Thursday, May 31, 2012

♫ If you can take it there, you'll take it any-where! ♫

I'm all the time hearing what a tough town New York is and how tough New Yorkers are, and then I read stuff like this:


If New Yorkers are so tough, how come one of y'all hasn't walked into this clown's office and pimp-slapped him the way he so richly deserves? Seriously, y'all are about to be reduced to trading pre-ban high-cap soda cups with each other until a thriving black market in smuggled New Jersey Big Gulps springs up.
“Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’” Bloomberg told The New York Times. “New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something.”
Apparently New York City is about "doing something", if by "something" you mean taking a lot of patronizing lip from nosy busybodies with Napoleon complexes.

Think about it: This is a man who thinks he can tell you what size container you may place sugar water into. That's nuts. That's completely, flat-out, Howard Hughes-meets-Kim Jong Il bugnuts crazy. Are you all going to just sit there and go "Derrr... hokay, boss!" while the rest of us snicker behind our hands at you and tell jokes about pre-ban soft drink cups, or are you going to toss this jackhole in the East River?

46 comments:

Joe in PNG said...

Note: his constituancy(sp)is most likely to revolt only when he begins regulating half-caf skinny mocha soy pepperment lattes.

jetfxr69 said...

Yes, I checked the list. Lattes are exempt from the restriction. (Coffee, on the other hand, is NOT.)

Anonymous said...

Tam - This is a man who thinks he can tell you what size container you may place sugar water into. That's nuts. That's completely, flat-out, Howard Hughes-meets-Kim Jong Il bugnuts crazy.

Yes and no. Since the gubmint has gotten into the business of paying for people's healthcare, then it has some (ahem) interest in doing what it can to minimize those costs, and one thing that it can do it try to keep people from developing certain diseases (heart disease, diabetes, etc.) that can be triggered by eating and drinking too much sweet stuff.

I don't agree with this, but I see the logic: "I pay for you, so I own you."

Joseph said...

It merely proves how enlightened they are, dontchaknow?

So they will ban softdrinks > 16oz, but the sonsobitches don't have the nads to ban cigs. No, they get too much revenue off of those.

BTW, if they truly cared about my health, they'd stop doing stupid shit like this that runs my blood pressure through the stratosphere.

Duke said...

NY has nothing to complain about, they vote these clowns into office and seem to like a big nanny state. The sad thing is most people don't care, are we getting so used to government intrusion we expect it as normal? I think we all know the answer to that.

Bram said...

New Yorkers aren't tough. They are the biggest whiners in the world. The city is being turned into a theme-park. Very rich liberals live their along with some poor folks for scenery.

The disagreeable middle-class has been moved to the outer boroughs and Jersey.

Ruth said...

Please don't tempt me. I've resisted cause I don't live in the city and haven't had to travel in or through in years....

Woodman said...

That's also the logic for "Death Panels".

It's a cost benefit transaction. And it's one of the reasons I hate PPACA so much.

As soon as I say the government has to pay for my healthcare they have a reason to tell me I'm too fat and don't run enough. I am willing to make that arrangement with my employer, but I am not willing to enter into that with the Government. However, I now have no choice as to what arrangement I can make with an employer. No matter what there are certain benefits that I have to pay for, including an unlimited annual payout in 2014, which will and is adding around 5-10% to every single person's insurance bill.

The number of multi million dollar claims that are actually paid by someone besides an insurance company are miniscule. The hospitals have always known when they start racking up bills in the 2+ million range they weren't going to get most of it back, oddly enough people seem to get better real quick when those numbers are hit. Now, those numbers are starting to creep up.

Why not, insurance is paying for it. (Gosh, what drives utilization faster than knowing someone else is paying for it?) And that's why you end up with panels and committees deciding what's allowable and practical. And since it's the government, unlike private insurance they can actually make it so you can't get it done instead of just not paying for it.

Randy said...

When Big Gulps are outlawed only outlaws and out of state visitors will have Big Gulps.

staghounds said...

