Month: July 2023

by Travis Mateer

On Wednesday I went searching for an algorithm–or, more accurately, the entity responsible for using an algorithmic tool to provide pre-trial supervision for people facing charges in CERTAIN courts, which I’ll get to in a minute–because a Request For Proposal (RFP) was recently opened up and closed by our Missoula County Commissioners. What does that mean?

To understand what that means I went to the wrong building on Stephens Avenue, instead of Mullan, because even now I get confused about the jurisdictional striations of our criminal justice system. The building on Stephens Avenue is where DISTRICT court people, doing time on FEDERAL probation or parole, must check in with their officers. Even though it was the wrong building, I still had an insightful conversation (on background) about anecdotal frustration.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it’s AMAZING what you can discover when you go IN PERSON to places like this:

It was through the combined locations of P&P and Pre-Release that I finally understood that the RFP process was opened up and closed, by request of our County Commissioners, in a pretty short amount of time, and the results are, so far, not known by the entities that would be impacted.

I have more people to talk to about all this, so if I hadn’t stumbled upon a missing person flyer on the door to the County Courthouse, this post would be pretty short and uninformative. But I did, and I spoke to two parents about their experience, so I’m going to shift to that anecdotal narrative.

I’m not going to use names, or the picture of the flyer, because the 16 year old teen has been located and the insights from the family have been provided in the spirit of HELPING law enforcement with perceived deficiencies in their response capacity.

Also, before getting to this family’s experiences, I’ll note I mentioned the name Joey Thompson in my outreach on Wednesday, and one of the offices I spoke with had a lot of familiarity with the case and the dynamics leading up to whatever happened that put Joey Thompson in the Clark Fork river where he allegedly drowned “in a period of minutes“.

I first spoke with the mother of the teen and found out the family (from New York) had sent their son to a boarding school in Montana. The program wasn’t working out for him, so mom was in Missoula with her son when he ran away and tried hitchhiking back to the boarding school. That is what prompted the missing person flyer I saw.

The mom suggested I speak with her ex-husband, since he had dealt with local authorities more than she had, so I gave him a call and learned a thing or two from his perspective as a former military ballistics expert who helps states like Texas understand the risks they are facing with the serious armament available to the criminal class. What I’m trying to say is this guy knew what he was talking about.

One of the main deficiencies (which I’ve heard before) has to do with technology. In this case, the teen was using Snapchat, and local law enforcement had no idea about the process to glean coordinate information from this platform. Once dad provided the steps for HOW to get the information, law enforcement DID follow up, but the delay was problematic, said dad.

Another delay happened when the member of law enforcement on the case was on vacation for 4 days. “Everything stopped during those 4 days,” the dad told me on the phone. This is ANOTHER aspect of the case that sounded familiar. Where did I hear THAT excuse before?

Jermain Charlo went missing on June 16th, 2018. So why did it take so long for authorities to get the case going? From the link (emphasis mine):

Charlo went missing on June 16, 2018. A Missoula Housing Authority security camera captured her about 1 a.m. walking through a downtown alley behind the Badlander bar toward Higgins Avenue.

That was the last known sighting of Charlo. However, according to a search warrant filed in Missoula County District Court, Charlo’s cellphone was “at or near Michael Defrance’s residence” between 2 a.m. and 10 a.m. on the morning she disappeared.

Missoula Police received that information on June 27, 2018, according to the search warrant. Garcia doesn’t understand why Defrance hasn’t been arrested, she said.

…

Garcia wanted to make sure the protest was outside the department, rather than a march, Russell said. She wants answers from police. It took 11 days for them to begin searching for Charlo, she said.

“Now two and a half years later, how much evidence was lost?” Garcia said. “If they would have started looking for her right away.”

What caused the delay? I’m looking for a direct quote, but going from my memory of the Stolen podcast, the delay was because Detective Guy Baker was on vacation.

