Month: June 2014
BOYZ IN THE HOOD
KERRY DIPLOMACY
WAL-MART FREAKS OF THE WEEK
Hmmm, I would have figured her back tatas would be a bigger cup size. I mean, the spacing is impressive so I suppose that makes up a bit for the disappointment.
Strollers? Who needs a stroller. Momma bear is a master of multi-purposing objects.
Ladies, don’t you hate it when your bra is showing? Don’t you hate it even more when your husband’s bra is showing?!?!
It looks less like you pooped your pans and more like you went down a slip-n-slide that was coated in poo.
Sometimes the obvious ending to a bad idea is still good to put out there as a friendly reminder.
Sometimes the obvious ending to a bad idea is still good to put out there as a friendly reminder.
I’m not exactly sure how you got poop on the back and the side of your shorts and not the middle. I mean, my dog will roll in poop and get it there, but hopefully you have a better reason.
Geez, the health care system in America just seems to be getting worse and worse.
SEE MORE FREAKS AT PEOPLE OF WAL-MART
THE JOHN STEINBECK OF TBP
As I was reading this comment from Hardscrabble Farmer on the Lazy Teenager thread it struck me. His comments remind me of reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They are so visual and plain spoken and wise. I’m looking forward to meeting our resident John Steinbeck later this week for a beer when he is in Philly on business. I can tell him how exhausted I am from working on that excel spreadsheet all day. 🙂
The past couple of days we have been making hay while the Sun shines, literally. There are several acres of hillsides too steep to mow with the sickle bar cutter, so my 17 year old son and I cut them with scythes and then rake the cut grass into windrows where it dries. These have to be flipped at least three times before we pick them up and make haycocks for the cattle. Scything is about 70% cutting and 30% honing and peening the blade so it involves extreme physicality and focused precision work with hammer, anvil and whetstone. Add to it the delicate rake work of tossing the cut grass into windrows on slopes that pitch like a 7:12 roofline and you start to get the picture.
Of all the things that we do it is the most physically draining, the most demanding in terms of straight through work- from just after the dew dries in the morning until we finally break for supper at 8:30 or so. We talk to one another off and on about books, about history, about family about his future. He is leaving in a week to backpack his way through Europe, from Barcelona to Geneva and we will miss him, but until then he works beside me harder than 90% of most adult males in our culture.
The group he is going with are predominantly the sons and daughters of the well to do. Jokingly I told him that when they sit around the alpine huts in the evening watching the last light fade from the snow covered slopes of Mont Blanc and they are gossiping about their early admission to Yale or Harvard he tell them about how he paid his way on the trip by felling oaks and then splitting them into fence rails, or digging a well by hand, or scything the steep hillsides of his family farm to make hay for his flocks and herds for the Winter ahead.
“You know they won’t believe it.” he says.
“But you’ll know it’s true.” I reply.
And this is followed by the soft snicking sound of blade against stem, in cadence, for quite some time.
The fact that so many have surrendered their lives to indolence and sloth says a great deal about the culture we inhabit. That their children follow in their footsteps is to be expected because that is the example that they set and it is all that they will likely ever know. It is not an excuse, however for those who understand their responsibility as parents, who believe in a better future for their own children, who plan further ahead than their next EBT transfer from Uncle Sugar.
After we had finished last night we took a walk into the south pasture where the cattle were grazing and studied the grasses, talked about the nitrogen benefits of the various clovers and vetches, and about his plans for building a couple of hobbity cottages along the bouldered hillsides where the stately maples grew in profusion. He sees the farm as a destination for moneyed urban types with an itch to visit the countryside for a long weekend, where they can wake up in the morning to the sound of ewes bleating to their lambs, and eat fresh eggs with yolks the color of tangerines. I listen to him talk about his love for this piece of property, about the light falling in the forest never penetrates deep enough to shake off the blue darkness inside, and even after his day how much he enjoys working beside me.
