Fat Accompli

The National Health and Medical Research Council claimed recently that within 10 years 83 per cent of Australian men and 75 per cent of Australian women will be obese.

Further, according to the NHMRC, obesity now costs Australia $21 billion a year and has overtaken smoking as the greatest risk factor for causing injury and disease.

Naturally, there were the usual immediate calls by the Ideologically Hidebound With No Sense of Humour Party – otherwise known as The Greens - for a “fat tax” to be levied, primarily on fast food companies.

It is a given that the Greens are motivated, not by a desire to address the issue at hand, but by a pathological hatred of corporations that dare to actually market and sell a legal product well enough to make a profit, so anything they have to say on the subject can be safely ignored.

What motivates others to mimic the insanity of Milne’s Moonbats is more problematic.

Apparently it is a totally non-political, non-partisan, non-ideologically motivated desire to defend the rights of society’s poor.

There is, apparently, a direct socio-economic correlation between income and lardarserry, in so far as rich people are skinny and poor people are fat.

This is because rich people can afford to eat better, while poor people, being poor, are forced to spend hundreds of dollars a week – more than rich skinny people do on healthy food - on junk food.

There is a flaw in this argument that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I’ll let it slide for the moment and come back to it later if I figure it out.

Of more importance, I am in complete agreement with the fat tax lobby, but differ somewhat on where and on whom it should be levied.

A fat tax should, in my opinion, be just that. A tax on fat people. That there is an urgent need for this is indisputable. As an example of the harm that fat people are doing to society, let us look at the airline industry.

If memory serves, RyanAir tried to go down this road a few years ago when it proposed charging fatties more for airline tickets on the basis that fat people weighed more than skinny people and were therefore more expensive to carry.

Although this premise seemed an irrefutable fact, the plan was dropped after a chorus of protests from an assortment of fat people and ’socially progressive’ types masquerading as citizen’s rights groups, play-lunch left political parties and manufacturers of sugar-filled edibles.

The primary argument of the naysayers was that it would be impossible to implement the policy without forcing people to reveal their weight when booking a ticket or lumbering onto a scale at the check-in counter.

Both of these options would cause said fatties untold humiliation and emotional harm.

Whilst ideologically sound, this argument assumed that the rest of us wouldn’t realise that the oompaloompa wearing the re-badged three-man tent was a fatso unless a scale provided us with the empirical evidence.

As somebody who, in a previous life, was obliged to fly often, I can attest that there was nothing more emotionally harming than being told that the penalty for exceeding the excess baggage limit by 300 grams was more than I earned in a month, while the mobile rotunda behind me weighing the equivalent of a small lead mine – but carrying only one suitcase full of cream doughnuts - was waved on through.

None of this, of course, addresses the emotional harm caused to me by having to share half my seat with some sweating behemoth.

Tax the fat bastards, I say. A $20/kilo for every kilo above an officially designated ideal weight would slash hundreds of dollars off ticket prices.

If they are fair dinkum about supporting the global warming scam, Milne’s Mung-bean Munchers should be all over this like a rash because - using the NBN cost analysis method - my back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that the exclusion of 10 fatties from every short haul flight within Australia would save 197.2 tonnes of aviation fuel.

Further, banning all tubs of lard from flying would reduce global carbon emissions by 1,397 per cent, solving the non existent global warming problem in a stroke. If the Greens can’t support that, well, they aren’t worth the recycled toilet paper their policies are written on.

If just one initiative can solve hypothetical global warming, how much benefit could be derived from a few more minor adjustments?

I believe that a further six steps would solve the ‘obesity crisis’:

I: A 10km vehicle exclusion zone around all fast food outlets. If they want to shove burgers, fries and pizzas in their gobs, let them earn it.

2: Weighbridges, equipped with alarms, at all food retailers to alert staff to a lurking fatty. Any customer triggering an alarm would face an automatic fine of $1000 for every kilo above a mandated weight limit.

3: Deny fatties access to television, radio, internet, magazines and newspapers. According to Milne’s Mendacious Morons, fat people are unable to resist the mesmerizing effects of advertising. If they are so mentally defective that they can’t resist advertising, don’t let them see it.

4: Display graphic pictures of fat people on packaging of sugar/carbohydrate rich foods. Smokers have to put up with it, so why not the fatties? Pictures of naked fat people attempting to have sex, finding two-week old slices of pizza in their tummy rolls etc, would be appropriate.

5: As being a disgusting fatso is now a greater cost on the public purse than smoking, fat people to be banned from eating in pubs, clubs, retail outlets, alfresco dining areas, sporting venues, schools and all Federal and State Government buildings. Fat people should also be fined if caught eating in cars when children are present.

6: Obese people to be forced to learn that obesity is a lifestyle choice, freely made. You CHOOSE to be fat, why should I pay for it?

Apocalypse Then

Well, that’s it then. 2012 has gone and we are still here. On the face of it, either the Mayans didn’t read the virgins entrails right, or they got their millenniums mixed up.

I’m a bit furious that I’m still alive to be honest because having first heard of the Mayan prophecy in 1993, I had spent the last 20 years making absolutely no effort whatsoever to make good use of my time on earth.

I mean, what was the point in trying if it was all going to come to nothing anyway?

