Month: September 2020

by William Skink

The psychological operation known as Qanon continues to proliferate like a mind virus, and neither the believers, nor the ridiculers, seem to understand the purpose of this operation.

At The Intercept, Aida Chavez discusses the spread of Qanon among her friends and family on Facebook. These once “normal” people, she claims, are suddenly worried about powerful pedophiles abusing children for Satan. This is particularly infecting white women in Suburbia. From the link:

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, I noticed this alarming shift in my Facebook feed. Childhood friends and old high school acquaintances began plastering my timeline with posts referring to a satanic cabal of pedophile elites, including hysterical, unfounded claims about the proliferation of child sex trafficking and cultural or political efforts to “normalize” pedophilia. 

During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with in Colorado had gotten sucked into QAnon, the sprawling and baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that is deemed a domestic terror threat by the FBI. I remembered them as perfectly reasonable people: some liberal, some conservative, but all frozen in my memory as intellectually curious. Now, online and from a distance, I was watching them change. Young, white suburban women, in particular, were falling for a Q-adjacent movement, “Save the Children,” which raises false fears about child sex trafficking through fabricated stories, pastel infographics, and hashtag campaigns.

The framing of these introductory paragraphs exposes the function of the Qanon operation. Things that ACTUALLY EXIST in our world, like powerful predators who sexually abuse vulnerable people, sometimes minors, is reduced in the minds of people like Aida Chavez to unfounded hysteria. The alleged involvement of “Satan” helps insulate people like Chavez from taking any of this the least bit seriously.

This is all very similar to the “Satanic Panic” of the 80’s which, according to this Vox piece from 2016, is apparently STILL not over. Here is how Vox buries that story to make sure its readers don’t do something crazy, like investigate this stuff for themselves:

Most people, if they know of the Satanic Panic, know of it due to satanic ritual abuse, a rash of false allegations made against daycare centers in the ’80s. But there are lots of threads that contribute to Satanic Panic, and they can be seen running through a handful of recent social and cultural events: the wave of clown scares throughout the country; the new TV seriesbased on The Exorcist; the weekend release of Ouija 2: Origin of Evil; and the October 23 death of fire-and-brimstone evangelical tract writer Jack Chick. All of these events feel lifted straight from this darker era of American culture, when fear of demons and strangers practicing dark occult things seemed to lurk in the heart of every neighborhood.

How successful has Qanon been? One example, referenced in the first article, is the Netflix decision to show the film Cuties. According to Chavez, those CRAZY Qanon believers believe the CRAZY idea that there is some nefarious effort to normalize the sexual preference for minors.

HOW CAN THEY BELIEVE THIS?

Yes, somehow affluent white people in the suburbs have developed the CRAZY idea that some of our cultural luminaries may have a sexual predilection for minors. But did you know the creator of this soft porn for pedos is a black woman from Senegal? From the first link:

Parker is an affluent suburb in Douglas County, the richest county in the state and among the richest in the nation. The population is heavily conservative and predominantly white. In the time I lived there, Parker was about 93 percent white, though it has diversified a bit more in recent years, according to census data. The suburb’s member of Congress, Republican Rep. Ken Buck, is among the GOP lawmakers fueling Save the Children conspiracy theorists. He’s demanding that the Department of Justice investigate the Netflix film “Cuties,” which has faced intense backlash over claims that it sexualizes young girls. The film, a coming-of-age comedy-drama directed by French Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, became an instant target for the pedophile-obsessed.

A target for the “pedophile obsessed”? Really?

Qanon has been a disturbing success for all sides. It’s followers appear ridiculous and mistakingly think it’s only Democrats involved in the sex trafficking that emanates from compromise operations like the one run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, while the mockers and ridiculers use Qanon to remain steadfastly incurious about ACTUAL EVIDENCE that warrants further investigation, like what exactly was Laura Silsby going to do with all those kids she was trying to kidnap from Haiti?

by William Skink

Looking at our Missoula community from an outsider perspective might be confusing. Are we an enlightened liberal enclave truly grappling with inequality in a substantive and meaningful way, or are we a financially exclusive community focusing on the optics of race placation while our non-wealthy white neighbors continue to get economically squeezed?

