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.

A Few Stats

By now you've heard about the August Jobs Report. And that it shit the bed. Surprise, surprise. It's even worse than the report that got Dr. McEntarfer fired from BLS. This report was worse. Way worser.

Ok. We all know it was Sleepy Joe's fault. All of it.

But, just so ya know, Here's the report. Some news organs give you more than the top-line results. Most don't give the number that really matters. As you likely do know: this report, and most government stats, are derived from sampling. No government is going to pay for monthly census data. Yikes.

The thing about sampling: it has errors. Census can, too, but that's another episode. Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don and his merry band of fascists bitch and moan when the Damn Gummint data doesn't support their rhetoric. When you're a rabid right wingnut, that happens a lot.

Now, if you go through the report's tables, you'll see all the disaggregated numbers. What you won't see are confidence intervals for each number. What you can find is this

Statistics based on the household and establishment surveys are subject to both sampling and nonsampling error. When a sample, rather than the entire population, is surveyed, there is a chance that the sample estimates may differ from the true population values they represent. The component of this difference that occurs because samples differ by chance is known as sampling error, and its variability is measured by the standard error of the estimate. There is about a 90-percent chance, or level of confidence, that an estimate based on a sample will differ by no more than 1.6 standard errors from the true population value because of sampling error. BLS analyses are generally conducted at the 90-percent level of confidence.

Of some note: typical stat analysis uses 95% CI. Why use 90%? Because the CI is wider. Why is that a good thing? Because the purpose of the CI is to set the interval in which the sample estimate is 'guaranteed' to contain the true population value; for 90% of samples. Sort of. So, the wider the interval, the greater the chance the estimate and true population value will co-exist in that interval. But that also means that the sample estimate can vary over a wide range and still be 'signficant'. CI and stat sig are widely and wildly misused.

So, what do we have for the Jobs Report

For example, the confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 136,000. Suppose the estimate of nonfarm employment increases by 50,000 from one month to the next. The 90-percent confidence interval on the monthly change would range from -86,000 to +186,000 (50,000 +/- 136,000). These figures do not mean that the sample results are off by these magnitudes, but rather that there is about a 90-percent chance that the true over-the-month change lies within this interval. Since this range includes values of less than zero, we could not say with confidence that nonfarm employment had, in fact, increased that month. If, however, the reported nonfarm employment rise was 250,000, then all of the values within the 90-percent confidence interval would be greater than zero. In this case, it is likely (at least a 90-percent chance) that nonfarm employment had, in fact, risen that month. At an unemployment rate of around 6.0 percent, the 90-percent confidence interval for the monthly change in unemployment as measured by the household survey is about +/- 300,000, and for the monthly change in the unemployment rate it is about +/- 0.2 percentage point.
[my emphasis]

As you see from the text, SE swamps reported change in employment. Frequently. And so it is for August.

The Greatest Threat - part the seventeenth

If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.
-- Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don/2020 on the problem with collecting Covid-19 data. Today, he's got his Office of Data Integrity to deal with such unAmerican activities.

You can be sure that VoA, what's left of it, won't be telling us about the climate change satellites about to be destroyed. Those days are over.

The two satellites provide precise global measurements of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that is warming the world. The data has been used in climate reports issued by both the United States and the United Nations and has been an important resource for other countries as they assess ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Without funding to operate them, the two missions are at risk of going offline along with three older missions — known as Terra, Aqua, and Aura — that are also still producing valuable climate and weather data. Another imperiled mission that monitors the atmosphere, Sage III, has been attached to the International Space Station since 2017.

A satellite can be decommissioned in a number of ways. The youngest missions potentially affected by the president's proposed budget cuts, OCO 3 and SAGE 3, would likely just be turned off, since they are on the space station.

It's easy to call "hoax" if there's no data to expose the lie. A very Trumpian way. The only way.

Stupid is as Stupid Does - part the sixth

Remember this tracing from 2020? It's now X, and closed so I can't see it (you can if you twit I guess), but back then, as twitter, this was an interactive tracing of covid from Florida beach locations to the (mostly) East Coast. Correlation was about as close to 100% as one might expect. Covid went where the beach crowd came from. DeSantis didn't care.

The Fla. surgeon general has gone all batshit crazy, as we should have expected. A quick search reminds that prior to 1909/1914, bad drugs were just commodities. "The damn gummint can't tell me what I can put in my body!! It's my body, God damn it!!"

How long before Fla. makes all opiates and narcotics and psychedelics legal? I mean the inverse is logically correct? Eh?

Don't take your ass to Fla. Not if you want to MAHA. All them preventable diseases will go ever where.

Die Motherfucker!

