Author: Mark Tokarski

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

The trivium, quadrivium, and blah blah blah

I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson, and finished his book Twelve Rules for Life. It was enough of JP for me, as at my age, there was not much new for me in it. As we age, we become wiser, learn from mistakes, even become more sympathetic to others and to different ideas. For instance, at age 38, having abandoned the Catholic faith, I was angry at the Church for having brainwashed me as it did, and thought people who were devoted to the faith to be of a lesser mind than me. Later I would read The Varieties of Religious Experience by the American intellectual/psychologist William James, and took on a new outlook. While religion would never appeal to me, those who experience religious enlightenment are experiencing real phenomena, and are made better and happier people in the process. (Oddly, I no longer have this book. It was a keeper, and I do not know what happened to it.)

I now look at my Catholic upbringing as a means of 1) brainwashing me, to ensure I stayed Catholic all my life, but also 2) as a means of protecting me, since teachers viewed most of us kids as having little enlightenment and intellectual ability. Life was going to be hard for us. Having a rudder, even if one based on superstition and falsehood, would not hurt. It would prevent thinking, but also prevent despair. Stupidity is a great insulator. Continue reading “The trivium, quadrivium, and blah blah blah” →

Blank slate

This post is just an experiment. If you are reading it, the experiment produced encouraging results. The idea is that I am sitting down with nothing on my mind, nothing to pore over, nothing important to share. The Ukraine thread is ongoing under “Wag the Dog,” and they are keeping it lively.

Chainsaw Bob

We have been inundated with snow lately, which gives me lots of time to fill. We have a 330 (is that a 33 I see?) foot driveway, and I have a 26 inch snow thrower (Is that an 8?). It’s a very good machine. However, whenever I need expert advice, I know of only one expert I can trust. His name is Chainsaw Bob. He is off-putting to many people, but I like him. As I told one of our neighbors the other day, Bob looks like an aging hippie and a drunk. But he does not drink. He may be the former, as he does have shoulder-length hair and a beard. However, I like to think of him as merely counter-cultural. I like that in a person.

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Monday minutia

Marc Maron is a comic, former alcoholic and cocaine addict, by his own admission. His comic routine is narrative and kind of free-floating. He might have a general idea of where he is going in any set, and a few punchlines in mind, but I doubt even he knows for sure exactly where he is taking us. His career has been a struggle to get to the middle. He was once known as the angry comic, and the image to the left fit him very well. I generally like him and do not change channels when driving if he comes on. But he is known to toe the line, ridiculing people who don’t see any Climate Change going on, and also any who refused to vaccinate and wear a mask. He can be doctrinaire, arrogant, and blind.

Long before so many others, like Conan O’Brien and Dana Carvey, Sarah Silverman and David Spade started doing podcasts (a result of the Scamdemic), Maron settled into the format. He is a good interviewer, and he does his homework. I was shocked to learn that he has done 1,315 episodes. He has hosted some of the biggest names in show business. I wondered what it was that made Ted Danson get up at 3AM on a Saturday to travel across Los Angeles to sit down for an interview in Maron’s garage. He has some kind of magnetic attraction to draw big names like that.

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Photo fakes – spotting trickery

Note to readers: You will find this post quite long, but I hope not tedious. I hope there are enough photographs so that reading goes fast. Enjoy. The last paragraph is repeated here as most people won’t read that far: “One more thing to mention at the end of a long post where very few readers will find it: At the Mathis site there is a 47 page article by “Lestrade” called Pacific Theater. Because it is a PDF and I am technically inept, I cannot link without having a dead link. So you’re on your own to find it. Lestrade has done some excellent work in deconstructing the Aleutian campaign in World War II. The reason I bring it up here is that his photo analysis is superb. It’s well worth a journey and perhaps an hour of your time.”

In a prior post, I mentioned that Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Denver and Taylor Swift had all been pasted into family photos, that is, we do not know their names, only that their last names: Morrison, Joplin, Deutschendorf and Swift are not their real names. It appears from the outside looking in that these musicians were (are) lifetime actors. I would guess that they were recruited because someone spotted some talent that could be developed.

