; the nihilist and the daydreamer. To me he was all of those things. He was something that engulfed with paralyzing immediacy; a voice that sounded half like a phone sex operator, half like he needed a cough drop. Big beautiful eyelashes. Pounding on your face like it were a locked door, shouting about leaving dead bodies in abandoned buildings. He could not be ignored. He was fucking there. He was all over you. I listened to him to escape limits, logic, definition, and so he did not have to be definitively anything. The myth was irresistible, all of its contradictions. For four minutes and 40 seconds I was a renegade, a prophet, a hurricane.

Notorious BIG did not need your love, but he wanted it. Throwing his arm around you, telling you about the girl he fucked, sharing his takeout with you in the parking lot, laughing till he coughed like his throat was about to give birth to something. Spitting at the motherfuckers while licking his lips at a girl across the room. In a castle far away asking you to come join him. But I pictured Tupac with his head leaned against a subway car window, contemplating something vast; bleak montages and despair. His songs were not gospel but something carved into a rock by a man who had been stranded on an island. There were celebrations, but even those felt like dances around a tire fire after the apocalypse. He was by himself, trying to make it. It was 2001. I was 14.

High school was not a tutorial for integrating oneself into a brutal mass, but a lens to reveal the power of being completely alone.

**

Promotional materials for the Broadway musical Holler if Ya Hear Me declare that it is “inspired by the work of Tupac Shakur.” This is not accurate. Holler is not Tupac’s work come to life; it is his work stuffed in a museum. It is TUPAC: THE RIDE, ONLY AT SIX FLAGS. It is a diorama, a Tupac stained glass in a church window. A commodification of nostalgia, of death, of IN MEMORIAMs. It is a Tupac kumbaya.

It is a wink-nudge to that party you ended up at in some fraternity, when “How Do U Want It” was playing and no one wanted you there. When a girl who was wearing heels on the carpet and a tube top that just would not accommodate her geometry asked you what you were doing, who you were, do we even know you? You should, like, leave, honestly. And you were sitting there on the futon, looking at her, at everyone, and you didn’t really answer her, you just sort of shrugged and wanted to tell her you were someone important, except you weren’t. So you looked down and kept drinking until she walked away.

In the balconies of the Palace Theater girls in dresses took selfies in the darkness and sung along to “Dear Mama.” In the lobby were two big chalkboards with “MY DREAM IS …” written at the top, and a dozen blanks for people to fill in. Here is what they wrote: “To make a contribution,” “To make it big,” “To be famous,” “To find happiness,” “To make a difference,” “To help lots of people.” This was the black experience sanitized for white people. A vague longing for positivity and optimism; nothing specific or terrifying, because this was the deepest that people in gingham shirts can engage with social problems. They were here to turn grief into a bumper sticker, a one-lined addendum to a tumblr reblog, a crossed-arm head shake at The Struggles because they bought a meat patty from a bodega in Bed-Stuy that one time.

Holler is a watery mix of Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, West Side Story, and every urban drama redemption arc you have ever seen. There is the black protagonist returning from jail who is attempting to turn it all around, for real this time. There is the friend who is shot in the first act. The kingpin with a good heart. The young idealist. The handwringing mother. The sexy-but-beleaguered girlfriend who just can’t take the violence anymore. The skeptical white guy who isn’t-a-racist-I-swear. An old, hunched man in a dirty suit who only staggers and shouts bible passages from a megaphone and paints PEACE IS NEVER on project walls. The play is blackness as something recreational, blackness as something naughty and dangerous an audience can immerse themselves in for two-and-a-half hours.

There are brief sequences when the actors mash this into something resonant. Saul Williams, the lead, is a nuclear missile in every scene. He huffs and paces and spits words that seem like they scald his lips on the way out. But his performance doesn’t matter. The production is not about provoking but about rubbing your back; not about narrative but about reminding you that there once was a black person who sang a bunch of intense songs, threw gravel in your face, and then got murdered. It is an iTunes playlist. Buzzfeed’s 28 Times Tupac Gave You Feels. Jimmy Fallon swiveling in a chair with his feet off the ground while Michael from The Wire sings “Changes” with Bruce Hornsby on the piano.

This is how we process emotions now. Our histories are raided and stripped for parts, peddled at slideshows and listicles, at Full House reunions, at musicals that don’t last. We don’t connect, we recognize. We don’t have identities, we have signifiers. We have NOSTALGIA: UNRATED COLLECTOR’S EDITION. There is no punch line, no context, no investment, nothing at stake. There is no wound because there is not the thing you actually loved, the feeling you actually felt; there are no longer the memories, just the YOU ARE NOW ENTERING sign on the memory interstate. There is only the minutiae that once defined your life, dragged from the attic, pumped full of helium and released into the sky for you to look at as it floats away.

Follow John on Twitter.

Holler if Ya Hear Me is closing this Sunday, July 20, after just one month on Broadway. Buy tickets here.

Kim Kardashian is a great life coach. Photo via Glu Mobile

A friend of mine recently told me there was a cell phone game that I needed to try. He said it was more than a game—it was an addiction and a revelation. He explained that by the end of the year, the app has been projected to make $200 million in revenue.

Still, I’m not usually into cell phone games. I missed Angry Birds and Candy Crush. I loved Snake on my flip phone and I remember borrowing my dad’s early version of the Blackberry to play Brick Breaker, but that was as far as I’d ever fallen into the phone gaming life.

That is, until I found a game worth playing, a game that could teach me how to change my life for the better. I’m talking, of course, about Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

I am a 25-year-old freelancer struggling to stay afloat in San Francisco. In other words, I’m poor. My style ranges from jeans and a t-shirt to jeans and a sweatshirt, and I tell the story of running into "E" from Entourage in a bathroom in Vegas and unsuccessfully attempting a handshake too often to consider myself the kind of guy who rubs shoulders with A-list celebs. I had a lot to learn from Kim, and luckily, with this app, she has made herself a willing Sherpa to the top of the celebrity world.   

I’m not into gimmicky apps. I believe that, at its best, my smartphone can make me a more efficient and effective human being. My Google Maps App helps me never get lost. My Yelp App keeps from eating at bad restaurants. And now my Kim App would guarantee that I don’t dress wrong or stay poor. This felt big—Flappy Bird big.  

To begin, I “kustomized” my character to look like a squarer-jawed version of myself. I realized pretty quickly that cutely misspelling words with Ks in the place of Cs would be a motif throughout the game. I was charmed and impressed. It took me a while to remove the default goatee that my avatar came with, but when I did, I felt ready to climb the social ladder. Anyone can be famous with an angular chin covering—I needed to do it my way.

My cyber-boss at the clothing store was a sassy black guy with a bowtie, a paperboy hat and forearm tattoos, which seemed fitting. I didn’t like his body language at first, but when he explained he was late for an appointment to look at a Beverly Hills apartment, I could empathize. My non-digital self was stressed looking for apartments in Oakland—I could only imagine what the competition for a chic Beverly Hills place was like. When he left, I was apprehensive for a moment about what I had to do. But luckily, green arrows popped up over every task that needed completing. And when I clicked on them, rolls of dollar bills fell onto the floor. If all else failed, this job at the clothing store didn’t seem so bad.

But wait, this was the same lack of ambition that had put me into this rut to begin with. What would Kim do? She would hustle her way to the top by any means necessary. I finished locking up and got on with my ascent.

When I left, I ran into Kim Kardashian right outside. So this is what LA is like! She asked me to reopen the store so she could pick something out. My boss might not like this, but who cares? Kim comes first.

I helped her pick out a dress, and when she asked how much, I told her it was on the house. I felt uncomfortable saying it, but there was only one choice in my speech bubble. When she said she couldn’t accept it, I was relieved. I loved Kim and she was probably famous enough to deserve free things—this country’s notorious for giving the rich and beloved stuff they don’t need—but I really didn’t want to get fired on my first day. Unfortunately, the only available response was to insist that she take it. I didn’t feel good about giving the expensive dress away, but I liked that Kim hadn’t just accepted it without some pushback. She totally would have paid for it if I hadn’t insisted, which showed that she really was a good person. And Kim appreciated the free dress so much that she invited me to a photo shoot at the Metropolitan Magazine building. This felt like the first big moment to earmark for my own real life—loser bosses don’t matter; if you want to make it, give shit away to any celebrity you meet.

I had to go back to my apartment to get ready for the shoot, but suddenly began to feel self-conscious about my look. People like me don’t get invited to model—what was I thinking making my avatar look like a freelance reporter? I changed my hair from parted to spiked up in front and put on a denim button-down and pink shoes. People wear these types of things, I think. Maybe real-life me should try colorful shoes—I made a note to go the Vans store tomorrow. I underlined the word “Vans”—Kim liked Vans.

I looked completely different, which felt right. I left my apartment and was told to take the bus to Beverly Hills. I usually like the bus—when I ride it, I feel a part of the city. The scene through the big, scratched windows is like a moving painting. But now it felt below me.

When I arrived, the photographer asked me my name. The default name in the speech bubble was “Nathaniel” and I wanted so badly to be named Nathaniel, but I knew it wasn’t me. I wrote in “Joe” and then erased it, and put in “Joey” and erased that, too. I finally settled on “Joseph.” It wasn’t Nathaniel, but at least Kim wouldn’t be embarrassed by it.

Kim looked amazing in the red dress I had picked out for her. And her photographer friend wanted to take pictures of me. I posed for him and he told me he thought I should model! This was big—my decision to dress the opposite of what my instincts told me was working. And after the shoot, Kim invited me to meet her at a party at the Brew Palms. I felt like I’d earned it too. I could have worn those boring clothes and none of this would have happened. But I wore a denim button-down, rolled up to my elbows, and I put the time in with my hair. This party with Kim was the reward I deserved.

At the bus stop, a good-looking guy in a white tuxedo top and camo pants asked me about the party at the Brew Palms. I told him that he wouldn’t get in and instantly regretted being so rude. But, I mean, he didn’t know Kim like I knew Kim. And I would be embarrassed if he showed up and Kim asked why he was there and I had to explain that I met him while waiting for the bus and he seemed nice enough and I didn’t know that the Brew Palms event was exclusive. I had done the right thing; it was better not to lead him on about the party.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that poor Kim must go through this every day. I realized how hard it must be for Kim to always say no to all these clingers with kind faces but bad motives. I realized that Kim was a saint for even making this game, for sharing all her knowledge with little old me. I quickly closed the app so I could give Kim the five-star rating she deserved. 40,000 others had felt the same way and beat me to the punch. They knew what I knew: it’s hard to make it to the top, but it’s even harder to remember the little people with bad style once you do.

