Comey fights back against Trump’s insults and slurs; Trump even accused Comey and others of committing “many crimes”– just what exactly he means is not clear, since Comey is not under investigation– while Trump is the “subject” of a special prosecutor’s investigation. The coordinated propaganda campaign against Comey was evident on Fox News, where the newsreaders constantly belittled Comey and accused him of multiple malfeasances too numerous for me to mention. Fox was covering Comey continuously and has been since the advance stories about Comey’s new book (due out today) started showing up on the regular networks. Even the titles of the stories on Fox are slanted against Comey, insulting him without cause before the reader even gets to the text of the story. How can Fox claim to be “fair and balanced” when even the title of the supposedly “hard” news story is “Comey is a gossipy little girl” or “Comey lies”– shouldn’t the title of a supposedly objective news story be something like “Comey attacks Trump in new book” or something simple like that, instead of “Comey lies in new book” or “Clinton World says ‘Comey is now lying'”…
The extent, the viciousness, and the wall-to-wall negative reporting on Fox News is truly remarkable. It is as if the site has been given instructions to make sure that everyone who watches is indoctrinated that Comey is lying. In fact, there is no evidence that Comey is lying, nor that he has committed any crimes. He has “leaked” information to the press, most famously when he revealed (by handing his post-meeting memo on Trump to one of his friends and telling him to call the news media about it) that Trump had demanded “loyalty” from him and had tried to get him to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn (who has now pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.)
There is clear evidence from Trump’s own loose lips that Comey was fired to obstruct the FBI investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Journalists have looked into Trump’s business dealings and have discovered that since Trump’s disastrous casino developments, he has been persona non grata to conventional banks. This would have made his further career as a “real estate developer” rather problematic, but the Russians– even before the dissolution of the USSR– saw him as a “useful idiot” who could be a front for money laundering on a scale heretofore unrealized. since the early 1990’s Trump has been supported by Russian gangsters, who use his hotel “developments” as vehicles for money-laundering even as the hotels themselves are not built, never completed, or are almost immediately declared bankrupt once they are finished.
Investigations have revealed that nearly every development with which Trump has been associated has been problematic– sited in the wrong place, bogged down in the planning stage by legal restrictions, having difficulties in the building process, or inadequately subscribed after completion with few buyers. The buyers of completed suites have been Russian mobsters, who tend not to actually live in them (partially because they are in hiding) and Trump properties that have been successfully built up have been plagued by management deficiencies. One of the latest is the Trump tower in Panama, which has been riven by a revolt among the owners of apartments who actually live in them. The Panamanian government has stripped Trump of management responsibility because of complaints by people who live in it, replacing Trump’s employees with those of another management firm selected by the residents.
Trump has been closely associated with Russian mobsters like the “boss of bosses” Simion Mogilevich, the ubiquitous Felix Sater (a US intelligence asset who has exploited his get out of jail free card), and Tevfik Arif– since the late 1980’s he has been a subject of Russian intelligence interest. Trump has been an ideal Russian asset because he presents a front as a successful real estate developer but has conveniently been unable to discern the actual motivations of people who come to him with money that they want him to “invest” in property development (that is, launder the money.)
It is propaganda, pure and simple, that allowed Trump to run for and win the Republican nomination for president. Once he was the official Republican candidate, despite all the truly awful information about him that circulated, the other candidates felt they had no choice but to back him. Even Mitt Romney, now that he has returned from retirement to run for Senate from Utah, has begun to show that he is a team member by muting his criticism of Trump. Romney had previously made damning statements about Trump that you would think can’t be walked back; he called Trump “a fraud”, for example. How do you reverse course and back such a person? Doesn’t it offend your sense of truthfulness and personal honor to support a man that you called a serial liar and a cheat? Even Mitt Romney has gritted his teeth and released positive statements now that he needs Trump’s support (and the Republican money machine.)
