Saturday, May 15, 2010

Of all tyrannies,

a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
Which seems a good introduction to this:
States receiving federal grants provided for in the bill would be required to annually track the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18. The grant-receiving states would be required to mandate that all health care providers in the state determine the Body Mass Index of all their patients in the 2-to-18 age bracket and then report that information to the state government. The state government, in turn, would be required to report the information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for analysis.

The Healthy Choices Act–introduced by Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee….amends the Public Health Services Act by stating that health care providers must record the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18. “The provision relates to all children in states that accept grants under the bill,” a spokesperson for Rep. Kind told CNSNews.com. “….BMI will be taken at times when the child makes an otherwise scheduled doctor’s visit.”

So the President's wife is declaring your kids weight a 'national security issue', and the socialists- 'Never let a crisis go to waste'- are using it as a lever to reach further into your lives.

Various objections to this BMI stupidity here, including
1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.

2. It is scientifically nonsensical. (why square the height? And ignore waist circumference?)

3. It is physiologically wrong. (bodybuilders and athletes are screwed)

4. It gets the logic wrong. (if you are obese, your BMI is high. If you have a high BMI, you may not be obese at all!)
and ending with
10. It embarrasses the U.S. ("It is embarrassing for one of the most scientifically, technologically and medicinally advanced nations in the world to base advice on how to prevent one of the leading causes of poor health and premature death (obesity) on a 200-year-old numerical hack developed by a mathematician who was not even an expert in what little was known about the human body back then." - yup!)

Not that any of that matters to the National Socialist Democrats: it's a way to take more control over people, and that's what really matters.

3 comments:

JohnMXL said...

Why does this remind me of the WKRP episode where Johnny Fever interviews a researcher who claims that children are all insane because they don't behave like adults?

I is my understanding that BMI is not applicable to children - as I recall due to the ratio of bone and muscle to body fat being significantly different in children because their bodies are still growing and developing.

However, that won't stop the FedGov. Their minds are made up, don't confuse them with the facts.

Anonymous said...

The culture is already causing our kids - especially girls - self-image problems, what with its obsession with slender figures. What do you think this will this do to the teen suicide rate when the damn federal government gets into the act of calling kids fat?

And if the government decides your kid is too fat, does this become a matter for Child Protective Services? Of course it will...

At least we've managed to identify another congresscritter deserving of tar, feathers and a public horsewhipping...

--Wes S.

Windy Wilson said...

A. The waist measurement BY ITSELF was found in some study (I'm too lazy to look up) to be even more predictive of heart disease than BMI.
B. This will be a Catch-22 for parents, as if the BMI is too high, CPS will be called, and if they try to restrict the child's caloric intake (they are not, after all, barnyard animals, despite the schools' best efforts), the ensuing drama will ensure that CPS will be called. Anyone who actually has raised children knows what a task it is to force a child to eat when he or she does not want to, or not eat when he or she is hungry.
C. This is a collossal ClusterF*** of the first order, and things will only get worse.

Am I the only one who thinks that this business of devising ever more burdensome and intrusive laws in an effort to correct some problem caused by the last round of slightly less burdensome and intrusive laws is like the Ptolemaic model of the solar system which required an ever increasing number and complexity of epicycles to approximate the Copernican model of the solar system? Dang that's a long sentence!