Month: March 2021

by Travis Mateer

People who take controversial action in a community should consider the full range of impacts, regardless of their belief in the righteousness of their actions. If a backlash is anticipated, it might be beneficial to put some energy into understanding WHY people might be opposed.

Before continuing, let’s define that weird looking word in the title of the post, schismogenesis. The word simply means creating division but, as a concept (developed by the problematic anthropologist, Gregory Bateson), it has been applied in some very interesting ways. The examples at the link include natural resource management and modern warfare:

Bateson’s treatment of conflict escalation has been used to explain how conflicts arise over natural resources, including human-predator conflicts in Norway[6] and also for conflicts among stakeholder groups in shared fisheries,[7] In the latter case, Harrison and Loring compare conflict schismogenesis to the Tragedy of the Commons, arguing that it is a similar kind of escalation of behavior also caused by the failure of social institutions to ensure equity in fisheries management outcomes.

…

There is documented usage of schismogenesis by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, an institutional precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)), against Japanese-held territories in the Pacific during World War II.[8][9] U.S. military academics have identified how China and Russia have pursued social-media strategies of schismogenesis against the U.S. and other Western liberal democracies in an attempt to polarize civil society on both sides of the spectrum to damage policy-making processes and to weaken state/military power.

Now, with that concept fleshed out, let’s revisit the refugee relocation program in Missoula.

I’ve been writing about this issue for years through my lens as a former social worker who worked at western Montana’s largest emergency homeless shelter and soup kitchen.

Back then it was the lack of housing that caused me the most concern, and that factor has significantly worsened thanks to the pandemic turning Missoula into a Zoom Town. Here is an excerpt I quoted from five years ago that is STILL RELEVANT to today’s situation:

Congolese refugees and the people trying to help them get settled in Missoula are facing a housing crisis.

Five families from refugee camps in East Africa will be in town by the end of September, none of them with a source of steady income or credit history.

It’s the job of the local resettlement agency, the International Rescue Committee, to help them secure both as quickly as possible, said IRC director Molly Short Carr.

But record home sales prices in Missoula have placed rentals at a premium. And in a town that swells this time of year with university students – many with no credit ratings themselves – property managers and landlords can afford to be picky about who they rent to.

“We’re kind of hitting a bit of a brick wall,” Carr admitted.

I’m familiar with hitting metaphorical brick walls. In fact, I’ve had metaphorical brain trauma from repeatedly hitting my head against that proverbial brick wall.

One pattern of repetitive head-bashing that occurs around this time of year is the Poverello Center warning our larger community that by the end of March the emergency shelter money runs out:

“What we are looking at though is over 100 people having nowhere to go at the end of this month. It’s really concerning. I think as a community we should be concerned about this. I think that the neighborhood, neighborhoods all over our community are going to be impacted by this change,” executive director of the Poverello Center Amy Allison Thompson said.

Now, contrast that reality with this one:

An international group helping refugees resettle in Missoula plans to expand its operations. The announcement came after news that President Joe Biden is significantly increasing the number of refugees that the U.S. allows into the country.

Beth Baker is the program manager for Soft Landing Missoula, an organization that works with the International Rescue Committee Office to help refugees settle. She was in a church lobby pairing customers with their orders from a fundraiser, one where refugee chefs baked cookies from their countries of origin.

So, while 100 economic refugees seek shelter wherever they can find it after March 31st, the IRC office is preparing to ramp up their efforts just as the president (same on I’m sure Missoula’s good liberals voted for) ramps up the bombing and killing of Syrians.

I don’t think Missoula do-gooders are intentionally creating division, but that will be the result if the supporters of relocating refugees to Missoula continue ignoring the reality of housing for poor American economic refugees already here while at the same time labeling any critics as bigoted, xenophobic racists.

To better understand how I might play a more positive role in addressing local eruptions of schismogenesis, I’m working on getting an interview with an amazing writer and thinker who is doing just that.

