spinline.net: The Blog

Hot Air’s got a great step-by-step exposition of Chris Dodd’s corruption. H/T RS McCain.

Worried about the swine flu epidemic that’s going to ravage the nation any minute now? Of course you are!

So click over to the Heart Scan Blog for the lowdown on vitamin D’s protective effects against influenza. Free sample:

In 2006, Dr. Cannell reports noticing that the patients in his psychiatric ward in northern California were completely spared from the influenza epidemic of that year, while plenty of patients in adjacent wards were coming down with flu. Dr. Cannell proposed that the apparent immunity to flu in his patients may have been due to the modest dose of 2000 units vitamin D per day he had prescribed that the patients in other wards had not been given. …

A similar conclusion was reached in a recent analysis of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey demonstrating that the higher the vitamin D blood level, the less likely respiratory infections were.

Personally, I used to suffer through 2 or 3 episodes of a runny nose, sore throat, hacking cough, fevers and feeling crumby every winter. Over the last 3 years since I’ve supplemented vitamin D, I haven’t been sick even once. The past two years I didn’t bother with the flu vaccine, since I suspected that my immunity had been heightened: no flu either winter.

And so it has been with the majority of my patients. Since I began having patients supplement vitamin D to achieve normal blood levels (we aim for 60-70 ng/ml), viral and bacterial infections have become rare.

New research is uncovering myriad new ways that vitamin D enhances natural immune responses to numerous infections, including tuberculosis, bacteria such as those causing periodontal disease and lung infections, and viruses like the influenza virus. Enhanced immunity against cancer is also an intensive area of research on vitamin D.

Following Kaus’s First Rule of Journalism, “Always generalize wildly from your own personal experience,” I would just add that since I’ve been supplementing with Vitamin D about a year and a half ago with a dose varying from 2000 to 6000 IU per day, I haven’t had so much as a sore throat. Case closed!

Here at spinline.net: The Blog, we strive not only to bring you entertainment, amusement, and thought-provoking commentary, but also to provide important news exclusives.

For example, earlier tonight I went to an American Cause event where Tom Tancredo spoke, and several newsworthy things were said that I will now share.

(I know it’s uncool to say mean things about the iPhone, but the iPhone camera sucks, as you can see here.)

First, Tancredo spoke about his recent UNC speech that was shut down by violent protesters. He remarked that he was relieved that nobody was injured save one — himself: a cop who was escorting Tancredo out of the melee stepped on his foot, breaking his toe. OK, that was exclusive #1. Pretty good, huh?

Second, after the talk a questioner spoke of his belief that the famously corrupt (and currently imprisoned) congressman James Traficant was railroaded or framed because of his unyielding populism or something like that. Tancredo replied that he basically believes Traficant “did it” but then, reminiscing about what a character he was, he recalled how Traficant, being a tall guy, would on occassion grab (short guy) Tancredo’s head in the halls of Congress and give him a noogie. That’s exclusive #2. Rep. Traficant (D-Ohio) gave Rep. Tancredo (R-Colo.) noogies.

Oh, and I also met Bay Buchanan, who seems like a very nice person. That is all.

At the Takimag podcast, Richard Spencer and Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter” seem pretty enthused about the Tea Party phenomenon. (Click the box to play.)

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But for a little perspective, see Kevin DeAnna’s post at Takimag, where he writes:

With all the tea parties, the infighting between the Alternative Right and the non-Alternative Right and all the other drama, the brutal reality is that Obama, the stimulus, and the managed social democracy that we are moving towards are all popular.

Well, that’s true. But the emergence of some kind of meaningful, articulate opposition to the regime has to be a good thing. If the American Right is now represented by the Tea Party movement rather than Sean Hannity telling us all how awesome Dick Cheney is, things are looking up.

See here for my earlier thoughts about the tea parties.

Good stuff on the economy over at the Lew Rockwell podcast.

This week you’ve got Gerald Celente…

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… and Michael Shedlock.

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UPDATE: that’s “depression” as in economic depression, of course.

Click on the boxes to play.

From Robert Wenzel: Is the Mexican Flu an assassination attempt?

During President Obama’s recent trip to Mexico, Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archaeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported.

