5

An Environmental Activist Exposes Illegal Dumping At A Church, Gets Sent To Prison

In 1999, Reverend Steve Jamison was renovating his church in Columbus, Mississippi when he and his workers discovered a sludgy substance in the soil. Jamison suspected his land was contaminated by creosote, a waste product of the creation of railroad ties, courtesy of the nearby Kerr-McGee chemical company. He called Kerr-McGee to take a look, but when the plant manager arrived, he said it wasn't their creosote -- must be some other guy's creosote -- and anyway, it wouldn't hurt anyone. He then twirled his mustache and jaunted away to steal mittens from orphans.

Shortly after, Jamison and some other church members developed breathing problems, skin rashes, and kidney failure. Finally, the Kerr-McGee guys came back (wearing full hazmat suits) and paved over the problem, because actually removing the infected soil might have taken a few more minutes. Kerr-McGee offered to compensate Jamison, but only if he kept his big mouth shut about the whole thing.

Jamison instead hired Tennie White, an environmental crusader with a lab that performed environmental tests for various companies. White had a little experience dealing with Kerr-McGee: over 15,000 settled contamination lawsuits, and another 9,450 still pending. She was also something of a troublemaker. After the city refused to test some potentially contaminated soil, White ripped a hole straight through the concrete covering it, forcing the city's hand. To be fair, they did discover that contamination levels were six times higher than normal. Regardless, The Man wasn't exactly her biggest fan, and by teaming up with Jamison, she had crossed the line.

4

A Student Saves A Classmate's Life, Gets Suspended

Sixth-grader Adrionna Harris saw one of her fellow students cutting his own arms with a razor blade, so she did the reasonable thing, snatched the razor out of the boy's hands, talked him down, then went to the school administrators to tell them what happened. They also did the reasonable thing, and suspended her for ten days, then threatened to expel her.

Reasonable is a ... relative term.

3

Newlyweds Save An Airplane, Spend Their Honeymoon Sleeping In A Terminal

In 2017, newlyweds Mike and Rachel Brumfield were waiting for their flight to Italy to take off when they took a gander out the window and noticed that fuel was pouring out of the left wing.

"Passenger, please turn your cellular device OFF. You are threatening the safety of the flight."

2

A Man Helping A Lost Toddler Gets Beaten And Slandered

Earlier this year, an unidentified Florida man was out enjoying a normal day of baseball and sensationalist news headlines when he spotted a two-year-old girl who looked lost. He asked where her parents were, but she, being a toddler, didn't have anything worthwhile to say. So he picked her up and began the search. Meanwhile, her parents had undertaken their own search effort, and some bystanders reported that they'd seen a man carrying the girl ... unhelpfully adding that he was "probably a child molester." Guess he had that "I have an underground sadness hole where I store my innocent lives" look about him.

1

A Good Samaritan Helps An Apparent Hit-And-Run Victim, Gets Sued Into Suicide

On New Year's Eve 2013, in the Guangdong province of China, Wu Weiqing was riding out the old year on his motorcycle when he saw an elderly man collapsed by the side of the road. Wu's first clue that something was off: The man accused Wu himself of hitting him. Wu logically assumed the man was disoriented, so he paid it no mind and carried him all the way to the hospital anyway. He also went ahead and paid the man's ER bill, about 600 American dollars, and thought that would be the end of it.

Imagine Wu's surprise when he found out that not only was the man asserting that Wu had hit him with his bike, but he was also now demanding that Wu pay more than $30,000 for the rest of his treatment. Wu soon found himself hounded by calls from the man's family. Rather than bankrupt his own family paying for a crime he didn't commit, Wu killed himself. After hearing of Wu's death, the man revealed the truth about who truly hit him: nobody. He had fallen on his own and couldn't afford treatment. That's it. There's no winner in this story. It's a sadness-coated pill, filled only with more sadness.

Good day.

John wrote a book about cruise ship passengers with explosive diarrhea. It's as delightful as it sounds.

No good deed goes unpunished? Say "f--k you" to the wrath of the unfeeling universe with this complete first aid kit. You can never be TOO prepared. Just ask Batman.

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