Author: Mark Tokarski

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

“I tried to pray, nothing happened.”

I am reading a book, The Recovering, Intoxication and its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. When it came I did not remember that I had ordered it. I thought had ordered a book about how scientific papers had all become corrupt, and when this one came, I thought that was it. It was not. The one I ordered, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, is frightfully boring, so I am stuck now with two bad books … I’ll hang on with the Recovering, if only because I know the ending of Unreliable.

Books by recovering alcoholics can be tedious, self-involved, and boring. But I read a few pages in, and liked that she was talking about famous writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who were also famous drunks. My own take is that these men, along with my own favorite, Edward Abbey, were crooked to begin with, so that both drinking and writing suited them fine. I seek no meaning in the fact that they drank, only the fact that they wrote. The same internal force that made them write might also have driven them to drink, but so what? That does not begin to explain all of the great writers who were not drunks.

Sidenote: This morning as I read she recounted reading the Stephen King book that became the Apollo 11 movie, The Shining. She’s not aware that with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, Stanley Kubrick, and not Stephen King, is using the word “All” to take the place of “Apollo 11”, where Kubrick was deeply immersed.

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Slippin’ out the back, Jack

At last count, Manhattan Contrarian’s five (and counting) posts on the JFK assassination have drawn 559 comments, though it the 80/20 rue applies, most have come from two or three sources.

My older brother told me, with awe, that Theodore Roosevelt had been shot while standing on a podium speaking, and still stood tall and finished his speech. With all due respect, Steve, that’s a crock. 1) If shot, or shot at, he would have hid behind the podium and there would have been a pile of bodies to shield him from further harm, and 2) he wasn’t shot (or shot at) anyway. That’s just presidential mythology, like San Juan Hill.

There’s a bit of popular mythology that says that in olden days presidents did not have tight security. They did, just like now. It’s not just presidents, but kings and queens, princes, dukes and archdukes. Security has been around longer than our country or colonies, and they know how to do it.

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JFK autopsy photos – the final mile

Note to readers: I was focused as I wrote this on my own Pauline conversion, having read Miles Mathis’s Camelot piece on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In so doing, I ignored another man of equal or more importance who allowed me to publish his piece, JFKTV, here. I offer apologies for the slight to Tyrone Mccloskey, author and long time friend of the blog.

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Everything interesting will happen beneath the fold. I will not put those gruesome photos right in front of faces of people who don’ t know they are fake, some of the best fakes I have ever seen.

But first, a few stories about me. I’ve learned over the course of my life that there are things about me that are not like other people, but also that most things about me are just like other people. For instance, I always knew that I was a very bright kid. In those days we would take tests, be they ACT or just pure IQ tests where we reassemble cardboard boxes. I always scored very high, in the 99th percentile.

How did I know this? Teachers told me. That was a huge mistake on their part, as I began to think, even in grade school, that things would be easy for me. I did not apply myself to things, did not work hard enough, and as a consequence did not grade out well in school, much to the frustration of teachers who looked at my files and knew my scores. I knew some classmates back then who were smart, maybe also in the 90s on those tests, and who also applied themselves, and became engineers, Microsoft employees, well, that’s only two of the 130 or so in my high school class. The rest became ordinary people, workers, teachers, craftsmen and women, and one, my girlfriend at one time, a Vegas showgirl. I loved her, but never saw her as such a stunning beauty as she later became. Continue reading “JFK autopsy photos – the final mile” →

JFK Morgue photos, revisited

I’ve been following the posts of the Manhattan Contrarian (here, here, and here) with a feeling of need for  forbearance. MC might knowingly be advancing the hoax, but I am keeping the faith that he is the real deal. He could be playing to the galleries, as people love a good mystery, and the JFK assassination is one of the best of all time. It’s got all the elements of skullduggery and hidden villains, and so much misdirection strewn about that an average person of curiosity can’t help but apply intelligence to the matter, coming to rest on one or another of the bogus “theories” involved.

I’ve dropped a few comments there, among the hundreds now, and offer the following as an introduction to misdirection, how it is done:

It will always stand as outright contradiction that the powerful Kennedy family could not stop 1980 publication of the Davis S. Lifton book Best Evidence, which contained in it gruesome morgue photographs of JFK’s corpse. Could they have stopped at least the photos? Of course they could have. Why did they not?

The photos were fake, masterful darkroom creations with JFK’s face superimposed on someone else’s head, some of the most important and sophisticated photo fakery ever done since invention of the camera. Why would the Kennedy’s allow them to be published? Because it drove home the idea of a brutal assassination that did not happen for real.

How do I know this? You can’t possibly just trust me. I have preserved my work, but I ask something better of you: Reproduce the work, prove me wrong. That’s how science is done.

I’d like to go back to the beginning here. I read the Lifton book more than a decade after it was published, and thought it the best exposition to that time of the mysteries, not solutions, surrounding the assassination. Keep in mind that I believed that JFK was gunned down, and was in a state a perpetual grief, as he was so dynamic, so energizing to the American population. Just the idea that kids my age were walking fifty miles (I never did) was testimony to the good he was doing.

