Changing the World One Job at a Time

In my writing life beyond this blog, I do a fair amount of work for my husband in his business consulting company. We got his first book published a couple of months ago, but the writing need continues. This week’s newsletter is something I worked on. It’s his concepts, put out there with my ghost writing for him. Some of these ideas have probably made their way into this blog before, but not directly. Maybe there’s someone out there who wants a better work life. So I’ll just share this as is (except I’m adding a few illustrations).

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Maybe you remember Billy Crystal in the 1991 movie City Slickers.   He sells ads for a radio station. When he participates in a career day at his kids’ school, compared to the other parents it seems pretty lame to “sell air.” The resulting depression is what sends him on the adventure of the movie.

screenshot from the trailer for City Slickers

Having meaningful work is a major factor in quality of life—more than income or any other reward from a job.

A friend in the Human Performance Improvement field, Brent Powell, was at the house for dinner one night some years ago. And as he always did, he talked a wide and deep range of things. One memorable part of the conversation was about young people who put in their hours at work and then go home to play video games. He pointed out that the games were giving them something they weren’t getting from work: heroism. The games gave them a mission that their skills and character traits made them suited for. They had meaning in their imaginary game world that they didn’t have in their real world. They weren’t willing to put in the hours and energy beyond the minimum for work that didn’t yield them anything meaningful. But they’d put in the endless hours and energy—even taking up their sleep time—to get that sense of meaning they craved, even though it wasn’t real.

photo of North Jerusalem Old City wall, East of Damascus Gate,
found on a friend's Facebook page

People want meaning. They also want to work. As it says in Nehemiah 4:6, “the people had a mind to work.” In their case the work was building the walls of their temple, which had meaning for them after a century and a half of being deprived of it. Meaning gave them the energy and drive to do the work.

What happens without that meaning? Bad things.

Mattias Desmet is a psychologist known for talking about a phenomenon called mass formation. That’s a sort of group think that leads to totalitarianism. It was first discussed by Gustave Le Bon as early as 1895, whose concerns came to fruition multiple times during the 20^th Century, leaving massive deaths in their wake.

I’ll let Desmet connect the dots that lead to the atrocities (which he does in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism). According to Desmet, there are four characteristics of a society that can lead to mass formation, all of which relate and lead to one another:

·        Feeling disconnected from one’s natural and social environment.

·        Lacking a sense of meaning making.

·        Feeling free-floating anxiety.

·        Feeling free-floating frustration or aggression.

In the last two, a particular person might lean toward one or the other; some are anxious in general without something to be anxious about, while some feel frustrated or aggressive without something identifiable causing those feelings.

Of the first one, Desmet points out that, just before the coronavirus crisis in 2020, a survey showed that over 30% of people worldwide claimed not to have even one meaningful relationship, and they would only connect to other people through the internet.

Mostly today we’re looking at that second one: lack of meaning making. Desmet, in a discussion with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein on mass formation, mentioned a 2018 Gallup poll that said 60% of the people worldwide considered their job to be a so-call BS job. He did not use the letters, but said the word so quickly, in his Belgian accent, that it was clear he understood the meaning but didn’t seem to recognize it as a profanity. Anyway, he described, for example, people who produce something in their work. Very few people get to see the person who eventually uses or benefits from the thing they produce. So they’re disconnected from it. It’s like “selling air.”

Mattias Desmet, left, and Bret Weinstein, on the DarkHorse podcast
screenshot from here

I’m not sure I found the same poll, but there’s this Gallup poll report from 2018.  In the intro, talking about their measurement of employee engagement, they tell us,

Out of 5 billion adults on this planet, 1.4 billion have a good job. Of these 1.4 billion, roughly 16% are engaged. Out of a global workforce of an estimated 3.3 billion adults who are working or looking for work, then, only 7% or 214 million people have a great job. This means about 3 billion people who want a great job don’t have one.

The dream of men and women around the world is to have a good job and, ultimately, a great job. Yet only 214 million people are realizing this dream. Global leaders need to make “great job” creation a top priority.

Weinstein asked Desmet whether this lack of meaning making was related to the industrial revolution, and he admitted it definitely was. People in industries—even in industries that produce solid products like cars or kitchen appliances, even furniture builders—may not even see the finished product. They might only see the various cogs they put in place. So to them it feels as if all they do is produce a long line of not-yet-usable factory parts. And much of that might be automated so that they’re even less connected to results of work. They watch machines for a living. Maybe they troubleshoot sometimes.

In the past half century more and more work is idea-related, rather than solid-product-related. That makes it even harder to see the results of work. People go to an office, put in time at a computer, just keeping busy at tasks their manager has assigned, which are unconnected to anything more meaningful to them than a paycheck.

For a while, getting a paycheck might seem meaningful enough. But most people who “have a mind to work” will soon want more. They’ll want to up their skills, move into position for promotion, find something more challenging—or more meaningful.

How do you get more work-life satisfaction? When I went about finding the answer to that, I realized that the key is meaningful work—and being good at meaningful work. Hence the name of my program: Meaningful Competence®.

Competence is not equivalent to competency; don’t even go there. Competency is usually a minimum requirement for a particular job or salary level. It isn’t related—except tangentially, with some intangible hope—to producing value for the employer. The employee going through a competency program might still never understand what it is her employer values—or how her work gets the organization what it values.

