Photo via Flickr user Random Retail

Last month, law enforcement officials raided the house of Jared Fogle, the ordinary guy who famously lost more than 200 pounds by eating at Subway and subsequently put the "toast" in "milquetoast" by serving as an almost impossibly bland sandwich spokesman for 15 years. His relationship with the chain was suspended following the raid, and at the time, it was widely speculated that the search had something to do with Russell Taylor, the former head of Fogle's charity organization for kids. Taylor was arrested in April after allegedly producing more than 500 child porn videos inside his homes.

Over the weekend, Business Insider reported details of a text message exchange that allegedly took place between Fogle and a former Subway franchise store owner in which the spokesman appears to brag about a sexual encounter with a 16-year-old girl, which he describes as "awesome!!!!" The story comes on the heels of an accusation by a woman in Florida who was allegedly told by him multiple times that "Middle school girls are hot."

On Munchies: Venezuelans Are So Desperate for Food That They're Looting Supermarkets

So while no one has officially charged Fogle with a crime, the guy has experienced a spectacular fall from grace in a country that loves gawking at people who used to be fat almost as much as it adores cheap food.

According to Business Insider, which obtained an affidavit the outlet says has been subpoenaed by the FBI, Fogle was very interested in meeting up with the Subway franchisee's underage cousin back in 2008. "Any more news with your cousin?" he allegedly asked the woman in a text. "Tell me what u think about when u think of the three of us all together???" Apparently these questions persisted, and Fogle even suggested to the woman that she market herself on Craigslist.

"Is this the same website you found that 16 year old girl you that you fucked?" the woman responded. "I still can't believe you only paid $100 for her."

At some point, the woman is said to have grown so uncomfortable with Fogle's alleged perversions that she hired a lawyer, who spoke to Business Insider. Strangely, the reason she sought counsel supposedly had nothing to do with the fact that Fogle was soliciting teens from the internet and bragging about it; instead, she was concerned that the conversation was violating her franchiser-franchisee contract with Subway. Business Insider was apparently able to obtain the text messages because they were included in an affidavit related to that case.

While it's possible that Fogle was talking about fantasies he had no intention of turning into reality, he did seem to keep some unsavory company. Taylor, the former director of the Jared Foundation—which aimed to reduce childhood obesity—is charged with seven counts of producing child pornography and one count of possession. According to a federal complaint, he was in the business of filming family members and others who stayed at his homes in various states of undress.

Meanwhile, both stories—or at least how they came to light—are eerily similar. A woman turned over text messages with Taylor after he tried to have sex with a horse she had on her property and hinted that he'd traveled to Thailand for sex with young girls in the past. Then came a raid, which uncovered droves of illegal images. As of right now, it's unclear what the FBI found, if anything, when they poked around Fogle's house in Indiana.

But even if the answer is nothing, his career is in tatters (though his reputed wealth means he isn't exactly facing dire straits financially). Almost immediately after Fogle's house was raided, Subway started scrubbing his name and image from its website. And on Saturday, a post was added to the sandwich chain's Facebook page that reads: "About the most recent news story on Jared Fogle, this allegation, if true, is appalling and is contrary to the values of our brand. As previously stated, we have suspended our relationship with Jared."

Fans of five-dollar sandwiches don't seem phased by the news, and life will certainly go on for the chain post-Jared. In fact, Subway's statement on Facebook is currently serving as venue for people to state the name of their favorite subs and attempt to speak to the chain as if it were a sentient human being.

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A memorial to 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Photo via Flickr user Jamelle Bouie

By now, almost every single person in America has an opinion about Darren Wilson. The white 29-year-old former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown—setting in motion a chain of anger and protests that led to the Black Lives Matter Movement—a year ago this month. Wilson's encounter with Brown has been dissected endlessly by everyone from Facebook commenters to cable news talking heads to the Justice Department (who did not bring charges against the cop after an investigation). But in the months after the shooting, Wilson has essentially been in hiding, even as he became a symbol for the worst sort of police brutality and racism.

Now a long New Yorker profile offers us a glimpse into his world. In interviews Wilson gave writer Jake Halpern, the former cop styles himself a persecuted man and something of a tragic figure. Writes Halpern:

During our conversations, Wilson typically sat in a recliner, holding his baby daughter, who was born in March. He said that, after Brown's death, people "had made threats about doing something to my unborn child." Wilson, a former Boy Scout with round cheeks and blue eyes, speaks with a muted drawl. When Barb went to the hospital to give birth, he said, "I made her check in anonymously."

Wilson said that he had interviewed for a few police positions but had been told that he would be a liability. "It's too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable," he said. He tried not to brood about it: "I bottle everything up."

The baby has helped Wilson, who also has two stepsons, accept the constrictions of his current situation. It has also allowed him to maintain a pointed distance from the furor that the shooting helped to unleash. He told me that he had not read the Justice Department's report on the systemic racism in Ferguson. "I don't have any desire," he said. "I'm not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It's out of my control."

At the same time, WIlson says stuff that sounds like veiled racism, like when he laments the gang-banging ways of inner-city urban types—a.k.a. blacks—and parenting that lets them off the hook. Sometimes it's not even veiled, as is the case in the most damning part of the piece:

At one point, I asked Wilson if he missed walking outside and going to restaurants. He told me that he still ate out, but only at certain places. "We try to go somewhere—how do I say this correctly?—with like-minded individuals," he said. "You know. Where it's not a mixing pot."

But whatever Wilson is, he's not uniquely racist or evil, or even the main problem in Ferguson. "Darren was probably the best officer that I've ever trained—just by his willingness to learn," Mike McCarthy, a 39-year-old, gay Irish-American cop who stands by Wilson, told Halpern.

The most shocking details in the New Yorker piece aren't even about Wilson, but about the environment in which he was policing. Cops in the so-called "North County"—the worst-off and most forlorn areas in St. Louis County—apparently made as little as $10 an hour, and police cadets in America often receive as little as eight hours of training in de-escalation tactics, compared with 58 hours on how to use their guns. Wilson wrongly told a white man he interrogated in 2013 that the man did not have the right to film their encounter, and admitted to Halpern that he simply did not know the letter of the law Ferguson cops used to arrest people for "failure to comply" with their commands.

Some Black Lives Matter activists have criticized the New Yorker for humanizing and empathizing with the man who killed Brown. While Halpern certainly doesn't shy away from criticizing Wilson (and sometimes lets the subject hang himself, as in the "mixing pot" comment), the profile does, at times, tell the story of Ferguson, Brown's death, and the aftermath from Wilson's perspective. Even in that version of events, Wilson is hardly a hero, but it's clear that police officers like him are both a symptom and a cause of the racism that the US has been dealing with since before the Revolutionary War.

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Craig James talks about his faith. Video via Craig James for US Senate YouTube Channel

When Craig James was hired as a sportscaster for Fox Sports in August 2013, he seemed like a perfect fit: James, who would serve as a college football analyst, had played football for Southern Methodist University in Dallas and went on to be a running back for the New England Patriots. In his hiring announcement, the company called him a "talented broadcaster" with an extensive "knowledge of college football." But just two days after starting the job, he was fired.

Now, James is suing Fox Sports for religious discrimination, as he believes the company axed him for remarks he made about gay marriage. (You can read the full lawsuit here, courtesy of the Dallas Morning News.)

Back in 2012, when James was running against Ted Cruz in Texas' US Senate race, he expressed his views on gay marriage in a public debate. He said that homosexuals would "answer to the Lord for their actions" and that the country's "moral fiber is sliding down a slope that is going to be hard to stop" because political leaders were attending gay pride parades. James added for good measure that he would "never ride in a gay parade."

The lawsuit alleges that Fox Sports told James he was fired "due to his beliefs about marriage, which were explicitly religious." But Fox denies that was the case.

"Craig James is a polarizing figure in the college sports community and the decision not to use him in our college football coverage was based on the perception that he abused a previous on-air position to further a personal agenda," Scott Grogin, senior vice president of communications for Fox Networks Group, said in a statement tothe Dallas Morning News. "The decision had nothing to do with Mr. James' religious beliefs and we did not discriminate against Mr. James in any way. The allegations are baseless and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them."

James, who is represented by the conservative Liberty Institute, is seeking $100,000 in damages. In a statement released today alongside the lawsuit, he said: "Today, many people have lost their jobs because of their faith. Sadly, countless are afraid to let their bosses know they even have a faith," before adding, "This is America"—an ironic thing to remind the Fox Network.

