Good News among the Bad

The nature of news is that it’s often bad. We’re so used to that, that sometimes we hardly notice the good news.

But last Friday Glenn Beck—often the self-admitted purveyor of doom and gloom—put out a list of good pieces of news over the past ¾ year or so. Most of these I was aware of, but a few had missed my notice. After his list, I’d like to add just a few more he didn’t include.

·        November 8, 2021  University of Austin announced, a new university dedicated to the unfettered pursuit of truth, an alternative to current “orthodox” views in education.

Commitment to open inquiry and civil discourse are required for
University of Austin staff and students.
image found here

·        November 19, 2021  Kyle Rittenhouse found not guilty—despite the politicization, media lies, and best efforts of activists and mobs; self-defense is not murder.

·        December 7, 2021  Saule Omarova, a communist, withdraws Comptroller of the Currency nomination, after massive pushback (much from Glenn Beck’s audience).

·        January 15, 2022  Glenn Youngkin inaugurated as Governor of Virginia, elected mainly by parents upset about schools.

·        January 28, 2022  Canadian truckers protest COVID-19 restrictions in Ottowa, and against authoritarianism. Their protest has had global reverberations—see farmers around the world now.

·        March 9, 2022  The RegionSmart bill died (because of Glenn Beck’s audience). RegionSmart had tried to enact a public/private partnership, a tri-state compact involving Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, that would have given enormous powers to unelected bureaucrats.

·        March 28, 2022  Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed the Parental Rights in Education bill—falsely called by the media the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, but in reality just prevented LGBT indoctrination before 3^rd grade—proving you can succeed even when a mob is against you.

·        April 18, 2022  Florida judge voids Biden’s national mask mandate on public transportation.

·        May 6, 2022  An internal memo from PR firm Zeno Group is leaked, showing that folks on the inside are waking up to the fact that, if you go woke, you could go broke.

·        May 9, 2022  Vivek Ramaswamy announces financial firm, Strive, to compete with Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street.

·        May 18, 2022  Elon Musk tweets about the ESG “scam,” saying it was weaponized by social justice warriors.

Glenn Beck lists various good news stories since last November.
screenshot from here

·        May 27, 2022  Top Gun Maverick opens in theaters, breaking Memorial Day box office records; it’s a patriotic, conservative-themed movie.

·        June 10, 2022  Politico reports conservative shareholders are pushing back, filing 52 proposals at major US companies, twice as many as in 2021. Proposals are often critical of ESG scoring.

·        Jun 11, 2022  Nebraska became the 25^th state to sever ties with the NSBA (National School Board Association)—after the NSBA requested the administration use domestic terrorism laws to go after parents who disagreed with what is being done in schools.

·        June 21, 2022  The US Supreme Court rules that Maine’s education voucher program cannot exclude religious schools—a win for both school choice and freedom of religion.

·        June 23, 2022  The US Supreme Court rules in favor of gun rights, striking down New York’s concealed carry restrictions.

·        June 24, 2022  The US Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and Casey in the Dobbs decision.

·        June 27, 2022  The US Supreme Court rules in favor of the right to pray at school football games, affirming the religious and free speech rights of school employees.

·        June 30, 2022  The US Supreme Court rules that the EPA does not have authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants—bigger than it appears, because it paves the way for lawsuits against government bureaucratic agencies that usurp lawmaking and enforcement functions.

·        July 28, 2022  West Virginia State Treasurer, Riley Moore, announces “Restricted Financial Institution List.” The state will no longer have banking contracts with Blackrock, Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan-Chase, Morgan-Stanley, and Wells-Fargo. Other states have already passed bills divesting from pro-ESG institutions, and 22 more are actively pursuing such legislation. 

Glenn Beck finished his list, saying this:

These are just the highlights. The most important stories are the ones that don’t make the news—the victories that are in your community and your family. That’s where each of us make the most long-lasting influence.

I’m telling you all of this to remind you—and me—hold onto hope. Yes, there’s a great deal going wrong. But there is also so much going right. And it is up to us to keep that momentum going.

