The Left vs. the Left

Strangely mine is quiet … damn crickets on there

1 Like

They must be quietly reflecting in their safe spaces.

If only those safe spaces were inside of air tight plastic bags…

2 Likes

You can’t sell out when you are the establishment. There is possibly no greater picture of a life-long politician entrenched in a failed ideology than Bernie. ( I know you are aware of this. It just drives me nuts to hear my idiot friends and coworkers talk about Bernie as if he isn’t a useless buffoon.)

2 Likes

Up until a few months ago I had long hippie hair and a big bushy biker beard. Living in Maine, we have our fair share of Bern-feelers, and they all assumed I was one of them. I took great delight in their reactions when I explained that I was not feeling the Bern at all.

I love arguing with emotional leftists, but it is not always the best way to make friends. The best way I’ve found to let them down is to throw them a bone and state that Bernie has many valid criticisms, but absolutely no good solutions.

3 Likes

I can’t stand that old washed up communist, and am very glad to see him totally sell out like he was instructed to do as a weak little troll of a former man.

That said, what you say here is 100% correct. Some of the stuff he bitches about I agree are issues. But nothing he proposes to “fix” it does anything but make it worse.

3 Likes

Minus the air???

What do you expect from someone who never had a real job.

http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-bitter-lesson-from-seattles-minimum-wage-hike/

:lol:

I love how Bernie just bought a 3rd house for a reported $600K because income inequality and all that…

3 Likes

Reading the article it reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend’s girlfriend recently. She said something along the lines of Seattle’s unemployment rate hadn’t been affected by the hike. To which I about about lost my damn mind.

My first reaction was to scoff with derision - which I did. The first words out of my mouth were something along the lines of well, minimum wage jobs don’t really drive Seattle’s economy now do they? The look of confusion on her face … I love it when economic illiterate people try to tout sound bite economics as if it’s deep analysis.

So, I proceeded to explain that the major employers in Seattle happen to be large tech companies, Starbucks, and longshoremen as Seattle is a hub for imports from China and lawd knows the longshoremen union isn’t going to let their workers earn anything under $20/hr. The likes of Amazon and Microsoft don’t really have any minimum wage jobs, and if they did they’re so few that they wouldn’t register on any real metrics. Same with Starbucks (corporate of course).

I told her the minimum wage effect wouldn’t be in the aggregate numbers - they would have to be in the communities they’d effect directly and no one worth their weight in narrative would report THOSE numbers - not at all.

I proceeded to ask her what the unemployment rate was for low skilled workers in and around Seattle? What was the effect on them? I also asked if there happened to be an increase in rents in and around the city? How about the homeless population? Low skilled people moving into the Seattle area from other parts of the country? Shit like that.

I told her that’s where the effects of the law would be felt. She, needless to say, had nothing to say. So, the moral of the story? I am the only known man in history to successfully leave a woman speechless. Lesson learned, fellas :wink:

5 Likes

I’m back! After having some terrible medical issues. You don’t have to be an expert in stem cells to know that America is being sold a bunch of lies. Why did Peyton Manning have to go outside the U.S. to have stem cell therapy in 2011? Only to come back and have one of his best years in 2012. The real backwards thing is keeping this off the market. And the FDA protecting markets for Big Pharma. And why can’t one look outside the U.S. for evidence of this therapy already being used? Try https://www.cellmedicine.com/ and see what they are already doing.

Obamacare was written by the insurance lobbyists so that they could benefit. It is a disaster and was modeled on Mitt Romney’s healthcare in his state.

Big government by and for the corporations is a disaster. But I notice you left out that little detail.

Like the U.S. Why don’t other countries adopt a U.S. healthcare system governed by profits and rising in costs higher than any other countries. And not to mention forcing it’s population into bankruptcy.

I already addressed this…

Citations, please. Specifically show me at least one citation in a PubMed-indexed journal that shows stem cell therapy has “superior results and no side effects.” I will be happy to break down the full study for any citations you provide, and assess whether the claim has any merit or not. But absent a scientific paper to evaluate, I cannot determine whether these claims have any merit.

As for this…

“Being used” /=/ “Proven effective”

If a novel therapy is being used in another country, that doesn’t mean we have sufficient evidence that it actually works. That’s sort of the whole point of research.

1 Like

Try typing in Medistem into PubMed and see what you come up with. Here is a study dealing primarily with expansion of stem cells, which are not allowed in the U.S. as multiplying them with some sort of solution puts the stem cells into a definition of drugs. Number 3 on the Pubmed list under Medistem Scalable efficient expansion of mesenchymal stem cells in xeno free media using commercially available reagents.So until Big Pharma can find a way to patent the procedure it will remain off market so the public has to go outside the U.S. for treatment or continue to suffer.

