Nadine Schweigert, North Dakota Woman, ‘Marries Herself,’ Opens Up About Self-Marriage (+video)

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Photo Credit: Anderson Cooper

Photo Credit: Anderson Cooper

A 36-year-old North Dakota woman who married herself in a commitment ceremony last March has now spoken about her self-marriage choice in an interview with Anderson Cooper.

The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged rings with her “inner groom”, My Fox Phoenix reports.

“I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous … I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability,” Nadien Schweigert told Anderson Cooper.

Schweigert said the ceremony was a celebration of how far she’d come since her painful divorce six years ago that led to her two children to decide to live with her ex-husband.

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Top 5 Reasons ANWR and Area 51 Are Alike

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area_51Joe Miller gave the keynote address at the Nevada Republican Party’s Unity Dinner last night in Las Vegas.

Despite the significant geographic differences between Alaska and Nevada, the two have one important trait in common: the majority of each state’s land is owned by the federal government. In Alaska, Uncle Sam holds the title deed to over 69 percent of the Great Land, outranked only by Nevada, where the feds control a whopping 84 percent. Ten states have more than a third of their land owned by Washington, DC. Miller, if elected, wants to work with other western states to bring those percentages down significantly.

Of course some of the best known federally controlled land in Alaska is ANWR and in Nevada, Area 51. What you may not know is that there are actually many similarities between them. Here are the top five:

5. Both are set aside as a federally controlled refuge: ANWR for animal wildlife, and Area 51…it’s classified.      

4. Both have limited accessibility: ANWR is accessible only by sea and air, Area 51 is only accessible by those wearing black suits and sunglasses who go by Agent G or Q…  

3. Both are said to contain vast treasures hidden underground: ANWR, oil and natural gas, and Area 51, state of the art flying machines and some say even the Ark of the Covenant.

2. Trespassing on either will lead to a heavily armed federal agents descending upon you from above. If only the federal government could find the same sense of urgency in enforcing our borders. 

1. Finally, spending any length of time on the ground in either location could lead to close encounters with species unfamiliar to most people. 

18-Year-Old Girl’s Request for Something So Simple Before She Suddenly Died Becomes Global “Pay-It-Forward” Movement (+video)

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picture - pay-it-forward-AJO-7Earlier this month Alyssa Josephine O’Neill, 18, made what appeared to be an everyday kind of request — she asked her mother to take her out for a pumpkin spice latte the following day. But her request turned out to be anything but everyday. O’Neill died the next day, Sept. 4, of an epileptic seizure…and she never got her latte.

“We were just shocked at the sudden loss and didn’t know what to do,” her father, Jason O’Neill, tells CNN. Alyssa was diagnosed a year ago, notes Deseret News.

“There isn’t a protocol for when you lose a child,” he tells the Erie Times News. “We didn’t know what to do or how to do it. But we knew that lying in bed and crying didn’t feel good. We wanted to feel good and honor Alyssa’s memory…”

Two days after Alyssa’s funeral, her family went to a Starbucks in Erie, Pa., their hometown, and bought lattes for 40 strangers — all O’Neill asked of the store manager was to pen an #AJO hashtag with a purple marker (her favorite color) on each cup in his daughter’s memory….

“It just kind of exploded at that point,” O’Neill recalls. “We had somewhat of a following, but nothing like this.”

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Texas Town Experiences Ending of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ in Real Life as Spiders Take to the Skies (+video)

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Photo Credit: Kevin Hamm via Facebook

Photo Credit: Kevin Hamm via Facebook

At the end of E.B. White’s classic children’s book “Charlotte’s Web,” the spider with the title name dies and her offspring send their silk threads into the sky, taking off from the barn and leaving the pig Wilber with only three of Charlotte’s children as companions.

This arachnid experience, known as “ballooning,” is exactly what a Texas town witnessed this week, seeing the white strands floating through the air and landing on buildings and cars.

“I thought it was weird; I’d never seen it before,” Myrna Olivas told KTVT-TV. “It just landed on my head and it left again.”

