
To the casual observer, this relatively new housing complex at 243 South 6th Street West represents one small step toward addressing Missoula’s housing crisis. To me, it represents everything I have come to hate about my father and the soulless aesthetic of suburban growth I thought I was leaving behind when I moved here 26 years ago.
Tom Mateer was born in Spokane in August of 1955. My Grandpa, like many men of his generation, had fought in the war and developed a drinking problem, while my Grandma was your average homemaker who had no reason to think Nazis were giving her miscarriages with Thalidomide. Like many women of her generation taking “medication” during the 50’s and 60s to help with nausea, the Thalidomide scandal would undermine her ability to start a healthy family:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, thalidomide was prescribed to women in 46 countries who were pregnant or who subsequently became pregnant, and consequently resulted in the “biggest anthropogenic medical disaster ever,” with more than 10,000 children born with a range of severe deformities, such as phocomelia, as well as thousands of miscarriages.
…
Thalidomide was first developed as a tranquilizer by Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba in 1953. In 1954, Ciba abandoned the product, and it was acquired by German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal. The company had been established by Hermann Wirtz Sr, a Nazi Party member, after World War II as a subsidiary of the family’s Mäurer & Wirtz company. The company’s initial aim was to develop antibiotics for which there was an urgent market need.
While the malignant seeds of Big Pharma were taking root, Tom grew up, graduated high school, then married into a family who’s patriarch, Robert Ditton, worked in the telecommunication business. After Tom moved his young family to Seattle in pursuit of better corporate opportunities, Grandpa crashed his airplane and died.

While my family moved around a handful of times in the Seattle area, it was our move to the suburbs of Kansas City, so Tom could take a job with Sprint, that really solidified my Daddy issues. Kids of my generation inherently knew something wasn’t right with the cookie-cutter houses built to accommodate corporate expansion, and if we didn’t, our culture had the faces of lost kids on milk cartons to remind us.
For more context on Tom Mateer and his business relationships with ATG and Strong Bridge, you can visit his website.


The “disruptive change” that made Tom Stergios lots of tech money ended up transforming ATG into ATG-Cognizant, then ATG-Cognizant got into bed with Palantir in February, which I covered in Friday’s post about no one coming to save us:
Cognizant announced a strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies Inc. to accelerate AI-driven modernization across healthcare and enterprise operations. As part of the collaboration, Cognizant will leverage Palantir Foundry and Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) to advance AI integration within its TriZetto healthcare business, while jointly pursuing broader enterprise AI transformation opportunities for clients across industries.
The other company my Daddy promotes his relationship with, Strong Bridge, is proud of its work with NASA, the space organization that just celebrated the supposed return of astronauts from its trip around the moon.
For over two decades, Strongbridge has been at the forefront of technological innovation, driven by a commitment to improve the lives of American citizens every day. Founded as a custom software engineering company, Strongbridge has evolved into a recognized leader in artificial intelligence, machine learning, low-code development, and data strategy. Our journey reflects a steadfast dedication to harnessing the full potential of information technology investments across the federal government.
Our legacy of service is rooted in firsthand experience with public service. Our CEO, Jeff Powell, began his career in the U.S. Air Force and later supported critical national missions at NASA Headquarters and the Goddard Space Flight Center. That early exposure to government operations and the impact of technology on mission outcomes shaped the values that still guide Strongbridge today. As the company has grown, we’ve extended our support across civilian and defense agencies, consistently adapting to meet the evolving needs of our clients.
While Tom’s business pals were playing space rockets and selling out their business platforms to the evil tech giants now fighting WWIII for Israel, the First Presbyterian Church was trying to figure out what to do with their valuable land, which a local cabal of do-gooders was eyeing for subsidized housing.
With the help of Tom’s corporate negotiating skills, the elders in the church who wanted to build a covered skywalk were politely told to kick rocks so that MMW architects, like Colin Lane, could push their ugly density housing agenda for the city gentrifiers who dominate Missoula’s City Council. And that’s what happened.

To further contextualize why this process smacks of everything I’ve been working to expose about local corruption, the picture below is credited to Martin Kidston, the former Democrat spokesperson now LARP’ing as a reporter so he can target opponents of City tax policy, like me. Also visible in the picture below is the bank financing the Hogan House project, Stockman’s Bank, a known abuser of Tax Increment Financing.

MMW Architects have an amazing ability to get public money to perpetuate their ugly aesthetic all around Missoula because their “do-gooder” architects, like Colin Lane and the guy I’m familiar with, John Wells, the architect who designed the new Poverello Center, know how to grease the wheels of Democrat control.
And I know how to correlate their political donations with that ability to get public money. Just ask John, Burt, Brent, Todd, or Ellie and they will tell you how obnoxiously observant I can be.

To finish up this post, which I’m writing on a Sunday morning while my Daddy is attending worship services at the church that helped target me, here are two supportive comments for the Hogan House project, and one critical comment. I’ll provide the missing context of the “support” after the quotes:


Sorry, Doc, you’re not the kind of virtue-signaling supporter of refugees, like Doug Odegaard is, and you’re not a New York transplant like Danny Tenenbaum, sneaking into churches like a Jewish Don Lemon while lending his support to Governor Gianforte for housing policies.
It’s disappointing to continue learning new aspects of how the people closest to me have directly contributed to what I’ve gone through these last few years of personal hell, but I still have enough of my marbles to know that Daddy’s effort to coerce me into declaring bankruptcy and shutting down this blog was one of the stupidest things he’s ever considered in that vaccinated brain of his.
Thanks for reading!






