Well, the sub-GED crowd in Fla. has gone totally batshit. I don't believe for an instant that Meatball Ron actually earned any of those degrees he claims. He's a walking, talking idiot. Just like Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don. So now we get the epitome of stupidity. It will, alas, take some years for the death and destruction, mostly, to be manifest. But, in due time, the sub-GED knuckledraggers will kill themselves off. The sooner the better, naturally.

Florida plans to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren, rejecting a practice that public health experts have credited for decades with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.

And, of course, the Office of Data Integrity (Fla. division) will, first remove all the 'bad' data and thence stop collecting any at all. Party like it's 1829!! Yeehah!! Or, as the former Joni Ernst put it

For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

To be fair, sort of. Joni isn't alone in that kind of stupidity. While she's a Lutheran (according to the innterTubes), that's been the position of the Christian Scientists (last I knew, the Home Church is in Boston) forever. Tom Lehrer: "A Christian Scientist with appendicitis".

In the good ole days. If you were accused a Witch, you could prove your innocence with the swim test. If you sank (and, of course, drowned), you were innocent. If you floated, you were a Witch. And, I guess, burned at the stake or similar. That's a great catch, that catch-22.

Make War, Not Love

You've read The Musk Ox opine on population collapse if we (read: upper class white people) don't start pushing out babies like bad colds. He, his own self, is breeding for his own country. He's an idiot.

Like it or don't Ehrlich was right back in 1968. He was just off, a bit, on the timing due almost wholly to the exponential growth in petrochemical fertilizers. I don't recall where I read it, and it was a lot of years ago, but one large corn farmer put it this way: "the soil is just there to hold up the plants". IOW, the soil has become empty of nutrients and the only way to grow crops, at scale, is with these petrochemical fertilizers.

Now comes more. It's been known for some decades that subsistence Brazilians have relied on slash and burn farming. Well, the chickens have come home to roost. Of course, the dictators of the world will claim that this is all woke science lies.

Less rainfall doesn't just mean less water for plants and animals. As the forest becomes drier, it becomes more prone to wildfires, which, in turn, eliminate more trees. The region has been plagued by slash-and-burn agriculture, in which fires are used to clear big tracts of land for ranching and farming. Sometimes, these fires burn out of control.

Here's the dire truth: the kids of today's 20-somethings may be able to live, but their kids? Not so much. Ole Mother Earth has a finite carrying capacity. Some estimate we're already there A steady reduction in population is the only way out. A plague or nucular war might end up being the only way out. The former did nicely in Europe long ago, and the latter in a couple of towns in Japan more recently. And the notion that most of the population can live the 90210 lifestyle?

There are a few ground truths in econ. The groundest of them all is that the individual's craving for consumption is infinite. What does that mean, in this day and age? That exponential population growth and infinite consumption are fatal. It also means, should we be wise, that economies can keep spewing ever more widgets to a population that is fixed, or even slowly declining. There's a reason that the pharma world loves them their Seniors: infinite demand. Of course, it was the Damn Gummint that handed pharma the Mother Lode by requiring Medicare to cover all drugs (very nearly, anyway). Yeeha!!!

Reactionary Futurists

One of the niggles floating around the drug approval process, and went on lightning speed during Covid's first year or so, is that FDA is too strict in approval. Of course, those self-same nigglers complain that mRNA vaccines are Toxic, and should never have been approved by any metric even though mRNA has been studied and tested for at least 60 years. It didn't spring out of some Big Pharma lab in just a couple of months, paid for by Operation Warp Speed taxpayer Bongo Bucks, with no understanding or testing. But, then, neither Bobby nor any of his bootlickers know shit about any kind of science. Well, beyond the efficacy of bleach wrt Covid-19.

And, naturally, the Office of Policy Integrity strikes again, with the interim appointment of the CDC head.

Mr. O'Neill has long criticized the Food and Drug Administration as too cautious in approving drugs. He has suggested that the agency approve drugs as soon as they are demonstrated to be safe, even without data on effectiveness.

More than once, these missives have offered the strict approach to getting us back to those thrilling days of yesteryear: repeal the damn 1962 amendments that forced FDA to adjudicate efficacy. But, naturally, that will require some proof that those above the grade of sub-GED knuckledragger will believe. OTOH, there were/are a lot who bought the bleach therapy approach.

Unleash the power of American industry to crank out tons of snake oil every day!!! Hark!! Do I hear the song of Executive Order? Why, yes. Yes I do. Coming to a pharmacy near you, real soon now. It can't hurt, right? Will any of Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don's congresscritters have the balls to say no way? One can only hope. The evidence is pretty clear that Red State congresscritters are geldings (what's the word for a gelded mare?). I suppose we can't count on them.