All of Us Need to Pay Attention

Pam Orebaugh and Rob Linebarger in Spokane valley are fomenting a hostile takeover of the entire five person School Board of Central Valley School District (CVSD). Their campaign is based on religio-political, anti-science rhetoric against mask mandates, masks, and vaccinations. Pam and Rob appear as supposed opponents for Position 5 on the CVSD Board on the November 2 general election ballot—but they are allies, partners in their attempt to replace the entire Board. In a sleepy August Primary in which only a quarter of the registered voters bothered to turn in a ballot, Pam garnered 5951, Rob 4962 and their opponent 4674 votes out of the 15761 votes cast. These are not large numbers, but Pam and Rob apparently see them as a mandate.

Rob and Pam’s fanaticism came on public display in the unofficial meeting they held on school property after they and their followers engineered a boisterous shutdown of the August CVSD Board meeting on August 23 by refusing to comply with the state mask mandate then in place. These are the same tactics and ideology that fired up the attack on members of the Coeur d’Alene School District Board I detailed on Monday. I urge you to watch and listen to Mr. Linebarger in this video:

https://www.facebook.com/ChalichForChildren/videos/1004052080442312/

Mr. Linebarger’s conspiracy-laden oration speaks for itself. This is not a man interested in the intricacies of school budgets and discussion under Roberts Rules of Order. This is a man who sounds primed for revolution, armed, if necessary. Rob’s partner in this plan, Pam Orebaugh, takes a quieter role at the unofficial gathering. She is seen intermittently sitting to the far right in the screen view and referred to by Rob as an ally. At 01:54 she walks across the room behind Mr. Linebarger.

This video should, and did, set off alarm bells. Stan Chalich, a retired Central Valley coach and civics teacher, stepped up as a popular write-in candidate for Position 5. Winning a write-in campaign is an up hill battle, but if you watch the video you will likely agree that the stakes are high. 

Bret Howell (seen in the flier above), encouraged by Rob and Pam, is running as a write-in candidate for Position 2, the only other CVSD board seat on the ballot in November. The only candidate already on the ballot for that Position 2 seat, Teresa Landa, Pam and Rob apparently think of as insufficiently right wing.

There’s more. On August 24th Rob and Pam, with Rob in the lead, filed an application with the IRS for 501(c)(3) [tax exempt non-profit] status for their “Washington Citizens for Liberty.” As “citizens4liberty.org” they began soliciting tax-deductible donations to pay for legal council immediately, counting on the IRS to validate and backdate the tax-deductible status for which they had applied. Visit “citizens4liberty.org” and see for yourself the far right news rathole on which these people rely as well as the wacko anti-vaccine rhetoric they espouse. Money gathered by the citizens4liberty “non-profit” is to be used to pay legal costs incurred to threaten the other three sitting CVSD school board directors with a recall election. Those directors, Debra Long, Cindy McMullen, and Keith Clark, in addition to their other volunteer board duties, now will need to defend themselves in court against a recall.

Contemplate for a moment the reaction you might have if you had been serving your community as an unpaid member of the school board with all the attendant meetings and homework—and then you were faced with hiring a lawyer and defending against a legal threat as the price you must pay for continuing to donate your time and good will. 

The September 28 Spokesman article written by Jim Allen announcing Rob and Pam’s recall petition filings against all three of the remaining CVSD Board directors left me puzzled (as newspaper articles often do) about the steps involved in an attempted recall. Recalls of “elective officers” in the State of Washington are addressed in Article I, Sections 33 and 34 of the Washington State Constitution. The details of the process are filled in by state law in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 29A.56.110 thru RCW29A.56.270. It is a complex process with many steps and deadlines, a process which, in the case of Linebarger’s three recall petitions, will hardly have started by the time the November 3 General Election voting is complete one month from now. 

The substance of these recall petitions is very thin. It consists of allegations that Debra Long, Cindy McMullen, and Keith Clark each 

committed acts of misfeasance, specifically misuse of power and wrongful use of lawful authority in the exercise of her office where she and her fellow Board Members, as a matter of policy, have mandated the use and placement of a medical device, specifically a mask, and now require District staff to have the first publicly available mRNA vaccination as a condition of employment

Essentially, Pam, Rob, and company allege that the CVSD’s Board directors are committing “malfeasance” by carrying out state level executive orders—a preposterous claim that will likely be thrown out, just like a similar recall against Governor Jay Inslee was thrown out when a judge ruled the alleged charges were “legally and factually insufficient last June.”¹

In summary, we have two candidates for the same Position 5 spot on the CVSD School Board, Pam Orebaugh and Rob Linebarger working together not only to get Pam elected to the board, but soliciting tax deductible unreported donations to their nonprofit, Citizens4Liberty, to 1) Support Pam’s and write-in candidate Howell’s candidacies and 2) Launch and fund dubious recall petitions against the other sitting school board members, petitions that function as a combination of grandstanding and legal harassment.

Whether or not you live in the Central Valley School District, this school board election is a consequential issue. It is one of the most blatant local manifestations of an organized national campaign. (Also in the Washington Post.) Watch the Rob and Pam video referenced above. Understand where Pam and Rob are coming from by visiting the News page at Citizen4Liberty.org . Then visit Stan Chalich’s website, check out the impressive endorsements on his Facebook page. Donate to his campaign. Tell your friends about the Stan Chalich write-in campaign.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P. S. I have obtained pdf copies of the recall petitions Linebarger filed on September 24, but I’ve been unable to attach them to this post. If any of my readers wants to see the pdfs request them of me by hitting “Reply” to this email and I will endeavor to send them to you electronically.

