holfresh wrote:

meloanyk wrote:

martin wrote:

WaltLongmire wrote:

earthmansurfer wrote:

martin wrote:

earthmansurfer wrote:Can you answer my question? Can others post about it but not me? They are and you don't say anything.
Either ban everyone posting about it or no-one, not just me.

EMS, you are the only one posting gutter-level conspiracy theories. And quite frankly your reasoning regarding what others are posting reminds me of how children who are aged 10 or less try to deflect blame away from themselves.

I am addressing you and your bald-faced awful posts in regards to this particular topic - a charge of pedophilia is a high high high serious matter and should be treated that way.

Your other posts also leave a LOT to be desired.

Mostly I don't think you understand either of the above and want it to stop. I don't want to waste any more time on this.

Gutter-level? Did you look at the picture? They are identical. What is wrong with investigating something?
You said pedophilia is a high high high serious matter and I totally agree. And I post those pictures and you don't even mention them? Seriously, how can you not comment on that?
I even gave the terms to search for and you just shut it down.

And my posts lately have in part been correcting others (e.g. Holfresh's false Boing post - no reply btw, questioning Bonns' job numbers about Obama) and giving some great new information, like about the 50,000 new jobs. Might be 100,000 actually with Foxcomm. And not being personal.

For a mod, you sure do a lot of name calling and seem to make things personal. Is that the best way to deal with a situation? Ask questions. If something is wrong that I say, discredit it, don't say conspiracy theory or name call. You never answered my question regarding this. And you really are not answering my question here either. And you give no proof, you just name call "conspiracy theory". That isn't research, that isn't digging, that is just shutting something down. And that is what MSM is doing here, just saying "Fake News" but it is making people dig deeper cause they are being told not to look. That is why it is going viral.

I'll follow your special rules. I just hope others like Walt do too.

Excuse me???!

Please show me the "conspiracies" I'm pushing. I'm not the gullible one. I'm not the one on my knees in front of Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Assange or all the conspiranuts who spurt out the fake news you seem to swallow on a regular basis and vomit onto this site.

Martin is not talking about the use, or misuse of statistics to prove this or that, he's talking about the extremist idiotic lies, misinformation, and disinformation that you seem to spend a lot of time "researching."

If I say something about Trump being a liar...its because he's said something that has been determined to be a lie. If I say you can't believe much of what he says it is because he has rarely made statments without including a fair number of exaggerations, or as he called it in Art of the Deal, "Truthful Hyperbole." If I call him a sexual abuser, its because 12 women accused him of such. If I call him a fraud, it is because he settled a fraud case and is paying a penalty for breaking NYS education law. You will know when I'm giving an opinion, and not factual info.

Most outrageous thing I do is the graphic cartoons I make of Trump using the nude anatomically correct statue of him that was found all over NYC months ago, but nothing I include in those cartoons is untrue.

I've lost it with you because you are frequently irrational, and seem to be approaching the status of the people Trump was talking about when he said he could shoot someone on the street and not lose a vote. You want to be a tool and a fool, fine, but don't ever equate me with you, because there is no comparison to be made.

I'm critical of many things but I'm a strict rational empiricist, who is also an atheist. I put faith in my mind, evidence, and the scientific method, and if I was to fall for a manufactured and false "conspiracy" I would be pissed off AT MYSELF, not the liar who put out the conspiracy.

DO NOT equate what I believe and say and HOW I COME TO BELIEVE SOMETHING, with the conspiratorial feces you throw out here and your total lack of critical thinking and childish naivete. Go onto your Daily Stormer forum or subreddit, or 4Chan, InfoWars, or whatever Bigfoot source you get you crap from and continue to enjoy the idiotic circle jerk you and your conspiracy friends regularly participate in, but any admonitions made to you by the mods have little to do with me because you are not going to see me putting out the misinformation/disinformation you consume and get excited over.

Walt, 100% agree with you.

EMS, let's you and I take this offline and I'd ask you again to stop posting in this thread.

Why ban earthman from this political thread, one created within a basketball forum, given such an informed and educated group. Appears that the vast majority share similar trains of thought and profess to know the facts. As such, shouldn't they be able to filter and separate what is true and what is fiction especially coming from one singular poster? Seems to me that earthman why certainly annoying to some is simply an unwelcomed guest who disturbs the harmony of group sessions. If one chooses they can easily skip his posts instead of censoring him as there is plenty of slanted information happening in every medium including here.

