Sunday, January 31, 2016

Gabe Brown from North Dakota and Sustainable Agriculture

Jerry L Hickman
1/30/2016, from one of my favorite Libertarians.
I went to Columbus Nebraska yesterday and listened to Gabe Brown from North Dakota talk about his farming operation.
Wow! Gabe is a known worldwide for his innovation in sustainable agriculture.
His story shows exactly why capitalism is so superior to socialism/fascism/communism. Gabe had to overcome the fascism in the United States to progress to where he is in his program. As he progressed he has rejected USDA farm programs originally developed by the socialist Roosevelt administration. (You know the program the Supreme Court shot down as unconstitutional until Roosevelt packed the Supreme Court with corrupt judges.) He also does not participate in the USDA multi-peril crop insurance program that rapes taxpayers. Because of his attitude of being self-sufficient I would not doubt if he will reject the socialist Social Security payments when he is old. (Another unconstitutional socialist program from the Roosevelt administration that rapes taxpayers).
Gabe sort of stumbled onto sustainable agriculture due to necessity caused by nasty weather. What is the old saying; necessity is the mother of invention? Gabe continued his pursuit of sustainable agriculture because of greed. Gabe likes to make money. He said, “I would rather sign the back of checks than the front of checks.”
Because of his innovation and methods of rapidly improving soils landlords come to him and want him to farm their land. He pays 20% below the going rate on rent.
Gabe’ yields are way out producing the rest of his county and he is doing it without purchased fertilizer and very few pesticides. But he does not reject these things because of some liberal anti-progress, anti-corporation agenda. He is approaching this from a standpoint of capitalist greed. That is a good thing in spite of what the lying socialist claim.
Because of Gabe’s production practices (he is not organic) people will pay high prices for his produce in farmer’s markets. He sells eggs for $5 a dozen, bacon for $15 a pound and on and on. And remember his cost of production is lower than other farmers.
This is why freedom is so superior to socialism and fascism. Today idiots call for government regulations to stifle business and innovation. Today idiots call for socialist programs to enslave people. The worst of it some of these people are old enough to remember the Union of Socialist Republics and its failed socialism. Some of these people are old enough that they studied about the failure of the National Socialism in Germany while they were in school. Of course most of the people who are worshiping socialism and believing all the impossible lies of Bernie Sanders are the youngsters who got pure socialist indoctrination in school and have never expanded their learning or learned how to think for themselves.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Stem tide of Illegal entry across our borders using Carrots more than Sticks

First, we must end free stuff. A welfare State and an open border will never work.  This is attracting many non-employable to live off the taxpayer's largess.

Second, create a bio-metric card for foreign workers after a thorough background check, both medical and criminal.  Workers can come and work, leave their families at home and easily get home for events or emergencies.  Today, trips home for even your parent's funeral are too risky.  Some parents don't see their children for years.

What are the carrots for those who comply?

Workers must return home for three months each year or risk losing their ID.  During that time, they may NOT cross into the US but they and their families receive the FICA withheld from their pay in three installments. Foreign families love their language, their flag, and their colors. Their children can live much better at home than hiding in America.  Often these children can attend a private school providing for a much better future for them.

Why would a craftsman, a roofer, skilled assembly line worker, a coder or an agricultural worker not comply?

Checking workers for their biometric ID is easy.  Factories will learn to adjust and rotate skilled workers through their nine months on the job.  Since the FICA will be refunded, the federal government knows who is here and where they are working.

The load on local communities for education and medical care for the families evaporate.

Those without an ID will be much easier to find and deport.  Why would an employer risk illegal workers?  Since the ID is free, the only reason not to comply is obvious.  They have a past criminal or medical reason found in their background check.

I hope someone will comment.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Education ideas, odds and ends

(Suggestions)

Require Public school principals to accept nominations for a board made up only of parents/custodians of his/her school’s students (tried and working in Australia) and organize an election at the end of each school term-one parental vote per pupil in attendance at that school the following year.  The principal and the subsequently elected board determine a budget based on needed materials and resources, and elect a representative to hold an office on the District School board for that year.  That way each school is represented equally on the Board.

Omaha Public School District has been unduly burdened. Keep schools along the Dodge Street Corridor in OPS but other districts can help with administration. For instance, South High attendance area can merge with the Bellevue District, Bryan can merge with Ralston or Papillion, Northwest can merge with Elkhorn and North can merge with District 66, as an example. Elaborate and expensive solutions like the Learning Community are not working.

