Actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish insists drinking small amounts of turpentine is good for you -- and she blames the government for trying to convince people otherwise.
The "Girls Trip" star explained her unorthodox views on turpentine -- a pine resin extract typically used as paint thinner -- to an incredulous reporter during an in-depth profile for GQ.
“A teaspoon of turpentine will not kill you,” Haddish claimed. “The government doesn't want you to know that if you have a cold, just take some turpentine with some sugar or castor oil or honey and it'll go away the next day.”
Reporter Caity Weaver pushed back, cautioning that turpentine was not intended for human consumption.
“Honey, back during slavery — let me teach you something, okay?” Haddish argued.
The actress claimed that slaves drank turpentine oil as a cure for various ailments, and historical accounts do show the organic solvent was commonly used as a topical remedy for cuts, sprains and even respiratory ailments.
The reporter told Haddish that slaves weren't known for excellent health, but she argued that's because not all slaves had access to turpentine.
“There's worms inside your body,” Haddish argued. “There are worms inside your body.”
Haddish told the reporter that she learned to use turpentine as medicine from YouTube videos and purchased some a few months ago on Amazon.
"Everything just felt so much better, clarity-wise," she said of her first dose.
The reporter argued that she might have been light-headed from drinking poison, but Haddish was undeterred.
“But I was killing the game onstage!” she said, laughing. “My thought patterns was coming quick, quick, quick. Girl, you just look it up -- just do the research.”
Weaver said she did research turpentine afterward, and the reporter sent Haddish information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine describing the dangers of turpentine poisoning -- but the actress dismissed the evidence.
“The government wrote it,” Haddish said. “Honey.”
The actress promised to update Weaver after her next doctor's appointment, and continued extolling the medical virtues of turpentine.
"The best doo-doo of your f*cking life," Haddish promised.
Following the day when the House select committee held its last public hearing and then formally announced multiple criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, CNN's Don Lemon suggested Tuesday the former president is about to face a further blow that could be even worse.
The latest setback for the former president will likely come if the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee votes on whether to publicly release years of Donald Trump’s tax returns as expected.
According to a CNN report, "The committee has had access to Trump’s taxes for weeks after winning a lengthy legal battle that began in the spring of 2019. House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal requested the first six years of Trump’s taxes as well as tax returns for eight of his businesses back in April of 2019."
After sharing a montage of Trump promising to release his taxes before and during his presidency, Lemon kicked off his segment by stating, "Promises, promises and then -- more excuses. Today, with only two weeks of control left, the Democratic-led house Ways and Means Committee is likely to hold a vote on whether to release several years of the former president's tax returns."
Introducing his guest, Russ Buettner of the New York Times, he added, "You saw the clip that we put on there. Promises, promises, promises and as I said, then more excuses. He's done everything possible to stop people from seeing his tax returns so today could possibly be worse for the former president than even yesterday's criminal referrals from the January 6 committee."
"This is something I think that concerns him the most," Lemon suggested. "His wealth and whether he was accurate about his taxes which will show what he's actually worth."
"I think this really goes to the heart of not only his, how he's presented himself to voters and the public at large, but how he sees himself as well. which is a man of incredible wealth," Buettner replied. "His tax returns, the twenty-years plus worth that we reviewed showed a very different story."
"The bulk of his money has come from entertainment, from licensing deals that required no real business expertise on his part and from an inheritance from his father," he added. "The businesses that he has run have kind of suffered or been inconsistent at best. If there's a report that comes out of this, the returns themselves, I think it will probably show the same thing we found."
In the following weeks, water, boiling-hot mud and natural gas were added to the mixture. When the eruption intensified, mud started to spread over the fields. Alarmed residents evacuated, hoping to wait out the eruption safely.
Except that it didn’t stop. Weeks passed, and the spreading mud engulfed entire villages. In a frantic race against time, the Indonesian government began to build levees to contain the mud and stop the spread. When the mud overtopped these levees, they built new ones behind the first set. The government eventually succeeded in stopping the mud’s advance, but not before the flows had wiped out a dozen villages and forced 60,000 people to relocate.
Why would the Earth suddenly start vomiting forth huge quantities of mud like this?
