It’s really kind of fascinating when you take a step back and realize that America has once again been bifurcated and that half the country is 100% certain the other half is not just wrong, but dangerously, delusionally insane.
Instead of sorting people into political categories, we have an even more reductionist method of dividing the country thanks to the pandemic. Now Americans are either COVIDIOTS or they belong to the COVIDIAN CULT.
Covidiots go to places like Zerohedge where they can read stuff like this:
Their initiation into the Covidian Cult began in January, when the medical authorities and corporate media turned on The Fear with projections of hundreds of millions of deaths and fake photos of people dropping dead in the streets. The psychological conditioning has continued for months. The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects. Lockdowns. Emergency field hospitals and morgues. The singing-dancing NHS staff. Death trucks. Overflowing ICUs. Dead Covid babies. Manipulated statistics. Goon squads. Masks. And all the rest of it.
Eight months later, here we are. The Head of the Health Emergencies Program at the WHO has basically confirmed an IFR of 0.14%, approximately the same as the seasonal flu.
Covidians have a bunch more options, but even some alternative media sites, like Moon of Alabama, are hard at work making the cultists feel scientifically and morally superior to the Covidiots. In this post, for example, the blog’s host, b, is trying to debunk PCR test skepticism. You can judge for yourself what you think of his efforts.
But that’s part of the problem, most of us can’t really judge for ourselves with our layman’s understanding of hard science, so we have to rely on supposed “experts” without really knowing how they acquired their expertise, where they get their money/funding from, and what agenda they might be witting or unwitting agents for.
It all just becomes too mentally exhausting to engage with, so people instead lock on to other targets that provide the illusion of control, like voting, while they direct their anger and hatred at THE OTHER.
So the Covidians lash out at the Covidiots, and the Covidiots lash out at the Covidians, and those at the top of the power pyramid–the capstone cabal–laugh and loot to their heart’s content.
We have the power to change this, we really do, but without a massive psychological jail break, I’m afraid we will keep focusing on the wrong targets.
I will never forget and I will never forgive what the exploitation of this pandemic is doing to our kids.
I have been reluctant to write about the joke that school has become for my kids because I’m trying to MODERATE my anger for health reasons. But, as the carrot of going back to in-person learning five days a week keeps getting pushed back further and further, I know I’m not the only parent about to lose it.
Remote learning for my middle kid entails my wife sticking to him like glue to get anything accomplished. If my youngest is around, forget it, so when she’s not in preschool, she’s with my mom.
I am immensely lucky and blessed that my wife CAN stay at home with our kids, and that my parents live in Missoula to help out. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, I have no idea how other parents with less resources are managing this madness.
The lack of social interaction with their peers is having an impact. If one of their friends has a last name that puts them with a different group of kids, they don’t see that friend at school anymore. Maybe in the hallway they can mumble something to each other through the idiotic masks they’re being forced to wear, but that’s it.
So why are my kids being forced to continue remote learning while concerts are resuming at the Wilma and people can go to bars five days a week? Are they FLATTENING THE CURVE still?
As I go about my day to day I’m starting to get the feeling that the Corona-spell is beginning to wear off, so it’s a good thing for our sociopath oligarchs that an existential election in which AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE is about to go down in a few weeks. That should keep us in the grips of fear for awhile longer so the sociopaths can keep implementing their GREAT RESET.
If we ever stopped being afraid we could be quite a countervailing force to this sociopathic agenda being pushed on us. Consider that as you keep consuming their fear porn and accepting their supposed solutions.
I don’t know how many years I’ve considered the Missoulian a crap source of local news, but during the most recent years of this paper’s existence, as it squeezed what little value was left for its corporate shareholders, Gwen Florio has been the editor.
Well, NO LONGER!
In a blazing example of virtue signaling, Florio has RESIGNED her position as editor over the paper’s endorsement of Jennifer Fielder for PSC.
On Twitter the accolades for Florio are pouring in. Why? Because she was a good reporter, taking on difficult stories, like the UM rape scandal, her supporters say. Ok. So did that make the Missoulian a quality newspaper while she was taking Lee Enterprises money to be the editor?
I spoke with Gwen Florio over the phone about the Sean Stevenson case a few months ago, hoping to get more official reporting on why the County Attorney’s office is declaring acts of violence resulting in death to be justifiable uses of force in self defense, both in the Stevenson case and the stabbing death of Ben Mousso. Nothing resulted from that conversation, or subsequent attempts to get Seaborn Larson to follow up on these important stories.
Maybe that’s because Gwen Florio had wrapped that story up back in January with this disgusting piece of self-congratulation over her paper’s extra effort to tell Sean Stevenson’s story. Here is a big chunk of the self-directed accolades Florio directed to herself and her reporters on January 12th, under the title The Value of a Closer Look:
It could have been “just” another police story. A fight at the Poverello Center, Missoula’s shelter for homeless people. One man dead. Another man arrested, briefly held, then released without charges after witnesses are questioned.
