“He’s a big man because he’s got a condition” – isn’t that what his girlfriend Lynn Zahra said?
Here he’s eating with Lynn, so he must have gone for the grilled fish and salad.
And the ‘condition’, otherwise known as morbid obesity, is the reason he has a disabled parking space outside his flat. Because, you know, Lynn Zahra would have us believe that there’s nothing he can do about it.
So, first we have the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the World Tourism Organisation photographed feeding himself huge quantities of muffins while alone at McDonalds – a photograph I have uploaded a few times. The muffins are not in the photograph, but the process was witnessed by the man (a professional photographer who works widely in the industry, as it happens) who took that picture.
And today I got this message:
Mad**na, you should have seen Joe Grima that over-obese Mintoffian bastard all alone eating a plate-load of pastizzi at Caffe Cordina yesterday morning. His table was practically immersed by his massive torso as he stuffed his face.
You need to keep a closer eye on your boyfriend, Lynn. He’s sneaking out and eating pastizzi, muffins and Big Macs behind your back, and then there you are, wondering about his condition which causes him to get to balloon to the size of Moby Dick on your steamed vegetables.
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Obesity is self inflicted; it is not a disability. To feed your face to the extent that you become so big and can’t move around properly shows a lack of self discipline. A lack of self discipline is not a disability. Furthermore, how does he get his leg over? The mind boggles!
Hold your horses. The Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the World Tourism Organisationis about to become the EU’s #1 fan.
EU’s top court may define obesity as a disability: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27809242
It’s truly amazing how Joe Grima always appears to be the tallest person in the room … when seated, obviously due to the “condition” that his hip joints can never be less than two feet above the seat.
I should have added my dear old dad’s saying: He’s digging his grave with his teeth.
Povru siggu
And they’re in a convenient spot too. All he’d need is a gentle nudge towards his North West and he’d be rolling all the way down to the ferry in Mgarr.
How old is this barrel of fat? That is a disgusting sight. He has sugary drinks in front of him too.
[Daphne – Mr Grima is in his mid-to-late 70s. His sons are older than I am, in their early 50s.]
I am under the impression that reserved parking for people with disabilities is given to those who have a Blue Badge, formerly known as Blue Sticker.
People who have a Blue Bdage must be be suffering from loss of mobility. Now, Grima went to Cordina to have his pastizzi and the dropping-off point is quite far away unless he has used one of those excellent electric cars which act as a taxi in Valletta.
Grima should go cold turkey.
Grima should go.
What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Neither. It was Grima who ate both.
I have known Joe Grima for many years.
He is actually extremely educated, self contained and not known to ever having offended anyone by words or deeds.
He is courteous, polite, considerate, well mannered, kind and with a gracious consideration toward others.
……then he wakes up and screws it all up.
Come on, he does have a Coke Zero in front of him, miskin.
As a business person running a business operation, I would never hire an obese person no matter how qualified he or she is.
If they have no self-control over their bodily weight then they will have no self-control to do a mandated job as specified.
Do you accept obese persons as customers/clients?
Only if their credit rating is good.
ken il malti, you seem so convinced. What you need is a little more courage to write under your real name. Hey presto, Norman Lowell’s followers are all your clients. Discarding people for their skin colour, their disabilities, their religion and now their obesity is on the same level. I am not obese but if I knew what your business is I wouldn’t give you my custom.
Obesity doesn’t mean one is fat as much as Joe Grima is. You will be surprised how many fall into that category when in our eyes they ‘only’ look fat. There is a fine line between fat and obese in many cases. Ask any doctor and he will confirm.
I don’t know why you’re all laying into Ken il-Malti. Some jobs require a level of body fat that precludes obese people. That’s all. And I’m not talking models and athletes. It could be builders, air hostesses and stewards, teachers, surgeons, priests, steeplejacks, window-cleaners, or indeed FAO envoys.
I will write under my own name when you do likewise, curious.
Norman Lowell followers or MLP followers or PN followers are not my customers because my business is not based in Malta.
I am very convinced that as an employer I have the right to choose who I hire and who I fire, as it is my business and not yours.
H.P, most of my employees are licensed journeymen or journey-persons in today’s politically correct lingo, and I employ a few apprentices, one of the few firms that still takes on motivated apprentices.
