Free Republic

<p>Make vodka from strawberries? No one does that, says Anthony Caspary, co-founder of Ventura Spirits, a bootstrap distillery he started with his brother and two friends in the basement of an old industrial building on the western edge of Ventura. Other than the expense of the strawberries themselves, it's just too much work.</p>

I was just thinking about the water problems in California. Governor Moonbeam and his fellow travelers opposed a series of water projects in the '70s that would have lessened the severity of the current water shortage in California. Then they invite in a few million illegal aliens. Now he wants to regulate how long people can take showers? They have turned into Soap Nazis.

It's National Beer Day, the perfect excuse to break out a frosty mug of your favorite brew. Because everyone's tastes and preferences for beers differ so significantly, it can be hard to objectively decide which ones are the cream of the crop. That's why we enlisted the help of the experts at RateBeer.com to come out with a list of the best beer from every state. Take a look at the map below to see if your favorite local beer made the list, or read the full feature for more information on the best brews.

Its spring time in America - a time when the musky marxists residue of a long winters night is washed away by the cleansing flood of purer more forgiving capitalism. So as you begin searching for plants to purchase for your landscape, lets discuss: -New and exciting plants for the landscape -Ways to recover from freeze damage -Techniques for planting trees, shrubs, perennials and other plants -General lore, tall tales, and history of gardening

The scientific world is stunned by research which backs an Aboriginal legend about how palm trees got to Central Australia. Several years ago Tasmanian ecologist David Bowman did DNA tests on palm seeds from the outback and near Darwin. The results led him to conclude the seeds were carried to the Central Desert by humans up to 30,000 years ago. Professor Bowman read an Aboriginal legend recorded in 1894 by pioneering German anthropologist and missionary Carl Strehlow, which was only recently translated, describing the "gods from the north" bringing the seeds to Palm Valley. Professor Bowman said he was amazed....

I took some tours during a local maple weekend in March. It looks to good not to pass up an attempted try for the 2016 season.

et out the cigars—Methuselah, a Judean date palm tree that was grown from a 2,000 year old seed, has become a papa plant. Elaine Solowey, of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, recently broke the good news to National Geographic: “He is over three meters [ten feet] tall, he's got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good," she says. "We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild [modern] female, and yeah, he can make dates." Methuselah sprouted back in 2005, when agriculture expert Solowey germinated his antique seed. It had...

It is in this environment of extreme financial risk and perpetually spiraling food prices where we consider the proposition of food as an investment asset class. We begin by looking at the “fundamentals” of this market/investment class. And what we see (from this perspective) is extremely encouraging: food prices consistently soaring by roughly 20% per year, and significantly more for some categories of food (notably meat products). With soaring food costs being a serious drain on the budgets of most families, our challenge is to find some way of turning this financial drain into a means of preserving/protecting our wealth:...

Southern Oregon marijuana growers want to ban industrial hemp production from the region out of fear that hemp may pollinate their crops and render them worthless. Some outdoor marijuana growers want industrial hemp cultivation to be limited to eastern Oregon - far from their lucrative marijuana crops. At the very least, they don't want hemp in Josephine, Jackson and Douglas counties. Compared to Oregon's marijuana legalization movement, the effort to launch an industrial hemp industry in Oregon has been an understated one propelled by a small but passionate group of advocates. When one of them, Edgar Winters, of Eagle Point,...

One of the world’s most popular weed killers—and the most widely used kind in the U.S.—has been labeled a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The decision was made by IARC, the France-based cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, which considered the status of five insect and weed killers including glyphosate, which is used globally in industrial farming. […] The new classification is aimed mainly at industrial use of glyphosate. Its use by home gardeners is not considered a risk. Glyphosate is in the same category of risk as things like anabolic steroids and...

A lawsuit is expected to be filed in California today over the amount of arsenic in some of the best-selling wines in the country. CBS News reports laboratory testing by Denver's BeverageGrades found some wines have as much as time times the maximum level of arsenic the Environmental Protection Agency allows for drinking water. The EPA doesn't regulate wine as it does water, and there are no federal labeling requirements to disclose what's in wine.