The Republican party and its politicians appear to be set on an irreversible course of support for Donald Trump and many of them seem to be aware that they are going down in the November mid-term elections. The House is likely to become majority Democratic, making it possible to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. These proceedings, may I suggest, should be drawn out through the next presidential election because even if the Senate turns Democratic, the Republican minority may not be convinced to vote for Trump’s conviction on the impeachment charges. It would be better if the impeachment does not go to the Senate– rather, the publicity of impeachment hearings and the airing of the truth about Trump should be drawn out to serve as propaganda for the Democrats in the 2020 presidential elections. This would be the best-case scenario, since even a completed impeachment of Trump is likely to leave Mike Pence as President, which is not going to be a good situation– despite the toned-down rhetoric, Pence being an evangelical Christian with medieval views on sex, he is likely to cause great difficulties just through his executive actions even without passing any legislation. Better to have the bad publicity for Republicans rub off on the Republican candidate for president in 2020, especially if Trump insists on running for re-election. Pre-impeachment proceedings can be drawn out for a year or more– President Nixon’s House hearings lasted from shortly after the election in 1973 until his resignation (after the House finally decided to impeach him but before the resolution was actually passed) in the fall of 1974.
I remember those impeachment hearings– they lasted throughout the summer of 1974, creating enormous negative publicity for the Republicans, even though they cooperated with the hearings and would have voted for impeachment. Now things are different– the Republicans are unanimous in their opposition to any investigation of Trump, much less impeachment. The Republican-controlled House Committee charged with investigating the Trump-Russia connection has already concluded its hearings with a finding of “NO COLLUSION” (as Trump would have it; all the Republicans have fallen into line behind this obvious lie.)
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and aitoff)
Quote of the Decade: Trillion-Dollar Deficits As Far As the Eye Can See, Thanks to the US Congress
The Congressional Budget Office projects that, over the next ten years, there will be trillion-dollar deficits every year. This is a result of the recent tax cut and the new budget. There is no question that Congress has created a situation that is potentially dangerous and without precedent in peacetime:
From 2019 to 2028, the federal government will run cumulative annual deficits of $12.4 trillion. The deficits — the gap between what government spends and what it collects in taxes — average about 5 percent of the economy (gross domestic product, or GDP). Since 1950, deficits have equaled or exceeded 5 percent of GDP in only six years (1983, 1985 and 2009-2012), and most of these occurred after deep recessions. These reduce tax revenue and boost “safety net” spending (unemployment insurance, food stamps and the like).
By contrast, today’s deficits occur with low unemployment and an economy that has been expanding for nine years.(from the Washington Post opinion piece by Robert J. Samuelson, as fed thru Microsoft News)
There has been, so far, no high-level recognition of this fact, much less the germ of a plan for dealing with it. Both conservative and liberal economists have addressed the issue, but without compromise, so no clear path forward has been suggested beyond the extreme and unrealistic options of cutting Social Security and Medicare or raising taxes on the wealthy.
However, changes in the character of the population may alter the picture in surprising ways. For example, a large influx of young workers could improve the balance of benefits versus costs. Or economic crash could further worsen the cost factors.
There is some black humor in all this: the budget that Congress just passed was, to all intents and purposes, the one that Obama proposed a year ago. They didn’t have any others laying around.
“It is imperative that the first officer on scene provides the most detailed information available. … Equally as important, the first officer on scene must make every attempt to neutralize an active threat as quickly as possible.”
These sentences come from an article about the police response to the Parkland massacre site after receiving 911 calls.
The hallway was “way quiet and full of thick smoke coming from gunfire.”
The end of the article contains the advice of the senior policeman on duty that day, who blames the first responder for the delay:
Retired Police Chief Tony Pustizzi, who ran the agency at the time of the school massacre, said the reports were “pretty consistent with what we thought.”
He blamed the delay — described as a few minutes by Burton — on the sheriff’s deputy.
“Responding officers are going to formulate tactical approaches based on the information provided to them as they are en route to a scene,” he said Monday.
“It is imperative that the first officer on scene provides the most detailed information available.”