And yes, they have to have a modicum of physical fitness, as being a tradesman (or tradeswoman) on a job site is physically demanding and it always will be, as it is the nature of the job.
Obese persons will mostly not be able to do the tasks.
It is not fair for them and it is not fair for my svelte employees who form part of the work crew.
As many costed-out job contracts involve ladder climbing and working in confined small spaces on construction sites and in commercial buildings and inside tiny heating and air-conditioning penthouses, pump-rooms, power transformer panels with very little spare room to move.
All this work is sometimes atop of high buildings and even sky-scrapers with roof-tops that are a maze of ducting and piping and power-cable troughs, all laid out on top of these roofs as a maze to walk through while carrying a bundle of 1/2″ conduit on your shoulders plus tools, so adaptable mobile agility is more than a survival asset.
For the qualified person I say, lose the weight, keep it off then apply for the job.
It is a hard task to lose weight and to keep it off no doubt, but it can be done.
ken il malti – Of course your business is yours and nobody else’s. You can do what you like as long as you keep within the law in the country where you operate. My question and comments were legitimate because in your first comment you spoke about obesity in general.
But I still say that I hate generalisations. The productivity and suitability of a worker doesn’t depend solely on whether one is obese or not. I certainly don’t agree with your statement that ‘Obesity is a strong visual marker of ………… possibly an unhealthy mind’. Once I had a work colleague who was thin and healthy. You would have employed him. Pity he turned out to be a thief.
Generalisation are useful. Indeed, they are necessary when you deal with large numbers, such as entire populations when you’re making policy.
The Maltese are the fattest nation in Europe, and obese means unhealthy and less productive. That’s a very useful generalisation and it’s also very true.
Curious, I am not generalizing when I say that I don’t hire obese people, in fact I am being very specific because I have to be if I want to survive in my business for the benefit of myself and my family and my employees.
This is not because I have some inner hate for obese people, as I am sure their life is not a bed of roses, sans the thorns.
I spoke as an owner of a business firm with very specific needs as far as manpower is concerned and obesity is very much a visual marker of an un-healthy body with no argument about that, ask any medical doctor.
The possibility of an unhealthy mind could also be there, as there is an emotional and addictive component to over-eating to compensate for other inadequacies or losses in life and over-eating is their chosen soothing balm.
This is only conjecture on my part, to be proved true or false in the future I am sure, but that won’t happen, as obese people do not make the first grade for a job at my business on physical incompatibly for the job description alone.
My job as an employer is to hire the right person for the right job that I have to offer and not to be their psychiatrist or to take on desperate cases on a charity basis.
Welcome to the real world.
What a load of bullshit.
Ken il-Malti, I hope your ass gets sued.
Daphne, please stick to criticizing people for their political views and behavior. Don’t give another excuse to haters for spreading prejudice and hatred. As for Joe Grima, I absolutely abhor his views and his past statements and history, but what he eats and why is his own business and it’ll be his funeral when he croaks and no one else’s.
There are hundreds of causes for obesity, ranging from genetic to endocrine to emotional. Putting down the “fatty” makes about as much sense as Norman Lowell’s theories about Jews and Africans and more prejudice on this rock packed with christian saints and martyrs is the last thing we need.
And Ken, I assure you that waist size has nothing to do with professional performance, unless the job involves an amount of physical activity the individual cannot handle. I myself have hired several individuals who would have been classified as overweight or obese, and always based on their qualifications and past performance, not on their looks. I’ve never had reason to be disappointed.
[Daphne – While I do not agree with Ken Il-Malti’s views on employing fat people at all, I most certainly say that any discussion of Joe Grima’s self-inflicted (perhaps you don’t remember him a third of that size?) obesity is entirely justified, if only for this reason: he has somehow acquired a personal reserved parking space in a high-premium parking area off the Sliema Strand on the grounds that he cannot walk because of his weight. He is then seen walking through Valletta and elsewhere. He is also made special envoy to the World Tourism Organisation, a position that would ideally require a great deal of dynamism, energy and – above all – travelling through airplanes and on planes. He is also an extremely unpleasant, vulgar, horrible and viciously aggressive man who has been motivated for decades to thump into silence (in the past, physically, and now, with verbal violence from his position of what he thinks is power) anybody whose truly liberal human rights views he does not share. He cannot expect to operate in an environment where his pig-swilling size is not discussed when he is perfectly happy to launch attacks on people who say immigrants should have a vote, on those whose religion is Islam, on Catholic priests who are apparently not allowed to dislike Mintoff, and the rest. Joe Grima is the living essence of gross intolerance. His pig-swilling attitude to food is directly related to his pig-swilling attitude to the political trough.
