Note: There is new content behind the green door. For those interested in the Western, I have a review of the 1969 classic The Wild Bunch. The role of the Western is something I’ll come back to again. It is an interesting topic.
The fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes begins this week, and it promises to be an enjoyable bit of theater for those interested in the workings of the Cloud People. Holmes founded a company called Theranos when she was just 19-years-old. She had dropped out of Stanford and promised to deliver miracle drug testing equipment. She attracted the support of all the beautiful people, who saw her as the living example of everything the Cloud People believed about the world.
In reality, the company had nothing to offer other than the promise to fulfill those prophesies the Cloud People cherished. Holmes adopted the Steve Jobs black turtleneck and spoke in a weird deep voice. Like all grifters, she was short on specifics, but long on inspirational flattery. This got some of the most famous men in the world to support her company, giving it an aura of authenticity. As a result, Theranos stuck around for a dozen years before it was revealed as a fraud.
In many respects, Holmes is the poster child for the new religion. The reimagined gender role for women is just women doing the things men normally do. You see this in movies where the normal male lead is replaced by a strong diverse female who does all the same things as a male lead, even the personality. There is really nothing new about the new gender roles. The new ideal female is nothing more than a fraud against nature, a fraud that is eventually undone by observable reality.
That is the story the Feds will tell in court. They will point out that nothing about this company was based in reality. Holmes and her business partner, another unicorn of the Progressive imagination named Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, knew all along that their new technology would never work. They hid the facts from investors in order to swindle them, the textbook definition of fraud. More important, she damaged the cause of women in the workplace, which is her biggest sin.
From the perspective of the Dirt People, the Elizabeth Holmes story is great fun and also a reason to keep fighting. One look at this woman and a normal man in control of his senses could see she was trouble. Many people at the time made this point, but the Cloud People fell for her shenanigans hook, line, and sinker. It is a good reminder that these people are not evil super geniuses. They are frauds like Holmes who now have real power, but they are not unbeatable.
The Holmes story is also a good example of abductive reasoning. This is the type of reasoning that makes a conclusion on what you know or what you think you know, which is always an incomplete set of data. You wake up in the morning and you see the driveway is wet, so you quickly assume it rained overnight. There could be other explanations, like your automatic sprinkler is on the fritz or a pipe burst somewhere during the night, but rain is the most likely answer.
The important thing about abductive reasoning is that the explanation for the given facts does not have to be right to be accepted. After all, the explanation is simply the most probable, based on the data set. This is why in the hands of a good storyteller, abductive reasoning is very powerful magic. Humans are hard wired to accept stories, so a good story that explains what is going on can quickly become gospel. A good story that confirms the gospel is never questioned.
This is what Holmes was doing with her presentation to Cloud People. She presented herself as living proof of the one true faith. She was every bit as talented as the pale males in Silicon Valley. She could do anything a man could do, even sound like them and run an identity cult like Steve Jobs. Apple became one of the world’s biggest companies selling toys disguised as holy relics. Holmes was the female Steve Jobs, but saving the world, rather than entertaining it.
Another interesting aspect to the trial is the plan by the defense to blame her former partner for everything. The old story of gender said that women were always the victims of male oppression. Women who killed their husbands for the insurance would always accuse the dead man of being abusive. That story was being replaced by the new story of female empowerment. The jury will be presented with a conflict of the two absurd visions of womanhood promoted by the Cloud People.
This story is a good example of how facts play a supporting role in life. People are believing machines. Even the most cynical hard cases among the Cloud People believe they are on the side of angels. It is why facts and reason have no effect on these people, outside of the extremes. Once the reality of Theranos was too much to ignore, the Cloud People abandoned their unicorn, but only after it became clear that Holmes was a mockery of their beliefs, rather than confirmation.
That is why the endless presentation of facts and reason falls on deaf ears. The Cloud People will never abandon their faith for mere facts. The only thing that will get them to abandon their faith is a better faith. This was the central insight of you know who back in the last century. His story of redemption covered the observable, and his new facts was the mortar that held them together into a coherent narrative. That is what awaits the Cloud People running the American empire.
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Anyone with a couple years of college chemistry knew that what she was claiming could not possibly be true. I said so at the time, as did Stanford professors. The Need To Believe sucked them all in.
Zman, for the love of truth, stop talking about “abductive logic” until you learn what it is. Abductive logic is NOT about ad hoc explanations that people continue to believe whatever the evidence. Abductive logic is THE OPPOSITE. It is the logic of framing hypotheses, which are then TESTED by what we call EMPIRICAL SCIENCE.
If the driveway is wet, you conclude that it rained last night. Is that inductive or deductive? Sorry, Sherlock, it’s neither. Pierce called “abductive” the ability to frame a hypothesis that would explain an unusual fact, WHICH IS THEN TESTED.
Finding a nifty term like “abductive logic” and using it to ride your hobby horse is a pretty good example of what you THINK abduction is.
What do I know? I’m just a dirt person under a cloudy sky. Typically I go to Infogalactic for a general understanding of a phrase such as “abductive reasoning.” In this case, I went directly to the cloud “intelligence,” (which of course means it very well may not be true). In its opening-and that is all, I have time for-Wikipedia defines the subjects as “It starts with an observation or set of observations and then seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from the observations. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it. Abductive conclusions are thus qualified as having a remnant of uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat terms such as “best available” or “most likely”.” Seems correct enough for me. Zman ride that hobby horse to the W. Virginia horizon! I sense this commenter was anxiously awaiting your post to impulsively be the first responder to whatever you had written.
Not her real voice! Very creepy. Who does this? If I could get a billion dollars, would I use a helium voice in public….? hmm
Mike Judge has a fantastic series about techland, aptly named “Silicon Valley”. super funny, and deeply knowledgeable about the local “culture” there. T J Miller is hilarious, and almost enough reason on his own to watch. If you liked “Office Space” you will very much enjoy this outing.
One thing that made me laugh in particular, is when male and female s/w engineers who are dating, break up over using tabs or spaces for indenting :P.
I have no problem with the Holmes and Madoffs of the world ripping off the gullible rich. The real problem is that these sorts populate government and that cost a great deal more. The grifts of global warming, war, equity, and now pharmacuticals cost trillions, and that is only the economic costs.
“… and spoke in a weird deep voice.”
“She could do anything a man could do, even sound like them …”
One wag on this side of the great divide said she sounds like the voice “Murdoch Murdoch” uses to voice their “Lauren Southern” character.
She was impersonating J Mascis (of all things). Men old and rich enough to pay her didn’t know that voice, and people young and uncultured enough to be journalists didn’t recognize it either.
Best girl. I’ll totally jail-marry her if she’s available.
Fred Reed has an entertaining review of the Carryou book “Bad Blood”, which is about the Theranos fiasco.
https://www.unz.com/freed/holmes-uncle-clunk-and-and-epic-con-job/
Reed forgot to mention Boies also represents Virginia Giuffre of Epstein Finishing School Fame in her mad chase for Prince Andrew’s pockets.
Small world at the tippy-top.
A business started by a hot White chick and an Indian… Where have I seen something like this before? Oh yeah, those late night local car dealer commercials. You know the ones, the dealership owner plays himself and is attired in his best bright green sportcoat, plaid button-down, blue corduroy pants, and plastic cowboy boots from Payless. The chick is wearing a low cut halter top and Daisy Duke cut-off jean shorts. Her main job is to motion in the air at the cheesy post-production CGI effects like the spinning $1995 price tag for that sweet ’92 Le Baron that just MUST GO NOW. They tell her to bounce up and down a bit for each price tag that comes up.
Theranos is just that dealership re-styled for the Cloudies who wouldn’t be caught dead at Kraaazy Jim’s Used Car and Truck. There’s money on the table here I tells ya! We should all just turn on the TV at 3 am and watch whatever infomercials and low budget local ads are running for the unemployed and slightly drunk Dirt People who are up at that hour. Then we just use all our tech and finance knowledge to translate each one into a pitch aimed at the Clouds. We introduce each new scam at a Ted Talk which is ostensibly about something else but that makes passing mention of our new startup – just enough details so their Googlephones can find it before the talk is even over.
Not quite Indian (Punjabi) per se….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysMt_9JnyI
I’m going to lean against the consensus ITT and say she will get pretty harsh treatment, “pour encourager les autres”. She embarrassed a lot of high-powered people, including Larry Ellison and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a big VC firm. She brought unwanted scrutiny to the VC industry. The VC biz is a gold for insiders and having some flake mess with the “golden goose” cannot go unpunished. Just my $0.02 (after a lot of experience around these folks; don’t want to dox myself).
