Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Sunday fiddlesticks

On being oblivious

We were walking on a trail in Anchorage last week, the day before returning. We were looking for moose, said to habituate the area. Not so, not that morning anyway. As we walked the grandson and I were tossing handfuls of elderberries at one another, my objective with my stenosis-limited arm to land them somehow in the hood of his sweatshirt. There was a time when I had a good strong arm for throwing things, even if inaccurately, as my old softball team members would attest.

I was not doing so well at this improvised contest. When we arrived at the car I found that surreptitiously the boy (and my wife) had been loading up the hood of my rain jacket with elderberries. And I was oblivious to it all.

The thing about being oblivious is that I don’t know, cannot know things that others around me know. Maybe I am the butt of a joke, and that’s OK. I have a good sense of humor and do not take myself too seriously,. The elderberry event was simply more evidence that things are slipping away from me. So be it.

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Editor emediocrus

I used the post down below as a means to write a review of the book, Unsettled, by Steven E. Koonin, severely editing it. I had little hope of seeing my review published by Amazon, as over the past couple of years overt censorship has taken over so much of our lives.

“Overt,” mind you. Not new,. It has always been like this. Technically speaking, we have, as expressed in the Bill of Rights, an inalienable right to freedom of speech. It is not given us by our Constitution. We own it, have it, have always had it. But during my years after schooling I slowly realized that this inherent right to speak our minds is severely limited, that is, if I have an opinion about who should be the quarterback of the Denver Broncos, that opinion easily flows through the censors. It is painless, stupid, offends no one, not even the current quarterback, whatever his name. (Russell Wilson.)

However, if my opinions are of a more serious nature, and especially if they rub up against anyone who has power, say the editor of a small local newspaper, they will be censored. Back in pre-Internet days the outlets for personal opinions were limited to newspapers and radio talk shows, and the gnomes guarding the caves were newspaper editors and talk show hosts.

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Unsettled, the book, and one more interview

“Unsettled” is a book by Steven E. Koonin, former science advisor in the Obama administration. That last part, following “former”, means nothing to me other than such a title offers credibility to normies who might then read the book.

Koonin writes, in the first nine chapters, a devastating critique of so-called “Climate Science”, which he capitalizes to distinguish it from real science. In short order he destroys current propaganda concerning emissions, the role of carbon dioxide (called “carbon” by alarmists), global warming, storms and forest fires, floods, sea levels, and the pending apocalypse.

Then he pulls his punches. He uses the word “hoax” but once, and places it in quotation marks, as if such a thing were not happening as we speak. He speaks of the science surrounding climate as if it is peopled by honest blokes who are mistaken in their alarmist views. True enough, however, he does concede that those scientists who do not go along with the consensus are severely punished.

Here are three quotes he highlights at the outset. offering more promise to the substance of the book than he musters in the end:

“[Inaction will cause] … by the turn of the century [2000], an ecological catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.” (Mostafa Tolba, former executive directions of the United Nation Environmental Program, 1982)

[Within a few years] winter snowfall [in the UK] will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”(David Viner, Senior Research Scientist, 2000)

“European cities will be plunged beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020.” (Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, quoting a Pentagon report in The Guardian, 2004)

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Big John

We are traveling with our grandson, a delightful boy who is slowly teaching us how to use our iPhones. For instance, we are never to go to maps to find a location. We are to hold down the “Siri button. Further, we are never to say “Hey Siri.” We merely hold the button and issue a command. It sure makes my driving less dangerous to others.

The above video is from another era, a 1962 top-10 hit by Jimmy Dean, yes, the guy who founded the sausage label. That is the only connection now between grandson and him. It is a ballad about John F. Kennedy and his heroic efforts to save his crew after a disastrous encounter with a Japanese warship tore his boat, PT109, in half.

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What I’ve been up to …

This photo was taken on the Katmai Peninsula, Brooks Falls, a world-renowned place to view the Alaskan brown bears feeding. These amazing animals have but three months to fatten up for a six-month hibernation. A run of red (sockeye) salmon helps them along.

