No wonder Republicans hate them! Planning and responsibility — who has time for that crap? Especially when it costs money.

Who needs review and ethical approval of drug trials, after all? These are just things we put in our mouths or inject into our veins, so sure, let’s just go crazy and shoot up whatever. It can’t hurt. If a rich tech vampire endorses it, that should be good enough for everyone. Especially if they are testing it, just not on Americans — those brown guinea pigs on Caribbean islands are good enough.

Heavyweight tech investor and FDA-critic Peter Thiel is among conservative funders and American researchers backing an offshore herpes vaccine trial that blatantly flouts US safety regulations, according to a Monday report by Kaiser Health News.

The vaccine—a live but weakened herpes virus—was first tested in a 17-person trial on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts without federal oversight or the standard human safety requirement of an institutional review board (IRB) approval. Biomedical researchers and experts have sharply rebuked the lack of safety oversight and slammed the poor quality of the data collected, which has been rejected from scientific publication. However, investors and those running the trial say it is a direct challenge to what they see as innovation-stifling regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.

Yeah, that’s their motive: skip the whole structure of regulatory fol-de-rol and fast-track testing by throwing it on a non-American population. The work was done to benefit a pharmaceutical company, which was plugged in the manuscript that the author attempted to publish (conflict of interest much?) and was done on a tiny population. What work was done put subjects at risk and also had negligible statistical power, but hey, the PI, Halford, and Thiel were stickin’ it to the Man and bypassing those onerous regulations, so it ought to get extra brownie points for that.

Other researchers and experts strongly disagreed with Halford’s stance and handling of a live, attenuated virus vaccine, which can cause infections in the uninfected or severe side-effects in those already infected. “What they’re doing is patently unethical,” Jonathan Zenilman, chief of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division, told KHN. “There’s a reason why researchers rely on these protections. People can die.”

Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner during the Obama era, agreed. “There’s a tradition of having oversight of human experimentation, and it exists for good reasons,” he said. “It may be legal to be doing it without oversight, but it’s wrong.”

You can read the reviewer’s comments on the paper for yourself. They are polite, professional and scathing. A sample:

4. The author presents results of 2 experiments on humans, the first one a safety study that he conducted on himself. While self-experiments are generally permitted, these still require IRB review. Please provide assurance that this protocol was IRB reviewed and that the participant signed an informed consent. Unfortunately, data on 1 person does not prove safety of a product.
5. The subsequent Phase 1 study was conducted on a Caribbean island nation. Again, no information about IRB for this study is provided, and the trial does not seem to be listed on clinicaltrials.gov. The data for efficacy are based on self‐report on participants who were questioned by the author and other staff before and after. As the author states “self‐reported cessation of genital herpes… should be viewed with skepticism.” Agreed.
6. On Figure 8, there is an impressively small p value. However, how it was derived is not shown. Given that there were only 17 persons in this study, it is unlikely that an appropriate statistical test for performed to obtain this result.

Someone also saw right through the whole game.

6. Flying U.S. trial subjects to St. Kitt for the immunizations and then flying them back to the US is ethically questionable. Who is giving the immunizations in St. Kitt and who is following them medically when they return to the US? Where is the clinical protocol based? Is this an end run around the FDA?

It is true that IRBs are a pain in the butt, and sometimes you just want to scream that they are unnecessary — that you know how best to care for your subjects, you have years of experience, why do you need to document basic stuff that everyone in the field knows you have to do? Well, just imagine that a Peter Thiel gets hired by your university. That’s why we have to go through the nitpicky rigamorole, because there are bad guys looking for excuses to do stuff you would never imagine doing.

For another example of disastrous lack of planning and oversight, look south to Houston. Texans are notoriously defiant about regulations and little things like zoning, so Houston grew willy-nilly, with industry flourishing for the short term with the relative lack of demands for safety and disaster planning, and factories and chemical plants sprouting little clouds of residential housing around their dangerous facilities. I’m sure it made commuting convenient, and also helped pay for desirable amenites like schools, but still…would you want to live next door to a bomb?

In Crosby, Texas, there is a place called the Arkema chemical plant where they work with something called organic peroxides. This plant is located amid a residential and business district where, remarkably, human beings live and work. If the cooling systems in the plant fail, as they apparently have, these organic peroxides can explode. A 1.5 mile radius around the plant has been evacuated.