Next week when he boards his flight, by himself with nothing but his backpack and the clothes he is wearing, I will be watching him go with a small degree of sadness, but with such a deep well of pride in him that it will temper anything else. He is confident well beyond his years, bright and funny and completely fearless of the future unlike so many of his contemporaries, and he has earned his trip from the sweat of his brow, something that means more to him than he understands right now. But one day he will and it will be a foundation upon which he will build his own future.
I feel bad for the teenagers that miss this, but my son is not one of them, and he makes his parents very proud.
Inflation? Only If You Look At Food, Water, Gas, Electricity And Everything Else
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
Have you noticed that prices are going up rapidly? If so, you are certainly not alone. But Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, the Obama administration and the mainstream media would have us believe that inflation is completely under control and exactly where it should be. Perhaps if the highly manipulated numbers that they quote us were real, everything would be fine. But of course the way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since the 1970s, and at this point it bears so little relation to reality that it is essentially meaningless. Anyone that has to regularly pay for food, water, gas, electricity or anything else knows that inflation is too high. In fact, if inflation was calculated the same way that it was back in 1980, the inflation rate would be close to 10 percent right now.
But you would never know that listening to Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. In the video posted below, you can listen to her telling the media that there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about…
And it is really hard to get too upset with Janet Yellen.
After all, she reminds many people of a sweet little grandmother.
But the reality of the matter is that she is simply not telling us the truth. Everywhere we look, prices are aggressively moving higher.
Just the other day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the price index for meat, poultry, fish, and eggs has just soared to a new all-time high.
This is something that I have repeatedly warned would happen. Just check out this article and this article.
And it isn’t just meat prices that are going up. One of the largest coffee producers in the entire world just announced that it is going to be raising coffee prices by 9 percent…
It took the Fed long enough but finally even it succumbed to the reality of surging food prices when, as we reported previously, it hiked cafeteria prices at ground zero: the cafeteria of the Chicago Fed, stating that “prices continue to rise between 3% and 33%.” So with input costs rising across the board not just for the Fed, but certainly for food manufacturers everywhere, it was only a matter of time before the latter also threw in the towel and followed in the Fed’s footsteps. Which is what happened earlier today when J.M. Smucker Co. said it raised the prices on most of its coffee products by an average of 9% to reflect higher green-coffee costs.
Not that coffee isn’t expensive enough already. It absolutely stuns me that some people are willing to pay 3 dollars for a cup of coffee.
I still remember the days when you could get a cup of coffee for 25 cents.
Also, I can’t get over how expensive groceries are becoming these days. Earlier this month I took my wife over to the grocery store to do some shopping. We are really ramping up our food storage this summer, and so we grabbed as much stuff on sale as we could find. When we got our cart to the register, I was expecting the bill to be large, but I didn’t expect it to be over 300 dollars.
And remember, this was just for a single shopping cart and we had consciously tried to grab things that were significantly reduced from regular price.
I almost felt like asking the cashier which organ I should donate to pay the bill.
Sadly, this is just the beginning. Food prices are eventually going to go much, much higher than this.
Also, you should get ready to pay substantially more for water as well.
According to CNBC, one recent report warned that “your water bill will likely increase” in the coming months…
U.S. water utilities face a critical economic squeeze, according to a new report—and that will likely mean higher prices at the water tap for consumers.
A survey by water-engineering firm Black & Veatch of 368 water utility companies across the country shows that 66 percent of them are not generating enough revenue to cover their costs.
To make up for the financial shortfall, prices for water are heading upward, said Michael Orth, one of the co-authors of the report and senior vice president at Black & Veatch.
“People will have to pay more for water to make up the falling revenues,” he said. “And that’s likely to be more than the rate of inflation.”
Of even greater concern is what is happening to gas prices.