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You probably heard the news over the weekend: Hitchbot, the hitchhiking robot, is dead. The Canadian experiment aimed at testing basic human decency, or at least willingness to play a quirky game of give-the-robot-a-ride, ended abruptly in the wee hours of Saturday morning when someone in Philadelphia beheaded and dismembered Hitchbot, and left it on the side of the road. The anonymous vandal apparently distributed a crime scene photo on social media.

The photo didn't show up in the official Hitchbot press release about the incident. "We decided not to publish it," Hitchbot creator Frauke Zeller told Buzzfeed. "It's upsetting—you can see how it has been taken apart and left in the street." She's right: Even though no media standards-and-practices rule sheet in the world would demand that journalists censor an image of plastic and rubber in a pile, it does seem like the destruction of Hitchbot was an act of cruelty.

Whether Hitchbot's family admits it or not, this outcome was what the experiment was all about. Leave a big hunk of plastic designed to ask people for a ride out by the side of the road, and you're not just asking whether people will go along with it, but whether they'll go out of their way to break it. That's because over the years, we humans have demonstrated hostility toward automatons, seemingly whenever we can find a reason, and sometimes when we can't.

But weirdly, we're starting to give a shit.

Engraving via Wikimedia Commons

The early robot victims didn't have arms and legs.

Though the earliest example of humans killing machines that most people can think of is the Luddites, people had been smashing machines for years before that group came along. While there's no recorded account of any angry, unemployed, Bible-scribbling monks trashing a Gutenberg Press, the machines that came along after it weren't so lucky.

The Spinning Jenny, an eight spool yarn spinning device invented by James Hargreaves, and named after his daughter, Jenny, that essentially replaced seven people, got spinners plenty pissed. In 1768, only a year after the product launch, a gang of spinners broke into Hargreaves' house and killed all of his Jennies—except the daughter. Hargreaves left town and found a partner, and together they helped launch the Industrial Revolution.

It was 48 years later when the Luddites started their campaign of violence against machines (to be fair, they'd already killed about 50 humans). According to legend, Ned Ludd, their Robin Hood-style folk hero, had smashed a knitting machine in 1779, but it wasn't until 1816 that a historical record of Luddites committing machine murder shows up. On May 18, and June 18 of that year, lace makers, furious about a new knitting machine that could do precision work previously thought to be unique to humans, broke into two factories and demolished their lace-making machines. The guys who were arrested had covered their tracks by plotting out alibis, and they got away with it.

For more robo-tragedy, check out our documentary about the world's first party robot:

In 1830, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, tailors in Paris broke into a factory that made military uniforms and smashed 80 sewing machines.

After the invention of clockwork, people started engineering machines designed to look like humans or animals—the kind you might have seen in the movie Hugo, that can be wound-up, and then move around like herky-jerky zombies. Some could sit across from you and play chess, kind of. Some could digest food, kind of. They often got destroyed in fires, and would be written about like human victims. In a supposed eye-witness account of the fire that claimed the mechanical chess player, the anonymous author claimed:

We listened with painful anxiety. It might have been a sound from the crackling wood-work, or the breaking window panes, but, certain it is, that we thought we heard through the struggling flames, and above the din of outside thousands, the last words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft repeated syllables, "echec! echec!!"

In 1920, the word "robot" came along in a play called "R.U.R." aka: "Rossum's Universal Robots." With it came the idea of a human-shaped automaton who could be used by industry as a cheap and efficient alternative to people. The play itself was also an important moment in the history of cruelty to robots, not just because it aroused our anger by featuring the first fictional robot overthrow of humanity, but also because it ended with a guy refusing to cut open a robot woman in an experiment. He decided she had feelings.

Office Spacevia 21st Century Fox

The concept stuck. For almost 100 years, we've been calling the machines designed to replace us "robots." And just like the American working class objected to the mythical steam-powered hammer that threatened to replace folk hero John Henry, we haven't been huge fans of our coming obsolescence.

Vandalizing company equipment is a classic way for workers to express frustration. By the 1970s, auto workers in the US had a "folk history of shopfloor sabotage." When used a bargaining strategy, sabotaging the heavily automated process of making cars could help them get what they wanted from their bosses. But they don't do much machine-smashing today. It's been replaced by subtler forms of sabotage that largely spare the employment. Today, the killing of machines at work can involve death by a thousand cuts: Egyptian textile workers torture their work machines to death slowly, smashing the parts that fall off, and then not telling anyone, until one day the thing stops working.

But usually these days, when we take our raw anger out on machines, it's less an act of revenge against our employers than a hot-blooded, random act of violence. In 2013, an Amazon employee trashed 15 or 20 hand-held scanners, citing, "frustration with the job and other associates." Outside of work, soda machines malfunction, and sometimes we go medieval on them. Same goes for stamp machines and parking machines.

But at the same time, we're starting to like our robots. We own them, and give them names, and we're starting to get genuinely queasy about our own violence toward them. This can be harmless, as in the 2001 experiment in which children had a hard time holding a Furby upside down because the robotic, talking toy will freak out and go "me scared." But this unlikely friendship can also interfere with how we use our machines.

.gif via Boston Dynamics

According to a 2013 survey at the University of Washington, we're really starting to view robots the way fans viewed Hitchbot—as our pets, or even our friends. After interviews with 23 bomb disposal technicians who used robots in their work, author Julie Carpenter described a complicated relationship. Technicians "would say they were angry when a robot became disabled because it is an important tool," which is fine, but she added, "then they would add 'poor little guy,' or they'd say they had a funeral for it." Carpenter worried that this might make workers hesitate to send a robot on a suicide mission.

In 2006, an army colonel working at test range in Arizona had to supervise a robot designed to step on mines. With each mine the robot stepped on, a limb would be savagely blown off. The roboticist observing the test felt that it was going well, but according to The Washington Post, the colonel who supervised the operation called it off, because he couldn't stand watching the increasingly disabled robot slowly drag itself to the next mine.

The experiment was, the colonel decided, inhumane.

Philosophers like Peter Singer and Agata Sagan are increasingly willing to entertain the idea that robots might someday be able to feel emotions. And last week, thousands of high-profile scientists and technologists signed an open letter calling for a ban on killer robots controlled by artificial intelligence—essentially, drones that can decide who they want to kill.

It might be good that we're starting to feel empathy for robots when we torture them. After all, when Skynet goes online, it's going to be bad enough. The last thing we need is for the robots' first emotion to be a thirst for vengeance.

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It isn't hard to have a cult. All you need is vision, charisma, and maybe a remote farm to isolate your followers and feed them a steady diet of venison chili and mescaline. The tricky part is making sure it lasts.

See, most cults live and die by their leaders. Once the figurehead is gone, members drift apart, unmoored, often falling in with other cults or charismatic leaders. It's the rare cult leader who starts something so strong enough that it thrives after his or her death. Only a few people have managed to pull it off—L. Ron Hubbard was one; Osho was another; and inexplicably, a man named Bernard Poolman was one, too.

Poolman was just a white guy from Namibia whose bald head and barrel-esque physique made him resemble the Kingpin, Spiderman's arch-nemesis. He wasn't blessed with good looks, but the man had determination. He also had more than a few crazy stories about killing demons. That was enough to turn him into South Africa's own L. Ron Hubbard, leaving behind a cult that would soldier on years after his passing, with their sights now set on America.

But before all that, according to Poolman, there was an exorcism. That's where it began.

The alleged exorcism took place during a TV interview at Poolman's house in Durban, South Africa. At least that's what his disciples believe. This was during the early 90s—years before he started the Desteni cult at his farm in Pietermaritzburg, years before his pyramid scheme would spread across the internet, and years before he met the girl he claimed could channel Hitler. Back then, the pale, heavy-set Poolman didn't have any worldwide followers. He was just an ex-cop trying to sell tutoring software for kids.

Things started casually enough, Poolman said in a 2008 interview with his cultmembers about Desteni's history. A film crew had come to Poolman's house to interview him about his software, which he claimed could fix attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other behavioral issues in children. But that day, Poolman just wanted to talk about a concept he developed called "self-forgiveness," a vague process of accepting your flaws that would later become a crucial tenant of his Desteni cult.

Poolman wasn't blessed with good looks, but the man had determination. He also had more than a few crazy stories about killing demons.

"Suddenly, one of the cameramen walked onto the set and started challenging me," Poolman recounted in the 2008 interview. "His anger was extensive."

