Sarah Burris is a long-time veteran of political campaigns, having worked as a fundraiser and media director across the United States. She transitioned into reporting while working for Rock the Vote, Future Majority and Wiretap Magazine, covering the Millennial Generation's perspective during the presidential elections. As a political writer, Burris has had bylines at CNN, Salon.com, BNR, and AlterNet and serves as a senior digital editor for RawStory.com.
In a Sunday evening panel discussion, MSNBC commentators explained that the White House appears to be just as chaotic and marred by chaos as the rumors say.
Many in the White House learned that the president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was working overseas in Ukraine. Giuliani claimed that he's been producing a film that he couldn't get Fox News to run, as it will appear on the fringe network OAN.
"What Rudy Giuliani is doing is using Kremlin-manufactured propaganda as a defensive shield for the president," said CNBC's John Harwood. "Fiona Hill was unambiguous in her testimony to the intelligence committee. What Rudy Giuliani has been doing with these two indicted men who are linked to a Russian oligarch who is tied to Russian organized crime, is trying to manufacture a story that Ukraine, rather than Russia or in addition to Russia or differently from Russia, meddle in the campaign. That is false."
He specifically named Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA), who both have taken up the Kremlin talking points to help defend accusations against Russia and the U.S. president.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said that it further indicates that the administration is just as disorganized as rumors say.
"The overall picture for me is that the administration, internally, is as incompetent, shambolic, paranoid, and given to conspiracy theories as it appears to be from the outside," he said."I think that's really the striking feature."
While Secretary Mike Pompeo may be the confirmed head of the State Department, it appears Trump has assigned Giuliani to conduct foreign policy in secret.
"We have an administration that believes in conspiracy theories that are clearly manufactured or serve the interests of Russia," Stephens continued. "And a Republican Party that gets behind what it would've opposed if a Democratic administration had been behaving in exactly the same way."
President Joe Biden has frustrated fellow Democrats and his own aides by remaining largely silent on Donald Trump's criminal cases, but that could change with one major development.
The president has ridiculed his Republican rival's tech company and taken shots at his record in office, but Biden so far has shied away from commenting on Trump's prosecutions to avoid politicizing the cases or giving credence to false claims that he's directing those prosecutions, wrote MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown.
"It’s doubtful Biden would leap from saying nothing to weighing in directly on Trump’s innocence or guilt," Brown wrote. "But Trump has falsely claimed for months that the charges he faces all stem from Biden’s orders, a serious case of projection given his own well-documented desire to place his thumb on the scale of justice from the White House. It’s clear that he would be eager to leap on the barest appearance of interference from Biden to have his lawyers try to delay the proceedings even further. And given the open legal questions in this case, the less that could prompt an appeals court to find issue with a guilty verdict, the better."
Although many Democrats would like to see Biden address the cases directly to draw a contrast between himself and the presumptive Republican nominee, Brown wrote that it's wise for him to hold his fire until the quadruple-indicted ex-president potentially gets convicted.
"Patience is the best bet for the Biden camp," Brown wrote. "The trial is already moving more swiftly than some observers predicted, with jury selection potentially wrapping up by the end of the week. Polling has found that while multiple indictments haven’t hurt Trump much in the polls, a conviction might prompt a real shift among independents and even some Republicans."
"Even if the federal cases against Trump remain off-limits, the gloves would come off politically should Trump shift from 'the accused' to 'convicted felon,'" Brown added. "It wouldn’t hurt Biden’s team, though, to start drafting some hits on that front now — just in case."
Many people around the world make and eat fermented foods. Millions in Korea alone make kimchi. The cultural heritage of these picklers shape not only what they eat every time they crack open a jar but also something much, much smaller: their microbiomes.
On the microbial scale, we are what we eat in very real ways. Your body is teeming with trillions of microbes. These complex ecosystems exist on your skin, inside your mouth and in your gut. They are particularly influenced by your surrounding environment, especially the food you eat. Just like any other ecosystem, your gut microbiome requires diversity to be healthy.
People boil, fry, bake and season meals, transforming them through cultural ideas of “good food.” When people ferment food, they affect the microbiome of their meals directly. Fermentation offers a chance to learn how taste and heritage shape microbiomes: not only of culturally significant foods such as German sauerkraut, kosher pickles, Korean kimchi or Bulgarian yogurt, but of our own guts.
Fermentation uses microbes to transform food.
Our workas anthropologists focuses on how culture transforms food. In fact, we first sketched out our plan to link cultural values and microbiology while writing our Ph.D. dissertations at our local deli in St. Louis, Missouri. Staring down at our pickles and lox, we wondered how the salty, crispy zing of these foods represented the marriage of culture and microbiology.
