Month: September 2019

by William Skink

If partisans can’t leave behind their half-blind attacks on the totally corrupt body politic, then democracy is already dead.

And that’s a good thing.

There are better ways of doing things then centralizing power and control for a minuscule minority of global sociopaths.

Partisans aren’t just wasting our time, they are actively torturing the body politic we call representative democracy with their willful half-blindness to their own team’s obvious corruption.

Once upon a time during the last presidential election cycle a Bond-like (former) UK spook used his mother Russia contacts to concoct a dossier. Campaign people with cool names like Papadopoulos even had honey traps set for them. This stuff was used by FBI bumblers and DOJ dunces to get FISA access.

Fun times for democracy in America.

Bob Mueller did a bang-up job looking in all the wrong places, and now, Act II: Ukraine.

Will the half-blindness hold? Will that side, and that other side, continue maintaining their selective ignorance, or can we step the fuck back from this shit show and finally acknowledge how mob-like our government institutions have become?

Wake up, people. Stop defending grifters because they’re wearing your colors and get ready for a very bumpy ride when the everything bubble goes bang.

by William Skink

fancy bear, fancy pants
strike the crowd with pundit rants
fill them full with peachy hope
crowd control, they’ll beg for rope

help the man no average joe
help his mind on where to go
help the hunter’s nasal lift
then give that lady’s hair a sniff

fan base morale will break the team
fancy bear knows what I mean
Crowley sighs eleven times
blood begins a tie that binds

mocking makers, their wizard eyes
squint to see who brings the light
a wicked process grafts the tech
upon the contour of your neck

to reach perfection, they will say
alchemical methods rule the day
and for a future bright and blue
there’s just one thing you’ll need to do…

sign here:

by William Skink

A new report from the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights the uncomfortable fact that no other flagship University in the entire country has lost more students this decade than the University of Montana in Missoula.

Since 2011 the undergraduate count has dropped 30%. The only University that comes close to UM’s decline is the University of Alaska at 18%.

So what is contributing to this decade of plummeting enrollment? Is the curse of Jon Krakauer to blame? According to the article, in part, yes:

What’s behind the drop? One possible reason is a sexual-assault scandal.

Montana has faced intense scrutiny from the news media and the government for its handling of sexual-misconduct cases. In 2013, Montana officials agreed to overhaul the university’s policies after a joint investigation by the U.S. Departments of Justice and of Education.

In 2015 the author Jon Krakauer published a book about the scandal, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, that chronicled the painful experiences of several Montana students who reported sexual assaults. And last year the Education Department imposed a fine against Montana of nearly $1 million for alleged Clery Act violations. The university has appealed that outcome.

Paula Short, a spokeswoman for Montana, acknowledged the challenges the university has faced since the start of the decade but disputed the idea that its struggles could be traced to a single cause. After years of transition within the enrollment and admissions units, Short said Montana had found stability and is prepared to vigorously recruit students, from both inside the state and outside it.

“The president has put together a new team focused on student success, and one that hopes to excite students with the UM story,” Short said.

I agree with Short, the rape scandal is not the single cause of UM’s decline, but I understand how those outside our community would take the unique factor of a popular author’s focus as an easy explanation.

While Universities are behemoth institutions that do take time to change, I can’t help but think that UM harbors some un-quantifiable degree of arrogance/denial that never effectively dealt with what Krakauer identified.

by William Skink

Trump Derangement Syndrome has so crippled the thinking of Democrats that they are working themselves up into an impeachment frenzy again over a presidential phone call to Ukraine that an anonymous whistleblower heard about second hand and filed a complaint about.

It’s absolutely maddening to watch for a number of reasons, but also sort of amazing. The amazing part is all the recent historical context that will have to be kept suppressed by all the right legacy media platforms in order to keep the widespread corruption from infecting poor old dementia Joe.

It’s sad how many people sucking it up to support Joe Biden don’t understand how he monetized his Veep position just like Hillary did with her SoS role.

For those with short-term memory issues, let me offer a quick recap: five years ago Hillary Clinton and her neocon pal, Victoria Nuland, helped coercively transition Ukraine (also known as a “coup”) to the control of a different corrupt oligarch clique that included actual, real-life Nazis.

