Author Archives: matthewgilmanauthor

The lost books of Bourdain

Three years ago, the world lost an example of the American dream. A bottom level chef, dope addict, and workaholic wrote a book that transformed his life and the life of others. Kitchen Confidential boosted Bourdain from a kitchen to television. There were books that came before and after but none of them were as successful as his culinary opus. For some reason his path did not take him into the literary world as he inspired to do, instead he ended up on television throwing insults at Rachel Ray and Emeril Lagasse. That trip didn’t appear to have an ending and somewhere along the way there was the idea for Bourdain to help others become published. An Anthony Bourdain Book became a subdivision of Ecco publishing, the company that published Kitchen Confidential. Every year after 2011, Bourdain picked books, some of them by people he knew, and they were published with his Oprah like stamp on the cover. For seven years this trend continued until Bourdain’s death in 2018. I have come across these books over the years and I have enjoyed every single one. I became curious, how many of these were published? Are there more on the way? Is there a list of all the Bourdain books with his stamp of approval? Sadly, Ecco stopped the publication of Bourdain books in 2018. The last books that Bourdain picked that year were the last to be published with that stamp of approval. The other questions took my down a Google rabbit hole that left me in a world of disappointment. Ecco didn’t have a list of books they had published, only listing items that were still available or still in print. Amazon doesn’t have a category for Anthony Bourdain books although they carry many of the titles I found. eBay was hit or miss with the deciding factor being how the seller listed the item. Even Wikipedia, while it had a listing for Ecco and their subdivision, did not have a list of books that Bourdain published.

The following is the list that I have been able to put together so far:

You’re Better Than Me by Bonnie McFarlane

Pain Don’t Hurt by Mark Miller

Start the Fire by Jeremiah Tower

WD50 by Wylie Dufresne

The Prophets of Smoked Meat by Daniel Vaughn

We Fed an Island by Jose Andres

The Mission Chinese Cookbook by Danny Bowien

Prisoner by Jason Rezaian

Vegetables Unleashed by Jose Andres

Grand Forks by Marilyn Hagerty

L.A. Son by Roy Choi

They call me Supermensch by Shep Gordon

Eating Korea by Graham Holliday

Eating Vietnam by Graham Holliday

Rice Noodle Fish by Matt Goulding

Grape Olive Pig by Matt Goulding

Pasta Pane Vino by Matt Goulding

Hawker Fare by James Syhabout

Adios, Mother Fucker by Michael Ruffino

Stealing Green Mangoes by Sunil Dutta

The publisher stated that the Bourdain portion of the company would publish 3-4 titles per year. There are 20 titles listed here and I’m not sure if they are all of the books published. I have a feeling there might be some missing. After this, there is the question of the introductions Bourdain wrote for other authors, books that Bourdain edited like the 2008 Best of Travel Writing, and the documentaries that Bourdain created like Wasted! The Story of Food Waste. Besides No Reservations and Parts Unknown Bourdain did a lot of projects on the side and some of which were released after his death. To stay on track here let’s focus on the books that Bourdain thought were worthy of being published.

I don’t know if this is a complete list or not. If there is anything missing, please comment on this post so that I can add and edit anything that had been forgotten. For one reason or another Bourdain thought these books were important and while some became popular for obvious reasons there are some that were forgotten the moment they hit the shelves. I find it interesting that Eating Korea appeared to have sold well and was an enjoyable read. However, Eating Vietnam was forgotten and I didn’t even know about it until I started doing this project. Even Goodreads appeared to have dropped the ball on that one.

Where should I go after this? Documentaries? Obscure writings that Bourdain contributed to? Let me know. In the meantime, I have some reading to do.

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The Purge is real

During the Obama administration the national defense authorization act (NDAA) had several points added that made people question the legitimacy of the act. The initial intent of the annual signing was to fund the military but somewhere along the way it became a way of passing laws without congress or voters’ input. Some of the things added included: legalizing propaganda to be used on the American people, the indefinite detention of American citizens, and detaining journalist. There have been lawsuits over the years finding the NDAA to be unconstitutional, violating the 1st and 5th amendment. One does not have to look far to see how the NDAA has been abused. Obama was questioned as he was signing the bill about the indefinite detention of American citizens he said “Yes I’m signing it, but it doesn’t mean it will ever be used.”

