Standard Mischief

Magic incantation follows: Not a doctor, not your doctor, not dispensing medical advice. By use of any medical information that I’ve aggregated on my site, you agree to review that information with a real doctor before acting on that information. (end incantation)

It looks like the FDA is adding protection against H1N1 in the 2010-2011 seasonal flu vaccine.

Every year, there’s a new crapshoot to guess which influenza strains are going to be “popular” during this year’s season. Then they try to pick three or so viruses to make the vaccine from. While the influenza virus mutates rapidly, there is some cross immunization between strains, at least in theory.

Can the seasonal flu vaccine provide protection against other seasonal flu viruses even if the vaccine is not a “good” match?

Yes, antibodies made in response to vaccination with one flu virus can provide protection against related viruses. Vaccine effectiveness may be lower than if the vaccine and circulating strains are most alike but the vaccine can still provide enough protection to prevent or lessen illness severity and prevent flu-related complications. (However, a flu vaccine is not expected to offer cross-protection against viruses that are very different genetically from those in the vaccine.)…

This year they picked:
A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)–like virus
A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)–like virus
B/Brisbane/60/2008–like virus.

The vaccine for the 2009-2010 seasonal influenza contained:
A/Brisbane/59/2007 (H1N1)-like virus
A/Brisbane/10/2007 (H3N2)-like virus
B/Brisbane/60/2008-like virus

According to Wikipedia, The H1N1 strain in this years’ batch is the same as in last year’s special vaccine that was oh-so-effectively metered out by the precursor to Obamacare.

I suppose that means that if you did get the special H1N1 vaccine and the standard vaccine last year, you’re only going to grow antibodies from one new strain. If you are like me, and didn’t get the special vaccine, but did get the regular one, you should be building immunity from two new strains.

Hurricane Earl.

It’s not bearing down on us, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. It’s starting to head up the Atlantic seaboard. I’m watching it on Wunderground, (but I don’t really suggest going there unless you’ve got the AdBlock plugin).

Usually, (since before I was born) our hurricanes don’t hit our area until they have dropped down to tropical storms. Earl, a Cat-4, has been forecast to curve up the coast, and then suddenly, this Thursday, take a sharp right and deflate to a Cat-2. If the predicted turn does not happen, it looks like it would hit the Chesapeake Bay dead on Friday evening.

It’s forecast to pass far out to sea, but now is probably the time to make sure you have enough plywood to cover your windows and make sure your katrina-kit is restocked and ready to go. Being ready now means you don’t have to wait in line for hours at the store and it means you can evacuate before the rush.

Update 02sep2010: It’s looking like it will miss me for sure. It’s clobbering the eastern part of North Carolina at the moment. Massachusetts look out!

Way back in October of 2007, an anti-civil rights newspaper editor named Laura S. Washington reworked and resold her NRA slamming story, “Let’s Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands” to another sucker. The major change? She took out the term “People of the Gun” and subbed in “The Gun Army”.

I think the reason why her opinion piece struck a nerve was that she tried to perpetuate the myth that the NRA has a massive army of brain dead zombies to do their bidding, and therefore can out-call, out-email, out-blog and out-argue any rights-stealing elitist asshole in these times.

Grassroots. While Laura complements us in a backhanded way about our activism and our tech savvy, she never really does anything to dispel the myth that each of us get a wheelbarrow of cash from the NRA to beat their drum for them. She never really gets the fact that we do this ourselves, and for freedom’s sake, for free. So when Laura pulled her second-stringer mischief, I decided to jump in the fray. There was already a website for The People of the Gun, I grabbed gunarmy.com. While I’ll admit the whole imitation thing was kinda silly, I still proved our tech superiority, as I went from zero to published website in less than 59 minutes.

Since then, I’ve done next to nothing with the site, so I’m planning to get rid of the thing. If anyone wants it, and if that anyone has any bit of pro-RKBA cred, I’d be happy to hand it over for free.

You’ll get a domain paid up till October, with renewal currently at around $8.99 per year. Privacy is available from my registrar for a mere $3.65 a year, on a per-day basis. You won’t have to expose your secret identity to me, either. Hosting is on your dime, but I’m paying less than $4 a year from my host.

I expect I’ll get no takers, in which case the domain will get snapped up by the “what you need when you need it” crowd just long enough to “taste” it and see there’s no traffic. They’ll then drop it like a hot rock.

If you’re interested, there’s an email address at the bottom of my blog.

Here’s something else I’ve got to thank tgirsch for. The following chart was stolen from (byline), “The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and Even-Handed“:

As you can see, there are three political parties. The economic policies of the Republicans are bad, but not as bad as the policies of “WW II”. The policies of the Democrats are good. None of the other data, from Hoover to Carter, matters at all, so that data has been omitted.

That is all.

—
Original copyright seems to be yglesias at thinkprogress.org. I’m claiming fair use because I can’t make my point any other way.

The graph seems to pre-date TARP 1 and 2, so that data does not appear to have been left off maliciously.

I’m going to take a page from the “Sinister Side of Life” and name tgirsch by name, but not link to him in my blog. Below was a comment I left over there, but the comment appears to not have been accepted. I don’t think anything sinister happened, it’s just that two prior comments were accepted a short time before, and I had javascript turned off.

I will link to the guy that helped me figure out why we issue a special IOU T-bills into the two Social Security “trust funds”, instead of having them just buy negotiable instruments from the marketplace. That person is Karl Denninger

Dan M. says: …I especially like how SM is repeatedly claiming that the lines on that graph are going up as they go down…

It’s actually pretty simple, the line went down, except…

You can’t spend the Social Security surplus to pay down the debt and at the same time claim we didn’t spend the surplus, we saved it in those special, Social Security only IOU-not-negotiable-T-bills. Subtract the surplus unfairly applied, and you’ll find the lines did not go down. Mind you, it wasn’t just Clinton that pulled this accounting scam. Every modern administration has used the same trick.

Also, due to the internet bubble-boom years, (remember pets.com and a million clones burning through their IPO cash and then sinking like a rock?) the Social Security surplus was significantly larger. Clinton can take credit for this though, because Al Gore invented the internet.

It’s still somewhat of a pastebin rather than a post, but I hope you can figure it out.