Which leads one to believe that perhaps Dr. Convit and his team are perhaps crusaders. Increasingly, science - particularly government funded science - serves political purposes and finds what the paymasters want them to find. This is particularly evident in Climatology where researchers produce voluminous bodies of work showing that the world is doomed when the actual world conditions show nothing of the sort. The way it works is simple; liberal activists get into controlling positions in science journals and professional organizations and reject papers that do not comport with their views, while promoting those that do. Once a paper is published it is used as a building block for another piece of research finding the same results, and the whole house of cards grows like a cancer, with no rebuttals allowed in the establishment system. Researchers understand this, and tailor their work to fit the new paradigm. It ultimately goes back to an excess of government funding.
It is a house of cards.
At any rate, for the sake of argument let us assume the study is painting a true picture. This prompted
Michelle Obama to say;
"Military leaders tell us that when more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight, childhood obesity isn't just a public health threat, it's not just an economic threat, it's a national security threat as well."
So now being overweight is a military threat!
Not long ago, there were those in the medical community calling for the
removal of children from their parents for being overweight.
Whether Dr. Convit and his team are correct or not is ultimately for science to prove or disprove, but we must ask the question; why are our children fat and stupid?
Why are our children fat and stupid? The answer is Liberalism
The answer is Liberalism.
One of the recognized root causes of obesity in America is the ubiquitous nature of junk food, which is particularly
prevalent among the poor. One must ask why the poor so readily gobble down Ho-Ho's, Ding-Dongs, Fritos, McDonalds, and other horribly unhealthy materials. Well, for starters, the poor enjoy the benefits of food provided by the government courtesy of the Food Stamp programs. Food stamps allow the purchase of such items. This would not be catastrophic in and of itself, but government policy over the last fifty years has accelerated the collapse of poorer families, and single-parent homes find it easier and cheaper to feed the children junk food than to purchase healthy fare and prepare it - and make the children eat it. Single parent households are entirely a creature of liberal thinking, with the sexual revolution and feminism encouraging the notion that men are largely unnecessary and indeed burdensome, and that there should be no stigma on out-of-wedlock births. That, coupled with economic incentives that were a part of the welfare state to have children without a husband, has caused a catastrophe in the poorer communities where children out of wedlock are common and a very harried and overworked mother is forced to care for more children than she is able. Strong families have sit down dinners - broken homes and impoverished families grab something. Fattening foods are easy foods, and they usually keep better than fresh produce or meats.
The Obama Administration is actually advertising for people to accept food stamps. At present, a record 46 MILLION Americans are receiving food stamps. And the Administration
earmarked 80% of its drought relief bill to subsidize food stamps. Michelle Obama may preach healthy eating, but her husband is diligently laboring to fatten the American public.
What is more, liberal hatred for law and order makes doing business in poorer neighborhoods very difficult, and so grocers who would sell food to the poorer classes simply can't afford to do business there. The Obamas have complained about
food deserts, and they are correct, but they never ask themselves why there are such things. It's a matter of economic survival; if crime is rampant profits are not to be made. Anyone who has gone into a quick shop or liquor store in the ghetto sees this; the clerks are usually behind bullet-proof glass. As a result, only gas stations and drive through operations provide food in ghetto neighborhoods, and that food is invariably unhealthy. Liberal theory does not believe in punishing crime but rather the innocent and productive, and lax prison terms and excuses are the order of the day. Crime rates skyrocketed in poor neighborhoods after the Great Society decimated the black family and liberal theory of social justice gained ascendancy.
Chew on this; a modern liberal ambition is the reduction of America's energy usage. Obama's Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in 2008 “
Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” and repeated his call for high gas prices
in an interview with Chris Wallace. High energy prices are a goal of the environmental movement, and, given the Obama Administration's promotion of "green energy" - a non-sequiter while taking such actions as killing the Keystone Pipeline and stopping drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, it is obvious that Mr. Obama shares the same desire. But what does expensive energy mean? Fatter people.
Calories are a measure of heat, and a nation paying more for heat (or for shedding heat) has less to pay for top quality foods. The poor are particularly hurt by this as they often live in older structures with leaky windows and inefficient heating systems. How do they stay warm? They use more blankets, burrow in, and eat more. More food makes them warmer. Junk food makes them VERY warm. And they won't waste money on gasoline to drive out of their way to a store to buy better food. It should also be pointed out that poorer people often have more people living in their domiciles, and they often spend more time outside. It is only natural for them to eat more, to squirrel away caloric acorns for winter.
And let us not forget the ethanol mandate for gasoline; this has driven food prices up worldwide. Higher food prices make the poor more likely to not purchase, say, corn-fed beef, or the better whole grain breads. The processed foods are cheaper.
And weight is a sign of affluence in the black community, as slaves or, later, laborers were thin. There are a
number of black people concerned with the growing obesity problem in the black community. But black culture is a sacred cow to the Left, and the mainstream will not criticize any aspect of black culture.