It was only a few days ago that I received an email stating that I had received my first strike on YouTube for violating their policies about “medical misinformation.”  I had quoted other channels, who happen to be experts in the field, and discussed how Fauci, the savior of the world, had killed millions of gay people over the decades by not funding studies into drugs that could help the treatment of AIDS. Instead, Fauci pushed for the production of an AIDS vaccine and I’m so glad that it was created (to this day there has been no success in the creation of an AIDS vaccine). I also used the word Hydroxychloroquine as an example of something that the medical community refused to look into because Trump had mentioned it as a possible treatment. This was disavowed without research. The YouTube policy of never saying the word is on par with punishing a three-year-old for using the “F” word even though they hear it all the time. That same morning, on my drive to work, I was listening to the morning radio show with Michael Patrick Shields and he started to discuss Governor Whitmer and her dinner party that broke Covid restrictions. A man filed charges against the governor so that she would receive the $500 fine that she deserves, and as the evidence was discussed the radio cut out. The rest of the segment did not air.

How far does this go? A few days ago, the Darkhorse podcast received a strike on their channel for talking about Ivermectin as a prophylactic drug in preventing contracting Covid-19. Both hosts, the husband-and-wife team, stated their credentials at the beginning of the show and read the studies on this particular drug. They gave the background on how the studies had been conducted in places like Africa but ignored here. The federal government went to different pharmaceutical companies asking if there were any drugs that might treat Covid-19, after stating they had hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the development of one. The answer was a solid “no” and the money was handed over with no questions asked.  

Steven Crowder is back after being kicked off YouTube for two weeks. His crime, questioning the CDC guidelines on wearing mask, back when they said it was not safe or preventative to do so. The other time he contradicted the CDC was when he suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan Lab, which they now state to be a possibility, and Dr Fauci had a hand in making that happen, and the federal government paid for the research, after it was banned in the US by the Obama administration. But Crowder is the bad guy here.

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a reversal of official story and policy coming from the government and big tech. now the government says that it is plausible that Covid-19 came from a lab and was man made. Facebook stated recently that they will no longer ban comments about Covid coming from a lab. After all of this, the accounts frozen or channels shut down, now they say that the people who had been saying this for over a year are right, but there is no apology. Channels are not brought back, Facebook accounts are not reinstated, while the companies move on like nothing happened and will not be held accountable for their actions. If there is anything that we have learned here it’s that the federal government doesn’t know what is going on, even now I don’t know what to believe on the lab leak because they were wrong before. Isn’t it funny that the same day 9-11 happened we knew right away that it was Osama Bin Laden but we can’t figure out where a virus came from? I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a long list of lawsuits after this. To have an account shut down for saying something you think could/ might be true is libel. The company is making a false statement about the person they are accusing and for them to come out over a year later and say that they are wrong and change their policy is proof of their false statement about others. If they are a publisher, as they claim to be, they can be held accountable for libel.

The purge is real. The shut down of the first amendment through private corporations is real. The so-called conspiracy theories that people have been discussing over the last year are real. Funny how the same people who claim to keep us safe are the first to hurt us.

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Was Ruppert Right?

We are just over a hundred days into the Biden Administration and already there is a series of “crisis” taking place. Immigration, war in the middle east, a gas shortage, domestic terrorism, cyber-attacks, and a pandemic that was supposed to end after a two-week lockdown that extended to a year and a half in parts of the country. Many of these things have nothing to do with Michael Ruppert’s book Confronting Collapse but considering the recent fuel shortage that has been created by bad policies one should be wondering what is really going on.

A computer hacker group shut down the Colonial Pipeline and within hours a ransom was paid. Before this event, President Biden stopped the construction of the Keystone pipeline while at the same time Governor Whitmer of Michigan placed orders to shut down the Enbridge Pipeline that transports oil from the Upper Peninsula to the lower peninsula of the state.  Colonial supplies 30% of the nation’s gasoline, oil, and natural gas to the East coast of the United States pumping 100 million barrels of Gasoline a day. Even with the ransom paid the pipeline did not function for days as gas stations ran out of fuel. As of 5-18-2021 gas stations in the state of Virginia were charging $7 a gallon for gasoline. Add that the pipeline was shut down again and things are not looking good for the nation’s energy independence.

Ruppert’s book argued that peak oil would be the cause of a world wide societal collapse. What he never considered is that it could be a man-made phenomenon and not naturally occurring as he argued. A man named Hubbard theorized that we would reach peak oil around the year 2000. This was the same time that 9-11 happened and a few years later we invaded Iraq. At the time this all appeared to be a US policy to counter peak oil for national security, and maybe it was. Then we started to invest in fracking and a decade later became energy independent and the leading exporter of oil in the world. Within a few weeks into the Biden administration that all changed and now we have $3 a gallon gasoline and several pipelines shut down and fracking banned on federal land where most of it takes place. Peak oil was achieved in the US but it was man made.

