“Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life, but to make them as unlike their fathers as we can. While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible…but that time has passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise. The people of the United States do not wish to curtail the activities of this Government; they wish, rather, to enlarge them and with every enlargement, with the mere growth, indeed of the country itself, there must come, of course, the inevitable increase of expense…It is not expenditure but extravagance that we should fear being criticized for.”
That is a quote from the father of modern education and president of progressive policy who along with Social Gospel soldiers such as John Dewey created the situation you see on the below chart. The quotes are from Woodrow Wilson.
Government is a corrosive, corruptible creature, and teachers are a reflection of everything that’s wrong with it. They take too much and do too little. Tocqueville proclaimed in 1840 “Having thus taken each citizen in turn in the powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but in hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”
Few tax payers ever really consider how much they actually pay in taxes, which robs them of money for themselves and gives it them to the mediocre only to feed a government monster with a big appetite.
And that’s where your tax money is going ladies and gentlemen. Remember, if you vote for a school levy, a social welfare levy, a tax increase of any kind…………………………..you’re stupid!
“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.” Thomas Jefferson.
Below is a great article from the Daily Reckoning about Oil Shale in Colorado. There is only one reason that our country is in a financial mess, and that is because fools are standing in the way. I am thinking of a speech from John Galt uttered in the book Atlas Shrugged. “You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.”
Oil Shale Reserves: Stinky Water, Sweet Oil
A Daily Reckoning White Paper Report By Dan Denning
You won’t think much of Rio Blanco County if you ever drive through it. In fact, unless you take a right turn off Interstate-70 West at Rifle, head north on Railroad Avenue and then west on Government road to Colorado state highway number thirteen, odds are you’ll never even step foot in Rio Blanco County.
But even if you keep heading west toward Grand Junction, through the town of Parachute and the shuttered oil shale refineries from the 1970s, you’ll see the Book Cliffs geologic formation on your right. For miles and miles. It’s a bleak landscape. Almost lunar. At first glance, it’s the kind of land you’d never want to explore, much less settle down in.
Oil Shale Reserves : America’s Strategic Future
In the small world of geologists, though, the region is well-known. In fact, you might even say it’s the single most important patch of undeveloped, unloved, and desolate looking land in America. But you’d never guess this particular corner of the Great American Desert may play an integral role in America’s strategic future just by looking at it. You’d never guess that the whole stretch of brown, red, and orange land contains enough recoverable oil and gas to make you forget about the Middle East for the rest of time.
There are places in Rio Blanco County like Stinking Water Creek, named after the smelly mix of oil and water the first white settlers found there, that tell you oil’s always been around the Rocky Mountains. It’s just not always been easy to find. It’s one thing to find oil that bubbles out of the ground in liquid form. It’s quite another to drill a thousand feet down, and encounter oil locked up tight inside a greasy rock.
The first seeping pools of oil were discovered in Western Colorado as far back as 1876, the year the state entered the Union. But exploration didn’t get serious until drillers settled in the town of Rangely in Rio Blanco County.
By 1903, thirteen different drillers had come and gone in Rangely. According to the local museum, the only six wells that actually struck oil were producing just two to ten barrels of oil a day. Hardly a Spindeltop, the gusher that launched the Texas oil-boom on January 10th, 1901, and immediately began producing 100,000 barrels per day.
The energy reserves of the Piceance Basin, upon which Rio Blanco County sits, contain massive petroleum reserves of a very unusual nature: Oil shale.
Oil Shale Reserves : A Congressional Legacy
Most of the nation’s oil shale reserves rest under the control of the U.S. government – a legacy of a 95-year old Congressional Act. In 1910, Congress passed the Pickett Act, which authorized President Taft to set aside oil- bearing land in California and Wyoming as potential sources of fuel for the U.S. Navy. Taft did so right away. The Navy was in the process of switching from coal-burning ships to oil burning ships. And the U.S. military, conscious of the expanding role of America in the world, needed a dependable supply of fuel in case of a national emergency.
From 1910 to 1925 the Navy developed the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves Program. The program became official in 1927 and President Roosevelt even expanded the scope of the program in 1942 as the U.S. geared up for war with Japan and Germany.
Several of the oil fields set aside for the nation’s first strategic reserve, particularly Elk Hills in California, would go on to produce oil for the U.S. government. Elk Hills was eventually sold off to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion in 1998 in the largest privatization in U.S. history. The shale reserves, however, still remain, locked 1,000 feet underground in the Colorado desert.
Unlocking The Future
The destruction of Hurricane Katrina shows the importance of a strategic petroleum reserve, or, more accurately, a strategic energy reserve. But the SPR in Louisiana only holds about 800 million barrels of emergency, enough to get the country through about 90 days of regular oil usage. That’s barely a band-aid for a country that faces a potential energy heart attack.