I am trapped at the car dealership. They are running a television. This story came on.

I am trapped at the car dealership. They are running a television.

One made the the high-cap argument, "There is no reason why anyone NEEEEEEEEDS this much soda". Because no one ever shares, or saves some for later.

Ben said...

One made the the high-cap argument, "There is no reason why anyone NEEEEEEEEDS this much soda". Because no one ever shares, or saves some for later.

... or just wants to drink half a gallon of soda. No need to make excuses for it.

Tango Juliet said...

"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." -- Robert Heinlein

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately not everyone knows what d-bag Nanny Bloomberg is.

They listen to the news talker idiots on TV. They think this ban on "big drinks" is the bestest idea ever. The clownette on one of the morning shows sounded like she was creaming her jeans.

You realize this idiot has locked-up the overprotective mommy, metrosexual male, and fascist I know better vote for the next 10 years?

cj said...

Heaven forbid they look at the heart of the issue where government subsidizes food fairly opposite of the government recommended diet we're supposed to eat to keep us all healthy.

How long until they start controlling the programming on cooking shows. "Sorry Emeril, you've reached the limit of meat in that stew. You need to use bean curd to reach the appropriate nutrient balance."

Anonymous said...

With healthcare reform, the government owns us all now. Of course the government is going to tell you what to do.

Shootin' Buddy

Anonymous said...

"If New Yorkers are so tough, how come one of y'all hasn't walked into this clown's office and pimp-slapped him the way he so richly deserves?"

Prbably because his Royal Highness Bloomberg The Nanny has armed guards that would shoot you dead? And have you branded a terrorist for the temerity of bleeding on the hem of his robes of office.

After all, these rules are for the little people, not their betters like Big Gulp Mike Bloomberg. He's better than us ignorant, unwashed, fly-over land, hayseed, hicks.

He's from NEW YORK!

And don't you forget it!

Anonymous said...

Will TSA start looking through my luggage for Big Gulp cups when I hit NYC?

Gerry

Anonymous said...

How about we rig a bunch of the big bottles of full-sugar coffee flavoring so that they drench him when he opens his office door? Followed by a soy-milk rinse?

I'd love to hear him tell this to a bunch of the oil-field and gas-field workers out here with their 44 and 64 oz refill mugs.

LittleRed1

Tremaine said...

You can take our king size snickers bars, but you'll never, take, our, SODAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Brad K. said...

Follow the money. This is a scam just like the bought-and-paid-for so-called "science" behind Global Warming. (The climate has been changing since Americans uprooted the old-growth forests between the Mississippi and the Atlantic to raise cotton, since Europe removed their old-growth forests, since the Amazon Rain Forest was razed to brew ethanol for the Indy 500, since China clear-cut Asia for lumber and charcoal for home heating, since WWII churned the oceans and air with ships, airplanes, bombs, burned oil and coal, and massive mining and industrialization, since building cities replaced growing green crap with concrete dust-makers. Etc. But the global warming science was a political farce.)

Bloomberg ignores the inconvenient facts. One report has people consuming two diet drinks a day gaining six times as much on the waist, even over those drinking sugared drinks. Another report shows lab mice fed high fructose corn sweetener gaining significantly more fat than other mice fed the same number of calories of sugar -- which mimics the results observed among people. But the government subsidizes the corn, and big chemical companies get to rake in profits from artificial sweeteners.

No one is worried that the obesity epidemic runs in families, that it follows on the heels of home use of ice cubes, air conditioning, and TV advertising. That smaller families with larger portions has a significant impact. That merchandising food stuffs has replaced home cooking.

We know that intense mental effort causes us to *feel* more hungry, yet fail to match that up with increased popularity of electronic media (with merchandising ads), with video games, with texting and use of electronic communication for social purposes. And surely digitizing US education hasn't triggered hunger hormones over and above actual expended calories. Why, just think of the profits, er, jobs at stake. I wonder if anyone has tracked funding of the US Dept of Ed against the rise in obesity? What about teacher's union membership levels?

