Who followed the Elizabeth Holmes trial?

Who followed the Elizabeth Holmes trial closely? “The Elizabeth Holmes Verdict: Theranos Founder Is Guilty on Four of 11 Charges in Fraud Trial” (WSJ, which is the newspaper primarily responsible for bringing down the company):

At the 15-week trial, Ms. Holmes testified in her own defense, showing regret for missteps and saying she never intended to mislead anyone. She accused her former boyfriend and deputy at Theranos of abusing her, allegations he has denied.

She was found guilty on three of the nine fraud counts and one of two conspiracy counts. She was acquitted on four counts related to defrauding patients—one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three charges of wire fraud.

The verdict doesn’t make sense to me on its face. If the patients weren’t defrauded with false test results how could the investors have been defrauded? But I didn’t follow the trial, so probably the jury knows a lot that I don’t.

If it were up to me, I would imprison the investors for stupidity in thinking that a young American college dropout knew more about blood testing than the file cabinets full of Ph.D. chemists at Philips, Siemens, and F. Hoffmann-La Roche. I would have been reluctant to find Holmes guilty of anything or sentence this new mom to any prison time.

The man whom Holmes has accused of raping her daily, Ramesh Balwani, goes to trial next. Let’s see if readers, via the comments, can predict the ratio of prison sentence between these two defendants. I am going to guess that the immigrant/accused rapist receives a sentence that is 2X as long as whatever Holmes suffers. This is partly based on “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases” (University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, 2018), which says, all else being equal, a person whom the jury identifies as a “man” will be sentenced to 1.6X the prison time that a person whom the jury identifies as a “woman” receives. I moved the needle from 1.6X to 2X because Mr. Balwani is an immigrant and I think both the jury and the judge will be angry that someone emigrated to the U.S. to become a criminal.

(If Mr. Balwani enters into a plea bargain, the above prediction should be revised to 1X.)

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Should police departments hire Kyle Rittenhouse to train officers?

Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has had a month to relax after his year of being targeted for what turned out to be, at least in the eyes of the unanimous jury, a meritless prosecution, I wonder what he will do next.

Although I did not follow the trial closely, I remember that Gaige Grosskreutz testified that young Kyle did not shoot him until Mr. Grosskreutz actually pointed a gun at him (NYT):

“So when you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?” Corey Chirafisi, a defense lawyer, asked.

“Correct,” Mr. Grosskreutz answered.

“It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun — now your hands down, pointed at him — that he fired, right?” Mr. Chirafisi said.

“Correct,” he said.

Imagine if 33-year-old Mohamed Noor had shown the same restraint as the 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse. Justine Damond would have lived to enjoy her 41st birthday and Minneapolis taxpayers wouldn’t have had to pay $20 million (George Floyd turned out to have a higher value than Ms. Damond; his survivors received $27 million from the City of Minneapolis). What if Michael T. Slager had received training from Mr. Rittenhouse? Walter Scott would be alive today and North Charleston (S.C.) taxpayers would be $6.5 million richer.

Should cities ask Kyle Rittenhouse to come in and train officers on how to recognize when it is time to shoot?

On a separate topic, the Ministry of Truth at Facebook recently lifted a ban on writing anything positive about Mr. Rittenhouse or searching for him by name (CNN), but the Ministry “will continue to remove posts that glorify the deaths involved in the Kenosha shooting.” Illustrating the limits of artificial intelligence, a Deplorable friend of a friend managed to post regarding Joseph Rosenbaum, who unwisely singled out the kid with the AR-15 as an appropriate person to attack. Background from an Arizona newspaper:

Rosenbaum had multiple convictions in Pima County, spending just over 14 years in prison. He served the first 10 years on his first rape charge. However, for the two other rape charges he only received sentences of 30 months.

WRN Investigates reported that Rosenbaum was charged by a grand jury with 11 counts of child molestation and inappropriate sexual activity around children, including anal rape. The victims were five boys ranging in age from nine to 11 years old.