P.P.S. Pam Orebaugh draws points for herself as a faculty nurse educator for obstetric nursing at the Washington State University College of Nursing. However (and for good reason) she notes that she is “not representing WSU or speaking for WSU in my stances.” Her anti-mask, anti-vaccination stances do not represent reasoned medical opinion.1

Debra Long, the board president and one of the three board members defending against recall, is also accused of not meeting residency requirements for her position—while the other two are accused of knowing this and not tattling on her. This accusation is detailed in Jim Allen’s Spokesman article. It seems likely that the Superior Court Judge who, according to the RCW, will need to sign off on the petition for Rob, Pam and company to start gathering signatures will find this accusation “factually insufficient” as well, but who knows?

Who will be willing serve?

Unlike most elected positions in local government, serving on a school board (at least in Idaho or Washington) is an unpaid, volunteer position. On top of that, school board service requires time and effort spent on an election campaign, and, after winning a seat on a board, it requires many hours of meetings dedicated to budgets, levies, and other issues, often with little thanks or notice from the community served. We, as voters and members of our communities, have tended to take the service, selflessness, and goodwill of school board candidates for granted. 

You might be pardoned if all that makes you wonder who on earth would put themselves through an election campaign–and then endure seemingly endless meetings—as an unpaid and often unthanked community servant. If you take the time to meet currently serving school board members (in most communities) it turns out they are mostly altruists, people with a genuine interest in providing our youth with a quality education. They have day jobs, children, and families that they juggle just like the rest of us. 

This year many school board members all over the U.S. are enduring intimidation that threatens to drive these altruists away from serving their communities, tipping the balance in favor of ideological extremists who pander to the intimidators (or are the intimidators) while they present themselves to the voting public as reasonable people.

Case in Point: 

After rowdy, confrontational anti-mask protestors forced the cancellation of a School Board meeting scheduled to address the issue of mask mandates, about three dozen of the protesters then invaded the Coeur d’Alene School District offices and frightened staff, actions that prompted a 911 call and a building lockdown. (See videos here and here if you have any doubt about the threatening, intimidating nature of this crowd). A Spokesman headline on Friday, October 1, read “Two [of five] CdA school board members announce resignations following mask controversy.” Board Chair Jennifer Brumley and Trustee Tambra Pickford announced their intention to resign one week after the special board meeting cancellation. 

Board Chair Jennifer Brumley was appointed to the CDA School Board in 2018. Her term ends this December, but her resignation will be effective a month early. She had spoken out about the stress of intimidation and bullying before the protests depicted in the videos. One is left to imagine the subsequent stress that precipitated Brumley’s rushed resignation. The other resigning board member, Tambra Pickford, was elected to the Coeur d’Alene School Board in 2015 and re-elected in 2019. Her second term doesn’t end until December, 2023—yet she is resigning two years and a month early alongside Brumley. Brumley and Pickford were part of the 3-2 majority that had voted on September 13 to “strongly recommend” mask wear in schools in the face of the rapid spread of Covid 19 that has forced North Idaho hospitals into triage mode. Neither Brumley nor Pickford was candid in their resignation letters about the threats they faced for even this watered-down recommendation—but it seems that the bottom line here is that the belligerent anti-mask, anti-science, anti-protect-your-neighbor crowd has won. 

The remaining Board (two of whom voted against making any mask recommendation) will name a “successor resident” to the School Board per Idaho State law to finish Pickford’s two years of remaining term, probably ensuring a 3 to 1 like-minded, anti-mask majority on the board. The occupant of the fifth seat, Brumley’s, will depend on the results of the November general election. Brumley and one other of the four candidates originally on the ballot, Jeff Zember, have withdrawn from the November election. (See Zember’s response to a rowdy school board meeting in July.) Zember filed on August 31 to run for Brumley’s seat after he penned his response to the July meeting, but, after the recent belligerence protests, he changed course and withdraw his name for the November election.

In our neighboring Kootenai County the animosity and intimidation extends to higher education. On September 22 a 3-2 majority of the trustees of North Idaho College fired the President of the College, Rick MacLennan. The firing was officially “without cause”, but it came after MacLennan’s imposition of a mask mandate, the trustees rescinding of the mandate, and a few week’s delay, presumably to disconnect the firing from the rescinding in the mind of the public. MacLennan is not taking it his firing lying down. On October 1 MacLennan filed a lawsuit against the three members of the Board of Trustees who voted to fire him, Board Chair Todd Banducci, Vice Chair Greg McKenzie and Trustee Michael Barnes. The article in the Bonner County Daily Bee on the firing and the lawsuit is illuminating. (Click here.) The malignant interference of the far right Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC) in establishing the 3-2 majority that fired MacLennan is made clear in this letter.

Intimidation and conflict over mask mandates and other cultural issues (like the bogus dustup over “critical race theory”) are obviously enough to discourage many reasonable people from running for and serving in these suddenly thankless volunteer positions. And such capitulation is exactly what the far right Republican ideologues fomenting these protests want to see. Ultimately, these ideologues want detailed control over public school curricula.