In other words, the future of oil shale may have finally arrived. Extracting oil from shale is no simple task, which is why the reserves remain almost completely undeveloped. But an emerging new technology promises to unlock the awesome potential of the oil shale.
“The technical groundwork may be in place for a fundamental shift in oil shale economics,” the Rand Corporation recently declared. “Advances in thermally conductive in-situ conversion may enable shale-derived oil to be competitive with crude oil at prices below $40 per barrel. If this becomes the case, oil shale development may soon occupy a very prominent position in the national energy agenda.”
Estimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – or more than five times the stated reserves of Saudi Arabia. This energy bounty is simply too large to ignore any longer, assuming that the reserves are economically viable. And yet, oil shale lies far from the radar screen of most investors.
But we here at The Daily Reckoning are on the case. Just yesterday, I caught a first-hand glimpse of a cutting-edge oil shale project spearheaded by Shell. I trekked out to a barren moonscape in Colorado to tour the facility with Shell geologists. To summarize my findings, oil shale holds tremendous promise, but the technologies that promise to unlock this promise remain somewhat experimental. But sooner or later, the oil trapped in the shale of Colorado will flow to the surface. And when it does, it will enrich investors who arrive early to the scene.
Can Oil Shale Change The World?
America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.
Obviously, there are some very real obstacles to oil production from shale. After all, if it was such a good thing, we’d be doing it already, right? “Oil shale is the fuel of the future, and always will be,” goes a popular saying in Western Colorado.
But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution.
Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter may have been entertaining similar ambitions in the late 1970s when they encouraged and funded the development of the West’s shale deposits. A shale-boom ensued, although not much oil flowed. The government spent billions and so did Exxon Mobil. New boomtowns sprung up in Rifle, Parachute, Rangely, and Meeker here in Colorado.
And then came Black Monday. May 2, 1982. The day Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project. The refineries closed. The jobs left (the American oil industry has lost nearly as many jobs in the last ten years as the automobile and steel industries.) And the energy locked in Colorado’s vast shale deposits sat untouched and unrefined.
Oil Shale Technology – Old & New
Extracting oil from the shale is no simple task. The earliest attempts to extract the oil utilized an environmentally unfriendly process known as “retorting.” Stated simply, retorting required mining the shale, hauling it to a processing facility that crushed the rock into small chunks, then extracted a petroleum substance called kerogen, then upgraded the kerogen through a process of hydrogenation (which requires lots of water) and refined it into gasoline or jet fuel.
But the difficulties of retorting do not end there, as my colleague, Byron King explains:
“After you retort the rock to derive the kerogen (not oil), the heating process has desiccated the shale (OK, that means that it is dried out). Sad to say, the volume of desiccated shale that you have to dispose of is now greater than that of the hole from which you dug and mined it in the first place. Any takers for trainloads of dried, dusty, gunky shale residue, rife with low levels of heavy metal residue and other toxic, but now chemically-activated crap? (Well, it makes for enough crap that when it rains, the toxic stuff will leach out and contaminate all of the water supplies to which gravity can reach, which is essentially all of ‘em. Yeah, right. I sure want that stuff blowin’ in my wind.) Add up all of the capital investment to build the retorting mechanisms, cost of energy required, cost of water, costs of transport, costs of environmental compliance, costs of refining, and you have some relatively costly end-product.”
But a new technology has emerged that may begin to tap the oil shale’s potential. Royal Dutch Shell, in fact, has recently completed a demonstration project (The Mahogany Ridge project) in which it produced 1,400 barrels of oil from shale in the ground, without mining the shale at all.
Instead, Shell utilized a process called “in situ” mining, which heats the shale while it’s still in the ground, to the point where the oil leaches from the rock. Shell’s Terry O’Connor described the breakthrough in testimony before Congress earlier this summer (And Congress may have an acute interest in the topic, since the U.S. government controls 72% of all U.S. oil shale acreage):
“Some 23 years ago, Shell commenced laboratory and field research on a promising in ground conversion and recovery process. This technology is called the In-situ Conversion Process, or ICP. In 1996, Shell successfully carried out its first small field test on its privately owned Mahogany property in Rio Blanco County, Colorado some 200 miles west of Denver. Since then, Shell has carried out four additional related field tests at nearby sites. The most recent test was carried out over the past several months and produced in excess of 1,400 barrels of light oil plus associated gas from a very small test plot using the ICP technology…
“Most of the petroleum products we consume today are derived from conventional oil fields that produce oil and gas that have been naturally matured in the subsurface by being subjected to heat and pressure over very long periods of time. In general terms, the In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) accelerates this natural process of oil and gas maturation by literally tens of millions of years. This is accomplished by slow sub-surface heating of petroleum source rock containing kerogen, the precursor to oil and gas. This acceleration of natural processes is achieved by drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.
