Wampum

I can't even bring myself to link to Ayn Rand roadie (and formerly known as Jane Galt) Megan McArdle's latest eat-the-poor rants on food stamps = obesity in the poor, but I will recommend this response from Andrew Leonard in Salon:

Would increasing food stamp benefits worsen American obesity? The claim that this is so has been a hobby horse of the right in recent years, most often associated with the writings of Douglas J. Besharov, the director of the Social and Individual Responsibility Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a hard-right think tank. But there are plenty of academics who argue otherwise. One economist at Sonoma State University declared in 2003 "that the data does not indicate any relationship between obesity and food stamps." That same year, a paper titled "Food Programs and Obesity in U.S. Children" by two University of Maryland Family Studies professors found no evidence that food stamps were correlated with childhood obesity in the United States. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition (also in 2003) by a City University of New York researcher did find that food stamp participation was "positively related to obesity in low income women" but a commentary in the same issue by a Cornell University nutritional scientist cautioned against making too much of the findings.

Low incomes in the United States are correlated with obesity, a stunning turnaround from the pre-World War II era. Low incomes are also correlated with food stamp program participation, so it makes sense that there would be some relationship between obesity and food stamps. But obesity is also correlated with disproportionate patronization of fast food outlets -- a practice that food stamp benefits don't cover. Which at least raises the possibility that strapped families would use a food stamp increase to buy more groceries instead of eating out at McDonald's, and thus potentially reduce obesity among the poor.

I lost a whole day of blogging on Friday, reading and commenting on McArdle's drivel. Apparently I wasn't alone. Feministe commenter Kali brilliantly opined:

It's Friday night, and also I think my brain might have melted at some point while reading her post, so I'm not sure I've got her meaning correct here: but I really think she is seriously saying that fat people are poor because they're fat, not vice versa. My head hurts now, because I find myself wanting to simultaneously argue with this ridiculous proposition, question whether she could actually have really meant this, wonder what her proposed mechanism for fatness causing mass poverty is (like, is it supposed to be a signal to employers that you're lazy and have no self discipline?)...and, gah.

Derren Brown talks about how if you're being threatened or in danger a good strategy is to say something totally surreal, because it will throw the person threatening you off balance mentally, and give you a chance to take control. I think it would probably work for criminals as well as victims. You could have burgled my house while I was reading that trainwreck. You could have driven a truck right up to the door and got a bunch of guys in black balaclavas to start carrying away my furniture and I would still have been frozen in disbelief, staring slack jawed at the screen with that blog on it. It's a weird talent, to be able to have that effect on a person. Maybe that's how she gets people to take her seriously - being so blithely and two dimensionally stupid that your brain rejects what it's seeing and starts an argument with itself, and then people mistake this mental mugging for being intellectually stimulated.