Thirty-five years since the artist we know as Papa created one of the most mind-bogglingly intricate hand-drawn mazes we had ever seen,
he once again picked up his pen in an attempt to outdo himself. Using
only his hand and a ballpoint pen, the artist began the daunting daily
task of transferring the image from his brain, onto canvas.
The maze was supposed to take much longer but the global
pandemic-induced lockdown allowed Papa to work uninterrupted, speeding
up its completion. The result is easily the most dense and challenging
yet beautiful maze we’ve ever seen.
Despite what you might think, the maze does have a solution. In fact,
it has 5 solutions for traveling from the arrow on the left to one of
the 5 circles on the right. It’s available
in the Spoon & Tamago Shop for $48. (It had to be priced slightly
higher than Papa’s other two mazes as the sheer density of the lines
required a specialized printing process)
Long touted as a health food, grapefruit has a dark side. Illustrations by Stella Murphy
In 1989, David Bailey, a researcher
in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect
humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his
career, in his lab in London, Ontario. Follow-up testing confirmed his
findings, and today there is not really any doubt that he was correct.
“The hard part about it was that most people didn’t believe our data,
because it was so unexpected,” he says. “A food had never been shown to
produce a drug interaction like this, as large as this, ever.”
That food was grapefruit, a seemingly
ordinary fruit that is, in truth, anything but ordinary. Right from the
moment of its discovery, the grapefruit has been a true oddball. Its
journey started in a place where it didn’t belong, and ended up in a lab
in a place where it doesn’t grow. Hell, even the name doesn’t make any
sense.
The citrus family of fruits is
native to the warmer and more humid parts of Asia. The current theory
is that somewhere around five or six million years ago, one parent of
all citrus varieties splintered into separate species, probably due to
some change in climate. Three citrus fruits spread widely: the citron,
the pomelo, and the mandarin. Several others scattered around Asia and
the South Pacific, including the caviar-like Australian finger lime, but those three citrus species are by far the most important to our story.
With the exception of those weirdos like
the finger lime, all other citrus fruits are derived from natural and,
before long, artificial crossbreeding, and then crossbreeding the
crossbreeds, and so on, of those three fruits. Mix certain pomelos and
certain mandarins and you get a sour orange. Cross that sour orange with
a citron and you get a lemon. It’s a little bit like blending and
reblending primary colors. Grapefruit is a mix between the pomelo—a base
fruit—and a sweet orange, which itself is a hybrid of pomelo and
mandarin.
Because those base fruits are all native
to Asia, the vast majority of hybrid citrus fruits are also from Asia.
Grapefruit, however, is not. In fact, the grapefruit was first found a
world away, in Barbados, probably in the mid-1600s. The early days of
the grapefruit are plagued by mystery. Citrus trees had been planted
casually by Europeans all over the West Indies, with hybrids springing
up all over the place, and very little documentation of who planted
what, and which mixed with which. Citrus, see, naturally hybridizes when
two varieties are planted near each other. Careful growers, even back
in the 1600s, used tactics like spacing and grafting (in which part of
one tree is attached to the rootstock of another) to avoid hybridizing.
In the West Indies, at the time, nobody bothered. They just planted
stuff.
Sometimes it didn’t work very well. Many
citrus varieties, due to being excessively inbred, don’t even create a
fruiting tree when grown from seed. But other times, random chance could
result in something special. The grapefruit is, probably, one of these.
The word “probably” is warranted there, because none of the history of
the grapefruit is especially clear. Part of the problem is that the word
“grapefruit” wasn’t even recorded, at least not in any surviving
documents, until the 1830s.
The origins of the grapefruit aren’t clear, but appear to point to Barbados.
Before that it was
known, probably, as the “shaddock,” which is especially confusing,
because shaddock is also a word used for the pomelo. (The word may have
come from the name of a trader, one Captain Philip Chaddock, who may or
may not have introduced the pomelo to the islands.) As a larger, more
acidic citrus fruit with an especially thick rind, the pomelo is what
provides the bitterness for all bitter citrus fruits to follow,
including the grapefruit. In the earliest and best history of the fruits
on Barbados, written by Griffith Hughes in 1750, there are descriptions
of many of the unusual hybrids that littered Barbados. Those trees
include the shaddock, a tree he called the “golden orange,” and one he
called the “Forbidden Fruit” tree. It was the latter that Hughes
described as the most delicious, and when the grapefruit eventually
became easily the most famous and popular citrus of the West Indies, it
was widely believed to be the one once called the Forbidden Fruit.
It
turns out this may have just been wishful thinking. Some truly
obsessive researchers spent years scouring the limited, centuries-old
descriptions of citrus leaf shapes and fruit colors, and concluded that
of those three interestingly named fruits, the shaddock was the pomelo,
the golden orange was actually the grapefruit, and the Forbidden Fruit
was actually something else entirely, some other cross, which the
researchers think they may have found on Saint Lucia, back in 1990.