According to Bloomberg, the price of gasoline hasn’t been this high at this time of the year for six years…
Gasoline in the U.S. climbed this week, boosted by a surge in oil, and is expected to reach the highest level for this time of year since 2008.
The pump price averaged $3.686 a gallon yesterday, up 1.2 cents from a week earlier, data posted on the Energy Information Administration’s website late yesterday show. Oil, which accounts for two-thirds of the retail price of gasoline, gained $2.49 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in the same period and $4.88 in the month ended yesterday.
The jump in crude, driven by concern that the crisis in Iraq will disrupt supplies, may boost pump prices by 10 cents a gallon at a time when they normally drop, according to forecasts including one from the EIA.
And the conflicts in Iraq, Ukraine and elsewhere could potentially send gas prices screaming far higher.
In fact, T. Boone Pickens recently told CNBC that if Baghdad falls to ISIS that the price of a barrel of oil could potentially hit $200.
Of course the big oil companies are not exactly complaining about this. This week energy stocks are hitting record highs, and further escalation of the conflict in Iraq will probably send them even higher.
Meanwhile, a “bipartisan Senate proposal” (that means both Democrats and Republicans) would raise the gas tax by 12 cents a gallon over the next two years.
Our politicians have such good timing, don’t they?
Ugh.
And our electricity rates are going up too. The electricity price index just set a brand new record high and there are no signs of relief on the horizon…
The electricity price index and the average price for a kilowatthour (KWH) of electricity both hit records for May, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The average price for a KWH hit 13.6 cents during the month, up about 3.8 percent from 13.1 cents in May 2013.
The seasonally adjusted electricity price index rose from 201.431 in May 2013 to 208.655 in May 2014—an increase of about 3.6 percent.
If our paychecks were increasing at the same rate as inflation, perhaps most families would be able to weather all of this.
Unfortunately, that is not the case at all.
As I wrote about recently, median household income in the U.S. is now about 7 percent lower than it was in the year 2000 after adjusting for inflation.
And if realistic inflation numbers were used instead of the government-manipulated ones, it would look a lot worse than that.
Inflation is a hidden tax that all of us pay, and it is systematically eviscerating the middle class.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
From Bernie T
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing. I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender. I know that to pay all proper expenses within the year would, in case of war, be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars could be reduced in that proportion; besides that the State governments would be free to lend their credit in borrowing quotas.”
Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor of Caroline, 26 NOV 1798.
Another Lie about Iraq Exposed
The sectarian myth of Iraq
Tony Blair has been widely derided for his attempted justification of the 2003 Iraq invasion, and his claim last weekend that he’s blameless over the current turmoil. Unfortunately, though, many of his critics have also bought into a central plank of his argument: that Iraqi society is no more than a motley collection of religions and ethnicities which have been waiting for decades, if not centuries, to slaughter each other and plunge the place into a bloodbath.
The main difference between the two sides seems to be that Blair believes western intervention is the answer; some of his critics say Iraq needed a dictator like Saddam to hold the nation together. Neither side, though, has yet produced historical evidence of significant communal fighting between Iraq’s religions, sects, ethnicities or nationalities. Prior to the 2003 US-led occupation, the only incident was the 1941 violent looting of Jewish neighbourhoods – which is still shrouded in mystery as to who planned it. Documents relating to that criminal incident are still kept secret at the Public Records Office by orders of successive British governments. The bombing of synagogues in Baghdad in 1950-51 turned out to be the work of Zionists to frighten Iraq’s Jews – one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world – into emigrating to Israel following their refusal to do so.
Until the 1970s nearly all Iraq’s political organisations were secular, attracting people from all religions and none. The dividing lines were sharply political, mostly based on social class and political orientation. The growth of religious parties followed Saddam’s ruthless elimination of all political entities other than the Ba’ath party. Places of worship became centres of political agitation and organisation.
