Month: December 2015

by William Skink

In a recent post, James Conner claims there is something rotten in Missoula, but he can’t figure out if it’s our community that’s rotten, the University, or both. Here are some of the factors Conner offers as explanation for the decline of enrollment at the University of Montana:

The immediate impacts are financial squeezes on UMT, which needs to make cuts totaling $12 million, and Missoula, and painful cutbacks in the humanities at UMT. The longer term impact may be a permanent reduction in the size and reputation of UMT as the state of Montana embraces educational objectives that emphasize training for the professions at the expense of the liberal arts.

A long string of athletic scandals at UMT hasn’t helped. Nor have allegations that a rape culture exists on campus and in the community. Add to that constant reports of crime, public drunkenness, and homelessness, in Missoula. Parents and students alike may be concluding that Bozeman is a much safer place to pursue a college degree.

Missoula is a liberal college town, that much is obvious. And we exist as a liberal bubble in a predominately conservative state, that is also obvious. So what does being a liberal town mean? Here is one quick definition of what “liberal” means:

Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all. It is the duty of the government to alleviate social ills and to protect civil liberties and individual and human rights. Believe the role of the government should be to guarantee that no one is in need.

What does this definition mean for Missoula? Let’s start with equal opportunity. When it comes to living in Missoula, there is a big disparity between what it costs to live in Missoula and what most jobs pay. The government can subsidize housing through agencies like the Missoula Housing Authority, but it doesn’t get close to meeting the actual need. For prospective students, that means the housing market will bleed them dry.

And why is housing so expensive? Because there is finite land for development which makes meeting demand for housing difficult. It seems that those who can afford to live in Missoula are those who made their money elsewhere (like the east coast) and then they transplant to this idyllic valley where the desire to live in a liberal utopia meets the reality of the negative side of growth, which are the urban problems we are seeing increase: addiction, violence and poverty.

Local and state governments have been inadequate in dealing with these social ills. Instead of funding what could help, Missoula is instead tapping the taxpayer piggy bank for more parks while the private sector is building more banks, breweries, distilleries and casinos.

And then we have civil liberties. While Missoula’s rape culture was (and still is) flourishing, our city was busy passing laws to make benign behavior, like sitting on sidewalks downtown, illegal. The worst example of this violation of civil liberties was introduced by an alleged “progressive” who sensationalized examples of women being chased downtown by homeless people to nearly get Missoula sued by the ACLU. We have wasted years with failed efforts to try and sanitize the areas in Missoula where the problems are most visible while the core factors contributing to chronic homeless are ignored.

Missoula, at least to me, seems more concerned with image than substance. This was most apparent when Jon Krakauer came out with his book that prominently featured MISSOULA in its title. When the book came out, the concern seemed to be about the image of the football team, the image of the university and the image of our town. While some great work has been done to improve the criminal justice system, there continues to be serious problems overloading the system, rendering it unable to deal with social ills, like addiction, which is fueling violence and keeping our local detention facility bursting at the seams.

In just the month of December there have been multiple murders. One was ascribed to meth use. Another appears to be a domestic violence situation turned lethal, as predicted by the victim, who was found dead in Pattee Canyon over the weekend. Another incident hasn’t been officially deemed a murder yet, but the little information reported makes it look like something violent happened.

I’ve lived in Missoula for 15 years now. I got my liberal arts education here, got married here and started my family here. And I spent the last seven years trying to understand how our community deals with some of these social ills and what I’ve learned is this: we aren’t dealing with them. We keep first responders in perpetual triage while more money is spent on studies and meetings are endlessly attended.

I know, I’m a total downer. At least we will have some pretty parks to look at, and a nice new bank at the corner of Orange and Broadway and a Verizon store to complain about because it’s the surface images that people in this community seem to respond to more than the underlying problems that continue to worsen.

by William Skink

I finished a series on Netflix this week that originally aired on CBS, called Jericho. The premise is what kept me watching through the melodrama, which was obnoxious at times. There will probably be some spoilers in this post, so you’ve been warned.

The show begins with the protagonist, Jake, returning to his hometown, Jericho, Kansas. Then a nuclear bomb goes off in Denver and everyone freaks out except for the mysterious guy who just arrived with his family, a guy who has curiously specific advice for dealing with nuclear fallout.

As the show progresses the audience learns that there were 23 nuclear bombs set off in a coordinated terrorist attack that plunges America into a survivalist’s wet dream. The attacks are blamed on Iran and North Korea, but the mysterious guy knows better and ultimately finds out that the attacks were coordinated at the highest levels of the US government. The result is an attempt by a new government based in Cheyenne, Wyoming (complicit in the attacks) trying to take over the remnants of the Federal government east of the Mississippi.