“During this time, very dense oil and gas is expelled from the kerogen and undergoes a series of changes. These changes include the shearing of lighter components from the dense carbon compounds, concentration of available hydrogen into these lighter compounds, and changing of phase of those lighter, more hydrogen rich compounds from liquid to gas. In gaseous phase, these lighter fractions are now far more mobile and can move in the subsurface through existing or induced fractures to conventional producing wells from which they are brought to the surface. The process results in the production of about 65 to 70% of the original “carbon” in place in the subsurface.
“The ICP process is clearly energy-intensive, as its driving force is the injection of heat into the subsurface. However, for each unit of energy used to generate power to provide heat for the ICP process, when calculated on a life cycle basis, about 3.5 units of energy are produced and treated for sales to the consumer market. This energy efficiency compares favorably with many conventional heavy oil fields that for decades have used steam injection to help coax more oil out of the reservoir. The produced hydrocarbon mix is very different from traditional crude oils. It is much lighter and contains almost no heavy ends.
“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated zone.”
It may seem, as O’Conner said, counter-intuitive to freeze the water around a shale deposit, and then heat up the contents within the deposit. It’s energy-intensive. And it’s a lot of work. What’s more, there’s no proof yet it can work on a commercial-scale.
Yet both technologies, the freeze wall and the heating of shale, have been proven in the field to work. The freeze wall was used most recently in Boston’s Big Dig project. It was also used to prevent ground water from seeping into the salt caverns at the Strategic Petroleum reserve in Weeks Island, LA.
But still, you may be wondering, does it really make sense to heat the ground up a thousand feet down for three or four years and wait? Of course it does. In case you missed O’Conner’s math, Shell could harvest up to a million barrels per acre, or a billion barrels per square mile, on an area covering over a thousand square miles.
It’s still early days in the oil shale fields of Colorado and Wyoming, but it looks to me like someone’s gonna make a lot of money out there. I’m working hard to discover how we outside investors can play along.
Shell’s Mahogany Ridge
Last week, I paid a visit to Royal Dutch Shell’s oil shale project in Colorado. The visit left me with more questions than answers, but I came away from the place with the sense that this opportunity is very real…or, at least, it soon will be.
After driving across a vast expanse of “Nowhere,” Colorado, my brother and I met up with a few geologists from Shell. Of course it’s just those large, unpopulated tracts of high desert that make the area so appealing from a geopolitical point of view. Tapping into the oil shale 2,000 feet underground isn’t going to bother too many people. And there are no spotted owls around either. If the technology to turn shale into oil works, the entire area will become a new American boom patch.
Soon after we arrived, the geologists escorted us around the facility, chatting all the while about the successes and challenges of their venture.
The two trickiest aspects of oil shale development, as the geologists and engineers explained, are heating the shale to extreme temperatures, while simultaneously surrounding the heated area with a subterranean ice wall. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, which part of the project will be the most challenging. If you were about to change the world by making it economic to tap into as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil under the Colorado plateau, you’d be pretty careful about showing your competitors how you were going to do it.
First, anything that heats up rock around it to around 600 or 700 degrees Fahrenheit has to conduct electrically generated heat well. The most conductive metals on the Periodic Table of Elements are, in order, silver, copper, and gold. Naturally, the number of heaters you put in a place affects the amount of time it takes to turn the shale goo into API 34 crude. The more heaters, the more cost, though.
And given the fact that Shell does not know yet if the heaters will be recoverable, you can see that sticking silver, copper, or gold heaters 2000 meters underground and then leaving them there once the kerogen has been pumped has a serious effect on the economics of your operation.
At the moment, Shell is not sure what the optimal size of production zones ought to be. The big issue here is how big can a freeze-wall be to be effective and freezing the groundwater surrounding a shale deposit? The test projects, as you can see, were quite small. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, what the optimum size is for a each “pod” or “cell”. That’s what they’ll have to figure out at the next stage…and the picture with the dirt is a football field sized project….where rather than creating the freeze-wall at 50 meters down…they will do it at 1,000 ft. down…. with 2,000 being the desired and necessary depth for commercial viability. I’m not sure anyone has ever created a freeze-wall at that depth….neither is shell. But we’ll find out. The oil itself that comes from the process looks like…oil. No heavy refining needed.
Shell thinks the whole thing is economic at a crude price of $30. So barring a major reversal of geopolitical trends, they’re forging ahead.
Since the Bureau of Land Management owns about 80% of the oil shale acreage in Colorado, there is no investment play on private companies that might own land with rich shale deposits. Although, if Shell and the DOE are right that you can recover a million barrels of oil per acre…it wouldn’t take much land to make a man rich out here.
Oil Shale: Testing Public Lands
The Bureau of Land Management recently received ten applications (by eight companies) for a pilot program to develop Colorado’s shale reserves. The program allows the companies access to public lands for the purpose of testing shale-extraction technologies. You see below an interesting mix of large, publicly traded oil giants and small, privately held innovators.
Natural Soda, Inc. of Rifle, Colorado.