Scientific surveys of bird populations in France showed dramatic declines, between one-third and two-thirds, over several decades. This finding follows research in Germany that showed declines of 80 percent in insect populations over the last 40 years. Scientists suspect agricultural practices have caused the drops. Birds eat insects, so the loss of insects might cause bird populations to collapse. The bad news was reported in an article in the New York Times.
The recent (over the last ten years) collapse of many bee populations in the United States may be related to the collapses reported in Europe. No direct relationship has been found.
Nonetheless, we should view these population collapses with alarm. As time passes, more and more ecosystems on Earth are damaged or degraded. This is not a pleasant thought. It is all epitomized by global warming and the great plastic patch in the Pacific ocean. The root cause is overpopulation and consequent overuse of the Earth’s resources. Drastic changes in resource use and conservation are needed to prevent ecological collapse.
There is an exception to the attorney-client privilege if communications with an attorney are used in furtherance of a crime or fraud; that could come into play here as well. And documents related to anything Cohen did on his own — after all, Trump has denied knowing about the payment to Daniels — are likely not privileged if they do not contain attorney-client communications. Documents are not automatically privileged simply because they passed through an attorney’s hands.
–From a Washington Post “opinion” piece about the FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office and hotel room Monday morning. Mr. Trump stated then, in front of his military chiefs, that the raid was “an attack on America” and the next day, he claimed that “attorney-client privilege is dead”– just more flaming falsehoods from a man who is vying for the title “Father of Lies.”
Some things about Michael Cohen are remarkable. The first, obviously, is that he is of Jewish heritage– Cohens are traditionally a hereditary class of Jewish religious persons (“Cohen” literally means “priest” in Hebrew) who are supposed to interpret the Law (religious law.) The fact that Mr. Trump would employ a Jew may surprise some in the anti-Trump camp who believe that he is prejudiced against Jews (among many other non-German people, mostly of a darker shade.) It is true that Mr. Trump holds massive prejudices, but he also holds tremendous degrees of stereotypy, one of those stereotypes being that Jews are good with money and the law. Based on this stereotype, Mr. Trump is known to employ Jews to handle his money issues as well as his legal issues. He has been known to make statements about not wanting African-Americans to handle his money counting duties– presumably because they “can’t handle” money without it slipping through their fingers into their pockets, among other places.
It is known that Mr. Trump employs people based on such simplistic stereotypes, as well as based on personal acquaintance. For example, he hired his former chauffeur to a high-level Administration position. He is not known to defer to investigations or “due diligence” reviews of persons whom he wishes to hire or retain. This is a bad thing.
In any case, regardless of Mr. Cohen’s heritage, the FBI’s execution of a search warrant on him is a potentially serious turning point in the FBI’s investigation. Mr. Cohen has been Mr. Trump’s lawyer for a long time, and is known to have done a number of questionable things for him, the most famous so far being his payment, allegedly from his personal funds, just prior to the presidential election, of $130,000 to the woman known as Stormy Daniels. The only known connection of “Stormy Daniels” to either Mr. Cohen or Mr. Trump is that she recently came out on “Sixty Minutes” with a tale of a one-night stand twelve years ago between her and Mr. Trump. Unless Mr. Cohen himself received substantial personal services from “Ms. Daniels” there is a substantial suspicion that the payment represented an unlawful campaign contribution, in this case to buy her silence.
Mr. Trump, just a few days ago, claimed that he did not know of Mr. Cohen’s payment to the lady in question. This is odd because of the alleged existence of a contract between the two (Trump and “Daniels”) that specifies said payment and spells out certain actions that she will be obligated to perform (or not perform) in return for that payment. She has come out with the statement that the contract is void because Mr. Trump never signed it, even using the pseudonym by which he is referred to in the document. We can understand why Mr. Trump would not sign such a document; what we have difficulty with is the concept that he thought he could get away with any of this.