And that’s where a lot of stories, and especially stories involving violence among the less fortunate, end — with a short recitation of the facts, to the extent that they’re known, and then a collective shrug as the news cycle rolls on.
Last week, reporters Seaborn Larson and Paul Hamby hit the pause button. Law enforcement had released the victim’s name and age — Sean Stevenson, 45 — but that was it. But Larson and Hamby kept asking questions, not just about Stevenson, but about the other clients of the Pov, and also the people who work there.
Sunday’s paper carried two stories that stemmed from their reporting. Hamby found friends and family who helped put a face and a personality to Stevenson — and a “dazzling” personality at that, according to his friend, Janice Gordon.
Now that Florio has RESIGNED, she can dedicate more time to writing her popular fiction and tweeting clever tweets about hashtag AM writing at the coffee shop. Whoever replaces her will undoubtedly make the paper an even worse product, but I doubt anyone will actually notice.
Is an alternative to the Missoulian ever going to rise like a Phoenix from the ashes, or did Lee Enterprises truly salt the earth with the Indy and the shuttering of its digital archives?
And if you think the Missoula Current is the answer, there’s a gap in KBGA’s Saturday schedule that says otherwise. Right, Gomer?
Sad times for our local media market, which means lots of important stories not being told.
While I can disdain the idea of “having an image” in order to sell oneself if you’re gonna peddle your original content, the reality is unavoidable. Even more challenging, an elusive “authenticity” is often sought because it’s an important ingredient in the recipe of inspiring others to give you money for the fruits of your imagination.
I can’t ever recall a time being interested in the clothes I wear, or the higher form of “fashion” involved in matching pieces of fabric on the human body. That’s why it’s so weird that I now eagerly anticipate packages with two hundred dollar pants coming to me from Philadelphia. How did I get here?
William Skink is a pseudonym I picked because William is my middle name and Skink is a type of lizard that can regrow its tail/tale as a defensive mechanism. I also first started blogging as “lizard” many years ago, so it made sense.
In 2010 I started a year long writing project (in October, when my second kid was born) that officially birthed William Skink as more than a pseudonym. William Skink became a character I gave over authorship to.
This will sound weird, but William Skink has become a sort of firewall I use between my real life and the influence of the muse, which I have come to mistrust as a force that has my real life interests in mind. Put another way, the muse can do great things for your ego, but your ego rarely does great things for the people in your personal life.
When I left my job at the shelter, I bit the tech-bullet and invested in hardware and software. I trudged through my disdain for technology to become competent with ProTools and FinalCut. I recorded screaming accompanied by keyboards, stitched video together, and helped support the Bota Box brand with my wine consumption.
Somewhere in my search for video content I ran across footage from Wasteland Weekend, an extended festival-like gathering of serious LARPers (live action role playing) dressed in an amazingly creative and inventive variety of post-apocalyptic attire.
Well, since William Skink wrote dystopian poetry, he was going to have to look like the part, RIGHT? And here was the perfect aesthetic.
Fast-forward through a bunch of Etsy purchases and Halloweens providing cover for my “costume” to the present, where my abstaining from wine guzzling has melted fifty pounds off my frame. Papa needed a new pair of pants, and William Skink needed some threads for the guerrilla marketing of his upcoming title WELCOME TO THE COVAXICON, and as providence would have it, we stumbled upon the Delicious crew.
Not caring about the clothes I wore was, in part, a reflection of not caring what I was doing to my body with alcohol. With that factor having changed, the fruits of my mind can now be delivered by a healthier body.
And I’m going to look damn good doing it.
To the delicious crew: THANK YOU for making amazing clothing!
P.S. Let me know if you would like to commission a dystopian poet to write up some catchy jingles. With the ego-blessing of the muse I can convey that William Skink’s poetic style offers a unique, post-modern mix of simple rhyme schemes and low-brow language to communicate the perils of the spiritual warfare being waged against us by dark magicians and transhumanist sociopaths who are currently leveraging technology to become immortal man-gods.
In other words, it’s good shit to combat some evil motherfuckers.
Do you wake up and smell the opportunity in the morning? Have you recently been quoted as saying investors are BULLISH on Missoula? If you answered yes to either question, then you may have been a virtual participant in the Big Sky Business Insight Summit where the lesson learned about our post-pandemic world is that there will be new opportunities in Montana.
The link is to the most incurious media source in our humble little valley, the Missoula Current, dutifully reporting on the players hoping to ride the pandemic to a biomedical/tech boom without any of the troubling context a real media source might want to include.