EGL Resources Inc. of Midland, Texas.
Salt Lake City-based Kennecott Exploration Company.
Independent Energy Partners of Denver, Colorado
Denver-based Phoenix Wyoming, Inc.
Chevron Shale Oil Company.
Exxon Mobil Corporation.
Shell Frontier Oil and Gas Inc
There is dispute within the industry over how long, if ever, demonstration extraction technologies can become commercially viable. I’ve spoken with some of the smaller companies that have applied for leases from the BLM. Some of them will have to raise money to conduct the project. And some of them have been less than forthcoming about how exactly their extraction technology is different or better than previous methods.
How will it all unfold? Well, for starters, it could all utterly fail. To me, Shell’s in-situ process looks the most promising. It also makes the most sense economically. There may be a better, less energy-intensive way to heat up the ground than what Shell has come up with. But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil clearly have the resources to scoop up any private or small firm that makes a breakthrough.
And there are a host of smaller firms involved with the refining and drilling process that figure to play a key role in the development of the industry, should that development pick up pace.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, otherwise known as a listless piece of legislation without any strategic vision, does, at least, make provision for encouraging research into the development of shale. But government works slow, when it works at all. It’s going to take an external shock to the economy to really ratchet up interest and development of the nation’s energy reserves…say…something like a nuclear Iran.
Al Gore and his friends of communism advocates want to stop the American economy and they are what is driving up our fuel costs by standing in the way of technological development. Our country is being run by fools and idiots by our default, because while the rest of us work at real jobs, those thieves of our tax dollars are using our own resources to destroy us. Those of us that think will never get along with communists. I’m going to call them that for now on, because that’s what they are. I don’t want the world they are advocating. I want oil, fast cars and government off my back.
On Monday April 18th, 2011 I did a long interview with Channel 9 News that will be shown on May 9th 2011. This will be an investigative report involving education issues and will also feature two other education reformers in Jennifer Miller formerly of the Mason School Board, and Sharon Poe, the leader of the levy defeat of the last Mason levy attempt.It promises to be a revealing report that I will not disclose until the airing of the program. Needless to say, there is a lot wrong with modern education, one of those things is in the quality of the teachers. It has been taboo to speak about this quality problem, but as evidence to those concerns look at this video just released.
Any threat to that fraternity is to be sought out and destroyed out of preservation of the government entity. I make no secret about it. I don’t like public education. It does not produce the type of students I think are relevant to society. It’s not the kids fault or even the parents directly. The school systems have for decades allowed them to become social police officers regulating life’s dangers such as making the shape of a gun with a child’s hand while they try to play cops and robbers, or discouraging any type of behavior that might be perceived as violent. And the result is that kids grow up to become passive adults that are easily steered by the persuasive words of a con artist like Barrack Obama, or even a Bob Taft. (He was a Republican) How anyone in society could listen to Jessie Jackson or Louis Farrakhanwithout asking why those people have a national platform to speak from, but just to accept it as a fact says everything, that people have allowed themselves to become so dumbed down and sensitive that they can no longer think critically. The fault of that starts with parents and then public education is to blame. As I look around at the way people vote and spend their time, I would say that public education is a miserable failure, because people are only living the lives of a fraction of what they should be.
The way the world should be is that a school should not have any business in whether or not a kid attends school. Truant officers have no place in American society. Who gave them any authority at all? Of what intention were they even conceived? Is it of the social need of a child to get an education and become a productive citizen? If so, how have the results been? Have they successfully made American civilization a better country, or just a complacent country that easily follows new rules such as seat belt legislation, or legislation against texting in a car. Look at the definition of truancy as described at Wikipedia:
Truancy is any intentional unauthorized absence from compulsory schooling. The term typically describes absences caused by students of their own free will, and usually does not refer to legitimate “excused” absences, such as ones related to medical conditions. The term’s exact meaning differs from school to school, and is usually explicitly defined in the school’s handbook of policies and procedures. It has no relation to homeschooling, although sometimes parents who practice homeschooling have been charged with this.[1]
A good friend of mine recently said to me, “kids need to be pushed, and that is the role of the teacher.” That thought drove me to consider……………………..why?
People have a natural desire to do well. So that leads to the definition of, “well.” Someone must understand what, “well,” is before they can define it. But public school defines well in a mechanical way, by grades A thru F. Wellness is somewhere between those two measures. But wellness is much more than that, so with such a narrow scope we are already setting kids up to fail. We believe that to perform “well,” we can coax them to perform with force, and that is the role of the teacher, to push the child to wellness.
This happens because of traditional learning that does not prepare the mind to think critically with divergence. If our society is to survive, we will “PRESERVE” the divergent thinking of our children and not destroy their minds with mind numbing, Marxist disguises of social engineering known as “public education.”
Reform now before it’s too late. And certainly don’t throw any more money at it. To find out why, tune in to Channel 9 in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 9th at 6 PM.
