Month: September 2016

by William Skink

As I quietly scheme about how to monetize my creative content, Youtube is making it less likely for someone like me with strong political opinions to monetarily benefit from sharing in ad revenue:

Earlier this month, YouTube, the behemoth video-sharing website was accused of censoring users.

Claiming some of their videos had been barred from making money through the company’s ad services, YouTube hosts like Philip DeFranco spoke out against the policy, claiming over “a dozen of his videos had been flagged as inappropriate for advertising, including one dinged for ‘graphic content or excessive strong language.’“

In a video entitled “YouTube Is Shutting Down My Channel and I’m Not Sure What To Do,” DeFranco called YouTube’s policy “censorship with a different name,” since users touching on what the company considers to be controversial subjects end up losing money. “If you do this on the regular, and you have no advertising,” DeFranco added, “it’s not sustainable.”

I doubt I’ll even try to monetize any videos I upload to Youtube because they will most likely not be the kind of content that will make it pass the censors. Judge for yourself. Here is the second video:

by William Skink

After Hillary’s 9/11 medical episode, where she was clearly unable to stand without support before being whisked away not to a hospital, but her daughter’s apartment, the mainstream media has been forced to drastically shift gears. Before Hillary’s collapse, anyone who claimed her health issues were important was quickly depicted as a sexist right-wing conspiracy theorist. After 9/11, the media has been forced to abandon their smear tactics because the conspiracy theorists were right–something is very wrong with Hillary Clinton.

Large swaths of the corporate media will still do anything they can to protect and promote Clinton, including putting forth their own conspiracy theories, like maybe Putin poisoned Clinton. Yes, seriously, this from the Washington Post:

Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who has made the NFL so uncomfortable with his discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased players, suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign be checked for possible poisons after her collapse Sunday in New York.

Omalu, whose story was famously told in the movie “Concussion,” made the suggestion on Twitter, writing that he advised campaign officials to “perform toxicologic analysis of Ms. Clinton’s blood.”

The suggestion was greeted somewhat skeptically in the replies.

But this is Omalu, whose credentials and tenacity are well known. He wasn’t giving up on Twitter, adding that his reasoning is that he does not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee who has expressed admiration for Putin.

That is one hell of a conspiracy theory coming from the Bezos Post. I guess with so little credibility left, the mainstream media just doesn’t give a shit anymore and will say and write anything to put one of the most untrusted, deceitful political creatures into the White House where she can turn the demonizing rhetoric against Putin into a hot war.

It’s not just the mainstream media that delights in using the conspiracy smear against those who don’t align with their preferred ideology. Party sycophants like partisan blogger Don Pogreba also uses the CT pejorative to attack, ridicule and marginalize writes he doesn’t agree with.

Mike Dennison recently put up an article about political bloggers. To his discredit, he regurgitated the following claim from the anonymous Moogirl:

Political blogs usually have a clear partisan slant and may be seen as tools of a particular party, candidate, or cause.

But the most prominent and persistent political bloggers in Montana insist they are independent, answerable only to themselves.

“Philosophically, I’m a liberal, but I’m not a drum-beater for any political philosophy other than liberalism, freedom and good common sense,” says James Conner, who writes the Flathead Memo, a website that has almost exclusively political commentary. “I receive no money from (any) party or anyone else.”

Even the Montana Cowgirl, Montana’s best-known blog, says it has no formal ties to the state Democratic Party – though its targets are almost exclusively Republicans and conservatives, and it openly and routinely advocates for the election of Democrats in Montana.

James Conner is the only liberal blogger mentioned in the article who can credibly claim independence because he has actually written things that bring the ire of Democrat mouthpieces like Cowgirl. ID and Cowgirl are so obviously Democratic party sycophant blogs that Dennison appears naieve to allow them to claim otherwise.