The poor suffer the most from unemployment, and work is one of the ways most people burn off calories. The Obama Depression has seen to it that far too many Americans are out of work, and it should not surprise us to find more fat people - particularly among the poor. Oh, and we had been importing laborers from Mexico for a long time, and the Democrats (and Establishment Republicans) have insisted we need them to "do the jobs Americans just won't do". Well, those jobs would go a long way to diminishing the obesity problem in America, particularly in the poorer areas. But the Left wants a flood of immigrants to vote their way and hopefully water down the American culture that they so despise.
Still, one must ask why the general community is getting fatter; much of this explains the poor (although single parent homes are not always poor). There are many answers.
Homes where both parents work function much like broken homes; in either case the family just doesn't have time to sit down together for healthy meals. Kids are raised in daycare and shuffled around to endless extracurricular activities, and grabbing a burger or bag of chips is the only way to go about things. Women were told by feminists that they could not be complete without a career, and so the nature of the family changed. That change leaves children vulnerable - especially where eating is concerned.
Another aspect of this is guilt. Liberals promote guilt as the Catholic Church promotes the Sacraments, and guilt is a powerful motivator for overeating. I suspect many children of liberal parents "punish" themselves by overeating and by eating the wrong foods. If a child is told by his teachers that the world is ending and it's all his fault (Global Warming), if a child is frightened and guilty, he or she may wind up eating to salve the wound. Liberals serve up huge platters of steaming hot guilt on a regular basis, and wonder why children become depressed.
And they refuse to simply let kids be kids. Every activity must be structured, every endeavor supervised and controlled. Kids used to go outside to play stickball on their own, but now they are stuck in schools until late, and then shuffled off to T-ball or whatnot where often there is no scorekeeping (to avoid hurting their self-esteem) and under the ever-watchful eye of the authorities. That is absolutely no fun; why play a game without keeping score? Who wants to be watched by authorities at all times? The loss of freedom that modern children endure is horrible from a psychological standpoint, and I suspect many of our children suffer from low levels of depression. They weren't created to be drones, which is what the schools, governments, and do-gooder organizational types want to make them. Better to watch television or play video games; at least there they have some sense of privacy and independence.
Liberals do not believe in free will. They believe that free will is an illusion, and that we are hard-wired into behaviors and under the control of conditioned responses. The Liberal notion of freedom is to open the door to all passions and desires but restrict their expression through laws, rules, outside authority. They erect guardrails and let the person act within the rails any way they see fit. This is quite different from Conservative thinking which believes in free will and the free moral agency of the individual. Conservatives believe children SHOULD be free to play as they choose in unstructured settings, because it teaches them how to exercise this free moral agency. Liberalism is cloying and smothering. Is it a coincidence that in this era of pre-planned activities for children they have grown fat? They are like animals in the zoo, only with unlimited amounts of food at their disposal.
There are other liberal causes of obesity. Consider the obsession with anorexic-type thinness among models and movie stars. Children know they cannot live up to that expectation, yet they are told by the entertainment industry (which is controlled by liberals) that they are nothing if they don't weigh as much as a carrot. Why bother trying to maintain a healthy weight? If a healthy weight is fat by glamorous standards?
In the end, it is the triumph of Liberalism in American culture which has led to the obesity problem. And yet the solution is more government, more regulation, straight jacketing our children into ever tighter control.
Which is the whole point. Those in the intellectual classes on the Left (not the "useful idiots" but the thinkers and planners) instinctively understand this. They realize they can ride this tidal wave of blubber to the socialist utopia they hold in absolute faith. If children are too fat and it makes them stupid and unhealthy, does that not justify government intervention? Does that not justify government overriding the family?
And if being fat makes you stupid, is that not a desirable course for liberals? After all, it generates more Democratic voters.
I am mindful of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World; the socialist structure was predicated on classes, with actual physical modifications being performed on embryos to stratify the classes. Some unfortunates had alcohol put in their amniotic fluids, and these were the Epsilon-Semi-Morons. Their purpose was to be the grunt labor class, and they were then conditioned to be happy as such. Despite the war on fat being waged by many on the Left, I wonder if they wouldn't be happy to have a few such fat and stupid children around. They could certainly count on them growing up into good Progressive voters.
But now the fight over who controls the food supply is more important. Control food and you control the population. America's agricultural system is the epitome of America's capitalist system, with small businessmen feeding the nation. That cannot stand if one is to "remake America" and the family farm must be absorbed into coops or large corporate farming. If government can show a crisis then control of those farms can be justified, and once the government gets in then the public only eats if government says they can eat. It's how tyrants throughout history have controlled their populations.
Is the obesity epidemic going to be used as justification for control of family farms? Does the Left want us to be fat, poor, liberal, and stupid ?
Food for thought.
