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Nathan Lewis
Nathan Lewis (independent) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent Texas' 19th Congressional District. He lost in the general election on November 5, 2024.
Lewis completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Nathan Lewis was born in Aurora, Nebraska. He earned a high school diploma from Beaver City High School. His career experience includes working as a nonprofit founder. He has been affiliated with Share the Light Solar Nonprofit, Lubbock Democratic Socialists of America, and Citizens' Climate Lobby.[1]
Elections
2024
See also: Texas' 19th Congressional District election, 2024
Texas' 19th Congressional District election, 2024 (March 5 Republican primary)
General election
General election for U.S. House Texas District 19
Incumbent Jodey Arrington defeated Nathan Lewis and Bernard Johnson in the general election for U.S. House Texas District 19 on November 5, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Jodey Arrington (R) | 80.7 | 214,950 |
 | Nathan Lewis (Independent)  | 10.3 | 27,461 | |
 | Bernard Johnson (L) | 9.0 | 23,964 | |
| Total votes: 266,375 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for U.S. House Texas District 19
Incumbent Jodey Arrington defeated Chance Ferguson, Vance Boyd, and Ryan Zink in the Republican primary for U.S. House Texas District 19 on March 5, 2024.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jodey Arrington | 83.5 | 70,705 |
 | Chance Ferguson | 7.5 | 6,316 | |
 | Vance Boyd | 6.0 | 5,116 | |
 | Ryan Zink | 3.1 | 2,586 | |
| Total votes: 84,723 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Libertarian convention
Libertarian convention for U.S. House Texas District 19
Bernard Johnson advanced from the Libertarian convention for U.S. House Texas District 19 on March 23, 2024.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | Bernard Johnson (L) |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Lewis in this election.
Pledges
Lewis signed the following pledges.
2022
See also: Texas' 19th Congressional District election, 2022
General election
General election for U.S. House Texas District 19
Incumbent Jodey Arrington defeated Nathan Lewis in the general election for U.S. House Texas District 19 on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jodey Arrington (R) | 80.3 | 152,321 |
| Nathan Lewis (Independent) | 19.7 | 37,360 | |
| Total votes: 189,681 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Jay Ford (Independent)
Republican primary election
Republican primary for U.S. House Texas District 19
Incumbent Jodey Arrington advanced from the Republican primary for U.S. House Texas District 19 on March 1, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Jodey Arrington | 100.0 | 68,503 |
| Total votes: 68,503 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2024
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Nathan Lewis completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2024. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Lewis' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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- Greed is not a virtue, no matter how many people wish it to be so. Greed does not mean ambition, desire or achievement-at least in the way I think most people understand those terms.
Donald Trump in 2014- "My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy." Nancy Pelosi in 2021- "They [Congresspeople] should be able to participate in that [trading stock]." It should be about trust, no? Is there a deficit of trust in America? With our lawmakers? Shouldn't our most powerful leaders be our simplest servants?
I live a modest life, but I'm willing to work for minimum wage or nothing at all. - The type of two party system which is present in America is an outlier. It helps drive the 'Us vs. Them' dynamic at play in almost every issue. Demonization of the 'other'. We need reforms like the Fair Representation Act which would bring us closer to the Representational Democracies present in most other developed countries. Eliminates the 'picking the worst of two evils' that so many people feel when going into the voting booth, and may get some people to think that they can pick someone who represents them better. Ranked choice voting, approval voting, scored voting. We can do better.
- We are all going to die at some point, so what else is there other than trying to make the World a better place than how we found it? If we don't leave a sustainable, stable backdrop, everything we have worked for, built, and the influence we've had on others will be lost forever. Abundance not scarcity. There is no shortage of money, resources, intellect, time or courage to do what we need to do. 'Money is a man-made device, and for an entire economy to be perpetually in the position of not being able to do what it wants, simply for lack of bits of paper with numbers on them, is strong evidence that the shortage of those bits of paper and numbers lacks all validity.'- Michael Rowbotham 'The Grip of Death'
- Who you love-how you identify-you are an equal member of society and our laws should reflect that.
- Term limits-one step to limit political power
- By the same token-limits on wealth-
Jefferson-'the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property'
- Encourage direct democracy through citizen led ballot initiatives and workplace democracy through employee owned businesses and nonprofit formation
- Abundance not scarcity-mental health, drug abuse, homelessness-there is no shortage of resources to mobilize
Fundraising is not one of those activities, but numerous reports have highlighted how much time most current members from both parties devote to it. I refuse. I will spend my time, and direct staff to spend their time on the above work. We won't meet only with lobbyists and insiders-everyone deserves a response-including people who reach out online through social media. I've considered a 'lottery' system to fill some of the staff positions with 'ordinary' people from the district. Citizens need to be more connected to the work that goes on in Washington. The barriers to entry should not be as high as they are.
The House holds the 'Power of the Purse'. If more representatives understood monetary theory better, they wouldn't keep having these ridiculous debt ceiling debates. The federal government can never go bankrupt in it's own currency. No economist would ever say that. I'm tired of these juvenile clashes over nothing of substance.
One simple way that I hope to inspire trust I've mentioned elsewhere. I am poor by almost anyone's standards, but I am more than willing to take minimum wage or no pay at all. I intend to be fully transparent. This is how I have lived my first 48 years and I don't intend to change.
We need a spiritual reawakening.
Regardless, she was an inspiration for performing a critical role despite many trials. I came away truly impressed by her resilience and even more upset at our elected leaders and their callous disregard.
So yes, I would sit down in a room and talk with people that I otherwise didn't have a lot of respect for if I thought there was reason to believe that so doing could lead to better outcomes in the long run.
I'd be happy to serve on any committee, but Ethics, Oversight and Accountability, Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce may top the list. I've committed to either taking no salary or minimum wage. Of course, no investments. No one should have to wonder if their Congressperson has money as their master.
It is beyond essential that lawmakers bend over backwards to regain trust. Unfortunately, way too many seem to think greed is more important.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Campaign website
Lewis' campaign website stated the following:
| “ |
Self Reflection
But most of us either don't have the time, don't want to wait for a tree to grow, don't own the property, don't like pecans, or a hundred other reasons.
Our consumerist and debt-based society has left many of us discombobulated. Many would like to grow a garden, or fix our own car, or learn something new—how to weld, how to knit, how to play the piano, how to speak Russian, how to put up solar panels, how to communicate better with our partners or our parents or kids, how to make a video game, how to... whatever... These aren't worthless endeavors, but often the only way we can pursue these dreams is if they are part of a job. And then, they are often not self-directed—which means a lot of the challenge and purpose is lost. Much of my life has been devoted to understanding why this tension exists and if it's necessary. Work—our paid work—is necessary, no? Well, certainly some of it is—certain people feed us, keep our houses warm, bring water to the tap. But if you're like me, many of our jobs have been... well... perhaps not as necessary... perhaps even superfluous or sometimes even counter to our dreams. In other words, not only do we often hate our jobs because they may be hard or dirty or whatever, but we also think the job shouldn't be done. This is not a good situation. How did we get to this point in history? Greed is not a virtue, no matter how much some would wish it so. Greed does not mean ambition, desire or achievement- at least in the way I think most people understand those terms.
Matthew 6:19: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal."
Mark 10:25: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Donald Trump: "My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy."