Instead of asking the guy what the fuck his problem was, like any normal person would do, Poolman decided to take the 20-year-old cameraman's hand and get the boy to say, "I forgive myself." That's when things started getting really weird. The kid's mouth began to gesticulate, as Poolman remembered it, but no sound came out.

Then the cameraman began to convulse. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his hands balled into fists. Poolman assumed it was an epileptic fit. But at some point, somehow, Poolman came to the conclusion that the guy wasn't having just any old seizure—he was possessed by a demon. Poolman knew what to do. He grabbed the kid and held him.

"It's such a good thing, to forgive yourself," Poolman cooed.

Finally, the seizure subsided, and the cameraman was able to croak out a sentence about how he forgave himself. Poolman took that to mean that his strategy worked—the demon had fled the guy's body. The film crew's cameras rolled the whole time, capturing every second of the encounter. Unfortunately, according to Poolman, the crew was so terrified that they destroyed every shred of film evidence. Today, Desteni followers' faith in this miracle rests solely on Poolman's word.

Poolman claimed the incident was his first exorcism. However, it was a short-lived victory. He quickly realized that he didn't completely destroy the demon. He just sent it out of the cameraman's body, searching for another host.

"When you exorcise a demon, you aren't solving the problem," Poolman later said in his thick, South African accent during a 2011 YouTube video published by DesteniDaily. "You're creating a new problem."

So Poolman set off down a path to rid the world of demons forever—one that would lead him to buy a compound, start a cult, and finally die of heart failure in 2013, surrounded by a group of his Desteni disciples, people who would continue to spread his insane tales of demons, spirit channelers, and killing Hitler in the "demon dimension."

Bernard Poolman defeating 300 demons at his home in Durban, South Africa. Illustrations by Matt Panuska

Bernard Poolman left his hometown of Okahandja, Namibia, to study law at North-West University in South Africa. He graduated in 1983 and started a career as a detective on the South African Police Force. He was fascinated by the spirit realm—his father-in-law at the time was allegedly a deep-trance medium, and Poolman would have regular sittings with the man to talk with the spirits who entered his body.

One night, according to Poolman, he received a warning from the spirit world that he should stop working on his current case, because he would be killed if he continued to investigate it. He took the spirits' advice, quit the police force, and moved across the country to live in Durban.

From there, Poolman began selling tutoring programs for children, but his interest in spiritualism and the occult continued to grow. Then came the day of the interview, the possessed cameraman, and the exorcism, which sent a demon spiraling off into the world, searching for another body to claim. At that moment, Poolman knew he had to devote his life to ridding the world of demons for good. Eventually, according to the Desteni lore, the demons fought back.

According to Poolman, the threat of the demons became clear to him in 1998, when he and his two kids woke up to find their house covered in Satanic graffiti. Big letters reading "I Will Kill You and Your Son" were allegedly scrawled across the carport wall.

"It became clear that a demon had possessed one of our workers and then went around placing these messages," Poolman explained in the 2008 interview about Desteni's history. He called the police, but there was nothing they could do. The cops made a note of the vandalism and left the demonic spray paint for Poolman to clean up.

"We've got demons everywhere," Poolman remembered his daughter saying. Poolman said there were about 300 demons in all, swooping around his house. He had experience fighting demons, but he'd never faced a group this large.

But he went ahead and fought the shit out of those demons. Poolman claims that he and his children gathered up all the demons and forced them into his body, since that seemed like the most logical thing to do. Then he showed the demons "what forgiveness is all about." And the 300 demons disappeared for good.

"At this stage," he told his Desteni followers in a YouTube video, "I was very clear that forgiveness does actually transform the demon specifically. Therefore, I made it my objective to help as many as possible."

Poolman began holding regular exorcisms at his house in Durban. People would writhe around on the floor, screaming and possessed, as Poolman led their demons down the path to self-forgiveness—the only way, he said, to defeat them forever.

Clockwise from left: Rick Ross (no relation), cult deprogrammer; Zena Swanepoel, Poolman's former assistant; Anu, alien overlord and creator of Mankind; Jesus Christ; Hitler, king of the demon dimension; Esteni de Wet, Poolman's girlfriend; Sunette Spies, the interdimensional portal; Cameron Cope, Texan Desteni member and head of TechnoTutor; Andrea Rossouw, early Desteni follower; and Bernard Poolman, Desteni's mastermind.

Zena Swanepoel started working for Bernard Poolman as his personal assistant in 2001. At that point, Poolman had just finished writing a book called A Virus-Free Mind , in which he described ways to reprogram people by tapping into the language centers of their minds. The book would become Desteni's Dianetics.

The formal Desteni cult was still just a vague idea when Swanepoel was hired. It would take a while for Poolman to get his plans in order and try to takeover the world. But he was well on his way to developing his techniques.

"Bernard could make anyone fall in love with him," Swanepoel said to me over Skype from South Africa. "He could knock a person down intellectually within minutes... He could mess with your head."

With Zena's help, Poolman combined the language techniques he developed in A Virus-Free Mind with the education program he sold in the 90s into a new tutoring software called Power Education by MindTechnology. Then they set off to sell it across South Africa.

"We would, in retrospect, manipulate parents into thinking they needed [Power Education]," Zena said to me. "Then we could sell something that was worth 400 rand [$35] for 12,000 [$1,030]."

Then, Poolman met a woman named Esteni de Wet and the two started dating. According to Swanepoel, de Wet took an immediate dislike to her. Swanepoel and Poolman had been very close, and she was making around $5,000 a month—but Swanepoel believes that de Wet convinced Poolman to cut her out of the picture. Poolman stopped paying Swanepoel and exiled her to an office in Cape Town.

Poolman's education software business started to gain traction in the early 2000s, and more money started coming in. Swanepoel remembers that Poolman had a fleet of sales consultants peddling Power Education across the country, and a new house outside of Pietermaritzburg—the farm that would soon become the Desteni cult's compound.

"He had a hold on our minds and our emotions. I was so in love with him and his ideas and his mind that when I became disillusioned with him, it was extremely difficult... He was so good at making us feel like we were becoming deprogrammed from society's bullshit that [we didn't realize] he was programming us."

He was so good at making us feel like we were becoming deprogrammed from society's bullshit that [we didn't realize] he was programming us.

A few years later, after severing all ties with Poolman and his business, Swanepoel ran into Esteni de Wet's parents.

"They were in Cape Town, staying at the Hilton, and I went to go see them. They were telling me about a meditation that Bernard had developed. They wanted me to try it. Then, they say the tool Bernard uses—the way it works best—is E."

According to Swanepoel, De Wet's parents dropped a pill of ecstasy into her hands in their Hilton hotel suite and told her to swallow it.

"I held it in my hands and didn't know what to say. He had everyone in the house taking it, even his daughter, Cerise, and his son, Leslie-John. All those kids."

Neither Desteni or Esteni de Wet's parents returned VICE's request for comment.

Swanepoel left the hotel and didn't think about Poolman for years, until old friends started calling her and asking what she knew about Desteni.

"People started saying, 'Have you heard what Bernie's done? Have you seen how far he's taken it?' I knew Bernard long before [Desteni] started. When I saw what he'd done, I wasn't shocked at all."

Poolman's group had grew from ecstasy-fueled meditation circles into a full-blown cult once he met the girl who could channel the spirit of Hitler in . Her name was Sunette Spies. She was a white, short-haired South African girl with a slight Afrikaans accent. She was also an "interdimensional portal."

She didn't just channel Hitler—Spies could channel Mother Teresa, Kurt Cobain, Anton La Vey, Audrey Hepburn , Da Vinci, Nietzsche, and the reptilian god Anu, who apparently created Mankind. She could even channel the essence of inanimate objects, like a tampon or a grain of sand.

Poolman found Spies around the time Swanepoel was exiled to Cape Town. He and de Wet were having breakfast at Kloof Mall outside of Durban, where he struck up a conversation with their pretty, teenage waitress. The girl's mother had just died of cancer, and after they finished their meal, Poolman found the girl crying. He invited her back to his farm. In 2006, Poolman made her Desteni's official interdimensional portal.

"He placed his hands on my back and said to me, 'Let go and relax,'" Spies explained on Desteni's Wiki. "When he spoke those words, I literally let go over everything, and everyone that ever existed within me in the world."

The interdimensional portal opened. Poolman had a direct connection to the heavens and the demon dimension.

