Free Republic

FoodNetwork marches cynically forward.

July 16, 2014 (LocalOrg) - Corporate biotechnology monopolies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and others have met increasing resistance to their attempts to patent and control global agriculture. They have spent untold fortunes attempting to sway the public but to no avail. Local, organic agriculture is growing in popularity and proliferating across all social-strata. The introduction of technology to automate and augment organic farming is making it as competitive and accessible or more so than the capital-intensive models of monopoly employed by big-ag. In response, big-ag has attempted several distasteful public relation stunts, including "super bananas for Africa" and "Golden Rice" to allegedly...

In recent years, the closest thing the team has had to an offensive line is "Hail to the Redskins." Now the guilt riddled left is hell-bent on taking that away. The least disruptive and most cost effective solution for the Skins, would be to replace the formidable proud American Indian profile with the humble redskin potato. That should shut the libs up until they realize that potatoes are members of the tobacco family.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin believes President Barack Obama timed the release of Bowe Bergdahl to distract from his administration's Veterans Administration wait-list scandal in which at least 40 veterans reportedly died after they were put on secret waiting lists. "This feel-good story doesn't feel real good, America," said on Monday. "The timing of this is to distract from the VA scandals and other Obama Error disasters. Now more than ever we need a cornerstone of our democracy to do its job and get the answers to what the devil is going on in the White House." Obama announced Bergdahl's...

This is my story on how you can cut down your grocery bill while improving your diet. It’s called intensive organic vegetable gardening and it’s like growing money in the backyard.My wife and I completed our organic certification course last year at the University of Richmond’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. We decided to take this course so we could eat healthier and reduce our grocery bill. This has been a fun project and we look forward to growing our own vegetables, or as I like to call it: growing money in the backyard!

Author Lewis Dartnell poses an interesting question in his new book, The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch: If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what book would you want to press into the hands of the survivors?Just over a decade ago, I was living in Texas and taking occasional trips out to the hill country for camping, hiking, and climbing. There’s a whole-lot-of-nothing out there, if you’ve never been. It’s beautiful, but you can go days without seeing another human being if you’re in the right spot. Bringing...

For only ten dollars a day or a month you can feed all the starving children in Africa. For only the price of a cup of coffee a year, you can make sure that no one in Kansas City ever goes hungry again. For just a third of your paycheck, you can subsidize a vast bureaucracy that will conduct studies on the best way to save the world and then come up with proposals that will only cost you half your paycheck. This misplaced philanthropic confidence is the idiot stepchild of a free enterprise society where anything can be accomplished...

The Justice Department should cross marijuana off the government's list of most dangerous drugs, says a House Democrat now trying to build congressional support for the action. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) is making the case to remove pot from the list of "Schedule I" drugs, a day after Attorney General Eric Holder revealed that the Justice Department would adjust existing rules to allow legal marijuana businesses to access the banking system. Recreational pot use became legal in Colorado this month, and 20 other states allow it for medicinal purposes. Blumenauer said the Obama administration was “unquestionably making the right call”...

I’ll be honest: for years, I never considered the survivalist/prepper crowds as target audiences. I mean, we’re on totally different ideological wavelengths, right? I’m not into shooting things, and they likely think I’m a touchy-feely hippie who wouldn’t survive a week after SHTF. What could we possibly have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out – apparently, ideology ain’t everything. As we’ve started doing more DIY/upcycling/self-sufficiency content, we’ve seen a steady rise in readership from sites like The Homestead Survival and Knowledge Weighs Nothing. And, as you might expect, I’ve spent more time checking out these sites and those...

FOUR bishops in the United States have published a book, Bishops on the Border, that calls for immigration reform, and urges Christians in the US to approach the issue with compassion. Bishop Minerva Carcaño, of the United Methodist Church; Bishop Stephen Talmage, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; the Roman Catholic Bishop of Tucson, the Rt Revd Gerald Kicanas; and the Episcopal Bishop of Arizona, the Rt Revd Kirk Smith, all minister in Arizona - a state where large numbers of Mexicans have illegally crossed the border in recent years. The bishops explain their experiences of the debate over...