But MC did feature this image of the players from their zoom meeting:
The older woman in the middle of the bottom row, Liz Marchi, represents Two Bear Capital. I wrote about Two Bear Capital back in July when MC reported it was helping the biotech start-up, Inimmune, find investors. Inimmune had already been on my radar since June, when I reported that this start-up was launched by former GlaxoSmithKline employees and is now deeply embedded in the “business incubator” at the University of Montana. From the second link (my emphasis):
The University of Montana has received a $5.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to help develop a vaccine against bacterial infection.
The principal investigator on the five-year award, titled “Immunization against filamentous bacteriophages to prevent bacterial infection,” is Patrick Secor, assistant professor in the Division of Biological Sciences at UM.
Other investigators on the award include Dr. Jay Evans from UM and Inimmune, a start-up located in UM’s business incubator, MonTEC; David Burkhart and Kendal Ryter from Inimmune; Paul Bollyky and Gina Suh from Stanford University; and Chandan Sen, Sashwati Roy and Valerie Bergdall from Ohio State University. The team’s goal is to develop a vaccine to prevent infections caused by the common bacteria pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
The relationship between biomedical start-ups, like Inimmune, and the University of Montana is incredibly important. These relationships are known as public-private partnerships and one of the big benefits of these relationships is how transparency evaporates when public dollars disappear into the private sector.
Getting back to the incurious reporting of the MC, check out the last name of the woman to the left of Liz Marchi. Does that look like the same last name of the president of the University of Montana, Seth Bodnar? Why yes it is. But Chelsea Bodnar is her own woman, damn it, and speculating on some imagined conflict of interest is probably just my sexism showing itself:
Despite the challenges that have emerged, the pandemic has brought new urgency and new opportunity to existing practices that weren’t widespread before the virus hit.
Dr. Chelsea Bodnar, the CEO of Montana Pediatrics, said the organization worked to convince doctors in the pre-COVID world that telemedicine was an acceptable practice. When the pandemic hit and the rules changed, telemedicine became essential.
“If you were going to maintain a practice and a connection, you were going to give it a shot,” Bodnar said. “Our community had a leg up because they’d been introduced to this technology and had more advanced tools and were able to comfortably dive into this.”
Bodnar said the pandemic opened the door to telemedicine and brought it farther than it was before. But it also has shown that pivoting during a pandemic isn’t always easy.
“We need better ways of sending emails and connecting and giving people codes. We need to get more sophisticated about what tools we offer at home,” she said. “But we’ve seen a ton of meaningful clinical interactions that reinforces for physicians how important it is to serve patients where they are.”
What an amazing coincidence that DOCTOR Chelsea Bodnar’s organization just so happened to be pushing telemedicine as “an acceptable practice” before this pandemic hit. Good thing she is so well positioned to influence the massive pivot of our entire medical system to an EVEN MORE impersonal doctor/patient experience.
Chelsea Bodnar got some attention from this blog a few years ago because of her close relationship with the political wizard, Jim Messina. Back then she was hoping Messina could help her husband turn around the enrollment crisis he was hired to fix:
Chelsea Elander, the spouse of University of Montana President Seth Bodnar, has been playing a significant role in the flagship’s preparation for a recruitment project with The Messina Group, records show.
CEO Jim Messina, who led former President Barack Obama’s 2012 election to a second term in the White House, is a passionate UM alum and longtime friend of Elander’s who volunteered the data analytics expertise of his firm to help UM recruit students. UM has experienced a nearly 30 percent enrollment drop since 2010.
This semester, Elander has been a liaison between UM and The Messina Group in discussions about providing the firm with student and family records. According to UM legal counsel Lucy France, the campus has not given the firm any data.
This created a bit of controversy when it was reported at the time, considering Chelsea didn’t have any official role with UM, but that was years ago. And who remembers things that happened a few years ago, especially when we are FIGHTING FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA!!!
If this is a fight, like a war, then I guess it’s a good thing we have a military/corporate guy leading the University of Montana. Bodnar’s pedigree wasn’t enthusiastically accepted by the University community when he was hired, but chalk this up to just another happy coincidence. If you don’t recall Bodnar’s military/corporate pedigree, here is the Kaiman’s reporting from before the selection was made:
Seth Bodnar, one of four candidates for UM’s presidency, has held many titles. He’s a Rhodes and Truman Scholar, a former Army Ranger and Green Beret and a senior executive at the General Electric Company all rolled into one. But he’s never worked in university administration, and now he’s after UM’s most important role.
Since we’ll be in a civil war with our fellow Americans soon, I guess it’s a good thing we have this military/corporate man in charge of our University, and that the old normal of a flagship humanities program will be switched out for a lucrative biomedical emphasis. It’s also good that Seth’s wife, Chelsea, has such strong ties to a Democratic political operative because that could benefit our humble little valley as we become a Montana beachhead for the resistance.