Spies was young, blond, and pretty—the perfect person for Poolman to use as Desteni's figurehead. The fact that she could open her body and allow herself to be possessed by just about every dead famous person, spiritual leader, or reptilian alien overlord didn't hurt, either. She could fake it well, at least. Maybe not "well," but the fact that she was willing to fake it at all was probably enough for Poolman.

The thing that separated Poolman's Desteni from L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology was that, while Hubbard waited until his members were already fully invested in Scientology before unleashing the crazy, while Poolman paraded his cult's batshit-insane demon-channeling front and center—and all over the internet.

With Spies around, Poolman could start whipping out videos and writing blog posts about her channeling sessions. Soon, there were hundreds of Desteni videos on YouTube showing off Spies channeling spirits.

Sunette Spies—the interdimensional portal—channeling Hitler, Kurt Cobain, and Albert Einstein

The interdimensional portal wasn't particularly convincing, but Desteni disciples still started trickling in. One of the first was Andrea Rossouw, who found Poolman and Spies in the winter of 2006. A demon had been allegedly possessing Rossouw since her father died, when she was 11. Rossouw claimed that the demon would occasionally leave her body, possess the body of her father's friend, and molest her. Then the demon would re-enter her body and try to convince her to kill herself.

Later, Rossouw wrote in a blogpost from 2008, the demon began to possess her boyfriend's body and beat her. The boyfriend would wake up later and not remember what had happened. Poolman invited Rossouw to live on his farm and stop the cycle of "demon" abuse. She moved in and helped the group launch their first Desteni website, where people from all around the world could watch channeling videos and talk to Poolman and Spies on the Desteni message boards.

Poolman continued to borrow pages from the L. Ron Hubbard handbook by starting his own pay-your-way self-help program, like Scientology's auditing. His was in the form of online classes, called Structural Resonance Alignment Training , and his best pupils were invited to come live on the farm.

By 2009, around 30 people were living and working off and on at Poolman's Desteni compound in Pietermaritzburg. Along with the channeling and the web self-help classes—which involved cluttering the internet with blogs praising the wonders of Desteni—the group began a head-shaving campaign called FaceWorldFaceOff. Baldness, Poolman taught, allowed you to be able to "start seeing somebody's face and not be caught up in the hair." Poolman, if you'll remember, had conveniently gone bald years before.

At this time, Desteni caught the attention of the Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults . Rick Ross, a cult deprogrammer who has worked on more than 500 deprogramming cases, began compiling information about Desteni in a thread on his website's message board . They mapped out Desteni's channeling videos, their online classes, and their cult-cliché shaved heads.

"In my opinion, based upon my interaction with Destini members online and through the message board, the group is a destructive cult," Ross later told VICE.

In response, Poolman and his followers launched an online smear campaign against Ross. They called him a "militant Jewish [bigot]" on an "anti-Christian crusade." Desteni members even popped into Ross's online discussion, spreading an endless stream of messages about "self-forgiveness." Despite the stab at Ross's Judaism, it's unclear if Desteni was actively racist. A photo from the farm shows they had at least one member of color—though it looks a bit like someone's throwing the Hitler salute behind him.

Eventually, Ross got tired of talking in circles with Desteni, and the forum thread went dead. Triumphant after defeating the evil, "anti-Christian" Rick Ross, Poolman continued his long quest of demon hunting, now with the help of the interdimensional portal.

One night, Poolman said, Jesus himself came through the interdimensional portal. After some discussion, Poolman asked Christ to team up with him and clean up the demon dimension for good. Jesus was apparently stoked to join the Desteni team.

Together, Bernard Poolman and Jesus of Nazareth rounded up demons one by one and blew them into oblivion with Self-Forgiveness. The last and biggest demon, Poolman remembered in the 2008 Desteni history interview, was Hitler himself. He was their final foe—the boss, the Bowser, the Dean of the Demon Dimension. Once Poolman was able to teach Hitler how to forgive himself, once and for all, the Führer and his demon denizens were vanquished.

With the world finally rid of demons, Poolman and his Desteni cult set their sights on developing their online Structural Resonance Alignment Training into a full-fledged, pay-as-you-go web seminar program, rechristened the Desteni I Process, or DIP. DIP classes cost $111 per month for the first year, and twice that for the second and third.

The Desteni I Process even had some multilevel marketing thrown in—according to the website, third-year DIP graduates were encouraged to become "Buddies" and find new recruits. Buddies kept their recruits invested in the program and pocket 35 percent of the students' payments.

Desteni claims that it has had "several hundred" participants in DIP over the years. It's difficult to find any hard numbers to back that up, but the DIP website lists 62 Buddies from all around the world keeping cuts of their students' tabs. Like all good multilevel marketing schemes, the majority of the money most likely went straight into Poolman's pockets.

Bernard Poolman died the morning of August 11, 2013, but the Portal still releases videos to this day. The videos still point people to the Desteni website, which still shills the $100 self-help classes and books explaining how the reptilian god Anu created mankind. And the spirit of Hitler continues to speak on YouTube, if you want to go listen.

"We must now prove to the world that Bernard was no 'guru,'" Poolman's daughter, Cerise, wrote in his obituary. "That we are entirely capable of standing without him and growing ourselves and the group."

And they are. Desteni has managed to stand without Poolman in the years since his death—the group is still limping along, and now they're coming to America.

Before he died, Poolman recruited Texan Desteni member Cameron Cope and his partner, Katie Conklin, to sell educational software in the United States. The software, called TechnoTutor, claims no direct connection to Desteni, though suspiciously enough the group does "endorse the educational software," and reviewers on the TechnoTutor website share names with Desteni members.

Cope also ran Aconduit Marketing, a now-defunct company that claimed to let you "work with a revolutionary product that improves lives" and earn an "income potential of $14K per month," but only if you have an initial $15,000 to spend up front.

The "revolutionary product"—probably TechnoTutor—and the multilevel marketing structure sounds an awful lot like the same education software Bernard Poolman was once shilling with Zena Swanepoel. Cameron Cope was initially open to an interview with VICE, but stopped responding once asked about the similarities between the two programs.

Desteni may never become the worldwide movement Poolman wanted it to be. It may never get tens of thousands of active members like Scientology, or even hundreds of people like Jim Jones led in the People's Temple—but it only took a few dozen followers to help Charles Manson burst the bubble on the 1960s. Even Poolman's pal Jesus only had 12 disciples, and he left a decent-sized mark on the world. If nothing else, Poolman's legacy is one hell of a tale about Hitler, Jesus, and the demon dimension. That's something.

We tried to talk to Sunette, Esteni, and the rest of Desteni for this story. They sent us a bunch of long, convoluted answers to our first string of questions, and never responded to our follow-ups. There wasn't anything worth quoting in the story, but you can read the answers they sent us here.

Follow River on Twitter.

Illustration by Ole Tillmann

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

The Norwegian government recently proposed a law that makes seven-year-olds eligible to legally change their gender—with parental consent. Under the new system, kids won't be allowed to undergo sex-reassignment surgery; only citizens 18 or older can have the procedure. The new legislation has received positive reviews in Norway partly because the previous one was considered so medieval. Before, to legally change your gender, you were required to go through psychological evaluations, sex-reassignment surgery, and sterilization.

"The [previous] system was unacceptable and has been unchanged for nearly sixty years. I'm therefore very pleased to propose a completely new system that makes it much easier to change legal gender," Norway's minister of health and care services, Bent Høie, wrote in a statement.

Credit for bringing the issue front and center in Norway should go to John Jeanette Solstad Remø. "The former submarine captain in the Norwegian navy realized she really was a woman but did not want to undergo all this physical interference," Gerald Kador Folkvord, a political adviser and coordinator for human rights education at Amnesty International, told VICE. "She took up this fight—saying it should be up to her to say who she is."

All photos by Awol Erizku

"The day you were born, there was a pine box and a prison cell built with your name on it."

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my father said that to me countless times, especially just as I was walking out the door. The first time I remember hearing those words, I had to have been about six or seven; I was so young, I didn't really understand what he meant. I had yet to grasp the burden that comes with being young and black and male in America. It just sounded scary, and after hearing it—given what little I understood about race at the time—I was left with the distinct feeling that I was cursed.

But that was dad's way. He always tried to speak to me like I was a little man. And not because he was on some cheap machismo trip or because he had a taste for the macabre—it was because he legitimately thought if I didn't understand this lesson early on, I might not make it to age 25.

