Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Audubon Schmodubon

I used to be a member of Audubon Society, in fact, up until 2021. We are a funky lot of people who devote time and energy into identifying, feeding, studying and talking about birds. Our back deck is usually a minor mess, as birds are not careful when feed is available. It is a tiered ecosystem where birds at the highest perch use their beaks to scatter seed below, looking for the most desirable morsel. Down below birds that are ground feeders hunt and peck. Seed that ends up below the deck accumulates until a doe or buck passes by.

Why, I was asked, do we care about these species? “Unconditional love” was the only answer I could muster. They show no gratitude, in fact do not even know we are caring for them. A bird pecking away at a seed bell strung from a wire has no clue he is not on a tree, one with abundant mealy worms.

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How not to communicate

Back in the 1990s I was active in a group called the Montana Wilderness Association, since renamed “Wild Montana” and changed from activism to collaboration, an industry front group. Part of my self-initiated volunteer work was to go around Billings, my home town, and speak to various groups. But rather than “speak,” I had an idea. I was dedicated to one purpose only, the preservation of wild lands, and noticed that we had this in common with just about everyone, even our severest critics. However, we had among us misanthropes, and such people tended to be the face of our movement, as cameras tend to pick out the wild ones with dreadlocks and who carry signs and stand on street corners. In truth, the men and women I worked with in MWA were serious and stable. These were some of the best people I’ve ever known, and I look back on those times with warmth and good feelings.

My idea was to speak to disinterested and even opposition groups, and bring love of wild lands to them. I went to the forest service and asked if they had any resources I might use – in fact, they had photographs of just about every lake and mountain in the state, and offered to let me use them. My first engagement was a large gathering with the Gem and Mineral Society, and was well received. All I did, without prepared script, was to show the slides and ask who in the audience recognized the places. They were enthusiastic – they knew the names and were proud of having been there. People in that group knew every place, more than a few having hiked to them.

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The George McGovern legacy: An equal distribution of poor health

The above image, no longer in use, is called the Food Pyramid. It contains within it suggestions for healthy eating. In my opinion, humble or not, it contains some of the worst dietary advice ever given.

    • It puts too much emphasis on vegetables and fruits. I’ve no problem with them, I like most of them, but I think them overrated in terms of health. In my diet I have a small glass of orange juice daily, though not religiously, and broccoli and onions, green peppers and jalapeños. These turn up in recipes. (As I will be discussing Keto in this piece, I mention here that on that system, we avoid vegetables grown underground, but eat many grown above. Potatoes and yams, for example, are diet death, french fries a never-no-no. Green beans? Not a big deal.) (Keep in mind that I am 71. If you are in your 20s, 30s or 40s, eat, drink and be merry!)
    • The pyramid suggests we eat less meat than fruits and vegetables by far. I even get the impression that it might want us to skip meat entirely. I get most of my nutrition from meat. It keeps me slim, and provides all the nutrients I need to stay healthy, except perhaps Vitamin C.
    • I would group cheese with meats, as it is something we can eat in any quantity without affecting our weight. I skip yogurt, and do not drink milk (except with coffee). I have never liked milk. Neither did my mother.
    • Fats and oils … use “sparingly?” The body loves fats of all kinds, saturated and not. In fact, our brains are comprised of mostly fat, 60% as I read it, meaning that my dad was 60% right in a certain insult he would occasionally lay on me. (For sake of humor, I am too hard on him. He never called me a “fathead.”)
    • The biggest problem with the above pyramid is the bottom, the bread, cereal, rice and pasta group – 6-11 servings daily! If you want to lose weight and avoid diabetes, you will ignore that recommendation. Of course we all love bread – I can wolf it down as well as anyone. But if I do, I pay a price – my weight mushrooms.
    • We can agree with one thing: Avoid sugars.

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A product endorsement

I have never endorsed a product on this blog, and receive no remuneration for doing so. This blog is 100% non-monetized. However, this morning as I was showering, my wife came up to tell me there was  a beeping in the basement. I quickly toweled off and got dressed and went down. Sure enough, the product to the left here, the Watchdog Water Alarm was sitting in a puddle of water by our water heater.

I had been troubled by the water heater, as the hot water coming out of the faucet seemed too hot to me – I used a meat thermometer to register it at 140 degrees when the thermostat is set at 125. I did what we all do, went to YouTube, which said that I probably had a buildups in the tank, and that I needed to flush the water heater to get rid of the debris. That should be done every year, I was told. I thought well, heck, I don’t do that every year, but I do it often, like … well, never.

At the same time, we had two leaks in our boiler room, so I called Weatherbee, the people who tend to our boiler, and while they were booked till Monday agreed to send a man over who was in the area. As it turns out, all leaks had a common source.

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Apollo 13 spookiness

I am reading the book Dark Moon, at 512 pages of double-columned 9″ x 6″ pages, quite a chore. Many have probably seen the movies that apparently accompany this book, a two-part presentation available  at Aulis Online called What Happened on the Moon, Part One and Part Two. I was reading the book this morning on page 344 forward, and stumbled across some things the authors do not seem to be aware of.  Though they talk about a lot of whistle blowing, they do not mention spook markers*.

