Thinking abou Russian site Q-Anon

 

What's on my mind is this: Q-Anon is a Russian site, meant to confuse the easily swayed. Lyin' Trump is gonna love it, of course, because he is depending on Putin's help to rig this election like he rigged the last one.

I don't like this bs at all. But the part that really hurts is that some people who used to have a heart and brain have gone down the rabbit hole and completely lost themselves. And they have no idea that they are being led by some pimply 16-year-old at a computer in a basement in Moscow. That just hurts my head and heart.

A Story from a Recent Interview Michael Sung Did with Me

 

Peter Gorman, an award-winning journalist and author of "Ayahuasca in my Blood" and "Sapo in my Soul," recounted a few colorful experiences with me from his 35+ years of living, traveling, and working in and around Iquitos and the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest:

_________

Peter Gorman: "I remember seeing Julio [Curandero Julio Jerena] get knocked off his stool once in the middle of an ayahuasca ceremony. He must have flown 3 feet. He was a tiny little guy, and it was like watching a sitting Aikido move. Suddenly, he went flying like he had been thrown and just lay there on the floor afterwards. His daughter then told me to start singing, and there were other people mareado in the room."

"I did not have any icaros to sing. Remember, this was before I knew about dietas and all this other stuff."

"So what could I do?"

"I started singing Alberta Let your Hair Hang Down Low. Good Golly Miss Molly. Devil in a Blue Dress. Because that is all I knew. I did whatever I could do. I must have sung for 1.5 hours. I just kept the shacapa shaking, singing, and blowing mapacho smoke."

"Julio finally got up, grabbed the shacapa, took the mapacho from my hand, and continued the ceremony. He was mad at himself the next day, telling me he was weak and was unable to keep outside influences from interfering in the ceremony. I never thought he was weak, but he was around 90 years old at this time."

"Julio would not really talk about brujeria [black magic] with me though. When I would ask him about it once in a while, he would just say: "Forget it, forget it. The less you know about it, the better. There is nothing good that comes from brujeria. Leave it alone."

A New York Story

 

So I found Patti Smith's M Train book on the kitchen table when I was cleaning it up. My friend Claudia V, whom I have known for 40 plus years, gave it to me. I liked Smith, not just for her music but because she and her then-boyfriend Robert Mapelthorpe, lived in New York City's Chelsea Hotel at about the same time I did. I think they were a year earlier or two years earlier. And I was only there for 5 weeks or so, after my breakup with CL.

Smith talked about Maplethorpe falling in love with hustling his ass on 42 street, with his friend, the poet-songwriter Jim Carroll. Both became famous: Carroll for his poetry, songs,and the book The Basketball Diaries.

Maplethorpe became famous for his photos of the extreme homosexual life.

So I was talking to my daughter Madeleina about Patti Smith and the Chelsea Hotel, and that led into a discussion of Maplethorpe and Carroll, which led into a discussion of the chicken hawks who plied 53 Street and Lexington Ave at the RR train station line, which led to talking about my gay cook at my The Cold Beer Blues Bar in Iquitos, Peru, who was fine until he tried to kill my son Marco -- def a pain in the ass -- with a kitchen knife, and then Madeleina said my story was getting too confusing and could she excuse herself to go to the bathroom.

I let her, of course. But damn, if I just had another hour, I could have brought that story back home....hahahaha. Sometimes I just take too roundabout a path. Darn it. I know it was all connected.

The Way It Is

I am being pushed a little. Two of my friends evidently believe in PizzaGate, which, if we lived in another world, would justify my separating their heads from the rest of them. Yes, two friends of mine believe Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carry and others are killing children to drink the essence of their third eyes.

if those friends were my livestock I would put them down out of mercy just because they are that stupid.

Other people I know listen to trump's farts and believe that Biden caused the depression we are in and is responsible for the civil unrest. I wish I could put those stupid people out of my misery as well.

There is no Pizzagate. Trump caused more than 125,000-150,000 deaths from the pandemic, he is responsible for the fucked economy, and he caused all the civil unrest. If you or anyone you know cannot see that, they are horrifyingly stupid.

 

One Time Only Bible Study

 

This is rare, coming from me. Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Catholic who was a great altar boy. In our parish the altar boys brought food to old people, read to them even when their homes smelled like urine, helped paint a house or two for poor people, that sort of thing. We weren't always great at it, but we tried.

