The Independent reports
More than a dozen protesters who clambered into holes dug for a high pressure gas pipeline said they had been found not responsible by a judge after hearing them argue their actions to try and stop climate change were a legal "necessity".
Karenna Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, was among more than 198 people who were arrested because of their 2015 actions protesting the pipeline in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Thirteen people were to go on trial this week, though prosecutors downgraded their original criminal charges to one of civil infraction.
On [March 27], Judge Mary Ann Driscoll of West Roxbury District Court, found all 13 defendants not responsible, the equivalent of not guilty in a criminal case. She did so after each of the defendants addressed the judge and explained why they were driven to try and halt the pipeline's construction.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:16PM (4 children)
Then again, judges opinions rarely make sense.
You know what they call the gal who ranked last in law school? "Your Honor".
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:22PM
girls cant be lawyers
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 30 2018, @01:25AM (2 children)
Isn't political protest a protected activity in the US? Wasn't it designed to be?
If these protestors had killed anyone, injured anyone, or caused people to miss meals and/or house payments, they they would have committed a crime. As things stand, they merely inconvenienced some large corporations. Is that a crime?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday March 30 2018, @02:10AM (1 child)
This is where it gets tricky. Apparently, for the moment at least, it's not a crime if you're protesting an oil pipeline that might leak and hurt someone down the road, but it IS a crime if you're protesting drones that are killing people on a daily basis.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 30 2018, @02:27AM
Good point. The difference lies in who owns the political toes you might be stepping on.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:20PM (5 children)
You see, they acquitted because they had lots of cloud. Looking at other people's clouds, well, it's not got much cloud in it. Everyone should move everything in to the cloud because there is no possible fault in the cloud. The cloud is here and you should use it too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:38PM (4 children)
Pipelines help make more clouds. But hippies make clouds too.
This cloud thing is hard, man. Pass it around.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:28PM (3 children)
They were acquitted because those holes were safe spaces.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:34PM (2 children)
Holed-up Protestors are a protected species, whether at the Malheur reserve or the pipeline construction site.
Next time, someone need to explain the proper approach to the Davidians.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:52PM (1 child)
The baby's cries were almost loud enough to damage one's hearing. Did it want food, or something else? No. At first glance, the baby was the only person in the room, but upon closer inspection, one would spot a hideous, obese man trying to forcibly jam his fat member into the baby girl's minuscule vagina. As a result, the baby was crying desperately. But wasn't this too much?
Sure, it was the baby's first time being raped, but weren't its screams a bit dramatic? The man then concluded that the new generation was filled with entitled crybabies and jammed his cock deep into the baby's hole. One of them felt immense pleasure, and the other felt immense pain. "I'll teach you all you need to know about men," said the man. Now, it was time for the man to utilize it until he was satisfied.
The man rapidly pumped his hips back and forth, completely ignoring the baby's screams. The man utilized it, and then utilized it some more. Utilize it! Utilize it! Utilize it! Suddenly, the man felt that things were about to get sticky, and shot everything he had into the baby's womb. The cock slowly emerged from the ravaged hole.
"Too good!" the man exclaimed. The baby's genitals were now bleeding profusely, a fact which made the man smile in earnest. He knew what he had to do now. Though it was true that utilizing the baby as it was intended had brought the man extraordinary pleasure, in the end, its desperate cries were proof that it was rebelling against men. As such, the man threw the baby off the balcony of his apartment, which was on the fifteenth floor. As the baby screamed for its life, the man simply chortled. If it didn't want this to happen, why did it sneer at men? It was a mystery.
Later, a passerby would find a baby smashed on the concrete in a parking lot. He knew. He knew that men's rights had won that day.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by captain normal on Friday March 30 2018, @03:21AM
Some one needs to report this guy to Jeff Sessions. Oh...wait...maybe it is Jeff Sessions?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:44PM (8 children)
A step in the right direction. Protesting is a very old tradition, including being killed by the police (corrupt or not), whether or not you were a woman or a child. Most people have no idea of the horrors that were involved in securing an 8-hour work day.
We wouldn't put up with that anymore, not with the Internet. They killed a black man again, and of course, he was a scary mother fucker with a cell phone. So he had to die according to cowardly cops, armed, trained, and probably sporting body armor. I'm not seeing the protests die down in Sacramento either.
