Donnie D., this tangent rip
is really, truly some crazy shit
Biff is traveling with almanac
as Bowie's Tesla tips the hat
Sabrina's coven significant?
alien/demon immigrants?
don't worry, zombies, it isn't real
like kids for them NO sex appeal
so hush and let the robots buzz
your silly research--they own the fuzz
but go ahead, you rogue P.I.
and trace the contours of the eye
eye-licious Billie, she's up next
so many willies they need to hex
to keep us humans from making home
they frazzle drip adrenochrome
I know, I know it sounds insane
seeing fiction as plans made plain
but that's the brilliance; their karma trick
a dark arts loophole to avoid the pit
Usually Twitter just pisses me off, but yesterday I used that censorious platform to interact with Monica Perez of The Propaganda Report, so I guess it ain’t all bad.
Perez has noticed a potential theme emerging in the recent reporting of incidents of gun violence, starting with the two FBI agents who were shot and killed recently while serving a warrant on a suspected producer of child porn.
That theme seems to be a focus on mental health, and not just the psychological strains that lead people to snap, but ALSO the psychological impacts on law enforcement and other operators within the criminal justice realm.
I tweeted Perez this link to a piece written by our County Attorney, Kirsten Pabst, for the NDAA (National District Attorneys Association). It’s all about prosecutor well-being. Under the header “Common Themes”, Pabst writes:
In promoting the well-being of our larger prosecution family, we will be emphasizing the importance of addressing secondary trauma — through education, prevention, and response — but also incorporating resiliency tools to keep us thriving physically, mentally, socially, financially, professionally and spiritually. For our purposes, spirituality is defined outside of a religious context but rather a reference to an individual’s belief or connection to something greater than oneself.
Speaking as a former social worker, I can tell you secondary trauma is a real thing. That said, the way this concept is being positioned by the operators of our criminal injustice system is greatly concerning to me.
Before getting to that, it’s important to note that there are two separate, yet parallel tracts to this focus on mental health. For those WITH POWER in the system, the negative impacts of secondary trauma will be used to shield prosecutors from criticism.
Or, to put it another way, instead of defense attorneys playing the victim card FOR THEIR CLIENTS, secondary trauma will be a way for prosecutors to play the victim card FOR THEMSELVES.
For those WITHOUT POWER in the system, the deterioration of mental stability will be used to FURTHER DISEMPOWER individuals through legal mechanisms, like red flag laws.
I wrote about red flag laws two years ago, but what I didn’t contextualize at the time was how Missoula County’s suicide prevention program was taken over by an anti-gun activist by the name of Nancy de Pastino. Here is an article archived at Moms Demand Action from 2013:
When it comes to fighting for stricter gun control laws in the United States, Nancy de Pastino offers some interesting statistics. The National Rifle Association often boasts it has more than 4 million members nationwide. That may be, de Pastino says, but there are also some 80 million mothers in this country, all of whom can sympathize with the horrors that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary two months ago.
“Yeah, the NRA’s powerful, but how powerful are moms?” asks de Pastino, head of the recently formed Montana chapter of grassroots nonprofit Moms Demand Action. “It’s a good number to keep in mind when I’m feeling little.”
Nancy de Pastino may depict herself as someone who feels inconsequential, but the red flag laws she supports are anything but. They destroy foundational legal concepts, like due process, and further empower a police-state crisis mentality of ACT NOW TO SAVE LIVES, leaving the legal ramifications to be sorted out later by our criminally clogged criminal justice system.
I will be writing much more about this in the weeks and months to come. And if a certain podcaster would like to have me on as a guest for a Rokfin deep-dive, I’m TOTALLY available.
Our bad Republican Governor who punches people he doesn’t agree with is going to be removing the statewide mask mandate. This is terribly concerning for anyone deluding themselves that masks have a measurable impact on transmission.
