DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — When rapper 50 Cent arrived at the Daytona 500, he immediately made an observation.

“Damn I don’t see no black people lol,” he tweeted.

That’s enough to make anyone feel out of place. But within a couple hours, 50 Cent — real name Curtis Jackson — had changed his tune.

 

Jackson posed for a photo with Mark Martin — a huge rap fan — and tweeted the 54-year-old driver was an “OG” while marveling at his rap knowledge. He got pumped up to see Denny Hamlin running second at one point in the race, noting Hamlin told Jackson to look for him at the front.

“DAYTONA IS THE BEST IM LOVING THIS” he tweeted.

He then deleted his earlier tweet about not seeing any black people.

If NASCAR can make fans out of 50 Cent and T.I. — who was also at the race — it might help change the perception of the sport in the hip hop community.

 

During a pre-race conversation with USA TODAY Sports, Jackson said any inroads would have to be natural and not forced. He compared it to skateboarding, a sport which rap artists like Lil Wayne are passionate about.

“When it has that (artist) that comes in that is completely (like) ‘NASCAR is life’ away from his actual art, it’ll come to the forefront,” Jackson said. “Now, skateboard culture and all these other things are exploding because the artists have that fetish away from music. And then it becomes more extreme, because that person is more involved.”

 

The other way for NASCAR and hip hop to bond, he said (in apparent seriousness), would be if a NASCAR driver started making music.

That doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

But there’s no reason NASCAR wouldn’t appeal to males from every walk of life, Jackson said.

“A male child, what do you offer him as a toy?” he said. “Before he can ask you, you offer him a car, truck.”

Jackson said he likes to drive fast — he said he once went 120 mph without getting a ticket.

T.I. recently drove at some excessive speeds, too — in a Richard Petty Driving Experience car at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He said he came away with a whole new respect for drivers.

Would Jackson ever name-drop a NASCAR driver in one of his songs?

“It would have to be me making reference to my sex drive,” he said, laughing. “Just figure out a creative way to take it out of context, but have it make sense.”

Jackson said his upcoming album Street King Immortal is finished. It is expected to be released in the first quarter of this year.

“I’ve had so much success in the past with my music projects that they compare me to me,” he said.

Ted Haggard
Known to his followers as Pastor Ted, the founder of the Colorado Springs-based New Life Church and former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard took a hard fall from grace in 2006. Haggard, featured in the documentary film Jesus Camp, admitted to sex with a male prostitute named Mike Jones, as well as purchasing and using methamphetamine. The disgraced pastor, who had adamantly condemned homosexuality, resigned and underwent counseling monitored by four ministers, continuing to assert that he is heterosexual. However, statements from Mike Jones as well as the account of a youg male church volunteer who claimed to have been subjected to nonconsensual sexual relations with Haggard, continue to dog Haggard.

Joe Barron
An undercover sex sting operation resulted in the arrest of Plano, Texas, pastor Joe Barron. The 52-year-old church leader was arrested in the town of Bryan, Texas, on his way, he thought, to meet a 13-year-old girl for sexual activity. The girl turned out to be an undercover cop, and two days later Barron’s resignation was announced by a fellow pastor to the congregants of Prestonwood Baptist Church.

Amish Beard Cutting
The F.B.I. is currently investigating a rash of beard-cutting attacks in eastern Ohio’s Amish country that started in early October 2011. Five men have been arrested in connection with the forced beard-cutting of Amish man Myron Miller at his home. The Amish believe shaving is a form of vanity, and so the men’s beards have evolved into a symbol of their faith. Miller was reportedly assaulted by a group of men in his home, dragged out and held down while the men cut off large parts of his beard. The wives were also assaulted, their hair crudely cut short, leaving bald patches. Several such assaults occurred in at least three different counties involving as many as 30 assailants. The attackers allegedly hired a driver to take them to the various victims’ homes. Though authorities believe there may be more victims, most Amish prefer to resolve such issues through their church and community, rather than involve the police.

According to Jefferson County Sherriff Fred Abdalla, the men would enter a victim’s home saying, “Sam Mullet sent us here, and we’re here on religious business,” and then perform the assault. Three of the five men arrested, Levi Miller (left), Johnny Mullet (center), and Lester Mullet (right), are the sons of break-away Amish preacher Sam Mullet. The men are charged with kidnapping and burglary. Sam Mullet, who insists that police should not be involved, says that he didn’t order the assaults, but he did not condemn them either. He says that he and his followers have been wrongly branded a cult, and that they should be allowed to punish their detractors. He is also reportedly angry with the local sheriff for prosecuting one of his son’s in an alleged sexual abuse case, and for siding against his daughter in a custody battle.

