Want to know what life is like on a working conventional onion farm, and the day to day musings of a real life onion farmer? That's what you will read about, plus posts for music, weird news clips, and stories about my lobbying in behalf of agricultural public policy!
Can we put Rev. Pat Robertson on the International Space Station?
or
The Devil didn’t go to Georgia … he actually went to Haiti ….
Back in 2010 there was a rumor floating around the internet that 700 Club Host Rev. Pat Robertson blamed an earthquake in Chile on “Chupacabra.” That’s a goat sucker, if you didn’t know.
It may have been an internet urban legend … but it’s not as if Pat has never said such a thing.
In January of 2010 he did blame the horrible Haitian earthquake on a pact with the Devil. He said it on tv, on The 700 Club. And we have it on YouTube.
The AP, on its YouTube page for the story about Pat’s revelation, says the following about this clip under the more info section:
“TV Evangelist Pat Robertson made some unusual observations about the Haiti earthquake on his CBN newscast Wednesday.”
“Made some unusual observations?” Wow, an understatement to rival all understatements I would argue.
Pat says in the piece (video below) “They (the Haitian people) got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said we will serve you, if you’ll get us free from the French. It’s a true story. And so the Devil said ‘okay, it’s a deal.'”
And then one of the Haitian people started playing on his fiddle and his fiddle playing was superior to the Devil’s fiddle playing and he kicked the Devil’s a** … oh I’m sorry, wrong narrative. I thought Pat was going to segue into that Charlie Daniels song. (Author’s note: I do like that song, by the way).
Check it out:
Can we all agree we need to send Pat Robertson somewhere isolated and safe? Like trade him for some beer and cigars or something? Or just put him on the International Space Station and just leave him there until we can figure out who wants him or how we can sort it all out? And can we by mutual consent agree to get him off the air? I don’t want any passing Vulcans or any other inter-galactic species to inadvertently catch part of his showgram while passing by and get the wrong idea about the rest of us. I don’t want them putting off “First Contact” because of Pat’s musings.
But either way, let’s just get him up to the Space Station and do the analysis later.
Don’t think this is a serious situation? Well, if you were to take a random collection of some of Pat’s musings and intermix them with the ramblings of someone like …, oh …, Charlie Manson, I guarantee that a sizeable number of people couldn’t tell you
1. What was spouted by Pat and what was spouted by Charlie
2. Which made more sense
Yet, Pat’s legions of followers, or dare I say, “family,” dwarfs Charlie’s. On top of that Pat’s are running around amongst us, with little to no supervision. Folks, we have to do something about this. I’m just saying.
Can I be snarky and say I’m fervently praying that Pat be gently but quickly removed from our society, all planetary society, and placed in high orbit until we can figure out what to do with him, long term? How ironic is that? I’m praying with my hands placed on my computer monitor just like Pat does when he prays on his showgram.
If anyone wants to donate to the cause I’ll humbly accept cash, checks, fresh produce or unopened boxes of saltine crackers as compensation?
To be fair, I’ve tried a few times to watch “The 700 Club.” As a cultural experiment. I can’t seem to last longer than 10 or 15 minutes. As I watch it and Pat starts saying some really stupid stuff and his co-host, whichever one, starts nodding their head in agreement and fawning over his lunatic ideas, I start to feel like Elvis and Bob Goulet is on the tv doing Broadway showtunes and I really can’t afford to do what the King used to do in similar circumstances.
The one dude thought the Beatles gave him secret messages in their music, and, along with material found in the Bible book of Revelation, those messages urged him to start a race war between whitey and the black man and he and his followers would be the survivors and future rulers of that apocalyptic war.
The other dude claims to have semi-regular conversations with the All-Being, sees a future cataclysm on the horizon where he ends up as some sort of boss or authority figure and in the meantime wanted to see the CIA take out the President of Venezuela.
Which sounds more or less plausible, more or less wacky, and even more or less disturbing?
Let’s do the quote game … intermixed below are a series of quotes from either Pat or Charlie. Can you guess which said which?
* “Lord, give us righteous judges who will not try to legislate and dominate this society. Take control, Lord! We ask for additional vacancies on the court.”
* ”The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. Itis about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
* “Pain’s not bad, it’s good. It teaches you things. I understand that.”
* “Look down at me and you see a fool;
look up at me and you see a god;
look straight at me and you see yourself”
* “I can’t judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.”
* “From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment.”
* “Maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom to shake things up”
* ”Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together.”
* “I started, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit … ‘”
* “Living is what scares me. Dying is easy.”
