Month: July 2020

by William Skink

I always find the reporting on housing numbers kind of off-putting, like I’m being shown a nice house without being told its previous occupant was a serial killer.

I start getting that feeling right from the headline of this MC piece: Vacancy in multifamily housing tight in Missoula; economic recovery key to building.

Economic recovery? Like what kind of economic recovery? A local one? A national one?

The geography of this recovery–which is to be the “key to building”–is important because, if we are talking about housing, what does Montana have? LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!

And they are coming.

Which is probably why we’re seeing this:

While the vacancy rate is trending up, the market remains tight. Area landlords have nixed most rent concessions and the median price of rent has grown.

Not too soft here in Missoula, unlike a far off land called New York where some markets are crashing.

The reason Missoula is not going to see much relief for people when it comes to housing is because tech, and mostly it is one name in tech making a BIG investment in Missoula: Cognizant-ATG.

Cognizant ATG plopped its headquarters in the partially gentrified Saw Mill District, a perfect location for a town shifting from extractive industry dependency (and quite nervous about its tourist flank). From the link:

Cognizant’s Advanced Technology Group officially opened its new headquarters in Missoula’s Old Sawmill District on Wednesday, announcing plans to recruit local talent and train them for the technology needs of today and tomorrow.

(pssst, think he’s talking about contact tracing employment opportunities?)

The Cognizant ATG Missoula Solution Center houses about 90 employees in its 15,700-square-foot space on Wyoming Street, with plans to expand the Cambium Place workforce to 125. About 175 employees work for ATG across Montana.

“This center is going to be our innovation hub as we continue to expand our portfolio both here in Missoula, in Montana and in the United States,” said Allen Shaheen, Cognizant’s executive vice president for North American digital hubs.

Cognizant, one of the largest professional services companies in the world, acquired ATG in 2018, seeking ways to find talent to fill IT positions in Montana and provide their employees a enjoyable quality of life.

I think now would be a good time to share a personal anecdote.

When I was being verbally berated by City Council person Gwen Jones for my poem at my place of work, and the discussion was hitting hard on TIF and the cost of housing, Jones said to me quite clearly (I am paraphrasing from memory): “You think it’s bad now, just you wait until ATG expands.”

That was November, 2018.

While lots of people are being financially squeezed and anxious about the future due to the pandemic, Cognizant-ATG, last month, reported to MC that they were BULLISH on Missoula:

While the city’s economy finds its footing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of Missoula’s fastest growing firms remains bullish on the future and is gearing up for another round of hiring.
…
“We see tremendous growth,” said Tom Stergios, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development in Missoula. “We’re confident we’ll be able to achieve that growth. We do have some facilities construction that’s underway – yet to be announced but underway. We’re very bullish on continued growth in Missoula.”

To encourage this bullishness, Governor Bullock gave his praise (from the previous link):

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock attended Wednesday’s grand opening ceremony, praising ATG and Cognizant’s role in Missoula and the AIM program.

With the development of over 34,000 private sector jobs in the last six years statewide and an increase in real-wage jobs, investment in companies like Cognizant and ATG makes sense for Montana, Bullock said.

Seeing a possible boost to tuition woes, General Bodner may finally have something to be excited about:

University of Montana President Seth Bodnar said he’s excited to continue a decade-long partnership with ATG and now with Cognizant, pointing out that about 100 UM graduates work at ATG.

“Today’s also an exciting start of a new chapter because we see a company like Cognizant with operations all over the world also making a bet not just on ATG, not just on Missoula, not just on Montana, but on the University of Montana,” Bodnar said. “We’re very excited about the emerging partnerships.”

Man, sounds exciting, all this worldly stuff Cognizant is up to, and totally not abusive, because it would be real unfortunate if a president of a university that got a book written about it for its rape culture again sent students into the arms of abusers.

I’m sure Cognizant is not, in any way, an abusive company, and that no quick online search will turn up any problems.

Whoops, I did it again. That link is about how Cognizant now contracts for Facebook:

Cognizant received a two-year, $200 million contract from Facebook to do the work, according to a former employee familiar with the matter. But in return for policing the boundaries of free expression on one of the internet’s largest platforms, individual contractors in North America make as little as $28,800 a year. They receive two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch each day, along with nine minutes per day of “wellness” time that they can use when they feel overwhelmed by the emotional toll of the job. After regular exposure to graphic violence and child exploitation, many workers are subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions.

Hey all you out of work service sector workers, if you are already familiar with sharp objects, sides of meat, and blood, you might have what it takes to make less than $30,000 traumatizing yourself as a Cognizant contract worker moderating atrocious Facebook content.

Welcome to Missoula, Cognizant.

by William Skink

Last week NBC Montana ran three articles on Missoula County Attorney’s decision to not charge Josh Paniagua with the stabbing murder of Ben Mousso (article 1, article 2, article 3).