…

Keep this in mind. The population of Mexico City, where Obama was greeted by Solis, is roughly 8.8 million people. If we assume all the 1,000 reported cases of the flu in Mexico are in Mexico City, the odds of any specific person in Mexico City having the virus is .0125%. And this guy ends up greeting the President, when he is highly contagious? It’s investigation time.

Team name misspelled on Nats’ jerseys. Nice.

You’ve got to admire this organization’s 100% dedication to futility. For their next act, maybe the groundskeepers could plant dandelions in the infield.

The economist Robert Murphy’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal is out. It’s an attempt to overturn the received wisdom about the Depression (i.e. Hoover espoused laissez-faire policies, World War II was responsible for the recovery, etc.) through an Austrian treatment.

This looks pretty good. Murray Rothbard wrote a classic work on the Depression, but I was frustrated by the fact that it ended its analysis with the end of Hoover’s term, when a Rothbardian take on the Roosevelt terms and the effect of World War II would have been so valuable. It also is pretty dense and dry in parts — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a scholarly treatise, after all. But Murphy’s book looks to be a less difficult treatment of the subject while still being analytically rigorous. It’s also gotten effusive reviews from Jeff Tucker and Robert Wenzel.

In case you missed it, I wrote an article at Doublethink touching on the same issues, which I had considered to be the last word on the subject, but apparently this Murphy guy thinks he has something more to add.

P.S. Who would have thought three years ago that a new book about the Great Depression would be so topical? How far we’ve fallen…

I’ve got a post up at Conservative Donnybrook about the tea parties, Krugman, Gingrich… Read it!

Have you ever noticed that when you do a Google search for something, often among the top five results will be something from a site called Yahoo Answers, and it is invariably useless? It’s a place where boneheads post their dimwitted questions and random Internet boobs provide nonsensical answers, one of which is chosen by the original asker or similarly clueless voters as the “best answer.” Meanwhile, Google crawls the page and its vaunted ranking algorithm judges it to be among the most valuable pages on the Web so that it can pollute our search results for years to come.

How many thousands of hours have been lost due to this worse-than-useless Internet offal and its inexplicably high Google rankings?

Ban Yahoo Answers, Obama!

Via the Mises blog, it’s a video of John O’Sullivan interviewing Hayek!

F.A. Hayek Interviewed By John O’Sullivan from FEE on Vimeo.

One thing that strikes me is how good O’Sullivan is on TV. He’s like someone playing a BBC presenter on a Monty Python sketch, except that in this case nothing funny happens.

I am sure everyone is as euphoric as the Street is over today’s surprising bank profit announcement.

But go over to Mish, who wrote just this Tuesday:

Lies, coverups, distortions, and no transparency are the norm for the Treasury Department and the Fed, so it should come as no surprise that Bank Stress Test Results Delayed For Earnings.

The U.S. Treasury Department is planning to delay the release of any completed bank stress test results until after the first-quarter earnings season to avoid complicating stock market reaction, a source familiar with Treasury’s discussions said Tuesday.
…

It’s earnings season and banks are going to pretend they are making money (or losing less than they are), and the Treasury does not want to interrupt those lies with stress test results.

Furthermore, the one thing we know for sure is the longer the Treasury delays reporting and the less detailed information the Treasury provides, the worse the actual results, regardless of what is actually reported.

This is a pretty good one. The AP posts videos to its own official YouTube channel. Some guy embedded AP videos at a site he was editing, and he subsequently got a cease and desist from an AP lawyer, who is apparently unaware that the whole point of YouTube is that you’re supposed to put videos up there that everyone in the universe is encouraged to embed all over the place.

Did this the AP’s law-talkin’ guys miss this language from YouTube’s terms of service?

You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.

OK, so the AP could conceivably have a separate agreement with YouTube that modifies these terms, but:

1. Still. It’s YouTube, people.
2. Occam’s Razor suggests that we should chalk this one up to stupidity.

As long as I’m passing along stuff that’s up at mises.org, I should strongly encourage you all to stop everything and watch this fantastic Peter Schiff speech.

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Good April Fools fare at Taki’s, including this blog post purportedly by NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. The only clue that it isn’t really written by Lopez: it’s coherent.

And then there’s William F. Buckley’s e-mail from Purgatory. C’mon, people… it’s just a joke! OR IS IT!!?!?