According to Yahoo News, “Hours before the fatal encounter, Rosenbaum had been released from a local hospital in the wake of a suicide attempt. He had pending charges in Wisconsin for alleged domestic abuse and jumping bail at the time of his death.”

This kind of information would certainly be forbidden by the algorithms and humans at Facebook. But the Ministry of Truth did not flag the following from the above-mentioned Deplorable:

Not many people get to die doing what they love. Those who do are truly fortunate.

Jojo Rosenbaum was one of those fortunate souls. He died chasing an unwilling minor.

Readers: What do you think Kyle Rittenhouse will do next?

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Jussie Smollett convicted

A friend texted me that Jussie Smollett had been convicted. I replied “Racism and homophobia in the U.S. are a lot worse than we thought.”

(How can I be sure that Mr. Smollett was innocent and, therefore, convicted unanimously by 12 jurors only because of their racism and homophobia? From our leaders…

The top reply to then-candidate Biden’s tweet:

)

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  • Merry Christmas from the iPhone 12 Pro Max (Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing are leaving the courtroom after arguing on behalf of Donald Trump and they get hit by a taxpayer-funded empty city bus. God meets them at the pearly gates and asks if they have any questions. … )
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Immigrant comments on the Alice Sebold/Anthony Broadwater situation

Why we need the Daily Mail:

What other news outlet would highlight the inequality of the situation? (The liar enjoys freedom (well, until the lockdowns) and a $6 million house, paid for partly from the profits of writing about the lie; the person who tells the truth goes to prison for 16 years and then tries to live and work as a convicted felon and sex offender.)

An immigrant friend sent a photo to our chat group from within this article:

The immigrant’s take on the situation?

I love this. Mask outside, reusable bag, San Francisco. So many markers of virtue. Except for putting an innocent black man in prison.

A native-born friend in Maskachusetts responded:

Saw a woman biking today with a mask on. On a rural road.

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What is your prediction regarding the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict?

Readers (especially those who followed the complete trial, which I did not): What is your prediction regarding the most likely verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case?

I probably shouldn’t offer an opinion because I did not watch any of the videos from the courthouse. However, since I’m asking you to guess, maybe I am obligated also to put forth my best guess…. guilty of at least one count.

My rationale for predicting a guilty verdict is not based on any of the facts in the case nor any evidence or argument that was presented at trial. My prediction is based purely on the psychology of compliance. One thing that we’ve learned from the 2020 lockdowns and the recent elections (national and California governor recall) is that Americans are generally compliant with whatever the government tells them to do. The non-compliant spirit among at least some young Americans in the 1960s is dead. In the specific case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the government is telling a group of Americans to convict him and therefore I think that he will be convicted.

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What’s going on at the Kyle Rittenhouse trial?

I have skimmed headlines regarding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. This is not the kind of news that I follow closely, so I hope that readers will catch me up on everything important. Is it correct to say that there was a gunfight in Kenosha among a bunch of white people who had different points of view regarding Black Lives Matter? And there is photographic and/or video evidence of who was pointing guns at whom? How did this evidence come to exist? Were people holding up mobile phone cameras while guns were drawn? Or is the electronic evidence coming from surveillance cameras that happened to be on nearby buildings?

Is there so much electronic evidence that it is possible to reconstruct what happened? (Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially if there is a lot of drama, such as gunshots.)

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Should a criminal defendant be required to wear a mask at trial?

Coronavirus is here to stay, just as the Swedish MD/PhDs said back in February 2020 (“don’t lock down unless you’re willing to keep everyone at home for the next 20 years”). Criminal defendants are also likely to remain plentiful here in the U.S. Where do these phenomena intersect? San Jose!

“At Issue in Theranos Trial: Whether Elizabeth Holmes, Witnesses Will Wear Face Masks” (WSJ, August 16, 2021):

Attorneys for Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes told a federal judge on Monday that she plans to attend her criminal fraud trial with three family members or friends by her side and strongly prefers not to wear a face mask.