Los Hermanos Hernández

In 1962 the brothers Santos and Cayetano Hernández convinced 50 or so residents of the village of Yerba Buena, Mexico (pictured) that they were priests sent by ancient gods to ask for sexual and monetary sacrifices in exchange for a great treasure hidden in the nearby mountains. Tribute from the villagers in the form of money and sex from their followers was duly rendered, but some began to doubt. The brothers introduced prostitute Magdalena Solis and her pimp brother Eleazar as incarnated deities, with a ceremony in a mountain cave, with a theatrical puff of smoke for effect.

Over the following six weeks, eight villagers were beaten to death as part of religious ceremonies, their blood was mixed with chicken blood and consumed by the faithful in something called “el ritual de la sangre.” The murders became more complex, with beatings, burning and machetes. A boy, Sebastian Guerrero, 14, witnessed one of the ceremonies and was so scared that he ran the 17 miles to the neighboring town of Villagran to tell authorities what he saw. No one believed him, but they did send an officer back to the scene with the boy. When neither returned, on May 31, 1963, police and soldiers raided the site and found the body of the officer with his heart cut out and the boy hacked to pieces, along with evidence of the other murders. Santos, whose brother had just been killed in an altercation with a villager, died in a shootout with police. Magdalena, her brother and the 12 villagers that remained faithful were captured, disarmed and arrested. Magdalena and Eleazar were tried and convicted of the murders of two villagers, receiving a sentence of 50 years each. The rest were tried on charges of group homicide or lynching and each sentenced to 30 years. (Source.)

Order of the Solar Temple

The Solar Temple cult, founded by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret in 1984, was a secret society that claimed to be the modern continuation of the Knights Templar. Their beliefs combined concepts of Christianity, the Rosicrucian Order, British occultist Aleister Crowley and New Age philosophy. They were obsessed with death, which they believed to be an illusion that one must pass through with fire in order to reach a new world on another planet.

The cult’s mass murders began in October 1994, in Morin Heights, Quebec, with the murder of an infant believed by Di Mambro to be the incarnation of the Antichrist. The child was stabbed repeatedly with a wooden stake. A few days later in Switzerland, Di Mambro held a last supper for the 15 inner-circle members, who died by poison. Thirty others died by gunshot wounds or smothering; and eight died of other causes. Many wore black ceremonial robes and plastic bags over their heads, their bodies positioned in a star formation with feet in the center. The structure in which many of the bodies were found had been set on fire. In Vercors, France, 15 more cultists killed themselves in a similar fashion between December 15 and 16, 1995, and five more in Quebec in March 1997. The total number of deaths attributed to these mass deaths is 74 including children. (Pictured: the remnants of one of the sites in Switzerland.)

Heaven’s Gate

The Heaven’s Gate cult was a U.F.O. religion that fused some Christian apocalyptic thought with concepts popular in science fiction. Followers believed that the Earth was going to be destroyed in a great “recycling” and that the only way to survive was to leave the planet by evolving to the next level. The cult was founded in the 1970s by Marshall Applewhite (pictured) after he had visions of himself in the Book of Revelation, then as an evolved human relative of Jesus, and finally as an alien being in human form. The cult believed that in order to be eligible to ascend to the next level of existence, members would have to give up all things human: possessions, money, jobs, individuality, sexuality, friends, family and even life itself.

The members decided that if they killed themselves at precisely the right moment they would not die, but would be taken up to an alien spacecraft hidden by the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp then passing near Earth. Interestingly the group funded itself by doing web development. On March 26, 1997, the bodies of Applewhite and 38 of his followers were found dead in the cult’s rented mansion. Police believe that they killed themselves in groups over the course of three days. The cultists ingested lethal doses of phenobarbital, though autopsies showed the presence of cyanide and arsenic as well, and put plastic bags over their heads. All the dead were found lying in their bunks dressed identically, down to their “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” armbands.

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God

The followers of the Ugandan doomsday cult The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God believed that the apocalypse would occur in the year 2000. They fiercely kept the Ten Commandments and supposedly preached the the word of Jesus. The group so feared damnation for accidentally breaking the ninth commandment, to not bear false witness, that they spoke little and used only sign language on some days. Sex was forbidden, soap was forbidden and only one meal consumed Fridays and Mondays.

The group was a break-away Catholic cult that found its origins with Paulo Kashaku, who claimed to have divinely inspired visions. His daughter Credonia Mwerinde (inset) claimed to have similar visions. She, along with Joseph Kibweteere and Bee Tait founded the group in 1980. Though the group had broken with the Catholic Church, it attracted many defrocked priests and nuns, who were given positions of authority.

After frenzied preparations, January 1, 2000, passed without incident. Followers began to lose faith and cult leaders set another date for the end of the world: March 17, 2000. On the big day over 500 worshipers in the town of Kanungu arrived at a church, but soon after, it exploded and burned down. At first it was thought to have been a mass suicide, but when signs of strangulation and poisoning became evident, the cause of death was changed to murder. A search of other cult properties turned up hundreds of bodies, more followers apparently murdered days before the final explosion and fire (pictured).

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