Month: December 2022

by Travis Mateer

I was going to take today off, since it’s Christmas Eve and all, but someone who doesn’t give a shit about Christmas, or committing slander, or destroying community credibility, isn’t taking the day off from SHAMING Missoula over the failed crisis mill levy, so here we are. From the link (emphasis mine):

But in order to meet the demand, nonprofit directors like Susan Hay Patrick, CEO of United Way of Missoula County, said it’s important for Missoula residents to think about their neighbors.

She was dismayed by the failure of the crisis services levy after campaigning heavily for its passage, and as a result, she has turned to motivating Missoulians to give time and money to nonprofits like United Way.

She said those who did not vote for the levy should be especially considerate of nonprofit work.

“I would say it is incumbent upon those folks to support nonprofits,” said Hay Patrick. “You can’t have it both ways.”

Oh Susan, it really is time to retire. Why? Because you’re not just a political loser running a shame campaign, you are a slanderous, out-of-control, grief-diva willing to destroy personal relationships in order to protect an abusive organization you have been given SPECIFIC information about.

Now, on to a constructive suggestion for the United Way Board President and Mayoral hopeful, Mike Nugent. If you, Mike, are wondering how one goes about pressuring someone like Susan Hay Patrick into doing the right thing and resigning, I recommend a chat with Eran Pehan, since she did a fantastic job riding the coerced departure of Ellie Boldman (Hill at the time) 11 years ago. My how time flies.

From the link:

Hill’s growing prominence within the Montana Democratic Party also played into the decision. In October, Time magazine included her in its “40 Under 40 Political Rising Stars” roundup. She was one of just two people from the Northern Rockies mentioned.

Hill’s new campaign position will involve a lot of travel. She will meet with legislative and national-level Democratic candidates to help with their campaigns and attempt to retake political offices. She said her goal is to help the Democrats retake majority leadership of the state Legislature.

“She has a true passion for the political process,” said Missoula United Way Director Susan Patrick, who partnered frequently with Hill on community projects. “But trying to do both – serve in the Legislature and run the Pov – it would just require superhuman efforts. Each of those is a superhuman job.”

Considering I worked at the Poverello Center during AND after Ellie Hill/Smith/Boldman, I can say the behind-the-scenes shit-show was VERY different than the PR spin provided by Patrick in the newspaper. This is one of those intangible services Patrick provides her collaborators, but the quality of that service is dependent on community credibility, and I don’t think Patrick has much of that left.

I can see Mike Nugent taking on the SHP role of doing public damage control for the media by thinking up a good cover story, like Susan needing time to travel to South Africa, or taking up an equestrian hobby, or volunteering for an anti-trafficking organization.

Will this bullshit Missoulian article be the last one in the shame campaign? I sure hope so, because what Susan Hay Patrick knows, when she knew it, and what she did with the information is a VERY ugly story, and I’m spending enough time on more important ugly stories to spend any more time thinking about this one.

It’s time, Susan, and I know I’m not the only one saying that.

by Travis Mateer

One of the VERY exciting things happening next year is the “free” acquisition of the Federal building that will eventually house the assembled administrative forces of City/County officials. Here’s the funny thing about acquiring a “free” Federal building, it’s actually kinda expensive, as KGVO reported a few weeks ago (emphasis mine):

The city and county have been interested in getting the building for “free” and using the space as a joint facility to solve the growing crunch for space for both jurisdictions. But getting the building converted isn’t cheap. Some estimates placed that cost as high as $ 40 million, although that figure has been quoted much lower this year, down to less than $ 10 million.

Where the money comes from is still a major question in a community strapped by tight revenue and complaints over taxes. But city officials argue the consolidation of government offices and services into a single location could actually save money.

Sure, it might be as expensive as 40 million to get this “free” building, but it COULD actually save money. No, they don’t think you’re stupid. Have you seen this building? It’s a fortress, and I drove around it yesterday to remind myself how pictures don’t do this post office AND federal building justice.

This building looks pretty torch-and-pitchfork-proof, which is good, considering the only takeaway our elected officials have apparently gotten from the failure of the crisis mill levy is the need to lobby the legislature next month for MORE creative ways to impose taxing schemes on the public.

One of the nice things about this building complex that no one has reported on yet is the security features ALREADY in place, like the ability to scan items for weapons and explosives. I noticed this security years ago when I went to pick up donations of office supplies for the homeless shelter. It seemed excessive, so I asked, and was told an interesting story.