Introducing mud volcanoes
The Lusi structure – a contraction of Lumpur Sidoarjo, meaning “Sidoarjo mud” – is an example of a geological feature known as a mud volcano. They form when a combination of mud, fluids and gases erupt at the Earth’s surface. The term “volcano” is borrowed from the much better known world of igneous volcanoes, where molten rock comes to the surface. I’ve been studying these fascinating structures on subsurface seismic data for the past five years, but nothing compares to seeing one actively erupting.
For mud volcanoes, in many cases the mud bubbles up to the surface rather quietly. But sometimes the eruptions are quite violent. Furthermore, most of the gas coming out of a mud volcano is methane, which is highly flammable. This gas can ignite, creating spectacular fiery eruptions.
Gases erupting along with mud can ignite.
Mud volcanoes are little known in North America, but much more common in other parts of the world, including not only Indonesia but also Azerbaijan, Trinidad, Italy and Japan.
They form when fluids and gases that have built up under pressure inside the Earth find an escape route to the surface via a network of fractures. The fluids move up these cracks, carrying mud with them, creating the mud volcano as they escape.
The idea is similar to a car tire containing compressed air. As long as the tire is intact, the air stays safely inside. Once the air has a pathway out, however, it begins to escape. Sometimes the air escapes as a slow leak – in other cases there is a blowout.
Overpressures are commonly encountered during drilling for oil and gas and are typically planned for. A primary way of dealing with overpressures is to fill the wellbore with dense drilling mud, which has sufficient weight to contain the overpressures.
If the well is drilled with insufficient mud weight, any overpressured fluids can rush up the wellbore to explode out at the surface, leading to a spectacular blowout. Famous examples of blowouts include the 1901 Spindletop gusher in Texas and the more recent 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In those cases it was oil, not mud, that burst out of the wells.
In addition to being fascinating in their own right, mud volcanoes are also useful to scientists as windows into conditions deep inside the Earth. Mud volcanoes can involve materials from as deep as 6 miles (10 kilometers) below the Earth’s surface, so their chemistry and temperature can provide useful insights into deep-Earth processes that can’t be obtained in any other way.
For example, analysis of the mud erupting from Lusi has revealed that the water was heated by an underground magma chamber associated with the nearby Arjuno-Welirang volcanic complex. Every mud volcano reveals details about what’s happening underground, allowing scientists to build a more comprehensive 3D view of what’s going on inside the planet.
Lusi’s mud is still erupting
Today, more than 16 years after the eruption began, the Lusi structure in Indonesia continues to erupt, but at a much slower rate. Its mud covers a total area of roughly 2.7 square miles (7 square km), more than 1,300 football fields, and is contained behind a series of levees that have been built up to a height of 100 feet (30 meters).
An officer of the Sidoarjo Mud Prevention Agency checks the water temperature of mud near the Lusi mud volcano in 2011.Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
Almost as interesting as the efforts to stop the mud have been the legal battles aimed at assigning blame for the disaster. The initial rupture occurred about 650 feet (200 meters) from an actively drilling gas exploration well, leading to widely publicizedaccusations that theoil company responsible for the well was at fault. The operator of the well, Lapindo Brantas, countered that the eruption was natural, triggered by an earthquake that had occurred several days earlier.
Those who believe the gas well triggered the eruption argue that the well experienced a blowout due to insufficient mud weight, but that the blowout did not come all the way up the wellbore to the surface. Instead, the fluids came only partway up the wellbore before injecting sideways into fractures and erupting at the surface several hundred meters away. As evidence, these proponents point to measurements made in the well during drilling. Furthermore, they suggest the earthquake was too far away from the well to have had any effect.
By contrast, proponents of the earthquake trigger believe that the Lusi eruption was caused by an active hydrothermal system in the subsurface, somewhat akin to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. They argue that such systems have a long history of being affected by very distant earthquakes, so the argument that Lusi was too far away from the earthquake is invalid.
Furthermore, they suggest that a pressure test in the well conducted after the eruption started showed that the wellbore was intact, not breached by fractures and leaking fluid. Consistent with this interpretation, there is no evidence that any of the drilling mud ever came out of the Lusi eruptions.
In 2009, the Indonesian supreme court dismissed a lawsuit charging the company with negligence. The same year, police dropped criminal investigations against Lapindo Brantas and several of its employees, citing a lack of evidence. Although the lawsuits have been settled, the debate continues, with international research groups lining up on both sides of the dispute.