Missoula County Commissioners are currently making economic decision about how to distribute public funds. Here is how the Missoula Current is reporting that effort:

As part of its annual distribution, Missoula County this week began earmarking revenue for a handful of social organizations to meet what officials described as basic human needs.

It also took steps to gauge the role a new position will play as the county looks to move away from its “history of oppression and domination” to address issues around equity, diversity and inclusion.

The role of this new taxpayer-funded position has not been defined yet, so to assist in that creating a definition for how this person will address issues of equity, diversity and inclusion, our elected brain trust at the County level has sent out letters soliciting feedback. Here’s more from the link:

The letters suggest that Missoula County, like all local governments, grew out of “a history of oppression and domination, perpetuated by a society built to centralize power based on the whiteness of a person’s skin.”

“This position will … be charged with reviewing everything we do as an organization, with a specific focus on making Missoula County a more inclusive leader in the community,” one letter reads. “We recognize many of our policies and practices are under-scrutinized and, to effect real change, we must look at the way Missoula County conducts every aspect of the services we provide and how we interact with all members of our community.”

How can local government “effect real change” amidst an economic crisis when its only idea to fix government is to grow government to police itself? The real change effected by these efforts will be more economic pain for the non-wealthy, whether they are white or not.

This is NOT TO SAY that systemic racism doesn’t exist in Missoula. It absolutely does, as any census of the jail population will immediately tell you. But the reality of racial inequality in places like our criminal justice system doesn’t erase the more pervasive ECONOMIC inequality perpetrated by these systems.

If you don’t think what I’m saying is accurate, then you probably don’t have much experience with the criminal justice system (this is often a byproduct of white privilege). From what I have seen of this inhuman system that runs on money, if you can’t afford to hire a lawyer to defend yourself, then it doesn’t really matter what color your skin is.

by William Skink

When an out-of-control local government has a skim and give slush fund distributed by unelected sycophants at the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, money is always the solution because there is little accountability when shit goes wrong.

Take the South Reserve Pedestrian bridge. This 4.1 million dollar project opened in 2017 and since then there have been problems with how this fancy bridge was designed to melt snow. Apparently the “composite panels” that contain “heating elements” don’t work when it’s below 20°, which is kind of a problem during Montana winters.

But don’t worry, Missoula, Ellen Buchanan is confident that a $30,000 dollar shot of public TIF money will fix this seasonal snafu. From the link:

The Missoula Redevelopment Agency (MRA) Board of Directors approved a $30,000 expenditure on Monday for the work. The bridge has experienced issues with snow removal since it was put into service years ago.

The bridge decking is made of composite panels that contain heating elements designed to melt snow and be carried off through a downspout drainage system. However, when the temperature drops below 20°, the snow refreezes before it is carried away creating a hazardous situation for bridge users.

City Parks reached out to the contractor, Anchor Electric and Controls, who provided a programming and software solution that provides both corrective measures and enhancements to the current system.

In an effort to explain why MORE public money is needed, after already blowing over 4 million on this bridge, Ellen Buchanan scapegoats the new technology used on this costly endeavor:

“Missoula was a bit of a guinea pig. This was the first time this system had been used, and we’re confident that if we made those modifications that it will not only melt the snow and the frost, but it will also carry the moisture off of the bridge so that it doesn’t refreeze,” said MRA director Ellen Buchanan.

Is telling the public that we were guinea pigs a good idea, or is Ellen Buchanan showing us why MRA needs that communication plan they are paying Spider McKnight’s Six Pony Hitch consulting firm $46,000 to develop? I don’t know, you decide.

