Congressman Steve King (R, IA) has introduced HR 610, titled Choices in Education Act of 2017. The bill does two things – establishes a nationwide voucher program and tinkers with the school lunch regulations. I’ll cover the voucher program at length in another article. Here’s a brief walk-through of the the school lunches part.
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
Section 9(a)(1)(A)(i) of the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act (42 U.S.C. 1758(a)(1)(A)(i)) is amended by inserting before the semicolon the following: “, to establish a calorie maximum for individual school lunches, or to prohibit a child from eating a lunch provided by the child’s parent or legal guardian”.
That would amend §1758 to read as follows (changes in bold):
1758. Program requirements
(a) Nutritional requirements
(1)(A) Lunches served by schools participating in the school lunch program under this chapter shall meet minimum nutritional requirements prescribed by the Secretary on the basis of tested nutritional research, except that the minimum nutritional requirements-
(i) shall not be construed to prohibit the substitution of foods to accommodate the medical or other special dietary needs of individual students, to establish a calorie maximum for individual school lunches, or to prohibit a child from eating a lunch provided by the child’s parent or legal guardian; and
(ii) shall, at a minimum, be based on the weekly average of the nutrient content of school lunches.
So, no calorie maximums and no confiscations of lunches sent from home. Not that the Congress has any business meddling in education in the first place, but this is not the typical unfunded mandate to take positive action which Congress has traditionally imposed upon public schools.
Public education priority. All your lunch are belong to us.
The no-calorie-maximums part will doubtlessly cause hysterics among the usual suspects, but in practicality will free the school lunch folks from having to worry about going over the limit by one calorie and incurring the wrath of US DoEd retribution. And while this is indeed micromanagement of the schools by Congress, it is a net gain because it rolls back existing onerous federal regulations; regulations which should not exist, of course. The US Secretary of Education would still be in the business of prescribing minimum nutritional requirements for school lunches.
The second part is a huge win for parents – no confiscation of lunches sent from home. HR 610 may also override the peanut butter bans in place in many schools. While still meddling in education, this is a more libertarian-friendly form of meddling as it articulates an individual right which the government may not infringe – much like the First Amendment.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where HR 610 currently resides, has twenty two Republican members including Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (NC), Vice Chairman Joe Wilson (SC) and Tea Party star Dave Brat (Virginia). The committee also includes seventeen Democrats. It will be interesting to see what they do with this.
Making the rounds on the outrage circuit is this latest update into the continuing saga of Trump – Oh, What An Ass.
‘‘This is what it’s like to be with Trump,’’ Christie said. ‘‘He says, ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’’’
The big take-away we’re supposed to have is that Trump is such dickhead. How Dare He. The choice of supper entree for an enormous fat man already the subject of one failed lap banding is none of your business, sir – he has agency, you know!
Pardon me if I hesitated to clutch my pearls. As many times as this story has been passed from shocked ear to shocked ear, people missed what I found to be the pertinent lede to the story, which defined a damning study in character itself.
Trump and Christie discussed the nation’s opioid epidemic during the lunch.
Christie on Wednesday signed a series of bills he requested to address the crisis, including a five-day limit on initial prescriptions for opioids and mandating state-regulated insurance plans cover treatment.
I’m sorry, were we discussing agency here? The agency of someone afflicted with a self-inflicted morbidity known to cause early death, disorder and severe limitations on quality of life?
Oh yes. I went there.
Chris Christie believes there is an opioid epidemic. Is he correct? Possibly. To what ends? His own. If the opioid epidemic were a problem for the consumers of opioids, they’d be proposing their own solutions. They might even be doing so – we don’t know, since Top Men and the mainstream media do not appear to have invited them to the discussion. But the real problem here is that Christie ate meatloaf when he might have chosen something else. Sure.
As detailed in my earlier article, Finding the Why, humans have a talent for spotting malfunction as defined through their own worldview. We apply self-serving corrections, and then when our best-laid plans end up tattered wrecks, we blame everyone else for the failure.
I, personally, believe Chris Christie needs to put the snacks down and take the stairs more often. I am fully confident that if he does not do so, his life will be needlessly shortened and suffer a loss of quality. I might even be right. So, tell me, America – at what point do I get to override Governor Christie’s agency in order to apply my corrections to his choices?
In my opinion, I don’t.
If he wants to be a great big fat bastard, that’s his problem. Nothing to do with me. But what about his elevated healthcare costs, due specifically to his bad lifestyle choices and now foisted onto the backs of taxpayers? Who, exactly, paid for Governor Christie’s surgery; the one that didn’t work?