Obesity is not a genetic condition: the tendency to put on weight is. You should make the distinction. Nor is there an emotional cause for obesity: the obesity is caused by over-eating as compensation for emotional reasons, and not by the emotional reasons themselves. A quick look at any society in which food is in short supply – or at any concentration camp pictures to hand – will reveal that the only cause of obesity is too much food and the wrong sort. The reasons why people eat, and eat the wrong sort of food, is a separate issue. Above all, Joe Grima is a lousy example to others in a small country with the world’s fattest people which is literally afflicted by obesity and the massive related health care costs – though to my mind this should most definitely not be seen as a ‘cost to the state’ issue only.]
Daphne, regarding genetic propensity to obesity, yes, genetic traits can cause a plethora of physical effects that increase, to a lesser or greater extent, the tendency to store excess fat.
These can range from hypothyroidism to polycystic ovarian syndrome in women to insulin resistance to neural problems causing constant craving and hunger for food, rivalling alcohol and drug addictions.
It has been shown that different people have different “set-points” for their body weight towards which the body automatically gravitates and away from which only departs with constant effort that, in general, is very difficult to maintain in the long term. So let’s not mince words or play around with definitions here. In essence, some people have to starve themselves constantly in order to lose and maintain a “normal” body weight.
There are also (it recently transpired in the scientific literature) genetic traits that increase the propensity of an individual to be sexually attracted to other individuals of the same sex. Let’s refuse those people jobs too, shall we?
[Daphne – You know I have difficulties tolerating non sequiturs in arguments, so please leave them out and save them for Facebook. I have said already that I do not agree with Ken Il-Malti’s reasoning in general. That does not mean this reasoning can’t be justified in the specifics. I can think of many jobs from which the obese are automatically disqualified on grounds of unsuitability: air steward, for instance, or quarry-worker, or diver, or soldier. In fact, anything where you are required to pass a medical test (except, going on the available evidence, policemen and traffic wardens) because the job is physically rigorous or because you are required to be able to walk down a airplane aisle without getting stuck. There is a physical reason for this which is 100% justified – a whole raft of other physical reasons will get potential army recruits failed. In conscription during war, this was actually seen as a positive. Being gay is completely different. There is no aspect of homosexuality which prevents you doing your job, so being barred from that job on grounds of homosexuality is obviously wrong. That’s why airlines rush to recruit gay men as air stewards (more willing to work difficult shifts and unlikely to have hassling family ties) but will block obese men because they’re not physically able to do the job, and not necessarily because they’re bad for the airline’s image. I would have no problem at all employing a fat person to do desk-work. But if an obese man presented himself for an interview as a gardener, I’d say, forget it. It’s physically exhausting work, and the more weight you’re carrying yourself, the less external weight you’re going to be able to carry – unless that weight is muscle and not fat.]
Or else we might make them live a life of perpetual abstinence, on penalty of public shaming and ostracism. The Catholic church would have something to say about that. I know you would never say or agree with such a thing, Daphne, be it with respect to gays or obese people, but it’s all a matter of degree after all, isn’t it?
I’ve seen “fat” people (especially women I must say as the social pressure tends to be greater on them) physically collapse from sheer starvation and others break out in tears as their efforts at controlling their weight consistently fail while their skinny friends stuff their faces to their hearts’ content.