Speaking of all these names, let’s
discuss the word “grapefruit.” It’s commonly stated that the word comes
from the fact that grapefruits grow in bunches, like grapes. There’s a
pretty decent chance that this isn’t true. In 1664, a Dutch physician
named Wouter Schouden visited Barbados and described the citrus he
sampled there as “tasting like unripe grapes.” In 1814, John Lunan, a
British plantation and slave owner from Jamaica, reported that this
fruit was named “on account of its resemblance in flavour to the grape.”
If you’re thinking that the grapefruit
doesn’t taste anything like grapes, you’re not wrong. It’s also
documented that there were no vine grapes in Barbados by 1698. That
means, according to one theory, that many of the people on the island
would not really have known what grapes tasted like. Their only native
grape-like plant is the sea grape, which grows in great numbers all
around the Caribbean, but isn’t a grape at all. It’s in the buckwheat
family, but does produce clusters of fruit that look an awful lot like
grapes but aren’t particularly tasty. In fact, they’re quite sour and a
little bitter, not unlike the grapefruit.
This is largely guesswork, almost all of
it, because citrus is a delightfully chaotic category of fruit. It
hybridizes so easily that there are undoubtedly thousands, maybe more,
separate varieties of citrus in the wild and in cultivation. Some of
these, like the grapefruit, clementine, or Meyer lemon, catch on and
become popular. But trying to figure out exactly where they came from,
especially if they weren’t created recently in a fruit-breeding lab, is
incredibly difficult.
A Frenchman named Odet Philippe is
generally credited with bringing the grapefruit to the American
mainland, in the 1820s. He was the first permanent European settler in
Pinellas County, Florida, where modern-day Tampa lies. (It took him
several attempts; neither the swamp ecology nor the Native people
particularly wanted him there.) Grapefruit was Philippe’s favorite
citrus fruit, and he planted huge plantations of it, and gave grafting
components to his neighbors so they could grow the fruit themselves. (It
is thought that Phillippe was Black, but he also purchased and owned
enslaved people.) In 1892, a Mainer named Kimball Chase Atwood, having
achieved success in the New York City insurance world, moved to the 265
acres of forest just south of Tampa Bay he’d purchased. Atwood burned
the whole thing to the ground and started planting stuff, and soon he
dedicated the land to his favorite crop: the grapefruit. The dude planted 16,000 grapefruit trees.
Grapefruit, though, is
wild, and wants to remain wild. In 1910, one of Atwood’s workers
discovered that one tree was producing pink grapefruits; until then,
Florida grapefruits had all been yellow-white on the inside. It became a
huge success, leading to the patenting of the Ruby Red grapefruit in
1929. Soon Atwood had become the world’s biggest producer of grapefruit,
supplying what was considered a luxury product to royalty and
aristocracy.
A brutally cold weather cycle in 1835
killed the fledgling citrus industry in the Carolinas and Georgia, and
the industry chose to move farther south, where it never got cold. South
Florida, though, can be a rather hostile place. By the time of the
Civil War, Florida’s population was the lowest of any Southern state,
and even that was clustered in its northern reaches. It was the citrus
groves down there that enticed anyone to even bother with the broiling,
humid, swampy, hurricane-ridden, malarial region. In the late 1800s,
railroads were constructed to deliver that citrus—and grapefruit was a
huge part of this—to the rest of the country and beyond. One of those
railroads was even called the Orange Belt Railway.
Citrus, and grapefruit in particular, play an outsize role in the development of Florida.
The railroads made South Florida
accessible to more people, and in the 1920s, developers began snapping
up chunks of the state and selling them as a sunny vacation spot. It
worked, and the state’s population swelled. Florida as we know it today
exists because of citrus.
Grapefruit maintained its
popularity for the following decades, helped along by the Grapefruit
Diet, which has had intermittent waves of popularity starting in the
1930s. (Many of these diets required eating grapefruits as the major
part of an extremely low-calorie diet. It probably works, in that eating
500 calories a day generally results in weight loss, but it’s widely
considered unsafe.) Grapefruit has long been associated with health.
Even in the 1800s and before, early chroniclers of fruit in the
Caribbean described it as being good for you. Perhaps it’s something
about the combination of bitter, sour, and sweet that reads as vaguely
medicinal.
This is especially ironic, because the
grapefruit, as Bailey would show, is actually one of the most
destructive foes of modern medicine in the entire food world.
Bailey works with the Canadian government,
among others, testing various medications in different circumstances to
see how humans react to them. In 1989, he was working on a blood
pressure drug called felodipine, trying to figure out if alcohol
affected response to the drug. The obvious way to test that sort of
thing is to have a control group and experimental group—one that takes
the drug with alcohol and one that takes it with water or nothing at
all. But good clinical science calls for the study to be
double-blind—that is, that both the tester and subjects don’t know which
group they belong to. But how do you disguise the taste of alcohol so
thoroughly that subjects don’t know they’re drinking it?