Equipped with the tools of microbial genetics and cultural anthropology, we were determined to find out.
Taste is highly variable and something you experience through the layers of your social experience. What may be nauseating in one context is a delicacy in another. Fermented foods are notoriously unsubtle: they bubble, they smell and they zing. Whether and how these pungent foods taste good can be a moment of group pride or a chance to heal social divides.
In each case, cultural notions of good food and heritage recipes combine to create a microbiome in a jar. From this perspective, sauerkraut is a particular ecosystem shaped by German food traditions, kosher dill pickles by Ashkenazi Jewish traditions, and pao cai by southwestern Chinese traditions.
Where culture and microbiology intersect
To begin to understand the effects of culinary traditions and individual creativity on microbiomes, we partnered with Sandor Katz, a fermentation practitioner based in Tennessee. Over the course of four days during one of Katz’s workshops, we made, ate and shared fermented foods with nine fellow participants. Through conversations and interviews, we learned about the unique tastes and meanings we each brought to our love of fermented foods.
Those stories provided context to the 46 food samples we collected and froze to capture a snapshot of the life swimming through kimchi or miso. Participants also collected stool samples each day and mailed in a sample a week after the workshop, preserving a record of the gut microbial communities they created with each bite.
The fermented foods we all made were rich, complex and microbially diverse. Where many store-bought fermented foods are pasteurized to clear out all living microbes and then reinoculated with two to six specific bacterial species, our research showed that homemade ferments contain dozens of strains.
On the microbiome level, different kinds of fermented foods will have distinct profiles. Just as forests and deserts share ecological features, sauerkrauts and kimchis look more similar to each other than yogurt to cheese.
But just as different habitats have unique combinations of plants and animals, so too did every crock and jar have its own distinct microbial world because of minor differences in preparation or ingredients. The cultural values of taste, creativity and style that create a kimchi or a sauerkraut go on to support distinct microbiomes on those foods and inside the people who eat them.
Through variations in recipes and cultural preferences toward an extra pinch of salt or a disdain for dill, fermentation traditions result in distinctive microbial and taste profiles that your culture trains you to identify as good or bad to eat. That is, our sauerkraut is not your sauerkraut, even if they both might be good for us.
Fermented food as cultural medicine
Microbially rich fermented foods can influence the composition of your gut microbiome. Because your tastes and recipes are culturally informed, those preferences can have a meaningful effect on your gut microbiome. You can eat these foods in ways that introduce microbial diversity, including potentially probiotic microbes that offer benefits to human health such as killing off bacteria that make you ill, improving your cardiovascular health or restoring a healthy gut microbiome after you take antibiotics.
Fermentation is an ancient craft, and like all crafts it requires patience, creativity and practice. Cloudy brine is a signal of tasty pickled cucumbers, but it can be a problem for lox. When fermented foods smell rotten, taste too soft or turn red, that can be a sign of contamination by harmful bacteria or molds.
Fermenting foods at home might seem daunting when food is something that comes from the store with a regulatory guarantee. People hoping to take a more active role in creating their food or embracing their own culture’s traditional foods need only time, water and salt to make simple fermented foods. As friends share sourdough starters, yogurt cultures and kombucha mothers, they forge social connections.
Through a unique combination of culture and microbiology, heritage food traditions can support microbial diversity in your gut. These cultural practices provide environments for the yeasts, bacteria and local fruits and grains that in turn sustain heritage foods and flavors.
Appearing on CNN Thursday, Schultz was asked about Trump promoting baseless claims leveled by a Fox News host that some jurors were "lying" about their feelings about Trump so they could sneak onto the jury and convict him no matter the evidence.
"He's referencing the jurors, he's pushing out something someone else said, yes, but the bottom line is [the gag order] applies to him," said Schultz. "So I think the judge is going to see this as a violation of the gag order."
He then outlined what he believed would happen next.
"Get ready," he said. "They're going to continue and continue and continue. Sure, the judge can fine him, he can admonish him, he can do a lot of things in the courtroom. He's not going to throw him in jail, his trial's still going to continue, and you're still going to hear from Donald Trump on Truth Social."
Schultz was then asked to specify if he personally believed that Trump had violated his gag order, and he nodded to indicate that he did.
Trump has continuously pushed the envelope in his hush-money trial by attacking Merchan's daughter, promoting derogatory claims about prospective jurors, and overtly slamming witnesses.
So far, however, he has not been fined for any violations of his gag order, let alone faced any jail time.