The rally at Glendale was very metaphoric. As I stood in the square filming and taking pictures there were three trains that passed by the station there, each at least 20 to 30 cars each. That meant there were 60 to 90 train cars going someplace coming from somewhere and that made me feel happy. The reason was that I had butterflies in my stomach over the premier of Atlas Shrugged Part 1 down at Newport on the Levy and I had read a lot of bad reviews from the Hollywood establishment and I loved the book and really wanted the movie to be good. The reviewers criticized the film for not adopting to the modern age by getting rid of the train oriented story line. And here I was watching three trains roar by in a half an hour from the CSX Line. Trains are a sign of an economy where things are happening. So it was my first inclination that the reviewers were missing the point of the film and were wrong about it. I had promised the booking agent for the film that Cincinnati would be a great market and I promised a sellout at the Newport on the Levy location, so all during the rally with the Cincinnati Tea Party I was thinking of our next destination which was the 8:20 PM showing of Atlas.
My wife and I left the rally to arrive at Newport in the drifting rain. The lights were on at Great American Ball Park across the river as the Reds were playing the Pirates. We arrived at around 7:45 and much to my relief, Atlas Shrugged was SOLD OUT! I have never been so glad to not be able to buy a ticket. We picked up tickets to the 10:45 show and headed to the Claddagh Irish Pub which is a favorite of ours when we go to Newport. We had a few beers, and watched the Reds game on the big screen while a major storm rolled in across the river outside. We like Claddagh because it’s a medieval looking place full of cubbyholes for the kind of meetings I attend a lot, where your neighbor can’t listen to what you’re saying. If offers the good kind of privacy for passing time, especially with your wife.
But that only went so far and after an hour or so, we went over to our favorite book store where I finished reading The Coming Insurrection. I became angry at the tone of that book, especially what was on the back cover shown in that picture.
We went to our movie; I was relieved that it was good. I already put up a review, so there isn’t any reason to repeat it here. Needless to say the weekend numbers were reputable. The film made a respectable $1,676,917 gross, averaging $5,608 per theater. The producers are considering expanding to over 1000 screens for the next weekend so that’s great.
I went to bed with hope that a violent future can be averted. If enough people become educated, watch movies that aren’t controlled by radical left-winged filmmakers which is just about everyone, and reading books that pander to a liberal publishing industry, while liberal unions are pushing for even more taxes to pay for their very expensive public wages, if the Tea Party continues to do its work and films like Atlas Shrugged are shown to people who haven’t or won’t read the book, this country has a chance.
If there is anything that one must reflect on tax day it’s, why do we pay so much in taxes, and why are there so many that want us to pay more!
I like the trend and I hope that the pendulum will continue to swing to the right and bring things more to the middle, because the radical talk I’m hearing from the left are fighting words that can only lead to one end, and that’s not what they want, believe me.
The Coming Insurrection might work in Europe where their minds are soft and their hearts are softer, but you can forget about it in the United States. Don’t even try it.
The theme of the article was that Lakota is operating with fewer administrators than the state average, so doesn’t that mean they are operating more efficiently than other school districts?
No. Statements like that, just like the president’s speech, is full of smoke and mirrors designed to justify excessively high costs of an out-of-control government at all levels, hoping that people will be foolish enough to just look at the smoke and not at what causes it.
Read that article here:
Lakota has 58% fewer administrators per pupil than state average, report says By Lindsey Hilty, Staff Writer Updated 1:43 AM Thursday, April 14, 2011
LIBERTY TWP. — At a time when finances of the Lakota Local School District have come under intense scrutiny from voters, officials say state data shows they are running a lean operation.
The district has 58 percent fewer administrators per pupil than the state average, and 20 percent fewer administrators than similar districts, which are categorized by size and demographics, according to the latest report released from the Ohio Department of Education in March.
In the 2009 report, Lakota had 43 percent fewer administrators than the state average, Interim Superintendent Ron Spurlcok said; however, “with our recent budget reductions and consolidations, we have seen that number grow.” While that number may be touted as a good thing for the bottom line, he warned that it puts a strain on operations.
Assistant principals are responsible for discipline and also must sit in on all individual education plan meetings for students with disabilities.
“We realize economies of scale by running larger buildings, so we can economize where possible,” Kursman said. However, fewer administrators in larger buildings means a bigger demand for their time, whether it is handling parent concerns, analyzing student data or reviewing teacher performance.
Many buildings now share assistant principals, she said, if the principal is called away for a meeting or to direct traffic due to transportation cuts, there is no one left to manage the building.
Levy opponent Rich Hoffman said he isn’t impressed with the numbers. “I don’t believe any of the stats they give me anymore, because the reality is that they could do a lot more with a lot less if things really get pushy,” he said.
Hoffman said administrators could be reduced more, but they aren’t the issue.