I recommend a return to the Spalding Method of teaching reading which involves saying, hearing, writing (penmanship) and seeing words and phonic patterns to build a list of spelling words that are understood by the child including how to form those words on paper, read them, spell them, listen, define them and say them.  As their ‘individual’ book of sounds and words grows, "reader texts" may not be required as children may select topics of interest from their classroom's books or public library books. Students are better able to think independently and contribute to current community ideas when they've been taught to read effectively whereas in contrast, 47% of the adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate today.

Offer a boost to Secondary education by offering within the College of Arts and Science, a minor in secondary education. Upon graduation with a major in their field, be it Biology, Math, Chemistry or a Foreign language and student teaching under their belt, the graduate is qualified to teach in a secondary school, Junior or Senior high school, in Nebraska and benefit from reduced tuition at any Nebraska University, to complete an Arts and Science Masters and/or Doctorate.  Students benefit from the quality knowledge in their field and the enthusiasm of an engaged instructor.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Education Stamps

My newest idea for improving educational outcomes in Nebraska is radical.

Model an 'education stamp' on the 'food stamp' program as a way to fund all public K-12 education as required in Nebraska's Constitution. Parents receive an 'education stamp' for each child and present it to the Principal of their selected school. Principals in turn send all students for a State administered test to assess their individual annual average gains on the California Achievement Test. And the State releases the annual AVERAGE gains of students, by teacher for the year, to the local news media. More detail below.

Parents can depend on published results by teacher, a type of Red, Yellow, Green report on student progress, to select a school to receive their child's 'education stamp.' By injecting market principles into our schools, all will improve. Just as no one takes 'food stamps' to a grocery store with browning vegetables, parents will choose schools that work and entrepreneurs will open schools in under-served areas.

Imagine the relief when all the overhead costs justified today by Districts, the State and federal mandates and micromanagement melt away and our kids become great Nebraska scholars again, able to read effectively, thinking and reasoning through the complex problems of the future. Many details must be worked out, such as, a Unicameral committee determining the value of 'education stamps' each year and funds for junior, senior and special 'education stamps' adjusted rates but those are the easy part once parents are once again put in control.

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A settling in period can require that private schools must accept the amount of the 'education stamp' as payment in full.  President Obama's girls attend Sidwell Friends which accepted several lottery winners' 50% stipend of average spending per pupil in D.C. Public Schools, or $9600, and added diversity to the education of their other students who pay approximately three times that amount.  Unfortunately, in 2009, Pelosi and Obama removed the lottery only grandfathering in some recipients.

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Average reading level of second grade students and their gains in Class A; Class B
Reading level of Students
Teacher A’s Class
Teacher B’s Class
Average leaving First Grade
Grade level 1.9
Grade level 2.5
Average leaving Second Grade
Grade Level 3.1
Grade level 3.4
Average increase
1.2 years
0.9 years

While in math problems,
Math level of Students
Teacher A’s Class
Teacher B’s Class
Average leaving First Grade
Grade level 2.9
Grade level 1.1
Average leaving Second Grade
Grade Level 4.0
Grade level 3.4
Average increase
1.1 years
2.3 years


In reading, Teacher  A is able to speed up reading scores faster than Teacher B but Teacher B does not let readers fall behind and accelerates math scores faster than Teacher A's class.  Teacher C’s job was eliminated as scores in reading and math in that classroom fell below grade level. No parents allowed their child to be assigned to Teacher C’s classroom.

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Some eighth grade graduates taught in Nebraska's country schools of our past and used the Spalding method.  "Once students have learned the first 30 phonograms, they can begin to read the Spalding Series 1 Leveled Readers. This occurs in Academic Week 10 of the Spalding Kindergarten Teacher's Guide."

Children learn sounds, and create a list of words they know, can read, spell, pronounce, use in a sentence and write and their list keeps growing.  Being in a classroom of mixed age children, drill for the younger students was often performed by the older ones. Every had multiple chances to fill in information they may have glossed over when presented earlier.

Success stories in Nebraska are legend, Willa Cather, Bess Streeter Aldrich, John G. Neihardt, Mari Sandoz, to name a few but remember our grandparents and great aunt's penmanship and English was impeccable. Teaching reading, needed for all the other subjects, isn't rocket science.