I don’t know if people can ever change themselves completely. I don’t know if we are who we are, or if we are what we make ourselves. And even with this newfound knowledge, I’ll never be Kim, because I wasn’t blessed with that it factor. But I do feel wiser. And I will be buying those pink Vans, because it’d be wrong not to. It’s what my better self would do.

Strangers with candy: Modern-day Klansmen are desperate for new recruits. Photo via Flickr user arete13

The Ku Klux Klan is having some trouble with recruitment. After all, competition is getting pretty fierce among the various right-wing militias and bunker-dwellers looking to build up armies to fight the fast-approaching Race War Apocalypse. Last weekend, Klansmen in South Carolina tried to sweeten their pitch by dropping off goody bags stuffed with candy and nativist propaganda in the driveways of unsuspecting exurbanites.

Residents were unsurprisingly alarmed by the gift, which included mints, Smarties, and a flyer invite to “SAVE OUR LAND / JOIN THE KLAN,” accompanied by a website and a hotline number for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a southern sect based in North Carolina. The number lead callers to a recorded rant about Mexicans and their “third-world diseases.”

“It is time to enforce our immigration laws and send them back, and put troops on our border with a shoot-to-kill policy,” says a man with a thick Southern accent. “Always remember, if it ain’t white, it ain’t right. White power.”

In an interview with FOX Carolina, Robert Jones, the Imperial Klaliff of the sect, said that the racist candy bags were part of a larger recruitment effort in advance of the Klan’s tri-annual “national night ride.”

Because this is Obama’s America, where black people sometimes live next door to white people, some of the flyers ended up in the yards of minority residents. But Jones explained that the group didn’t target specific houses, because obviously that would be racist.

"I mean, we can't tell who lives in a house, whether they're black, white, Mexican, gay—we can't tell that," he told the TV station. "And if you were to look at somebody's house like that, that means you'd be pretty much a racist." He added that residents don’t need to be scared of the Klansmen, unless they’re doing something wrong—which, according to the LWK website, includes “drugs, homosexuality, abortion, and race-mixing.”

The South Carolina charm offensive is not an isolated incident. Despite being the country’s most notorious hate group, the KKK’s membership has been steadily falling for decades, thanks to infighting, scandals, and a generally bad reputation. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that membership in the KKK now numbers between 5,000 and 8,000, spread across isolated (and frequently warring) sects.

In a sense, the Klan has become the Windows of hate groups. They enjoy great brand recognition and customer loyalty among racist grandfathers, but are rapidly losing market share to savvier, more aggressive right-wing fear-mongers.

But in the past few months, various KKK sects and chapters in several states have tried to step up their recruitment efforts. Using social media and other digital strategies, along with traditional tactics like late-night leafleting, they are targeting new members—particularly nascent racists between the ages of 13 and 17. In Pennsylvania, for example, a local KKK group announced in April that it was launching a “neighborhood watch,” informing residents of Fairview Township that they could “sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake.” Even more alarmingly, Barcroft TV reported this spring that some chapters in West Virginia and the Midwest are even starting to train members in military-style combat—a first for the modern KKK.

More recently, KKK groups like the Loyal White Knights have been capitalizing on the current border crisis in an effort to swell their flagging ranks. Fliers similar to those that popped up South Carolina have materialized on suburban doorsteps and windshields in Atlanta, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida in the past few weeks, scaring local residents and raising fears that the hooded hate group is undergoing another resurgence.

Whether that is the case isn’t clear yet, according to SPLC’s Mark Potok. The KKK has successfully parlayed nativism into new members in the past, most famously during the wave of Catholic and Jewish immigrants in the 1920s, but also during the Bush-era debates over immigration reform. But according to the SPLC, the number of KKK chapters has declined significantly since 2010, amidst a proliferation of other right-wing terrorist groups.

Of course, the Klansmen aren’t the only ones exploiting the plight of detained migrant children. In addition to the various Tea Party politicians fundraising off amnesty fear-mongering, Patriot militias and other Cliven Bundy fans have been patrolling the border for weeks: setting up “command post,” blockading buses full of Guatemalan children, and drawing in new conscripts who see the current influx of unaccompanied minors at the border as another harbinger of some vague but imminent collapse.

Here again, the KKK finds itself at a disadvantage—because who wants to eat candy and play dress-up when there’s a war going on? 

Photo courtesy of Bim Ditson

Have you ever played basketball on a hoop attached to the back of a graffitied utility van? Probably not, because you aren't in a band. And even if you are in a band, you don't live in Portland, Oregon. And even if you are in a band, and you live in Portland, chances are that you missed the registration period for the basketball tournament. All 32 slots on the bracket were filled with bands in less than 24 hours. There's always next year.

The annual tournament, called Rigsketball, takes place every summer all around Portland. Here's how it works: The Rigsketball van is parked in front of strip clubs, in cul-de-sacs, and in alleyways—two bands face off until a champion emerges or the cops break it up.

The band that makes it through to win the championship walks away with bragging rights, a bunch of media attention, and an obscenely large golden trophy topped with a statue of the van. Past tournaments have included Portland royalty bands like Starfucker, Typhoon, AAN, and the Rock 'n' Roll Soldiers.

There's a 32-band bracket this year, with bands like Minden, the We Shared Milk, Hustle & Drone, and Con Bro Chill competing. The first round of games takes place on Friday at PDXPop Now!, Portland's city-wide music festival. Be sure to show up before the games devolve into a drunken roman candle fight, like has happened in the past.

Bim Ditson and the Rigsketball hoop. Photo by Brenton Salo

Rigsketball is the brainchild of Bim Ditson, a lanky guy with a frizzy red mohawk who looks a bit like a punk version of the turtle guy in Master of Disguise. I first met Bim when he was a 15-year-old high school kid in Eugene, Oregon. He was loud and charismatic and was already running an oddly-successful chainmaille jewelry business at local craft fairs. The last time I saw him, he showed me an eight-inch stick-and-poke tattoo on his thigh of a slice of pizza nailed to a cross. He called it "Cheezus Christ."

Bim moved to Portland to join one of Portland's most-loved bands called And And And. For a while he was going to shows every night and reporting on them for local newspaper Willamette Week in a column called Bimstagram. Then he decided to drill a hoop to the back of the And And And van to give the band something to do on tour.

It was only natural that other bands would start challenging them to three-on-three pick-up games. That grew into this insane, 32-band tournament. Bim's always been good at making stuff happen. I recently called him up to find out what the hell Rigsketball is, how you play it, and why all the bands in Portland are suddenly into sports.

VICE: Hey Bim. Why'd you decide to build a basketball hoop on the back of your tour van, anyway?
Bim Ditson: My band, And And And, built it because we thought it'd be funny. We would play pick-up games after soundcheck against the other bands on the bill that night. It grew from there into Rigsketball.

But the hoop comes off, right? You don't just drive around with that ten-foot basketball hoop on the back of your van.
It folds down, but it's on there permanently. We just needed something to cut down on drag and get us better gas mileage, so we went ahead and built a heavy basketball-hoop spoiler on the van.

Smart. So Rigsketball started out with you guys playing against bands before shows. When did the tournament come together?
This is officially our fourth year. When we started out, I really had to hassle bands to get 32. Now, when we open registration, the bracket is full in a day. We had 20-25 bands signed on during the first hour.

The first year we played each game in a different location—we had 31 different spots and no permits or anything. I can't believe we got away with it. Now, we just use a handful of locations.

Photo by Brenton Salo

What kind of spots?
Parking lots of bars, little dead-end streets, skate parks... We look for the places where it's OK for you to brown bag it.

Are all Portland bands really into basketball now?
There are at least 10 people that I know who, before Rigsketball, never touched a basketball. Now they play all the time. 

You're keeping them healthy. Does Rigsketball have any special rules?
This year we're going to be doing best of three games to 15. Three-on-three, half-court, streetball style. The teams decide as they're playing how aggressive they want to be. Sometimes it's basketball and other times it's more like rugby. Depends on who is calling fouls. 

We've had games where people climb up on the van and push each other off, but also games where they call every hand slap.

Is there a big prize, or do people just do it for the glory?
Totally for the glory. We make an absurd trophy every year and people like that. Last year we set up a bunch of media stuff for the winner, which helps them with visibility in the music community.

TxE, past Rigsketball champions. Photo courtesy of Bim Ditson

Anything wild happen in past years?
We've run the gamut on crazy stuff. There were days where we played outside of a strip club and all the strippers came out to watch, and then everybody started shooting roman candles at each other. It's absurd. You let 100 musicians do whatever they want and it gets crazy most of the time. No one leaves without at least a skinned knee.

When's the first game this year?
The first and second rounds will be this weekend at PDXPop Now!. It'll go from 2PM until 9PM Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The semifinals and finals will be the following weekend, with a big finale show that Friday, with a bunch of the bands. The show is going to be at this ridiculous East Portland Eagles Lodge.

It's the kind of place where old people with a lot of pins on their coats go to day-drink. It's pretty awesome. We'll have two stages, and KPSU—the local college radio station—is sponsoring it.

What is it about the Portland music scene that keeps it so close-knit? It seems like you guys are all good buddies.
Portland has a huge infrastructure of entry-level venues. Places that will throw free or $5 shows and let the band keep the door. We have an endless number of those venues, plus an endless number of basements—bands always have places to play.

There's such a strong community and camaraderie between Portland bands—even ones in different genres. It's not uncommon to see psych bands on the same bill as a metal band. That's why I wanted to start Rigsketball. It taps into that idea that we're all on the same team when we're at this level. We aren't hurting each other when one of us gets success. We're all in it together.

Except when you're competing for the Rigsketball trophy.
A little good-natured competition never hurt anybody.

Check out the 2014 Rigsketball compilation featuring this year's bands here.

Follow River Donaghey on Twitter.

Rick Perry in 2012. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

In April, as a Texas state grand jury began hearing testimony for a criminal investigation of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, the politician sought to defend himself by hiring a high-powered attorney named David Botsford. That raised some eyebrows, to say the least. Perry, a conservative Republican, had hired a politically active progressive Democrat as his defense attorney. But within Austin’s tight-knit legal community, Perry’s hiring of Botsford made perfect sense. Austin, where the grand jury is seated, is a rare progressive enclave in the reddest of states—and the majority of the grand jurors now determining Perry’s fate are Democrats.

