- Hampton, Fla. has been a national punchline for months.
A city so corrupt that state lawmakers wanted to shut it down is an easy
target, but Hampton is safe for the time being. The battle began in earnest
back in February, when state Rep. Charles Van Zant and Sen. Rob Bradley launched an effort to
strip Hampton of its cityhood. The 89-year-old city seemed on the brink, beset
by rampant corruption in its executive and law enforcement branches. Van Zant
accused Hampton of "abusing the public," while Bradley wondered,
"Why is this even a city?" Offended locals responded with a
grassroots campaign to save the place they live and went to work on a rotten
system that began when a Texaco station on nearby U.S. 301 asked for police
protection after a few bad traffic accidents and a couple of homicides. From
there, a connivingly brilliant mind surmised that there was plenty of easy
money to be made from catching speeders and writing tickets. The city map was redrawn
and Hampton began scoring big money from policing the highway. Still, the
police department consistently overspent its budget and the revenues from the
traffic citations along the highway provided no discernable benefits to anyone
outside city hall. A state audit found glaring irregularities such as a
$132,000 credit account at the local BP station $27,000 in credit card charges
for items that "served no public purpose." Following a meeting with
the community, Van Zant and Bradley agreed to give the city a chance to clean
its act up, but warned they would move forward with a bill to dissolve the
city's charter unless extensive changes were made. Give Hampton’s 477 residents
credit for saving their one-stoplight town by enacting a series of changes under
the leadership of interim Mayor Myrtice McCullough, including the resignation
of every elected official who was in office when the scandal broke, getting rid
of the entire police force and accounting for misspent dollars. The final link
in the chain was de-annexing the section of U.S. 301 where the speed trap
operated. Having a mayor who hasn’t been arrested on a charge of selling a
single 30-milligram oxycodone pill to an undercover informant also helps and in
the most liberal sense of the term, Hampton is alive and well for now………
- Leave it to the maple syrup chuggers up north to come up
with arguably the most detailed scientific research to date in defense of fat
people. A five-year
long research project led by Dr. Joel Ray and a team of Canadian medical
researchers has concluded that being underweight is even riskier than being
overweight or obese. Underweight people are those considered to have a body
mass index (BMI) of 18.5 or less and according to this study, the fatality rate
among the underweight is 1.8 times greater than people with normal BMI. Those
folks suffer from many more complications that lead to death in comparison to
people who have a normal BMI between 18.9 and 24.9 and are on par with those
who are considered overweight. Ray and his team carried out their work at St.
Michael’s Hospital and Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute and kept their
small-scale effort limited to 51 patients. According to the researchers, obese
people (those with a BMI between 30 and 34.9) increase their chance of death by
1.2 times in comparison to normal people. The morbidly obese (those with a BMI
of 35 or higher) increase their risk of death by 1.3 percent. The study also
noted that underweight people often drank heavily, abused drugs, smoked heavily
and had poor mental health or poor self-esteem. Simply put, being underweight
is equally dangerous as being overweight – merely with different contributing
factors and consequences. Participants were observed for five years and those suffering
from chronic lung diseases or cardiovascular disease or cancer were weeded out
along the way. Ray concluded that it is important to maintain a healthy body
weight and size in order to properly fight obesity without descending into a
sea of gaunt, dangerously underweight people. This study clearly was done in
Canada because finding such underweight people in the United States is an
impossibly difficult fight……..
- We win, we riot. We lose, we riot. Such is the mindset of
drunken and amped-up sports fans around the world when their team plays in a
big game. It happens in Europe, it happens in South America and you can be damn
sure it happens in the United States, as evidenced by the scene Saturday night
in Tuscon, Ariz. The hometown Arizona Wildcats took on Wisconsin in an NCAA
tournament regional final and came up on the short end of a 64-63 overtime
thriller. After watching their beloved ‘Cats have their Final Four dreams
dashed, students and local degenerates with a beer or 10 in each of their
systems had plenty of anger, plenty of rage and very little means to properly
process their drunken despair. Cue the chaotic scene on the streets of Tucson,
wherein police shot pepper spray and clashed with hundreds of lubed-up idiots
who hurled beer bottles and firecrackers at them because clearly, the police
were the reason Arizona’s last-second shot glanced off the rim and sent
Wisconsin on to the next round. No serious injuries were reported, but 15
drunken ass hats were arrested for
offenses such as resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly,
Tucson police Sgt. Pete Dugan said. Only one of those 15 was sent to Pima
County jail and the street was cleared of intoxicated revelers before the end
of the night. According to Dougan, fans leaving bars and restaurants near
campus after the game filled University Boulevard and wouldn't leave despite
urging through a PA system and social media declaring it an unlawful assembly.