There might even be a tie-in between standing back to watch the police chase bad guys (and make a better bonus and police union kudos) rather than being vigilant and armed to watch one's own home, family, and neighborhood. 'Cause people weren't getting all fat when the government wasn't swiping guns and handguns. Of course, there weren't as many lawyers back then, either, even in New York or Chicago. There weren't as many fat folk before the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, etc., either. Do you suppose mere regulations make people fat?

There is some consternation that the "food pyramid" that the US Dairy and Beef Industry worte for the USDA is flawed, in favor of merchandising Dairy and Beef Industry products despite good nutrition. This model has been re-examined, but never actually, you know, been shown to be actually, observedly, valid.

Ed Foster said...

Joseph and Bram tie for the honors today.

I was born in New York City, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spent a considerable amount of my misspent youth on Floyd Bennett Naval Air Station and a nearby Scandahoovian and Irish fisherman's village called Gerrittsen Beach, a misplaced piece of Marblehead Mass accidentally glued onto Brooklyn at Avenue U. That's aavenyuh with a strong Yiddish nasal on the first a.

If you want to hear a New York accent anymore, you need to head out to Long Island (LawnGuyLan) or Jersey (Joyzee). New York City is like Scotland. The real estate is still there, but all the natives have left.

Working class European-Americans are almost non-existant in Manhattan, the lower Bronx, or western Brooklyn, and are gradually being pushed eastward into the Rockaways and Long Island from central Queens and Brooklyn east of Utica Avenue (remember the nasal).

I was in Manhattan shopping last week, and the freespending crowds were about half Asian, with a majority of the remainder speaking French, German, and Russian. Fewer and fewer middleclass Americans can even afford to visit New York, much less live there.

The upper west side is all Jewish and WASP gentry and their Dominican maids, isolated from reality by money, private schools, and contempt for "flyover country".

The upper east side is populated by young, aggressive hustlers all looking for the benchmark experience, a million in the bank before age thirty and a house north of the city in Scarsdale or New Rochelle.

I'm serious. The "Million Before Thirty" meme was a flatout promise given by the corporate recruiters to my son's Columbia graduating class back in the '90's, to anyone who could handle the high pressure 95 hour workweeks.

The only reasonable rents are down at the south end of Manhattan, in Chinatown. And they're only available to, wait for it, Chinese people.

American Blacks live in ghettoes and are rarely seen outside them, Puerto Ricans live in barrios and take the subway to midtown where they collect garbage and flip burgers.

One bright spot is the clothing industry in East Harlem. Bright Puerto Rican ladies bought sewing machines and some Dominican slave labor and are now making most of the formerly imported ladies clothes sold downtown in the cutesy botiques, but as taxes go up and services go down, they're move upstate to abandoned parts of Albany and Schenectady.

But mostly, the place is populated by newly arrived sheeple, come from Woggish places that are all authoritarian to a goosestepping degree, so Mayor Mike seems like a strong leader, and that's what they want.

New York City hasn't been part of America since Truman was elected and is now, culturally, somewhere between Islamabad and Odessa.

New Yorker Billy Joel wrote a song called Miami 2017.

Part of the lyrics went

"They sent a carrier up fron Norfork, and picked the Yankees up for free...

They said that Queens could stay,

They blew the Bronx away,

and sank Manhattan out at sea".

I miss what was, warts and all. It had some vitality. Now it's a corpse being swarmed by maggots.

Chris said...

How long before some entrepreneur comes up with a double-16oz-cup arrangement with a reusable plastic cups connector? Will Bloomie then start issuing soda ration coupons? Have random stops for blood sugar level? (They already stop far too many folks on no pretext at all, so why not, he will ask himself?)

OtherWhiteMatt said...

But if its that bad, why not ban them out right? Soon people will be just buying 2 16oz sodas.

Idiots.

Woodman said...

They'll just start brewing the hard stuff at home.

http://www.midwestsupplies.com/root-beer-soda.html

Then Bloomberg will activate a new task force to keep them from selling it to their neighbors in unapproved containers.

