Landis on Armstrong - the gory details

Suitcase of Courage wrote:

if all your friends jumped off wrote:

That is no justification at all for Armstrong's (presumed) actions.

Which is presumably why he prefaced his post with "I'm not justifying blood doping."

And then proceeded to post an attempted justification.

BOHICA wrote:

B33R G0GGLES wrote:

I just spewed barf all over my computer screen.

+1

Sagarin just exposed himself as being a total Armstrong nut-barnacle.

Except that, being the complete moron you are, you overlooked the fact that "Sagarin" didn't right that. B33R Goggles culled a quote from Phil Sherwen and presented it as though "Sagarin" had written it. I merely cited a paragraph because it had a comment in it from a TDF commentator that Armstrong had lost 20 lbs. If you had read any of my posts on here, you would've seen that I'm one of Armstrong's biggest critics. No way he wasn't doping.

Moreover, as far as the Wikipedia citation, I wasn't lending any credibility to it, just simply pointing out that the actual weight on the bio was culled from a presumably accurate source in the third citation. And that weight changed depepending on which tour he rode in. The allegations merely summarize the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Lance. There's nothing new there. It's just simply hard to believe that anyone thinks this guy was clean his entire career.

xlev2 wrote:

Sagarin, I think the drop in Treasury yields is the red flag. TBT is looking like it might actually go up. Do you think the March 09 lows will hold?

It is a red flag. And credit constipation is stirring again at the short end. Gold is a harbinger of sovereign credit risk more than of deflation. The yield curve is flattening in the middle and with short rates at essentially less than 0%, I don't see how we can get the "typical" inversion that signals contraction. The ECRI's WLI is rolling over, housing is double-dipping, M3 is contracting big time, manufacturing has stalled, all of this "growth" was illusory, inorganic, inventory replenishment grounded largely in the temporary stimulus measures and the Fed's counterfeiting operation. Plus, state and municipal cutbacks are looming.

I think the fat finger day was the big boys saying this cyclical bull within a secular bear is coming to an end. Moreover, BP is a huge credit issue more than an energy issue, with all of its special purpose off-balance sheet entities. Its tentacles, like Bear Stearns, are everywhere.

Still, I expect the Fed to maintain a presence in the mortgage securities market and to keep the printing presses rolling going into the election cycle. And some inane form stimulus III is on the horizon. Hard to say exactly where the market goes from here with all of that chicanery, but I don't think we will bottom until next year, and I have a hunch about how low we will go. We have definitely not seen the nominal low. Still, the entire global economy is bubblicious. My time frame is about 5 minutes these days, and I don't take anything overnight.

When the dividend yield on the S&P 500 is roughly equal to the PE ratio, that's probably a good time to start buying stocks, IMO.

... for the long term.

I also think we could see unemployment up near 11-12% before we peak, but the numbers are so goosed that it's hard to believe we accuse China of opaque economic reporting. The real rate of unemployment is around 16.5% and probably heading higher.

Just my opinion. Due for an oversold bounce here, and if we don't get it, this market is really sick. Ok, no more about this stuff.

I think the key things to remember are:

1) Floyd Landis is a proven liar

2) Lance Armstrong has never failed a drug test

3) Other than Landis' imagination, there is not ONE shread of evidence that his wild accusations are true

Did it ever occur to anyone on this board that with the depth of doping in the sport that at the top level of cycling is a level playing field?

The spectators get to see more super human performances and the best athlete wins.

Landis doesn't care about the sport and is a desperate man he is going to overshadow the tour with doping allegations I want to watch the tour and not care about the stupid drug accusations every year.

Why are cycling fans so obsessed with doping when football fans don't really seem to care much at all? I've never seen anyone incensed about drug abuse or steroid use in NFL players. Nor have I seen anyone suggest that the superbowl is a sham because of rampant drug use in it's players. Not saying people shouldn't care about doping, just thought it was an interesting difference.

Long Run wrote:

Did it ever occur to anyone on this board that with the depth of doping in the sport that at the top level of cycling is a level playing field?

The spectators get to see more super human performances and the best athlete wins...

Did it ever occur to you that having doping be virtually a necessity to compete at the top level forces a terrible choice upon every potentially top level athlete:

Dope and suffer potentially horrifying physical consequences down the road as well as know that I am cheating to win

or

Don't dope and drop out of the sport (or play at the equivalent of local 5k fun runs).

And you're OK with this?!? I truly cannot imagine anyone who has a son or daughter with some talent and big dreams being OK with this.

The heat is on wrote:

there is enough evidence to support/convince that he isn't on drugs

The bulk of that is based on irrational belief whereas there's far less of that on the other side.

Funny that someone who can't parse out the oh-so-narrow difference between "write" and "right" (and typed "depepending") is calling anyone else a "moron." You posted the quote to support your contention, you didn't make it difficult at all to see between those lines. Say what you will, you've cultivated the appearance of playing both sides of the fence, at the very least. You probably aren't bright enough to help that, so I guess you can be excused and dismissed.

Michael Faraday wrote:

3) Other than Landis' imagination, there is not ONE shread of evidence that his wild accusations are true

FAIL

Long Run wrote:

The spectators get to see more super human performances and the best athlete wins.

Nope, the best responder out of the best athletes win. Often the one with the best team funding to afford the best doping system, as well.