Yep, Just like Maddoff.
Help !!!! Maybe it’s advancing yrs, but I can’t figure out what Z intends or suggests with his last sentence …..
Oops … excuse the duplicate (… s?). In vehicle on side of road with malfunctioning phone. Apologies
A new religion to replace this failing one. Perhaps a strong reaction against it. Return of the Mustache?
And likely being another civic religion without a higher power to check its excesses, it’ll go to whatever extreme its ethics point to, for what it’s worth. Because people are crazy!
PrimiPilus: Help !!!! Maybe it’s advancing yrs, but I can’t figure out what Z intends or suggests with his last sentence …..
Z: The only thing that will get them to abandon their faith is a better faith. This was the central insight of you know who back in the last century. His story of redemption covered the observable, and his new facts was the mortar that held them together into a coherent narrative. That is what awaits the Cloud People running the American empire.
The last century was the 20th Century [we’re now in the 21st Century].
Which rules out Karl “Marx” HaLevi as the author of the “better faith” [because Marx lived in the 19th Century].
So you’re looking for a 20th Century leader who developed a new mythology for the Dirt People, at the expense of the Cloud People and their old mythology.
Now concentrate on “what awaits the Cloud People”, and think of the internet meme, “Suddenly, for no reason whatsover…”
HINT: The Cloud People’s old mythology started with a “W”, had an “M” in the middle, and rhymed with “Pry Bar”.
The Danger to Tribe Dirt aka Whites is not an American Hitler or Stalin, the danger to us a Woke Andrew Jackson.
You see we’re the Indians now, or the In-The-Way-dians if you like.
As for the New Religion it’s already here; Woke.
Woke makes Holy Writ all the existing Laws of HR and the Cloud People. Actually the most competent thing they’ve done since 1945. They know and knew they were ending the Republic and so the Constitution and the basis of laws- sawing off the Branch they perch on. So they grew a new branch- Religion. Their Religion, their Writ made Holy Word. This replaced the Old Legitimacy with a new Holy one. Holiness always trumps the mere laws of men.
And you don’t need a God or Gods to have Religion- not that Saints like Saint George of the White Dragon (Floyd) aren’t available, along with sacred primates 🐵.
Neither incompetent nor insane.
the danger to us is a Woke Andrew Jackson
Usury is your lifeforce?
Help !!!!! Can’t seem to see what Z-Man intends with the last sentence of his post ….
Another religious awakening awaits the Cloud People? God help …. Can it get any worse?
Sex sells. Would anyone have bought this nonsense from a guy? Or an ugly woman? Nope. They’d have looked past her looks and used their top brain. Face it – sex sold 18A, 19A, and every major pathology in the West, from welfare and fatherless kids and no-fault divorce, to crap education and unsafe streets and millions of illegal immigrants, women have enormous and almost completely un-checked power over society. And they aren’t using it for good.
Yeah men need to think with their heads and not the other one. Maybe this is what happens when you bleed out your warriors— you’re left with pussies who can’t control themselves, even literally.
Elizabeth Holmes: “I have a dream” or bust.
I’m thinking the title of the piece – esp with the ref to the “new woman,” is a ref to an old TV sitcom… No? Yes?
Petticoat Junction?
A fellow from Arkansas, named Bob Dorough, played piano & woodwinds for the Army during WWII, and afterwards attended North Texas State and Columbia, then bounced around every manner of gig over the decades, until he finally struck paydirt with American Broadcasting Company’s “Schoolhouse Rock”.
Dorough was one of those staggering geniuses whom no one has ever heard of.
Dorough also inserted every manner of Christian symbolism into his lyrics, and I suspect that no one at ABC ever even realized what he was doing.
In particular, the symbolism of Dorough’s “Three Is a Magic Number” is eerily reminiscent of Lowell Mason’s Christianization of the poem “Mary had a Little Lamb”.
And if you want to have a chill run down your spine, then listen to a chick named “Blossom Dearie” sing Dorough’s “Figure Eight” – it’s an exquisitely beautiful song, and there are several different copies of it uploaded to yewtube.
Dorough just died a few years ago, at the ripe old age of 94.
Which I guess leaves Jimmy Webb now as the dean of American songwrights.
[And Blossom Dearie died back in 2009, at the age of 84.]
ANYWAY, the point of this is that Dorough also wrote a rather famous tune, called “Conjunction Junction” [what’s your function?], and I suspect that that might be the wordplay associated with “Abductive Junction”.
But I could be way off base here.
For the record, “Petticoat Junction” is much more likely to be what Z had in mind.
But getting back to Bob Dorough’s genius, Blossom Dearie had a rather high soprano voice, akin to Bernadette Peters.
OTOH, this Elizabeth Holmes chick is a deep Contralto [sub-Contralto?], getting down towards a solid Tenor.
These days, if you had never before heard of her, then your working assumption would have to be that Elizabeth Holmes was an especially winsome Tranny [in sheep’s clothing].
So I dusted off Audacity, yanked the thing down an octave, slammed the result back into VLC, and la voila,
TRANNY ELIZABETH HOLMES SINGS “FIGURE EIGHT”!!!
files DOT catbox DOT moe / 8li1wh.mp4
Blossom Dearie was pretty awesome. She didn’t just sing with fine time sense, essential to a jazzer, but she also played some really nice piano. A number of individual songs, as well as several albums are available on Apple Music.
I got to watching some clips of Bernadette Peters, especially in “Pennies from Heaven”, with Steve Martin & Christopher Walken.
Then I spent a little time at Wikipedia, reading about these folks, and as far as I can tell, the following is fairly accurate:
* Bob Dorough: Never married, no children
* Blossom Dearie: One brief marriage, no children
* Bernadette Peters: Brief post-menopausal marriage to a jew, no children
* Christopher Walken: Married to Georgianne Thon for almost 60 years, no children
* Steve Martin: Two marriages, only one child
Those are [or were] six extraordinarily talented White people [Dorough, Dearie, Peters, Walken, Thon, Martin], with a total production of precisely ONE CHILD amongst them.
Given the amount of marijuana & LSD & cocaine which must have been flowing at the parties those boomers [and silents] attended, in the 50s & 60s & 70s, and the amount of fornication which must have been transpiring, I don’t see how only one child gets born, unless we’re talking tens [if not hundreds] of abortions here.
Or else they’re all closeted sodomites & sapphistes.
Verily the Hellmouth doth eat its own.
You must have nerves of steel and ice water for blood, Z. I don’t see the Globohomo Woman when I look at her at all. I see a warm smile and sincere eyes. Where you hear a freakishly deep voice, I hear a pleasant contralto. On The Scale: I see a 6 dressed up as a 9. Did you see the way she played the bald headed host at CNBC? She had him eating out of the palm of her hand.
This gal is playing to emotions first and foremost. Many men would have been helpless before her. The ideology would have shielded her from the Cloud’s women who would have seen through her in a flat second. The only reason I can see it is that I am a sales and marketing guy. I know a hustle when I see one. The only difference between me and that chick is anatomy and honesty. Her skill here is not duping the guys… it’s duping the women.
Don’t be surprised if she gets off with a slap on the wrist. Grifting on this level? That is skill, and knowing your customers. I am almost envious… and I’m forced to give the devil her due.
As a woman when I watched a short clip of the linked video what I saw is a female version of Zuckerberg. Weird flat aspect and dead eyes. The voice really throws me too. Maybe knowing she’s a psycho clouds what I see. I’ll admit to that possibly. Kudos to her in any case for ripping off a bunch of Cloud people.
Look at her Wikipedia page. She’s one of them.
She’s a Heimie instead of a Holmie?
“Elizabeth Holmes was born February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. Later he held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer.”
Doesn’t seem to be an early lifer, but she’s cloud all the way 🙂
There are brief clips of her natural voice out there.
It’s surprisingly bubbly, California valley girl, not unpleasant at all.
Of course. This is what Game looks like when women play it. Many of the Manosphere types don’t realize it, but women are genetically engineered to play, and are generally much better at it than most men. Her act is tailored and tuned for the shitlib and a stunning success. Most of those guys are attuned to the presence of other predators and they missed this chick completely. As our blog host notes – these guys aren’t that bright.
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Pretty sure there was one of those “Schoolhouse Rock” deals called “Abductive Junction, what’s your function?”
