Big Brother is Watching You Eat
Need more proof that the Government is not only over-regulating people’s everyday lives today, but is likely to be even more intrusive in the future?
DBKP has assembled unassailable evidence that the Government might one day tell you how much to weigh.
To wit.
Ever looked at one of the height/weight charts and rolled your eyes?
Or the more recent “body mass index”?
Even during the flower of youth, while competing in three sports, those weight chart numbers never added up to the coveted “ideal weight”. About our senior year in high school, the following conclusion was reached.
Most people–who after checking those neat rows of intersecting numbers and uttering the words, “I’m at my ideal weight”–are either:
a-suffering from a dread disease;
b-suffering from sort of chemical imbalance which, while not technically a dread disease, will make them wish for the sweet caress of Death’s icy fingers;
c-holding the chart upside down;
d-twisted into the throes of a nasty crack habit; or,
e-the perfect specimen of humanity.
Since perfect specimens of homo sapiens are rare, it was assumed that everyone else fit into the first four categories.
We could never figure out how the only time we were ever at our “ideal weight” was during the middle of wrestling season.
And we knew we didn’t want to spend the rest of our life enjoying a Life Saver and a glass of water for lunch.
It wasn’t until later, after reading of the different densities of muscle, fat and tissue that we understood one of the main reasons for our weight “problem”–at least as the charts saw it.
Obesity is a condition in which the natural energy reserve, stored in the fatty tissue of humans and other mammals, is increased to a point where it is associated with certain health conditions or increased mortality.
Which brings us to today.
Obesity is in the news.
While browsing over at the friendly confines of Jammie Wearing Fool, we noticed the following.
A CANADIAN tribunal has ordered domestic airlines to charge clinically obese or disabled passengers accompanied by an attendant only one ticket to fly, even if they take up two or more seats.
As JWF observes, “I’m sorry, but when you’re running a business and charge a certain price for a seat, it’s fundamentally unfair to expect the company to have up to three people fly for the price of one.”
“If you’re so obese you needs two seats, pony up or find another means of transportation.”
Seemed sensible to us.
Which started us to thinking (thinking tangentially being, we assume, one of the results of a gloriously-mispent youth) about who has the title of “World’s Fattest Man”.
As of July 2007, it appears Manuel, pictured below, takes honors.
Poor Manuel.
That got us thinking about the old Weekly World News, home of the Bat Boy and the candidate-endorsing Space Alien.
WWN always ran a regularly photoshopped picture of their “World’s Fattest Man” and the various twists and turns his life took.
Eventually, the WWN’s WFM met the World’s Fattest Woman and, in true faux tabloid fashion, they married.
Happiness for the masses.
Two of them anyway.
But marriage doesn’t solve all of one’s problems, either in real life or in the pages of the Weekly World News: the World’s Fattest Couple ran into at least one problem, detailed below.
It was never learned how the ensuing legal fisticuffs between the WWN WFC and the Sex Club turned out.
And, though the WWN is no more, we pondered the many tiny snapshots of life chronicled by the former Florida supermarket check-out line staple.
Every week, the Weekly World News managed to make up stories that, for us at any rate, proved that fiction is stranger than truth.
One of the more touching ones we remembered was the one involving the tale of former First Lady and current presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and a homeless baby.
Which got us thinking about Clinton’s chances for success. Would she be able to, in the words Maureen Dowd, “Cry Herself Back to the White House?
If Clinton wins, the ensnaring tentacles of the nanny state will gather strength as HillaryCare, either in one bold leap or incrementally, is attempted.
Since HillaryCare will be paying the freight on all health care costs, the Government won’t want their charges smoking or eating excessively.
Obesity will then cease to become a personal problem and, in that Orwellian/Clintonian near-nanny-state-future, will become a problem with which the government will concern itself.
Like we said, DBKP has assembled unassailable evidence that the Government might one day tell you how much to weigh.
by Mondoreb
[images: tinypic;wwn]
Sources:
* AIO Forum
* Wikipedia – Obesity
* Fare deal for obese air travelers
* News for the Corpulent
Originally posted at:
DBKP@Blogger.
[...] As we wrote in January 2008, Big Brother is Watching You Eat. [...]