Kids forever have complained about their school lunches. But now the complaints aren’t about the quality of the spinach, but the paucity of food. Since the passage of The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act 0f 2010, and its mandate reducing the intake for school lunches down to 750-850 calories, more students say they’re starving. Student athletes, in particular, fault the new mandate for leaving them drained of energy for afterschool practices. H/T iOwnTheWorld
Reason TV’s Nanny of the Month Award for August goes to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the US Health and Human Services Department. Sebelius won because her department used Stimulus and Obamacare funds to back campaigns imposing local soda taxes and enacting tougher zoning rules for fast-food restaurants. Besides violating the job-creating intent of the Stimulus program, the department’s Office of Inspector General is now investigating whether these campaigns violated federal anti-lobbying provisions.
Reason TV also named two runners-up for the August Nanny of the Month Award:
PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was founded in 1980 in Virginia, but not too surprisingly, the radical animal rights movement first became a fad in California. Perhaps none of the activists to the cause was more eccentric than Lewis Beach Marvin III, wealthy heir to the S & H Green Stamp fortune, as his late father had served as the chairman of Sperry & Hutchinson Co. In the 1960s, Marvin established a 60-acre compound near Topanga Canyon above Malibu, where, emulating Noah, he gathered together and sheltered scores of animals of many different species, allowing them to roam freely. At his mountaintop retreat, he also built the Moonfire Temple, site of orgies, Acid Tests and pagan rituals involving countercultural figures ranging from The Doors to members of the Charles Manson Family.
What specifically did Marvin believe? We can get a sense of his hardcore dogma from this 1966 clip when he appeared in “the beef box” on The Joe Pyne Show to assail the slaughter of any animal for any purpose whatsoever.
Notice the distinctive skull and crossbones hat he’s wearing? He let Jim Morrison wear the same hat on the night of March 1, 1969 when The Doors performed in concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, Florida — the infamous concert in which a highly intoxicated Morrison fondled himself on stage, leading to his arrest on charges of lewd and lascivious behavior in public after allegedly exposing his genitals. Did Morrison really whip it out? No known photographs prove that, but stills show the singer arriving on stage carrying a lamb — one of the creatures from Marvin’s menagerie. Watch this compilation (extreme language alert) to get a sense of what transpired that night.
The Doors had hooked up with Marvin in 1966 when they agreed to perform a benefit concert at Will Rogers State Park in California to raise money for Marvin’s campaign to ban weapons-related toys during the height of the Vietnam War. Marvin continued to press his activism, helping to establish the Animal Freedom Fighters in Venice, California, and addressing the throngs at Woodstock with an anti-meat message, again carrying a lamb on stage, and telling the masses, “The killing of animals causes the killing of men.” He died in 2005 at a monkey refuge in Panama.
Why bring up Marvin now? For starters, he plays a prominent role in Mondo Hollywood, today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, containing two extended interludes devoted to him. In the first segment, starting at 12:34, we meet the multi-millionaire shacking up with his pet monkey, Mr. President, in a rented garage for $10 a month while he builds the Moonfire Temple, having already dropped a bundle on acquiring his mountaintop. He resurfaces much later in the film, at 1:08:47, cavorting in the temple as he delivers a sermon that evolves into a full-blown rant: “The universalist, the pacifist, the vegetarian and the compassionate are smothered, are overwhelmed and driven to the place of death. Each of us must become a Christ. Each of us must die before we would take the life of another.”
Exploring Marvin’s life and his connection with The Doors brought to mind all of the recent celebrities going nude to publicize PETA’s militant broadsides against its latest targets. These celebrities actually aren’t as daring or shocking as they might think. In retrospect, they are simply upholding a tradition that’s now a half-century old, with roots tied to a pagan temple in California and a quixotic, early animal rights activist. Kinda figures.
Many men are into breasts, but New York’s Nanny Mayor Michael Bloomberg has carried his fascination with breast milk to an illogical extreme — so much so that he’s now not only upset civil libertarians, but also earned the scorn of the liberal women on The View, and even been subjected to ridicule on RT, the global Russian TV network. When even the Russians are pouncing on Bloomberg’s penchant for “regulation rather than promoting policy through education,” you’d think His Highness might see the arrogance of his ways. But after waging war on cigarettes, sodas, trans-fat and now baby formula, somehow it won’t be surprising if he refuses to back off his pious pedestal.
Fox and Friends reports on a U.S. Department of Agriculture newsletter that encourages employees to go meatless every Monday on the grounds that raising cattle, chickens, sheep and other animals can cause global warming. You’d think that the USDA would be duty-bound to promote US livestock, but apparently, pop stars like Paul McCartney and Moby have been pushing the “Meatless Monday” meme for a few years, so it’s now gaining traction among the subalterns within the rank and file of the federal bureaucracy.
We say: It’s high time to plant a counter-meme. If the planet’s heating up, come Tuesday, go topless. H/T small dead animals
A “locavore” is a fancy word for describing someone only interested in eating locally produced food. Many proponents of farmers’ markets are locavores, but the movement also has spawned some radical adherents, a ripe topic for satire in the Dec. 31, 2011 Bizarro comic strip featuring a man about to eat a hand sandwich. “If you take the local food movement to its logical extreme…people who live beyond their local food chain are essentially parasites,” says Pierre Desrochers, co-author of The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet. Here, Desrochers shares his observations on the movement with Reason.TV’s Nick Gillespie.
After moves to outlaw super-sized sodas, wonder if the pizza will become the next target for the food police? Here’s a sneak peek into what it might be like to order a pizza in the future. H/T Moonbattery
The Center for Science in the Public Interest pushed trans fats into the fast-food supply, then later sued restaurants for using them. From the documentary film FAT HEAD, taking a look at these meddlesome busybodies trying to control your freedom to choose what you eat.