Despite popular myths, the majority of Ba’ath party founders were Shia. However, Iraqi Ba’athist ideology always had a racist dimension against the Kurdish people and non-Arabs – as well as a class orientation, when in power, that marginalised millions in the poorest sections of society, mostly in the south. Southern Iraq and some areas of Baghdad, populated by mostly Shia migrants from southern rural areas, have historically been home to the poorest people.
Iraq’s biggest mass organisation from the 1940s to the 60s was the Iraqi Communist party, founded in 1934 by activists from all religious and ethnic backgrounds. It was the strongest party even in Iraqi Kurdistan, and remained a mass party until its leadership decided to join Saddam’s regime in 1973 – against the wishes of most party members. Saddam launched a vicious campaign against the ICP in 1978-9, and the party lost its raison d’être after joining the Iraq Governing Council set up after the occupation in 2003.
Commentators on Iraq often refer to ethnic wars waged against its Kurdish people. They fail to mention that none of these wars were popular but were ruthlessly pursued by repressive regimes, particularly Saddam’s.
One of the greatest testaments to the tolerance that exists between the various communities in Iraq is that Baghdad still has up to a million Kurds, who have never experienced communal violence by Arabs. Similarly, about 20% of Basra’s population is Sunni. Samarra, a mostly Sunni city, is home to two of the most sacred Shia shrines. Its Sunni clergy have been the custodians of the shrines for centuries.
Every tribe in Iraq has Sunnis and Shia in its ranks. Every town and city has a mix of communities. My experience of Iraq, and that of all friends and relatives, is that of an amazing mix of coexisting communities, despite successive divide-and-rule regimes.
The most serious sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq’s modern history followed the 2003 US-led occupation, which faced massive popular opposition and resistance. The US had its own divide-and-rule policy, promoting Iraqi organisations founded on religion, ethnicity, nationality or sect rather than politics. Many senior officers in the newly formed Iraqi army came from these organisations and Saddam’s army. This was exacerbated three years ago, when sectarian groups in Syria were backed by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It is this officer class that this month abandoned Mosul and a third of Iraq’s territory to the terrorists of Isis, beefed up by thousands of foreign fighters, members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party, and the Islamic party (a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood). It has also become clear that leaders of the Kurdistan regional government have expanded their control and implemented a de facto ceasefire with the sectarian insurgents. It is also significant that the officers who abandoned Mosul and other areas without firing a bullet fled to Kurdistan.
Whether Iraq can survive this most serious threat to its existence remains to be seen. But those who claim it could only have peace if it is divided into three states do not appreciate the makeup of Iraqi society – the three regions would quickly fall under the rule of violent sectarians and chauvinists. Given how ethnically and religiously mixed Iraq’s regions are, particularly in Baghdad and central Iraq, a three-way national breakup would be a recipe for permanent wars in which only the oil companies, the arms suppliers, and the warlords will be the winners.
2008 REDUX
Gas prices are the highest in history at this point in the year, except for 2008. That was a fun year. Gas prices are already over $4.00 in California, New York and Chicago. I wonder if history will rhyme? If Iraq blows sky high or a couple of large hurricanes drift into the Gulf of Mexico, the resulting oil price spike will ignite a new conflagration that will make the 2008/2009 implosion look like child’s play.
FRIDAY FAIL
A Florida Man Known as “Fat Boy” Hides His Drug Stash in Exactly the Place a Guy Called “Fat Boy” Would
The deputies searched Mitchell and fount 23 grams of marijuana hidden under his fat. Police also found a handgun in the middle console and $7,000 in cash stuffed in a tube sock. The suspects tried to hide the smell of drugs with carpet freshener and scented dryer sheets, but that didn’t work.
IRAQI ARMY
See more at the FAIL BLOG
THE WARMONGERS SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH
FUCK THE MEEK!!!
“We have a world economic system that is not good. A system that in order to survive must make war, as great empires have always done. But since you cannot have a Third World War, you have regional wars. And what does this mean? That arms are made and sold, and in this way the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, obviously keep their balance sheets in the black.”
