Self-centered jackasses, v. XXV

In Ned's Money mag that came today he found a letter from some idiot who said, in response to a query about how one handles children of friends who try to sell one junk food like cookies "for a good cause:"
"Here's how I handle it (smugly). I buy the stuff and then give it away to the lowliest workers at my firm. It makes me feel good, helps the kids and I KNOW the poorly paid employees appreciate it."
Ned rubs his hands in glee at the very thought of this clueless, smug, self-centered, insolent meathead (from Texas--where else?) and begins to see how why our poor tend to be more obese than the wealthy.  

The Need For An International Psychiatric Conference

Arising out of his observations this past week, Ned today announces the need for a new International Psychiatric Conference to address the growing tendency for grotesque fat people to aggressively call attention to their condition. The situation that caused this resolution was this: Ned had occasion to have a pedicure (yes, and let his adversaries and belittlers make the most of it), and he was astonished to see the large (!) number of grotesquely fat people of all ages, that came in for pedicures and manicures, almost exclusively female. Many of these persons were repulsively fat, dressed in tight clothing, but were apparently intent on having their toes colored and their fingernails polished and manicured. Ned can only conclude that this activity made them feel attractive, and they were capable of overlooking the repulsive grotesqueness of their obesity and focus on the banal triviality of the color of their fingernails and toenails.
Ned, not being a psychiatrist or even a psychologist, has no explanation for this bizarre behavior, and so he calls upon his brothers and sisters in the medical profession to explain such aberrant behavior to him. All he can tentatively surmise is that it is easier to get a pedicure than to eat sensibly and exercise.

Warning: Disgustometer Readings High Today

Ned's disgustometer has reached a high not seen since the halcyon days of the criminal Bush regime, when it broke through its casing and had to be rebuilt. The readings today arise out of reports that the nation's obesity levels have reached all-time highs. The top nine obese states are all members of the Old Confederacy + Kentucky, which should tell us something, mainly that these places are generally unfit for human habitation. But we digress.
Ned was reading this news while sitting at his local Starbucks drinking a short Pike's Place. He has noticed that almost no one orders anything smaller than a "grande" which may help explain both an obesity epidemic and an unreported excess of disposable income. But we digress again.
What got Ned's ire raised to nearly unprecedented heights was the sight of so many disgusting fat people, of all ages, sexes, races and persuasions. And this in a state that was 35th on the list of obesity by states!
Another point: those who were most repulsively obese were the ones who seemed to flaunt their obesity by wearing revealing and tight clothing. A girl in her teens wore a tight green top, and she must have been 50 pounds overweight. A man had a tightly-cinched belt and shorts, the shorts exposing legs of staggering flab content, and the belt was cinched such that his roll of fat literally spilled over the belt and lapped on the abdomen below like so many waves on a beach.
And all this at a time when we hear of crises in health care, when 50 million of our fellows cannot or will not afford health care, and, more and more, health care costs are being driven by this epidemic in obesity, all of it avoidable.
ALL OF IT AVOIDABLE. Ned asks again: where is the guardia civil when you need it?

Fixing teen smoking and child obesity the BP way

SUPPOSE YOU HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN A PINA COLADA AND A GINA KOLATA? What would you do?

Now, this absurd question is only slightly less preposterous than an opinion piece in the Sunday Week In Review NYT written by Gina Kolata, a NYT "science reporter." The article is titled, "Whether A Child Lights Up or Chows Down." The piece, such as it is, cites "experts" who debate the relative demerits of both teen smoking and child obesity. They conclude (wait for it) that both are bad.
But before he could even get into the gristle of the article (for there was, sadly, little meat), Ned was irked by the silly use of directional suffixes-- you know, 'sign OFF ON,' 'chow DOWN', 'light UP,' or Ned's favorite blood pressure increaser, 'listen UP.' But let that pass.
The topic of the article was encapsulated in the first sentence "If you had to choose one public health problem to attack, which would it be: teenage smoking or childhood obesity?"
To which Ned immediately replied, why should he have to choose? This is what the logicians call a false choice.
Both are severe health problems and both could be easily addressed.
Let's apply the Chicago-style BP shakedown of the Obama administration (for whom Ned voted) to the problem of teen smoking. Now, smoking kills 400,000 people a year in this country. Philip Morris International alone pays $4 billion in dividends. Ned would apply the BP shakedown to PMI, but in this case you could end teen smoking and save hundreds of thousands of people and their families untold misery.
One could raise the price of cigarettes to confiscatory levels, ban their use outside the home, and prohibit tobacco companies in this country from paying dividends until they pay the entire cost of smoking related health problems.
Now let's apply these methods to childhood obesity, which is tied to an epidemic of child diabetes, and results in tens of billions in unneeded health costs annually..
No manufacturer of junk food would be permitted to pay a dividend until they withdraw any food the Surgeon General and/or FDA determines to be a "material contributor" to childhood obesity. This would include any and all sugary drinks. Childhood obesity could be further addressed by restoring activity to grade schools, introducing healthy school lunches to replace the toxic fare presently on offer, taxing sodas, banning sugary drinks and 'snacks' from schools (a no-brainer, to Ned) and educating parents on the toxicity of most of what passes for industrially produced food in this country, among other things.
Ned wonders how Kolata got to write such a non-article in the first place. One thinks of all the positive, useful pieces that could have occupied that space, read by millions of people. Because Ned cannot think of a better way to waste a quarter of a page in the Sunday Week In Review section that a piece like this, unless it is to write pieces on the LeBron James "story" or the latest item in the sad saga of Lindsay Lohan.
Oops, they did that too.