Month: October 2016

by William Skink

From big, corporate media conglomerates to little Montana start-ups, the effort to destroy Trump is becoming all-consuming. And because Trump is perceived as such a unique threat, there is just no room for journalistic objectivity or equal attention to the great unmasking Wikileaks has gifted our dead Democracy.

At Missoula Current, Martin Kidston explores the down-ticket impact on Montana Republicans after pussygate, with an article titled Montana GOP’s statewide candidates not fazed by Donald Trump’s missteps. It remains to be seen whether any statewide Democrats will have to field similar inquiries to gauge if they are fazed by the deluge of disclosures exposing Hillary Clinton’s chronic corruption and sleazy deceit.

At Last Best News, Ed Kemmick eagerly scapegoats right-wing talk radio hosts for piecing together Trumpestein in their laboratory, then setting him loose to stir up the deplorable villagers against the liberal eggheads who oversaw the experiment, but are now panicking and in need of local scribes to obscure their culpability.

Convoluted analogy, I know, so let’s take a look at Ed’s actual framing of the origin of Trumpestein:

It looks like the presidential election might be over already. Thank God. But the creatures that spawned the Creature from the Reality TV Lagoon are likely to be with us for a while yet.

I refer to the lords of talk radio, whose unrelenting sledgehammer attacks on conventional governance finally coughed up presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. He has been, sure enough, unconventional. But unlike most iconoclasts, Trump seems to have been blissfully unaware that there were conventions, customs and rules that people live by in the real world.

The handful of right-wing talk radio hosts who created his candidacy are not quite so innocent. They have, over the past several decades, spewed forth a river of words that would, if put into books, have the heft of about 2.5 million Bibles, by my rough estimate.

I’m sure blaming Rush and Hannity feels good, but they are not the ones to blame for Trump. The real culprit is hiding in plain sight: conventional governance.

Here is the awkward reality: the conditions that created an enraged populous willing to use Trump as their political molotov cocktail were created during the neoliberal takeover of the Democratic party during the 90’s by, you guessed it, the Clintons. And like a venereal disease, it’s taken awhile for the syphilitikesque symptoms to become apparent in the subject, which is us.

First, let’s take a look at economics. The trifecta of financial deregulation (repealing Glass-Steagall), free trade (NAFTA), and welfare reform set the stage for rage by outsourcing jobs, destroying the safety net, and giving the wolves of wall street the keys to the hen house.

Then there’s the media, and the gift to the unofficial ministry of information in the guise of the Telecommunication Act of ’96. I think we can all agree that the corporate consolidation of media power has not resulted in a more informed electorate.

And how about race relations? Well, the tough-on-crime Clintons exploded mass incarceration with mandatory minimums and other craven policy positions that have greatly deteriorated relations between law enforcement and the communities they are tasked with policing. I think the mantra back then was political lives matter, specifically ours (the Clintons), and fuck the rest of you.

So now here we are, less than a month before the 2016 election, and Trump still has a chance of becoming president, despite everything he has said and done. It’s like those cheap, Chinese finger traps: the more vigorous you try to dislodge your fingers, the tighter the trap becomes.

If you really want to destroy Trump, media crusaders, quit pulling so hard, pause, take a breath, then actually try to understand the dynamics that made Trump possible. If Rush and Hannity is the best you can do, take another breath, look around, then try again.

Or don’t, because this late in the game there’s no stopping this train from derailing.

by William Skink

While it might seem like I’ve always disdained the Obama regime, there was actually a period before the election in 2008 where I suspended my disbelief and allowed the hopium to fire my synapses with cautious optimism. I even teared up a little when Obama spoke on campus.

I remember precisely when the disappointment hit, followed quickly by the realization that the potential for change was nothing more than a slick ad campaign: the cabinet appointments, specifically little Timmy G., the sniveling twat who got Treasury.

With wikileaks email dumps coming fast and furious, I fully agree with the New Republic’s framing of the revelations: the most important one doesn’t have anything to do with Hillary:

The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

So how do these lists stack up to who got the job? The article goes on:

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.

