Labor Matters

This past Monday was Labor Day. I spent it working as usual. I’d like to share a little something about work, mainly about a perspective that, if the work matters, it doesn’t matter if it’s unpleasant.

I’ve just finished reading Zach Mercurio’s book The Power of Mattering. The book is mainly about showing other people that they matter, and how to do that, particularly as a business leader, although the principles apply to parents, friends, and everybody. Near the end is a section called “Develop a ‘So-That’ Mindset.” Mercurio tells a story of someone he met as a doctoral student:

When I was a doctoral student, one of the first research interviews I conducted was with Susan, a sought-after cleaner in the housing department at the local university. Her interview reflects much of what researchers know about how people perceive their work as meaningful, and themselves as mattering. I asked Susan, “What part of your job is the most meaningful to you?” Without pause, she described cleaning the university dormitory bathrooms on Monday morning. To me that sounded extremely unpleasant. She admitted it was, but then pivoted, saying, “I’m cleaning their bathroom so they don’t get sick. You know?”

Susan told me that she regularly uses this “so-that” framing, repeating the statement to herself as she’s doing the task: “I’m cleaning this bathroom so that these kids don’t get sick.”

Later in our interview she recalled a blind student who lived in the dormitory. “When we cleaned her room, we had to make sure we put everything back when we vacuumed—make sure the trash can was in the same spot, and that nothing was moved—so that, when she would come back into her room, she would not trip over anything.”

Then he added this:

Susan’s story is also a reminder that what’s purposeful isn’t always pleasurable. Experiencing mattering has less to do with what we’re doing and more with how we see the impact of what we’re doing. Everything has a “so that.” If you look hard enough, you’ll see another human being at the end of almost every act.

That got my attention this week. It’s certainly true that not all work is pleasurable. There’s a saying that, if you find work you love, then it never feels like work. It’s a nice sentiment, but in real life work entails hard things. Sometimes the unpleasantness is icky or dirty-hands kind of work—like Susan’s cleaning dorm bathrooms. Sometimes it’s mundane, boring tasks, like paperwork or billing, things that have to be done whether you like them or not. Sometimes it’s interpersonally unpleasant tasks like laying off employees or dealing with conflict within a team.

But if you have a larger picture, a “so-that” mindset, you can see the meaning that makes the unpleasant tasks worth doing.

To read the full article, follow link to Substack.

You Don’t Heal a Delusion by Changing the World to Align with the Delusion

It happened again a school shooting, this time at a Catholic school. Two children and the perpetrator died, and another 17 were injured. This was in Minnesota on Wednesday, August 27.

New York Post cover August 28, 2025; meanwhile,
the NYT failed to report that the perpetrator was transgender

 

There was an almost instantaneous two-pronged response: call the perpetrator by the perpetrator’s preferred pronouns, and insist that prayer doesn’t work. It’s possible that the second one, specifically “prayers are not enough; take action,” is a lead-in to using the event as an excuse to call for gun control.

You don’t solve a delusion by changing the world to align with the delusion. And you don’t prevent violent crime by pretending you can remove all weapons from all of society, really just preventing law-abiding citizens from having an effective means of self-defense.

To read full article, follow link to Substack.

Off-Off-Year Means School Board Election

 We’re just a bit over two months out from an election—an off-off-year election. It’s not a presidential election year. It’s not even a congressional election year. This year is between even those. The only things on our ballot will be school board positions and propositions (proposed amendments to the state constitution, coming out of this year’s legislative session, but we’re not getting to those in this post).

 

The School Board Races

Four years ago we were among some of the first school districts attempting to flip our board from woke to conservative—or, you could say, to what parents and communities want, instead of what has been forced down our throats.

We have seven school board trustees (board members). Three positions come up the year after a presidential election, such as 2021 and this year; four other positions come up two years later, such as 2023 and 2027.

Cy-Fair Independent School District Board of Trustees, circled are incumbents
Natalie Blasingame, Scott Henry, and Luke Scanlon, whose seats are on the ballot this November.
Natalie and Scott are running again. Luke is not seeking reelection. Image found here

These are supposedly nonpartisan positions. But, as we’ve all learned the hard way, nonpartisan just means no information on the ballot about the candidates’ actual partisanship. Somehow we’d found ourselves—in a northwest section of Harris County, in one of the strongest conservative senatorial districts in the state—stuck with a 7-0 non-conservative school board. So we set out to change that.

We won three of three seats in 2021. That included an arch-enemy ringleader, who had essentially run the board for a couple of decades. But it still left us with a 4-3 woke-majority board.