The first season is 28 episodes and the second season is a 7 episode wrap-up that makes it appear the show wasn’t cleared for more time, so they had to rush to tie up the narrative. It’s the second season that really got me thinking about authority, occupation and following orders. I swear I’m going somewhere relevant with this, so bare with me.

One of the main bad guys in this fictional series is the head of DHS (Department for Homeland Security). Another bad guy is a private contractor that works for Ravenswood, a clear reference to the company of mercenaries formerly known as Blackwater. Ravenswood is part of a company called J&R, a company that makes me think of Halliburton. Add this to the fact the new government is based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and it starts looking like this series is a commentary on the reign of Dick Cheney and the unaccountable power that has poisoned the Federal government after 9/11.

In the second season, a military commander is sent to Jericho to restore order after Jericho goes to war with a neighboring town. The military commander is an honorable man and struggles with the growing realization that he is serving a corrupt government. With episode titles like “Sedition” and “Patriots and Tyrants” you can clearly see where this is going.

The implication of this fictional narrative suddenly became oddly relevant this week with another controversial article from investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, claiming the US military undermined the Obama administration in 2013 over foreign policy in Syria:

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

If true, this is huge because this isn’t just military officials pushing back against the foreign policy of the White House. When the article describes actions being taken outside official political channels, we are getting very close to describing acts of treason.

Once again, Hersh should be commended for his investigative journalism. If we had more Hersh’s maybe we wouldn’t be in a situation where the Obama administration is trying to repeat the disastrous policy of regime change that has turned Libya into a haven for jihadists. And if we had more honest, accurate assessments of the consequences of US foreign policy, maybe we wouldn’t have such a propagandized population incapable of understanding the risk of America playing global cop.

by William Skink

The last Saturday before Christmas; a time for holiday parties, shopping and football. Oh, and a little movie franchise called Star Wars released one of the most eagerly anticipated movies since the last new Star Wars movie came out.

If one were to desire to insulate a political candidate from the scrutiny of viewers, then last Saturday was the perfect day to schedule a debate…and that’s what happened.

It’s obvious that the DNC would prefer a coronation instead of an election. The timing and frequency of the debates is just one area that has been intentionally dampened by the DNC. The recent data breach provided an opportunity for the DNC to deviate from their own rules to punish the Sanders campaign:

The DNC appears to have been in such a rush to shut down Bernie Sanders’ campaign, that they violated a few of their own laws according to a lawsuit filed by the campaign against the DNC.

The shutdown came about because of a DNC software security error that allowed one campaign to view another campaign’s proprietary voter data. This is an error that had been reported to the DNC for months by the Sanders campaign but continued to occur. A few Sanders staffers allegedly accessed private data from the Hillary Clinton campaign during a period where the error had been occurring again, and when this was found the DNC immediately locked the Sanders campaign out of their data.

Democracy has been involved in a long vanishing act for awhile now, along with our constitutional rights, but Democrats have been too involved with maintaining their power to notice this disturbing disappearance.

The holiday season has provided cover for another legislative move to erode constitutional safeguards regarding citizen privacy. The title of this article says it all: Worst Anti-Privacy Bill Since the PATRIOT act, Passes Hidden in a Budge Bill and Media is Silent. That’s right, in this anti-Democratic sequel to last years Cyber Wars, where CISA was stopped from becoming law, Darth Obama has already signed this latest iteration of CISA into law with nary a peep from Democrats:

On Friday, Congress passed a $1.15 trillion omnibus spending package to continue funding the federal government, which included an already defeated, and extremely controversial cyber security bill, that was inserted into the spending package as a means of assuring it’s passage.

In spite of this massive revelation and horrific blow to privacy, the mainstream media remains mum. While many outlets are covering the passage of the spending bill, they are completely omitting anything about CISA.

The New York Times, for example, broke the story Friday morning about congress passing the omnibus measure. However, they conveniently left out any mention of CISA.

Aside from the tech sites who know about the dangers of this measure, the entire realm of mainstream media is choosing to remain silent.

The Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA), quietly pushed back in 2014 before being shut down by civil rights and privacy advocates, was added into the Omnibus Appropriations Bill by House Speaker Paul Ryan as a means circumventing rampant opposition to the anti-privacy legislation.

The CISA legislation, which Rep. Justin Amash called “the worst anti-privacy legislation since the USA PATRIOT Act,” has now been passed by Congress and will be signed into law by President Obama as part of the government spending package.

The Empire is relentless, Congress is worthless and our two corporate parties go skipping hand in hand when pleasing their corporate Sith lords.

