"Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:01 PM
From: "Sylvain Pafumi" <sylvainpafumi@yahoo.com>
To: OrgonomicEcology@yahoogroups.co.uk
Joel,
We shouldn´t publicly accuse someone of being responsable for such damages as recently happened in Australia without being sure 100 per cent.
It's exactly as if, because I am interested in orgonomy, I would have been suspected by all my neighbors of causing the December 1999 storm which devastated France.
You do not have enough evidence to hold up in a court, so it is unfair to accuse someone in public."
Joel Carlinsky replies:
If it were a criminal case, with the possibility of a prison sentence, I would agree there should be an absolutely air-tight case. But this series of e-mails between so few people is not a criminal trial and there is no realistic possibility of any real punishment for someone we accuse of what in an ideal world, would be considered a very serious criminal offense.
The only power we have is the ability to "name and shame" and we also do not have the vast resources the state has to investigate suspects. If we had unlimited money to hire investigators we could tap phones, bug a suspect´s house, have some undercover investigator spend months, perhaps even years, getting to be his friend, send a girl to lure him into bragging about his power to control the weather to impress her, and force his e-mail service provider to give us copies of all his e-mails.
But we can´t do that. The only way we have to investigate a suspected case of cloudbuster involvement in a damaging storm is the way I have developed over the pàst 20 years in riding herd on James DeMeo. I look at the weather maps, and I look at what I know the suspect was doing, usually from his own publications, and I draw logical conclusions, based on what I know of how the atmosphere responds to cloudbusting, about what was most likely to have been done to cause what later happened.
That might not be enough to get a conviction in a court, and I am not sure I would want it to be. But in the world as it is, where no court would entertain a charge of causing damage by cloudbuster, and there is no budget for investigations, the only other choice would be to just drop the whole thing and leave whoever wants to do cloudbusting with no need for any accountability whatsoever.
That is not an option. Cloudbusting IS dangerous. And the massive and indiscriminate proliferation of cloudbusters must be addressed somehow. At this time, I am the only one trying to do ANYTHING about this environmental issue, and I have no other way to do it than what I have been doing.
So I will not just forget about it and let these people do whatever they wish to the atmosphere, secure in the knowledge that no court will hold them accountable. I will hold them accountable.
This is exactly the same thing the Sea Shepherds do about whalers., Whaling is illegal under international law, but there is no means provided to enforce that law, so the Sea Shepherds have declared themselves a private, unofficial law enforcement agency, enforcing international conservation laws on the high seas.
This is actually an activity that is envisioned and protected in an international treaty, the World Charter For Nature, a United Nations document that most nations have signed, but never live up to. It says " Individuals....to the best of their abilities, are responsible for enforcement of the provisions of this convention IN AREAS BEYOND THE JURISDICTION OF NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS".
Since the atmosphere is "beyond the jurisdiction of any national government", I consider my anti-cloudbusting activism to fall under this provision of the World Charter For Nature.
And just as the Sea Shepherds use tactics that a government law enforcement agency would not use, so do I. I am not a police organization. I am a cyberjournalist, an investigative reporter, a whistle-blower, exposing activities that are destructive to the environment. And in that role, I do not have to stick to the procedures and standards that the police do.
The police are required to stick to those procedures to protect the innocent from being wrongfully conviced and punished. Since I have no power to actually punish anyone, I am within the proper limits of journalism to be satisfied with a lower standard of evidence than would be required to convict them in a criminal courtroom where they could be imprisoned for their crimes instead of just being embarassed for them.
Please look up the website of the Sea Shepherds, www.seashepherd.org and the public archive of the Yahoo Groups Earth First Alert list, and see how environmental groups conduct a champaign against companies like Monsanto, or against the Japanese whaling fleet.
They do not act gentle and polite about it. They do not hesitate to be offensive to the evil-doers who are trying to murder the earth. They do not expect to win over the evil-doers. They do not try to do that. What they try to do is get the people who are being hurt by the evil ones angry enough to stop them.
And using emotionally meaningful words like "evil-doers" is one of the tactics that has proven to be successful in many campaigns. When Captain Paul Watson says the Japanese whalers are members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, he does not show recordings of their phone calls or video tapes of their secret meetings to prove it to anyone. He just says it. Some people will believe it. Others will not. The ones who do believe him will be more inclined to help stop the whaling. The ones who do not, probably would not help much anyway.
What you are trying to do is talk me into going easier on the bastards who are trying to ruin the atmosphere. I will not do that. I will hit them as hard as I can. Every time. That is the only way to stop them. And I want to stop them. Not to be fair to them. Not to win them over and convince them to become nicer people. Not to win a debate with them. Not to look morally better than they are. To stop them. Nothing else. Just to stop them.
But it is also right to use every tool in the toolbox, so if you think a softer aproch would work, you try it. Then with both of us working on the case, with different tactics, there is that much better a chance of success. Every revolutionary movement needs both a radical violent underground and a legal, political, above ground faction that publicly denounces the underground for being too fanatical. That dual strategy has worked for the IRA and other groups, and it would be a good one for us to try too.
So you are hereby appointed my above-ground respectable faction. Feel free to tell people you agree with my goals but my methods are too uncompromising and fanatical. Then we shall see if your methods work better at getting them to give up attacking the earth with cloudbusters.
If you have any better suggestion of how we can stop these people from cloudbusting, please tell me. But please do not tell me to wait until the official science community accepts the fact that cloudbusters work so the police will take over the job. That is never going to happen. So, in the absence of any governmental efforts to protect the earth from cloudbusting, how else would you suggest we go about it?