The first and really only time she ever came to my attention was she was supposed to have some patch you could wear that would constantly monitor your body and inject medicine as needed. I thought, “where the hell is this patch going to get a therapeutic dose of whatever you happen to need?” Next thing I heard was that it was all a big fraud.
She may have been a big time celebrity among the cloud people, but I was only vaguely aware that she existed. This was a play by and for the cloud people.
Never heard o’ the broad before Z’s piece. Then again, I made it a point to pretty much tune out of the popular culture back in ’92.
Completely off topic but a friend of mine’s son is a marine and he’s in Kuwait now. He was in Kabul until the end and he just got his Verizon bill. It’s $3,000. He never used his phone in Kabul but it was just the fact it was there and roaming the whole time. Verizon offered to take 10% off. Every service person that was over there has a bill like that. That is so effed up
Not at all surprised. The empire is also a racket.
Yeah, I learned that US cell carriers who provide international data charge hideous rates the hard way after I got the $500 AT&T bill for a 21 MB book download that I did in a North African airport because my flight was delayed.
There are laws like SCRA .
Servicemen’s Credit Relief Act. Also Military legal. This has happened before.
Send a copy of your orders and tell them NO, and would you like to talk to my Congressman?
https://www.fcc.gov/military-cellphones
I could be wrong, but I don’t think Holmes will do any real time. “Female empowerment” is just like “magic negroes”. It exists, until it doesn’t. Then, the narrative is not questioned, the media and its disciples suddenly ignore that women and negroes can’t compete on a level playing field, but use that as an excuse. “Oh, we must shepherd blacks and women into the upper echelons because they are incapable of doing it themselves. Then, they’ll morph into the beautiful butterflies that they really are, and usher in the new utopia. What do you mean they failed? It only looks that way because of your racism and gynophobia.” White people have to give these genetically challenged beings the prizes, since they can’t earn them on their own. The commonsense view that “if they can’t earn it on their own what the hell are they doing there in the first place” has to be wrong and, once we acknowledge that, the right side of history will reward us with paradise. So, Holmes will be treated with kid gloves, since she has a vagina. Not that that makes her a woman, as she identifies as Steve Jobs. She’ll probably be fined, which she will pay for with the billions she has moved offshore. And she’ll still be unbelievably rich, by dirt people standards. Plus, she will have the cachet of being a successful woman in a man’s world, so we’ll see her autobiography, for sure.
I agree. It is highly unlikely she gets s serious prison time.
However, there is the wild card that she stole all of that money off of people who matter.
I heard they are going to use her being pregnant as an excuse of why she shouldn’t go to prison.
I could be wrong, but I expect a token prison sentence, but possibly with a good headline number. Like maybe 5 years with a giant (invisible) asterisk next to it which really means time served plus a day. They make a big deal and story of her reporting to prison and then quietly walks out the next day or next week.
Lizzie femmed right up, got knocked up, and banged her way into a marriage with a scion’s son who is 6 or 7 years her junior.
She gon’ be jus’ fine….
Wild Geese – Plus she is now saying she was the victim, having been manipulated by the subcon Balwani (her former lover). Does it really matter if either of them serves a day? What difference will it make at this point? I assume anyone who is part of clownworld structure is guilty of being an arrogant and ignorant liar, at minimum. They all need lamp posts or helicopters; making an example of one or two because they fleeced some big names makes no real difference. All modern day American life is theater of the absurd.
That might be the root of it: how is her scam all that different from the bajillion of other scammers that she was swimming with. At least in her case it seemed like a lie she may have actually believed at some point but then had no way to walk away from it since she’s not as smart/clever as Bezos or Musk who always leave a backdoor through which to escape.
Her trial and sentence might just be another example to help wake Joe Normie up. Z-man did an excellent *initial* write-up. If she skates, then he can close the story with an appropriate moral teaching.
Joe Normie’s gettin genocided, if that don’t wake him the fuck up, what will? God calling him on his cell phone?
“Apple became one of the world’s biggest companies selling toys disguised as holy relics.”
Best. Description of Apple. Ever.
I’ll step in to run some light defense. This was certainly true in the pre-OSX days but by the iPod days it was starting to wear thin. Apple’s true innovation at the time was figuring out a way (pre-streaming) for people to get their mess of music on to their device. For competitors then (and even today) it’s just painful. Add to that their devices were just better engineered. Now yes, they probably deserved a 10% premium and not a 25% premium, but in those days there wasn’t anything comparable. Way back (eight years?) when I bought a MacBook Pro that is still my main work laptop it was either pay a premium for Apple, or get a plastic-fantastic piece of WinClone crap that would start to fall apart the instant it was out of the box.
(I’ll note that Win hardware has improved dramatically, I think because Microsoft forced the OEMs to compete with their Surface line. Much like with the business laptops of old, a lot of the price disparity between Apple and the OEMs goes away as the build quality becomes comparable. There’s still a premium, yes, but it was never as much as people fantasized it being).
I still have my 20 or so year old ipod. Must have at least several hundred songs on it that I play on shuffle in the vehicle. Far better than listening to the GD radio and it takes a month or more to get thru all the tunes and then I’m ready to go again.
one of the most boomer comments i’ve ever read. guy lives on a music starvation diet of only 20 songs because…f**k radio. love it. grumpy at its best
He was referring to the age of the device, 20 some years, and not the number of songs on the device.
Ready, fire, aim. Kind of encapsulates the knee jerk nature of Boomer Hate.
IsNthem, and others of us old coots are here learning and sharing, because we are all in the same boat. We don’t appreciate you lunging at a chance to insult The Old Fossils who are surely responsible for All That’s Wrong With the World.
You know, this attitude aligns pretty well with the thought processes of the Antifa. This line of thought smacks of a Victimization Spiral; more Pokemon Points for being the most put upon. Do you really think that being ground under the wheels only started with your age cohort? Why do you think that Zman spends a lot of energy on historical examples? Because you can learn from them, maybe stuff like human nature and previous circumstances that parallel current circumstances in some edifying way. Or that which either provides salutary examples for contemplation, or negative examples to be sedulously avoided.
Parallax, vision in depth. I listen to younger people to learn about the texture of their lives, and maybe, just maybe, this can go the other direction, too, so that we all improve our bision in depth. We’re all pilgrims, plunked down in the middle of inauspicious times, but if we are of good will, we do our best to not make them worse, and maybe through learning and sharing, to make them better.
Meanwhile, our Tali-bros are painting over a George Floyd mural in Kabul:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/gone-too-far-taliban-paints-over-george-floyd-mural-kabul
Y’know….these guys might not be so bad after all….
They should have left it, made sure there were always lit candles and fresh flowers in mockery of the histrionic American jogger worship, open the mural it for pilgrimage.
They could invite some Republican Congressmen on a safe conduit so they could demonstrate their willingness to go the extra mile for Saint George.
Every politician must make sure he’s pictured wearing a turban and putting a little note in the (_____) Wall, a solemn prayer on his lips.
There was a George Floyd mural in Kabul? What the HELL was .gov doing over there? Trying to make Floyd the patron saint of the opium fields? Killing their way into a foreign nation so America’s white Elites can lecture the people how awful the white men of America are?
SJW: “This is what a Chosen People looks like.”
Afghan: “It looks like a jogger.”
With the beautiful irony that he was a dope fiend. The Spirit of Saint Floyd of Minneapolis smiles down on the opium poppies of Afghanistan.
Gunner: What the hell were gender studies majors doing in Kabul? That is your tax dollars at work, bub – the government of the US of A. Womyn and flamers and joggers, oh my.
I really need to go shoot something – my normal cynicism is getting a bit too much. Good thing hubby finally decided ammo prices were not going to go down, after all, and bought some 9 mm range ammo.
$273 million a day for 20 years doesn’t just spend itself.
For those not on twatter, here’s one of the best Tali-bro memes. When you click on the link you will see a pop-up window. Just click outside of the pop-up to see the payload.
I agree with Howard. Maybe I’m joking when I say that I like them.
https://twitter.com/navyhato/status/1432427069212856320
Muhammad al-Jabril and Abdul Salaam Hussein in ’24.
Katie: Would that be the R or D ticket?
that would be the S ticket
The Muslim man is respected by his wife, children and adored by his sons.
Seen first hand.
Think about that.
Paterfamilias helps, but that’s Ultima Ratio, not common.