Michael Faraday wrote:

I think the key things to remember are:

1) Floyd Landis is a proven liar

2) Lance Armstrong has never failed a drug test

3) Other than Landis' imagination, there is not ONE shread of evidence that his wild accusations are true

If you read through the article posted, you'll see that Landis says US Postal was funding its doping program by selling off a lot of its extra bikes. Trek confirmed that Postal was selling its bikes online, and that it wasn't happy about it. Hmm, why was Postal trying to get off the records money?

Anyway, this at least confirms that there's some factual basis behind Landis' accusations.

I don't know whether Lance used to dope, or still dopes. So I don't know whether Landis is finally, now, telling the truth. But here are a couple of things that we DO know, beyond a shadow of a doubt. (And please correct me if I'm wrong.):

1) Landis doped in order to win that remarkable comeback stage and then the Tour

2) He lied and lied and f'ing LIED about having doped for the next several years. He created a "free Floyd!" website, essentially. He begged and begged people to have faith in him and his truthtelling capacity

3) Lance has been under suspicion for a long time, and therefore under especially--some might say excruciatingly--close scrutiny. The French in particular were after him in a bad way. Yet, despite all that, he's continued to win Tours and stages and the doping allegations have never been proved

4) Landis, having begged people to believe that he was clean when he won the Tour--begged them for YEARS--has now suddenly spun 180 degrees and insisted that well, he WAS doping, which is to say, he WAS lying all that time. He's asking us to believe him now: asking us to believe that he is and was a liar. If we are willing to believe that, then we're forced to believe--or so goes the logic of his current stance--that Lance is a doper and a liar.

I don't know what the truth is about Lance. I really don't. But I DO know that anybody who now sucks hard on Landis's current story and calls ME a Lance fan-boy is full of sh-t.

The fan-boys are the ones who are willing to swallow Landis's current story lock, stock, and barrel.

What's the harm of suspending judgment for a little while?

Sagarin, thanks---sorry to interrupt the rousing debate about Lance v Floyd. Although I don't sense a true collapse is imminent, I do think a crash relative to expectations is quite likely. No further room for QE. I continue to like the currencies where the goverments that house them (China and Brazil) respect the cost of capital. Fairly soon, Washington will follow Wall St's lead and begin fear-mongering the citizenry into a "Third Depression" so that professional politicians can once again ramp up spending. In the meantime, the buy-the-dip long and wrong crowd will continue blaming the Europeans and high-frequency trading.

Actually, Landis still claims that his positive at the 2006 Tour was FALSE. He might be doing this for legal reasons because he defrauded so many people regarding his case. He knows that no one believes him, but he still has to look out for himself legally and financially, so it would be harmful to admit the 2006 positive. The guys is a weasel and a liar. There is no way to know whether he's telling the truth about anything because he says whatever he needs to say to serve his current purposes.

It is amusing to hear everyone suddenly believing every word Landis says now that he is accusing their bete noire, Armstrong.

Suitcase of Courage wrote:

There is no way to know whether he's telling the truth about anything because he says whatever he needs to say to serve his current purposes.

It is amusing to hear everyone suddenly believing every word Landis says now that he is accusing their bete noire, Armstrong.

When federal investigators get involved, you know that the smoke leads to a fire. That's the most damning implication in all of this.

BOHICA wrote:

Funny that someone who can't parse out the oh-so-narrow difference between "write" and "right" (and typed "depepending") is calling anyone else a "moron." You posted the quote to support your contention, you didn't make it difficult at all to see between those lines. Say what you will, you've cultivated the appearance of playing both sides of the fence, at the very least. You probably aren't bright enough to help that, so I guess you can be excused and dismissed.

So sorry many of us type fast and don't feel the need to edit. So sorry I thought we were mature ladies and gentlemen on here, and I didn't, myself, feel the need to point out your misspelling of the word barnacle (quite unlike yourself), which really reinforces the point about your moronic nature in hindsight. So sorry that I didn't merely cull the part of the quote that was relevant to answer another's question, because I didn't foresee that some adolescent would merely borrow and contort the last sentence, which, truthfully, I hadn't even read, to lure another moron into misconstruing the "spirit" of my argument without checking. So sorry it was only in hindsight that you had to go back and read through the thread to see that, at the very least, I'm not an Armstrong "nut-barnacle." And what kind of a moron uses such a term anyway?

Lastly, my assertion all along was that Armstrong doped, but it's a moot point, because they were all doped. If they were all clean, Armstrong still wins, especially with the same engine in a lighter body. Of course it's merely my opinion as I've firmly stated. At the very least, read through the debate in full next time before you make a sophomoric, what you think is a clever remark. You're the one who got busted here and then tried to put forth a one-off sideshow to distract from your own lack of initial credibility, not to mention, hypocritically, pull out the old grammar diversion in an attempt to enhance said lack of credibility. At least make sure you can measure up to your own standards first.

xlev2 wrote:

Sagarin, thanks---sorry to interrupt the rousing debate about Lance v Floyd. Although I don't sense a true collapse is imminent, I do think a crash relative to expectations is quite likely. No further room for QE. I continue to like the currencies where the goverments that house them (China and Brazil) respect the cost of capital. Fairly soon, Washington will follow Wall St's lead and begin fear-mongering the citizenry into a "Third Depression" so that professional politicians can once again ramp up spending. In the meantime, the buy-the-dip long and wrong crowd will continue blaming the Europeans and high-frequency trading.

True that. Good post.