spinline.net: The Blog

Good stuff up at mises.org from the recent Austrian Scholars Conference.

First, you’ve got Dan McCarthy of AmConMag speaking about American exceptionalism and the Right.

Download Daniel McCarthy at ASC

And then there’s an interesting talk by the historian Marshall DeRosa on the constitutional implications of the bailout, specifically with regard to Article I, Section 10, precluding states from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts” — a power assumed to be denied to the Federal government as well. Needless to say, it’s basically a dead letter now.

Download Marshall DeRosa at ASC

And much more at Mises Media!

There’s a post on the NYTimes Well blog that points to a study that purports to show that encouraging children to drink water leads to good health outcomes:

Adding school water fountains, distributing water bottles in classrooms and teaching kids about the health benefits of water can lower a child’s risk for becoming overweight, a new study shows.

… At the beginning of the study, there were no statistical differences in the prevalence of overweight kids in the different groups. By the end of the school year, however, children in the schools where water drinking was encouraged were 30 percent less likely to be overweight.

Then, later, this:

Why the water intervention influenced weight risk among the schoolchildren isn’t entirely clear. Overall, the study didn’t show statistically meaningful differences in body mass index scores or overall consumption of sugary beverages. However, juice consumption did appear to drop slightly in the water group.

Well, that’s probably it right there. The way the study measured “consumption of sugary beverages” was from self-reporting by the kids, so you can throw that right out the window. But fruit juices, like soft drinks, are pretty much the worst thing you can consume, metabolically speaking. And it seems likely that if children are being pumped full of water they’re less likely to be drinking other beverages.

So my take, in short, is that if this study has any validity, the water project worked because the excess drinking of water meant that these kids drank less of everything else, most of which is bad.

Also, the study doesn’t mention what it was, exactly, that they were telling the children about “the health benefits of water.” I’d love to know.

Rather than propagandizing them on the supposed benefits of excess water consumption, how much easier would it be just tell kids to avoid fruit juice and soft drinks?

(And yeah, I know that “eight glasses a day” and the like was already a health fad. But this looks like this could shape up to be a separate albeit related childhood health fad.)

All, I would like to officially unveil an important new service of spinline.net: The Blog whose debut — at the risk of sounding immodest — is very likely to change the world forever. It is RightGuide, the directory of right-wing podcasts and online multimedia.

I did this because there isn’t really a good central place where you can find a list of right-of-center online media. If you search for “conservative” in the iTunes directory, for example, you get a lot of stuff from guys recording their own do-it-yourself Hannity-esque diatribes in their basements. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I thought it would be nice to have a list of podcasts from established magazines, think tanks, and the like.

I tried to categorize things as well as I could, but some of the stuff is hard to classify, or falls between categories. Other than that, the listings are in no particular order.

I’ll be adding more stuff as I find it. Do let me know of errors, broken links, or omissions.

In the grand tradition of Comics in My Pants and Garfield Minus Garfield…

Madness is rare in individuals -
but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

It’s The Nietzche Family Circus! Go there immediately.

Is one in every 50 children really homeless?

See Kausfiles for the answer! (hint: no.)

Wow, Ross Douthat has replaced Bill Kristol as a token conservative at the Times. This is a big improvement. (That’s not sarcasm, it really is a big improvement.)

Personally I think they should have hired Paul Gottfried but I’ll take it.