Silicon Valley has been going this direction for a long time. There are so so many Theranoses right now. It depresses me to see how long the sh t show has gone. I think she’s going to claim the “abuse” angle as well from what I’ve read. He wasn’t just a mastermind, he was slapping her around and mentally torturing her. It a pattern. I am woman, hear me roar, becomes the abused wallflower when cornered. See if a man can pull that off out there. Ultimately, all of the Theranoses are the result of decades of easy money policies, in which all kinds of funds, pension administrators ,etc., are chasing yield anywhere they can find it not to mention the Robinhood type of retail investors. CalPERS by contract needs a 6.8% return in a zero rate environment. The investments like this become more and more dangerous (see Tesla one day) and no one cares. And the yield will be chased right over a cliff of the everything bubble.
The interesting thing about Holmes is her board of directors: James Mattis, George Schultz, Sam Nunn, William Frist and Henry Motherfucking Kissinger.
So she goes to these reptiles and tells them she will invent a skin patch that monitors, diagnoses and treats diseases, with a micro-needle array, a microfluidic processor and an embedded supercomputer plus drug repositories ready to be administered.
And they buy it.
When I was 10, I designed a rocket-powered road-laying vehicle with giant rotary saws in front. It was able to cut through rain forest at 200 mph, trailing behind it a six-lane motorway, complete with traffic signs and roadmarkings. At the rear it had a fan to cool down the asphalt so it could be driven on immediately so if you had a traffic jam, you just made a new highway on the fly.
Never managed to get it funded, despite its revolutionary potential, and my drawings being way better and more detailed than Elizabeth Holmes’.
I should have asked Henry Kissinger.
“I should have asked Henry Kissinger.”
And had long blonde hair, crazy eyes, wore a black turtleneck, and spoke in a low, monotone voice. In like Flynn.
She has sanpaku eyes!
Heartiste may be angry with himself for being such a Vercintigorix he got stomped by the imperials, but he popularized a revolutionary discipline and changed thousands of lives.
Mine included.
Millions, in time. He won’t get the credit now- that is the justice of the gods, to withhold greatness- but may he become the Plato of the ape historians.
Yikes! I mean the Aristotle. We already have a Plato.
One for observable science, one for political philosophy.
Wasn’t that a Tom Petty song?
I for one would like to hear more about your rocket powered terra former thingy. Always looking to get on the ground floor of a good investment. I mean, do you know what you have there? Revolutionary. ( I am dubious about the fan drying the asphalt in real time, but the rest is good.)
If Kissinger had had a few of these babies in Vietnam, the world would have looked much different today.
I suspect Theranos was a front company for FedGov to collect DNA samples of the population. Her parents were both FedGov and reports are that her father was CIA. Early funding came from CIA and NSA. The BoD was entirely FedGov security apparatus players. There were no practicing research doctors on her BoD.
Theranos became superfluous when 23andMe duped large numbers of people into voluntarily sending DNA samples to them.
One of the interesting tidbits about this story is that Holmes actually discussed her ideas with a Stanford biology professor, who told her in no uncertain terms it was not doable as she envisioned it. Her idea was to use a single prick to do all sorts of tests, instead of multiple vials. If I recall correctly, the blood from the initial prick is too corrupted by the skin and other surface-level contaminants for it to be properly used in analysis. Holmes just brushed this off and forged ahead.
There is something admirable in the desire to go “do the impossible”, but Silicon Valley at the time really saw itself as a group of chosen, magical beings who were put on this earth to “do the impossible” and show us the mighty way forward (on the backs of thousands of low-paid H1B employees). Holmes really was a perfect fit for Silicon Valley at the time, which is why Theranos was a tech company first and a biotech second (and the company was structured and operated n this way). Of course, there was always a certain Utopianism in companies like Apple (Microsoft or Oracle, not so much), but it really got going with Google and their “Do No Evil” rhetoric. Arguably this thinking peaked 5-10 years ago, with Holmes as well as the self-driving car nonsense that was pushed solely by Big Tech. Lately this viewpoint has collapsed as all the Big Tech companies have fully embraced the darkness and gotten fully in bed with leftist totalitarianism and anarcho-tyranny, but was prominent in the 00s.
Ascended Masters!
Right up there with angelic councils, channeling Cleopatra, and the Lizard Star Fleet.
My gods, how I laugh sometimes at the spiritualists and their hoodoo wankery. I know they’re trying, but it if ain’t magical, people really don’t want to believe. Magical is fun!
Oracle was a “steal everything that’s not welded down” tech company well before it became the only way tech companies operated. Them, SAP, and a host of others are always on the prowl to add a charge to every mouse click a business makes.
“The Holmes story is also a good example of abductive reasoning. This is the type of reasoning that makes a conclusion on what you know or what you think you know”.
My spidey sense (which I now know is actually abductive reasoning) told me her sh*t stinks.
The Holmes & Theranos drama reminds me of my adventures in getting companies funded and working with Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has a strong herd instinct and if you go to the right school (Stanford or Harvard) and don’t separate yourself from the herd you have a nice life.
During the dotcom boom I tried to get funding from a company that actually had a product people would pay a lot of money to use and was told by investors that only an incompetent executive would want to sell a product because everything was going to be given away for free. A magazine had said so.
When I was consulting, I world routinely had Venture Capitalists ask me if I could help a start-up that they had invested millions into figure out a way to make money. They mainly would invest based on whether the CEO went to Stanford and worked at a sexy company not because there a sound business model.
The fall back position was to have another company in their portfolio buy a lemon so everyone could show a successful sale.
One of the most bizarre stories was a CEO of a startup who didn’t go to Stanford but was able to get global 1000 companies to buy his early stage product. He bragged about that in his funding pitch and was confused as to why he could not get funded. Venture Capitalists told me that they didn’t want to invest in companies that actually had to really sell their early stage product. They wanted to invest in executives who had friends in high places and would just do buddy deals.
So Theranos want surprising
This all day long. VCs are the biggest bunch of groupthink trend followers you’ll ever meet. There is no Venture in Venture Capital anymore.
I think we should all thank God that Holmes didn’t pick politics as her field. If she had, she would have been free of the one thing that tripped her up at Theranos: the need to produce results. We might have President Holmes right now.
And the downside?
Couldn’t be any worse than what we’ve got. And will get.
She’s younger, like AOC — more years to screw things up. Though, yeah, in the big picture one more sociopath, more or less, doesn’t matter much.
AOC
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
It’s the modern Titanic story – nothing but glitz and stories of invincibility which was taken down by the iceberg of reality. Given the Silicon Valley mentality, every investor got exactly what they deserved.
Hey now! The Titanic was a perfectly nice and functional cruise ship that some idiot drove into an iceberg.
This woman looks insane.
A clear cut case of being able to judge a book by its cover. Any man in possession of his faculties would see flashing red lights within seconds of meeting this woman.
The Silicon Valley created untold wealth for a lot of people. I even know a couple of them. The big shots that Elizabeth and “Sunny” swindled were living out an old male fantasy about giving a woman money and getting in her pants. “Sunny” playing the role of the dangerous Pimp who keeps everybody in line. Next to Cain and Abel it’s the oldest story in the book.
Not even getting into her pants. I know the type of male you’re describing and they’re simply that desperate for female approval.
Once I was eating lunch with a female coworker during fieldwork. A guy came out of nowhere and thanked her for being a woman in Man’s World. She lit up and he loved every moment of it… a very strange dynamic, like two emotion vampires feeding off each other.
She was an insufferable nag then became a single mother. I could’ve killed him for praising her.
And like Derek Chauvin, you would have done society a favor.
orbiters are annoying
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The youtube channel cold fusion did a fantastic video of the whole holmes, theranos affair a few years back. I would suggest watching it if anyone is playing catchup, and if not, it’s just plain entertaining. I would very much like to see the deep voiced, turtlenecked holmes trying her steve jobs routine on a jury, but she’s apparently smart enough to wear a dress for her new audience. Oh well.
As further prep – she got herself knocked up so as to ratchet the volume on sympathy knob up to 11. I ask you: what jury gonna’ put a baby mama in jail separating her from her precious offspring?
Yes.
There’s also an excellent and very entertaining book out, by the guy that busted Theranos: Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
She’ll probably go to jail for quite a while. She must have killed hundred if not thousands of people.
Yes, she should go to jail for a long time.
No, she will not go to jail for a long time.
Yes, she will be found guilty on some, but not all charges.
No, her hands will not be hurt after being slapped.
What, did she concoct a magic elixir vaccine to keep us all safe?
