Month: September 2018

by William Skink

The title of this post comes from an infamous Donald Rumsfeld quote where he expounds on known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

What got me thinking about this Rumsfeld quote are two instances where it is known something happened, but what that something is remains unknown.

The first incident happened in New Mexico, at a Solar Observatory. For 10 days the facility has been shut down, its staff evacuated and the FBI has not been forthcoming toward local law enforcement about what kind of threat triggered this rapid federal response:

“The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on,” Sheriff Benny House told the Alamogordo Daily News shortly after the closure. “We’ve got people up there (at Sunspot) that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why. The FBI were up there. What their purpose was nobody will say.”

“But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there was a lot of stuff going on up there,” he added. “There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers but nobody would tell us anything.”

While the observatory reopened today, there are still lots of unanswered questions. Here is more the NPR report today:

“AURA has been cooperating with an on-going law enforcement investigation of criminal activity that occurred at Sacramento Peak. During this time, we became concerned that a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents. For this reason, AURA temporarily vacated the facility and ceased science activities at this location.

“The decision to vacate was based on the logistical challenges associated with protecting personnel at such a remote location, and the need for expeditious response to the potential threat. AURA determined that moving the small number of on-site staff and residents off the mountain was the most prudent and effective action to ensure their safety.”

Additional security will remain in place because authorities are anticipating curious members of the public will start poking around. The observatory is not very far away from Roswell, New Mexico.

The second known unknown is the unusual event declared today at Duke Energy’s Brunswick Nuclear Plant:

A nuclear power plant just outside of Wilmington, North Carolina declared an “unusual event” Monday after rising floodwaters and storm damage caused limited access to the facility, officials said.

Duke Energy’s Brunswick Nuclear Plant – located about 30 miles south of Wilmington – declared the state of emergency, the lowest required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, after roads surrounding the 1,200-acre complex were impacted by flooding and downed trees.

“None of the roads are passable,” NRC spokesman Joey Ledford told the News & Observer. “The plant is safe. The reactors are in hot stand-by mode 3 shutdown.”

If providing information to the public could cause a panic or tip-off a suspect, I understand why being careful is important. With this latter “unusual event” at the Brunswick Nuclear Plan looking like a Fukushima replay (ok, that’s a bit much to say at this point), the concern should be over what local authorities will take more seriously–protecting Duke Energy’s profits or the public’s safety.

In Japan, the public lost and the disaster remains ongoing.

by William Skink

Jeremy Calhoun won’t be going to trial over the assault he perpetrated against another student in downtown Missoula last May, but that didn’t stop the sentencing hearing from turning into an opportunity for Calhoun’s lawyers to make the laughable claim that the County Attorney’s office went too hard on Calhoun because Jon Krakauer’s literary focus on past incidents of leniency with regards to the handling of rapists on the Griz roster has rendered them too sensitive:

The state had recommended to substitute Justice of the Peace Alex Beal that Calhoun receive a six-month suspended sentence, which would remain on his record, and 200 hours of community service. Smith contended 200 hours was excessive, and asked for 40 hours community service and a six-month deferred sentence, which would be wiped from his record if he completed the term without issue.

Smith argued that since the release of Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” was published in 2015, the Missoula County Attorney’s Office had been seeking unreasonable punishments against UM football players.

“I think judge, that, yes, it’s a serious offense but I also think, and this isn’t Mr. Bloom at all, but since Jon Krakauer’s book came out and we got a new county attorney there’s been a sensitivity toward Grizzly players,” Smith said. “I think they want the appearance they’re not going easy on Grizzly football players” as has been alleged was the practice in the past. “What has happened, then, is that they’re going harder on Grizzly athletes.”

No, 200 hours of community service is not excessive, not when the County Attorney’s office could have brought felony charges for aggravated assault against Calhoun. Here is what the Montana Code Annotated has to say about aggravated assault:

45-5-202. Aggravated assault. (1) A person commits the offense of aggravated assault if the person purposely or knowingly causes serious bodily injury to another or purposely or knowingly, with the use of physical force or contact, causes reasonable apprehension of serious bodily injury or death in another.

Is getting hit in the face/head hard enough to dislodge teeth a serious bodily injury? I would say so. Depending on the strength of a punch and the location of where a punch lands, a blow to the head could result in a brain injury, or even death.