That said, a friend of mine recently posted something about the New Testament of the Bible on FB, calling out the impossibly magikal stories that could not have happened. I agree, but for different reasons. If Jesus could, for instance, raise Lazarus from the dead because Lazarus' mother was so distraught, why didn't he raise others whose mothers were also distraught? I mean, what kind of superhero is that?

My personal favorite story in the various books of the New Testament is the story of the Loaves and Fishes. That's the one where Jesus was followed by a large crowd out of town and when he realized people were hungry took one loaf of bread and one fish and gave it to the first hungry person. But he still had a loaf and another fish, so he gave that to the second person. And he kept multiplying the loaves and fishes until everybody ate.

I grew up thinking what a wonderful miracle that was, until I realized that I didn't like it at all. First of all, who the heck plays pied piper with a couple of thousand people to drag them out of town in the freaking desert without having water available? Where were the concessionaires? Who planned that rally and why were they so darned incompetent?

I get that multiplying loaves of bread and fish is a cool miracle, but it doesn't seem like much of a miracle to me. My idea of a great miracle would be that when people were hungry and thirsty, Jesus would have known that everyone, or most, had brought a stash of food or water. That is fairly standard all over the world when going off the beaten track. But people are selfish with their stashes. If they thought to bring it and someone else didn't, there is a tendency to think "too bad for you for not bringing food" in such situations, and I have been in a lot of them in the jungle, or hitchhiking across the USA several times, or just hiking.

To me, the real miracle -- once you realized you hadn't brought anybody with a food stand -- would be to coax everyone at the event to take out their secret stashes and to share those. And there would probably be -- as there usually is -- more than enough for everyone.

Getting people to be selfless is a true miracle. You don't need superpowers, you just need enough love. And that's what I think really happened that day in the desert a long time ago.

And that is the end of Gorman's bible study, I promise.

Questions for Donald Trump

 

The Huffington Post reporter who had the balls to ask Trump about lying to the American public tens of thousands of times a couple of days ago should win an award for honesty in reporting. I suggest a few follow up questions from other White House reporters:

Mr President, how do you feel about having cheated to win the presidency in 2016 and are you happy with your cheating efforts with the Ukraine, China, Russia and the United States Postal Service currently? Will your cheating put you over the top?

Mr. President: Are you happy with the $142 million in taxpayer money that your golf courses have accumulated while you were playing at them in the last 42 months, or do you think you deserve to rip the US people off for more than that?

Mr President: Being directly responsible for at least 3/4 of the Covid deaths in the US -- 125,000 or so to date that you could have prevented, is that enough for your blood lust or can we anticipate another several hundred thousand dead to keep you smiling?

Mr. President: Having organized and executed to the largest financial recession since the great depression -- and a good argument can be made that your recession is greater than the great depression -- are you feeling like you are Number 1?

These are a few of the questions I would ask if I was a White House reporter these days. And again, congrats to the HuffPost reporter who had the balls to ask about the 20,000-plus lies.

Sickness and Societal Changes

Someone I know, a friend, was posting on FB about the media hysteria surrounding the current Covid-19 pandemic. He asked if anyone remember when the AIDS issue broke in the 1980s and said he remembered that it was going to kill everyone but that we were still standing. it was an idiotic comparison and I felt like just telling him off. I didn't. Instead i thought about it for a few minutes and think i came up with a much better response than telling him off. Here is what I wrote;

I think there is an important lesson or two to learn here. When AIDS hit, people were not certain about the cause. It wasn't a disease. It was a condition in which the immune system got overloaded and broke down. Mostly it got overloaded from needle sharing and unprotected sex with lots of partners. But some people got their immune system overloaded from blood transfusions — my friends with hemophilia, Barbara and Kenny Jenks were two of them — and others had their immune systems blown out by simple hepatitis shots. Of course, once the immune system is really blown out, your body can't defend against much of anything and even minor infections and viruses can lead to death.

    There was hysteria and it was warranted. Not only were drugs developed to help maintain the immune system, but the first needle-exchanges were established. People who had multiple sex partners, if they were intelligent, began to use condoms even if they hated them. And those changes were not only helpful in reducing those awful deaths, but were necessary across all levels of society.

    Now we have Covid-19 and there is some hysteria. It is warranted. There are medicines being researched that will hopefully help. Masks and social distancing might suck as bad as using condoms but they saved, and are continuing to save a lot of lives. Societal adaptations are always difficult, and met with skepticism, anger, denial, conspiracy theories. But in the case of AIDS, changing habits was necessary for a lot of people. Now, with a virus that does not care whether you are contributing to your illness with your behavior, those changes are even more vital. And they are not a big deal at all.