Joe Biden: "I think you should be able to become a billionaire and a millionaire."
Nancy Pelosi on lawmakers trading stock: "We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that."
We can't take it with us when we go. What else is there than leaving the World a better place than how we found it?
Getting to Pelosi's statement more specifically with regard to lawmakers—you all are some of the most powerful people in the World. It's about trust. Donald Trump—'No one wants to see my taxes.' It's about trust. Hillary Clinton not releasing her Goldman Sachs speeches. It's about trust.
Is there a deficit of trust in today's World?
That being said, I don't think most people are driven first and foremost by greed. When Bob says to his co-worker, "Tom does way less work than I do, but gets paid way more.", this isn't primarily an argument about wanting more, it's an argument about justice. Bob and Tom could be making slave wages or be hedge fund managers.
This type of localized concern about justice can be comforting if we blind ourselves to the World around us. What are our duties to those we have never met? Which people count as 'us' and 'them'? Should there be an 'us and 'them'? This is the realm of religion and the realm of politics. The realm of economics and education. Of law and foreign affairs. The realm of self-reflection. Briefly on Alasdair MacIntyre's economics Money
There's often this disconnect between the economics in our personal lives (like the decision on whether to install solar) and the larger macroeconomic terms that get thrown around like GDP, inflation, the FED debt, and the 'economy' itself. I labeled this section 'Money' instead of 'Economy' because the latter means a hundred different things to a hundred different people. The 'economy' has a very different meaning to someone living on the streets than it does for someone in a corporate boardroom. It's a buzzword that we should be very hesitant in using without further explanation. Money, on the other hand, is a man-made creation with largely specific origins. Most all of us in this part of the World use the U.S. dollar for almost all of our transactions. The history of the U.S. dollar has largely been written down and can be analyzed...
Can the Federal government go bankrupt? Jodey Arrington often says so—timestamp around 1:10. I don't know if he really believes that, but even Rush Limbaugh knew that was BS: "How many years have people tried to scare everybody about [the deficit]? How many years, how many decades have politicians tried to scare us about the deficit, the national debt, (Sen. Jim Sasser pronunciation) "the dafycit," any number of things? Yet here we're still here, and the great jaws of the deficit have not bitten off our heads and chewed them up and spit them out." Rush is right. If you want a more academic take you can look at this clip where Donald Trump also lets the cat out of the bag. The Federal government issues the U.S. dollar... they can't go bankrupt. If you could 'print' your own money, could you go bankrupt? So politicians need to stop scaring us that way. But wait, you might say...maybe we can't go bankrupt, but we can sure end up like Zimbabwe, or Greece, or the Weimar Republic— HYPERINFLATION!! Oh no!! Anything is always possible, but if you look at all those cases, you'll see that there was a tremendous loss of productive capacity. I like to look at it this way: if you are a small country, or a country like Germany after WWI where you have had much of your infrastructure destroyed or you have to give resources away to France, why would anyone (foreign or domestic) want your currency if you have nothing they want to buy? What are the real resources—physical, human, technological, climatological, etc... that your country has to offer? In the end, it's not the currency that matters, it's what lies behind it. So... I hope we haven't gotten to a point in this country where people think we don't have anything to offer in the U.S. As one example, West Texas is on the southwest corner of one of the most productive agricultural regions of the World. Wait, wait... We are having inflation (written January 2022). True, so what's the cause? Jodey has his ideas that seem to revolve around the idea that Congressional spending=inflation. Put aside the fact that this idea of spending on things like the military is never questioned with respect to inflation, is his premise right? The attached video goes into the case. I like to start where prices are actually set. Sellers set prices. Usually businesses are the sellers. Sometimes governments, sometimes individuals, but usually businesses. Who has the greatest pricing power of those sellers? Not the small farm or business owner. Maybe not even regional or statewide sellers. At the top of the food chain are the multinational corporations. Profit Inflation is Real. Let's see how their profits are doing during the last few years—lumber, used cars, oil, shipping, meat packers, etc... Furthermore, inflation isn't the same everywhere around the World- even in places that have some of the largest deficits. Perhaps there's more to it? Not all Countries-Japan 'Entrenched expectations built up through decades of little to no inflation play a big role in explaining why rising producer costs have not fed through to consumer prices. Domestic companies are notoriously unwilling to pass on increases in the prices of imports to consumers.'
'Behind all of this are demands from Wall Street investors and analysts, who will explicitly punish companies that don’t step up and gouge their customers. When Target said it would not raise prices after exceeding its profit estimate, its stock sank.' Not all Lawmakers "This is one thing we have to do," said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., chief sponsor of the bill that for the first time would create a federal law on energy price gouging. The legislation is supported by state attorneys general. "American consumers are demanding protection from price gouging," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., in floor debate. Climate And the never ending fences and howl of dogs that remind us that we sometimes just barely tolerate each other. I have thousands of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets about climate change, energy infrastructure and related issues from the last six years. It's not difficult to see that it has played a major part in my thinking, not only the last six years, but really the last 15-20 years.
For me, it really boils down to the saying,
We all die at some point, what else is there than to try and make the World a better place than how we found it?
For at least the last 30 years, almost all climate scientists have been in near unanimity that we are failing in spectacular fashion in keeping the Earth's climate stable compared to how it has been over human history. I wasn't always completely convinced. Even after I had changed my life in many ways to try to live with lower emissions, I was thinking ten years or so ago that...maybe...maybe...there was a 'pause' (as Ted Cruz continuously would go on about). Turns out Ted and I were wrong, and the climate scientists were right. Their models have been very good in almost every way. If anything, there have sometimes been underestimates. I think most people, regardless of what they may say around certain people, alone with their own thoughts know that the majority of climate scientists aren't in on a massive conspiracy. Most surveys agree. Studies also show that even here in West Texas, most people believe humans are causing climate change and want the government to do something about it. The loudest voices on TV and radio like to mock or demonize ideas like the Green New Deal or whatever to boost ratings, but the vast majority of people would love for this to be in the past someday. Unfortunately, like termites eating at your house that go untreated, the problem persists and gets worse.
Feel free to argue with me on Facebook or Twitter or call me up and tell me to go to hell. I don't think I have any alternatives at this point in my life other than to give a shit from here on out. If that means endless arguments, begging, guilt tripping, or whatever... so be it. There's a good chance I hate all this more than you do, but neither one of us hates it as much as the people that are dying and will die from our actions or inaction. I would love to go back to ignoring you and you probably feel the same way about me, but it doesn't happen by magic, and you can't wish it away. The video on the right was a response to the Democratic National Committee thinking of penalizing candidates for having their own climate debate in 2019. Voting
".. dead people voted, I think the number is close to 5,000," Trump told Raffensperger. "They went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. A minimum is close to about 5,000." The actual number was 4.
Multiple other lines of evidence:
200 Tweet thread directly after the election giving evidence against many of the allegations of fraud from Trump and assoicates. AZ election Four years later and the false claims continue.
Time after time, Trump appointed election officials or judges have refuted Trump's claims. As just one example out of dozens: Derek Lyons, who was White House staff secretary and counselor to Trump, testified that, at a meeting about a month and a half after Election Day, top White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann “told the group, the President included, that, you know, none of those allegations had been substantiated to the point where they could be the basis for any litigation challenge to the election.” Knowing that all of these top Trump officials and judges were saying there was no basis for challenge, Congressman Arrington stayed silent or helped fan the flames of deceit.
