Author: JC

By JC

Couple of things the media and Missoula County School trustees are not telling us about the special bond levy that Liz referred to yesterday. There are certain participation requirements:

If a school district bond election is held at a regular school election, or special election called by the trustees, the bond issue is subject to the following:
a) 40% or more of the qualified electors cast a ballot in the election – the proposition must be approved by a majority of the votes; or
b) More than 30%, but less than 40%, of the qualified electors cast a ballot in the election – the proposition must be approved by 60% or more of the votes; or
c) 30% or less of the qualified electors cast a ballot in the election – the proposition fails.

As a mail-in school bond issue would be lucky to get 40% turnout43% (the 2013 Missoula County mail-in election got 43% turnout with a mayoral election on the ballot), it becomes unlikely that it is going to pass. And if it is a close election at, or just above 40%, it would be better for the “no” votes to abstain from voting to push the total participation into the 30-40% range where 60% “for” is needed to win, or into the sub-30% range where the election becomes moot.

So, isn’t democracy wonderful, where a bond can be defeated more easily by a “no” contingency just staying home?

Of course, parts of the bonding are good, but as with the ill-fated 911 county bond a few years back, a lot of hidden stuff is packaged in with the essential, and we don’t really get to discuss that, or pick and choose what the voter thinks is really essential through a series of smaller bonds stretched out over time.

What this bond really shows is the “leadership” ability of past Superintendent Alex Apostle, whose main accomplishments seem to be pushing the Superintendent’s salary from a mere $132,000 when he was hired to $200,000 seven years later, and increasing his bennies to an $1,000/month auto allowance and $832/month retirement annuity.

Apostle’s “leadership” style pissed off the lowly workers in the school system — teachers and support staff, as the operations budgets and wages were horribly constrained while the school board lavished raises and perks on him. Apostle failed to incrementally increase ops budgets, and deal with critical infrastructure needs in a phased and as-needed basis, instead resorting to being nothing more than a bonding hit-man doing the dirty work for the local contractors that will be the ultimate profiteers if this bond passes. One wonders what sort of kick-backs might follow Alex to his new job in Washington???

There’s another more insidious side to this whole bonding dilemma. And that it who is going to pay for it. The obvious part of this is that property tax payers will. But another story in the local paper rag pointed out that the rise of nonprofit housing for less-than-median income individuals and families is tearing a hole in the property tax base.

While affordable housing for students and the worker classes is commendable (though Liz and I are more about housing and jobs for the un-housed and unemployed) in the current economic malaise, the amount of public assistance needed to create affordable housing, and the creation of those properties by tax-exempt nonprofits like HomeWord will prove to hobble the bonding capability of our communities:

By JC

In a recent post at Intelligent Discontent, I read another in a long line of litanies from a member of the blogging community lambasting a Missoulian op-ed writer’s lament about the state of environmentalism. Or environmentalism in the state. Whatever. I could link to the blogger’s post, but why?

I may have linked to an incorrect op-ed, and if so then I apologize to the unnamed and unlinked blogger.  In that post, said blogger attacked the alleged op-ed writer and his opinions about what constitutes a “real” vs. “pseudo” environmentalist. And by doing so, the blogger attempts to create his own version of proper behavior within the “environmental community” (as if there is any such contrivance).

It’s a neat rhetorical flourish, being able to simultaneously call out a writer for failing to engage in “substantive debate” while failing to name the writer, or groups he is suspect of categorizing into his neat environmental subsets. Of course, maybe there is more than a mere debate about policy going on. After all, the suspected op-ed writer also is a substitute teacher and judge for Montana state high school debate championships.

Bingo! I think we may have a bit of a personal and/or professional issue creeping into the mere discussion of environmentalism. Nothing more competitive than a little controversy over debate in the state, particularly between judges and coaches! Of course, I could be wrong, and said blogger could be referring to some other enviro. In any case, it is hard to get to the heart of the policy issue in any environmental debate, when the goal is to beat the other debate team, regardless of the meat of the issue. The goal of debating is to win, not to discern the best policy. Just like politics. Continue reading “Wherein a Blogger goes Ballistic on “Real” Environmentalists”

By JC

Gratuitous link to the blog I am responding to.

Anti-vaccination Activist: Vaccines cause autism. Jenny McCarthy said so, and I don’t want my kid to be vaccine injured!

1) Jenny McCarthy is a red herring. The flak about her prominent role in the vaccine debate is only because she was a playboy bunny — and blonde. And who would ever believe anything a blonde playboy bunny would say… right??? You’d have to be a pretty marginal person to do so (or so PW would have us believe).

