spinline.net: The Blog

So Drudge has linked to this story headlined “Local Woman Convicted of Drug Fraud Joins Obama at the Podium.” Obama had given some speech at the Rose Garden calling for Congress to extend unemployment benefits. He has a few unemployed people up there with him as props. Now it comes out that one of them, Leslie Macko, has some sort of drug conviction in her past, which is apparently supposed to be scandalous.

Well, who cares? I guess that’s a little embarrassing for Obama, but OK, shit happens. What really caught my eye was this snippet from his speech:

We need to extend unemployment compensation benefits for women like Leslie Macko, who lost her job at a fitness center last year, and has been looking for work ever since. Because she’s eligible for only a few more weeks of unemployment, she’s doing what she never thought she’d have to do. Not at this point, anyway. She’s turning to her father for financial support.

God forbid!

Seriously? Obama thinks that government benefits should be extended so that people don’t have to turn to their own families for help?

The “not at this point, anyway” is telling. See, once we hit a certain age, it just isn’t dignified to ask for help from Mom and Dad. The social stigma of taking government handouts has now sunk below that of turning to your own parents for support, I guess.

Given Obama’s base of support among the coastal urban under-40 set, it probably wasn’t a bad idea for him to say what he did.

With this post, I will hereby attempt rectify the severe case of spinline.net The Blog withdrawal that I have undoubtedly subjected my legions of readers to the past so-and-so months. So hop in, strap yourselves in, and let’s GO, BABY!

• So first off, head to Conservative Donnybrook for my thoughts on Harry Reid and the upcoming crash in China.
• John Siracusa posts a Mac-geek-licious retrospective of his decade of epic reviews of Mac OS X releases, dating back to the early developer previews. It’s weird to think of those early days of the Return of Jobs, when the jury was still out on whether the Mac as a platform could survive at all, the success of the adorable new iMac notwithstanding. “Classic” Mac OS was very, very long in the tooth and extremely crash-prone, as I can recall from bitter experience. It annoys me just thinking back on it. GRRRR! But the success of the upcoming OS X was hardly assured, and it did seem plenty ambitious, slow, and resource-hungry at the time. Anyway, glad it all worked out.
• So Sam Raimi and Tobey McGuire are out of the Spider-Man franchise, and the whole thing is going to be rebooted. No Spider-Man 4 in 2011. Well, this strikes me as a pretty horrible move for the studio. But still, Spider-Man 3 was pretty disappointing, and maybe there wasn’t much left in the tank, so perhaps it’s for the best to get a fresh take on the franchise, even if it doesn’t have much of a chance of matching the success of Raimi’s. Anyway, as long as I’m feeling all nostalgic, I’ll tell a little story. The first time I heard anything about Raimi’s Spider-Man was when the preview came on before The Phantom Menace — opening night, midnight showing. It was awesome, and it blew everyone in the audience away. Every geek in that audience, including me, sat spellbound through that trailer. At the end, McGuire’s voiceover went, “Who am I? I’m Spiderman.” The logo flashed up on the screen, the music pumped, and the theater erupted in cheers. It was really an electrifying moment of mass communal geek bliss. That trailer was definitely the high point of the evening, given what a pile of horseshit Episode I turned out to be.
• Bob Murphy notes that Adolph Hitler doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions that drops down on the Google home page when you type in a search. Steve Sailer discovers another name Google doesn’t seem to recognize: Pat Buchanan!
• That’s all for now, bye!

People over 30, do you remember a short-lived soda from the early 80s called Like Cola? Despite heavy TV advertising it failed dismally. I was trying to remember the jingle for some reason so I scrounged up some YouTubes of their ads.

I remember these commercials for the “flavored by the cola nut” angle they pushed. Duly programmed, I’m pretty sure I (unsuccessfully) lobbied my parents to buy this stuff, insisting that we experience the delicious genuine flavor that only real Brazilian cola nut extract can provide, or something.

Anyway, what I did not remember until I saw these was how heavily the caffeine-free aspect was played:

(See also Pepsi Free.) What the heck is going on here — was there some kind of anti-caffeine health scare going on the 80s or something? Well, if it isn’t our old friends at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, America’s Greatest Public Health Menace!

A quick Google search returns these two snippets — the first, from the book Junk Science Judo:

The CSPI petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November 1979 to label coffee and tea for caffeine content and, once again, issue warnings to pregnant women. …

The FDA soon caved, issuing a 1980 warning to pregnant women to minimize their consumption of coffee, tea, and colas — even though, the FDA acknowledged, the evidence wasn’t conclusive. … Baby rats had been born with missing parts of toes when their mothers were force fed caffeine at the human equivalent of 24 cups of coffee per day.

The CSPI’s campaign unraveled soon enough, though. In June 1981, a review panel at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences concluded that the pregnant rats may simply have been poisoned by the high doses of caffeine. This caused them to lose weight and the weight loss itself affected the development of the baby rats.

And there’s this from a book called Uncommon Grounds:

More consumers … were switching to decaffeinated coffee as health concerns peaked in the early 1980s. … health fears escalated, so that even the average coffee drinker worried about what his morning cup might be doing to him.

Throughout the late 1970s, Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI) had hammered away at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to remove caffeine from the list of drugs “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS). … In November 1979 Jacobson filed a petition with the FDA asking for warning labels on coffee and tea packages reading: “Caffeine May Cause Birth Defects.”