Spokane County school boards are not immune from intimidation. Protests have shut down school board meetings in the Central Valley and Spokane Public Schools Districts. Extremist candidates for the school board in Central Valley are trying to engineer a full takeover of the board (more in a post later this week). Some candidates for School Board for the two open seats in Spokane Public Schools (District 81) are more subtle than those in Central Valley, but are cut from the same cloth. 

It’s time to pay attention to School Board races. The altruists who volunteer their time and expertise on our School Boards are coming under increasing pressure and intimidation from the far right. School Board members deserve our thanks and our support—and more than ever we owe it to the current members to scrutinize the candidates running for positions on those boards before casting our ballots. 

In the meantime, send a note to your current school board indicating your support for their efforts to keep our children safe. 

Here’s the page with the email addresses for the Board at Spokane Public Schools:

https://www.spokaneschools.org/Page/1030

Here are the school board members and their email addresses for Central Valley:

https://www.cvsd.org/apps/pages/schoolboardmembers

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

We Must Tackle Climate Change! (Psst–But not now)

There is inherent evil and inanity in the concept of corporate personhood. Unlike the Roman god Janus, the god of two faces, the public face and lobbying face of a corporation doesn’t even share a brain. If all the faces of a corporation did so it would be harder to trot out a sincere spokesperson who can issue pronouncements without a hint of hypocrisy—while another arm of the corporation spends money, time, and lobbying effort to defeat precisely that legislation for which the spokesperson is publicly declaring their corporation’s support. 

Judd Legum, an independent researcher publishing on Substack, is doing a terrific job highlighting the hypocrisy of corporate public and legislative faces. I urge my readers to sign up to support and receive Legum’s work, but in the meantime I’ve copied below Legum’s post from September 30. In addition, I recommend an earlier post of Legum’s on the same topic, The corporate campaign to tank reconciliation.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Walmart calls for “strong climate policy now,” backs campaign to kill strong climate policy

Judd Legum

In a new post on LinkedIn, Walmart’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Kathleen McLaughlin, underscored the company’s commitment to addressing climate change. But McLaughlin noted, correctly, that “even the most ambitious voluntary individual and collective actions are not sufficient” and “[b]old domestic climate policy action is needed now if we are to meet the demands of this generational moment.”

McLaughlin went on to say that effective climate policies are included in the reconciliation package pending before Congress:

In the U.S., Walmart is encouraged by the many climate-related policy proposals being debated by Congress, including proposals made through budget reconciliation and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as well as additional ideas being surfaced in policy circles. We urge our national leaders to find ways to enact much-needed legislation to enable the U.S. to move forward on climate action now to avoid the worst effects of climate change in the future. 

…As the IPCC report affirms, global warming is not just a challenge we must address for tomorrow, but one whose effects are already being felt by many communities today. We need to act now and with urgency.

The centerpiece of the climate policy in the reconciliation bill is the Clean Energy Standard. The proposal would allocate about $150 billion to incentivize utilities to shift to cleaner sources of power. The goal of the Clean Energy Standard in the reconciliation package would be to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector by 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035.

While McLaughlin is urging Congress to “act now and with urgency,” her boss, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, is leading a multi-million dollar campaign to defeat the reconciliation package.

McMillon is the current chair of the Business Roundtable, a group of influential CEOs who are participating in a “massive lobbying blitz” to kill the reconciliation package and its Clean Energy Standard. In a press release this week which featured quotes from McMillon, the Business Roundtable said its efforts to defeat the reconciliation bill would include “direct CEO engagement to Capitol Hill and the Administration, as well as high-frequency radio print and digital ads in over 50 media markets across the country, generating calls and letters from constituents in target states.”

Walmart is also part of another well-funded campaign to defeat the reconciliation bill by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Walmart did not respond to Popular Information’s request for comment. 

GM endorses reconciliation bill; GM CEO takes over Business Roundtable

GM released a statement on Tuesday officially endorsing the reconciliation bill, also known as the “Build Back Better” plan. The company says that the bill presents a “once-in-a-generation opportunity for our nation.”

General Motors applauds those who have worked tirelessly to advance the Build Back Better Plan, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, and urges Congress and the Administration to move forward legislation that will bring critical improvements to the country.  Build Back Better lays the foundation for sustainability policies that will help address climate change and improve environmental quality and resiliency.  GM supports those goals and, critically, we support those provisions that accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and establish the U.S. as a global leader in electrification today, and into the future.

On Wednesday, the Business Roundtable announced that GM CEO Mary Barra would be its incoming Chair in 2022.Business Roundtable @BizRoundtable.@GM Chair & CEO Mary Barra elected incoming Chair of Business Roundtable for a two-year term beginning on January 1, 2022. Read the press release: businessroundtable.org/general-motors…

September 29th 20214 Retweets6 Likes

Soon, Barra will lead a company that says the reconciliation bill is “critical” and a lobbying organization doing everything possible to defeat it. The media coverage of Barra’s appointment ignored this contradiction.

Under increased scrutiny, Apple stays silent

Walmart’s conduct is similar to Apple’s contradictory approach. Apple’s VP for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, put out a statement supporting “the enactment of a Clean Energy Standard (CES) that would decarbonize the power sector by 2035.” This is the exact policy in the reconciliation bill. Jackson called taking action on this issue “urgent.” 

But, as Popular Information reported earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook sits on the board of the Business Roundtable. So Apple is describing the climate provisions of the reconciliation bill as “urgent” while also participating in a campaign to kill the legislation.

