Free Republic

SPCA Officials Stunned After 2 Feet Of Feces Found In Room Of House Located In Million-Dollar Community Officers Say It's One Of The Worst Cases Ever Reported Reporting Sean Hennessey CHESTER TOWNSHIP, N.J. (CBS) ― One New Jersey SPCA official said it was probably the worst case he's ever seen.

VALRICO — It took 15 minutes to get through the front door of a $300,000 house. Investigators used broomsticks and mop handles to push away debris. From inside a gated Valrico community, they removed a frail older woman and some of her cats — eight dead and 15 alive. Hillsborough County Animal Services said both the woman and the cats appeared neglected. The Department of Children and Families was summoned, to see whether 74-year-old Alice Santy, a woman who showed signs of hoarding, needed help. Now, the Sheriff's Office is investigating to see how Mrs. Santy, who is married, came...

A spinster who obsessively hoarded clothes died in her home after a mountain of suitcases fell on her, burying her alive. Joan Cunnane, 77, owned 300 scarves as well as thousands of trinkets and valuables. They took up so much space in her bungalow that she had only a 2ft-wide path to get around them, and her car and garage were packed with other goods. After she was reported missing earlier this week, it took police searching her home two days to sift through her possessions. Miss Cunnane was eventually found buried under a 3ft pile of cases in a...

AMSTERDAM, Ohio -- Deputies found garbage wall to wall inside the Amsterdam home and now one parent is facing charges. The 10-year-old girl and 6-year-old boy are in the care of a foster parent tonight and the father is facing a charge of child endangerment. Sheriff Fred Abdalla said me he did not arrest the mother because she is pregnant with the couples third child.

A woman in Shelton, Wash., who was reported missing by her husband, was found dead under piles of clutter in their home, where she suffocated to death, according to police. Shelton Police Chief Terry Davenport said the home was so cluttered that police officers' heads touched the ceiling as they climbed over the clutter. Authorities found the body of 62-year-old Marie Rose buried under clothes after 10 hours of searching. She reportedly suffered from a condition known as hoarding. Rose's husband believes she fell while looking for the phone in the house this week and suffocated. There were so many...

The cases never cease to fascinate: reclusive people trapped by their own accumulations, in rooms made unlivable by floor-to-ceiling heaps of newspapers, books and saved objects — from twist ties to grand pianos.Some pass into legend, like the Collyer brothers, "the hermit hoarders of Harlem," who in 1947 were buried by the piles of urban junk that filled their four-story Harlem brownstone. But even less extreme examples, like that of the Bronx man rescued on Monday after being trapped for two days under an avalanche of magazines and catalogs, haunt the public imagination.Such compulsive hoarding is being recognized as a...

For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday. These experimental devices, described in the journal Nature, are advances in DNA nanotechnology, in which bioengineers are using the molecules of the genetic code as nuts, bolts, girders and other building materials, on a scale measured in billionths of a meter. The effort, which combines synthetic chemistry, enzymology, structural nanotechnology and computer science, takes advantage of the unique physical properties of DNA...

If you like birds (no salt and pepper jokes) you may like this.

The words of Amos ring true today. I like the way he makes a distinction between the “needy” and the “poor”. While the “poor” belong to the “needy” classification, the “needy” include so many more than just those without financial means. “Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, saying, ‘When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?’— skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for...

Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted. I found this website a few months ago and figured I'd share it. Some cool odds and ends. I am not...

Here is the second installment of "The Story of Stuff: The Critique, pt. 2" from "How The World Works".

Here is the third part of "The Story of Stuff: The Critique, pt. 3 of 4" from "How the World Works".

Al Gore may have an Oscar, a Grammy and a Nobel Prize on the mantle of his solar-powered, carbon-free fireplace, but he's being one-upped by a controversial environmental activist named Annie Leonard. The California-based filmmaker has an online hit with "The Story of Stuff," a 20-minute video that is being used in thousands of schools to explain America's dangerous obsession with material things — and one that some critics are calling a misleading diatribe against capitalism.

Apparently the apocalyptic, doom-and-gloom, sky-is-falling liberal left is at it again with one of their anti-capital, America-hating indoctrination videos again, just like Al Gore and his "An Inconvenient Truth". "The Story of Stuff" is a huge Internet sensation and is now being shown around the country in our tax-funded public schools with the intent of scaring the hell out of the minds of our children about capitalism and America. Here is something that I hope becomes another Internet sensation. This video comes to us from the good folks at "How the World Works". It's the first part of their installment...

The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air. Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation. The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it has been embraced by teachers eager to...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - \Barack Obama is trouncing John McCain in the race for the White House -- at least in sales of T-shirts, badges, baseball caps and other campaign merchandise. "Everyone is going for Obama," a sidewalk vendor whose stand was smothered in Obama and McCain T-shirts, along with garb for visitors to Washington, told AFP. "We sell about 70 percent Obama stuff -- way more than McCain," said the vendor, who asked not to be named. Obama-embroidered baseball caps sat in the center of the stand; the absence of a McCain equivalent was striking. "I don't think our wholesaler...

It seems there are more and more religious posts every day on Free Republic. Posts bashing this belief or that one...posts on Mormons, on Catholics, who's going to Heaven...who's going to Hell...theology, etc. Has the site turned into "Free Religion?" There are hardly any conservative topics in News anyore. It's degenrated into a bunch of religious people trying to convince others whose beliefs are best. Why is that?

When, and if, it comes time to look for a running mate, Barack Obama will be looking for "somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not an expert on.'' This was the senator's word at a closed-door fundraiser last night in San Francisco, the Huffington Post reports. Obama fielded a question on what he's looking for in a running mate, HuffPo''s Mayhill Flower writes. "I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not as expert on," the senator is quoted as saying. "I think a lot of people assume that might be...

Asian women, fancy coffee, farmers markets, dinner parties and gay friends — these are just a sampling of life's pleasures — if you're white. Excuse me? That's according to Christian Lander, the (white) wit behind the Web sensation Stuff White People Like blog, an irreverent daily missive on the passions of posh urbanites of the Caucasian persuasion. It's the latest in a string of racially charged blogs (first came theassimilatednegro.com, then angryasian.com) that act as a virtual shrink's sofa for those tackling the tricky topics of race and class. Lander is not the only one who uses the Web site...

Rush Limbaugh and others are calling for Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton in tomorrow's Ohio and Texas Primaries, to keep the race going. As if we needed more evidence to support the idea that infighting is hurting the Democrats, Barack Obama made yet another gaffe while criticizing Hillary Clinton. FOX News has the story and Hillary Clinton is of course trying to slam the future Democrat nominee with it: He (Obama) said that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a fellow Democrat from neighboring West Virginia, had read the intelligence estimate as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and after a...