Sea Shepherd

Whereas the local MSM are into hugging eco-terrorists, Sea Shepherd isn’t getting that free pass from AFP

Five activists from the militant Sea Shepherd conservation group have been ordered to leave the Faroe Islands after they tried to disrupt a traditional whale hunt in the autonomous Danish province, police say.

Four were expelled on Friday, and a fifth was to leave on Saturday, police spokesman Christian Jonsson told AFP, adding that they were barred from the islands for a year.

A Faroe Islands court on Friday found the five guilty of disrupting the region’s traditional “grind” pilot whale hunt, one of the activists said.

During the hunt, which many locals defend as a cultural right, the three-to-six metre sea mammals are driven by a flotilla of small boats into a bay, or the mouth of a fjord, before being killed by hand. Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Conservation group Sea Shepherd has changed its target – it no longer wants to save the whales but their food.

It claims human consumption of krill as a health supplement has led to overfishing and it’s calling for a boycott of a leading health supplement company.

The group is known for daring frontline tactics against Japanese whalers, but Sea Shepherd has now gone online with a petition against Eco Krill, sold by Australian company Blackmores.

“This particular supplement, because of its outrageous claim that it’s somehow environmentally-friendly sets a dangerous precedent across all other krill products,” says Adam Burling of Sea Shepherd.

Krill is the main food for whales, some penguins and Antarctic birds.

It’s also rich in Omega 3 and Sea Shepherd claims huge factory ships are vacuuming up krill and selling it to fish farms and supplement companies like Blackmores.

“This company is taking around about 100,000 tonnes a year, its half the global catch of krill.”

There are many krill products available but Sea Shepherd is targeting Blackmores because of the company’s eco claims.

The product carries a Marine Stewardship Council certification, an organisation which claims to “set and maintain the standards for sustainable fishing and seafood traceability”.

But Sea Shepherd rejects that and warns it’ll step up its action if Blackmores doesn’t listen.

“As the campaign goes on we will look at a range of tactics potentially including field tactics,” says Mr Burling.

Blackmores take 100,000 tones, that’s 0.1 million tonnes (this is important later), of a total harvest of 0.2M tonnes per year world-wide.  Blackmores obviously present the largest target in the market. Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

I don’t think so.  They are petulant and self righteous, and expect way too much in return for their actual support base.

What about Labour and the Greens, eh? Can’t live together, can’t live apart.

Just how the two parties can co-habit on the Left has been one of the longest-running conundrums since MMP was a pup.

How can they turn being allies – or is that just very good friends – into benefits for both? And how can they draw the line between potential co-operation in government and competition for votes?

And then there have been the parties playing gooseberry: once upon a time United Future; ever and always New Zealand First.

As centre parties camped on the fulcrum of power they have been able to force the Greens out of government, when Labour has been in power, leaving them no option but to grimace and bear it.

The real problem for Labour is that it needs to position itself as partnering with Winston instead of the Greens, because not enough voters like the idea of the Green Taliban getting near the levers of power on the back of a Labour vote.

A vote for Labour is a vote for a Labour Green government.  And how much did the voters run away from that?    Last time, they did it in unprecedented numbers.

Instead of learning from this, the Greens are even more self-righteous! Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Sea Shepherd ship Sam Simon leaves Wellington for Antarctic waters today with a crew braced for conflict.

The organisation is famous for violent clashes in Antarctic waters as it battled to stop Japanese whaling, but this time the target is the illegal fishing of the Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish.

The Sam Simon, with 30 crew including three New Zealanders, would meet with fellow Sea Shepherd boat Bob Barker, which was coming from Darwin, Australia, before heading south.

Initially they would track Japanese ships to make sure they were only doing “non-lethal” whaling research, he said.

They would then track six ships that had been blacklisted for poaching, believed to be illegally hunting toothfish.

Sam Simon captain Sid Chakravarty said the crew planned to follow Sea Shepherd’s “direct action” motto.

“We will be putting ships in their way and ensuring their ships are shut down,” Chakravarty said.

Crew member Timothy Evetts, of Wellington, now on his fourth Sea Shepherd mission, had no doubt he was risking his life.

On an anti-whaling trip two summers ago, he was on a Sea Shepherd ship that placed itself between a Japanese whaling ship and a refuelling ship.

In that incident the Sea Shepherd ship was rammed by a Japanese ship “eight times its size”, but added: “If there is something worth risking your life for, this is it.”

This is nothing short of eco and business terrorism.   These fishing companies are going about their legal business.  If they do overstep the mark, there are legal ways to solve these problems.   Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Sea Shepherd pirate vessel Steve Irwin flying the Jolly Roger

The Sea Shepherd pirates are in Dunedin refuelling and taking the opportunity to attack the Japanaese and insist our government does the same thing.

The NZ Herald reports:

The Government should strongly censure Japan after one of its whaling vessels entered New Zealand’s waters, the Green Party says.