For an idea how SMOOTH Detective Guy Baker can be, here’s some fawning from Connie Walker, the indigenous journalist who swooped into Montana to make a true crime product for Spotify:

I’ve tried reaching out to Connie Walker several times on Twitter, since both Guy Baker AND Lowell Hochhalter were heavily involved in this case, but after getting conned, Connie moved on. But not before giving Baker more of the limelight he seems to enjoy. Here’s more fawning about how Baker even listens to DREAMS! Isn’t that amazing? (emphasis mine):

Yes, I’ve even heard this time-spiel before, and directly from Detective Baker himself! It was last summer, after a VERY concerning situation with a young girl selling flowers on the sidewalk of Missoula with her “dad”. I ended up calling 911, getting a shitty response from dispatch, then doing some of the work myself, which included emailing our County Commissioners.

Here’s the relevant part from the post I wrote about the experience (emphasis mine):

Maybe it was because I did some investigative groundwork the following day to get surveillance footage preserved, or maybe it was because I sent an email to County Commissioners and a contact at the Missoula police department. Regardless, it was nice to have someone in a supervisory role tell me the way dispatch handled my call was NOT appropriate.

After the apology I got the best indication yet this call was finally being taken seriously when the FBI called. Well, that’s how it showed up on my phone, but the guy on the other end of the line was Detective Guy Baker. Now the REAL action was about to begin, right?

The follow up call came a few days later, and I guess it was intended to put my concerns to rest. I was told by Detective Baker that a vigorous 6-8 hour investigation revealed the man was indeed a Russian out-of-stater traveling with his “family” from western Washington. There were two boys and a woman who appeared to be the “mother”. This family’s behavior had caused another bystander to call 911 two days after I did, and this concerned citizen took pictures, something Guy Baker suggested I could have done to make his job easier.

I kept scrolling through the transcript of the first episode for the exact time sequence of how the case was processed by Missoula PD and finally found it. Here it is:

No, Connie, they are NOT law enforcement, but that doesn’t mean Lowell Hochhalter doesn’t pretend to be one every now and then.

In my conversation with the father of the missing teen who was found, he was adamant that law enforcement needs MORE resources, and that the conversation about this need should be happening at the Governor/Lt. Governor/AG level. I listened, then gave him some of the troubling context making that prospect very unlikely.

Just because something isn’t likely to happen, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying to get the message out that Montana needs to step up its game to combat a drug epidemic hitting during an economic crisis precipitated by a political crisis emanating from a societal decline designed by psychopaths because to do nothing is to be complicit with monsters, and who, other than the psychopath class, really wants that?

To help with this modest effort, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is awaiting your support, or you can use the donation button at my about page.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

To counter my extreme sadness/trepidation on the 4th of July, I decided to rewatch a movie directed by Christopher Nolan, titled Tenet. Most people watch movies to be “entertained”, but not me. I watch in an attempt to better understand our present moment and to anticipate, if possible, where this crazy train is going.

Nolan has been on my radar for years, especially as it relates to the manipulation of time. Movies like Memento (2001) and Interstellar (2014) break apart linear time in fascinating ways as plot features, giving audiences much more complicated experiences of time as it relates to narrative development. Is this simply to entertain us, or could something more involved be going on here?

Before getting to Tenet, I’ll mention a few other Nolan movies relevant to my the cultural research, and that’s The Prestige (2006) and Inception (2010). In The Prestige, David Bowie plays the role of Tesla during Tesla’s time in Colorado Springs–a very important location in my personal pantheon of synchronicities. And with Inception, the idea of the mind as a battlefield is taken to such an extreme, the very notion of how thoughts can be implanted in our consciousness is turned inside-out with a mind-bending, technological flare impossible NOT to be impressed by.

To start grappling with Tenet’s mind-breaking narrative, this GQ article is actually pretty good. From the link:

Despite what you may have heard, Tenet isn’t really about time-travel–it’s about time manipulation. Rather than jumping forward decades like Back to the Future, the characters are able to do something more like rewinding and fast-forwarding through time. This core idea is known as inversion, and it’s possible thanks to a new technology that can reverse the entropy of people and objects, but thankfully you don’t need to know what entropy is to get it. Inversion is explained around 15 minutes in, when the scientist Barbara (Clémence Poésy) makes loose bullets jump off a table into her hands in order to demonstrate the concept to the Protagonist (John David Washington)–the bullets are moving backwards through time while the people stay stable.