[Daphne – Again, you’re arguing with somebody who agrees with you. I’ve written about this repeatedly, and am on the record as saying that self-starvation is the neurotic plague of our era. I’m not into being skinny at all – when I was super-skinny, that was the default position because I ate like a horse. Beyond that, my line of thinking is: who on earth are they doing it for? You’ll find that it’s not for men but for other women, and if there’s one thing I really don’t give a damn about, it’s that: other women and what they think. The clue to solving this problem isn’t food but eradication of a mentality of gang culture and ‘klikkek’ among girls and women. Boys don’t have this problem: in the same gang you’ll find fat ones and thin ones and plump ones and skinny ones, and they don’t bother. Thirty years ago, most girls were chunky, plump or ‘big-boned’. Who cared? They still had fun and found boyfriends and got married and had children. Now, in their 50s, their hovering on the verge of extreme neurosis, starving themselves and affecting their daughters – and still, the jolly girls who eat up everything on their plate find a boyfriend quicker. Why? Because the self-starvers are concentrating on what other women think and want of them, while the jolly eaters know to keep their eyes on the ball. ]
I’ve also seen schoolchildren retreat from social interaction due to bullying from their peers prompted by their weight. Some of those children manage to get out of it and rebuild their lives. Others grow into troubled teens some even going the route of suicide. So please, please, don’t trivialize such a multifaceted and complex problem such as obesity. It is not worth adding to so many people’s daily dose of negativity just to score points against Joe Grima.
The causes of obesity are not always simple to determine and never simple, sometimes impossible to solve. Joe Grima has plenty of skeletons in the closet as well as out in the open that he could and should be criticized for. His weight should be the least of those, if only because open season on one fatty from a prominent opinionist such as yourself Daphne, can only mean open season on all the others who might not deserve it, public or private. Just look at the attitude of Ken il-Malti.
[Daphne – I’m afraid you fail to distinguish between the helpless genetic fat person and people who are grossly obese because they stuff their faces uncontrollably. I make that distinction. I have been looking – because he has been forced upon me by the news media – at Joe Grima since the late 1970s. He has gone from a standard size in middle age to gross obesity in old age. This is the reverse of what normally happens. Normally, you are at your fattest in middle age and then shed the weight through natural attrition as you enter your 70s. This is not due to a condition. This is due to gluttony of Henry VIII proportions. There is a reason why gluttony – yes, it has a name in English – has historically been derided and despised in western culture. My distaste for Joe Grima’s gluttony grows out of that. You are not distinguishing between gluttony and obesity. I feel distaste for Joe Grima not because he is fat, but because he is a glutton and worse, a coarse glutton. As for Ken il-Malti, he operates in the USA, the ultimate liberal economy where yes, for better or worse employees, real or potential, do not have the protection of the nanny state that they do in Europe. You might have noticed that he says he pays for his employees’ medical insurance (do we need to explain why, given that he operates in the USA?). So yes, given that he pays their medical insurance voluntarily, he is entitled to choose not to employ people who are a medical insurance risk and for whom much higher premiums have to be paid. He is not operating in Europe.]
Come and sue me Bubu, I dare you or anyone else to do so.
I have my criteria for hiring people and obese people do not make the list or ever will as long as they stay obese.
No one is going to force me to hire anyone who I do not want.
As an employer I have the right to choose who I think is suitable for the job, AND who is healthy to do the job.
Obesity is a strong visual marker of an unhealthy body and possibly an unhealthy mind.
Since I pay 100% for their medical insurance as one of the job’s benefits, then their health can become a concern for the bottom line and I am in business to make a profit for myself and for paying the wages to my employees, plus paying for the overheads of my business, including taxes.
My business is not a charity organization, nor is it a government-run make-work enterprise.
There was not one case of obesity found in concentration camps after WWII. All the glandular or genetic disorders must have been miraculously cured.
Do not tell me obese people cannot get themselves to a healthy weight. It is done all the time if it becomes important enough to the person.
It’s just like quitting smoking. You do it if you really want to. Nothing in the world works against nicotine except the desire to quit. And it’s the same with eating too much of the wrong food.
Just because people cannot control one aspect in their life, doesn’t mean they can’t control all.
The most hard-working and competent person I work with is obese.
How about quality control in Jimmy’s Food Factory.
ken il malti – I have just read your comment in answer to Baxxter where you courteously gave details about your line work.
That changes the whole scenario and I will go as far as to tell you that given the job description one would be insane to apply if he is obese.
As I said before, your very first comment was misleading.
I heard he’s gone vegan.
Oops there goes the rain forest now as it becomes his staple diet.
Not only does he have a parking place right outside his flat, but another across the road for good measure. No space for the high-up to pull him down when he needs to go to hospital.
Ken, there are some conditions such as thyroid deficiencies that can exacerbate the problem. I hope there are not many employers with your mindset around. What makes you think that by having control over your body weight you also have the monopoly of self-control?
“What makes you think that by having control over your body weight you also have the monopoly of self-control?”
