Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

My business plan: I will kill you with my smug

Just a brief note in passing to discuss two things that on the surface might seem unrelated. That is because under the surface they are unrelated. They are smugness, and business plans.

First, business plans. If you were to go to a bank seeking financing for your business, be it nail grooming or dog bathing or plumbing and heating, the bank will ask to see a written business plan. Stripped of its jargon – things like market dimensions and depth, rate of return, maximized cash flow … all real to a degree but also inside baseball talk, the simplest way to understand a business plan is to answer the question: “What’s your gimmick?”

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The radon game

If there is one ‘truism’ – something obvious and neither new or interesting – it is that the vast majority of people rely on authority figures in forming their own opinions. What else can we expect when our education system at its core (the tests) punishes students for being wrong. The SAT and ACT regimes are long lists of things to be memorized, statements by authority figures that students must regurgitate to land in a good college. It instills students with fear of being wrong even as mistakes are the best teachers around.

I long ago read a book (I should stop right there) by Edward Bernays called “Propaganda.” I would imagine at a website like this many others have read it as well. It was an interesting book in that Bernays, writing in the 1920s, came right out and said things that were known to be true among insiders, but were rarely spoken outside of the club (the men of his time who managed public opinion). I cite here a passage that appears right at the opening:

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The Great Sagan

BookI am reading again of Immanuel Velikovsky, this time of his public interactions with Carl Sagan, widely regarded as a go-to source in the field of astrophysics. I am reading a book by Charles Ginenthal, who apparently had low regard for Sagan. I have read much of Sagan’s popular work, and would not call him a fraud. However, he did not put actions behind his words, and that is Ginenthal’s complaint, as will be apparent below.

Ginenthal published Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky in 1995, and so knew of the transparency of the Sagan figure long before I even knew of Velikovsky. I take heart that Sagan, who died in 1996, must have known of Ginenthal’s work, published a year earlier. But of course, being Sagan, he would have smugly set it aside. (Ginenthal has also written Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky and Newton, Einstein and Velikovsky. Hallelujah! I’ve been dying for fresh reading material.)

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If it is on YouTube … it is suspect

We have, in the past, spent inordinate time on two (or three or four) men named Paul McCartney and John Lennon. I must take responsibility for this, and it is because of my age. The Beatles came on stage just as I was growing pubes and noticing girls, and like every kid alive of that age at that time, I fantasized about being a Beatle. Later on I learned what phonies they were, mere actors backed by a huge Intelligence team that included spooks, publicists, song writers, studio musicians. But at the time, they mattered to me.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  (1 Corinthians 13)

Would that the bible verse were true, I suppose. Here I am writing about John and Paul, two old men, even older than me, one in hiding somewhere  (or maybe dead for real by now), the other having a hidden twin (or out in the open as “John Halliday”). It has been good for shits and giggles to uncover and expose these low and vile creatures, but it has also for a long time been time to move on.

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An answer for JJ

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I have repeatedly gotten the following comment from JJ on an old post called “We know that Sharon Tate did not die that night, but was she even pregnant?”

The “rose” is actually part of the string of Christmas lights that Candice Bergen left strewn about the fence before moving out with Terry Melcher.

I have not let the comment through. If I do, JJ becomes a regular, and I don’t want that. This person seems to be dealing on an intimate level with the Tate Massacre. Such people litter the landscape, and are either clueless or are deliberately casting about seeds of doubt on honest research. In either case, I don’t want him/her coming around. So I am answering here, as the odds are that the email address given with the comment is bogus.

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An interesting journey fueled by our commenters

I just got done with an interesting journey this morning and yesterday, fueled by commenters on the post below. I’ll go through the links one by one, and urge you to follow my path for your own entertainment. Otherwise, I will summarize.

440 vs 435: Tyrone took us to this link. His comment was in part

“Separating emotion from critical function is the mandate of all pop culture, corporate division. “

That’s an important insight. I have long avoided advertising in all forms for that very reason, that the object of advertising is to distract us with one message while subtly inserting another. Of course, most often that “other” message is simply “buy this product.” The larger point is, however, that advertising is never straightforward. As one young ad executive told me once in a candid moment, the purpose of advertising is to get us to change our behavior. TV has long been the best medium for dispensing this message and altering our behaviors, as we are in a mild hypnotic state while watching.

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Wolfgang Amadeus McCartney

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be
There’s a shadow hanging over me.
Oh, yesterday came suddenly.

I’ve been running these lyrics through my head lately, as something about them does not fit. The song Yesterday was supposedly written by Paul McCartney in 1964 when he would have been age 20 or 22, depending on which Paul McCartney we are talking about – the original Beatle who performed the song, born 6/18/1942, or the twin brother given a spooky birth date of 1/7/44.

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The missionary position

Our friend and fellow writer Gaiassphere and I have been going back and forth on the nature of shills, who is a shill and who is not. I don’t claim to know everything, which is comforting as it allows me to be wrong and move on. But the recent self-outing of AA Morris was revealing.

Morris, as I gather, appeared on the scene in 2017, and within a stretch of maybe ten seven months had put up 200 225 or so podcasts, each long and tedious and detailed. That does not happen in real life, so I knew he was reading a script. But what if he wrote the script and was merely reading his own stuff? Possible, I suppose. Unlikely, but possible.

Anyway, enough about Morris. I hope Gaiassphere writes more about that experience in public. He has given us some tantalizing details in private.

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Outing Brian Staveley

I have one household chore that generally takes well over an hour, and so like to have background noise. This morning I listened to Brian Staveley in a 9/11 video hosted by AB and Fakeologist.

I am not a good liar, and in fact decided years ago that it is better in almost all cases (except when feelings are needlessly hurt) to be honest. Consequently, I have never studied the art of lying. My first wife was a highly skilled liar, part of the reason she was able to charm me into being her mate. I still marvel at how she can tell detailed lies with seeming innocence and absolute conviction. That is what it takes to be a good liar.

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Don’t touch me, you brute!

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I was in vegetative state last night when I saw this penalty called on a Cincinnati Bengal defender. He reached out and grabbed the jersey of the offensive player, but not in a way that impeded his motion in attempting to catch an otherwise overthrown ball. It was probably just a hyperactive referee, but reminded me that officials control the game of football with their ability to call or not call anything on any play. This was ridiculous.

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