Crocs before people

Relatives of a young girl killed by a crocodile want a cull of the reptiles, but their plea fell on deaf ears yesterday. The eight-year-old girl was on the Blythe River in northern Arnhem Land on Saturday night when taken by a croc. Police and rangers yesterday continued searching the river, about 400km east of Darwin, in the hope of finding her body. Search co-ordinator NT Police Acting Supt Tony Fuller said police had found no sign of the girl's body or the crocodile which attacked her. "The crews out there are very experienced, particularly the parks and wildlife people -- if anyone is going to find them, they will," Supt Fuller said.

The girl's grieving uncle, Ronnie Barramala, said croc numbers needed to be reduced. "They're pests. Too many, too many," Mr Barramala said. The girl was the NT's third fatal croc attack victim in 18 months. Hunting crocodiles in the Northern Territory was banned in 1971 and the Government yesterday ruled out a cull. "It's not an issue, not a question before government at the moment," Acting Chief Minister Syd Stirling said.

Police believe the girl was collecting water from the river's edge between Maningrida and Ramingining about 9pm. It was not known how large the crocodile was. Supt Fuller said the attack happened in a remote area.

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When Regulating Wetlands Means Ruining Lives

Writing in Human Events, Senior Fellow R.J. Smith takes a look at recent Supreme Court action regarding wetlands and includes a few stories about wetlands regulations run amuck:

"...The Wall Street Journal's Max Boot has referred to this CWA-EPA-Army Corps axis as "The Wetlands Gestapo" for very good reason. In every state of the union, small landowners have faced bureaucratic nightmares when some federal or state agent suddenly showed up and said their property contained protected wetlands -- whether wet or dry. And typically these landowners have entered no-exit mazes of bureaucratic red tape running on for years and years, and even decades, of extremely costly permit-seeking and legal proceedings, vainly seeking to exhaust all available "administrative remedies" so that their cases might become ripe for seeking takings compensation. Meanwhile, they were paying taxes on land they could not use.

The best example of the naked power behind the CWA surfaced in Maine, where Gaston Roberge owned a 2.8-acre commercial lot which he had allowed the town to use to dump fill. When he tried to sell it for his retirement the Corps charged him with having an illegally filled wetland. In the subsequent legal discovery process, an internal Corps memo was located recommending "Roberge would be a good one to squash and set an example" in order to create a climate of fear among landowners and developers.

While most victims suffer "only" substantial monetary losses and the loss of the use of their land, others have fared far worse. James Wilson, a Maryland developer, created some wildlife ponds on his land and was found guilty of violating the CWA and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and fined $4 million. In Florida, Ocie Mills and his son each spent 21 months in prison for filling a dry ditch with clean building sand in order to construct the son's personal home.

Perhaps the most notorious case was that of John Pozsgai who had escaped Communist Hungary in 1956 to live in the land of the free. He purchased property in Pennsylvania for a home and to build a truck repair shop. He cleaned up part of the land and a storm-water drainage ditch, removing an illegal dump containing more than 5,000 old tires. The tire-filled ditch had flooded during heavy rains. Yet the Feds considered it a stream, declared the dump removal a CWA violation, and Mr. Pozsgai was fined and imprisoned, serving one and a half years in federal prison, another year and a half in a "halfway house," and then five years of supervised probation. The family was forced into bankruptcy and his daughter is still vainly attempting to gain Mr. Pozsgai a presidential pardon..."

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"Smart Growth" Policies Hurt

It is not uncommon to find workers in the Washington, DC area who suffer a two-hour commute each way to their jobs. Some travel from as far as West Virginia or Pennsylvania. In many cases, the cause is not preference but finance. Simply put: There is lack of affordable housing in the region. It is a problem nationally, not just in our nation's capital.

Steep increases in property values are often attributed to a robust real estate market or an area's appeal for living, working and attracting business. However, another more flagrant and largely overlooked cause is so-called "smart growth" planning. There is mounting evidence that smart growth policies have already prevented thousands of American households from their claim of the American Dream of owning their own home.

