What happens if the cops can’t catch the creep threatening our schools?

Classes cannot be canceled forever. Or, as a practical matter, not for much longer. Children must be educated. Community activities must resume. Our daily round must be restored, even if it is at higher risk of disruption than before.

Will schools reopen with beefed-up security?

Will a false alarm be declared? Sheriff Curry, reports the Missoulian, now says ““Based upon our estimation, without revealing any details of the investigation, we certainly feel that there is a credible threat, or at least a potentially credible threat.”

A potentially credible threat? That’s an artful phrase. To me, it’s a predicate for a face saving statement to the effect of “Folks, we can finally relax. A diligent investigation revealed this was a clever hoax. We’re sorry for the disruption, but to play it safe we had to take it seriously. That’s our job.”

Meanwhile, the nature of the alleged threat is still being withheld from the public. I’ve been advised that this is standard procedure, which it undoubtedly is, and that being deprived of the facts is nothing to be concerned about, which is nonsense. When a county shuts down its schools, a city (Whitefish) bolts the door to city hall, businesses cancel sales (the Sportsman Ski Haus), public events are canceled (the oil and water don’t mix program sponsored by Trout Unlimited, et al), the public needs to know why.

Most threats are hoaxes. The damage done is from the reaction to the threat, not from the threat’s being carried out. If someone decides to blow up a school, he’s going to plant the bomb, light the fuse, and perhaps make a last minute warning call from an untraceable burner phone. He’s not, with one exception, going to reduce the probability of success by issuing a threat.

The exception is an attempt to extort money, to force the release of a prisoner, or to force a change in public policy. Because Sheriff Curry and school officials are being so tight-lipped, we cannot rule out the possibility that someone is trying to extort money by threatening to blow up a school, shoot a student, or do another bad thing. Our schools, of course, by being shut down, are being held hostage right now.

If this is attempted extortion, our law enforcers could be stalling for time while they attempt to capture the extortionist. They could also be stalling for time while they raise the ransom (which might have to be paid in Bitcoin).

But doing all that while keeping the public ignorant stands democracy on its head.

Public officials must hold themselves accountable to the public. That requires releasing information the public needs to evaluate the decisions and conduct of those officials. If information can be kept secret while a school system is shut down, the doors to city hall are locked, and commerce is curtailed, because of fears of something that’s unknown but is alleged to exist, we’re living in a police state, not in a democracy.

Permalink

What does withholding the nature of the
threat that closed Flathead schools accomplish?

All schools in the Flathead, public and private, and Flathead Valley Community College, are closed today because someone sent the schools email and text messages threatening to do something bad. According to the Flathead Beacon, “persons of interest” are being interviewed by the county sheriff and the FBI.

Because the investigation is in progress, the public and parents are being kept ignorant of the nature of the threat. That’s the official justification for keeping secret what the texter/emailer threatened to do.

Yet, the person who made the threats knows what he threatened to do. So do school authorities and law enforcement agents. How would the investigation be harmed by releasing what was threatened to be done?

Unofficially, of course, keeping parents and the public ignorant of the nature of the threat deprives them of the information they need to assess the judgment of school officials and law enforcers. “Trust us,” demand the agents of ignorance, “we know what we’re doing and we have everyone’s best interests at heart.”

Most people will trust the authorities, and trust them blindly. The specter of children being harmed always causes parents and decent citizens to demand erring on the side of safety — to demand a risk free environment, which is an impossibility — and school administrators, skilled in covering their backsides, are happy to oblige.

But keeping the public ignorant, an objective not found in education’s mission statement, invites speculation, may leave people more fearful than the facts warrant, and generates resentment toward, and mistrust of, authority.

Permalink

The Flathead’s Birch Grove private air quality monitoring station

Approximately four kilometers southwest of Glacier International Airport, a citizen scientist has installed two meteorological stations that display realtime results for temperature, humidity, and wind (Birch Grove 1, published at the Weather Underground), and suspended particulates (Birch Grove 2, published at Purple Air).

There are numerous private wind, temperature, and humidity, stations in the Flathead, many connected to the U.S. Weather Service’s Mesonet. But private particulate monitoring stations are rare. Indeed, Birch Grove 2 may be unique to the Flathead.