Her company handed out bad blood test data to the unsuspecting. Often times the patients didn’t know as their health care provider had some contract with Theranos
This is just another example infinity why women have no business being in positions of power or influence where their often emotional decisions can negatively affect the lives of hundreds, thousands or millions of people. I’m not saying men aren’t major f-ups as well, but women have one major biological purpose – to bear and nurture the future generations of civilization. Just look at that New South Wales hag – oh, I mean premiere, or Ardern or Whitmer. Again, plenty of males/soy boys on board that same train, but feminism in all its trappings has got to go. I blame a lot of our current woes on the decade of the 60’s, but in this case, the 70’s have much to answer for as well – “I am woman, hear me roar”…
This video is a brilliant mashup of the NSW hag. What’s creepy about it is that even though it’s been constructed of many, many separate clips, if you close your eyes she seems to be speaking with a very natural cadence. You get the impression she’s really saying these outlandish things. Perhaps because she’s actually thinking them.
https://uploads1.newtube.app/TonyHeller/PxAdfsp
rofl and the fun is just getting started. thanks for the laugh, KGB.
Thumbs up KGB, I follow Tony but missed this one…and for her next trick she’ll end global warming over our dead bodies!
The average person will assume that Thernos is legitimate because it got billions in funding and those lenders would have analysts with actual expertise in this specific industry and certainly would not make a mistake of that magnitude.
However, that did not happen. I don’t want to dox myself but my career was in the specific industry Ms Holmes looked to upend, medical laboratory testing. I only knew one Clinical Chemist who saw through her scam, and did so almost immediately. The claims she made were physically unsupportable within today’s invitro blood testing – 150 tests from a single finger prick. Before getting into the various measuring technologies needed, the sample size is too small. He brought the topic up numerous times for years and no one would listen.
He finally threw in the towel when the American Association of Clinical Chemists invited Holmes to be a keynote speaker at their national convention. Even my own management/marketing/R&D folks would discuss at meetings that we had to face a future where Thernos would take our customer base.
These are literal geniuses with years of research and experience in medical science and they never questioned the basic premise of her claim.
Trust the science? I saw firsthand how the scientists can get snookered too. I see some analogy to the medical experts today and their embrace of the vaccine.
Most “scientists” nowadays are irreparable midwits who pursue credentialism in order to smugly feel smarter than the people who do actual work. Science, medicine, law, nursing, law enforcement, big business, and especially government are increasingly filled with mediocrities chasing the prestige associated with these positions rather than the enlightened vocation that created the prestige in the first place.
Your friend the Clinical Chemist is spot on that the sample size Theranos claimed they could test is far too small.
I’ve done a lot of testing in another area of STEM, and one thing I’ve realized over the years is that many, many, “tests,” are actually criteria defined around a statistical process that has produced a data set.
All of those processes require a minimum input population size to generate a credible, quality data set at the output. It was obvious that Theranos’ claimed input sample size was far too small to accurately produce their claimed output result.
What I find fascinating is how this all illustrates the tunnel vision credential-chasing creates. I mean, I’m a Liberal Arts guy who has to pull off a sock if I have to count past ten, but even I know that blood doesn’t work like that… but apparently real live biology PhDs don’t.
(It works the other way too, of course. I remember sitting in a history class where the professor was going on and on about how the X army should’ve just done Y. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, so I started looking around. I caught the eye of this kid I knew who had military experience, and we couldn’t help it, we both started cracking up. Pretty soon we had five, six other guys — all vets, as it turns out — practically rolling on the floor. Finally the professorette yells “What’s so funny?!?” All the kid managed to say was “logistics.” The kicker: This professorette listed “military history” prominently among her many specialties).
Severian-
They will never admit it, but there are many, many otherwise intelligent, credentialed people out there who are unable to see the world as it is rather than the way they wish it to be.
Part of this is due to the inherent positivism that is built into mainstream, civnat, normie American culture.
Another important component is the ongoing mass international gaslighting campaign being executed by governments and media.
Many people that are sophisticated thinkers in their field simply lack the intellectual tools beyond that field that would help them recognize and ignore the deluge of propaganda in the world.
Let me guess. At opportune moments she would cross her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
what’s the point with a shorn pelt (as is the norm these days)?
Yeah when this story broke I wondered “did any of these people giving here money ever have to get a blood test?” Didn’t they ever wonder why the blood sugar results are know instantly while other tests take a week?
This ranked right up there with the 100mpg carburetor: a lie so gorgeous that it had to believed, even if thinking about it for more than ten seconds would show it had no way of working (the ‘fix’ of course is not doing that last part).
This article about the Moderna CEO it’s just a shortened version of the book written about Elizabeth Holmes. Our culture is producing these sociopaths at a lightning fast rate. It’s a white guy but it’s pretty much the same and the same cast of characters have invested in Moderna that did Theranos which makes me think they’re just using it for money laundering. At least she wasn’t injecting 50% of the global population with some experimental drug.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/13/moderna-therapeutics-biotech-mrna/
Interesting article. One look at the guy – who appears to have something ‘exotic’ in him (Moroccan, Algerian?) – and I could tell he was obsessed with status and ‘success’ at whatever the cost.
The funniest thing is really the complexes these people have. They ‘must change the world’, ‘if I do not do it, no one will!’. The language surrounding this technology mRNA is so overblown as to be essentially all marketing. Much like in the IT sector, where new ideas are floated, but everybody knows the reality is hard as nails, so the answer is to puff it all up. Big fancy words. Big, catchy slogans. Maybe a logo. Perhaps some famous spokesperson or some such. The claims made always fall short.
Years back, men were ambitious to attempt the impossible, but knew when to give up. Or at least they may have been more honest when then failed. But there’s little incentive for that now, that grubby Moroccan will be Holmes’ing his way to a private island or a jail cell. Who knows.
It’s all so tiresome…
The “changing the world” bit really gets under my skin. Nuking all the cities would “change the world” in a fundamental way, but nobody assumes this would be a good thing. But it is always assumed that anything that “changes the world” must be great.
The silver lining could be that everyone hates globohomo so much they are just dying to “change the world.”
Everyone wants to “change the world” but nobody wants to fix all the problems in their hometown.
The magical thinking is everywhere. Sending people to live on Mars is practically already a reality. Or how we will change our electric grid to be all wind and solar and how we’re gonna drive our EVs on solar panels literally (solar roadways). There are a bunch of companies working on electric helicopter taxis. Or travel around in magical vacuum tubes.
Driverless cars, an energy grid that’ll cope, plenty of power from renewables, Theranos, Covid vaccine, &c. I could go on and on, but these things have to be ‘sexed up’ because the reality is so hard and so mundane.
Oh, and AI as well. Human beings will never create an actual AI, as fully human as possible. Can an AI simulate the feeling a small-dicked Asian gets when a white girl he is smitten with rejects him? Never!
We simply must over-hype and over-market everything now, because a lot of stuff is nothing new. Just the same stuff re-packaged. Doing new stuff is now rock hard, because all the ‘low-hanging fruit’ (internal combustion engine, Internet, Calculus, Fracture Mechanics, …) has been picked.
Perhaps those NASA joggers will lead the way…
Rant over.
I really enjoyed the book “Bad Blood” and hated the HBO movie which provided little information about the process they used to swindle from the “Elites”. Just look at the Board of Directors they Hoodwinked:
George Shultz, former US secretary of state – Grandson (whistle blower) interned and recognized the fraud but George wouldn’t hear of it
Gary Roughead, a retired US Navy admiral
William Perry, former US secretary of defense
Sam Nunn, a former US senator
James Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general who went on to serve as President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense
Richard Kovacevich, the former CEO of Wells Fargo
Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state
William Frist, a heart and lung transplant surgeon and former US senator
William H. Foege, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Riley P. Bechtel, chairman of the board of the Bechtel Group Inc. at the time.
At no time did any of these genius board members think to hire a medical board to review the data and possibilities of such an instrument. Incredible grift that would make the Clintons jealous – except the Clintons never get caught. A lesson these morons failed to learn.
A sucker born every minute said the man. Even in our illustrious “Ruling Klass.”
Just higher class carnys who can spot a mark and fleece them better than so called smarter people. Pride and snobbery, it’s a bitch.
You said it way better than I could have. Thanks.
Even 10 years ago, the average age of this group would have been well over 70. A lot of this is done on trust, that Shultz didn’t believe his own grandson is pretty bad though. Who did they trust that told them this was legit, and how could Frist not know better given his background?
