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Rants April 17, 2011

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1. Today I see I can buy an Elvis two dollar bill for 20 dollars. Somehow the math escapes me and you will have to explain to me why I should do this.

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2. Here’s your gee-whiz fact for the day. The girl who played Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend has two children who are the grandchildren of the real James Bond and the guy who invented Kermit the frog. So one of the siblings has a grandfather who dated Pussy Galore and the other one has a grandfather who dated Miss Piggy. Their mother dated Ferris Bueller. What a pedigree. If these kids can’t make it in the movies you had better forget about a career in the movies because there is no hope for you.

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3. We read in the newspaper about a No Labels political organization that describes itself as a grassroots group that aims to convince politicians to put aside their party affiliations and, instead, work together to address the country’s problems. Ho ho ho, thinks I. To begin with, in every country in every age there have really only been two political parties. One party, whatever it is called, is a collection of people who have banded together to support the financial interests of the wealthy merchant class. Back in the good old days, they bought slaves. Today it is only by keeping wages as low as possible that they can keep profits as high as possible. The other party, whatever it is called, consists of the millions of people who work for wages and the folks who work 18 hours a day to try to keep their little mom and pop stores afloat. These people have the same goals as the wealthy --- they also want their income to be as high as possible. So there is an inherent conflict of interest between these two groups when it comes to the bottom line, which is --- how do we divide up the amount of money that came into our collective till on this working day? The wealthy merchants have always had an advantage when it comes to getting more than their share of the money in the till because there are many ways to keep wages as low as possible. War is a sure-fire means of sucking the lifeblood out of the most prosperous society. Nothing makes the rich richer like a good meaningless war to “protect our freedom.” You can also create a recession and lots of unemployment. Unemployed people are more than willing to work for whatever scraps they can get. Because men are trying to feed hungry families, there is likely to be an increase in crime --- another win-win for the rich who own and service the privatized prisons. About the only way the working class can negotiate for better wages and working conditions is to band together into an organization which, in English, is called a union. Unfortunately for working people everywhere, management has whispered in the ears of millions of its employees, “If you have to work for me for three dollars an hour, why should your friends across the street be getting four?” How can management lose, when it can get 75 percent of an uninformed labor force to write letters to the editor that cry out for lower wages? “I work as hard as they do. Why should they get more than me? These are hard times. We all have to sacrifice.” When it is possible to get millions of working people in any country to honestly believe that they deserve lower wages, that country is in grave danger. But back to the No Labels organization. When I read of any organization, the first thing I do is to Google around to find out who is behind that organization. In other words, which of the two so clearly delineated classes of people in any society is behind that particular organization: Who is going to get the money? Would you believe that the page that came up on Google belonged to Rush Limbaugh? And in the middle of that page is a big circle. And in the middle of that circle it says --- in capital letters, “No Brains. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY.”

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4. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect woman, said she was going to give me a haircut. I said that I was like Sampson – a haircut sapped my strength. She said, “You’ve said that before but it doesn’t seem to matter.”

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5. Husson University announced Tuesday that it has formed a School of Hospitality, Sport, and Tourism Management within its College of Business. If they move fast enough they might be able to find a location for this new school up in that part of Maine someone in Augusta says he wants to turn into a fast food strip.

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6. Someone must have pointed out that working people can no longer buy gas and will be riding bicycles because everything from junior’s first two-wheeler to the highest-end road bike would cost more under a Maine lawmaker’s plan that would apply a new tax on bicycles purchased in Maine. But it will be a hot summer day in Maine before that crowd slaps a tax on the 2 million dollar yachts that tie up in Camden. If you will read the newspapers, you will read many reasons why the rich should not pay taxes. Guess who owns the newspapers. And again, keep your eye on the ball. Remember the diversionary reasoning behind monkey kung fu. This bicycle taxing business might be a simple diversionary or bargaining tactic. --- We won’t tax your bicycles if you don’t tax our yachts.