Meaningful Competence®, on the other hand, connects an employee’s work to what is of relevant value to the organization. Then, more granularly, it helps the employee identify the countable, measurable outputs of value she produces. That employee’s personal metrics will identify their batting average, if you will.

Literally, in baseball, everything is measured. The team owners have a particular outcome they value—a full stadium, or fans that buy tickets or pay to watch. The successful batter is one of the contributors to that. So the individual employee’s batting average matters. Other metrics might be the right measures of value for other players who specialize in defense. But they’re all measurable in ways that can be seen contributing to the value that is relevant to the employer—the Relevant Business Results.

Not all jobs will bring the fame and fortune of a really great major league batter. But every job can be something that connects to their organization’s Relevant Business Results. And every employee can learn what to produce that the employer values—the Value-Added Outputs for his job. And then he can find ways to increase his production of those Value-Added Outputs.

book available here

In principle, it’s not that complicated. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery. Some employers and employees figure it out themselves; they’re naturals. For everyone else, there’s Meaningful Competence®.

·        Good for the employer—who gets engaged employees producing more of what they value.

·        Good for the employee—who sees how his work has value to the employer, and how increasing the value he produces is in his hands.

·        Good for the world—where people no longer have a lack of meaning making.

So, in an effort to make work life more meaningful—more value-producing—we’re doing our small part in saving the world from existential threats of totalitarianism, or just general drudgery.

Saving the world—it’s my meaningful work.

If you’re interested, check out my book: Untapped Value: The Power of Meaningful Competence®.

Or check out what’s available at TorchSolutionsGroup.com. 

Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention

This past Saturday, at our local Tea Party meeting, we had the privilege of hearing from Alan Vera on election integrity—including a heavy dose of what we need to do. Alan is an expert on the subject and trains people nationwide in fighting various kinds of election fraud. As one of the originators of True the Vote, he was mytrainer for poll watching back in 2011.

Unfortunately, I missed the first 20 minutes or so of his talk; I was stuck in traffic, spending 40 minutes to travel the last 2 miles. Of course there was no warning of the slowdown until after the only previous exit. I recorded it (here), but I’m missing that first part. Still, there was enough in the hour, including Q&A, that I heard to share a few gems here.

He reiterated the refrain that we need “Deterrence, Prevention, and Real-Time Intervention.” I’ll mostly be looking at his stories of real-time intervention—the stories of what regular citizens have done and need to do, because, as he puts it, “Law enforcement ain’t comin’ over the hill to save us.”

Alan Vera, former Army Ranger, election integrity expert,
speaks at the Cypress Texas Tea Party, July 23, 2022
screenshot from here

This first story is from way too close to home—about three miles down the street:

The day before Early Voting in 2020, I got a call from a lady here in West Houston. She had been to the Food Town Grocery at the corner of Highway 6 and FM [farm-to-market road] 529. She came out of the Food Town and was stopped by a young man and young lady, each of whom was pulling a big wagon full of canvas bags. And they said to her, “Would you like to earn a $100 gift card?” And she said, “Well, yeah. What do I have to do?” “Well, just take a handful of these home, sign them, put a stamp on them, and send them in.” And she said, “What are they?”

So they pulled out a stack. It was all mail ballots. Already filled out. Every Democrat candidate was checked. And they showed her, “Just check the name of the voter here. Fold it up, and before you seal it sign your name across that seal. And here is the roll stamps to send it in with.”

And she said, “I don't feel comfortable with that.” She went home and called the Harris County Sheriff's Office, but they said, “We don't do election fraud.”

We don’t do election fraud! Law enforcement ain’t comin’ over the hill to save us.

Sure, we need laws on the books, and we’ve done well at upping some the crimes to felonies. But once the crime is committed, it’s often too late. We need to deter, prevent, and step up—in real time—to stop the steal from happening in the first place.

Another of Alan’s stories is from 2020, when the interim county clerk, replacing the elected county clerk who stepped down amid ethical violations “for health reasons because of COVID,”—that interim clerk did all he could to use the COVID crisis, proving that mail ballots are their chosen election fraud tool:

Back in 2020, you know, County Clerk Chris Hollis held a press conference. He announced that there was going to be a record number of mail ballots in Harris County for that election: 285,000 mail ballots was his confident prediction. We knew the Democrats were going to use try to use mail ballots as their key fraud that election.

So in March of 2020, my wife, Colleen, published the first of two articles exposing the mail ballot fraud ring in Harris County, to get started on it. And we published that, and we said, “What do we do now?” And we said, “Let's pray.” So we prayed.

some of the evidence found by Colleen Vera,
in her 2020 post here

Two days later, I got phone calls from four private investigative agencies. They'd seen the article. They said, “What can we do to help?” We said, “What do you know? How can you help me again?” They said, “We know where the two buildings are which are the mail ballot factories in Harris County. One’s owned by a guy named Womack [?—couldn’t tell what he said]. The other owned by a guy named Dallas Jones. We know where those are.”

So I said, “Tell about that.”

“Well, there's buildings, two-story buildings. People come in, and they go to the top floor, and they work there all day, signing mail ballots—fraudulently signing mail ballots. We know where they are.”

