Tag Archives: mother

Fabulous New Blood Test Technology Not Quite as Fabulous as Advertised

by PhillisLqs Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, when I was getting my blood drawn with dismaying frequency, I sang the praises of Elizabeth Holmes, a young billionaire who founded a company that promises to perform lab tests with only as much blood as you get from a finger prick. That sounded great.

My blood tests have gotten much less frequent these days, and I’ve mostly gotten over my needle phobia anyway,1 so I haven’t paid much attention to Theranos, the Silicon Valley darling Holmes founded. But this morning, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was basically a house of cards. It actually does very little testing using its “Edison” finger-prick technology, and has had trouble getting FDA approval for its tests due to questions about the accuracy of its results.

Tonight, Carreyrou reports that things are even worse than that:

Under pressure from regulators, laboratory firm Theranos Inc. has stopped collecting tiny vials of blood drawn from finger pricks for all but one of its tests….That test detects herpes and was cleared by the FDA in July.

….Theranos has since nearly stopped using the lab instrument, named Edison after the prolific inventor, according to the person familiar with the situation. By the time of the FDA inspection, the company was doing blood tests almost exclusively on traditional lab instruments purchased from diagnostic-equipment makers such as Siemens AG , the person says.

….Most of Theranos’s blood-drawing sites, which it calls “wellness centers,” are located inside Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. drugstores….A blood-drawing technician at a Walgreens in the Phoenix area, reached by phone late Thursday, said Theranos had “temporarily suspended” finger-prick draws and was only drawing blood from patients’ arms with needles at that store.

That doesn’t sound very promising. I have a feeling that Elizabeth Holmes might not make the Forbes list of billionaires next year. She might be lucky if Theranos even still exists.

1So far, the upsides of my chemotherapy have been (1) better hair, (2) weight loss2, (3) less dread of blood draws, (4) forbidden to clean the litter box,3 and (5) the purchase of a powered bed, which is really cool.

2Though, sadly, I’ve gained most it back.

3Though, sadly, I’ve since been given permission to do this again.

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Fabulous New Blood Test Technology Not Quite as Fabulous as Advertised

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The Benghazi Charade Is Finally Melting Away

by DenishaX72 Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican congressman Richard Hanna talks about the Benghazi committee today:

This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.

Hanna supports gay rights, so I suppose that basically makes him a Democrat who can be ignored on this subject. Still, the evidence that Republican leaders viewed the committee as mostly a way of making trouble for Hillary Clinton is sure getting tough to dismiss. Greg Sargent comments on how Team Hillary is exploiting this:

It isn’t just that Clinton is using the new GOP quotes to tar it as a partisan exercise and attack its credibility, though that is a key goal….The idea is to turn the ongoing Benghazi battle with Republicans into an emblem of her willingness to fight on in the face of determined opposition — thus playing to one of her strengths, i.e., perceptions of her tenaciousness.

Maybe. But I’d say there’s something else at work here. Do you remember Mitt Romney’s big problem back in 2012? He was perceived as too moderate by the base of the Republican Party. He addressed this by endlessly making over-the-top attacks on President Obama. The calculus was simple: the base hated Obama more than they distrusted Romney, so he could gain their trust by showing that he hated Obama more than anyone else.

Hillary is playing a similar game here. The Democratic base distrusts her, but they hate Republicans more than they distrust Hillary. By making it clear that she’s the primary target of Republican attacks, she’s tapping into that. If Republicans hate her more than anyone, she must have something going for her. Plus there’s just the Pavlovian instinct to defend any Democrat against Republican attacks. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Republicans have screwed the pooch on Benghazi. The press can only play along with their faux investigation as long as they maintain plausible deniability about its partisan goals. But now we have (a) Kevin McCarthy spilling the beans, (b) news reports that John Boehner wanted to use the committee to attack Hillary, (c) Richard Hanna agreeing that it was mostly a partisan witch hunt, and (d) no less than the New York Times reporting that the committee has all but given up on Benghazi in favor of holding hearings on Hillary’s email server. We knew all along there was a man behind the curtain, but now he’s actually been exposed. It’s getting harder and harder to play along with the charade.

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The Benghazi Charade Is Finally Melting Away

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Medicare Premiums Set to Soar for Small Group of Unlucky Seniors

by AndrewWaggoner0 Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports today that Medicare premiums may soar next year even though inflation is low and medical costs have been relatively tame.

Why? Well, Medicare actuaries predict that Part B spending is expected to go up a bit more than they initially projected, and premiums are supposed to cover one-fourth of spending. However, for 70 percent of Medicare recipients premiums are linked to Social Security benefits, which are not expected to rise at all thanks to low inflation. This means that the entire burden of paying for the increased spending will fall on the other 30 percent of Medicare recipients. For these people, premiums will rise $648 in 2016.

That’s a lot of money for someone living on $15,000 per year. So what are we going to do about it?