The state and plant owners have been lying lately about the hazards

“[The Harris County fire marshall] said that they don’t expect like a shock wave kind of explosion,” Matt Dempsey, a data reporter for the Houston Chronicle, told Maddow. “That’s in contradiction to the expert said who said we’re sitting on a powder keg type of situation here.”

“Experts on one side are saying it’s a huge thing, and I have the government officials and the company saying it might not be that big,” Dempsey continued. “It’s hard to tell for sure.”

Dempsey went on to detail a back-and-forth he’d had with Arkema’s CEO, who refused to make the plant’s inventory public and who hasn’t answered questions about whether the plant has industry standard fail-safes that deplete the stock in case of disasters like Hurricane Harvey.

Oh, no, they say, it’s safe — that big container of highly reactive peroxides isn’t going to explode if neglected and without power. It’s fine. You can trust the CEO who’s not saying anything about their safety measures or even what’s stockpiled there.

Guess what? This morning, it exploded. Twice. And there are concerns that multiple storage sites means that more explosions will occur. But don’t worry, while tons of toxic chemicals are now pouring into the flood waters, we can all hope they’ll catch fire and burn.

Still, the company said Wednesday, “the most likely outcome is that, anytime between now and the next few days, the low-temperature peroxide in unrefrigerated trailers will degrade and catch fire. There is a small possibility that the organic peroxide will release into the flood waters but will not ignite and burn. … In the alternate, there could be a combination event involving fire and environmental release. Any fire will probably resemble a large gasoline fire. The fire will be explosive and intense. Smoke will be released into the atmosphere and dissipate. People should remain clear of the area.”

The Associated Press reported that Arkema was previously required “to develop and submit a risk management plan to the Environmental Protection Agency, because it has large amounts of sulfur dioxide, a toxic chemical, and methylpropene, a flammable gas.”

Good luck, Texans. Your water is poisoned, your neighborhoods have been washed away, and what’s left is on fire, with clouds of sulfurous black clouds in the air. Yeee-hah!

These are human beings suffering from the consequences of generations of irresponsible neglect — where business has flourished at the expense of people’s long term health and happiness. We can blame all of this on the Republican party, which has built its popularity on this kind of contempt for government and regulation.

This is probably going to end up being the costliest disaster in American history. Who do you think is going to pay for it? Not the shareholders in the Arkema chemical plant. Not the legislators who shirked their responsibility. Not the rich capitalists who took advantage of the lax regulatory environment in Texas. It’s going to come out of the pockets of the victims.

Hurricane Harvey could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history with a potential price tag of $160 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from private weather firm AccuWeather.

This is equal to the combined cost of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and represents a 0.8% economic hit to the gross national product, AccuWeather said.

“Parts of Houston, the United States’ fourth largest city, will be uninhabitable for weeks and possibly months due to water damage, mold, disease-ridden water and all that will follow this 1,000-year flood,” said AccuWeather president Joel Myers.

The Federal Reserve, major banks, insurance companies and other business leaders should begin to factor in the negative impact this catastrophe will have on business, corporate earnings and employment, Myers said.

That last paragraph says what is wrong with this country. Oh, gosh, the bankers, insurance companies, and CEOs are going to suffer so much! Screw ’em. They’ve been exploiting the people who are now actually suffering for decades.

I’m a bit fed up with people who turn immediately to lawsuits to get big money for slights, but this one is different.

• I’m not the one being sued! Yay! That changes one’s whole perspective, I tell you what.

• It’s Sargon of Akkad being sued. It’s hard to be sympathetic, sorry to say, but if it was another bullshit suit by people angry about being called mean names, I would be.

• This is not a bullshit suit! He’s actually been caught dead to rights on copyright infringement.

Here’s the person doing the suing to explain it all. Sargon just simply uploaded her video to his monetized channel, no commentary, no satire, just lazily retitling a copy to get mo’ money.

Note too, that in that first link, there are a bunch of Sargon’s buddies and allies telling him that he screwed up and he better settle, so it’s not just my bias compelling me to pick sides here.

It has been discovered that Louise Mensch made false allegations based on a hoaxer’s claims. Why is anyone surprised?

Louise Mensch is a hack, and always has been. This is not news at all.

The only reason that this is worth mentioning is that she was telling lies about the progress of investigations into Donald Trump, asserting that Trump was in even bigger trouble than he actually was, a story the left wants to hear.