So stay tuned…

by Travis Mateer

I wouldn’t normally go to local news for pandemic information, but the headline of a recent NBC Montana article caught my eye: Johnson & Johnson vaccine efficacy improves over time.

Before getting to the article (and the “expert”), let’s take a moment to make sure we understand what the word “efficacy” means, and that meaning is simply the ability to produce a desired or intended result.

Now, here’s how the article begins:

Some pharmacies are now giving users the option to sign up for the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine or a two-dose option in Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

As one health official put it Wednesday, the best vaccine is the one you can get an appointment for. At first glance, the J&J vaccine may not be as appealing as the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, but doctors say it has plenty of its own benefits.

This unnamed “health official” sounds like he or she is making some kind of vaccine joke about simply getting ANY of the Big Pharma products, but this article is specifically about informing selling the Johnson & Johnson ONE POKE product.

And remember, when you see the word “efficacy”, please ask yourself WHAT IS THE INTENDED RESULT of this vaccine? Because the article does NOT make that clear:

First, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only requires one dose and doesn’t require extreme cold storage, making it far easier to distribute to places like rural Montana and smaller providers.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine shows a 72% efficacy rate in the U.S., and even though it falls short of the 95% rate found in Moderna and Pfizer studies, doctors say its efficacy may actually get better over time.

So, is the efficacy discussed in this article about reducing transmission of the virus, or reducing the severity of the symptoms? And how can this poorly defined efficacy rate “get better over time”? Let’s bring in a doctor to explain all this, shall we?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist who says J&J reaches as high as 90-95% efficacy for severe COVID-19 at 56 days, which he says is on par with Pfizer and Moderna.

Feigl-Ding says comparing vaccines isn’t like comparing apples to apples, because the trials for Pfizer and Moderna were done before we saw a huge outbreak in variants.

“The Johnson & Johnson trial was done during this epically bad winter surge, which was surging in all these places worldwide, while the Moderna and Pfizer, they were done in a very old era, back in the summer, late summer, when the surge hadn’t gone bad,” Feigl-Ding told NBC Montana Wednesday. “The variants had not grown out of control. We did not have a New York variant, we had no California variant. The U.K. variant wasn’t really that much of an issue back then, and so it was like a from a completely different era, and the cases were much lower. You want to compare apples and apples and vaccines — they’re good, as in they prevent severe disease and death. And no one has died in any these trials — of all the vaccines, no one has died of COVID.”

As Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding talks about apples and vaccines and all those exciting variants to remain IN FEAR of as we mark a year of going into lockdown for TWO WEEKS to FLATTEN THE CURVE, I decided to get a little more context about this doctor.

And here is some relevant context from the Association of Healthcare Journalists about Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding

Most experts will be quick to tell you whether they are the right person to talk to; it’s in their own best professional interest to stay in their own academic/subspecialty lane. Unfortunately, there is the occasional person who will whip across five lanes to land on CNN or feed a hungry Twitter audience — even when they lack the relevant expertise to discuss a topic. The current outbreak has provided a perfect case study in what not to do when seeking an expert: Don’t go to the self-styled expert with no background in infectious disease just because they posted some inflammatory (and misleading) tweets or teach an adjunct course at Harvard.

As Alexis Madrigal discusses in an excellent story at The Atlantic, this is precisely how nutrition scientist Eric Feigl-Ding, Ph.D., ended up on the national media’s radar. After reading a non-peer-reviewed preprint about the virus, Feigl-Ding wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD—the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad—never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating.” (In fact, many diseases have much higher R0s, such 12-18 for measles and pertussis.)

