Monaco--entire country depicted here
Recent articles in both Yahoo and the Huffington Post have featured the ten nations with the longest life expectancies, none of which is the US, and noted that all have of some form of universal health care, equivalent to Obamacare or something even worse. This information is probably being spread by the fem-lib-gay-healthcare types who want Americans to live longer.
They ignore that fact that national health care would infringe on our rights as Americans, particularly our right to die prematurely, which is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. All right, the Second Amendment only explicitly guarantees our right to die of a gunshot wound, but it implies our right to die prematurely of drinking, smoking, bungee-jumping or eating cream cheese wontons at every meal.
If you look more closely at the facts, you'll see what obvious fraud is being perpetuated by these kinds of studies. First off, there are only three regular-size countries on the list: Japan, Italy, and Australia. In Japan, people only live a long time because they're trying to outlive the Emperor, and those guys live forever. Most of them don't even get the job until they'd be old enough for Social Security over here.
In Italy, people live a long time because they are on a Mediterranean diet, which means they drink a lot of red wine, cook everything in olive oil and lie about when they were born. In Australia, vital statistics are known to be imprecise. Australian authorities calculate a dead person's age by counting the number of empty Foster's cans in his or her house when they find the body.
The rest of the nations on the list are tiny, and I don't mean tiny like Belgium or Luxembourg. I mean tiny by being not much bigger than your average municipal sports complex. I mean Monaco and Macau, Andorra and Hong Kong. All seven of the remaining nations on the list would fit into San Diego County, where I live, and there would still be room for Rhode Island and Delaware. Unlike some of the statements I make here, this is not an exaggeration.
None of these countries is big enough to have a straight-line marathon, and in most of them you can't even go for a jog without a passport. San Marino is on the list, and most of you thought San Marino was a type of sheep.
Guernsey is on the list. Guernsey is definitely a type of cow.
How do these mini-countries keep their citizens alive for so many endless, aged years? For one thing, many of the opportunities we big nation citizens have to check out are not available in pint-sized principalities. You're not going to suffer snakebite in Singapore, or get hit by an avalanche in Hong Kong. There are no barren wastes in which to get lost in any of these itty-bitty burgs, no cliffs to fall off, no endless interstates on which to fall asleep and crash in the middle of the night. Tornadoes and hurricanes even find them too small to bother with. So they've got that advantage. But even when these city states try to keep up with the rest of the world in fatal statistics, like when Singapore executes people for chewing gum, or Hong Kong starts yet another of their crazy flu epidemics, enough of their citizens fail to buy the farm to make a dent in their soaring longevity rates. What gives?
First off, size matters. If you suffer a heart attack while running in Andorra, for example, chances are you've already run into the next country. Bingo! You're somebody else's statistic now.
Next is cheating. Monaco probably has a big billboard outside its border saying "Envie de vomir? Séjour en France!" which means "Feeling sick? Stay in France!" No doubt they also encourage their sickly citizen to emmigrate, possibly because they aren't even big enough to have their own hospitals. If you're feeling fatally ill in Guernsey, why not use it to wangle a free trip to London? That's international granny-dumping, is what that is.
Citizens in these tiny nations aren't allowed to shoot each other, either. This is not necessarily because they are gun-control wussies (although they may well be) but because any time they miss, their bullet flies into the next country and they've started a war. You can't have a gunfight when your entire nation isn't as big as the OK Corral.
So changing over to Obamacare isn't going to make any difference, unless we want to give up much more of what makes America great, which is stuff you can't get in these midget provinces—guns, highways and fried cheese sandwiches. It's too high a price to pay for a couple extra years of sitting around staring at an oxygen tank, not to mention the embarrassment of being ruled by a bishop or some prince with a hat nearly as tall as he is. And if the Monacans, San Marinos, Singapoos, Hong Kongers and the rest of them start feeling superior because they're still sitting in their wheelchairs in some foreign old-people warehouse while we've already embarked upon the adventure of being dead, let them laugh.
They'll still be watching our TV shows.
