Another astonishing scoop by our summer intern Biff Spackle (on Twitter @BiffSpackle):
Oh, and in case GEICO comes after me, this is satire. Kinda.
(For more from the author of “EXCLUSIVE FIRST LOOK: Hillary Clinton Inks Ad Deal With GEICO!” please click HERE)
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A man was so overwhelmed by the bedbugs in his Detroit apartment that he sprayed himself with alcohol and then tried to light one of them on fire, badly burning himself in the ensuing flames.
By the time the accidental fire was extinguished, about four units had been destroyed by flames, and two dozen more received water damage.
The fire started at around 4:30 a.m. Sunday at the St. Antoine Gardens apartment complex in Midtown Detroit. That’s when the man thought bedbugs had returned to his apartment and sprayed alcohol on his couch and body in an attempt to destroy them, said Dan Austin, a mayor’s office spokesman.
But then, while sitting on the alcohol-doused couch, the man lit a cigarette and also tried to set one of the bedbugs on fire, Austin said. That caused the couch to catch fire, along with the man’s body.
Within minutes, Phyllis Waller heard shouts from her room just down the hall, on the building’s eighth floor. When she looked through her peephole, the smoke was so thick that she couldn’t see the door across the hall. She said she escaped by crawling to the stairwell. (Read more from “Man Accidentally Sets Himself and His Apartment on Fire for This Bizare Reason” HERE)
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This March A&E will premier “Damien,” a drama about the Antichrist. It is based on the 1977 film “The Omen,” and is one of three new shows that depict the devil and demonic possession. The others are “Lucifer” (Fox) and “Outcast” (Cinemax).
When asked by the Hollywood Reporter why there is renewed interest in the Antichrist, Glen Mazzara, the showrunner of “Damien,” said he thought it was because there is increased anticipation that we may be living in the end times, the Biblically prophesied final years before the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ.
(Read more from “Producer of New TV Show on Antichrist: ‘People Feel Like These Are the End Times'” HERE)
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On a freezing night in late December, a group a of dog-lovers gathered on a quiet corner by a park in lower Manhattan.
Their purpose? To deploy their household pets as soldiers in the never-ending war against New York City’s legendary population of rats.
Mike Rowe, host of CNN’s “Somebody’s Got To Do It,” spent an evening with the group, which calls itself R.A.T.S. (Ryder’s Alley Trencher-fed Society), last year.
Speaking with TheBlaze, Rowe described the nocturnal outing as something “unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Mild manner little terriers, these loyal pets are transformed into the hound of the Baskervilles,” said Rowe. “Together they go into the city and they start killing rats.” (Read more from “‘Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen’: Mike Rowe Describes His Wild Night With a Pack of Rat-Hunting Dogs in New York City” HERE)
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When Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green receives invitations to be a guest speaker for professional groups, schools and nonprofit organizations, she almost never turns them down.
“Usually if there is an invitation to speak at a forum like that, I accept it because I feel like it’s a responsibility,” she said. “There are so few of us (black women in STEM fields) I don’t feel like I have the luxury to say I’m too busy.”
By many measures, Green has been extremely busy. One of fewer than 100 black female physicists in the country, she recently won a $1.1 million grant to further develop her patent-pending technology for using laser-activated nanoparticles to treat cancer.
A tomboy as a child, Green was crowned Homecoming Queen at Alabama A&M University (by a landslide vote), earned her master’s and Ph.D degrees at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and is now is an assistant professor in the physics department at Tuskegee University.
It’s tempting to see Green for all the ways that she is unusual – not the least for winning a large grant at a relatively young age, and for being black and female in a field dominated by white men – but it’s not something she said she thinks about in her day-to-day life. (Read more from “Alabama Scientist Breaks Ground in Cancer Research” HERE)
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It is a good thing when Hollywood attempts a portrayal of the facts without overtly distorting history beyond recognition in the process. So, hats off to the creative team behind The Big Short. It is necessary, however, to fill in the gaps with facts that may not fit into a film’s limited timeframe. Real world events are always more unwieldy than a tightly knit movie script. There are no spoiler alerts in what follows. We all know the ending. It is how we got there that matters.
