Trego's Mountain Ear

This is a reminder of my time in the academy, and of some of the things I saw some colleagues publishing – while the university system does operate under the idea of publish or perish, some of the publications and research projects do require kindness when reading. Calvin’s title reminds me of someone’s dissertation.

This system gives direct power to the people. Everyone votes on decisions in public meetings.

It sounds ideal.

But in Eureka, where only 8 to 24 people typically attend, it doesn’t work the way people imagine.

Instead of the whole community deciding, you end up with:

• A very small group making decisions
• Strong personalities carrying more influence
• Outcomes shaped by who shows up, not the full town

This creates a different kind of problem:
Not official corruption, but informal influence and pressure.

If participation were high, this system could work well. With low turnout, it gives too much power to too few people.

Bottom line: High transparency in theory, but not effective with low participation.

I’ve seen polls that show Iran is 98% Muslim. 99.98% if you take the official 2011 Census. On the other hand, social media polls show Iranians as between 32 and 38% Shia Muslims.

Iran shows one of the big problems with polling – if a pollster calls on the telephone, he or she already has my number. It isn’t much of a problem to learn my name and address. Many of the pollsters call and want to speak to Michael – they already know my name as well as my phone number. There is no anonymity in telephone polling. I watched polls in South Dakota that were intensively anti-abortion proven invalid by elections turning down the same laws that the pollsters supported. People don’t tell pollsters what they’re really thinking without anonymity. Heck, I’ve gotten to the point of, when a pollster asks for Michael, putting a sad note into my voice and explaining that he’s dead. We’ll see if that reduces the interruptions as we move into this next election cycle.

So how should I understand Iran’s religion under the Islamic Republic? All Arab News quotes Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi as saying that 50,000 of the country’s 75,000 mosques have closed their doors. He made his speech hoping for more government money to support the mosques – but when the official sources say that two thirds of the mosques are closed, and the social media polls identify somewhere on the close order of a third being Shia Muslims, that’s kind of a correlation. I suspect the Islamic Republic is a minority rule – a plurality at best – and has been for a long time.

Javier Milei describes the change in his view of the left after moving from being an Econ professor to head of state:

Geography matters in government. It keeps mattering after the geography has changed, and government has became habitual, ignoring how changes in transportation – both methods and terrain – have made past decisions and methods counterproductive.

Let me start in my backyard. Trego, School District 53, was created in 1904, when it was still part of Flathead County. Just before he left the Great Northern to develop the route for the Panama Canal, John Frank Stevens had located the Point of Rocks – a small area along the Stillwater River where they could lay railroad tracks and bring the rails through the Kootenai Valley – an area that was primarily accessible through Canada. School District 53 existed at the beginning of the boom town phase that built Trego.

That early school board created an approach to education that lasted them for about fifty years – building a school where it was needed. Between 1904 and 1960, School District 53 included Stryker School, Swamp Creek School, Edna Creek School and Trego School. Around 1960, the district dropped to a single school. The map hadn’t changed, but improved gravel roads had made transporting students a practical option. Additionally, the cost of setting up a one-room school had increased substantially, as electricity became available in 1948, making the expectation of electric lights and running water normal for a school. (Trego school kept it’s outhouses until the mid-sixties, just in case.) The geography of a remote area, where it was cheaper to build and staff a one-room school than to gravel the roads developed a unique approach to schools.

On the other hand, the West Kootenai now operates with no public schools. It wasn’t always so – when Tooley Lake school consolidated with Rexford, it was a relatively short trip down the hill, across the bridge, and into the school at old Rexford. (Rexford is the only town in the county that has moved three times) It made sense – there was a relatively brief bus ride to a larger school.

In the West Kootenai geography and demographics changed. With Libby Dam and Koocanusa Reservoir, the bridge moved south – and then Rexford school merged with Eureka, to turn a short bus ride into a 25 mile or more each way commute to school. The West Kootenai now has a large Anabaptist (Amish) community. While many Montana counties are accustomed to providing pubic schools to Hutterite communities, Lincoln County does not have such a tradition – which means that inertia keeps public school service to the West Kootenai just as consolidation left it over a half-century ago. No condemnations – just that Eureka’s school board and teachers both have limited experience with providing public schools to Anabaptist communities. (To be completely fair, Lincoln County went through a long time of delegating the County School Superintendent duties to the County Treasurer. ) There has been no motivation to change the West Kootenai public school situation to reflect the changed geography and demography.

Lincoln County was set up in 1909 so that most of the communities (excepting Yaak and Sylvanite) would be connected by the railroad, and all would be in the Kootenai drainage. Libby Dam, and the (second) railroad relocation around 1970 eliminated the railroad relocation and almost all of the Kootenai River towns. The geography had changed. Perhaps that was when the county commissioners should have realized that Lincoln County had been gutshot, and the changed geography meant the county could no longer function as planned. Perhaps, had they realized the problems that the changed geography brought, it might have been a good time to split into a pair of smaller counties. People tend to fixate on the boundary lines on a map – and the map is not the territory.