Correlation? Causation? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Scientists have identified what they claim is a biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome.

I am not so sure.

What they are describing is a marker for a stressed immune system, and there are any number of conditions that stress the immune system.

What they need to do is look at how this test works for people with other related conditions: Depression, mitochondrial disorders, McArdle's disorder, etc.

Then again, I'm an engineer, not a doctor, dammit!^*

People suffering from a debilitating and often discounted disease known as chronic fatigue syndrome may soon have something they’ve been seeking for decades: scientific proof of their ailment.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have created a blood test that can flag the disease, which currently lacks a standard, reliable diagnostic test.

“Too often, this disease is categorized as imaginary,” said Ron Davis, PhD, professor of biochemistry and of genetics. When individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome seek help from a doctor, they may undergo a series of tests that check liver, kidney and heart function, as well as blood and immune cell counts, Davis said. “All these different tests would normally guide the doctor toward one illness or another, but for chronic fatigue syndrome patients, the results all come back normal,” he said.

The problem, he said, is that they’re not looking deep enough. Now, Davis; Rahim Esfandyarpour, PhD, a former Stanford research associate; and their colleagues have devised a blood-based test that successfully identified participants in a study with chronic fatigue syndrome. The test, which is still in a pilot phase, is based on how a person’s immune cells respond to stress. With blood samples from 40 people — 20 with chronic fatigue syndrome and 20 without — the test yielded precise results, accurately flagging all chronic fatigue syndrome patients and none of the healthy individuals.

The diagnostic platform could even help identify possible drugs to treat chronic fatigue syndrome. By exposing the participants’ blood samples to drug candidates and rerunning the diagnostic test, the scientists could potentially see whether the drug improved the immune cells’ response. Already, the team is using the platform to screen for potential drugs they hope can help people with chronic fatigue syndrome down the line.

They have shown a test for immune response to various stressors, but this does not make it a reliable test for CFS, nor for that matter, does it prove the existence of CFS.

Absent a mechanism, or a more extensive study and comparison to other conditions that resemble, it's very preliminary to claim proof of anything.


^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Linkage

• Here’s How Time Warner Cable Was ‘Ripping You Off’ All Those Years (Motherboard) Yet another reason to hate the cable companies.
• Brutal obit slams Texas man whose life was ‘much longer than he deserved’ (Washington Post) This is harsh.
• We now know why mosquitoes find malaria victims so tasty (Ars Technica) Mosquitos are more likely to bite those infected, increasing the spread of the disease. Nature in all its glory.
• Edward Snowden's New Job Is To Protect Reporters From Spies (WIRED) Not found any feet of clay on him yet.
• Iron Age Potters Carefully Recorded Earth's Magnetic Field — By Accident (NPR) We now have a record of fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field.
• 'Extraordinary' levels of pollutants found in 10km deep Mariana trench (The Guardian) Sh%$ rolls down hill ……… Seven miles down hill.
• Federal Judge Rules Against Presidential Debate Commission ( Independent Voter Network) I don't think that it will stand on appeal, but the commission, which has run debates since 1988, is fairly clearly an explicitly partisan organization created to favor the nominees of the two major parties.
• Love And Money: Marriage The McArdle Way (The Hunting of the Snark) The author is completely unfair to Megan "Math is Hard" McArdle, who richly deserves such a treatment.

This Raccoon Riding on a Garbage Truck Is the Only Thing in DC That Makes Sense (VICE) Kawaii (可愛い), neh?

I'm Afraid to Click Through on the Link

Over at Alicub blog, I came across the phrase "This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written.

Megan "Math is Hard" McArdle might very well be the stupidest f%$#ing person on the internet, and her writing makes my head hurt on the best of days.

If I read This article, might have unfortunate results.

Megan McArdle Gets Everything Wrong

I have, on numerous occasions, noted how the musing of Megan "Math is Hard" McArdle have at best a passing relationship to the facts.

In yet another example, let me point you to a detailed and thoroughly amusing Fisking of her latest drivel on Social Security:

With even mainstream Democrats coming to embrace the idea of expanding Social Security to help address our looming retirement crisis, it couldn't be long before the pushback emerged from conservatives and Republicans.

