by William Skink
they hide it in a lipid coat to slip it pass your molecular guards a sly design that could provoke your body burning all its cards no longer do they hide their hand we're on warp speed once repo blew target softened on every front then force-fed fear of each achoo bizarro cartoon clown mach 10 slow down, breathe, the sun's your friend they can't create and that makes them mad we can and always begin again
by Travis Mateer
I wanted the guest I was interviewing yesterday to have some water, so I ran to a cafe downtown to purchase a bottle. Halfway there I realized I didn’t have my mask, so instead I took my zip-off hood and placed against my face with my hand.
When I entered the store the barista immediately told me I needed a mask. I gave a muffled reply, saying I just needed a bottle of water and that I was doing my best to cover my face. She was clearly frustrated, but allowed me to toss two crumpled dollar bills on the counter.
I don’t have ANY animosity toward the hourly wage slave who was put in the position of enforcing a ridiculous, ineffective and counterproductive mask requirement. The people who deserve the animosity are the ones who claim SCIENCE is driving this instead of what’s really happening: psychologically conditioned passivity for their new strain of totalitarianism.
Since mask true believers don’t understand the primacy of the political symbolism (and the worthlessness of the stated purpose of wearing masks), they think Montana’s Republican Governor is out to harm them and our community. So, to show Governor Gianforte the power of Missoula’s virtue-signaling beliefs, Missoula County is keeping their precious mask mandate:
In anticipation of the potential rollback of a statewide mask mandate with a change in state leadership, the Missoula City-County Board of Health adopted a rule in December that extended statewide directives put in place by former Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock and local orders.
Gianforte was sworn in Jan. 4. Montana has been under a statewide mask mandate since July for counties with four or more active cases of COVID-19, and Bullock extended the requirement to all counties regardless of active case counts in November.
The local rule will remain in effect until revoked or revised by the Missoula City-County Health Board. Missoula City-County Health Officer and Board of Health director Ellen Leahy said some of the newer restrictions — such as the requirement for bars, restaurants and casinos to operate at 50% capacity and close at 10 p.m. — may be lifted if Missoula County’s seven-day average of new case incidence rate lowers to 25 cases per 100,000 population for a period of at least two weeks.
This is ALL political. If it was about the science then we would have had a ROBUST conversation about the PCR test and the need to standardize the cycle threshold in order to minimize the chances of false positives.
But that didn’t happen. Why? Because you need to just STFU and take your poke. Don’t think about false positives and cycle thresholds and pathogenic priming and messenger RNA and your immune system and the great disappearing act of influenza. Thinking could lead to questions and questions could lead to hesitancy and hesitancy means you don’t take an experimental vaccine produced at warp speed while skipping animal trials.
The good news is thinking hasn’t been declared illegal yet by our illuminated braintrust, so until I am banned from using my brain I am going to continue exercising my critical thinking skills in assessing what the actual risk is.
I suggest you do the same. Thanks for reading.
by Travis Mateer
Back in July, the USA today reported on the LACK of testing at nursing homes in Montana. Not testing meant not knowing what was circulating, and that was a bad thing. From the link:
Nursing homes became the first places with fatal outbreaks in the USA. Six of Montana’s earliest deaths were tied to infections acquired at a nursing home, but the state avoided the widespread early outbreaks seen elsewhere in the nation.
“My impression is that the facilities believed they had all protocols in place to keep their residents safe, were doing everything possible, and there was no need (to test) because of so few cases in their area,” said Rose Hughes, executive director of the Montana Health Care Association, which represents long-term care facilities.
Nursing homes have LOTS of protocols. When I was working at Missoula Aging Services, I had plenty of conversations with family members about the process known as discharge planning. If you’re not familiar with this process, here is a brief description:
Medicare states that discharge planning is “a process used to decide what a patient needs for a smooth move from one level of care to another.” Only a doctor can authorize a patientʼs release from the hospital, but the actual process of discharge planning can be completed by a social worker, nurse, case manager, or other person. Ideally, and especially for the most complicated medical conditions, discharge planning is done with a team approach.
When you take the concern about the community spread of Covid, and you combine that with the need of skilled nursing facilities to plan for the discharge of their patients, the story of how Mayor Engen got his Covid-positive mom OUT of a nursing home, getting himself infected in the process, makes no sense. From the link (my emphasis):
A week after announcing that he’d tested positive for COVID-19, Missoula Mayor John Engen on Monday said he was released from quarantine over the weekend and was feeling relatively well.
During last week’s City Council meeting, the mayor said he’d been infected with the virus, most likely after taking his mother into his home after she had contracted the virus.
Later in the article, we get this:
Engen’s mother, who is 91, contracted the virus in early December. Engen said he brought her home to ensure her care and suspects he contracted the virus from her.