“It was really my wife
Barbara and I, one Saturday night, we decided to try everything in the
refrigerator,” says Bailey. They mixed pharmaceutical-grade booze with
all kinds of juices, but nothing was really working; the alcohol always
came through. “Finally at the very end, she said, ‘You know, we’ve got a
can of grapefruit juice. Why don’t you try that?’ And by golly, you
couldn’t tell!” says Bailey. So he decided to give his experimental
subjects a cocktail of alcohol and grapefruit juice (a greyhound, when
made with vodka), and his control group a glass of unadulterated
grapefruit juice.
The blinding worked, but the results of
the study were … strange. There was a slight difference in blood
pressure between the groups, which isn’t that unusual, but then Bailey
looked at the amount of the drug in the subjects’ bloodstreams. “The
levels were about four times higher than I would have expected for the
doses they were taking,” he says. This was true of both the control and
experimental groups. Bailey checked every possible thing that could have
gone wrong—his figures, whether the pharmacist gave him the wrong
dosage—but nothing was off. Except the grapefruit juice.
Bailey first tested a new theory on
himself. Felodipine doesn’t really have any ill effects at high dosage,
so he figured it’d be safe, and he was curious. “I remember the research
nurse who was helping me, she thought this was the dumbest idea she’d
ever heard,” he recalls. But after taking his grapefruit-and-felodipine
cocktail, his bloodstream showed that he had a whopping five times as
much felodipine in his system than he should have had. More testing
confirmed it. Grapefruit was screwing something up, and screwing it up
good.
Eventually, with Bailey
leading the effort, the mechanism became clear. The human body has
mechanisms to break down stuff that ends up in the stomach. The one
involved here is cytochrome P450, a group of enzymes that are
tremendously important for converting various substances to inactive
forms. Drugmakers factor this into their dosage formulation as they try
to figure out what’s called the bioavailability of a drug, which is how
much of a medication gets to your bloodstream after running the gauntlet
of enzymes in your stomach. For most drugs, it is surprisingly
little—sometimes as little as 10 percent.
Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds
called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from
fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins
permanently take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming
back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the
body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up its
hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome P450s. This
can take over 12 hours.
This rather suddenly takes away one of
the body’s main defense mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent
bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact
cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you
actually need, because so little will actually make it to your
bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome
P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100
percent. You’re overdosing.
And it does not take an
excessive amount of grapefruit juice to have this effect: Less than a
single cup can be enough, and the effect doesn’t seem to change as long
as you hit that minimum.
None of this is a mystery, at this point,
and it’s shockingly common. Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some
of the medications that research indicates get screwed up by grapefruit:
Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium)
Amphetamines (Adderall and Ritalin)
Anti-anxiety SSRIs (Zoloft and Paxil)
Cholesterol-lowering statins (Lipitor and Crestor)
Erectile-dysfunction drugs (Cialis and Viagra)
Various over-the-counter meds (Tylenol, Allegra, and Prilosec)
And about a hundred others.
In some of these cases, the grapefruit
interaction is not a big deal, because they’re safe drugs and even
having several times the normal dosage is not particularly dangerous. In
other cases, it’s exceedingly dangerous. “There are a fair number of
drugs that have the potential to produce very serious side effects,”
says Bailey. “Kidney failure, cardiac arrhythmia that’s
life-threatening, gastrointestinal bleeding, respiratory depression.” A
cardiac arrhythmia messes with how the heart pumps, and if it stops
pumping, the mortality rate is about 20 percent. It’s hard to tell from
the statistics, but it seems all but certain that people have died from
eating grapefruit.
Grapefruit interacts with a wide variety of medications, potentially causing serious side effects.
This is even more dangerous
because grapefruit is a favorite of older Americans. The grapefruit’s
flavor, that trademark bitterness, is so strong that it can cut through
the decreased taste sensitivity of an aged palate, providing flavor for
those who can’t taste a lot of other foods very well. And older
Americans are also much more likely to take a variety of pills, some of
which may interact with grapefruit.
Despite this, the Food and Drug
Administration does not place warnings on many of the drugs known to
have adverse interactions with grapefruit. Lipitor and Xanax have
warnings about this in the official FDA recommendations, which you can
find online and are generally provided with every prescription. But
Zoloft, Viagra, Adderall, and others do not. “Currently, there is not
enough clinical evidence to require Zoloft, Viagra, or Adderall to have a
grapefruit juice interaction listed on the drug label,” wrote an FDA
representative in an email.
This is not a universally accepted
conclusion. In Canada, where Bailey lives and works, warnings are
universal. “Oh yeah, it’s right on the prescription bottles, in patient
information,” he says. “Or they have a yellow sticker that says, ‘Avoid
consumption of grapefruit when taking this drug.’”