I said, “Well, can you surveille them?” They laughed, and said, “We'll do better than that.”

So they surveilled these two buildings. But they didn't do it clandestinely from two blocks away with binoculars. They were on the sidewalk outside the front door of each building, with video cameras. They were recording the face of everyone going in their door. They were taking photos of their driver's licenses. [I think he means license plates, visible on every car.] They were making it very uncomfortable to go in and out of those buildings.

Two weeks before early voting began, they shut down both facilities, thanks to four private eyes who said, “We’re going to do something.”

That’s only the first part of the story. Here are some more details of a win for the freedom fighters:

And you all have seen the movie 2000 Mules. We didn't have unmanned drop boxes in Texas. But we had worse. Governor Abbott, in his COVID wisdom, extended early voting by a week in 2020. Then he did something much worse. He changed the rules for dropping off your mail ballot in person.

The Texas Election Code says you can drop off your mail ballot in person on only one day: Election Day between 7 AM and 7 PM, and only at the main office of the Early Voting clerk, which is the EA [election administrator]. One day, 12 hours. Governor Abbott extended it to 62 days. 62 days, you could drop off your mail ballot.

Well, I wrote and sent off a letter of protest. Got [Senator] Bettencourt involved, Senator Hughes involved. Said, “You guys got to do something about this.” And then I just prayed. Prayed and prayed and prayed.

Two days later, I got a call from a church leader I'd never met before. She said, “I hear you need some help with mail ballots.” I said, “Yeah, I need 35 poll watchers who will be around 24/7 at NRG Arena and stop the mail ballot fraud to that venue.” She said, “Give me two days.”

Two days later, she had me 35 poll watchers willing to go round the clock at NRG. And I trained them by Zoom call Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. And they did it. They did it. They stood at NRG through rain, and through heat, through wind, thunderstorms. They were there 62 days at NRG Arena.

mail ballots being turned in at NRG Arena in Houston in 2020,
Getty image by Go Nakamura, found here

Did they stop stuff? You betcha.

Car after car would pull up with banker's boxes full of mail ballots filled with mail ballots. And these church poll watchers said, “No, the law says you can only drop off your own mail ballot. That's it. And you must show ID to do so. And the name and signature on your driver's license has to match the name and signature on the carrier envelope. And then you have to sign this form here,” it’s a sign-in form with the time you dropped off your mail ballot.

They upheld that. And they turned away car after car after car, full of mail ballots to be dropped off. They stopped it.

Now, there were a couple of nights that got kind of harry. And, believe it or not, the private detective guys were across the street from NRG Arena with binoculars, making sure our polls were okay. They were watching over them.

Chris Hollins said 285,000 mail ballots. We got 163,000, just average for Harris County in a presidential election. We beat him. We beat him without a single act by law enforcement or any elected official. Real time intervention.

This is not to say you don’t also work with the legislature and law enforcement. This next story is a good look behind the scenes of the legislative fight. To remind you, in the 2021 legislative session, we had a bill, SB1, that would strengthen voter laws in a number of ways. The legislators cut work short by a day, preventing some final bills from passing, which included this one. So the Governor called a special session. The Democrats fled the state so no business could be done. So the Governor called a second special session, by the end of which some Dems were trickling back in. There were three sessions in all, but the “time bomb” was planted in the second:

From August 2020 to October 2020, there were four of us working clandestinely to write the bill that eventually became Senate Bill 1. It was myself representing Harris County Republican Party. It was the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It was Texans for Lawsuit Reform. And it was the Opiela Law Firm up in Austin. We worked for three months drafting Senate Bill 1, and the bill was finally filed that January. 80% of the language was ours.

So we got it done. We hand it off. And now it belongs to Senator Bryan Hughes. And we got to watch the Democrats go apoplectic over Senate Bill 1. They broke quorum. They fled to Washington. They held press conferences. They yelled voter suppression. And we're all sitting back here laughing. The four of us again going, “Gee, no one knows we did that.” But it’s fun to watch them melt down.

So then Senate Bill 1 didn't pass in the regular session, because they broke quorum.  It didn't pass in the first special session. And Democrats are starting to trickle back. Between the first and second special session, we were doing a project for Mike Schofield, and I suddenly remembered, because I’m old, that—Holy Cow! We've got another problem. In Harris County, since the Democrats took over in 2019, in every election we have had more ballots and voters. Another miracle of the loaves and fishes. Every election there were more ballots cast than voters who signed in.

So I approached Senator Bettencourt and Senator Hughes, and said, “Guys, I need to add two sentences to Senate Bill 1.” Just two simple sentences. Just requiring that, every election there be a reconciliation of the number of voters and the number of ballots. They snuck it in there between the sessions.

Now, because the special session starts all over again, Senate Bill 1 was refiled. It wasn’t like an amendment from the floor of the Senate. It was refiled. So these two sentences are at the bottom of page 38 and an 80 page bill. Nobody noticed them. They fought over the poll watchers. They fought over the civil penalties. They fought over everything, but not over that reconciliation issue. It sailed through and was finally passed in the second special session.