Related: Black Lives Matter

The phrase "dead or in jail" loomed large over my adolescence, as I think it does many young blacks today. The New York Times estimates that there are 1.5 million "prime age" black men in America who are "missing" from society today, meaning they are either behind bars or pushing up daisies. How they got there is a confluence of the micro and the macro—individual choices and a game with incredibly high stakes that's been fixed against them from the start.

Allowing your child to play that game without understanding the rules is tantamount to leading them to slaughter. My parents understood this, not just as blacks who lived through the Civil Rights era, but as retired police officers who saw the way race played out on streets and inside the municipal courts in the city of Cleveland.

The storied legacy of the premature death of black men (homicide is still our greatest killer, according to CDC data) has arguably been eclipsed by the mass incarceration of black nonviolent drug offenders. And although President Obama's administration has advanced sentencing reforms and clemency initiatives that will help reign in this injustice, we're going to be living with the fallout for generations.

Right now, blacks make up 12 percent of the population, but almost 60 percent of those doing time in state prison for drug-related offenses—and according to the Sentencing Project, these black prisoners are serving almost as much time for their drug offenses as whites are for actually violent crimes.

That is the great equalizer of the black American experience, whether you grow up in the whitest suburbs like I did or in the grimiest ghettos: Interacting with police is fraught with peril and inequity. Despite my familial connections to law enforcement—two of my great-uncles, both my parents, my uncle, and my sister have all served or are serving on the force in Cleveland—I know that sick scenes like the unnecessary arrest of Prairie View A&M grad Sandra Bland, who died in custody, or the brutal treatment of black teens at Craig Ranch North Community Pool in McKinney, Texas, earlier this summer are not exceptions to the rule. They are the norm—indignities etched into the everyday experience of being black in America. And even I—with my white friends and my media job and my master's degree in publishing—can still get caught up in that when I get stopped by the cops. Although we live in a country with an unhealthy obsession with status and wealth, whether you're in a Pinto or a Porsche, wearing a hoodie or Helmut Lang, when the law comes down on you, you're still a nigger.

I think that's why the last few years have been so terrifying for me as I've seen the names cycle through from Trayvon Martin to Kimani Gray to Victor White to Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott to Freddie Gray to Samuel DuBose. I know that no matter how well I play the game, no matter how cognizant I am of the rules, it could happen to me. I think about it when I walk past the police station at the end of my block in Brooklyn. I ask myself: Is today going to be the day they are going to fuck with me? And if so, what will I do? Every time a new video shot on police cameras and bystander's cell phones emerges with yet another black life being smothered across the screen, I feel myself getting one step closer to a kind of nihilism about this country and my place in it.

I can relate to the blinding, hot rage I've seen swallow up so many other brothers of my generation, from the pain they foolishly inflict against each other because their arms can't reach the system, to the pain they inflict upon themselves because they are trying to escape the realities of the everyday. It's in those fits of anger that I wonder, Were we always destined to live and die this way, like savages in the street or alone in cold cells? And if this is it, why did our parents have us at all? Why bring us into this world where our lives are short and wracked with pain?

This existential thought crossed my mind recently as I stood in the fabricated slave quarters of Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, an hour West of New Orleans. I was on a much-needed vacation from immersion in the dizzying American news cycle. The trip was mostly about escape via consumption of hurricanes and daiquiris, but I made a point of visiting a plantation. Having grown up in the north, plantations only existed in movies and history class, but I wanted to see the remnants of my ancestors' subjugation.

I had imagined visiting a plantation might be tantamount to visiting the Holocaust museum—a kind of solemn, emotive experience. Instead, the Big House tour was sold like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with crowds of Midwestern whites gawking at the good life enjoyed by the masters during the heydays of slavery—with little to no mention from my guide of the blood and tears on which that life was predicated. The slave quarters weren't actually even part of the primary tour—they were self guided, I suspect because of lack of interest and a tacit reaffirmation that their stories and lives still don't matter. As I sat on the crusty stoop of one of the recreated rickety shacks in the towering shadow of the imposing plantation, I wondered how far black folks had actually come from living a life of terror and squalor in those huts, and whether it was worth all of the suffering it took to get here.

That suffering has certainly dissipated, but it's not to the degree you might expect with a black president sitting in the White House. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, a black ex-con today barely has more rights—and arguably enjoys less respect—than a freed slave or "free" person living below the Mason-Dixon line during the Jim Crow era. In many ways, the plantations have been exchanged for overpopulated prisons. According to the Washington Post, there are more incarceration facilities in the US than there are degree-granting colleges and universities. And labor from these prisons—where the incarcerated can get paid just pennies on the dollar—produce more than $2 billion in products every year. Most of this labor is on behalf of government agencies, but increasingly, the private sector is cashing in on the cheap, mostly black labor to make coveted consumer items. What else can you call that but modern-day slavery?

Watch Wilbert investigate the unregulated world of drug rehab.

But even if we manage to avoid the death-or-jail-cell quagmire my father warned me about, there's still the plantation in our minds to contend with. The terror we live under today may not be comparable to that of the 1860s, but the fear, the humiliation, and the emasculation remain in subversive and subtle forms, creeping in and crippling us from the inside. Of course, not every altercation between the police and black youth ends in death, but the indignities we endure every day take a different kind of toll. They chip away at our personhood, our humanity, and can very easily make us meek—or else a uniquely American breed of monster.

When I first began to tune into the slew of cryptic videos and horror stories that have been arriving by the boatful in the last few years, I wanted to weep. What I did instead is weep inside until my emotional well went dry. And then I started to feel nothing but a gnawing angst, searing through the sides of my belly.

It's that burning feeling that at one time made me certain I would never bring another black child into this world. For what? To be beaten, to be caged, to be taught to hate himself and everyone who shares the same skin as him? There was a time when I couldn't imagine subjecting anyone else to that curse, that burden.

But I don't feel quite that way anymore. Perhaps the catalyst for the change was when I was standing in those slaves quarters on that plantation, with the call of my ancestors shouting so loud at me that they were impossible to ignore. Up until that point, I had been fixating so much on their suffering‚ our suffering, my own suffering, that I let it eclipse the extraordinary phenomenon of our survival. It was amid the torturous iron shackles and tattered clothes of slaves who'd long since left the realm of the living that I remembered what we had endured.

We survived the perilous Middle Passage, 246 years of being human chattel, a century of Jim Crow, and the past 50 years of mass incarceration and police brutality.

Given all the hateful, wicked, genocidal shit we've been up against since this country's inception, black folks should be wiped out by now. But we're still here, clawing along in the fight for the recognition of our humanity. And on some fronts—many of which are more ceremonial than substantive—we have overcome. The simple fact that I, the descendant of slaves, could come back to that plantation as a freeman—a tourist—signifies there's something special about how our people contended with some of the most abhorrent, virulent oppression in recent human history.

With that legacy, how could I not have a son to push that struggle forward? I owe it to all those who died in order to see me here to keep the fight going and resist those pangs of hopelessness that linger inside my spirit when I see other brothers fall. I should have a son for every Sean Bell and Kalief Browder. I should have ten sons, 100, 1.5 million, one for each of the missing brothers who couldn't find a way to escape the pine box or the prison cell.

Actually, just one would be good enough—one to carry on my family name, and carry on that fire that's been burning since we came to this country in bondage. When he gets to be about six, I'll tell him the same thing my daddy told me. Except I'll add something that I've had a hard time remembering amid the deluge of stories about unarmed shooting victims and disproportionate prison sentences:

"Against those insurmountable odds, many of us overcome. You can overcome."

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

All portraits by Awol Erizku. Follow Awol on Tumblr and Instagram.

Senator Chuck Schumer is arguably the most powerful Democrat in Washington after President Obama. He came to visit us at our new offices in Brooklyn where we had a chance to sit down and chat about growing up in the neighborhood, college debt, and Iran.

Clockwise from top: Dewi, Sjoerd, Jaco, Sean, and Daantje in front. All photos by Raymond van Mil

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

The idea of a "nuclear family"—white picket fence, a kid or two, friendly golden retriever—has been under siege for a while now. No longer do stories of step-parents or half-siblings shock us, and children being raised by parents of the same gender (so-called "pink families") are becoming increasingly common. Another new, lesser known family structure that has emerged is that of multi-parenting—or raising a child with more than two legal parents. For instance, a lesbian couple and a gay couple bringing up a child together as a single family, but in separate households.

That's more or less the family unit that two couples—Jaco and Sjoerd, and Daantje and Dewi—have decided upon. The four have known each other for ten years, and have been considering the possibility of having a child together for about six. That possibility is going to become a reality this week, when Daantje gives birth.

