Anti-Elon Musk demonstrations have erupted across the US with Left-wing protesters attacking Tesla showrooms with guns and Molotov cocktails. The Mail has the story.
Dozens of fired-up crowds assembled outside Tesla stores across the country on Saturday afternoon to protest against Musk’s efforts to slash Government spending and enact reforms. Demonstrations also erupted in London, Portugal, Malaysia and Iceland.
Roughly 250 activists were gathered outside a showroom in New York City, holding anti-Musk placards that read “Block Fascism Now” and “Musk Must Go” as they shouted “Elon Musk is not elected! Democracy must be protected!”
Five protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct at the Manhattan demonstration and one was taken into custody for resisting arrest, obstruction and violation of local law, the New York Daily News reported.
There have also been more than a dozen acts of vandalism against Tesla vehicles, dealerships and charging stations since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to police and local reports.
A Tesla showroom in Salem, Oregon, was shot at with an AR 15-style rifle in February. Suspected vandal Adam Matthew Lansky, 41, is also accused of causing major damage at the same store with Molotov cocktails in January.
Similarly, four Tesla cybertrucks were set ablaze overnight at a storage lot in Seattle’s industrial SoDo neighbourhood, KING-TV reported.
Officials say at least two vehicles were severely damaged in the fire. Seattle police are investigating if the blaze was an act of arson. …
Police say it is currently too early in the investigation to determine if the blaze was intentionally set.
The potential act of arson comes just days after suspected vandal Lansky was arrested in neighboring Oregon for attempting to destroy a Tesla dealership.
He allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at the showroom on January 20th, striking the dealership building and several vehicles and causing fires, Department of Justice court filings state.
Lansky then returned to the site on February 19th to fired multiple rounds into the building and at least one vehicle, federal prosecutors allege.
He was arrested last Tuesday and been charged with illegally possessing an unregistered destructive device. He was ordered detained pending further court proceedings.
Police in Oregon are also working with the FBI to investigate gunshots fired at a Tesla dealership in Tigard, outside Portland, last week.
Investigators believe at least seven shots were fired at around 1.46am Thursday, damaging three cars and shattering windows. One bullet went through an office wall and into a computer monitor. No one was injured in the shooting.
While the motivation for the attack has not been confirmed, Tigard police said they “are aware that other Tesla dealerships have been targeted across Oregon and the nation for political reasons”.
Worth reading in full.
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Let’s not loose sight of the fact that the cladding manufacturer and supplier only recommended that particular cladding for use on building of less that two storey’s!
Who allowed it to be use against the manufacturer’s recommendation?..who pushed it through to that end?
the penny pinching council!
The fire resistant version was and is available but costs way more!
Exactly. Why should safety be an expense instead of default? The argument that adding a second stairway would reduce the chance of the apartments being sold is also weak – and any decent council would fight it. Every building should offer the maximum possible safety to its residents and there needs to be a solution to fire fighters being able to access high levels quickly.
The argument is not that second staircases reduce the saleability to developments, but rather than they take up valuable floorspace that should be used to squeeze yet more apartments out of a development.
Make that the well-oiled council and it’ll be closer to the truth.
Everyone but the local cat population seems to be getting the blame for this. But who in their right mind takes a perfectly safe concrete (or other) building and covers it in stuff that will burn all the way up the building? Before we had this cladding, if a fire broke out in one apartment it would quickly be brought under control and there would not be this out of control fire racing all over the outside.
—-Because of the Climate Change Act in 2008 and governments determination to use renewables which greatly increase the cost of energy, they simultaneously had to embark on other things, like smart meters in order to ration and control energy use etc etc and also insulation in houses and cladding on high rise buildings. So government can blame Fire Brigades and Construction Companies and make every excuse under the sun but their absurd energy policies based on this evidence free “climate crisis” has caused this disaster.
