Month: August 2016

by William Skink

Clearly the American embarrassment known as Ryan Lochte succumbed to a Russian plot in Rio. I suspect Russian agents infiltrated the party Lochte left with his swimmer bros and used some kind of chemical agent and/or mind control techniques to cause the swimmers to go berserker on a gas station bathroom.

Knowing the inclination of Americans to lie and blame others for their misbehavior, all Russia had to do was sit back and watch the moronic Lochte concoct a robbery story that was immediately scoped up by the propagandists in our media predisposed to any negative story depicting Brazil as a dangerous, disgusting toilet of a country unable to pull off an Olympics in their third world hovel.

I hope our media can uncover this Russian plot to embarrass us at the Olympics so we can get back to feeling superior and mocking others like entitled mean girls laughing at the less fashionable at a high school prom.

by William Skink

When the effort to resettle refugees in Missoula got international attention earlier this month from the BBC, this is how the opening paragraphs framed the opposition:

“ISIS will come for our women”. That’s how one resident expressed his fears about the proposed settling of refugees in the US state of Montana.

Around 100 refugees could be moving to the American West thanks to a local group in Missoula who were inspired to help after seeing the photo of a drowned Syrian boy whose family had fled the conflict.

But people in the neighbouring rural county are not happy. A local politician told the BBC they want a guarantee refugees will not be a threat – and he warned of a culture clash between any Muslim refugees from Syria and the predominantly white local population.

The dynamic being set up is pretty obvious: stupid, ignorant yokels from the rural margins of Missoula saying stupid shit like the opening quote versus inspired empaths rising to save Syrian toddlers from certain death.

I have written about my perspective on this issue many times now, mostly contrasting the liberal do-gooders desire to save the world one refugee at a time with the reality of failing systems unable to meet the need that already exists in our community.

On Facebook, I have even been that asshole who shares this perspective by providing contrasting comments on posts gushing with that self-congratulatory adulation over the perception that Missoula is such a welcoming and amazing place (within city limits, of course, where that rural ignorance is kept at bay with liberal righteousness)

When I mention scarce resources for the disadvantaged already struggling in our community, I am told all the funding is from different pools and will have no negative impact. But the one resource that supporters of bringing 100 refugees a year to Missoula don’t have an adequate retort for is one of the most crucial: housing.

In the Missoulian today there is an article describing the “skyrocketing” price of housing as “unprecedented”. From the link:

The skyrocketing prices of homes in Missoula this year have even long-time real estate agents shaking their heads in disbelief.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Brint Wahlberg of Windermere Real Estate. “It’s truly an unprecedented market.

“I’ve been in the business 16 years, my mom has been in the industry 36 years. We’ve never seen a market where sellers have such an advantage to drive sales price and terms of sale and everything because there’s such a lack of supply inventory and a lack of affordable new construction.”

Over just the last eight months, the median sale price of homes in the Missoula urban area have surged up 4 percent from $239,500 to the current price of $249,900. That’s a jump of over $10,000 since the end of last year and a $53,000 increase since 2011.

The article goes on to describe immediate bidding wars over new listings, frustrated buyers who miss out if they have to wait until after work to do a walkthrough (the house already going under contract before the end of the work day), and buyers giving up to return to a rental market the article put at operating with a 3% vacancy rate, down from the 4.9% vacancy rate cited in an article about housing earlier this year.

Here is more from the article:

The affordability gap has been growing in Missoula. From From 2012 to 2016, the median price of a home in Missoula rose from $209,700 to $249,900. However, the median income for a single person has stagnated right around $44,000 and actually decreased last year.

As of Aug. 5, there were just 339 active residential listings in the Missoula urban area and 602 in the county. In July alone, the median sale price of the 128 homes sold in the Missoula area was $268,000, so there doesn’t appear to be any deceleration of the climbing prices.

Wahlberg said that it’s a simple math problem: People in Missoula don’t make enough money to afford housing.