Both couples are married, but Jaco and Sjoerd's relationship also involves a third person: an Australian named Sean who's been their partner for the last three years. "Three and a half," Sean shouts from the kitchen when he hears me asking Sjoerd how long they have been together. Sean is such a big part of their relationship that he will play an equal role in raising the gang's future son.

"Jaco and I have been married for eight years now. Unfortunately we can't marry Sean as well, otherwise we'd have done it in a heartbeat," says Sjoerd.

From left to right: Sean, Jaco, Daantje, Dewi, and Sjoerd

"Five parents with equal rights and responsibilities, divided across two households—those are the terms of the agreement that we all signed and had notarized," says Dewi. They had to do this because, legally speaking, the Netherlands isn't quite ready for multi-parenthood just yet. A child can still only have a maximum of two legal parents and, in a marriage, those parents are usually the biological mother and her husband or wife. However, the biological mother is also allowed to appoint someone else as the second legal parent.

The laws surrounding parental rights have improved significantly for gay parents in the Netherlands over the past few years, but the issue of multi-parenthood is still a complicated one. In the case of this particular five-parent family, Jaco has taken on the role of legal parent number two—replacing Dewi, who initially held the position because of her marriage to Daantje.

"We wanted to make sure that there was one legal parent in both households, because we're splitting the upbringing equally," explains Dewi.

"The advantage of that is that us men can take our son on vacation without customs stopping us for traveling with a child that, legally speaking, isn't ours," agrees Sjoerd.

"If Daantje and I go traveling with our son, we will need an official permission slip from Jaco, because the baby will have his last name," continues Dewi.

Related: How I Figured Out the Rules of My Three-Way Relationship

"The laws weren't written for people like us, so we're constantly looking for ways to make things work for all five of us. Sometimes, that can make you a little opportunistic," Sjoerd told me. "I don't have any legal connection to my son, so I'm not entitled to any parental leave when he's born. But I want to be there, so now I have a statement from Daantje and the "father," that says I take care of "their" child, which will grant me the right to foster care-leave; even though I am not a foster parent. It's very complex for everyone involved and isn't ideal for any of us. I mean that legally because, in practice, I think our situation is ideal."

Basically, it worked like this: Daantje and Dewi were getting it on in one room, and we were in the other. At some point, Dewi yelled: 'Yes, we're ready!' and then we walked into their room with a jar of semen.

When I ask whether it was difficult to come up with a first name that they all liked, Dewi assures me that it wasn't but they'd rather keep the name to themselves. "We'd already settled on a name before we were even pregnant."

Sjoerd and Dewi

The legal aspects of multi-parenthood are complicated enough as it is, but what about the practical side? Who had to sleep with whom?

"Oh no, that wasn't something we wanted to do," Sjoerd tells me when I ask if Daantje had slept with the biological father (who'd prefer to remain anonymous). "So basically, it worked like this: Daantje and Dewi were getting it on in one room, and we were in the other. At some point, Dewi yelled: 'Yes, we're ready!' and then we walked into their room with a jar of semen."

Dewi explains: "We'd read somewhere that, because of the mucus and contraction of the cervix, sperm enters a woman more easily if she has an orgasm during the insemination. We actually used these basters that we'd been given on our wedding day, but those turned out to be way too big. There was a lot of air in them and the semen ended up in all sorts of places that it shouldn't have."

"That first time was more of a disaster than a success," laughs Sjoerd.

"During that first ovulation period, the guys would stop by and after every attempt, we'd have a cup of tea while Daantje sat on the couch with her legs up in the air. Thankfully, it only took two months for her to get pregnant, because I remember thinking, Imagine if we have to do this for a full year: all those jars of semen and basters and all that," elaborates Dewi.

Related: Watch our documentary 'ICEMAN'

"Ejaculation can become this very physical, practical thing," Sjoerd concurs. "I've heard from a lot of straight couples that sex just stops being fun whilst trying to conceive. I reckon they would be better off just trying to get pregnant like we did—at least that way sex just stays sex and doesn't become a chore."

The vast family (the baby will have five parents, 11 enthusiastic grandparents, and 21 aunts and uncles) seem to be ready for whatever issues that may arise while they're raising the child together. "We're ridiculously well-prepared," says Sjoerd. "We've already picked out schools. It's mainly people around us that expect problems, but that whole myth about the more people being involved with something the harder it being to come to a decision, isn't true. With us, there isn't a lot of room to be irrational—if it's just the two of you, you can easily get stuck in an emotional discussion which you both want to win. But when there's five of you, you're forced to reach a reasonable consensus."

Related: I Grew Up in a Polyamorous Household

Dewi tells us that she was surprised about the criticism they'd been getting from the LGBT community. "People say things to Daantje and I, like: 'You shouldn't get the men involved,' and to the boys: 'Be careful with those lesbians, they'll take your child away from you.' It is all about ownership, about fears, and ego."

"And about stereotypical views of what men and women are like—that us men will only be there for the good parts, the fun days out with daddy, and that Daantje and Dewi will be overflowing with hormones and turn into overprotective mama bears. I don't think that's how things will go," Sjoerd chimes in.

Another problem that their friends and family seem to worry about is the question of what will happen if Daantje and Jaco (the legal parents) die in a car accident. "But," argues Sjoerd, "If that were to happen, it would be less of a problem for us than for a traditional family. I wish everyone had a safety net like ours. If I suddenly lose my job, our son can still take violin lessons or whatever. I don't understand why more couples don't have children together. You see all these young parents barely surviving the first few years. They don't get any sleep and hardly see their friends. We'll still have enough energy to go out with our friends and talk about other things than babies a few days a week."

Their friends can definitely see the positive side of being able to get some sleep every now and then, as well the benefits of the different influences that five people will have on a child. "We've got yoga, acrobatics, music, politics, and education in our talent pool," says Sjoerd. "The five of us are very different, but that's our strength."

The baby is due this week and all parents plan to be present for the delivery—during the interview with Sjoerd and Dewi, Jaco and Sean had just come back from setting up the birth pool at Daantje and Dewi's house. Dewi says that it took Daantje a while to come around to the idea of everyone being there for the birth. "It was a process for her to open herself up to all of us in that way—it is her body after all. But she wants everyone to be there, and feels comfortable enough with everyone now to have all five of us around." Everyone has been assigned a task for the delivery: Sjoerd will take care of snacks and drinks, Sean and Jaco will give massages where necessary and Dewi will mostly be supporting her partner.

When I ask if they've read about attachment psychology in young children, Sjoerd tells me that a friend of his is writing a doctorate on the subject: "She says the main thing is consistency in the family, and that is something we can offer."

"The world of a baby gets bigger over time, but in the initial stages a baby can attach to about five people—so that works out perfectly for us," says Dewi.

Supertrash dress, Kim K Wang shoes

PHOTOGRAPHY: LOUIE BANKS
STYLING AND ART DIRECTION: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Set design: Penny Mills
Hair: Sami Knight using Unite
Makeup: Adam Burrell using Mac Cosmetics
Assistants: Bo Phoebe and Thomas Ramshaw

Special thanks to the Black Club

Ciara is the princess of pop. Since sashaying onto the scene with her debut single "Goodies" in 2004—which is basically one giant shrugging-off of male advances—Ciara has held it down as one of the few young women in the music industry who has singing, dancing, and songwriting all under her professional belt. Princess is, quite literally, her middle name.

Her new record, Jackie, has seen her come at 2015 like a freight train, bringing not only her sixth studio album, but one that's packed with dance floor R&B, power hooks, and what feels like a personal tale of redemption that whispers through the lyrics. Well, we say whisper, but one of the lyrics is: "Man, I just delivered a nine-pound, 10-ounce baby. I'm a bad motherfucker." So maybe it's more like a war cry.

I caught up with the one woman army to have a relaxed chat about how amazing Janet Jackson is, how irritating fuckboys are, and whether she'll ever do a rap album.

Read the interview over on Noisey.

Paul Smith coat, DKNY dress

Westwood Red Label jacket, McQueen suit, Topshop shoes

Topshop dress

Roberto Cavalli dress

Westwood Red Label suit, Kooples shoes

Vintage suit

If you want your sprog to go to Eton, then best to get a super tutor (photo via)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Along with Lidl and loan sharks, the UK tuition industry has thrived throughout the recession. It is now valued in excess of a staggering £6 billion [$9 billion] a year. In turn, we have seen the emergence of a new strain of high-powered career tutors who charge as much as top-end lawyers to educate the offspring of the super rich. Because what else is there to do when you leave university swimming in debt and neck-deep in rejections from street food startups? Given the current state of the job market, it's little surprise that many fraught graduates are helping rich kids pass their A-levels.

