Author: Mark Tokarski

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

The illusory pandemic

I am going to include some tables and graphs in this presentation, easily understood ones. I asked myself yesterday morning about the number of deaths (only in the US, not worldwide) during the Sars-COV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic. There was a time when pandemics were defined by “excess deaths,” but oddly that definition was replaced before Covid with the following:

[An] outbreak of infectious disease that occurs over a wide geographical area and that is of high prevalence, generally affecting a significant proportion of the world’s population, usually over the course of several months.

Deaths are no longer a factor in pandemics. I think that is odd. We generally define past pandemics by excess deaths.

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Poornima once more and hopefully, finally

Mike Stone was a guest on Ab’s Fakeologist site, and did an hour+ interview, quite well done. I only have a few qualms, purely personal preference. I felt he was too deferential to Poormina Wagh, even after he learned that her degrees were fake, her research nonexistent, and no evidence of any FBI raid anytime. I also felt he dealt with Drs. Kaufman, Cowen, Bailey(s) and Lanka with too much reverence. Ask yourself, why did these five people come to prominence exclusively of all others? I do not know the answer to that question, and only suggest to be slow to trust anyone who self-appoints as a leader. Kaufman’s appearance on the scene, especially, had the look and feel, to me, of a rollout.

What I have learned from both Poornima and the Mike Stone interview:

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Poornima versus Biggus Dickus

Al Gore was used to front for a book and movie, both released in May of 2006, called “An Inconvenient Truth” (which, trust me, he did not write). A man whose weakest subjects at Harvard were science and math does not turn around and become a science nerd. Here’s Wikipedia on his Harvard stint:

Gore was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories,[21] but he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.[20]

In other words, for the Inconvenient Truth book and movie, he was a hire. The “theories” he fell in love with had more to do with public relations than science. He obviously loves the camera. He even showed some comedic chops on 30 Rock:

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Some specious-osity

This post, as I envision it, will be a ramble about a number of topics not even related, but hopefully that generate interest and comments over the weekend. But first, I want to highlight a comment from yesterday, as I recall, on the Carl Sagan post:

Yeah, agreed on Sagan, and his successor in scientific fraud, Neal DeGrasse Tyson. I did not want this post to be a forum on Sagan, as he did say some useful things, as in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

As long as I am leading with my chin, I will lead with that, but the reason I want to highlight the comment is that in the history of this little blog, it is number 50,000. I did at one time eliminate a large number of posts as part of a general cleanup, and when a post is discarded all comments underneath it go too, but officially, that it #50K.

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Carl Sagan on scientific tyranny

This link is to Fakeologist and a video that is very brief, a minute or so of Carl Sagan interviewed by Charlie Rose not too long before his death in 1996. In the clip, Sagan is warning us of scientific tyranny, what happens when the public has no basis in science.

Of course, that is fait accompli now. Covid was the worst expression of such tyranny, a complete hoax with a fake virus and a testing process guaranteed to imitate a spreading disease.

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The mysterious greenhouse effect

It is a well-advertised fact that putting CO2 (usually referred to as “carbon” ***) into the atmosphere causes global warming. My problems with this idea are that 1) the planet is barely, almost imperceptibly warming, and 2) CO2’s role in this mild warming is very tiny. The demonization of carbon dioxide is another agenda, having nothing to do with warming, and everything to do with command and control, population reduction, and perpetuation of poverty, especially in Africa. Climate Change is in large part a racist agenda.

So, I say CO2 is not a cause of warming. Where are my facts? There are quite a few “greenhouse gases,” the primary ones being water vapor, CO2, and methane. The latter two, CO2 and methane, pale in significance to water vapor, which is the cause of 95% of the so-called greenhouse effect. That is more than twenty six times that of CO2, and over 237 times that of methane. So that if we truly wanted to stop or slow down the greenhouse effect, we would be sequestering water, not CO2.

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Secession … Is it OK to just leave?

This subject came up in the post beneath (A Tale of Two Countries) about the 14th Amendment. Was the South legally justified in seceding from the United States? BMSeattle left a comment that summed up my attitude on the question, here. Of course it was justified! Voluntary going in, voluntary going out.

My only thought about the violent response was what we now call “Balkanization,” or the fragmentation of a large region or country into smaller countries, as happened with Yugoslavia after the death of Marshall Tito. While it may seem a normal and legitimate process, it is usually accompanied by warfare. I was once years ago listening to Larry King on radio late at night, not being a good sleeper. He had on a CIA analyst, and he commented on the United States. I paraphrase: “The remarkable thing about this country is that it has held together as long as it has, and not fragmented.”

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A tale of two countries

Barack Obama is said to be a “constitutional scholar”. He is no such thing, although I grant the man his due in terms of real abilities, such as personal charisma and a sense of humor. The reasons I say he is no scholar are two:

  • The “ghost of Columbia”. In this story, at least two former students are suspicious that Obama ever attended there. There is little in the record, perhaps one photograph and an alleged roommate, such details easily planted by spooks. More importantly, a legendary Columbia professor, Henry Graff, has no memory of Obama ever being there. He taught American history and diplomatic history there, and says that any student of note who ever passed through there before going on to public reputation took his classes. Obama did not. He was never there.
  • Secondly, any serious constitutional scholar knows that our governing document is fractured and flawed, and that attempts to reassemble it are pointless. James Madison is considered the “Father” of the Constitution, a man who understood it better than any in his time, including the “Founding Fathers”. Pause on his words: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

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Updates …

A couple of matters, and I need to do this quickly. Our Internet signal degrades as people awake and turn on their devices. I can already see things slowing down at 7AM MDT. Later in the day, as people turn on streaming services and little Johnny decides to do some gaming with his friends, our signal will be so intermittent as to be unusable.

This has always been the problem we face with Centurylink (CL) Internet service. We moved here in 2010, and at that time CL offered 1.5 mps, and oddly, that was all we needed. Our TV was supplied by DirectTV, and we did no streaming. For a brief period we switched to a company that beamed their signal from a nearby mountain. The installation technician said that day that signals could range as high as 7 mps, but he was lying. It was 1.5 mps. The company cut back all of its clients to that level to allow for more customers and to make a few more $$$. Since that was all that CL offered, no one up here in the foothills had choice. The dish on our front porch was ugly, so we gave it back to them and went back to CL.

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Internet is back! And stuff.

We get our Internet from Centurylink, one of the few Baby Bells left in form. Consequently, it comes to our house on a wire. There is a switch box a couple of miles down the road that serves our neighborhood, and we are at the end of the line. For that reason, whenever I check speed at 192.168.0.1, it reads that our line status is either “poor” or “moderate.”

Last February we traded out an older model modem (Centurylink does used modems, and not routers), and the service agent who came by the house said to be careful, we might be “overprovided.” Not too long after that our service started blinking out now and then, and modem reboots had to be done frequently. I called tech support about that, and ask them if we were indeed overprovided. They had no clue what I was talking about. I suggested we drop our service back to perhaps 10 mps but the agent said not to do that, and I allowed him to keep me at 17mps. The intermittent service continued. It finally got so bad that I was convinced that the new modem we got in February was defective. An agent agreed with me, and sent me a new modem.

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