Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Kicking the can down the road

After writing and publishing this in a sleep-deprived state, I thought I ought to take it down and rework it. I slept from 8PM to 1:30AM, and then from 2AM to 4AM last night, which is 7-1/2 hours, so I ought to be rested. But I’m not. This aging thing, I don’t understand much of it. Some of it I like, as with never being expected to stay late at a gathering or participate in a family volleyball game. I’m never asked to pick up someone from the airport, 75 minutes away on the other side of Denver. It’s not all bad.

Anyway, here’s the piece, hopefully much shortened.

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Additional work on Columbine

In my original piece on the Columbine “massacre”, September of 2017, I had stopped doing face chops, thinking them the object of ridicule among “informed” folk. Instead, I began doing opaque overlays wherein one person becomes another. Thus in the Columbine piece did I show Eric Harris morphing into Trey Parker and Dylan Klebold into Matt Stone, Parker and Stone being the alleged creators of the long running TV show South Park.

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Jim Bennett RIP

I met this man but once, maybe forty years ago, but once was enough. He and I sat next to each other at a fancy luncheon in Billings, Montana. At that time I was employed by a woman who was, by means of inheritance, very wealthy, so it was not unusual that I would be seated beside the president of a local bank. 

First, Jim was a nice man. At the time I met him he was probably early 50s, as he died in 2025 at age 93. That would make him perhaps 54 at the time, me 35. He was well liked in the community, and if anyone not knowing him takes time to read his obit, he was well loved by kids, grandkids, and was married to the same woman for 72 years. He was a good man and had a life well-lived. 

But enough about that. God rest his soul. I only sat next to him for a couple of hours one day forty years ago, and it stuck with me. Why? Perhaps out of the blue, perhaps for some unremembered reason of passing conversation, Jim took time to explain to me war bonds that were issued during World War II. He said, to my young and curious ears, that the money they raised from those bonds was not used to pay for the war. That was just the selling point to get the public to go along. 

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Off to see the Wizard

I was driving down highway 285 into Denver (Lakewood) last week and came across a man carrying a cross. As I was going 70mph, I did not take time to note his dress or hair style nor stop for a photo. The cross was large, taller than him, and as a result rested on wheels. This man’s commitment goes only so far, it appears.  

There is no photo of the man easily available, and so I grabbed the photo shown above, said to be of Roy Scott and Moab (Utah) pastor Rick Pacheco. Scott has apparently vowed to take his cross coast to coast. I do not know if he is the man I saw on 285, as there have been others around the country doing the same thing. 

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Ratiocination

I get up each morning (at a ridiculous hour) and settle in with coffee and a well-lit easy chair and read. That time is my favorite time of day. Right now I have several books going, and where once I would try to work my way through them as if they were assigned reading, I now allow them to penetrate the cranium and stop whenever I’ve had enough, or as a famous Far Side cartoon once had a student asking a teacher: “May I be excused? My brain is full.” (In that cartoon, Gary Larson drew the kid with an unusually small head compared to the kids around him.)

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The nature of political power

I get a sickly feeling when I see the Climate agenda backed by raw political power, as it has been from the beginning, as anyone who could read between the lines of the Climategate emails should have come to understand. I gets a bit sicklier when I see scientists throwing numbers and papers at one another, as if it were all just a debate among good scientists and less good ones. It’s about changing the world and the way we live. It’s got a good dose of climate imperialism built in, in case anyone wonders if anything ever really changes.

We live in the high Rockies, and have to look hard to see if anything has changed at all. Other than perceptions (it snowed every Christmas till seven years ago) nothing has changed, not here, not in Pakistan. But the beat goes on day in and out, made up news, disasters, distorted realities. Nothing has changed. Look out your window if you don’t believe me.

