American Dream Ph.D.

     I’m a context guy so I’m going to tell you a lot about where I came from to where I am now to tell you where I’m afraid we are going. a product of a small high school with a graduating class of 20. Vo-tech two years which lead to a great career using those skills. Parents had a restaurant from 6th grade to graduation. Paper route twice a day then once a day through high school, lifelong friends. Late in life college graduate, and here I am, just five months shy of my five year anniversary of retirement. My third year of teaching high school has come to a close. A lot of lessons learned. If  it for my teaching/admin family, it would have been impossible to get this far.

    Here is where I stand at 56.

    A literal (as far as a typical GenX learned as a kid) thirty year, start to finish, gold watch ending career. Happily living a bachelor life, with few responsibilities and a lot of time for my insatiable and probable brain malfunction type curiosity. Yeah, I learn how to live in Vladislav on 840 Rubles or $10 a day, or watching a Japanese craftsman craft a sword, or a man in Utah sand casting some amazing art because my brain says it’s curious at 3:49 a.m….

    Have an ex-wife (she and her husband are good and we frequently talk and care about each other) and two amazing, independent, professional daughters, mom, brother, nieces and nephews, some extended family like cousins but my dad’s side is gone. Mom’s side a great aunt and my aunt and uncle. 

    Countless social friends, few close friends, regretfully too many ex-girlfriends, a great teacher work family, a super supportive admin staff up to the top level. 

    I spent thirty years of my life in a small and tight knit, very secure community. Same routine, same shop, same people, same jobs, same color aircraft, same parts, same inspections, same generous holidays, same, same, same…for three decades.

     A little more time off each year, more job security each year, sometimes a lot more money each year, same buddies, new stories, new hobbies, new novels, then audibles during downtime or while painting or sanding so you kind of educated yourselves with whatever  you were interested in at the time.

     And with our pay you had the resources to get the top of the line whatever we’re interested in at the time. Some guys it was deer plots. Drag cars. Bigger boats. Longer fishing or hunting trips. New truck. Bigger retirement account. 

    You grew up with them. Some came, some left, some died. We all shared the same experiences for the majority of our lives. You started the new guy and then you were the old guy in the shop. 

    I really identify with Shawshank Redemption. I admit I became institutionalized in a way. I suppose this blog is a document to all of that and how I got to here and now almost five years after leaving that life and not allowed to go back. I lost my way when I had to find a new purpose. Only looking back now do I see how much like Brooks I was. 

    I own my house, car, numerous skills, unstoppable work ethic, and learning more skills or how to introduce more tangible skills to my students. I’m working on becoming a much better teacher. A unstoppable drive to be self sustainable with a freeze dryer on layaway. 

    A bachelors and masters degree in marketing, but over 700 unanswered job applications. Over 2200 safe trips as a Spark Driver during what was a genuine small golden age of my life. Over 1300 taxi trips. A year as a budtender during the true Wild West Oklahoma days of 2018-2019! 

    A good understanding of how real teachers operate, how much they love their job and being teachers. They were made for it, they knew what they wanted to do.  It’s their life, love, passion, and core! 

    Here is what we face, a dozen A.I. companies that are spending trillions to create something that has never existed before. Not since the atomic bomb has anything had the potential to be more destructive except a bomb can’t replicate and improve itself, by itself. This is coming sooner than later. The world economy is at stake and AI control over that by one single AI company. They aren’t stopping. 

    Industries will replace humans with AI, degrees will become more useless, colleges will close or consolidate as more students realize the cost isn’t worth the reward, leaving public schools to prepare students for? 

    What? 

    We can’t funnel them to college anymore. It’s conceivable that within three years 80% to 90% of degrees will be obsolete with a cheaper AI replacement. 

    Schools will need to pivot to teaching tangible skills. We need to be teaching the basics in the morning and building a house in the afternoon. When you can’t make a living because the jobs are gone, what can else you do? You need a trade or some other tangible marketable skillset. 

    I’ve had one full lifetime, I’m on a bonus life now and have some great skills, and am a master at problem solving, Columbo is my all time favorite TV character. That’s why I can say public education has to change now for our soon to be future. 

A Free Iran!