Don't be fooled by universal preschool raising scores of the underprivileged like we did all day Kindergarten classes. All day classes doubled the amount of resources required; two teachers and two classrooms, but as I discovered by comparing the OPS 8th grade outcomes 9 years after all day kindergarten, that they did not rise scores and in fact scores had dropped again.  Universal preschool may cause our high school graduates to carry a four year college loan for an Early Childhood Education degree to work in a preschool.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Perpetual War for Petroleum

Clinton bombed Kosovo and Serbia and Iraq for good measure. His sanctions left approximately 200,000 children dead from water borne illness because we withheld dual use chemicals like Chlorine and deprived the Iraqis of water treatment chemicals IN A DESERT!
Clinton's team couldn't manage to find support for invasion at Ohio State:

Bush bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, two of Iran's neighbors, and CIA targeted drones bombed across national boundaries.
Obama bombed Libya and caused death of Qaddafi who supported the African Union and selling petroleum products in gold, Hillary and Kerry funded rebels in Syria to oust Assad, and supplied the rebels with weapons (possibly shipped out of Qaddafi's arsenal) as those rebels were beheading Syrian Christians. When questioned about Qaddafi's weapons by Rand Paul, Hillary 'could not recall' whether any were shipped out of Libya & reminded me of the times Hillary 'could not recall' when questioned under oath about Whitewater. The CIA targeted drones kept flying across national borders, and Obama has bombed Syria even without UN or NATO approvals.
And we're now asked to give arms to Ukraine after Victoria Nuland and our Ambassador to Ukraine supported the riots which overthrew their elected leader. Russia's one warm water port is in Crimea, needed for imports and exports, as well as their Navy, so we must have known Putin would attempt to annex Crimea.
Beau Biden is now, after testing positive to Cocaine while in the US Navy, on the board of the Ukraine Gas Pipeline company.

Here's how I put this all together, as it always comes down to money and power in the end.
1) the US$ has flourished when tied to petroleum and is often referred to as the petrodollar.
2) Russian has been a major supplier of energy to the EU flowing through pipelines in Ukraine.
3) Middle Eastern petroleum is still sold in US$s, so a pipeline through Syria (would Assad oppose?) expedites the process of supplying the EU's energy needs in US$s instead of Russian Rubles.

I hope someone can correct me! 

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Slip the Bonds

In, High Flight, — John Gillespie Magee, Jr, gave us the memorable lines,

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings"

and this week, President Obama is slipping the bonds of our Constitution.  The voters said no, but like a petulant child, it didn't matter.  We said, we are having no more of your socialist agenda, and he's not hearing us.

Instead, Obama is amassing an army of millions entering the US as undocumented, and adding them to his victim side of the "victim vs. oppressor" scale, the (proletariat vs. bourgeois) paradigm of Karl Marx.

Instead of Ferguson ready to explode, Martin Luther King, Jr., took the high ground of Gandhi and non-violent protests and blacks were on the their way into the middle class until 'the great society' taught many they were victims instead.  Babies and their young moms were snatched from family homes where Gramma and Gramps lived, in the 'village' of responsible grownups and placed in projects, alone in an apartment with their infant, a recipe for depression, where few if any of the adults were not victims.  Generations followed in their footsteps, pushing post WWII, 75%+ two parents in the home, down to below 25% today.

Hayek understood the difference between socialism and Marx.

"The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way.They still hoped for the miracle of a majority’s agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible."

The adage, "you can't fight city hall,' just became a whole lot larger and more dangerous.

Monday, November 10, 2014

UNSHACKLE OUR TEACHERS


"Whereas, an educated population being necessary for informed voting, civic duties, economic growth and tranquility in daily discourse; and,

Whereas, multiple funding sources originating outside of Nebraska and lacks parental oversight add burdens to teachers in their classrooms complying with various rules and regulations which are attached to said funds, and,

Whereas, these burdensome rules and regulations have caused a precipitous decline in student achievement while simultaneously growing the divisions between segments of the population; now,

Therefore be it resolved, that the Sarpy County Republican Party encourage the State of Nebraska to break all ties with federal or any other outside control of education within our borders; and,

Be it further resolved, that any and all remuneration for education from outside the State is encouraged to be accepted and acknowledged by Nebraska's schools, including private & parochial schools, so long as the funds do not require the school to change its curriculum, add burdensome rules or regulations for teachers, the school, or the district offices." Will be voted on Thursday as a Resolution. 

From 2009 through 2012, PISA international statistics saw the U.S. slip from 25th to 31st in math; 20th to 24th in science; and 11th to 21st in reading. Let me repeat, our teens in the USA slipped from 11th place to 21st place in THREE YEARS.  If you cannot read effectively, you cannot think!