I'm not speaking on Martin's behalf, I'm just trying to give color to what may be going on..There has to be a baseline or a standard of information being passed to keep the conversation at an elevated level..It is very easy to degrade a conversation with misinformation from unsubstantiated sources...

For example I am anti-Trump to the nth degree..In my case, I have seem the story about Trump's trial coming up on December 16th for child rape...It's being reported in the Washington Post, a very reputable paper..I haven't seen any traction about that story..I saw the video of the young lady making the charge and I'm not really convinced that her story is true...MSM isn't running with the story either..I have posted the information twice about the trial and decided not to continue because it's really unsubstantiated although there is a trial date..

EMS doesn't have that filter..He doesn't care where the story is coming from or how true it is..He will find the story and will work a way to present it to you...Some one has to filter that if EMS doesn't want to...If we are going to keep the conversation elevated, there has to be a filter and it should come from ourselves before the moderator gets involved...

Yes, well stated, thanks.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

In exit polls of 23 states from the primaries, all showed a higher median income for Trump supporters than the national average, usually around $70,000. Exit polls last week, while not definitive, reveal that both college-educated white men and college educated white women voted for Trump by much higher than expected margins.

A Giant reportedly became the latest victim of the wave of hate crimes that has been sweeping through the tri-state area.

On Wednesday, CBS New York reported that Nikita Whitlock’s home had been broken into and vandalized a night earlier, and the alleged intruders had scrawled racist messages all over the walls.

Whitlock, 25, who has spent the entire season on injured reserve, came home to a graffiti swastika, according to CBS New York, as well as “KKK” and “Go back to Africa” messages scrawled on the walls inside his Moonachie home.

markvmc wrote:Soros and other rich Democrats need to fund a "move to the swing states" initiative. Clinton has almost 3 million votes more than Trump, but they are all on the coasts. Incentivize people, through grants, telecommuting work programs, moving corporate hqs for companies you own, etc... to actually go live in Ohio, Indiana, Florida, etc... Put a few hundred thousand registered Democrats in each swing state, and the electoral college can start to reflect the will of the majority.

Dems need to move their economical agenda to the right and keep social liberal agenda where it is with some patriotism thrown in.
And select some young good looking candidate to run and they will be golden.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Even after the 2012 election in which Americans re-elected most of the sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate -- as is typical in national elections -- three-quarters of Americans say that, given the opportunity, they would vote "for" term limits for members of both houses of Congress.

Americans' Support for Establishing Term Limits for Federal Lawmakers, January 2013

Republicans and independents are slightly more likely than Democrats to favor term limits; nevertheless, the vast majority of all party groups agree on the issue. Further, Gallup finds no generational differences in support for the proposal.

These findings, from Gallup Daily tracking conducted Jan. 8-9, are similar to those from 1994 to 1996 Gallup polls, in which between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms that members of Congress and the U.S. Senate can serve.

More Than Six in 10 Would Abolish Electoral College

Americans are nearly as open to major electoral reform when it comes to doing away with the Electoral College. Sixty-three percent would abolish this unique, but sometimes controversial, mechanism for electing presidents that was devised by the framers of the Constitution. While constitutional and statutory revisions have been made to the Electoral College since the nation's founding, numerous efforts to abolish it over the last 200+ years have met with little success.

There is even less partisan variation in support for this proposal than there is for term limits, with between 61% and 66% of all major party groups saying they would vote to do away with the Electoral College if they could. Similarly, between 60% and 69% of all major age groups take this position.

Americans' Support for Doing Away With U.S. Electoral College, January 2013

Gallup has asked Americans about the Electoral College in a number of ways over the years, and regardless of the precise phrasing, large majorities have always supported doing away with it. That includes 80% support in 1968 and 67% in 1980 with wording similar to what is used today.

Compared with today, support for abolishing it was slightly lower from 2000 through 2011, ranging from 59% to 62%, when using a question that asked Americans if they would rather amend the Constitution so the candidate who wins the most votes nationally wins the election, or keep the current system in which the winner is decided in the Electoral College.

Gallup trends show that Republicans were far less supportive than Democrats of abolishing the Electoral College in late 2000, when Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush had lost the popular vote, but was fighting a legal battle to win Florida and therefore the Electoral College. Since then, however, Republicans have gradually become less protective of the Electoral College, to the point that by 2011, a solid majority of Republicans were in favor of abolishing it.

