Author: Mark Tokarski

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

On being woke, the Great Awokening

I started out reading a book called We Have Never Been Woke, by Musa Al-Gharbia, and finally, on page 50, I thought “I can’t do this.” I cannot finish the book. It is well-written by a new PhD who is also an intellectual, and I am reminded that I am neither of those things, and that I’ve never been curious about people who claim to be “woke.” I think it is all self-aggrandized posturing, large-scale virtue signaling. It’s made its way on to campuses, but then most campuses have long ceased to serve intelligent function, that is, producing critical thinkers who are hard-working  and serious adult humans. Instead (most) colleges offer a new kind of dumbed down.

Worse yet, Climate Alarmists have saturated campuses and schools, so that our graduating classes at all levels don’t know shit about climate and don’t know they don’t know shit. It is large-scale Dunning-Kruger. We’re in a new dark age. It’s quite a predicament.

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Exploring psyops with Petra

Below is a video featuring our friend Petra Liverani. It is over an hour long, but she kept me interested throughout. She speaks mostly about 9/11, including stuff I did not know or even know to suspect, that the building collapses we saw on television that day were CGI. The reason, she and the host Brendan Murphy speculate, is that controlled demolition would be too easy to spot. (Continued beneath the fold.)
 
[If the video does not light up your screen, go to this link to view it.]
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The Olsen twins

This matter was brought up in a comment before now, and I am unable to locate it. It is in regards to Barbara Olsen, who was allegedly killed on 9/11/2001 when the aircraft she was on, American Airlines Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon. I seem to recall that she was able to carry on a phone conversation until the moment of impact.

I am a no-planer, and so do not believe her story or her ending. She was 45 years old in 2001, and so would be 69 now. I will play with some photographs beneath the fold here, but note that her husband, Ted Olsen, remarried (several times), Barbara his third wife. He married his fourth wife, Lady Booth Olsen, in 2006, he 66 and she 45. I was surprised to find that he died just last week, on 11/13/2024 at the age of 84. Lady Booth Olsen is currently 63.

All very interesting, but the question is, what became of Barbara Olsen? The implication of the post and photos I saw was that she is one and the same person, both as Barbara Olsen, and Lady Booth Olsen. I have examined the photos, and my conclusion is that …

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Hugh Jass

Yesterday I had gotten no further than the title of this post when I came upon Kevin Starr’s delightful post on wokism. “I thought I can sit back now, he’s covered an important topic”, being “woke” versus “awake”. Here in the land of the free there is very little awakism going on. That’s always been the case.

Over a decade ago I was a fan of the NPR radio show Car Talk and its hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Tommy sadly died of Alzheimer’s in 2012, and NPR reverted to reruns, and then relegated the show to podcasts only. It is still thriving even as the boys talk about cars of the 90s and before. The reason: Tommy and Ray were nice, honest, and funny. As Doug Berman, the show’s founder noted on Tommy’s death, they were “diamonds in the rough.” I lived in Billings at a time when Yellowstone Public Radio would host quarterly fund-raising drives, and I would contribute, but only tagging my money to Car Talk. Then and now I wanted nothing to do with NPR’s woke news and public affairs broadcasts, smug and humorless.

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A Feigenbaum tree of chaotic behavior?

The above chart is a summary of various hurricane models predicting the future course of Hurricane Rafeal. I got it from an article at Watts Up With That by Kip Hansen, whose cv appears to be a Chaologist, or someone who studies chaos theory. The black spot above Cuba is the 24-hour point for the storm, and the diverging lines thereafter are predictions of its future course by the models.

As you can see, nobody knows. Why it seems almost … chaotic.

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Election oddity

Paper ballots are considered the gold standard of vote counting. Three states in the U.S. use them, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Other states claim to use them, but they are not reliable. Some just issue receipts repeating what the voter intended, but offering no guarantee that is what is recorded. Quite a few states offer nothing, just a smile and thank you to the voter, no assurance at all that the vote was even recorded, much less counted.

