Month: September 2021

by Travis Mateer

Everything in Missoula would have been just fine if it wasn’t for Republicans and their terrible, horrible, awful, very bad legislation hamstringing our illuminated braintrust from locking us down and mandating jabs and masks.

That’s the gist of Mayor Engen’s interview with CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday, which was reported locally like this (my emphasis):

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday, Missoula Mayor John Engen said healthcare strains could have been avoided if Montana lawmakers had not passed legislation earlier this year.

“We really have none of the tools that were at our disposal early in the pandemic, which I think contributed mightily to keeping our numbers low and to keeping our community safe,” Engen said. “Those options aren’t available to use today and it’s tragic, and it’s some of the dumbest politics I’ve experienced in my 16 years as Missoula mayor.”

Actually, John, you DO HAVE A TOOL that wasn’t available to you when this all started and it’s the fucking vaccine.

Of course, Mayor Engen can’t do ANYTHING that would call into question the efficacy of Big Pharma’s ONLY solution offered to end this manipulated pandemic, so instead of dealing with the actual reality of what’s happening on the ground, he goes whining and bitching to Don Lemon like a petulant child told he can’t have his way.

To be fair to Engen, maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on in our hospitals. Is the staffing shortage due to lengthy quarantine policies keeping healthy, asymptomatic workers at home? Are workers leaving their jobs because Biden’s vaccine requirements for large employers are compelling them to leave?

Engen doesn’t want questions like those answered because he’s already got the answer: we are here at this crisis point solely because of Republicans and the unvaxxed and that’s it. Nothing more to see here.

What I’m hearing, though, is staff at hospitals like St. Pats are leaving their jobs in droves and that is driving the staffing shortage. I’m hearing the shortage is so bad that administrative personnel are doing things like changing the sheets on hospital beds.

If I had any trust in our hospitals telling us the straight story I wouldn’t give much credence to the rumors, but I DO NOT TRUST hospitals like St. Pats, especially when they won’t even disclose basic policies, like the process for how someone is removed from life support.

I found out St. Pats won’t release ANY of their policies to the public without a court order last month around the same time I recorded some footage of Michael’s rotting foot as he sat in a wheelchair a few blocks from the hospital.

To answer the question posed in the title of this post, I have a pretty good idea what Engen thinks he can accomplish by going on CNN, but to understand his goal you have to understand we are in an information war.

In this information war, trust and credibility are very important, so it’s not surprising to see new, anonymous commenters coming out of the woodwork to depict me as mentally unwell when I write about things like synchronicities.

As a former insider working with the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission (pdf), I had plenty of access to the inner-workings of the Engen regime. The link goes to a PDF from 2014, just 2 years into Missoula’s 10 Year Plan To End Homelessness. Here are some of the names from back then (including mine) working on things like mitigating the negative DAYTIME antics of homeless people in order to keep downtown safe for tourists to spend money:

In so many ways, those were simpler times.

Or maybe I was just a simpler person with my trust in the stated intentions of our local leaderships still intact.

That trust is long gone. My goal now is exposing what Engen and his enablers have been doing for 16 long years.

If you would like to help my efforts, there are plenty of ways to support me at my about page.

Thanks for reading.

by Travis Mateer

Yes, I could have just said Tim’s Mom, Kathy, joined us on today’s recording of Zoom Town, but then what fun would that be?

I want to give Kathy a BIG thank you for being a good sport getting all mic’d up and stuff. I hope listeners enjoy our conversation.

by Travis Mateer

Steven Ray DeCarlo won’t be peddling meth for awhile after his “Jane Doe” accomplice apparently rolled on him. From the link:

DeCarlo told investigators that he and Jane Doe were involved in getting meth, which Jane Doe had been distributing. DeCarlo told officers he had financed multiple purchases of meth that Jane Doe had made with the supplier. DeCarlo later admitted to personally bringing a pound of meth from out of state to the reservation for distribution. A pound of meth is the equivalent of 3,624 doses.

This bust is being attributed to the Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative I’ve written about many times over the past two years. Here is how the article describes the initiative:

This case is part of Project Safe Neighborhoods, a U.S. Department of Justice initiative to reduce violent crime. Through PSN, federal, tribal, state and local law enforcement partners in Montana focus on violent crime driven by methamphetamine trafficking, armed robbers, firearms offenses and violent offenders with outstanding warrants.

Before listing the posts I’ve written on this topic, I’d like to mention that the former U.S. Attorney who worked with PSN, Kurt Alme, suddenly resigned his position as Governor Gianforte’s budget director earlier this month.

Was he too chummy with a Democrat influencer AND recipient of PSN loot? I don’t know, but maybe something in one of my old posts will provide some relevant context. Here are my posts on Project Safe Neighborhoods:

Can Some Hip Hop Wisdom Expose The Real Objective Of Project Safe Neighborhoods?

Guess Who The Father Of Project Safe Neighborhoods Is, Libera Missoula?

On Trying To Understand Project Safe Neighborhoods

The Problem When The Sheriff Is Also The Coroner

Meth In Montana Gets A New Placation Plan From Community United Way’s Community Fixer Susan Hay Patrick

A Montana Meth Bust Made Possible By CIs

What The Montana Media Is Missing With The Appointment Of Kurt Alme As Gianforte’s Budget Director

The Problem Of Meth And The Problem Of Technocratic Solutions

by Travis Mateer

If synchronicities are not something that interest you, there is no need to read further.

But if they DO interest you, then oh BOY did I have a fun time in the land of my birth, a mystical place hidden beneath the rough SPOKOMPTON veneer most outsiders think of it as.