Designed as an environmentally-sensitive response to perceived suburban overcrowding or "sprawl," smart growth policies crowd housing units together into clusters of dense, skyward structures. In over 100 cities and regions across America, smart growth plans have been implemented on a false premise that growth should be controlled by concentrating it. These new "American utopias," as smart growth proponents have called them, claim to offer "mixed use" amenities of urban life, whereby transportation, retail shops and dwellings are intertwined.

Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and NIMBY suburbanites support these policies because they want to protect open space. They claim that concentrating people together through restrictive urban growth boundaries encourages mass transit use, reduces automobile dependence, cuts air pollution and preserves the "aesthetic and natural assets of communities."

But smart growth development restrictions pose a distinct problem for regions experiencing population growth. The overall shortage of housing can create affordability and quality of life problems for families entering the housing market, particularly those with low and moderate incomes and upwardly mobile minorities.

The problem is largely overlooked but could have far-reaching consequences. According to an econometric report commissioned by The National Center for Public Policy Research, one million households who bought homes between 1992 and 2002 would not have been able to do so had smart growth policies such as those found in Portland, Oregon been extended nationwide. Smart growth proponents consider Portland's policies a model for other metropolitan areas. Of this displaced group, a disproportionate number - 260,000 - would have been black.

Just How Smart?

Smart growth can even create the sprawl it is intended to prevent. Steven Greenhut, an opinion writer for the Orange County Register, points out that those "who want a bigger place [that may be unavailable because of smart growth policies] simply move away, thus promoting the sprawl that Smart Growthers are trying to stop."

In November 2004, Bozeman, Montana residents passed a $10 million taxpayer-funded "land trust" bond in an effort to help halt "sprawl" in the fast-growing but traditionally small college town. County officials use the fund to bait local ranchers into forfeiting development rights on their estates - in effect, creating a green development buffer. In an area awash with open space, this buffer cuts off affordable housing to many residents who now are forced to move to the lower-cost and distant countryside and to commute into town.

Smart growth can also be seen as a crude attempt to exclude less affluent and, in particular, minority residents from communities. Development restrictions in Richland County, South Carolina prevent much of the county's prime farmland - owned for generations by descendents of black sharecroppers - from being subdivided. County planners and environmentalists say they wanted to prevent the rapid commercial growth in nearby Columbia from spreading to the farmland, ruining the county's traditionally rural character.

In reality, their policy keeps black property owners from selling their land to small business developers or giving property to their children. Segregation has ended, but today these families face a new economic form by being denied the wealth from the selling of their own land. Smart growth proponents cry out that building more suburban homes would exacerbate already clogged roads, schools and neighborhoods. But how responsible is a policy that has some residents resorting to extreme measures simply to find a space to sleep at night?

A troubling example involved a Waldorf, Maryland woman who was arrested in 2004 on child endangerment charges for locking her four and five year old daughters in a commercial storage unit while she worked during the day and spent nights at her mother's home. Felicia M. Dorsey pleaded guilty for moving into the $65 a month space, which does not have running water, with her daughters for three nights after being evicted from her Waldorf apartment and unable find space at a homeless shelter. Unfortunately, Dorsey is not alone in seeking such makeshift shelter. Sheds, cars, trailers and even the woods are sometimes the only affordable option for families.

In Maryland's Charles County, where Dorsey and her daughters lived, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $1,218 the year she was evicted. The median home price in 2005 was $298,000 - up from $237,000 in 2004. As housing prices continue to climb in growth-restricted areas, the $58 to $149 per month it costs to rent storage shelter, depending on its size, is an attractive alternative for those squeezed out of their homes. Far from creating a utopia, smart growth planning perverts the housing market with "grand designs" that limit choice of housing types and locations. Reducing the supply of homes while demand increases drives home prices to unprecedented levels.

Unleash the Market

Instead of a top-down approach, there must be a market-based solution that is both mindful of long-term development impacts and is flexible enough to distinguish among the different housing needs of all residents. Dr. Samuel Staley of the Buckeye Institute, for instance, proposes that consumers - not politicians or bureaucrats - determine appropriate housing densities through "performance zoning." Development would correspond to various standards that are community-established such as appropriate levels of road congestion or home vacancy levels.