Fear of asymptomatic spreaders established the perception that masks are needed and effective. This is very similar to the fear of Muslim terrorists and the possibility they could be hiding bombs in their shoes. To KEEP US SAFE from those possible terrorists, we are now required to take our shoes off EVERY TIME we board a plane. You think masks will be any different?
In Missoula, the fear of unmasked children and bad Republicans has merged to create a special policy just for Missoula public schools. The board of trustees approved the policy Tuesday night:
At a meeting Tuesday night, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution to require al staff, volunteers, visitors and students, regardless of vaccination status, to wear a face covering while in school buildings, as well as during any outdoor school activity where distancing is not possible.
“We do want to make it clear that face coverings are a key mitigation strategy and we’ve seen that time and again with several guidance documents that talk about reopening schools,” Superintendent Rob Watson said at the meeting.
“We believe that this policy needs to be adopted so that we’re clear with our students and our staff and more importantly, with our community that might come into our buildings, that you do need a face covering when you’re coming into our building.”
Why just ONE mask? Didn’t the CDC just tell us that TWO MASKS are better than one? Is the school board trying to murder teachers like Ted Cruz tried to murder AOC?
I’m glad to see that “vaccination status” won’t trump the mask mandate. This makes sense, considering the so-called “efficacy” of the experimental gene-therapy vaccines doesn’t mean a reduction in transmission.
But don’t take that from me, here’s a mainstream news source (BBC) that says the same thing (my emphasis):
So far, the available Covid-19 vaccines have not been judged primarily on their ability to prevent transmission – though this is now being evaluated as a secondary endpoint for many of them. Instead, their efficacy was assessed by whether they could prevent symptoms from developing. “This means that we set our targets kind of pragmatically,” says Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London.
Nope, that fancy vaccine won’t free your face, so stop thinking your kids will be released from face diapers anytime soon.
And if you are worried about any unintended consequences of ubiquitous mask wearing, well, how were those terrorist-coddlers dealt with 20 years ago?
The masks and the plexiglass are here to stay, just like various forms of lockdown. That’s what happens when you allow sociopaths to change the meaning of words.
Or maybe you still think “herd immunity” is achieved when infections in a given population reach a certain point? Thanks to the evolving definition from the WHO, that is no longer the case, and this article wants to make sure you understand these changes WERE NOT MADE IN SECRET. From the link:
The screenshots from the WHO’s website are real. The first herd immunity definition is from the June 9 version of the COVID-19 serology Q&A page. The second definition is from the November 13 version of the same page. There has actually been a recent update to the webpage since these claims began circulating that made further changes, and that update is from December 31.
You can see that the June 9 version had a one-paragraph definition for herd immunity that said it is the “indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”
The Nov. 13 version, however, focused entirely on vaccination and said “’herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.”
The mask mandate today will become the vaccine mandate tomorrow, and that will mean my kids will NOT BE in public school because they are NEVER going to take an experimental gene therapy that skipped animal trials and is only called a vaccine in order to protect Big Pharma from litigation.
I know I’m not the only parent who feels this way. If you’re one of those parents, it’s time to start thinking about alternatives to public school.
Am I being too hard on an old feminist by the name of Mary Stranahan? Why make an example out of someone with monetary resources who is just trying to do some good in the world for the poor? I mean, it’s not like she’s connected to some evil transnational entity that profited off the housing crisis known as Blackrock, right?
BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $8.67 trillion in assets under management as of January 2021.[5] BlackRock operates globally with 70 offices in 30 countries and clients in 100 countries.[6] Along with Vanguard and State Street, BlackRock is considered one of the Big Three index funds that dominate corporate America.
I wasn’t going to write another post about this Montana do-gooder, but a commenter popped up on Monday’s post and said this:
Clearly, based on this comment, there was more Stranahan awesomeness I had yet to uncover, so I went back to the Google to see what else might emerge and I discovered Mary Stranahan is a PATRIOTIC MILLIONAIRE, just like the former managing director of Blackrock Inc., Morris Pearl.