 Yesterday we woke up to the news that attacks on Iran’s leadership had started. By afternoon reports started coming out the Ayatollah Ali Khameni was dead and now a resident of hell for eternity. 

I remember when the Shah fled to the US when the first Ayatollah took over and became a symbol of evil in the west. He unleashed decades of terror in his country and projected from his country. 444 days of the hostage crisis, a feckless Jimmy Carter bungling his way to worst president ever and being landslided out of office. 

Today, we are witnessing an event akin to the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall! This is historic! 

In the span of one year we are looking at a free Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran! Are you kidding?!

Is China next? What if Russia became our trading partner, and Cuba and Iran was a top notch tourist destination! That’s what is possible right now! 

46 Years Ago and Now 47

I was 9 when Iranian students seized our embassy in 1979 and when they were released on January 20th, 1981 when Ronald Reagan was elected. 

We saw images of the Ayatollah Komenhi every night on TV as they held our people hostage. Nightline with Ted Koppel started specifically to cover the hostage crisis. 

Our embassy had been overrun and we had Jimmy Carter in the White House. The most feckless president in our history until Joe Biden. The failed rescue operation. It was horrible and our generation knew democrats were bad then. 

Since that moment Iran became a force that promoted terror around the world to satisfy their warped islamic apocalyptic agenda. Before then they were very western. A strong ally. We had invested billions in Iran, their defense and we even trained their pilots where I worked! I knew one that couldn’t return home, Benny. He was really cool! 

He was given the death sentence if he ever returned to Iran. Many pilots were stranded. Benny became a mechanic and stayed. He died a while back but if he’s in Heaven, I think he’d be pretty happy that that same regime is falling right now. 

It’s amazing! It’s like watching the Berlin Wall fall right now but in the Middle East. 

It’s historic and it’s because we elected and God rose to power Donald J. Trump. 

Venezuelan oil ran the economies of Cuba, Russia, Iran, and China. Now with one amazing operation that arrested Nicolas Maduro, Trump enforced the Monroe Doctrine and put the brakes on a major oil supply to evil and shifted it to us. 

Russia is panicking, Iran is falling, Cuba has no money or oil now. Could you imagine if Cuba, Iran, and Russia wound up as allies somehow after all of this???

Yes. That is a real possibility right now. 

Finally, It's All Out There!

Since 2016 if you follow politics as I do, you know about the Russia Russia Russia hoax. Today, after all of these years everything has been investigated and declassified and the reports were released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard. 

President Barack Obama himself was behind the Russia hoax to overturn the 2016 election results. In effect Obama tried to commit a coup by directing the entire thing. Keep Trump out of office and put Hillary in office. Maintain all the corruption, all the shady deals, all of it. 

President Barack Obama tried to overthrow the government.

President Donald J. Trump exposed it. We were milimeters from a Kamala Harris regime and this would have never happened. Everything would have been swept away forever as Obama's fourth term would have begun in earnest. 

Wow, I never thought I'd see the day where the Obamas and Clintons would face any kind of justice this side of death. This is truly a momentous day!!!

Thank you President Trump for exposing these traitors, let justice be done though the heavens may fall. 

New Year Notes

 This year has been kind of a transition style of year I think. Stressful no doubt, uncomfortable was a big definitely. If anything I desire my routines now at my seasoned age. I like to know my purpose day in and day out. I've learned that if you can't find your purpose or lose your purpose, you can drift and become detached. 

Maybe too detatched sometimes. It's not a good place to be. A purpose helps keep you focused and alive. 

It's time for some yearly reflection I suppose. 

I've been at the school this week working on the process to making our fundraising coins. It's easier to do without the students around and I can just be in the Foundry all day and work on stuff and experiment. 

If you'll recall the plan, change the way schools are doing their fundraising and putting more power into the hands of the schools and making it mean more to the community as a whole. Well since all of the equipment showed up late, well after school started, I've had to go into teaching this as we go but I haven't had time to work out everything with the lost cast process.

You have to go off of flask size, which brand of investment you've got, mix ratios, burnout times. But this week has been really helpful for that! Had my first test pour Tuesday (didn't work yesterday) and it was a spectacular failure!