In his letter objecting to certifying the election, Arrington never really specifies what he thinks might be fraudulent, other than to claim that Trump would have won if some of the court cases would have went the other way- which I have seen no evidence of. Just because a bunch of your constituents might think something is true, does not make it so, and you should use the opportunity to educate and not to pander to misinformation. He had two months to look into the claims brought by Trump before the certification. Has he ever stated a position on whether he thinks the election was 'stolen'? Will any of the local press ever make him take a position? Will he ever have to explain why he knows (or thought he knew) more than all the Trump appointed election officials and judges? I have done some work the last few years in the Lubbock County Elections Office. Almost universally, the staff seems to have conducted themselves with integrity. Why are Trump and his defenders only interested in auditing the places he lost? Justice is supposed to be blind.
Arrington and others are voting against measures that would make audits better and more universal and mandatory. Many state legislatures are trying to put in place laws that would make it easier for partisan state legislatures to overturn election results. He (Arrington) refuses to take measures to stop the gerrymandering from both parties—which makes it so these parties can control 'safe' districts. Pretty much silence from what I can tell.
Finally, I'm not against some forms of voter ID, but the fear of being severely punished because of simple errors makes tons of people in certain populations just give up on politics altogether. I don't know how many times in registering voters where people said they are afraid they will get jury duty (largely a myth), are afraid because they used to be in prison, or don't know the rules if they are a college student away from home. None of these problems have to continue if certain rules were changed. But the party in power has no interest in this. And these problems transfer over from generation to generation. We can do better, and there are multiple examples from around the World to look at:
Probably the best way to end gerrymandering COVID/Health
An ICU Nurse
'I live for the little moments. Yes, I want them all to recover and walk out of the hospital. But I just try to connect with their humanity. To let them know that they matter. That their life is precious and meaningful. That every moment of waking breathing sentient awareness is a miraculous gift from God. Those little moments when I make eye contact with them, and mutual love/respect somehow gets transmitted between us fill me with purpose and energy.
But the moments when I see the dark fear in their eyes? When they experience the flash of hopeless terror? When they know, deep down, that they are a dead man walking? And I know that I can't fix it? And that it was largely preventable? It hurts at the soul level.' Another ICU Nurse 'Staffing in hospitals has been a problem long before COVID. We've been in a health crisis before COVID, but people don't want to really talk about that much either. We just want it to be "normal"... I know many aspects of labor are experiencing similar things, but we in this field are experiencing actual deaths as a result from it every single day. ... So they tell us if we strike we are abandoning our team and our patients, and we care about our patients so we don't. But that's how they keep control of us. So we need better laws, we need walk-outs, we need strikes. And we're fed up.'
'They took something that we're good at and we're proud to do and they made us bad at it because we're stretched too thin. And these companies and our leaders do not care about these patients, and they do not care about our lives, and they are actively stealing our lives from us.' Finally, a couple of lenthy Twitter discussions, some FB posts and other articles around healthcare, if you're interested my thoughts at various stages of the pandemic and before (I'm writing this on 1/7/22): Mostly about vaccines (August 2021) A little on lockdowns and other measures (January 2022) An explanation of how viruses work (May 2020) Xenophobia and COVID (March 2020) E.R. Doctor's Suicide (July 2020) Lubbock County Healthcare Workers Speak Out (November 2020) Former health care exec admits he spread lies about single payer health care to prop up the insurance industry How to 'pay for' a Green New Deal (lengthy economic analysis of how to source Medicare for All - which is part of a Green New Deal) Education
The internet was just starting out for me around my high school graduation of 1994, so I think I have some sense of how education was before and after. I attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for six years, but dropped out with 6 weeks left before graduation—two 3 credit hour courses left. An Electrical Engineering degree awaited and probably a fairly high paying job. The attached audio goes into a bit about why I dropped out, but here in the text I want to look a little about how. I can pretty honestly say that without the internet, I would not have done it. The people in my life- my family and friends almost all thought it was crazy—no doubt many still do. But the internet allowed me to seek out other voices (John Gatto was one of those early internet influencers of mine) that were speaking to some of the conflicts that I was having.
This resource (the information age) has had the greatest impact on human society of probably anything else the last 30 years. It's relatively new on human timescales, and as we all know by now, voices from cyberspace can often overwhelm voices from family, friends or teachers—for good or bad.
I have never taught formally. I've had some experiences with kids at some of the jobs I've had and organizations I've been involved in, but a lot of my knowledge of the state of the current system comes from my brothers who have both taught school and other people (on and offline).
So I come to debates around things like critical race theory kind of perplexed—do you think that if these things aren't taught that kids can't find out what's going on by a Google search or AI? Of course, it's more about authority and trust, right? Do the parents trust the teachers? Or vice-versa? Do the kids trust their friends or the YouTube talking head? Never before have kids (or the rest of us) had so many options on who to trust. No longer is education about lack of information (although making broadband free and universal would be something I support), it's about who you trust and how it's presented. It's about how much time and what kind of distractions you have. It's about how much freedom you have to search for answers vs. how much time is required to perform for a test.
I don't envy teachers or parents or students who are in the middle of this. If you go far enough in reading other sections of my website, you'll see that lots of my thinking has been influenced by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). So in education debates, the first thing you'll see from me is—Is it just a shortage of money? Does everyone agree that having more teachers per student would be a good thing? If so... if you have teachers ready and willing to work... it can happen. It's just a matter of passing a bill at the Federal level to help states and municipalities afford these things. We don't have to have these constant debates about whether there is enough money for things that almost *everyone* thinks would be better.
On the deeper issues of the structure of schooling, private vs public, homeschooling, whether student debt should be repaid—these aren't just questions of money. They also involve questions of justice, grace and who should be in positions to garner trust. Abortion
So much for states' rights... Arrington's extreme views are not held by 80% of Texans who want exceptions. People sometimes ask, "What if your mother would have aborted you?' The question doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. My response is often, "I would never have known. I had no ability to sense anything." (before around 23 weeks) Further, why would I want to put my mother in the position without a choice? Why would I want to do that to her? It would be great if every pregnancy happened to someone who wanted it. It's just not reality and never will be. Since Roe was overturned and many states, including Texas imposed bans, abortions nationwide are actually up, not down. If Republicans, like my opponent, actually wanted fewer abortions, they would sign legislation that increases pregnancy leave, maternity leave, and paternity leave. He would increase the child tax credit, eliminate poverty and make it easier to adopt. As divisive of an issue as this often is purported to be, people have often very nuanced views. For instance, only 18% of Democrats think abortion should generally be legal in the third trimester and 42% of Republicans think abortion should generally be legal in the first trimester according to a 2018 Gallup Poll. Although these attitudes have been relatively stable the last 30 or 40 years, some of the rhetoric has become much more supercharged.