The hoaxer, who fed the information to Taylor by email, said she acted out of frustration over the “dissemination of fake news” by Taylor and Mensch. Their false stories about Trump have included a claim that he was already being replaced as president by Senator Orrin Hatch in a process kept secret from the American public.

“Taylor asked no questions to verify my identity, did no vetting whatsoever, sought no confirmation from a second source – but instead asked leading questions to support his various theories, asking me to verify them,” the source said in an email.

Louise Mensch is a fake news source, and her work reinforces the false claims by Trump that his opponents are all liars, even as she disseminates anti-Trump stories. Seriously, people, she is a discredited source. What are you going to do next? Express shock that the Daily Mail and Weekly World News are garbage newspapers?

Go home, prop your feet up on the La-Z-Boy, and watch TV news, it’ll never steer you wrong. Don’t forget — when things go wrong, it’s not your fault, and you can just blame those dang Millennials for everything. You’re the greatest and America is the bestest.

There is a monument to Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota capitol in St Paul? I had no idea. He was an evil old monster, I’m all for removing anything like that — and there is a petition to remove it and replace it with two statues, one of Prince and another of someone chosen by the Indian community. I like that idea.

But then, I think we should regularly change art anyway. The Columbus statue isn’t exactly equivalent to Michelangelo’s David. It was bought and paid for by an association of Italian-Americans about a century ago, and so what it really represents is a wave of self-promotion by an ethnic community that had been discriminated against (which is a fine thing to do; it’s just too bad they picked such a terrible hero), and isn’t necessarily high art. Of course, Michelangelo’s David was also commissioned as propaganda by Florentines to cock a snook at Rome, so motives don’t necessarily mar great art, but does anyone believe this particular statue will stand the test of time? Does anyone think the Confederate statues that dot the landscape are actually significant works of art? Many of them were mass-produced!

I have no problem with old, pedestrian art being taken down and replaced with new stuff — that’s the kind of change that also brings more money to artists, too. And then, a century from now, Minnesotans can look at the statue of Prince and think about whether to swap it out with something new, too.^*

We often revise and modify memorial art. That statue of Columbus originally described him as ‘discovering’ America; that did not go over well in a state with a substantial native population and an even larger Scandinavian population (and, I fear, the sensibilities of the Lake Wobegone set were more influential than the Indians) and it was replaced with a plaque that credited him with initiated the merging of the cultures between the old and new worlds (warning: autoplay video at link!), which is the niftiest euphemism for rape, looting, and genocide I’ve ever seen.

There’s also a Spanish-American War memorial there that had the most revealing change:

The original memorial honored Minnesota soldiers who “battled to free the oppressed peoples of the Philippine Islands, who suffered under the despotic rule of Spain.”

The corrected language reads: “The United States entered that war to defeat Spain, not to free the Filipinos. Most of the battles listed above were fought against Filipinos.”

Yeah, that’s a kinda different interpretation all right.

So sure, let’s not pretend old statues become sacred with the passage of time.

---

^*I know, the music of Prince is timeless, and he didn’t go around maiming and murdering people, but still…we don’t get to dictate the will of our descendants.

I’ve heard of medieval-themed dinner theater before, but this is the first I’ve heard of Confederate-themed dinner theater, where they re-fight the Civil War, with the South usually winning. And it’s a Dolly Parton operation!

Because I had seen the promo video on the show’s webpage, I thought I knew what to expect. It all seems innocent enough until you begin to see relics of the War Between the States: waiters dressed in Union uniforms dropping food on the plates of happy patrons hungry for nostalgia and smiling men on horseback wearing Confederate uniforms. As one colleague pointed out with a mix of horror and delight, recalling the deliberately offensive fictional musical from The Producers, it’s Springtime for Hitler.

Except that this thing has been running for 30 years, and the audience doesn’t see it as parody.

Last time I was in Germany, I didn’t see any Nazi-themed restaurants, or Nazi musical revues. Did I not look hard enough?

It’s time to march on DC and just throw the rascals out.

Charles Pierce is having no more of these Trump supporters.

Before we get to the other stuff, and there was lots of other stuff, I’d like to address myself to those people represented by the parenthetical notation (Applause) in the above transcript, those people who waited for hours in 105-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You’re all suckers. You’re dim and you’re ignorant and you can’t even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, something that everybody who can see past the veil of their emotions can see as plain as a church by daylight, to borrow a phrase from that Willie Shakespeare fella. The problem, of course, is that you, in your pathetic desire to be loved by a guy who wouldn’t have 15 seconds for you on the street, are dragging the rest of us toward that end, too.