So, like a good Army Ranger booby trap, the tripwires were set. The detonators were all primed. and the ammo was all live; the explosives were all live. And it just sat there sat there. It sat there until the March 1^st Primary. Isabel Longoria [the appointed Elections Administrator, after the County Commission removed oversight of elections from the County Clerk] had pretty much screwed up everything about the elections. She had screwed everything up. And it was getting harder and harder for [Harris County] Judge Hidalgo to continue to support her—especially when the Communist Chronicle [the Houston Chronicle] even said, “Sorry, Dems, this mess is not the Republicans’ fault.”

Then, on election night, of course we had to sue, because she was not going to finish counting the ballots in the 24-hour period required by law. We had to go to court to sue to give her more time to count the ballots. It took her 41 hours instead of 24 hours.

And then came the moment of truth: the reconciliation form. They signed it at 3:00 in the morning, on March 3^rd. They're all sleepy, they're all groggy. And they signed it and sent to Secretary of State. The next day, he called and said, “Harris County, you seem to have forgotten to count 10,000 ballots. Boom! Trip wires went off. Detonators went off. It was great. Lina Hidalgo then asked for Isabel's resignation.

No one knows who did that. Bettencourt knows was, because he helped me get it in there. But it's fun. There's real satisfaction in doing things quietly behind the scenes that nobody will ever know about. It’s important. It's important.

So real time intervention, it's up to us.

There were more stories, and there was more advice. But this is enough for now. Again, he makes sure we understand—this November 8^th, no one gets to sit home on election day. We’ve all got to volunteer. Work the polls, or be a poll watcher. Or volunteer at central count. Between now and then, we can help check the voter rolls and clean them up; we can get our neighbors to understand how important it is to vote in this election.

I asked Alan afterward if what I’m seeing is true: if we don’t stop the voter fraud this election, and we lose to Democrat cheating, is that the end of our freedom? Are things that dire?” He said yes, things are that dire.

Don’t be caught sleeping through the demise of our great country, when you could be taking a day off to deploy to somewhere in your county to guarantee free and fair elections. Join in our fight to recover our constitutional republic. Be there for the real-time interventions.

Famine by Design

“and there shall be famines”—Matthew 24:7

That is one of the responses Christ gave to his apostles when they asked the question, “What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” in verse 3.

There have been famines throughout history. Somewhere in the world at any given time, there’s probably a famine going on. But maybe it’s worth wondering whether upcoming famines portend something foretold.

We’ve done a fair amount to mitigate the famine threat in the past century or so. We have better farming equipment, irrigation, and fertilizer.

We get food transported from around the world. Things we used to be able to get only seasonally are now always in season somewhere. More food is grown on less land. Sometimes we forget that a lot goes into getting the produce we buy weekly, to get it grown, harvested, and shipped to our neighborhood grocery store for our convenience. One thing goes wrong, and that food isn’t there.

That also means that the market is worldwide, not just local. So when a crop fails, the loss is felt in a worldwide ripple.

Lack of rain has been the presumed cause of famine in most cases. Sometimes it’s war, which interrupts the planting of crops, or the harvesting. Sometimes it’s other weather problems, like an untimely freeze. Or it could be pestilence—bugs that eat the crop, or infect it, maybe a fungus that ruins it.

But sometimes it’s government interference.

Back in the previous century, the Soviet Communists under Stalin starved some 4 million (I’ve also read estimates of 7-10 million) people in Ukraine, their most productive farmland, and also in Russia. It was policy that caused the famine. They vilified the middle-class landowning farmers, called kulaks—anyone who owned 8 acres or more. They confiscated land from the kulaks and imprisoned or killed them—eliminating their expertise along with them. They also made it illegal for people to partake of any harvest before the government had come in and taken all they wanted for export. People on the richest farmland in the Soviet bloc starved—without any natural cause.

newspaper photo found here

This year Ukraine is suffering war conditions, so that is likely to cause a famine in that land—and affect supplies to the places usually receiving exported grain from Ukraine.

The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country in Western Europe with surprisingly high agriculture production. Their government has recently implemented a policy prohibiting the use of nitrogen in fertilizer. While nitrogen can be chemically produced, it is also the result of natural fertilizer, as from cattle waste. Farmers in The Netherlands are among the most skilled in the world, to produce as they do on so little land. But they can’t produce without fertilizer. So they’re protesting.

Roman Balmakov, of Facts Matter for The Epoch Times, traveled to The Netherlands to do some interviews. (If you can’t get behind the pay wall, try the free trial.):

·       “Manufactured Food Crisis: Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ Plan to Take Farmer’s Land, Convert It to Housing: Dutch MP” Facts Matter, July 8, 2022.  

·       “Exclusive: On the Ground with the Farmers Blockade; True Reason Why Elites Plan to Confiscate Land” Facts Matter, July 11, 2022 

Speculation is, the Dutch government is counting on the farmers’ failure. If they can’t produce, they lose their farms. And that land is what the government covets, for the purpose of building housing for new immigrants. Doing away with farmland has the added “benefit” of causing the people to rely on imports; i.e., food supply controlled by the government. A government that controls the food supply controls its people.

Farmers in The Netherlands protest farm-killing regulations.
screenshot from here

In the US, people have been noticing that Bill Gates has been buying an unusual amount of farmland. No purpose stated. But I doubt the pro-limited-population guy is just planning to make sure we have adequate food. He does support “sustainable” farming, which does not mean sustainable in the normal sense, but something related to climate change policies.