What took me to Spokane was the need to pick up a car that my parents had lent to a friend’s adult kid, who had his car break down in Missoula. I used this technical need to fulfill a personal need to get the fuck out of Zoom Town for a bit.

During my short trip I was hoping to investigate Expo ’74 (a World’s Fair my dad worked at), hit up some second-hand and antique stores, and swing by a church in Coeur d’Alene where an unstable person thought his pastor was a shapeshifter.

I knew I couldn’t dilly-dally, though, because I had to get back to Missoula in time for a 3pm Zoom conversation with Michael Wann, a synchronicity specialist I had enlisted to make some sense of the synchro-soup I was swimming in.

Before leaving, my wife gave me HER goal, which was to deal with a burst of anger that resulted in a disinvite to my birthday dinner.

I got to Spokane AND started working on my wife’s goal (thanks Tim!), then I went to an antique store and found a book on Expo ’74–a brash plan by Spokane’s civic leadership to use a World’s Fair to clean up a riverfront polluted by various industries that no longer needed riverfront access.

According to this book, the success of pulling off this audacious plan was laid at the feet of a man with a cartoon-like name I had to double-check to believe: King Cole.

I spent the night in a fancy hotel room in downtown Spokane with a glorious view of the fruits of the World Fair my dad worked at 4 years before starting a family and moving to Seattle, a much bigger city that held a much bigger World’s Fair the previous decade.

With new insights from my a-symmetric research into Missoula’s development history, I left the next day (my birthday) for home.

On my return drive I thought about how Michael Wann’s synchronicity work directed some of my own intuitions and inquiries into the recent past, especially Wann’s most recent presentation, titled The Field Of Dreams And The Merchants Of Death on The Higherside Chat podcast.

One aspect of Wann’s work is picking up signals from popular culture, something I experience frequently, so I should mention the two movies I watched in my hotel room: Old and Songbird.

Both movies had a bunch of personal significance I won’t get into. The one point I’ll reference is a scene in Songbird where the message ABANDON HOPE is spray-painted on an elevator door as it opens.

Switching to Wann’s pop-culture reference, Field of Dreams is a movie with Kevin Costner based on a book by W.P. Kinsella. My conversation with Michael Wann would connect Costner to the research I’m currently doing on the Chapel of the Dove.

This was what I was thinking about when I checked my progress to see if I had time to stop at a used book store, where I was of course delighted to find a book of short stories by W.P. Kinsella in the Montana section (I was told there were some scenes from Field of Dreams shot in Livingston, Montana, but so far I haven’t been able to confirm that).

I’ll leave most of the synchronistic connections I found for the podcast episode I’ll be posting Tuesday or Wednesday. For this post I’ll simply end with the portion of the short story, “Elevator” I found as I flipped through the story minutes before starting my conversation with Michael Wann, and ended up reading during our chat.

“You figure if you keep things up the white man going to bring his colored pictures back one day?” the old man says very slowly.

“Um-hm,” says Simon, staring at his feet. “I can hope.”

Standing-in-the-bush turns to starer across the clearing and corral to the scrub poplars standing all fluttery-leafed in the hot July wind.

“Don’t do no harm to dream,” the old man says.

“I’ll dream those movies back,” says Simon. “Everything’s painted and in better shape than when they quit it. They’ll be surprised when they come to open up again.”

“You see your movies on that big white screen,” says the old man, “sometimes when I look far away, I dream of the buffalo. I must be the only one who remembers them. I liked the train, but it went away. I liked the movies. Sometimes they made the earth tremble just like the buffalo.”

They are standing almost back to back, Simon shaped like a cross staring off toward his immaculate theater, Standing-in-the-bush gazing across his corral where two skinny roan steers reach their necks through the poles for grass.

by Travis Mateer

As a parent with three kids, you might expect me to be upset that The Hub in Missoula is closing. According to this article from KGVO, the closing of The Hub is one of many family fun locations to call it quits. From the link:

It’s just another addition to the number of family venues and activities that we’ve seen close recently. Flying Squirrel Trampoline Park closed at the start of the year, The Giggle Box is about to end its run at Southgate Mall, the Missoula Maze has sold the property and future plans aren’t known at this point, and the Missoula Haunted House isn’t happening this year – and might be done for good. I’ve been reading the comments on social media about The Hub closing and one common theme is that parents are definitely frustrated that family activities around Missoula continue to close.

Frustrated? I don’t know why parents would be frustrated. Our NEW NORMAL sees kids as dangerous spreaders of disease unless they are masked and vaxxed, so maybe places where kids congregate for fun is just something we need to say goodbye to in order to keep us all safe.

With this big venue for kids now closed, what needs to happen next is clear: homeless camps.

Now, this kind of stuff has been tried before, like in Austin, Texas, where Desert News did a big write up on a sanctioned homeless camp, asking whether or not this type of setup is right for Salt Lake City.

What I’d like to propose is a little bit different than your average homeless encampment. Hear me out.

What I envision is a two-tiered homeless community where the entry-level tents are set up in the parking lot. The elite homeless guard will occupy the INSIDE of the building, training new homeless residents with different modalities of skill development.

The go-cart track can be repurposed to become an Uber training center, while the laser tag section will help qualified homeless learn the skills of the private security industry.

My favorite part of this vision is the chemistry classes that will be taught on site so that the homeless can MAKE instead of just USING their own meth.

Once we get the right recipe, maybe the business incubator on campus can help the homeless package and market their product. The sky’s the limit, especially if you’re tweaking on high-quality craft meth.

I know there will be critics and haters, but those people probably voted for Gianforte and gargle iodine, so fuck ’em.

All I need is a 2 million dollar government grant to make my vision a reality. Or maybe I should start a go fund me page.

Stay tuned….