The cost of avoiding such big premium increases, $7.5 billion by some estimates, could be a problem for conservative Republicans. Aides to Mr. Boehner have told Ms. Pelosi’s staff members that the cost would have to be offset by savings elsewhere in the federal budget….Republicans worry that Democrats will depict them as waging a “war on seniors” if they do not go along with legislation to soften the effect of any premium increase, perhaps by using general revenue to plug the gap. A struggle over Medicare would add to fights expected this fall over legislation to raise the federal debt ceiling, prevent a government shutdown and keep money flowing for highway projects.

In other words, the usual: we’ll squabble over it like small children and then eventually patch together some kind of half-assed solution after Republicans threaten to hold their collective breaths until their faces turn blue. That’s American exceptionalism, baby.

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Medicare Premiums Set to Soar for Small Group of Unlucky Seniors

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New Study Says Sitting a Lot Won’t Kill You After All

by LoriZVJtsn Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Did you buy a standing desk because you heard that sitting too much would kill you? Or because you wanted to be like Don Rumsfeld? It doesn’t matter: a new study says sitting isn’t especially hazardous, and Rumsfeld shouldn’t be a role model for anything. The chart on the right shows the basic association between more sitting and more dying: none. Nor did it matter when the authors controlled for age, gender, employment grade, ethnicity, smoking status, alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable consumption, BMI, physical functioning, or daily walking time. “There were no associations between any of the five sitting indicators at Phase 5 and all-cause mortality risk over the follow-up period in either model 1 or 2.”

The authors say that their sample is fairly physically active, and “it is therefore possible that the higher than average energy expenditure in the current study may offer a degree of protection from any deleterious effects of high volumes of sitting.” In other words, don’t worry about sitting too much. Just get enough exercise, period. You’ll be OK.

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New Study Says Sitting a Lot Won’t Kill You After All

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

by CortezKiddle197 Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore notes this morning that “the media appetite for naming a clear winner has fed a post-debate trend towards labeling HRC as a gigantic, titanic, overwhelming cham-peen.” True enough, and you can blame that on a sort of self-feeding bandwagon loop among the campaign press. Still, in this case I think it’s probably justified. Sure, O’Malley did OK, and so did Sanders, but let’s face it: Nobody cares much about O’Malley, and Sanders probably didn’t change the dynamics of the race in his favor despite a decent performance. What’s more, my own personal reaction is that Sanders made it even clearer than ever that he doesn’t really want to be president. He just wants to move the race to the left.

But the fact that Hillary did well really does matter. She showed Democrats why they’ve always liked her in the past. She showed off her debating skills. She put to rest all the Benghazi/email nonsense. She almost certainly halted her slide in the polls. She basically made herself the inevitable winner yet again. Plus this:

And that leads to the aspect of the debate that struck me apparently more than most observers: the exceptional hostility of the questioning from moderator Anderson Cooper, who seemed to be trying to defy expectations that he’d be less savage than Jake Tapper was in CNN’s GOP debate. Pretty quickly, Cooper became a stand-in for all the media folk trying to make the Democratic contest about emails and Benghazi! and “socialism,” and you got the sense the candidates and the immediate audience united in disdain for the superficiality of where the hosts wanted the discussion to go. The feral roar that greeted Bernie Sanders’ statement that Americans were tired of “hearing about Clinton’s damn emails”—followed by HRC shaking Bernie’s hand—was the signature moment of the night. And this wasn’t just some “gift” from Sanders to Clinton, as it was called by several talking heads last night. It was a party-wide rebuke to the MSM for how they are covering this campaign.

I didn’t get the sense that Cooper was especially hostile. But Kilgore is right that debate moderators generally try to focus on superficial “toughness” instead of asking either genuinely tough questions or genuinely interesting policy questions. In a way, this is justified: you don’t want candidates to get away with just making stump speeches. You want to challenge them. You want to see how they perform under pressure. Unfortunately, when you take this too far it becomes obvious that you’re just desperately trying to gin up controversy for its own sake. Debate moderators need to understand that the show isn’t about them. It’s about genuinely digging out answers from candidates on subjects they might prefer to fudge. That’s genuine toughness. But that takes a deep knowledge of policy and the willingness to engage with it. That’s too often missing from these events.

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

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This Aunt Is Suing Her 12-Year-Old Nephew For an "Unreasonable" Hug

by EdnaHarpur Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today’s spotlight for some internet outrage can be directed towards Jennifer Connell, a human resources manager who hails from New York.

According to the Connecticut Post, 54-year-old Connell has filed a lawsuit against her 12-year-old nephew claiming he acted “unreasonably” after giving her a hug that caused her to fall and break her wrist.

The unabashed display of affection happened four years ago at her nephew Sean Tarala’s eighth birthday. He is the only defendant identified in the lawsuit, which claims his “negligent” hug caused her serious harm.

“All of a sudden he was there in the air, I had to catch him and we tumbled onto the ground,” Connell testified before a jury last Friday. “I remember him shouting, ‘Auntie Jen I love you,’ and there he was flying at me.”

She says did not complain to her nephew at the time because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, she told jurors. But four years later, Connell is now seeking $127,000 in damages, which include compromising her ability to eat gracefully at social occasions.