Inversion becomes more complicated as it trickles into complicated action sequences, like the highway chase. Eventually, when we realize that the masked man the Protagonist fought down corridors during the Freeport battle was an inverted version of himself, it becomes clear that scenes from the first half of the movie involved characters who rewound from the second half.

Before continuing, I’ll note that spending TOO much time trying to understand the mechanics of “inversion” can distract a viewer from what Nolan is trying to do on the meta-level of Hollywood storytelling. That said, here’s some more from the article (emphasis mine):

Inversion initially doesn’t seem too dangerous. But it turns out that the unnamed creator of inversion technology allowed it to become weaponized into an object known as the Algorithm (referred to as “plutonium-241” for a large portion of the movie), which is capable of inverting the entirety of time itself instead of just individual objects. Regretting this, the inversion creator decided to kill herself, but not before she broke the Algorithm into nine physical pieces (MCU Infinity Stones, anyone?) and hid them throughout time. If stacked together to rebuild the final formula, the Algorithm would cause all events on Earth to start flowing backward. The inversion of the Earth itself is said to cause a catastrophic event that would destroy everything that ever lived, according to Neil.

Sator is part of a group that wants to acquire the Algorithm and reverse time in order to undo the effects of climate change and other devastation the present has wrought on the future. (Also, he’s dying and decides to take a melodramatic “if I can’t have it, no one can” approach.) This sets up Tenet’s core plot: the Protagonist must recover the Algorithm’s final piece to stop the end of the world. In other words, it’s essentially a fancy Bond movie, with Sator playing the over-the-top villain role.

The rationale of using this time-manipulation technology is interesting, and made even more so when you consider the timing of this movie’s controversial release date during the pandemic. Here’s a New York Times article about this curious aspect of Tenet’s injection into mass culture:

I’m dying to see Christopher Nolan’s new film “Tenet.” But would I actually die to see it?

These are the things we must mull about movies now that the pandemic has turned Nolan’s $200 million spectacle into a high-stakes test case. After months of being shuttered, movie theaters in many states have begun the tentative process of reopening. Still, with the number of coronavirus infections rising in the United States, it’s unclear whether those theaters can safely launch a would-be summer blockbuster like “Tenet” in just a few weeks.

A time-bending sci-fi flick starring John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, “Tenet” was long scheduled to come out on July 17, right in the middle of Hollywood’s most lucrative season. Then the pandemic hit American shores, states like New York and California began issuing stay-at-home orders, and spooked studios started shuffling their blockbusters out of the summer corridor. Only “Tenet” held firm to its date, the rare tentpole that wouldn’t pull up stakes.

But as that July 17 release drew closer, Warner Bros. finally blinked, moving “Tenet” back two weeks to July 31. This date would prove temporary, too: As coronavirus cases continued to climb over the summer, the studio hit “Tenet” with another two-week delay, this time shifting the movie to its current release date of Aug. 12.

This context is interesting to think back on now, especially when you consider the characters must where oxygen masks when they enter the “inverted” world of backwards-running time.

While the malleability of time is weaponized in Tenet, it’s the key to solving the future cataclysm of climate instability in the movie Interstellar, a movie I caught just enough of recently to rip my heart out and stomp on it as I sat next to my equivalent of the daughter motivation that drives Matthew McConaughey’s character to enter the blackhole.

Another reason I chose Tenet as the movie to watch while fireworks exploded outside is because Christopher Nolan has a new movie coming out later this month, and it’s very significant to a trifecta of posts I’ve written lately about Jack Parsons (which you can read here, here, and here).

What’s the movie about? It’s about a historical figure who is actually referenced in Tenet, along with the Manhattan Project that may or may not have broken time, for real. Here’s a promotional image so you know exactly what we’re dealing with:

There is so much more I’d like to get into, like Nolan’s work with the Batman/Joker narrative, but I’m going to wrap this post up in order to continue my hunt for a different, more local “algorithm story” for tomorrow. It won’t be as sexy as a protagonist moving through inverted time to save the world from a hostile future technology, but it will hopefully give you an idea of how we are ceding control in small but critical ways, to real algorithmic overseers.