First, use of the number 13 for the bad luck Apollo trip was most likely no coincidence. Liftoff was on April 11, 1970, at 1:13 pm Houston time, which is, as we all know, a reference to the spook marker ’33’. That time of day can also be expressed as 13:13, which embodies “11” and “33.” April 13 was a Mo(o)nday. The switched astronaut who toggled the switch that produced the alleged exposition was Jack Swigert, the 13th astronaut in the Apollo program.

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Informed consent

This is a comment I left over at Travis Mateer’s site, Zoom Chron Blog. After leaving it, I decided it belongs here too, and that I can take the rest of the day off now.

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“The vaccines, having un-revealed ingredients and unstated purposes, are a guidepost to how far we have descended back into fascism in the post-war era. It appears to be a natural regression, as humans do not seem to want to be free, in fact, behave like frightened sheep when confronted with any hobgoblin, this time around a virus never isolated or proven to even exist. What is being done to us falls under the Nuremberg Accords regarding medical experimentation on humans. I quote: 

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

I look around me and wonder how many of these masked lost souls actually have the capacity to give informed consent. Do most humans even have the capacity to stand tall and live free? You’re doing so, Travis, and so am I. But there aren’t many others. (The Nuremberg Accords are not the law of the land, not that it matters as the Constitution has been shredded anyway, but were signed onto by the US.)”

Paid to be blind

I was interviewed last year about an event in my life, and willingly participated. I deeply regret that now, feeling like Charlie Brown as Lucy holds the football for him to kick. I am featured, somewhat, in a series of podcasts that can be found here and which covers the event in detail. To this day I have not figured out what happened that night, or why. The event, which happened in 1987, has been covered now by three generations of journalists, and they still are no closer to the truth than in that year when we all were in shock, like me, having no clue why it happened to my family.

My subject here is not that event, but rather the profession of journalism, and why it is of no use in pursuit of truth. Journalists are taught to be professional truth avoiders, though they do not know it. The means by which they avoid truth is called “objectivity”.

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Response to a professional Debunker

[Note to readers: This post was published by accident and prematurely. What follows below differs in many parts from the original. My fat fingers hit the wrong button.]

Petra Liverani is the object of this post. While so, I want to keep it objective as possible, and to resist personal insult. I bear no ill will, maintain no posture of superior wisdom. She and I suffer the same shortcoming, resistance to reading anything we are not predisposed to agree with. She challenged me to read a long treatment by a professional “debunker” of Dave McGowan’s Moondoggie series. I have done so, even knowing she has not read McGowan’s work. I have done my due diligence.

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Fear is the enemy of freedom

As a youngster in the 1950s and 60s, the big thing hanging over my head was the Russians and the bomb. The propaganda was relentless. The fear we felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) was real in us. I remember a gal named Susan who was teachers’ pet assigned to go to all eight classrooms in our school to announce that the Russians had backed down. Our sense of relief was palpable. Creating fear in children in that manner is abusive, but the idea is to get ’em while they are young, instill the fear so that it will reside in them for their entire lives.

At age 38 I finally realized that the USSR never posed a threat, that the Cold War was not real. I felt a physical sense of relief, as if a cloud had been removed, a weight taken off my shoulders. That physical sensation was real. All the fear they instilled in me as a child vanished, and I felt a wonderful freedom I’d never before experienced.

I did this for myself, that is, I was not following some leader or guru. I was just exploring and testing my boundaries when the dam broke. It was an accumulation of questions and doubts arising, and no specific instance. But I do remember a particular moment. In the book The Fish is Red, by Warren Hinkle and William Turner, there is a a brief section (pp 129-31) where it is alleged that Havana had concocted a plan to overthrow the Arturo Frondizi Ércol government of Argentina. A Cuban career diplomat serving in Buenos Aires resigned and took with him eighty-two documents that purported to detail such a plan. The Cuban government claimed that the documents were forged by Cuban exiles working with the CIA. The US State Department announced that it had exhaustively studied the documents and that they were genuine.

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I’ll take Manhattan, and give you Houston …

No doubt I am not the first to have this flash of insight – in fact, just as George Harrison* picked up My Sweet Lord from Ronnie Mack and the Chiffon’s He’s So Fine, unknowingly and with great embarrassment, I am sure I will be reminded that this idea has passed here on the blog by commenters, and at other places too.

I’ve been thinking about public hoaxes that have been pulled off during my lifetime, but there was a gigantic one that played out in the years before I was born, while dad was chauffeuring a general in the Philippines and playing clerk/typist in safety. It was called The Manhattan Project. It was an ‘eyes only’ affair that was gripped in military discipline and compartmentalization. Only a very few had a wider view of the whole project.

I had an uncle who was involved in Manhattan. He was a shop foreman for various workers at Hanford, Washington. (I’ll bet you thought I was going to say he did something really important. He did not.)

What was Manhattan about? Building the bomb, we are told. But readers here, and those who follow MM, might have serious doubts that this is the true purpose of the program. After all, we learned, various atomic tests were obvious fakes, using photography tricks to make the explosions, which were probably just stacks of TNT, look massive. But I think we can be certain that Manhattan was a huge sink for real money that could not openly be authorized for expenditure.

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