So picture this, if you will, as you go back in time and tap into the remnants of an article that I wrote in 2012 that revealed a real life disaster that was not made in Hollywood, but in Washington, DC.
Old news, except it isn’t. In regard to the devastating housing fraud that helped collapse the U.S. economy, a Reuter’s headline read: “U.S. Sues Bank of America for Alleged Mortgage Fraud.” According to Reuters, Barack Obama’s Justice Department “filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Bank of America, accusing it of selling thousands of toxic home loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that went into default and caused more than $1 billion of losses.”
That’s right, the banks did it. In reality, it is another glaring example of Barack Obama and the Progressive Democrats’ adeptness at avoiding culpability and deflecting blame. After all, to this date, they have fooled so many about their role in perpetuating the housing collapse that thrust the economy into a nose dive. They are counting on voters lacking enough information to connect-the-dots as they point accusingly at their partners in crime. Obama’s sycophantic media obediently reported that it was all the fault of greedy bankers, mortgage brokers and Wall Street derivatives. What they failed to report was that the Democrats set-up the alchemy, the opportunity for greed that bated the bad players into joint accountability.
The question the American people should ask is: Who were the svengalis of the economic collapse, the architects whose scheme worked so well that they virtually escaped the blame? Historically, it will go down as one of the liberal Democrats’ all-time big lies to the American people. Democrats led by Barney Franks (D-MA), Chris Dodd (D-CT), Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Greg Meeks, (D-NY) are on video, in effect, in support of glutting the housing market with unsustainable mortgages in the form of bad loans.
In Capital, Azi Parbarah reported in 2011 that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed the finger squarely at the Democrat-controlled Congress as instigating America’s financial collapse:
“If there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of the financial industry, it’s not the “big banks,” but Congress. [They] were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.” Bloomberg added, “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”
What Bloomberg failed to mention is that Obama, himself, adamantly demanded that banks make more loans to low-income borrowers. Subprime loans became the great American rip-off. Obama and the Democrats both enticed and strong-armed lenders to give loans to people who could not repay them. The plan? In exchange, grateful new homeowners would obligingly ply the Democrats with their votes.
The ugly and inevitable consequences forced the poor, mostly Hispanics and Blacks, out of their unaffordable houses through wide scale foreclosures. Home prices fell, construction workers lost jobs, the housing industry began a free-fall and America’s AAA credit rating was downgraded for the first time since 1917. The result: The worst economy in recent memory. Today, America bears the brunt of the Democrats’ manipulation of the housing market resulting in lost homes and lost jobs. Hawking for votes, Obama and liberal Democrats put politics over people.
Many harken back to former Democrat President Bill Clinton igniting the long fuse that led to the crisis when in 1998 he removed the barriers between commercial banks and investment banks. After Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, big banks suddenly had federally insured money to play with. Greed from Congress to Wall Street spread unabated.
Some claim Clinton’s deregulation of banks was not a factor. Yet, the Guardian reported a direct correlation as cited by economist Robert Kuttner in his testimony before Congress. Kuttner’s testimony revealed Clinton’s actions as both a cornerstone and an early catalyst that seeded the greed years:
“Since repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s – lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s. Much of it isn’t paper at all, and the whole process is supercharged by computers and automated formulas.”
Obama and the Democrats counted on an already embedded need for greed. Some banks and lenders found policy and conditions enabling corruption to be irresistible. The lure of big money that was ill-gotten — crossed political and commercial lines and made bedfellows out of adversaries as deals were made and commissions increased to all-time highs. As financial institutions dove head-first into irresponsible behavior, Democrats looked the other way and feigned innocence during the housing and market collapse that followed.