Apple did not respond to our request for comment but Popular Information’s reporting caught the attention of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. On his program Tuesday night, Hayes said Apple also ignored MSNBC’s inquiry:

Today, journalist Judd Legum points out in this newsletter Popular Information that Apple CEO Tim Cook sits on the board of the Business Roundtable along with at least 12 other influential CEOs. The group is running ads on Facebook attacking the reconciliation bill’s higher corporate tax rate.

We reached out to Apple for comment. They did not get back to us….

Manchin snaps at reporter who asked about his financial conflicts

The reconciliation bill does not need any Republican votes to become law. But it is opposed by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and a handful of other Democrats. On Wednesday, Manchin released a lengthy statement criticizing the bill seeks to “vengfully tax” in pursuit of “wishful spending.” 

The statement did not get into specifics because the specifics are very popular.

Manchin did not mention it, but he reportedly also objects to the climate provisions in the bill, which would transition the energy sector away from fossil fuels by 2035. Manchin wants a policy that would give “a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry.”

As Popular Information reported earlier this month, Manchin has a financial conflict. He continues to hold an ownership stake in two coal companies that would likely be put out of business if the country stopped generating power from coal. Manchin has recieved hundreds of thousands of dollars in dividends from these holdings since he became a Senator. 

Manchin was confronted on Wednesday by Bloomberg’s Ari Natter about his financial interest in fossil fuels. It quickly got testy:Frank Thorp V @frankthorpMANCHIN asked by @AriNatter whether an energy company he founded is a conflict of interest as he negotiates reconciliation: MANCHIN: “I’ve been in a blind trust for 20 years, I have no idea what they’re doing. Ari: You’re still getting dividends. MANCHIN: “You got a problem?”September 29th 20211,186 Retweets3,541 Likes

When Natter brought up that Manchin’s son runs the companies, Manchin snapped back: “You’d do best to change the subject.”

Earlier this year a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on camera bragging that he spoke with Manchin’s office weekly. Manchin said these claims were exaggerated. Over the last week, ExxonMobil has spend $275,000 on Facebook ads opposing the reconciliation bill.

Buried on the Coronavirus page in the A Section in last Sunday’s Spokesman (September 26), there was an article entitled “Rally against vaccine mandates draws 4,000 to downtown”. The gathering was organized as the “Rally for Medical Freedom,” a title that obscures the motives of the rally’s principle organizers, Caleb Collier and Matt Shea. Shea and Collier have been featured speakers at nearly every anti-government protest and rally from the early days of the coronavirus lockdown to the present. Just enter their names in the Search window at Spokesman.com. (See here, here, here, and here.) Long before the coronavirus, Matt Shea allied with Ammon Bundy during the Malheur Wildlife Refuge armed standoff in 2016, something we would all do well to remember.

Matt Shea declined to run again for the seat he had held as Washington State Representative from LD4 (Spokane Valley north to Mt. Spokane) after the exposure and controversy over his tract, “The Biblical Basis for War.” Since then Shea, Collier, and company seize every opportunity to rile their far right religious flock against existing government. While regional Intensive Care Units fill with unvaccinated Covid-19 patients, the inanity of Shea and Collier’s current protests against vaccinations and masks is exceeded only by the extremist religious fervor with which they pump up their followers over gun “rights”, abortion (as “The Church at Planned Parenthood”), the establishment of the theocratic breakaway “Liberty State”, and over any effort government might make to limit the current pandemic. 

Shea declined to run again for his seat as the state representative from LD4 last fall after being credibly accused of “domestic terrorism.” For at least the last ten years Shea has disguised his anti-government agitation in a cloak supposed Christian piety. Shortly after leaving the Washington State legislature in January 2021 Shea’s extremist religious politics came on full display as he took on the mantle of pastor of the Covenant Church. Ken Peters, the founder and prior head pastor of this non-denominational entity on Princeton Ave in near north Spokane was moving on to establish more “patriot churches” elsewhere. (Non-denominational simply means that as a pastor in such a church there are no institutional checks and balances on the finances or on the personality cult the pastor establishes with his [or her] flock.)

In Pastor Ken Peter’s absence, Shea took over. When Peters returned from Nashville, Shea decamped with much of Peter’s former Covenant Church flock to a new location in downtown Spokane in a large building at 115 E Pacific Avenue. (On google maps the building is labelled “Healing Rooms Ministries International Office”. The building is also the address of the “Revival Culture Church”.) 

Caleb Collier is Shea’s apparent aide-de-camp in all Shea’s recent religio-political agitation. Collier, an ex-Marine who was once a council person on the City of Spokane City Council, is/was the co-host of “Church and State”, a local podcast producer with a flashy, flag-draped website. (That website may or may not be up-to-date. Its last “Latest Episode[s]” is dated July 23, 2018.) Collier was recently identified as “executive field coordinator” for the John Birch Society. Rumor has it that he has been fired under questionable circumstances even from that extremist organization. 

The common theme to all the protests that Matt Shea and Caleb Collier lead is straightforward: everything government tries to do is evil and must be resisted—resisted in the name of God and Shea and Collier’s particular concept of “freedom”. “Don’t you dare attempt to quell a pandemic with a requirement to wear masks or get vaccinated; don’t you dare attempt to limit the violent deaths by introducing common sense gun regulation; don’t you dare suggest that Biden was elected in a free and fair election!” Behind it all among these religio-political assault weapons toters is the implied threat of an armed uprising. Shea’s “The Biblical Basis For War” was a justification, not an outline for a Sunday school lesson. Shea and Collier, under the cloak of Christianity, are assembling an armed cult whose reason for being is to demonize and oppose government in any form but their own. Surely not everyone at the protest last Saturday fully subscribes to Shea and Collier’s message, but these two men are assembling a coalition of gullible believers carrying assault weapons instead of pitchforks. That last Saturday’s rally was entirely peaceful is no guarantee of future performance.