Also a valuable lesson! I put the hot flask into the Kaya Cast and wouldn't you know it, my investment was very light on one corner where the top of the coin was and it broke out when I turned on the vacuum. 

But I didn't know that at the time and poured the bronze right through it! Sort of, most of it caught but part of it followed the broken cracked area and into the bottom of the machine. 

Today I made another cast but this time with a shorter sprue to allow for more investment. The challenge coin sets deeper into the flask so it should produce a perfect coin, I'll but it out tomorrow and pour it! 

So...My Job

 After several false starts, misunderstandings, a serious miscalculation my new project has begun!

So to recap, I'm not called to be a teacher. It's not in me but it's my new project right and I'm determined to change the way we do fundraisers and combine it with an educational course. Altogether the district invested just over ten thousand dollars into my vision.

We have 13 new Anycubic printers to pair with the 4 printers from last year and one casualty of the school year last year. A Kaya Cast vacuum pump, smelter, and a kiln on backorder. You guessed it! We are going to create our own fundraising things.

The students start learning 3d modeling software. We advance to the 3d printer stage, in The Foundry (my rebrand from the Fablab) where we learn to use the Kaya and how to vacuum cast our own medallions and such! We will be able to work with the teacher directly or administration or district directly and custom create any project they can come up with and market it. 

Right now you have things like chocolate where you have kids that don't want to do it and hand it off to parents that dread it and bring it to angry coworkers that also might have to bring in their kid's fundraiser so they buy your kid's fundraiser. 

Why not have a student create a coin for example, could be a special ring, athletic medals, etc. with the teacher/coach/administration wanting the fundraiser? 

We can presale the coin, create that many to fulfill the orders, no wasted products, the kid gets a cut of the proceeds for the design, the school benefits on something that might cost us $2.00 at most to create if we make ten at a time. The fundraisee gets a brand new handmade by the fundraiser itself with 100% of the proceeds going directly back to the school. Make it a new tradition. Just one of at least a dozen ways off the top of my head we can use this for the school's and student's benefit! Eventually expand it to each of the other area schools. 

I'm sure there will be red tape and such but that's the ultimate plan for my Foundry. I can also say this has been exhausting. It's drained me, physically and emotionally and I drag myself home every night and can barely move for a while. Then I don't want to think for a while longer. Some of these kids have some solid futures ahead and some, I'm worried about. Phones have eaten their brains in schools. They have to be banned, there's no other way around it. 

Once the kiln arrives, at whatever future date that is, I'll get things organized and put where it's going to live! So things are out and not put up yet so a little chaotic there, kind of when you move and you're putting things around and organizing like that. It was all to be put together and tested before school started and you are up to date and we are several weeks into school with October next week and the breaks begin. 

They believed in that plan and have been nothing but supportive during this whole building process and all of the setbacks and unforeseens. It's a challenge and it's my new project. I don't know where it'll lead to but I know the growing pains have been intense! And again, it's exhausting but in a better way and leading somewhere! 

I just have nothing left after work, I mean nothing but when we get it completed and bug free, it'll be worth it!

The Revolution Started The Other Day

It was a few minutes after 6 p.m. Saturday and I had just come back from a delivery at Pizza Hut (yes, I drive for Pizza Hut and I also have one of the coolest jobs ever right now, I'll get into that in a minute) and my buddy from Nashville that I drove Spark delivery with before I tripped into being a teacher, had a crowd around him watching his phone. 

Trump had been grazed by an assassin's bullet, and then I saw the footage of the raised fist! 

And the mainstream media yawned because he lived. Let that sink in. No matter how much you hate them, it's not enough, not sure who said it, but that is the summation of the Uniparty. Just like the Cold War brought down the USSR, I believe the Uniparty's days are numbered. 

There's a groundswell of genuine change out there. It's been a lifetime of change but I mean, this feels like it's finally time for genuine change. There used to be civility in disagreement but it changed little by little, just like the proverbial boiled frog, the watertight corpse is now floating at the top of the churning water. 

How's that analogy? Try this one...

The left was more subtle in the day, moderate by any standard. But like those that become addicted to power, give them a fraction of an inch and they'll take over your culture and drive your country to ruin to maintain power. Do your own research, it's in front of you. 