But in the United States, there’s no way a
patient would know that many exceedingly common drugs should absolutely
not be taken with an exceedingly common fruit. It is unclear whether a
patient is expected to know that grapefruit has an interaction with many
drugs. Should patients Google “drug I take” with “food I eat” in every
possible configuration? The FDA only recommends patients talk to their
doctors about food-drug interactions, and that can be a lot of ground to
cover.
This interaction, by the way, seems to
affect all of the bitter citruses—the ones that inherited the telltale
tang from the pomelo. Sour orange. Lime, too. But it’s unlikely that
anyone would drink enough sour orange or lime juice to have this effect,
given how sour it is. Grapefruit, on the other hand, is far more
palatable in large doses.
Bailey, though he doesn’t particularly
like grapefruit, notes that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the
fruit. There’s plenty of really helpful, healthy stuff in a grapefruit,
especially vitamin C, which it has in spades. He just makes the case
that in a time when more than half of Americans take multiple pills per
day, and 20 percent take five or more, grapefruit-drug interactions are
just something everyone should know about.
The United States produces
more grapefruit than any other country, from Florida and now California
as well (and elsewhere, though in smaller quantities). The industry is
not unaware of this issue. In fact, citrus growers have been working
for more than a decade on a variety of grapefruit that doesn’t
interfere with drugs. But the industry has more pressing problems,
especially the disease called huanglongbing, or citrus greening, that’s
ravaging groves, and the citrus lobby certainly doesn’t want more drugs
labeled “Do not take with grapefruit.”
From its largely
mysterious birth on an island halfway across the world from its parents,
the grapefruit has had an unusual journey to the modern world. It
fueled the growth and development of South Florida, has spearheaded many
an attempt at healthy eating, and has almost certainly killed people.
Still delicious and refreshing, though.
In
the vice-presidential debate, Vice President Pence took a number of
flimsy claims out of the Trump playbook, although he often delivered
them more deftly. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) also stretched the
truth at times. Here is a roundup of 15 suspect claims that were made.
As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of
facts in debates.
“When
Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, not 7½ million
people contracted the swine flu; 60 million Americans contracted the
swine flu. If the swine flu had been as lethal as the coronavirus in
2009 when Joe Biden was vice president, we would have lost 2 million
American lives.”
— Pence
This
is a silly apples-and-oranges comparison. Because the swine flu was not
nearly as lethal as the novel coronavirus, there was not nearly as much
need to halt its spread. Even with 60 million infections, there were an estimated 12,500 deaths.
(Note: That was an after-the-fact report, based on statistical modeling
of excess mortality. The death toll at the time was much lower.)
A New York Times assessment
in 2010 noted that some flaws in the system were discovered, but
overall the Obama administration was praised for its response — in part
because it turned out that the pandemic was not as severe as it once had
appeared. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
in August 2009 had forecast 30,000 to 90,000 deaths, and the final
death toll was much less than that.
“When Joe Biden was vice president, we lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs.”
— Pence
Pence’s
statistic depends on some sleight of hand. Barack Obama took office in
the midst of the Great Recession, and thus so many jobs were being lost
every month that it makes a difference on whether you start counting the
start of the term in January or February.
The
BLS says there is no right answer for when to start counting. Pence
starts with January. But if you start counting in February, as many
economists recommend, Obama over eight years actually had a modest gain
in manufacturing jobs — 4,000.
At
The Fact Checker, we are dubious about the practice of measuring job
growth by presidential term. Presidents do not create jobs; companies
and consumers do. This huge difference in a two-term presidency because
of a one-month shift simply shows how mindless and arbitrary this game
can be.
“[We]
secured 4 trillion dollars in the Congress of the United States to give
direct payments to families, saved 50 million jobs through the Paycheck
Protection Program.”
— Pence
This
“50 million jobs” claim is a dubious number cooked up by the Trump
administration. In fact, officials told Reuters that the number referred
not to jobs saved, but the total number of workers reported by
businesses approved for a loan under the program.
“The PPP likely did not save 51 million jobs, or anywhere close to it,” Reuters concluded
after interviews with economists and an analysis of the program’s data.
“Half a dozen economists put the number of jobs saved by the initiative
at only a fraction of 51 million — ranging between one million and 14
million.”
Moreover, The Washington Post dug into the data
behind the 51-million figure, collected by the Small Business
Administration, and found “half a dozen businesses that said they had
fewer employees than the SBA reported the businesses had retained.
Bankers also said employment figures for hundreds of businesses had been
incorrectly reported by the SBA.” For instance, Fire Protection
Systems, a sprinkler system installer in Kent, Wash., retained more than
500 jobs using its PPP funds, according to the data. But the company
says it has only 20 employees.
“The president said it was a hoax.”
— Harris
Harris is taking comments from President Trump out of context. Trump, at his Feb. 28 campaign rally in North Charleston, S.C., said, “This is their new hoax.”