Not wanting to just relate something I remember being told years ago, I decided to park and enter Fort Fed for a quick inquiry. The serious looking security man came out of his security room and I asked him if it was true that the building our local officials are trying to acquire was on the list of potential targets found on a guy by the name of Timothy McVeigh. Yes, I was told, that’s the story they’ve heard about the building.

So far I haven’t found anything corroborating this story, but I’m going to keep digging. Why? Because I think it will make our elected officials feel safer to know a terrorist took a big pass on this hefty piece of property.

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by Travis Mateer

If the title of this post is raising your eyebrows, or ruffling your feathers, good. There’s a figurative mass grave that now exists where the bulk of my counter-culture influences have been unceremoniously delivered by veil-annihilators like Dave McGowan, and today’s post will make the case for sending Hunter S. Thompson to that unmarked location where a less discerning audience of worms and moles can have at him.

For Gen-X kids like myself, who grew up in the 80’s and early 90’s, the counter-culture of the previous generation was repackaged into movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnny Depp stepping into the GONZO shoes of Hunter S. Thompson in order to sell us the script of drugs as rebellion. It worked quite well.

While I had the basic plot-points of the 60’s in mind as a rebellious youth, with events like the Rolling Stones performance at Altamont, and the death at the hands of the Hell’s Angels, in a neat box with a bow on top, McGowan changed all that with his book (then a web-series) called Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon. When I began to see the darker side of the counter-culture, I primed myself for the eventual tarnishing of Thompson, a tarnishing he damn well deserves.

I haven’t read the book that birthed the Gonzo persona yet, but I picked up a copy recently in Alberton. Here it is alongside a painted plastic skull I bought at the antique mall a few years ago. I’ll explain its significance later in the post.

For a taste of what this book contains, I found a quote that provides a glimpse of what embedding himself into this “motorcycle club” did to Thompson. This comes from a New York Times book review (1967):

Hunter Thompson entered this terra incognita to become its cartographer. For almost a year, he accompanied the Hell’s Angels on their rallies. He drank at their bars, exchanged home visits, recorded their brutalities, viewed their sexual caprices, became converted to their motorcycle mystique, and was so intrigued, as he puts it, that “I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them.”

The skull pictured above (to the left of Thompson’s book) is painted by a Hell’s Angels tattoo artist. The man I bought it from is someone my gut told me was into some weird shit. He no longer has a vendor spot at the antique mall, but I have several objects from his collection. I believe it’s authentic, and creepy as hell.

The darker, albeit more speculative side of Hunter S. Thompson, is examined in this blog post where I came across the NYT book review quote. I’m familiar with much of the speculation, so won’t rehash it here. Instead I’ll make note of some early impressions I’m taking away from this book, which I just picked up a few weeks ago.

Peter Richardson has no idea the gem he has provided in the introduction to someone like me who stopped venerating Thompson years ago. Before getting to that gem, it’s important to understand that Richardson wants to essentially canonize Thompson on his literary merits, something the all-encompassing GONZO persona hasn’t allowed other biographers to do, Richardson claims.

To make his case, Richardson makes an important concession that’s obvious to anyone who has tried to help a creative “sculpt” their end-product, and that’s the role of the editors in Hunter’s life who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to making the drug-fueled pages coherent to a wider audience. But that’s not the gem I found.

Richardson obviously has a big affinity for how Thompson communicates, and much of this communication is in the form of letters (note to younger generations: writers used to write something called LETTERS to friends, and this ephemera helped provide insights into the artist’s world). And this is where the gem comes in, because Peter Richardson doesn’t have access to Thompson’s letters. Here is Richardson explaining the barrier to the archive and what that has meant for his argument that Thompson is an accomplished literary force (emphasis mine):

The inaccessibility of Thompson’s archive has made that work more difficult. At the time of this writing, the archive is reportedly housed in a Los Angeles storage facility and contains some eight hundred boxes of material, including a massive trove of letters that Thompson began producing and saving as a youth. Authors often sell or donate their papers to research libraries to enable the scholarly study of their work, but Thompson’s archive was purchased in 2008 and has been held privately ever since.

I had a hunch about the timing of this archive purchase. When did Nick Bryant’s book about the Franklin scandal come out–the same scandal some researchers think implicates Thompson in the production of snuff films?

While this isn’t explicit proof of anything in particular, I find the timing, and inaccessibility of the archive, to be quite curious. Who was the buyer?