Meanwhile, there has been the pushing of “green” policies that fail to understand how food is produced.

Last week I saw the post below on Facebook. The Facebook friend who posted said, “I was raised on a farm, my daddy used to run a mobile combining outfit that went from state to state. John Deere is being pressured to go GREEN.” Then he introduced the post below from a friend. So I don’t have a source name, nor can I verify. Nevertheless, it’s an anecdote I find concerning: 

A close friend farms over 10,000 acres of corn in the mid-west. The property is spread out over 3 counties. His operation is a "partnership farm" with John Deere. They use the larger farm operations as demonstration projects for promotion and development of new equipment. He recently received a phone call from his John Deere representative, and they want the farm to go to electric tractors and combines in 2023. He currently has 5 diesel combines that cost $900,000 each that are traded in every 3 years. Also, over 10 really BIG tractors.

JD wants him to go all electric soon.

He said: "Ok, I have some questions. How do I charge these combines when they are 3 counties away from the shop in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?" "How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the weather is coming in?" "How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to the shop 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?"

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

When the corn is ready to harvest, it has to have the proper sugar and moisture content. If it is too wet, it has to be put in giant dryers that burn natural or propane gas, and lots of it. Harvest time is critical because if it degrades in sugar content or quality, it can drop the value of his crop by half a million dollars or more. It is analyzed at time of sale. It is standard procedure to run these machines 10 to 12 days straight, 24 hours a day at peak harvest time. When they need fuel, a tanker truck delivers it, and the machines keep going. John Deere's only answer is "we're working on it." They are being pushed by the lefty Dems in the government to force these electric machines on the American farmer. These people are out of control. They are messing with the production of food crops that feed people and livestock... all in the name of their "green dream."

Look for the cost of your box of cornflakes to triple in the next 24 months...”

A John Deere electric tractor
screenshot from here

If you’re wondering whether someone fully thought things through, the answer would likely be no.

On Tucker Carlson earlier this week, he showed video of a GM spokesperson in Lansing, Michigan, talking about their electric vehicle. A news reporter asked her, “So, what’s charging the batteries right now? What’s the source of electricity?”

She answers, “Here,” directing his attention to the plug. “It’s coming from the building.”

He asks further, “I mean, is it, um— What’s our mix of power?”

She answers, “Oh, actually Lansing feeds the building.”

“What’s that?”

“Lansing feeds power to the building.” Then his question seems to dawn on her. “So, I don’t know. I bet you they’re a bit of coal. I think they’re heavy on natural gas, aren’t they?”

The news guy goes on to ask a representative of Lansing Board of Water & Light, saying, “Right now the car is charging off of your grid—”

“Right. It would be charging off our grid, which is about 95% coal.”

It reminds me of people who think we should get rid of cows, which produce gaseous emissions, since most of us can just get our milk from the grocery store. Face palm.

I heard also today that, while we’re looking at how strained the electric grid is during the height of summer with its accompanying air conditioner needs, for a typical family to charge its cars would quadruple the amount of electricity the household uses for air conditioning.

That means going electric would increase four-fold the need for fossil fuels and other reliable sources.

Someone has not thought this through—except as far as to impose on you some crushing regulations that are designed to make you feel helpless.

Food, shelter, transportation, electricity, water—if they can control those things, they control the people.

It’s famine by design.

It is designed by “experts” who are too myopic to understand the basics, like how you need to plant a seed in fertile ground and nurture it through harvest time.

Maybe you should do what you can to be self-sufficient. Plant a garden. Get acquainted with the local farmers' market. Maybe pay attention to some of those off-the-grid preppers. Because you can’t trust someone whose interest is in having power over you, who has no interest in making sure you can get your needs met.

No One Gets to Sit at Home on Election Day

Last night, after a monthly religious study group, while we were standing around visiting, three people separately asked me the question, “What do you think is going to happen in the November election?” I’m not a good predictor. But I am, in some very local circles, the go-to person on political matters. I wish I had more answers. But I do have thoughts.

The prevailing estimates are that it will be a bloodbath for Democrats in November. Recent polls are trying to say otherwise, but I doubt their validity; I’m guessing such polls have an opinion-forming purpose, rather than an opinion-learning purpose.

FiveThirtyEight makes these predictions for House races.
Image from here; you can go there to click on individual races.

Typically, the midterm after a presidential election goes against the president’s party.  Typically, when the economy is in bad shape, the midterms go against the president’s party—and the state of the economy right now is pitiful. There’s a useful Katie Pavlich article here. And here are a few stats from a Heritage Action email I received today:

·        Inflation rose 9.1% for the month of June, even higher than anticipated.       

·        Milk and coffee prices are up 16% percent, butter is up more than 21%, flour by more than 19%, eggs are up a staggering 33%, regular gasoline is up more than 60%, natural gas is up 38%, and electricity is up almost 14%.

·        Real wages are down 3.7% over the past 12 months, which is nearly a 40-year record. This means that a typical family now pays more than $1,900 in inflation tax.