These people mean business. Learn their names and their backgrounds. Stay alert. Re-read the history of the takeover of the government of the Weimar Republic in 1920s and 30s Germany, by the religio-political movement of Nazi Aryanism. Take heed. It can happen here. It creeps up. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. This post was partly inspired by reading an opinion piece by a conservative commentator, Robert Kagan, last weekend in the Washington Post, entitled “Our constitutional crisis is already here

It will take more than a non-binding executive order and soothing words from the Big Three

If we all converted to full electric cars (EVs) tomorrow (not hybrids, which retain a gas engine) many of us would need to figure out a way to plug in our cars to at least basic house current (15 amps at 110 volts) while parked at home. Seventy-eight percent of drivers in the U.S. drive less than 40 miles in a day, a drive requiring less charging time on a 110V, 15 amp outlet than the time most cars spend at home each day. With this basic home charging we would need far fewer non-home charging stations than we have “gas” stations today. I have owned an EV for three years. In that time I have only used a non-home charging station when I have been more than 150 miles from home. 

There is more good news about electric vehicles. Electric motors provide nearly instant acceleration. Merging on the freeway with an EV is not a problem. Brakes wear out much more slowly in an EV than in a vehicle powered by internal combustion—regenerative braking kicks in as soon as you take your foot off the accelerator. That not only returns some electrons to the battery but it slows down the car. Driving downhill on a mountain road requires little or no braking and no downshifting. EVs are nearly silent, there are no roaring engines and no blue smoke belching from an exhaust pipe. Electric vehicles (EVs) require far less maintenance: they require no oil changes, air filters, catalytic converters, or exhaust systems. All they share with carbon burning vehicles are the tires, suspension and steering systems, windshield wipers (and washers), and the minimally used brakes. (Of course, with a hybrid or even a “plug-in” hybrid you keep all the complexity and maintenance issues of a conventional vehicle while adding a battery and an electric motor.) Furthermore, and I say this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but in the event of the apocalypse you can manufacture “fuel” for an EV at home with solar panels—but if you’re dependent on oil extraction, refining, and distribution for your fuel you could be out of luck. 

So with all these advantages what’s the problem? Why don’t we see far greater numbers of EVs on the road? Range, lack of standardization, and inertia. While it may be true that most cars in the U.S. travel less than 40 miles in a day, many people are understandably reluctant to buy a vehicle with a range of only, say, 100 miles. before searching for a charging station, figuring out how to connect to it, and then waiting hours for the vehicle’s battery to take on a charge. Drivers’ comfort with the ease of long distance travel in their carbon-burning vehicles is a source of skepticism and of massive inertia against the adoption of EVs. The Big Three automakers, fully wedded to their profit centers in internal combustion engines and the burning of fossil fuels, understand range issues and lack of standardization—and they are likely just fine with that status quo. 

Whatever else one might think about Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, the largest EV manufacturer, Musk clearly understood these issues (and others) when he bought a large share of Tesla stock and became the chairman of Tesla in 2004. Tesla not only built cars that are exciting to drive, cars that would compete with anything else on the road, but Tesla, importantly, in 2012, embarked on investing in a worldwide system of Tesla “Superchargers” to address the issue of range. 

We recently returned from a trip from Spokane to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in a full-on EV, a Tesla Model 3 (the economical version of a Tesla vehicle), that we’ve had for three years. With a range of nearly 300 miles on a full charge, the availability of electrical outlets at motels and some camp sites, and the ever-growing network of Tesla Superchargers (now including West Yellowstone MT and Jackson WY) acquiring “fuel” for the trip required only minimally more planning than with a carbon fueled vehicle.

For the first time since I’ve owned the Model 3 I explored what was available in non-Tesla Supercharger “fast” charging, what’s called Level 2, the only charging for other EVs that might undertake this trip (other than 110V, 15 amp conventional outlets at motels and homes). The disparate entities investing in the placement of these charging stations are no doubt motivated by noble intent (see Yellowstone Forever in Gardiner MT), but “filling up” a 100 mile battery at a Level 2 charger like this would take around four hours; chargers offered by different networks offer confusing directions (lack of standardization); and if your vehicle’s range is really only 100 miles, you’ll have a hard time making it through the parks before running out of electrons. Only a devoted EV nerd would attempt this trip in a vehicle dependent on the existing non-Tesla charging systems. It is hard not to suspect that the Big Three makers of carbon-fueled automakers are just fine with this, too.

On August 5th President Biden signed an aspirational executive order aimed at making electric vehicles half of all new vehicles sold in the United States by 2030. (The order also proposed new emissions standards to replace those Trump threw out during his administration.) According to Yahoo News:

Biden’s 50% goal, which is not legally binding, does have buy-in from Detroit’s Big Three: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, now a unit of Stellantis.

Conspicuously not invited to the signing ceremony was any representative of the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla Motors, a peculiar omission. 

With this executive order and the Big Three’s cooperation we’ll see American highways fill up with full-on electric vehicles (not just hybrids) in the next nine years, right? I wish I believed that, but I would be a fool to do so. Remember when mileage standards were introduced and the Big Three used a gaping loophole in the requirements to shift production to the gas and diesel-guzzling trucks that offered a better profit margin? 