The job goes beyond grades. With many tutoring websites heralding the effect of their services on confidence, manners, and etiquette, it's more like finishing school for hot-housed millennials. It is not uncommon for pushy parents to pay £300 [$467] an hour but for others, this is at the tightfisted end of fees. Take Mark Maclaine—one of the most in-demand super tutors around—who has been known to charge £1000 [$1,550] an hour. "In that instance, the family asked me to come to the Far East and tutor their kids for an Eton entrance exam at the last minute," he says. "They'd heard from another family that I'd done a really good job with their kid and when they put this offer out there, I couldn't refuse."

Since embarking on his career as a private tutor 17 years ago, Maclaine has enjoyed his fair share of luxury, long-distance travel: "The list of places I've been to is pretty big. From Brazil to America, Europe, United Arab Emirates, Russia, the Caribbean, and more. But after a while, you get desensitized to it. I've tutored on Jumbo Jets that are laid out to be like houses where you get your own bedroom, and on yachts and sailing boats that have cinemas on them."

As the industry has boomed, parents' attitudes have simultaneously shifted says Maclaine, whose work and the high regard internationally for the British private school system means he now owns three properties in London. "People are a lot more open about admitting they have tutoring. Parents are now going, 'If you have a tutor, I should have a tutor, we should all have a tutor.' A lot of parents feel like if they don't give tutoring to their kids, they're going to get left behind."

WATCH: VICE pays a visit to the Oxford-Cambridge boat race to talk to some drunk yuppies about politics:

For this reason, Maclaine makes sure he doesn't just work for top-end clients—he helps out people who aren't able to pay anything along with "high-end clients such as royal family, movie stars, rockstars, and bankers." He has also been involved in setting up Tutor Fair, an agency that provides free tutoring for children who cannot afford it. "I really wanted to do something that was actually fair. We've helped 2,000 kids in the state system, kids in city schools, kids on free lunches..."

Rest assured: Titanium Tutors will not take any old tutor

Ruby Robson* is another tutor who has edified the progeny of the mega-rich. "I worked for an agency in Poland called Academia. You won't find it online. It's a secret tutoring agency that works by word of mouth. A banker will tell his banker friend who will tell his other rich friend. Only the elite of the elite send their kids there and they don't want just anybody to find out about it," she explains.

Robson stumbled across the clandestine agency while studying at Oxford: "They put an email out in my final year. I guess they did the same at Cambridge as they only recruit from Oxbridge. They're not even that interested in seeing your CV."

While spending a month tutoring in Poland last summer, Robson says she met a lot of kids she will not forget. "I remember sitting down for an introductory session with one who was about 14. I was like, 'So what do you want to be when you grow up? And he was like, 'I want to be an arms dealer. If I sell a million dollars worth of arms to Israel, I get 10 percent of that.' The mixture of male bravado, teenage arrogance, and being very, very rich was a lot to handle.

"If I'm honest, the kids' attitudes have ranged from disinterested at best to obstructive at worst," she went on. "Although some of them were really nice, they're all incredibly over-privileged and spoon-fed. Sometimes if you tried to get them to work, they got angry." To be fair, how many children wouldn't throw a wobbly if you asked them to spend hours doing extracurricular study after a 9 AM–8PM school day, seven days a week? It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the little billionaire-arms-dealers-in-waiting.

READ ON VICE SPORTS: Inside the Great Wall of China Marathon

Robson is less than effusive about her time tutoring. "Perpetuating the system of privilege really stuck in my throat. After all, you're just helping the kids who've got the most money. In my darker moments, I felt the only thing Oxford had prepared me for was to train other people to go to Oxford."

As with many, tutoring was only ever intended as a stop gap for Robson. But while she's since moved into media, many graduates inadvertently remain tutors for far longer than they expect. Glamorous destinations, Gulfstream jets, inter-family bidding wars, and City-level salaries make it increasingly appealing.

WATCH: Welcome to Broadly, VICE's new women's interest channel

So, what is driving the recent growth of the tutoring industry? All of the main tutoring agencies in Britain primarily cater for private school education. To name just a few, Bonas McFarlane, Titanium Tutors, and Keystone Tutors all cater for 7/8+ prep school exams and 11+ exams for "the most prestigious private schools" and the highest ranked universities. If you want to get your boy sprogs into Eton, Harrow, Winchester, or Westminster and your girl sprogs into Wycombe Abbey, St Paul's, or Cheltenham Ladies, you're hardly going to go it alone.

For this very reason, many agencies provide exorbitant consultancy services that advise parents on every single stage of the application process. As Bonas McFarlane readily explain on their website, "Our consultants are in touch daily with the leading UK independent schools. We have a team of administrators who know the different and precise procedures of each institution—from registration deadlines to testing requirements." If this wasn't enough, Bonas McFarlane also provide, "School Liason: We consult and negotiate with schools, at times making detailed personal recommendations to these selected schools." It seems that the name of your university and the color of your blood counts for a lot more than the class of your degree, teaching qualification, or specialist experience. As such, the "shadow education sector" lacks industry regulation and a standards body.

Not that this is likely to put off the increasing number of Russians, Saudis, Chinese, and others from overseas who are looking to buy their way into the British private school system. Who better to help your Kazakh billionaire child get into Eton than a helicoptered-in former Bullingdon member?

It goes without saying that private tuition creates and exacerbates social inequality. Not only does it distort and undervalue the state curriculum, it exhausts human capital and financial resources that could be invested in those who need it. In a culture cursed by obsessive aspiration, most super tutors work to keep the rich rich and the poor poor—but in spite of this, private tuition remains a relatively invisible and overlooked force in a polarized education sector.

*Ruby Robson is a pseudonym.

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Crime scene tape blocks off part of Dufferin Street—one of several sites being investigated by Toronto police. Photo by Josh Visser

A festival afterparty hosted by Drake ended in a shootout early Tuesday morning, killing two.

This is the second consecutive year that gunfire has broken out after the OVO Fest afterparty at Muzik nightclub, on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. Drake was also the host of last year's event, when two people were injured in a shooting in the early morning of August 4.

This year, police told reporters, shots broke out at about 3:15 AM. The violence began inside the club, where one man was pronounced dead at the scene, before spilling out into the streets, where a woman was critically injured, later dying en route to hospital.

An officer at the scene told VICE that the woman who died was given CPR on Dufferin Street by a police officer near where a lone bike could be visible lying on the sidewalk Tuesday morning.

Deputy Police Chief Peter Sloly told a press conference that the incident comes in the midst of a spike in gun violence in Toronto, and police were already taking precautions. There was a "large visible police presence" when the shooting began, according to Sloly, and officers "were running toward live fire incidents" as the violence spread north and south of the nightclub. Sloly confirmed one officer performed CPR on the woman who died.

"Despite the [police] presence, armed offenders took out firearms and started shooting inside the venue... packed with hundreds of innocent people," said Sloly. "Obviously we have a brazen set of individuals who are armed and willing to use those firearms in crowded areas and put innocent lives at risk."

Sloly said that police don't know how the weapon or weapons got into the club. "General procedure" would see private security agents pat down partygoers, he said. There is also no information yet released about whether Drake was present at the time of the shooting.

The two victims were in their 20s and 30s, according to police. Three others were injured in the attack, two seriously. At least one of them was an innocent bystander with no involvement in the dispute, according to Sloly.

A bicycle believed to be linked to the shooting seen here on Dufferin Street nearby VICE's Toronto office. Photo by Lindsay Gray

"We were very lucky that there was not a larger body count," Sloly said.

Police have not released any information on the number of suspects or their identities, and the area around the club remains cordoned off while they investigate three separate crime scenes.

One of the crime scenes is directly in front of VICE Canada's Dufferin Street office, which police cordoned off, not allowing employees to enter. VICE's office is about 400 metres from Muzik.

In the first seven months of the year, 143 shootings have taken place in Toronto, up from 103 the year before. That makes 2015 the most violent year since 2012, when 153 shootings were recorded by the end of July.

Toronto Mayor John Tory said that he was "saddened and angered by these senseless shootings."

"I am very confident our Toronto Police Service will track down those responsible for this despicable act and ensure they are put away for a long time," he said in a statement.