Peak oil was not the only concerning aspect of Ruppert’s book and the movie Collapse. There was a map of social unrest and the chaos that would happen during the breakdown of social order. For a while, cities and other smaller governments were shutting down different parts of infrastructure in order to save money. Street lights were turned off, water was no longer available to certain parts of cities, roads were no longer maintained. Then technology stepped in. LED lights started to be installed in street lights and in government builds using a small fraction of traditional light bulbs. But even with the money saving factor of this new technology studies found that cities were using more electricity even with the new lights. Somehow the problem was still not solved.

Riots broke out in 2020 and the nation is still experiencing this in various places. These are not the food riots that were predicted. Instead, this is an artificial event that was built on lies and a social agenda including but not limited to removing Trump from office.

What we have started to see now is the break down of the federal government. There are several parts of this and they all appear to be happening at the same time. The death of the US dollar through inflation and a spending spree that doesn’t appear to have an end in sight. States refusing to follow Federal laws that counter state laws, or even better, the state’s interpretation of Federal Law (the constitution). We are seeing 2nd amendment sanctuary states and in some cases the state police are authorized to arrest federal agents who try to break state law. Texas even has a bill going to their state government considering leaving the Union because the federal government doesn’t represent the people of Texas. This argument is well documented with the resent law suit that was refused by the Supreme court claiming that Texas voters were disenfranchised in 2020 when other states changed their voting laws through executive orders and not through state governments like the constitution says. Texas had precedence with the 2000 verdict of Bush v. Gore where the same thing happened in the state of Florida. As one pansy judge stated during an inner office argument “I don’t want to hear about Bush v. Gore. There are riots in the streets.” Even the Supreme court appears to be dictated by mob rule.

Looking back, it would appear that Ruppert was correct about many things but of course the details are sketchy. Ruppert wasn’t a prophet and he never claimed to be. He read the signs of the times and for the moment he could see where it was going. There are factors he could never had accounted for and while peak oil doesn’t appear to be the ultimate culprit society does appear to be collapsing right on schedule. I wonder if Ruppert had stuck around if he would have considered the uprising of Wokeism and the current Communist revolution that is taking place in the country. Could this be a symptom of the limitation of energy in the world? We saw what happened in Texas when renewable energy stopped working and the shut down coal fired power plants could not be brought back online. There would also appear to be the connection of UN programs like Agenda 21 that were not considered and how they have been brought to the forefront through The Great Reset and 30 by 2030. The information that Ruppert had at the time is what he had to work with, although I am surprised that UN programs were not considered in his map of the world order. Of course, the first decade of this century had the UN appearing to be an incompetent organization that could not stop its own officers from sex trafficking and had a horrible inability to stop genocide in any country on the planet. They signed bills and laws, whined about the deaths of thousands of people but didn’t have the ability to do anything about it. The UN functioned like a castrated rooster in a hen house. It talked big, acted like it would do something, but in the end, there were no results. Now with the World Economic Forum, the UN, and the adaptation of the Great Reset in the policies of countries across the planet the UN appears to have a new power implemented through national policies rather than a world governmental body. Now instead of having one group of idiots trying to run things they don’t understand we have several groups of idiots taking orders from those idiots and creating systems that will cause chaos and death across the planet. Great.

To answer the question, was Ruppert right? Yes and no. the Peak oil argument has fallen on its face and while it could still happen in the coming years it would appear the greater threat to civilization is government policy and the new secular religion of Wokeism. Throw in a little communism and you have the break down of society that Ruppert described. All the small details are there, the riots, the inability for supply chains to function, loss of revenue for government, the death of the dollar as the reserve currency, and the outbreak of war. Its funny how so many of these were delayed while a different president was in office and suddenly, we are seeing an uptick in chaos with a change of office. If you were to take out the peak oil argument from Collapse then his predictions would be correct. While Ruppert wasn’t a prophet he was a brilliant man who could put pieces together and figure out what was really going on. I know that some people will want me to say that he was wrong and had some mental issues but with every bit of genius comes a hint of crazy. The man lived an interesting life and when you know what he does its difficult to stay sane in an insane world. Ruppert saw the collapse of society coming and I am left wondering what he would have thought about the revelation of UFOs, now that would have been interesting.

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