The Big Three automakers have, for at least a century, invested in the technology to burn gasoline and diesel fuel to power transportation. Along with this investment, a huge and enormously lucrative infrastructure has developed to mine, refine (think Koch brothers), and distribute the fossil fuels that currently power most of our transportation. There is massive inertia in all this. 

EVs are not like smartphones. Smartphones filled a nearly virgin economic niche. Smartphones took advantage of a niche that almost entirely new—before smartphones there were cell phones, but there were no pocket dictionaries, encyclopedias, adaptive calendars or pocket entertainment centers. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and now, fourteen years later, smartphones are ubiquitous. They seem essential to daily life. 

In contrast, electric vehicles are filling a niche that is already fully occupied. EVs’ challenge is to replace methods of transportation deeply embedded in our way of life and the economics of every family, a niche occupied by enormous, decades-old corporations comfortable making vehicles powered by internal combustion engines that have consistently generated a profit for stockholders. To expect the Big Three to risk that profit on an electric vehicle future is like expecting a leopard to change its spots. 

If we are to achieve a low or no carbon future that might blunt the impending catastrophe of climate change, shifting to EVs from the internal combustion engine (and electrical power generation away from fossil fuels) is essential. Corporations deeply entrenched in the economics of fossil fuels cannot be expected to lead the charge. The shift will not happen without government intervention that standardizes a fast charging network similar to (and probably integrated with) Tesla’s Superchargers, a network supports efficient long distance travel. For government not to take the lead is to condemn EVs to a niche market local travel and, worse, to give up on addressing climate change. 

As long as Republicans (and a few Democrats, like Joe Manchin) who are wedded to and dependent on the fossil fuel companies, people who give only lip service (if that) to global warming, as long as these people remain in office, addressing the need for the standardization and provision of fast-charging infrastructure will not happen. Without such governmental standard setting and support a zero carbon future cannot occur. Keep that in mind as you contemplate for whom to vote in coming elections.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Corporations are only as good as the people who run them. I have no doubt of the good faith efforts to promote conversion to EVs of many people employed by the Big Three, but the soul of these corporations is wholly invested in the fossil fuel economy. These corporations, by flashily signing on to Biden’s aspirational executive offer are simply buying time. As corporations their motivation is guard the lucrative investments they’ve already made. 

Enchanted by the drug industry and an imagined free market

“Democrats’ Stumble on Drug Prices Shows Power of Industry” was a headline in the New York Times on September 15. Ironically, the photo at the top of the article featured featured our very own Cathy McMorris Rodgers (U.S. Rep, Congressional District 5, Eastern Washington):

The article focuses on three Democratic members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (or a sub-committee of that committee—the article is unclear) who voted against a proposal to rein in drug prices paid by Americans. They were Representatives Scott Peters of California, Kurt Schrader of Oregon and Kathleen Rice of New York. 

According to the article:

The United States pays higher prices for prescription drugs than any of its peers — about 250 percent of the price paid on average by other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, according to a recent report from the RAND Corporation. And those high costs ripple through the federal budget and the economy, increasing insurance premiums, and putting lifesaving medications out of reach for some patients.

Every American knows that ridiculous drug pricing is a major problem; a problem that was exacerbated when, in the lead up to passage of the Affordable Care Act ten years ago, the pharmaceutical lobby managed to induce legislators to strip from the measure the ability of Medicare to negotiate with drug companies on the basis of price. On September 15, the three Democratic committee members featured in the article voted “Nay” on measures which would have put forward into the 3.5 trillion dollar infrastructure bill drug expense savings of at least 500 billion dollars. 

McMorris Rodgers is the ranking (senior) member of the minority party (Republican) of the full House Energy and Commerce Committee. That also makes her an ex officio member of all the subcommittees of Energy and Commerce. McMorris Rodgers has voted against virtually all efforts to rein in drug prices for years. A statement on her website:

What we do know is, if H.R. 3 becomes law, we’d lose hope to cure cancer or treat genetic conditions. Instead of price controls, we should focus on the areas for bipartisan work.

H.R.3 is the “Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act”. McMorris Rodgers’ statement is the major talking point of the pharmaceutical industry, that paying (inflated) prices for drugs through Medicare and patients’ pocket is necessary to fuel pharmaceutical innovation. This is a talking point that totally ignores the exorbitant paychecks of pharmaceutical company executives and the drug company profits paid out to investors. Of course, the talking point is precisely in line with the Republican slavish fealty to the “free market” in health care—a complete illusion. A few years ago McMorris Rodgers claimed to be working very, very hard to rein in drug pricing (and helping preserve small pharmacies) with a bill that would trim the power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers—a tack of dubious value that never went anywhere. McMorris Rodgers was unable to move that bill or its successor in spite of the relatively prominent position she held for six years as Chair of the House Republican Conference (replaced by Liz Cheney—herself now also replaced). 

It is ironic that McMorris Rodgers’ drawn face appears at the top of this New York Times article, an article in which McMorris Rodgers is not mentioned by name. Instead, the article focuses on the three Democratic defectors presumably taken in by the same well-funded arguments of lobbyists for the drug companies that already dominate the minds of every Republican on the committee, every one of whom voted “Nay” on September 15. The New York Times writers are focused on the short term while ignoring the need to vote these Republicans out of office if any progress is to be made with any of this. 

