Month: December 2020

by William Skink

When it comes to the skyrocketing costs of housing, Missoula’s elected braintrust likes to feign impotence with their specious claim that they lack “the tools” to address the problem because the state of Montana won’t enable them to levy more taxes, like a sales tax.

This line of bullshit is implied in the title of one of two Missoula Current articles on this topic: Housing issues mount in Missoula as costs rise; city looks to Legislature for help. But before we get to the article, let me explain why I don’t expect the Legislature to help Missoula with its housing crisis.

In order to make my point, I’m going to use the analogy of an individual going to a bank to get a loan. In this analogy the individual is Missoula and the bank is the state of Montana.

Missoula arrives at the bank in its brand new zero-emission vehicle and our dear leader, with his excellent health coverage, gets out, ready to make his pitch. Riding shotgun is the Queen of Gentrification, Ellen Buchanan.

In the meeting, our dear leader sets the dire scene for the bank agent. Missoula’s housing crisis IS GETTING WORSE and we DON’T HAVE THE TOOLS to do what’s NEEDED.

The bank agent remains unmoved by this emotional appeal and waits for our dear leader to finish. After describing the impending housing apocalypse, our dear leader takes a breath and waits. The agent speaks.

AGENT: So, you NEED our help because you don’t have enough tax revenue to do what’s required, is that what you’re telling me?

DEAR LEADER: Yes, and if we don’t act fast, people will die.

AGENT: But you had enough money for new parks and a new school, right? And you had enough money for a new library, right? And you have enough money to buy open space, and to buy zero-emission vehicles, and you were going to give 16 million dollars to Nick Checota to build an event center, but NOW YOU ARE COMING TO US FOR HELP?

DEAR LEADER: But COVID! It’s all because of COVID, COVID, COVID!!! If it wasn’t for Covid we would have solved homelessness and everyone would be happy and life would be perfect!

AGENT: Sorry, giving you more taxing power would be like making a pedophile the head of the school board.

END SCENE

While the above scene is fictional, a similar scene played out earlier this week when members of the public made their appeal to City Council to take more action as housing costs spiral out of control. Making excuses for our enlightened braintrust, here is the angry and defensive Gwen Jones:

“I am hoping there is outreach to the legislators for the upcoming legislative session, because frankly, there are so many intertwined issues between local and state government on these issues,” council member Gwen Jones said. “ Tax reform is really hard, but the State of Montana needs to take a hard look at it, because we’re butting up against some walls here in Missoula. If they give us the tools, we can do a heck of a lot more at the local level.”

City Council president Bryan von Lossberg echoed Jones, saying they need to meet up with state legislators for statewide solutions, as other metropolitan areas in Montana are likely facing similar issues with the rise in out-of-state residents moving into Montana.

I doubt our elected braintrust actually expects the state of Montana to help us with our housing crisis because all those terrible Republicans who won their elections have no reason to assist a town that literally can’t stop itself from peddling millions of dollars in bonds for wishlist projects like the fairgrounds.

Instead the Missoula Current is running an article on the possibility of Joe Biden coming in to save the day:

Urging Congress to pass rental assistance legislation before lawmakers recess for Christmas break, the report estimates the downstream public costs of a wave of evictions would be $62 to $129 billion.

That includes emergency shelter for the displaced; medical care, as the stress of homelessness aggravates their medical conditions or leads to Covid-19 infections; foster care of children removed from their parents; and juvenile detention costs, as homeless children are more likely to be arrested.

Biden wants to help renters stay in their homes. A former public defender, the president-elect says he’ll push for passage of the Legal Assistance to Prevent Evictions Act, which would help tenants get lawyers for eviction cases and encourage local governments to start eviction diversion programs.

While good liberals wait for their liberal savior to save them, Missoula liberals are building outdoor homeless camps that one homeless man says he won’t use.

I’d like to commend NBC Montana’s Madison Doner for actually going to the Reserve Street camps enough times to provide this perspective from an actual resident of the encampment:

They call it a temporary safe outdoor space, but one long-term Reserve Street camp resident tells us why he thinks it won’t work.

“All you’re doing right now is putting the Poverello Center on a plot of land so people can stay there,” encampment resident Kevin Sandberg said.

Organizers disagree. “What we are doing is bringing together a legal provider and service rich environment for the folks that are going to have to remain unsheltered no matter what,” Ashley Corbally with Hope Rescue Mission said.

Sandberg says it’s a start but thinks only the newcomers will head there.

“It’s great they got property for the homeless people to go to, but I don’t know very many people that are on the island that will be going over there to you guys, I’m sorry to say,” said Sandberg.

Well, so much for relocating the Reserve Street campers. I wonder when the Health Department will start issuing fines to the Department of Transportation?

If Missoula wants the state of Montana to act like we are in a housing crisis, then it would help if our own elected braintrust started acting like it. They can do that by making housing Missoula’s NUMBER ONE PRIORITY and start implementing those policy suggestions Eran Pehan took 3 years to develop.