From What Does the Bible Actually Say about Abortion?: "In 1968, for example, a meeting held by the Christian Medical Society and the highly influential evangelical magazine Christianity Today concluded that abortion had to be considered in the light of “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility,” and the organizers refused to describe abortion as sinful. Three years later, the Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps the most important conservative denomination in North America, passed a resolution calling on “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The reference to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the woman carrying the fetus leaves the door wide open to abortion rights. It also makes the exponential growth of radical opposition to abortion within evangelical Christianity seem extremely contemporary." Energy
The new Ford F150 Lightning has up to a 131KWH battery. The average home uses around 30KWH/day. So a fully charged battery could give possibly 4 days of power during an outage. Let's say a home is using closer to 50KWH because outages often occur during really hot or cold periods like the 2021 Texas blackout. Still almost 3 days of power not even counting what a home solar system could provide. A typical home solar installation might be 10KW, which can give maybe 50KWH of power during good sun in the summer. But wait, you're saying... There wasn't good sun during the blackout. What were solar panels producing during that storm? Let's say a third- 13KWH/day. Over 4 days, that's 52KWH plus the 131KWH from the F150. 183KWH- enough for almost 4 days.
Furthermore, solar systems can be larger and lots of people have more than one vehicle. Further, not only could that combo give more peace and security during outages but the rest of the year you're producing your own power!! Lots of people could possibly disconnect from the grid if they wish to.
Wait...
What about the cost? Read and listen to my section on money. Lots of the constraints we have in helping people achieve this or other types of greater energy independence are largely illusory or at least misunderstood.
What about raw materials? Batteries take a lot of lithium, right? This is certainly a concern, but keep in mind- "Assigning all 328 million Americans equal share of our fossil fuel use, every American burns 1.6 tons of coal, 1.5 tons of natural gas, and 3.1 tons of oil every year. That becomes around 17 tons of carbon dioxide, none of which is captured. It is all tossed like trash into the atmosphere. The same US lifestyle could be achieved with around 110 pounds each of wind turbines, solar modules, and batteries per person per year, except that all of those are quite recyclable (and getting more recyclable all the time) so there is reason to believe it will amount to only 50-100 pounds per year of stuff that winds up as trash." Saul Griffith
What about all the jobs lost from places like the Permian Basin? I think this is a good place to point out that much of human history has been about working *less*. The combine and tractor, corn mill and cotton gin, the washing machine and automobile, among millions of other inventions, have freed up time for millions, if not billions. Even though many tout jobs from solar, wind or batteries, it's just not true that these technologies require a lot of long term jobs (after construction). That is *not* a bad thing. But making sure we don't ignore the people that have been providing us all with energy is important. The Job Guarantee, changing Right to Repair laws (more repair jobs), Medicare for All (remove that worry), universal job training (more options), increased worker equity and power (share in wealth), pension protections and more can go a long way.
What about the grid? How will it handle all of this distributed energy and battery power? First, the example above is largely grid independent. That's what energy independence is. But for larger industry and all the other use cases where more distributed energy won't or can't make sense, an interconnected high voltage DC grid speaks to reliability and transition. Demand response (smart grids and paying people to conserve or utilize their vehicles or hot water heaters for storage of energy), all of the different grid storage options- flow batteries, liquid and compressed air energy storage, hydrogen and ammonia, gravity, pumped hydro, etc...- and baseload power options like nuclear or geothermal can all play a part. There will be even more options in the future, but it's essential we start now with all the solutions we have.
Are fossil fuels really that dirty? What about carbon capture?
"The figures for CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequestration] are elevated for two reasons. First, upstream emissions during mining of coal or extraction of gas continue. Second, the study assumes that CCS only captures 90% of power plant CO2. Higher capture rates are more costly and would not eliminate upstream emissions, equivalent to 23-42gCO2e/kWh, still well above the numbers for nuclear, wind or solar."
Indoor NO2 emissions from gas stoves Indoor methane from gas stoves
"This study is the first to look at the whole lifecycle of LNG fuel, from the wellhead to the tanker ship to the burner tip and finds that LNG has a 33% greater greenhouse footprint than coal over a 20 year time frame. That’s because methane escapes from every part of the extraction, distribution, and combustion chain." Dr. Sandra Steingraber on Howarth study. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen. I’ve been in 102 countries. I have never seen anything like this. And there is nothing in my mind that can fix it,” he said. “You go around the world telling everybody how great Texas is, then come home and see this. It’s rather embarrassing.” Hawk Dunlap, a fourth-generation oil worker and sixth-generation Texan on leaks from old oil and gas wells ruining property and threatening fresh water aquifers. Tolk Coal Station near Muleshoe "Since 2010, depletion of the [Ogallala] aquifer has been accelerated by significant regional drought. As a result, the saturated thickness of the aquifer has declined to a point that sufficient water will no longer be recoverable. Despite the addition of new wells and replacement of existing wells to supply Tolk, wellfield productivity will not be able to meet Tolk's water needs through 2042."
What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy? "All energy sources have negative effects. But they differ enormously in size: as we will see, in all three aspects, fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner." Agriculture
And there are lots of reasons to think we should be trying to increase the number of people in agriculture. This article, "Fifty Million Farmers", written in 2006, was wrong about the timing of 'peak oil', unfairly demonizes genetic modification in my opinion, and has some other takes that I find issue with, but there is a lot of food for thought. Since it was written, there has been some increase in the number of very small farms which coincides with a drive toward a hollowing out of midsize farms. And there has been some increase in the number of younger people that have started farming (often at these very small farms). But this increase is dwarfed by the number of older farmers retiring. I worked on a couple of small farms before I came to Lubbock, and most of my time in Lubbock has been spent working at the South Plains Food Bank in their Farm and Orchard division.
Besides the crazy cost of land and equipment to get started, there is often a need for more labor on these small farms because of the attempt to farm with lower pesticides, herbicides and inorganic fertilizers. Having a one size fits all approach to things like minimum wage doesn't necessarily make sense in this regard. Some lawmakers introduced a $15/hr minimum wage, but with carve outs for smaller businesses and farms, but it never went anywhere... I have never seen a reason why you can't keep the minimum wage at $15/hr (or more) for large corporations, while supplementing the employees of smaller businesses and farms so that they also get up to $15/hour. It's sad that our current crop of politicians couldn't see that through. It's insane to me that people that are working so hard trying to farm in a sustainable, local way, have so many obstacles to overcome. And after all that is taken into consideration, the food often has to be sold at much higher prices just to break even. Which means fewer people buy it- which means it's harder to be profitable, which means less supply, an so on.
One last point to make on labor. I don't think Andrew Yang was wrong about automation and jobs, although he may have been a little premature about the timing on things like autonomous vehicles. As I've hinted about in the Energy section, much of human history has been about making life physically easier. About introducing machinery to take out the grunt work. So the idea of 50 million farmers or whatever may seem contradictory. My thought is that most of us want to do *some* labor. We want challenging, purposeful work. As we automate more away from jobs that can be done by machines, there's still a need to build, discover, plan, learn from nature, challenge yourself physically and mentally, etc... If you've never tried to grow anything for yourself, let alone for other people before, let me assure you that it's challenging- especially in West Texas- but also rewarding. Giving more people that opportunity seems like a no-brainer.