The fact that Feigl-Ding went apoplectic over R0 values in a tweet he later deleted is a big red flag, but it gets worse:

The problem is that Feigl-Ding has precisely zero experience in infectious diseases. He has an impressive list of publications in global disease burden and the epidemiology of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, but nothing in infectious disease. Yet Feigl-Ding’s followers rapidly grew, from around 2,000 to now more than 109,000, as they voraciously consumed Feigl-Ding’s often misleading, inaccurate or exaggerated tweets. Soon Feigl-Ding was on CNN, identified as “Public Health Expert, Harvard University,” and on CGTN as a “scientist” at Harvard. Colleagues and other experts on Twitter who tried to correct Feigl-Ding were attacked, dismissed, blocked or ignored. Feigl-Ding is a public health expert, no doubt, and he is a visiting scientist at Harvard. But that doesn’t mean he’s remotely qualified to speak on an infectious disease outbreak. Relying on someone who appears authoritative but isn’t actually an expert in the topic is dangerous, as you risk communicating inaccurate or misleading information to an anxious public.

Despite this information being easily accessible with a five minute web browser search, this HARVARD doctor is given a local media platform to say shit like this:

“Another surge will be driven by the more contagious variants. So right now when the old common strain is still common, we need to use this window and every chance we have right now to slow down epidemic and to try to stop it and go for zero,” Feigl-Ding said. “Getting the vaccine right now protects you, it protects your family.”

If you want to trust a doctor with no experience in infectious diseases about the safety of vaccines for you and your family, that is your choice to make.

Before you make that choice, though, you might want to consider the fact that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over 4 BILLION dollars over the decades:

A branch of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the program has adjudicated vaccine injury and death claims for three decades while rarely drawing much attention.

One of the reasons the court works in obscurity is that vaccines provide vast public health benefits, and authorities are reluctant to point to the rare cases where they lead to harm out of fear that the information will dissuade people from being immunized.

Yet the program’s payouts to those injured and their attorneys have mounted since the late 1980s, when the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act set up the vaccine court as an alternative to lawsuits for people seeking compensation for adverse reactions to vaccines. Payments—which surpassed $4 billion by Dec. 1, according to data from the federal Health Resources & Services Administration—come from a trust fund supplied by a surcharge on vaccines.

A separate court that “works in obscurity” to “compensate” vaccine victims should be a BIG RED FLAG for anyone who believes informed consent is a critical part of our relationship with the medical industry.

Sadly, instead of thinking critically and searching out additional information, too many people are allowing fear-pimps like this Fiegl-Ding to scare them into the waiting arms of Big Pharma.

If you want to believe these fear-mongers, that is your choice. Just don’t lash out at those of us who didn’t abdicate our critical thinking faculties when the fear fog descended.

by Travis Mateer

Because I think this will be an instructive lesson in absurdity, I’m going to share my family’s experience with our child’s quarantine experience from school.

Last Monday we were notified by the school that one of our kids was a close contact of someone who tested positive for Covid, so my wife picked him up and brought him home for a week of remote learning.

We weren’t told much other than the positive test occurred on 2/17. Was the individual symptomatic? What kind of test was administered? If it was a PCR test, then what cycle threshold is being used?

We discussed who would take the hit to work hours (I’m working part-time now) and it was me, which ended up being a good thing in the end, but it’s another reminder how those with less economic resources must be facing immensely difficult challenges when similar situations arise.

The absurdity enters the picture with government bureaucracy. Go figure.

My kid’s return to school on Tuesday was predicated on the school receiving the official letter of release from the Health Department, which wouldn’t be ready to go until the Monday before. To ensure no mail delay, my wife asked if we could pick up the letter to expedite the process and was told yes.

So I showed up, in person, to the Health Department, where I had to physically open doors with my potential meat vectors (hands). After waiting around for a few minutes inside with a cowering young woman, I decided to go outside to await the letter, which I finally got and hand delivered (again, touching surfaces) to my kid’s school.

The saddest part of the whole thing was the young woman. As I was walking away I made eye-contact with her before she got into her car, alone, with her mask on. I asked if she ever got frustrated that the kids have to wear masks outside at recess.

Here response: you get used to it.

I just nodded my head and walked away.

by Travis Mateer

This week’s episode of Zoom Town is a conversation with New Yorker cartoonist Marisa Acocella about her new graphic novel, The Big She-Bang, which you can purchase here.

I reached out to Marisa via Twitter (after listening to an interview she did with Isaac Weishaupt) because the narrative Acocella is telling is the Gnostic narrative of Sophia, something I am VERY interested in.