 

Now for more good news, although I’m not pinning down all the dates:

·        Soros-backed prosecutors who refuse to prosecute violent offenders, based on skin color or some other “equity” criteria are being ousted. The people ousted one in San Francisco. Governor DeSantis suspended the state attorney in Florida last week, when that official announced his refusal to uphold the state’s abortion laws, and other laws. 

·        Indiana was the first state to pass legislation banning abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned.  What is called a “near total abortion ban” does, however, include exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother, severe permanent physical health risk to the mother, and fetal abnormalities that are incompatible with life.

·        The documentary 2000 Mules showed enough evidence of voter fraud to have changed the outcome of the election. Ahead of the November election, many states around the nation have increased their vigilance against such cheating. They know we’re watching. And a group of sheriffs are investigating election crimes as presented in 2000 Mules. 

·        While the government keeps trying to fearmonger about COVID-19, deaths from the latest variants are very low, and people now recognize that the so-called vaccine does not prevent illness or spread. Their current attempt to scare us about monkeypox is almost laughable, when the fact is it is almost totally avoidable by not attending gay orgies.

·        The January 6 inquiry has failed to produce any evidence, or even any convincing testimony, and people are tuning out; they know it’s a biased show trial only. Meanwhile, the Epoch Times has produced a documentary on January 6, “The Real Story of January 6,” that shows a clearer picture of what happened, and asks the questions that should be asked. 

·        The James Webb telescope has been producing some stunning images from deep space. 

Phantom Galaxy, as seen by the James Webb telescope
image from here

 There’s still a steady stream of really bad news. But one of these days the good news is going to overwhelm the bad—and it will be because good people did all the good around them that they could.

 

Pregnancy Resource Centers Aren’t the Ones Faking Care

Elizabeth Warren recently pushed for legislation to shut down pregnancy resource centers in her state. She said:

In Massachusetts, right now, those crisis pregnancy centers that are there to fool people who are looking for pregnancy termination help outnumber true abortion clinics by 3 to 1. We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts. And we need to shut them down all around the country. 

Senator Warren is angry that pregnancy resource centers
are allowed to exist in her world, where she thinks the only
choice ought to be abortion. Screenshot from here.

Such centers may outnumber abortion clinics 3 to 1 in Massachusetts, but they’re 4 to 1 in most of the country. They are not, however, there to fool people looking for an abortion; they are there to help women facing an unexpected pregnancy—usually because they’re young, unmarried, and without resources, and they don’t know what to do.

There is only one answer at an abortion clinic: get an abortion.

At a pregnancy resource center there is medical help, pregnancy information, connection to government and private charity resources, help in deciding between choosing adoption or raising the child. They get resources either way—even on up through perinatal care and getting housing and baby clothing and supplies.

None of these choices is available at the place where they call themselves pro-choice.

This past Tuesday there was an issue on the ballot in Kentucky, a pro-life amendment, called “Value Them Both,” intended to clarify the state constitution—in which some judge “found” a right to abortion in 2019. The amendment would have meant the legislature could regulate abortion, now that the Dobbs decision gave that authority back to the states.

But the amendment failed. By about 17 percentage points. In a state that on the surface looks fairly conservative. Trump won the state by 15 points in 2020.

Pro-life spokesperson Mallory Carroll said:

The abortion lobby’s message to voters was rife with lies that ultimately drowned out the truth. Because of tonight’s results, Kansas could shortly become home to unrestricted abortion on demand—even late-term abortion without limits, paid for by taxpayers. The people and their elected legislators now have no recourse to use the tools of democracy to enact laws that reflect consensus.

The pro-abortion lobby has been gathering funding—including at taxpayer expense—for decades. They had millions to throw at this issue, the first on the ballot since the Dobbs decision.

Polling shows that nationwide most people want to severely limit abortion but worry about removing exemptions for the life of the mother, and also for victims of rape and incest. Since well before the SCOTUS ruling in June, the pro-abortion lobby has been claiming everything means forcing women to die and have no recourse regardless of circumstances—“It’s all A Handmaid’s Tale in real life!” they cry.

If you're wondering where your state now stands, check out the interactive map provided by the ACLJ.

for the ACLJ's interactive map on current abortion laws, go here

I can’t tell you exactly what lies were told in Kentucky, but I imagine they’re similar to lies being told in Texas. One is that women won’t get care for an ectopic pregnancy. Not true. Termination of that type of pregnancy has never been defined as an abortion—because the embryo is never implanted in the uterus; it cannot mature and become a baby, and is a high risk to the mother’s life. Nothing about outlawing abortion affects that.