Perhaps Perry’s supporters had reasons to be concerned about his choice of attorney. An investigation by VICE has found that Botsford, in the late 1990s, had secretly provided what Botsford claimed was potentially damning information on Perry to the FBI in the hope of instigating a federal criminal investigation of his now client. At one point, Botsford even described himself as an informer for the FBI in regard to the information he was providing to the agency about Perry and spoke of furtive meetings with FBI agents. He strongly expressed his belief that he had brought the Feds hard evidence of an allegedly illegal stock-trading scheme involving Perry. In 2011, the Huffington Post even ran a false and erroneous account that Perry had been targeted by a federal criminal investigation, based in part on information Botsford provided to the website.

In short, the man now entrusted with preventing a grand jury from bringing criminal charges against Perry once worked just as hard to put Perry in jail.

Botsford did not respond to several phone messages and emails seeking comment for this story. At the time of publication a spokesman for Perry did not respond, either. A secretary for Botsford told VICE: “Mr. Botsford is a very busy man. Do you know he is currently representing the governor of Texas? If you really wanted an interview, you should have contacted him like six weeks ago.”

Perry has good reason to want to hire the most able—and loyal—attorney to defend him. A special prosecutor, Michael McCrum, impaneled the state grand jury to hear evidence as to whether Perry had broken any laws while using the powers of his office to curtail the funding of the anti-corruption unit of the Travis County district attorney’s office at a time when it was investigating an agency of the Perry administration. The Travis County Public Integrity Unit had been investigating whether officials at a Texas anti-cancer state agency had violated any laws by showing favoritism in the awarding of grants to wealthy political supporters and contributors to the campaign of Governor Perry.

In June 2013, Perry vetoed an annual $7.5 million appropriation by the state legislature to fund the Travis County Public Integrity Unit. The veto of the funds for the anti-corruption unit was apparently legal and within Perry’s power as governor. But Perry had allegedly offered to withhold the veto of the funds in exchange for the resignation of the Travis County district attorney, who had been arrested on DUI charges. Unsuccessful in his attempt to unseat the district attorney, he pushed the veto through while simultaneously offering to reinstate the funding for the unit if the district attorney resigned. Because of Perry’s pressure on the district attorney and the anti-corruption unit, and his offer of a quid pro quo of forgoing a veto of the funding or reinstating it in exchange for her resignation, the grand jury is investigating whether Perry allegedly abused his oversight and misused his office in what may constitute illegal coercion and bribery of a public official.

“I’m investigating the circumstances surrounding the veto and whether the governor’s actions were appropriate or not under the law,” McCrum, a former federal prosecutor for the Western District of Texas who is now a prominent San Antonio defense attorney, said in a recent phone interview. “My duty is to look at all of the laws and determine whether any were broken by the governor or anyone else.”

Solomon Wisenberg, who worked as a federal prosecutor alongside McCrum in San Antonio, said McCrum is a “stellar person and attorney in every sense of the word.” Wisenberg and others described him as meticulous and thorough—a prosecutor “who will leave no stone unturned.”

Botsford is similarly highly regarded among his peers as one of Austin’s best defense attorneys. Colleagues and adversaries alike describe Botsford as “bookish” and “congenial” and someone who works zealously but within the rules to defend his clients—descriptions echoed about his temporary adversary, McCrum.

“I think if Governor Perry had chosen a Republican lawyer from Houston or Dallas, that would have been a mistake,” Ben Florey, a former Travis County assistant district attorney, said. “David knows the nuances and practices of law in Travis County.”

Although experts say that Botsford apparently did not break any ethical rules if he did not inform Perry of his covert meetings with the FBI, Wisenberg said he believed that Botsford should have told Perry about his actions: “I think you should disclose something like this this to your client. If I were the client, I would certainly want to know.”

Federal law enforcement authorities provide a very different account of their interactions with Botsford than the more heroic one that Botsford has privately given over the years to colleagues: They say that they never conducted any criminal investigation of Perry, let alone one based on information Botsford had provided them. They say that the information Botsford turned over to the FBI about Perry allegedly being involved in insider trading was very similar to accounts that had already appeared in the Dallas Morning News. And they say that the FBI hears out virtually anyone out who has a complaint, which is what they claim they did with Botsford—and after hearing out Botsford, they saw no reason to follow up.

William Blagg, then the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, the place where Botsford had taken his information about Perry in the late 1990s, said in an interview that he was concerned—“wary,” in Blagg’s words—that Botsford’s efforts to instigate a criminal investigation of Perry were done to affect the outcome of a state election.

Perry was at the time locked in a razor-thin race to be lieutenant governor against a Democrat named John Sharp. Perry had Karl Rove on his side, advising his campaign. And Republicans were increasingly winning office in the once Democratic state. But Sharp was proving to be a tough adversary. With Election Day growing closer, both campaigns pulled out all the stops searching for an advantage. That’s when Botsford came forward with his information for the federal authorities.

In fact, Blagg told me in an interview, Sharp had personally come to him to request that he open a criminal investigation of Perry in the closing days of the campaign. Sharp’s obvious motive aside, Blagg pointed out to Sharp that he had brought him little of substance. Sharp told Blagg that an attorney working with him—who turned out to be Botsford—would soon be in touch and have much more detailed information.

Sharp, who is today the chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, declined to comment for this story.

Today Blagg is an assistant district attorney in Bexar County, Texas. He said that he had been naturally wary of Sharp and Botsford’s entreaties because they “occurred during a political time.” The former US attorney continued: “You don’t want an investigation to further a political agenda… Even if there had been anything there, we would have waited the short time until after the election is over.”

Attempting to have opposing candidates investigated by federal or state authorities during election season is a time-honored tradition in Texas and other parts of the country. Greg Cox, the director of the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County district attorney's office, said in an interview that “political opponents file complaints against each other one after another” just prior to Election Day. Investigations are routinely “deferred until after the election.”

When Botsford met with the FBI in 1998, the information he brought the agents was nothing more than similar information that had already appeared in a newspaper article: a story written by veteran political reporter Wayne Slater in the Dallas Morning News on May 15, 1998, in which he raised questions about whether Perry had benefited from an insider stock tip.

Slater and the Dallas Morning News reported that back in 1996, Perry had purchased stock in a company called Kinetic Concepts, Inc., which was owned by a wealthy contributor to Perry’s campaigns named James Leininger.

On the same day stock was purchased on Perry’s behalf by a stockbroker, Slater reported, “a California investment group began buying 2.2 million shares in the company, boosting the stock's value.” This suggested that Perry might have been given insider information that the stock’s value was going to skyrocket, a suspicion that was further fueled by the fact that Perry had spoken at a luncheon attended by Leininger. Perry and Leininger admitted speaking together the day of the stock purchase, but the two mean denied ever discussing the stock or engaging in collusion.

During a meeting with the FBI, Botsford did little more than provide agents with “any information [other] than what was in the newspaper,” a federal law enforcement official said. “The whole thing was very amateurish. You initially had Sharp himself come in. He didn’t even use a proxy or cutout or send someone else to make it appear that it had nothing to do with the campaign. And then you have a guy Sharp sends us who has nothing.”

Blagg and two other federal law enforcement officials told us in interviews that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department had ever opened any formal investigation of Perry for the insider trades. “I never heard back anything from the FBI,” Blagg said. “And we never opened a file. There just was never any investigation.”

A second law enforcement official questioned about the matter added: “Anyone can come in and file a complaint, which is what Botsford did. But you can’t go out and say because someone listened to you that someone is under criminal investigation.”

Still, that didn’t stop the Sharp campaign and Botsford from peddling a story to Texas reporters in the final days of the campaign that Perry might be under investigation by the FBI for insider trading. But not a single news organization published a story about it—because it was impossible to confirm. It was impossible to confirm, of course, because it was untrue. Sharp and Botsford had simply been unable to convince federal authorities to investigate Perry.

In the end, Perry was elected lieutenant governor, winning 50 percent of the 3.6 million ballots cast to Sharp’s 48 percent. Had Sharp and Botsford succeeded in having the FBI open a criminal investigation of Perry—or even managed to get a major Texas newspaper to erroneously report that that was the case—the outcome could have easily been different.

While Sharp and Botsford were unable to affect the outcome of Perry’s 1998 race to be lieutenant governor, more than a decade later Botsford was presented with a second shot at harming Perry’s electoral prospects when Perry decided to run for president. For a while, Perry was a first-tier candidate and, briefly, the front-runner. Political opponents and opposition researchers scurried for not-yet-public information to discredit him.

At a pivotal moment in the campaign, on September 11, 2011, the Huffington Post published a story alleging there once had been a federal criminal investigation of Perry: “In the late 90s, federal law enforcement authorities investigated allegations that Perry had engaged in insider trading, sources involved in the inquiry tell the Huffington Post,” the news site erroneously reported.

The primary source for the Huffington Post article was Botsford, who was quoted at length in the article as an anonymous source:

It took at least two years for an Austin attorney to uncover the suspicious trade. The attorney, who would only discuss the matter on condition of anonymity… said he spoke with two sources who corroborated that Perry and Leininger had met on the day in question and that the donor had advised the politician on the stock purchase.

“Perry bought immediately,” the attorney recalled. “I mean it was immediately. It was immediately after that that the transaction was announced and the stock went up considerably. My source was telling me that Leininger told [Perry] to go buy some stock.

“I was told that such a private conversation took place and in that private conversation, Leininger told him he needed to invest a little money,” the attorney added.

The attorney took his findings to federal prosecutors. They met in an Austin ice cream parlor and he related what he knew.

Reporters for other news organizations attempted to confirm the allegations, but were initially skeptical. How could the governor of the nation’s second-largest state have been the target of a federal criminal investigation more than a full decade earlier, but somehow nobody heard about it? They were assured by their sources that there never had been any such criminal investigation, and there the matter died.

David Botsford amid a scrum of reporters in 1998, during the trial of Karla Faye Tucker, a murderer who was represented by Botsford in her ultimately unsuccessful attempt to have her death sentence commuted to life in prison. Photo by Paul K. Buck/AFP/Getty Images

The current—and very real—state criminal investigation of Perry by a special prosecutor, appointed by the Travis County district attorney, is a complex tale:

It begins with a 2012 investigation by the Travis County DA's office of a state-run agency: the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, or CPRIT, which was set up in 2007 to dispense more than $3 billion in grants for cancer research over ten years. The little-known agency provides more funds for cancer research than any other government agency except for the National Cancer Institute.

An activist agency such as CPRIT would seem, at first glance, to be an aberration for a state with a fondness for limited government, anti-spending sentiments, and a Tea Party senator in Ted Cruz. But long before he was disgraced for doping, champion cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong was one of the state’s most respected and beloved residents, and Armstrong and his foundation pushed for the creation of the agency. Perry saw this as an opportunity to cross ideological fault lines and burnish his credentials for a presidential run. Eventually, the two became political partners in creating CPRIT.

