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Good afternoon/evening FReepers. Yep, it is Beer Thirty Time Once Again!Happiness is a bubbling airlock! And a Cold Brew Irish Stout Yum! Good evening/afternoon brewers and winemakers. There was too much going on last Friday for me to post the thread. I wish every Freeper a Merry Christmas. I will be popping the swing top on a bottle of my Cranberry Mead this Christmas. Now that we have survived this Mayan Doomsday 12-21-12 nonsense we can all get back to planning and making our favorite Homebrews and Wines and go off the cliff in style. I hope all of you and...

I was asked this in an online forum, and my answer got too long to manage. Here’s my infallible prediction. How did I do? Orthodoxy: Little visible change, zero substantive change. Increasing numbers and cultural impact. Progress toward a single American Archdiocese, but still not there yet.Catholicism: Neither women priests nor married priests will happen. Increasing disaffection among liberal American Catholics leading to a significant decrease in attendance. Identification as Catholic will be increasingly cultural rather than creedal. This trend, combined with decreasing numbers of men seeking the priesthood, will force additional parish churches to close. This will be...

After a week of what was thought to be respectful, even remorseful, silence on the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shootings, the NRA took to the podium this morning, with… shall we say, both barrels blazing. National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre addressed the media in Washington D.C. with the message that the only way to keep our children safe is to put armed security guards in schools. From the press conference transcript: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” (VIDEO AT LINK) It’s an old message gun advocates...

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have affected humans for much longer than is currently believed. Alfred Roca, an assistant professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, thinks that the genomes of an isolated West African human population provide important clues about how the disease has evolved. HIV is thought to have originated from chimpanzees in central Africa that were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a retrovirus. "If you look at the diversity present across SIV in chimpanzees, it suggests that they have had it for tens of thousands of years," Roca...

President Obama urged congressional leaders to consider a scaled-back plan to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff" in a holiday plea for a debt-deal compromise. The president said that legislators should pass legislation on points where there was consensus — including extending Bush-era tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent of taxpayers, extending unemployment insurance and laying "the groundwork" for future deficit reduction. "That's an achievable goal that can get done in 10 days," Obama said. The plan, as described by the president, would leave unresolved issues like the looming defense sequester and the debt ceiling. The president said...

A seaplane has engine trouble and has to settle down on a lake in Alaska during winter, that's just the beginning....

Homeowners in the Foxchase subdivision of Clermont have seen their packages disappear from their doorsteps and front porches as of late, suspecting a teeny thief was behind the pilfering. Tiffany Baggs had two packages go missing so she coordinated with her neighbor across the street, Tim Lebeda, and set up a camera and decoy boxes to bait the bandit. Their suspicions were confirmed when footage showed an 8-year-old girl walking up Baggs' driveway to the porch, looking at the door briefly and running off with the goods, according to a police report.

The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world's best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah. Tune in to Christiane Amanpour's two-part ABC News special,...

“She is in good spirits and could not be more excited about the announcement that I'm making,” Obama said. The president, hailing her contributions as a member of his "extraordinary" national security team, said she had wanted to be there for the announcement. "She’s looking forward to getting back to work,” he said.

In wonderful news on the philanthropy front, Mark Zuckerberg has contributed 500 million dollars to… well, to an organization that will spawn a subsidiary foundation to contribute to… well, a funding mechanism that will facilitate his ability to contribute to… well, to things involving education and its ability to contribute to… well, to the general wellbeing of society and its ability to contribute to… well, Mark Zuckerberg’s reputation. And the government. It is too early to predict just who if anyone will benefit from this “gift” to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Take a look at this organization’s website and...

Bobby Jindal, the conservative Catholic governor of Louisiana, attracted some attention last week for a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he advocated making oral contraceptives available over the counter without a prescription. And for his pains, he received a slap on the wrist from his local archdiocese.Jindal made his case on libertarian and partisan grounds: People should have a right to buy products free from government restrictions, and letting them do so in this case (as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists now recommends) will take contraception out of the political arena (where the Democrats are using...

While gun sales are spiking across the country in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Connecticut, people in the firearms industry aren’t necessarily enjoying the profits. Instead, they are gripped with worry about potential gun control fallout. Just ask Brian Sipe, owner of the Montana Rifleman barrel and action manufacturing company located on Montana 35 east of Kalispell. “I’m very concerned about legislation. If they do an assaults weapons ban, I’m going to have to lay off people,” said Sipe, who is in regular communication with firearms manufacturers across the county. President Barack Obama’s call for a special...

When you lose an election you get frustrated. When you’re sitting in a subpar 2 percent economy, and are faced with tax hikes rather than marginal rate reductions, you get even more frustrated. And when you’re staring at $47 trillion in spending over the next ten years, and $8.6 trillion in deficits, your frustration levels climb even higher. These are among the frustrations that led a number of House Republicans to pull back from Speaker John Boehner’s so-called Plan B. Nobody looked good on the Republican side when Thursday night’s vote fell through. But you have to understand their frustrations....

House Republicans seem shocked by their party's meltdown on the so-called fiscal cliff. They shouldn't be. The uncompromising conservatives who blocked Speaker John Boehner's tax bill were merely sticking to policies that Boehner and nearly all other GOP leaders have pushed, without reservation, for years: It's always wrong to raise tax rates on anyone, no matter how rich. The nation's big deficit is entirely "a spending problem, not a revenue problem." And in any deficit-reduction plan, spending cuts must overwhelm new revenues, by 10-to-1 if not more. To be surprised by Boehner's failure is to assume one of two things....

The Legacy Lives On! Mark’s Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation “Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and TyrannyWelcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

Christmas came early for law-abiding gun owners. Last Tuesday, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Illinois' ban on carrying concealed weapons, the last remaining such ban in the country. The landmark decision gave state lawmakers six months to come up with a version of the law that legalizes concealed carry.In contrast, one thousand miles from the Illinois state capitol, in a rare Sunday night address from Newtown, Connecticut, which preempted even the usually sacrosanct NFL, Barack Obama telegraphed --- without clearly saying so --- that he will create political opportunity out of tragedy by pushing for...

The Silver Star Families Call for a Debate on PTS

Gun owners give up weapons for groceries SAN DIEGO — Gun owners had a chance to exchange weapons for Friday morning. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and the United African American Ministerial Action Council held another installment of their “Guns for Gift Cards” program from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Tubman/Chavez Multicultural Center in Valencia Park. The program allows people to turn in working-condition guns, no questions asked, in exchange for monetary vouchers redeemable at area grocery stores. Shotguns and rifles bring $50 credit each, while pistols and assault-type weapons fetch $100 apiece. Participants must place the weapons,...

n the wake of last week's Connecticut school shooting, many in the media and on Capitol Hill blamed one powerful lobby, the gun industry, and suggested banning assault weapons would lead to safer streets. "On the first day of the new Congress, I intend to introduce a bill stopping the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of assault weapons," Sen. Dianne Feinstein D-Calif., said. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews said "people on the far-right, on the NRA front ... they go to bed at night ... afraid somebody's going to take that gun away from them. Normal people have other interests." On...

The New York Times has finally discovered that fiscal cliffs aren’t the only thing that menace the modern nation-state. There’s a demographic cliff, too. A couple weeks ago, the Times’s Ross Douthat wrote a column about America’s bleak demographic future and suggested that the reason we aren’t having enough babies is that we’ve become a decadent society. Douthat’s column touched off something of a firestorm on the left as liberal writers flipped out over the ideas that (1) There aren’t enough babies; (2) More babies would be a good thing; and (3) The dearth of babies suggests there might be...