There was a recent story of a woman whose baby died in utero, and she claimed that the doctors wouldn’t treat her until she had undergone multiple ultrasounds verifying that the child was not alive. And she was forced to keep carrying a dead fetus for two weeks. How can I say this without hurting someone’s feelings? She lied. That is not the procedure for a fetus that dies, and the procedure did not change after the Dobbs decision meant abortion was outlawed in Texas.

Once it is verified that there is no heartbeat, the baby is delivered, likely by C-section. This is not an abortion, because it does not terminate the life of the unborn baby, which has already died. Leaving a dead baby to degenerate within the mother could lead to serious consequences for the mother, possibly sepsis. Even in this story, simply having a second ultrasound to verify that there was no heartbeat was all that was needed; she could have come in the next day, and her doctor probably told her that. He probably mentioned nothing about the change in law after Dobbs—because there was no change. Anyway, at most it would be mere days before the procedure is done.

This was the unfortunate circumstance of a friend of mine just last month (post-Dobbs)—a mother of many children, who wanted the child, and who would never consider an abortion. She learned the child no longer had a heartbeat; she scheduled and had a C-section; she is in the process of healing both physically and emotionally. The family held a graveside service for the lost child—just as we had done for our child who had been born alive prematurely and lived only a few hours.

People are worried about the loss of choice for women who are victims of rape or incest—in other words, who did not choose the behavior that led to the pregnancy. I understand that. But it is already the exception in most states that outlaw abortion, and is an appropriate debate to have in the legislature. It’s not currently an exception in Texas—only life of the mother, I believe. And I think if we better informed and better supported women in that rare circumstance, people would clamor much less about it.

I’ve always been pro-life. Yet I have always assumed there would be exceptions made for the life of the mother—which in most cases means that the baby can’t survive either, so it is a matter of saving the mother’s life or no one’s. My Church actually makes exceptions for rape and incest, in addition to life of the mother. So I have been open to the conversation concerning those exceptions. I’ve been concerned that, as a society, we do not well support a woman who has suffered rape. We don’t even do a very good job of tracking down and bringing the rapist to justice. And I thought giving her no way out of propagating the seed of the rapist would lengthen and possibly intensify her trauma. I’m beginning to rethink that exception.

A friend of mine phone coaches women finding themselves pregnant and unable to support themselves, let alone a baby. She has been there, in crisis. I’ll briefly (and anonymously) tell her story, and what she taught me. She was fifteen and pregnant, with her 18-year-old alcoholic boyfriend. He offered no support. His mother pressured her to get an abortion; the woman had been a teen mom of two and knew how bad that was going to be.

My friend comes from a dysfunctional family, to say the least. Her parents had broken up when she was two. Her mother remarried when she was seven, to an abuser. My friend suffered sexual abuse from a series of abusers. She lacked protection and direction. The mother had taken them to church sporadically, so she had a surface knowledge of religion. My friend actually prayed, not really knowing who she was praying to, that she and her boyfriend could marry and have this family. But that wasn’t going to happen with this young man.

Not knowing what to do, she gave in to the pressure and went to an abortion clinic. Right away they put in a cervical dilator; she was supposed to go back the next day for the abortion. This insertion was painful, and it scared her. She went home and told her mother she was getting an abortion. Her mother was upset and to told her not to do it, and she agreed; she didn’t want to go through with it. She called her OB about the cervical dilator, to get it out, and was told it was probably too late; it would cause a miscarriage. Years later she learned this was not necessarily true, but she was a 15-year-old scared little girl, looking for help from adult experts who weren’t helping. She told her mom she had no choice now but to go through with it, and her mother told her not to come home if she did.

The boyfriend got drunk the night before and bailed on even taking her to the clinic. So her “friend” who had been having sex with her boyfriend behind her back ended up taking her. She remembers two vivid things about that clinic experience: the extremely sharp pain when her baby was dismembered and ripped from her; and the horrible sucking sounds and noise of the vacuum machine.

