Month: February 2023

by Travis Mateer

Objects in the sky are suddenly a very compelling topic for our leaders to be discussing in serious terms, since the first one was allegedly a Chinese provocation over American airspace. Now there have been multiple shoot-downs, a Chinese claim of tracking a UAP or something, and the conspiracy pod-talkers are all talking about Project Blue Beam.

The link is to the Wikipedia page of a Canadian by the name of Serge Monast, the man supposedly responsible for introducing the notion of Project Blue Beam. Here is the 1994 provenance of this particular conspiracy theory:

In 1994, he published Project Blue Beam (NASA), in which he detailed his claim that NASA, with the help of the United Nations, was attempting to implement a New Age religion with the Antichrist at its head and start a New World Order, via a technologically simulated Second Coming of Christ. He also gave talks on this topic.[3] Other conspiracy theorists have noted[4] the similarity of Project Blue Beam to the plots of Gene Roddenberry’s unreleased 1975 Star Trek movie treatment The God Thing and the 1991 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Devil’s Due.

When I see fictional overlap like this I think predictive programming, so I pulled a book from my library where this particular conspiracy theory was woven into the “fictional” content of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

The book is comprised of all sorts of image-ephemera and does not read at all like a conventional novel, which is perfectly in line with the creepy, disturbing content Lynch made his brand on. And Project Blue Beam is all over this narrative.

Let’s shift from objects in the sky to objects on the ground and how they move, because that can be fraught with a MUCH greater risk than the fear and paranoia being pushed by sky theatrics.

The news coming from the Ohio/Pennsylvania border town of East Palestine is NOT good after a train derailment and hasty mitigation effort, which was summarized recently like this (emphasis mine):

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (WKBN) — First News was recently informed of three more chemicals that were on the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine just over a week ago — and we are being told that those chemicals are dangerous.

“We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist.

While this is a significant disaster that will be made clear as more time goes by, national media outlets don’t seem too interested in giving this disaster the priority it deserves. Why is that?

The media-angle on this CNN story continues adding to the disorientation I’m feeling as the lines between fiction and non-fiction are increasingly blurred and inverted. From the link:

When Ben Ratner’s family signed up in 2021 to be extras in the movie “White Noise,” they thought it would be a fun distraction from their day-to-day life in blue-collar East Palestine, Ohio.

Ratner, 37, is in a traffic jam scene, sitting in a line of cars trying to evacuate after a freight train collided with a tanker truck, triggering an explosion that fills the air with dangerous toxins. In another scene, his father wears a trench coat and hat while people walk across an overpass to get out of town. Directors told the group they wanted them to look “forlorn and downtrodden” as they escape the environmental disaster.

The 2022 movie was shot around Ohio and is based on a novel by Don DeLillo. The book was published in 1985, shortly after a chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, that killed nearly 4,000 people. The book and film follow the fictional Gladney family – a couple and their four kids – as they flee an “airborne toxic event” and then return home and try to resume their normal lives.

Ratner tried to rewatch the movie a few days ago and found that he couldn’t finish it.

“All of a sudden, it hit too close to home,” he said.

I can definitely sympathize with Ratner, since Montana is ground zero for Project Blue Beam hysteria, and David Lynch was born in the same hospital where Sean Stevenson was euthanized by the Missoula County Sherrif’s Office.

I’ll conclude this post with an image of some books of fiction from the Twin Peaks book. The caption, which you can’t see in the image I took, reads as follows: “Much can be learned in unexpected places. The library at the Bookhouse is unique in my experience as an invaluable local resource. This special shelf contains the members’ favorite tomes.”

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by Travis Mateer

It’s tiring hating my father–and also a bit of a cliche–but since I don’t flee from the anger anymore by self-medicating with alcohol, I just have to endure the waves of rage as they hit, sometimes with tsunami-level force.

I didn’t understand the damage emotional neglect has had on my ability to form healthy relationships until my marriage fell apart. Now my family is having to realize the hard way that money is a VERY POOR substitute for love.

Before the pandemic I had reached a sort of equilibrium in my emotional approach to my father’s emotional retardation, but that was destroyed (along with so many other things) by an insane pressure campaign to accept a “health” intervention I didn’t think was a good fit for myself or my kids. Having now seen the results, I can safely say that I will NEVER FORGET how that manipulation was carried out by flying monkeys like my father.