Anti-vaxxers: Meh. I saw a bunch of stuff on Facebook, so I’m not vaccinating my kids.

2) Casting anti-vaxxers as nothing more than FacebookBots again is a thinly veiled attempt to delegitimize any argument that people may have by casting them as ignorant. Some of us were anti-vaxxers 25-30 years ago before the internet projected it into a red-hot topic.

Anti-vaxxers: Look, I don’t trust that science. My worldview dictates that anything from Official Sources is probably corrupted by giant corporations.

3) Implying that anti-vaccers don’t trust science again ignores the fact that many anti-vaxxers are scientists and intelligent people — who may or may not believe the pro-vaccination research — and have good reasons behind their position. Casting anti-vaxxers as anti-science (like he is doing) allows him to ignore any science or public policy that may question either the safety or efficacy of vaccines.

Want some real reasons to be anti-vaccination? Here’s a few (there are many more):

1) What gives the government the right to demand that they can inject undisclosed (and potentially harmful) materials into one’s bloodstream? Do public health concerns raise to the level that individuals have to give up certain inalienable rights in order to participate in society — like go to school? One would think that if you believe that the government has the right to inject undisclosed substances into our bodies, then maybe the government, in its quest to “protect” public health, might first enact a public health care system that all citizens have a right to participate in.

2) If the science is so settled, then why does the government maintain a slush fund to pay off those who have been harmed by vaccines (the hush money is funded by a 75 cents per shot excise tax)? If the science was settled, you’d think local governments demanding vaccinations for access to public schools wouldn’t be afraid of lawsuits claiming harm. I mean, what jury trial would convict and award damages if the science said vaccines were safe and didn’t cause harm?

3) Why, when the anti-vaccine discussion comes up, must we be shuffled off onto stupid arguments, when there are many legitimate studies in mainstream, peer-reviewed academic journals that show the potential dangers of vaccinations?

Here’s one: “Review of Vaccine Induced Immune Overload and the Resulting Epidemics of Type 1 Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome, Emphasis on Explaining the Recent Accelerations in the Risk of Prediabetes and other Immune Mediated Diseases.”

“There has been an epidemic of inflammatory diseases that has paralleled the epidemic on iatrogenic immune stimulation with vaccines. Extensive evidence links vaccine-induced immune overload with the epidemic of type 1 diabetes.”

Here’s a quote from a government CDC scientist in a legal deposition admitting he fudged the data in a study:

“I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism.”

So why can’t we have a rational discussion about vaccines, without resorting to red herrings, guilt-by-association tactics, and false narratives? No wonder Monsanto gets away with its BS — because people like Polish Wolf amplify the delegitimization of any who would question the lock-step drive to vaccinate, or ignore the existence of real science that can inform the debate.

No, we must all just cowtow to the powers that be and offer our children up for a grand experiment in toxic injections. I find no humor in Polish Wolf’s chosen literary device here.

His innuendo that anti-vaxxers are responsible for the depredations of Monsanto is sad. It is tantamount to him telling those of us who have the gall to question the “authority” of the government or certain acceptable scientific outlets should just shut up, or bear the responsibility for the negative affects and horrors that Monsanto’s chemicals, genetic engineering, and patenting have wrought upon the world.

By Matthew Koehler, WildWest Institute

With so much media and political attention focused on wildfires – and in some cases public lands management and calls to greatly increase logging on national forests by reducing public input and environmental analysis – it may be helpful to take a look at this year’s wildfire stats to see what’s burned and where.

Here’s a copy (http://www.nifc.gov/nicc/sitreprt.pdf) of the National Interagency Coordinator Center’s ‘Incident Management Situation Report’ from Tuesday, September 1, 2015.

• As of today, a total of 8,202,557 acres have burned in U.S. wildfires. In 1930 and 1931, over 50 million acres burned each year and during the 10 year (hot and dry) period from the late 1920’s to the late 1930’s an AVERAGE of 30 million acres burned every year in the United States. Additionally, the 2001 National Fire Plan update (https://www.nifc.gov/PIO_bb/Policy/FederalWildlandFireManagementPolicy_2001.pdf) indicates that an average of 145 million acres burned annually in the pre-industrial, conterminous United States.

[NOTE: Under the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal government agencies largely purged all records and information about wildfire acre burned stats from before the period of 1960].