In any normal year, that would be an automatic death knell for the party in power.

meme found on Facebook here

Add to that, the country’s respect worldwide has plummeted under Biden. His Middle East tour this week produced nothing positive. Without a strong America, the imminent attainment of nuclear weapons by Iran leaves Israel alone to protect itself and others. In case you've forgotten, under Trump’s leadership, Middle East countries allied against Iran in the Abraham Accord. Biden has managed to undo all that progress.

Add to that the spending of taxpayer resources on the Ukraine/Russia conflict rather than on our own southern border. And then add the Hunter Biden evidence of Biden family corruption, including deals that seem to explain Biden’s favoritism toward China.

Any of these things would be enough to sink a presidency that was otherwise functional. This one is not otherwise functional. The president’s own party entertains the possibilities for replacing him, in full view—only a year and a half into his administration.

So of course the predictions are for a Democrat blood bath.

FiveThirtyEight makes predictions for governor races, here.
This shows that in 96 out of 100 scenarios, Abbott beats Beto in Texas.

However, these are not normal times. And these are not normal people. These are power mongers. They will do anything to maintain their power. That means they will be desperate, like a cornered wild animal. Expect lashing out. Expect the unlikely.

And remember, they have the media covering for them. Even though those of us with eyes wide open can clearly see what they’re doing, people who allow themselves to be fed the propaganda day after day don’t know what we know.

What can we do?

As far as that November election goes—be more vigilant than you have ever been. No one gets the luxury to sit home on election day this year. This is not a call to simply go vote, although you must do that. It is a call to volunteer to be part of the army necessary in this very real war against those who want to take away our freedoms.

This is not a year that you can leave it to someone else and maybe you’ll volunteer another time. Because if they get away with stealing elections this November, we will not have a next time that matters.

Be a poll worker—a presiding judge, an alternate judge, or a clerk. Or be a poll watcher. All of these are necessary for Early Voting, Election Day, and for the counting of the ballots after the polls close.

In Harris County it takes an army to run an election. There are roughly 1,000 voting locations on Election Day. Each takes an average of 6-8 workers. That’s 6,000-8,000 right there. We need more than half of these to be Republicans. Add in Early Voting. With roughly 50 locations, with more clerks to handle more voters, there’s probably 10-12 workers for each—and we’ll assume they all work all the Early Voting days, for simplicity. That’s another 500-600 workers, of which we need at least half to be Republican. Add on the counting of the ballots. I’m not sure of numbers, but I’d say around 20 of each party to do this.

I haven’t mentioned the many volunteers who handle the pickup of equipment and supplies, including ADA regulations. That’s probably another 20-40. And the people to deliver equipment to those 1,000 voting locations, another 20-30, I’m guessing.

And, besides the people who count the ballots, there are the workers who accept the ballots and equipment being turned in. There are an additional several dozens of these.

In addition to all these jobs, the Harris County Republican Party is trying to put at least one poll watcher at every polling location. Close to 1,000. Some of these got practice at easy places during the Primary Runoff.

Harris County’s now-fired-and-finally-gone Elections Administrator has tried to institute pickup of the ballots and equipment by Constables and random (Democrat) county employees—breaking the chain of custody between election officials. Republicans have refused to go along. But any polling place led by a Democrat presiding judge will do that again in November, if we don’t stop it by then.

The point here is, there is something you can volunteer to do. And you should. Here in Harris County, you can go to the party website and find a way to volunteer. The Harris County signup is here. Training opportunities are underway. And, in our party (can’t say as much for the County, whose official training you’ll probably also have to undergo, depending on the position you volunteer for), we have good training from some of the best experts on election integrity in the country. Poll watcher training is especially good on election law.

Another way you can help is on cleaning up voter rolls. For us, here’s the instruction:

1.      Go to https://www.harrisvotes.com/VoterRegistration/Search.

2.      Search by your address; i.e., house number and street name.

3.      Confirm the list for valid, registered voters.

4.      Repeat for neighboring addresses.

If you see anything odd, send a message to your county party, preferably someone involved in ballot security, and they can help any citizen file to challenge a registered voter. This is a fairly easy process (I’m working on it right now; daughter Social Sphere, who hasn’t lived here or voted here since 2011, is on our rolls; I’ve checked, and no one has voted in her name, but I want that possibility to be gone). People move, yet our county, as most counties, has not done a good job in removing invalid voters. Spread the word, we can all play a small part in forcing the county election administrators to do their job.

There are lawsuits underway, and on the way, in our county, because of previous lawbreaking. There’s work to do in the state legislature. There’s holding people accountable to the law. Good people are working on those things.

But more than anything there is the need for everyone who cares about preserving our freedoms to be part of the solution in November.

We don’t know what the enemies of freedom will try. But we’ve seen them act as though they have a right to do whatever they want to get their way. We try to anticipate. But we don’t know what they’ll try next in their desperation. When they see the looming loss of their power, they’re going to pull out all the stops.

So, watch. Be vigilant. And be part of the army of volunteers that day. Voting is absolutely not enough at this critical time.

Power Mongering

The word monger means to sell, or to make deals. It’s an older word, used only in certain circumstances today, more of them nefarious than on the up-and-up.