Instead of awarding grants based on the potential of projects to save lives, however, CPRIT quickly became known for mismanagement, cronyism, and insider dealing. Preferential treatment was allegedly given to the political backers and major campaign contributors of Perry and other Republican state officeholders, according to the findings of a state audit and other official internal and governmental investigations of the agency.

Dr. Alfred Gilman, the agency’s chief scientific officer and a Nobel laureate, resigned in protest following a grant being awarded without a full scientific review, a sidestepping of the agency’s internal regulations. Almost three dozen other scientists also eventually resigned, complaining of “suspicion of favoritism” and “hucksterism.” Many of them sat on peer-review committees tasked with evaluating applications for scientific merit. Too often, they said, the committees’ recommendations were ignored and qualified applicants were turned down in favor of the politically connected.

Some former CPRIT officials said in interviews that the favoritism shown to biotech firms and companies associated with Perry came with a price. “It wasn’t like one person just got rich who should have never qualified," said one. "The money was taken from somewhere else. Some program that might help save the lives of children with a rare type of cancer didn’t get funded because someone else wanted to line their pockets.” After temporarily suspending its grant-giving, overhauling its upper management, and putting in place new safeguards to prevent similar abuses, CPRIT says the agency has now turned a corner.

In 2012, Greg Cox, the director of the Travis County Public Integrity Unit, confirmed that it had opened a criminal investigation of the agency. The Travis County DA's office is unique in Texas: It prosecutes local criminal offenses like most other district attorneys or state prosecuting attorneys. But because it is in Austin, the Texas capital, it also has jurisdiction to investigate political corruption in state government, which is what the Public Integrity Unit was created to do.

Most famously, the unit is known for having prosecuted former US House of Representatives majority leader Tom DeLay for allegedly laundering money to conceal corporate campaign contributions. The Travis County DA won a conviction of DeLay in 2011, which resulted in a three-year prison sentence, but that decision was later overturned by an appeals court. As things currently stand, the Travis County DA has appealed that ruling to yet a higher court.

The reversal of DeLay’s conviction, the large number of Republican officeholders it has convicted, the fact that the elected DA is a Democrat, and the fact that Travis County votes primarily for Democrats have led to allegations by Perry and other Texas Republicans that the office is partisan. Defenders of the DA and the Public Integrity Unit have pointed out that the office wins convictions of most political corruption cases it brings and a disproportionate number of Republicans are charged because Republicans control the majority of the state’s offices. The Travis County DA's office has won a number of convictions against prominent Democratic politicians as well, including a powerful state legislator and even a Democratic speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.

The district attorney’s investigation of the cancer agency in part focused on major campaign contributors and supporters of Perry who allegedly got preferential treatment and thus could indirectly impact the reputations of the Perry administration and even Perry himself, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The investigation initially went well: In December 2013, a former senior official at CPRIT, Jerald Cobb, was indicted on felony charges that he had circumvented normal scientific or financial oversight to award an $11 million grant to a Dallas biotech firm. Cobb is currently awaiting trial.

On April 12, 2014, in the midst of the CPRIT investigation, Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving. She was three times over the legal limit, and police found an open bottle of vodka in her vehicle. While being placed under arrest, Lehmberg was caught on a tape threatening one of her arresting police officers: “I am not drunk. I am not a criminal. I’m the [bleep] damn district attorney. You better do something pretty quick 'cause I’m getting pretty pissed off.” She was so unruly during her booking that the police felt it necessary to put a net over her head to prevent her from sticking her tongue out in protest, an act that by that point she had already performed for the jailhouse-booking cameras.

Lehmberg pleaded guilty to the drunk-driving charges and agreed to a 45-day jail sentence. There were calls for her resignation, including from Democrats, but she vowed to stay in office until the 2016 election, after which she would retire.

Perry saw an opening and quickly pounced. The governor threatened to veto a planned $7.5 million for the Public Integrity Unit over the next two years unless she agreed to resign. Lehmberg steadfastly refused.

Among the reasons that Lehmberg wouldn't give in to the threats was that Perry, as governor, would be able to appoint her temporary successor if she resigned. This meant that for the first time a Republican might control the Travis County DA's office and would oversee the investigation of CPRIT.

In response to a complaint filed by a watchdog group, a Texas state judge appointed a special prosecutor, McCrum, to investigate whether Perry had broken the law in demanding Lehmberg’s resignation in exchange for not vetoing funds for her office, or, in his later offer, after the veto, to restore them if she resigned. McCrum in turn impaneled a special grand jury, which in late April began hearing evidence.

Powerful public officials—among them governors and even presidents of the United States—have long attacked prosecutors investigating them or their political associates by defunding them or simply firing them—a practice that is usually legal and constitutional.

Richard Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973 in what has become known as the Saturday Night Massacre, which galvanized public opinion against the president and was a turning point in the Watergate drama that led to his resignation from office. But the House Judiciary Committee, in drawing up articles of impeachment for Nixon, did not include the firing of the special prosecutor as one of them. Nor did Cox’s successor as special prosecutor consider criminal charges against Nixon for firing Cox. The reason: Even though Nixon had allegedly engaged in obstruction of justice and other alleged criminal actions to thwart the criminal investigations of him and the White House—and the firing of Cox was perhaps his most audacious and outrageous attempt to defeat the rule of law—Nixon’s firing of the special prosecutor was both legal and constitutional.

Perry’s vetoing of appropriations for the Travis County district attorney’s office could similarly have irreparably stymied the investigation of Perry’s managements of CPRIT and the alleged favoritism displayed toward political backers and contributors. But such a veto of funds, like Nixon’s firing of Cox, was apparently entirely legal and constitutional.

In defense of the governor’s veto at the time, his spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said, “This veto was made in accordance with the veto power afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution.” Botsford similarly told reporters just before the grand jury started proceedings that, in his and his client’s opinion, what Perry did “pertains to the power of the governor to issue vetoes as allowed under the Texas Constitution.” The investigation, Botsford said, would vindicate that Perry’s veto and related actions were “carried out in both the spirit and letter of the law.”

Had Perry simply vetoed funding for the Travis County district attorney’s office and stopped with that, there would have been no question that his actions were within the bounds of the law. But Perry did not stop there. Even before the veto, Perry, through intermediaries, informed Lehmberg that he would forgo the veto if she were to resign. In subsequent weeks after the veto, Perry, again through intermediaries, offered to restore the funding almost as quickly as he had withheld it, if Lehmberg were to resign.

While vetoing funds for the office might be legal, offering to forgo the veto or restore the funds in exchange for Lehmberg’s resignation might be a potential crime, the state judge who had appointed the special prosecutor concluded.

The grand jury is investigating whether Perry’s offer of returning funding in exchange for Lehmberg’s resignation and perhaps other things might have constituted a bribe, according to people close to the grand jury. The grand jury is also looking into whether Perry had attempted to “coerce” Lehmberg into undertaking “a specific performance of [her] official duty”—in this case, stepping aside.

The seriousness of the investigation only underscores that Perry needed the best man possible as his legal counsel. In other words, he needed David Botsford.

In 1996, Botsford was recognized for his skill and his good relations with colleagues when he was named president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Benjamin Blackburn, another Austin defense attorney, said, “Botsford is incredibly smart. He does complicated civil litigation in federal court that requires know-how and intelligence that most attorneys don’t have.”

Botsford is also a well-known figure within Travis County’s Democratic Party, fundraising and donating his time to judges, congressional candidates, and other Democrats. “I see him at fundraisers,” Blackburn said. “You’ll see him at the big fundraisers, but he’s not active at the grassroots level; he’s more moving and shaking from the top down.”

Texas state campaign finance records show that Botsford made more than $24,000 in campaign contributions over the past decade to Texas judges, judicial candidates, and other local officeholders— a majority of whom are Democrats.

It is because of these partisan connections, not in spite of them, that Blackburn and others in the Austin legal community believe it was a shrewd move for Perry to retain Botsford before the Travis County grand jury.

“Travis County and Austin in general is an island of liberalism within Texas," Blackburn said. "There’s no politician that has won countywide office as a Republican here in nearly two decades… People, even if they lean more conservatively, give money to the Democrats.” To the uninformed it may appear that, on the surface, Perry’s hiring of Botsford might make strange “bedfellows”; yet Blackburn said it was a “smart move for Perry” that “makes sense.”

A local law enforcement official who wished to remain anonymous agreed with Blackburn’s assessment: “Rick Perry has to be thinking that if he were indicted, and a jury were seated, the jurors would be mostly Democrats in a Democratic county.”

“To me it seems the choice was assessed on merit, and that’s kind of a flat world,” says Kyle Lowe, an Austin defense attorney who has known Botsford for years. “The governor is looking to defend himself before this goes any further. David knows the [Travis County] district attorney, and he also knows Gregg Cox at the Public Integrity Unit. He’s known them for a long time.”

There are recent indications that the grand jury is wrapping up its work, although few if any specifics are known about the investigation’s potential outcome. Texas has some of the toughest grand jury secrecy laws in the country. Those who testify can be jailed for simply revealing what questions they were asked during the proceedings, although some Texas attorneys told us that any prosecution of witnesses for simply talking about their own testimony might be successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds.

In the meantime, Texas taxpayers are footing the bill to defend Perry before the grand jury. Botsford was paid more than $41,000 for his legal work for Perry up to June 18, according to information made public by the Texas state comptroller. (McCrum had submitted invoices for $22,000 over a similar time period.)

When the San Antonio-Express News recently tried to learn more about exactly what services Botsford was providing to Perry at the taxpayer’s expense by filing a public-records request with the Travis County’s attorney’s office, Botsford wrote state officials asking that they not make that information public.

Botsford’s letter to state officials underscores how seriously he and his client are taking the grand jury probe: “Disclosure would provide a road map to strategic and tactical decisions made during the course of my ongoing representation while simultaneously revealing matters subject to grand jury secrecy.”

A sign indicating the “rules of conduct” for attendance greets you upon entry at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. “Please be reminded that the 9/11 Memorial is a place of remembrance and quiet reflection,” it says. “Visitors should exercise proper decorum, personal behavior, and conduct at all times.”

While decorum may not be a word in the average American’s vocabulary, it goes without saying that the Memorial pools that now exist on the hallowed ground where nearly 3,000 people lost their lives on September 11th, 2001 aren’t exactly the ideal environment to exercise one’s tastelessness. To most, the mere idea of acting in a less-than reverent manner when standing on such consecrated land would be impossible.

Said pools, located where the Twin Towers once stood, are enormous holes in the Earth surrounded by the names of those who perished—visiting them is a solemn, overwhelming experience.