Any chance at meaningful conversation with my father ended when he made it clear that he thought I was making a BIG MISTAKE by not jabbing my kids. Another mistake my family thinks I’m making is FIGHTING BACK against the elements of our society that allowed empathy to be weaponized so that a Big Pharma product could be rushed into billions of bodies around the world.

I wonder if there are any RED flags for a supposed Christian like my father to observe that might clue him in to the kind of agenda he’s uncritically accepting?

Yes, signs and wonders abound, and with REVELATION of the method on fully display, subtlety has been replaced by overt mockery. It’s nearly impossible for hot-heads like me to NOT take the bait.

Since we’re in the middle of an apocalypse, and because I can’t get the haunting voice of Jim Morrison out of my head, I spent the pre-dawn hours of February 11th watching a movie that opens with Jim’s song about THE END. It’s a movie that definitely involves fathers, and what happens to them in this WAR realm–fathers like Charlie Sheen’s dad and Jim’s, the admiral who helped escalate the war the movie is about.

I’m glad I rewatched this fucked up movie because I heard with fresh ears the story that sends Colonel Kurtz deep into the heart of darkness. Here it is, from a transcript of the screenplay (emphasis mine):

The diamond shot that fucked up Kurtz is a cerebral reaction to the annihilation of the heart, which then leads him into a dangerous assumption that these “others” he witnesses acting brutally are fighting WITH heart. Kurtz assumes his men aren’t of a higher caliber because they are different kinds of men, and that’s not true. It’s not about what the men are fighting WITH, it’s about what they are fighting FOR, and the problem for the West’s occupying colonial presence in Vietnam is that they aren’t really fighting FOR anything.

That’s not true, young American men were killing and dying in the jungles of Vietnam (and Cambodia, and Laos, and, and, and…) for sociopaths who think there are too many dirty humans on this planet to share limited resources with. These sociopaths LOVE imposing infrastructure that benefits their bottomline, and they can’t accomplish their goals without their loyal monkeys flapping out from the castle to protect the sorcerers of bullshit.

Since the legal process for dissolving a marital contract is expensive, I did something I loathed and immediately regretted, which was ask my parents for some financial help so that my interests could be independently represented by counsel. The response I got back triggered a wave of anger that nearly smothered me. For reasons someone else helped me see, I won’t include the language of the text.

I’m pulling the curtain back on my personal baggage because it’s anecdotal evidence to anyone who gives a shit that some of us are beyond the point of verbal apologies being adequate to rectify the complicity of those who enabled psychopathic monsters to take our entire society in the direction of a full-blown, totalitarian dystopia. Words are empty shells if they’re not backed by meaningful action.

The action my father took during the pandemic was to simply do what corporate America told him to do, and then to gaslight his own son for NOT going along with the program. I asked him, point-blank, if he STILL thought I made the wrong decision for my kids, but he refused to answer me. That’s cowardice. I also asked him if he was up-to-date on his Big Pharma final solution, and still no response, so I poked around his office and found a great of example of what cowardice looks like:

While my father has made his choices, I’m happy to get to know OTHER fathers who chose differently for their families, and it shows.

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by Travis Mateer

On this SUPER BOWL Sunday I’m thinking the LAST thing anyone wants to do is read about how to properly observe decorum while giving public comment before some VERY skittish Council Critters. If you are one of the odd ones seeking an alternative to eating plates of trash while bookending a public ritual to demons, this week’s review is a REAL doozy.

Before playing the pre-written comment that got me POINT-OF-ORDERED (which you can hear at the 21:04 mark), there’s a good discussion exploring precisely how justified Council person Anderson was in shutting me down. This review of the rules may help if you’re just reading along:

If you want to bypass all the talking and just jam out to my ukulele skills, this week’s song is about the BAN on BANS that kept poor Stacie Anderson and her pals from being able to ban single-use plastic bags. I think this song may be one of my best yet, and it begins at 1:38:22.

Will I abstain from watching the pig-play? No, my younger days watching the Kansas City Chiefs means I’ll be watching and trying to keep the sneaking suspicion it’s all a sham from ruining the meager enjoyment I’m hoping to squeeze from the tsunami of garbage one must endure to watch some skilled athletes grind it out on the gridiron.