All the while, two government-sponsored finance giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were reportedly hiding their role in the subprime and low-rate mortgage loan business. Harold Raines, former head of the Budget Office for Clinton and Fannie Mae’s CEO in the mid-1990s, told the Washington Post that Fannie Mae is “the equivalent of a Federal Reserve system for housing.”
Democrats were entrenched in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s top management. According to Bethany McLean of CNNMoney, “The same article noted that Fannie’s financial moves generated more than $100 million a year in fees for Wall Street firms …. guaranteed a stunning $1 trillion of mortgages and held $376 billion of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities on its own books.” A Security and Exchange Commission investigation uncovered accounting irregularities in Fannie Mae’s books and a false reporting of $9 billion in past profits. At the time of Raines early retirement from Fannie Mae, the Democrat reportedly earned $20 million in salary and bonuses.
What the film, The Big Short, was short on was the role the government played in short-changing the American taxpayer and the tragic aftermath on unqualified mortgage holders forced into foreclosures. Controlling the nation’s purse strings in Congress, the Democrats steered the economy toward the fiscal cliff. With the DEMS behind the wheel, some Republicans jumped on for the ride amid the financial melee.
Based on voter backlash against Obama’s handling of the economy, in the 2010 midterm elections the Democrats lost control of the House. In the 2014 midterm elections, still feeling the financial sting, voters took away the Democrats majority in the Senate. In addition to filling in the gaps of a Hollywood movie, this tale of greed, arrogance and deception at the expense of the American people should serve as a warning to both Democrats and Republicans in regard to the mood of a betrayed constituency come the 2016 elections.
Sharon Sebastian, author of the book, “AGING: WARNING– Navigating Life’s Medical, Mental & Financial Minefields,” is a columnist, commentator, and contributor in print and on nationwide broadcasts on topics ranging from healthcare, culture, religion, and politics to domestic and global policy. Sebastian’s political and cultural analyses are published nationally and internationally. Website: www.AgingWarning.com
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Swindlers, scammers, and quacks fill the Internet. During times of desperation cons are quick to manipulate the vulnerable with fraudulent promises. Normally one dismisses them by thinking buyer beware and hoping that the gullible will not succumb to the hokum being plied to seduce the unwary.
The worst of the worst are the vermin that prey on families whose loved ones suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s and the many varied forms of dementia are today claiming more people than at any time in the history of the disease. Studies show that the disease increased 68% over ten years when, according to the U.S. Census, the elder population only increased by 15.1%. Families are desperate for a cure. Victims are desperate for relief. Increasing in alarming numbers across the Internet are societal vultures aiming at the hearts of the vulnerable. They are predatory parasites out to pick the pockets of desperate people while blinding them with false promises that they have a cure for the deadly disease.
Having spent several years embedded in both hospitals and nursing homes, and coming face-to-face on a daily basis with patients stricken with the long-term, but always fatal disease, it is with certainty that it can be stated that there is no cure.
Dementia has become so prevalent that everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has it. The numbers are so great that an ill-prepared health system is not equipped to render the proper “care” that is needed for the overwhelming numbers of dementia patients that are streaming through its doors. From nurses’ aides to whistleblowers, staff complain that they are not being trained to deal with the ever increasing number of people that are incapacitated with brain diseases.
To understand the severity of the cruelty of the swindlers, it is important to understand the heartache and real-time bereavement of families confronted with most forms of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
In my latest book, “AGING: WARNING – Navigating Life’s Medical, Mental & Financial Minefields,” few have captured the devastation more succinctly than a well-knit crew of Hollywood creatives. The group is raising both money and awareness about this disease that decimates both mind and body. In as straightforward a way as they can put it, the team at Hilarity for Charity posts this warning on their fundraising website:
“There’s a thief out there. And it’s robbing people’s memories. It’s robbing their ability to talk. It’s robbing their ability to eat, walk, get dressed, shower, or recognize their loved ones. It’s robbing people of their ability to be humans. It’s called Alzheimer’s…” – Hilarity for Charity
Dr. Neal Barnard, President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine talks openly that debilitating memory loss plagues his family. Though advocating a healthy diet and striving for a cure, he does not claim one. Dr. Barnard states that: “There is nothing more [important] than the connections with your loved ones. If your heart is beating, but your brain cells have been destroyed and you lose your connection with your children, grandchildren, and everyone else around you, you have lost everything and they have lost you. My hope is that we can change that and it starts with information…”
People across the nation who are both emotionally and financially devastated scour the Internet for a ray of light that there is a way out of the darkness that is Alzheimer’s. That is why families must be warned about the shocking number of advertisements that herald that Betty or Bob have gotten their memory back from a simple pill that cures Alzheimer’s. That all that people need to do is just buy and apply a special hand cream that makes those stricken with dementia mentally resilient again.