I’m sure some of those board members don’t call themselves woke. They might say they’re all about what’s best for the kids—and they know what’s best so much better than mere parents and community members. But what we found, going door-to-door, was that people were fed up with what the schools were doing. You’ll remember, 2021 was just a year into the COVID pandemic. Schools had closed for a while, then did online learning (not very successfully), then had kids wear masks in school—all the time except when actually putting food in their mouths. It was during this time that parents became more aware of what schools were saying to their children, and they didn’t want it.

So we started pushing for legislative changes, to remove DEI, CRT, and LGBTQ sexualizing materials. The community spoke pretty clearly about that.

But it wasn’t until the second round, when we got three (out of four) more seats on the board,  that we had the opportunity to make real progress.

It turns out, taking over the school board, while essential, isn’t the end of the story. We got our majority at the same time that we got a new superintendent—chosen by the previous, outgoing board, although they let new board members participate in the vetting process. But there’s a whole “deep state” of district administrators still left. And, with the new board and the new superintendent—surprise!—there was a huge debt suddenly in need of being taken care of. This is just a year after the opening of a new administration building (named after the outgoing superintendent who caused so many of our problems, including debt for this new building) along with a new performing arts center.

You can’t really go to the taxpayers—after that incredibly expensive (and unnecessary?) infrastructure purchase and say, “We can’t actually educate your kids unless you give us more money.”

So, the new conservative board was put in an impossible position. Nevertheless, they did some of the things we asked for....

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Abandoning Their Post

At 1:00 PM today, Friday, August 8, 2025, there was no quorum in the Texas House.

The Texas Democrats are at it again—abandoning their elected offices to prevent the House from functioning. They’ve done it a few times before. Their most recent ridiculous spectacle was in 2021, to prevent election integrity legislation (which eventually passed in spite of their drama). This one is to prevent redistricting.

In Illinois, with Texas House members, August 4, 2025, image found here.
Photo credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The Texas Tribune

The basic story is, although it is only halfway through the decade, Texas has had enough influx of population—and that combined with irregularities in the 2020 census, which required illegals to be counted and used in apportionment—that it seems reasonable to redistrict now, rather than wait until after the 2030 census. The proposed plan is likely to give Texas five additional congressional seats.

You can see the proposed plan here. 

While it is not illegal, the Democrats are claiming it's illegal and unconstitutional (it's not). And they claim foul by fleeing to states where gerrymandering to favor Dems is de rigueur.

To read the full article, follow link to Substack.

Treasonous Conspiracy

On Friday, July 18, NDI Tulsi Gabbard came forward with information showing, in her words, that Barack Obama had led a treasonous conspiracy against newly elected President Trump in late 2016.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard releases documents implicating Obama, July 21, 2025
image by Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg, via Getty Images, found here

On Sunday, July 20, Obama responded with piffle, saying this was just a distraction from important things—like what, he didn’t say. Maybe releasing the Epstein files, which Dems never released nor wanted released before? Maybe from tariffs, which turn out to be working so far, so maybe the Dems could use a distraction from that, as well as the 3% growth in the economy.

On Monday, July 21, Glenn Beck reviewed some of the news—reminding us that almost all of it we already knew. In fact, he commented just this week (Thursday morning, July 31) that he’s presented it all before, and nothing ever happens, which is frustrating.

I’ve written about it as well (listed below), chronicling what I think is important. So I have it documented, but I’ve also been disappointed that wrongdoers were never brought to justice.

What is new in the various documents being released since July 18 is the actual documentation showing that Obama led this attempted coup, not some underling with his tacit but plausibly deniable approval. From previously available information, we had suspected his involvement, but inferences had to be drawn. We hadn’t seen the hard evidence.

To read the full article, follow this link to Substack.

SCOTUS End-of-Term Review

The typical SCOTUS term ends on June 30 annually. So I’m behind schedule in doing a review. However, there have been additional emergency rulings coming up every few days, so maybe that’s for the best.

The emergency rulings are mostly related to this administration’s immigration policies, those before the end of term and after. So we’ll take a brief look at some other cases first, and then look at some of the immigration-related cases.

US Supreme Court Building, from a visit in 2015

To read the full article, follow this link to my Substack.

A Flood and Tears

 

Texas faces its share of natural disasters: hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, freezes, hail, heatwaves, and floods. (We think we’re relatively safe from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.) Sometimes the disasters are combined—such as happens when hurricanes come with accompanying tornadoes and floods. It was a year ago July 8 that Hurricane Beryl blasted through.

We Texans think we’re fairly resilient. But this current disaster, hitting the Texas Hill Country, is going to take a while.

image from here

Read the full article on Substack, here.