The only logical answer to that question is the observation that he has “gotten away with it” many, many times in the past, either by resort to money payments, blank denials, or physical threats, all of which “Ms. Daniels” has alleged in this case. The task before Democrats, liberals, and progressives this November is to make sure that he no longer gets away with it. Whether this is by reducing him to impotence with majorities in the House and Senate or by actual impeachment (preferably of BOTH Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence) in the House is a matter that has not been yet settled. I would favor impeachment of both malefactors, which can readily be drawn out all the way from January 2019 to the next Presidential election in November 2020– for maximum effect.
There is one variable which I cannot confidently predict but fear nonetheless: what happens to the economy between now and then. A crash between now and November is unnecessary but significantly possible– I’m sure the Democrats can win in November without the assistance of the economy. The possibility of Mr. Trump’s actions having a serious negative effect on the economy is very significant, and particularly troublesome in light of the fact that he has “baked in” huge federal deficits as far as the eye can see– despite the current strength of the economy, which in conventional economic thought, should dictate a federal surplus– that is, higher taxes and spending on tangible objects (that is, infrastructure or at least weapons systems.) (I’m following Paul Krugman here, not the right-wing conservative economic “unicorns.”)
(today’s photo is courtesy of pixabay.com and jplenio, and represents “the light at the end of the tunnel”– let us hope that it is not an oncoming train.)
Taken together, these examples amount to a clear pattern of catastrophic losses, colossal mismanagement, gross negligence, and stupendous incompetence of 1.)TRUMP and his partners at best; he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye or he might have been in on it, and though there is no evidence to support this other than his considerable and risky efforts to obstruct investigations into these dealings, the sheer number of them is enough to suggest some level of complicity on TRUMP’s part personally, the only other reasonable explanation being that he is a gigantic fool.
This quote comes from an article under the imprint “LinkedIn” titled “Think you know how deep Trump-Russia goes? Think again– this chart/info will blow your mind” by Brian Frydenborg published July 17, 2017. The attached chart shows photos of over sixty individuals, sequentially numbered starting with 1)TRUMP. The article goes into mind-numbing detail and describes an astounding number of “complete failures” of deals to build hotels, all subverted by colossal “mistakes” or fraud– take your pick.
In each case, Mr. Trump was backed by figures associated with organized crime, starting with Simion Mogilevich, the “boss of bosses” of the Russian underworld. In each case, large amounts of money were simply thrown away, usually in Mr. Trump’s direction, in failed attempts to buy, lease, and develop properties all over the world. In most cases, innocent parties were duped and swindled; in most cases, finished hotels were never delivered; in other cases, hotels opened for business and closed within a year, collapsing in bankruptcy.
In the first case, “MOGILEVICH starts up a fake company called YBM Magnex International in Pennsylvania in 1995 that would be used to perpetrate a massive stock fraud worth $150 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange.” In the 1980’s, Mr. Trump had personally sold five apartment units in Trump Tower to David Bogatin, the brother of the CEO of what would become YBM Magnex. In the second case, “FELIX SATER [ the son of Mikhael Sheferovsky (aka Michael SATER)]was involved in an at least $41 million (and up to $60 million) stock fraud and money laundering scheme and ran it in the mid-1990s from an office in II.) 40 Wall St., another TRUMP-owned property. We know this scheme involved the Russian mafia, but the details of that case remain sealed because SATER later cooperated with the U.S. government on national security issues…”
The article goes on and on with case after case of Russian mafia-connected individuals using Trump properties to launder money, in amounts denominated in millions of dollars. There is simply no reasonable possibility that Trump can have been unaware of the character and business dealings of individuals who bought his properties or leased his name to use on properties.