Few things are more galling than charlatans preying on families by scamming them with a false hope that they have a cure for Alzheimer’s. No cure exists. Serious research is underway searching for a cure. As yet, there is none.
As detailed in the book, “AGING: WARNING,” what patients and their families need to know is that “… sticky proteins, now scientifically linked to the consumption of processed foods, become clumped together and irretrievably shred nerve cell endings and eventually disintegrate brain cells. There is no recovery. When brain cells are attacked, the brain eventually clogs, shrinks and dies. The destruction of brain cells is permanent. The damage is not reversible. There is no restorative cure.”
Truth can be harsh. False hope is far harsher. Avoid the “miracle cure” scams posted on what appear to be legitimate and often respected websites. Do not let your heart succumb to the ploys of Internet con artists who prey on your deepest hopes and prayers. Keep your money in your pocket for those rainy days or expenditures to secure comforting care. Consider diverting your dollars to research with organizations such as the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund that reports that a 100% of all donations go towards research for a real, but as yet illusive cure.
Top research scientist Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, heads up Genetics and Aging Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi warns that you should not assume you’re immune just because you have no family history of Alzheimer’s. When asked if a cure for Alzheimer’s exists as 2016 begins, his answer is, “Absolutely not — unfortunately.” Trust that the world will know if and when there is a cure for Alzheimer’s and dementia. Meantime, protect your wallet and emotions. Ignore the scammers and the quacks. False hope is no hope at all.
Sharon Sebastian, author of the book, “AGING: WARNING– Navigating Life’s Medical, Mental & Financial Minefields,” is a columnist, commentator, and contributor in print and on nationwide broadcasts on topics ranging from healthcare, culture, religion, and politics to domestic and global policy. Sebastian’s political and cultural analyses are published nationally and internationally. Website: www.AgingWarning.com
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A glancing blow from the polar vortex will direct cold air southward and could raise the chance of snow in the central and eastern United States toward the middle of January.
The pattern of cold air coming and going will be a theme through January.
According to AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Elliot Abrams, “Arctic air will leave quickly, after giving the Great Lakes and Northeast a cold shock this week.”
Temperatures will rebound to above-average levels in much of the Midwest and Northeast during the latter part of this week and this coming weekend.
High temperatures will return to the 30s in Minneapolis, the 40s in Chicago, the 50s in Washington, D.C., and the 60s in Atlanta for multiple days. The warmup will be of short duration. (Read more from “Polar Vortex to Usher Widespread Cold, Snow Chances Into US During Mid-January” HERE)
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The body of country singer Craig Strickland was found on Monday, authorities confirmed to FOX411.
Strickland was the lead singer of the Arkansas-based country-rock band Backroad Anthem. He disappeared during severe storms on Dec. 27 while on a duck hunting trip with friend Chase Morland.
The pair’s capsized boat was found that day. Morland’s body was recovered from the lake on Dec. 28. (Read more from “Body of Country Singer Craig Strickland Found After Days of Searching” HERE)
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Based upon an article by Daniel Greenfield and illustrated by Biff Spackle.
You can read the entire article here and follow @BiffSpackle on Twitter. You can see more of Biff’s political graphic stories here.
(For more from the author of “ESCAPE FROM CHICAGO: An Illustrated Tale” please click HERE)
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