Let’s get right into the justification for NOT bringing charges against a budding psychopath who, after murdering Mousso, went on to threaten his mom, build a torture room for her, and forced a standoff with law enforcement where he lives, in Florence.

Here’s Pabst’s justification for non-prosecution:

Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst explained it this way, “We are bound ethically to follow the law and can only file charges where probable cause is met and where we are likely to obtain a conviction.”
…
“We are looking at the reasonable person standard,” said Pabst.

Montana law specifically allows someone, in this case Paniagua, to use force, including deadly force, to prevent a robbery.

Here’s how that statute reads: 45-3-102.Use of force in defense of person. A person is justified in the use of force or threat to use force against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that the conduct is necessary for self-defense or the defense of another against the other person’s imminent use of unlawful force. However, the person is justified in the use of force likely to cause death or serious bodily harm only if the person reasonably believes that the force is necessary to prevent imminent death or serious bodily harm to the person or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

When Pabst talks about ethics and being bound by the law I want to puke.

Mousso’a mom, Aly Wilding, isn’t buying this legal justification. Here is her response from the article:

Wilding criticizes the law.

“There are murky sections. Here we have a case where they are talking about felonies involved. How can you be dealing drugs, which is an illegal act, then claim a legal protection to murder someone to protect your drugs?” she asked.

Damn good question. Can any drug dealer now claim legal protection to kill if they “reasonably believes that the conduct is necessary for self-defense”?

Pabst continues defending her office’s inexplicable actions:

Pabst explains prosecutors must look at it from both a subjective and objective viewpoint.

“It is important to know the person who is acting had a subjective fear for his or her own life. It is also objective in that fear has to reasonable, so if you or I were in the same situation we would have the same fear. That is to prevent people from over-reacting and using their own fear as justification for something else” she said.

And Wilding continues accurately de-mystifying this legalese bullshit:

But Wilding believes the message is clear. Tell investigators you are reasonably afraid, and you can kill and not face a judge. She asked other attorneys, in both Montana and Washington, to weigh in.

Wilding said, “They said that (Missoula County’s) decisions were wrong. That it made no sense that they were not charging the men in the car, that they were not charging homicide.”

Wilding is right, it doesn’t make any sense, unless something else is going on here.

Is there something else going on here?

If it was JUST this case, that would be bad enough, but it’s not just this case.

Around the same time Ben Mousso was murdered, Sean Stevenson was murdered by Johnny Lee Perry at the Poverello Center. Similarly to the Mousso murder, authorities claim Perry was justified in using lethal force–strangulation, in this case–to defend himself against Stevenson.

Pabst has not publicly commented on the non-prosecution of Sean Stevenson’s killer, Johnny Lee Perry.

So what is going on here? Is there some unspoken reason authorities have for protecting violent killers like Perry and Paniagua?

If there is a reason, the families deserve to know. Instead it seems what these families are getting from the Missoula County Attorney’s office is damage control.

Why?

by William Skink

Caitlin Johnstone wrote a post a few years ago with a title as true today as it was then: Whoever Controls The Narrative Controls The World.

I’ve been thinking A LOT about narrative control lately, especially as it relates to the past 10 years, and I’ve come to a conclusion about my writing activity: I’ve been on a decade-long counter-narrative operation against what Liberalism claims to be on the surface because I have come to understand what Liberalism is hiding in the basement.

What Liberalism claims to be, on the surface, is, according to wikipedia, this: Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.

I was a good, liberal-minded individual in 2008 when I started my new job at the homeless shelter. I attended Obama’s campaign rally at the Adams Center and his speech brought tears to my eyes. That year I also started a family, so my hopes were high.

I was high on hopium.

Obama’s cabinet selections were the first red flags. The Democrat response to Wall Street running a global ponzi scheme was the last red flag I needed. These weren’t liberal-minded people worried about equality before the law, or the consent of the governed. No, these creatures were something else, something neoliberal, apparently.

Jasun Horsely and his book, The Vice of Kings, is helping me to correlate a bunch of seemingly disparate topics that have swirled in my head for years. The subtitle is a big tell what you’re getting into with Horsley’s counter-narrative operation: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse.

The threat Bush posed to my young mind was easy to understand. The cabal he was a figurehead for connected to a dark underbelly of corruption in order to maintain power. Obama was going to counter all that, but he didn’t.

While that illusion was being dismantled by the reality of what Obama was doing (abroad) and NOT doing (domestically), the illusion I had of Missoula being a beautiful liberal utopia in an ugly conservative state was being confronted with the reality of how our community treated people without homes, and how a liberal politician wannabe by the name of Ellie Hill treated her hourly paid staff doing an impossible, dangerous job.