The
full quote shows Trump is criticizing Democratic talking points and the
media’s coverage of his administration’s response to the coronavirus.
He does not say that the virus itself is a hoax.
Moreover, at a news conference Feb. 29
with members of the coronavirus task force, Trump was asked about the
“hoax” comment. He clarified: “ ‘Hoax’ referring to the action that
[Democrats] take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done
such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — I’m not talking about what’s
happening here [the virus]; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the
hoax. … But the way they refer to it — because these people have done
such an incredible job, and I don’t like it when they are criticizing
these people. And that’s the hoax. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Granted,
Trump and members of his administration have played down the spread of
the virus and falsely touted the strength of their response, as our
numerous fact checks have pointed out.
“He
[Trump] suspended all travel from China, the second-largest economy in
the world. Now … Joe Biden … opposed that decision. He said it was
xenophobic and hysterical.”
— Pence
Trump
did not suspend all travel from China. He barred non-U.S. citizens from
traveling from China, but there were 11 exceptions, and Hong Kong and
Macao were not included. U.S. citizens and permanent residents could
still travel from China but were subject to screening and a possible
14-day quarantine. Some flights were immediately suspended, but others
continued for weeks, at the discretion of the airlines. Many other
countries imposed similar bans ahead of the United States, some even tougher.
Some
analysts at the time predicted that Trump’s action would be ineffective
at preventing the virus from taking hold in the United States.
“All
of the evidence we have indicates that travel restrictions and
quarantines directed at individual countries are unlikely to keep the
virus out of our borders,” Jennifer Nuzzo, associate professor and
senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security,
said at a congressional hearing Feb. 5.
“We
don’t have a travel ban; we have a travel Band-Aid right now,” said Ron
Klain, the Ebola “czar” during the Obama administration, at the same
hearing. He added that monitoring everyone carefully “is the only
practical thing we can do.”
The New York Times calculated
in April that at least 430,000 people arrived in the United States on
direct flights from China since Jan. 1, including nearly 40,000 in the
two months after Trump imposed restrictions. Moreover, screening
proceedings of travelers from China have been uneven and inconsistent,
the Times said.
Pence
points to a comment by former vice president Joe Biden — “This is no
time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia … and
fearmongering to lead the way instead of science” — but Biden says that
did not refer to the travel restrictions. He made no mention of the
travel restrictions at the time he made the comment. He later said he
supported the restrictions.
In
any case, the virus was already spreading through the United States,
and there is little evidence the travel restrictions on China saved
lives, especially because the Trump administration did not rapidly set
up an effective testing regimen, as did many other countries.
“They left the strategic national stockpile empty. They left an empty and hollow plan.”
— Pence
This is a false claim consistently
made by the Trump administration. First, the coronavirus pandemic
emerged in the past year, so if the Strategic National Stockpile was
truly empty, some responsibility should rest with Trump. In a statement,
the Department of Health and Human Services said that “in January 2017
the total number of ventilators in the SNS inventory immediately
available for use would not have been much different than what the SNS
had immediately available for use in March 2020.”
Second,
the SNS was not empty. The administration eventually admitted that
there were nearly 17,000 ventilators available when the pandemic
emerged. That was more than enough to deal with the crisis in the
spring.
Ventilators
are expensive to procure and to maintain in emergency-ready condition,
which is one reason the SNS was not overflowing with ventilators
(Another 2,425 ventilators were in maintenance as of March, HHS says,
though the New York Times reported in April that 2,109 were unavailable because the government had let a maintenance contract lapse.)
As for a “empty and hollow plan,” that is a matter of opinion.
The Obama administration left behind a National Security Council staff
playbook on fighting pandemics. The color-coded document lists dozens of
pointed and detailed questions that top policymakers should be asking
themselves if a novel virus suddenly emerges overseas. Some elements
certainly could have been helpful, but the Trump White House dismissed
it as having little value.
“They
[Obama] created within the White House an office that basically was
responsible for monitoring pandemics… They [Trump] got rid of it.”
After
grappling with the 2014 Ebola epidemic, Obama in 2016 established a
Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National
Security Council. A directorate has its own staff, and it is headed by
someone who generally reports to the national security adviser.
The
structure survived during the early part of Trump’s presidency, when
the office was headed by Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer. But, after John
Bolton became Trump’s third national security adviser, he decided the
organizational chart was a mess and led to too many conflicts. He also
thought the staff was too large, having swollen to 430 people, including
staffers in the pipeline.
Bolton
fired Tom Bossert, the homeland security adviser, realigning the post
to report directly to him. He eliminated a number of deputy national
security advisers so there was just one. And he folded the global health
directorate into a new one that focused on counterproliferation and
biodefense. Bolton thought there was obvious overlap between arms
control and nonproliferation, weapons-of-mass-destruction terrorism, and
global health and biodefense, believing the epidemiology of a
biological health emergency is very similar to a bioterrorism attack.
