NYT. Well, I have to confess that the diet of Adélie Penguins in Antarctica is certainly one of my top priorities.

NYT. Not to mention all those people breathing out there. I mean, what’s up with that? Have they no concern for the environment?

WP. Turns out that Congress is to blame for all these scumbags skipping out on their taxes. Whoda thunkit?

I guess even socialists get the blues. They’re against capital, and their against gains, so capital gains drive them right up the wall. And they don’t even get a cut of the money they had no hand in making! How immoral!

NYT. The subtext is all about “How DARE the ARMY approach OUR underclass?! Don’t they realize that these people ought to be manning the barricades here at home, not driving around freeing people overseas?!”

Unfortunately for the Brahmin caste, many of the underclass are determined not to stay there. They rightly see the military as an environment where they can get paid a decent wage for work that needs doing, from which they can get a leg up into the middle class. This doesn’t sit well with the People of the Crust, of course, whose power depends upon an uneducated proletariat steeped in Identity Politics whose votes can be bought with taxpayer money.

Read it. Let’s just step back a minute and see what’s going on here.

A major newspaper, the chief paper of the nation’s capital, is expressing an opinion on how people get fat. Think about that for a second.

1. Why do they care? Is this the business of a newspaper? Especially of a major metropolitan newspaper?
2. Is there nothing more important that they could spend their time on?

The study has a lot to say about how and why America has gotten fatter — and how the country can fight what might be fairly described as an epidemic of expanding waistlines.

Ponder the approach. The problem is “how and why America has gotten fatter”. Not certain individuals, who happen to make up an unspecified portion of the population, have gotten fatter (fatter than what?); not certain individuals who happened to figure in the studies that underly the whole handwringing (do these studies say something of general applicability?); but: “America” has gotten fatter. The focus is on the country as a corporate entity; the camera has pulled back so far that we see just a single block called “America”, without being able to make out any details. Just a big lump: America. Fatter.

Ponder the unspoken assumptions. “Fatter is bad.” “The country must fight it.” “It’s like an epidemic.”

Ponder the natural policy implication: “People must be responsible to themselves — and, now, it appears, to others around them — to eat healthy and exercise.” Emphasis added.

Could there be a clearer demonstration of how this house organ for the People of the Crust view the world and their place within it? Everyone is responsible to everyone for everything. Incidentally, you non-ruling-class dweebs are so stupid that you don’t know how to take care of yourselves. Well, you’d better shape up, or… what, exactly? The obvious next step is that the Nanny State is going to be all over your ass like ugly on an ape. Don’t make us come down there.

Does that bother you? It certainly bothers me.