And farming, and our knowledge base is going to have to increase in order to adapt to all the things we are doing to our land, oceans and ecosphere. Katharine Hayhoe, former Texas Tech climate scientist has said that the average summer temperatures in 2050 could be like they were in 2011. There were 48 days above 100 degrees in Lubbock that year breaking the old record of 29. 55 percent of cotton fields in Texas were abandoned. The last three summers were the second, third, and fourth hottest Lubbock summers on record. How does a region survive? How does that affect our groundwater availability? And why do people like Jodey Arrington never talk about climate change and the effects it will have? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil? Law and Authority A few years ago I knew someone who was put in jail for a small amount of marijuana. At the time, he was working with me and living in his car. As is usually the case, jail didn't 'scare him straight', it didn't make him reevaluate his life, it didn't do anything but make him 'hate the system' more than he already did. For what? We tried prohibition of alcohol 100 years ago and found out that criminalizing addiction and/or use was a complete failure. Yet somehow we have kept doing it for other substances since.
I mention in the attached audio the experience from The Netherlands where they have stopped criminalizing addiction—crime has plunged in areas with endemic heroin use and there are almost no addicts under the age of 40. What does an addict *need* every day? Money for the addiction. What will they do to get? Often steal, prostitute, or worst of all—get others addicted so they can act as a middle man. What better to ensure a steady supply of cash than having someone else have to go through you to feed *their* addiction? With legalization and government sourcing you take away that need for cash, you take away the destructive behavior that addiction fueled.
Furthermore, how many cops want to arrest people for drug addiction? How many ICE or DEA agents? How many more people in law enforcement have to die in this war against addiction? Let's start with not asking law enforcement to carry out laws they probably know themselves aren't doing any good. References from the video:
Do people need AR-15's? In certain areas, I will admit that more government control is sometimes my policy preference (such as we had during WWII - rationing on some especially climate unfriendly practices, price controls if necessary, huge government contracts to certain industries to accelerate the transition to clean energy, etc...). I'm not sure others advocating for this would agree with me, but I think part of the way to maybe make people feel less threatened by these changes would be less talk about gun control, at least the part about taking away the AR-15. I think this article gives a pretty good reason why that's not a totally insane position to take. More on video sidebar to the right.
Australia - could their model work here? Andrew Yang on guns and gun safety technology[2] |
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| —Nathan Lewis' campaign website (2024)[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] | ||
2022
Nathan Lewis completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Lewis' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Honesty, transparency, and integrity are very important to me, and Donald Trump has none of those qualities.
Jodey Arrington isn't Trump. Not as outwardly demeaning or insulting most of the time. But I'll be damned if I've ever seen him criticize the former President for any words or actions. Perhaps I missed it, but...
I have seen no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump lied and pressured election officials to 'find votes'. He continues to lie. Time after time, Trump appointed election officials or judges have refuted Trump's claims. Arrington had two months to look into the claims brought by Trump before the certification. Just because a bunch of your constituents might think something is true, does not make it so, and you should use the opportunity to educate and not pander to misinformation. That's not leadership, it's cowardice.
- We are all going to die at some point, what else is there than trying to make the World a better place than how we found it? If we don't leave a sustainable planet, everything we have worked for, built, and the influence we've had on others will be lost forever. We are failing miserably. And there is no shortage of money to do what we need to do. 'Money is a man-made device, and for an entire economy to be perpetually in the position of not being able to do what it wants, simply for lack of bits of paper with numbers on them, is strong evidence that the shortage of those bits of paper and numbers lacks all validity.'- Michael Rowbotham 'The Grip of Death'
- Greed is not a virute, no matter how many people wish it to be so. Greed does not mean ambition, desire or achievement- at least in the way I think most people understand those terms. Donald Trump in 2014- "My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy." Nancy Pelosi in 2021- "They [Congresspeople] should be able to participate in that [trading stock]." It should be about trust, no? Is there a deficit of trust in America? With our lawmakers? Shouldn't our most powerful leaders be our simplest servants? I live a modest life, but I'm willing to work for minimum wage or nothing at all.
- The type of two party system which is present in America is mostly an outlier. It helps drive the 'Us vs. Them' dynamic at play in almost every issue. Demonization of the 'other'. We need reforms like the Fair Representation Act which would bring us closer to the Representational Democracies present in most other developed countries. Eliminates the 'picking the worst of two evils' that so many people feel when going into the voting booth, and maybe get some people to think that they can pick someone who represents them. Ranked choice voting, approval voting, scored voting. We can do better.
For at least the last 30 years, almost all climate scientists have been in near unanimity that we are failing in spectacular fashion in keeping the Earth's climate stable compared to how it has been over human history.
I think most people, regardless of what they may say around certain people, alone with their own thoughts know that the majority of climate scientists aren't in on a massive conspiracy. Even here in District 19, most people believe humans are causing climate change and want the government to do something about it. The loudest voices on TV and radio like to mock or demonize ideas like the Green New Deal or whatever to boost ratings, but the vast majority of people would love for this to be in the past someday. Unfortunately, like termites eating at your house that go untreated, the problem persists and gets worse.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Campaign website
Lewis' campaign website stated the following:
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Self Reflection One of the reasons I bought the house I did was because of the pecan tree in the backyard. Located on the SW side of the house, not only did it provide shade in the summer, but it also dropped its leaves at exactly the correct time each year to let in more light for the winter. And to top it off, some years, when there is a decent amount of rain (for West Texas) it even drops food right by your feet in a protective shell, which gives you time before it rots to store it and process it. Extremely minimal amount of work that anyone could do if they had enough time. But most of us either don't have the time, don't want to wait for a tree to grow, don't own the property, don't like pecans, or a hundred other reasons. Our consumerist and debt-based society has left many of us discombobulated. Many would like to grow a garden, or fix our own car, or learn something new- how to weld, how to knit, how to play the piano, how to speak Russian, how to put up solar panels, how to communicate better with our partners or our parents or kids, how to make a video game, how to... whatever... These aren't worthless endeavors, but often the only way we can pursue these dreams is if they are part of a job. And then, they are often not self-directed- which means a lot of the challenge and purpose is lost. Much of my life has been devoted to understanding why this tension exists and if it's necessary. Work- our paid work- is necessary, no? Well, certainly some of it is- certain people feed us, keep our houses warm, bring water to the tap. But if you're like me, many of our jobs have been... well... perhaps not as necessary... perhaps even superfluous or sometimes even counter to our dreams. In other words, not only do we often hate our jobs because they may be hard or dirty or whatever, but we also think the job shouldn't be done. This is not a good situation. How did we get to this point in history? Greed is not a virtue, no matter how much some would wish it so. Greed does not mean ambition, desire or achievement- at least in the way I think most people understand those terms. Matthew 6:19- "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Mark 10:25- "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Donald Trump- "My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy." Joe Biden- "I think you should be able to become a billionaire and a millionaire." Nancy Pelosi on lawmakers trading stock- "We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that." We can't take it with us when we go. What else is there than leaving the World a better place than how we found it? Getting to Pelosi's statement more specifically with regard to lawmakers- you all are some of the most powerful people in the World. It's about trust. Donald Trump- 'No one wants to see my taxes.' It's about trust. Hillary Clinton not releasing her Goldman Sachs speeches. It's about trust. Is there a deficit of trust in today's World? That being said, I don't think most people are driven first and foremost by greed. When Bob says to his co-worker- "Tom does way less work than I do, but gets paid way more."