NotClauswitz said...

New Yoke makin' Califordinia look smaht - or at least restive.

Anonymous said...


One report has people consuming two diet drinks a day gaining six times as much on the waist, even over those drinking sugared drinks. Another report shows lab mice fed high fructose corn sweetener gaining significantly more fat than other mice fed the same number of calories of sugar -- which mimics the results observed among people.


Also: on what grounds should Hfcs be regulated by government, were it true? Would that be constitutional?

Maybe not. What would be would be slashing subsidies for corn.



BTW .. Go check what were portion sizes in 1950's, how much people walked and s on.

People get fat because food is so cheap for them, and they apparently can't resist cramming their faces till their chins multiply.

It's a matter of personal-choice :-)

God, Gals, Guns, Grub said...

Tam,

I think Bloomy only wants to ban the High Capacity Assault Cups...

...the regular capacity cups limited to 16 oz. will still be allowed...

Dann in Ohio

Sebastian said...

The real irony is that you can still head out to Dunkin Donuts in New York and buy yourself a cream filled donut, which probably has just as many calories and sugar as a 20oz coke, and with a nice heaping helping of fat to boot.

The reason you get so many approving comments on that article, I think, is because what Bloomberg is speaking of doing is just enforcing leftist social norms for the city on everyone else. If he actually banned large portions in general, or banned particularly high sugared foods, it might impact something that leftist culture in New York actually consumes.

As long as it only affects the little people, they'll go along with it. They know what's best for the little people, anyway.

New York traditionally was never into this kind of shit in a big way until Bloomberg came along. At least I don't remember it. Giuliani had a few odd nanny streaks in him, but nothing like King Bloomberg.

I think a reason for it might be that middle class people who work for a living, traditionally the kind of people who get outraged by this stuff, can't really afford to live in New York. It's pretty much just the wealthy, who have always been, as a class of people, meddling, elitiest assholes in the Northeast, and their hipster clingers on, and poor immigrants, who are willing to live in the shitty low-rent districts, and who come from cultures where they are used to their betters controlling their lives.

Earl said...

This is the same New York City that hosted the Royal efforts to quell the rebellion in the American colonies, except for General Washington's live fire training in retreat/regroup exercises, the town was happy being Royal. They only took the term Yankees for the baseball team, they know they aren't Liberty Loving. The Royal Mayor Bloomberg has more to do with that famed Dutch governor.

Sebastian said...

As an addendum to that, there's also probably a large amount of fear, from those who are not inclined to cheer Bloomberg's nannyism, that repudiating Bloomberg and his ilk could bring about a return to pre-Guiliani New York governance. Bloomberg was largely elected and re-elected because it was believed he'd retain most of Guiliani's policies and practices.

So there are some folks in New York who probably weigh being able to buy a 20oz coke with the risk that tossing Bloomberg out on his ass could mean a return the New York of the 1980s. Personally, I'd take that gamble, if I lived there, but to people who lived in the city in the 1970s and 1980s, that's a dark dark era to risk returning to over soft drinks.

velcro8ball said...

...not with a bang,
but a slurrrrrp.

John Richardson said...

@Ed Foster: You forgot the "forgotten borough" Stat NYE-land aka Staten Island.

While it has changed tremendously since they put up "that damned bridge" (Verrazano Narrows Bridge)as my SI native mom called it, it is still the hinterlands and full of Euro-Americans esp. those of Italian descent. At least that is what my cousins tell me.

Les Jones said...

Sebastian, speaking of which...

http://xkcd.com/1035/

Lazy Bike Commuter said...

I came up with a solution pretty quickly.

Price a 16 ounce drink at half the cost of the now-banned 32 ounce. Provide free 32 ounce water cups.

Watch how the only effect of the regulation is to increase littering.

Anonymous said...

Remember the good old days? When Coke came in 8 oz bottles? When that bottle cost the same as a loaf of bread, so people basically only drank one or two a week if they were lucky? And when those Cokes were made of of sugar, not Big Biz Chemi-Crap?