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by Travis Mateer

On Sunday afternoon a person in Missoula used lethal force against a burglar who reportedly refused to stop his criminal activity despite being warned by the person inside the home. The result is Patrick Shemorry got himself shot and killed.

The article linked above places Shemorry, geographically, in the Spokane Valley before arriving in Missoula, but a Zoom Chron reader sent me this link about what Shemorry was up to in 2009. From the link:

A local real estate agent who has admitted to hiring a man to kill his wife was sentenced today in United States District Court to federal prison time.

Patrick Scott Shemorry, 28, of Charlottesville, pleaded guilty in September to one count of murder for hire causing interstate travel with the promise of payment. Today in District Court, the defendant was sentenced to 114 months of incarceration and three years of supervised release thereafter.

“Mr. Shemorry’s actions in trying to kill his wife were both meticulous and chilling.” United States Attorney Timothy J. Heaphy said today. “Once he made the decision to have his wife killed, the defendant stopped at nothing to achieve that goal. Today, he was justly punished for that terrible, criminal decision.”

In this case the prosecutor put this man in prison, but he didn’t stay there for the duration of time you might think, based on the serious nature of his crime. Unfortunately there is NOTHING unusual about this, as this Deep Dive episode with Nikki Goeser clearly shows.

Nikki Goeser didn’t have her gun on her to protect her from the obsessed stalker when he entered the restaurant and shot her husband in front of her. To understand how this psychopath could actually be OUT OF PRISON in 5 years, listen to the episode. The criminal justice system is fucked.

Since the criminal justice system is fucked, it makes sense even the prosecutors get impacted by the trauma of it all. And that’s where our literate County Attorney, Kirsten Pabst, comes in with a new book I CANNOT WAIT to get in the mail.

In the wake of a number of brutal and vicious crimes in Missoula County that deeply affected law enforcement and prosecutors, Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst developed a program that deals with what she termed ‘secondary trauma’ to help them deal with and recover from the effects of such prosecutions.

That effort, which she shared with the National District Attorney’s Association, has resulted in a new book entitled ‘Thriving Through Chaos; Survival Gear for Criminal Justice Professionals’.

I’m glad to see Kirsten Pabst taking a firm hold over her office’s narrative by describing it as THRIVING through the chaos of…Missoula? Is Missoula really so full of chaos that it’s required a whole book to other prosecutors across the nation? I won’t contest Pabst’s depiction, since I’ve seen the chaos resulting from the failure of the entire carrot/stick spectrum of incentives and consequences, but I’m not sure other elected officials, or those in the private sector, will appreciate the depiction, since chaos isn’t really good for business or getting reelected.

Back when Pabst was feeling the heat of national scrutiny over her role in Missoula’s handling of sexual assault cases, control of the narrative was NOT a luxury this prosecutor enjoyed. Here’s an example of the reverberations a journalist by the name of Katie Baker continued making two years after the investigation wrapped up (emphasis mine):

Missoula, Mont., was rocked in 2012 by an unprecedented United States Department of Justice investigation that found the County Attorney’s Office badly mishandled sexual assault cases.

But just two years later, a former prosecutor who was deeply involved in the troubled office may be in line to take it over.

Kirsten Pabst says she’s running for county attorney to bring the Missoula office “back in line with community values” including “compassion for victims,” after its reputation was badly tarnished by almost three years of highly publicized sexual assault scandals and the subsequent federal probe.

Even though this article references a FEDERAL probe, I’m not sure the Feds ultimately got to do the investigation, or, if they did, old Fred didn’t make it easy. Here’s more from the article, and more of MY emphasis:

Pabst is one of just two candidates, both Democrats, running to replace current Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, who has been battling the Department of Justice ever since it announced a three-pronged federal investigation in May 2012 into how Missoula’s County Attorney’s Office, police department, and the University of Montana handle sexual assault cases.

But Pabst, who served as Van Valkenburg’s chief deputy from 2006 to 2012, may be a hard sell to Montanans shocked by the findings of the Justice Department report, which found that “women consistently told us that Deputy County Attorneys treated them with indifference or disrespect, and frequently made statements to women victims, advocates, and the public diminishing the seriousness of sexual violence and minimizing the culpability of those who commit it.”