Here's a short one, finally

So a liar, a thief, and a narcissist walk into a bar.

The bartender says: "What'll you have, Mr. Trump?"

Political question seeking answers

I need someone in the know to answer this. I know I am being cynical, but with the goings on of the last few years and during much of my lifetime, I don't know what else to be.

The moratorium on evictions, some federal, some state, will expire in just a few days. If those evictions are permitted to proceed — and there could be a reported 23 million of them, which would represent about 40 million or so adults — would those people still be able to vote? I ask because the address on their voter registration would no longer match. I ask because if they are registering now, or asking for an absentee ballot and it is sent to an address where they no longer live, how would they get it. If those evicted move in with family or friends in another state, will they be allowed to register?

Again, I know I am being cynical but I would love some informed input.

Another Insane Food Post!

Ladies and Gents. Gorman here. I am so tired of FB lately. Too many people shouting at one another. Too many decent folk have fallen for Q. I try to refrain from responding most of the time, but once in a while people I like write or reprint something so cockamamie that I dash off a negative response telling them how full of bologna they are. I'm right and they know it, of course, but they can't help themselves.

Okay, so I just feel like talking about food since that is currently a primary outlet for me. In the last week the Italian mama in this Irish boy came out. You'll see. Very unusual.

Started off about a week ago with a nice vegetarian manicotti with fresh mozzarella, asiago, and good ricotta -- along with garlic, spinach, tons of fresh organic basil, and scallions in a nice tomato sauce. Topped with more mozzarella.

Moved on to a barbeque of marinated chicken, sausage, burgers, marinated grilled veggies and a homemade macaroni salad with diced red and green peppers and scallions.

The burger was so good we had them again the next night. We used a mix of coal and pecan wood from a fallen pecan in the yard (big yard at 1 1/2 acres or so), and it was unreal. Served it with a Caprice salad that was outlandishly simple and good..(Thick slice of organic beefsteak tomato topped with a thick slice of fresh mozzarella, topped with basil, sea salt, cracked black pepper and a drizzle of olive oil steeped in chopped garlic.)

Next night was mussels posillipo — fresh mussels in a homemade sauce of garlic, onions, scallions, finely diced fresh Roma tomatoes, wine, salt and cracked black pepper. Served with garlic bread, of course.

Moved on two nights ago to fresh fried calamari. Got a pound of calamari tubes, cut them in 1/2 inch slices. Breaded and fried them and served them with a HOT marinara -- a regular marinara i made but to which was added red pepper flakes and some crab boil. A bottle of Shiner Bock beer beer finished the sauce off.

And last night was freaking excellent chicken parmesan with my fourth tomato sauce of the week. Served with spinach sauteed with garlic in olive oil.

That was a good-eating week. A few bites of each every night was plenty for me so there is lots of stuff left over in the fridge.

And I hope this was better than a political rant. This time.

Legality of Ayahuasca in USA

For the 10 millionth time, someone emailed me about the legal status of the ayahuasca outfit Soul Quest, in Florida. This is my response:

Lots of people love Soul Quest. Legally, it is, of course, entirely illegal and there has been at least one death there from someone drinking too much water before doing frog sweat, sapo/kambo. What do you want to ask me? If it is going to concern the grey area Soul Quest claims they are in, I have to say they are simply lying. They are not in any way connected to the Native American Church, and the NAC has no legal right to use any controlled medicine except peyote. ONAC is an invented silly name with no meaning, and and absolutely no legal significance.

One group of santo daime has the right to use ayahuasca in the USA at one location, and there might be one other exception, but it certainly ain't Soul Quest or any of the other hundred or two groups that I know are claiming legal right or grey area via connection to NAC (which has no connections) or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. They are just too small fry to bother with at the moment. They get big, they are all going to jail.

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.

Agent Provocateurs

During the protests of the Vietnam war, both in New York and Washington, DC, most of the violence was started by agents provocateur. Sometimes they were crazies, sometimes they worked for the police or the FBI, sometimes they were paid by the police or the FBI. 
    From the looks of the white guy who was filmed breaking all the windows in Autozone, it looks like he was one of those. 
   Once the powers that be decide they do not like the television version of what is going on, the best way to change it is to send in someone to commit violent acts, allowing the police to respond to all protesters with violence. That, in turn, produces real violence. 
   Right now, with all the photos of white people looting stores, and with the film of the white guy breaking the windows at Autozone, I suspect that's exactly what is going on here. Create violence to change the perception of what is/was happening.