For the refugee resettlement crusaders, the housing situation in Missoula represents a potential flashpoint of frustration that isn’t fueled by ISIS IS COMING FOR OUR WOMENFOLK!!! With supply this tight and demand so significant, making competition for housing so fierce, there is simply no way for the white saviors of war refugees to wiggle out of the reality that relocating 100 people a year into this housing situation will only make things more difficult for people trying to buy a house in Missoula.

Missoula isn’t the only place experiencing skyrocketing housing prices. There is an interesting resignation letter from a city official in Palo Alto who cites the price of housing as the reason she is moving her family away.  Read the whole letter below the jump.

Continue reading “Housing Refugees Amidst Skyrocketing Home Prices in Missoula”

by William Skink

After the “Obama is the founder of ISIS” bullshit Trump deployed to once again capture the media attention for the next few cycles, I’m more convinced than ever of Trump’s trojan horse function to actually benefit the Clinton campaign.

While Trump is now claiming he was being sarcastic, his insistence that he was being literal after the firestorm erupted, and not figurative, ensured that incredulous media outlets would carefully dissect his every iteration of this latest absurdity.

How this benefits the Clinton campaign is obvious. Trump could have hit Hillary hard on the new emails exposing how Clinton Foundation donors called in favors while Clinton ran the State Department, but he didn’t. Instead his remarks dominated news coverage, eclipsing the growing body of evidence that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt peddler of political influence unfit for the presidency.

There is also the added benefit of any topic that gets the Trump treatment becomes too toxic to approach, even though the topics need to be examined.

For example, let’s take a look at Trump’s claim that the vote count will be rigged. Here is how specifically Trump states it could happen:

Trump specifically told the Washington Post this week that he thinks rigging will take the form of voter identification fraud. But, as Hasen told NPR this week, the kind of fraud that voter ID laws are intended to counter just doesn’t seem to exist.

That quote comes from this NPR article. If you read the entire article, there is one election result conspicuously missing from the article: the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush. There is very good evidence that the Ohio results were hacked for Bush, but lucky for Bush (and Karl Rove) the guy who could have provided insight into this voter theft, Michael Connell, conveniently died in a plane crash before his deposition.

But Trump isn’t talking about voting machines, where the real threat of stolen elections exist. Why not?

Then there are the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s health. I think this is a real area of concern (better start investigating just who Tim Kaine is), but let’s see how Trump is framing this issue:

“She goes out and she sees you guys for about 10 minutes, she sees you for a little while, it’s all rehearsed and staged,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Sunday on Fox News’s “Media Buzz.”

“They’ll pick a couple of people out of the audience that are like, you know, 100 percent. She’ll sit around a little plastic table, they’ll talk to the people for a while. It’s ridiculous,” he added.

“And then she goes away for five or six days and you don’t see her. She goes to sleep.”

So Hillary sleeps? That’s the dig Trump is going to take? Hillary is no spring chicken, so it’s doubtful this line of attack is going to do much. Trump is trying to question her stamina, for sure, but there are much more substantive concerns regarding potential blood clots and other health issues that Trump isn’t using. Instead it’s excessive napping Trump is choosing to focus on.

Going back to the Obama as founder (and Hillary as co-founder) of ISIS comment, this one really pisses me off because the whole argument here is Obama abandoned Iraq (thanks to Bush’s Status of Forces Agreement) and Hillary destroyed Libya, creating the vacuums that ISIS emerged from. While there is a little truth to this assertion, there is a much more sordid tale to be told.

But Trump isn’t going to go there. No, he won’t talk about the other founders of ISIS, like Saudi Arabia, or the support provided to terrorists by Israel, or the complicity of Turkey in facilitating ISIS and other terrorist groups to make millions selling oil on the black market. Trump won’t question why it took Russia providing satellite evidence of ISIS transporting oil to shame Obama into finally ordering airstrikes.