Bottom Line

Large majorities of Americans are in favor of establishing term limits for members of the U.S. House and Senate, and doing away with the Electoral College. Despite sharp polarization of the parties on many issues in 21st century politics, Republicans and Democrats broadly agree on both longstanding election reform proposals.

arkrud wrote:

markvmc wrote:The second thing I agree with. With the possible exception of Bush mk.I, the most charismatic candidate has won every election since the 70's.

Your first point is nuts. It's not like the Dems were too leftist this time out. A bit more populist leftism, a la Bernie Sanders, and they'd have won the crucial swing states in the rust belt.

I do not believe Dems lose because of going not enough to the left but rather lost by going too far. Wrong country for this.

http://www.kolotv.com/content/news/Linda-McMahon-donated-7m-to-pro-Trump-super-PACs-405561755.htmlhttp://

NEW YORK (AP) - The woman President-elect Donald Trump chose Wednesday to lead the Small Business Administration gave $1 million in October to a super political action committee that supported him.

That brings Linda McMahon's total pro-Trump super PAC donations to $7 million. The former wrestling executive gave $6 million over the summer to the group Rebuilding America Now and another $1 million in October to the group Future 45. Both spent money primarily on television advertising.

McMahon's most recent contribution was disclosed for the first time in a Federal Election Commission report filed late Thursday.

djsunyc wrote:WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump’s presidential campaign sent Donald Trump’s businesses $2.9 million in the final days prior to and the weeks following his election.

Trump’s Miami golf club, where he staged an Oct. 25 news conference to showcase his employees who like him, received $13,015. Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas received $176,933 for lodgings from his presidential campaign and $60,442 more from a joint fundraising committee for Trump and the Republican National Committee.

Trump Tower in Manhattan, meanwhile, received a whopping $462,011 in rent, including $283,500 on Nov. 28 – nearly $114,000 more than the campaign had been paying for its headquarters space for the previous several months.

The president-elect’s transition team did not respond to a Huffington Post query regarding the higher rent payment.

The figures are contained in new filings Thursday night by the campaign and related committees with the Federal Election Commission. The filings cover the six weeks from Oct. 20 to Nov. 28

The burst of spending brings to more than $12 million the total Trump has funneled back to his businesses since the start of the campaign. It continues his pattern of choosing to spend donors’ money at his own properties for events and on his own airplane for travel, even though it meant spending considerably more than comparable alternatives.

Trump paid his West Palm Beach, Florida, golf resort $29,715 in May following a “victory” party he held there March 5. He sent $35,845 to his club in nearby Jupiter after a March 8 party. In both cases, the attendees were mainly dues-paying members of the clubs rather than campaign staff or volunteers. And in both cases he could have held his party at the West Palm Beach Marriott for less than half of what he spent.

Also in May, Trump paid his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach $423,372 in campaign funds even though he had held only two victory parties and a news conference there two months earlier.

You have to remember that Trump donated $66 million of his own money. Where as Clinton didn't touch her bank account.

Bonn1997 wrote:

Vmart wrote:

djsunyc wrote:WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump’s presidential campaign sent Donald Trump’s businesses $2.9 million in the final days prior to and the weeks following his election.

Trump’s Miami golf club, where he staged an Oct. 25 news conference to showcase his employees who like him, received $13,015. Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas received $176,933 for lodgings from his presidential campaign and $60,442 more from a joint fundraising committee for Trump and the Republican National Committee.

Trump Tower in Manhattan, meanwhile, received a whopping $462,011 in rent, including $283,500 on Nov. 28 – nearly $114,000 more than the campaign had been paying for its headquarters space for the previous several months.

The president-elect’s transition team did not respond to a Huffington Post query regarding the higher rent payment.

The figures are contained in new filings Thursday night by the campaign and related committees with the Federal Election Commission. The filings cover the six weeks from Oct. 20 to Nov. 28

The burst of spending brings to more than $12 million the total Trump has funneled back to his businesses since the start of the campaign. It continues his pattern of choosing to spend donors’ money at his own properties for events and on his own airplane for travel, even though it meant spending considerably more than comparable alternatives.

Trump paid his West Palm Beach, Florida, golf resort $29,715 in May following a “victory” party he held there March 5. He sent $35,845 to his club in nearby Jupiter after a March 8 party. In both cases, the attendees were mainly dues-paying members of the clubs rather than campaign staff or volunteers. And in both cases he could have held his party at the West Palm Beach Marriott for less than half of what he spent.

Also in May, Trump paid his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach $423,372 in campaign funds even though he had held only two victory parties and a news conference there two months earlier.