Perhaps there is an easier explanation of how such an “illustrious” Board could be so naive—they weren’t. They were in essence shills for hire, contributing their names and “prestige” for a fat salary and perks. All at the cost of a few meetings a year worth of their time. Keep awake at the meetings, listen to the presentation of the company hucksters, ask a few questions of negligible import, go home.
Hell, I see it here with our political class on the Board of Supervisors. They meet, the County Administrator hands them a list of proposals, they rarely ask questions or take time to independently analyze the data (that’s what they pay the Country Administrator for), they vote (usually *yes*), then go home. Only difference is that a lazy politician may be voted out of office on occasion, but a Board of Directors—who supervises them?
Those eyes of hers should’ve been warning enough.
She won’t get as much hoosegow time as a man would’ve.
It is tragically true that facts do not change ppl’s beliefs and the really problematic thing is that, b/c of where the cloud ppl are situated, at the top, i.e. most insulated, place in society, facts will not change their beliefs until facts start to touch their personal well-being. As w ancient Rome, that only happens when ‘inconvenient facts’ have burned their way through the surrounding uplands and turned them into waste. And those ‘uplands’ are where ‘ordinary people’ live. So perhaps it is a sort of race between political (and social and ideological) and physical collapse right now and if it is the latter that ‘wins’, this will not end before the West is a heap of ashes. We should then clearly try to make sure the political collapse happens before the ‘elite’ have thrown everything worth preserving, into the fire to buy more time for themselves. The ‘elite’ will not ‘wake up’, their entire status depends on the current, suicidal beliefs destroying the West.
The sort of people who have the lust and drive to be in charge do not for the most part have the character traits that make them good managers of civilization and freedom. The Founding Fathers saw this, and our Republic was founded on the idea of keeping these people in check through various means (including arming every last mother’s son of us).
As was probably inevitable, the people who have the lust have basically removed most if the impediments to what drives them, mostly by championing democracy over republicanism. Now we’re in a position where the people who run most of our important institutions are either world-class thieves or bat-crap crazy.
The tools for a totalitarian society beyond Orwell’s wildest dreams exits right now, as do the tools to empower a dirt person with information he could never have imagined. These are two mighty forces that will eventually collide, and that will be an interesting time. I’ve no predictions on when.
What I found amusing was that an employee of the company was one of the main whistleblowers, and he was also Schultz’s grandson (a board member and investor). This is a huge Cloud Person food fight.
Didn’t Shultz blow off his grandson dismissively?
I believe so. It created a schism in his family from what I recall.
Yep.
There’s no fool like and old fool.
Also wrapped up in this were Mad Dog Mattis (aka, the Warrior Monk) and Henry Kissinger. Our “elites” are well past their expiration dates.
The book “Bad Blood” by John C is excellent. Great read on the E Holmes saga.
“Lap Dog” Mattis.
Queer as a football bat Mathis.
“Eye Bags Mattis”
Yes. He entrapped him into a confrontation with Holmes’ lawyers who wanted him to sign an NDA, and leaned on him to sign it.
What are people’s thoughts on the theory that Theranos was just a front for obscene amounts of money being thrown at different medical technologies funded by shady people that couldn’t be done “on the books”?
Personally, it seems to just assume the powers that are 5-D chess masterminds instead of the simpler answer they are over-credentialed morons.
My bet is there were several people who knew it was a scam, but were smart enough to maintain deniability, while profiting from the scam. This is an underappreciated part of all confidence games. The conman comes with a baggage of second and third order grifters. The better the conman, the better those second and third order grifters. There were people who got rich off Madoff, for example. They got out before they scheme collapsed. There were people who walked away from Enron with millions.
In some respects, Holmes is a victim here too. Her original sponsors who got her in touch with powerful players either knew she was a fraud or should have known, but chose not to notice. Her story was simply too good to question, especially as they were cashing the checks. They helped sell her act to like-minded investors. Again, some surely knew she was a sociopath.
There is another piece here. So much of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is really just a clever marketing idea. The idea gets funded on the promise of selling the eventual product built to fulfill the marketing idea. If the product or service becomes reality, the work is done by someone other than the pitchman who dreamed it up. In this regard, Holmes fit the pattern.
Madoff’s story is fascinating. There were more than a few people who noticed that what he was doing was impossible.
Ed Thorp, the mathematician who figured out how to beat blackjack and, later, became a wildly successful investor, looked Madoff’s numbers in 1991 and immediately concluded that he was a fraud.
Madoff’s main clients were part of his tribe. A lot of people suspect that these clients knew – or, at least, suspected – that Madoff was doing something shady, but the clients just assumed that he was ripping off other people and not them because, you know, they were all a part of the tribe.
read the “Boca Mournings” book by Steven Forman, it explains it in very simple terms.
Madoff’s main clients were part of his tribe. A lot of people suspect that these clients knew – or, at least, suspected – that Madoff was doing something shady, but the clients just assumed that he was ripping off other people and not them because, you know, they were all a part of the tribe.
Just so, that was why people were throwing money at him, they thought it was about stealing from the goy and they loved that.
The theme I recall from the Fall of 08 after Maddoff was revealed -“How could he do this to his own people?”
” So much of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is really just a clever marketing idea.”
This is pretty much the case with everything in this country. Lately I’ve noticed this in dietetics and psychotherapy. Alot of the studies and “innovation” in both spheres is done purely as a way to sell more product down the line (dietary marketing, pharmaceuticals)
The Keto diet and Celiacs disease are perfect examples of fads/trends (one mainly for men, the other for women). You come up with an esoteric compound which sounds really complex. But really, all you are doing is cutting out empty carbs and processed sugars etc. You can’t market this however: “Be disciplined, do the obvious!” is boring and doesn’t make for a good slogan. You’ve got to brand your target market with the mark of uniqueness. They don’t just have a strict diet, they are achieving “ketosis”; they don’t cut carbs, they have “celiacs” disease. Now they have a path laid out for them, a target to shoot for. Now they are part of a cult. Now they are special.
Many of us in this comment section could go into our offices and bang out a good fake-syndrome or a good fake-diet trend in a few hours time. Create a compound of a few vitamins and minerals, attach a Latin-based term to it, and make sure that in consuming/avoiding this compound the subject must cut out dense carbs, grease, concentrated sugars, processed foods etc. Boom, you got yourself a fad-diet!
Its fake. Kind of. The diet will work even if its based on fraud. You could show your creation to someone alongside a “real” one, and they’d have a hard time seeing the “fraud.”
But Keto is really the anti-marketing-fad diet. Nobody is getting rich selling eggs, butter, meat, and spinach.
Type Keto in Amazon right now. Its a profitable label. Its a brand, a label that can get slapped on a variety of products. Most fad diets start with an original idea which are then scaled up to broadly marketed programs with prescription fees, fungible products etc.
I know the ketogenic diet and celiacs disease are legitimate things which were originally developed for a very small subset of patients. But then these terms/diets were marketed for the masses.
10 years ago, all the girls in my university, especially the athletes, had celiacs. 5 years ago, all the upper class women in my latte-town NEEDED gluten free everything, and so all the cafe’s HAD to carry gluten-free products. Now, they are all eating pastry again and no cafe carries gluten free anything. It’s almost like these women never had “celiacs” at all….
I just went to my local farmer’s market. Someone I know is into Keto (I could probably claim I have a soft-keto diet). I bought him a keto brand of local elk-meat-jerky.
Keto will not be the diet to end all diets. There will be more.
Keto is based on converting your body to using fat for energy as opposed to sugar. The equivalent of putting a big log on a fire to keep it burning all day as opposed to constantly throwing kindling on it. And it doesn’t reek havoc with one’s insulin.
And now I have to use the “S” word – it’s not a fad, there’s actual science behind it. I recommend reading Primal Body Primal Mind if you’re interested.
I just created my own new fad diet. You can look up the specific terms. Its all based on reality.
I call it the “Lepto-Ghrelin Diet. Its based off the ratio of two hormones: Leptin (“the satiety” hormone) and Ghrelin (the “appetite” increaser hormone). So Leptin = good. And the nasty sounding Ghrelin = bad (sounds like Gremmlin doesn’t it?) By eating a diet which balances these two hormones, you can reach hormonal harmony and burn fat effortlessly!
You can eat specific foods which “activate” Leptin and “suppress” Ghrelin.
I can create a color coded chart which documents the ideal ratio’s with an attending graph of foods to help you achieve those ratios. It will be color coded and tiered.
