spinline.net: The Blog

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.

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.)