Jorge Bergoglio, Francis I
ARE AMERICAN TEENAGERS JUST LAZY?
These charts are head scratchers. I had a paper route when I was 12. I started a part-time job when I was 16 and have worked ever since. The number of teens working has been falling for the last 20 years.
The number of teens with summer jobs has fallen roughly 30 percentage points since the late ‘70s. In 1978, nearly three in four teenagers (71.8%) ages 16 to 19 held a summer job, but as of last year, only about four in 10 teens did, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the month of July analyzed by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas . It’s been a steady decline, seen even during good times: During the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, when national unemployment was only about 4%, roughly six in 10 teens held summer jobs. Even recently, with the economy recovering, fewer teens opted for jobs: Last year’s summer job gain was down 3% from the summer payrolls in 2012, the report revealed.
The first chart shows the dramatic plunge from 1995 onward. Have parents become too soft and are coddling their little babies? It certainly isn’t because people’s financial situation is better than it was in 1995. Real household income is lower than it was in 1998. College tuition has skyrocketed, so you would think teenagers would need to work in order to save for college and pay for their incidentals. Has the peddling of student loans by the government made teenagers think they got found money?
The chart below would indicate that teenagers are just lazy. They don’t want to work. They just want to play video games, text, facebook and twitter. Are they just the most spoiled, coddled generation ever? We know they all get trophies no matter where they finish.
Or does this chart tell the true story? Are baby boomers refusing to leave the workforce and clogging up the traditional entry level jobs for teenagers? If you go to fast food joints these days there sure are a lot more gray hairs behind the counter. Boomers lived for today and never saved for tomorrow, so now they are taking the jobs from millenials.
I think I know the answer I’ll get from the old fogeys on this site. My teenagers are working. Based on my observations, if a kid really wants to work, they can get a job.
NEW DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE STUDY
New Department Of Agriculture Study Finds 85% Of U.S. Farmers Woefully Kicking At Dirt
WASHINGTON—According to a Department of Agriculture study released Friday, the vast majority of U.S. farmers have recently finished squinting off into the horizon and are, at present, woefully kicking at the dirt. “Based on our research, we can confirm that 68 percent of American farmers are currently removing their hats and wiping the sweat from their brow with the back of their arm, with an additional 26 percent coughing into a threadbare handkerchief,” the report read in part, noting that if they had not done so already, most farmers in the U.S. would soon spit on the ground beside them before staring up at the clouds and reckoning the possibility of rain. “The data indicate that while American farmers may or may not be chewing on a single length of wheat, nearly all of them are at this time squatting down to inspect a dried, shriveled beanstalk.” The study concluded that 100 percent of American farmers would, within moments, lazily shake their heads and lament that things just ain’t what they used to be.
DARING ESCAPE
Employee Executes Daring 3:30 P.M. Escape From Office
BINGHAMTON, NY—In a risky maneuver requiring precise timing and careful preparation, LifeTech Medical Devices employee Trevor Sadler, 32, executed a daring 3:30 p.m. escape from his office Monday afternoon, sources confirmed. “All right, it’s go time,” Sadler said to himself moments before furtively slipping out of his cubicle and taking a circuitous route to the back stairwell leading out to the parking lot where his car would be waiting. “I’m leaving my monitor on, and there’s a full glass of water sitting on my desk so it’ll seem like I’m still in the building. And I won’t bring my laptop bag with me. That way, if anyone sees me leave, I’ll look like I’m just stepping out for a minute. Then I should be home free.” At press time, Sadler had been drawn into an unexpected conversation with a coworker about an upcoming sales meeting, forcing the would-be fugitive to hastily snap the man’s neck and drag his body into the supply closet.