Bloomberg's libertarian economics columnist Megan McArdle was quick out of the box, with a column published Tuesday titled, "The Left Gets it Wrong About Social Security." You should read it, because it's rare to find so much sophistry, misunderstanding and misinformation about Social Security packed into one article. You can count McArdle's disdain for retired people, seldom expressed so openly, as a dividend.

Read the rest.

It methodically takes apart her assumptions, and shows how they have nothing to do with reality.

Go read the rest of Michael Hiltzik's article in the LA Times.

Linkage

• Let's call him BACKTRACK Obama (Cannonfire) How Obama has reneged completely on his promise of openness
• On civility, again (Matt Bruenig) A truly epic take-down of Megan McArdle
• Where Was Anal Rape Approved in the OLC Memos? (Emptywheel) Marcy Wheeler uncovers a hidden gem of truth from the Guantanamo, that Rahim al-Nashiri is showing symptoms consistent with sexual assault
• State Employment Trends: Does a Low Tax/Right-to-Work/Low Minimum Wage Regime Correlate to Growth (Econbrowser) Spoiler warning!  The answer is, "no".

Here is a drink that you will never see on Maddow, the Alien Brain Hemorrhage: (H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS)

Thank You Megan McArdle………

I frequently write about Meghan "Math is Hard" McArdle, and when I do, I frequently portray her as  one of the most completely useless pundits out there.  (which says a lot)

I have finally discovered that she serves a purpose.  She is an excellent reverse barometer:  If you reflexively disagree with her, you are almost certain to be right.

Case in point, her Op/Ed suggesting that police blotters should be made private.

Because some scumbags on the internet are posting people's mugshots online, and demanding extortion a fee to remove the pictures, she wants to further restrict public records.

My initial reaction was, "I'm against it."

Then I looked at her examples.  They were all hipster trustifarians who got caught with a joint, or some X, or got busted for drunk driving, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and because daddy has some money, they lawyered up and got a deferred adjudication.

We as a society need to have this information, even if there are ratf%$#s are out there who are attempting extortion.

I knew I was right as soon as I knew that I disagreed with McArdle, and on closer examination this was confirmed.

If You Spend the Better Part of a Decade Sh%$ting on a Profession………

It appears to me that if you are going to do your level best to be horrible to teachers, and to make their lives a living hell, it's Probably not a good idea to let them bring firearms to work and to give them military training:

Tennessee has emerged this week as a center of the “the answer is more guns in schools” sentiment following the Newtown, Conn. elementary school shooting.

A member of the Republican-controlled legislature plans during its upcoming session to introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms so, the sponsor told TPM, potential shooters don’t know who has a gun and who doesn’t.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) has said the idea will be part of his discussions about how to prevent a shooting like the one in Newtown from happening in the Volunteer State.

This is not quite as stupid as McArdle's suggestion that we brainwash 6 year old children into gang tackling gun toting maniacs, but it's pretty f%$#ing close.

I am waiting for The Onion to announce mass layoffs, because they can no longer compete with reality.

Megan "Math is Hard" McArdle is the Most Horrible Person in Punditry

In her latest spewing (no direct link, ever) she suggests that we need to train school children to gang rush gunmen:

I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.

Ummm ……… You ignorant Randroid sociopath, you are are unaware of the physical capabilities of a 6 year-old child.

Let me illustrate this with pictures.

This is 8-12 6 year old children:


This is the worst ranked defense in the NFL, the New Orleans Saints:


While I could concede that the Saints (What is with those pink shoes and gloves) might be able to take down an adult armed with a wet noodle, those kids could not take down a llama, or for that matter, the Dali Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet.

Repeating for the benefit of the terminally stupid:

Children with llama

New Orleans Saints:

Dali Lama

And the Dali Lama, and the aforementioned 2 "l" llama,  are both more likely to take down a gunman armed with an assault rifle than are the children.

Why does this child or privilege and political patronage have a job?

Megan "Math is Hard" McArdle Is Worse Than I Thought

Due diligence, what due diligence?

I've always thought of her as a partisan hack, but it turns out that it's worse than that. She is yet another bit of Koch brothers bought and paid for AstroTurf:

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/ The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

There is a line between being a hack, and being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.

If you hire someone while they are paid agents of an entity that they cover, you are making the integrity of your news organization a joke.

I have made the same argument about NPR's religion reporter, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, who interestingly enough is the sister of the multi-millionaire owner of MCardle's employer The Atlantic, David Bradley. (The world is weird that way)

There are some good people at The Atlantic, but even before these revelations, it was clear that giving McArdle a megaphone was a blight on the magazine.