My emphasis in the first paragraph is to highlight how the investigation was one prong short of a fork, so to speak, by leaving out the Sheriff’s Office. I think this was a big missed opportunity, considering words like “indifference” and “disrespect” can be applied to at least one case I’m aware, which was investigated by the Sheriff’s Office.

To conclude this post I’m going to uncomfortably agree with Fred Van Valkenburg under the principle of “it takes one to know one”. From the link (emphasis mine):

Van Valkenburg, who is fighting the Department of Justice’s investigation (though the local police and university have accepted the report’s findings), dismissed Pabst’s recent attempts to distance herself from his tenure.

“I don’t take her statements about ‘it’s time to move the County Attorney’s Office in a new direction,’ as anything more than political rhetoric calculated to help her get elected,” Van Valkenburg told BuzzFeed. 

As chief criminal deputy, Pabst was free to establish any policy she thought she was appropriate in the criminal division, he said. “She was an integral part of the management of this office for over five years.”

When Fred is right it’s because Right Said Fred. Get it?

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Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

When I saw the Northside pedestrian bridge on the Climate, Conservation and Parks Committee agenda I knew I had to attend. Bridges in Missoula are a HOT topic for me, so I shook off Monday’s point-of-order drama and headed to Council chambers at 10:30am on a Wednesday, and I’m glad I did because I learned SO much!

First, let’s look at the boring stuff. Project Manager, David Selvage, is the man up to bat asking for MORE money to fix this 23 year old bridge rendered useless by winter salt and other factors. Here’s a portion of the document justifying the expense that raises the price tag of this fixing this bridge to $2.5 million dollars:

While I’m sure these numbers are fun, since they’re not coming from David Selvage’s personal bank account, I’m more interested in the upstream insanity I heard forming like dangerous fiscal storm clouds on the horizon, and since this threat is in its infancy, there’s no price tag to speak of to shock the public. Yet.

What do you see here, Missoula readers? Do you see a coffee shop? Neither do I, but that’s not going to stop Heidi West from conspiring with the financial terrorist running Parks and Rec, Donna Gaukler, to consider it a possibility. You see, Heidi West has A DREAM of seeing a coffee shop here, and Donna Gaukler thinks it’s a GREAT IDEA!

I was already getting fiscally anxious sitting there in Council chambers listening to the discussion about how UGLY this chainlink fencing is, and how it could be replaced with something more permanent and aesthetically pleasing, which I interpret to mean ALSO more expensive, but that doesn’t seem to be a consideration at this COMMITTEE stage of the “public” discussion.

Did I make public comment? Yes I did, as did the man behind MIST. My comment included a plea to NOT spend unnecessary money on things just for appearances. Mr. MIST’s comment was about the terrible alternative to Northside access, like the Orange Street underpass, which is dusty and loud with honking (poor Bob). Guess who the Missoulian quoted? Hint: NOT me (emphasis mine):

The public echoed West’s comments about the importance of rehabbing the bridge.

Bob Giordano, executive director of Free Cycles, called the bridge a “critical piece” of connectivity for the Northside community.

The other part of my question was about the possibility of restricting public access once the fix of the bridge is complete. I referenced the bridge to nowhere by the Poverello Center, explaining how my questions to David Selvage about public access have gone unanswered. The quick answer to my first question is there are no plans to restrict access to the public once the NORTHSIDE bridge is fixed.

Interestingly, I got additional perspective on the bridge to nowhere AFTER leaving the committee meeting. Turns out the security guy (who I had never seen before, but addressed me by my first name) had been listening and was interested in what I said about Black Knight Security being responsible for managing the gate that supposedly restricts public access to this bridge and West Broadway Island.

I was told that Black Knight is ONLY responsible for closing this gate. The responsibility for OPENING the gate is up to Parks and Rec. The security guy I spoke with noted that, from his recollection, the gate had been closed recently for at least a week and he wasn’t sure why. That question would be best addressed by David Selvage.

I’m going to do Selvage a favor and NOT waste his time sending another email, with the expectation that I’ll get some kind of response, because I know he’s busy listening to his boss, Donna, tell him about this GREAT idea for the Northside bridge and a coffee shop she’s seriously considering. I’m also saving MY energy so I can get back to doing on-the-ground reports, like this one:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/797142157?h=2fadf3a4f5&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

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