Birch Grove 2 employs low cost (<$500) equipment manufactured by Purple Air. Thus far, 564 Purple Air particulate monitors have been installed around the world, but mostly in the United States. There are two in Montana: Kalispell and Helena.

The low cost of Purple Air’s equipment could initiate a paradigm shift in air quality monitoring. If the equipment proves durable, and the measurements accurate and reliable, a grid of air quality monitors of the Purple Air genre could be installed in the Flathead Valley for a few thousand dollars. Being able to check the PM 2.5 realtime reports for the grid nodes closest to home would liberate the Flathead’s population from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s single station for their PM 2.5 data.

If anyone does undertake such a project, the funder should require that the realtime data be available to the public in real time, and not hoarded by academic researchers seeking the glory of being the first to publish.

Permalink

Grant Kier announces for Congress on the day
Hillary Clinton’s I was Robbed! book is released

Is this a coincidence? Perhaps not. Kier, reports the Missoulian’s Holly K. Michels, this evening will formally announce his entry into the Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives. His leap into the ring follows John Heenan’s, and they may be joined by State Rep. Tom Woods, Bozeman, and former State Senator Lynda Moss, Billings.

Heenan supports single-payer health care. Kier apparently does not, Michels reported:

Hillary Clinton, of course, not only opposed single-payer health care, but during her campaign against Bernie Sanders actively attempted to discredit the idea of single-payer health care, a policy — and political — choice that kept her in good standing with the health insurance industry and the manufacturers of prescription drugs. Heenan supports single-payer, and thus is courting Democrats aligned with Bernie Sanders. Kier, therefore, may be brushing single-payer aside to appease the Clinton wing of the party, which still cuddles up to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Kier may have a campaign website — an anonymous person registered kierforcongress.com — but as of 1700 today it showed only a looping video of a kitten playing on a kitchen table.

Hillary — settling scores by throwing her book at everyone

Hillary Clinton ran for President for one reason, and one reason only: to be the first woman elected as President of the United States. She tried cloaking her gender based candidacy in dozens of position papers, but her fundamental message, not always concealed, was “Vote for me because I’m a woman; because it’s my turn; because I’m a woman.” She ran a strategically and tactically incompetent campaign, proudly crowing she would put a lot of coal miners out of work, and disparaging white working class voters she needed in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, as racist and homophobic deplorables.

But will she accept responsibility for her defeat? Oh, no; hell no. She’s convinced she would have won if Bernie hadn’t bashed her during the primary; if the Russians hadn’t tampered with her campaign and the DNC; if FBI director Jim Comey had kept his mouth shut; if sexist men, and in her worldview all men are sexist, hadn’t voted against her because she was a woman. Her loss was everyone’s damn fault except her own. She wuz robbed!

In my view, she never should have been nominated. She was too old, running for the wrong reasons, and temperamentally unsuited to the job she sought. Yet, if Tim Kaine had been at the top of the ticket, and she had settled for second, I think she probably now would be vice president.

If you want to read What Happened to try to understand Hillary and how she feels, by all means do so. But if you want to know what really happened, read Shattered, by Allen and Parnes.

To borrow a verse from Jimmy Buffet:

It’s Hillary’s claim,
That Jim Comey’s to blame.
But we know: ‘twas her own damn fault.

Permalink

Another Flathead Valley football smoke bowl is averted

Two years ago, in a fit of football über studenten sicherheit, football crazed Glacier High School played a football game in the smoke at Concussion Flats (aka Legends Field) in Kalispell despite an air quality designation of Very Unhealthy at the kickoff.

There was no Smoke Bowl in Kalispell last week. Glacier was in Bozeman, where the air was suitable for heavy breathing. And it’s possible school officials came to their senses sufficiently to subordinate athletic entertainment to protecting the health of student athletes and high school football fans. I hope so, but in my experience, high school coaches and administrators are slow learners these matters.

Whether there were no games by accident, or by design, it’s good the football flats were unoccupied last Friday — the air in the Flathead was twice as bad as it was two years ago (2015 graphs).

Highway 93 at 1633 MDT on 5 September.