• This year, 63% of ALL wildfire acres burned in the U.S. burned in Alaska, much of it over remote tundra ecosystems. According to federal records, since 1959 the average temperature in Alaska has jumped 3.3 degrees and the average winter temperature has spiked 5 degrees.

• Less than 8% of ALL wildfires that have burned this year in the U.S. have burned in the northern Rockies.

• National Forests account for ONLY 15% of all wildfire acres burned in U.S. this year.

• 88% of all BLM (Bureau of Land Management) acres burned in wildfires this year were in Alaska, again much of tundra, not forests.

This information is not meant to discount specific experiences communities, homeowners or citizens have had with wildfires this year, but just serves as a bit of important, fact-based information and context regarding what land ownerships have burned and where they are located.

Again, this information is especially important in the context of recent statements (and pending federal legislation) from certain politicians blaming wildfires on a lack of national forest logging or a handful of timber sale lawsuits.

If politicians are going to predictably use another wildfire season to yet again weaken our nation’s key environmental or public lands laws by increasing logging (including calls by politicians like Montana’s Rep Ryan Zinke for logging within Wilderness Areas) then the public should at least have some facts and statistics available to help put the wildfires in context.

Finally, please keep in mind that right now the U.S. Forest Service has the ability to conduct an unlimited number of ‘fast-track’ logging projects on over 45 MILLION acres of National Forest nationally – and on 5 MILLION acres of National Forests in Montana. This public lands logging would all be ‘categorically excluded from the requirements of NEPA.’

By JC

I don’t get the reflexive knee-jerk reaction to articles quoted from Counterpunch. The lede to Skink’s recent post is a piece from Sam Husseini, the communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy. Husseini’s article received widespread postings, including at dem/prog news fest, Huffington Post. The article was also posted on Consortium News, a leading indy news source. Truthdig, Smirking Chimp, Strategic-Culture, World News Beat, the Russophile, and on and on.

Counterpunch is just like any other news aggregator. They pick from a very wide selection of authors, the articles they choose to post. It’s not like Counterpunch goes out and does a lot of policy advocacy on its own. Of course Jeff St. Claire and the late Alexander Cockburn had strong opinions and a soapbox to project them from. But what’s up with the guilt by association with CounterPunch? That’s a bunch of bigoted BS.

Take a look at a list of recent articles. Are we to think that all of these authors deserve our disdain because they’ve been published at Counterpunch? A cursory overview of authors includes a wide variety of viewpoints from far left to paleoconservative and libertarian viewpoints. And those articles are published world wide in hundreds of other outlets.

Well, what about Sam (Osama) Husseini? Well, among other things he founded the website VotePact, an interesting alternative to two party elections. And as we have lots of folks in our midst who are interested in alternatives, Husseini has a very interesting approach, and we’ve been talking about fusion elections here. He has another alternative where a democrat and a republican agree (“Vote Pact”) to vote third parties of their choice instead of canceling themselves out in standard two party elections.

He’s also the communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy which encourages the media to access a wide variety of sources:

IPA increases the reach and capacity of progressive and grassroots organizations (at no cost to them) to address public policy by getting them and their ideas into the mainstream media. IPA gains media access for those whose voices are commonly excluded or drowned out by government or corporate-backed institutions. As a national consortium of independent public-policy researchers, analysts and activists, IPA widens media exposure for progressive perspectives on many issues including the environment, human rights, foreign policy, and economic justice.

Sounds like a pretty good mission statement to me. Unless you are into suppressing independent thought outside of traditional dem/prog themes.

So what are we left with besides a snippet of how democrats are continuing to close the circle on their “big tent” and increasing their disparagement of any people who dare look beyond the accepted parameters of democratic group-think? Not much, except a view of politics from those inside the fishbowl that continue to fear that they are becoming irrelevant in a world spinning out of their control.

Withdrawing into the discomfort of traditional politics is the bane of progressivism. One might say that withdrawing into the comfort of traditional politics is what allows the rise of nationalism, and all of its despicable characteristics which are defining the American “tradition” of exceptionalism and its attendant foreign policy. A foreign policy predicated on the “father knows best” notion that only American-directed hegemony can keep the world safe for… something.

Well, I’m tired of it all. I’d rather see a multi-polar world with many elements balancing trade and security. At some point the U.S. will be forced to disengage from maintaining empire, as it will no longer be affordable, except at the barrel of a gun (the biggest one possible). Whether or not that disengagement will be comfortable or uncomfortable rests on our expectations of what a world without the U.S. as policeman can become.