This is one of those Who do I root for? stories. It starts when the always-unpredictable People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launches their new Viva Las Veggies campaign. The idea here is a big fat Elvis impersonator sitting on a toilet seat (to commemorate the death of the King), who belts out PETA-inspired Elvis tunes like "Dont Be Cruel (to your heart)" and "Heart Attack Hotel." They figure if you see this, that quarter-pounder won't look so good. "Meat eaters, he tells his audience, are 'four times as likely to be obese as vegetarians.'"

Enter Jeanette DePatie, a self-proclaimed "fat activist" who represents the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She and her group are not amused at this blatant display of "sizeism."

"It's not acceptable to portray other groups this way. We wouldn't see Asian or African-Americans, short people or disabled people in a campaign like this. So why fat people? This promotes the idea that it is shameful to be fat."

"Nothing is acceptable to mention anymore. Why, if we used a bunch of svelte models in our campaigns, I'd hear from all the feminists about it."

The ISAA is calling for a nationwide boycott of PETA by "the size-acceptance community" to help stop "fat hatred."

Truth In Labeling

A 14-year-old girl in Charlotte, North Carolina, broke into a school with some of her chums and racked up "about $60,000 worth of damage." This is a bit beyond petty vandalism, so last February Judge James Honeycutt came up with a fiendishly clever punishment: The vandal would have to wear a square-foot sign about her neck reading "I am a juvenile criminal" at any time she appeared in public for the remainder of the school year. Seems fairly lenient, but effective, no? Well her parents weaseled and got the girl a lawyer and of course he appealed and the net effect is that she only had to wear the sign for "about 10 days." Let's hope it was enough.

The larger issue, however, is that this was a prime example of the sort of justice that we need to re-institute. There are too many "zero-tolerance" laws and mandatory sentencing guidelines such that a judge nowadays has little leeway for assigning an appropriate measure of discipline for a given crime. Worse, the emphasis seems to be on the punishment such that any factors involving the circumstances and motivation of the criminal are difficult to weigh into the equation. The Raven likes Judge Honeycutt's approach and would like to see more of this sort of creative sentencing.

6:38:28 PM       

Britain's former Prime Minister John Major is back in the news as his former mistress, Edwina Currie, tells all in a series of excerpts from her diaries being published in the London Times. Beginning today, her journal chronicles her life in the public eye and in it she recounts her long-running affair with Major while the two were ministers serving in Maggie Thatcher's government. But isn't this sort of thing rather common? Sure it is, but remember that Prime Minister Major ran a "Back to Basics" campaign promoting traditional values and morality as a cornerstone of his administration—and thus these revelations are hollowing out his legacy like a spoon scoops through a halved avocado. Here's Edwina:

"Governments should not start running morality campaigns. Governments are no better than the people that elect them and here we are in this country, we've the highest divorce rate in the world, the highest illegitimacy birth rate in the world, the highest rate of teenage pregnancy—we are no country to start chucking stones at each other and we should not expect our politicians to be any better."

"He then, as a policy, decided to have Back to Basics all about family morality, about how awful single parents were—I thought that was evil, really rotten, really cruel, and it was then open house on the way that his ministers had been behaving."

Ideally, the role of government—in an abstract sense—is to do more than simply tally livestock and apportion revenues. Good rulership ought to try and improve the lives of the governed and make them better people. While bringing citizens the fruits of prosperity, our leaders should be concerned with the promotion of virtues so that wealth does more than feather nests and build dynasties. They can't do that when they're leading lives of duplicity.

Felonius Monk

This story is off the British wire so there's no hyperlink yet. But here's the text in full:

A Buddhist monk who allegedly encourages his followers to commit suicide as a way of reaching Nirvana, or supreme happiness, has been arrested in Cambodia. Dim Moam, 34, was arrested after a monk and two nuns burned themselves to death at a temple in Prey Veng province. He told police he preached a message of "self-sacrifice in the name of Lord Buddha". He has not yet been charged. Seng Sona, a 16-year-old monk, and two nuns identified as Svay Roeun, 53, and Sat Thuon, 38, died after tying themselves to poles and sitting in petrol-filled basins that they then set on fire.

Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong

In the remote city of Ivolginsk, Siberia, a monestary is claiming to be in possession of a full-blown miracle. Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, a former lama of the Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism prominent in Siberia, told his followers to "visit and look at my body" after 30 years. He then sat down to meditate and expired. That was back in 1927. About 30 years later a loyal follower digs up Dashi per the lama's instructions and sure enough, the man hasn't decomposed or anything. He looks perfect. But times are a little uncertain in Russia and they decide to bury Dashi again, for safekeeping. This year, on September 11, they decided to have another look.

The lamas who opened the coffin wore surgical masks, but they need not have. Itigilov's body remained preserved.

Bargain Hunter

White House spokes-hawk Ari Fleischer is in the soup for an impromptu remark he made yesterday. Noting that a war in Iraq would saddle the U.S. with a bill of about $13 billion a month, Ari suggested that there are more economical ways to meet our objectives in the region.

"The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that," Fleischer said.

9:25:29 AM