From the beginning, since that phone call from Bill encouraging him to run, Trump has done more damage to the GOP than to the Clinton campaign. It’s gotten so bad that now there is speculation that down-ticket races are being hurt by Trump’s continued attempts to self-destruct his campaign. How convenient for Hillary Clinton.

by William Skink

Lately I’ve been thinking about how central storytelling is to the human experience, and not just because I’m in the midst of constructing my own barely fictitious story. I believe we are (or become) the stories we tell ourselves through a sort of narrative alchemy that is much more potent than terms like “propaganda” can approximate.

Stories told through the mediums of cinema, television and music have had an immense impact on my own sense of narrative. The latest story to spark my synapses is the Netflix show Stranger Things. Set in the fictional town of Hawkins, circa 1983, the show has quickly imprinted its narrative on the minds of millions as they follow the nostalgia-laden characters through a visual collage of 80’s references.

I got so pulled into this narrative I even bought a poster on Etsy because I’m apparently 15 again decorating my basement room. Yeah, the nostalgia really is that good.

But it’s not just the nostalgia. Stranger Things takes on some plot points that are synchronistically fucking with me, but I don’t want to get into spoilers, so for now I’ll just leave it at that.

Next month I’m turning 38, and I have to say I don’t think the distinction between what is real and what isn’t has ever been this confused. I like fiction because there is no claim of being objectively real. Artists can create worlds with words and images and sound, and sometimes those worlds contain better information than what our reporters and journalists are pushing on us, especially during this election cycle.

Though I’ll probably regret it, I’d like to include Mark Tokarski’s descent into his face-splitting claims that celebrity deaths are mostly hoaxes to provide cover for reassignments to other roles. The comedian Bill Hicks transformed into conspiracy barker Alex Jones, for example, and Janis Joplin (or her twin) transformed into Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now.

While it might be easier to just ridicule and relegate this craziness to Mark’s murky corner of the interweb, I think the story Mark is telling himself is important. Because it’s not just Mark. I caught a piece at Zerohedge the other day speculating that nuclear bombs aren’t really that destructive, so what Japan experienced was more likely from conventional weapons.

I’m sure there is some level of comfort derived from declaring everything a hoax. And while revulsion and outright dismissal is the standard reaction to this kind of speculation, I try to at least keep an open mind about how much of our understanding of history has been artificially constructed to fit our present day agenda.

The narrative I’ve been chasing for years now is starting to coalesce. A central plot point to the story I’m interested in involves the overlap between the occult, Nazism, and the New Age movement. One of the books I’m currently plodding through is Peter Levenda’s Unholy Alliance.

After WWII, I think there is compelling evidence that America absorbed and expanded on Nazi research into mind control and other paranormal aspects of the planet we inhabit, with reckless disregard of the potential blowback. While this may seem like an outlandish assertion, there are plenty of compelling sources adding to our understanding of the 20th century wars that recast the global order, an order that is currently falling apart.

How far will this country go to preserve the destructive story of American execptionalism? The story of manifest destiny was bad enough, but the notion that America is the one indispensable nation is probably the most damaging story ever told.

The hubris and arrogance involved in the stories Americans tell themselves will ultimately be our undoing. Instead of believing in some divine mandate to expand and displace other cultures (manifest destiny), or in the exceptional role that justifies killing and manipulating whoever refuses to accept American hegemony, we need to start constructing alternative stories to pull us back from the brink of self-destruction.

by William Skink

Donald Trump has once again taken over the news cycle with his comments that are being interpreted as a call to violence to stop Hillary when he said this:

If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.

Now the media is predictably freaking out with their saturation coverage of all things Trump.

While Trump is being portrayed as an out-of-control demagogue calling for a political assassination, Hillary Clinton is seeking the endorsement of the indochina butcher, Henry Kissinger.  Here is The Nation suggesting how Bernie supporters should react to this impending endorsement:

Word comes from Politico that Hillary Clinton is courting the endorsement of Henry Kissinger. No surprise. Kissinger and the Clintons go back a ways, to when Bill in the early 1990s sought out Kissinger’s support to pass NAFTA and to, in the words of the economist Jeff Faux, serve as “the perfect tutor for a new Democratic president trying to convince Republicans and their business allies that they could count on him to champion Reagan’s vision.” Hillary has continued the apprenticeship, soliciting Kissinger’s advice and calling him “friend.”