In eastern Washington we need to focus not on the defector Democrats but on the block of Republican Representatives, including our own McMorris Rodgers, who are enthralled by the rhetoric of the pharmaceutical industry.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Epistemology

I have long been interested in how we know what we think we know (epistemology). I tried to write about epistemology and conspiracy theories in a post, Trust and Knowledge, a couple of years ago, but my writing pales next to Doug Muder’s thoughtful analysis in last Monday’s, September 13’s, Weekly Sift, On Doing Your Own Research. I’ve copied and pasted his post below. Once again, I highly recommended signing up to receive the one to three emails he sends out nearly every Monday morning. (Sign up here in the left hand column.) I look forward to his level-headed analysis every week.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

On Doing Your Own Research

by weeklysift

It’s easy to laugh at the conspiracy theorists. But our expert classes aren’t entitled to blind trust.

One common mantra among anti-vaxxers, Q-Anoners, ivermectin advocates, and conspiracy theorists of all stripes is that people need to “do their own research”. Don’t be a sheep who believes whatever the CDC or the New York Times or some other variety of “expert” tells you. If something is important, you need to look into it yourself.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of pushback memes. This one takes a humorous poke at the inflated view many people have of their intellectual abilities.

While this one is a bit more intimidating:

And this one is pretty in-your-face:

I understand and mostly agree with the point these memes are trying to make: There is such a thing as expertise, and watching a YouTube video is no substitute for a lifetime of study. In fact, few ideas are so absurd that you can’t make a case for them that is good enough to sound convincing for half an hour — as I remember from reading Erich von Daniken’s “ancient astronaut” books back in the 1970s.

Medical issues are particularly tricky, because sometimes people just get well (or die) for no apparent reason. Whatever they happened to be doing at the time looks brilliant (or stupid), when in fact it might have had nothing to do with anything. That’s why scientists invented statistics and double-blind studies and so forth — so they wouldn’t be fooled by a handful of fluky cases, or by their own desire to see some pattern that isn’t really there.

All the same, I cringe when one of these memes appears on my social media feed, because I know how they’ll be received by the people they target. The experts are telling them: “Shut up, you dummy, and believe what you’re told.”

They’re going to take that message badly, and I actually don’t blame them. Because there is a real crisis of expertise in the world today, and it didn’t appear out of nowhere during the pandemic. It’s been building for a long time.

Liberal skepticism. Because the Trump administration was so hostile to expertise, we now tend to think of viewing experts skeptically as a left/right issue. But it’s not. Go back, for example, and look at liberal Chris Hayes’ 2012 book The Twilight of the Elites. Each chapter of that book covers a different area in which some trusted corps of experts failed the public that put its faith them: Intelligence experts (and the journalists who covered them) assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Bankers drove the world economy into a ditch in 2008, largely because paper that turned out to be worthless was rated AAA. The Catholic priesthood, supposedly a guardian of morality for millions of Americans, was raping children and then covering it up.

Experts, it turns out, do have training and experience. But they also have class interests. Sometimes they’re looking out for themselves rather than for the rest of us.

More recently, we have discovered that military experts have been lying to us for years about the “progress” they’d made in promoting Afghan democracy and training an Afghan army to defend that democratic government.

It’s not hard to find economists who present capitalism as the only viable option for a modern economy, or who explain why we can’t afford to take care of all the sick people, or to prevent climate change from producing some apocalyptic future.

Such people are very good at talking down to the rest of us. But ordinary folks are less and less likely to take them seriously. And that’s good, sort of. You shouldn’t believe what people say just because they have a title or a degree.

If not expertise, what? So it’s not true that if you argue with a recognized expert, you’re automatically wrong. Unfortunately, though, recent events have shown us that a reflexive distrust of all experts creates even worse problems.

• It’s hard to estimate how many Americans have died of Covid because we haven’t been willing to follow expert advice about vaccination, masking, quarantining, and so on. Constructing such an estimate would itself require expertise I don’t have. But simply comparing our death totals to Canada’s (713 deaths per 100K people versus our 2034) indicates it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands.
• Our democracy is in trouble because large numbers of Americans are unwilling to accept election results, no matter how many times they get recounted by bipartisan panels of election supervisors.
• The growing menace of hurricanes and wildfires is the price we pay because the world (of which the US is a major part, and needs to play a leading role) refuses to act on what climate scientists have been telling us since the 1970s.

Without widespread belief in experts, the truth becomes a matter of tribalism (one side believes in fighting Covid and the other doesn’t), intimidation (Republicans who know better don’t dare tell Trump’s personality cult that he lost), or wishful thinking (nobody wants to believe we have to change our lives to cut carbon emissions).

Which one of us is Galileo? The foundational myth of modern science (Galileo saying “and yet it moves“) expresses faith in a reality beyond the power of kings and popes. People who have trained their minds to be objective can see that reality, while others are stuck either following or rebelling against authority.

The question is: Who is Galileo in the current controversies? Is it the scientific experts who have spent their lives training to see clearly in these situations? Or is it the populists, who refuse to bow to the authority of the expert class, and insist on “doing their own research”?

Simply raising that question points to a more nuanced answer than just “Shut up and believe what you’re told.”