You have to remember that Trump donated $66 million of his own money. Where as Clinton didn't touch her bank account.

That's a generous use of the term "donation"

It's more of an investment than a donation..I'm sure Trump campaign has been paying his way for the last year, housing, airplane, food, etc..I'm sure campaign money flowing in after winning..So he will get that back and then some...

How $9 Billion Blood-Testing Startup Theranos Blew Up

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/how-9-billion-blood-testing-startup-theranos-blew-n671751

In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes was the young, blond, fearless CEO of Theranos, a hot Silicon Valley biotech firm she had founded in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford at 19. After flourishing in a regulatory gray area, how is it now that Holmes has been banned from running a laboratory for two years, and the company's $9 billion valuation has plummeted to $800 million?

This is the story of a flawed idea that just kept going until a man committed suicide, a company imploded, and an entire industry was left reeling.

The company, Theranos, was pioneering a new kind of blood testing. Its claim to fame was that with just a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick — instead of several vials drawn from a big, scary needle — its proprietary lab device, the Edison, could run a battery of blood tests at a fraction of the going rate and return results directly to the consumer within hours instead of days.

Blood work

After showing your insurance card, doctor's note, and photo ID, your sample could be drawn and sent to Theranos's lab and be tested for everything from cholesterol ($2.96), to cocaine ($9.90), to HIV ($16.39), according to an archived copy of its blood testing menu.

Never mind that these prices were up to 90 percent lower than the rates set by Medicare — just publicly publishing its prices online was a revolutionary act inside America's opaque healthcare system.

But for many, Theranos already represented a promise that disease could be caught sooner and get consumers more involved with their health.

Nanotainer(TM) tubes
Nanotainer(TM) tubes. Courtesy of Theranos
With a valuation greater than either of her two existing competitors, Holmes was gracing the cover of Fortune and garnering write-ups in Wired. She was Silicon Valley's "It" girl, drawing comparisons with Steve Jobs from both the secretive and driven way she ran her company to her habit of wearing the same black turtleneck outfit every day.

She struck a deal with Walgreens, which added branded Theranos walk-up counters to 41 of its pharmacies for patients to have their blood drawn, with ambitions for thousands more across the nation. By age 31, she was on the Forbes' billionaires list.

But with the heightened exposure came increased scrutiny.

Theranos manufacturing facility
Theranos manufacturing facility in Newark, California. Philip Harvey / Courtesy of Theranos
"They were the greatest new story in Silicon Valley and health and saving the world," Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention at Stanford told NBC News. "And I just said, 'Where is the evidence?'"

After he published a skeptical column in February last year, he said he got "a lot of pushback" from the company.

"Less than two years later, we can see the whole thing has collapsed."

A disruptor, disrupted

First, a damning WSJ investigation raised serious questions about the company's testing results and methods.

Theranos FDA inspection report
A page from the FDA inspection report of Theranos.
According to the Journal's reporting, Theranos was performing only 15 of the 240 tests it offered on its own Edison machine, with the rest on traditional lab equipment. There were also instances where those diagnostic machines appeared to have been miscalibrated and gave incorrect results.

Some patients who received questionable test results from Theranos reportedly became alarmed or changed the amount of medication they were taking.

The company failed federal lab inspections from the FDA and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees diagnostic labs. Holmes was banned from owning or operating a medical laboratory for two years. Walgreens backed away from the partnership. At each juncture, the company issued strong statements in its defense.

"This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you and then all of a sudden you change the world," CEO Holmes told CNBC's Jim Cramer after the Journal article broke.

Finally, earlier this month, the company announced it was laying off 40 percent of its staff and greatly narrowing its ambitions.

Instead of reinventing lab diagnostics from A to Z, Theranos has pivoted to just developing the "miniLab," an overgrown Keurig that could deliver faster, cheaper results to the frontlines of healthcare. Its development at Theranos won't be helped following the 2013 suicide of the lead scientist who had been working on design patents for the company up to that time.

One week later, a hedge fund that had poured nearly $100 million into the company announced it was suing Theranos for fraud. Theranos called the suit "baseless" and "without merit."

Theranos miniLab
The Theranos miniLab. Courtesy of Theranos
The first Theranos investor, famed venture capitalist and Holmes's former next-door neighbor Timothy Draper, said the company is the victim of the status-quo trying to squash innovation.

"Just the way Uber was being attacked by the taxi drivers and Bitcoin was attacked by the banks, Theranos is being attacked by the powers that be," he told Bloomberg in June.

