Your weight is unacceptable. Wear this yellow star (overweight people make global warming worse)

Your weight is unacceptable. Wear this yellow star

Snip

There was a letter in The Times yesterday that summed up the new fat politics in all its sanctimonious smugness. “The time has surely come for luggage and owner to be weighed together — and the owner charged accordingly,” said A. Halfwit from Hertfordshire. “This might help to lessen the country’s obesity problem and reduce global warming as a large percentage of the population would have to lose weight or not fly, owing to higher costs.” No, it would mean the fat poor would no longer be able to take up cheap flights, rich fatties being unaffected by this triumph of intelligence and continuing to sit in first-class stuffing their faces across the Atlantic. That is what happens when you reduce everything to a pound note. And, yes, I’ve read the yearly cost of blubber to the NHS and I’ll play the game: provided we apply the same rules to everybody.

...


We listen to these clowns and they infest our consciousness. I can make you thin, boasts Paul McKenna on the cover of his latest book. Yes, and so can cancer. So can a prison sentence. I know a guy did time for serious assault, came out never looked better. My father-in-law, just a teensy bit on the stout side since he stopped playing football, got a terminal brain tumour, sorted that right out. Weight fell off him.

Ultimately, we trade vices, all of us, without exception. Smokers, drinkers, philanderers, fast drivers, hooligans, incompetent DIY enthusiasts, people too dumb to keep the strimmer away from their Wellington boots. Everybody is to some extent reckless or self-indulgent, which is why the world will always need lifeguards and mountain rescue teams.

So what is the answer? Acceptance. Tolerance. “We must love one another, or die,” wrote W. H. Auden, a sentiment that, while impossibly optimistic, still makes more sense than anything yet uttered by Dr McKeith and her army of faeces-sifting fascists.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/martin_samuel/article1299128.ece

or were you just doing a comparison?

Already makes fat people buy two seats. It's annoying and embarrassing.

...you should have to pay for 2 seats. It's just common sense. I couldn't possibly agree with Southwest any more on this one.

the only way for an oversized person to get enough room is to buy two seats -- a person who weighs 400 pounds or more just can't fit into a standard coach seat and they end up sitting on the person next to them if they're in economy seating

on two class aircraft, the oversized person can buy a first class seat

although it often still comes out cheaper to buy two coach seats, if the airline will guarantee they are kept together

i think most very large people have noticed they are very large, but there are always a few cheapskates who figure they can just sit on their seatmate and nobody will notice

those people need to buy first class, buy both seats that they are using, or be put off the aircraft until there is a flight that isn't full

It is striking to notice the difference in western european countries such as Italy, where there is universal health care. When I was there last fall I saw no morbidly obese people anywhere (I was in Rome, Tuscany and Umbria). People there ate meals with more courses than we generally have here. And they drank a lot of wine, too. My friend and I would eat either the pasta course or the meat/fish course, never both. WE couldn't understand how these people could put away all that starch, including lots of white bread, and keep from gaining lots of weight.

From everything I've heard, Naples (a relatively poor, crime plagued city) has an obesity problem.

It's interesting. I was in Sicily in 2005 and did not see morbid obesity. Some people were stockier than others but nowhere nearly as obese as the poor are here. And Sicily is relatively poor. But I did notice in the small towns in the mountains that everybody did a lot of walking and much of it was uphill!

US I saw some big blond football-player type guy and he looked ENORMOUS.

the tiny boutiques near the Piazza Navone were mostly too small for her. She managed to find one sweater that fit her! I am a size 12 so there was no way I could even hope to fit in anything!

Seriously - it was amazing to see that this is just a thin people, and even the most muscular guys I saw were pretty slim by American standards.

I was trying on a shirt in one store and felt like a sausage in a casing, it was so snug. The saleswoman kept insisting I needed a smaller size, and I just wanted to laugh.

It was amazing how well I got by in Italy with barely more than a dozen words --- though by the end of the trip I had quite a few more!

So my guess is you are not from Italy but your relatives were.

My Italian improves when I am there but is difficult to maintain here. I am in a conversation class here that is 3 hours long every Tuesday afternoon. If I did that ogni giorno I would be in good shape, but...

either reading, speaking, or listening to Italian.

That's what I do with my French lessons and it helps greatly.

I just put on my earphones and listened during my 45 minutes on the treadmill. It was very good. The tapes had dialogues which had vocabulary and verb forms in the context of a real conversation. The translation was in my text so I could follow along. I think the dialogues are the best way to integrate the language.

Once we hit Italy it was pretty clear which half of my ancestry I share my appearance with.

"Mysteries of the Middle Ages." There's a whole section in it on how the Romans became Italians. He contends that the Romans of today look pretty much like the Romans in ancient times (judging by their likesnesses on old coins, statues, frescoes etc).

You'll like the book. Lots of fascinating insights. I particularly loved his exploration of the Giotto frescoes in Assisi, where I visited last November. Amazing.

Do Italians eat a lot of processed food?
Are the Italian animals given growth hormones and other chemicals?
Is salt used as freely in their food as it is here?
Do they eat fast food, potato chips, and other snack foods the way USA does?

I will stop there because I have too much going on here to think right now. I know when I was young I was very thin, as was most people, and we did not have fast food or snack foods. We lived in town but raised most of our food ourselves. On one lot, we had our house, a front yard, in the back was our garden, chicken coop and fenced in area, plus a shed and an outhouse, and we still had a play area. Most of our neighbors had the same type of arrangement. That all changed with zoning. Now we are totally dependent on food bought at the grocery store and processed food is cheaper than fresh. Chemicals enhance everything we eat, even the fresh fruits and vegetables are raised from bio-engineered seeds. Very little of what we consume now is really natural. Especially the poor who cannot afford the price of "organic".

We walked or ran (which was something we enjoyed doing) everywhere we went unless it was out of town or my father decided he would take us in THE family car. We played outside, with my mother calling us in for a short time to listen to the radio or watch a tv show just so we would take a moment to rest. Things have really changed in this country in the last forty years, and we wonder why people have weight problems.

Why don't we put a yellow star on prejudiced people for polluting the planet with their stupidity and hatred?

of some people ooze out so readily.