A blog by Dan Brooks
There is no Combat! blog today, because my girlfriend and I are driving to Seattle for her coworker’s wedding. While I become hypnotized by those endless white lines, how about you enjoy this video of cats vomiting to electronic dance music? This blog would get more clicks if it weren’t so damn highbrow.
Missoula mayor John Engen atop Water Works Hill
On Tuesday afternoon, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a district court decision forcing the sale of Mountain Water to the city of Missoula by eminent domain. It was the culmination of a fight that has lasted almost two years, beginning when the city offered multinational private equity fund The Carlyle Group $50 million for our water system in 2014. After Carlyle refused and Missoula started preparing its eminent-domain suit, the city estimated the total legal cost of condemnation at $400,000. As of this writing, we’ve spent $6 million, and we’ll likely be held liable for Carlyle’s $8 million in legal costs, too. But the important thing is we bought the water company—not for the $50 million we considered a fair price in 2014, but for $88.6 million. But we won, and Mountain Water is a good deal at any price, as the mayor expressed in this tweet yesterday:
And it will cost taxpayers, and ratepayers, less. Study before you tweet.
— John Engen (@EngenJohn) August 3, 2016
That’s kind of infuriating. At a City Club forum in January of last year, before the value of Mountain Water had been established by a district court, I asked city council members at what threshold the purchase price of the water company would no longer save ratepayers money over the life of a 20-year bond. They didn’t know. The city had not run the numbers to determine at what point Mountain Water stopped being a good deal. Fifty million was a good price, apparently, and $50 billion would be too much. But within that range, no one could say exactly where a smart investment would turn dumb. Then-Councilman Adam Hertz said no such detailed financial analysis was available.
Engen insists this deal will save ratepayers money, and he admonishes us to study before we tweet. But he did not study before he embarked on the largest purchase in Missoula’s history. His insistence that those who criticize him base their arguments on careful examination of the numbers ignores the fact that he committed to this plan without studying those numbers himself. It’s a bad look, and so is the lawsuit alleging that the $8 million Carlyle spent on legal defenses was excessive. The city is going over Carlyle’s expenses with a fine-toothed comb, looking out for taxpayer dollars in the matter of dinner at Hooters, for example, when it overshot its own estimated legal bill by 1400 percent. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.
I’m glad we won City of Missoula v. Mountain Water. It will be good for this town to own its water system. But I don’t know whether it will be good for ratepayers to have bought it for $89 million plus $14 million instead of $50 million. Apparently, neither does anyone in city government. That’s the problem. The city didn’t perform its due diligence on this deal, and now we have committed to a massive investment that may or may not save us money over the next two decades. It doesn’t matter. We just did it.
The origin of yesterday’s brute-force login attempt in Luhansk, Ukraine
Readers who came to Combat! blog to shop for children’s melatonin will be disappointed to learn our security measures are working. After yesterday’s discovery of hax, I finally installed some basic protections, including a lockout function to prevent brute-force login attempts. Basically, if you enter the wrong password too many times, you can’t connect to the site for an hour. What’s that you say in your coarse, plebeian voice? You’ve never logged in to Combat! blog? That’s because the only user is me, plus the admin account WordPress requires for stuff like changing my password. Yesterday, my firewall locked out an IP address in Luhansk, Ukraine for multiple failed login attempts on that admin account. I changed my password, you vodka-sodden kleptocrat. So why don’t you just impulsively kill your landlady and then worry about it for six hundred pages?
She’s not even real!
Last year, when links such as “suck video” and “gay on gay brother porn” started to appear on Combat! blog without directing users to my Hire Me page, I suspected we had been hacked. I was right. After fixing the problem, GoDaddy convinced me to sign up for their partner service SiteLock, to prevent malicious injections into my homespace and whatnot. This afternoon, I learned my level of SiteLock protection provides the service of informing me when my site has been infected by malware, but the service of removing that malware or even preventing further attacks costs $129 a month.
Combat! blog has been hacked, again. Although the SiteLock lady was very nice, her offer sounded bogus to me, and I opted to address the problem myself. There are a half dozen WordPress plugins that implement basic firewall protection, and I installed one of them. I deleted all the user accounts but this one, logged off all terminals but mine, and changed my password to the name of some cosmic horror yet undiscovered. I set up lockouts to resist brute force attacks. I enumerated all these measures in a post, which is probably an infosec no-no, but you know the Russian dude who hacked Combat! blog to add links for children’s melatonin isn’t reading this. I hope he is. Children’s melatonin isn’t a thing, you bearfucking gas magnate. But I digress.
My point is that the Russians will do anything to divide us. First they hacked the Democratic National Committee, and now this. There is no post today, really, because I fixed Combat! blog instead of writing it. O cruel irony! Must you always be Russian? While I change my ftp password, how about you check out this fun Times visualization of the fact that only about 9% of Americans voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. We’re all going to vote on what to have for dinner as a family. But first, your mother and I have narrowed the field to brussels sprouts or tofu rat feces.
Some unfortunate homeowner’s Nest security camera caught this footage of the Roaring Lion wildfire, which burned about 1500 acres south of Hamilton yesterday before firefighters contained it overnight. For those of you living on the outskirts of civilization, Hamilton is about 40 miles south of Missoula, in beautiful Ravalli County. No word as to whether this fire had anything to do with fugitive treasurer Valerie Stamey, but probably it didn’t.