Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Dog sense

Dear Neighbor:

Isn’t it a wonderful time of year? The mornings are cool, the scents of the forest invigorating. It must be wonderful for you to walk your dog each morning and take it all in.

But please, fellow human, clean up after him! This morning he left a pile on our newspaper at the bottom of the driveway. Some dignity, please!

Sincerely,
Mark
______________

Dear neighbor’s dog,

What a treat this time of year to be out taking in the smells each morning! I see your owner walks you, and if you are a normal dog, you’re checking out everything there is to check out. It’s dog heaven!

But please, when you take a dump, do it somewhere other than our driveway.

That aside, I am curious. We take two newspapers: The Denver Post and the Financial Times. You took your crap on the Denver Post.

How did you know?

Sincerely,
Mark

How to cook a frog

jacksmith wrote down below concerning ACA

There is no mandate to buy private for-profit health insurance. There is only a nominal tax on income eligible individuals who don’t have health insurance. This is a HUGE! difference. And I suspect that tax may be subject to constitutional challenge as it ripens.

This is a critically important distinction. Because under the commerce clause individuals would have been compelled to support the most costly, dangerous, unethical, morally repugnant, and defective type of health insurance you can have. For-profit health insurance, and the for-profit proxies called private non-profits and co-ops.

Equally impressive in the courts ruling was the majorities willingness to throw out the whole law if the court could not find a way to sever the individual mandate under the commerce clause from the rest of the act. Bravo! Supreme Court.

The penalty for failure to buy private insurance is $94, insignificant. However, one must understand the position of AHIP (American Health Insurance Providers) as they guided this bill from birth to passage. An onerous fine would have raised hackles and may have rallied support against it. The important objective at that time was the principle put in motion: AHIP has the power to force the government to impose fines on us if we do not buy insurance from them. These people are rent seekers, nothing more. The fine is currently a feather. In the end, it will be an anvil. They mean business.

Will the get bigger? It depends on us. If we do as we are told and buy their crappy products, the fine will stay small. But if we don’t, if we are recalcitrants, they will indeed stick it to us. The fine will go up, eventually approaching the cost of a health insurance policy. That’s why it is there.

That is the only reason to have a fine. The fact that it starts out small is akin to the old story about cooking a frog … start it out in lukewarm water. By the time he realizes it is hot enough to cook him, it is too late.

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

I was a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal in the early 1990’s and their editorial pages, then as now, were rabid right-wing. But every Thursday there appeared a man named Alexander Cockburn, a leftist. Things were a bit different in those days. People talked to each other.

WSJ described Cockburn, as I recall, as a writer for Village Voice (run by Rupert Murdoch, who never once censored him), and the “Anderson Valley Advertiser.” That was a bit of an inside joke, as AVA, run by another fine writer and wit and Cockburn’s friend, Bruce Anderson, was a small town newspaper in Boonville, CA with a circulation of maybe 3,000. Cockburn charged AVA $25 to run his weekly column. I subscribed for years, only drifting off after the Internet made everything available everywhere. I need to re-up.

Cockburn was loyal, fierce, original, insightful and witty. He had no admiration for powerful people who abused others. He angered many of them, and some will no doubt now crawl from their hovels to pay him back. Dealing with him in real-time was not easy. He was smart, quick, and did not suffer fools.

The best remembrances of Cockburn that I’ve read are at AVA, by Bruce Anderson.

Mark’s weekly poetry series

This weekly poetry series starts here today, and will continue every Monday throughout July except for next week. It’s meant to show that I have depth too. Shhhhheeeeet! I’ve got lots of it. I go way down.

The poem that came to mind is not some obscure remnant of some insightful individual. That’s just not a good way to make mass market poetry, which is the only kind that makes a scalable financial return. Indeed, this is a Facebook entry of unknown origin, so that Facebook itself might someday be able to monetize it. (Facebook has indeed advanced its ability to monitor entries to provide carefully targeted ads to users.* Can it be long before it claims ownership of all content?)

I think of the poem as Homeric.

Roses are red.
Bacon is also red.
Poems are hard.
Bacon.

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*Perhaps this explains the emails I get from sexy, horny, lonely Russian women.

