Michelle Obama's secrut liberal plot of encouraging people to drink water

Nocturnal

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Finally the heroes at NRO have uncovered the plot!

How dare this woman tell us to drink more water.

Michelle Obama wants you to drink more water, at least one more glass a day. Frankly, I think it’s great. Sure, the science behind some of her claims is somewhere between iffy and debatable. If you’re not dehydrated, drinking more water won’t give you more energy or cure your headaches, as her office vaguely claims. But it might take up belly space that otherwise would have gone to grape soda, Red Bull, or some other sugary concoction.

Team Michelle won’t admit this is the real agenda, insisting this is just a healthy, helpful reminder from the first lady. “Water is so basic,” she explained from Watertown, Wis., “and because it is so plentiful, sometimes we just forget about it amid all the ads we watch on television and all the messages we receive every day about what to eat and drink. The truth is, water just gets drowned out.”

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Except that’s not really true. According to Beverage Tracker (you don’t subscribe?), in 1998, soda was our No. 1 drink of choice, with Americans consuming 54 gallons of the stuff every year. Today, it’s down to 44 gallons, while water consumption has hit 58 gallons and rising.
Although on one level it may seem as if Michelle is breaking the corporate grip on our drinking habits by celebrating the original no-frills beverage, it’s more like she’s pulling a Ferris Bueller: jumping in front of a parade in progress and acting as if it were for her all along. There’s nothing more mainstream than going with the flow.

We tend to talk about culture as if it’s something produced solely by obvious outlets like Hollywood or publishing. But the trend toward bottled water (which accounts for 21 of those 58 gallons a year Americans consume) is every bit as real a cultural phenomenon as Miley Cyrus’s twerking — even more so. Whenever we talk about ancient Greek or Egyptian culture, we spend an awful lot of time talking about what they drank and ate, we study their pots and pans, and we even write the occasional ode to their urns. There was no popular demand to see Cyrus behave like a bonobo in heat. There’s a very real demand to drink pure water instead of other beverages.

We crossed a milestone in 2006 when, according to the U.S. Census, Americans started drinking more bottled water than beer. Susan McWilliams, a brilliant (liberal) political scientist, lamented this turning point in American culture. “There’s a reason that beer commercials tend to include lots of people hanging out in a room together,” she writes, “and bottled water commercials tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise — even though they are not being chased.”

Bottled water is the beverage for an atomized generation that listens to music in a private-headphone world. Beer is social. “Most people drink beer to lower social inhibitions,” McWilliams notes, “to make it easier to have conversations with other people, to assuage loneliness, to grease the wheels for engaging in what my students euphemistically call ‘relationships’ — in other words, to give a form and excuse for social life. You don’t drink beer to improve your private, individual health.”

This last point is one I can confirm after years of empirical testing.

Indeed, while every brand of bottled water has its own unique sales pitch, they all share one appeal: It’s not common water.

Which raises one irony. Lots of socially engaged young people have started to rebel against bottled water on the grounds that all of that plastic is allegedly wasteful and deleterious to the environment. Some will even note that bottled water is an indictment of the public water system, the same way FedEx and UPS reflect poorly on the U.S. Postal Service. In other words, drinking Fiji water is a kind of lifestyle luxury most associated with elite culture — like eating kale salads and having a home gym. Obama’s water campaign is of a piece with Michael Bloomberg’s notorious efforts to make poor people live the way rich people think they should.

That doesn’t make Obama’s efforts misguided, but it’s worth pointing out that even — or perhaps especially — liberals have a noblesse oblige all their own.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/360095/irony-michelle-obamas-water-campaign-jonah-goldberg
 

BigMattTheHobo

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I see it more as harm reduction without her having to say soda is terrible, thereby alienating people.

Water is amazing.
 

chalupa

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I drink beer by myself all the time, and I've only been divorced once.
 

chalupa

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I think it's a gin night for me tonight, Hendricks with a twist of lime that I grew myselfs.