Take me, for example. This blog arises from distrust of experts. After the Saddam’s-weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, I started looking deeper into the stories in the headlines. Because I was living in New Hampshire at the time, it was easy to go listen to the 2004 presidential candidates. Once I did, I noticed the media’s habit of fitting a speech into a predetermined narrative, rather than reporting what a candidate was actually saying. Then I started reading major court decisions (like the Massachusetts same-sex marriage decision of 2003), and interpreting them for myself.

In short, I was doing my own research. Some guy at CNN may have spent his whole life reporting on legal issues, but I was going to read the cases for myself.

When social media became a thing, and turned into an even bigger source of misinformation than the mainstream media had ever been, I began to look on this blog as a model for individual behavior: Don’t amplify claims without some amount of checking. (For example: In this weeks’ summary — the next post after this one — I was ready to blast Trump for ignoring all observances of 9-11. But then I discovered that he appeared by video at a rally organized by one of his supporters on the National Mall. I’m not shy about criticizing Trump, but facts are facts.) Listen to criticism from commenters and thank them when they catch one of your mistakes. Change your opinions when the facts change.

But also notice the things that I don’t do: When my wife got cancer, we didn’t design her treatment program by ourselves. We made value judgments about what kinds of sacrifices we were willing to make for her treatment (a lot, as it turned out), but left the technical details to our doctors. At one point we felt that a doctor was a little too eager to get my wife into his favorite clinical trial, so we got a second opinion and ultimately changed doctors. But we didn’t ditch Western medicine and count on Chinese herbs or something. (She’s still doing fine 25 years after the original diagnosis.)

On this blog, I may not trust the New York Times and Washington Post to decide what stories are important and what they mean, but I do trust them on basic facts. If the NYT puts quotes around some words, I believe that the named person actually said those words (though I may check the context). If the WaPo publishes the text of a court decision, I believe that really is the text. And so on.

I also trust the career people in the government to report statistics accurately. The political appointees may spin those numbers in all sorts of ways, but the bureaucrats in the cubicles are doing their best.

In the 18 years I’ve been blogging, that level of trust has never burned me.

Where I come from. So the question isn’t “Do you trust anybody?” You have to; the world is just too big to figure it all out for yourself. Instead, the question is who you trust, and what you trust them to do.

My background gives me certain advantages in answering those questions, because I have a foot in both camps. Originally, I was a mathematician. I got a Ph.D. from a big-name university and published a few articles in some prestigious research journals (though not for many years now). So I understand what it means to do actual research, and to know things that only a handful of other people know. At the same time, I am not a lawyer, a doctor, a political scientist, an economist, a climate scientist, or a professional journalist. So just about everything I discuss in this blog is something I view from the outside.

I don’t, for example, have any inside knowledge about public health or infectious diseases or climate science. But I do know a lot about the kind of people who go into the sciences, and about the social mores of the scientific community. So when I hear about some vast conspiracy to inflate the threat of Covid or climate change, I can only shake my head. I can picture how many people would necessarily be involved in such a conspiracy, and who many of them would have to be. It’s absurd.

In universities and labs all over the world, there are people who would love to be the one to expose the “hoax” of climate change, or to discover the simple solution that means none of us have to change our lifestyle. You couldn’t shut them up by shifting research funding, you’d need physical concentration camps, and maybe gas chambers. The rumors of people vanishing into those camps would spread far enough that I would hear them.

I haven’t.

Not all experts deserve our skepticism. Similarly, one of my best friends and two of my cousins are nurses. I know the mindset of people who go into medicine. So the idea that hospitals all over the country are faking deaths by the hundreds of thousands, or that ICUs are only pretending to be jammed with patients — it’s nuts.

If you’ve ever planned a surprise party, you know that conspiracies of just a dozen or so people can be hard to manage. Now imagine conspiracies that involve tens of thousands, most of whom were once motivated by ideals completely opposite to the goals of the conspiracy.

It doesn’t happen.

I have a rule of thumb that has served me well over the years: You don’t always have to follow the conventional wisdom, but when you don’t you should know why.

Lots of expert classes have earned our distrust. But some haven’t. They’re not all the same. And even the bankers and the priests have motives more specific than pure evil. If they wouldn’t benefit from some conspiracy, they’re probably not involved.

Know thyself. As you divide up the world between things you’re going to research yourself and things you’re going to trust to someone else, the most important question you need to answer is: What kind of research can you reasonably do? (Being trained to read mathematical proofs made it easy for me to read judicial opinions. I wouldn’t have guessed that, but it turned out that way.)

That’s what’s funny about the cartoon at the top: This guy thinks he credibly competes with the entire scientific community (and expects his wife to share that assessment of his abilities).

My Dad (who I think suspected from early in my life that he was raising a know-it-all) often said to me: “Everybody in the world knows something you don’t.” As I got older, I realized that the reverse is also true: Just about all of us have some experience that gives us a unique window on the world. You don’t necessarily need a Ph.D. to see something most other people miss.

But at the same time, often our unique windows point in the wrong direction entirely. My window, for example, tells me very little about what Afghans are thinking right now. If I want to know, I’m going to have to trust somebody a little closer to the topic.

And if I’m going to be a source of information rather than misinformation, I’ll need to account for my biases. Tribalism, intimidation, and wishful thinking affect everybody. A factoid that matches my prior assumptions a little too closely is exactly the kind of thing I need to check before I pass it on. Puzzle pieces that fit together too easily have maybe been shaved a little; check it out.

So sure: Do your own research. But also learn your limitations, and train yourself to be a good researcher within those boundaries. Otherwise, you might be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.