Author: Mark Tokarski

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

On re-reading the Cultural Cold War

I first read The Cultural Cold War  in 2019. Written by Frances Stonor Saunders, it was highly recommended to his readers by Miles Mathis. I gave my copy away. It is one of those books that should be kept on hand for reference. Saunders is surprisingly (to me) young to have published such a book. She would have been 33 when it was first published in 1999. I am rereading the 2013 edition. (Saunders is currently 58.)

I am only 30 pages into the book. I ordered it while we were in Europe, as the only reading I did over there was of the beach variety, Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin, and The Woman in Cabin 10, by Ruth Ware. I started reading another book by Ware, The Lying Game, but opted not to finish it as I felt it was going to be very dark and depressing. After exposure to those three books, I longed for substance, not looking down my nose by any means, but rather preferring nonfiction over popular fiction.

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Waiting to catch a plane … like watching election returns?

We are sitting in our hotel room in Venice, and head for the airport at checkout time, 11AM, which is 3AM in Denver. Tonight when we arrive in Denver, it will be 10:30 there, but in our heads 2:30 in the morning. I have always had a harder time traveling west than east,  so getting back on Colorado time will take some effort. 

Sitting in our hotel room waiting to go to the airport, not wanting to get there too early, is tedious. It’s like watching election returns, which I have not done in years. They don’t have the final numbers, but need to keep you glued so you watch the commercials. So you just sit and watch. 

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The Steppes of Dubrovnik

Well, here we are again, in the last two days of our trip. We haven’t traveled in some time now, first with Covid forcing us to cancel a trip to the Dolomites in 2020, and then again after with health issues, same result.

We came back to the Dolomites this time, but scaled back from the older times. Our longest trek this trip was seven miles with 1,500 feet of climbing, staying in the same hotel every night. In times past we went hut-to-hut with miles between them (refugios they are called), and challenging ascents of three or more thousand feet, one time four. I like to think we’ll get back to it, but in the back of my mind I think not, not with arthritic knees. I don’t take any kind of pain relief medicine, not even Advil, as I am pretty sure they are not good for us and are habit-forming. And, as I hear, they quit working after time.
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An open letter to Mike Williams, Sage of Quay

Mike Williams is also known (musically, I think) as Sage of Quay, and runs a website by that name. He puts out videos, and since I have been traveling, suffering jet lag and that sort of thing, I’ve watched a few of them. They are quite long, and in my opinion, very good. I will link to some of them at the end, but not run them here.

Generally when someone does an “open letter”, get ready for a takedown. That is not my purpose. Mike does a few common themes which cause me to avoid him, such as the idea that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a person known as Billy Shears. He and I have been around the block on that, and I am not going to rehash, as it serves no purpose. The whole of the McCartney business was covered here in my post, Sir Faul. His side, my side, and a group that first performed on Ed Sullivan in 1962, 62 years ago!

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No two alike

We were booked on Delta to fly to Venice out of Atlanta on Monday, but Delta could not find a gate for their plane. We ended up in B107, and left there three hours late. That meant we missed all our connections the following day, and depended on the kindness of strangers. At the train station Bolzano a shuttle driver agreed to give us a ride to the airport, even as he was off duty. We offered him twenty euro, and he only reluctantly took it, hiding it under papers on his passenger seat. Our car rental agency was closed, so we needed to get to our hotel, but no cabs were available. Two police officers, the only other people in Bolzano Airport, called all over and finally ran down a cab for us. They were very kind. Europcar the next day downgraded our reservation to a tiny Fiat since we were late getting there. I have to duck my head to lower the visor.

White guy problems? I suppose. Delta, by way of apology, gave 200 of us a free snack, airline peanuts or tiny bags of chips.

But here is the interesting thing, and I have experienced this once before. Delta announced when we finally boarded that our faces would be our boarding passes. To get in the plane we stood for maybe a second before a camera that looked at our facial plates, recognized us from passport photos, and let us pass.

My facial work is far less sophisticated, but this reinforces my notion that no two of us look alike. Take that, all you Martin Luther King/Don King doubters.

Martin Luther King … hidden in plain sight

It’s not every day this happens, but when it does, my heart soars like a hawk. I am going to reprint some comments from You Can Call Me Ray. Since we are leaving on a trip Monday morning, I don’t have time to flesh this out, study the timelines, do multiple face chops. But I am confident that with the face chop above and all of the circumstantial evidence supplied by Ray, that we can make a strong case that Martin Luther King, Jr., who readers of this blog know did not die April 4, 1968, simply became someone else.  Hopefully Ray will be around to flesh it out in the comments. I could wait until our return later in September, but truth is, I can’t wait to publish this. I am waiting on Ray’s permission to proceed. (By the way, face chops like the one above are hard to come by – you’d be surprised how rare it is to find the subjects looking directly at the camera, which is why I elected to use the one of Don King with a cigar in his mouth.)

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Memory Lane: The Death of Eva Perón

María Eva Duarte de Perón, popularly known as Evita, was an early rock star of sorts, the Princess Diana of her time, the late 1940s-early 50s. She was world famous. She was (1946-forward) the First Lady of Argentina by way of her 1945 marriage to Juan Perón, who was elected president in 1946. Evita is said to have died on July 26, 1952.

This post is a bit of a rehash of my work surrounding Evita. I am quite certain her 1952 death was fake. I posted as much on my blog, PieceofMindful, and walked right in on the greatest shock of my life thereafter. How’s that for a tease?

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IPCC: Just Bad at Science … or Engaged in Science Fraud?

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and climate alarmists in general don’t think the sun is terribly important in the matter of the climate of our planet. As absurd as that sounds, there is a reason: The UN’s political Agenda (established by Resolution A/RES/43/53 of the UN General Assembly in 1988) is to promote Anthropogenic Climate Change. That is the cart that precedes AGW and its so-called science horse. If the sun was shown to be a major player in global climate, it would short circuit the AGW movement. But that creates a problem, as the sun is indeed the major player behind our planet’s climate.

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National Interagency Fire Center joins the long con

The Heartland Institute is a group of climate change skeptics comprised of scientists and others, many like me simply impressed with their work and willing to contribute. (I tongue-in-cheek give them $33 a month). In 2022 they put out a booklet called Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students that offers up a brief summary of thirty hot topics, so to speak. Each item is referenced so that debate among the public and climate “scientists” can go on intelligently.

The above graph is a 93-year record of forest fires in the lower 48. I recognize that it is somewhat blurry, as I had to scan it out of the book. It is no longer available on public agency websites. The X-axis is years, 1920-2020, and the Y-axis the number of acres burned in the lower 48, 10 million to 60 million. As we can see, the most acreage burned by forest fires was the 1930s and 40s, with 1931 seeing 52 million acres burned. I hesitate to say we “lost” acreage, as it has almost all grown back, and also know that wildfires are a natural component of forest health.

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