How was I to know that the Mayans weren’t a bunch of great civilisation building, spiritually cool noble savages in tune with the forces of the cosmos, but a bunch of cocoa-toking eco-freaks who made it all up over a few pints of virgin’s blood after a hard day at the sacrificial altar?

I said at the beginning that the Mayans may have made an innocent mistake with the entrails or the millenniums, but the more I think about it, I’m convinced there is a third possibility.

Maybe the whole ‘end of the world’ thing was the Mayan version of the Great Global Warming Scam. I’d lay good money – if I had any left after five years of Wayne ‘Dr Deficit’ Swan’s tender ministrations - that archaeologists will one day discover stone tablets detailing how a bunch of Mayan cocoa-derivatives traders got together with the ancient South American equivalent of the Greens and realised they could make a killing in the sacrificial virgin market. 

All they needed was a passell of priests – the Mayan equivalent of the modern day ‘scientist’ – open to a bit of good old-fashioned financial coercion and some power-crazed yet gullible politicians and they were home free.

It was, if you’ll excuse the expression, the ultimate pyramid ponzi scheme.

Viewed from the modern perspective, it is laughable that anybody would fall for it, but before anybody laughs at me, I can only point out that somebody, somewhere fell for the idea of making a congenital idiot treasurer of Australia.

Thanks a lot, Mayans. Now I not only have to spend the entire year making a mess of home-renovation projects, I also have to make up for 20 years of Mayan practical joke/carbon tax-induced inertia.

This, I’m bound to confess, is a big ask for someone who has trouble fitting a week’s work into a year.

In desperation, I spent an intensive few months trawling through the 27, 358 books, penned by Americans with the kind of names you wish you had heard BEFORE you came up with the joke name for your dog, offering the definitive interpretation of the prophecies of Nostrodamus in the hope of finding another excuse for extended ennui, but alas, to no avail.

But then, just three weeks after the devastating disappointment of waking up alive on December 13, new year’s eve came along.

Of course! Instead of the usual drink-induced, doomed-to-failure resolutions like promising not to pee in the garden, all I had to do to make up for the last 20 years was resolve to do really, really big things.

Yes, it would be difficult to cram so much into one year, but I was rejuvenated by my second chance at life! I was pumped! I was, um, pissed!

To that end, 2013 will be a year of delivery on the following resolutions:

1:  I will abolish Federal parliament Question Time. Gillard and her motley crew of reform school-bred union acolytes never bother to answer any questions anyway, so I will replace the ‘lets all abuse Tony Abbott’ fest with something the public would find much more entertaining: Naked mud-cage wrestling.

Julia Gillard v Christine Milne will be the main event, supported by an undercard of Wayne Swan v a tag team of Gina Reinhart and Clive Palmer.

(Gillard v Milne would, unfortunately, have to be adults only. Inadvertent camera angles would reveal the equivalent of a road kill squirrel and a badger killed by an axe, so best to spare the kiddies the trauma. I had also planned to pit Swan against a corpse so as to ensure an even contest, but he has been taking free kicks against Reinhart and Palmer for so long I thought it was time for him to put our money where his mouth is.)

Kevin Rudd will make weekly appearances. He will fight himself.

2: I will appease our Muslim friends by borrowing their strategy for ensuring world peace; ie, I will blow up, behead and otherwise generally slaughter everybody who doesn’t do exactly as I say.

3: I will make being Tim Flannery a criminal offence.

4: I will re-institute child labour. All children will be required to work 12-hour shifts in underground salt mines, after which they will complete six hours of intensive study aimed at teaching them radical concepts such as how to write their own name, recite their times tables and walk quietly through shopping centres.

5: I will alter the rules of the AFL draft so as to ensure that Fremantle get the first 10 picks in every draft. For ever. On the surface this may look unfair, but Fremantle is such a fucked up football club its continual failure to win anything will just increase its humiliation.

6: In concert with item 4, I will introduce mandatory psycho-neural profiling of children to ensure they are channelled into the occupation for which they are best suited. If this programme had been instituted earlier, the following people would, instead of wasting their lives, be enjoying careers suited to their talents:

Julia Gillard: fishwife.

Wayne Swan: village idiot.

Anthony Albanese: pig offal process worker, 2^nd class.

Greg Combet: penny store indian.

Bill Shorten: stage musical prop for Hobbits R Us production.

Nicola Roxen: brothel receptionist.

Peter Slipper: brothel condom recycler.

Jenny Macklin: prison guard.

David Bradbury: public servant, Level 1.Dept. of Transport: Square wheels licensing division.

Craig Emerson: travelling Botox salesman.

Craig Thomson: nothing. Just, nothing. There isn’t a single thing that this man is suited for. Assistant to Peter Slipper is about the best he could hope for.

7: I will introduce compulsory euthanasia for neighbours over 70 who complain constantly about EVERYTHING, from the cat sitting on their car roof to the leaf that is hanging over their side of the fence. Be warned, Maurice.

8: Lotto players will be forced to undergo an IQ/Age/Identity test. Only people who fit the specific, very very specific, parameters will be permitted to win. Every week. For Ever.

While only a fool would dispute that all of these initiatives are sorely needed, there is a catch: to introduce them I need to have myself crowned Emperor of The World.

February is almost gone and I haven’t pulled it off yet, but I live in hope. After all, if a complete fuckwit like Wayne Swan can become treasurer and deputy PM, how can I fail?