- this isn't primarily an argument about wanting more, it's an argument about justice. Bob and Tom could be making slave wages or be hedge fund managers. This type of localized concern about justice can be comforting if we blind ourselves to the World around us. What are our duties to those we have never met? Which people count as 'us' and 'them'? Should there be an 'us and 'them'? This is the realm of religion and the realm of politics. The realm of economics and education. Of law and foreign affairs. The realm of self-reflection. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he [Trump] said when Mr. D’Antonio asked him to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.” Briefly on Alasdair MacIntyre's economics
The slide in the background was part of a presentation I helped give on the economics surrounding installing solar that would be connected up to the Lubbock Power and Light (LP&L) grid. If you scan my 46k tweets on Twitter, you'll find more than a few where my exasperation with the economics underlying not only solar installations, but the whole way we look at the 'economy' is laid bare. There's often this disconnect between the economics in our personal lives (like the decision on whether to install solar) and the larger macroeconomic terms that get thrown around like GDP, inflation, the FED debt, and the 'economy' itself. I labeled this section 'Money' instead of 'Economy' because the latter means a hundred different things to a hundred different people. The 'economy' has a very different meaning to someone living on the streets than it does for someone in a corporate boardroom. It's a buzzword that we should be very hesitant in using without further explanation. Money, on the other hand, is a man-made creation with largely specific origins. Most all of us in this part of the World use the U.S. dollar for almost all of our transactions. The history of the U.S. dollar has largely been written down and can be analyzed... Can the Federal government go bankrupt? Jodey Arrington often says so- timestamp around 1:10. I don't know if he really believes that, but even Rush Limbaugh knew that was bullshit: "How many years have people tried to scare everybody about [the deficit]? How many years, how many decades have politicians tried to scare us about the deficit, the national debt, (Sen. Jim Sasser pronunciation) "the dafycit," any number of things? Yet here we're still here, and the great jaws of the deficit have not bitten off our heads and chewed them up and spit them out." Rush is right. If you want a more academic take you can look here with a clip where Donald Trump also let the cat out of the bag. The Federal government issues the U.S. dollar... they can't go bankrupt. So politicians need to stop scaring us that way. But wait, you might say...maybe we can't go bankrupt, but we can sure end up like Zimbabwe, or Greece, or the Weimar Republic- HYPERINFLATION!! Oh no!! Anything is always possible, but if you look at all those cases, you'll see that there was a tremendous loss of productive capacity. I like to look at it this way- if you are a small country, or a country like Germany after WWI where you have had much of your country destroyed or you have to give some of it away to France, why would anyone (foreign or domestic) want your currency if you have nothing they want to buy? What are the real resources- physical, human, technological, climatological, etc... that your country has to offer? So... I hope we haven't gotten to a point in this country where people think we don't have anything to offer in the U.S. As one example, West Texas is on the southwest corner of one of the most productive agricultural regions of the World. Wait, wait... We are having inflation (written January 2022). True, so what's the cause? Jodey has his ideas that seem to revolve around the idea that Congressional spending=inflation. Put aside the fact that this idea of spending on things like the military is never questioned with respect to inflation, is his premise right? The attached video goes into the case. I like to start where prices are actually set. Sellers set prices. Usually businesses are the sellers. Sometimes governments, sometimes individuals, but usually businesses. Who has the greatest pricing power of those sellers? Not the small farm or business owner. Maybe not even regional or statewide sellers. At the top of the food chain are the multinational corporations. Let's see how their profits are doing during the last couple of years- lumber, used cars, oil, shipping, meat packers, etc... Furthermore, inflation isn't the same everywhere around the World- even in places that have some of the largest deficits. Perhaps there's more to it? Not all Countries-Japan Not all Corporations Not all Lawmakers "American consumers are demanding protection from price gouging," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., in floor debate.
Our back alleys are windows into our relationship with the Earth and each other. You have all the elements of what people talk and think about with regard to climate change, energy, and sustainability. Overhead power, telephone or cable lines, underground water, sewer, gas and maybe fiber optic lines, trash and debris in or out of receptacles, maintained or unmaintained roads, flora that grows close to the ground without human intervention and usually human planted trees that overhang it all. And the never ending fences and howl of dogs that remind us that we sometimes just barely tolerate each other. I have thousands of Facebook posts or Twitter tweets about climate change, energy infrastructure and related issues from the last 4 years. It's not difficult to see that it has played a major part in my thinking, not only the last 4 years, but really the last 15-20 years. For me, it really boils down to the saying, We all die at some point, what else is there than to try and make the World a better place than how we found it? For at least the last 30 years, almost all climate scientists have been in near unanimity that we are failing in spectacular fashion in keeping the Earth's climate stable compared to how it has been over human history. I wasn't always completely convinced. Even after I had changed my life in many ways to try to live with lower emissions, I was thinking 10 years or so ago that...maybe...maybe...there was a 'pause' (as Ted Cruz continuously would go on about). Turns out Ted and I were wrong, and the climate scientists were right. Their models have been very good in almost every way. If anything, there have sometimes been underestimates. I think most people, regardless of what they may say around certain people, alone with their own thoughts know that the majority of climate scientists aren't in on a massive conspiracy. Most surveys agree. Studies also show that even here in District 19, most people believe humans are causing climate change and want the government to do something about it. The loudest voices on TV and radio like to mock or demonize ideas like the Green New Deal or whatever to boost ratings, but the vast majority of people would love for this to be in the past someday. Unfortunately, like termites eating at your house that go untreated, the problem persists and gets worse. Feel free to argue with me on Facebook or Twitter or call me up and tell me to go to hell. I don't think I have any alternatives at this point in my life other than to give a shit from here on out. If that means endless arguments, begging, guilt tripping, or whatever... so be it. There's a good chance I hate all this more than you do, but neither one of us hates it as much as the people that are dying and will die from our actions or inaction. I would love to go back to ignoring you and you probably feel the same way about me, but it doesn't happen by magic, and you can't wish it away. The video on the right was a response to the Democratic National Committee thinking of penalizing candidates for having their own climate debate in 2019.
