My heart is breaking.
My hometown team, the Milwaukee Bucks, ain't shit. Not that this is a surprise, as they've been wack for quite some time now, it's just that each year I feel that my city is closer to losing it's NBA team. And I just stumbled across an old stat that I'm sure is still valid.
If you care, check it out after the stretch.
STRETCH...
Here's a list of the ten most valuable franchises in the NBA, according to Forbes.com:
And these are the least valuable:
SMH.
See who's DEAD LAST? The Milwaukee fuckin' Bucks. Our bum-ass team is worth less than the damn Bobcats, and they REALLY ain't shit! They're one of the few teams I think we can handle pretty easily.
Nobody wants to play here (except Hakim Warrick), no corporations wanna buy the naming rights to our bum-ass arena, and our old fogey of an owner doesn't wanna sell. To his credit, though, Herb's reason for not selling the team back in '03 was that he wanted to sell to someone committed to keeping the team in the Mil. Gotta love that.
Unfortunately, as the losses continue piling up and the marquee names continue to look right over us, it's probably only a matter of time before the beloved Bucks gallop right on out of Milwaukee.
That's not only fucked up, it also really hurts to say. :(
I'm crying gangsta tears.
This was in the news about a week ago, but I somehow missed it. Sheer insanity.
SAN ANTONIO - A woman charged with murdering her 3½-week-old son used a knife and two swords to dismember the child and ate parts of his body, including his brain, before stabbing herself in the torso and slicing her own throat, police said Monday.
Otty Sanchez, 33, is charged with capital murder in the death of her infant son, Scott Wesley Buchholtz-Sanchez.
Sanchez apparently ate the child's brain and some other body parts. She also decapitated the infant, tore off his face and chewed off three of his toes before stabbing herself.
San Antonio Police Chief William McManus described the crime scene as so grisly that police officers barely spoke to each other while looking through the house. Parts of the child were missing, including pieces that Sanchez allegedly ate.
Officers called to Sanchez's house at about 5 a.m. Sunday found her sitting on the couch screaming "I killed my baby! I killed my baby!" McManus said. They found the boy's body in a bedroom.
Investigators are looking into Sanchez's mental health history to see if there was anything "significant" ...
For the record, Sanchez survived her self-inflicted injuries and is recovering. They should just pull the plug on that bitch.
That shit there is mind-blowing -- and I'm from Milwaukee, the home of Jeffrey Dahmer.
What is this world coming to?
Supplier: Yahoo! News
Awww, shit...
WASHINGTON — A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been discovered in a woman from the African nation of Cameroon. It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine.
The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But they added they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans.
How widespread this strain is remains to be determined. Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus' rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported.
As if the plain ol' Monsta wasn't bad enough, now we gotta worry about the Gorilla Monsta, too? What the fuck is goin' on out here?!?
Wrap it up, B!
Supplier: HuffPo
From the NY Times:
GOMA, Congo — For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.
The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world ... The male rape cases span several hundred miles and possibly include hundreds of victims. The American Bar Association, which runs a sexual violence legal clinic in Goma, said that more than 10 percent of its cases in June were men.
But nobody knows the exact number.
Last year, Congo’s rape epidemic appeared to be easing a bit, with fewer cases reported and some rapists jailed. But today, it seems like that thin veneer of law and order has been stripped away. The way villagers describe it, it is open season on civilians.
Congolese health professionals are becoming exasperated. Many argue for a political solution, not a military one, and say Western powers should put more pressure on Rwanda, which is widely accused of preserving its own stability by keeping the violence on the other side of the border.
Now that is REALLY fucked up.
Read the whole story here.
From USA Today:
"I don't think anyone could have stopped him," Allegheny County police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said at a news conference in the parking lot of the LA Fitness center in Collier Township (PA) early Wednesday.
Moffatt said police were not sure who the target of the shooting was but that the gunman went into the health club planning to shoot several people — firing "multiple" weapons "indiscriminately," Moffatt said — and did not say anything before unleashing a burst of bullets.
"He walked right into the room where the shootings occurred as if he knew exactly where he was going," Moffatt said.