The sheer magnitude of the one-acre pools, the largest manmade waterfalls in the United States, is intended to impart the enormity of the loss of life that took place in the buildings they have replaced. The intense sound of water flowing, constantly flowing, down the infinitely deep pools drowns out the sound of the city surrounding it, thus facilitating the aforementioned quiet reflection.

It is a place to reflect on the fragility of human life and the impermanence of being. It is a place to honor the brave men and women of the New York City Police and Fire Departments who made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives to assist their city’s residents in their time of need.

It is also a place to honor the average folks who lent a hand to their fellow man, and in doing so either risked or lost their lives as well. It is a place to think about the ineffable strength of the human spirit, and our ability as a people to rally together when presented with senseless tragedy.

While the names of the thousands of soldiers who perished fighting the “War on Terror” that ensued post-9/11 are not listed, knowledge of their sacrifice, as well as the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians, adds further grimness to the Memorial.

Realization that the events of that fateful day, and the fear they induced, set the wheel in motion for America to allow the Patriot Act to be instated, and to reelect George W. Bush, and all that those events entailed, adds further grimness still. We did not merely lose life that day. We lost liberty as well.

It is a place, indeed, of remembrance and quiet reflection. A sacred place, where one may, and should, ruminate on matters of life and death.

Which I’m totally gonna do in, like, one second. Um… but first? Lemme take a selfie.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Sean J Patrick Carney is a concrete comedian, visual artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. He is the founder and director of Social Malpractice Publishing and, since 2012, has been a member of GWC Investigators, a collaborative paranormal research team. Carney has taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Virginia Commonwealth University, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and New York University. Follow him on Twitter, here.

Illustrations by Krent Able. Click to enlarge.

"It was a different time." This is the mantra of those seeking to dampen the crimes of the pedophiles currently being hunted in the UK. And they're right, though why that should constitute any kind of defense is difficult to see. But it does at least raise other pertinent questions—namely, when and why did the UK shift so dramatically from one that ignores child abuse to one that quite deliberately and dynamically addresses it?

As kids' heroes continue to be unmasked as monsters, Britain has come to realize it has a fucking terrifying history of glossing over the sexual abuse of children. From the sidelines—while browsing, say, a new long-scroll dossier on the unchallenged assault work of Jimmy Savile or reading in the FT that senior Tory whip Tim Fortescue once boasted he'd cover up for any "chap" embroiled in a "scandal involving small boys," so long as it was worth it in "brownie points"—it suddenly seemed the UK's long-term approach to the matter had been to pose a binary question. Were you a credibly accused pedophile with (a) no money, no connections, and no light-entertainment showreel to speak of? Or were you a credibly accused pedophile who had (b) popularized a catchphrase, once shot shit with the Beatles, and sat in parliament? To the (a)s might come policemen, red-top reporters, any local vigilantes with the time and petrol. Meanwhile the (b)s sat tight, thinking, with fair reason, "Someone'll fix it."

Have matters changed for the better? This is a time of nightly top-line news on child abuse. UK police have just revealed the arrest of 660 pedophiles in the last six months and a big government inquiry has been announced. The issue is squarely in the UK's national conversation. After years of careful dredging by campaigners and journalists, the occasional grenade of a question was lobbed into parliament by fringe MPs, more recently an ex-health minister acknowledging on the radio that UK children's homes were "a supply line, sometimes" and Channel 4 broadcasting something with a no-mess title like How Cyril Smith Got Away with It—all of this atop the fizzy shame of a British public still digesting Jimmy, Stuart Hall, and Rolf. There is a sense that Britain has begun to try remodeling itself away from being a country that would prefer not to know. But, why now? Why the sudden interest in confronting child abuse rather than pretending it doesn't exist?

THEORY 1: A CRISIS TOO BIG TO BRAND-NAME

I spoke to a social worker, 30 years into a job in child protection, who told me about the UK's current state of affairs: "I feel heartened, optimistic and, like all good child protection professionals, forever dubious and cynical." (He asked not to be named in this article.) "One notices after many years in the work that these big-issue responses to child abuse seem to come in waves." Waves that wash in and then recede.

He gave the examples of "Colwell, Cleveland, Baby P"—catastrophes widely reported on, lamented, and then forgotten. "The media certainly ran with [these stories about child abuse]. There were investigations and criminal findings. But somehow all were somewhat self-contained," the social worker told me. "Not 'big picture.' It would die down again, even though us in the work knew full well that much abuse was still out there."

This may have been a matter of digestibility. In the past, the social worker explained, famous instances of abuse "tended to get compartmentalized into ciphers. And what seems to get lost is that it's all one thing. It's all child abuse." The sheer difficulty of digesting the current rolling combo-horror makes it almost too unwieldy to get a name. Applying a name gives a horror some shape. It gives it a start and an end. It starts the process of our forgetting about it. "What's different now?" said the social worker. "Those different threads seem to be finally coming together into a critical-mass [acceptance] that there has been, and is, a very big child-abuse problem in all walks of life. That's a new facet to me."

I spoke to Beatrix Campbell, a writer, broadcaster, and campaigner who has reported on child sexual abuse for more than 20 years. Campbell knows the history of this stuff intimately. "In what conditions do enough people in a society want to listen?" she said. "The conditions come and go. There are times that are hospitable. There are times that have very, very cold climates indeed. We're in a climate for it right now."

There were several reasons, as Campbell saw it, for current conditions being pro. And one of them was glaring. "Dead men have detonated this stuff."

THEORY 2: A CONFLUENCE OF DEATHS

It appears the only confirmed corporal punishment Savile ever received for his 50-year incumbency as one of the worst men alive was a semi-serious dusting from a Welsh professional wrestler, Adrian Street. Street faced Savile in the ring once and, appalled by the celebrity's backstage boasts about girls, "dropped him on his skull." (Street told his local paper that he'd do more, now, were a rematch possible.) Savile, famously, felt so invincible during his lifetime that he published a cheerful anecdote in his memoirs about police-authorized rape. I cannot better Beatrix Campbell's phrase for it: "Jimmy Savile had astounding room for maneuver."

And then in 2011 he died.

Campbell said, "In that moment, he loses his power. To threaten, to litigate, to blather on and on as he did? The lid on a tomb full of stories is lifted. It's like the moment when a dictator dies. People get to tell their stories."

Savile's death—"serendipitously," as Campbell puts it—followed that of "another big powerful man who did bad things."

"There's a shower of rumors in Rochdale about what a dangerous, dirty rotter Cyril Smith was."

Cyril Smith, 20 year-Member of Parliament for Rochdale, was widely known in his constituency and in Westminster to prey on young boys. Questioned by police about offenses related to child abuse, he was outed by magazine exposés (twice) and known by at least one Rochdale councilor to visit a hostel for vulnerable boys at night ("he went straight upstairs to the lads' rooms").

Smith was never held to account as a dangerous pedophile. In fact, come his 80th birthday, two years before he died in 2010, Smith was given a party at Rochdale town hall, sent a fond message from party leader Nick Clegg, and given a DeLorean sports car. His successor MP in Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, detailed much of this in a book published in May. Danczuk has been probably the most active figure in addressing Rochdale's traumatic and unresolved relationship with Smith.

Campbell said, "There's a shower of rumors in that city about what a rotter, what a dangerous, dirty rotter, Cyril Smith was. A wave of his constituents who have a story to tell. And Simon Danczuk decides to take his constituents seriously. He thinks what they have to say is important." In tandem with Tom Watson, that ridiculously impressive asker of annoying questions, Danczuk badgered parliament to launch an inquiry.

"Smith's death and Savile's death were the detonator," Campbell told me. "Those deaths generated a new kind of knowledge about what had been going on and [victims] felt: Yes, that happened to me and there's a place to put my story at last."

Illustrations by Krent Able. Click to enlarge.

THEORY 3: A LESSENING IN DEFERENCE (OR THE "WE DON'T GIVE AS MUCH OF A SHIT THAT YOU'RE ON TELEVISION" THEORY)

Say what you like about the fading of celebrity luminosity, a decade and a half into the age of biannual Big Brother, at a time when TMZ will cheerfully broadcast the backstage meltdowns of just about the only famous family left with a sense of mystique. Hundreds of onlookers, voluntarily keeping quiet for half a century to protect a wide-roaming pedophile on the grounds that, what? They couldn't possibly bust the guy who'd once shared stage space with British TV dance troupe, Pan’s People? A guy who was friends with Frank Bruno and DJ Andy Peebles?

Old hesitations begin to seem absurd. We know that until recently it was possible to stroll into Paris Hilton's private shoe lair by rooting for a key under her door mat. The court cases of the well-known now routinely require intimate shaming: Reviews of drug habits, the detailed itemization of a dirty DVD collection. This unraveling of the truth has minimized the shield that comes with fame—we no longer feel inclined to defer to it.

I spoke to Brigid Featherstone, a former social worker who is now a professor of the Open University. She specializes in gender and inequalities. She told me that this crumbling of deference was a subject of growing academic interest. "People at the minute are inclined to believe the very worst of people in power. We've had, over 30 years, a growth in inequality, and the social-scientific evidence suggests that the more unequal a society is, the less trusting it is." Scientists, doctors, judges, politicians. We don't genuflect to them quite as we did, post-war, for instance, when the gaps in society were narrower. "People are questioning things, and don't just accept because someone is a lord, or is well connected, that they have to be listened to. When there was more possibility of social mobility, there was more trust around."

And without that trust? "I think it would be quite scary if we ended up not being able to trust each other at all—but it does open up the possibility for people to say: 'Actually, I think it might be so. There might have been collusion'… There is a contesting of the idea that just because you're in a position of power you are right, and can be believed."

THEORY 4: WE JUST LACK ALL DECENCY NOW

When the 83-year-old Tory politician Lord Tebbit appeared on Andrew Marr a few weeks ago, he was asked by his host how likely he thought it was there'd been a political cover-up of child abuse "in those days"—meaning the 1980s. "I think there may well have been," Tebbit replied. "But it was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at the time… You didn't talk about those sort of things… Not even, if I may say so, television journalists. Let alone the politicians."

It's worth a note that the first person in government to make a public effort to confront child sex abuse within the establishment was Geoffrey Dickens, a Tory who in 1983 sent to his chiefs a dossier pointing a finger at eight prominent figures. (The dossier has since been lost.) Dickens was known within his party as bit of a joke, a clown, in part because he had a cockney accent. And that open talk of pedophiles in government: what a nerd.