Red herring. If we all eat enough of them, we’ll be thin as rails. The problem isn’t that Christie has a sweetheart Cadillac healthcare plan exempted from Obamacare’s onerous health-damaging idiocies, at the expense of people who lack such privilege. The problem isn’t even that he uses this sweet privilege to rectify the self-inflicted abuse of his body. The problem is that government picks my pocket to enrich people who think lunch should be not merely free, but an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those who rob Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul.
Is the analogy too subtle? Perhaps it is. In the abundance of articles about poor, poor Christie’s stolen agency, not one thus far to mine eyes has pointed out these astonishing parallels. Christie is upset at the loss of his own agency, while taking others’ agency away with both hands and the expectation of applause.
Governor Christie is the very thing against which he rails. He merely has trouble seeing this clearly, since he is as convinced of his own narrative rightness as every other human on the planet. He is the good guy, because that’s what his head tells him is so.
Being the good guy isn’t a side, a team. It doesn’t come with the proper hand-waving to paper over what you did with a thin veneer of respectability and concern. It’s an action. Those who do bad things are not the good guys. Everything from there is rationalization.
Prediction: If an opioid epidemic exists, it will not be cured by talking at opioid consumers coupled with the proper removal of just exactly the right set of agencies from the correct people, handing that power over to some bureaucrat whose claim to fame is a bachelors degree in fine arts and a cushy job divorced from the requirement for functional results. What we’ll get then is another set of dysfunctions, and more people insistent that more money and and more power to the people who caused the new problems are the next sole best solution.
If there is an opioid epidemic, we’d be best served to start with finding the why.
Why are more people consuming more opioids? If consumption has reached levels causing individual health concerns, why has that individual come to the conclusion that this was the most effective cure for their pain despite the risk-reward calculation? Lest anyone labor under the delusion that only people making good and proper social normie choices make risk-reward calculations, allow me to disabuse them of that notion. Everyone makes risk-reward calculations. The man drinking himself to death knows it. This choice nevertheless appears, to his mind, to be the most effective option available. If this calculation fails to make sense, I’d suggest asking him to explain it rather than assuming we know everything about the matter and can solve that problem for him.
Chris Christie post-surgery is still grossly obese. If you want to know why, don’t ask his surgeon; ask Christie.
Therein lies our real solutions. Taking away the proper agencies and handing more power and money to people ill-equipped to use them will solve nothing. Such actions have, in fact, gotten us to this state of disorder and chaotic whack-a-mole with accompanying enormous and rising costs; both fiscal and societal.
We need to start involving those who we purport to assist. Not at them and to them, but with them, will these problems be solved. Every individual has agency, and re-labeling people as sub-human and otherwise lesser-than to excuse our actions in taking away their individuality does not make us the good guys.
The… characteristics referred to as antisocial personality in the FBI report were as follows: sense of entitlement, unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful of others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior, disregardful of social obligations, nonconforming to social norms, irresponsible. These… were not simply persistently antisocial individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for ASPD; they were psychopaths- remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends.
We are eating the very people we claim to help because it feeds our narrative and increases power and money in one direction only. The stated goals are never reached, and the subjects loathe us for our efforts; this is natural, since we are not helping them, that’s just our rationalization of our bad choices. This is tribal monkey behavior with evolved vocabulary, not civilized humanity.
I expect this will be a recurring segment. It will cover things that people of a libertarian bent get outraged about every day that finally bubble up into the public consciousness. Suddenly, much outrage is spouted because a particular person, possessing some special trait, attractive to media outlets and their audiences, has been treated badly by the government.
The first in this series is NASA engineer Sidd Bikkannaver, US born citizen who was ordered to unlock his phone at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
It was January 31. Bikkannavar had just arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after a nine-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, where he’d competed in a two-week race from the southern tip of the country to its capital in a solar-powered car. In a few hours, he would board a connecting flight back home to California, where he’s worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for over a decade.
Be still, my beating heart. So smart, so hip. And his phone was property of the JPL! How dare the agent not believe the “it’s not even mine” story! Who does this agent think our hero is? Some scruffy-looking dope mule? This is an outrage!
Actually, the outrage is that ICE agents can hold people indefinitely, or at least long enough to cause them signifcant loss of money and time, to get around 4th Amendment protections that apply to everyone on US soil, citizen, resident, visitor, or illegal. The broad police powers, rather than how or to whom such powers are applied, are the outrage. This example is, sadly, a result of a well-designed program in that it occasionally assigns a random check (probably, I don’t have special knowledge) to even people who ICE has good evidence are solid citizens. Bikkannaver “[is] a part of the Customs and Border Protection Global Entry program, whose members are waved through the line after just scanning their passport and fingerprints. That would lead me to believe that this is not the result of some Border Patrol agent from flyover country picking the guy with the funny name.