If a novel therapy is being used in another country, that doesn’t mean we have sufficient evidence that it actually works. That’s sort of the whole point of research.

So the people being treated are either actors or lying. Ask Manning about his treatment. If people are having overwhelmingly positive results is it not there choice to give it a try if they want or should they wait around for Big Pharma to come up with there latest garbage drug? Talk about side effects and safety issues.

See, here’s the problem with asking laypeople to provide scientific evidence of their claims. They have no idea how to read scientific papers, so anything that has a sciency-sounding title is impressive.

This isn’t even a human study with clinical outcomes to show that stem-cell therapy “works” in humans. It’s a cell-culture study and basically all it does is show that their system can grow stem cells…which is great, but it says nothing about whether this will work in humans, how it will impact clinical outcomes, and what the side effects are.

@Aragorn likely can comment more directly on the actual quality of the study since this is nearer his area of expertise, but to my eyes this looks kinda like a junk paper (Figure 5 is laughably stupid, for one point).

Again, I ask: please show me a citation that supports your “stem cells have superior results and no side effects” claim with a study done in humans that has clinically relevant endpoints (physical function, quality of life, hospitalizations, mortality…)

2 Likes

I don’t really have a lot of time at the moment, I’m leaving for a meeting here really quick, but I did skim the paper. I will try to come back to it this evening more thoroughly. You’re largely correct in the paper’s scope and purpose, which means that Zep did not fulfill his purpose like you asked him, but I would not call it a junk paper. The Journal of Translational Medicine is a good journal–but naturally that does not mean that a junk paper could not be published in it. Essentially the authors wanted to show not only that their system could grow stem cells but that it also did not interfere with differentiation or phenotype of the resultant MSCs.

Figure 5 is horribly designed and stupid, but works to show its purpose–the author’s wanted to show ‘no change’ from FCS serum to the new culture media by assessing the phenotype CD markers. Figure 5 shows no significant changes (we think), but it is teeeerrribly designed and you can’t see how big the error bars really are which sort of defeats the purpose of having them. Makes me cringe.

The paper also directly mentions some side effects of stem cells so that’s a swing and a miss on Zep’s part as well.

Ok, so: mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) are stem cells that differentiate into bone, fat, cartilage, neuronal, liver, and pancreatic cells. Naturally, that means that they are candidates for transplant in cases of type 1 diabetes, stroke, liver failure, and problems associated with bone marrow transplant procedures. Specifically, to ameliorate the immune response to marrow transplantation.

There are a number of problems present, but it’s easiest just to quote directly from reference 14 (Wenxin et al., 2014):

Emphasis is mine. The bolded portions should clearly suffice to show that there are problems as well as downsides involved in stem cell therapy. Incidentally this is also a review that indicates the clear world-leading role that USA stem cell research plays, as they highlight the amount of money and the number of clinical trials as well as the indexed citations that USA based research receives compared to other institutions. In any case, back to the study Zep mentioned:

Most of the research on MSC has been done with stem cells cultured in fetal calf serum (also called fetal bovine serum, and abbreviated FCS or FBS). This presents some problems, not the least of which is immunogenicity–in other words, rejection of the stem cells by the host immune system. Clearly, not “risk free”. In any case alternate culture media has been looked for and in the mid 2000s platelet lysate media was developed.

This however had other problems, with the authors of the present paper mentioning several–

  • some inhibition of MSC proliferation (which is a problem for getting therapeutic numbers for injection),
  • batch to batch variation in quality depending on numerous factors and platelet donor characteristics,
  • “proprietary methods” for institutions that are not standardized and lead to quality issues in addition to not being widely available,
  • incomplete characterization of platelet lysate substituents that affect MSC culture quality,
  • and what if any are the roles of heparin and fibrinogen on culture quality.

To address these many concerns with proprietary lysate media, the authors decided to test the results for MSC culture with a commercial platelet media. Therefore they tested cell proliferation rates, differentiation ability, and phenotype to see whether this media was suitable and could replace FCS and the current proprietary blend media. Their results indicate that as far as they can tell the media they used was equivalent or better than FCS for all markers and that the media did NOT affect the culture phenotype adversely, as all CD antibodies registered that the MSC grown were standard compared to FCS–this was the stupid figure 5, which was supposed to show no significant difference across the concentrations. They also report no negative immune response as seen with FCS, which is a good initial sign for safety.

One nice touch of this is that 2 independent laboratories were involved to double check results with different locations, as well as 4 separate batches.

This had exactly zero to do with clinical trials or treatment.