When you are spending other people’s money, it must seem like it’s always a sunny day, and sunny days are great to spend at the park. That is why Missoula taxpayers supported a 42 million dollar bond six years ago to build shit like this:

Voters agreed to pay $42 million over the next 20 years to develop a regional park at Fort Missoula, improve city playgrounds and establish a county trails program. By far the largest share of the bond, some $38 million, will go to building and making over 146 acres of park land at Fort Missoula. The regional park concept has been in the dream and planning stages since the mid-1990s.

Now that all this work is done, we can enjoy TOP OF THE LINE sports fields, right? And if it rains, the fields were PROPERLY DESIGNED to deal with it, right?

Wrong. From the link:

A Missoula taxpayer is concerned and upset about the conditions of the Fort Missoula turf fields.

“Beautiful facility paid for by city and county taxpayers, but I mean it’s a flawed facility. I mean its flawed because the turf either it wasn’t put in properly or it isn’t being properly maintained,” Missoula resident Tony Boote said.

Officials tell us the fields are designed to drain about .6 inches of rain in an hour.

On June 29, Missoula recorded just shy of an inch of rain, on the June 30 just over a half inch fell.

All together roughly one and a half inches of rain over 48 hours.

The fields though were still muddy and wet, when they should have drained in about three hours.

So, to recap, Missoula citizens have paid over 4 million dollars for a bridge that features dangerous, icy conditions when it’s cold out, and we are STILL PAYING for sports fields that become water-logged messes when it rains too much.

I hope Missoula citizens remember this bullshit when Mayor Engen makes his case next year to continue this trend of unaccountable development that just keeps tightening the screws on the affordability crisis we are suffering.

by William Skink

TRIGGER WARNING: this post features speculation that will include the name “George Soros”. Please abstain from reading this if the name “George Soros” triggers anti-1st amendment sentiments in your small, little brain. Thank you.

It’s been over 9 months since two men were killed in Missoula.

Sean Stevenson was allegedly strangled in an altercation at the Poverello Center by Johnny Lee Perry. He later died at St. Pats. The Missoula County Attorney’s office claims this lethal act of violence was a case of self-defense.

Around the same time of Stevenson’s death, a young man by the name of Ben Mousso was stabbed in a bathroom and later died. Once again the Missoula County Attorney’s office determined the individual who killed Mousso, Josh Paniagua, acted in self defense and used justifiable force when he stabbed Mousso four times. The case was referred to the state for review, but the results have not been reported yet.

A few days ago someone who went to high school with Sean commented on this RD post. This is his comment:

My name is Mark. I graduated high school with Sean in 1992. Has there been any progress on this case?

The answer to Mark’s question is a big NO. There is no progress on this case because, according to the County Attorney’s office, THERE IS NO CASE.

Missoula has moved on from this unfortunate death of a black man killed at our homeless shelter to more important things, like placating Missoula’s minority population with a qualitative research project called LEARN, which stands for “Listening, Engaging, Action, Reflection Network”.

For anyone interested in contacting someone involved with this project, I suggest contacting Laurellé C. Warner at laurelle.warner@wallawalla.edu

Since there is no case to report on, the question becomes WHY is there no case? This is where my speculation comes in.

Last week Newt Gingrich posted a reaction to a Fox interview where he was quickly shut down from discussing Soros. Please note that just because I am referencing this scumbag and linking to his post, that DOES NOT MEAN I endorse anything he represents. In the following quote, the emphasis will be mine:

I have been watching a truly curious phenomenon over the past few days.

It seems there is suddenly a movement in media to silence anyone who speaks out against George Soros—and, specifically, his funding of radical prosecutors seeking to change the criminal justice system by simply ignoring certain crimes.

When I read this response, the bold part jumped out at me. Could there be a connection here?

Gingrich continues:

Soros’s plan to elect these prosecutors has been well documented already—and it has nothing to do with his spiritual or ethnic background. The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Politico, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CBS, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel—even Fox News itself, among others, have all thoroughly reported on it.