I have seen no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump has often been shown to have lied and pressured election officials to 'find votes'. Just one example: ".. dead people voted, I think the number is close to 5,000," Trump told Raffensperger. "They went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. A minimum is close to about 5,000." The actual number was 4. Multiple other lines of evidence- 200 Tweet thread directly after the election giving evidence against many of the allegations of fraud from Trump and assoicates AZ election and many more. Time after time, Trump appointed election officials or judges have refuted Trump's claims. I have done some work the last couple of years in the Lubbock County Elections Office. Almost universally, the staff seems to have conducted themselves with integrity. Why are Trump and his defenders only interested in auditing the places he lost? Justice is supposed to be blind. Arrington and others are voting against measures that would make audits better and more universal and mandatory. Many state legislatures are putting in place laws that would make it easier for partisan state legislatures to overturn election results. He (Arrington) refuses to take measures to stop the gerrymandering from both parties- which makes it so these parties can control 'safe' districts. Pretty much silence from what I can tell. In his letter objecting to certifying the election, Arrington never really specifies what he thinks might be fraudulent, other than to claim that Trump would have won if some of the court cases would have went the other way- which I have seen no evidence of. Just because a bunch of your constituents might think something is true, does not make it so, and you should use the opportunity to educate and not to pander to misinformation. He had two months to look into the claims brought by Trump before the certification. Has he ever stated a position on whether he thinks the election was 'stolen'? Will any of the local press ever make him take a position? Will he ever have to explain why he knows (or thought he knew) more than all the Trump appointed election officials and judges? Finally, I'm not against some forms of voter ID, but the fear of being severely punished because of simple errors makes tons of people in certain populations just give up on politics altogether. I don't know how many times in registering voters where people said they are afraid they will get jury duty (largely a myth), are afraid because they used to be in prison, or don't know the rules if they are a college student away from home. None of these problems have to continue if certain rules were changed. But the party in power has no interest in this. And these problems transfer over from generation to generation. We can do better, and there are multiple examples from around the World to look at- Australia's voting system
Many of my thoughts are spelled out in the video on the right. I don't have all the answers. There's a million stories out there from those who have been most affected: An ICU Nurse 'I live for the little moments. Yes, I want them all to recover and walk out of the hospital. But I just try to connect with their humanity. To let them know that they matter. That their life is precious and meaningful. That every moment of waking breathing sentient awareness is a miraculous gift from God. Those little moments when I make eye contact with them, and mutual love/respect somehow gets transmitted between us fill me with purpose and energy. But the moments when I see the dark fear in their eyes? When they experience the flash of hopeless terror? When they know, deep down, that they are a dead man walking? And I know that I can't fix it? And that it was largely preventable? It hurts at the soul level.' Another ICU Nurse 'Staffing in hospitals has been a problem long before COVID. We've been in a health crisis before COVID, but people don't want to really talk about that much either. We just want it to be "normal"... I know many aspects of labor are experiencing similar things, but we in this field are experiencing actual deaths as a result from it every single day. ... So they tell us if we strike we are abandoning our team and our patients, and we care about our patients so we don't. But that's how they keep control of us. So we need better laws, we need walk-outs, we need strikes. And we're fed up.' 'They took something that we're good at and we're proud to do and they made us bad at it because we're stretched too thin. And these companies and our leaders do not care about these patients, and they do not care about our lives, and they are actively stealing our lives from us.' Finally, a couple of lenthy Twitter discussions, some FB posts and other articles around healthcare, if you're interested my thoughts at various stages of the pandemic and before (I'm writing this on 1/7/22)- Mostly about vaccines (August 2021)
Too often the political debates around education are framed as public education versus private schools, or around college debt, or around what sort of subjects can be taught in the actual classroom. Sometimes these debates seem to me like they are forgetting that the information revolution took place. Like we are debating as if it's 1994. The internet was just starting out for me around my High School graduation of 1994, so I think I have some sense of how education was before and after. I attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for six years, but dropped out with 6 weeks left before graduation- two 3 credit hour courses left. An Electrical Engineering degree awaited and probably a fairly high paying job. The attached audio goes into a bit about why I dropped out, but here in the text I want to look a little about how. I can pretty honestly say that without the internet, I would not have done it. The people in my life- my family and friends almost all thought it was crazy- no doubt many still do. But the internet allowed me to seek out other voices (John Gatto was one of those early internet influencers of mine) that were speaking to some of the conflicts that I was having. This resource (the information age) has had the greatest impact on human society of probably anything else the last 30 years. It's relatively new on human timescales, and as we all know by now, voices from cyberspace can often overwhelm voices from family, friends or teachers- for good or bad. I have never taught formally. I've had some experiences with kids at some of the jobs I've had and organizations I've been involved in, but a lot of my knowledge of the state of the current system comes from my brothers who have both taught school and other people (on and offline). So I come to debates around things like critical race theory kind of perplexed- do you think that if these things aren't taught that kids can't find out what's going on by a Google search? Of course, it's more about authority and trust, right? Do the parents trust the teachers? Or vice-versa? Do the kids trust their friends or the YouTube talking head? Never before have kids (or the rest of us) had so many options on who to trust. No longer is education about lack of information (although making broadband free and universal would be something I support), it's about who you trust and how it's presented. It's about how much time and what kind of distractions you have. It's about how much freedom you have to search for answers vs. how much time is required to perform for a test. I don't envy teachers or parents or students who are in the middle of this. If you go far enough in reading other sections of my website, you'll see that lots of my thinking has been influenced by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). So in education debates, the first thing you'll see from me is- Is it just a shortage of money? Does everyone agree that having more teachers per student would be a good thing? If so... if you have teachers ready and willing to work... it can happen. It's just a matter of passing a bill at the Federal level to help states and municipalities afford these things. We don't have to have these constant debates about whether there is enough money for things that almost *everyone* thinks would be better. On the deeper issues of the structure of schooling, private vs public, homeschooling, whether student debt should be repaid- these aren't just questions of money. They also involve questions of justice, grace and who should be in positions to garner trust.
People sometimes ask, "What if your mother would have aborted you?' The question doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. My response is often, "I would never have known. I had no ability to sense anything." (before around 23 weeks) Further, why would I want to put my mother in the position without a choice? Why would I want to do that to her? As divisive an issue as this often is purported to be, people have often very nuanced views. For instance, only 18% of Democrats think abortion should generally be legal in the third trimester and 42% of Republicans think abortion should generally be legal in the first trimester according to a 2018 Gallup Poll. Although these attitudes have been relatively stable the last 30 or 40 years, some of the rhetoric has become much more supercharged. From What Does the Bible Actually Say about Abortion?: "In 1968, for example, a meeting held by the Christian Medical Society and the highly influential evangelical magazine Christianity Today concluded that abortion had to be considered in the light of “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility,” and the organizers refused to describe abortion as sinful. Three years later, the Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps the most important conservative denomination in North America, passed a resolution calling on “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The reference to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the woman carrying the fetus leaves the door wide open to abortion rights. It also makes the exponential growth of radical opposition to abortion within evangelical Christianity seem extremely contemporary."