Here is more from the Montanan Code, defining serious bodily injury:

“Serious bodily injury” means bodily injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious permanent disfigurement or protracted loss or impairment of the function or process of any bodily member or organ. It includes serious mental illness or impairment.

Getting teeth knocked out is permanent; they don’t grow back. Getting teeth knocked out also impairs the function of the mouth, impacting what kind of food can be consumed. If the County Attorney’s Office really wanted to come down hard on Calhoun, there is an argument that could have been made justifying aggravated assault charges.

Jeremy Calhoun is not out of the legal woods yet. The other incident that resulted in a disorderly conduct ticket has yet to be addressed.

Luckily for Calhoun (who wasn’t deterred from his aggressive behavior, as the new charge of disorderly conduct indicates) he has the Missoulian to drum up some sympathy by amplifying his mommy, who says her son is really sorry for putting a fellow student in the hospital:

Calhoun did not make a statement to the court, although his mother came with a prepared letter, and apologized directly to Ward and his family.

“This isolated incident does not define my son’s character,” she said, fighting back tears as she spoke. “He’s not a violent person. He was not raised to be violent … We pray we’re all able to learn and move forward with our lives.”

Jeremy Calhoun is a lucky man. Despite an emerging pattern of aggressive behavior, the County Attorney’s office let the entire summer go by before finally getting around to pleading this out with what still amounts to, in my opinion, a pretty lenient sentence. And his punishment from UM’s football program was a measly 3 game suspension.

Since Calhoun is not supposed to be at bars for the next 2 years, the partying will have to be at house parties.

Bitches, beware.

by William Skink

On my way to work this morning I stopped to get some food and to grab a few copies of the last edition of the Indy we will get to see hit the stands in Missoula. The cover piece about public lands features missing puzzle pieces of an idyllic Montana landscape and the image couldn’t be more appropriate.

Being an avid consumer of local news, my options to get informed about what is going on in Missoula and Montana continues to dwindle as blogs and online news efforts go kaput. Last Best News shut down last June, and Montana Cowgirl is so lame I rarely check it anymore. Logicosity was interesting for a brief time, but it seemed there were efforts to out the author(s) who wrote under pseudonyms. I know how that goes.

After yesterday’s move by Lee and POS Matt Gibson, geared it seems to maximize the gut-punch factor, what we have lost as a community is just starting to be felt. For example, the Indy archive is no longer accessible. Apparently eliminating competition wasn’t enough for Lee. No, these corporate fuckers are erasing the Indy’s entire legacy.

When Tim Lloyd died of exposure last November, Brouwer (alerted by a tweet I put out) wrote a moving article about it. I wrote about it here, which you can still read, but the link to Brouwer’s piece now redirects to the Missoulian website.

Same obviously for the feature piece on Glacier Hope Homes put out in February of this year. I wrote multiple posts trying to bring attention to claims of abuse and mismanagement impacting homeless Veterans, and implored local media to take on what I couldn’t.

Now that piece is gone as well, so when this scammer starts up his scam in another community (Susan Shepherd, the author of the feature piece, reported he was moving to Texas), there won’t be a record of what was reported by the Indy regarding what was going on at Glacier Hope Homes.

Since Lee Enterprises only cares about profits for its shareholders, the most effective way to hit back against this corporate strategy of total annihilation is to compel/shame/boycott any business still willing to put advertising money into the coffers of this despicable corporation.

When I said this on Twitter I got a reply pointing out this strategy could hurt local businesses. Yes, I replied, that’s the point. If local businesses don’t understand why this move to literally erase parts of our community’s history should be met with a response Lee Enterprises will understand, then they really don’t deserve your business.

Where will things go from here? Will politicians like Kathleen Williams and Jon Tester say anything? How about the Mayor and City Council? We have a corporate bully retaliating against unionized local media staff, going scorched earth in our own backyard. So what are we going to do about it?

Word is still getting out about what happened. I plan on keeping a close eye focused on what transpires in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned.

by William Skink

Today was just made all the more depressing by breaking news that Missoula’s alt-weekly, the Missoula Independent, is shut down as of 8am this morning. The doors are locked, the corporate overlords are smiling and Matt Gibson is victorious over the unionizing staff he threw to the corporate wolves.