If you appreciate my work, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to help me keep it going, and the donation button at my about page is another.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

Before we get to the terrible process I’m a bit surprised to see the Missoulian reporting on, the image above is from the website of the Montana Coroner’s Association where they allegedly do the following (emphasis mine):

The Montana Coroner’s Association exists to support the Coroners of Montana through education and training, and to render support to each County Coroner to aid in the timely resolution of death investigations.

Well, HAVE their been timely resolutions of death investigations? According to the Missoulian article, no, and one reason is because the coroner must be a CIVILIAN coroner in order to preside over the inquest. I did not previously know this little fact.

Before we get to that fact, the process of a coroner’s inquest is described and I’m already having some difficulty matching what’s being described with what I’ve seen play out in the MULTIPLE inquests I’ve observed. From the first link (emphasis mine):

Two pending Missoula cases involving use of force by police likely won’t see a courtroom until the fall.

The Missoula County Attorney’s Office currently has two inquests awaiting their day in court because of scheduling challenges and a shortage of coroners, according to Missoula Chief Criminal Deputy County Attorney Matt Jennings. Coroner’s inquests are public inquiries held in courtrooms that examine the causes of and circumstances surrounding the death of a person when they’re killed by law enforcement. 

…

Inquests play an important role in the legal process. They are required by law for people who die in a prison or jail or in the custody of any law enforcement agent.

A coroner (not a judge) presides over an inquest before a coroner’s jury in a public courtroom. Evidence surrounding the person’s death is presented to a jury, which then decides if the use of the force by law enforcement was justified. Deputy county attorneys present evidence and witnesses to the jury, but they aren’t legal representation for the person who died, or their families.

That last point of emphasis is where my experience deviates from this description. The standard I’ve heard explained to the jury by the coroner presiding over the inquests I’ve attended is whether or not law enforcements committed a CRIMINAL act in using force, not a “justified” act. But maybe my understanding of this process isn’t accurate.

Later in the article we get the civilian excuse from Deputy County Attorney, Matt Jennings:

In an email, Jennings said the coroner Missoula County typically enlists for its inquests doesn’t have dates available until the fall, but the county is trying to find another coroner with sooner availability.

“When a person is killed by law enforcement we have to use a civilian coroner and they have to be from another county,” Jennings said. “There are not many choices.”

He explained civilian coroners usually have other jobs, like funeral directors, so presiding over inquests for other counties tend to be voluntary, add-on tasks for them. He said coroner shortages aren’t unique to Missoula, and his office uses the same coroners that most urban counties throughout the state use.

Yes, I consulted the Montana Coroner’s Association directory and most of the coroner’s listed are NOT civilians, but Sheriffs. This certainly does limit one’s options when it comes to pretending a legitimate process of officer-involved death investigation actually exists in the state of Montana, right Matt Jennings?

Republicans at the state level, with their supposed super majority and billion+ surplus to play with, should have been able to bring elements of the criminal justice system into the 21st century, but I don’t think the move made in this area of the criminal justice system will bring the “transparency” we are being told it will.

Here’s more from the article about what the legislature did to help this inquest process not suck so bad (emphasis mine):

Gov. Greg Gianforte signed House Bill 705 in May, brought by Scot Kerns, R-Great Falls, in this year’s legislative session, which revised Montana’s current inquest laws to allow juries to select an option that a person died by suicide through police intervention, if the evidence supports such a claim.

“House Bill 705 is to provide the jury with greater transparency in cases by allowing them the option, only if warranted, of suicide by law enforcement,” Kerns said at a hearing for the bill in February. “By amending the current law, we will bring transparency to police deadly force cases and allow critical evidence to be presented during the inquest.”

How the hell does “allowing” jurors the option of saying someone used cops to kill themselves bring anything close to transparency to this process? Another obvious question: why the hell wasn’t this an “option” in the first place?

I’m glad the Missoulian’s reporter, Zoë Buchli, is TRYING to bring some clarity to this process, but failing to explain to readers that jurors would need to find law enforcement CRIMINALLY liable for a death will leave readers without the proper context to understand why 39 inquests since 2012 have ALL cleared law enforcement of CRIMINAL liability.