Should this be at the discretion of judges? Suppose that Dr. Fauci says that the best way to #StopTheSpread is to cover people in hoods, like Al-Qaeda warriors getting into a CIA-chartered Gulfstream for the trip to Guantanamo. Would it be okay for a jury to convict a defendant whose head they’ve never seen? If not, why is it okay for a jury to convict a defendant whose full face they’ve never seen?

Separately, the Theranos fraud (largely perpetrated, according to Bad Blood, by David Boies (on the Theranos Board) and the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner (now representing Palm Beach County in its fight to keep schoolchildren masked against the Florida governor’s order to allow parental choice)), was vaguely predicted here in 2014:

New Yorker magazine carries an article about a young self-made billionaire whose success was partly due to having put in the effort to learn Mandarin while in high school.

Separately, the article covers the question of whether people will benefit from being able to get blood tests more easily and cheaply, e.g., without having to first visit a physician and without having a vein opened up. A doctor friend says “Never order a test unless you know what you’re going to do with the answer.” If he is correct then generally we will not be healthier if we get more numbers more frequently. The article also covers the question of the extent to which the FDA will regulate vertically integrated blood testing labs differently than labs who buy their machines from third-party vendors.

Regarding the second question, I queried a friend in the pharma industry. Here’s what she had to say…

A couple of things struck me, the first being the powerful friends/supporters that she has on her Board. I really do believe that this has insulated her from some rather obvious scrutiny. The second was the FDA representatives who appear to not have a clue regarding their own regulations.

Who was the first to expose what Elizabeth Holmes and David Boies were up to at Theranos? According to Wikipedia, it was coronaheretic John Ioannidis (excommunicated Stanford professor, author of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, and colleague of Dr. Jill Biden, M.D., Ph.D.). Dr. Ionnidis, M.D., Ph.D. pointed out the red flags in February 2015 (a little later than this blog!), which was well before the October 2015 Wall Street Journal article that destroyed the company.

Circling back to the main topic… is it acceptable to run criminal trials in which defendants can be forced by judges to wear masks?

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Longest terms and conditions document for consumers? (177 pages at National rental car)

Signing up to the National Emerald Club since the U.S. is mostly out of rental cars and Hertz, Avis, and Enterprise are no longer sufficient….

How long are these Ts & Cs?

Is this a record? Here’s some of the stuff that I’m supposed to read now and remember perhaps a few years from now when it is time to visit Nicaragua:

On the other hand, maybe it will be sooner. The ruling party there seems to realize, as we do, that preventing citizens from hearing opposition voices is the best path to stable government: “Fifth presidential candidate detained in Nicaragua; 15 opposition leaders now detained in total” (CNN, June 21). Certainly, Nicaragua can teach us a lot about how to control COVID-19. As of June 22, the country had suffered 188 COVID-19-tagged deaths in a population of 6.5 million. Compare to New Jersey: nearly 26,377 deaths in a population of 9.3 million (Census 2020, though it is unclear if Census documents account for the undocumented.)

Readers: Who has ever seen a longer terms and conditions document from a company offering goods or services to consumers?

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Cost of being continuously stoned: $7,400 per year

From “Medical marijuana patients just got huge win as N.J. court says company must pay injured worker’s bills” (nj.com):

The New Jersey Supreme Court dealt medical marijuana patients a big victory Tuesday, ruling unanimously that a construction company must pay for an injured employer’s medical cannabis bills.

The decision upheld an Appellate Division ruling from January 2020. That court said Vincent Hager’s former employer, M&K Construction, must foot the monthly bill for medical marijuana he uses to treat injuries he sustained on the job in 2001. As of early 2020, those costs were about $616 a month, according to court documents.

New Jersey’s medical marijuana patients have long complained of high costs. Prices have averaged between $350 to $500 an ounce. The law allows them to purchase up to 3 ounces each month, though most use less.

Only in America could we figure out a way for a literal “weed” to cost $7,400 per year per person!

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