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.

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!

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.

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.

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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 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.

I’ll tell you what. The next time we send American troops overseas to shield the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from attack from someone like the Iraqi Republican Guard, we need to tell them it’s a package deal. Along with the Privates, Platoons, and Patriot surface-to-air missiles; we need to make it clear that we’re going to send Pornography, Pork BBQ, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. We left those traditions home with us during Operation Desert Shield out of respect for our hosts. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Screw the rest of the world’s peaceful Muslim community, maybe we should have just nuked Masjid al-Haram, (via suborbital trajectory, because it’s the only way to be sure), in retaliation for the al-Qaida attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

On a slightly less hysterical note, can we hope the over-regulators in Manhattan exercise a little eminent domain abuse?

The problem with the above blog’s RSS feed is that its not a full text feed.

The hyperlinks are missing in the full text of  this version of the feed. Nevertheless, I’d much rather read it than the official one.

I really hate Yahoo pipes, with its kludgey and slow attempt at a usable GUI, but this was someone else’s work and it was free. It’s good enough that I haven’t bothered to code up anything better for myself.

Since at least a third of my income this year has been from writing exactly these types of screen-scraping scripts, I probably don’t have an excuse for that. Oh well.

Enjoy.

Louisiana’s governor Bobby Jindal signed House Bill 1272 into law that allows “any church, synagogue, mosque, or other similar place of worship” to exercise control over who may carry firearms in defense of the congregation. That means it would be legal for someone in Louisiana to be a hero just like Jeanne Assam was at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

As you can expect, the left side of the “separation of church and state” crowd doesn’t like this slight relaxation of the laws concerning churches one bit. You’ll get all the usual “blood running in the pews” and “fights over parking spaces ending in gunfire” scenarios that somehow never really pan out as true. I won’t link to that crap, but if you want to find it, they’re calling it the “guns in churches bill”. Knowing that, you don’t need anything higher than a white belt in “search engine-fu” to find all the hand wringing you want.

Let the anti-freedom crowd pick the catch-phrases, and you’re fighting an unfair fight with one hand tied behind your back. I know what I’m going to call HB 1272.
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Jeanne Assam has a blog and a book out.

nola.com published a link to the bill. Thanks, I’m always bashing the MSM for not doing that.

You can find the text of the bill (linked as a pdf) on this page, and it’s a compact 3 pages of double spaced text and the usual wide margins, so you just know it was meant to be read by the voters.

Gibson’s vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his client’s articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement — to compel quick settlements.

Clayton claimed he only published excerpts and links, but since he removed his entire archive, that claim is hard to verify. I suppose the Righthaven business model is to buy the right to sue at a pittance from the legacy media and then send out threating letters with an offer of settlement that’s less than the cost of even discussing your fair use legal defense with a lawyer.

While “fair use” is codified in copyright law, there’s no “safe harbor”, no easy-to-understand rulebook for staying in compliance.

I fully support the rights of a copyright holder, but I’m also a defender of fair use, excerpts with attributional, and deep linking.

The other reason I like him is because he’ll take walk-ins, which is handy if you get flunked on you eye test the day before by the Maryland MVA. The last time I went I had a competent substitute doctor. Since there were no customers, I was able to talk directly to the Optometrist, and I asked when she could fit me in. She said right away, so I asked her if she would provide me with my pupillary distance if I paid her in cash (saving her maybe 2-3% in credit card processing fees, though I’m sure as a professional, she paid her share of taxes in any case). She agreed and then started the exam.

She also showed me how she takes it, and she merely had to read the scale right off the phoropter, which is the big, bulky, “try different lenses until you can see the eyechart” tool. My measurement is 59.9 mm, (though 60 mm is close enough when you get around to ordering.) While optical professionals are required by law to give you a copy of your prescription, the pupillary distance number is left off, even though it you’re going to need it at some point. The excuse is that this is the responsibility of the Optician that actually fits your glasses. If so, the last three Optician I had order my glasses did it wrong (although one used a proper measuring tool after I refused to accept the wrong frame size she chose using a scientific wild-ass guess instead of the tools of her trade).

With my prescription and pupillary distance, I then hit up a few web pages to understand how glasses are fitted, and then I placed my order at an online retailer called Zenni Optical. Getting ready to order, I went over my old, broken glasses with a metal ruler with a millimeter scale. That let me get the proper size of the frames themselves, including bridge the width and the bridge sizes.

There’s about six sites online to order glasses from, so feel free to pick your favorite. At Zenni Optical, at least you can tell that they’re not spending any profits on the site itself, because it’s awful. I spent about two hours browsing the frames before I groked what was going on. The very cheapest frames were like $8, but what they don’t tell you is that not all frames fit all heads. Even worse is the fact that you can’t enter in say, the width of your head or your pupillary distance and be shown only the frames in stock that would fit. Eventually I got it right, but I looked at the return policy to be sure the risk/reward ratio was acceptable to me. It was. Including shipping I could have re-ordered glasses online nine times in a row before breaking even with my last pair of “fitted” glasses.

I’ve shown my pair to several people, telling them I bought them online and asking how much they guess it cost me. Everyone was amazed at the price. My first pair cost me about $12 plus maybe a bit for shipping, (I don’t have the receipt handy). Mind you that’s bare-bones with a UV coating only. There are also “memory” flexible frames, eyeglass tinting and line-less bifocals to chose from. Zenni lets you order a frame only for half the cost of the frame + lens price, so I would highly recommend ordering yourself some spare parts at the same time if you are as rough on equipment as I am.

Even if you’re happy having someone locally to yell at if things go wrong for your primary pair of glasses, I would highly recommend you get yourself a few backup pairs. As a minimum, I’d say that you need a spare pair of eyeglasses in every glove box, every range bag and every Katrina Kit. Nowadays that does not cost a fortune.

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This post was inspired by Linoge’s, though mine is solely based on my real life experiences and is completely payola free. I’m not your healthcare provider and I’m not dispensing medical advice, (and this sentence is a magic incantation meant to ward off a lawsuit).