We viewed them safely from a platform above. At one time we counted 17 bears present. Standing in the river downstream, perhaps 300 yards away, are a dozen fly fishermen. The forest service lectures everyone to mind our manners, never interfere or draw the attention of a bear. Since we are not a food source, we coexist in tenuous harmony. I stood with a small group outside a restroom as two of these massive creatures wandered by us, not oblivious, but not concerned.

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An interesting Tom Hanks story

This could mean something, but is probably nothing. Nonetheless, I found it interesting.

It has to do with Conan O’Brien. His father is well-placed and a very important man, but I see his genealogy, while not scrubbed, only goes back to the turn of the 20th century. His mother is a Reardon, maybe a peerage name, and her genealogy goes back to the mid-1800s.

Conan went to Harvard, studied hard and got good grades. He happened to join the Harvard Lampoon at the urging of a friend, and found he had a bent for making people laugh. This was not his original calling or his plan for his future. After college, I believe he did some improv, and then ended up as a writer for Saturday Night Live. He was not on-screen talent, and only did rare camera appearances. He did love making the entire writers’ room laugh.

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Anyone know a home remedy?

Yesterday I was listening to musician/actor Jack Black on the Smartless podcast. He mentioned that he was a guest on Conan O’Brien’s last Late Night TV show in June of 2020.

Something that I have always known or assumed, when you are watching say Late Night with Dave Letterman (I know, he’s now retired) and he does one of his bits where he gets up and leaves the stage to go, say, down to the street below or into a back office, all of the footage you see was filmed in advance and the host is merely sitting down offstage while it runs. Their only problem is continuity, to be sure he is wearing the same clothing for both the advance shots and the live broadcast.

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To quote MM

“Despite that, I would say things are looking pretty good long-term for those of us who refused the vaccines et al. The rest of the year will be turbulent, but I think that after the mid-term elections things may stabilize a bit. I think that is part of the plan. After that, the results of the great culling will start coming in, and will come in for decades. The primary result will be 10-20% fewer people on planet Earth, which—though achieved by murder—will have its upsides for those of us left. I expect the housing market to cool way off, for instance, due to a glut of existing housing. It will quickly go from a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market.” (Miles Mathis, side note in paper titled Charles Dickens)

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Narcissistic malevolence

I borrowed the phrase Narcissistic Malevolence from Jordan Peterson. He used it in reference to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who banned six million unvaccinated Canadians from traveling for months after the rest of the world had eased up on this insane and punitive policy. When I heard him use it, I immediately thought of Joe Biden and the leaders of the Climate Change Alarmist movement.

These people are malevolent. They want to harm us. They claim that CO2 is the control knob for climate change, and then set out to destroy nuclear power, which is CO2-free. I had a long conversation with Gaia and Ab about nuclear, as they claim that power plants merely absorb excess energy to keep the grid from boiling over. All I can say at this point is if nuclear power is an illusion, it is a grand one. I need to explore more than I have. Just understand that on the surface, shutting down nuclear plants directly contradicts any real desire to rein in CO2 in the atmosphere.

Climate alarmists are harming us with record gasoline prices and shortages of energy in Europe and England and Australia. But the long-term outlook is even more depressing, as they continue to push renewable energy even as they know it cannot replace fossil fuels. How do I know they know this? Because of the malevolence, the desire to harm us. Solar and wind contributes hardly anything to our net energy use, yet Biden is using that as a lever to shut down coal and oil production. He can read, he can even interpret a graph, and so knows exactly what he is doing.

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It’s official now: I have lived too long

My wife and I are in our seventies now, and each of us is trim. That doesn’t just happen, however. It takes great effort.

First, we had to understand the nature of body weight – why it accumulates, where it accumulates. There are a lot of fad diets, from starvation (and accompanying psychosis) to vegan. In between are things that sell books, like South Beach and Caveman. I cannot speak for my wife, as we each cook for ourselves and eat differently. For myself, I long ago settled on what is now called “Keto,” short for ketosis.

If you wake up in the morning with “morning breath,” you are in ketosis, that is, fat-burning mode. Often during the night our bodies run short on carbohydrates and convert to that mode. This is the essence of Keto, to force our bodies into fat-burning mode, not just as we sleep, but 24/7.

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