Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art. He's the founder of the blog DeadState.org.
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) says that he was unaware that the "Save the Children" human trafficking rally he attended this weekend was backed by a supporter of the "QAnon" movement, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
While the rally's affiliations were not made apparent in its advertising campaign, attendees sported memorabilia that signified their adherence to the conspiracy theory, which claims that there's a secret Trump-led operation to take down Hollywood and Washington elites involved in Satanic pedophile rings.
QAnon supporters organized “Save the Children” rallies over the weekend in various cities, the AJC reports. The FBI has labeled QAnon as a domestic terrorist threat and Facebook temporarily blocked the #SavetheChildren hashtag earlier this month for spreading misinformation.
Carter's spokespeople say he has no involvement with QAnon and was simply at the rally to show his support for causes aligned against sex trafficking.
“Congressman Carter was invited by a constituent who shares his strong stance against human trafficking, especially the trafficking of children,” spokesperson Mary Carpenter said in a statement. “Rep. Carter had no knowledge of any QAnon ties to the event, his attendance had absolutely nothing to do with QAnon, and Rep. Carter is in no way affiliated with QAnon.”
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.
This story was originally published by CalMatters, nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
The California Justice Department announced today that it has found no cause to file charges against a Los Angeles police officer who, while aiming at a suspect, shot and killed a 14-year-old girl hiding in a department store fitting room.
Fourteen-year-old Valentina Orellana Peralta was picking out a quinceanera dress with her mother just before Christmas in 2021. She was shot and killed by a bullet that ricocheted off the floor.
The suspect, Daniel Abisai Elena Lopez, 24, was also killed in the shooting.
Los Angeles Police Department Officer William Jones will not face charges under the Justice Department’s two-year-old program to investigate fatal police shootings of unarmed people.
The Justice Department program has closed eight police shooting cases since July 2021. It has not recommended charges against officers in any of them. There are 46 cases still open, the oldest one dating to August 2021.
“The evidence shows that Officer Jones likely believed he was acting in self-defense or defense of others,” the Justice Department concluded in its analysis. “This killing appears to have been unintended and unforeseeable.”
Multiple officers told Jones to “slow down” as he advanced through the department store, according to the Justice Department and body-worn camera footage provided by the Los Angeles Police Department.
Los Angeles officer Jordan Head had a 40-millimeter bean bag gun, but before he could aim it at the suspect, Jones fired his AR-15 three times.
Head “did not discharge the 40-millimeter launcher because, before he could aim, rounds were fired, and the suspect fell to the ground and was no longer an immediate threat,” according to the Justice Department analysis of the shooting.
Officer Michael Mazur, who assumed command of the scene on arrival, told Jones to “slow down” multiple times, and at some point later told Head “It’s f—– up. We tried to slow it down.”
Mazur later explained his comment as referring to “an emotional release of (a) very violent crime scene.”
The Dec. 23, 2021, shooting began with a 911 call about a man striking people with a metal bike lock at a Burlington Coat Factory store. Store surveillance footage showed Lopez bringing his bicycle into the store and assaulting at least three women with the U-shaped lock.
He left the store and returned 90 seconds later, where he found a woman pushing a shopping cart. The footage from body cameras worn by the officers shows him striking her multiple times as she attempts to crawl away; then he drags her toward the dressing rooms.
At least 10 Los Angeles Police officers can be seen on the footage walking toward Lopez. According to body camera footage, Jones saw the woman lying on the floor, her face covered in blood. Another officer can be heard yelling for Jones to “slow down” and “hold up, hold up Jones.”
“She’s bleeding,” Jones said, then looked up, saw Lopez and fired three times.
“My heart goes out especially to the family of Valentina Orellana Peralta,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta, “who tragically lost her life and whose only involvement in this incident was by being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”