However, it had to be made clear them that they were not to be let loose on the world, that they would put in their time, learn their trade and then exit the music business. They would be given intense training and then songs to sing that they pretend(ed) were (are) their own creation. In fact, Morrison, Denver and Joplin faked their deaths. Swift is still with us, but I have to suspect a fake death is on her horizon. (Prince probably fits into this category, but I never listened to his music and so have not taken the time to look into his very suspicious death. So too a few others, like David Bowie, for example. Rappers and hip hop, I never tuned in. Die away.)

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In defense of face splitting …

If you want to jump ahead, I have with the help of a blog commenter come upon an article  in which author Karen Leibowitcz that implies (actually, seems quite certain) that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the love child of the late Cuban premier Fidel Castro. I am going to take issue with that based on my own knowledge and experience in studying faces. But before doing that, I want to offer up a defense of the technology that I developed and use, and will use for Trudeau and Castro, called face splitting, or face chopping.

Quite some years ago I learned that in our late teens our skulls are fully formed, and will remain in that shape for the rest of our lives. The only exception that I have seen to this rule (there are probably others) is that ALS can cause skull deformities. Miles Mathis wrote a paper (dated 4/17/15 – it is a PDF and I am unable to link, so search for a paper titled Stephen Hawking Died and Has Been Replaced) claiming that Stephen Hawking died in 1985 based on the following language in Wikipedia:

During a visit to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the border of France and Switzerland in mid-1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia, which in his condition was life-threatening; he was so ill that Jane was asked if life support should be terminated. She refused but the consequence was a tracheotomy, which would require round-the-clock nursing care, and remove what remained of his speech. [ 55] [ 56] The National Health Service would pay for a nursing home, but Jane was determined that he would live at home. The cost of the care was funded by an American foundation. [ 57] [ 58] Nurses were hired for the three shifts required to provide the round-the-clock support he required. One of those employed was Elaine Mason, who was to become Hawking’s second wife.

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More Twaddle

Japan has not warmed since 1989!

1989 is the year that Dr. James Hansen, then Director, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a Senate subcommittee, its name too long to matter.  Prior to the hearing, air conditioning was turned off in the room and the windows opened. They wanted people to be hot and uncomfortable. This was the hearing that introduced the world to the concept of Global Warming, later changed to Climate Change (probably to avoid the embarrassment of absence of warming).

This article shows three graphs, one each for Tokyo, the island of Hachijō-jima, and the entire island of Japan. Winters there have not warmed since 1987 (the entire island), and 1984 (Tokyo). The graph for Hachijō-jima goes all the way back to 1947. If anything it shows a slight cooling trend.

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Tuesday Twaddle

The Ukrainian matter

Yesterday, as I read the discussion going on in Stephers’ post regarding the reality or falseness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I was reminded that my name, Tokarski, originates in Ukraine, and is Ashkenazim Jewish. I am neither Ukrainian nor Jewish, but the name “Tokarski” is in the Jewish registry of surnames. The last I knew of my ancestors was a letter that circulated among us saying that my paternal grandfather’s family lived in Austria, “down the hill from Switzerland.” Legend has it that the surname Tokar, taken from the Tokar region of Ukraine (which I could not locate) spawned emigrants to the United States, many of whom landed in Pennsylvania, mining coal I imagine.

Indeed my grandfather immigrated to Pennsylvania, but not from Ukraine. The story is that while in school he had a particularly strict and unpleasant teacher. The boys in his class managed to subdue him and lock him in a closet. I would make him to be a young teen at that time. It was not shits and giggles. The authorities took the rebellion seriously, and enlisted police and military to hunt down the boys, who would be drafted. There was a war going on at that time (late 1800s, perhaps Franco-Prussian, a predecessor to WWI). My great grandmother stowed grandpa on the back of a potato truck, and he made his way to France, and then to Ellis Island, and only then to Pennsylvania. I assume he worked the coal mines, because he ended up in Great Falls, Montana. The “Great Falls” of the Missouri River, over which Lewis and Clark and their men (33 total) had to portage with massive outriggers, were by that time underwater, as the Anaconda Copper Company had a reduction/smelting operation there. They needed the electricity generated by the powerful movement of current, so no more waterfall.

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