Author: Mark Tokarski

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

Teaching versus learning

Some time ago I read the 1971 book Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich (1926-2002). As is my custom, I place 3M flags on passages I want to revisit, and then later come back and re-read and even transcribe those passages into MS Word. Otherwise, it is as if I never read the book. It does not sink in. The second time around is the one that counts with me.

Today I was re-reading a passage by Illich on schooling that so resonated with me that I am reprinting it here. I learned how to read in first grade, how to do accounting in college, and about the tax code early on as a stumbling CPA. When I entered that profession, I was distressed at how little I knew compared to my colleagues, not understanding that we are all like that. Becoming good at what we do is purely on-the-job training. “Brilliant” students who come out of college and take on important roles are a rarity, the stuff of pulp fiction. (I usually put a work of fiction down when I see the words “brilliant young” in reference to a character. I lose willing suspension of disbelief.)

For me, I don’t think I learned anything of value in high school or most of grade school. My real education started in earnest early on and outside my classes.

Our friend and co-writer Steve Kelly refers to schools as warehouses. I could not agree more. We have to do something with these kids to get them out of our hair, so we put them in big buildings with regimented schedules and bells telling them to move about. If they are caught in the hall while class is in session, they better damned well have a pink slip.  (When I was a senior in high school I got hold of a packet of pink slips, which allowed me some freedom to roam.)  Most teachers I know refer to themselves as “educators,” I think because it sounds a little more like a noble calling than being a mere teacher. They look at their job as a mission, helping young people. Illich would set them straight. Here is the part I just transcribed.

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Some shameless self-promotion

Last December I received an invitation from Travis Mateer (aka Will Skink) to have a podcast conversation, which I readily accepted. We ended up talking for 90 minutes, and as a result I have a long list of things I have to look into. Travis and I don’t agree on everything (“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much” – Walter Lippman), and I have pledged to keep an open mind on the things that we do not see eye-to-eye on.

I started the Piece of Mind blog in 2006 when I lived in Bozeman, Montana. At that time, the Montana blogosphere was very active, even somewhat influential. The Montana Democratic Party had moved into blogging forcefully with two apparatchiks, Jay Stevens and Matt Singer, who formed a blog called Left in the West. Their task, their raison d’etre in my view, was Jon Tester, who would be narrowly elected US Senator in 2006. Tester sold himself as an environmentalist and progressive, and then as quickly ditched both groups after attaining office. This led to a dip in his support, so that when he ran for reelection in 2012, he eked in due to dark money injected into his campaign. It was a very professional scam on the Montana Libertarian Party, using an industry front group called Montana Hunters and Anglers to run $2 million plus in advertising urging voters to support Dan Cox, Libertarian. Cox ended up with 6.6% of the vote, mostly drawn off Tester’s Republican opponent, Dennis Rehberg. This allowed Tester a victory with 48.6% of the vote.

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A book review, Poisoning for Profits, by Commenter TimR

Click to access PoisoningForProfits.pdf

A few comments on Genereaux’s Vit. A toxicity hypothesis, after reading the eBook linked above (looks like I mispelled his name throughout, sorry bout that):

“Poisoning for Profit” is overall very compelling and persuasive, though of course it also raises new questions and areas where, as they say in the mainstream, “more research is needed.”

His critique of the early Vit A studies claiming to prove the dangers of Vit A deficiency is excellent. However, one of his arguments, that it doesn’t even fit with common sense or observation – animal species would rapidly go extinct if 4 to 8 weeks of Vit A deficiency led to rapid vision deterioration and all sorts of organ failure – seems like it could be applied to his own contention of Vit A toxicity.
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Institutionalized stupidity

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” (Albert Einstein)

I invite everyone to take a few minutes to read this post by Jon Rappoport, labeled Yes, the NY Times exposed the PCR Test. I generally avoid journalism, as I don’t have the stomach for human stupidity in its raw, institutionalized form. For instance, this piece from my home town by Juliana Sukut (get ready to be barraged by pop-ups if you follow the link) reports that there are 244 “new cases” of Covid-19 in Montana, a relatively sparsely populated state. Sukut has no clue what a “case” is, nor any idea of how testing is done or what the results mean. The standard etiquette in dealing with human stupidity is to ignore it, and look for the good. But the Covid-19 campaign at the top is being run by liars, and at the bottom by morons. I look around and sometimes, like now, just want to toss it all in and up, and read a detective mystery.

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John Wayne, The Duke (Gacy)

John Wayne Gacy’s profile

The moniker at the bottom of pages says that I printed out the Wickedpedia (AB’s term) write-up on John Wayne Gacy, the alleged serial killer, on December 6, 2020. At some point along the line I had stumbled upon him and saw that he was said to have had 33 victims. That signal in mind, I printed out the 51 page report, and began to absorb it. I wanted it to speak to me without my having preformed conclusions. I’ve been looking at it off and on, just letting it settle in.

