Month: February 2021

by Travis Mateer

As housing prices in Missoula and Bozeman continue to skyrocket, locals who are increasingly priced out of getting into this Zoom-crazed market might be getting desperate.

For those desperate people desperately looking for ANY sign that things might change, I think Pete Talbot has some unintentionally good news to share.

I say “unintentional” because the dire warning Talbot is giving to visitors coming to Montana isn’t supposed to be good at all. It’s supposed to be an interpretation, based on legislative actions, of how terrible Republicans will be making our beautiful BIG SKY state.

If we’re lucky, this might get a few people to think twice before relocating.

Here’s my rundown of Pete’s rundown, which you can go read at the above link if you want the fear porn direct from the jack-ass’ mouth.

Let’s get started.

HB 138 is going to murder and torture your dog.

HB 102 is going to turn bars into wild west shootout zones and Pete might not be able to drink his bourbon without getting shot.

SB 324 will pack your fish with selenium.

And HB 273 will result in some nuclear leak one day.

Think that’s bad? Don’t worry, there’s more.

But first, I’m a little confused about why we should be welcoming visitors to Montana at all. If the pandemic is so dangerous and deadly, forcing my kids to wear masks outside while they play with their pod-peers, then why allow people from all over the country to drive and fly to our Big Sky country for a visit in the first place?

Since we can’t stop tourists from flooding our state as the weather warms, Pete Talbot, with his kind, progressive heart, just wants those people to be safe while they spend money at the handful of local businesses that managed to survive the slaughter of 2020.

But our evil Governor has other plans, and that’s to allow maskless germ factories to go breath all over each other.

One of my favorite parts of Pete’s little tirade is where he laments how Republicans are trying to formally label ANTIFA as terrorists right before lamenting that Republicans REFUSE to label white supremacists as DOMESTIC TERRORISTS.

How much bourbon does one have to drink for this to make sense? Here’s the actual juxtaposition this wet-brained Democrat is making:

No need to worry about all the antifa radicals in Montana. A bill to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist threat is still alive. (HJ 11) It will “send a message that we as a state won’t tolerate a group like this coming into our state,” according to the sponsor.

A heads up if you’re Jewish or Muslim or a person of color or maybe just look a little weird: there was less support for a bill that would have declared Montana’s white supremacists and neo-Nazis as domestic terrorists. It died in committee. (HJ 12)

All this legislative talk is just partisan masturbation over abstractions. Pete Talbot is using fear of hypotheticals for political effect because Democrats in Montana don’t have much actual political power to wield. This is what happens when partisans are detached from the on-the-ground reality where real people work and live to survive.

While Pete Talbot writes about legislation dying in committees, the ACTUAL DEATHS of humans in his own backyard are dutifully ignored, like the death of Sean Stevenson at Missoula’s homeless shelter, the Poverello Center.

I guess if there isn’t a Republican-bashing angle to be played, then it’s best just to ignore how a “person of color” came to Missoula for a fresh start and instead ended up being fatally assaulted and removed from life support without his family being notified before pulling the plug.

Nope, that might take some actual introspection from a town that is much more comfortable with public relations campaigns than with reality.

by Travis Mateer

I had an amazing interview yesterday that I am still buzzed over, but I’m not going to say with who just yet. Instead I’d like to discuss the idea that the invention of the alphabet usurped female power in society.

This idea comes from a book I read years ago by Leonard Shlain, titled The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess. The link is to a Brain Pickings post about the book, with this statement from Shlain describing the premise:

Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. . . . One pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.

This is a provocative assertion that Shlain–a neurologist by profession–backs up with his scientific understanding of how the brain processes images versus how the brain processes words. Here is a brief description:

Images are primarily mental reproductions of the sensual world of vision. Nature and human artifacts both provide the raw material from the outside that the brain replicates in the inner sanctum of consciousness. Because of their close connection to the world of appearances, images approximate reality: they are concrete. The brain simultaneously perceives all parts of the whole integrating the parts synthetically into a gestalt. The majority of images are perceived in an all-at-once manner.

Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctive individual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word with meaning emerges. The meaning of a sentence, such as the one you are now reading, progresses word by word. Comprehension depends on the sentence’s syntax, the particular horizontal sequence in which its grammatical elements appear. The use of analysis to break each sentence down into its component words, or each word down into its component letters, is a prime example of reductionism. This process occurs at a speed so rapid that it is below awareness. An alphabet by definition consists of fewer than thirty meaningless symbols that do not represent the images of anything in particular; a feature that makes them abstract. Although some groupings of words can be grasped in an all-at-once manner, in the main, the comprehension of written words emerges in a one-at-a-time fashion.

To perceive things such as trees and buildings through images delivered to the eye, the brain uses wholeness, simultaneity, and synthesis. To ferret out the meaning of alphabetic writing, the brain relies instead on sequence, analysis, and abstraction. Custom and language associate the former characteristics with the feminine, the latter, with the masculine. As we examine the myths of different cultures, we will see that these linkages are consistent.

I think the difference in neurological processing of words versus images can be applied to blog posts versus podcast conversations. I’ll use my relationship with fellow blogger Mark Tokarski as an example.

After years of interaction through words on a screen–words constructed in isolation to influence others within the playground hierarchy of the blogosphere–I decided it might be more constructive to actually speak to each other.