Since they can't just kill us and label us the enemy anymore, they need to take away civil rights and make protesting illegal, or just flat out conflated with terrorism. I'm glad a judge stood up to this anti-American bullshit.
May every oil & gas executive spontaneously die on fire today.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:57PM (5 children)
I guess all the productive people of Europe immigrated to the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:05PM (4 children)
The thing is, if your work day is significantly longer that about 8 hours you won't be productive for very long. If people are disposable, this is not an issue. Sociopaths often rise to positions of power.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:19PM (3 children)
Productive people aren't afraid to work hard when necessary, and they aren't afraid to give their peers slack when necessary.
Americans don't need a government holding their hands.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:36PM
"Americans don't need a government holding their hands."
That is true for all values of $GOVERNMENT, but it is especially true of government that is incompetent and corrupt.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Friday March 30 2018, @09:00AM (1 child)
The trouble is people don't define "long" and so the length of time keeps creeping up. Yes, you can be productive working 9, 10, 11 and 12 hour days for a week or two and maybe even a month or two at a stretch but the human body is not designed to sustain this. Very often nowadays our workload keeps getting increased a bit at a time and we find ourselves routinely working a 10 hour (or longer) day for years at a time with frequent bursts of 12+ hours and weekends. I've been there (several times), got the t-shirts etc.
All you end up doing is making your staff sick and stressed, they leave or get fired and your institutional knowledge goes with them. All of a sudden you can't make your products any more. In the short term, though, it can double the share price.
And by "work" I don't mean being present on company property. I don't count the 1 hour lunch break and I don't count going for coffee or making small talk at the water cooler. I mean actually getting stuff done.
The sooner we are replaced by robots and get Universal Basic Income the better, as far as I'm concerned. The bread heads can keep their ill gotten gains.
Not all managers are sociopaths. I had one once who had a friend who died in a car crash on the way home from work due to tiredness from over work. He banned excessive overtime.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @05:38PM
Don't forget the hidden time sinks!!
Commuting is rarely a carefree relaxing endeavor and for many people a 1+ hr commute is pretty common. So a regular work day goes from 9 to 11 hours assuming you get an hour lunch break. Also, an hour lunch break is hardly enough to actually relax as time is wasted traveling from A to B or you take the lunch in the office which is dubious. So basically a 40 hour week is actually closer to 55 as far as stress on the human body.
A myriad other stresses from modern life creep in as well. A multitude of bills and steadily increasing knowledge requirements and influx of pressure from advertising and scammers.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday March 30 2018, @12:28AM (1 child)
They've been handed the EPA on a silver platter...nice to see that at least they don't own the judiciary...at least not yet.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 30 2018, @09:41PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @06:48PM (4 children)
"after each of the defendants addressed the judge and explained why"
You can see right there the power trip the judge gets. People with their lives at stake grovel before her, and she has the pleasure of deciding their fate. Grovel well, and you can get away with crime. Fail to grovel well, and you'll get your life messed up.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @08:55PM (2 children)
No, it's put up or shut up for the judge to determine whether you are sincere. If you told her you were there for the publicity, or to hit on protest chicks, you probably wouldn't end up so well. The law isn't written nor intended to be some stupid algorithm to read off. The whole reason you have a judge in the first place is to apply appropriate justice given the circumstances. That's why everyone (except the current Administration) knows that mandatory sentences are bad.
Unless you're one of them in the current Administration?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:35PM
But honestly, it's far too easy for judges to just arbitrarily punish people for 'disrespect' and such. Restricting their power to do so (not the same as mandatory sentencing) would make the system less authoritarian, not more.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @10:57PM
That's why everyone (except the current Administration) knows that mandatory sentences are bad
Is that why Hillary Clinton was a key player in 3 strikes? Oh she 'regrets' it now that it eviscerated her 'black vote'.
That pipeline protest was so sockpuppeted it was not even kind of amusing. Look to who pushed it and who fought it. Two of the largest companies that transport oil on rail. Warren Buffet and Bill gates own those companies. It was nothing more than the oil companies vs the transportation companies with a majorly thin veneer of 'save the world'. http://www.pipeline101.org/where-are-pipelines-located [pipeline101.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @03:07PM
It helped that Al Gore's kid was with them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday March 29 2018, @11:43PM
Now you just need a politico's daughter in every protest and you'd have a democracy.
compiling...