"All of us girls were just ducking behind each other and it was just, you know, I was behind a girl, one of the girls in front to get hit, and when he was in the opposite corner shooting, I booked it," Stacey Falk, 26, of Bridgeville, who was in the class, told WPXI-TV.
Two women and the man believed to be the shooter died at the scene Tuesday night and another woman died on the way to a hospital...
Five victims arrived in critical condition at UPMC Mercy Hospital, but three were upgraded to serious condition by early Wednesday. Two women remained in fair condition at Allegheny General Hospital, hospital officials said. Two female victims were in stable condition at St. Clair Hospital, spokesman Rich Sieber said Tuesday, but their conditions were not immediately available Wednesday.
By early Wednesday, Moffatt said two victims remained critical, two others were in surgery and two had reportedly been treated and released, with the others still hospitalized.
You go to the gym to get healthier and take of yourself, only to end up hospitalized or dead. That's some real fucked up irony.
People are crazy these days.
Here, officers in Cookeville, TN sic their dog and seem to plant drugs on a totally compliant suspect:
In this one, cops in Boise, ID literally stick a taser up a guy's ass and threaten to put it right on his balls. Here's the audio, courtesy of Carlos Miller via the Idaho Statesman:
N.W.A. - "Fuck the Police"
Cathy Hughes, RadioOne Founder and CEO
And the war rages on.
Musician Dionne Warwick has fired the latest salvo in the battle over artists' royalties being waged between big, corporate radio and the Congressional Black Caucus. She said in her Huffington Post blog:
Every time we buy a CD or download a song, the artist is paid for their work. You might not know that this isn't the case when a musician's work is played on the radio. That's because corporate radio CEOs like Cathy Hughes are exploiting a legal loophole that allows them to play these artists' songs without paying them for their work.
Ms. Hughes is now very angry with me, other black recording artists, and civil rights leaders because we support the Performance Rights Act, which many now call the Civil Rights for Musicians Act. This bill, which was written by the Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressman John Conyers, closes the legal loophole the radio corporations and CEOs are using to ensure that African American artists receive fair pay for airplay...
Cathy Hughes, founder and CEO of Radio One and arguably the most powerful Black person in radio, is the biggest opponent of H.R. 848, which, as Warwick mentioned, would effectively end the exemption from copyright laws that radio stations have enjoyed and profited from for decades and force them to pay additional royalties to artists who perform the songs played on their air.
Pay somebody other than herself or her sons?? Cathy Hughes doesn't know what the fuck that even means.
(More after the stretch...)
STRETCH...
Currently, the law only requires stations to pay copyright royalties to the artists who compose hit records, not those who perform them, pretty much keeping performers from enjoying the profits their work helped generate.
According to a resolution released by the NAACP - who fully and officially support H.R. 848:
Every modern country requires radio stations to compensate musicians, and copyright law requires that artists be compensated in every other circumstance when their music is played on satellite radio, downloaded from iTunes or even played at a local bar. H.R. 848 is about ending the exploitation of African-American musicians and paying them a fair wage for their work ... H.R. 848 is the only source of income for many older performers. They didn’t write the songs, but they brought them to life. Without the performers, these songs would be nothing but words on a page. And for many of them, radio performances are their only source of potential income...
Hughes (whose company owns 54 radio stations across the country) and other station owners argue that being forced to pay additional royalties would bankrupt them.
“Most of the people who don’t support this bill have a financial interest in radio. When people hear the whole story, they support the bill," says Sean Glover, a spokesman for Music First, a coalition of companies that has partnered to pass Conyers’s bill. "So far the public has heard only one side of the story because Cathy Hughes and Radio One control the airwaves. They won’t let us advertise on their radio stations."
Instead, Hughes has used her stations to go on the offensive in recent weeks, releasing a series of ads slamming several Black lawmakers associated with or supporting the bill, including Conyers (D-Mich) and Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Mel Watt (D-N.C.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.). An obvious attempt to negatively effect their re-election attempts, Hughes' ads are mostly calculated smears that attack the lawmakers' ethics and knowledge and generally have little or no relevant factual basis.
She was given the opportunity to state her case in the proper manner, but, for some strange reason, declined Conyers' invitation to participate in the House Judiciary Committee Hearings on H.R. 848. I guess she couldn't face the music.