This Just In: ISIS is a F***ING PsyOps Lie
EVERY person with at least two brain cells has wondered; “How in the hell did this ISIS group appear out of fucking nowhere, and how in the hell did they suddenly become this powerful fighting force, and what the fuck is up with their ‘Annual Report’ bullshit??” Well, the answer is in. It’s all bullshit.
—————————————————————-
Could ISIS in Iraq Be a Hoax?
The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really an Attack on Iran
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/18/the-isis-fiasco-its-really-an-attack-on-iran/
HOW PSYCHEDELICS SAVED MY LIFE
SSS will love this article. I did a lot of these when I was in college and I still have generally fond memories of tripping in the outdoors.
Who would like to drop acid with this chick? *raises hand*
How Psychedelics Saved My Life
Amber Lyon
Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy of Amber Lyon
The following article was written by Amber Lyon and first appeared onReset.me:
I invite you to take a step back and clear your mind of decades of false propaganda. Governments worldwide lied to us about the medicinal benefits of marijuana. The public has also been misled about psychedelics.
These non-addictive substances- MDMA, ayahuasca, ibogaine, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and many more- are proven to rapidly and effectively help people heal from trauma, PTSD, anxiety, addiction and depression.
Psychedelics saved my life.
My Experience with Anxiety and PTSD Symptoms
I was drawn to journalism at a young age by the desire to provide a voice for the ‘little guy.’ For nearly a decade working as a CNN investigative correspondent and independent journalist, I became a mouthpiece for the oppressed, victimized and marginalized. My path of submersion journalism brought me closest to the plight of my sources, by living the story to get a true understanding of what was happening.
After several years of reporting, I realized an unfortunate consequence of my style- I had immersed myself too deeply in the trauma and suffering of the people I’d interviewed. I began to have trouble sleeping as their faces appeared in my darkest dreams. I spent too long absorbed in a world of despair and my inability to deflect it allowed the trauma of others to settle inside my mind and being. Combine that with several violent experiences while working in the field and I was at my worst. A life reporting on the edge had led me to the brink of my own sanity.
Because I could not find a way to process my anguish, it grew into a monster, manifesting itself into a constant state of anxiety, short-term memory loss, sleeplessness, and hyperarousal. The heart palpitations made me feel like I was knocking on death’s door.
Why I Chose Psychedelic Drugs Medicines
Prescription medications and antidepressants serve a purpose, but I knew they were not on my path to healing after my investigations exposed their sinister side effects including infants being born dependent on the medicines after their mothers couldn’t kick their addictions. Masking the symptoms of a deeper condition with a pill felt like putting a Band-Aid on bullet wound.
I was made aware of the potential healing powers of psychedelics as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in October 2012. Joe told me psychedelic mushrooms transformed his life and had the potential to change the course of humanity for the better. My initial reaction was one of amusement and somewhat disbelief, but the seed was planted.
Psychedelics were an odd choice for someone like me. I grew up in the Midwest and was fed 30 years of propaganda explaining how horrible these substances were for my health. You can imagine my jaw-dropping surprise when, after the Rogan podcast, I found articles on the prodigious effects of these substances that behave more like medicines than drugs. Articles like this one, this, this , this, and this. And studies such as this, this, this, this, this… and this … all gut-wrenching examples of how we’ve been misled by authorities who classify psychedelics as schedule 1 narcotics that have ‘no medicinal value’ despite dozens of scientific studies proving otherwise.
Tripping Around the World
Having only ever smoked the odd marijuana joint in college, in March 2013 I found myself boarding a plane to Iquitos, Peru to try one of the most powerful psychedelics on earth. I ditched my car at the airport, hastily packed my belongings in a backpack and headed down to the Amazon jungle placing my blind faith in a substance that a week ago I could hardly pronounce: ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is a medicinal tea that contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The brew is rapidly spreading around the world after numerous anecdotes have shown the brew has the power to cure anxiety, PTSD, depression, unexplained pain, and numerous physical and mental health ailments. Studies of long-term ayahuasca drinkers show they are less likely to face addictions and have elevated levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for happiness.