While I wrote about the disgusting foreign policy moves by the Obama regime, and the further eroding of our constitutional rights, I worked for 7 years navigating a broken health care system and a broken criminal justice system, thoroughly burning myself out while our Mayor drank his lunch and made self-deprecating fat jokes.

I watched from the inside for years how this liberal politician operated without being openly critical. That time is long gone.

Here is a quote from Horsley’s book that deeply resonated with me:

“One major factor in the maintenance of the illusion of the world as a more or less civilized or benign space (the belief that the kinds of things reported in this book simply do not happen) is our unconscious assumption that the people in positions of authority are reliable narrators who can be trusted to provide an accurate account of reality. We implicitly, unthinkingly, trust those who have assumed power in our society, just, just as we tend to distrust those without power—the poor, the old, the sick, the homeless, the drug-addicted, the mentally unstable. To a large extent, social authority is the authority to determine what is true or false, to dominate the narrative. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, those who are able to define what is true—truthfully or not—are for this very reason able to attain power in society. The lawmakers are also the spell-casters.”

Horsley (his emphasis) is echoing Johnstone when she says whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Our job as critical thinking citizens is to ask of our spell-casting lawmakers and elected leaders: ARE YOU RELIABLE NARRATORS?

Tax Increment Financing is a tool that provides a public benefit.

Is Engen a reliable narrator when he tells us this story about his slush fund?

Sean Stevenson was an out-of-state homeless man killed by Johnny Lee Perry when Perry used strangulation as the means of killing Stevenson in self defense.

Is Kristen Pabst and the County Attorney’s office she leads a reliable narrator when she tells us this story about someone’s family member who they can no longer talk to because he was killed in Missoula?

The story Missoula tells itself has slowly transformed from something that felt mostly rooted in authenticity to something that is wholly controlled by PR wizards. But behind the glitz and glamour lies something very dark.

The second part of Horsley’s book takes on the narrative control over the story of Aleister Crowley, famed British occultist who inspired people like guitarist Jimmy Page and child killer Damien Echols.

Did Crowley ever engage in the ritualistic sexual abuse of children, or are his own words that indicate his religious beliefs allowed for this depravity just a type of “joke”, as his apologists and defenders claim?

Another tightly controlled narrative Horsley takes on is the one that claims the pioneer of sex research, Alfred Kinsey, was a disinterested academic doing important, scholarly studies on human sexuality. The reality? Kinsey used the cover of academia to feed is own obsessions, and even enlisted the help of a serial child rapist.

For more on Kinsey, Judith Reisman is the expert to consult. Did I mention Kinsey was a fan of Crowley?

Working at a homeless shelter, one can’t ignore the underbelly. I remember the incomprehensible ramblings of one female client who disclosed a history of incest. Both her father and brother raped her.

While that abuse was familial, the system itself is comprised of abusers.

In 2015, near the end of my time at the shelter, a well known psychologist by the name of Jay Palmatier was arrested for having child porn on his computer. I actually testified in a legal hearing, along with Palmatier, to get a client committed for psychiatric evaluation. On the say so of someone like Palmatier, you can be committed to the psych ward of a hospital. How often is power like that abused by agents of the system?

Tomorrow I’m going to continue looking at the power of the County Attorney’s office and the alarming interpretation of self defense and justifiable force statutes in Montana because I know that Kristen Pabst is NOT a reliable narrator in regards to two cases of inexplicable NON PROSECUTION.

Pabst is protecting someone’s underbelly, the questions are who, and why.

Stay tuned…

by William Skink

On this 4th of July the biggest risk you will be taking is getting behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle. The data says this is true, but I bet you will be thinking about different risks this weekend.

Yesterday I only avoided a head-on collision with an elderly couple because I am a defensive driver prepared to slam on the breaks at the slightest indication of stupidity/distraction/inebriation/being old. I also gave the old man a good 3 second blast of my horn. Despite that, he almost pulled out in front of ANOTHER DRIVER.

Stay safe out there and do what you can to mitigate your risk. For me that means sheltering in place with Legos and enough fireworks to keep the kids entertained.

by William Skink

The arrest by the FBI of Ghislaine Maxwell in New Hampshire is an interesting development in the pedophile/compromise operation she was running with her “boyfriend” Jeffrey Epstein.

Keyboard warriors, fingers quivering, are at the ready to meme the shit out of whatever happens to her. The Q-Anon crowd must be going nuts.

I have the perfect book-pairing for this moment, if any summer readers out there are looking to upend their world. It’s called The Vice Of Kings and it’s written by Jason Horsley.

I’m not sure what to say about the book. It could certainly be triggering because of the subject matter of family dysfunction and child abuse. Horsley examines his family and makes some pretty fascinating discoveries and connections to the British power structure and, most interestingly, the Fabian Society.