From a couple of decades' vantage it comes to seem that reports of abuse were disregarded, then, because of some sort of cognac-cupboard etiquette. Less couth now, are we any less likely to abuse children? No. The social worker I interviewed told me he didn't believe there had been significant upswings or downswings in child abuse at given points in his career, only swings in the acknowledgement of it as abuse. "The what's-the-harm thing is complex, because one clearly has to analyze who was saying it—suffice to say those in my line of work were not. But yes, societal attitudes have changed. It is less denied, and talked about and acknowledged more openly."

So television journalists like Andrew Marr may ask grubby questions about it. And politicians may have to delve for grubby answers. And while this may be crass, by sad old standards, this is good. "As people in my line know," said the social worker, "it's a case of, sorry, I know you don't want to deal with a dark subject. But here's how it really is."

Illustrations by Krent Able. Click to enlarge.

THEORY 5: DUBIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT GENDER

There were theories I brought to an expert like Beatrix Campbell, I should say, that were shot down without hesitation. For one, Campbell took issue with my in-those-days thinking. ("I don't accept this mantra that 'once accepted' behavior is now being challenged. The people who endured [abuse], whether it was in the 1950s, the 1970s, the 19-whatevers, never felt it was acceptable, always knew that it was in some way injurious.") And she doubted my line of questioning on gender.

Thinking of Theresa May, home secretary, who announced the inquiry, and Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, who welcomed it, I suggested to Campbell that part of the new mood might be due to there being more women in positions of power. What if they were less inclined to perpetuate a culture of turning away, hushing up? "We don't have many women in power," Campbell said, flatly. (She was speaking before the recent Cabinet reshuffle.) "We have very few. We've got a political culture in Britain that is robustly misogynist."

"The people who've made this happen aren't women who've got power... They're people who've had horrible experiences of powerlessness."

Whereas Featherstone had cautiously agreed with my pitch—"I think it's possible the Theresa Mays of this world are less likely to be 'clubbable,' to be more influenced by an understanding of the harm of abuse." Campbell told me: "The people who've made this thing happen aren't women who've got power. The people who've made this moment are precisely not that, they're people who've had horrible experiences of powerlessness."

Gender was not absent from the issue, Campbell said, crediting activist groups such as Everyday Sexism and No More Page 3 for "reviving eternal feminist questions" about "sexually oppressive behavior and uninvited sexual intrusions." But as to matters of gender and why now, why this mood, Campbell pointed to the very opposite of my first thought—powerlessness, and how it can make people very, very angry. "We're in the second decade of the 21st century and we've still got a very misogynist political culture. So when certain moments arise like this, it's a..." She paused. "A final exasperation. Women are so sick of it."

THEORY 6: A MULTI-FACETED SHIT STORM (OR THE "ALL OF THE ABOVE" THEORY)

In the mid 80s, already thickly guilty of sexual crimes against children, Rolf Harris had the idea he'd make a film. Kids Can Say No!, a 20-minuter for schools, featured a racked soliloquy (Harris looking frankly appalled by the thought) in which he said: "Some people don't act right with kids." He advised children: "You have a right to feel safe." The film ended with an educational song—just Harris, a couple of dozen kids, and two uniformed policemen, dancing. Apparently pleased with it, Harris made a sequel.

It's the thickness, the layered-on nerve of this, which jolts. Rolf fronting Kids Can Say No!… Jimmy Savile lending his name to an educational book called Stranger Danger... Cyril Smith founding a charity called the Rochdale Childer. The experts I spoke to agreed that if the national mood has shifted, significantly, it is because of the thickness of all that's gone on. A layered-on convergence of shit happening at once.

When I spoke with the social worker about the theories outlined here, he said: "All of the above." "What we're seeing," said Featherstone, "is an eruption of a range of forces." Campbell: "The convergence is what's important. You've got a matrix here where all sorts of things that are apparently disconnected come together."

"The big picture is finally starting to be revealed."

Featherstone and the social worker saw reasons for proper optimism. "There's still a long way to go," said the social worker. "But much has improved. The big picture is finally starting to be revealed." Featherstone said, "I think we've had a genuine opening up around sexual abuse, sexual violence, I do." It was left to Campbell to sound a wary note. Hold on, she cautioned, no back-patting yet.

Despite the launch of a government inquiry, "we cannot overestimate the scale of resistance that there is to the implications of all this, to the sheer scale of childhood oppression, of sexual predation, and those with an interest in protecting it. You know: people like doing it. A lot of people hate it. But a lot of people like it."

"Over the last 30 years there's been, maybe every five years, a scandal," said Campbell. "A really important story that ought to change things. People think about it, they worry about it, it becomes part of the national conversation. And then those with an interest in shutting it up, shut it up. That happens absolutely consistently."

So don't be too hopeful?

"So hope for the best," said Campbell. "And expect the worst."

Follow Tom on Twitter

If you ask the linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, the Arab Spring did not begin in Tunisia in 2011—it began with the October 2010 protests in the town of Gdeim Izik, in Western Sahara's occupied territories. The former Spanish colony has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975. Its territory is divided in two by a 1,677-mile-long sand wall and surrounded by some 7 million land mines.

The native Sahrawis, led by their independence movement the Polisario, are recognized by the International Court of Justice as the rightful owners of the land. However, Morocco hijacked Western Sahara's decolonization process from Spain in 1975, marching some 300,000 settlers into the territory. This triggered a 16-year war between Morocco and the Polisario, which forced more than 100,000 Sahrawis into exile across the border in Algeria. Technically, Western Sahara is still Spanish and remains Africa's last colony.

Whether adrift in refugee camps and dependent on aid or languishing under Moroccan rule, the Sahrawis are still fighting for their independence in an increasingly volatile region. Meanwhile, the UN has no mandate to monitor human rights in occupied Western Sahara. VICE News travels to Western Sahara's occupied and liberated territories, as well as the Polisario-run refugee camps in Algeria, to find out more about one of the world's least-reported conflicts.

In part three, VICE News finds out how the Polisario tackle the threats of terrorism and drug smuggling in their increasingly volatile part of the Sahara. We look at how the movement has improved security to avoid another event like the 2011 kidnapping of three foreign aid workers from a Polisario complex. Then we speak to the ministers of defense and security, and follow a Polisario anti-terrorism unit on one of their night patrols, going dangerously close to the smuggling routes of the Sahara.

Irish UN soldiers Derek Smallhorne and Thomas Barrett, who were killed in Lebanon in 1980. Photo by Justice for Smallhorne and Barrett, Facebook

Mahmoud Bazzi, the Detroit ice cream truck driver who allegedly participated in the abduction and killing of two Irish UN peacekeeping soldiers in Lebanon 34 years ago, has been arrested and now faces a deportation hearing.

I was with the ill-fated UN patrol on April 18, 1980, when they were abducted by Bazzi and a group of militiamen from the Israeli-supported South Lebanon Army. At the time, I was an Associated Press correspondent based in Beirut.

Bazzi told us he wanted to avenge the death of his younger brother, who had been killed in a clash between the Irish battalion of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon a couple of weeks prior.

He took the three Irish drivers in our convoy into an abandoned, bombed-out elementary school and shot one of them, Irish Private John O’Mahony, several times. An American UN officer and I carried O’Mahony to safety. Bazzi then left the scene with two other Irish soldiers, Private Derek Smallhorne and Private Thomas Barrett.

The bodies of Smallhorne and Barrett were found hours later. They had been tortured and killed.

One year ago, I was contacted by Homeland Security agents at my business in Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Brewery. They told me Bazzi had applied for US citizenship. In the course of their investigation, they discovered that Bazzi had entered the US illegally, with a false passport. They also uncovered information about the slayings of the UN soldiers.

They asked if I would identify Bazzi at a deportation hearing. I said I would. On Tuesday, July 15, Homeland Security spokesman Khaalid Walls in Detroit announced that Bazzi had been arrested and would appear at a removal hearing next week.

I wrote a detailed story about the abduction and Homeland Security’s new interest in the Bazzi case last January for VICE magazine. The article prompted orderly protests by Irish Army veterans of peacekeeping duty in Lebanon. On July 5, several hundred veterans marched in Dublin, demanding the United States bring Bazzi to justice.

One of the leaders of the protest, former Irish Army soldier Robbie Masterson, who was posted in Lebanon in 1980, texted me last night: “Heard the news about Bazzi. Unbelievable, after 34 years. Thank you, and VICE.”

The VICE story prompted Irish Central, a US-based newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, the Irish radio station RTE, and other Irish media to investigate and report the incident, putting pressure on Homeland Security to do something.

In 2000, RTE did a one-hour TV special about the abductions and killings. The RTE reporter accosted Bazzi as he left his home for a day selling ice cream. He denied killing the Irishmen, in spite of Lebanese television footage showing him boasting of the murders 34 years ago. He claimed that the leader of his militia, rebel Lebanese Army Major Saad Haddad, had threatened to kill him if he did not confess publicly to the killings.

I interviewed O’Mahony, the Irishman who was shot by Bazzi, a few months ago. Like me, he identified Bazzi as the leader of the abduction team. O’Mahony also said Bazzi was the man who shot him on that day in 1980.

In a recent interview with the Detroit Free Press’s Jim Schaefer, Bazzi again denied killing the Irishmen, but he then admitted to being present during the abduction.

The Homeland Security official would not say what country might receive Bazzi if he is deported. He has been living in Dearborn, Michigan, with his family for 21 years. Some former members of Haddad’s militia have been given refuge in Israel. South Lebanon is now controlled by Hezbollah, a sworn enemy of the Jewish state. In 1980, Hezbollah did not exist.

Protesters mocking cops and their crackdown on sex work at a 2010 rally. Photo via Flickr user Steve Rhodes

When I logged in to Facebook on June 26, I was immediately confronted by dozens of screenshots of a notice with FBI and IRS seals indicating that MyRedBook had been seized. I typed in the URL myself and got the same message, at which point my stomach dropped. For the uninitiated, MyRedBook was an extensive network of public and private forums offering escorts a place to advertise, be reviewed, blacklist bad clients, screen new ones, and generally support one another in an often solitary and isolating business. Most importantly, MyRedBook was probably the largest adult advertising venue in Northern California, and the only venue to offer free ads.

A few years ago, Craigslist shut down its erotic-services section after Melissa Farley lied to Congress about the average age of entry into prostitution being 13 and the Women’s Funding Network falsely told lawmakers that underage prostitution advertised on the site was exploding and had increased by 64.7 percent in a period of six months. That, too, left me reeling. Craigslist had made it easy to post explicitly about the experiences I wanted to have and fish for compatible gentlemen—suddenly I was faced with advertising only my availability to meet up at an hourly rate. Discussions of compatibility or expectations could land me in jail, and were blocked by advertising sites. What if my new customers wanted services I didn’t want to provide?