“I was at a party recently,” she explained. “And it was difficult to hold my hors d’oeuvre plate.”

On Friday, local media reported Sean Tarala sitting next to his father in court looking “confused.” His mother died last year.

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This Aunt Is Suing Her 12-Year-Old Nephew For an "Unreasonable" Hug

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Here’s What to Really Expect in Tonight’s Democratic Debate

by ClintHonner Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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I assume you all know this by now, but the first Democratic debate is tonight. It starts at 8:30 pm Eastern on CNN, and I gather that it’s scheduled to go two hours. It was originally going to last three hours—which is flatly insane—but apparently CNN got an earful after the endless slog of the last Republican debate and decided to take pity on us all.

So what can we expect? Really expect? My guesses:

The highest polling candidate will be in the center and the lowest polling candidates at the edges. Fox News seems to have set a permanent precedent here.
Hillary Clinton will of course get a question or ten about her email server. She’ll give a standard scripted reply, and the others will all shuffle around nervously when asked to respond. They’d love to take a shot at Hillary, but they’ll be reluctant to look like they’re stooges for Republican conspiracy theories.
Bernie Sanders will be asked if he’s really a socialist. Sigh.
Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee will both be asked some version of “Why are you here?” This is actually a fair question since neither seems to be running a serious campaign and neither has even the slightest chance of winning.
There will be some kind of question about Joe Biden. Everyone will insist that they love Joe and have nothing but the highest regard for him.
There will probably be some kind of question that dutifully inventories all the conservative complaints about Obamacare and asks what the candidates are going to do about them.
They’ll be asked about Syria, of course. This is an unsolvable problem,1 so no one will offer up anything worthwhile.
Hillary will get asked if Bill is a problem for her.
We’ll be treated once again to a “fun” question. God only know what it will be. Favorite song? Craziest Republican? Person they’d like to see on the ten-ruble note?

Anyway, I’ll be liveblogging it. The thought fills me with dread, but I know that when the time comes, I’ll be there. I’ll hate myself for it, but I’ll do it.

1We are opposed to Assad, ISIS, and all the al-Qaeda supported rebel groups in Syria. This is bipartisan, not something unique to President Obama. This means the only groups we support are “moderate” Syrian rebels who are willing to fight ISIS, not Assad. As near as I can tell, such groups basically don’t exist and never have.

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Here’s What to Really Expect in Tonight’s Democratic Debate

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Critics Pan New Show "21st Century"

by QuyenClarkson Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Charlie Stross is unhappy:

I want to complain to the studio execs who commissioned the current season of “21st century”; your show is broken.

I say this as a viewer coming in with low expectations. Its predecessor “20th century” plumbed the depths of inconsistency with the frankly silly story arc for world war II. It compounded it by leaving tons of loose plot threads dangling until the very last minute, then tidied them all up in a blinding hurry in that bizarre 1989-92 episode just in time for the big Y2K denouement (which then fizzled). But the new series reboot is simply ridiculous! It takes internal inconsistency to a new low, never before seen in the business: the “21st century” show is just plain implausible.

So far, I give the 21st century two stars. It might be better if they’d just release the whole thing at once so I could binge watch it, instead of forcing me to live through this nonsense week by week.

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Critics Pan New Show "21st Century"

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

by ChelseyUyc Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hannah Giorgis writes about the endless struggle with catcalling in New York City:

After another summer spent shrugging off men’s loud assessments of my body any time I left my apartment, I am exhausted. And as the streets thin out and the weather cools to a temperature less accommodating of men who consider catcalling a leisure sport, I am increasingly able to pause and feel the depth of my own fatigue.

….Every outing involves dozens of split-second decisions. The short, loose dress or the long, form-fitting one? The almost-empty subway car or the crowded one? The shorter route or the more well-lit one?….My mind can only make so many daily calculations before it slips into what social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister calls “decision fatigue.” Processing each of these useless equations takes a biological toll on my brain, leaving it more inclined, as the day wears on, to look for shortcuts.

Read the whole thing. Or, if you’d prefer a video dramatization of what it’s like, check out the YouTube below.

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

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Was the "California Stop" Really Invented in California?

by MarlaBembry Posted on October 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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On my way home from lunch today I saw the billboard on the right. Seems like it should be “California Alto” or something, shouldn’t it? I guess “California Stop” is one of those things that’s famous enough that it’s always rendered in its native language.

But I’m curious: where did “California Stop” come from, anyway? I won’t claim that I have a ton of experience driving all over the country, but I’ve driven in plenty of places both east and west, and it seems to me that people are pretty casual about stop signs everywhere. Sure enough, on a message board that posted a question about this, various folks said that in their neck of the woods it was called a:

St. Louis Stop
New York Stop
Hollywood Stop
New Orleans Stop

This suggests that it really is common everywhere, but it’s equally common to think it’s unique to your own city/state/region. But if that’s the case, why is it so common to call it a California Stop? Did we do it first? Is it related to California pioneering the right-on-red rule? Anybody know what the deal is?

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Was the "California Stop" Really Invented in California?

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