So when someone tells you there is no evidence connecting Donald J. Trump with the Russian government, point them to this article showing a dense web of connections between Trump, the Russian mafia, and the actual Russian government. Only a willing blindness to Trump’s corruption born from a desire to see his most basic and inhumane policies implemented can account for the denial of his indebtedness to Russian mobsters as an explanation for slavish devotion to Vladimir Putin. This country cannot afford to have a malignantly narcissistic and dangerously psychopathic inveterate liar who is clearly hopelessly in debt to Russian organized crime as a chief executive… but we knew that already. What comes next, the slow unravelling of a corrupt administration, will have a negative effect on national morale. Continued support from Republican authority figures will only make matters worse. Persistent, die-hard support from the 30-40% of people who are fully susceptible to Fox “News” propaganda will cause a further deterioration of public trust. Trump’s desperate attempts to obstruct the Mueller investigation and New York State Attorney’s Office investigations will have additional negative effects. Trying to fire Mueller or other figures in the FBI, using national security crises to distract attention, or other unanticipated diversionary tactics, could cause national crises of unimaginable proportions.
I am reminded of the atmosphere surrounding the House impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974– and the maneuvering by Mr. Nixon and his “enemies” that led up to the beginning of those hearings. Following the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the United States was in a vulnerable position and many feared that additional disruptions could occur. We can ill afford this sort of commotion, but that is what is going to happen.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Quote of the Day: Novichok has Already Killed: Ivan Kiveldi, Head of Rosbusinessbank, in 1995
According to this Russian-language website, thoughtfully translated by Google, the nerve agent “Novichok” [loosely translated as “Newbie”] was used in the “poisoning of the head of Rosbusinessbank Ivan Kivelidi in 1995” and the associated poisoning and illness of numerous other people who entered his office while the substance was apparently applied to the mouthpiece of his telephone receiver.
The crime was conveniently found to be done by Chechen terrorists and other foreign criminals, but the testimony of a Professor Leonid Rink was featured in this web article on the site “Novaya Gazeta” in Russian, published on March 22, 2018. The testimony was originally given in 199-2006 in association with an investigation. Professor Rink claimed that he “received” the poison in the course of his work at a government-run research institution and later sold it to a ring of criminals who used it for their own purposes. Rink worked as head and leading investigator at the “State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology” and says that, in those days after the collapse of the USSR they weren’t being paid their salaries and were desperate for money (1994)… so he sold a small quantity of the substance to a criminal who had demanded such a thing from him on pain of death (you know, the mafia way)… and this lead to the deaths of Ivan Kiveldi and his secretary, and serious poisonings for numerous other people who went in the room where Kiveldi and his secretary Zara Ismailova died, even briefly. Why the head of a major bank should have to die was not explained, but it is somehow assumed that he stood in the way of some criminal plan.
A similar scenario could have been behind the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal. A small quantity of the poisonous substance could have been synthesized and then smeared on his doorknob by knowing or unknowing accomplices. It is even possible that a binary version may have been developed, making the application less risky.
The principal criminal plan that seems to envelop the name of Donald J. Trump is the institution of money laundering. For many years, criminal gangs have been whitewashing their profits by purchasing large apartments at inflated prices in places like Trump hotels, of which there are money all over the world. Then they don’t bother to actually live in those apartments, leaving empty shells that consume no water or other resources– making an ideal tenant for the owner, Donald J. Trump. That is the easiest explanation for why a particular known Russian gangster purchased five apartments for five million dollars and left them empty.
There is abundant evidence that Donald J. Trump, after bankrupting two casinos, became persona non grata to the usual New York, national, and even international money lenders– the big banks. There is also a large quantity of circumstantial evidence that Mr. Trump benefited from the sale of his name for promotional purposes to known gangsters. The only thing lacking is clear, convincing evidence that Mr. Trump knowingly participated in a criminal conspiracy to launder money in a particularly blatant way. The lack of direct links between Mr. Trump and dirty money, despite the numerous and open associations with famous Russian gangsters, is not surprising.
From the New Republic, for those who believe that the Russia investigation is a total “nothing burger”:
President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.
. . .