Truth be told, even I don’t know now which said which.
And just consider this fact …, Charlie and his “family” have been tried, convicted and sentenced to lifetime prison sentences. Charlie, for his part, killed no one but only gave the orders.
Pat, on the other hand, who has openly, yes OPENLY, called for the CIA to assassinate an elected head of state of another country and for a nuke to be deployed on the State Department, has his own tv showgram and it is highly likely you and I will run into a number of his “family” the next time we go to Wal-Mart or The Piggly Wiggly, amongst many other places.
Let’s just stop his transmissions immediately and put up up in the ISS as quickly as possible. We want any and all passing space visitors think that this will happen if they decide to stop in:
We don’t want them fearing this may happen instead:
Click on the text that says “See full bio & links” to read my bio and for a series of links about me and some of my public policy activities.
Again, if you can back me fantastic … and if you can spread the word and encourage your friends to back me … better yet!
In the meantime enjoy these videos which are stories that ran on WABC 7 Eyewitness News in NYC about he devastation of Hurricane Irene and my subsequent $150K 50 lb bag of onions on eBay ad. My dad with his reference to Oprah Winfrey totally steals the show in that story.
I humbly request your generous support and spreading the word about my project.
To those that have already backed me and spread the word you again receive my incredible gratitude and my sincere apologies for having to read this over and over and over again.
The rest of you have the power to make me stop … by helping me reach my goal.
Now, watch this and get inspired and go chase a chicken in honor of my Muckville Kickstarter campaign:
A brief update on my Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to pay for an editor for my farming memoir “Muckville: Farm Policy, Media and the Strange Oddities of Semi-Rural Life.”
Okay, we are at 15 backers, $492, which is close to 10% of goal! A good start but I need a great deal more help. Please consider backing my project and spreading the word about it. My memoir is all about what is involved in being a small family farmer. It also details my wife and I’s years of experiences working on public policy issues connection with farming. What I detail you can use as a roadmap for your own situation and cause!
And to those that have already backed it, thank you!
Remember, Kickstarter is all or nothing! And the best way to get me to stop posting this crap is to back my project and help me reach my funding goal!
The following is another brief excerpt from my yet unpublished memoir, “Muckville: Farm Policy, Media and the Strange Oddities of Semi-Rural Life.” It deals with the backstory involving Eve and I’s first two CNN appearances.
As the 1999 growing season progressed a devastating drought began to slowly affect the eastern seaboard. By mid-August the effects and toll taken on all sorts of crops began to become evident. In late August Eve and I were contacted by CNN. I got a call from producer Frances Causey. She had come across some of my materials regarding crop insurance and asked if we would mind being interviewed for a story about the drought and the problems with crop insurance. We happily agreed. I sent Frances a ton of information, and then we spoke a bit about Ken Ackerman. I related all that had happened in our meetings with Glickman, how Glickman and his operatives knew how poor the onion policy was, and how the buy-up policy in particular was essentially a rip-off. And how USDA officials, and Ackerman in particular, would continue to state untrue things like “CAT was free” and the onion farmers of Orange County were in a situation that was their own fault, because the failed purchase the buy-up. This was despite Glickman saying this sort of thing would stop. I also told her what happened with American Vegetable Grower and how USDA put pressure on the magazine to pull the USDA official’s offending quote.
She told me that CNN planned on interviewing Ackerman as they interviewed Eve and I for the story. I told Causey that Ackerman and the USDA would certainly try to pull the same sort of stunt that they did with American Vegetable Grower a year before.
On August 17th, 1999, veteran CNN correspondent Gary Tuchman and crew came to our farm to interview us. Like Randall Pinkston of CBS Tuchman was very friendly and kind. They spent much of the day interviewing Maire Ullrich, the vegetable crop agent at the time for Cornell cooperative Extension, Eve and me. The piece was outstanding (it had one small error, it stated I had CAT coverage at the time but in 1999 we actually had the buy-up, despite how bad it was.) It was a pretty devastating indictment of the current crop insurance program. Ackerman was interviewed separately in Washington by a stringer crew. And Ackerman, predictably, placed the blame everywhere but himself and the Agency. The piece reported:
“’Our program is often very bureaucratic,’ said Ken Ackerman of the department. We have a number of legal restraints that make it difficult for us to respond to situations.” Tuchman then states. ‘But Ken Ackerman says that the current system of taxpayer-supported crop insurance, for which farmers pay just a small fee, often should be supplemented with so-called ‘buy up’ policies for extra coverage.”