There were after effects. As she recalls,

Because I was still in the dark literally, a friend later took me to Planned Parenthood for birth control pills. They gave me a year’s worth of pills. The doctor didn’t know my medical history and probably didn’t care (and they failed to disclose the risks of the pill, that the WHO has it classified as a Class 1 Carcinogen, or how being abstinent could have really helped me emotionally and physically). I tried to tell myself that it was okay, but I knew deep down it was not okay—I was not okay. Physically, I worried if I would ever be able to have children. Had the abortion made me barren? Emotionally, I felt such shame and regret. Spiritually, I felt so ashamed that I thought God would never forgive me and I would be punished for the evil I committed. My boyfriend and I broke up, and I stuffed everything deep down inside and tried to pretend it didn’t happen, and no one spoke of it.

There’s more they don’t tell you at these places. She adds:

One of the things the pro-choice people never tell you is that when you become pregnant you are already a mom and that an abortion doesn’t take care of your problem; it actually stays with you the rest of your life. You are the mom of a dead child, and you can never undo that. Women that endure abortion suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When you look at the symptoms—difficulty concentrating, depression, anger, anxiety, fear, being unable to sleep—numbing yourself with drugs and alcohol trying to forget the most horrible thing ever that has ever happened, it doesn’t work.

The abortion didn’t get rid of her problems. She continued drinking and doing drugs, and got pregnant again at 19; the father, again, was an abusive alcoholic. But this time when pressured to abort the baby, she knew she would never do that again. Off and on she hoped to form a family with the father, but again that wasn’t going to work, and she ended the contact. But having that baby girl, at age 20, gave her a new purpose in life, and led to her connection with God, which changed everything.

She thought that with a past like hers, she would probably never marry and have any more children. But good fortune came her way at 25. And she has spent the next couple of decades living a totally different family life than the one she grew up in.

I’m interested in the detail she told me about knowing she had this child that died, that should be in her life, or at least should be alive. There’s a hole there, and it is never filled. Because I have lost a child, I know what that feels like.

Hers was different from a rape case. But she has since had quite a lot of experience with rape victims. That missing child is what they experience after an abortion as well. What they have is the trauma of rape, and on top of that they experience the trauma of a dead child—that hole that is never filled. No one warns them. They get told, “Let’s just get rid of that problem for you.” But it doesn’t solve the problem; it adds another one that may be even more traumatic.

There was another story, told on Glenn Beck’s program back in May (May 4, 2022), by a black woman, Shemeka Michelle, who is pro-life but had had an abortion. Her story was that, while she had always been pro-life, she was with a man she should not have been with. They already had a child together, and he was not a good father, or provider, or protector. Before she succeeded in leaving him, she found herself pregnant again. His mother told her to go ahead with an abortion but not tell the father—because he was against abortion but would be as shiftless and irresponsible as he had ever been. She was about seven weeks pregnant. She asked the doctor what she would see on an ultrasound, and he told her she’d see nothing; it was just a clump of cells.

Shameka Michelle tells her story on the Glenn Beck Program, May 4, 2022
screenshot from here

She went on with her life, and then some years later was pregnant under better conditions, within a good marriage. She had an ultrasound at about that same point in the pregnancy. The happy technician showed her the baby, with heartbeat, and head and arms and legs. It should have been a happy life event—and it was. But it was also a shocking awareness that the baby she had aborted years before was not a clump of cells; it was a growing human being, like this one she was pregnant with.

She believes that if she had been told the truth the first time, she would not have had the abortion. And she believes—and data bears this out—most women, if they were shown a good quality ultrasound of their living baby, they would not abort. Knowing it is a baby, and not just a clump of cells, makes a huge difference to a pregnant woman.

Pro-abortionists do not care for women in difficult circumstances; they prey on them. And they are working hard to prevent anyone from having real choices.

Pregnancy Resource Centers, on the other hand, offer young women actual help and hope, without inflicting further trauma on them. We need more of these. 

While we're at it, we need more intact families that teach their children right from wrong. And we need more cultural support for young women—and young men—to stay committed to abstinence before marriage and complete fidelity within marriage. Age-old truths are still true.

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).

_______________________________________

 

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.