The corrupt Uniparty is a combination of politicians, lobbyists, and media narratives directed by the Uniparty. It's orchestrated chaos for the most part. Push a narrative, create a crisis (sometimes they flop like the gas stoves, remember that climate narrative?) and that drives ad revenue. Ad revenue creates profit all around for everyone including dimocrat and RINO politicians who are always the roadblocks. 

It's changing now, the big money events like pride, the BLM riots, Antifa, Ukraine, and the IDF/hamas war. All of it became possible when President Eisenhower said, "Beware the military-industrial complex, when war became profitable, there will be more of it and we saw the cost of the last 20+ years, a disastrous withdrawal, and going to paying the taliban tens of millions per week of money we don't have. That is beyond disgraceful and I would hope that sometime in the past if real journalism had any integrity, they would do something about this and make it mean something. 

Make the sacrifice of these men and women who bear a weight so heavy we should be grateful we will never know the nightmares they have, make that mean something Uniparty. 

Saturday night we almost woke up to a different country and they should be on their knees, thanking Christ, the Sovereign God, and His Divine Providence that bullet missed. I don't think a lot of people would have slept that night and a lot of men that wanted to be left alone spoke up. The country would have been forced to change that night and even today things would be very fluid and events happening right now that I never thought we'd see. I never ever thought the people would finally catch on like they have. 

There is real change happening right now and I don't feel like I'm in the political minority anymore. The Uniparty has a real problem right now, they've finally added the final straw! Something about metaphors tonight, hhhmmm. They forced people too far to keep power by importing tens of millions of illegals to wreak havoc in the country, overload the system for votes, and finally kill the two-party political system ending our constitutional republic once and for all. 

Saturday changed things. I'm a taxi driver this summer with a well-established company here in town. Every passenger with whom I talk (some don't want to talk and I'm good with that too) tells me the same story. They can't make it anymore on what they are earning. Most of them have two jobs, and some like me have three (but for different reasons) they need all the money they can get, and I have the extreme luxury of boredom. 

Damn, just typing that out makes me think right now we don't need to Make America Great Again, we need to rescue America first. There are so many different factors but here is what the American Dream should be, live on one income with enough for a house, food, 2.7 kids, and various household pets over a lifetime with the freedom to go further and dream bigger all you want. 

That'll never happen again, but what can happen is all of the costs that artificially keep costs high like fictitious carbon taxes, the full stop on domestic production in our own very rich energy fields, unlimited funding for wars that don't concern us and are inching us closer to a very real nuclear exchange type of danger,  the destruction of the dollar through vast interest payments and the end of the world reserve currency status our economy will collapse. It's inevitable now and it won't matter who is in office when it does. 

(What matters is how you are prepared for it. Insulate yourselves by protecting your food supply, water supply, and freedom supply. Know your neighbors, have a plan so everyone helps everyone, remember The Twilight Zone episode The Shelter and you'll understand. Show them if they don't and then show them your arsenal in your safe. You don't have to show them how much ammo you have, they can assume that part. But offer them a solution instead just in case!)

If The Uniparty will try and change out Biden next, he just tested positive for covid today. As if that isn't a HUGE Red Flag waving over D.C. of something incoming. The Republican Convention has few RINOs this year, very few! That's the best news ever! More and more people are finally waking up to the real enemies:) They are living really hard lives right now and they know they don't have to, they know it's deliberate, they know it's cruel, and they know who's responsible. 

Patriots have finally been heard politically and the Revolution started a few days ago. 

It's a long progression and I don't want to go through it, I'm sure I was talking about it in this blog somewhere. I'm pretty consistent in my beliefs and when they change and evolve, I am sure I wrote that too, and this blog is over 20 years old and hopefully the culminating events of my political beliefs are on the horizon! A complete victory for my brand of conservative/libertarianism. 

(And yes, being a small-town taxi driver is pretty cool, I get to drive around town, listening to audibles (currently listening to the Convergence series by Craig Alanson, Ron Chernow's Grant and U.S. Grant's autobiography at the same time or chatting with the clients if they want, it's also an excellent fallback job if this teaching gig doesn't work out)