So, once again Ackerman attempted to mislead the press and public regarding the true cost or value of CAT and wrongly blame the farmers for their current predicament. Though very pleased with the piece, which ran the evening of August 17,1999 and also multiple times on CNN’s Headline News channel, I was very angry about Ackerman’s quotes and implied blame. After the piece aired I spoke with Butch May at USDA and told him to tell Ackerman that “I thought his mommy dressed him very nice for his TV interview.”
You may wonder, even though it held such little value, why on earth did we buy the buy-up policy for the 1999 growing season? Because of Eve and my view that we did have a responsibility to assist in managing our risk. So, though a waste of money, we felt that the position of having bought it strengthened our ability to work within
the framework of the system to fix the policy. We figured, it would be kind of hard to argue for a “No Stages” program if we didn’t actively participate within the system. So, we bit the bullet and bought it. And to this day we believe it was a factor in motivating Grau to put so much pressure on RMA/FCIC and the various bureaucrats to get us that pilot and listen to our concerns. Of course Congressman Gilman putting incessant pressure on them helped.
As the summer progressed into autumn it quickly began to sink in how bad the losses from the drought were and how little even our buy-up policies were going to help. In early October, CNN producer Frances Causey called us and asked how things were going. We told her the drought was worse than even we thought it would be and the year was going to be a real body blow. She asked if they could interview us for a rare follow-up story and we happily agreed. She also said that this time she would be coming out with reporter Gary Tuchman and crew.
Causey, Tuchman and crew arrived on October 14th to shoot the 2nd story. Once again Tuchman was very kind, matched only by the warmth expressed by Causey. As we re-capped what had developed since their first story Frances, while laughing, detailed what happened with the Ken Ackerman interview. She was simply amazed that Ackerman and USDA did exactly what I predicted they would do, how he would imply CAT was free and the farmers were at fault for not buying the virtually worthless buy-up (we told Frances the one small error in the piece was that we did in fact have the buy-up insurance for the 1999 crop year but inexplicably they reported again that we only had CAT) and she confirmed that Ackerman and USDA were very displeased with the portions involving him in the August piece. “Ackerman and the USDA implied we took him out of context but look at this,” she then pulled out a document from her bag and continued, “this is the word for word transcript of his interview. He didn’t say what he said just once, he kept repeating it over and over again.” What a surprise … not.
The 2nd piece aired all day on October 15th and it too packed an incredible punch.
It was at this point that Eve and I kicked it into high gear in regards to not only fighting for changes to the crop insurance program but also for a special disaster aid program for the onion growers of Orange County. This was now the third devastating year out of four and we needed some sort of special assistance to continue to survive as an industry in our region. When we first started raising the possibility of such aid in 1998 we were told by Representative Gilman’s press secretary that it was an “unrealistic request.”
But when you are wiped out three out of four years you don’t accept such a rejection. In 1999 President Clinton signed a $1.4 billion ad-hoc disaster aid package passed by Congress. The structure and formulation of that ad- hoc disaster aid program was based on the very same federal crop insurance program which made necessary that aid package to begin with. Well, we knew we would need more targeted help. In the October 1999 CNN piece Tuchman reported our assessment that the aid package would only provide us with pennies on the dollar on our losses. And when it was eventually appropriated we learned that we were correct.
I ran into my father a short time later and excitedly told him.
Dad: “Really? I didn’t see it between 8-9 am this morning when I came back from deer hunting. Someone must have brought it back.”
Me: “I’m sort of surprised.”
Dad: “Me too, I didn’t think it would work again.”
Later, when I took the photos I noticed that the people who took and returned it were even thoughtful enough to bracket the tires with small stones to prevent it from falling.
I just called my dad and told him about the stones.
Dad: “I saw that … that was nice … you know what, if they identify themselves I will give the battery charger to them for free now.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad throws in a 50 lb bag of onions on top of it … on second thought, I highly doubt that.
We’ll at the start of DAY 4 of my Project I now have 10 backers and have reached 5% of my goal. A great start!
I found out yesterday on the Kickstarter website, under the section for staff picks for the publishing section my project is 9at least at the time of this posting) their top pick!
Now I need your help to keep things moving! It won’t remain a top pick for long if it doesn’t continue the momentum. Eight of my backers are friends while two are strangers.
The added bonus to this project becoming successful is that I will stop haunting everyone!
Just a reminder, Kickstarter is “all or nothing” so if I don’t reach my funding goal I get none of the pledged support.
Help a 4th generation small family onion farmer who has lobbied on Capitol Hill get his memoir published via Kickstarter!
Mucking it up in Muckville 