Isn’t it ironic

The tragedy in Aurora, Colorado is of course causing anxiety and angst throughout this country, laden as it is with weaponry and ammunition within reach of any citizen. James Holmes appeared weird to some, smart to others, and just a tad off kilter. One young woman who lives in his apartment building said he had a “stay away” quality about him, a feminine instinct she said. More likely it is that hair-standing-up-on-neck reaction we sometimes get being close to psychopaths. I remember clearly having that reaction to a much younger Dick Cheney as he spoke to reporters when we attacked Panama in 1989. Creepy.

Holmes’ lone recorded offense is, as I read it, a traffic citation.

Irony abounds. President Obama:

We never understand what leads someone to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Life is very fragile and it is precious.

Obama, of course, never has to look into the eyes of his victims, the countless Afghanis and Pakistanis he has murdered, along with a few Americans. (“They were all bad guys!” said Schwarzenegger, speaking of Palestinians in his movie “True Lies.” Yes, dear reader, movie themes are coming to mind today. Just the fact that they are calling it the “Movie Massacre” rather than the “Dark Knight Massacre” speaks of the power at work behind the scenes to protect the franchise.)

Obama is, as Hannah Arendt coined a term, a “desk murderer.” He loves his own children beyond words, as we all do, and kills those of others with reckless indifference. And he cannot see it because just like the pilots who drop the ordnance, he is murdering from afar.

Further curiosity on my part: Why has no one mentioned the most grotesque scene of blood and mayhem in American film history, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where a theater was sealed and everyone inside murdered. It came instantly to mind for me, along with the words “Ah, that’s just Tarantino.” Quentin, you should realize that not everyone out there is normal, like you. Be careful please.

And finally, we learned that Warner Brothers is “deeply saddened.” It is true then! Corporations are people.

A silly place

In the news this morning about the tragedy in Aurora, we learn that President Obama is “shocked and saddened” and that Mitt Romney is “saddened” but apparently not shocked. Score one for Obama.

That’s important to know. But it would really be news worthy of print if either admitted that they were distant, uninvolved and indifferent, the likely situation.

Who planted that bomb?

A bomb exploded on a bus in Bulgaria, killing six seven Israeli teenagers and wounding many more. No one has claimed ‘credit” but Israel is busy charging that Iran is behind the attack.

It bears watching. One thing I know – it was not Iran, nor Hezbollah. Contrary to various demonization campaigns, neither is in the business of deliberately blowing up civilians, much less children. That is an American/Israeli calling card. Beyond that, Iran’s leadership is not insane, nor is it suicidal. An act of no strategic value done at a time when the US is showing the flag and rattling sabers would be insanity.

I have my suspicions, if indeed this is an act of terrorism. I would immediately suspect either American or Israeli intelligence agents/provocateurs/terrorists. The reason is as old as time itself – when there is a need for war, there is a need for provocation. That’s why Hitler did Reichstag, and why the US attacked itself at Tonkin. If the reader might think that Americans and Israelis don’t kill children, millions of people would beg to differ. Start in Iraq.

Watch what follows: If the US resists the call to attack Iran, then it is Israel acting alone, trying to provoke the US. If the US jumps at the opportunity to attack Iran, using the bus explosion as casus belli, then it was likely American agents that planted (or authorized Israel to plant) the bomb.

Which reminds me – there was a suicide bombing yesterday in Syria, and several high-ranking officials were killed, including the defense minister. What I am looking for now are any American news sources who refer to this incident as “terrorism.” Glenn Greenwald did reproduce the tweet on the left from Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff at the Pentagon.

As I’ve said many times before, I’d be content if the US would limit itself to mere double standards. Three, four, five standards are too hard to track.

British judge censors documentary

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either. (Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar)

The name of judge who handed down the order was not disclosed.

From the Guardian:

The BBC has pulled a film about the experiences of rioters during last summer’s disturbances just hours before it was due to be broadcast after a ruling from a judge. The film, due to be broadcast on BBC2 at 9pm on Monday, was a dramatisation based on the testimony of interviews conducted for the Guardian and London School of Economics research into the disorder.

The British public is not allowed to know the “nature of the order or the identity of the judge who handed down the ruling.”

Contrast this with the United States, where we have had uprisings and even some rioting, and where we have a first amendment. We have large corporate-owned broadcasting outlets free of government censorship. These corporations are staffed by highly trained journalists and fronted by pretty faces who emphasize selected news with great sincerity and ignore other selected news with a high measure of opacity.

These organizations have the good sense never to make documentaries that are such an affront power. We don’t need no stinking court to tell us that.