This move will have implications that reach far beyond Missoula. Shutting down the Indy is not some isolated, objective financial decision, it’s a corporate message of intimidation to any other Lee Enterprises staff thinking of unionizing.

It’s disgusting that the Indy was sacrificed in this manner. I hope the Missoulian is punished financially with cancelled subscriptions. I hope karma exists and Matt Gibson gets some for his role.

And I hope the Indy staff, who are now without a job, land somewhere where their talents are appreciated.

Thanks to Matt Gibson and Lee Enterprises, Missoula is no longer that place.

by William Skink

Tomorrow makes it 17 years since the attacks on 9/11, enough time to transform the jihadist ideology that allegedly inspired the attacks back into a useful tool of US imperialism.

For Richard Clarke, former member of the National Security Council, it was around 2007 when he realized George Tenet and dozens of others, despite what he had been told (and despite what Tenet told Congress), actually had seen the “cables” that soon-to-be terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in the states. I’ll use Newsweek for the source:

In 2002, Tenet swore to Congress that he wasn’t aware of the imminent threat because it came in a cable that wasn’t marked urgent—and “no one read it.” But his story was shredded five years later when Senators Ron Wyden and Kit Bond forced loose an executive summary of the CIA’s own internal investigation of 9/11, which stated that “some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of the six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists.”

Clarke went ballistic. Until then, he had trusted Tenet, a close colleague and friend, to tell the truth. In 2009, despairing at the lack of media traction on the astounding disclosure, he wrote a book about the duplicity, Your Government Failed You, which was largely ignored. So when Duffy and Nowosielski came calling, he welcomed them.

“I believed, for the longest time, that this was one or two low-level desk officers who got this [information about Hazmi and Mihdhar] and somehow didn’t realize the significance,” he told them. But “50—five oh—50 CIA officers knew this, and they included [Tenet and] all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me? Saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to describe it.”

When corporate media laments about their victimhood status under this new Trumpian threat, I think about how brazen liars like Tenet can get away with lying to Congress, leaving someone as firmly establishment as Richard Clarke to “despair” that he can’t get any traction with (I would assume) establishment media platforms.

And it’s not just Tenet. James Clapper lied to Congress, and John Brennan SPIED on Congress. Their punishment? Face-time on cable tv.

It’s important to make the distinction that most of the media workers laboring down the food chain in local branches are by no means the enemy of the people, but at the corporate behemoth level, where plutocratic propaganda is served (and anonymous op-ed soft-coups confirm we are already in a constitutional crisis) the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend.

Corporate media plays a critical role in misinforming us about the world around us. Without the media arm of the “steady state” resistance, for example, the new McCarthyism could never flourish so feverishly.

17 years ago I was glued to my neighbors television, watching in disbelief. I watched how quickly the narrative began to take shape. I watched the first and now longest war in US history start against Afghanistan, then another war start based on lies and corporate media hype two years later, in Iraq.

The wars got bad, some Democrats were elected in 2006 saying they would do something, but they didn’t. Then Barack Obama was elected in 2008.

I will forever be astounded at how wars suddenly turned humanitarian under Obama, thanks in large part to corporate media. It’s a lesson I will never forget. Because the killing shifted to drones and special-ops, the narrative of a more refined, nuanced foreign policy was an easy sell to partisans.

Now comes President Trump, possibly deranged enough to reverse not just campaign anti-interventionist Trump in places like Syria, but also yesterday Trump. Or ten minutes ago Trump.

In my own fevered vision I see the 25th amendment hanging over the presidency like the sword of Damocles, held in place by the thin thread of justification used by the NYT to allow its pages to be used by some self-serving insider within this administration who wants to use Trump for the conservative agenda while simultaneously distancing himself from the uglier aspects of tyrant enablement.

While this drama plays out over the coming news cycles, a truly miraculous achievement of corporate media is not given the credit it deserves.

So let’s give credit where credit is due:

Without corporate media to smooth over the rough edges of cognitive dissonance, people might be confronted with the realization that on the eve of another anniversary of 9/11 the US military is preparing to potentially help the ideological brethren of the jihadists who supposedly attacked us on 9/11 as they fight to maintain their final Syrian stronghold in Idlib.