Still, Bernie Sanders, and Sanders supporters and surrogates, should use the Politico story to draw a line, making clear that they will withdraw their support of Clinton if Clinton accepts Kissinger’s endorsement. If Sanders stands for anything, it is the promise of decency and civil equality, qualities that he has worked hard to bestow on Clinton since the Democratic National Convention. By accepting Kissinger’s endorsement, Clinton wouldn’t just be mocking that gift. She’d be sending the clearest signal yet to grassroots peace and social-justice Democrats that her presidency wouldn’t be a “popular front” against Trumpian fascism. It would be bloody business as usual.

The article goes on to describe Kissinger as a “unique monster”. The childhood taunt that it “takes one to know one” comes to mind.

One of my contentions about the danger of Democrats is that where Republicans say stuff, Democrats actually do stuff. I use this counterpoint with my dad all the time. For example, while hiking in Glacier recently, my dad lamented that Republicans wanted to destroy our national parks. I retorted that while he is afraid of that, Democrats like Jon Tester are actually doing immense damage to the environment by weakening the endangered species act to delist wolves (as a depressing side note to that, it’s now feared the entire East Fork wolf pack in Alaska has been wiped out for good).

Getting back to political assassination, while the corporate media throws out any remaining shred of journalistic standards to destroy Trump, making quite a stretch to imply that Trump’s statement were a call to violence, there is growing suspicion that one of the recent convenient deaths that have benefited the Clinton campaign may have been just that: a political assassination.

The person now hinting at this scenario has been the target of calls for political assassination himself. Julian Assange, who has had both Democrats and Republicans call for his political assassination, is now hinting that the murdered DNC staffer, Seth Rich, could have been the email leaker. This is big. Here is the exchange from a recent interview:

Assange: Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often significant risks. There was a 27-year old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back… murdered.. for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.

Host: That was just a robbery wasn’t it?

Assange: No. There’s no finding.

Host: What are you suggesting?

Assange: I am suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.

Host: But was he one of your sources, then?

Assange: We don’t comment on who our sources are.

Host: But why make the suggestion?

Assange: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources face serious risks… that’s why they come to us so we can protect their anonymity.

Host: But it’s quite something to suggest a murder… that’s basically what you’re doing.

Here is some more context from Zerohedge:

The mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of 27-year-old Democratic-staffer Seth Rich (shot multiple times, and not robbed, at 420am near his home in Washington D.C., where no homicides have been reported within 1500 feet) have stirred Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to offer a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. But it is Assange’s comments during a Dutch TV interview that are most disturbing as he hinted that Rich – who was in charge of DNC voter expansion data – was the email-leaker and his death was a politically-motivated assassination.
…
Within hours of the event alternative media reporters began to suspect something was amiss, as police had no witnesses, no suspects and no motive. This led to theories that Rich, who was in charge of voter expansion data at the DNC, may have been killed to cover something up. Subsequent reports even suggested Rich may have been on his way to speak with special agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding an “ongoing court case.”

Will the mainstream media take a break from everything Trump to do some investigative journalism into this? Probably not, as most people would prefer to keep their jobs and not be added to the body count themselves.

Or maybe the media could continue providing insight into the email evidence of corruption from America’s first female presidential nominee:

The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate. In the email Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides at the State Department Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is “important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that “Personnel has been sending him options.” Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative.

Included in the new document production is a 2009 email in which Band, directs Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon. Band notes that Chagoury is “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us,” and insists that Abedin call Amb. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury.

Chagoury is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and a top donor to the Clinton Foundation. He has appeared near the top of the Foundation’s donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to a 2010 investigation by PBS Frontline, Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for laundering money from Nigeria, but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government.

Hillary Clinton is a political creature who turned the State Department into a den of corruption and shows no qualms about getting advice and an endorsement from a murderous butcher who oversaw the slaughtering of millions of humans. I don’t think it’s that big of a stretch to claim Hillary Clinton knows more about political assassination than Donald Trump.