If you want to know if you have achieved a specific level of LGD (Lepto-Ghrelin) “hormonal harmony” you can get a special LGD blood testing kit which tests for these two hormones!
I can even market my diet to men and women. Women will suffer from naturally defficient LGD ratios and need to tend to a very specific diet, while men can achieve outstanding results by doing research an “activating” the right hormonal balances.
LGD harmony achieves the same thing as every fad diet out there. The foods, the diets, the insulin levels will be nearly identical. Its just a matter of how I want to present the material, what I want to emphasize.
You can observe this phenomenon with ‘Gluten Free’ – a term at first useful solely to people with specific food allergies or intolerances has now become ubiquitous. I’ve bought foods marked as such that would never contain gluten in the first place, such as yogurt, popcorn, and even pickles. Not long from now the only edible foods in America will be adorned with a mishmash of meaningless ‘paleo’, ‘grass fed’, ‘keto’ labels, like graffiti tags sprayed on the slum of our culture.
I wouldn’t knock Keto. I went from 78kg to 68kg (172lb to 150lb) in four months on keto. Never felt hungry, but God did I crave bread.
I’m not really knocking Keto and its efficacy. Its similar to the Paleo-diet. I’m pretty much on a soft-Keto diet with intermittent fasting myself. But I still allow for sweets and breads in small amounts.
I’m just pointing out how most diets are working with a very limited amount of variables, and every combination will be roughly the same. What’s more important is the creation of a new term based on a rearranging (or merely a relabeling) of the variables, and slick marketing behind that new term.
This same process can be found in many different fields– psychology, technology entertainment etc. Its the marketing that’s key.
Reynard, I agree with your all-is-marketing theme. However, just a minor point, Keto is real. Yes, it’s sold books etc. But the idea IS bold, fresh and “NEW!” Unlike the fake marketing you criticize. Anyway, good comment otherwise.
The Theranos debacle should be viewed in the same context at the Surfside Condo collapse that occurred last year. For years, serious cracks & spalling were observed and noted in the structures foundation (particularly under the pool area where chlorine in the water corroded the reinforcing steel bars in the main support columns). City building officials ignored warnings and residents turned a blind eye on these problems because the estimated cost of repair threatened to undermine their property equity. And then, in less than 3 minutes, two major sections of the building pancaked killing 100+ in their sleep. And did the building developer, designer, construction contractor, inspectors, city building department, or condo HOA officials pay any price for this crime against reality? No, not one. There will be lawsuits and fines, of which, most will go to attorneys and be paid for by insurance companies that will spread that expense onto all the uninvolved plebs in their base. And none of that will change the future, but if at least one asshole were found hanging from a street lamp, that just might make a difference. We have no fate but what we make.
Penalty aspect aside—which is quite a valid concern, you seem to think that the condo collapse was foreseeable by those directly involved in prevention/detection of such, e.g., building inspectors for the City.
I agree it should have been, but there is another line of thought—with support—that those immediately involved were not of the intellectual acumen to detect the criticality of the situation and act accordingly.
This is possibly an early warning sign of our decline as a 1st world technical society and our reaching the limit of the critical fraction needed to maintain and support our technological base.
Agreed. We are indeed getting stupider as a species because of the extinction of evolutionary fitness selection (and concurrent culling). But we cannot solve this problem with fancy words, persuasion, more education, voting harder, or better management of dwindling human capital. At some point, we have to face the hard reality that hard choices will have to be made or there will be much more loss of innocent life in debacles such as the Surfside condo fiasco. Our nation’s leadership is currently too incompetent, corrupt, or just plain evil to make these kinds of hard choices, so that burden will fall on the few remaining sane among us. It’s 1776 all over again, and it’s going to take real balls to step into the breech.
Amen! I hear ya. There will need to be a shakeup in the very essence of our political structure. Don’t know exactly how, but really there are simply to many stupid people allowed to vote–and therefore too many stupid people allowed to hold office and rule over us–but that doesn’t mean I want to live under a Bill Gates administration. 🙁
“Last year” was just over 2 months ago.
*midwits, whether in the Midwest or not
The thing I don’t understand about the Theranos case is; What is the tipping point for these cloud people to turn on one of their own like this? Theranos is far from the only fraudulent ponzi scheme out there in cloud-cuckoo-land. Their readings were useless – have you had any other medical tests recently?
Also, legitimate research and development, something that the startup world usually has no time to let happen properly, often ends up at a dead end – many blind alleys out there: Even if the technology wasn’t working out, why not just go with that?
What’s the tipping point to make them turn on her?
What if the truth is blackpilling – they expose the people who don’t go along with their pedo or satanic schemes.
Despite everybody (deservedly) mocking her on here, it’s entirely possible that she did the right thing and simply said no to escalating globohomo initiation rituals, and got thrown to the wolves.
“Their readings were useless – have you had any other medical tests recently?”
Like a painful, hazardous nasal swab that no medical provider has ever heard of before, demanded twice weekly?
For a test that doesn’t work, for masks that don’t work, for a vaccine that doesn’t work?
It’s a punishment for the unbelievers, and a reaffirmation of faith for the believers.
A small sacrifice to the priests.
Everything for the Cult, nothing outside the Cult. We are ruled by superstitious zealots, IQ means nothing here.
I agree with everything you said, but would like to remind everyone not to overlook the power of what i call the “situational seven.” Observed in a vacuum — minus the crazy eyes and the clothes and the weird cult leader affect — Holmes is a somewhat pretty girl. Nothing to write home about, but she wouldn’t lack for choices at happy hour….
…anywhere except Silicon Valley or academia, where she’s the hottest thing any of them have ever seen. In those conditions, a sorta six like Holmes becomes a hard nine. She completely blows the circuits of every nerd she comes across. See also: Zoe Quinn, who at her absolute best — drop 15 lbs., take off the face tackle, get a normal haircut in a natural color — is a five, but the fight for her favors destroyed an entire industry.
Yeah, it’s mostly Cloud People Religion that is responsible for Theranos, but don’t overlook the power of punani on hardcore betas.
This is observable in the clip of her on stage with Slick Willy. He asks her to tell the audience her age, which I believe was 24 at the time, and he’s visibly aroused as she replies. So much so that he appears to be seconds away from whipping out his tallywhacker right there in front of everyone.
Billy wasn’t exactly discriminating when it came to his women. The chubby intern wasn’t even a 5. He wasn’t scoring Kennedy level bitches, that’s for sure.
I have no way of knowing, having never met the lady, but I bet she gives off major DTF vibes, too. I’m sure every man here has one of those girls in his past. I remember one girl that my friends at another college were all gaga over. They showed me photos — recall that this was in the Jurassic, before the internet — and I just couldn’t see it. I mean, yeah, ok, she’s kinda cute… I guess… but look, dudes, I know y’all can do better, because you DID better, back in high school. I was there…
And then I met her, and yowza, I got it. Hard. I was as ludicrously puppy-dog smitten with this girl as they were. Objectively a six at best, but oh lord, in person she just had… something. A million crude expressions come to mind, but that wasn’t it (or, at least, not just it). Just beaucoup je ne sais quoi, as the Germans say.
That, plus being an actual six, means she hits like an atomic bomb on the STEM set. You’d think the Kissingers and Mattises of the world would be able to keep it in their pants (especially Mattis, who I’ve heard doesn’t exactly roll that way), but… je ne sais quoi.
“Just beaucoup je ne sais quoi, as the Germans say.”
Comments like that make me feel better about spending time on this website rather than working.
Severian,
I think what you’re addressing is the concept of “attainability”.
Unless you’re completely narcissistic or truly autistic, most men figure out their “league” with women. A supermodel or actress is going to go with a guy who has the looks and status that match or exceed hers. So most guys know the fabled 8, 9, or elusive 10 are WAAAAAAY out of their league.
But a cute, trim, 7, 6, or 5? Per “Dumb and Dumber”: “So you’re saying, there’s a chance?” Yeah, most of us on the blog know from experience or experience from friends that if you can see the whites of her eyes on either side of the iris, strap on the five point harness, the ride’s gonna be bumpy. But the intoxication of the chance! She may be In My League!
But as you say, if you’re working in tech and most of your female co-workers are Asian, and the Chinese gals aren’t giving you the time of day (too busy stealing secrets), someone like Liz Holmes with long blonde hair who actually TALKS to you would be intriguing.