In the three states mentioned, voters hand-enter their choices on ballots, and the ballots are then run through optical scanners to tally the vote. It is not fool proof, as the scanning software can be corrupt, but the ballots are stored under lock and key for at least 22 months for recounts and perhaps study or statistical sampling. I think that 22 months storage is the law.

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Now it can be told

I am winding down now on my second pass through Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War, befuddled at how new the book seems new to me even as I read it well in 2019 and even took notes.

My original impressions were of how the art world was affected, with the likes of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol replacing real artists. Warhol is not mentioned, oddly. Could it be that he is left out due to his transparent nature? His work was hardly worthy of  mention in the circles of real art, yet he stole the show in the 60s and 70s, Wikipedia now calling him “…one of the most important artists of the 20th century.”

(Warhol became prominent due to an obviously staged event, a shooting by a feminist who advocated the elimination of men, Valerie Solanas. Sometimes it takes a fake major event to garner headlines and usher a fake, a charlatan into the public consciousness.)

In Saunders’ tract, Warhol should be as prominent as Pollock or Georgia O’Keefe, but is absent. Odd.

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Jimi Hendrix/Cornel West revisited

Someone linked to this post that I wrote in 2016 this week, and I reread it. I liked what I wrote eight years ago, and stand by it. I think that musician Jimi Hendrix faked his death in 1970 at age 27, and later down the road reappeared as philosopher, theologian, political activist, politician, social critic, and public intellectual Cornell West.  He has made frequent appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher, appropriate, as Maher was once known as Welsh musician Pete Ham, who faked his death in 1975. You decide. I left the comments intact underneath, 59 of them, all useful.

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See Addendum below on dental comparisons.

for-openingOne of the “zombies” we discovered some time ago was Jimi Hendrix/Cornell West. This particular assertion has created doubt, even within our group of writers here. At least part of that doubt comes from rookie caliber work – I was new at this and easily satisfied once it was established in my head that I had found a match. Consequently, others did not see what I saw, and naturally thought I had reached. I’ve got a lot more experience now, and can maybe do a better job here.

I have redone the Hendrix/West match not with the idea that I needed to prove I was right, but from scratch and letting the photos talk to me. They either convey a match or they do not.

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The Mighty Wurlitzer, Again

I wrote using the title above before, and then became engrossed in other pursuits, mostly having to do with cutting up logs, hauling them up a hill behind our house, splitting the logs and then stacking them. It takes hours and offers so little payback! All that results is a stack of wood for the winter and a savings of perhaps $300, but then, I could pay that $300 and then have the wood dumped in our driveway. I would still have to haul it and stack it.

Why bother do it myself? I have a sense that the amount of work involved is making my sore aching body somehow better.

Enough of that. I want to recount four experiences I have had on this blog with my face splitting experiments. Many years back I learned that human beings develop in many ways, some permanent. One of those permanent ways is the shape of our skulls, which are finalized in our late teens or early twenties.  It does not change thereafter. ( I can recall one person whose head was deformed by ALS so that photo comparisons of him, young and old, could not be done: Stephen Hawking.)

I thought that if I could develop a means by which I could compare faces of supposedly different (or dead) people, or people at different ages, I could uncover a mystery or two. Just as an example, another blogger used humor, splitting my face and placing it next to that of John Candy, claiming we were the same person, by my technique, anyway. 

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The Mighty Wurlitzer

A couple of anecdotes that hopefully, at the end, will tie into this piece, which is based on my reading of Frances Stonor Saunders The Cultural Cold War. They may seem detached, and if you are reading this, I have decided they are useful. Or maybe just interesting.

First, we had a man come to our house recently to clean our wood stove. It’s a long and tedious process that requires that he walk up onto our steep-peaked roof and use various tools which only make sense in light of chimney sweeping. While he was working I asked if he would mind my looking on, as there is always much to learn about the machines and devices in a home and how they work. We talked about a wide range of subjects, including music* and the sign business. While he set the ladder for the roof ascent, I mentioned that my Dad had been in the sign business, and my Mom insisted that he take me with him on summer trips to various Montana outposts. My job was to hold the ladder. I could have been filling shopping bags with Styrofoam for all the help I gave him.

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