Oops, hold that. Going to pasta night at the club. That makes it a Moscow Mule night.

I like things.
 

BigMattTheHobo

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Chalupa never tells me about pasta night anymore.


I'm on a hiatus from drinking. Got too drunk a few weeks ago and decided to leave the stuff alone for awhile.

I also quit smoking cigs
 

Nocturnal

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American beer and water are pretty much the same thing.
That's an outdated stereotype. Only the big brands are light tasting these days. US mid sized breweries and micros are as good as anything in Europe. Plus every country I've visited has their version of a light tasting lager style beer, not dissimilar to a Budweiser. (well I guess Germany didn't)

Fun facts. The big American beers were all started by German immigrants who wanted to bring the clean lager/pilsner style beers to the US market. Before that we drank the heavy IPA style British beers. (blech) During prohibition almost all the breweries went under, except for the handful that were able to meet the .5% alcohal limit by using non-malted grains such as rice. Following the end of prohibition Americans had become used to the taste of the lighter rice beers and there just wasn't much competition left in the market.
 

FenderBender

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That's an outdated stereotype. Only the big brands are light tasting these days. US mid sized breweries and micros are as good as anything in Europe. Plus every country I've visited has their version of a light tasting lager style beer, not dissimilar to a Budweiser. (well I guess Germany didn't)

Fun facts. The big American beers were all started by German immigrants who wanted to bring the clean lager/pilsner style beers to the US market. Before that we drank the heavy IPA style British beers. (blech) During prohibition almost all the breweries went under, except for the handful that were able to meet the .5% alcohal limit by using non-malted grains such as rice. Following the end of prohibition Americans had become used to the taste of the lighter rice beers and there just wasn't much competition left in the market.
Typical ignorant Europeans thinking that their own shit doesn't stink. You come over here wearing your European flag shirts thinking that you're better than us. Well you're not.
 

Fero

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That's an outdated stereotype. Only the big brands are light tasting these days. US mid sized breweries and micros are as good as anything in Europe. Plus every country I've visited has their version of a light tasting lager style beer, not dissimilar to a Budweiser. (well I guess Germany didn't)

Fun facts. The big American beers were all started by German immigrants who wanted to bring the clean lager/pilsner style beers to the US market. Before that we drank the heavy IPA style British beers. (blech) During prohibition almost all the breweries went under, except for the handful that were able to meet the .5% alcohal limit by using non-malted grains such as rice. Following the end of prohibition Americans had become used to the taste of the lighter rice beers and there just wasn't much competition left in the market.
Belgians are really spoiled when it comes to beer. German lager is very plain to us and really all tastes the same. I've tasted American beer and to me it doesn't taste less bland than the common Dutch, German or English lagers. If you're ever in Belgium, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I know this sounds like a load of patriotic BS, but it's really not. I hate this country, but one has to admit it boasts nothing less than the best and most varied beer in the world.

If you're ever around, lemme know. I've got a 2011 Kriek in the cellar that'll be just right in about 4-5 years.
 

Nocturnal

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Belgians are really spoiled when it comes to beer. German lager is very plain to us and really all tastes the same. I've tasted American beer and to me it doesn't taste less bland than the common Dutch, German or English lagers. If you're ever in Belgium, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I know this sounds like a load of patriotic BS, but it's really not. I hate this country, but one has to admit it boasts nothing less than the best and most varied beer in the world.

If you're ever around, lemme know. I've got a 2011 Kriek in the cellar that'll be just right in about 4-5 years.
One thing I think you will see here is that thanks to our Microbrew explosion a few years back we have a staggering variety of types of beer available.

Re the lagers, no that makes sense to me. By definition lagers are clean and fairly mild tasting. Belgian beers do seem to be very different than most others offered on the continent. Lately I've been drinking a fair amount of lambics, although they are fairly hard to find here. IIRC most of the ones I've been buying are belgian.

Sadly I won't get back to Europe for a while. We have a 1 year old and another on the way. But the plan is to go over for a month once the kids are 4-5 years old.
 
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