That’s a lot of it. Simple youth is another. I used to have a civilian buddy come in and give some guest lectures to my college classes. The first few times he did it, he thought I must’ve somehow gotten the entire varsity cheer squad to sign up — all the girls were knockouts!
A few more lectures, and he figured it out — they’re just young. A college-aged girl has to work very hard to not be at least kinda cute; hell, normal BMI is usually enough. That’s just the way the male brain is wired — a 6 compared to her 19 year old sorority sisters is a 9 compared to all but the very hottest, most heavily jazzercized 30-something woman in your workplace (and even then, if we’re being honest with ourselves, most guys would still pick the 19 year old 6).
I know, I know… oink. Guilty as charged. But biology is what it is, and biology explains a LOT, including quite a bit of the Theranos scam.
It’ isn’t just that the women in tech are all Chinese, they uniformly are of that particular insectoid phenotype that even a severe case of yellow fever would find unappealing. Picture the midget’s wife in Bad Santa.
Severian-
I hear what you are saying.
I just went on a date with an age-appropriate woman that involved wandering around a local park near sundown.
Of course, there were tons of scantily-clad young women frolicking all over.
Oh man, it’s nearly impossible not to let one’s eyes wander.
I’ve had that issue with specifically British women who tend to be not very photogenetic at all (sorry) but add in that third dimension and, whoa, they could probably talk me into going into the wrong end of a chipper/shredder (I exaggerate of course, slightly).
I’ll take the British over the average Irish,Jewish,Southern Italian,Greek women that seems to be prevalent in the US. I also don’t get the hype about Hispanic women-I prefer Emily Blunt over Sofia Vergara, or Jeb’s wife LOL
Good grief. I’ve been married too long, I can hardly keep up with his conversation. They all look pretty goo to me at my age. 😉
Good point. There is a lot of intersection here between arousal and religion, too. Since she is a Silicon Valley nine AND needs. checks the religious boxes, Holmes is especially hot to beta tech nerds.
Just like white people are learning to put compliant minorities “in charge” of companies for that sweet sweet federal money, guys are going to start picking hot, compliant, girls as CEO for the venture capital simp funds.
Think of it as just another indirect tax.
That’s where antisocial media actually works in our favor. Back in the Jurassic, if you wanted to carry on like a nine, you’d better actually BE a nine — just as I’m sure every man here of a certain age has met that girl with je ne sais quoi that I was talking about above, so I’m sure every man here whose alley cat days were pre-Facebook has said at least once (if only to himself, as he was walking away) “Honey, you are not nearly hot enough to be acting like that.”
These days, though, thanks to Faceborg and all the rest, even the fives carry on like supermodels. Which is fine, I guess, in ordinary life, but it’s not going to work on the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, who easily pull actual nines, and often real live supermodels.
Eh, a lot of the MOTU are paying for their company.
I’m not trying to condemn them for that, I’m just trying to say they don’t have some magical, undefinable charm that pulls these gals in.
There are plenty of supermodels and actresses who spent years working as, “yacht girls,” in Cannes and St. Tropez. Lindsey Lohan is one of the best known and saddest examples going.
Ah, that’s why Lindsey opened a successful resort club in Europe. That’s the world she knows.
You go, girl.
Use what you have, where you’re at.
I would have no doubt that suggestive T&A if not the real thing had a starring role in her climb up the ladder.
Watch her little girl voice suddenly re-emerge when the trial starts. Also, I recommend wearing something flowery. Then drop a dime on the pajeet.
When busted and broke, she dropped the “vocal fry” man-voice act, sweetened up, and married the heir to a hotel fortune to pay her bills. Got preggers to have a sympathy plea if she gets a prison sentence.
The go-to move for “empowerment “ for many women, but there’s no dishonor or dishonesty in traditional gender roles.
Too bad she had to wreck so many lives with her crappy product and burn so much capital first. The world would be a better place if she’d just married a nice guy at Stanford.
Then again, the Stanford soy-boys are all high pitched Valley girl uptalk nerds. “The odds are good, but the goods are odd “ , as they say.
Gender reversal roles are making everyone miserable and insane.
From what I know of the facts, a conviction should be a slam dunk. Yet the prosecutors are in quite the bind. On one hand, this is a show trial intended to send a warning not to mess with the Cloud People and take their stuff. On the other, a thin line has to be walked not to reveal the Clouds as the abject fools they are. That’s tough to do since the con was so transparent.
Your point about the Cloud People being defeatable is the lesson to take from this. They are high on their own supply and feel safe since they have well-bribed their dutiful whores in the administrative state and the political class and propaganda organs. Midwest who believe they are untouchable are very vulnerable to the likes of Holmes and those with even worse intentions.
Yes just like that baby talking blasey ford woman in the rapey mcblackrobe theater a while back.
And just like every other strong independent womyn selling pharma or finance they will leverage their natural intermittent reinforcement of thirsty males to make their way.
Sell their sex, then ballbust “like one of the guys”, then when bigger swingin dick eats their lunch they retreat to vulnerable just a girl in a mans world and the cucks will marshal around her and do her maths homework. Also, where are all the good men at who arent intimidated by my success? It would be funny if not for how ruinous it is.
“Women who killed their husbands for the insurance would always accuse the dead man of being abusive.” Yes this bug eyed whore is doing just that. She was trapped in an “abusive relationsjip” with street shitter.
And so goes the story of Western Civ. Women standing in ashes, crocodile tears rolling, white culture was so unfair! The barbarian smirks. He has seen it all before.
Heh, Ford.
Remember how she claimed all her traveling was for, “surfing?”
Several times over at iSteve’s I implied that claim was a smokescreen.
Yeah, those comments never made it through moderation.
Speaking of film reviews (and it’s Western in location and feel), I’d enjoy your take on the ’97 Costner vehicle ‘The Postman’. Mediocre at best, a bit long, and touched with early poz (compulsory magical negro, for instance and a boatload of civnattery), but an interesting take on how Hollywood thought the wypipo will end up in 2013(!). I can’t say that I read the source novel.
I hope Mr. Zblogman does a public post about westerns. Until recently I had only seen the newer big Eastwood westerns (unforgiven, etc.) but lately have been checking out the older Eastwood ones. The Outlaw Josey Wales is fantastic, probably my favorite. I tried Fistful of Dollars and it was just too low on production value for me to enjoy.
I think what I enjoy most about these westerns is the fantasy aspect. To be a man on the land in a still traditional culture… sweet.
Pale Rider is a great Eastwood Western. High Plains Drifter is another.
If John Wayne didn’t like Eastwoods early westerns he would have hate Unforgiven.
“Yeah, I’ve killed women and children”
Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter are similar movies and both are very good.
In the Western genre, I’ve recently watched and enjoyed the Anthony Mann-directed movies from the 50’s. Most starred Jimmy Stewart. Winchester 73, The Man from Laramie, The Naked Spur, etc.
Another underrated gem from that era is “Ride the High Country,” one of Sam Peckinpah’s (director of The Wild Bunch) early movies. Features B movie stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrae at the end of their careers.
High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider are both interesting because they prominently feature metaphysical elements and themes, yet both films do an excellent job of integrating those elements into the overall story and setting, making them great examples of the, “Weird West,” subgenre.
My personal motto in life since I was aged 13 or so has been “Be Like Josey Wales”. And in a bind, it’s “WWJD”, what would Josey do?
Even have a sketch of him hanging on the wall of the master bedroom like grandma has Jesus.
Can’t say I’ve been perfect in my conviction, but it never fails when followed.
Don’t give up on the spaghetti westerns. Fistful is the weakest one. For A Few Dollars More is great, with Lee Van Cleef as the good guy (and featuring a rapey Hispanic in the bad guy role, when such a thing was done) and The Good/Bad/Ugly is even better, with Cleef as the bad guy.
In the 60s, westerns ruled American TV, and taught us “American values”- so the hippies dressed like Indians.
Did he do Postman? I don’t remember it. I like the line from the bad warlord regarding his pre-apocalypse life, I was a copier salesmen.
I watched that expecting it to be one of the worst things I’d ever see and was surprised at it’s…normalcy. One theory is that the hatred for the movie at the time was born from (mild spoiler) the characters trying to birth a new nation based upon the founding principles of America.
(The one issue I had with the movie towards the end was it’s masturbatory love with the Oregon “wilderness”. This was supposed to be a wasteland (maybe) but by the end it seemed like a travelogue for Travel Oregon. That can work I suppose, but it eventually just seemed like an end unto itself.)