If I had any reservations, doubts, or disbeliefs, they were quickly expelled shortly after my first ayahuasca experience. The foul-tasting tea vibrated through my veins and into my brain as the medicine scanned my body. My field of vision became engulfed with fierce colors and geometric patterns. Almost instantly, I saw a vision of a brick wall. The word ‘anxiety’ was spray painted in large letters on the wall. “You must heal your anxiety,” the medicine whispered. I entered a dream-like state where traumatic memories were finally dislodged from my subconscious.
It was as if I was viewing a film of my entire life, not as the emotional me, but as an objective observer. The vividly introspective movie played in my mind as I relived my most painful scenes- my parents divorce when I was just 4 years-old, past relationships, being shot at by police while photographing a protest in Anaheim and crushed underneath a crowd while photographing a protest in Chicago. The ayahuasca enabled me to reprocess these events, detaching the fear and emotion from the memories. The experience was akin to ten years of therapy in one eight-hour ayahuasca session.
But the experience, and many psychedelic experiences for that matter, was terrifying at times. Ayahuasca is not for everyone—you have to be willing to revisit some very dark places and surrender to the uncontrollable, fierce flow of the medicine. Ayahuasca also causes violent vomiting and diarrhea, which shamans call “getting well” because you are purging trauma from your body.
After seven ayahuasca sessions in the jungles of Peru, the fog that engulfed my mind lifted. I was able to sleep again and noticed improvements in my memory and less anxiety. I yearned to absorb as much knowledge as possible about these medicines and spent the next year travelling the world in search of more healers, teachers and experiences through submersion journalism.
I was drawn to try psilocybin mushrooms after reading how they reduced anxiety in terminal cancer patients. The ayahuasca showed me my main ailment was anxiety, and I knew I still had work to do to fix it. Psilocybin mushrooms are not neurotoxic, they’re nonaddictive, and studies show they reduce anxiety, depression, and even lead to neurogenesis, or the regrowth of brain cells. Why would governments worldwide keep such a profound fungi out of the reach of their people?
After Peru, I visited curanderas, or healers, in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Mazatecs have used psilocybin mushrooms as a sacrament and medicinally for hundreds of years. Curandera Dona Augustine served me a leaf full of mushrooms during a beautiful ceremony before a Catholic alter. As she sang thousand year-old songs, I watched the sunset over the mountainous landscape in Oaxaca and a deep sense of connectivity washed over my whole being. The innate beauty had me at a loss for words; a sudden outpouring of emotion had me in tears. I cried through the night and with each tear a small part of my trauma trickled down my cheek and dissolved onto the forest floor, freeing me from its toxic energy.
Perhaps most astounding, the mushrooms silenced the self-critical part of my mind long enough for me to reprocess memories without fear or emotion. The mushrooms enabled me to remember one of the most terrifying moments of my career: when I was detained at gunpoint in Bahrain while filming a documentary for CNN. I had lost any detailed recollection of that day when masked men pointed guns at our heads and forced my crew and I onto the ground. For a good half an hour, I did not know whether we were going to survive.
I spent many sleepless nights desperately searching for memories of that day, but they were locked in my subconscious. I knew the memories still haunted me because anytime I would see PTSD ‘triggers’, such as loud noises, helicopters, soldiers, or guns, a rush of anxiety and panic would flood my body.
The psilocybin was the key to unlock the trauma, enabling me to relive the detainment moment to moment, from outside of my body, as an emotionless, objective observer. I peered into the CNN van and saw my former self sitting in the backseat, loud helicopters overhead. My producer Taryn was sitting to the right of me frantically trying to close the van door as we tried to make an escape. I heard Taryn scream “guns!” as armed masked men jumped out of the security vehicles surrounding the van. I watched as I frantically dug through a backpack on the floor, grabbing my CNN ID card and jumping out of the van. I saw myself land on the ground in child’s pose, dust covering my body and face. I watched as I threw my hand with the CNN badge in the air above my head yelling “CNN, CNN, don’t shoot!!”
