Yeah. It was four years ago that I wrote the following (mildly) amusing post about a bunch of clowns dressed as bees who attempted to hijack Boris Johnson’s bus in the pouring rain. The climate protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) wasn’t particularly effective in those days: Few paid much attention, and many of those who did pay attention did so just to laugh at them. QED.
Four years on, XR has become much more prominent and disruptive, most notably for dangerous stunts on bridges, in traffic, and for gluing themselves to roads (but I repeat myself). Equally disorderly offshoots such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil regularly riot and misbehave in an effort to provoke media attention and mass arrests, while preventing hardworking, decent, citizens going about their business, getting to work, enjoying sports or culture events, or taking their loved ones to the hospital.
One European country, at least, seems to have had enough. From today’s Telegraph: Climate protester left with block of tarmac stuck to his hand is jailed. The photo accompanying the article is of a very glum-looking Raul Semmler, a “38-year old former soap opera actor” and member of the climate action group Letzte Generation (Last Generation), with a large chunk of asphalt still attached to his hand, from the time (one of many apparently) where he glued himself to the road with a combination of sand and superglue. Apparently, the authorities removed him, and his trophy, from the scene rather quickly.
His jail sentence is quite short (only three days), but it’s a start.
And it would be lovely to see the sorts of countermeasures that are now being taken in Germany to get these folks off the roads and out of the way spread to the UK, where the police are regularly seen escorting them around, cordoning them in place to protect them from an irate public, and chatting happily to them while normal citizens who desire to live their life unimpeded, are inconvenienced and prevented from doing so, sometimes in dangerous ways, by fanatical pests with no respect for their fellow man. Here’s hoping the lightbulb will switch on, and that we won’t have to wait for 2050 before it does.
PS: I see the next “extinction event” we are meant to get worked up over involves Artificial Intelligence (AI), something which–if not controlled and regulated post haste- -is going to wipe out mankind very soon.
Maybe those climate activists should start looking for another cause. The state of the sea-level in the Maldives a hundred or two hundred years from now might not matter much after all.
Here’s the old post:
Proposed: Any individual who has to start out a sentence with “I don’t want to be standing here in the freezing cold and the pouring rain glued to a bus,” has already lost the argument.
The article, in The Daily Mirror, contains plenty of other gems that signal that, perhaps, things are not going so well for “Extinction Rebellion” in the UK. Apparently, some friends of one of the soggy apis melliferae have been on a 23-day hunger strike outside Conservative HQ in London and “they’ve had almost no press. No Conservative members have spoken to them. It’s an act of desperation, and they’ve been completely disregarded.” And, horror of horrors, “the Tories have failed to attend the climate TV debate and many of the climate hustings.” The article details further indignities that have been visited upon the group, mostly due, it seems, to lack of interest from almost anyone else in Britain.
Thus, the last, desperate act of the Bee-yond Politics group on a cold and rainy, windswept, Staffordshire night as Boris Johnson’s bus left a manufacturing plant where he had delivered a speech.
Finally! They see victory within their grasp! Press! Attention! Action!
Unfortunately, though, in the damp squib of a finale to their epic protest, it appears that Boris Johnson wasn’t even on the bus.
Sad. Oh well, better luck next time, lads. What’s your next target?
Any suggestions for the brave crusaders?