One
key issue during such reorganizations is whether policy expertise is
maintained. Luciana Borio, the previous director for medical and
biodefense preparedness, is a practicing medical doctor and has an
extensive background in medical health preparedness. She was replaced by
someone with a background mostly in North Korea policy.
But
whether having a separate office on pandemics in the White House would
have made the administration react more swiftly to the emerging
coronavirus threat is questionable. “There isn’t any organizational
chart in the U.S. government that makes any difference in the Trump
administration,” a former administration official told the Fact Checker.
“Trump is more likely to say to Jared [Kushner], ‘What do you think we
should do?’ That’s the big problem.”
“It was an outdoor event which all of our scientists regularly and routinely advise.”
— Pence
The Sept. 26 Rose Garden event
announcing Judge Amy Coney Barrett as Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is
believed to have turned into a superspreader event for covid-19, the
disease caused by the coronavirus. Pence falsely suggests it was all
outdoors, but there was an indoor component, during which participants
posed for photos without wearing masks.
Even the outdoor event had problems, as people were closely seated together and most did not wear masks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines
that state: “CDC recommends that people wear masks in public settings
and when around people who don’t live in your household, especially when
other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
In
other words, people should wear masks when in public or when surrounded
by people they do not live with. That clearly did not happen at the
Barrett announcement.
“Joe Biden has been a cheerleader for Communist China through, over the last several decades.”
— Pence
Pence
is trying to rewrite history here, because Trump is vulnerable for his
lackadaisical approach to the coronavirus pandemic. For weeks in the
early stages of the crisis, Trump repeated assurances that China had the
virus under control — at a time when he was most concerned about
keeping intact a trade deal with Beijing. (Former national security
adviser John Bolton has alleged that Trump pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy enough products to ensure his reelection.)
For
years, U.S. policy toward China was to help manage its rise and have it
become — in the words of Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick
under President George W. Bush — “a responsible stakeholder”
in the international system. Zoellick established a “strategic
dialogue” between senior officials in the two countries that continued
into the Obama administration. Eventually, it became a “strategic and
economic dialogue,” led by the secretary of state and treasury secretary
but also including the vice president.
The
record of those meetings provides the Trump campaign with an array of
Biden quotes on China that it chose to attack Biden in ads. In 2011, for
instance, Biden published an opinion article, titled “China’s rise isn’t our demise,”
that reflects U.S. policy at the time. “I remain convinced that a
successful China can make our country more prosperous, not less,” Biden
wrote.
Still,
the Obama administration tried to hedge its bets by forming the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement with 11 other nations
that was designed to be a geopolitical instrument that would halt
China’s rise and weaken its diplomatic clout. The TPP had many critics —
including eventually Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee — and
Trump pulled out of it to pursue a unilateral deal with China. He has
had limited success, however, achieving only a first-stage deal that
fell short of his original goals.
“And,
of course, we’ve all seen the avalanche, what you put the country
through for the better part of three years until it was found that there
was no obstruction, no collusion. Case closed.”
— Pence
Pence
claims that Democrats orchestrated a coup of sorts that hampered most
of Trump’s first term. But it was Rod J. Rosenstein, then a Trump
appointee at the Justice Department, who signed the order appointing a special counsel in 2017 to look into possible illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The
FBI was already looking into the Trump campaign’s multiple contacts
with Russia, but the investigation kicked into high gear after Trump
took office because he fired then-FBI Director James B. Comey, That’s
when Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller III to be special counsel.
And
Mueller, contrary to Pence’s claim, documented 10 instances in which
Trump possibly obstructed justice. In at least four of those cases
(Trump’s attempt to remove Mueller, Trump’s attempt to curtail the
investigation, Trump’s instructions to then-White House counsel Donald
McGahn to deny the attempt to remove Mueller, and Trump’s remarks
raising the possibility of a pardon for former campaign chairman Paul
Manafort), Trump appears to have met all the elements of an obstruction
offense under federal law, according to Mueller’s report.
Mueller
declined to say whether these episodes were criminal, vaguely suggested
that Congress might consider impeachment, referred to a Justice
Department policy that bars the indictment of a sitting president, and
proffered a list of other reasons why he couldn’t state his views as to Trump’s conduct.
“If
we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the
President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so
state,” the report says, adding that, “while this report does not
conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not
exonerate him.”
Attorney
General William P. Barr and Rosenstein reviewed Mueller’s report and
concluded that no crime was committed. But Mueller did not exonerate
Trump, as Pence seemed to suggest.
On
the separate question of coordination between Trump’s campaign and
Russians, the Mueller report concluded that the Trump campaign welcomed
Russia’s help and sought to exploit it, but there was not enough
evidence to bring charges that members of the campaign conspired with
Russian government operatives.
“Joe
Biden and Kamala Harris consistently talk about mandates, not just
mandates with the coronavirus, but a government takeover of health. ...