With less than two months to go until election day, Democrats across the country are getting very nervous. They allowed their primary process to be hijacked by a pathological liar and her army of sycophants (something the partisan bloggers ignored because TRUMP!), they bashed anyone who speculated on Hillary’s health, including journalists and doctors, and now there is the rumblings of contingency planning if it turns out that Hillary is too ill to continue her campaign.

Will fear of Trump and claims that Putin is behind every Democratic fuck-up be enough to win the White House in November? Or will other means have to be implemented, like electronic vote rigging and/or judicial intervention? Remember, the stage has already been set to blame Putin for hacking the US election if things don’t go Hillary’s way.

Regardless, the way the last few days have shaken out, the ability of the mainstream media to be objective has been demolished. We are all conspiracy theorists now.

by William Skink

I got a fantastic opportunity today to reflect on how local government and its policy crusades deviate from experienced reality. The reality concerns guns, and who has them. Let me explain.

The gun background check measure from City Council is back. For those not aware of this mostly symbolic effort, the hope is that requiring background checks at gun shows will somehow lessen the chance of a statistically infrequent mass-shooting perpetrated by a zealot/crazy person to occur. The requirement will only extend to gun transactions within city limits, so come out to where I live in the county, and gun anarchy shall be yours.

Now, reality.

Today my mom, wife and baby returned from Kansas City. They were especially tired from being woken up around 3am when gunshots rang out. My in-laws live downtown, near Westport, where six people were shot.

Then, after they arrived safely in Montana, the threat of gun violence got closer to home in a scary way that is in no way yet resolved.

Where I live there is a dirt road between our house and our neighbors only used by people on our street, which dead ends at the river. Four properties face this road, and we all have kids. There has been some speeding issues with young drivers, but my neighbor has been on it with signs and landscape deterrents to keep people from cutting the corner and balling it down roadway.

Well none of that worked when earlier today I heard him yelling. I came out of the garage where I was playing with Legos with my kids, and saw the car stopped and my neighbor approaching. I followed.

I’m not going to get into the details of what happened other than saying the driver communicated what I consider to be a credible threat of violence with a gun that caused me to call 911.

After the incident I find out from my neighbor that he had a previous interaction a few days earlier with these two young men after they recklessly bombed down the dirt road. He thinks meth might be a factor. The one who threatened me said he just got out of prison.

I got the license plate, which I related to the 911 dispatcher, and a Sheriff’s deputy was supposed to get back to me, but so far I haven’t heard anything.

Usually I keep all my guns in the safe. Not tonight. Tonight I’m going to feel slightly less exposed from a direct threat of violence because I decided I needed to be a responsible gun owner familiar with a lethal deterrent to anyone who intends to harm me or my family.

Please don’t mistake this as some chest-thumping bravado. I am not happy at all that I have to write this or even think this way, but this is the world we live in. Maybe statistically it’s better than it used to be, but right now I’m just not feeling it.

Taking this person at his word, if just out of prison, and if truly in possession of a gun, what good would more background checks do for me regarding this threat?

I read op-eds all the time about meth problem this, and jail overcrowding that, but what ever gets done to reverse the trends?

Some damaged young punk with a prison mentality feeling disrespected threatened me today as my kids watched.

If there is a problem I won’t be waiting for police to respond to defend myself.

by William Skink

by William Skink

On September 11th I’m going to upload a video to my new Youtube channel. Since leaving my job in February I’ve been working on an art project that will culminate in a website featuring the bulk of my artistic output, including poems, visual art and a barely fictional story set in a mountain town called Zula.

For me the project is a therapeutic process of integrating two fictional representations of myself so I can move forward as an artist in this new phase of my life. It’s been a great chance to reflect on the previous two phases of my time here in Missoula.

I moved to Missoula during the summer of 2000 to finish my undergraduate degree in creative writing. When the attack on 9/11 happened, I was 22 years old. I graduated the year this country illegally invaded and occupied Iraq, with the help of once reputable newspapers like the New York Times (which today can’t even get the capitol of Syria correct).