There are plenty of specific examples of Soros’s work in action.

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, who campaigned on the promise that he would not prosecute a host of crimes—including thefts—admitted his campaign was largely funded through Soros or his groups. He has been so dismissive of crime and police that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has had to send in the Texas State Patrol to police large swaths of Dallas.

Soros gave $333,000 to the Safety and Justice PAC in 2016 to support then-Cook County District Attorney candidate Kim Foxx in Illinois—who is currently presiding over terrible violence and mayhem in Chicago, where murders are twice what they were in 2019.

Soros and his organizations spent $1.7 million to help get Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner elected in 2018. Before being elected, Krasner earned a name for himself by suing the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times. Since he took office, dozens of experienced prosecutors have either been fired or resigned. Criminal prosecutions have plummeted and crime has risen. Philadelphia now has the second-highest murder rate among large cities in the country.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to claim that billionaires with more money than they know what to do with often use their wealth to influence policy. Liberals have no problem with this concept when it’s directed at people like the Koch brothers, who funded the Tea Party.

The power of the prosecutor is a power no community should take lightly. As Missoula prepares to launch another placation plan for our minority population, with token participants and a bullshit study, I am going to try and figure out why it appears some unstable people in our community are getting away with murder.

by William Skink

After reading this Missoula Current article last week, my first thought was this: what the hell is an opioid vaccine?

Before getting to that question (which the article doesn’t help answer at all), the meat of Friday’s announcement is that the public/private relationship between the University of Montana and biotech firm Inimmune has netted the University its largest grant EVER, at 33 million dollars. This money is will help Inimmune develop an opioid vaccine.

If the name Inimmune sounds familiar, that’s because I wrote about this biotech company’s GlaxoSmithKline origin story in June, then I wrote about this company again the following month after I realized one of the investors is a shady billionaire who relocated to Kalispell, then got sued by the police chief.

Luckily, none of this pesky context is keeping this public/private relationship from moving full steam ahead to develop a vaccine to “cure” the problem created by Big Pharma in the first place. From the first link:

The University of Montana on Friday announced it’s largest grant in school history, a $33.4 million award from the National Institutes of Health for the development of opioid vaccines and their clinical trials.

The funding covers two Phase 1 clinical trials of opioid vaccines developed by UM’s Center for Translational Medicine. The collaboration includes Inimmune Corp. in Missoula and the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Jay Evans, the principle investigator on the award and director of UM’s Center for Translational Medicine, said the funding will boost the school’s ongoing research on the development of an opioid vaccine and serves as “validation of our world-class research team at UM.”

“It will allow us to advance lead opioid vaccine candidates to Phase I human clinical trials and better understand the safety and efficacy of our vaccine adjuvants, which early research has shown will be needed to increase the quantity and quality of the anti-drug antibody response in people with opioid addictions,” Evans said.

If you’re curious how a vaccine could be developed for opioid addicts, this article has the context missing in the MC article.

Personally, I don’t find anything encouraging about this news. The opioid crisis is a crime of mass murder perpetrated for profit by Big Pharma, but instead of throwing people in prison and dissolving these evil corporations, little foot soldiers of Big Pharma, like Jay Evans, get to spinoff biotech startups, using public money to develop products for private profit.

Is this how the University of Montana is trying to survive? And another question worth asking: is transforming Missoula into a haven for tech startups going to be a good thing for this community? Do Missoulians actually WANT to become a little inland silicon valley?

One thing is for sure, as tech companies flock to Missoula, or grow in Missoula, or start-up in Missoula, our housing affordability crisis will keep getting worse and worse. Unless you think it’s cool to rent a 250 square foot pod for $600 dollars.

While media like the Missoula Current become cheerleaders for this biotech trend, tune in here for the doses of reality our local media doesn’t want to talk about.