Life Hack Beauty Tip

When I got my first apartment in NYC when I was 19, my neighbor in the tenement apartment next to mine, an elderly but sprightly woman, used to rub bacon grease into her face every evening. She would rub and rub, then put her face over hot water to get rid of it. she swore it eliminated wrinkles, and by god, she didn't have a one! 
And then, of course, when I was a chef in NYC once a week a 
fat-render would come from the Ivory soap plant in Queens, NY to buy my fry grease to make Ivory soap, shampoos, and facial products with, so I think my neighbor was on to something.

It's raining in Joshua, Texas

I've spoken on this before, but I'm gonna speak on it again. I hope you don't mind.

It's raining outside here in Joshua, Texas. Been raining pretty much since yesterday afternoon. The greens get greener as the roots of the trees and grass get to lap up the fresh rain water in the earth.

And I am reminded of the beauty of green magic. That water will find its way to streams, and rivers, and finally oceans. Some of it will evaporate quickly; some will take a longer time. But all of it will make its way around the world sooner or later. All of it will appear as rain on oasis, or on Chinese villages, or feed the Amazon jungle.

At its most vulgar, remember that what you pee today will water plants that feed a yak or an elephant one day. And what that yak or elephant pees will feed the vegetables that feed your children and mine.

We are all so very, very connected. We are all so intertwined that we cannot do without one another. I am guilty of sometimes forgetting that. But I am a better person and this is a better world when I remember it and remember to live it.

How Sister Somayah came to be a public figure.

How Sister Somayah came to be a public figure. In the early or mid 1990s a crazy woman began calling me at 3-4 AM about once a week at home. I'd anser my rotary dial phone and she'd cuss and cuss at me ant then hang up. After maybe 15-20 such calls I finally got her attention and asked what the hell she was calling me for and what could I do for her. He calmed a little and told me that white folks, very few of which get sickle cell anemia, were ignoring black folks who had the disease. then the hung up. Over the course of the next few weeks and next few phone calls, she explained, with a lot of cussing, that she was a black woman suffering from sickle cell and had had to leave the military — I think she was in Navy provisions — because of her illness. she said the US government provided all sickle cell patients with morphine two or three times a week to alleviate the pain, but that just made them junkies. She said that marijuana dilated the blood vessels and arteries and allowed the sickle cells to pass without causing unbearable pain. She was angry that High Times did not report on this. She called me because I was the editor of the Highwitness News. By chance, I had a friend doing a Masters thesis at (I think) Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. She looked into patients getting morphine for sickle cell and then questioned hundreds and discovered that many, when they could afford marijuana, discovered it worked better than morphine and allowed them to work pain free again rather than being government junkies. so I wrote a story about her and the movement picked her up and the issue got out there and she was marvelous when the spoke about marijuana. And that's that.

I disagree with friends about the pandemic

So I have friends, friends I love, who do not believe the pandemic is real. They think the government is slowly herding us into sheep by starting off with masks and social distancing. I think they are crazy.

They think Bill Gates and his (transsexual, they say) wife are trying to implant things in us. They think the Bildergergers are going to run the world.

I want to laugh and I want to strangle my friends for sheer stupidity.

If you have a smart phone, the government and 2,000 other agencies knows where you are at all times, from shitting to sleeping to fucking your neighbor's husband. If you have Siri or one of the others, you gave up your freedom willingly.

So there are no new tricks needed to know where you are 24/7. Hell, I have a land line with a rotary phone and it has been tapped since I went to work for High Times in 1986. When I brought my wife back from Peru's Jungle in 1994 she would call me once or twice a week to say the men with the blue suits -- the FBI-- were at our door, asking to come in for a minute. I always told her to tell them no,

But they were there twice a week. they knew who we were. The difference between me and paranoia is I accepted it and did not care. I moved a lot of marijuana for High Times centerfold or story shoots in the day and I did not care that they knew I was doing it. When child services came to check out my boys during a separation between my wife and myself, I told them to tell the truth about the pot in the house if they asked.

My point is that being fearful, running away, does not help. Smuggle in plain sight, wear the damned mask and do not be afraid that it suggests cowardice. Not wearing it represents a level of fear I hope I never achieve.

Stay strong, Stay smart. Do not fall prey to the bullshit that well-meaning people are putting out there. Just be yourself.