For the first time in human history, individuals, families and small communities have access to energy technologies that allow a degree of independence and self-sufficiency without a lot of the drawbacks of the past. Gas or diesel generators require a constant fuel source, lots of moving parts in comparison, and contribute to emissions. The new Ford F150 Lightning has up to a 131KWH battery. The average home uses around 30KWH/day. So a fully charged battery could give possibly 4 days of power during an outage. Let's say a home is using closer to 50KWH because outages often occur during really hot or cold periods like the 2021 Texas blackout. Still almost 3 days of power not even counting what a home solar system could provide. A typical home solar installation might be 10KW, which can give maybe 50KWH of power during good sun in the summer. But wait, you're saying... There wasn't good sun during the blackout. What were solar panels producing during that storm? Let's say a third- 13KWH/day. Over 4 days, that's 52KWH plus the 131KWH from the F150. 183KWH- enough for almost 4 days. Furthermore, solar systems can be larger and lots of people have more than one vehicle. Further, not only could that combo give more peace and security during outages but the rest of the year you're producing your own power!! Lots of people could possibly disconnect from the grid if they wish to. Wait... What about the cost? Read and listen to my section on money. Lots of the constraints we have in helping people achieve this or other types of greater energy independence are largely illusory or at least misunderstood. What about raw materials? Batteries take a lot of lithium, right? This is certainly a concern, but keep in mind- "Assigning all 328 million Americans equal share of our fossil fuel use, every American burns 1.6 tons of coal, 1.5 tons of natural gas, and 3.1 tons of oil every year. That becomes around 17 tons of carbon dioxide, none of which is captured. It is all tossed like trash into the atmosphere. The same US lifestyle could be achieved with around 110 pounds each of wind turbines, solar modules, and batteries per person per year, except that all of those are quite recyclable (and getting more recyclable all the time) so there is reason to believe it will amount to only 50-100 pounds per year of stuff that winds up as trash." Saul Griffith What about all the jobs lost from places like the Permian Basin? I think this is a good place to point out that much of human history has been about working *less*. The combine and tractor, corn mill and cotton gin, the washing machine and automobile, among millions of other inventions, have freed up time for millions, if not billions. Even though many tout jobs from solar, wind or batteries, it's just not true that these technologies require a lot of long term jobs (after construction). That is *not* a bad thing. But making sure we don't ignore the people that have been providing us all with energy is important. The Job Guarantee, changing Right to Repair laws (more repair jobs), Medicare for All (remove that worry), universal job training (more options), increased worker equity and power (share in wealth), pension protections and more can go a long way. What about the grid? How will it handle all of this distributed energy and battery power? First, the example above is largely grid independent. That's what energy independence is. But for larger industry and all the other use cases where more distributed energy won't or can't make sense, an interconnected high voltage DC grid speaks to reliability and transition. Demand response (smart grids and paying people to conserve or utilize their vehicles or hot water heaters for storage of energy), all of the different grid storage options- flow batteries, liquid and compressed air energy storage, hydrogen and ammonia, gravity, pumped hydro, etc...- and baseload power options like nuclear or geothermal can all play a part. There will be even more options in the future, but it's essential we start now with all the solutions we have. Are fossil fuels really that dirty? What about carbon capture? "The figures for CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequestration] are elevated for two reasons. First, upstream emissions during mining of coal or extraction of gas continue. Second, the study assumes that CCS only captures 90% of power plant CO2. Higher capture rates are more costly and would not eliminate upstream emissions, equivalent to 23-42gCO2e/kWh, still well above the numbers for nuclear, wind or solar." Indoor NO2 emissions from gas stoves Indoor methane from gas stoves "There is a catch: when it comes to the Permian, high greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas industry could mean that the climate benefits of U.S. natural gas over European domestic coal are all but eliminated. Two recent studies show that the flaring, venting and leakage of natural gas are a much bigger issue in the Permian than elsewhere in the country." Other Permian problems Tolk Coal Station near Muleshoe What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
I grew up on a cattle ranch in Southwest Nebraska. The population of rural America is declining almost everywhere. District 19 is no different. There are many reasons, but the price of farm and ranch land has to be one of the biggest. My parents always said that if my grandparents (on my father's side) had not already been in farming and ranching (and probably more importantly been landowners), that it would have been very difficult to start. And that was 50 years ago. Prices and barriers to entry have only gotten larger in the years since for large numbers of people. Now, if you want to start out and buy your own land, you may be competing with billionaires. I wonder who is going to win that bidding war? And there are lots of reasons to think we should be trying to increase the number of people in agriculture. This article, "Fifty Million Farmers", written in 2006, was wrong about the timing of 'peak oil', unfairly demonizes genetic modification in my opinion, and has some other takes that I find issue with, but there is a lot of food for thought. Since it was written, there has been some increase in the number of very small farms which coincides with a drive toward a hollowing out of midsize farms. And there has been some increase in the number of younger people that have started farming (often at these very small farms). But this increase is dwarfed by the number of older farmers retiring. I worked on a couple of small farms before I came to Lubbock, and most of my time in Lubbock has been spent working at the South Plains Food Bank in their Farm and Orchard division. Besides the crazy cost of land and equipment to get started, there is often a need for more labor on these small farms because of the attempt to do things with lower pesticides, herbicides and inorganic fertilizers. Having a one size fits all approach to things like minimum wage doesn't necessarily make sense in this regard. Some lawmakers introduced a $15/hr minimum wage, but with carve outs for smaller businesses and farms, but it never went anywhere... I have never seen a reason why you can't keep the minimum wage at $15/hr (or more) for large corporations, while supplementing the employees of smaller businesses and farms so that they also get up to the $15/hour. It's sad that our current crop of politicians couldn't see that through. It's insane to me that people that are working so hard trying to farm in a sustainable, local way, have so many obstacles to overcome. And after all that is taken into consideration, the food often has to be sold at much higher prices just to break even. Which means fewer people buy it- which means it's harder to be profitable, which means less supply, an so on. One last point to make on labor. I don't think Andrew Yang was wrong about automation and jobs, although he may have been a little premature about the timing on things like autonomous vehicles. As I've hinted about in the Energy section, much of human history has been about making life physically easier. About introducing machinery to take out the grunt work. So the idea of 50 million farmers or whatever may seem contradictory. My thought is that most of us want to do *some* labor. We want challenging, purposeful work. As we automate more away from jobs that can be done by machines, there's still a need to build, discover, plan, learn from nature, challenge yourself physically and mentally, etc... If you've never tried to grow anything for yourself, let alone other people before, let me assure you that it's challenging- especially in West Texas- but also rewarding. Giving more people that opportunity seems like a no-brainer. And farming, and our knowledge base is going to have to increase in order to adapt to all the things we are doing to our land, oceans and ecosphere. Katharine Hayhoe, Texas Tech climate scientist has said that the average summer temperatures in 2050 could be like they were in 2011. There were 48 days above 100 degrees in Lubbock that year breaking the old record of 29. 55 percent of cotton fields in Texas were abandoned. What happens if every year, on average, has temperatures like 2011? How does a region survive? How does that affect our groundwater availability? And why do people like Jodey Arrington never talk about climate change and the effects it will have? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?
As I said in my intro, I didn't go to law school. I haven't been a cop or in the military. I haven't ever been arrested. I've never owned a gun. My interactions with anything that can be called 'law enforcement' have been limited. So I try to be humble in my assessments, but... A few years ago I knew someone who was put in jail for a small amount of marijuana. At the time, he was working with me and living in his car. As is usually the case, jail didn't 'scare him straight', it didn't make him reevaluate his life, it didn't do anything but make him 'hate the system' more than he already did. For what? We tried prohibition of alcohol 100 years ago and found out that criminalizing addiction and/or use was a complete failure. Yet somehow we have kept doing it for other substances since. I mention in the attached audio the experience from The Netherlands where they have stopped criminalizing addiction- crime has plunged in areas with endemic heroin use and there are almost no addicts under the age of 40. What does an addict *need* every day? Money for the addiction. What will they do to get? Often steal, prostitute, or worst of all- get others addicted so they can act as a middle man. What better to ensure a steady supply of cash than having someone else have to go through you to feed *their* addiction? With legalization and government sourcing you take away that need for cash, you take away the destructive behavior that addiction fueled. Furthermore, how many cops want to arrest people for drug addiction? How many ICE or DEA agents? How many more people in law enforcement have to die in this war against addiction? Let's start with not asking law enforcement to carry out laws they probably know themselves aren't doing any good. References from the video: Do people need AR-15's? Is there a case to be made? Australia - could their model work here? Andrew Yang on guns and gun safety technology[2] |
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| —Nathan Lewis' campaign website (2022)[13] | ||
Campaign finance summary
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Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on June 19, 2024
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Self Reflection,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Money,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Climate Change,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Voting,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: COVID/Health,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Education,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Abortion,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Energy,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Agriculture,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis' campaign website, “Issues: Law and Authority,” accessed October 16, 2024
- ↑ Nathan Lewis 4 Congress, “Home,” accessed September 28, 2022
