Robbing Peter to Pay Paul - Again

Long time reader may remember what happened the first time Bone Spur Samurai^© decided to dunk on Xi: Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnut Farmers got bailed out to the tune of 32⁺ billion Bongo Bucks in 2020 alone.

Yeah, the Free Market. And, he's said he'll do it again. China's literally stopped buying good old USofA soybeans. Nada. Not a one.

Of course, all those Blue states that make something, as opposed to the extractive industries (and farming is exactly that) in Red authoritarian states, will end up footing the bill. Again.

Thought For The Day -25 September 2025

Well... this will likely go down, so far and it could get worse (as Curly said, "day ain't over yet"), as the biggest shitstorm that Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don has yet brought down on his own self.

The Comey indictment, by his newly minted U.S. Attorney (insurance lawyer in real life). Now a 100% tariff on drugs. Killing healthcare After the mid-terms was cute, but doubling the price of drugs next week? He's as dumb as a sack of hair.

Testing Testing

In the world of Drugs, in the USofA the FDA is the gatekeeper. Until the Ascension of Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don, that has meant Gold Standard placebo controlled, Phase III clinical trials. Now, it is not widely understood that FDA seldom interferes with the conduct of clinical trials by drug companies. In almost all cases, if the Sponsor (aka, drug company) proposes to do something that endangers patients (or is discovered in the course of a trial), then FDA will step in. Otherwise, FDA is happy to let bidnezz piss away money on compounds/trials that are doomed from the gitgo.

Again, in general, final phase (III) trials are almost always placebo controlled, blinded exercises. During the trial, no one involved with the trial (who has some skin in the game) knows what the patients are getting. There's a sub-culture in the drug biz, the Contract Research Organization, which mitigates between the FDA and Sponsors. IOW, while a Sponsor pays for, and usually, designs the trial, it's the CRO which carries out the trial separate from the Sponsor. Often enough, there's also (by various names) a Data Monitoring authority (again separate, but reporting to the Sponsor) which has continuous access to data. The DM may find issues, and will recommend to the Sponsor to modify/halt the trial; usually for futility, but on rare occasions, wonderful results. But the DM can only recommend. The Sponsor is supposed to notify FDA of any Adverse Events as they happen. But that can, at times, by contentious.

Which brings us to this X post from Feuerstein:

The validity of external control arms like the one used by Uniqure is still hotly debated, even as regulators, including the FDA, allow them under certain circumstances. It's been lost to memory, but recall that the AMT-130 study started with a true, sham-surgery control arm that showed no benefit for the gene therapy. It was only after the company reconfigured the study and started using natural history comparators was a benefit observed.

For those who find that gibberish, here's what it means. From the beginning, the Sponsor established a placeco controlled, blinded trial. For some part of that period of the trial, it became known that the therapy fucked the dog. The Sponsor: "what the fuck do we do now!!!!" The answer: 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent control group?' And the Sponsor did. Viola!!! Success!!

Feuerstein's post was, well addendum, to the report that the trial results reported recently were stat sig. That's good. Drug companies, with more aggression recently, have been trying to scrap placebo controled, blinded, PII trials (more so in some areas than others; that's another episode) where the Compound/Therapy is compared to some placebo equivalent (so far as patients and practitioners know) to comparing to some data set representing historical experience/drug/therapy. All the patients get the Therapy. Their response is compared to this historical record. Of course, it does matter what that historical record consists of.

And, it's also worth mentioning: the trial was merely a PI/II trial of a gene therapy; such 'drugs' have a different profile from 'normal' drugs. This is not normally grounds for approval. Huntington's Disease is particularly troublesome.

Feuerstein was just reminding, mostly retail plungers (not the Pros, who mostly know better), to be vewy, vewy cawful believing this result.

By The Numbers - part the ninety second

You want to know who's responsible for political violence? Well, Thomas B. Edsell has gathered the numbers. To the surprise of no one with a brain, it's the MAGAnauts.