Oddly the book doesn’t name the famous actor who bought the archive. Why not name Johnny Depp as the person who is keeping scholars from perusing Thompson’s letters and other materials? I don’t know, but Johnny Depp didn’t just buy the archive for shits and giggles. Depp is deeply enamored with the man he played on the big screen, going so far as spending 3 million dollars on a custom cannon to shoot Thompson’s ashes into the air for funeral attendees, which included John Kerry. From the link:

The reason the Hunter S. Thompson cannon story is so funny is that of course the ashes being shot out of the cannon belonged to Hunter S. Thompson, and not, say, Peter Jennings, or even David Foster Wallace. Hunter S. Thompson’s influence on modern journalism and pop culture looms over us like the 153-foot-tall tower Depp had constructed to house the cannon he shot Thompson’s ashes out of; it is not surprising that luminaries like then-Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson were there to witness his cannon-ash ceremony.

I don’t want to think that Hunter S. Thompson was bestowed with the ability to deploy his GONZO persona because he was a part of a depraved network of elites, but everything I’ve learned about the counter-culture during the course of my research over the years points to Thompson’s involvement in some very dark stuff. I hope I’m wrong.

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by Travis Mateer

Electricity is an awesome, powerful force. It can give us light in the darkness, warmth in the cold, and a jolt if you’re bothering that gang with uniforms and badges. You can also power all kinds of things with electricity, even objects like fences and guitars, but did you know BRIDGES can also be electrified?

I know, I could hardly believe it myself. How could the MANY problems with bridges in Missoula now include transforming a pedestrian bridge into a giant taser? Who could be responsible for such a strange fiasco?

From the link:

A contractual oversight during the construction of the South Reserve Street pedestrian bridge has left the structure “energized” due an electrical leak, and the Missoula Redevelopment Agency will address the issue.

The board of commissioners last week approved a $47,000 agreement with Parks and Recreation to install a ground fault protection circuit to address the problem, which surfaced over the last two winters, according to city staff.

Let’s not fuss about little things, like accountability, and just appreciate how MRA is always there to save the day…unless it’s the humans being chewed up by the HIC (Homeless Industrial Complex). If we’re talking about them, it better be in the context of holding the public hostage for MORE money when the result is just more street violence from lovely people like this dude:

December must be hard for Ryan Salas, considering last December I wrote this post about his antics. It’s a good thing we have such a ROBUST system of help and support, especially when it comes to the elderly (just kidding, we’re second to last in the entire country when it comes to protecting them, according to a new report!).

What Salas is exhibiting should be familiar to Ellen Buchanan, and that’s how having no accountability makes one flippant about things other people would normally experience consequences over, like an electric bridge that was NOT supposed to be an electric bridge. Please explain to me how the following rationalization for why MRA (with public money) and NOT the contractor (with private money) is paying the $47,000 for the fix. From the original link:

Because the ground-fault protection circuit should have been included as part of the construction package, MRA agreed to cover the $47,000 cost of installing it. Parks and Rec will continue to manage and maintain the bridge.

Huh? How does this make any sense?

Using the power of electricity, which makes our technology run, I recently listened to TIP OF THE SPEAR featuring all 3 County Commissioners speaking with our MULTI-MODAL Mayor, Jordan Hess.

It was excruciatingly boring for the most part, but Hess mentioned some reading he’s been doing recently (at the 15:40 mark) by revisiting a classic by Jane Jacobs. This means Hess has been reading about the FAILURE of Town Planning. Here’s an image of the book from my library:

And here’s a timely quote from the chapter titled “The Self-Destruction of Diversity”; the following excerpt is one I hope Josh Slotnick pays attention to, since he spoke so glowingly about diversity in the brief podcast episode. Here’s Jane Jacobs from The Death And Life Of Great American Cities:

The self-destruction of diversity can happen in streets, at small nodes of vitality, in groupings of streets, or in whole districts. The last case is the most serious.

Whichever form the self-destruction takes, this, in broad strokes, is what happens. A diversified mixture of uses at some place in the city becomes outstandingly popular and successful as a whole. Because of the location’s success, which is invariably based on flourishing and magnetic diversity, ardent competition for space in this locality develops. It is taken up in what amounts to the economic equivalent of a fad.

The winners in the competition for space will represent only a narrow segment of the many uses that together created success. Whichever one or few uses have emerged as the most profitable in the locality will be repeated and repeated, crowding out and overwhelming less profitable forms of use. If tremendous numbers of people, attracted by convenience and interest, or charmed by vigour and excitement, choose to live or work in the area, again the winners of the competition will form a narrow segment of population of users. Since so many want to get in, those who get in or stay in will be self-sorted by expense.