The problem, he said, is “I think Lakota has drowned itself in salary obligations, and when you’re trying to cover 22 buildings when management of those salary obligations has been bad, it turns out to be a catastrophic mistake. Administrators get paid a lot, but there aren’t so many of them that it affects the bottom line costs, so their damage to the budget is negligible.”
There are too many employees netting more than $65,000 annually, he said, and that is the crux of the problem. He pointed to the salary lists recently published in the Pulse-Journal, and said the increase in employees in just one year who reached the $65,000 plus benchmark is unsustainable.
“You have to get the costs in line, but the costs are your salaries … None of us can afford it anymore.” Hoffman called for tough negotiations as the board as the Lakota Education Association reopen the 2011-2012 school year contract, and said many in the community would stand behind the board as long as it was aggressive in controlling costs.
In fiscal year 2010, Lakota spent $96 million on salaries. In 2011, that number dropped $2 million due to retirements, no increase to the base salaries and a reduction in force. Employees still earned close to $2 million in step raises, Treasurer Jenni Logan said, but one third of employees, who are at the top of the pay scale, saw no step increase. As details from legislation like SB 5 keep the district in a holding pattern, Logan said, “Inside the walls of Lakota, we’re focusing on the job at hand, which is educating our students.”
As stated in the interview, there is a preponderance of evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii. What that means is that there are some newspaper reports, and some other documents that lean in the direction of birth in Hawaii, but it appears that Obama claimed otherwise to get financial aid. So on one side of the story or another, Obama has lied in his past. He’s either claimed to be a foreign student for admission into Occidental College or he was really born in Kenya and his grandparents placed the notification in the newspaper in Hawaii. I think many Americans would forgive him for the first offense. Because the second offense is much more serious, which is why over 10 million dollars and much public relation debate has been created to combat even bring up the question.
If we are stuck with this joke for a few more years because everyone is too weak to actually demand that our public officials live by the actual rules of our law, then I say the law goes our way too. Ignore that speed limit sign, those demands to buckle up, forget the DUI laws. And for taxes, forget about April 15th, just send in your taxes whenever you feel like it. Heck, it’s just rules and laws. Who cares……..right?
I was going for a big topic there on a 7 minute radio spot, but I liked the question and the eventual debate that followed. I meant it when I said that I do not play the lottery, ever, because I wouldn’t want to come into any money that way. I would not keep money given to me in an inheritance either, or any other random act. In fact, once when my wife and I were at a casino cruise in Cape Canaveral, I spent .25 cents on a slot machine and lost my money. I was extremely upset so I spent .25 cents on one more try. I won back .50 cents and my wife and I spent the rest of the cruise eating from the buffet and watching sea gulls fly next to the ship while reading a book, happy I made my money back and was leaving with what I started with. I was done with gambling for the rest of my life. I simply will not gamble away anything loosely that I earned with my hard work for the fantasy of hitting some kind of collective jackpot. I don’t even do office pools for the same reason, which people think is strange because such things are very popular.
If I were to win the lottery I would have been robbed of the opportunity to earn the money with my skills and tenacity. It would be like winning a football game without the other team ever showing up and the score keeper just putting some points on the board, and you automatically win. For me, the fun is in beating an opponent, to taste the blood in my mouth from a hard-fought battle, to sweat droplets from my forehead in the hot sun, or to work late into the night to outsmart a competitor. If someone just handed me a check and said, “you win, the fight is over,” I’d feel deprived of a true victory.
I understand that my way of thinking is “old fashioned,” and probably is a complete foreign concept with today’s youth. Socialism is a big part of their life, and it starts in school when they are taught that nobody is better than anybody else. Everyone is the same. Except athletes and straight “A” students that can help a school system get funding from the community by putting those students on a pedestal. But for the most part, our youth is taught that it’s bad to excel. It’s bad to be the “best.” It’s bad to be strong, faster, or more creative.
Our government created millions of welfare recipients that have put out the lights of ambition in many people. When someone is given something, and they don’t earn it by giving back something of equal value, they are robbed of their merit. This might bother them at first, but once they accept the lack of merit they lose their ambition, and this is the cause of massive failure in the welfare system.
I once attended a trade show in Chicago’s McCormick Center for one of my products. I drove up from Cincinnati and was appalled that there were so many toll booths on the way into the city. Counting all the cars going through the booths, it was obvious that Chicago was ripping people off by generating enormous sums of money with the tool booths. So on the way back home after the trade show was over, I drove back through South Chicago and was stunned by how poor it was. My plan was to avoid the toll booths and get back on the highway far to the south. I drove through miles and miles and miles of slums and getting back on the highway that was built over the slums was nearly impossible. It seemed as if the slums were desired by the city of Chicago in order to keep everyone on the toll highway, and discourage what I was doing, by driving through a crime riddled neighborhoods to leave the city.
