Tenant Letter To Police: Fill & Download for Free

Because China has never forgotten how it lost Hong Kong to Britain in the 1800s and how Britain poisoned its people with dried latex obtained from the seed capsules of a plant called Papaver somniferum.In 1839 the Qing emperor instructed Commissioner Lin Zexu to end the illegal opium trade with Britain.Lin came to Canton (Guangzhou) and made changes within a matter of months of his arrival. He arrested more than 1,700 Chinese opium dealers and confiscated over 70,000 opium pipes. He initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed.Lin then resorted to using force and ordered a large amount of British opium seized from the western merchants’ warehouses. A month and a half later, the merchants gave up nearly 1.2 million kg of opium. Beginning 3 June 1839, 500 workers labored for 23 days to destroy it, mixing the opium with lime and salt and throwing it into the sea. He even composed an elegy apologising to the gods of the sea for polluting their realm.Lin also sent a letter to Queen Victoria addressing the opium issues. The following is an excerpt of Lin’s letter to the British Queen:“We find that your country is sixty or seventy thousand li from China. The purpose of your ships in coming to China is to realize a large profit. Since this profit is realized in China and is in fact taken away from the Chinese people, how can foreigners return injury for the benefit they have received by sending this poison to harm their benefactors?They may not intend to harm others on purpose, but the fact remains that they are so obsessed with material gain that they have no concern whatever for the harm they can cause to others. Have they no conscience?I have heard that you strictly prohibit opium in your own country, indicating unmistakably that you know how harmful opium is. You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China. Why?The products that originate from China are all useful items. They are good for food and other purposes and are easy to sell. Has China produced one item that is harmful to foreign countries? For instance, tea and rhubarb are so important to foreigners' livelihood that they have to consume them every day. Were China to concern herself only with her own advantage without showing any regard for other people's welfare, how could foreigners continue to live?I have heard that the areas under your direct jurisdiction such as London, Scotland, and Ireland do not produce opium; it is produced instead in your Indian possessions such as Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Patna, and Malwa. In these possessions the English people not only plant opium poppies that stretch from one mountain to another but also open factories to manufacture this terrible drug.As months accumulate and years pass by, the poison they have produced increases in its wicked intensity, and its repugnant odor reaches as high as the sky. Heaven is furious with anger, and all the gods are moaning with pain! It is hereby suggested that you destroy and plow under all of these opium plants and grow food crops instead, while issuing an order to punish severely anyone who dares to plant opium poppies again.A murderer of one person is subject to the death sentence; just imagine how many people opium has killed! This is the rationale behind the new law which says that any foreigner who brings opium to China will be sentenced to death by hanging or beheading. Our purpose is to eliminate this poison once and for all and to the benefit of all mankind.The British, instead of shutting down its international drug trafficking operation, sent a naval force to China so as to impose reparations for the financial losses incurred by its British traders over the seized opium.On 21 June 1840, a British naval force arrived off Macao and moved to bombard the port of Dinghai. In the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its superior ships and guns to inflict a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire.The war was concluded with the signing of the humiliating Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the first of Unequal Treaties between China and Western powers. The treaty forced China to cede the Hong Kong Island and surrounding smaller islands to Britain, as well as pay large sums of money as damages to Britain.So, with such humiliation experienced by the Chinese, do you think China would let Hong Kong go independent, or worse go back to UK?Ref:Lin Zexu - WikipediaOpium Wars - WikipediaEdit: Just want to add that even though opium in those days under the British East India company was mainly produced by the Indians in northern India for the Chinese market, it was also hard on the Indian farmers.According to a BBC report in 2019, it was said that Britain's opium trade in China actually impoverished the Indians. In those days, poppy was harvested by an estimated 1.3 million peasant households in northern India. By the end of the 19th Century, poppy farming had an impact on the lives of some 10 million people in what is now the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.New research by Dr Rolf Bauer, a professor of economic and social history at the University of Vienna, has found that the British opium business did not bolster India's rural economy. Dr Bauer concluded that the opium business was hugely exploitative and ended up impoverishing Indian peasants. "Poppy was cultivated against a substantial loss. These peasants would have been much better without it," Dr Bauer said.Exports, mainly to China, increased from 4,000 chests per year at the beginning of the 19th Century to more than 60,000 chests (15 times) by the 1880s. Opium became the second-most important source of revenue for the colonial state, after land taxes.Even so, the lives of Indian farmers did not become better. The British monitored Indian poppy farmers, enforced contracts and quality with police-like authority. Indians workers were given commissions based on the weight of opium delivered. Interest-free advance payments were offered to poppy farmers who could not access easy credit. However, Dr Bauer found that what was bad for the farmers was what they paid for rent, manure, irrigation and hired workers was higher than the income from the sale of raw opium.In other words, the price the Indian peasants received for their opium did not even cover the cost of growing it. And they were soon trapped in a "web of contractual obligations from which it was difficult to escape".Stiff production targets fixed by the British also meant farmers could not decide whether or not to produce opium. They were "forced to submit part of their land and labour to the colonial government's export strategy". Local landowners forced their landless tenants to grow poppy; and peasants were also kidnapped, arrested and threatened with destruction of crops, criminal prosecution and jail if they refused to grow the crop. "It was a highly coercive system," Dr Bauer said.So, that being the case, who do you think benefitted immensely from the opium trade? The Chinese, Indian or the British?Edit (27 Nov 2020): Some readers have asked if Lin's letter ever reached Queen Victoria. Unfortunately, it didn't.After Lin wrote the letter, a Captain Warner of the British merchant vessel Thomas Coutts agreed to carry a translated version of Lin's letter to England. The vessel was then operating under the charter of the East India Company and was a fast sailing ship.(The vessel Thomas Coutts)The letter eventually reached England and was handed over to the ship owner. He then in turn sought an audience with then British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.Palmerston, at the time, dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830 to 1865, when Britain stood at the height of its imperial power. He held office almost continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865. Some of his belligerent actions as Foreign Secretary were in fact, highly controversial, and have been regarded by historians as prototypes of liberal interventionism practice - a foreign policy doctrine to intervene in other sovereign states with actions such as military invasion in order to pursue liberal objectives.In any case, Palmerston rejected seeing the ship owner and refused to accept the letter. He didn't think the correct diplomatic protocols were followed. It was also evident that he regarded Chinese laws and diplomats as subordinate to the Crown, and did not regard China as an equal diplomatic counterpart with full legal rights within its territories.The letter would later make its way to The Times and was published on 11 Jun 1840. But by the time it appeared in print, the British government had already decided to send troops to impose reparations for the financial losses of the British traders in Canton and to guarantee future security for trade. It was in fact decided just a month earlier in May 1840.By Jun, British troop movements in the Far East were well underway. And 10 days after the letter appeared in The Times, a British naval force arrived off Macao on 21 Jun and moved to bombard the port of Dinghai. The rest, as they say, is history.Ref:The Indiaman 'Thomas Coutts'Lieutenant Charles Cameron's Opium War Diary on JSTORHenry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston - Wikipediahttps://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Su_SocSci_2008.pdfOpium Wars - Wikipedia