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$5.25 Million For Senate Hair Care And 21 Other Ways Politicians Are Living The High Life At Your Expense

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picture - Barack-Obama-John-Boehner-Nancy-Pelosi-Harry-Reid-Mitch-McConnell-300x300If you want to live the high life, you don’t have to become a rap star, a professional athlete or a Wall Street banker. All it really takes is winning an election. Right now, more than half of all the members of Congress are millionaires, and most of them leave “public service” far wealthier than when they entered it. Since most of them have so much money, you would think that they would be willing to do a little “belt-tightening” for the sake of the American people. After all, things are supposedly “extremely tight” in Washington D.C. right now. In fact, just the other day Nancy Pelosi insisted that there were “no more cuts to make” to the federal budget. But even as they claim that things are so tough right now, our politicians continue to live the high life at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. The statistics that I am about to share with you are very disturbing. Please share them with everyone that you know. The American people deserve the truth.

According to the Weekly Standard, an absolutely insane amount of money is being spent on the “hair care needs” of U.S. Senators…

Senate Hair Care Services has cost taxpayers about $5.25 million over 15 years. They foot the bill of more than $40,000 for the shoeshine attendant last fiscal year. Six barbers took in more than $40,000 each, including nearly $80,000 for the head barber.

Keep in mind that there are only 100 U.S. Senators, and many of them don’t have much hair left at this point.

But hair care is just the tip of the iceberg. The following are 21 other ways that our politicians are living the high life at your expense…

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Michelle Obama has Nearly 2 Million Fake Twitter Followers

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

…According to the Twitter analytics application Status People, 37 percent of Michelle Obama’s 5,290, 506 Twitter followers — or approximately 1,957,487 followers — are considered fake. Thirty-five percent of her followers are inactive, and 28 percent are considered “good,” or real…

Percentage-wise, she still fared better than President Barack Obama. Over half of Obama’s Twitter followers, according to a Sept. 20 Daily Caller report, are fake – 55 percent, or 20.2 million out of 36.8 million followers, to be more exact.

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President Obama: Wife Stopped My Smoking (+video)

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Photo Credit: NewsBusters

Photo Credit: NewsBusters

…While in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama struck up an off-mic conversation Monday with Maina Kiai, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association for the United Nations.

“I hope you’ve quit smoking,” he said to Kiai, according to a CNN report…

The audio is fuzzy, but Obama can be heard admitting: “No, no no I haven’t…in six years. That’s ‘cause I’m scared of my wife.”

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Fear Memories Can Be Overcome During Sleep, Researchers Say

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Photo Credit: Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez

Photo Credit: Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez

It can take only an instant for fear to take hold in the brain: a fear of snakes after being bitten by one, or anxiety around bodies of water after witnessing a drowning.

Overcoming that fear can take a long time, but now researchers are saying it can be done in your sleep. Scientists at Northwestern University say they have lowered levels of fear in people by using certain odors to trigger and rechannel frightening memories into harmless ones during a deep slumber.

“Sleep sort of stamps memories in more strongly,” said neurologist Jay Gottfried, senior author of the study, which was scheduled to be published online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience. “That’s when a lot of memory formation can take place.”

The researchers first created a fear of a certain face in their subjects by using conditioning — making them link a face and an odor in their minds with a painful electric shock. After some trials, the participants became afraid of the face, and the smell acted as a cue associated with that face.

The researchers then used the smell to trigger fear memories during sleep as a way to enable patients to adjust without the stress of conscious terror.

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‘Brain Dead’ Might Not Actually Mean Brain Dead, Study Says

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Photo Credit: Opposing Views

Photo Credit: Opposing Views

A new study from the Universite de Montreal found that parts of the brain may still be active after flat lining on an electroencephalogram (EEG), leading experts to debate the criteria for declaring a patient “brain dead.”

Researchers put 26 cats under deep anesthesia and monitored brain activity in the cortical region of the brain and the hippocampus. They found that every single cat had a “ripple event” of brain activity in their hippocampus after the EEG flat lined, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Flat line was the deepest known form of coma,” said study researcher Florin Amzica, according to Discovery.

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US Nearly Detonated Atomic Bomb over North Carolina – Secret Document

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Mushroom CloudA secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons – the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city – putting millions of lives at risk…

Writing eight years after the accident, Parker F Jones found that the bombs that dropped over North Carolina, just three days after John F Kennedy made his inaugural address as president, were inadequate in their safety controls and that the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst. “It would have been bad news – in spades,” he wrote.

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