Yes, greek yogurt is delicious, nutritious, and surprisingly cost-effective. But, we admit we’d never really thought about this consequence of making it our go-to breakfast snack. It turns out that one of the byproducts of greek yogurt production is a little thing called acid whey. It’s a runny substance that is remarkably bad for the environment: If acid whey is dumped, its decomposition can deplete ecosystems of oxygen, killing fishy inhabitants. But, with the continuously growing popularity of that delicious yogurt — it now accounts for $2 billion of the $6 billion yogurt market — finding an ecologically responsible way...

Most of our snow, along with the neighbors from San Diego, has melted away. They didn't actually melt. It was more like they ran screaming back to warmth and Palm trees. Us hardier and poorer types look forward to the snow. We have to. It's all around us. We have had warm winds blowing in from Canada the last couple of days. We call these "Chinook" winds. The Canadians call it "Blowing all the tumbleweeds South". I like our name better. The Canadians have a lot of strange names for things. They call a hat a "Took". They call beating...

TEL AVIV/FRANKFURT, March 12 (Reuters) - Two years after scientists cooked up the first test tube beef hamburger, researchers in Israel are working on an even trickier recipe: the world's first lab-grown chicken. Professor Amit Gefen, a bioengineer at Tel Aviv University, has begun a year-long feasibility study into manufacturing chicken in a lab, funded by a non-profit group called the Modern Agriculture Foundation which hopes "cultured meat" will one day replace the raising of animals for slaughter. The foundation's co-founder Shir Friedman hopes to have produced "a recipe for how to culture chicken cells" by the end of the...

The jade artifact, which has cleft rectangles, incisions and a cone at its top, was discovered underwater in Veracruz, Mexico. Photo courtesy Professor Carl Wendt A mysterious corncob-shaped artifact, dating to somewhere between 900 B.C. and 400 B.C., has been discovered underwater at the site of Arroyo Pesquero in Veracruz, Mexico. Made of jadeite, a material that is harder than steel, the artifact has designs on it that are difficult to put into words. It contains rectangular shapes, engraved lines and a cone that looks like it is emerging from the top. It looks like a corncob in an abstract...

Naughty, naughty cows broke into a woman’s home and pooed everywhere as she showered. Pat Costen, from Guernsey, came downstairs to find the two wandering around her house. They’re part of a conservation herd bred to protect grasslands. But she’d forgotten to lock her doors and the animals barged in with heavy bowels and no respect. Ms Costen said: ‘I was in the shower and when I came out I could smell something. I looked over the banister and there was large cow pat. They came in through the kitchen, along the corridor, round the snooker table and into the...

I finally had to put Old Gus out of my misery. Gus was the pickup I inherited from my Father. I wouldn't call Dad a hoarder, but the man had a collection of shoestrings. "Well, the boots might wear out, but you can always use the strings for stuff like hanging up pictures." You should have seen his art collection. Naked Mexican ladies hanging by a shoestring. That sounds like a new Showtime series. But I digress. Old Gus was like a brother to me. In fact, in Dad's will, he left me to Gus. Oh, I'll bet the lawyer...

Suspected Israeli nationalists set fire to a Christian seminary in Jerusalem and vandalized an elementary school in Nablus on Thursday, officials said. The attacks, which came a day after a similar group burned a mosque near Bethlehem, have been characterized as hate crimes by Israeli officials and "terrorism" by Palestinians. According to local media reports, the assailants poured flammable liquid into a bathroom window of the Greek Orthodox seminary and ignited it. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said "anti-Christian" slogans were scribbled in Hebrew on the seminary's walls — including “Jesus is a son of a whore” and “the redemption of...

My friend Jerry works for the Fish and Game. I guess they teach fish how to play Monopoly or something. He's had some interesting jobs. One time, he had to shock fish. I saw that movie about the Cuckoos Nest, so the fish must have been wiseacres and deserved it. I went along as an unpaid volunteer. Dad always said, "The workman is worth his wages". I had to carry this metal pole out into the river. Normally, as I found out later, they use a car battery for electricity when they shock fish. Jerry figured that if a little...

Missan, 29, may be the world’s oldest cat, according to its Swedish owner who says that aside from suffering from some minor back and kidney problems, there is no reason why her furry friend won't make it to the grand age of 30. Missan the Swedish farm cat is turning 30 this spring and may be the world oldest living cat. By far. “I read an article about another cat that was supposed to be the world’s oldest, and I just thought to myself: ‘mine is older!’,” Missan’s owner Åsa Wickberg, from Karlskoga, told the TT news agency. According to...