Power monger means dealing in power, as a commodity. It implies an insatiable hunger for getting it. I introduced the term in one of my earliest blog series, back in 2011. Grammatically, I debate still on whether to attach the words, or hyphenate. Words move from separate to hyphenated to attached, usually gradually, based on continuous frequency of connection. I’ve made an editorial decision for now to keep them separate, to make it clear what is being mongered.

 

Definition and note both from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.
It can also be a verb, transitive, meaning peddle

This definition from the online American Heritage Dictionary, which pops up
at the top of the search, gives additional shades of meaning.

This week I’ve been watching “Who Is Hunter Biden?” the Part II second season of which came out last week. (It’s behind the paywall at Fox Nation.) There are an additional five episodes. It’s a lot to stomach. Don’t watch with children in the room—although actual graphic imagery is brief and blurred. The subject matter is the utter depravity of a man and his family who sell their influence for money and power.

Jeanine Pirro in the Who Is Hunter Biden? series,
screenshot from the series

While there is more detail, I didn’t see anything new. The Fox Nation series, led by Judge Jeanine Pirro, lays out what we’ve known, and what has been corroborated by the infamous laptop. A fair amount of commentary comes from Miranda Devine, author of The Laptop from Hell, as well as investigative journalist Mollie Hemingway and others. You can read their writings if you can’t get to the series. (You'd do well to read them in addition to watching the series.)

The shocking thing is that this much can be known, and yet nothing has been done about it.

The short version is Joe Biden, his son Hunter, his brother Jim, and the rest of the family have been making quid pro quo deals for many years—the entire time Joe Biden has been an elected public official (we won’t call it public service in his case).

Hunter has been the main deal maker, it appears, at least since his father became vice president in 2009. He is a crack addict and whoremonger and self-made pornographer. He has no marketable skills beyond selling his father's name. He is not a person to be trusted. And yet Joe Biden trusts him. They are liars and cheaters all.

One of the recovered texts, screenshot from the series

Another of the recovered texts, screenshot from the series

Deals have been done around the world, most notably in Ukraine and China. When you look at foreign policy today, with Joe Biden in the White House, there isn’t a more logical reason for the pouring of our resources into Ukraine and the kowtowing to China—which, by the way, recently included drawing down our strategic oil reserves, purportedly to help assuage the soaring gas prices here in the US after Biden shut down drilling and the Keystone pipeline, and then selling the reserves to China so that they could do nothing for struggling US citizens.

I won’t go into all the details of the series. There are too many today. What I will say is that these details are corroborated and known. If you’re unaware of them, that has been your choice. They were known before the 2020 election—although at that time you were told by biased media that it was Russian disinformation, until half a year later when they did a half-hearted mea culpa.

One of the things that struck me as I listened to the series was a quote of what Hunter Biden told his longtime friend and business partner Devon Archer after Archer’s incarceration for defrauding an American Indian tribe (as punctuated in the original): 

“Every great family is persecuted in the US-you are part of a great family-not a side show not deserted by them even in your darkest moments. That’s the way Biden’s are different and you are a Biden. It’s the price of power. And the people questioning you truly have none whereas you do through the perseverance and poise.”

Hunter Biden defines “great family” very differently from the way I do. After years of infidelity and betrayal to his first wife, he had a drug-binge-based affair with his brother’s widow shortly after his brother’s death. And then he went on to have an affair with the widow’s sister. There were tens of thousands of dollars spent on multiple occasions—subsidized by his father—for high priced hookers. Joe and Jill, by the way, didn’t meet on a blind date; they met at a campaign event and started their affair while she was still married. The lying and cheating are part of being a “great family,” according to Hunter.

But here he has a friend, in prison for a crime they both committed, that Hunter got off scot-free from. He tells him it’s part of being in their great family. The Bidens, however, get the benefit of the name; the extras, who are only like family apparently do not.

Then Hunter says it’s the “price of power.” All that persecution and prosecution is what he means. But prosecution for crimes isn’t, as he says, because you have power and “the people questioning you truly have none”; when you’ve committed crimes, the prosecution is for the crimes. Unless the prosecutor is corrupt. Maybe Hunter assumes everyone is corrupt, because that is the world he knows.

What does he know of power? He knows how to monger it—to sell influence in exchange for money, which allows him a lavish and self-indulgent lifestyle, at the expense of his country.

Worldly power is a temporary and fleeting thing. He doesn’t know real power. He doesn’t have the power to say no to drugs, or lying, or cheating, or debauchery beneath the tolerance of the vast majority of people in the world. He is too weak to say no to himself. He has relinquished his power to a lower authority—the source of evil, the source of all power mongering.

In the end, when those who have mastered themselves are given “all that the Father hath,” this so-called great family will be forever powerless.

Putting the Pieces Together

This post is something of a puzzle, with some assembly required. The pieces relate, but you might have to put them together before you can see the whole picture. Each video piece is relatively short, mostly in the 15-20-minute range.

image found here

The good news is the current variants of the COVID-19 virus are causing fewer and fewer deaths or hospitalizations. The bad news is the current variants are much more contagious, easier to spread.

The worse news is that the variants are adapting in a way that you can get it again, even though normal natural immunity would prevent that. The worst news is that this situation is caused by mass vaccination.

