Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Sir Faul

Sir Faul

Boat photo with arrows

It all started with the boat photo, and two “Paul’s” visible. I have arrows pointing at them in the photo above. I saw this photo long before I discovered the McCartney twins, and it stuck with me. But I did not know to follow my instincts. It just struck me as very strange.

Years later (it is now 2022), I do not think the guy under the arrow on the left is Paul. The secrecy around this band would preclude any photo of the two of them together. He is someone else. But the guy in the middle (I can see his cowlick) is Mike McCartney. It is not his twin brother, Paul. Mike is the guy we today call “Macca”, or “Paul McCartney”. He is a huge phony.

We were walking through Barnes & Noble not too long ago, and I came across a book called The Lyrics, supposedly the words and stories behind all of the musical work of Paul McCartney, maybe the biggest walking impostor of a genius who ever tread on our planet. Lorne Michaels, the man behind Saturday Night Live, calls him a “fucking Mozart.” That’s OK by me, as I do not care for Mozart either. I do not buy all the stories about this child prodigy who was writing complete symphonies at age six. He was a project. So is Sir Faul. He is a guy who is perfectly comfortable taking credit for the works of scores of anonymous others. He did not write Yesterday. Neither did his brother, Paul.

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Sunday stuff

Taylor Tomlinson’s imaginary illness

I watched a performance by comedian Taylor Tomlinson last night. She is young (currently 28) and having lots of success. She’s also blue, that is, quite a big of her act involves sexual experiences and attitudes about sex and guys in general. I suppose part of that is that she is very attractive, so as with, say, Iliza Shlesinger, there is an element of imagined accessibility for guys. Neither are stunners, but both exude raw sex appeal. Most guys would fantasize that they perhaps have a shot with her. That type of fantasy does not happen with true knockouts, where guys realize they have no shot.

That’s not why I am writing about her (them). Both are very funny, and I wish them both long and prosperous careers. During Tomlinson’s act, she talked about being “manic depressive”. For anyone who does not know, that condition, sometimes referred to as a “disease” and treated with antidepressants and antispychotics, probably doesn’t exist. It is like the hundreds of disorders promoted by the DSM-5, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. There is no physical or blood or urine test that would give any indication of illness, no medical test of any kind. Like so many of the “disorders” promoted by the psychiatric profession, they are voted up or down. It’s based on symptoms, things like bouts of depression or spells of anxiety, erratic behaviors, or substance abuse.

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Of proxies and ice cores

The last post, called Some Pedagogy on Weather and Climate, showed graphs that are direct temperature measurements for the last 100 years from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. I mentioned in the comments that those temperatures may not be reliable, as Anthony Watts has studied the data gathering system, the actual instruments that report temperatures, and found that perhaps 95% of them are located on heat islands, places like airport tarmacs and parking lots. As a result, temperatures reported may be too high, and even the slight amount of warming reported in the Tisdale book, Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate may not be reliable.

I based my premise on observations that seemed to me pertinent, that our school kids do not study graphs, certainly not statistics. Consequently, when they look at complicated presentations like the Tisdale graphs, and especially the Palmer Drought Severity Index, their eyes glaze over. So I used the word “Pedagogy,” which merely means the art of teaching. What I hoped to avoid was to be “pedantic,” someone annoying. I was hoping to cross a line delicately into spreading understanding of Tisdale’s important work, which I regard sea-changing. He completely destroys the myth that our planet is warming at an alarming rate, at least for our lower forty-eight.

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Some pedagogy on weather and climate

The temptation here is to look away, I know. Recent discussions going on here about weather control have left me a little flummoxed, as even as I know such things are possible, I do not imagine that our climate can be controlled. It is simply too big to manage. I am aware of things like cloud seeding, going on for decades, and HAARP, High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a mysterious array of satellite dishes in Alaska. In June of 2021 the city of Seattle experienced incredibly high temperatures, 108 degrees on one day, shattering all records. My eyebrows arched, as Seattle is in the vicinity of HAARP. The array, allegedly funded to study the ionosphere, or outer reaches of our atmosphere, was off-limits to aircraft at the same time that Seattle/Vancouver were frying, leading to suspicion that HAARP was active during that time. I only bring this up because I want to emphasize that I am not a stranger to weather modification. That’s weather, and not “climate.”

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Face splitting put to good use

The watched a new version of an old tale, The Batman last night. It stars Robert Pattinson, and man is it dark. Every outdoor scene is at night and in pouring rain. Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is morose, depressed. It seems that his mother and father were murdered, and the guy never got over it. So there he is, an orphan, living in a mansion, having all the resources a man can have. He’s got no girlfriend, of course.

