London's burning: the Blade Runners rebellion

Are Londoners finally fed up with the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ scam? Could be, could be.

London 'Blade Runners' Fight Back Against Big-Brother Emissions Spy-Cams
In 2015, Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, announced plans to create an Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) in the core of the city — which demonstrates that many of the UK’s Conservative Party members aren’t all that conservative. In the ULEZ, vehicles that weren’t certified as low-emission vehicles would face an emissions charge.

Under Johnson’s scheme, the ULEZ would be a small “congestion zone” in the heart of the city beginning in 2020, but his successor Sadiq Khan began the plan a year earlier. The original “congestion zone” encompassed roughly eight square miles, but Khan expanded the ULEZ in 2021 to about 146 square miles.

A more controversial expansion last year brought the ULEZ into all of London’s boroughs, covering 600 square miles. Khan wanted to broaden the ULEZ even more in 2025 — including a Zero Emissions Zone — but those plans came to naught.

While government estimates suggest that 90% of the cars in the ULEZ are compliant, roughly 700,000 cars in Greater London would be subject to the emissions charge. The ULEZ program uses license plate readers to determine who is in and out of the city and who has to pay for their gauche non-ultra-low-emitting cars.

It’s easy to see why Londoners aren’t happy about the latest expansion of the ULEZ. Not only has license plate cloning become a major issue, but Londoners are also destroying the plate-reading cameras.

A group of vigilantes who call themselves “Blade Runners” are damaging and tearing down the cameras.

“Blade Runners” are cutting down cameras with saws, climbing up them to break them, and burning them with heat guns. And they’re specifically sticking it to the mayor with statements like “frying some Ulez for breakfast…have some of that” and “unlucky Mr. Khan, here’s another one…gutted for you.”

The Bromley News Shopper reports that Londoners covered one toppled camera with dog poop. Commenters on social media expressed their solidarity with the “Blade Runners.”

Not shockingly, London isn’t thrilled with the acts of civil disobedience. Khan said that “protest should be lawful, safe and peaceful” and added, “It is really important to stay on the right side of the law.”

Not when The Law Is A Ass, it ain't. When The Law has become unjust, unreasonable, immoral, and excessively punitive of minor transgressions and/or is a naked grab for cash stolen from subjects already groaning under the crushing weight of Superstate overtaxation, then The Law Is A Ass. Under those circumstances it is really, REALLY important—crucial, in fact, a matter of utmost urgency—to flout it, to defy it, to ignore it, and to undermine it at every opportunity, using any and every tool at hand, as widely both geographically and demographically as can be contrived.

All this “stay on the right side of the law” business, remember, in the name of ameliorating a Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ “crisis” that manifestly does not exist—that is in truth nothing but politicized jiggery-pokery based entirely on “evidence” that is wholly fraudulent, the tainted product of a “scientific consensus” manufactured by greedy, white-smocked charlatans who befoul and defame the conceptual ideal of honest scientific inquiry by bowing and scraping to every fascistic whim of their government paymasters.

My God, how any real, true-blue scientist can resist the urge to pump a few rounds into the cranial vacuum of every partisan pseudo-scientist rumpswab he can get within cap-busting range of is well beyond my poor ability to comprehend. My cap is duly doffed to ‘em in awe of their incredible self-restraint, it’s gotta be tough.

Tyrants gonna tyrant, which elementary truism requires that every national leader be mocked, derided, spurned, and made to look an abject fool at the very first intimation of despotic ambition, lest the self-proclaimed Great Man grow too comfortable and confident of his hold on Power, the relentless expansion of which makes it ever more difficult to cast him down without mass violence and grievous societal injury the longer his day of reckoning is postponed.

The dismal end result of a polity failing in its duty to keep its professional-politician class humble and in check is visible across the Western world entire, and is extremely unpleasant to behold. Better, far better, to have kept the governments and institutions the ProPols infest properly constrained, preemptively denying them a ready-made mechanism they can warp and manipulate to the detriment of those they seek to oppress and exploit. Alas for us all, that ship sailed long, long ago.

And so…well, here we all are: no more than helpless spectators as a once-proud bark batters itself into shards and splinters on the rocky shores of our own lackadaisical complacency and inattentiveness. Their feisty sabotage is probably way too little way too late at this point, but good on the Blade Runners just the same.