Free Republic

You may have enough weapons and ammo stashed away to fight the next World War all by yourself… You may have fortified your home and have 3 different routes mapped out to get to your bug-out retreat… You may have a food stockpile that will see you, your family, heck, the whole darned neighborhood, through until the Second Coming… You may tirelessly watch militant YouTube videos that show you how to take down your opponent in 3 easy maneuvers… But.. If you aren’t realistic about your skills and your physical abilities, you are likely to be just as dead as...

Kylene and Jonathan Jones' book "The Provident Prepper" (Plain Sight Publishing, $16.99) gives straight forward and easy-to-understand details on emergency preparedness. It's a great resource for families or individuals who'd like to learn how to take care of the necessities during an emergency. Written in conversational style, readers can adapt the information to fit their situations. The 358-page book has sections on a variety of topics including survival kits; communication; water storage and purification; food and fuel storage; emergency heating; lighting; and cooking. Here are a few tips the husband and wife team share: In the case of an emergency...

The unbearable sadness of climate activism: Nicole Thornton remembers the exact moment her curious case of depression became too real to ignore. It was five years ago and the environmental scientist – a trained biologist and ecologist – was writing a rather dry PhD on responsible household water use. Fair enough. That would make anyone depressed. Thornton had always been easily upset by apathy towards, and denial of, environmental issues. But now she began to notice an oddly powerful personal reaction to "the small stuff" – like people littering, or neighbours chopping down an old tree. So, she's a bossy...

When Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring”, was published, filled with totally false claims about DDT, the Environmental Protection Agency looked it over and concluded she had used manipulated data. They concluded that DDT should not be banned, but its first administrator, William Ruckleshaus, overruled the agency and imposed a ban. Ruckleshaus was a lawyer, not a scientist. He was also politically connected enough to hold a variety of government positions. He got the nod for the EPA job from John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General who later went to jail for his participation in the Watergate cover-up.

KINGDOM CITY, Mo. — Missourians already have the constitutional right to religion, speech and guns. On Tuesday, they could make a novel addition to the State Constitution: the right to farm. A proposal known as Amendment 1 will be taken up in a statewide vote on Tuesday, leaving Missouri poised to change its Constitution to guarantee the rights of its people to “engage in farming and ranching practices.” The right to farm hardly seems threatened in Missouri, one of the leading agricultural states, with nearly 100,000 farms producing crops including soybeans, corn and wheat. But a coalition of state farming...

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)...