At a certain point in the movie, The Riddler (Paul Dano) is in jail, and he and The Batman are conversing. The Riddler subtly implies that he knows that Bruce Wayne is The Batman. Thinking about it, I thought, you know, man, that could be right. I’ve never really thought about it. But I do have this technology here to test this theory.

So I did the usual, setting the eye pupil distance and all of that, and I have to tell you, with The Batman, it was difficult. The guy wears contacts that record everything going on in front of him. So I just sort of had to guess. This is what I got:

There you have it.Bruce Wayne is The Batman. For me, this puts the whole movie, in fact, the entire Batman franchise in new perspective. I’ll never again see two separate and unrelated characters.

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Noam, why the long face?

This article, brought to us courtesy of Big Swede, is about Noam Chomsky.

Author Noam Chomsky predicted a grim future in an interview with The New Statesman: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history. … It looks like the grim cloud of fascism is spreading over the whole world inexorable. That was in February 1939.”

He is talking about the rise of Nazism.  He needs to get up to speed. I saw fascism in full-dress parade in the Covid scam, an attack on civil liberties that was unlike any before, open, shameless, and brazen. People were locked in their houses, warned to stay six feet apart, forced to wear pointless and useless masks just for humiliation sake. Toilet paper disappeared … no accident. We could not attend public events, including attending church. Where was Uncle Nummy during this human disaster? Supporting it. All of it. Then this:

“People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to, but rather to insist that they be isolated. If people decide, ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing to vaccinate,’ they should say then, ‘Well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine, but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’ That should be a convention,” said Chomsky.

Ask what they would do for groceries, he said “Well, that’s actually their problem.” How’s that for glum and oppressive.

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The Sacramento 6 (3+3)

I generally do not pay attention to mass shootings, knowing that every one I have looked at before turned out to be fake. I did extensive research on Columbine, Jonestown, the Pulse Nightclub, even Tienanmen Square, and found all to be hyped, and fake, fake, fake.  On March 22 of 2021 there was a supposed mass shooting at a King’s Sooper in Boulder, Colorado. At one time we lived a few blocks from there, and did our shopping there. I turned on the news to see if the event was spook-markered, and sure enough, the news reader told us that the perpetrator was frog-marched out of the store at 3:30 PM. That was all I needed to know, the appearance of the magical 33. (Columbine was declared officially over at 3:30 PM too.)

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Crazy times, a follow-up

I have on the wall a few feet away from me here the above photo taken in the 1980s, the subject of the encircled part a man I will call Clem. The main photo was taken in Yellowstone National Park on the Blacktail Deer “trail”. He and I spent the whole day breaking trail, and as I worked to keep up with him I saw this: A lone man by a lone tree. I thought it apropos of Clem, as he lived alone, had no girl friend, but many men in his life, his city buddies. (Clem was not gay, by the way.) The lower left photo I keep there to remind me of Clem at his best, the two of us in the mountains. He would leave his smokes and liquor behind. As one mutual friend described him, Clem was a “mountain gem and a city slut.” He drank too much. Way too much.

I gave this enlarged photo to Clem, and he hung it on his wall. People went through his belongings after he committed suicide in 1998, and the photo was returned to me. The reason I bring this up is that while grieving over his loss, I took the photo apart and wrote on it every trip we made, every hike and incident I could remember. In so doing I realized that I had been many places and done many things in the wild. Three years before Clem’s suicide, I had met my future wife, and the journeys would continue. She and I hiked and backpacked the mountains of Montana and Wyoming. Eventually, beginning in 2010, we would add Alaska, the Alps of France, Switzerland, Italy, Patagonia, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Andes and Himalayas. Though our backpacking days are over, we ain’t done yet.

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Shallow Hal takes on Ben Franklin

I have never watched anything by Ken Burns, the famous documentary film maker. Now that he has tackled Benjamin Franklin, I am even less interested. In 2017 MM wrote a paper called Benjamin Franklin: Premier British Spook, which fit in nicely with my own thinking on the American Revolution. It is a British template, one that the Americans would later use on Cuba. The idea is to take a people infected with revolutionary fervor, and let them have their silly revolution,

In the end, however, it will still be British or American agents in charge, masquerading as patriots and heroes. Thus did we have our Founding Fathers, perhaps all of them compromised, or those not, those who were true believers, marginalized or cashiered.

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