Green New Deal, all government control.”
— Pence
The
Trump campaign for months has claimed falsely that Biden’s campaign
platform is a mirror image of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.). That’s
simply false. Keep in mind: Biden prevailed in the Democratic primary by
running as a moderate alternative to Sanders’s far-reaching liberal
platform.
Biden
has never supported the Green New Deal, which is a nonbinding
resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other
Democrats that calls for cutting carbon emissions to net-zero over 10
years while making steep investments in green infrastructure.
Harris
was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal resolution in the
Senate, as Pence said later in the debate, and has since introduced more climate legislation with Ocasio-Cortez.
But Biden’s climate plan
is more limited, calling for net-zero emissions “no later than 2050,”
and proposing fewer green investments. The Biden campaign has not budged
from this position after tapping Harris to join the ticket.
Similarly, on health care, Biden has suggested nothing like Sanders’s Medicare-for-all proposal.
“If
your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have
another, better choice,” Biden’s website says. “Whether you’re covered
through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going
without coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to
purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare,
the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating
lower prices from hospitals and other health-care providers. It also
will better coordinate among all of a patient’s doctors to improve the
efficacy and quality of their care, and cover primary care without any
co-payments. And it will bring relief to small businesses struggling to
afford coverage for their employees.”
Sanders
proposed a much more ambitious plan, Medicare-for-all, or universal
health care with the government acting as the single payer, that Biden
does not support.
“They
want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking, which would cost
hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland.”
— Pence
False.
Biden has said he would not issue new permits for fracking on federal
lands but would allow existing operations to continue. That position has
earned him detractors among climate activist groups.
Fracking,
short for “hydraulic fracturing,” is a drilling technique that uses
high-pressure water and chemical blasts to access natural gas and oil
reserves underground. The technique has facilitated a boom in U.S.
energy production over the past decade, but it has been controversial,
the target of climate-change activists and many Democrats.
The
issue is important to Pennsylvania because underneath about two-thirds
of the state is the Marcellus shale formation — which also covers parts
of New York, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland.
“Senator Harris is denying the fact that they’re going to raise taxes on every American.”
— Pence
Biden would raise taxes by a substantial amount, but not on every American, no matter how you slice it.
Among
his key proposals, Biden says he would restore the top individual tax
rate from 37 to 39.6 percent, raise the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28
percent, set minimum corporate taxes for domestic and foreign income,
boost the tax on capital gains by labeling it as ordinary income and
reintroduce limits on itemized deductions. As Harris noted, he has vowed
not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year.
The
tax analyses also broadly agree that virtually all of that revenue
would be gathered from the very wealthy or from corporations, with about
half of the money coming from the top 0.1 percent, and three-quarters
from the top 1 percent of households.
But
when you dig into the distributional tables produced by these groups,
you see they estimate that some of the burden from the tax increases
would fall on people making less than $400,000. The amounts are
relatively small, according to Penn Wharton — an average of $15 for the
bottom quintile, $90 for the second quintile, $180 for the middle
quintile and $360 for the fourth quintile. But those numbers are in the
tables, so some Republicans have claimed (incorrectly) that 80 percent
of Americans would face higher taxes.
Tax
experts say that is because of technical reasons related to the
corporate tax increase as the tax models assume corporations adjust to a
higher tax by reducing investment returns or cutting workers’ wages.
The
Penn Wharton model has a handy feature that allows you to see the
impact of the Biden tax plan without the corporate tax increase. When
you click that option, the average tax change suddenly drops to zero for
the bottom 90 percent of households. Even households between 90 and 95
percent would face only an average tax increase of $5. Nearly 97 percent
of the tax increase would be paid by the top 1 percent.
“President Trump and I have a plan to improve health care and protect preexisting conditions for every American.”
— Pence
Yes, they have a plan. The plan is to kill those legal protections
through a lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court and replace them
with a plan that Trump has been promising for years and never delivered.
Before
Obama and Democrats enacted the Affordable Care Act in 2010, insurance
companies could and did deny coverage to people with preexisting
conditions, such as cancer or lesser ailments.
The
ACA prohibited this practice by mandating that insurance companies sell
plans to anyone who wants them and by requiring that people in similar
age groups and geographic regions pay similar costs. This is known as
the coverage guarantee for patients with preexisting conditions.
The
Trump administration filed a brief on June 25 asking the Supreme Court
to strike down the entire ACA, including its coverage guarantee. Trump
has issued a brief executive order
saying he supports coverage for patients with preexisting conditions,
but experts, Republicans and Democrats say what’s needed is a law.
“Literally
in the midst of a public health pandemic, where more than 210,000
people have died,” Harris said during the debate, “Donald Trump is in
court right now trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, and I’ve
said it before and it bears repeating, this means that there will be no
more protections for people with preexisting conditions.”