Gacy’s known victims were young boys and men, the youngest 14 and the oldest 21. The killings took place from 1972 to 1978, and appear to have become more frequent as time went on. It is like an FBI profiler’s dream come true. In 2007 Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the art and science of profiling for The New Yorker, and I think he got it right, that it is an overblown hobby more often misdirecting than aiding in pursuit of a criminal. (Dangerous Minds.) Often enough, a profile can fit hundreds, if not thousands of potential suspects. But whoever wrote the tale of John Wayne Gacy was surely caught up on the idea. This is from Wiki:

“Gacy was close to his mother and two sisters, but endured a difficult relationship with his father, an alcoholic who was physically abusive to his wife and children.[8][9] His father also belittled him, calling him “dumb and stupid” and comparing him unfavorably with his sisters.[2] One of Gacy’s earliest memories was being beaten with a leather belt for accidentally disarranging car engine components his father had assembled.[10] His mother tried to shield her son from his father’s abuse, which only resulted in accusations that he was a “sissy” and a “Mama’s boy” who would “probably grow up queer“.[8][4][11] Despite his mistreatment, Gacy still loved his father,[9] but felt he was “never good enough” in his father’s eyes.[12]”

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The Charlie Sheen Group

The path of discovery has been exciting these past years, from the day I stumbled on to the Miles Mathis site until today. There is always some strange phenomenon not before encountered and begging for explanation. I do not consider the fact that I do not have an explanation to be a problem. Maybe someday I will, or maybe someone will trip by here and drop a comment that clears things up. But for now, I am content to be in the dark, knowing what but not why.

The Charlie Sheen group is a name I gave to some movie stars whose faces are so like Charlie’s that were it not for other features like hair color and date of birth, I might think them the same people. First I am going to go through the list, and then at the end speculate about what is going on.

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Bill Hicks became Alex Jones: Case Closed, Part 2

This post was originally published in August of 2016. There’s been an ongoing debate about the comedian Bill Hicks, who in my opinion faked his death and re-emerged as Alex Jones. Some of the drawbacks to this are facial differences, like a more pointed nose for Jones, easily done by plastic surgery, a thinner lower lip, ditto. In the first photo below, image three on the far right of Jones shows telltale lines indicating some plastic surgery. I have seen these as well on both McCartney’s, Paul and Mike.

However, the post below was a different story – someone had put up the two photos, one of Hicks and one of Jones, saying that Jones has a smaller mouth than Hicks, but what jumped out at me instead was that I was looking at identical teeth. Further down in the post you’ll see a Photoshop overlay in which every single tooth in both mouths line up exactly.

Another objection was voices, Hicks higher pitched than Jones, whose is almost guttural. I thought that for his TV show Jones could easily be speaking into some sort of voice distortion instrument, and that still might be the case. However, I was reading a Michael Connelly book (The Narrows) and in it the lead character, Harry Bosch, mentions that someone, a really bad guy, had probably had surgery to change his voice. I wondered if this was common.

Googling “surgery to change voice” I found it quite common, most often in women who want to sound more feminine. But there is thyroplasty surgery, which does indeed lower a man’s voice. I thought – what the heck – – the had Hicks under the knife for plastic surgery anyway, a makeover, so why not change his voice too?

From August, 2016:

My colleague Straight wants me to move forward, to get better at using PhotoShop. It offers a far wider array of possibilities than my current tools. I have been using them because I have so much work ahead, and don’t want to take time to learn such a big and complex program. But I must. Fortunately, Straight is already well-versed.

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So, what’s more fun than talking about Beatles?

This video was posted in the comments under my Friday Tidbits piece, and has taken on a life of its own. So I decided to bring it front and center. It is loaded, and I mean loaded, with oddball things, but what caught my eye most was the appearance of original Paul McCartney, but only in brief shots, a few seconds each. He is mocking the Beatlemania days, doing the headbanging and woooos, all the while playing left-handed bass. Take a look at the screencap below the fold. The guy I say is Beatlemania Paul is circled in orange.

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Friday tidbits

Paul is not dead (PIND)

It seems odd to need to explain this to some people, but Paul McCartney has always been two people, a set of twins who, for lack of better information, we call Paul (the original crooner seen far more often in the early days) and Mike (who turned out to be a much better stage performer).

The people behind the Beatles, some very talented musicians, artists, psychologists and writers, knew that the two did not look enough alike that they could pull off the ruse forever. But professional propagandists as these also knew that lying is not an effective tool for misleading people. It is far better to misdirect. So with McCartney they started, even as the group was still touring, placing clues on the albums indicating that Paul might have been killed and replaced. Lyricists planted words in some of the songs (“He blew his mind out in a car”), and even George Martin did his part, knowing a camera was running, by referring to McCartney as “Billy.” (Part of the misdirection was that a lookalike named Billy Shears had become the new Paul.)

As Ab said to me this morning in a message, “I agree it’s all fun, like a cat playing with mice.”

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How terribly strange to be twenty-six

Two things are really bugging me this morning, one that in the musical piece above, it is not only preceded by a commercial, but that they interject one too. They actually cut into the music and start talking about f****** insurance! That is about as indifferent to human suffering as anyone I know can be, even my ex-wife.
 
The other is that line, “How terribly strange to be seventy.” I know, Paul Simon (current age, 79) was only 26 when he wrote it, and from that perspective, being seventy looked like the end of life. His description of old men sitting on park benches in another song, Bookends, has them merely waiting to die.
 

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