Remember when people in this country were actually FIT, and could serve their country? And didn't flounder around in mom's basement eating Cheetos and drinking 96 oz Mountain Dews every hour?

Remember when people had a little self-control? When they weren't all hedonistic, self-absorbed sociopaths? When COMMUNITY came before self?


Yeah.......

Sebastian said...

As I have just posted over at my place... in regards to my earlier comment about donuts in New York... it's times like this that I ponder whether the universe is really just an elaborate simulation created for my own amusement:

http://politicker.com/2012/05/mixed-message-with-soda-ban-and-national-donut-day-endorsements-video/

Sebastian said...

I'm sorry, there must be a way to do a proper link in this blogger contraption:

Perhaps this?

Anonymous said...

Tam, Tam, Tam. Surely you know this is all for the children!

All those fat, obese lazy-a$% children who are that way because their overindulgent lazy-a$% parents aren't willing to do their duty and say no to the little critters every time they want a super-sized grape/orange slurpee with their pizza because that's all they will eat without throwing a hissy-fit.

This is a perfect example of the socialist nanny state where we the people are not expected to take care of ourselves or our children because we are not fit to do so.

We expect the government to do it for us, with someone else's money of course.

Scott D. said...

I can't wait until the greens start lamenting about how the smaller drink sizes cause people to purchase more disposable containers, further exacerbating our growing garbage disposal problems. It will be funny watching the flawed philosophical systems collide.

Pretty soon they'll be limited to organic, locally sourced, fair trade, low carb, high protein, nutrient rich, government approved sodas served only in reusable plastic cups made from corn and soy oil derivatives. We'll call it "Dr. Bloomberg" or "Orwellian Dew," and it'll be available at a low, government subsidized price of $5 per ounce.

Any attempts to undo the madness will be labeled an "assault on our nutritional freedom."

Joseph said...

The New York City nanny-state started with Fiorello La Guardia, who was elected during the closed-borders era. Back then the nanny state took the form of banning pinball. (I am not making this up.) As far as I can tell, the left-wing dominance of NYC politics was at a maximum during the Lindsay administration (elected before post-1965 immigrants became naturalized).

In other words, don't blame recent immigrants.

Ed Foster said...

John Richardson: I excluded Staten Island for the same reason you brought it up, namely that, except for the trashy parts down around the Ferry Port, it still resembles America.

You're right. it's still an O.K. place, and where real people go to at night after working alongside the Borgs all day in "The City" as they call it. And as a Brooklyn boy, we refered to the Verrazano Narrows bridge as the Ginny Gangplank, so I imagine the place as being heavily Italian is also spot on.

I suspect European clannishness (lots of Irish and Germans out around the Great Kills area) and the fact that it's almost entirely private homes has kept the welfare recipients out, and the bureaucrats who follow them.

And they've even elected a suprising number of Republican politicians, practically the only place in the New York Metro region that does.

So if I admit that my birthplace, New York City, mostly sucks, please don't think I'm including Staten Island as part of the city.

A pity they can't split and join up with Connecticut. They would fit beautifully wedged in next to West Haven down on Long Island Sound. Same ethnicity, same dialect, same architecture, and the same center-right politics.

Windy Wilson said...

Hmm. I think some 32 oz plastic cups labeled something like
"32 oz Pre-ban high capacity Soda Magazine" would be just the thing for Cafe Press right about now, with free shipping to NYFC.

Windy Wilson said...

Hmm. I think some 32 oz plastic cups labeled something like
"32 oz Pre-ban high capacity Soda Magazine" would be just the thing for Cafe Press right about now, with free shipping to NYFC.

Anonymous said...

Somebody needs to run this column as a full page as in the NYT, just to see the reaction...

PL

Tam said...

"Somebody needs to run this column as a full page as in the NYT, just to see the reaction..."

Heck, I have a gun. Why should I need to worry about New Yorkers? ;)

Todd said...

This reinforces my belief that he's Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown's long lost brother...