I looked at angry faces at every stop sign at every block. I had a few arguments with men and boys that shouted racist slurs at me and I expected at any moment to have a gun fight right in the street. It was obvious to me that the good intentions of socialism as implemented in the welfare system was a massive failure, and I felt sorry for the people I was seeing. I knew that if I could have a few of those angry young boys for a few weekends, and take them on a camping trip and teach them to value themselves, I could probably help some of them a little, because what was missing was a sense of value in their lives. They had learned and accepted to live off the government, and had lost their ambition. They had lost their merit. It is no wonder they turned to crime, trying to steal back from society what was robbed from them, which is their honor. The crime began with our government “helping them.”
This is why when people who have lost their merit, or never had it to begin with because their parents didn’t provide them with a sense of value, and they inherit money, or win the lottery, they go broke in just a few years. The money does not make them better people. Money cannot buy merit, or honor. Money is only as good as the people who hold it. Social problems cannot be fixed by throwing money at those problems.
The same thing happens when an owner of a business works hard to build that business, and then passes it on to his kids later in life, only to have the kids screw it up. The kids don’t work the business the same because they didn’t earn it.
Kasich is a self-made man, and he governs that way. Willie did work for the public sector, so he cannot see the socialist tendencies present, because he accepted them in his past. He can justify them, but cannot speak against them now, even when it’s the right thing to do.
There have been plenty of warnings about what socialism will do to people who embrace it. If you haven’t seen it, here is a version of George Orwell’s, Animal Farm. The British animation firm of John Halas and Joy Batchelor perform yeoman service in adapting George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm to the screen. As any high-school English student can tell you, the original 1945 novel was Orwell’s spin on the rise and fall of the Communist myth. A group of intelligent animals overthrow their corrupt human owner and set up their own self-sustained farm, predicated on an idealistic credo: “All Animals are Created Equal”, “No Animal Shall Ever Drink Liquor”, “Four Legs Good: Two Legs Bad” etc. But when Snowball the Pig (read: Trotsky) is overthrown by the despotic Napoleon (read: Stalin), all idealism goes out the window, and soon the pigs are ruling dictatorially over the other animals. Before long, Animal Farm operates on but one principle: “All Animals Are Created Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” Orwell’s ironic ending, in which it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the Pigs and the Humans, is blunted in favor of a grafted-on happy ending, perhaps to mollify the kiddie trade. Maurice Denham supplies all the character’s voices, while Gordon Heath serves as narrator.
The warning signs have always been there for us in literature, whether it’s from George Orwell, or Ayn Rand, the analysis on socialism as been conducted.
Socialism is a disease that robs society of ambition and takes us down only one path, our eventual destruction.
But there are those in government who use the excuse to “help” people in order to place themselves in the managing role, so their support is simply a power grab built on the backs of slaves. They will exploit millions of people’s integrity in order to feed their own egos for power. That’s why socialism will never work.
Here’s just one example from the Comedy Central cartoon South Park. Guess popular culture doesn’t want young people to read Atlas Shrugged……………..why do you think that is?
Socialism is a terrible concept which leads to all out communism and the eventual destruction of the culture that embodies it. If you don’t want to hear me yell about it on WLW, or Glenn Beck yell about it on Fox News, or Milton Freeman lecture about it try Ayn Rand from 1961. Ayn was a little girl when socialism took over her country of Russia and she dedicated her life to combating the disease of socialism because she had seen firsthand what it did to her home country. She fled to the United States and fell in love with skyscrapers, because such a thing could have never been built without American ingenuity and the power of individuals in a capitalist society.
Capitalism works because it allows for merit. Socialism doesn’t work because it robs people of merit. To see why just look at the high cost of education in your local community, and the blank look of our children coming out of those schools, and have the courage to ask the hard question……..why did I surrender our children to a blank, meritless life of socialism?
And why did I buy that lottery ticket hoping to escape the perils of life by wimping out when times are tough. Money won’t make a person better if they lack merit to begin with. And people with merit will find that money isn’t that difficult to obtain, because the world lacks people with true merit.
Darryl Parks is right when he says that only the weak, veal type people in our society are attracted to socialism. Let’s just hope that the weak don’t outnumber the strong, because that’s when freedom dies forever. And socialism knows it. So long as the welfare system expands, so long as government continues to be a primary employer, so long as public sector unions exist, the weak will continue to put representatives into our republic that will slowly convert our society into socialism.
How do we get more people strong in our society, so we can get the country moving back toward capitalism? You have to stop pandering to people. Stop coddling that child every time they bump their head. Stop dressing your kids in elbow pads and knee pads. Stop trying to breast feed your kids even when they are 16 to 17 years old. In fact, this is the path of socialism, watch this clip of Hugh Jackman zip lining into the Sydney Opera House. I think Jackman did well. He came in too fast, but so what. He was able to make his transfer to his rappel line. But look at the women’s reactions here.
