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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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A group of protesters trespassed on to a coal-fired power station and vandalised it, painting a message to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown about global warming. They were arrested and prosecuted.
 
Their defence strategy was to claim a "lawful excuse" on the grounds that their actions could help prevent significant damage to others' property that would result from global warming. Their defence witnesses included James Hansen, Al Gore's adviser and head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and Zac Goldsmith, ultra-wealthy heir of Sir James Goldsmith and a wannabe Tory MP.
 
The strategy worked. Yesterday, a jury returned a majority verdict, acquitting the so-called "Kingsnorth Six". As The Independent put it, the jury decided the "threat of global warming justifies breaking the law."
 

Kingsnorth Power Station

 
This is bloody appalling. In the first place, it provides a precedent for protesters to take any action they see fit. The animal rights activists who attack the families of scientists or dig up a farmer's granny could claim "lawful excuse". Terrorists could claim that the threat to their families from American troops in Afghanistan was a "lawful excuse" for planting bombs in London buses.
 
Hundreds of protesters who have been fined or imprisoned for demonstrating outside American airforce bases over the years could appeal on the grounds that they had a "lawful excuse" because they were trying to make the world safe from nuclear weapons.
 
And all of these lawful excuses would have a damn sight more justification than the Kingsnorth Six. After all, it would be cruel to make guinea-pigs smoke eighty cigarettes a day, if indeed anyone were doing that - which of course they aren't. It could certainly be argued that the presence of American troops in Afghanistan - or British ones, come to that - poses a threat to ordinary Afghan families going about their lawful business of growing opium. And nuclear weapons undoubtedly pose a risk to the safety of the world, although alternatives may be even worse.
 
Those are all real threats that many of us would recognise. Global warming, on the other hand, doesn't exist - not in the last ten years, anyway. And if it did, there is little question of it being man-made anyway, so to target coal-fired power stations is absurd.
 
And it's not just protesters who could benefit from this precedent. "Your honour, I admit I stole that BMW 3-series, but I had a lawful excuse. It belonged to a 19-year-old driver who only passed his test a month ago, so I took it to save him from driving it dangerously and possibly killing innocent people …" sounds pretty good to me.
 
Secondly, this verdict throws into doubt the whole system of jury trials. In this country we've always clung tenaciously to the principle of "twelve good men and true", but it seems as though juries can't be trusted to make rational decisions any more. Bombarded by politically correct propaganda, their brains addled by hysterical newspaper reporting and dumbed-down television, betrayed by a school system that leaps this way and that to embrace every latest fad, many members of the public just aren't very bright . Would you like your future to hang on the opinions of people who only a month ago told a YouGov poll that more than half of them had negative views of Anthony Hopkins and Michael Palin, and 38% of them regarded Paris Hilton as a positive role-model?
 
Frankly I'd sooner take my chances with just one judge. Senile and out-of-touch he might be, but at least he had a proper education once upon a time, and got a university degree in something with a bit more intellectual rigour than hairdressing or leisure management. He can probably spell, too.
 
The GOS isn't against protest, lawful or not. In fact, we don't do nearly enough of it. But when he picks up his placard and takes to the streets, he doesn't expect the law-courts to encourage him. When one protests against the establishment and its actions, it rather takes the gilt off the gingerbread to find the bloody establishment shoulder to shoulder with you at the barricade.
 

 
The GOS says: Mind you, it could be worse. If you think British people are stupid, try being an American. Some Yank was saying on the television the other day that only 10% of Americans can find the USA on a map ...
 

 
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