Before we get to that link, let’s take a look at a Time magazine article from last summer, where the PATRIOTIC MILLIONAIRES (many of whom are billionaires) were advocating for higher taxes for themselves:
Dozens of millionaires from the U.S. and six other countries have a message for their governments: “Tax us. Tax us. Tax us.”
Calling themselves the Millionaires for Humanity, more than 80 wealthy individuals — including Walt Disney Co. heiress Abigail Disney, former BlackRock Inc. managing director Morris Pearl, and Danish-Iranian entrepreneur Djaffar Shalchi — are petitioning for higher taxes on the rich to help pay for the billions in new government programs made necessary by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Today, we, the undersigned millionaires and billionaires, ask our governments to raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently,” according to the open letter. “We are not restocking grocery store shelves or delivering food door to door. But we do have money, lots of it. Money that is desperately needed now.”
Yes, money IS desperately needed by the NOT wealthy, who have had their asses kicked while the wealthy made BILLIONS during the pandemic. So, what is a PATRIOTIC MILLIONAIRE like Mary Stranahan worried about, now that Joe Biden is Prez?
She is worried about Greg Gianforte and…wait for it…DARK MONEY. Yep, here is old Stranahan and her Blackrock buddy, Morris, opining on the DANGER of Gianforte and his dark money.
First up, Morris:
“We believe that the fundamental problem is that those with money have so much more access than everyone else, and that is even more true with Gianforte. Most politicians at least pay lip service to paying attention to constituents but he has only met with donors the entire campaign. We are concerned that he will only know the issues and point of view of the wealthy class, and not the many unique problems of the people of Montana,” said Morris Pearl, Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and former managing director at Blackrock, Inc.
Next, Mary:
“Is this the best outcome that the most expensive legislative race Montana has ever seen? Here is what 12 million dollars bought for Montana voters: a guy who is going to ‘drain the swamp’. The current swamp has the richest cabinet members this country has ever seen. This swamp has a Republican-led Congress that has a commitment to decrease medical coverage for children, seniors and people in poverty, and a commitment to endless war and yet cutting benefits for veterans. This spending has elected a bully to represent Montanans that will fit right in with the ‘drain the swamp’ crowd,” said Patriotic Millionaire Mary Stranahan, retired general practitioner.
That’s not even MY emphasis. No, these PATRIOTIC MILLIONAIRES are very BOLD about their entitlement to influence the world around them.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
Isn’t this just fantastic? No hint of a fascist merging of business interests and government officials here, absolutely not. And definitely no election theft, no, no, no.
If I do ever get a chance to meet this amazing PATRIOTIC MILLIONAIRE named Mary Stranahan, I should probably thank her for saving democracy from BAD ORANGE MAN. I’m glad the many concerning things about this past election are being so nobly suppressed by Big Tech, who run benevolent private businesses and therefore deserve their government-protected monopolies.
And, someday, thanks to some really cool legislation in Nevada, Tech companies could even bypass Uncle Sam to become THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS with cops and courts and EVERYTHING!
I’m excited to see what our benevolent wealth class has in store for us. As long as we let them keep SAVING DEMOCRACY every couple of years, I’m sure it will all work out just fine.
This week’s episode of Zoom Town is a long conversation with my friend and former co-worker at the Poverello Center, Patrick Duganz. We talk about our shared time working at the homeless shelter (2008-2011) and the difficulties involved in managing people in an inappropriate space during cold weather that can kill you.
This is the first interview where I’ve done some editing for length. Patrick likes his tangents and our comfort with each other ensured our talk would substantial.
Parts of our conversation are graphic, so be warned. We talk in visceral detail about what alcohol can do to long-term addicts, and we also talk about Lee Nelson, the homeless man who was bludgeoned to death last November in broad daylight, just a few blocks from his temporary shelter at the new Pov.
If you have questions, or would like to contact me about being a guest on Zoom Town, my email is willskink at yahoo dot com.