All photos courtesy of svantana

Last week, YouTube user svantana released a remix of Human League's 1981 classic song "Don't You Want Me" distilled to its essential line "working in a cocktail bar"—repeated over and over again.

Since then, the intensely vocation-focused video has racked up over a quarter million views and been praised as "so dumb it's genius," "significantly better" than the original, and "perfect."

I Skyped with svantana, who lives in Sweden, about why he chose that line specifically, how to make viral comedy gold (repetition, specificity, confusion, and surprise), and what he's working on next: an "EDM" remix to Aqua's 1997 hit "Barbie Girl."

VICE: Has your inbox been blowing up?
svantana: You're actually the first person who wanted to ask me about it personally. People [seem to] want to just take it at face value for what it is. I put that video up like a week ago. It's funny how things go viral because I just shared it on my Facebook and some friends of mine shared it on theirs, and it just took off from there.

So, why that line specifically?
I was just listening to the radio, and that song came on. It opens up like that and it's kind of convoluted. [The line]'s a bit forced the whole thing, and then the female voice comes back and says it again. So I was going to do this back-and-forth thing where they just tell each other [that] line. But then I realized it's more funny to just make the whole song go like that. I've been doing some other remixes—I don't put all my stuff online—but I do some stuff to play in clubs where I like mess around with the vocals and pitch.

Another thing I like is the element of surprise. I like whenever a remix starts out just like the original, and then more and more you start to realize that this is not actually the original. Something weird is going on.

YouTube user svantana

You said it took about an hour to make.
Yeah. Once you get used to these tools, it's not that hard. You just copy/paste and start editing the pitch and things. If it was ten years ago, it would probably would take a whole day. But the tools have become so good right now. No one would try to make this remix ten years ago because it would be too much effort. You wouldn't know if it'd be any fun until you were done. But now I can just be like, "Oh, whatever, I have an hour to spare. I'll just fire up my software and just mess around for a bit."

Are there any examples of remixes that didn't make the cut?
I've done a lot of remixes that I'm really proud of, but you can't hear them because all these cloud sites have all these content-infringement things. So they're blocked by Universal record companies and so forth. At first I put [the Human League] one up on Soundcloud, but they just rejected it right away. So the next move was like, "OK, let's try Youtube," and that worked out. You never really know where you can put your stuff.

So that's a bit of a bummer because I have a bunch of them that I really like. But I don't really know how to share them with the world. I did this one thing with—you remember this 90s song "Barbie Girl"? I did it a while back. It started out normal and then I just started cutting up the vocals more and more and it became like more like EDM... It's kind of hard to explain.

You find that one thing that is kind of weird and you don't get how that turned up in a popular song and you just overdo it until it's really funny. –svantana

Do you have any particular affinity for cocktail bars?
[Laughs] Not really. I just like lyrics that are descriptive. I find a lot of pop songs are based around these very few standard phrases like, "Yeah, I love you," and so forth, "You mean everything to me," and blah blah blah. I like these songs where you paint a picture with your words and describe a scene. The humor of that track just came about from the fact that it is such an unusual line to have in such a big hit song.

It's so specific.
Exactly.

Do you remember that song by the band Das Racist, about the combination Pizza Hut Taco Bell?
Yeah, yeah. Another one's this song "Mom's Spaghetti" by Eminem. It wasn't me, but it's quite similar to mine actually—I just realized that the other day. They took this one 8 Mile [song] "Lose Yourself." On the beginning of the track he raps about being nervous, so nervous that he throws up. There's vomit on his sweater already—Mom's spaghetti. And that was such a weird thing to have in an amp-up song. So [the YouTube user] took that Mom's spaghetti part and just put it on every line in the whole song. And that's turned into three million views on YouTube. It's very similar how you find that one thing that is kind of weird and you don't get how that turned up in a popular song and you just overdo it until it's really funny.

May I ask what you do for work?
I actually work with audio technology. Right now I'm working on this iPhone app. It's a DJ app called Pacemaker. It's for iPhone and iPad where you can mix records from Spotify or from your device. What we're doing now is that we're putting in so you don't actually have to mix yourself, the app will mix for you so you just choose tracks and it will mix them for you.

As a person who remixes your own tracks, do you fear that an app like that will one day put you out of business?
[Laughs] Well, actually I want to have better tools. I don't want to have an idea and then spend 20 hours just getting it to work. I just want to have my computer. I just want to tell my computer like this is what I want and it will just fix it for me. The idea is the whole point, and you just need to know your tools good enough to actually be able to do it. But that's not the hard part, really. I find that better software will make these types of things even better.

Speaking of YouTube, we met viral sensation Shoenice22, a self-professed "professional idiot" who will eat anything for fame:

Did you send this remix to your parents?
Actually, no. The problem with this type of remix [is], if you're not familiar with the original song then it just makes no sense at all. I tried to play it for some older friends, my girlfriend's mother, for example, and she was like, "OK, what's going on here?"

Another funny thing [is that] it kind of seems like it's a male thing actually. On Youtube you can look at analytics and I can see that it's like 85 percent males who listen to the track. All the people who reached out to me and said, "Oh, I love this track," are also guys. My girlfriend was like, "OK. It's fun, but it's not that funny." There seems to be something about guys and this type of joke or mix or what you want to call it.

I [also] do a lot of stuff in the Swedish language so that probably wouldn't be too funny to you. That's just something I do to amuse my friends.

Anything else the VICE readers might like to know about you or this remix?
Some people getting in touch have told me they like this remix because they can just put it on without saying anything, like in a party, and just watch the reaction. That's something I find quite funny. I need to try that myself. Just because it starts off like normal, and a lot of times it just sounds like the song. But it gets people [to be] like, "What the fuck's going on?" That's kind of a... cute way to use music? Something like that.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

Vinicius Rodrigues is on the left and Esdras Gomes is on the right. All photographs by Guilherme Santana

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

It's 8:30 on a Saturday morning and 22-year-old Vinicius Rodrigues is opening his barbershop in Eastern Sao Paulo a little earlier than usual so that he can cater to those who can't afford a haircut. Outside Bom de Corte (which loosely translates to "Ace of Cuts"), a bunch of kids sit on colorful beanbag chairs, waiting to get their hair done.

This is the first time that Vinicius has offered free haircuts at his shop. That said, at least once a month he and a friend, 19-year-old Esdras Gomes, visit nursing homes, childcare centers, and homeless shelters offering their services to those less fortunate.

One of Vinicius's and Esdras's clients. All GIFs by Guilherme Santana

It was Vinicius's father who first encouraged him to take a hairdressing course. At one of those classes he met Esdras, and the two have been inseparable ever since. Vini tells me that before he started working as a barber, he used to wait tables and also spent some time as a stockroom clerk. He says that even though he'd never previously considered being a barber, it only took one class to get him hooked.

Related: Watch 'The Biggest Ass in Brazil'

"I paid 50 bucks [$14 USD] for the chair and my mum gave me the mirror and we were set," he says, looking around his shop proudly. "We're modern. We don't offer our customers magazines or coffee, but we have Wi-Fi." A basic haircut costs about 12 bucks [$3 USD] and on a good day, Vinicius sees about 25 clients.

He often googles African American hairstyles for inspiration. According to Vini, it's the ultimate guide to perfecting the styling lines, fades, and geometric shapes that are so big on the outskirts of São Paulo these days. "Before we started, nobody was doing these haircuts around here," he says. He also believes he sets local trends: "We'll post a haircut online, and the next week there are kids running around the neighborhood schools and they all wear that same style."

Vinicius also teaches kids from the nearby Itaquera neighborhood how to cut hair once a week. "The courses I take are expensive, so it can be a struggle. A one-day course can be like 300 bucks [$86 USD] and if you're not up to speed, you can easily fall behind."

Esdras has his own shop right by Vini's—it's called Salão RB (RB Salon). "Don't ask me why it's called that," he says, so of course I do. "When I was a kid, I got bullied because of where I lived. There was this stream of open sewage around—it was a nasty area. People started calling my hood 'Rola Bosta' (Dung Roller). It didn't bother me at all—I even named my shop after it," he says.

The barber duo told me that they started doing social work after Vini saw a Paulo Bronks video calling on MCs to donate to underprivileged kids. "I contacted him and said, 'Look, I don't have any money but I can cut hair for free.'"

Vinicius and Esdras are planning to open a shop together soon. But, who cuts their hair? "I do his, he does mine. We help each other out," Vini laughs.

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