After graduating and getting married I took my degree and…worked in a kitchen for four years. Artistically I stewed in poems, trying to understand the world that had darkened so dramatically on that blue September morning. I went down the rabbit hole. I entered Chapel Perilous.

2008 marked the start of my second phase in Missoula. In addition to the personal milestone of having my first child, America put a half-black man in the White House amidst the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It was also the year I started working at Missoula’s homeless shelter.

Now another eight years has gone by. When the stress and risk to my personal safety got to be too much, I decided I had to leave my position at the shelter. Since then I’ve been slowly learning how to use the recording/editing software I’ve invested in. I’m still a bit overwhelmed with the technology, but it’s coming along.

The topics I’ve been researching have sent me deeper and deeper into the bowels of Chapel Perilous. If I didn’t have artistic outlets, strong family support, and frankly the financial resources to take this time to recover, I think I probably would have lost my mind by now. The stuff I’ve delved into is dark and disturbing.

The topics I’ve been reading about–Nazism, the occult, child trafficking, weaponized drugs, secret societies, mind control, dangerous science and religious end-times paranoia–keeps springing up in the stories we consume as entertainment. I just finished binge watching Orphan Black. Before that, it was Stranger Things. Other shows that have caught my attention recently include True Detective, American Horror Story, Walking Dead, Jericho, Salem and Helix.

The most dangerous story, though, is the piece of fiction we were sold as the official conspiracy theory put forward by our government about what happened the morning of September 11th. Last month Europhysics News took a fresh look at the physics of high-rise building collapses (pdf). Will this have any impact on public opinion regarding the official narrative we were told?

Paul Craig Roberts thinks the tide is already turning:

The ability of the presstitutes to influence Americans seems to be on the decline. The media ganged up on Donald Trump during the Republican primaries, intending to deny Trump the nomination. But the voters ignored the presstitutes. In the current presidential campaign, Hillary is not the run-away winner that the presstitutes are trying to make her. And despite the propaganda ministry, the legs under the official 9/11 story are wobbly, to say the least.

Indeed, the official 9/11 story already has lost credibility with the American public. Last April a Rasmussen Poll found that “Americans doubt they’ve been told all the facts about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and strongly believe the government should come clean.”

A YouGov poll in 2013 found that 50 percent of Americans “have doubts about the government’s account of 9/11,” which shows that the public is far more intelligent and less corrupt than the presstitutes who are paid to lie to the public. This poll also found that as a consequence of the cover-up job performed by the American presstitutes, 46 percent of Americans were not even aware that a third WTC building, Building 7, collapsed on September 11. After viewing films of WTC 7’s collapse, 46 percent saw it as a controlled demolition. By a margin of two to one, poll respondants support a new investigation of Building 7’s collapse.

So, in America today “conspiracy kooks” outnumber those who believe the official lies. As the official lies are themselves conspiracy theories, Americans who disbelieve the official conspiracy theories outnumber Americans who believe official conspiracy theories. The question is: who are the real conspiracy kooks, the majority who disbelieve the official lies or the minority who believe the official lies?

Kids starting high school this year will be learning about 9/11 as a historical event they weren’t alive to experience. But that one day of death and destruction has dramatically shaped the world they inhabit in ways they may never fully understand.

The official story that two planes caused three steel-framed buildings to collapse into their own footprint is ridiculous, yet for fifteen years that narrative has been the only state-sanctioned explanation of what happened on 9/11.

I’m doubtful, though, that the hold this piece of fiction has on us is loosening its grip. Can art help pry the figurative fingers from around our collective throat? I don’t know. But regardless of any wider impact, I feel compelled to start sharing the fruits of my artistic process.

For those interested in what my new phase will look and sound like, stop by here Sunday, September 11th, to see. After 6 years of blogging, I feel like my real work is just starting.

Stay tuned.