Some of my friends were left in much worse positions. One was unable to get a credit card or bank account, and with no one in her life she could confide in and borrow a credit card from (which would make them, legally, her pimp or sex trafficker), she quickly turned to working on the streets to make her rent.

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” I texted another friend who lives in San Francisco. “I hope people aren’t going to end up walking the street.” I stared at my bookshelf and tried to rearrange the titles into poems to occupy my mind. My phone buzzed.

“Of course it’s going to happen. It’s probably happening as we speak.”

I turned back to Facebook in search of information. Abeni, a nonprofit that provides services to those in the sex trade, including domestic sex trafficking victims, posted: “In the wake of [the RedBook seizure], we know some will be making hard choices about how to proceed and which calls to book. We urge you to up your game, listen to your gut, and don't skimp on the steps you take to keep yourself safe. Don't forget to check in and out, research your dates if possible and to consider apps like KiteString if needed. For those who have little or no choice about the work they are engaging in, we urge you to stay as connected as possible to the advocates and friends you have.”

I chatted with Meg Munoz, Abeni’s director, and she explained that MyRedBook was “a huge asset when it came to survivors we knew and were following. It was actually a huge asset in helping us work with a survivor to set up an emergency relocation."

Rumors flew about minors or pimps who could have been using the site, attracting the ire of the FBI. “How are the cops going to find trafficking victims now that there’s nowhere for them to advertise?” many reasonable people wondered. It seemed those arrested were only charged with money laundering and something related to the Mann Act, which apparently prohibited an alleged prostitute from placing an ad on MyRedBook in order to facilitate transporting themselves across state lines for immoral purposes. That part made me extra angry. Almost ten years ago there was a man in my extended network of sex-worker friends who repeatedly flew women to his state to rape them. That clearly seemed to be transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes, but the FBI didn’t seem to agree and declined to press charges. As usual, law enforcement refused to use laws supposedly designed to protect women to actually protect women, and instead was using them against us.

The seizure of MyRedBook came on the heels of a cross-country sweep in which the FBI arrested 168 victims, 281 pimps, and more than a thousand sex workers. That’s right: Somehow, the FBI managed to find 1.67 pimps per victim. In some cities, the FBI found several pimps and no victims. These sweeps are called Operation Cross Country, a part of Project Innocence Lost. When I first heard about it, I thought Innocence Lost must be a barely legal porn site, but it turns out it’s actually a thing where the government hunts you down if you’ve misplaced your innocence.

A reporter from Truthout spoke to several FBI agents who were evasive about the number of sex workers arrested and what happened to the minors who were “recovered.” Last week, the FBI national office did not return calls from VICE.

Five days after MyRedBook was seized, US senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Mark Kirk of Illinois introduced the SAVE Act. The bill, intended to crack down on the sex trafficking of children, would entirely eliminate online “adult advertising,” including advertisement of legal adult services. It would make having a website that “facilitates or is designed to facilitate” adult advertising “to facilitate commercial transactions” a federal crime. The Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have criticized the bill for its broadness and potential effects on free speech.

I can’t claim to be an expert in constitutional law. But what I do understand is that the elimination of online advertising would send many sex workers back to the dark ages of street work. To avoid attracting the attention of law enforcement, workers would jump too quickly into the cars of customers they haven’t screened, with no time to negotiate payment or services before finding themselves in a small space equipped with child-safety locks in the company of a strange man. If it passes, this bill will be the cause of so much unnecessary violence toward sex workers—people who are often unable to report crimes committed against them without being arrested themselves.

Nine days after the SAVE Act was introduced, a member of my local community was arrested and charged with seven felony counts of sex trafficking. She’s not accused of force, fraud, coercion, or any kind of abuse. Instead, the troopers allege that she provided online marketing of women for “customers of the sex trafficking trade,” maintained a place of prostitution, and was in possession of 31 independent contractor agreements. Online marketing, associating with one another, and safe, shared indoor work spaces provide a higher level of security for people in the sex trade—but taking measures to increase safety is called sex trafficking these days.

They say this is all to save people who work in the sex industry, to rescue us as if we were mewling kittens. But to the sex workers impacted, their actions speak pretty clearly of a different agenda—one that seeks to create a world where sex workers are driven further underground, and escorts are cut off from professional and personal support, with no way of protecting themselves from violent pimps or customers. They say that patriarchy is concerned with guaranteeing men free sexual access to women. Today, it is most certainly succeeding in punishing women and trans people who dare to offer sex that isn’t free.

Tara Burns is the author of Whore Diaries: My First Two Weeks as an Escort and Whore Diaries II: Adventures in Independent Escorting. Follow her on Twitter.

If you look past the tabloid ruckus surrounding her and her adultery and listen to some of the classic LeAnn Rimes hits, you’ll find a sublime and distinctive voice that rises above the dated beats, productions, and her hilarious music videos.

A commercial airplane carrying almost 300 people crashed in eastern Ukraine today, just 20 miles from the border with Russia. Ukraine's Interior Ministry advisor said all passengers on board have been killed.

On the night of July 2, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year old Palestinian from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, was abducted and killed by a group of right-wing extremist Israelis. The attack was in apparent retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens whose bodies were discovered north of the West Bank city of Hebron two days earlier. Khdeir's autopsy showed the boy burned to death while he was still alive. His killing set off demonstrations and clashes throughout the West Bank and elsewhere, with thousands of Palestinians protesting his death.

VICE News went to Shuafat to speak with a grieving father about his son's death and the latest round of events that followed it.

Tommy Guerrero in Future Primitive

During the 80s the Bones Brigade was the biggest thing in skateboarding. Their team was made up of the decade’s greatest Anglo-vert skaters with names destined for greatness (Hawk, Mountain, Cab, McGill), and they were all hand-picked by Dog Town superstar Stacy Peralta. Their mission was to take skateboarding into the mainstream, and they succeeded. George Harrison even invited them to dinner, for Christ’s sake.

But one member of the Brigade stood in stark contrast from the rest. Tommy Guerrero, a San Francisco skater with Filipino ancestry whom Peralta decided to market as a street skater, was in many ways the antithesis of his teammates. To a generation of city kids who didn’t grow up with vert ramps in their backyards, Guerrero was the most important skater on the Bones Brigade.

In the early 90s, when vert fell out of favor and street skating took center stage, Tommy teamed up with old friends Jim Thiebaud, Eric Swenson, and Fausto Vitello to start two companies with a focus on city skating: Deluxe Distribution and Real skateboards. At the time they were barely pressing 300 boards for each new graphic. Now, 23 years later, Deluxe has grown to encompass some of the biggest companies in skateboarding: Real, Anti-Hero, Krooked, Spitfire, Thunder, and Venture. They are a dominating force in the global skateboarding industry in much the same way that Powell Peralta was in the 80s.

Over the years Guerrero has worn nearly every hat imaginable at Deluxe, but none have been as challenging as trying to make sense of the genius/madness that is Mark Gonzales’s artwork for Krooked skateboards. On a recent trip to the Deluxe offices I got a firsthand glimpse of the 10,000-piece puzzle that makes up a line of skateboards from Gonzales: bins, flat files, boxes, rolled tubes, old skateboards, shipping boxes… anything and everything covered in unfinished artwork waiting for Tommy to piece it all together. Mark Gonzales is every skater’s favorite skater, and perhaps the greatest artist to come out of skateboarding, but Krooked skateboards would not be Krooked skateboards without the loving hand of Tommy Guerrero.

I rang up Tommy G. on his way to the studio to discuss the Bones Brigade, the early days of Real, the Deluxe mafia, being the unsung hero of Krooked skateboards, and his latest album, due out on Tuesday.

Photo by Claudine Gossett

VICE: The most important question everyone wants answered is—
Tommy Guerrero: Is there a God? I don’t know, Chris.

No. What was it like being the only black skater on the Bones Brigade?
It was hard. I had my struggles, you know. I’m the epitome of an American. I’m everything under the sun, actually. I’m a complete mutt. I am everything except for what people think I am. I am not Mexican, from what I’m told. I wish I were Mexican. I’m Filipino, Chilean, Portuguese, Ohlone, Irish… all kinds of shit up in there.

How did you get on the Bones Brigade as a street skater from NorCal?
I had this lawyer who had some dirt on George Powell, and he kind of forced the issue that way. No, I saw Stacy [Peralta] at Joe Lopes’s ramp the day before a street contest in San Francisco. After I finished skating he came up to me and said, “I really like the way you skate.” The next day at the contest he spoke with my brother, and when my brother relayed the information to me, I thought he was just giving me shit—he was always giving me shit—but it turned out that Stacy actually wanted me to ride for the Bones Brigade.

The Bones Brigade ruled the 80s. What was the highlight of that time for you?
The highlight for me was when I got a Christmas check.

How many zeros?
Like 70! No, I got a really good one once, but the highlight was the traveling. That was by far the best and it still resonates with me today. I love to travel and to be on the road. Just getting to experience stuff outside of San Francisco was great. I’d never been on a plane until I went to my first contest for Powell. My mom didn’t have a license or a car, so flying to contests was amazing.

Photo by Claudine Gossett

When people think of bombing hills in San Francisco, they generally think of you. Do you get royalties whenever anyone films an SF hill bomb?
I do. I get a small residual. I make sure I have my lawyer on it. Anyone who is ever skating down a hill should know I have cameras hidden in trees that people don’t know about, Big Brother–style, and I’m watching. I’ll be like, “Dude, I saw you skating down 17^th Avenue the other day. Where’s my 26 cents?” Beware. I’m watching.

Skateboarding was relatively small when you guys started Real in 1991. What was that like in comparison to the enormity of the Bones Brigade in the 80s?
The rad thing was being part of it with Jim [Thiebaud] and just doing stupid shit. We’d come up with stupid ideas and be like, “Yeah, Sure. Let’s do it.” We didn’t have to get permission to do anything—we did whatever we wanted and that was the coolest. Whatever lame graphic we wanted to do we could do it. Or we could make six wheels that came in a package… and Eric Swenson and Fausto Vitello funded it all. It started very small, just the four of us sitting on the floor, Xeroxing, making our own graphics, and my brother doing sales. Pretty low budget.