I wasn’t thinking about engaging different parts of my brain, but that is what happens when you are responding in real time to not just words, but the subtleties of tone and inflection and, if you can see the person, body language. It’s a very different experience, and it yields different results.

For Mark and I the results were very positive. He wrote up a nice account at his space and I’m benefiting from a richer conversation with his fellow contributors about topics that I think are critical to our survival as humans.

There is something truly powerful and magical happening right now, and I feel quite blessed to be a small part of it.

Thank you, everyone, for the support.

by Travis Mateer

The Missoula Children’s Theatre was one of the biggest recipients of CARES Act funding. In addition to this lifeline from the American taxpayer, MCT also managed to use their phone line to speak with NBC Montana. The other big recipient of taxpayer Covid money wasn’t able to muster the same response.

Before getting to the excerpt from the article, you should know that Nick Checota owns Logjam Presents AND the Rialto in Bozeman. I guess he’s taking a page from the Ellie Boldman double-dip strategy of Covid taxpayer enrichment. From the link:

We found so much data, we focused on just one category: live entertainment. That group alone received over $10 million. In Bozeman, the Rialto netted $244,243, the Flathead Under the Big Sky received $656,783. But the two largest recipients were Logjam Presents and Missoula Children’s Theatre. Both received $1 million.

Logjam didn’t answer our calls.

It’s too bad that after getting $1,244,243 in CARES funding, Nick Checota can’t hire someone to answer the phones for his live music empire. Is this son of a Wisconsin multi-millionaire over-leveraged or something?

We can only hope that Nick Checota makes it through these tough times so that he can get back to his culture-production monopoly and the good work of treating local acts with professionalism and properly serving respectful audiences the appropriate amounts of alcohol to enhance the experience of the show.

by Travis Mateer

The latest episode of Union of the Unwanted features Craig Sawman Sayer on the very difficult topic of child sex trafficking. Even though profits for this criminal enterprise are in the billions, good people in good places like Missoula would prefer to pretend like it doesn’t happen in their own back yard.

They are wrong.

In 2015 a psychologist who I knew from my work at the Poverello Center was charged with possession of child pornography. As a psychologist, Jay Palmatier had plenty of interaction with vulnerable populations. Did he ever take advantage of the power he had over mentally unstable people? I don’t know, but I DO know his arrest was a shock to those in the non-profit world in Missoula.

Another hint that local power structures are involved in the child sex industry came from a local contractor who wouldn’t stop running his mouth with my wife when he was bidding a job.

The contractor kept making comments to my wife about my young daughter and how my wife needs to protect her because predators are everywhere. To give her an example, He said he worked as a volunteer for the Sheriff’s Department and one of their stings nabbed a cop who was using his neighbor’s internet connection to download child porn.

My wife was so disturbed by his comments that she called me at work, and I called Ethan Smith, the Crime Prevention Officer for Missoula PD, to confirm that this guy had actually volunteered for the Sheriff’s office. Smith confirmed he had.

The last red flag that power and deep pockets are involved in this atrocious market in human exploitation comes from a NBC Montana headline, titled Lawsuit accuses Goguen, associates of ‘sexual enterprise’, racketeering.

For a quick reminder, Michael Goguen’s Two Bear Capital is invested in Missoula’s biotech industry, which I wrote about back in July. How shocking that a man who sees human health as a commodity would stand accused of engaging in human trafficking.

Here is an excerpt from the NBC article (note: Amyntor is a private security company):

The 135-page lawsuit filed Friday by Marshall and three other plaintiffs who worked for Amyntor goes into explicit details about what the plaintiffs call the “Goguen Sexual Enterprise,” with claims of sex trafficking and Marshall’s account of his time working for Goguen.

There is nothing in the article that indicates Goguen is involved in trafficking minors for sex. Instead, he’s accused of more conventional philandering. But it’s clear from the earlier reporting I referenced that Goguen has had some interesting relationships with the local power structure in Whitefish.

Just ask Whitefish Police Chief Bill Dial.

by Travis Mateer

If you’ve been around the Montana blogosphere for awhile, the title of this post might surprise you, since I’ve butted heads with Mark over the years, going so far as to use his deceased brother to make a point, which earned me a well-deserved ban at his website, Piece of Mindful.

In December of last year I decided to reach out to Mark and the result is this 90 minute conversation between two conspiracy theorists.

For anyone interested in some Montana blogosphere context, here is one of my earlier posts from 2010 criticizing Missoulian editor, Sherry Devlin and reporter, Gwen Florio, for stirring up controversy and doing an absolutely abominable job moderating online comments at the Missoulian website. And here is a jhwygirl post from 2009 where the comments had to be closed because Mark and Rob (aka Wulfgar) were flaming each other, which was a regular occurrence for many years.

My problem with Mark was selfish. While we both had similar outlooks regarding the controlling dynamics of America’s political duopoly, I wanted to establish a level of credibility in my writing that I felt Mark undermined with his conspiratorial speculation. I wanted to avoid the guilt-by-association attacks that I knew would be directed my way if I got too honest about my own conspiratorial speculation.

The plandemic changed my calculations significantly. It transformed liberals into authoritarians, conservatives into punk rockers, and, thanks to one of the most sophisticated psyops ever deployed, conspiracy theorists are currently being transformed into domestic terrorists.

I now see Mark and the other writers at his site, like Steve Kelly and Stephers, as allies in the effort to understand what is happening to us, and I appreciate the insights I get from checking out their work.