Because it takes self control to lose that excess weight and more importantly, to keep it off. One has to have self control to eat one pastizz instead of half a dozen pastizzi or more at one sitting for the rest of your living years.
It takes self-control to go and do physical exercise as a regular routine when you are tired or when your body-joints ache.
Self-control to push yourself that is also applicable to how you or anyone else performs when given a task to accomplish, as on a job with a contract, that I am responsible for with the customer if it is not finished on the agreed date that is written on the contract.
Obesity cased by medical conditions are rare, most obesity is caused by addiction to great quantities of junk-food on a daily basis and physical inactivity, which obviously gets greater with more weight added to the body.
Go to any 24 hours open large grocery store in any sizable town in North America and late at night you will see a lot of obese people in their motorized scooters buying great quantities of ready-made chocolate cakes, pies, sugar sodas, big bags of chips (crisps), doughnuts etc. for their daily carbohydrate induced dopamine fix.
Yes, there has been a change to our diet in the last 35 years, like the replacement of unhealthy white sugar with even more unhealthy HFC syrup ( high fructose corn syrup) in processed foods and drinks.
The addition of seed-oils and seed-oil based fats in processed foods that are always touted as better than animal fats, which in reality cause weight gain, as seed-oils affect the function of the thyroid gland and spleen in a negative way that has been known since the late 1940s by medical experiments on humans and experiments on animals.
But most obesity is still self-inflicted, even with to-days doctored and over processed foods, as we can avoid consuming these foods and we still can buy and ( if possible) grow healthy natural foods in this present time.
Obesity in most cases is a life choice, a self destructive one, but a life choice.
Go see any photos or films of common people, up to the late 1970s of Malta or Northern Europe or North America and obese people were a rare sight, unlike our present time-line but that does not mean that obesity today is a foregone conclusion for all of us.
‘Obesity cased by medical conditions are rare’
In fact no obese persons were ever found in the German concentration camps.
You are either right, Ken, or Jews are immune to obesity caused by medical conditions which I doubt.
You are so right! But the keeping it off is a lot harder than getting it off.
It has to be a lifetime project that you can never let go. Depressing but true.
And as you lose, your calorie count per day has to go down, too. Double depressing. The good news is – as you progress and get to a normal size, food is not as important to you as before.
“Mad**na, you should have seen Joe Grima that over-obese Mintoffian bastard all alone eating a plate-load of pastizzi ”
His obesity probably gives him depression which mixed with his vile character is disastrous.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080602152913.htm
He’s got a condition or three.
He has a condition of stuffing his face. It is only mental, nothing physical just the end result.
Can one imagine how rude he would be if his mouth wasn’t occupied in stuffing his face for the greater part of the day.
Boyfriend? At their age? Companion I would say.
What Daphne is saying here is that you shouldn’t get a reserved parking space for the disabled just because you’re obese.
I am sorry but the discussion turned to some people saying bad things about obese people. I am obese and it hurts to see such comments which are unfortunately used by quite a number of people.
Not all obese people stuff their face with food. Some of us out here are trying hard to overcome the situation which is affected by medical problems, but the process is slow. Lucky you who do not have problems but please do not hurt other people.
That’s a load of bull, Ken. I don’t think that workers generally want their employer’s charity or alms; that’s why remuneration is also called compensation. By your standards even smokers who cannot break the habit are unemployable because they cannot control themselves.
Over 30 years of working experience has taught me that a person’s shape or size is no guarantee for efficiency or otherwise.
Unfortunately for some, even a pastizz is one too many. I am in daily contact with people who can stay slim and trim despite their laid back lifestyle, while others have to work very hard to retain an acceptable weight.
Since you seem so keen in labelling people, how should we label you?
There is no excuse for being obese, period. Fat people eat huge volumes.
Go to any restaurant in Malta and have a look at the size of plates; worse are the buffets.
The fatter the person, the fuller the plate. The Maltese in general judge a restaurant not by the quality but the quantity. “Dak ghandu ikel tajjeb ta, ghax jimlijlek il-platt.”
We can’t blame being obese on our genes, that’s just a small fraction.
Most of my ancestors were fat, perhaps because they were poor and lived mostly on bread, but that gives me no excuse. I exercise every day and watch what I eat to maintain my petite size 8, and yes that requires some self control.