TBogg? Don’t you remember the shit storm you started with the concern trolls last time you picked on teh fatties?

Yeah. But it’s not hard to outrun them….

He does look like a younger Rush Limbaugh with hair.

Gentlemen! We cannot afford an Obesity Gap!

Thirty lousy minutes a day. Should send all the children out to pick the crops that the undocumented workers won’t be able to get to. That’ll keep ‘em sleekie and trim – and for considerably less than $50/hour.

As long as he couples elimination of physical education with a concerted effort in the school cafeterias to ensure the little tykes get plenty of calories, in order to strengthen their thinking power, I see nothing wrong here.

Some of those pudgy kids will surely achieve high office in the State of New Jersey.

Don’t forget that New Jersey is the home of our vast national repository of Vinnie’s.

Have to say I’m with the fat guv on this one. Anything that might eliminate the horror that is high school gym class can’t be bad.

Depends. I wouldn’t mind if they taught aerobics or tai chi or anything not reeking of hypercompetitive sniff-my-jock mentality. And it’s not as if a decent PE class would be that expensive, either.

…sniff-my-jock mentality.

You just lost the Republican vote.

Unfortunately, PE takes away from precious time that could be spent molding the tykes into proper working drones, so the monetary cost probably isn’t the biggest factor.

On a more serious note, when I started school, every lunch was an actual meal, with meat and vegetables and fruit, and they stayed that way all through high school.* Occasionally we would have “treats” like pizza for lunch, but those days were the exception. When my son started grade school, I went with him to lunch one day, and could not believe the crap they were feeding those kids. No wonder they’re all getting fat.

* – Also when I was in first grade, my grandmother was the school lunch lady — but she retired the next year, unfortunately for me. :)

I thought they were more the “sniff-your-panties” vote?

Clearly, you haven’t been paying attention:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/ex-gay_leaders_male_escort_actually_we_did_have_se.php?ref=fpb

Hey, is that a neck under his head, or is he just glad to see me?

Apparently I fail at html today — here’s the actual link:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1775#comic

It appears that somebody snapped a (wide angle) pic of Governor Chris “Chris” just as he was ordering a troika of Triple Whoppers for lunch. Not to worry though, he counts lifting them to his pie hole as his 30 minutes of daily exercise.

Thanks muchly; that particular image is going to haunt my dreams for a while.

Here is a little more info along these lines from my corner of South Jersey. Next year’s budget for the three school districts in my area include the abolishment of sports in middle schools, and the abolishment of freshmen sports in the high schools. These are NOT poor districts either, they are wealthy suburbs of Philadelphia and home to many professional athletes. If that is happening here, I shudder to think about what is going on in the poorer districts. Oh, and an across the board 10% reduction in teachers.

Larger class sizes, kids with nothing to do after school, and no job prospects. What could go wrong? Oh, and across the board raises for Fat Fuck (my apologies to the overweight, but that is the accepted moniker for this piece of shit in my parts) and his minions.

I held my nose and voted for Corzine, but I should have been out campaigning for him. Sorry kids, but it’s scientific experiments for the lot of you.

Heh! The fashionable thing, as it always has been, is for older workers to chastise younger ones for being “lazy” because, using newer technologies, they can get done in two hours what the older workers once did in eight — and refuse to engage in busy work just to preserve the appearance of slaving one’s fingers to the bone.

Yup.

And when Mayor Mike tried to get the public schools in NYC to do SOMETHING about this, like, say, get rid of the vending machines dispensing sugary drinks and salty snacks, the usual collection of morons started screaming about how he was a tyrant who was stealing their kids’ freedom (to be fat fucks who are going to die soon but in the meantime make the rest of us pay for their health care).

The parenthetical part is, of course, never said out loud.

This trend has been the norm in California for 20 years. My degree is in Physical Education and even as an undergrad at SDSU I saw it coming. There is a direct correlation between the decline of physical education in our schools (and I understand that “gym class” could be torture)and the increase in obese children and adults. Our kids no longer learn to love activity and games for the sake of fun and camaraderie. The only thing that has survived the “cuts” are the competitive sports and even in middle schools, those teams are made up mostly of kids who play on travel teams, have private coaches and trainers and generally play one or two sports exclusively. There is no such thing anymore as the 3 or 4-sport high school athlete because by sophomore year, they are so focused on a potential college scholarship that they choose to stand out in one sport, rather than just be good in two or three. And since the teams are loaded with these focused, and I must add, talented players, there is little room for the casual player or the walk-ons. And the kids know it. I’m sure this seems like a strange point of view coming from the parent of one of those “travel team” kids. Casey did play club soccer beginning when she was 8, she did have private training and we did look for a college scholarship. But I also coached her middle school teams and watched those kids who saw the writing on the wall give up and quit playing sports altogether. As a trained educator, that was extremely painful to see. Our schools have an obligation to find an alternative way to teach lifetime sports and activities to ALL ability levels, just as they do on the academic side. We need to, as parents, help our kids find the FUN again if we ever want to see a positive change in our national health trends.

Hm. Well, maybe it depends on what technology-influenced job you’re talking about, but in my experience (and from my occasional reading on the topic, too), the effects of new, efficient techology can go like this:
(a) fewer people are employed in the given field, and they’re expected to turn out the work that would have employed a larger number before; and
(b) when the inevitable business downturn comes along and demand for that work product declines, the fewer people of (a) become even fewer.

Laziness and/or make-work don’t come into this picture much. But I’m sure it varies from field to field, business to business, economy to economy.

Very enlightening, MrsTb – I’ll bet you were a super PE teacher, too. I’m a good deal older than you, having been an elementary schoolkid in the 50s, that supposed golden age of American childhood (if you leave out the A-bomb drills and weren’t nonwhite). And in some respects the laxer, more inclusive attitude toward gym class in those days was preferable. Also we had a good half to three-quarters of a hour to just run around outside at lunch, and true kid playground culture was alive and well.

But my own experience as a sports klutz was not far from what you describe, in that the teachers we had had showed no interest in helping, or encouraging, or coaching, or making PE fun for, the less talented kids.

Such an approach would have to be purpose-designed to be effective and to counteract, at least partially, the jeering pecking order promoted by team sports. And it would have to be overseen by an instructor who had an overall philosophy like yours.

You wouldn’t wanna come to my house and teach me how to hit a ball, wouldja??

Whew! Teabaggin’ shit storm avoided thanks, in large part, to posting entry on first bingo night after Social Security checks arrived…..