Over the years Deluxe [distributor of Real skateboards] has developed a Mafioso mystique. How did that develop?
I think that’s because Fausto and Eric were full DIY type people. Instead of giving someone the money to do something they would just start their own company. They’d be like, “I’m not paying that asshole to print shirts! We’ll just start a print company!” And it makes sense because I’m that way, DIY by nature, where I’m going to make my own music and CDs. I think Fausto and Eric were both hardasses, and they’d tell anyone to fuck off with the blink of an eye. Thrasher magazine controlled content in NorCal and pushed their products, the people they liked, and their agenda just like Transworld pushed their products and their agenda down south. It was just different up here because we had the whole fuck you attitude and down there it was a much cleaner version of skateboarding.

At what point did people start getting beaten up for quitting Deluxe companies?
That’s Mic-E’s deal. Mic-E instituted that “jump in, jump out” program. I don’t know who it started with, but I think Danny Gonzales and a few others might have felt the wrath of that. That was not Deluxe’s policy; that was Mic-e’s personal policy, which we didn’t help or hinder.

What’s the best urban legend you’ve heard about Deluxe?
I heard that I was smoking crack; that was a good one. One big urban legend is that Jim and I own Real. We don’t own Real. We’re small shareholders in Deluxe, but we don’t own Real unfortunately. If I did, I would be driving two Porches stacked high, or maybe a Porche limo.

How did you go from being there on day one with Real—owning it or not—to being the man behind the scenes at Mark Gonzales’s Krooked skateboards?
I’ve worn many hats here at Deluxe and have had many duties, and it just sort of happened. I’ve done everything here from filming to editing to layouts and design to team managing—which was hilarious. Mark and I have been friends forever; he used to stay at my mom’s house when I was still living at home before we were pro. We have a good rapport and I kind of know where he’s coming from, I think. Just a little bit. At least with his work. So I ended up working with him directly—getting art for Krooked, coming up with ideas, and doing all the layouts for the boards and catalogs, which totally sucked. Now I’m removed from that and am just art directing, because we have a great crew here who is way better than I’ll ever be. So it’s actually aesthetically even better now. I just tell Mark, “We need art. Send it, son of a bitch!”

Photo by Tobin Yelland

You’re downplaying what it took to make the Krooked graphics all those years. Weren’t you receiving random faxes and packages of art in the mail, with no rhyme or reason, that you had to make sense of?
Yeah, there was a long period of time where he was just faxing the work in. I had to clean up all the line work and go over it with a Sharpie so it wouldn’t look completely terrible. I’ve actually scanned boxes that he’s sent with art in it because I liked the art on the box better and I’d use that for boards. I’ve scanned napkins, line paper, Fed Ex boxes, shitloads of faxes, tons of original art, boards that he’s written on… He draws on everything and writes on anything in sight. He even draws on the mail he sends us and we’ll scan that. Plus there are archives of shit from when he moved out.

How do you mash all that together to come up with something cohesive?
Really meticulously. You’ll find images that relate that kind of make sense to create a whole. Sometimes, once in a great while, he’ll send something that’s almost finished. It’s a process.

Mark Gonzales. Photo courtesy of Adidas

What’s your best Mark story from over the years?
There are so many. He’s just a funny guy. And he’s super generous, too. Once one of our employees at Deluxe commented on Mark’s shirt, like, “Cool shirt, Mark.” It was some nice button down because Mark has an affinity for things that are expensive. Mark was like, “You like it?” And he took it off and gave it to him. I still see the guy around and he’s like, “I still have that shirt. I ain’t never getting rid of it.” And then just his skating! Way back in 1986 or ‘87, everyone was practicing in the heat and I was skating behind him when he went at this quarterpipe and did a frontside 180 on flat, so now he’s going backward and then does a switch frontside 360 ollie. People weren’t doing that. Back then you wouldn’t even call it switch, you’d be like, “I don’t even know what that is.” I was right behind him, like, “Did anyone just see that?” That shit fucked me up.

Earlier you mentioned your DIY approach. Let’s talk about your new album coming out Tuesday: No Man’s Land. You handled everything, soup to nuts?
I have a couple guys on it. My friend Money Mark plays harmonica on one song, my friend Mark Capelle plays trumpet on one, and Matt Rodriguez plays different percussive instruments on some songs—but other than that I engineer everything and play everything. It’s a one-man show. A lot of love, joy, happiness, and positive vibrations went into it.

So you’re making hippy music now?
Come on, I’m from San Francisco. Give me a break.

Tommy Guerrero performing live

Follow Tommy on Twitter and buy Tommy’s new album, No Man’s Land, here.

More stupid can be found at ChrisNieratko.com or @Nieratko.

VICE and Jim Norton are teaming up to put a weird twist on the traditional late-night talk show, beginning July 23. 

The show will be a loose mix of stand-up comedy, debates, and interviews with guests like Mike Tyson, UFC President Dana White, and notorious drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross. To keep things really unpredictable, we'll be filming everything before a live audience. 

In Norton's words, "VICE didn’t censor any language or ideas at all; they were amazing creatively. I got to do exactly the show I wanted to do. Which also sucks, because if it fails, it’s completely my fault.” We think you'll like it.

Video courtesy of News in Levels

There’s a robot takeover on the horizon. Drones do our military bidding. Roombas clean our houses. Robots assist in surgeries. Driverless cars will soon cart us around. There’s a campaign to crowd fund Jibo, the world’s first “family robot.” Soon, we’ll all be asking the question from those weird Svedka advertisements: R U BOT OR NOT?

With all of this imminent technology seeping into our lives, robo-ethicists have been debating very new, very practical ways that robots intersect with society. Last week, at an event called Our Robot Future at Berkeley, robo-ethicists introduced the idea of using sex robots to rehabilitate pedophiles.

Ah, what a brave new world we live in. Some people seem to think this is a brilliant idea, but manufacturing child sex robots is probably the worst use of technology since Transformers: Age of Extinction.

In the olden days, pedophilia was treated with techniques like electroshock therapy or “covert sensitization,” in which a patient would learn to associate thoughts of naked children with things like having his dick stuck in his zipper. Today, the treatment is determined on a case-by-case basis (fortunately, dick-zipper imagery has fallen out of favor). Katie Gotch, who works for the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me that the most common methods are either rooted in cognitive-behavioral therapy or psychopharmacology, using drugs that are often referred to as “chemical castration.”

One thing that definitely doesn’t work is demonizing pedophiles or treating them like monsters. Remember, not all pedophiles are criminals; having an interest in children does not a molester make.

No one is really sure how pedophilia is developed, but we do know that it’s somehow wired in the brain. In other words, pedophilia has no “cure” and we can’t realistically expect that these desires will evaporate, no matter what kind of treatment is used.

So if we can’t change pedophiles’ inherent interest in children, and the rate of recidivism for offenders is fairly high (depending on who you ask, it’s somewhere between 15 and 50 percent), then a good method of treatment should have two aims: to allow pedophiles to manage their illicit desires, and to reduce harm to children.

iCub, a humaoid robot not intended for use by pedophiles. Photo via Wikipedia

Here’s where the robots come in. If we simply swap children for childlike bots, we could deal with the pedophilia problem without actually endangering kids. This type of theory came up in 2002, when the Supreme Court defended the merits of “virtual child pornography”—porn where child actors had been replaced by digital renderings. The Supreme Court legalized virtual child porn on a technicality, as the Justices are want to do, and it was quickly criminalized the following year when Congress passed the PROTECT Act. But the case incited a bizarre debate about whether or not virtual child porn could actually do some social good.

The logic goes something like this: The demand for child porn is high. Even with strict laws against the stuff in the United States, it’s pretty much impossible to stop the spread of internet porn from other countries. Plus, the internet is full of nefarious marketplaces for illegal stuff like child porn, so it’s probably always going to exist. If we can’t effectively get rid of child pornography, we might as well find a way to make child pornography more palatable, right? We do that by incentivizing animated child porn, rather than the real stuff. It’s child porn, without the children.

In theory, a child robot intervention would work the same way. We realize that pedophilia isn’t going anywhere, so we ought to find a way to deal with the lust for children in a way that keeps actual kids out of the equation. Hence, robots. It’s child molestation, without the children.

Of course, things that sound good in theory don't always work out in practice. Introducing child sex robots to the world is a terrible idea, and it’s highly unlikely that it would actually help to reorient pedophiles. For one thing, sex robots are creepy. The primitive models that exist on the market look mostly like the Real Housewives reimagined as strung-out hookers. Even if we were able to create bots that looked normal and vaguely human, there’s the issue of the uncanny valley: objects that look almost-human make us extremely uneasy, like Madame Tussauds’ wax figures or those creepy animations in the Polar Express. Robots are also notoriously bad at pretending to be human; even Eugene Goostman, the “super computer” that passed the Turing test this year, was about as intelligible as Gary Busey.

So it’s unlikely that child sex robots would be a passable substitute for real children—at least, based on the technology we have today. But that technology is rapidly improving. In 2010, the top-of-the-line sex robot was Roxxxy, who was surprisingly capable of carrying on a semi-lucid conversation and providing three useable holes. Sure, she was once described as “Lady Gaga having her wisdom teeth extracted,” but Roxxxy had something that even the most expensive flesh light didn’t: responsiveness.

Roxxxy, the "world's first sex robot." Video courtesy of Asylum.com

This is great news for the future of the sex robot market, but when we’re talking about pedophiles, responsiveness is probably the last thing we want. When I told Gotch about this latest advancement in robotics, she balked.

“Now you have a child bot that’s indicating pleasure to these sexual activities? That could be very detrimental to the individual’s cognitive understanding.” The emergence of pedo-bots would likely reinforce pedophilic behaviors, sending the confusing message that sex with (robot) children is totally okay but sex with (human) children is not.

There’s also an important distinction to be made between pedophiles, or persons who have a known attraction to prepubescent children and child molesters, or persons who have actually molested children. In fact, a shockingly small number of pedophiles actually act on their impulses. So what happens when we build non-offending pedophiles a sex robot and encourage them to use it?

The answer, according to Gotch, is that “having that sublimation through a robot may, for some, actually increase their difficulties with their arousal patterns rather than meeting those needs." In other words, she argues that child sex bots are pretty likely to redirect pedophilic interests back toward human children, rather than satisfying the desire outright.

Back in 2002, some proponents of virtual child pornography argued that providing access to an alternative form of child porn would reduce the demand for the real stuff. But that logic ultimately boomeranged: child pornography—whether real or animated—is sometimes used as a tool for offenders to “groom” children, or demonstrate that having sex with children is okay. Child sex robots could effectively be demonstrative in the same way.

But most importantly, if science fiction has taught us anything, it’s that robots can be evil, but they don’t have to be. People with deviant sexual desires are the same way. But we’re not going to get anywhere with rehabilitating pedophiles if we treat them like monsters by encouraging them to go at it with weird, childlike sex bots.

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