For MY reporting on coroner inquests in Missoula, here are some relevant posts:

Missing In Montana And My Cynicism On The Narrative Framing (November 17th, 2021)

If I Wanted To Kill Johnny Lee Perry, Here Is How I Would Set Up His State-Sanctioned Execution (April 29th, 2022)

WTF Is Going On Between The Jurisdictional Sheets Of The Missoula And Mineral County Sheriff Offices? (June 16th, 2022)

The real benefit of the Missoulian article is the official reminder of TWO officer-involved deaths that local authorities have been VERY mum about. I’ll quote the Missoulian article again first, then provide links to how I’ve tracked these cases after that. First, the quote (emphasis mine):

Vance Ledeau, 34, was shot and killed by law enforcement at the Smokejumper Center last August. He was reportedly a robbery suspect, though very minimal details were provided in the aftermath of the shooting about Ledeau’s death and the circumstances leading up to it. Nearly a year later, an inquest for Ledeau isn’t on the county’s calendar.

Gary T. Duncan, a 45-year-old Missoula resident, died from a gunshot wound at the Clinton Market in February, a news release from the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office stated.

“Sheriff Holton said the coroner’s investigation concluded that the armed suspect/decedent displayed suicidal tendency and was ultimately killed by law enforcement at the scene,” the news release stated.

Ah, now the legislation is making more sense. By “allowing” the suicide-by-cop option, a new rationale for justifying officer-involved shootings has been codified. And this makes for better transparency how?

Instead of reading about pretend efforts by state legislators to improve transparency for the coroner’s inquest process, I suggest checking out MY posts about recent officer-involved shootings and the response by local authorities to local media. Here they are:

Is There A Rural/Urban Divide When It Comes To Local Law Enforcement In Missoula? (August 29th, 2022)

SPECIAL REPORT: You Know Something Stinks When The Missoulian Calls Out ALL Jurisdictions For Killing…Someone? (September 2nd, 2022)

Name Of Man Shot Near Airport Finally Released…But Not Much Else (September 14th, 2022)

On The Glacial Movement Of Information From The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office (November 3rd, 2022)

Does The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office Know What The Word “Deescalate” Means? (February 20th, 2023)

If you appreciate my local reporting, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to support my work, and the donation button at my about page is another.

I’ll note here, at the end, that I’m writing about officer-involved deaths on the day I’m celebrating the THIRD year of leaving the alcohol-involved death-path I was walking when the psychopath class showed their hand three years ago. I may be nowhere close to having my shit together, but at least I’m not still guzzling box wine!

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

https://vimeo.com/841934852?share=copy

Today’s post is simply an apology song. I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be back tomorrow with an actual post. Stay safe, Missoula!

by Travis Mateer

Sometimes it feels like my research into the occult is more a process of deprogramming myself than it is a process of discovery, especially as it relates to the movies and tv shows I consumed as a kid. Watching old media with new eyes can be a jarring experience because the depths of manipulation we’ve experienced through our shared culture can appear endless.

I have the Psyop Cinema guys to thank for re-contextualizing a movie that helped form my impression of the “alien contact” narrative as I was growing up and, more importantly, providing a fascinating nugget of intrigue about the leading actor’s family’s role in history. Here’s a screenshot from this link to get us started:

Before getting to the movie Close Encounters, this Dreyfuss connection to the assassination of Alexander II is synchronistic for me considering I picked up this book recently:

With my interest in narrative control, this theory that Nicolas and his family did NOT meet the violent fate history has ascribed is fascinating to me. I’ve added this theory to the list of possible things we’ve been lied to about. It’s a long list.

Another synchronicity with Richard Dreyfuss is the Rolling Stone issue I special ordered because it features an article about the Shroud of Turin, which involves the father of Sean Stevenson, Dr. Kenneth Stevenson.

To help put all this in the larger context of the forces I think are at play, I suggest reading both of last Friday’s posts surrounding Jack Parsons (first post; second post) because Jack will be making another appearance near the fringy end of this one.