Basically, Hughes is pissed and seems to be having a bit of a tantrum. Despite the speculation Warwick shared in her blog, Radio One has been LOSING - big time - in the last fiscal year or so. According to a May 2009 article in the Washington Post:
Radio One posted a net loss of $387 million after its sales fell even faster than those of the industry generally and it was forced to write down more than $400 million in the value of its radio licenses. Several of its top executives quit or were forced out, its credit rating was cut, and it was forced to sell off several stations to raise cash. Because of accounting errors, the company restated several years of earnings and has been caught up in the Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into backdating of stock options. Yesterday, after announcing another quarterly loss of $18.3 million, Radio One's stock price closed at 86 cents.
The Post goes on to say that Radio One's management team and board of directors "overreached in their strategy, underperformed in executing it and sometimes put their own interests ahead of those of their public shareholders," citing the large bonuses Hughes awarded herself and her son, Radio One President Alfred C. Liggins, III, as proof positive. "...In a conference call with analysts, it was comical listening to the company's new chief financial officer, Peter Thompson, as he struggled to rationalize the pay packages, resorting to every piece of jargon and twisted logic in the executive compensation consultant's handbook," the Post chides.
Here are a few of the highlights of the Hughes/Liggins compensation and bonus packages, according to the Post:
-Liggins, who in addition to his base salary of $575,370, last year earned a bonus of $468,720 for turning in the worst financial performance in company history.
-To compensate Liggins for working for the past three years at a salary the board now thinks was inadequate, directors awarded Liggins $1 million for signing the new contract.
-Liggins will also receive 8 percent of any Radio One profit from its investment in TV One
-Should Radio One be sold and the services of Hughes and Liggins no longer required, the agreements call for each to receive a cash payment equal to three times annual salary and three times the average bonus from the previous three years.
-To compensate him for the decline in the value of Radio One stock that he purchased under his old contract, the board awarded him a one-time, makeup payment of $4.8 million.
-Investors ... are likely to find it galling that, having seen the value of their stock fall by 95 percent and the value of the company fall from $2 billion to $85 million, they now have to shell out $4.8 million to compensate Liggins for the decline in his shares.
-Hughes and Liggins control 88.3 percent of the votes at the annual meeting
Basically, it seems that Hughes - who apparently has no clearly defined executive responsibiities at Radio One - is legally raping her shareholders in the name of profit for her and her son.
That's nepotism like a muthafucka.
As much as I respect Hughes for building such a powerful and influential empire, I can do nothing but shake my head at her company's gargantuan fuck-ups and her own gargutuan egoism.
And now it seems Hughes wants to continue keeping artists from receiving the royalties they deserve for songs they helped make popular -- even though damn-near every other country on Earth pays artists for their work played on terrestrial radio.
Fortunately for the artists, it seems like she's going to lose this fight.
What it all seems to boil down to is greed. Hughes and her son have already ensured that they'll be ballin' for quite some time (regardless of Radio One's fate), they just don't wanna give up one red scent to no stinkin' singers, regardless of how much they deserve it.
And that's fucked up.
-Read Hughes' interview with Essence Magazine -- where she states her eyeroll-worthy reasons for opposing H.R. 848 -- here.
-For a more in-depth breakdown of Radio One's shady dealings, check out The Reid Report. Miss Reid goes ALL THE WAY IN.
Suppliers: The Hill, HuffPo, EUR Web & The Washington Post
ALABAMA - Mobile police used pepper spray and a Taser on a deaf and mentally disabled man Friday after they were unable to get him to come out of a bathroom at a Dollar General store, authorities said.
After forcibly removing Antonio Love from the bathroom of the Azalea Road store, officers attempted to book the 37-year-old, on charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer, but the magistrate on duty at the jail refused to accept any of those charges.
The officers' decision to take Love to jail — even after they discovered his disability — as well as their conduct throughout the incident is still under investigation.
Since the incident, Love's family said, he hasn't been himself. He's been scared of anyone in a police uniform...
That's just fucked up. After the magistrate refused to enter the bogus charges, police allegedly dropped Love off in the middle of the parking lot of his family's apartment complex and sped off without so much as knocking on the door to let them know he was out there. Catch the whole story here.
Supplier: HuffPo via The Mobile Register
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