Democrats should be outraged over this. At the highest level of the party, bankers were calling the shots, placing their preferred women and non-whites (identity politics!) in prominent positions of power. And boy, did it work out for them.

Now that the curtain has been torn open, we can see how nearly every dark suspicion of corruption and deceit has been confirmed. Pay to play? Yep. Media collusion with the Clinton campaign? Absolutely (you understand why I had to use Fox, right?). Privately (and explicitly) acknowledging our “allies” support ISIS terrorists while publicly supporting those same allies? Why the fuck not, worked great in the 80’s with Afghanistan, didn’t it?

There is so much more, and probably more to come, but the next Trump tape will be the focus when it comes out.

And that’s too bad, because there needs to be a serious reckoning for Democrats as all this ugly shit gets dragged into the light of day.

Thank you Wikileaks! The truth may hurt, but how can we expect anything to change if we don’t know how deep the rot has grown in DC?

by William Skink

The only thing more impressive about the constant drip of email disclosures exposing how deceitful and corrupt Hillary Clinton is, is the relative sidelining of the full context from mainstream media. The issue where this lack of context is most dangerous is the war to impose regime change on Syria.

What those of us who consult alternative media have been screaming about for years–that our “allies” are supporting terrorists in Syria–is now being conclusively proven. The full context is that Hillary Clinton knows Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming and supporting the terrorists, yet despite this knowledge she is still advocating for safe zones, or a no fly zone. Here is the admission that our pals are helping terrorists in Syria:

A recently leaked 2014 email from Hillary Clinton acknowledges, citing Western intelligence sources, that the U.S.-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar have supported ISIS.

“We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” the document states.

This adds to a growing body of evidence that theocratic Gulf monarchies have helped fuel the surge of extremist groups throughout the Middle East.

Another newly released email, from January 2016, includes an excerpt from a private October 2013 speech in which Clinton acknowledged that “the Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth over the course of the last 30 years.”

I guess this is one of those privately held positions that the public wasn’t supposed to know about. Well, can we now admit that the idea of “moderate rebels” is a total fiction? Or will the media whores keep the public focused on pussy grabbing?

For Democrats perpetually horrified at Trump, what do they think about the leaked strategy of elevating the most extreme elements of the GOP? From the link:

A memo sent out in April 2015 outlined a strategy to boost “Pied Piper” Republican candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson in an effort to force the whole slate of presidential hopefuls to “lock themselves into extreme conservative positions,” an email hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, reveals.

“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate,” the email, posted by WikiLeaks, which provided a link to the email on Twitter, shows.

Well, the Clinton team got what it wanted, but they miscalculated the rage that exists across the country. Even worse, now all those irredeemable deplorables know precisely how disconnected HRC is from the people she so easily lies to, and disdainful. As Podesta frankly strategized how to frame Hillary’s campaign launch, this unfortunate statement was made:

“I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans, but I think we should use it once the first time she says I’m running for president because you and everyday Americans need a champion,” he wrote. “I think if she doesn’t say it once, people will notice and say we false started in Iowa.”

Her director of communications, Jennifer Palmieri, responded, “Truth.”

This is the unfiltered liberal elitism rotting the core of the Democratic party. Bernie supporters are ridiculed, everyday Americans are despised, public positions are nothing but lies, bankers and big donors get to hear the private positions for six figures a pop, and the media is riddled with colluding shills willing to undermine the notion of objective journalism to put this criminally corrupt windbag into the White House.

Oh, and terrorism is a known tool wielded by our allies in support of another attack on a sovereign nation.

If Trump wins and isn’t deposed by a military coup, Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.

by William Skink

It’s getting brutal on Facebook. The Trump/Clinton spectacle is turning people on each other. Those of us with kids have to get more and more creative in limiting their exposure to this toxic shit spewing from the various forms of media we consume.

I have never seen the media use this much of their influence to destroy a political figure, then thrash about when that once powerful influence fails to produce the desired results. It just doesn’t seem to matter how many Republicans defect or terrible thing Trump says, the anger is so white hot (pun intended), Trump is still standing. Not only that, but pussygate is receding after the quip about Hillary being in jail landed hard last night.