The movie Close Encounters is not just a set of cinematic images put into my brain by Hollywood when I was a kid, it’s also a book I came across a few years ago and cut up some excerpts for my culture-archive journal. Here’s one of the pages:

I didn’t realize how synchronistic this excerpt would be until I took this pic for the post. Not only do we have Frankenstein, written by Shelley, who was referenced in the Crow777 podcast I linked to in post 1 about Parsons, but we ALSO have a rocket ship! And a tank, so we can apply youthful imagination to eventual pursuits of war!

There is also a distinctly creepy vibe being created by details like the Frankenstein monster “blushing” when its pants fall down. Huh?

This Spielberg movie is made even more curious, as it relates to Richard Dreyfuss, when the Psyop Cinema guys explain how the selfish actions of the “protagonist”–when he absconds from his family with the New Age chick–was an element of the movie that Dreyfuss himself argued to keep in the script, despite alleged misgivings by Spielberg. Interesting.

As I poked around for Dreyfuss info I found this Washington Post article from 1982. Here’s how some more Dreyfuss family color was described four decades ago (emphasis mine):

“My great-uncle Dick, whom I was named for, worked as a broken-arm broken-leg man for Waxey Gordon. My grandfather says to this day, ‘Mister G was the finest man I ever knew: He waited for his butter and eggs in line like everyone else.’ “

Waxey Gordon, of course, was an enforcer for the Mob.

Later in the article we get a careful depiction of Dreyfuss’ temperament, along with a description of deep disappointment that a film he made about the porn industry didn’t pan out so well (emphasis mine):

Richard Dreyfuss and the press have had their bad days. His sheer intensity, his quickness, his explosive reactions seem to have upset some interviewers. And critics have squatted on some of his favorite pictures. “Inserts,” an offbeat story about a Hollywood director reduced to shooting porn films, never recovered from the X rating it got when United Artists absentmindedly let it be prescreened.

“A wonderful movie. So intelligent. Almost the only movie that really said something about the business. The greatest set I’ve ever been on — it was shot on a London soundstage, but when I walked in I thought I was back in Beverly Hills. I knew mansions like that. This is my home; I’ve been here.”

I’ll wrap this post up with drugs and a cute movie. First, the cute movie, and I think you’ll see why it’s included in this post pretty quickly (emphasis, below, is mine):

ASTRONAUT stars Richard Dreyfuss as Angus, a retired civil engineer who’s always dreamed of going into outer space. One night, he sees a promotion for a competition where the public will pick one person to ride on the first commercial spacefraft into space. Right before applying, Angus suffers a heart attack, and his daughter takes him to a nursing home. In the home, Angus befriends a sickly man who pushes him to apply. Angus applies with one minute left in the competition and is chosen to be interviewed in front of the public. Will Angus do well enough to get the public’s vote?

ASTRONAUT is a cute movie with many positive themes. Richard Dreyfuss is the main reason to see ASTRONAUT.

Ah, how nice! I LOVE cute movies about the first commercial space flight for an elderly civil engineer! How touching!

Now, from that previous article, the drugs. Which is totally in Dreyfuss’ past (emphasis mine):

Fame and money seem to have taken the edge off his self-destructive anxieties, and the drinking and drugging have stopped, though he has a never-ending battle with the scales, and last year there was that $2.5-million breach of promise suit by a Hollywood beauty. He is full of projects. His constant drive for the new, the challenging, the harder, the greater roles has taken him back to the stage. He did a Cassius in Brooklyn and an Iago to Paul Winfield’s Othello. He wants to do a Hamlet, “and maybe Malvolio,” he adds, noting that villains and supporting parts have more fun than the heroes.

I’m sure Richard Dreyfuss has had plenty of fun “playing” villains in Hollywood, but in many people’s hearts he’ll always be that dorky scientist who helped kill a big, bad shark.

Now that I’ve finished the post, I’m going to go jump into some water myself, but nothing exotic with danger lurking beneath the surface. At least I hope not!

If you appreciate my summer dedication to updating this little old blog, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to help me out, while the donation button at my about page is another.

Thanks for reading!