Am I missing something here?
One of the issues early on in the pandemic was nursing homes TAKING IN Covid patients:
Coronavirus is particularly dangerous in elderly, vulnerable patients. This defines just about every nursing home resident in the United States. In nursing facilities, staff go from room to room caring for residents, passing out food, administering medications and cleaning patient rooms. Even with stringent infectious disease isolation policies, the spread of this highly contagious disease is possible among these weakened nursing home patients.While nursing homes must legally be prepared to handle existing cases of COVID-19 involving their own residents, it is obvious why a facility would not want to admit knowingly infected corona patients from the hospital.
Yes, this would seem like an obviously bad idea. Just like DISCHARGING a knowingly infected Covid patient to the home of the elected Mayor of a community seems like an obviously bad idea.
I must be missing something. Wouldn’t be the first time this week.
by Travis Mateer
I was intrigued and a little confused when I read that “geographic distribution” was the big concern when it came to how local Covid job retention money was recently dispersed. I mean, it’s in the headline: Missoula County Defends Job Grants Amid Questions On Geographic Distribution. From the link:
Missoula County is defending the job retention grants awarded to 27 area small businesses last week as a tool to help prevent further layoffs amid the pandemic.
More than 125 businesses across the county applied for the limited pool of funding, which totaled $625,000. The award amounts ranged from $10,000 to $25,000 and the majority of the funds – 58% – went to the food and drink industry.
“There were many different ways the role-out of program could have happened,” said Melissa Gordon, manager of grants for the county. “The program design we landed on, which was first-come first-serve for complete and eligible applications, made the most sense given that the goal was to get the funds out in short order.”
With a first-come, first-serve approach set up by the County, it’s not the GEOGRAPHIC location that matters, unless by “geographic” you mean proximity to information networks, either formal, or informal. That is what the following criticism from Seeley Lake Pathfinder, quoted in the article, is actually talking about:
After the awards were announced in December, the Seeley Lake Pathfinder questioned the geographic distribution of the grants. Most, if not all of the businesses that applied for and received funding, were in the Missoula urban area.
Gordon said the county worked with the Missoula Economic Partnership, the Missoula Downtown Association, the county’s communications team and neighborhood councils to help spread the word that the grants were available.
Examining the geographic distribution of the 27 recipients glosses over the fact that ONE Montana State Senator by the name of Ellie Boldman received 8% of this money for her law practice and Cannabis testing business.
Before your curiosity turns to concern, don’t worry. County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier wants you to know these are “familiar small businesses in our community”:
“People wonder what Missoula County is doing to help with the economic crisis we’re in. This is it,” said Commissioner Dave Strohmaier. “It’s not as much as we wish we could provide, but it’s not an insignificant amount of money and it was leveraged creatively. These are familiar small businesses in our community.”
What exactly does Dave Strohmaier mean when he says the money was “leveraged creatively”? And when he claims these are “familiar small businesses in our community” I have to wonder, familiar to WHO?
After trying to understand third-party contracts for Cannabis testing, I’m still not very familiar with what Willow Branch does, but this Missoulian article from 2019 helps explain it this way:
Former state Rep. Ellie Hill’s extraction company, Willow Bark Sciences, had been leasing its high-caliber equipment to growers, creating what’s been termed a third-party extraction arrangement.
In this case, medical marijuana providers take their plants to Willow Bark, which has specialized equipment to extract components of the plant to be used in edibles or other marijuana-infused products.
This partnership between Hill’s Willow Bark lab and providers — notably Bozeman-based Lionheart, far and away the largest medical marijuana provider in the state — took on scrutiny last year. Hill and Willow Bark associates contend that the 2017 law for regulations (Senate Bill 333) allowed third-party extractions, but the health department argues its interpretation found the contrary.
I definitely want to become more familiar with Willow Branch Science and how $25,000 dollars was creatively leveraged to retain jobs.
by Travis Mateer
Earlier today I posted episode 2 of my podcast, Zoom Town, titled The First Response. My guest, Tim, who has been helping me behind the scenes, joins me in a conversation about the dynamics involved in coordinating responses to emergencies, like a fight at the Poverello Center.
Tim has experience working within 911 dispatch centers, and I bring some off-the-record conversations I’ve had over the past week that helps explain the first response to the alleged altercation that resulted in Sean Stevenson being taken to the hospital where he was later removed from life support on January 5th, 2020.
The conversation goes beyond the first response of local emergency responders to our national response to the events of January 6th as our Zoom Town and EVERY town in America gets dragged into a contrived hate-fest of their fellow Americans.
If there is any place left that hasn’t been politicized, I hope it’s among the people tasked with responding to emergencies.