So welcome to the party, pal! You’ve done everything right and felt the State’s boot.
According to a poorly-sourced Wikipedia bio, Louis J. Marinelli, driving force behind Yes California (better known as Calexit) and the [former] interim co-chair of the California National Party (CNP), was born in Buffalo, NY and raised in the area. He went to Iowa to work in the Edwards campaign there at 17 for the 2004 election, but became frustrated when the party chose the overly liberal Kerry. In 2006 he started a Facebook group called Protect Marriage: One Man, One Woman, while he was living in Russia as an English teacher. It eventually became affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and he (according to Wikipedia) was a paid strategist for them. He returned to the US in early 2010 to help with the Summer for Marriage Tour. By late 2010 he had come out in favor of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and fully broke with NOM’s position on marriage equality by April 2011, which brought him to the attention of MSNBC, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. According to The Daily Beast, NOM spox, Brian Brown, denied that Marinelli was a key player and stated that he was just a “bus driver”:
Bear Republic
“Louis was a bus driver,” Brown said. “It’s pretty hilarious, this idea that he was a top strategist for NOM. He was a part-time consultant. He has since changed his position, and people have a right to change their minds.”
Marinelli falls out of the public eye for a few years after this. He moves back to Russia to teach English, marries a Russian national, and (again, according to Wikipedia) started a movement called Sovereign California around the time that he fell in with Marcus Ruiz Evans and advocate for “sub-national sovereignty.” They began working together and re-branded as Yes California along the model of the Scottish Independence movement. He ran for state assembly, but did not generate much interest or make it past the primary. In 2015 and 2016 he received some friendly puff-piece coverage from the likes of The LA Times and Vice. He is named as a co-founder of the California National Party in the Vice profile while his involvement is otherwise implied in other venues.
And Then There Was Trump
Yes California became relevant to Californians following the 2016 elections who felt that the result was out of step with their values. A recent Reuters poll pegs Californian interest in secession at 32%. This Reuters devotes four paragraphs to Marinelli’s “quixotic campaign”. What it failed to mention is Marinelli’s participation in a Russian backed conference for Western secession movements hosted in Moscow. In December, KQED reported on how heavily Russian state news organization RT and the Communist Party organ Pravda had been covering Yes California prior to anyone in California actually caring. In fact, Marinelli had spoken at a September conference hosted in Moscow for Western secession movements including Catalonia, Ireland, and…Texas. Pravda quotes Marinelli in it’s article “Moscow gathers ‘fifth column’ for Washington”:
‘We’ll need international recognition of our voting in the future, when the referendum is held. We count on the Russian authorities to support us within this issue, as the Crimea also separated from Ukraine due to a referendum. We want to exit from the US the same way,’ Louis J. Marinelli said
The conference was hosted by an organization called Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (ADR). ADR has been the recipient of Kremlin funds to drive their activities and have subsequently allowed Yes California to use office space in their headquarters as a “California Embassy” to Moscow. It is unclear how much funding the Kremlin provides ADR although it did receive a Presidential grant. ABC News confirms that the conference was funded by the Kremlin, but the head of ADR is evasive about how much of their funding is direct from the government, and Marinelli seems unsure across several interviews.
To make matters more interesting the CNP denies any current relationship to Marinelli. He was one of eight founding members, but has resigned his position as of June 2016, and has had no further involvement with the organization since June, according to CNP Vice Chairperson, Jed Wheeler (via email). Linda Daly, the Los Angeles co-chair of the CNP was in the audience, but not a participant, for a February 13 conference where Marinelli downplayed the influence of Russian involvement. Mr. Wheeler clarified that she attended to correct any potential misrepresentation Mr. Marinelli might make regarding his continued involvement with the CNP.
Marinelli is difficult to pin down politically. His CV purportedly includes stumping for John Edwards and the National Organization for Marriage. Various profiles from his Assembly run peg him as a “moderate liberal” and wanting a devolution of Federal power to the state, although in the most recent interview he indicated he wanted to “establish the kind of liberal and progressive republic that we want in California, but often can’t have because of congress, because of the White House, because of the supreme court.” His current position also hints at a more definitive break with the US than his previous “sub-sovereignty” solution.
The problem isn’t that Christie has a sweetheart Cadillac healthcare plan exempted from Obamacare’s onerous health-damaging idiocies, at the expense of people who lack such privilege. The problem isn’t even that he uses this sweet privilege to rectify the self-inflicted abuse of his body. The problem is that government picks my pocket to enrich people who think lunch should be not merely free, but an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those who rob Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul.
What we’ll get then is another set of dysfunctions, and more people insistent that more money and and more power to the people who caused the new problems are the next sole best solution.