Not another!

As if Tierney wasn't bad enough, Brooks piles on with his ignorant and irresponsible column in today's NY Times regarding the JAMA study on BMI and excess years lost.

It turns out she doesn't like those body-worshiping, multi-abbed marvels who've spent so much time at the bench press machine they look as if they have thighs growing out of either side of their necks. She doesn't like those health-conscious rice cake addicts you see at Manhattan restaurants ordering a skinned olive for lunch and sitting there looking trim and fit in their tapered blouses while their buns of steel leave permanent dents in the upholstery.

Is that what it really says? Wow... I must have read the wrong article because the one I looked at didn't come to any such conclusions. What a dickweed... dollar to a donut he didn't even read the damn thing, nor would he have cared if he did.

If the report from researchers at the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is correct - and it is the most thorough done to date - then it seems that Mother Nature has built a little Laffer curve into the fabric of reality: health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.

AAARRRRGGGHHH!!! The study is on BMI and excess years lost, but says nothing, NOTHING about other measures of fitness... as I mentioned previously, not only might our definitions of weight normalcy be a little off, but level of exercise and fitness might be a significant factor (or even moreso) than BMI with regards to proper health... it doesn't even hint that people who are health-conscience or workout are at risk, or that a higher BMI is protective (save in >70 year old populations). Furthermore, it never suggests that the current mode of thought in the health care community is the lower your BMI the better off your health is, as Brooks would have it above. If that were the case, then Karen Carpenter would have been pretty damn fit and healthy. And finally, it says nothing about quality of life.

If this study is correct, I'll be ordering second helpings on into my 90's while all those salad-munching health nuts who have been feeling so superior in their spandex pants and cutoff T-shirts will be dying of midriff pneumonia and other condescension-related diseases.

Sounds like you have some personal issues you need to resolve there, Davey...

In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve. The people with the worst grades start the most successful businesses. The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system. The people regarded as lightweights, like F.D.R., J.F.K. and Ronald Reagan, make the best presidents, while you - so much more thoughtful and better read - would be a complete disaster.

Life isn't fair, logic is of limited value and, as Woody Allen observed years ago, everything your parents once thought was good for you turns out to be bad for you: sun, milk, red meat and college.

That's a great message... college is bad for you. Don't worry about getting good grades because your level of education has no effect on your career success. Being shallow and vapid and ignorant are all admirable personal traits. What a total nutsack.

In the medical world, there is such a beast known as the defiant ancestor... this is relative your patients refer to as the reason they don't need to stop smoking or doing drugs or whatever: "My granddaddy smoked 8 packs a day, ate fried lard for every meal, washed it down with fifth of gin, screwed every syphilic prostitute in the state, and he lived until he was 110! So don't be pushing your fancy-pants medical knowledge on me!"

Here, Brooks is essentially doing the same thing... yeah, Bill Gates was a drop-out. Yeah, I'll bet you can come up with several other cases of people who struck it rich without a degree. Yes David, you yourself are living proof that you don't have to have a gram of intelligence in order to get a high-profile job. But methinks there are a whole mass of people flippin' burgers who would disagree with your proclimations on education.

You know, if it was just Brooks writing on a blog, or even at his old gig at the Weekly Standard, it wouldn't make me quite as DHP. But this is the friggin' NY Times op-ed page... this sort of utterly irresponsible retarded bullshit should never come within shouting distance of the funny pages, let alone one of the supposedly most highly regarded pieces of journalistic real estate.

Man, I just friggin' can't stand these assholes!!!

P.S. And what is with writting a second column on the JAMA study after Tierney, especially when it adds nothing to the issue (not that Tierney's did)? Hey guys... the needle on your record is skipping...

P.P.S. Hey DHP's Ma, you don't know how many cusswords I editted out for your viewing pleasure... sure, swearing is not elegant, but it can be cathartic, so I hope you appreciate my restraint!