[speaking of Simion Mogilevich: ]
“He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
Which brings us right up to today. Litvinenko was murdered in 2006 with polonium, a radioactive synthetic element, a crime that could only be carried out with the resources of a nuclear state: Russia. Little was made of his death at the time, but now, just a few weeks ago, another ex-Russian agent survived an assassination attempt with “Novichok”– an advanced chemical warfare agent with seemingly incredible powers. A solid, it is lethal at doses of roughly 10 milligrams– less than 1/30 the weight of an aspirin tablet. It is persistent, and English scientists believe it was smeared on the victim’s front door knob, where he and his daughter were exposed. They both were found unresponsive, with symptoms of atropine-like nerve poisoning: drooling, pinpoint pupils, and coma. Even survivors of sublethal doses of this agent do not recover well; they are often impaired for the rest of their lives with severe depression and weakness.
The Russians are the only known government in the world to have sponsored the development of these nerve agents, which were never known to have been used. It appears that a small supply was manufactured some years ago (perhaps between 1973 and 1990) and hoarded up for uses such as the one to which it was put on March 4, 2018. On that date, former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were discovered in a public park, on a park bench, in Salisbury, UK, unconscious and suffering from symptoms of atropine-like nerve poisoning. A policeman who responded to the scene also fell ill from similar symptoms. Yulia Skripal has recovered consciousness and is talking, but her father is in more guarded condition. It is now suspected that others may have died from the same or similar agents in the past and have mistakenly been thought to have died of natural causes.
The bottom line is that Russia is controlled by a kleptocratic autocracy which has taken over since the fall of the Soviet Union, a government run by a mafia-like organization that is extending its tentacles of dirty dealing and death through-out the world, including to subvert and enslave relatively free countries like the United States. The US is under attack from Russia, and the “boss of bosses”, Simion Mogilevich, a highly intelligent, patient, but completely corrupt and potentially murderous “don” is the godfather, with Vladimir “the Impaler” Putin in day-to-day command of the onslaught on our somewhat civilized institutions.
So here you are: Russia has succeeded in subverting the government of the United States and, as a result, there have been installed leaders who are attempting to turn back the clock on human rights, civil rights, the rights of people of color, the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people, and the rights of women to control of their own bodies. The only answer to this attack and near-overthrow of representative, humane, progressive government is to declare open war on Russia– a cold war, but a war nonetheless. The first strike in this war will be at the ballot box with votes for Democratic leaders who can reverse the retrogressive policies of the Russian-entangled Republicans and strike a blow for freedom all over the world.
The article linked and quoted at the top of this column in the New Republic describes most of what is known and suspected about Donald J. Trump’s entanglement with the Soviet and Russian governments, from as early as 1987. This article on linkedin.com will definitely make your brain explode with incredibly detailed information about the labyrinthine interconnections between Mogilevich, all his intermediaries, and Donald J. Trump and his family. The friendly relations between Donald and the Don go way back and are as thick as the cables holding up the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of what Donald has done for the Don in the past is simple money laundering, but with his election to the presidency his breadth of subversion has dramatically increased.
Post-Script: Just for personal enjoyment, to make your day more entertaining and relieve your stress, there is the superbly eloquent poetic jeremiad “The Trumpiad”— a very long, closely-researched, profusely illustrated with satiric cartoons, poetic tour de force describing the history of the Trump (nee Drumpf) family in crime and draft dodging (yes, Donald J. Trump’s grandfather Friedrich was a draft-dodger in his home country of Germany and was deported to the US for same, but not until he’d made his fortune running whorehouses in the gold-stricken Yukon) (Donald’s father Fred was a slumlord who made trashy, whites-only segregated housing a fixture of New York and New Jersey) (and Donald was dumped into military school because he assaulted one of his teachers in grade school, among other defiant, violent acts) from the late nineteenth century to March 29, 2018, due to be updated soon, I hope.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Makalu)
Quoting from the New York Times:
“Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than other nations, but rather in her ability to repair her faults,” Justice Ginsburg said.
. . .
Bedecked in a multicolored collar that reflected the diversity of the 201 new citizens before her, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over a naturalization ceremony on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, treating her rapt audience to a history lesson, one crackling with life and liberty.