My housemate called the cops because we were all trespassing. A bunch of us rented a large house together. Kind of an urban commune, students and young professionals. Manny was the only one of us who had a “real job,” so he had to sign the lease.All was well until Manny had a religious conversion and decided the house must be only for those who shared his beliefs. We pointed out to him that we were all in it together and he was bound by our mutual agreement. He said, no, his was a higher calling and transcended our secular agreement.Since he had the lease in his name, he decided to evict all the rest of us. He had one of his religious acolytes come into the house and serve us with eviction notices. This poor girl was mortified seeing who she was serving papers to.We refused to be evicted. One evening Manny called the police and said his house was full of trespassers and asked them to come remove us. When the police arrived, I was in my pajamas brushing my teeth. We all related our stories to the police, who then admonished Manny for summoning them for a trivial matter.After this, the other tenants and I pooled our resources and hired an attorney, who wrote a suitably nasty letter to Manny. When he saw we were going to stand up to him, he gave up and moved out, to find another place he and his religion junkies could live together.The household was much nicer after Manny was gone. I lived there another year or so, then moved in with my girlfriend. We’ve been married for over 40 years now.(This gorgeous house was right on the beach in Santa Monica, California, just south of the Santa Monica Pier. Walk out the front door, across the sidewalk and onto the sand. It was built for Mary Pickford, the early movie star. After we all moved out, the house was demolished, and nothing built in its place. It’s still a vacant lot.)Edit: Just got a notice from Quora saying I’m getting views here but not many upvotes, and suggesting I change my credential. I’m curious what kind of credential would attract more upvotes on a question like this.

Something about your question seems a little off. Ultimately, you aren’t the landlord, so you have no right to cut down anything on the property just because you think it shouldn’t be there - assuming it is the landlord’s property, and you are renting an apartment in a complex. What the neighbors do in their part of the complex is between them and the landlord. For all we know, your neighbors have already negotiated with the landlord to pay extra for access to land they can use for gardening. What the landlord does about vegetation growing on his land is his decision, not yours.For that reason, you definitely should not call men with guns to the scene because you think there are some plants where they shouldn’t be and you want the landlord to do something about it - unless you’re a 100% pure grade Karen. They will tell you to take it up with your landlord as it is a civil, not criminal issue, or at most will tell you to call the non-emergency code enforcement line about the vegetation growing, if it actually is against code/local ordinance, etc. They may even give you a ticket for abusing 911 services. They are not just there for you to call anytime you have an issue in your life that isn’t going how you want it to. They are there for emergencies and criminal acts. This is not criminal at all; it is a civil issue between you and your landlord. And ultimately, if you don’t like what he does with his property then you are free to move somewhere else.Edit: It’s been drawn to my attention that many lease agreements do contain a clause stating that “common areas” of the apartment complex cannot be used for the benefit of a single tenant. I’m not sure if “common areas” would include outdoors, or if it would still be legal in such a case for a landlord to rent outdoor land to a tenant for purpose of gardening. If your lease does have this provision, I would try 1) talking to the landlord and 2) talking to code enforcement, and if nothing came of that, then I would move to 3) having a free consultation with an attorney who specializes in tenant’s rights to find out my options. Most likely you could pay the lawyer a small sum to write a strongly-worded letter to the landlord that may fix the entire situation. But then you have to be ready for the landlord possibly not wanting to renew your lease anymore at the end of the lease period, so you should also consider how badly you need this particular housing before doing all of this.