Officers in cruisers and an army of cops with batons, helmets and face masks
were brought in to block the street when the bottles began flying and the
firecrackers started popping. A hot mess of pepper spray, pepper canisters and
pepper balls, which disperse into the air when they hit, proved sufficient to
quell the uprising. Clearly, those who were at the center of the drama subscribe
to the theory that you’re not a real fan unless you react to a big win or a
tough loss by trying to burn your city to the ground………
- When is trying to count people a reason to go? When that
census is taking place in Myanmar, where everything is a reason for a fight.
The nation formerly known as Burma began its first full
national census in 30 years on Sunday and will be collecting population data
across the country until April 10, according to the Ministry of Immigration and
Population. That’s a problem because several ethnic and minority groups have
already
raised concerns that the census questions do not include accurate names or
misrepresent many ethnic groups. Critics have warned that the census process
could also inflame communal tensions in western Rakhine State between Buddhists
and Muslims. Getting accurate information could be difficult, as Buddhist
Rakhine groups have threatened to boycott the process over suspicions that the
census will allow Muslims to include themselves as Rohingya, therefore
legitimizing their ethnic status. For those would do take part, the census is
based on a questionnaire with 41 questions ns that aim to provide the
government with up to date and accurate social, economic and demographic data
of the country’s people and households. For the census, code numbers to be used
to identify the 135 official ethnic races recognized by the government allow
for the use of “other” which gives people the right to define their own
identity in the allotted blank space. Anyone who has ever taken a survey knows
that allowing someone to fill in a blank with whatever they choose is asking
for trouble and the primary issue here is the government’s continued assertion
that the Rohingya are not an official “ethnic race” and will therefore not be
registered as such on the census. “The main thing is that if a person said he
is Rohingya when he is asked questions at his house, we will not accept it. We
will either mark him as a Bengali or other specified code names. We will not
register it when they said they are Rohingyas,” government spokesperson Ye Htut
explained. The Ministry of Immigration and Population remains adamant that the
census data will be kept confidential and cannot be used for other purposes,
including tax or household registry. A preliminary census was taken in 20 townships in various states and
regions, but doing so on a full scale is a much different enterprise. Let the
bureaucratic shenanigans begin……….
- God was big at the box office this weekend. The Almighty
held down the first and fifth spots on the earnings list, including a winning
debut for “Noah,” which banked $44 million despite the thoroughly unbelievable
premise of Russell Crowe playing a faithful man of God. “Divergent” fell one
spot to second place, banking $26.5 million to increase its two-week domestic
tally to $95.2 million and blow right past the break-even mark. Third place
belonged to “Muppets Most Wanted,” with its $11.3 million in earnings and
two-week bank roll of $33.2 million. “Mr. Peabody & Sherman” finished
fourth for the frame, adding $9.5 million to its cumulative total to raise the
number to $94.9 million and counting. “God’s Not Dead” took its
Nietzsche-smacking message all the way to fifth place, earning $9.1 million for
a four-week haul of $22.1 million. In sixth place was “The Grand Budapest Hotel,”
which continued to excel in limited release with $8.8 million. In four solid
weeks, Wes Anderson’s critical darling has brought in $24.4 million and
continues to add theaters to its repertoire. The second newcomer in the top 10,
“Sabotage,” could do no better than seventh place and $5.3 million in its
debut. That was just enough to hold off “Need for Speed,” which claimed eighth
place in its third weekend and continued to underwhelm with $4.4 million for an
overall domestic take of $37.7 million. Ninth place was the domain of “300:
Rise of An Empire,” a war epic that claimed the penultimate spot in the top 10
by battling its way to a mere $4.3 million and has earned $101.1 million in
four weeks. “Non-Stop” slipped two spots to tenth and brought in $4 million to
up its five-week total to $85.2 million. “The LEGO Movie” (No. 11) and the
crap-tacular “Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club” (No. 14) both tumbled out of
the top 10 from last weekend………