ALBANY, N.Y. – New York would become the 21st state to allow medical use of marijuana under an initiative Gov. Andrew Cuomo will unveil this week. Cuomo plans to use administrative powers rather than legislative action to allow a limited number of hospitals to dispense marijuana for certain ailments. He will formally announce his plans in his state of the state speech Wednesday.

Jonah Goldberg has a lot of fun at the expense of Greg Sargent, who is less a journalist and more a hack on behalf of the Obama administration, and the Democratic party. But in the midst of the entirely warranted Sargent-bashing, let’s not forget that Sargent’s calls for a bipartisan fix to Obamacare’s problems reek of fright and desperation. As Goldberg properly notes, “[t]he president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law. The Right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete...

Daylight Saving Time, or DST, is a brilliant campaign to convince us that we’re getting more daylight each day, when in reality we’ve simply changed our clocks and then forgotten about it within two weeks. DST begins each year at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March in most of the United States and its territories, however there are some places that have not bought into this campaign: it is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the city of South Bend, Indiana nor the state of Arizona except for the Navajo Indian Reservation,...

A beneficiary of President Obama's signature healthcare law standing behind the president during his speech Monday in the Rose Garden nearly fainted toward the end of his remarks. Karmel Allison, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes according to information provided by the White House, began holding the hand of a woman standing next to her at the event and breathing deeply. Noticing the disruption, Obama halted his remarks to turn around, just as Allison appeared to be falling backward. Another event attendee braced her from behind while the president held her arm to prevent her from falling. A White...

On Tuesday, Mediaite White House correspondent Tommy Christopher added another chapter to his ongoing self-promotional crusade masquerading as a career in journalism. And this time, it didn’t involve a shameless ploy to be an invited guest on whatever incarnation of Chris Hayes’ show MSNBC is currently airing. During Tuesday’s White House briefing on Tuesday, Christopher, whose name isn’t really “Tommy Christopher,” asked a question about President Barack Obama’s health-care reform law that incorporated his personal experiences with health insurance after his 2010 heart attack. ...more (w/video)...

ost people think that Springtime is the time to start growing that vegetable or herb garden. But there are many types of plants that should mainly be grown during the cooler months. Fall is a great time to try your hand at growing leafy greens, and that makes this a great way to save some money on produce. If you end up with a good harvest, you'll have a bountiful source of vegetables while other people are paying higher prices for greens at the grocery store. Here are 6 cooler weather plants you may want to try your hand at...

Pest control in Xinjiang seems to work, but many fear felines will freeze Hundreds of stray cats have been released in northwestern China's prairies to control the region's rat rampage, but the effort has sparkled online debate and concern. In early August, eight stray cats were released in rat-plagued grassland in Bole, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. They are among a group of around 100 cats that have been introduced this year to control the prairie's rat population. The city's prairie workstation started introducing urban strays for rat control as early as 2011. So far, more than 600 stray cats...

With each passing day, it seems the United States of America, “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” is becoming more and more like the Communist Russia I learned about in elementary school where people weren’t allowed to grow their own food unless the State “allowed” it. In this latest crackdown on citizens simply trying to provide for themselves using the most basic of skills – gardening – the USDA’s Rural Development Agency is forbidding Rosie, an industrious 4-year old girl in South Dakota from using a small, unused area outside her subsidized housing unit to grow green...

The Korean Food Foundation (KFF), promoter of "hansik," is shedding light on food from North Korea, currently more infamous than famous because of its nuclear brinkmanship. It is publishing a 120-page book “The Hidden Taste of North Korean Food” that contains recipe of 50 meals based on document research and interviews with North Korean defectors here, the foundation said, Thursday. The primary goal of the project is to preserve authentic recipes and cooking methods for North Korean dishes. At the same time, the book will help raise international awareness of the secretive nation’s signature meals, it said. “The English-language version...

Western-funded green groups are wrongly accusing mainland companies of causing environment destruction and creating social problems in Southeast Asia to restrain China's economic influence in countries along the Mekong River, a top government think tank claims in a new report published yesterday. Two studies, part of a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences annual report on co-operation and development in the Greater Mekong sub-region, admitted that agricultural, mining and hydro projects with Chinese investment had caused adverse environmental impact in countries including Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. But international environmental groups working in the region, most of which receive funding from Western...