Remember that this Michael Jacobson of CSPI is the same anti-meat douchebag who bullied fast food restaurants into ditching delicious and nutritionally benign beef tallow as their frying oil in favor the dangerous hydrogenated vegetable oils that they are only now abandoning.

Anyway, it’s kind of weird to think that the health-conscious were so fastidious about avoiding caffeine back then. These days your average organic tofu-eater would take double espressos through an IV if he could.

Richard Spencer has a pretty good postmortem on the semi-defunct webzine Culture11.

I’m sad to see C11 go, as their heterogeneous collection of conservative-libertarian contributors seemed to promise to enliven the conversation beyond the intellectual cages in which such GOP organs as National Review lock themselves. But it never managed to find its voice.

Spencer suggests that C11 had its plug pulled by its funders Bill Bennett and Steve Forbes for other than financial reasons, speculating that they might have been a bit befuddled at the direction Culture11 had taken. Of course, if C11 had succeeded in cultivating an alternative rightist voice, the plug might have been pulled even sooner, I reckon.

Meanwhile, head to Conservative Donnybrook for my latest thoughts on the stimulus!

Greetings all. Today, the Drudge Report sports this exciting teaser: “Boy, 3, saved by puppies…” which links to this story, headlined “Puppies save three-year-old boy lost in freezing Virginia woods.” Sounds promising!

So what was it that these four-legged heroes did to rescue our wayward toddler? Did they haul him out of a pit of quicksand? Stoutly fight off an angry bear? Leap through a plate-glass window, knock over a telephone and dial 9-1-1 with their wet little noses?

No, they snuggled up to him when it got cold. Let us leave aside the obvious naked self-interest involved in these puppies exhibiting totally normal snuggling behavior (the puppies were cold, too!). When I see a headline promising to tell the story of puppies “saving” a little boy, I demand Disney Movie of the Week-scale heroics! What we see here, my friends, is nothing less than the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Now, I am as gratified as anyone that this little boy was recovered safe and sound by his grateful family. All I’m asking for is a little truth in advertising. How about this: Puppies, boy snuggle in furtherance of mutual aim of heat preservation.

You know what we could do with less of? Saturation coverage of the space station urine recycler. This story was worth about 5 seconds of snickering over on cable news. It’s time to move on.

From the New York Times:

The old-fashioned school bake sale, once as American as apple pie, is fast becoming obsolete in California, a result of strict new state nutrition standards for public schools … They require that snacks sold during the school day contain no more than 35 percent sugar by weight and derive no more than 35 percent of their calories from fat and no more than 10 percent of their calories from saturated fat.

Outrageous! Now, I’m all for healthy eating, and I would be delighted if parents were less wont to load their kids full of sugary snacks and soft drinks. But these people need to lighten up!

In Chula Vista, Calif., near San Diego, sales plummeted at Hilltop High School’s multicultural food fair, an annual fund-raising event for the foreign language and global studies departments that has traditionally featured bratwurst, breadsticks with marinara sauce, apple pie and root beer floats. “This year was really hard,” said Jade Wagner, a senior, referring to the half-bratwursts and nondairy diet root beers.

Half-bratwursts!? Save the children!

A multicultural food fair without the food is just a multicultural fair. And folks, that’s just boring.

What’s more, under these nanny-state brownshirts’ regime, the life-giving, healthful saturated fat in a bratwurst is banned, but a glass of apple juice and a bagel—no added sugar, right?—would be the ideal healthy meal, even if it’s basically the nutritional equivalent of eating pure table sugar. Makes sense!

And the NYT might have mentioned that similar programs have been shown to be useless. The Junkfood Science blog recently had a look at some recent studies which failed to show any benefit from school sugar bans:

… we heard little about the intensive two-year study published earlier this year that was to provide evidence for the effectiveness of the School Nutrition Policy Initiative in reducing childhood obesity. This comprehensive program included every initiative popularly believed to reduce obesity and all of the interventions were in accordance with the CDC’s “Guidelines to Promote Lifelong Healthy Eating and Physical Activity” that are being incorporated into school wellness policies across the country. The program was a total failure. Not only had the children’s “healthy eating” behaviors slightly dropped, but it had no effect on the incidence, prevalence or remission of obesity…

… Given the massive resources, and increasingly intrusive interventions for students and families as school and government officials attempt to monitor and control what young people eat in schools, parents and tax paying consumers might begin insisting on some evidence before continuing to support these programs.

And one last thing: how can you trust anyone who can’t spell “McDonald’s?”

John Schwenkler pens a conservative defense of arugula, and muses on the poverty of movement “conservatives” who scorn it. “So whether we’re Slow Food conservatives, libertarian grass farmers, or gastronomically traditionalist organic-loving liberal foodies, let’s all stand firm against the attempt to treat our diets as just another pawn in the politicians’ scheme,” Schwenkler writes. “Hotdogs, corn on the cob, and warm apple pie are entirely deserving of their all-American reputation – but what good is our freedom if they won’t let us eat arugula?”

Via Dreher, who adds: “Food snobbery is one of my pet peeves. You get it from pseudo-foodies, who turn up their noses at more proletarian fare, but given where I come from philosophically, and the circles in which I run, I more often encounter its reverse: a knee-jerk condemnation of any attempt to stand athwart the Great American Junk Food Conveyor Belt and say ‘Stop!’ as evidence of snobbery and effete liberalism.”

Full disclosure: I don’t even know what Arugula tastes like.