I saw the pain in my face as the security forces threw human rights activist and dear friend Nabeel Rajab against a security car and began to harass him. I saw the terror in my face as I glanced down at my shirt, arms in the air, praying the video cards concealed on my body wouldn’t fall onto the ground.
As I relived each moment of the detainment, I reprocessed each memory moving it from the “fear” folder to its new permanent home in the “safe” folder in my brain’s hard drive.
Five ceremonies with psilocybin mushrooms cured my anxiety and PTSD symptoms. The butterflies that had a constant home in my stomach have flown away.
Psychedelics are not the be-all and end-all. For me, they were the key that opened the door to healing. I still have to work to maintain the healing with the use of floatation tanks, meditation, and yoga. For psychedelics to be effective, it’s essential they are taken with the right mindset in a quiet, relaxed setting conducive to healing, and that all potential prescription drug interactions are carefully researched. It can be fatal if Ayahuasca is mixed with prescription antidepressants.
I was blessed with an inquisitive nature and a stubbornness to always question authority. Had I opted for a doctor’s script and resigned myself in the hope that things would just get better, I never would have discovered the outer reaches of my mind and heart. Had I drunk the Kool-Aid and believed that all ‘drugs’ are evil and have no healing value, I may still be in the midst of a battle with PTSD.
The Creation of Reset.me
This very world that glamorizes war, violence, commercialism, environmental destruction, and suffering has outlawed some of the most profound keys to inner peace. The War on Drugs is not based on science. If it was, two of the most deadly drugs on earth—alcohol and tobacco—would be illegal. Those suffering from trauma have become victims of this failed war and have lost one of the most effective ways to heal.
Humanity has gone mad as a result.
I spent ten years witnessing the collective insanity as a journalist on the frontlines: wars, bloodshed, environmental destruction, sex slavery, lies, addiction, anger, fear.
But I had it all wrong journalistically. I had been focusing on the symptoms of an ill society, rather than attacking the root cause: unprocessed trauma.
We all have trauma. Trauma rests in the violent criminal, the cheating spouse, the corrupt politician, those suffering from mental illness, addictions, inside those too fearful to take risks and reach their full potential.
If it’s not adequately processed and purged, trauma becomes cemented onto the hard drive of the mind, growing into a dark parasite that rears its ugly head throughout a person’s entire life. The wounds keep us locked in a grid of fear, trapped behind a personality not true to the soul, working a mundane job rather than following a passion, repeating a cycle of abuse, destroying the environment, harming one another. The most common and severe suffering is inflicted during childhood and hijacks the driver’s seat into adulthood, steering an individual down a road deprived of happiness. Renowned addiction expert Gabor Mate says, “The major cause of severe substance addiction is always childhood trauma.”
We live in a world full of wounds and when left untreated, they’re unceremoniously handed from one generation to the next, so the cycle of trauma continues in all its destructive brutality.
But there’s hope. We can transform the course of humanity by collectively purging our grief and healing at the individual level, with the help of psychedelic medicines. Once we collectively heal at the individual level, we will see dramatic positive transformation in society as a whole.
I founded the website reset.me, to produce and aggregate journalism on consciousness, natural medicines, and therapies. Psychedelic explorer Terrence McKenna compared taking psychedelics to hitting the ‘reset button’ on your internal hard drive, clearing out the junk, and starting over. I created reset.me to help connect those who need to hit the ‘reset button’ in life with journalism covering the tools that enable us to heal.
It’s a human rights crisis psychedelics are not accessible to the general population. It’s insane that governments worldwide have outlawed the very medicines that can emancipate our souls from suffering.
It’s time we stop the madness.
This article first appeared on Reset.me and waspublished with permission from Reset.me and the author.