Happy Holidays!

by William Skink

My reasons for maintaining anonymity have evolved over the years. When I first started writing at 4&20 Blackbirds in 2010 I actually didn’t give anonymity much thought. I had commented under a pseudonym and therefore started writing posts under the same pseudonym. As I started experiencing the attacks that come with not adhering to the political binary of Democrat good/Republican bad, and as I started writing about “conspiracy theories”, I felt using a pseudonym allowed me more freedom to write about things that would trigger derision and ridicule.

I don’t worry about derision and ridicule anymore. My concerns are now twofold. Politically, I’m increasingly concerned about what a Nation waging perpetual war across the globe will do with dissenters. Will dissent be conflated with extremism? Will being called a Putin lover be followed with a knock on the door? Across the pond, the UK recently distributed leaflets as part of an “anti-extremism drive”. From the link:

Child protection officials have been criticised after warning parents that young people who take issue with government policy or question what they are told in the media may have been radicalised by extremists.

A leaflet drawn up by an inner-city child safeguarding board warns that “appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policies” is a sign “specific to radicalisation”.

Parents and carers have also been advised by the safeguarding children board in the London Borough of Camden that “showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and a belief in conspiracy theories” could be a sign that children are being groomed by extremists.

Seven years ago we were promised a Democratic administration would be more transparent. But, as usual, there is a great disparity between word and action. In practice, the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to aggressively go after the people who are trying to tell us the surveillance state has destroyed our constitutional rights.

Beyond the political concerns I also have personal reasons for maintaining my anonymity. My work puts me in constant contact with unstable individuals. A few years ago I started receiving letters from a mentally ill woman who thinks I’m her kid. The letters first arrived at my workplace. Then, a year ago, they started arriving at my home address. I have since moved, but I still get the letters forwarded to my home. This woman has threatened to take my kids away from me after having me imprisoned for sexually assaulting her.

A few months ago I was physically assaulted by a mentally ill man who threatened to kill me. I believed this threat was legitimate, and so did a judge, who signed off on a permanent order of protection. These threats are exacerbated by systems that are breaking down, specifically our health care system and criminal justice system. It’s bad and getting worse in ways people outside these systems simply can’t understand because those of us within these systems can’t really talk explicitly about what we’re seeing.

I’m not the only one who is burnt out and exhausted by the volume of problems overloading these systems. As our political leaders commission more studies while programs get defunded, the first responders on the front-lines suffer.

Don’t get me wrong, I greatly value the real-world education I’ve received. It was worth all the vicarious trauma I’ve absorbed over the years. I have a better informed understanding of how difficult policing can be, for example, after seeing up close their day-to-day frustrations. I have a lot of sympathy for law enforcement now. If you would have told me seven years ago I would have these sympathies, I would have laughed in your face.

I don’t know if there are political solutions to the immense problems facing this community and this country. I’d like to see Democrats take responsibility for their part in getting us here, but I don’t expect that is possible in our hyper-polarized atmosphere. While I appreciate this olive branch from one partisan, I’m weary of how our years of disagreement is being framed:

I’ve tried, since last night, to negotiate a ceasefire. My argument is pretty simple: it’s clear we cannot persuade each other, and it’s also clear that the history of bad blood between the two sites is so strong that we’re just not capable of seeing each other’s postings as anything other than hostile acts. There are times when relationships become too toxic to continue, even with the best intentions, and silence is most appropriate.

So one more time, publicly, I ask: can we please put this to rest? Can we agree not to write posts about each other’s sites so that both sites can be better places for the people interested in reading what’s written there? I’m willing to do that. If the writers at the other site are not, then I have to give some thought to shutting this blog down because, rightly or wrongly, I worry that the conflict will spill over into my real life. I am a teacher foremost. This is a hobby, a weird one, yes, but a hobby. I can’t afford to jeopardize my career or personal relationships over this.

I’m not sure what I’m being asked not to write about here. “Posts about each other’s sites” seems intentionally vague. When I wrote about the politics of emasculation, it wasn’t a criticism of a site, but a tactic. When I wrote about reality averse partisans on Syria it wasn’t a criticism of the site, but a criticism of uncritically accepting the erroneous media framing of the dynamics in Syria.

I’m not going to stop writing about foreign policy or our corrupt two party political system. I will, however, do my best to avoid using ID posts as examples of the damaging effects of partisanship and the ignorance that ensues from exclusively relying on western propaganda to understand world affairs.

by Theodore Roethke

My wrath, where’s the edge
Of the fine shapely thought
That I carried so long
When so young, when so young

My rage, what’s to be
The soul’s privilege?
Will the heart eat the heart?
What’s to come? What’s to come?

O love, you who hear
The slow tick of time
In your sea-buried ear,
Tell me now, tell me now.

–from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Random House, Inc.