I’m glad the power of electricity allows me to communicate this textbook definition of GENTRIFICATION to readers, and I hope electricity helps everyone stay warm as the arctic blast coming our way threatens to make the holiday break more than a little blustery.

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by Travis Mateer

While today’s court hearing in the case against J.D. Partain is just a small step in a CRIMINAL JUSTICE process directed at an individual, the larger context of sexual abuse within religious institutions–and the response of church leaders when it’s uncovered–is something outsiders can have a hard time understanding.

Despite considering myself a mostly-outsider to the Missoula church scene (in other words, a Christmas-time Presbyterian), an overlapping set of circumstances has put church culture deeply on my radar, and it just keeps getting deeper, with synchronicities and a family connection to Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho emerging last week.

For this post we aren’t going to Idaho, but to Hunter S. Thompson’s adopted home-state of Colorado. That’s where a VERY famous Evangelical preacher got into trouble when was busted in a motel room with meth and a male prostitute. Yes, I’m talking about the Ted Haggard scandal.

Some things you might not know about the controversy that blew up New Life Church in 2006 is that a SECOND staff member had to resign amidst allegations of sexual impropriety, and that man’s name is Christopher Beard (guess where Christopher ended up after leaving Colorado?) From the link (emphasis mine):

Rob Brendle, an associate pastor at New Life Church, could not immediately be reached for comment. The Post quoted Brendle saying Beard’s resignation was tied to a “series of decisions displaying poor judgment, including one incident of sexual misconduct several years ago.” Beard wasn’t married then, but is now.

Since Haggard was fired in early November after admitting to buying meth and getting a massage from a male prostitute, the 14,000-member church has encouraged people to report potential “spiritual character” problems involving others at the church, which has a staff of 200.

Before getting to Beard’s presence in Missoula, I wonder what Ted Haggard is up to? Has he managed to find redemption and to NOT act on his impulses?

Former Colorado megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, who fell from grace in 2006 after a gay sex-and-drug scandal, is now facing some of the same allegations at another church.

Haggard, 66, is being accused of using methamphetamine and behaving inappropriately with young men at St. James Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a church he founded in 2010, The Denver Gazette reported.

…

The most recent allegations were made by Kirk “Seth” Sethman, who was ordained as a minister by St. James Church in 2012. Sethman recorded the statements of two young adult men who said Haggard touched them inappropriately on several occasions at the church. One of them was a minor at the time the touching began in 2019.

Sethman said he first approached church elders with allegations about Haggard in 2020.

This article is from July of 2022, so despite new allegations in 2020, it can apparently take YEARS for something to happen. How many potential new victims can that time-frame create? I don’t know, maybe the pastor in Missoula who knowingly hired Christopher Beard can answer that question.

You will no longer find Pastor Matt Reneau at the Christian Life Center here in Missoula because he got run out of town. Did he get run out for hiring someone with a sex abuse scandal in his past and for putting this person in a leaderships position? No, Pastor Matt exited Zoom Town after defrauding his church because MONEY seems to matter more than protecting the flock from the wolves.

To get a better idea of who Pastor Matt knowingly hired, you have to hear from someone with direct knowledge of the “24/7 Program” Christopher Beard helped run in Colorado. I mean, who doesn’t love showering with 18 year old boys after a tough night of placing bags over their heads and simulating a terrorist attack on missionaries in the woods?

Writing this isn’t gratuitous Christian-bashing. People need the hope of redemption, even from the vilest of vices. In fact, I’ve even had a conversation recently about trying to find the balance between still working with someone afflicted by these impulses to exploit others for sexual gratification while NOT being a dupe to their grooming tactics.

Is that possible? Maybe, if the offender is remorseful and WANTS to stop lusting after inappropriate sexual relationships, a balance can be found. As it pertains to Partain, balance is now a question for the courts to decide, and it includes the rights of the victim of his sexual predation. It will be interesting to see how the people who previously supported him position themselves as this case plays out.

If churches want to be serious about addressing sexual abuse within their congregations, the first place to start is NOT HIRING people with proven histories of poor decision making. Then maybe looking at outside resources for members of respective congregations dealing with these issues might be possible.

And, while we’re talking about “looking”…boys, if you’re showering in a public bathroom and someone is starring at you for a little too long, make sure it’s not this guy:

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