Just months after the coup, Biden’s son, Hunter, got a nice gig sitting on the board of a natural gas company, an area he had absolutely no experience in that warranted his handsome monthly payout. Robert Parry was all over this years ago, pointing out how hollow Biden’s lecturing of Ukraine’s parliament was. Here’s a meaty excerpt from Parry’s piece:

Worried about the continued corruption, Vice President Joe Biden, who took a personal interest in Ukraine, lectured Ukraine’s parliament on the need to end cronyism.

But Biden had his own Ukraine cronyism problem because three months after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Yanukovych government Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed his son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.

Burisma a shadowy Cyprus-based company also lined up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

As Time magazine reported, “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.”

According to investigative journalism inside Ukraine, the ownership of Burisma has been traced to Privat Bank, controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the U.S.-backed “reform” regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine (though Kolomoisky was eventually ousted from that post in a power struggle over control of UkrTransNafta, Ukraine’s state-owned oil pipeline operator).

In a speech to Ukraine’s parliament in December 2015, Biden hailed the sacrifice of the 100 or so protesters who died during the Maidan putsch in February 2014, which ousted Yanukovych, referring to the dead by their laudatory name “The Heavenly Hundred.”

But Biden made no heavenly references to the estimated 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, who have been slaughtered in the U.S.-encouraged “Anti-Terror Operation” waged by the coup regime against eastern Ukrainians who resisted Yanukovych’s violent ouster. Nor did Biden take note that some of the Heavenly Hundred were street fighters for neo-Nazi and other far-right nationalist organizations.

All these players are corrupt. Do impeachment-crazed Democrats really think they can keep their lying white male presidential candidate from being trounced by the compulsive lying white male currently occupying the White House?

Is everyone fucking crazy?

by William Skink

When I first heard that Sheriff TJ McDermott was bringing LivePD to Missoula County, I thought to myself, well, that sounds like a terrible idea, so of course everyone will just go along with it. Despite problems experienced in other states, McDermott chose to move ahead with this bone-headed idea to turn Missoula County residents into entertainment for profit.

I’m obviously not the only one who thought this was a terrible idea considering McDermott felt the need to write his own column in the Missoulian explaining all the due diligence he did, which you can read here. 

To step back from this for a moment, let’s recall some of the more pressing issues facing our County: we have holes in a bridge, an overcrowded jail, escalating property taxes and a thriving homeless encampment the Sheriff’s Department is actively ignoring. So LET’S BRING IN THE CAMERAS, says the Sheriff.  

I imagine there is some second-guessing amongst elected officials happening right now after an angry parent with a terrorized 15 year old wrote this letter to the editor appearing in the Missoulian today (online). Here is the letter in full:

On Saturday evening my son, 15, was sitting in his car in a parking area near Missoula, collecting himself before driving home up Evaro Hill. A Missoula County sheriff’s officer pulled up and asked him nicely how he was doing.

Then a camera crew from LivePD jumped out of a vehicle nearby and hustled over with cameras and lights, and the officer suddenly became aggressive and intimidating. He shouted at my son to tell him how much he’d been drinking, told him “Don’t lie to me,” and repeatedly made my son follow his finger with his eyes. The officer then rushed off to a car accident, leaving my son with a secondary officer.

My son was terrorized. He does not drink and was doing nothing wrong, which is why he was released to his parents when we arrived 15 minutes later.

This contract the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office has with LivePD has already damaged community relations with law enforcement, starting with my teenage son. As a teacher, I have always supported other civil servants and promoted their work. But the sheriff’s office, production company and network are turning our citizens into entertainment for others, and the byproduct of that is appalling and destructive.

Well, that didn’t take long.

The Sheriff’s Department is apparently covered by the show’s insurance in case any litigation happens, which if I was the parent of this kid, I would be calling lawyers yesterday. Missoula County, however, is not covered. If this becomes a costly lawsuit for Missoula County, will there be any accountability for the elected official who went out of his way to get this dumb show involved with Missoula County residents in the first place, despite concerns voiced by community members?

Accountability doesn’t seem to be a concept that applies to our elected leaders, so I don’t expect much will come of this. I would love to be wrong.