spinline.net: The Blog

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.

Download

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!!?!?

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.

This Matt Asay guy at News.com has written a post taking Mac users to task for not using Firefox as much as Matt Asay thinks they should. He writes:

In the midst of counting the total number of Linux users in the world, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler reveals a startling statistic:

The Mac only accounts for roughly 7 percent of active Firefox browser installations.

Sure, Windows has massive market share, but I would have thought more Mac users would be running Firefox than their Windows peers. Meaning, I had assumed that whereas Windows users would be content to let inertia guide them to Internet Explorer (IE), a greater proportion of Mac owners would make the choice for Firefox, instead of Safari that comes preinstalled on the Mac, netting the Mac a greater percentage of active Firefox installations.

[...] Imagine what Mozilla’s Firefox could do on a level playing field.

Um… what?

First, what does this 7% number tell us? I assume it is measuring worldwide share of Firefox users. Does that tell us anything? It seems like we would have to know the overall share of Mac users to give that number any meaning.

Over here, we see that the Mac’s share of retail sales, presumably in the US only, is about 13% and was recently as high as 16%. But a lot of computers are bought outside of retail channels, particularly in business where Windows is more dominant, so the real US share is probably much lower.

What’s more, the Mac’s worldwide share is lower still — outside the US they don’t sell nearly as well. And Mac market share has risen dramatically over the past couple of years, so the Mac’s worldwide installed base is even lower yet, probably in the low single digits. This is all kind of rough but at least it shows that saying that “only” 7% of all Firefox users are on Macs tells us absolutely nothing about what percentage of Mac users are using Firefox. Heck, it could be all of them for all we know.

What’s more, who cares? People on Windows switch to Firefox from Internet Explorer because IE sucks. IE has laughable standards support and pathetic security. But the Mac’s preinstalled browser, Safari, compared to Firefox, has better standards support, renders pages faster, launches faster, runs scripts faster, is less ugly, and is better integrated with the Mac’s user interface. About the only thing FF for Mac has going for it is that it runs extensions and you can install new themes, features that you can hardly blame anyone for not giving a crap about. So saying that those Mac-using dullards have failed to see the light regarding FF’s self-evident superiority and general awesomeness is a bit unconvincing.

I’m not trying to rip Firefox here, it’s a perfectly decent browser and in fact I’m using FF for Mac right now because I like some of the extensions. But still. Come on.

Over at the Donnybrook, Karl responds to my previous post, and I respond to Karl’s response to me. I think we basically agree that there probably isn’t any hope, except that maybe there is a tiny bit of hope.