Day: June 16, 2003

When I think of nutty lawsuits I typically think of their prevalence here in the United States, but occasionally our friends across the ocean also receive their fair share of bizarre cases.

Take the case of Brendon Fearon. Fearon, 33, was shot and wounded during an attempted burglary at a farm house. A legal decision last week will allow Fearon to press ahead with his case against the owner of the farm house — in fact, Fearon received money from a government-funded Legal Aid organization to press his case against his assailant, Tony Martin.

Martin is currently in jail after being convicted of manslaughter for killing Fearon’s 16-year-old burglary accomplice Fred Barras.

Fearon served 18 months of a three year sentence for the burglary, but is back in jail on drug charges (he has amassed more than 30 convictions over his short live). These two paragraphs from the Daily Telegraph really highlight the idiocy of the whole case,

An earlier hearing was told that Fearon claimed that his injuries, which included a leg wound, had affected his ability to enjoy sex and martial arts and that he had suffered post-traumatic stress.

The judge said that the full hearing must consider what rights a householder has to protect his property and also whether a burglar can be deemed to be outside the law.

Source:

Tony Martin to be sued by the burglar he shot. The Daily Telegraph, June 14, 2003.

This Wall Street Journal article about Long Island maintenance worker Greg Packer. It seems that Packer’s hobby is to show up at public events — such as a recent book signing by Hillary Clinton — and actively seeking out reporters who are looking for the “man on the street comment.” A Lexis Nexis search on Packer turns up dozens of stories in major newspapersover the past few years in which he is quoted on everything from the newest Mets farm team to a 1998 Clinton fundraiser held in the Hamptons.

According to the Journal story,

It’s also possible he is the world’s most successful “man on the street,” one of the endless parade of regular Joes that reporters love to use to decorate their stories. Both quotable and available, Mr. Packer has insinuated himself into hundreds of subjects such as a new minor league baseball team (New York Post: “there’s no place like Brooklyn”), TV’s “Joe Millionaire” (Allentown Morning Call: “the show mostly had to do with money”), and the U.S. invasion of Iraq (AP: “we had to do whatever we had to do”). Last Monday, Mr. Packer was quoted in newspapers about a dozen times, once with his name spelled incorrectly, and was interviewed for television.

Source:

Long Island Man Sows His Platitudes Widely. Matthew Rose, Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2003.

The New York Times carried an interesting article on June 5 about environmentalists squaring off with other environmentalists over wind farms designed to harness the wind to produce energy.

Wind farms never made much sense when you have such other viable low-footprint options such as nuclear power, but the federal government offers tax breaks to wind farms and hence people are beginning to build more of them — and some environmentalists are beginning to apply the same obstructionist tactics that they would normally apply to more traditional power generating projects.

It was objections from environmentalists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, that were responsible for bringing to a halt — at least temporarily — construction of the first off-shore wind farm in the United States. The wind farm was to have been placed of Cape Codd in Nantucket Sound, but the power generating facility is just too ugly to be tolerated.

As businessman Wayne Kurker told the New York Times on why he opposed the wind farm,

I didn’t like the idea that what we consider our Grand Canyon was all of a sudden going to be industrialized.

I.e., generate low-polluting electricity, just do it in someone else’s backyard.

Charles Komanoff, who the Times describes as a “longtime economic consultant to environmental groups” told the Times that such motives are just selfish,

They want to have it all and they won’t brook any trade-off, especially a trade-off that sacrifices their own comfort.

The American Wind Energy Association tells the Times that although wind power generates less than 1 percent of the electricity produced in the United States, by 2020 they predict that will be up to 6 percent. I suspect that prediction’s just a lot of hot air.

Source:

Windmills sow dissent for environmentalists. Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, June 5, 2003.

At the recent G8 summit in France, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva offered an intriguing proposal — institute a global tax on arms sales and use the money for a hunger fund to alleviate hunger.

Lula told the G8,

My proposal is the creation of a global fund capable of feeding those who are hungry and at the same time creating the conditions to eradicate the structural causes of hunger.

Like I said, an intriguing proposal but not likely a realistic one. The obvious response to the existence of such a fund would be for developed countries to reduce their aid to forestall hunger on the grounds that now there is this new fund to take up the slack.

It is also difficult to understand how Lula thinks the mere presence of such a fund would be able to solve the structural causes of hunger. Has he taken the time to add up all of the money spent over the last 50 years on this problem and just how ineffective such efforts have been? If simply throwing money at developing nations worked, hunger would have been eradicated decades ago.

Source:

Lula proposes hunger fund. The BBC, June 2, 2003.