The Shonan Maru No. 2, which provides security for the Japanese whaling fleet, entered New Zealand’s 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) on Friday.

Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd said the Japanese ship had been tailing its protest vessel, the Steve Irwin, after a recent clash in which two ships collided. The Sea Shepherd vessel docked in Dunedin to refuel early this morning.

Foreign Minister Murray McCully said it was disappointing the Japanese vessel had entered New Zealand’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone).  Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

I see 3News was running unedited pirate propaganda from the Sea She[herd pirates last night.

The NZ Herald in its bid to corner the market on cuddling international criminals is also running their lines where the poor petals are upset about an apparent attempt by the Japanese fleet to disable their ships with cables.

Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd says one of its ships has been rammed by a Japanese whaling vessel.

The Bob Barker was hit by the harpoon vessel, the Yushin Maru 2, when it crossed in front of its bow in sub-Antarctic waters just before 9am (NZT), the group said.

The incident was a part of an attack by the Japanese whaling fleets’ three harpoon vessels, on the Sea Shepherd ships, The Steve Irwin and The Bob Barker, which began about about 2am, Sea Shepherd said.

“The assault is an attempt to deter the Sea Shepherd ships from their current position, blocking the slipway of the Nisshin Maru, preventing the whalers from loading whales poached from the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.”

During the clashes, which were continuing into afternoon, the whaling vessels had also made consecutive attempts to tangle the propellers of the Sea Shepherd ships by dragging steel cable across the bow of the conservation ships, a Sea Shepherd spokesman said.  Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

I originally posted this in 2010. Given the Labour party thinks they speak for all New Zealand upset over a few Minke whales getting harpooned and the fact that the media accept pirates as a valid source of news, I thought I’d repost these rather inconvenient facts that the anti-whaling crowd wouldn’t want you to know.

The world’s meddlers gnash their teeth over whaling whether it is for scientific purposes or for commercial. Right now the moratorium on commercial whaling isn’t working and just over 1500 whales were harvested last year in whaling activities and 31,084 in total since the moratorium began in 1986. Those figures sound horrendous. I am of course using the WWF figures and we all know how accurate and peer reviewed their information is. An independent assessment done by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (they must be good, they have the word conservation in their title) says that “Iceland, Norway, and Japan – have brutally slaughtered over 25,000 whales under the guise of scientific research and for commercial purposes”. Note their overly emotive language. They were harvested, as we know, not brutally slaughtered. To use that terminology I would hate to think how they consider the Beef  industry. Somewhere between those numbers lies the truth.   Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Here we go again, the self appointed spokesmen for the entire country: The Green Taliban. RFC Gareth Hughes wants the HMNZS Otago to dick around wasting time watching the Japs and learning how to catch whales. If anything, we should be sending them to sink the pirate ship that flies the jolly roger, the Sea Shepherd. Should he be focusing on matters more close to home though?

One of the world’s so-called greatest whale traps has claimed another pod.

Thirty-nine pilot whales washed up on Farewell Spit at the top of the South Island overnight, and none of them could be saved.

Almost every summer, a pod of whales is left stranded at Farewell Spit.

In the latest incident, the 39 long-finned pilot whales could neither escape by themselves or be rescued.

The Department of Conservation had spotted the pod yesterday afternoon, but stopped monitoring them when it went dark. Read more »

Green eco-terrorists and pirates like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd are being pursued because of changes in thinking surrounding piracy laws.

Traditionally, piracy was carried out as a form of robbery to enrich the pirates. In the ‘golden age’ of piracy, pirates such as Blackbeard commanded large fleets of ships and amassed huge fortunes on the high seas. The pirate crews also profited from the raids and there were even systems of workman’s compensation for the crews.

Under international law, piracy prosecutions traditionally required that the alleged pirates were seeking private gains. The Harvard Draft Convention on Piracy from 1932 noted that, “If an attack by a ship manned by insurgents is inspired by a motive of private plunder, it may be piracy under the definitions of the draft convention.” Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, piracy requires the use of violence against a ship when it is “committed for private ends.” The requirement fits with the traditional definition of a pirate as a businessman seeking to enrich himself and his crew. In the 1820 case of United States v. Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court defined piracy as “robbery on the high seas.”

But now that’s changing: Nations have begun to accept the idea that piracy can include politically motivated attacks on ships, even by environmentalists.  Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Oh dear, it looks like the Russians aren’t as soft a touch as New Zealand in dealing with Greenpeace ratbags…they are charging 14 of the green taliban warriors with piracy. 

It looks like Greenpeace is set to join Sea Shepherd as pirates at large on the seas.

More than a dozen Greenpeace activists and a video journalist have been charged with piracy by Russian authorities after a protest at an Arctic oil rig.

The Federal Investigative Committee said authorities had begun charging the 30 people from 18 countries arrested after two Greenpeace activists tried to scale the Prirazlomnaya oil platform, which plays a crucial role in Russia’s effort to mine Arctic resources.  Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz