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'Emergency Action' trumps Property Rights

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Tenure

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A gang of criminals openly confessed their guilt and there was no way of hiding what they had done. They did it in broad daylight in plain view, proudly and unashamedly. Their crime? Trespassing on private property and defacing of private property, amounting to £30,000 in damages. Their punishment? None. Apparently, their action was the only one possible to them, when faced with the self-evident fact of global warming.

Yes, this is a real case, yes, this is really happening.

This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but the silent snuffing out of rights. I wonder how the court would have voted if these people were young Islamic men, climbing the Houses of Parliament and defacing it with 'Praise be to Allah' in blood, claiming that the aggressive policy Britain has taken in the Middle East will surely only end in Nuclear Warfare, and that they are simply acting in everyone's interest.

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More evidence that juries do not achieve justice when society is philosophically corrupt.

I hope E.ON doesn't let them get away with it. Fortunately E.ON can still sue. A criminal acquittal doesn't preclude a civil suit. But what is this 10-2 nonsense? Has British law moved away from unanimous jury verdicts? In the US, a hung jury results in a mistrial.

I wish there were more details. Specifically, what kind of damage the hippies caused.

~Q

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I found a more lengthy article, the story of which is pretty much the same though.

Although it does point out a few extra things, such as Greenpeace's wish to halt the development of growing countries like India, and it echoes my sentiment that this is going to set a legal precedent for all sorts of crazy now.

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This was certainly one of those moments when I yell "...WHAT THE F*CK?!?" out loud.

I honestly don't know what to say, except that this is an example of 1- a complete disregard of property rights, 2- a corrupt judicial system, deluded by an evil philosophy, and 3- an example of what happens when mass amounts of people actually believe this doomsday prophesy.

Hansen, a Nasa director who advises Al Gore, told the court that humanity was in "grave peril".

He said: "Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations."

It also heard David Cameron's environment adviser, millionaire environmentalist Zac Goldsmith, and an Inuit leader from Greenland say that climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world.

The court was told was that some of the property in immediate need of protection included parts of Kent at risk from rising sea levels, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu and areas of Greenland.

The defendants also cited the Arctic ice sheet, China's Yellow river region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans.

Goldsmith told the court: "By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder in exerting pressure on countries like China and India to reduce their burgeoning use of the fossil fuel."

The question is: does this give someone the right to go and destroy private property? Of course not.

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Apparently this is not the first time Greenpeace has been able to avail itself of the "emergency action" defense (defence?) under the Criminal Damage Act. In 1999, Executive Director of Greenpeace UK Peter Melchett and 13 others destroyed a corn crop in Lyng, Norfolk. The corn was a "genetically modified" strain. (I always wonder what the hippies mean by "genetically modified corn," given that corn has been being genetically modified by man for thousands of years.) They used the "but if we didn't destroy it before it flowered, neighboring crops would have been irreparably harmed by the contamination!" defense (again, is it 'defence' if the law and court are British?) and were acquitted in September 2000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2000...tivists.gmcrops

~Q

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Clearly they mean gene-splicing rather than simple selective breeding. But.... why does it matter?

It matters quite a bit. For example, many of these GM seeds have a "termination" sequence, which means that seeds for the next generation will not be fertile. This is done for a very practical reason, to ensure that farmers need to buy seeds year after year instead of saving them as one would do with normal crops. Now, imagine what would happen if the GM crops cross-pollinated with a neighbor's plot...If the "terminator" sequence got into the other farmer's fields, he could suddenly be faced with no seed bank for next year. This is just one example.

I'm not sure where I fall on the whole GMO debate. On the one hand, I'm glad the technology exists and there should be some legitimate applications from it. On the other hand, many of the concerns regarding the safety and efficacy of GMOs seem legitimate.

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Now, imagine what would happen if the GM crops cross-pollinated with a neighbor's plot...If the "terminator" sequence got into the other farmer's fields, he could suddenly be faced with no seed bank for next year. This is just one example.

I don't think we ought to be giving any credence whatsoever to what these hoodlums are up to. They were not trying to protect a neighboring field of corn, but were trying to not let the genetically engineered crop out -- as if it was going to cause a catastrophe, because it would become a "Frankenstein monster" type of corn. If the neighboring crops were damaged in the sense that you relate, then they could sue for damages to their seed corn. It is most certainly not something that these hoodlums are doing that ought to be excused. Their actions are based on irrational fears that the sky is falling, and they have no evidence.

They want to destroy civilization! and I don't think it ought to be whitewashed into anything else.

All these rulings are going to do is to encourage them to do more damage, because now that they have gotten away with it, who is going to stop them? They will now have an excuse to go out and stop any coal-fired electric plant, and then will move on to other things -- anything to activate their nihilistic craze.

Tenue is right, this is how it will end, with suicide and "everyone" in society agreeing with it. But that is what happens under socialism anyhow. Since there is little or no respect for property rights, what do you expect? If the power plant was privately owned, then they could have kept them out with force, if need be; but the "public" utilities, both here in the US and abroad, leave it up to "the people" to decide, and they have evidently sided with the environmentalist mobs. They also, most likely,complaining about the high cost of electricity, and yet they don't want any more power plants built; just as they complain about the high cost of gas over here, but don't want any more drilling platforms or oil refineries to be built.

I mean, if I wasn't a victim of this and if the major industries continue not to defend themselves, I'd say, "Let them die!" But then I would have no way of getting electricity or gas for my car.

Green Peace and other groups like it are viciously evil. They are like the swarms of savages that over-ran Rome; but I will also say that Rome let that happen -- and it is happening to us as well.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Perhaps following the example set by the Greenpeace thugs, Al Gore has now called for "civil disobedience" against coal fired power plants:

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.

http://www.reuters.com/article/environment...ews&sp=true

And to think that this man received a majority of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election. He's a criminal.

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