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True Green Report

Debut of the food fascists

June 9, 2003

Eating your greens is taking on a new meaning in today’s intrusive society. Children of past generations were admonished by their mothers to "eat your spinach".

Moms have been replaced with something called "activists," who, when banded together, become the "food fascists."

Using obesity as their clarion call, the food fascists want to use government power to make you eat what they think you should eat.

Despite all diet and exercise fads, obesity is on the rise in America, among children as well as adults. Obesity is linked to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other serious diseases.

"The experts are getting tired of waiting for the public to recognize their wisdom voluntarily," writes Peter Ferrara of The Washington Times. "At the top of their increasingly coercive agenda is imposition of special punitive taxes on their disfavoured foods.

"Bills proposing such taxes are popping up in state legislatures all over the United States. One proposes a 1- percent excise tax on so-called junk food, as determined by the state Department of Health. Several others propose increasing the sales tax, or imposing special excise taxes, on soft drinks, or soft drink syrup.

"Another bill proposes a special "selective" tax on candy, soft drinks, certain non-carbonated beverages, snack food, and bakery items. Proposals in several states where food is exempt from the sales tax seek to remove the exemption for foods that are not politically correct. The disfavoured foods in one such bill include bottled, ready-to-drink tea or coffee, sports drinks, spring or mineral water, and flavoured milk products.

"Other proposals seek to prohibit the use of food stamps for the now politically incorrect foods. Another bill seeks to ban the sale of cookies in schools.

…"Is government policy going to be based solely on the objective science? Or will it be based on the influence of local and national special interests?

"Dictating our personal diets is not a proper role for government. Programs to spread knowledge, and the best understanding of the experts are, fine. But the final choice belongs to each one of us, not some mad, self-appointed, food fascist in his laboratory."

If you’ve been feeling a bit queasy of late, it may be the activists on the way to your digestive tract.

If Mom’s blandishments about not eating your broccoli sounded like nagging in the past, today it might sound more like soothing music.


Snake shy

First came Yankee outfielder Dave Windfield, who killed a seagull in Toronto with a warm-up throw on Aug. 4, 1983. Ontario police charged Windfield with animal cruelty, but later dropped the charge.

Then came 19-year-old Daytona Beach minor league pitcher Jae-kuk Ryu, who could be facing charges of animal cruelty for knocking an osprey from its perch during pre-game practice.

Now it’s 47-year-old James Galloway, who was convicted by a six-member jury of killing a protected reptile or amphibian, without a state permit.

Galloway killed an Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake--Michigan’s only venomous snake.

Galloway will be sentenced June 26 on the misdemeanor charge that carries a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and a $500 fine.

"I’m stunned that the snake had more rights than a human being," Galloway said after the trial.

The Michigan man was charged with killing the 2-foot-long snake during an afternoon outing last August with his two sons and their friend at Pickerel Lake, 15 miles northwest of Ann Arbor.

Galloway testified that while his two sons and their friend fished on the dock, he was heading up a narrow, sandy path to his pickup truck when he heard a hissing sound that he first thought was air. He then spotted a rattlesnake about six to eight feet away. At the same time he saw a young girl, who looked to be about 3-years-old, coming down the path toward him, and ahead of two adults he assumed were her parents.

Galloway told them to stop the girl because there was a rattlesnake in the path.

Grabbing a nearby stick, he held the reptile’s head down, even though the snake struck out at the stick a couple of times, while the girl and her parents passed to safety.

Galloway later went to a wooded area near the parking lot, intending to release the snake, but felt threatened when he put it on the ground and it came toward him. He then cut off the snake’s head with a shovel, snapped the rattle off, and tossed the carcass in the woods.

Herpetologist Glenn Fox was certainly on the side of the serpent. Galloway’s story, he said, was unreasonable because an Eastern Massasauga will not strike a stick, is shy, and will probably flee when approached.


Pyromaniacs at ELF

The radical environmental group Earth Liberation Front (ELF)--kept afloat with donations from other environmental groups with your money--is getting even bolder in the pyromaniac department. Notorious for its activity in the burning of SUVs on car lots, the group has stepped up to take responsibility for house fires, including one that destroyed two houses near Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The slogan "ELF, no sprawl" was spray painted on the garage door of a house next to one of those burned in the Mystic Forest subdivision. On its website, the group claims responsibility for the fires, which it says cost $400,000 in damage.

The group also takes responsibility for burning luxury homes being built near Philadelphia late last year. A picture of a burning home is featured on the website, along with instructions on how to start fires.

The group says no one has claimed responsibility for last summer’s fires that destroyed two luxury homes under construction, but police said they suspect the ELF.

The FBI (news-web sites) has said it considers the Earth Liberation Front one of the nation’s most prolific domestic terrorist organizations. The group has taken responsibility for a series of antigrowth attacks in the past six years.


Seeing the forest for the trees

It’s a problem every summer, raging forest fires jeopardizing human life.

"Last year alone, wildfires burned more than 7 million acres of public and private lands--an area larger than Rhode Island and Maryland combined." (Charlie Coon, The Washington Times). "These fires claimed the lives of 21 firefighters, destroyed thousands of structures, and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. The two-headed monsters forest officials now confront--forests with excessive "loads" of dead trees and other brush, and forests deteriorating because of disease and insects--now consume 190 million acres of public land, an area twice the size of California.

"Communities such as Flagstaff, Ariz., and Klamath Falls, Ore., no longer can afford to have sound forest management plans stifled by extremists and their frivolous challenges until fire season arrives and it’s too late to help. That’s the focus of President Bush’s proposed Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, now under consideration by the House.

"The initiative would make it easier for forest managers to "thin" forests--fell and remove diseased or dead trees--to perform "prescribed burns", in which small controllable fires are set to prevent unwieldy conflagrations, and to otherwise treat forests against insect and disease infestation.

"It would also do so by streamlining the administrative appeals and court challenges to fire-prevention strategies on up to 20 million acres of forests near residential communities, municipal water supplies, areas with threatened or endangered species, and areas where trees are infected with certain insects.

"It’s time we recognize that times have changed with respect to our forests. Our burgeoning population means more of us live near forests and rangelands than ever before. Leaving the forests alone may sound like the best environmental practice, and it may have been 100 or more years ago when the occasional natural burn could correct overgrowth without threatening communities. Now, circumstances demand we control the elements, and thankfully, we have the technology and know-how to do so.

"But how we must do so must be based on what’s best for the forests and the people who live around them. And those who have devoted their lives to the study of these ecosystems can best make those decisions--not extremists who insist that to touch a forest is to defile it."