Once upon a time the media could douse sparks of populism before a serious conflagration could take hold. The Dean Scream is a perfect example, amplifying a second of exuberance from Howard Dean on the campaign trail into a fatal loop that killed his campaign.

The media must be thinking back fondly on those days, realizing now that what they thought was water turned out to be jet fuel (and jet fuel is really dangerous because it can cause entire buildings to just collapse into their own footprint).

The latest attempt to bring Trump down entails linking his crude remarks to rape culture. Don’t get me wrong, Trump’s casual attitude about sexually assaulting women is absolutely a facet of rape culture, but there’s a problem with this line of attack: the Clintons.

There is plenty of evidence and credible accusations that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator. And there are also accusations that Hillary’s role has been to protect this sexual predator by going after his victims. Slut-shaming is not just a prosecutorial tactic Hillary used to benefit her client, it’s been a strategy used, when necessary over the years, to protect her own rise to power.

It shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to understand how women enable rape culture, especially Missoula Democrats. Remember that Grizzly football player accused of rape in Missoula? Yeah, it wasn’t just men coming to his defense, there were plenty of his female peers engaging in slut-shaming to protect the team that bestows a social status highly coveted by some.

But this aspect of rape culture won’t retain the White House for team Democrat. Instead local partisans will trot out some newbie blogger to utter this kind of partisan crap:

When you, people of the United States, step into the voting booth in November, remember that the president (along with other elected officials) is supposed to represent not only your political views, but also the United States as a nation. When the rest of the world looks at us, the president is who they see. When your son or daughter or mother or father thinks about the face of America, the president is who they see. Is this the way we see ourselves? As defenders of rape and propagators of hate? If you feel that way, then go ahead and vote for Mr. Trump. I’m not going to stop you, nor do I have any right to. Just remember that your vote has consequences.

Nope, not going to work, but Kudos kid for giving it the old college try. And I will add that if you are planning on wasting your consequential vote on Hillary Clinton, you are absolutely defending rape–the rape of entire nations, not to mention the propagation of an end-stage imperialism that probably feels a lot like hate to the poor bastards living in countries that try to determine paths of development outside America’s insatiable lust for total control.

by William Skink

Like the millions and millions of people who can’t not watch a train-wreck, I tuned in tonight to watch the showdown. How would Donald respond to #pussygrabbinggate? How would Hillary respond to the rape survivors she stepped on along her rise to wealth and power staring her down as her rapist hubby and wall street-wed daughter sat in the audience?

I don’t really want to talk about all that, though. I recently snagged a six CD set of Robert Anton Wilson talking about his work and it’s reminded me how subjectively any one of us views the world through our own, very limited, “reality tunnel”. It was a perfectly timed shift in perspective I’ve been taking long drives just to listen to.

We are are the meta-programmers we’ve been waiting for!

Hillary tonight accurately claimed Donald lives in an alternative reality. I agree, but not in the pejorative sense that experiencing an alternative reality is bad. It’s actually the standard way for every human soul to exist.

Bob (Robert Anton Wilson) describes one of the little games he played with students to show them how the reality each one of us creates in the process of filtering the vast amount of data flooding our nervous systems is completely subjective. He simply asks individual students to describe the hallway they took to enter the classroom they currently occupy. Bob claims in all his years doing workshops and lectures and trainings on guerrilla ontology the descriptions of the relative hallway always varied, sometimes wildly so.

Listening to Bob has been helpful as I navigate my own subjective hallway, stitching together sound and images as the first building blocks of a larger structure. I talked to a friend a few days ago who knows the musical material pretty well, due to our cathartic rocking out we squeeze in whenever possible (we both have kids), and he gave me some encouragement that I’m improving my use of Pro Tools and Final Cut.

The larger structure is a story that will exist as fiction, but draws from experiences that I have had and have been trying to tell, in some form, for the better part of the last 15 years.

While I’ll keep putting out a few more music videos, the next little project I am considering is a short documentary about my connection to a brutal murder that occurred under the Reserve Street bridge, and how that experience impacted the reality tunnel I use to see the world.

For now, here is my latest video: Riff on Yeats. Enjoy!