That’s right. The doctors who said it was a bad idea to mass vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic were right. One such doctor is Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a specialist in virology and vaccinology. He recently talked with Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, who has followed carefully all things COVID. Their conversation explains why the omicron variant, at its peak in January, didn’t result in herd immunity, as we thought it would.

The first puzzle piece, then, is Dr. Vanden Bossche’s conversation with Bret Weinstein:

·       “We have thrown a BOMBSHELL on this delicate balance (Geert Vanden Bossche & Bret Weinstein)” Dark Horse podcast, July 1, 2022.  

 

The second puzzle piece is Dr. Vanden Bossche again. On the Steve Deace show on The Blaze, Deace presents a 16-minute video in which the doctor essentially begs parents: DO NOT get your children vaccinated. He explains how the vaccine works in a way that undermines the natural immune system, which means, not only does it not work to prevent the variants of COVID-19, it can make cases worse. And—it can undermine the immune system’s ability to recognize other viruses. Vaccinating your child for this virus that has almost no chance of serious risk for your child can risk the child’s health—permanently.

Deace plays the whole thing, then talks it over with a couple of his teammates. You can’t talk openly about such things on YouTube, so it’s got to be on an alternative platform. This is worth it. Get a free trial, if you need to.

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, during presentation shown by Steve Deace
screenshot from here

·       “Overtime: Virologist Provides Dire Warning about Covid Jabs,” Steve Deace, on The Blaze, July 6, 2022.    

·       If you can’t get that one, I think Dr. Vanden Bossche does a similar presentation here. 

 

Another piece has to do with the CDC’s failure to consider adverse events related to the vaccine. Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, also a biologist, discuss this:

·       “SHOCKING revelation from CDC FOIA request (from Livestream #132)” Dark Horse podcast July 7, 2022. 

Dr. Mobeen Syed discusses, I think, the same CDC failure a couple of weeks earlier:

·       “Makes Me Angry” Drbeen Medical Lectures, June 22, 2022. 

 

Dr. Mobeen Syed shows the promise to report adverse events, followed by 
an admission that they have not been doing the testing as promised.
screenshots from here

The next piece has to do with excess deaths—excluding COVID-related deaths. Why are they so high? Some things are related to COVID response, such as lockdowns and the various turbulence that caused in so many lives. Some of it, however, may be due to unexpected long-term effects of the spike protein in the body—from the illness itself and/or from the vaccine and boosters. Dr. John Campbell (as with Dr. Mobeen) is not against vaccination in general, nor against the COVID-19 vaccines. But he is about looking at the data and seeing if we can draw conclusions. Here’s his discussion:

·       “Non covid excess deaths,” Dr. John Campbell, July 6, 2022. 

 

Another look at this issue, from several months back, is presented by Dr. Kelly Victory, an emergency medicine and disaster specialist, going over observations noted by insurance companies, talking on KUSI News. She’s not saying the causes are known, only that 2021 has a statistically significant difference, and we ought to look at possible causes.

·       “There was an unexpected 40% increase in 'all cause deaths' in 2021,” KUSI News, February 2, 2022. 

Another recent report on the insurance data comes from Roman Balmakov for The Epoch Times.

·        “Life Insurance CEO Reveals Deaths Are Up 40%Among Working People: ‘Just unheard of,’” Facts Matter, with Roman Balmakov, June 29, 2022.

 

We’re dealing with a “vaccine” that doesn’t prevent illness, as we’ve come to expect from vaccines—such that they had to change the definition of vaccine to even apply the term to this injected medical intervention. It has proven to be neither safe nor effective. Now we’re looking at serious damage to individuals and society as a whole. Yet the push to vaccinate—and even mandate vaccination of an emergency use authorized drug—continues.

Roman Balmakov, for The Epoch Times, discusses the effect of mandating these vaccines in the military, with Lt. John Bowes. They discuss a report that some 40,000 National Guard troops will be expelled from the military for refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccines. This is going to affect military readiness. The states with the highest percentage of unvaccinated troops include Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Mississippi, with 30-40% refusing the shots. By the way, 98% of all religious exemptions have been denied.

chart showing vaccination percentages in Army National Guard
screenshot from here

·      “Exclusive: Vaccine Mandate Will Force Over 700 Pilots, 40,000 National Guard Troops to Be Discharged,” Facts Matter, with Roman Balmakov, July 4, 2022. 

·       Full interview at EpochTV here. 

Lt. John Bowes, full interview
screenshot from here

 

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson reports on the COVID-19 pandemic as “the greatest crime in history.” He goes over the lab origin, the coverup, and more.

·       “This may have been the greatest crime in history,” Tucker Carlson on Fox News, July 8, 2022. 

 

The picture isn’t fully put together yet. But what we’re seeing is perhaps the greatest death toll and misery ever perpetrated on the people of the world, without a war or natural disaster. It’s not over. It might never be over, because of the ongoing push to force vaccination on the population, rather than allow herd immunity, and rather than allow early treatment, which we have known to be effective since the earliest weeks of the pandemic.

In short: prepare yourself with treatment on hand, because you’re likely to get it again. Getting the jab won’t prevent you from getting it or from getting a worse case. It is likely making things worse, for individuals and society as a whole. If you’ve gotten the injection before, don’t risk your body any further. And absolutely under NO circumstances should you allow your children to be injected with it.