When
moderator Susan Page asked Pence to explain how the Trump
administration would protect people with preexisting conditions, Pence
falsely claimed that Biden and Harris support abortion “up to the moment
of birth” and did not mention anything related to preexisting
conditions.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support taxpayer funding of abortion all the way up to the moment of birth, late-term abortion.”
— Pence
Neither
Biden nor Harris supports “late-term abortion and infanticide.” They do
not support funding abortion “up to the moment of birth.”
Biden supports abortion rights and says he would codify in statute the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade and related precedents, which generally limit abortions to the first 20 to 24 weeks of gestation.
Most
abortions are performed in the earlier stages of pregnancy. About 1
percent happen after the fetus reaches the point of viability. Trump and
antiabortion advocates have claimed for months that Biden supports
abortion “up until the moment of birth,” a claim we have awarded Three Pinocchios.
They
argue that some laws and court decisions have opened loopholes that
allow abortions to the very end of a pregnancy. Experts have told us
abortions up to the moment of birth, what could be described as
infanticide, are not happening in the United States.
Some
Democrats support abortion rights, but that doesn’t mean they support
“extreme late-term abortions,” experts told us. “That’s like saying
everyone who ‘supports’ the Second Amendment ‘supports’ school
shootings,” said Katie L. Watson, a professor at Northwestern
University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
The Supreme Court’s rulings in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey
say states may ban abortion after the fetus reaches viability, the
point at which it can sustain life, which happens at or near the end of
the second trimester. States with such bans must allow an exception “to
preserve the life or health of the mother.”
These
rulings don’t force states to ban abortions. Some states don’t have
gestational-age restrictions, although most do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 43 states have laws restricting abortion after the fetus reaches a certain gestational age.
Asked
whether he supported restrictions, a Biden campaign representative
previously told The Post that “Biden believes in the standard laid out
by Roe and Casey.”
One lesser known fact about Kaspar Hauser
is that he was an accomplished amateur artist. In fact the use of
drawing and painting to “civilize” the foundling constitutes an early
example of art therapy. The bizarre first image was apparently executed
while Hauser was in a trance state. Elsewhere, conventional fruit and
flower studies include a naive still life which could have come from an
early 20th century artist, and a chilling depiction of the weapon used
by an unknown assailant to attack the boy in 1829.
I do believe you’re right, though it
unnerves me to look at it for too long. How does one draw oneself if one
has apparently been living in a cell with no human company (and
presumably no mirror, or art materials) for years on end? There is no
“fact” about Kaspar Hauser’s life which doesn’t instantly raise about
three further questions.
Thanks for the comment – they come from a
German book published in 1995 called ‘Das Kind von Europa’, an
exhaustive study of documentation, literature and images relating to
Kaspar Hauser.
I don’t have a website as such but you
can always find me in Google UK and type my name in the Google box.
From there you’ll be able to see many headings about me. To see the
photos, click on images.
I love Kaspar’s drawings. He was such a gifted young man. I’m. Great
Fan of Kaspar Hauser. I was in Ansbach last July 2012 for the KHF.
Paintings
Very BEAUTIFULL PAINTING FROM Kasper Hauser!!
Paintings
Danke Kasper Hauser für deine Tollen
Zeichnungen du bist ein Genie gewesen, und der Sohn der Königin! Deshalb
sind die Kinder Särge verschwunden! Alles KLAR!!!!
Do you think the first image was a self-portrait? Added to your gallery from yesterday it wouldn’t be all that out of place.
I do believe you’re right, though it unnerves me to look at it for too long. How does one draw oneself if one has apparently been living in a cell with no human company (and presumably no mirror, or art materials) for years on end? There is no “fact” about Kaspar Hauser’s life which doesn’t instantly raise about three further questions.
Ooh, then maybe it plays into the “family locked him up” conspiracies and it’s a brother or father. The questions never stop, it’s true!
These are quite amazing! And that plum looks exceedingly sexual. Just sayin’.
Ha! You’re right, it does look mighty peachy for a plum…
These are great! Where did you get them from?
Thanks for the comment – they come from a German book published in 1995 called ‘Das Kind von Europa’, an exhaustive study of documentation, literature and images relating to Kaspar Hauser.
I don’t have a website as such but you can always find me in Google UK and type my name in the Google box. From there you’ll be able to see many headings about me. To see the photos, click on images.
I love Kaspar’s drawings. He was such a gifted young man. I’m. Great Fan of Kaspar Hauser. I was in Ansbach last July 2012 for the KHF.
Very BEAUTIFULL PAINTING FROM Kasper Hauser!!
Danke Kasper Hauser für deine Tollen Zeichnungen du bist ein Genie gewesen, und der Sohn der Königin! Deshalb sind die Kinder Särge verschwunden! Alles KLAR!!!!
What is the original source of the images?
The images come from a German book published in 1995 called ‘Das Kind von Europa’.