A guy basically went mad, right there on the stage in front of you, and you cheered and booed right on cue because you’re sheep and because he directed his insanity at all the scapegoats that your favorite radio and TV personalities have been creating for you over the past three decades. Especially, I guess, people like me who practice the craft of journalism in a country that honors that craft in its most essential founding documents. The President of the United States came right up to the edge of inciting you to riot and you rode along with him. You’re on his team, by god.

Sasha Abramsky is wondering what he is: a bumbling dolt out of his depth, an opportunist riding the gravy train, or is he actually, deep down, a genuine Nazi, a white supremacist.

The third possible reason is that Donald Trump—the son of KKK-supporting Fred Trump, the pupil of Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn—actually is, to the very core of his being, a white supremacist, a man who always has and always will divide humanity into hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Trump’s almost pathological inability to do what ought to be the simplest thing in American politics—issue a clear, unambiguous, eyes-looking-straight-at-the-camera denunciation of swastika-waving, weapons-toting Nazis—certainly raises this as a strong possibility. He has certainly never needed Steve Bannon’s or any other adviser’s encouragement to spout his bigoted obscenities. So Bannon’s recent ouster, however welcome, will not address the key problem we’re facing.

I can answer that! We know, and it’s never been the slightest bit ambiguous.

Our moral imperative is crystal clear: we must oppose this man. He must be driven out of office, along with his corrupt cronies. He is wrong, he is incompetent, he is a terrible person with monstrous ideas. And if you are supporting him, you are also a terrible person.

Without even getting into the antic, hateful content of his demented speech, why is he even having this rally? He has accomplished nothing but chaos, and alternates between golfing and having ever-shrinking crowds cheer him.

Today is the first day of classes. I’m thinking I shouldn’t bother presenting a coherent lecture on the basic chemistry of organic molecules, but should just go around the classroom and demand the students tell me how much they love me. And then I’ll go play video games for the rest of the day.

That old Jesuit motto, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is significant, although the age is arbitrarily specific. Shape them early and you can do all kinds of rotten things to the adult. Fundamentalist Christians also know this; we’ve seen the consequences here in the US, where they’ve invested a huge amount of time, money, and effort in school boards and corrupting the educational system. Creationists don’t just spontaneously appear, they are the product of years of indoctrination.

So what do we do about College Republicans? The school year has started, my university has over a hundred clubs (anyone can start one, for any cause or reason), and there are first year students signing up this week for the College Republicans, in a sincere belief in conservative values, and they’re going to stumble right into a toxic atmosphere.

Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?

Ha ha, no.

Our two-party system has us locked into this weirdly limiting binary dynamic, where power is driven entirely by the party qua party, both for the Democrats and the Republicans — we might as well rename the factions the Blues and the Greens. Unfortunately, it means party membership is driven more by gamesmanship and identity and hatred of the opposition than by policy and civil service and sensible leadership. The next generation is not looking any better, either.

Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party candidate pipeline in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely comprises the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP aren’t the hooded Klan members or Nazi-tattooed thugs who presented the most cartoonish faces of hate in Charlottesville, but they are their clean-cut fellow marchers, and the many young right-wingers around the nation who sympathize with their cause.

Alex Pareene makes a terrifying prophecy.

This is the state of the GOP leadership pipeline. In a decade, state legislatures will start filling up with Gamergaters, MRAs, /pol/ posters, Anime Nazis, and Proud Boys. These are, as of now, the only people in their age cohort becoming more active in Republican politics in the Trump era. Everyone else is fleeing. This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the box labeled “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them scared of terrorism, start electing Pepe racists to Congress.

It’s sad. There are some optimistic young people entering the university, and one of the mistakes they’ll make is to join CR and breathe the mind-rotting poison, and next thing you know, they join the staff of the Morris North Star (or its equivalent; it seems to have gone belly-up, but we’ve had a succession of right-wing rags with different names and different editors, all the same) and start writing bigoted drivel to qualify themselves for the wingnut welfare program.

And I can do nothing. The people who ought to be cracking down on this malignancy are the mythical Responsible Republicans, who believe in cautious conservative values, but who, it seems, don’t actually exist. Conservative has become a code word for racism and misogyny.