If you are interested in the Gnostic concept of the divine feminine I don’t think this conversation will disappoint you. I was a little wary of how Acocella might interpret the role of the divine masculine and the fraught relationship men have with subsequent waves of feminism, but that weariness quickly dissipated as we talked.

You can follow Marisa on her various social media platforms:

INSTA @marisaacocella
FB @marisaacocella
TWITTER @marisaacocella

If you find any value in the work I’m doing, please consider a financial contribution. There are several ways to do that at my about page.

Thank you.

by Travis Mateer

Let me start off this post by saying I abhor violence and I respect the power of fear.

I would never advocate for the use of violence outside the limited scope of protecting one’s life or another innocent life from imminent death, nor do I want to minimize the capacity for people (even those with power) to genuinely experience fear.

I believe the fear of local officials in Missoula is mostly genuine when they claim sweeping gun reforms coming out of Helena have them concerned. From the link:

While HB 102 is now law, a second bill – House Bill 436 – would take the measure further, allowing a concealed weapon to be carried in public buildings and stripping local governments of their ability to establish gun-free zones.

That includes city and county public meeting rooms, where elected officials engage in challenging issues that at times upset some constituents.

“You mix anger with a gun and sometimes regretful things happen,” said Missoula County Commissioner Josh Slotnick. “We have to make hard decisions that anger people and that’s how it is. It’s a bad idea to mix that decision making with the potential that people in the audience have guns.”

Last year, a Missoula man was banned from attending Missoula City Council meetings after making death threats against elected officials and others. He was formally charged and was held on a $100,000 bond.

There are a couple points here to consider.

First, it’s nice to see our elected officials think they’ll be facing their constituents again in real life, and not through Zoom. I wonder if a condition for attending public meetings will be proof of vaccination?

Second, the death threat our sly “reporter”, Martin Kidston, slips into his narrative to bolster the fear-factor for local officials has NOTHING TO DO WITH GUNS.

There was a lot to that story, which played out at the beginning of 2020 in ways I don’t have time to get into here other than to say the only in-person threat from the accused was a loud voice and a wooden staff in a public meeting I was in attendance at.

If in-person meetings do ever happen again, I think local officials SHOULD be worried about their safety. Please do not misconstrue that as a threat (see top of post). I just think the risk of someone who is being financially squeezed going postal increases with every $100,000 dollar use of money for some alleged need, like this one to pay the architects who forgot police showers to design a community center add-on to the aquatics center. From the link:

Saying it needed a plan before taking the next step, members of the Missoula City Council this week approved a $120,000 contract with a local architect to design a proposed community center in McCormick Park.

While the cost of the contract with MacArthur, Means & Wells is covered by existing impact fees, opponents of the design process fear it will lead to another general obligation bond and leave taxpayers with ongoing costs.

During the budget days of last summer, when department heads panhandled their hearts out for every extra crumb they could get, our Parks and Rec Director was saying this:

“We are trying to align ourselves better with all the City Council adopted plans, acknowledge the trends that exist, including those caused by the pandemic, and prepare ourselves to address the challenges and opportunities before us,” Guakler said.

The department’s budget currently sits at around $7.4 million, though it’s seeking at least $538,000 for a range of needs, from new positions to a water truck. Funding to cover annual increases related to union contracts is also being sought.

What trend says we need to BUILD a new Community Center? Aren’t there a lot of empty spaces opening up from the decimation of small businesses? And where is the money going to come for this?

“We think there’s plenty of energy in this community,” said Gaukler. “It’s too early to be definitive (on funding sources). The public will ultimately decide whether this is something that’s essential to the community, just as they did with the library and aquatics.”

The micro-madness of Donna’s blind faith in magic money is a derivative of macro-money wizards in central bank nodes taking America down the Weimar path.

And we know how that turned out.

Makes me think of a famous William Carlos Williams poem, which I have updated thusly:

so much depends
upon the cash wheelbarrow
glazed in hubris
beside the woke chickens