Recent articles in both Yahoo and the Huffington Post have featured the ten nations with the longest life expectancies, none of which is the US, and noted that all have of some form of universal health care, equivalent to Obamacare or something even worse. This information is probably being spread by the fem-lib-gay-healthcare types who want Americans to live longer.
They ignore that fact that national health care would infringe on our rights as Americans, particularly our right to die prematurely, which is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. All right, the Second Amendment only explicitly guarantees our right to die of a gunshot wound, but it implies our right to die prematurely of drinking, smoking, bungee-jumping or eating cream cheese wontons at every meal.
If you look more closely at the facts, you'll see what obvious fraud is being perpetuated by these kinds of studies. First off, there are only three regular-size countries on the list: Japan, Italy, and Australia. In Japan, people only live a long time because they're trying to outlive the Emperor, and those guys live forever. Most of them don't even get the job until they'd be old enough for Social Security over here.
In Italy, people live a long time because they are on a Mediterranean diet, which means they drink a lot of red wine, cook everything in olive oil and lie about when they were born. In Australia, vital statistics are known to be imprecise. Australian authorities calculate a dead person's age by counting the number of empty Foster's cans in his or her house when they find the body.
The rest of the nations on the list are tiny, and I don't mean tiny like Belgium or Luxembourg. I mean tiny by being not much bigger than your average municipal sports complex. I mean Monaco and Macau, Andorra and Hong Kong. All seven of the remaining nations on the list would fit into San Diego County, where I live, and there would still be room for Rhode Island and Delaware. Unlike some of the statements I make here, this is not an exaggeration.
None of these countries is big enough to have a straight-line marathon, and in most of them you can't even go for a jog without a passport. San Marino is on the list, and most of you thought San Marino was a type of sheep.
Guernsey is on the list. Guernsey is definitely a type of cow.
How do these mini-countries keep their citizens alive for so many endless, aged years? For one thing, many of the opportunities we big nation citizens have to check out are not available in pint-sized principalities. You're not going to suffer snakebite in Singapore, or get hit by an avalanche in Hong Kong. There are no barren wastes in which to get lost in any of these itty-bitty burgs, no cliffs to fall off, no endless interstates on which to fall asleep and crash in the middle of the night. Tornadoes and hurricanes even find them too small to bother with. So they've got that advantage. But even when these city states try to keep up with the rest of the world in fatal statistics, like when Singapore executes people for chewing gum, or Hong Kong starts yet another of their crazy flu epidemics, enough of their citizens fail to buy the farm to make a dent in their soaring longevity rates. What gives?
First off, size matters. If you suffer a heart attack while running in Andorra, for example, chances are you've already run into the next country. Bingo! You're somebody else's statistic now.
Next is cheating. Monaco probably has a big billboard outside its border saying "Envie de vomir? Séjour en France!" which means "Feeling sick? Stay in France!" No doubt they also encourage their sickly citizen to emmigrate, possibly because they aren't even big enough to have their own hospitals. If you're feeling fatally ill in Guernsey, why not use it to wangle a free trip to London? That's international granny-dumping, is what that is.
Citizens in these tiny nations aren't allowed to shoot each other, either. This is not necessarily because they are gun-control wussies (although they may well be) but because any time they miss, their bullet flies into the next country and they've started a war. You can't have a gunfight when your entire nation isn't as big as the OK Corral.
So changing over to Obamacare isn't going to make any difference, unless we want to give up much more of what makes America great, which is stuff you can't get in these midget provinces—guns, highways and fried cheese sandwiches. It's too high a price to pay for a couple extra years of sitting around staring at an oxygen tank, not to mention the embarrassment of being ruled by a bishop or some prince with a hat nearly as tall as he is. And if the Monacans, San Marinos, Singapoos, Hong Kongers and the rest of them start feeling superior because they're still sitting in their wheelchairs in some foreign old-people warehouse while we've already embarked upon the adventure of being dead, let them laugh.
They'll still be watching our TV shows.
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