The greatest advantage to a flexible and voluntarily-imposed solution is that it would not unnecessarily drive up home prices. The cost of housing would instead be a reflection of a number of demand pressures. Smart growth has a woeful record of pricing-out affordable housing for many middle income Americans. The smartest way to put housing back into reach is to let the market determine the supply and demand that planners are now dictating.

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A balanced look at some "natural" diets

American ingenuity has found one solution to the energy crisis: food you never need to cook. There's no need for fuel when everything you eat---from salad to, well, more salad-is served up at piping room temperature. I'm speaking of the raw food diet, for those who find the vegan lifestyle of no animal food products far too opulent. This is particularly popular in, where else, California, yet it's making its way across the country.

On one level, the raw diet has much going for it. Hardly anyone on this diet is overweight. With mostly fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and sprouted beans, the diet is low in fat and high in nutrients. Some followers believe the raw lifestyle can prevent or cure cancer; and it has high-profile adherents, such as Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few years ago. One another level, this is just whacked.

Natural: A dangerous word

Like many alternative diets, the raw food diet is grounded on a few solid principles. Americans eat too much processed food; and fresh, minimally prepared food is more nutritious. Blackened food, that delicious charbroiled taste, can cause cancer in the long run. But on closer examination, the raw diet makes little sense biologically.

A primary claim among raw food advocates is that the raw diet is a natural diet. After all, no other animal cooks its food, and humans only started cooking after the domestication of fire. But "natural" is always a dangerous word. Humans have evolved to eat and survive on a wide range of diets. The Inuit have survived thousands of years almost entirely on a diet of raw fish and meat. Some cultures, conveniently in regions of prolonged growing seasons, shun all meat as unnatural.

That said, humans have always eaten some cooked food. So, too, do many land animals; and so did our human ancestors. How? Largely in the form of roasted grasshoppers or other small critters caught in forest fires and brushfires. Fire foraging was quite natural and helped secure our survival. This is how we developed the taste for cooked food.

Cooking up claims: Another main claim by raw food advocates is that heat (from cooking) destroys enzymes in the food. Enzymes are proteins that serve as catalysts for specific biochemical reactions in the body. There are indeed many forms of enzymes. There are plant enzymes, digestive enzymes and metabolic enzymes, for example. And, yes, heat can destroy enzymes. But plant enzymes, which raw dieters wish to preserve, are largely mashed up with other proteins and rendered useless by acids in the stomach. Not cooking them doesn't save them from this fate. Anyway, the plant enzymes were for the plants. They helped with the plants' growth, and they are responsible for the wilting and decomposition of plants after they are harvested. They are not needed for human digestion. Human digestive enzymes are used for human digestion.

Raw foods certainly aren't safer than cooked food, as some claim. Most commercial chicken and a good deal of beef and pork, sadly, are loaded with bacteria and parasites. Cooking kills this, unless the meat is rancid. Major and surprising sources of food-borne illness, however, are raw sprouts, green onions and lettuce. These must be washed thoroughly before consumption. Raw (unpasteurized) milk is dangerous and mostly illegal to buy; trust your source. Raw (sprouted) kidney beans and rhubarb are poisonous.

Despite major flaws in the raw diet philosophy, one needs to question why a so-called natural diet leaves the dieter dependent on pills for B12 (impossible to get without animal products, such as meat or eggs) or zinc (very hard to get on a raw diet).

A healthier idea

Amusingly, the raw diet pits one questionable food philosophy against another, the macrobiotic diet. The macrobiotic diet emphasizes locally grown whole grains, vegetables, seaweeds and soy products. Cooking, based on seasons, is essential to bring out the energy in the food. Like the raw food diet, adherents believe a macrobiotic lifestyle can prevent and even cure cancer, and this was promoted in the United States by Aveline Kushi, who died of cancer.

The macrobiotic people got it right, though. While cooking can destroy vitamin C, it helps with the absorption of carotenoids such as beta-carotene and other nutrients. This is why the macrobiotic diet and most nutritionists recommend a mix of some raw products with cooked food. The macrobiotic diet is one of the healthiest around, actually, despite the strange philosophical baggage that accompanies it. And Americans would be a far healthier lot if we subscribed to it to some degree.

Similarly, we should welcome the take-home message of the raw food diet: Eating fresh vegetables, sprouts, nuts and seeds is good for you. But lighten up and light up the stove.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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