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7. We read that some nurses in Maine have voted to authorize a second one-day strike. Are strikes part of the process in a working democracy? When I was a small boy there was a country in Europe where strikes were outlawed and where the secret police could arrest, torture and kill anybody. An American general, who later became President of the United States, presided over the defeat of that European country at a great cost of lives. You and I have elderly neighbors who fought in that war and survived and might even remember what it was all about. Being a very smart man, however, our President knew that this unfortunate type of government he had defeated, being very popular with the rich and uneducated/sadistic poor, would rise again --- perhaps even here in the land of the free--- and he gave a very famous speech warning us about the danger of voting for Senators and Representatives who would support a military industrial type of government. Although I liked that man, I am happy to say he was 100 percent wrong. In our proud democracy workers still have the public’s support while striking against unfavorable working conditions and within 10 years the torture of Bradley Manning will be long forgotten.

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8. We read that the Maine Senate has rejected a proposal to amend the state Constitution so at least 50 percent of the vote would be needed in order to be elected governor. Our friends in the Maine Senate obviously think this amendment would not be to their advantage and we can easily understand why: If there had been a similar 50 percent law on the books in Germany in 1932, it would have been more difficult for Hitler’s minority to weasel its way in.

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9. Are you becoming suspicious about all the talk in the press about handing down optimum sentences to petty criminals? Heinous throw-away-the-key crime is one thing. Petty crime against the state is another. People who argue for optimum sentencing should study press photos of the portly prisoners and figure what it will cost Maine taxpayers to feed chubby petty criminals for 10 as opposed to 30 years. Why not let uneducated petty criminals out of jail after they have earned an MA or PhD --- or have written a best-selling novel from behind the bars? Why pay to keep them inside if they can now get a good-paying job on the outside? There is only one good reason to keep some people in jail and many Maine people are starting to ask themselves if the folks who argue hard and loud for maximum sentencing for petty criminals are no more than fronts for businesses and personnel that derive income from servicing the prison. Think about this. Prisoners are their cash crop.

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10. Here it is in my computer again --- the email that says, “Are you having a hard time getting your kids to read the Bible?” If you will quickly read the first few pages of Genesis you’ll see why children want nothing to do with it: Here’s a guy who wipes out a quarter of the population on the planet just by killing his brother. Here’s a drunken father staggering around bare-bottom naked who curses his son just because the son happened to see him drunk with no clothes on. Here’s another man who has a kid by one of his wife’s servants. Here are two girls who get their father so drunk he does things with them that would earn him a life sentence in prison today. In other words, before one even gets to Chapter 30 in the first book, there are tales of drunkenness, incest, trickery, deception, and other things so unspeakably bad that I can’t --- well, these other things are unspeakable. I can’t even talk about them and I wouldn’t if I could. So you can see why children wouldn’t want to read the Bible. To a child who has been exposed to all this over and over, the Bible is no more than a boring synopsis of last year’s TV shows.

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11. Have you ever gone into court just to see what they do in there? If you go in there day after day and just sit quietly and listen, you might see different people, but they all tell the judge about the same story. You get the impression that the judge doesn't even have to listen because he never hears anything new. There is no one smart enough or original enough to say anything that might surprise him or her. The judge has heard it all before. At least that's what I thought until I asked my friend, Lawyer Crandall, if he ever said anything in court that surprised a judge. And Lawyer Crandall said, "Yes, Skog, I have. I once said, “Judge, my client is guilty.”

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12. The weather report for Wednesday was mostly sunny. The weather report for Thursday was partly cloudy. I asked myself if there was a difference between partly cloudy and mostly sunny. You might evince an inordinate interest in these things if you have solar hot water panels on the side of your house and photo voltaic panels in your back lawn like I do. The more the sun shines, the less you have to pay for electricity and hot water. So you Google and learn that the scale is: sunny, mostly sunny, partly cloudy, partly sunny, mostly cloudy, cloudy. Mostly sunny means more sun than clouds, partly sunny means more clouds than sun, and partly cloudy generally means an equal amount of clouds and sun. Because there is obviously nothing you can do about the amount of cloud cover over your solar collectors, you can probably only wish you lived in a Home on the Range. And if you can remember what I’ve just said about these grades of weather, a one-night spot on a quiz show would make you rich.

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