I posted the above comment at The Honest Broker, a Substack hosted by Roger Pielke, Jr., under his article The Takeover of the IPCC. I don’t know if the comment is still there or only visible to me. Pielke Jr.  is a prolific writer, and gathering as I can from his past work, supports the IPCC framework and the idea that Climate Change presents and existential crisis. He departs from the mainstream in that he doesn’t think there is any way to change it. It will take decades, he asserts, to make a noticeable difference. For that reason he was labeled a climate skeptic, aka, a “denier,” the propaganda term used to demonize honest science and dissent. 

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Pop Quiz: Game Show Host, or Politician

“Our politicians, they all seemed like game show hosts to me.”

The above quote is from Sting, the musician, and is quite insightful, if you ask me. Below the fold here are photos of fifteen men, and your job is to 1) identify them, or 2) failing in that, tell me whether they are games show hosts or politicians. Keep in mind, there is one clinker.

I’ll put the answers in the comments.

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The green flash, and a non-self aware author

Back in April of 2019 (pre-Covid), we were in Tucson, AZ to get out of Colorado’s seemingly endless winter and to celebrate my birthday. One of the treats was to visit the Kitt Peak Observatory, an array of optical and radio telescopes. I learned quite a bit.

  • It’s very cold in the Arizona desert at night. Dress appropriately. 
  • Even if you’ve not been pulled over by a cop in ten years, that is not a good way to project the future.*
  • Large telescopes deliver images much like the early days of PC’s, mostly one color and subject to interpretation. 
  • Power of suggestion is everything needed to justify the exorbitant cost of two Kitt Peak tickets. The following day we got email copies of the images we had seen, with two problems: They were colorized, and they were not what we saw. This is the same strategy Disney uses when you visit them, to take a photo of you and Mickey where you are smiling big, so that later you will forget how miserable you were when you posed for that stupid photo. I was cold and disappointed as we looked through one of their smaller scopes. 

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Bunk, debunk, and Mike Williams

“Back in 1820, Felix Walker, who represented North Carolina’s Buncombe County in the U.S. House of Representatives, was determined that his voice be heard on his constituents’ behalf, even though the matter up for debate was irrelevant to Walker’s district and he had little of substance to contribute. To the exasperation of his colleagues, Walker insisted on delivering a long and wearisome “speech for Buncombe.” His persistent—if insignificant—harangue made buncombe (later respelled bunkum) a synonym for meaningless political claptrap and came later to refer to any kind of nonsense.” (Merriam Webster)

“History is more or less bunk.” (Henry Ford)

“The most trusted fact-checking websites on television programs go to some expense to maintain their reputations and are often useful to check on inconsequential urban legends or threats of computer viruses. However, providing many true statements for each ruse, along with disproving false rumors, they also claim to “debunk” (a trigger word to make people believe them) proof of scams perpetrated by specific treacherous corporations.” (The Memoirs of Billy Shears, author unknown).

Con Game: “a swindle involving money, goods, etc, in which the victim’s trust is won by the swindler; a shortened form of confidence game.”

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Shootings in Anaconda, Montana

I heard about this mass shooting, from August 8th, recently even as I do not subscribe to newspapers. For some reason, information reaches me. I do check in on the Billings Gazette of my hometown, but am not a subscriber. I cannot access anything but the teaser article in the beginning.

Once upon a time, I was able to click on the teaser, and the story would appear for a brief instant before being covered by a banner. I would quickly hit control A (select all) and control C (copy) and capture the story, which I would reprint on Microsoft Word. I said to myself at the time, “Don’t let on about this! Don’t tell them you can do it.” But then one day the cover-up banner appeared so quickly that I could no longer perform this exercise. My only way of accessing content was to subscribe, and I am often intrigued by stories, but cannot force myself to push that button.

In this story, four people were shot and killed at the Owl Bar, 819 E 3rd St., Anaconda, Montana. It happened at 10:30 in the morning on August 8th. “Sounds fake!” I immediately thought.

Here they are, left to right Daniel Edwin Bailee, 59; David Allen Leach, 70, Nancy Lauretta Kelley, 64, and Tony Wayne Palm, 74. I looked them all up on Ancestry.com, and they all turn up as Anaconda residents. But there are issues:

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