All those girls and women are probably going to have kids, and they’ll be the ones to pander to their children’s every whims, and nobody will attempt to toughen up those kids creating a society of……..as Darryl calls them………………………….veal.
Veal is good for only one thing, to be eaten. And you can’t build a country on people like that and expect it to stay strong for long. That’s when socialism takes over.
With all that in mind I thought about what President Obama said about Gaddafi over the weekend by saying that “Gaddafi needs to step down. He has lost the confidence of his people who means he should turn over power.” Well, Obama has lost the confidence of his people, at least a majority of them. Doesn’t that mean he should step down too?
I used to be ashamed of Bill Clinton and couldn’t imagine a worse president, but at least he had been a governor and knew some basic management skills.
I’m not crazy about either of the Bush’s. I think they wanted to be president for too many of the wrong reasons. The first clue that you have a bad president is that if a man gets a surge of power just by sitting in a chair, he’s the wrong guy. A president should not be enamored by power of any kind. In fact, the office of the president should be a step down to what they’ve accomplished in their private lives. The popular myth is that it’s the most powerful position in the world, but it’s really not. Ronald Reagan breezed through his presidency just on his ability to act and a single-minded ability to believe he was right and on the side of God. There are many, many, many more people in our nation more qualified for the presidency than Reagan was, but he could speak well. So he goes down in history as one of the greatest presidents in American history. His greatest gift was that he didn’t listen to everyone around him. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it, which makes him distinctly American. American’s are not naturally collaborative. I know that might bust the bubble of many that think very highly of Ronald Reagan, but those are the facts.
My favorite president in recent history is Calvin Collage. That’s my idea of a manager president. Everyone else has fallen short, and that covers the entire span of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt was my next pick for a great president, but he became too much of a monarch lover by the end of his presidency and had the fatal flaw of craving power. He could not turn away from the power, so much so that he became a progressive in order to run against his friend President Taft. Many of the presidents have done their share of good things, but not enough. Not what we should expect out of an American president.
But Obama, he’s an absolute joke. He does not represent me as an American. I mean look at his website. What are we supposed to be “fired up” about? What change? And what are we organizing? He’s the president. His message is one for children in school and people without wit to know better.
If he believes Gaddafi should step down in Libya because he’s lost the confidence of the majority of the people, which I agree with him on that point, then Obama should step down voluntarily and admit that the job of the presidency is too big for him. Maybe he could try again in a few years after he works as a manager of a McDonalds and gets some experience under his belt. Because he is an absolute embarrassment that makes me look at the decadent days of Bill Clinton with yearning. The only reason he wouldn’t do it is because he’s in love with his authority, no different from the cop that flunks his test and doesn’t belong on the force because he’s not smart enough to be a cop. This President isn’t qualified to be a president. And the people of America respect authority too much to admit it to themselves.
The Warrior of the Week is Doc Thompson. I could have made him that for any week prior to this week, because his work is exhaustive. For those of you that don’t know him, he’s the radio personality at 700 WLW from 9 to noon. He also still does his radio show in Richmond Virginia on 1140 WRVA from 3 to 6 PM. That’s two 3 hour radio programs which requires at least 6 to 7 hours of show prep each, reading newspapers, interviewing people, watching the news and taking notes and running things together with the program director, so just those two shows are big deals by themselves. But Doc doesn’t stop there.
During last week Doc had on a protestor from the University of Cincinnati to speak against S.B.5. He was a student at the school who organized a rally against S.B.5 prior to the vote. The reason it is a significant interview is that Doc was very kind and fair to the young man, but after asking a number of tough questions, the protestor revealed on the air around the 16:30 minute mark that he was a socialist.
Doc could have taken the easy road, and just asked surface questions like the TV News would do, or newspaper interviews. But Doc let Ohio hear the truth behind the mobs from the lips of an organizer.
It is a pleasure to have Doc Thompson in Cincinnati. He is just getting started in this market, and if this is just a preview of what’s to come, I shudder to consider the implications of future influence as he continues to bring truth, justice and the American way to 700 WLW.
Check out the source article of this chart at: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/the-charts-that-show-why-the-u-s-is-screwed/
Government is a corrosive, corruptible creature, and teachers are a reflection of everything that’s wrong with it. They take too much and do too little. Tocqueville proclaimed in 1840 “Having thus taken each citizen in turn in the powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but in hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”
If you listened to Darryl’s radio broadcast he also covered gas prices. There are two reasons for the dramatic increase at the pumps; one is that the Fed as driven up inflation, by printing too much money, and the second is that there are a lot of hidden taxes in our gas. In Ohio it’s between .47-.48 cents per gallon. This is why states like Tennessee and Georgia are .30 cents cheaper per gallon, because of the tax allocation between the states. Where is all that money going? What about all the sales tax we send to the state? And the federal tax. We are taxed on everything, and schools want to continue to tax our property to fund mediocrity when they’ve irresponsibly spent the money. All they know to do is to ask for more!
