Author: Mark Tokarski

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

A new link, and a treasure trove of podcasts

This link is to a specific podcast, Most Peoples Brains Are Broken. In comments beneath another post, we were linked to Legalman and some of his writing, that about the abuses of the Supreme Court. I think the name of the blog was The Truth About the Law. He has apparently quit posting and gone over to podcasts.

This link is to his current blog, which looks to be entirely podcasts. It is called The Quash.

Two things about Legalman: One, he is a lawyer. The other, his voice reminds me of Jimmy Stewart, or at least Stewart as done by Dana Carvey. You might catch this as his voice inflects upward.

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A glimmer of hope

The post below was written in 2016. I had just read a book that, amazingly, still rests on my shelf, called Everything You Know About the Constitution is Wrong, by a man calling himself Edward James Snowden. I normally do not recommend what others should read or watch or think. It is up to you.

Last night comments were appearing on the nature of our Constitution, and I remembered this book. It had impacted me. There are many threads within the book that Snowden writes well about, but the one that caught my eye most when I read it was the 14th Amendment, passed in 1868. It is long and wordy, and I will reprint here only the pertinent parts of the first clause:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Honestly, that sounds like overstating the obvious along with virtue signalling. The country had just emerged from a bloody Civil War, blacks were emancipated, so the ground was ripe to make major substantial changes in our laws. Prior to this amendment, non-black people were citizens of the various states, and none (except slaves) could be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Blacks were no longer slaves. Why restate? It appears as though the purpose was to make everyone a subject of the Federal Government rather than any state.

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Liberal Democrats and the Bill of Rights

Anyone who paid attention during the Covid lockdowns, testing and mask regimes saw what I saw: A very high correlation between liberal Democrat governors and highly repressive rules. My former home state of Montana was among the worst. Governor Bullock mandated that anyone entering the State be quarantined for two weeks, with or without (worthless) PCR testing. New York and California were equally and unjustifiably harsh. These liberal cats bared their claws and stopped pretending to be supporters of our Constitution.

MM recently wrote the following:

As you may know, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade as unconstitutional, and Congresslady Maxine Waters immediately puckered up and gave a press conference and said “to hell with the Supreme Court, we will defy them”. In any rational universe, that would be cause for her immediate arrest and permanent ejection from Congress, since that is treason.

Indeed, a group of office holders who cared so little about due process and free assembly during the lockdowns are not going to honor the law of the land, a Supreme Court decision.

MM urged that Waters be jailed, and I second that notion.

We’ve written plenty about the Covid regime. This post, however, is about another court ruling.

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Smartless … Jeff Bridges

I listen to podcasts these days when exercising, more so than music. There are a number of good ones out there. My own preference is comedy. It seems during lockdown people decided that being alone at home and hooking up via computers was a way to alleviate boredom. There are quite a few, my own favorites Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and Fly on the Wall with David Spade and Dana Carvey.

One that I picked up on is called Smartless, which has three hosts: Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, the latter one of my favorite comedic actors. He played Job on Arrested Development. Bateman, of course, is one of our Brats, part of the Matt Damon group, and appears unaware of it. He is not aware of us, of course, but his own “chosen” nature. He had an unhappy childhood and that sort of thing. He’s been employed on one thing or another his entire life, including Arrested Development, where he shows great comedic chops (along with Arnett). Hayes I know nothing about, a costar in Will and Grace, a show I never watched.

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MMT and current inflation

I was reading something a short while back about our current rate of inflation, 8.6%, and what is causing it. One of the reasons given was MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. That is accurate, but not true.

The classic definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Indeed, MMT can be the cause of too much money, and probably is. The government has been throwing money at people for over two years now, subsidizing unemployment, keeping business afloat, and in our case just sending us free money, hoping we would spend it. We did not.

As I understand it, we have been practicing MMT for over fifty years now, since 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window, the “Nixon Shock” as it was called. Prior to that time, based on the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, gold was pegged at $35 an ounce, and the US guaranteed that exchange. But even on the gold standard, we have had bouts of inflation.

The source of that “too much money”? The same as always – deficits. Here’s a chart of inflation since World War II. In addition, shocks to the pricing system like the rise of crude oil from $5 to $40 per barrel in response to two (fake) embargoes had a ripple effect through the economy. Poor Jimmy Carter was a deer in the headlights.

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Climate news

EPA can  no longer regulate CO2 emissions from power generation plants

This is, in my view, huge! Supreme Court ruling : EPA doesn’t have power to regulate carbon dioxide. In reading the summary of the ruling, we find Chief Justice Roberts’ words …

“But the only interpretive question before us, and the only one we answer, is more narrow: whether the “best system of emission reduction” identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. For the reasons given, the answer is no.”

It appears that EPA is a usurpatory agency – I made that word up. It also appears that Congress did not do its job, as it is the body that must do the regulation if regulation need be done. Instead it shifted that responsibility to EPA, and the final nine say that is a no-no.

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A new batch?

This latest batch came about because Stephers noticed a strong resemblance among three men, seen below.

They are, left to right, actor Scott Bakula, pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and actor Ben Stiller. Most times mere resemblance does not pay off in face splitting, as our eyes are not terribly reliable. But Stephers saw something that turned out to be real. See below.

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Covid vaxxing causes infertility?

I was going to link to this in a comment but decided it deserves more exposure, including 1,791 emails that go out when I post it. This link will take you to Fakeologist and a post titled Covid Vaccines and Infertility. I wondered about this as I wrote the post below, if they are finally making abortion less easily obtained due to a rise in infertility, making it far less an issue than ever before.

These people we are dealing with are, after all, misanthropists.

Give Ab a visit.

Dobbs versus reality

The US Supreme Court has overturned Roe V Wade and turned the matter of legal abortion back to the states, where it never should have left.

I will not get into legalities. That’s beyond me. I only want to recount my experience not of abortion, but as a young boy raised in an intensely Catholic environment. I was 21 when Roe v Wade came down, and I was appalled and disgusted. At that age, so inexperienced and overly righteous, I had no problem in judging that women, once pregnant, needed to stay pregnant, and either put up their children for adoption, or set aside their lives, futures and careers and raise that child.

How do unwanted pregnancies happen? Poor judgment, strong impulses, changes in circumstances, and probably most importantly, alcohol. Slowly over time my attitudes began to soften. Sometimes pregnancy is an unplanned mistake, and if there is a way out without killing a fully formed baby (or fetus), I thought it best to take it. What is more important – the life of a fetus, not fully formed or sentient, or that of a young woman, who should be allowed to make a mistake and still have a future.

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