Justice Ginsburg told them that her own father arrived in this country at 13 with no fortune and no ability to speak English, and yet, she would soon be administering the oath of citizenship to them as a member of the highest court in the land.
Across the packed rows of seats at the historical society’s Upper West Side theater sat people from 59 countries, with first names like Islam, Hussein, Kazi, Angie and Sunday, and with professions as diverse as pastors and pediatric cancer doctors. Two men from Guinea sat in the third row and learned they were both named Mamadou Alpha Diallo, both taxi drivers.
“We are a nation made strong by people like you,” Justice Ginsburg said.
. . .
(today’s photo is courtesy of pixabay.com and jplenio, and represents “the light at the end of the tunnel”– let us hope that it is not an oncoming train.)
An article in the opinion section of the NYT describes the unexpected side effects of certain compounds used in the manufacture of modern foodstuffs– chemicals like trehalose, saccharin, and Tween-80. These synthetic (in most cases) chemicals are used for many purposes, primarily as sweet-tasting substitutes for sugar, emulsifiers, and additives designed to lengthen the shelf-life of otherwise perishable foods. The following post summarizes the information that forms the basis for this NYT opinion article.
First, trehalose appears to select for particularly aggressive forms of the toxic bacterium, Clostridium perfringens, which causes a potentially lethal diarrhea in humans treated with antibiotics to which they are resistant (primarily clindamycin, cephalosporins, and fluoroquinolones.) This was not a problem when trehalose was too expensive to be added to foods. However, perhaps twenty-five years ago, a new method of synthesis of trehalose was developed which dramatically lowered the cost (from $700 a kilogram to $3.) Trehalose is valued because it has the ability to retain large amounts of water and keep foods moist on the shelf– it is used by some microbes to prevent damage from freezing.
The presence of even low concentrations of trehalose selects for a virulent strain of C. difficile which can cause severe or even lethal diarrhea, particularly after competing microbes have been removed by the administration of antibiotics. Since the introduction of large quantities of trehalose to foodstuffs, a new “epidemic” strain of C. difficile has appeared and dramatically increased the incidence of toxic diarrhea. This strain is often resistant to the new fluoroquinolone antibiotics such as ofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, and levofloxacin. A study in Nature shows that mice fed trehalose are more often killed when they are challenged with C. difficile strains that have this new ability to metabolize trehalose.
Second, emulsifiers like polysorbate-80 and carboxymethylcellulose can thin the mucus barrier that lines our intestines and can induce gut microbes to produce proteins that cause inflammation. This inflammation is associated with metabolic syndrome, a form of obesity that is a precursor to diabetes. Maltodextrin is a food thickener that does this, plus it enhances the growth of a strain of Escherichia coli that is associated with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory gut condition that is extremely debilitating.
Third, artificial sweeteners like saccharin and sucralose that taste sweet but are supposed to contribute nothing to our calorie counts, can be metabolized by some microbes. Studies have shown that saccharin and other artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiome (our intestinal bacteria.)
The bottom line is that, when we consume chemicals that we cannot metabolize, this selects for the growth of intestinal microbes that can do the job for us. A classic example is the presence of gut microbes that can metabolize seaweed constituents in Japanese people. Most world populations do not normally eat seaweed, and they cannot digest it to generate food energy. The Japanese people, however, have long eaten seaweed as a significant part of their diets, and their gut microbes have adapted by evolving the ability to digest seaweed. It is likely that this has occurred quite simply, by the co-ingestion of microbes living on seaweed that are able to break it down. As a result, people with this population of microbes gain calories and nutrition from consuming seaweed, whereas people without it miss out.
This information may make you less likely to consume foods containing these chemicals. That would be logical, but it may be difficult to avoid some of these things and still eat ice cream or drink soda pop. The NYT opinion article also recommends that you consume more soluble fiber, in foods such as “nuts, legumes, and vegetables.” I heartily endorse this recommendation. In addition, you may still be able to eat ice cream if you make it yourself or find a brand that does not contain any of these chemicals.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Alexas_Fotos)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 