Atrios is an Ill Conceived Son of a Wombat

You see, he's been blogging for 10 years, so in honor of this, he is doing a list of the top ten wankers of the decade, a list I will follow with some enthusiam.

That being said, he is getting above, or below himself:

It's time to begin the weeks long celebration of 10 years of the world's suckiest blog, hosted by yours truly, the world's suckiest blogger. There will be some laughs, some tears, and of course there will be lots and lots of wankers. Some our old friends, the ponies, might make some guest appearances if we put some appropriate snacks out to tempt them. We'll start counting down to the ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE, beginning with roughly daily announcements of the 9 runners up, with #9 being announced today at precisely noon o'clock. The determination of all the winners has been made using the highly scientific system known as "what I happened to remember this morning," though I did give a slight bit of thought on what to emphasize. It's the wanker of the decade, not the wanker of the day, so I'll try hard to reach into the past to remind us of some quality wanking from the Golden Age Of Wanking. Emphasis will be on media figures, though I'm not entirely ruling out politicians or similar. No posthumous awards, excluding some otherwise likely candidates.

(emphasis mine)

I object, I'm the world's suckiest blogger.

That being said, his list promises to be entertaining, if somewhat scary.

Why scary? Because number 10 on his list is Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt.

It's not scary that she is on the list, but it's scary that she is so low on the list.  If she's number 10, I would peg Ms. "Math is hard" at number 3, this could get scary.

Even money says that Tom Friedman is number 1.

Wanker of the Day

Megan McArdle (Note that this is a link to Barry Ritholtz, not the McArdle article, because friends don't give friends links to Randroids).

You see, she's one of those people who read "Atlas Shrugged" in high school (I read the "Virtue of Selfishness, and hated every poorly crafted juvenile word), and never got over it. (She used to blog under the pseudonym "Jane Gault")

She says that Matt Taibbi is wrong when he fingers Goldman Sachs as a politically connected octopus (OK, "that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,"^* Goldman Sachs.) that was front and center in gaming and profiting from the regulatory arbitrage and fraud that enriched their principals, and beggared the rest of us, "for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system."

What's at the core of this is Randroid objectivist bullsh$#. The markets, you see, are brilliant, and so no one person, nor one organization, can game them.^†

It's the same thing that led Alan Greenspan to tell Brooksley Born that, "Wasn't a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him."

You see markets, and all there participants are the epitome of capitalist savvy, and as such, they would never be unaware of others engaging in unsafe activities for their own benefits, and so the only explanation of failure must be collective, so it's everyone's fault, particularly that lay-about mom working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, which makes it no one's fault.

I hope she has someone to cut her meat for her, because I think that the safe operation of a steak knife is beyond her.

^*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
^†This is despite the fact that the currently unraveling software theft case shows that Goldman Sachs has been front-running the entire stock market.

Update on the Santelli Story

So, Playboy pulled the posts, but it remains up at the Exiled, and Mssrs. Ames and Levine confirm pretty much every aspect of the story, though, to be fair, Rick Santelli has disavowed any involvement with any of the AstroTurf sites.

That being said, Santelli also canceled tomorrows appearance on The Daily Show, and is declining interviews, which is a polite way of saying, "That's a fair cop, officer."

I recommend that you read the whole article, if just for the delightful evisceration Megan McArdle's attempted to refute a Freedomworks connection, despite the fact that she, you know, shares bodily fluids a man who was only recently running AstroTurf campaigns for Freedomworks, but finally even she is forced to admit that Freedomworks is hip deep in this:

Meanwhile, I've spoken with Brendan Steinhauser, the chap at FreedomWorks who has helped organize the tea parties. FreedomWorks has been, as far as I can tell, completely open about their interest in furthering the tea parties, which is not surprising because they've been completely open about opposing bailouts since before Obama took office. As Brendan describes it, he and FreedomWorks were calling for demonstrations against the stimulus even before it passed, but he got the teaparty idea from Michelle Malkin's blog. FreedomWorks emailed its members and set up a website to encourage people to join in. This seems like pretty standard political organization tactics.

Ms. McArdle must thank her lucky stars every day for Amity Shlaes, because it's only in comparison to Mrs. Lipsky that she does not come across as a complete tool.