He lists many, many studies. The Right Wingnuts come out on top. By a mile. But this is how he writes the punchline:

At 7 p.m. on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was killed, Laura Loomer posted on X:

Charlie Kirk's death will not be in vain. I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I'm going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.

If Trump, Vance, Miller and Loomer have their way, America will take another step toward becoming a McCarthyite state with the ever-present danger that your colleagues and friends will report your offhand quick-reaction social media posts to government authorities.

As terrible as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, this way of honoring it is repellent.

Just what Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don wants: to out do Kim, Putin, Erdogan, and the rest. And slurping up lots of Bongo Bucks for him and his. It's not just an autocracy, it's a kleptocracy. Buy one for yourself today!!

I Told You So - 15 September 2025

What a monument to Tax Day!! Some Right Wingnut psychopath on Fox said the following

Brian Kilmeade, a longtime host on Fox News, apologized on Sunday for comments he made on a broadcast last week in which he proposed killing mentally ill homeless people by "involuntary lethal injection."

"Just kill 'em," he said.

I guess that doesn't apply to Right Wingnut sociopaths?

If you believe he's really sorry, I've got some nicely naturally watered farm land in Arizona at a good price. You can grow lots of soybeans.

mRNA - New Kid on the Block

Whilst doing a bit of letting my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles, I came across this piece by Derek Lowe from 2023. I don't recall if I was a consumer of his writings back then. But it does qualify as a strong fuck you to the RFK crowd. To put it another way: the RFK crowd treats mRNA compounds (not just vaccines) like your average small-molecule drug - Dr. Frankenstein cobbled it together in a beaker in his lab.

mRNA has been in humans forever. It just wasn't until 1960 that the scientists found out it existed. Never before made, my ass. You can't make a vaccine in short order, my ass. 60 years, or thereabouts.

This is a key discovery in getting mRNA vaccine technology to work, and the research along these lines, which had already been going on for years before the coronavirus pandemic, is absolutely a reason why we had effective vaccines available so quickly.

And, just so no one forgets: Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don's OWS had nothing to do with it.

I Told You So - 8 September 2025

Not for nuthin, but AI (as currently implemented) is horseshit. You've read such here a few times before. But... now an AI veteran, is proposing (not for the first time) that the current approach can't work. I could have told you that. Wait... I did.

The current strategy of merely making A.I. bigger is deeply flawed — scientifically, economically and politically. Many things, from regulation to research strategy, must be rethought. One of the keys to this may be training and developing A.I. in ways inspired by the cognitive sciences.

IOW, what we learned in high school: GIGO.

Large language models, which power systems like GPT-5, are nothing more than souped-up statistical regurgitation machines, so they will continue to stumble into problems around truth, hallucinations and reasoning. Scaling would not bring us to the holy grail of A.G.I.

Ah. Another I told you so moment. GIGO. Again. A massive correlation matrix of shit. Way to go Bros.

The government has let A.I. companies lead a charmed life, with almost zero regulation. It now ought to enact legislation that addresses costs and harms unfairly offloaded onto the public — from misinformation to deepfakes, A.I. slop content, cybercrime, copyright infringement, mental health and energy usage.

And, now another I told you so moment: make 'em pay for their externalities. That'll cut into the profit. If there ever is any. (the link has a bunch more links in this sentence; way too lazy to C&P here.)

The cognitive sciences (including psychology, child development, philosophy of mind and linguistics) teach us that intelligence is about more than mere statistical mimicry and suggest three promising ideas for developing A.I. that is reliable enough to be trustworthy, with a much richer intelligence.

He goes on to describe those three ideas. You should read him up. But... I will crow that, taken together, they amount to a RDBMS of ground facts to constrain the correlation matrix. There. I said it. Again. His second idea is nearly explicit:

But as cognitive scientists like Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Spelke and me have emphasized, the human mind is born with some core knowledge of the world that sets us up to grasp more complex concepts.

QED Like any good maths proof.