Sapo and Pregnancy: Don't Do It

Someone was asking me about using the indigenous Matses frog sweat, sapo, with regard to pregnancy. This is what I responded.

At the earliest stages of pregnancy, the first few weeks, sapo in a very tiny amount is applied to a woman's wrist to discover who the father is. Later, very tiny amounts are applied to see what the sex of the fetus is and whether it is healthy. If not sapo can be used as an abortive.

   As a male, I never witnessed how tiny those initial applications were. Now, as someone who has seen several women abort/miscarriage with sapo I would strongly, strongly urge it not to be used by pregnant westerners at any amount. The abortion can take a couple of days. It is very painful. I knew someone who used it as an abortive and the evacuation — at just six weeks of gestation — took 12 hours. She was in serious pain the entire time.

   A couple of years ago a woman sat at the table I use as my office while in Iquitos. I had never met her prior to that moment. As she sat she was obviously in pain, and i asked her what was wrong. She told me that several hours earlier she'd been treated with sapo because she was pregnant — three months — and was told the medicine would strengthen her umbilical cord. She would not tell me who treated her, and there are lots of idiots, both locals and gringos, in Iquitos serving sapo/kambo. Whomever it was i wanted to strangle them because I knew the woman was beginning to abort, and she had wanted to bring the fetus to term. I did not tell her because it was too late to stop the process.

  She finished aborting about 24 hours later.

  Please use sapo wisely. It can strengthen the body overall, but for pregnant women, it is primarily a very lousy abortive. It should NOT be used on lactating women either, as no studies have been done to see 1) if the poisons being eliminated from the mother might find their way into her milk, and 2) if the medicine itself found its way into her milk, what effect that would have on a baby.

   I hope this helps.

All of It is Trump's Fault.

It is all Donald J Trump's fault. The whole mess. It started with him eliminating the pandemic team put together by President Obama to get a jump on future pandemics. It continued with him discarding the Pandemic—101 booklet on handling pandemics put together by Obama's administration. It continued with Trump ignoring all the warning signs and actual warnings about the coming pandemic throughout January and February, while he held rallies and golfed.

Those moves, plus a refusal to secure masks that were offered led to the severe outbreak of COVID-19 in the USA, which has led to over 110,000 deaths here thusfar.

That outbreak, most of it directly Trump's fault, led to the economy crashing, putting tens of millions out of work.

On a completely different tact, Trump's cheering on — while himself a coward — of violence by others against hi perceived enemies, whether at rallies or in the media or even in his administration, helped lead to the George Floyd killing and others like it. That killing led to the protests 've had here for two weeks, most of them peaceful, but with enough agents provocateur and ordinary looters to justify the use of police force in dozens of cases, resulting in serious injury to many.

Last week Trump got news that a couple of million people went back to work in May and he crowded like the cock of the walk about that. He omitted the part that he encouraged states to reopen and that once reopened people who did not return to work lost their unemployment and would probably lose their jobs. So that 2-plus million who went back to work are now at risk for COVID-19 to give Trump something he could pretend was good news.

I have people writing to me that I am too harsh on Trump. I am not. I am not because all of this is his fault. All of it.

Glad to Be Part of the Movement

A friend noted that liberals freed the slaves, gave women and blacks the right to vote, voted in the civil rights act and twenty other things. I felt compelled to add this:
    Damned fucking straight! This is what we liberals did and I am proud that I wrote and marched against the Vietnam war, for Women's rights, for Gay rights, for LGBT rights, to end prison privatization, for the Americans and Mexicans to take their place in out society, for the rights of Weed smokers and growers when I worked for so many years at High Times, for the end of forfeiture laws connected to marijuana, for the environment, for peace, and for everyone to get a square deal while we live together on this planet. I still have work to do and I am ready and able. If I can't march anymore, I can still write. Victory to decency!

Good Food Found in the Fridge

Like most of us, I have been spending time concentrating on trump's attempted coup of the USA, the murder of George Floyd, the collapsed economy, the racial divide in our country, and COVID-19. I've also been watching the bunker boy trump ease and erase control on the EPA and infrastructure rules, while he gasses church rectors to get a photo op holding a bible upside down and backwards.
I have also had to see that the shopping was done, do the cooking, and clean up.
Tonight I  was not in the mood to cook and was thinking about getting pizza. We have two pretty good joints near me, mom and pops, and while they are not Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philly or Chicago, are still pretty good for texas.
But then I looked into the fridge. I was startled by the leftovers. There was two or three pounds of potato and egg salad and 4 chicken legs, plus marinated and grilled veggies from a barbeque a few nights ago.There was a nice hot sausage in chicken velouté we'd used on thin pasta. There was a bowl of meatless dahl made with small red beans, a bowl of raita (cucumber salad in yogurt with cumin), some pork vindaloo, a fajita stew, five pieces of lime chicken (my invention: Chicken breasts dressed in breadcrumbs and grated parmesan, sauteed, then baked with fresh lime juice), and one piece of sauteed salmon done in ginger, teriyaki, garlic and sesame oil with a candied skin. There is also an almost new loaf of sourdough that we used last night to make grilled Virginia ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches with tomatoes. And plenty of left over ham, plus two good avocados, fresh cucumber and a beefsteak tomato.
Damn. I hope my family shows up in the new bar my kids Italo, Marco, and my granddaughter Taylor Rain made to eat some of this.
If they don't want it, I guess I'll just order pizza. Dang.
Dang.