"The government has never gone and inspected any of the their competitors, so somehow big pharma's nervous, they're getting the government 'hey go inspect these guys, go create some turmoil, see if you can shake them up and put them out of business.'"

In Silicon Valley, "disruptors" are a dime a dozen. But it's one thing to "break all the rules" and reinvent artisanal laundry delivery — and another when people's health is on the line.

In the face of the criticism and crackdown, Theranos has taken steps to rehab its reputation, saying in previous statements that "quality and safety are our top priorities." It invalidated two years of results and sent tens of thousands of revised test results to doctors and patients.

A black box

But what made it especially tough for outsiders to evaluate the company is that, citing trade secrets, Holmes just wouldn't tell people how her technology did what she said it did.

While it may be par for the course to closely guard trade secrets around how a new app or manufacturing component functions, experts say it's virtually unheard of for new medical devices.

Theranos published zero peer-reviewed studies of how its breakthrough technology worked, doctors told NBC News. This alone earned automatic rejections from some of the established venture capital firms she initially shopped her idea around to, including Google Ventures.

As the New Yorker reported, he company was able to operate in "stealth" mode for a decade due to a regulatory gap. Its diagnostic competitors bought their equipment from outside companies whose machines have to be FDA approved, and thereby publicly reveal more information about how the tests run, before they can be sold. Theranos made its own testing equipment and was therefore able to test blood on them without being approved by the FDA.

Though the company obtained 41 patents, that's a far cry from explaining how the devices function, experts say.

"A CHEMISTRY IS PERFORMED SO THAT A CHEMICAL REACTION OCCURS AND GENERATES A SIGNAL..."
A reporter who did manage to get something out of her described the answer as "comically vague."

"A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel," Holmes told the New Yorker.

Later, she clarified that because of "miniaturization and automation, we are able to handle these tiny samples."

This disparity between the level of the hype, claims, and funding with the paucity of information on how it all came together drew intense scrutiny from the medical community.

Theranos manufacturing facility
Theranos manufacturing facility in Newark, California. Philip Harvey / Courtesy of Theranos
"In the lab business, we are like an open book. We're highly regulated, we're friendly with the lab field services. Everyone walks around and you can see the equipment," Dr. Tracy George, Professor of Pathology at the University of New Mexico, told NBC News.

In an August article in the Hematologist, published by the American Society of Hematology, she and co-author Dr. Rama Gullapalli criticized the startup's lack of transparency.

" WE NEED TO HAVE A GATEKEEPER. THERANOS JUST COMPLETELY IGNORED THAT."
In their article, they called the science behind the technology "elusive," decried "the absence of any form of peer review," and said the way in which blood samples were analyzed was "unknown."

But even if there was proof the device worked, experts say there was a fundamentals flaw in the company's long-term premise.
Holmes said she envisioned a future of prescriptionless blood tests, where patients would get results before they see a doctor. In theory, it would empower consumers, a deepening of the patient-driven healthcare trend that already has us gamifying our vitals with FitBits and comparison-shopping pharmaceuticals on sites like GoodRx.
But it would also run counter to some of the basic tenets of diagnostic testing.
"You can't just go out there and start testing people's blood like crazy," said Dr. Ioannidis. "The false positives will overwhelm those who really have problems."
The biotech field is full of companies and inventors vying to be the next wonder device.

"The problem is not lack of ideas," said Ioannidis. "Most of them just don't work or improve what we do. We need to have a gatekeeper. Theranos just completely ignored that."

A way forward?

This time around, Holmes says she's doing things differently.

"We have a new executive team leading our work toward obtaining FDA clearances, building commercial partnerships, and pursuing publications in scientific journals," she wrote in an open letter announcing the company would be refocusing exclusively on developing the miniLab.

Theranos says the miniaturized, automated laboratory can run diagnostic tests on small amount of blood and holds multiple cartridges that could each run up to 40 tests. The device hasn't been evaluated by a third party and doesn't have FDA approval.

Theranos miniLab
An exploded view of the miniLab. Courtesy of Theranos
"Our ultimate goal is to commercialize miniaturized, automated laboratories capable of small-volume sample testing, with an emphasis on vulnerable patient populations, including oncology, pediatrics, and intensive care," wrote Holmes.

Her most ardent defender thinks the miniLab has promise.

"If the government officials act fairly and allow this new technology to develop and improve, the company is worth way more than $9 billion," seed funder Timothy Draper told CNN Money in August, two months before the layoffs.