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Note: Below the fold here are gruesome morgue photos from the Lifton book. Proceed with that knowledge, or stay away. _____________________________________________________________

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61 years and counting …

Manhattan Contrarian, a site I like and follow, has unfortunately entered the world of the JFK assassination. The two posts have thus far spawned almost two hundred comments, and here we go again.

I might not post this, as I do not have anything original to offer. Here’s a comment I left at Fakeologist, a post about a Miles Mathis post on the latest release of documents:

I was glad to see MM walk back from his original idea that there was some kind of underground ruling council and that JFK left the scene to participate. That, to me, detracted from one of the best written and most important papers I have ever read, one that changed my life.

I would add one more fake presidential death to his litany of Garfield, McKinley, Lincoln and JFK: FDR. Speaking of using death of the office holder as a means of installing an otherwise unelectable person in office, Harry S. Truman qualifies. He got in on FDR’s death after wee hours shenanigans at the convention to get him installed as VP, and then the 1948 election had to be stolen to keep him in office.

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All the world’s a stage, Horatio

We got a comment here, linked, which I decided to follow. It led me to Chris Hohn and a post titled True Humans Will Separate from NPC’s, which turns out to be homage to musicians, some real, some fake. They are all given far too much rah rah, as a fan boy might do.

Hohn decided to belittle the work of Dallas Goldbug, a worthy undertaking, but the real purpose of Goldbug blew right by him, to discredit the idea that famous people who die often reappear in another form. As I noted to him in a comment I left, “… it is interesting that you latch on the nonsense of Morrison/Limbaugh, as Goldbug intended, and by doing so discredit real and honest work on Hicks/Jones, as Goldbug intended.

My comment, which I repeat below the fold, is “awaiting moderation”, probably meaning it will never see the light of day. This often happens when worlds collide, as when I introduce Hohn to a world of fakery in musicians when all he wanted to do was idealize a few of them.

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Some words, just words

I recently returned from Kenya with 464 photos on my camera, and as I said to friends and family, “one or two of them are actually quite good.” Of course, the essence of a good photo is to be there, and to snap the one above I had to be in a Land Cruiser, and the lion, while aware of us, needed to be indifferent. As noted by our driver, were I to get out of the vehicle, she would eat me. If this shot were taken from a helicopter above, you would see perhaps five Land Cruisers surrounding the beast. The lion’s attitude reminds me of what is the proper way to view American politics: Studied indifference.

I write a lot, and as with photography, now and then I write something I want to remember, even if no one else cares. Thus the paragraph beneath the fold here, a comment originally addressed to our friend Petra, and modified to include part of her wise response and to remove her personally from it, with respect.

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Is it a shifting tide, or signal from on high?

We all take note here of the Trump executive orders since his inauguration, and while I am not optimistic about Trump, welcome them nonetheless. He has removed us from the Paris Accords once again, and this time has gone after the endangerment finding, that goofy piece of agitation propaganda that set the stage for a host of administrative rulings shutting down fossil fuel activities that benefit all of us. In brief, that ruling says that CO2 is a pollutant. Such a grievous outcropping was the result of years of stage-setting by the people behind the climate change hoax. It was set in stone when a sitting president told an outrageous lie as follows: Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.

Obama tweeted that.

Presidents lie all the time – it’s right there on the job application: “Are you prepared to use all of the status and prestige of high office to tell egregious lies? If the answer is “Yes,” you have just a shot. If the answer is “YES!!!”, and you are young and handsome and well-spoken and able to control a forum, we’ll make you president. We’ll even dummy up a fake education and change your place of birth to make it happen. The job requires at its very soul a complete lack of character. Only exceptional criminals need apply.

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The poor, misunderstood carbohydrate, Part II, and finale

I am not going to belabor this subject, as I’ve had a couple of other insights that play along with it. I do want to stress the following:

  • Nutrition has not changed since the nineteenth century, when it was understood that a diet rich in animal fats led to better health than enjoyed by most people coming out of that dreary and unhealthy time.
  • The formula has not changed: balance. Animal fats should be at the center of a healthy diet, though carbohydrates have a part to play.
  • In modern times, ease of production of carbohydrates in the form of sugars delivered by bread and pasta, starchy vegetables, high-fructose corn syrup (now labeled simply “corn sugar”) have led to super-abundance of carbs, simple and complex, in the modern diet.
  • “Complex” carbs like pasta and bread take a day longer for the body to process, but in the end, the body does not know the difference between complex carbs and simple sugars.
  • Hand-in-hand with this are epidemics of diabetes and obesity, often morbid obesity.
  • Just as medical doctors are not trained in healthy nutrition, nutritionists are not either. If they had the ability to walk backward through time, they would discover that they are in large part responsible for our epidemics.

Continue reading “The poor, misunderstood carbohydrate, Part II, and finale” →