…read the rest

Admiral Nimitz’s wisdom on preparing for heavy weather

When a hurricane, a forest fire, or high water, approaches, do smart people wait until the roof rattles, they choke on smoke, or water laps at their door, before they reef the sails, batten down the hatches, wrap their house for fire, cancel athletic events, evacuate, or head for high ground?

No.

By then it is too late. They must act while they still can.

After losing three destroyers in the typhoon of 18 December 1944, a storm sometimes called Halsey’s Typhoon, and the storm in which Captain Queeg was removed in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet, issued a letter made famous by its timeless wisdom on when to prepare for adverse weather. Nimitz’s final paragraph should be the forward to every disaster preparation plan, and read by every official faced with the dilemma of needing to act to prevent harm, but not wanting to act too soon lest the expected crisis, such as playing a high school football game in dense smoke, not materialize

If Saturday is a smokeless, sunny, clean air, day, consider Nimitz’s wisdom before castigating decision makers as frightened old fools because they canceled marathons, dragon boat races, and track meets, in the expectation that the Flathead’s air would be fouled with very unhealthy smoke.

Permalink

Did a Montana newspaper commit the
largest numerical error in journalism history?

In all likelihood, yes — and the honor belongs to the now defunct Kalispell Weekly News. Here’s what happened.

Fine volcanic ash reached the Flathead less than a day after Mount St. Helens erupted on 18 May 1980. Very fine, but gritty, it filled the Flathead Valley with a powdery tan cloud, limiting visibility, and giving the air a heavy feeling when breathed (that didn’t stop some fools from jogging).

Rough measurements produced startling, four-figure, values for suspended particulates, which are reported as micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m^3). In Kalispell, the peak particulate concentration was 7,355 µg/m^3.

But the KWN’s reporter, a competent journalist working under great stress and unfamiliar with air quality issues, reported the value as 7,355 megagrams per cubic inch (I’m working from memory, as I think I discarded the clipping). That translates to 449 million kilograms per cubic meter, 80,000 times the density of the planet Earth, and half the density of a white dwarf star (but just one-millionth the density of a neutron star).

I reckon the error as 12 orders of magnitude, but urge readers to make their own calculations and to let me know if I missed the mark, and so, by how much.

Permalink

Note to readers

I expect to begin posting again tomorrow. The effects of a virus I’ve been fighting were compounded by this week’s awful air quality, and I just haven’t had the energy to concentrate on writing. Thanks for reading Flathead Memo. James Conner.

Tornow missed 14 August withdrawal deadline

Yesterday, Tom Tornow announced he’s withdrawing as a candidate for municipal judge in Whitefish. He’s shut down his campaign’s website and suspended campaigning — but his name will be on the 7 November ballot because he missed the 14 August deadline for having his name struck from the ballot. He’ll receive some votes, and in a close election between Kristi Curtis and William Hileman, Jr., those votes could determine the election’s outcome.

There’s undoubtedly a backstory to his belated decision to stop campaigning that was not addressed in his withdrawal announcement. Perhaps that will be revealed in the coming weeks. In the meantime, he deserves the thanks of his community for standing for election and for his efforts to make Whitefish a better place to live.

Permalink

Sperry Chalet probably won’t be rebuilt

The old chalet burned down yesterday, its tinder dry wood ignited by the Sprague Fire. No one was injured. Many were saddened by the demise of the chalet, which has a large and relatively well-heeled constituency, and which is a relic of the European “all this luxury in wilderness” style of backcountry visitation that dominated the early days of Glacier and many large national parks. Quite likely, there will be a campaign to rebuild the chalet.

In the anti-wilderness Trump administration, anything is possible, but the likelihood the chalet will be rebuilt is low. Rebuilding would be extremely expensive. More important, the location isn’t suitable for a chalet. Were the site now unoccupied, even a backcountry campground there might not pass environmental muster, and a new chalet never would be approved. The National Park Service should knock down the stones that didn’t burn, remove the trash, restore the site to its pre-chalet condition, and ban horses from the trail. That will require money, and probably entail some unpleasant skirmishes with the historic preservation zealots, but it’s the best solution for the park and future generations.

Permalink