Thursday, July 2, 2009

Fact: Republicans Cause Obesity

Causality is Density. Density is Monetizable.
- Milton Friedman


So to celebrate Independence Week, the Trust for America's Health exposed a long-hidden (but barely secret) fact: a high state incidence of GOP membership and voting causes people to get fat...not just in the head, like from listening to Der große Hillbilly Heroin Addict, but in the corpus, as well.

No big surprise here. William Howard Taft, a Republican who became the 27th president of the United States, was such a lard-ass that when he became a Justice of the Supreme Court, he couldn't get his 300+ pound physique up the stairs to his working area. He was, as they said at the time, "too big to fail," so's they had to build a special Taft+1 sized elevator to haul his carcass (shaped by years of training at Republican all-you-can-eat havens such as Olde Country Buffet) up to the job (an early form of Republican Corporal Welfare).

But back to the present. The Trust published a table of obesity by state, and it looks eerily, uncannily like the table of voting-Republican in the last election. Wide-enders and Dead-Enders are the same sub-population.

Look for yourself. Here's a list of the 10 states with the highest rates of adult obesity:
1. Mississippi (32.5%)
2. Alabama (31.2%)
3. West Virginia (31.1%)
4. Tennessee (30.2%)
5. South Carolina (29.7%)
6. Oklahoma (29.5%)
7. Kentucky (29.0%)
8. Louisiana (28.9%)

9. Michigan (28.8%)

10. Arkansas (28.6%)
Nine of the top ten obesity states voted Red in the 2008 election.
Let's look at the bottom ten United States in obesity frequency:
41. California (23.6%)
42. New Jersey (23.4%)

43. Montana (22.7%)
44. Utah (22.5%)

45. District of Columbia (22.3%)
46. Vermont (22.1%)
47. Hawaii (21.8%)
48. Rhode Island (21.7%)
49. Connecticut (21.3%)
50. Massachusetts (21.2%)
51. Colorado (18.9%)

Eight of the Top Ten States in HWP voted Blue in the 2008 election.

It's sad to say, but the Lester Pearson alpha sigma squared at 98% confidence with a correlation coefficient of .567097114 leaves no other conclusion possible except that voting Republican makes not only the voter more likely to be obese, but his fellow state residents, too.

Why is this true? Niccolò Machiavelli, a great GOP hero, once noted that body type follows the politics of the city state in which an individual lived and that a city state driven by greed will be increasingly inhabited by people who are interested in consuming more than the minimum needed to prosper. As prosperity, he suggested, is measured against a yardstick not of prospering but of acquiring the maximum amount of free and available possessions, eating for its own sake, for proving one's ability to consume beyond the level that defines prosperous, will result in competitive overconsumption -- the very definition of the millenarianist, Talibaptist cult that has taken over the Republican party, a cult that abjures everyone to do without even as it consumes mass quantities of the things it most proscribes for everyone else.

With everything else the Republicans have to take on coming into their make-or-break 2010 election fund-raising rumpus, it's kind of a shame this devastating research had to surface right now as just about everyone whose name isn't Timmy Geithner is tightening their belts, a severe constraint on flab expansion and, therefore, as we already proved above, Republican values.

God hates Red States.