Or don’t, and we’ll see what happens.

by William Skink

poke me in Tuskegee
watch my body change
God was a shitty architect 
building this meat cage

they're building bodies better
by editing the flaws
and making water wetter 
with a better water clause

hesitancy monsters
who scoff and doff their masks
will get new scarlet letters
and wrist tattoos to match

stupid anti-vaxxers
they own your neural links
and soon the algorithm 
will reteach you how to think

by William Skink

A got an angry reaction on Twitter yesterday from Chris LaTray, a Missoula writer and enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

LaTray’s One Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large won the 2018 Montana Book Award, the 2019 High Plains Book Award (Best First Book) and the 2019 High Plains Book Award (Best Book by Indigenous Writer). He’s an up and coming culture creator, which makes his broad assessment of the intelligence of Montanans worth noting. Here’s the tweet I commented on that triggered LaTray’s wrath:

Isn’t it nice to see how these two men are bonding over their disdain for all the stupid Montanans who voted for the CREATION MUSEUM GUY? When I retweeted LaTray’s assessment of his fellow Montanans I received quite the micro-aggression, or is being told to GO FUCK MYSELF a macro aggression? I dunno, but here it is:

After giving self-copulation some thought, I decided it’s not worth my time arguing with an angry bowling pin about why people voted for Greg Gianforte in Montana. I’ll let smart guys like LaTray figure out why the dummies won.

by William Skink

I’ve got some other stuff to attend to today, so instead of a post, I recommend listening to Nora Gedgaudas on The Higherside Chat podcast.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more scathing insights about this lovely Zoom Town in which we live, and the totally sane nation in which it exists.

by William Skink

What are your red lines? What are the points that, if crossed, you acknowledge there’s no going back?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I can say, without any hesitation, my red lines are the imposition of a mandatory vaccine and the undermining of parental consent.

I know there will be significant psychological resistance to this harsh reality fast approaching, but there isn’t much time left to prepare for this technocratic control grid being set up and slowly slipped around our necks like a noose.

We have a choice: either face up to what the evidence indicates is the plan for us human cattle, and get ready to fight, or don’t, and get ready to be a slave.

The effort to gaslight anyone talking about the name of their psychopathic plan is already well under way, as evidenced by this gutless Daily Beast article declaring the Joe Biden presidency ALREADY HAS ITS FIRST CONSPIRACY THEORY. Please note the mocking tone in the opening paragraphs:

Joe Biden isn’t president yet. But his incoming White House already has its first conspiracy theory to deal with.

It goes by the tag the “Great Reset” and under its construct a wild dystopian future is in store. The coronavirus pandemic is merely a means to enslave humanity and end capitalism. Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan is really a cover for nefarious plotting of a global cabal from Davos, Switzerland, intent on abolishing private property and building prison camps for the dissenters who refuse to accept microchips that will read their thoughts. Even Grover from Sesame Street might be involved.

HAHAHAHAHA these CRAZY conspiracy theorists think such CRAZY things, don’t they? What are they going to dream up next, a slogan declaring WE WILL OWN NOTHING AND BE HAPPY?

Yeah, sure, it’s the conspiracy theorists who are the crazy ones, right?

It’s not fun anticipating what these globalist nutters are planning, and I wish there was more time to get more people to wake up to what is lurking just around the corner, but we no longer have that luxury.

I’m taking a risk just by writing this post. If you don’t think that’s true, that’s because your brain is occupied territory. They even have a new term for what dangerous people like me are doing: we are promoting vaccine hesitancy and in the UK they are deploying the British Army’s Information Warfare Unit to combat this dangerous phenomenon:

The British Army’s Information Warfare Unit will be deployed to tackle anti-vaccine propaganda ahead of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it has been revealed. 

Soldiers are already monitoring cyberspace for Covid-19 content to find out how British citizens are being targeted online, leaked documents showed.

It comes amid a rise in the number of anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests taking place around Britain as three potential vaccines were found to have around 90 per cent effectiveness.

Do you know what else can be effective in fighting off viruses? Bolstering the immune system with vitamins and exercise. But for some WEIRD REASON–as entire countries go into lockdown, destroying businesses and livelihoods and leading to increases in the symptoms of Shit-Life Syndrome, like addiction and suicide–that hasn’t been a part of the conversation. I wonder if it has anything to do with vitamin D not making BIG PHARMA billions of dollars?

So, my willingness to engage in a critical discussion of “vaccine hesitancy” is a big problem for BIG PHARMA because I’m far from being alone in my concerns. An even bigger problem is the people I could directly influence, like my kids.

What if my 12 year old wants a vaccine because all his peers are doing it, but his crazy conspiracy theorist dad won’t let him? Sounds like parental consent could be a problem, so let’s explain to all you ignorant parents who don’t want corporations to inject a Covid vaccine into your child why you are undermining your child’s health.

The following excerpt is from the United Nations website describing how parental consent undermines the right to health in adolescents. The article uses AIDS as the example, and was updated in March of 2020. From the link:

Many countries have laws or policies that prevent adolescents from accessing essential health services without the consent of a parent or guardian. The original intention may have been to protect minors, but these stipulations often have the opposite effect and increase the risk of HIV and other health problems among adolescents.

A large proportion of countries across all regions restrict access to HIV testing and treatment for adolescents. In 2019, for instance, adolescents younger than 18 years needed explicit parental consent in 105 of 142 countries in order to take an HIV test. In 86 of 138 reporting countries, they needed such consent to access HIV treatment and care. These kinds of laws and policies also may complicate or hinder adolescent access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a highly effective prevention tool.

Research in sub-Saharan Africa shows that in countries where the age of consent is 15 years or lower, adolescents are 74% more likely to have been tested for HIV in the past 12 months compared with countries where the age of consent is 16 years or higher—with girls especially benefiting from the easier access.

20 years ago, when 9/11 happened, the NEW NORMAL was easier to downplay and ignore because the societal changes we saw were mostly kept to airports and airplanes, while the more esoteric operations of the national security state were slowly and incrementally moved into place, mostly unseen by a scared-stupid population willing to trade their civil liberties for the false illusion of safety.

But now it’s impossible to ignore because every aspect of our lives has been impacted by what’s happening.

So, what are YOUR red lines? And, more importantly, what are you going to do when these GREAT RESETTING sociopaths cross them?

If you don’t have a response to those questions, you better start giving it some thought, because we are running out of time.