You forgot quite a number of other things but the primary cause for the loss of life was that the fire brigade “forgot” (by dictat of someone nameless) that their primary duty is rescue of persons, not putting out the fire (which they didn’t anyway). This has now happened several times, but the recent fire where everyone was rescued shows that it is now being considered. All the other stuff about the construction, poor workmanship, wrong materials, poor design, lack of maintenance etc. is true of nearly every building in Britain. These are all distractions, because the more the blame (reason) is spread, the less it is noticed. The reason is simple, none of our supposed “Public” services is fit for purpose, Police , Fire, NHS, and most of the alleged “Civil service”. It is because Politicians don’t care, and couldn’t fix them properly anyway because they are clueless about pretty much everything. I am going to exclude Reform from that because it largely consists of businessmen with experience of real life, the rest are useless dreamers.
No, you are wrong. They had written instructions that the fire commander could not evacuate the building whilst there was a “stay in place policy”. Have you heard all the evidence, as I have? I suspect that this support is either you have something to do with the fire brigade, or worse you wrote the absolutely stupid instructions! The “forgot” was not the men on the ground, It was the command structure, somewhere. The enquiry tried slightly but got nowhere to establish who and why.
No, you are wrong. The ‘stay put’ policy had been in place for decades for sound reasons, this didn’t stop firefighters from attempting rescues, no ‘written instructions’ were in place to stop them doing it. Speak to the firefighters that were there…
Agree that cladding and insulation with the wrong materials is the main fire danger. Insistence on insulating homes with cavity wall materials can also impair ventilation and lead to the spread of thing like black mold. The environmental lobby is making our lives so much worse. But although a concrete/steel/glass building won’t go up like a torch, the writer of this piece describes a non cladding fire, as I understand it. Her argument seems to be that compartmentation failure can allow a dangerous spread of smoke, even where there is no flammable cladding in place. The truth is that far too many new builds are bodge jobs. That’s because the NHBC guarantee is barely worth the paper it is printed on. Builders and other contractors are adept at dodging responsibility. They set up SPVs to construct each block then wind the company up when the building is complete. They also subcontract, creating layers of responsibility, so that it’s impossible to get to the bottom of who should pay out when things go wrong. A young friend of mine spent his life’s savings on a penthouse in Kentish Town, which turned out to have so many construction problems it has been condemned. He’s thrown good money after bad trying to sue those responsible. It has cost him his physical and mental health and he has not retrieved a penny. Nor, probably, will he. Frankly my message to young homebuyers is this. If it’s new build, don’t touch it. If it’s leasehold, super super don’t touch it, because you aren’t actually buying anything just renting it for a very long time. Which I admit doesn’t leave first time buyers with many options. Maybe, once they realise the truth they’ll join the fight to change this crazy British system.
On commercial buildings, you missed another point. Some years ago, I used to work in one, which was owned by the insurance firm Zurich, and from time to time we had to do emergency exit exercises using the stairs only, and gather up in allocated areas outside in the street. At the time, I was working for a different firm, that rented space from Zurich.
Tower blocks aren’t built to be inhabited¹ but because they maximise the number of flats per acreage which can be sold to would-be buy-to-let landlords who’ll hope to be able to eventually pass them on to the next gullible person and make some money from that because of “rising house prices” and accrue some tax-positive losses in the meantime.
The reason Keir Charmless and his band of very merry people of indeterminate gender want more of them to be built is not that homes are needed but that they’re being bribed by the people who want to build them.
¹ The inner town area of Reading is mainly composed of two types of buildings: Tower blocks full of empty offices and tower blocks full of empty flats. Despite this, and despite the fact that more are being built all the time, renting a flat there is absolutely unaffordable (>>£1000/month for anything larger than a cupboard with toilet). Ergo: They’re meant to be empty.
Yes but the main point is that without cladding to try to keep energy prices down since the government energy policies are forcing them up these building s would not go on fire like this. This NEVER happened before cladding. A fire would maybe occur in one flat but could easily be controlled by the Fire Brigade with minimum damage to the rest of the building. —-It is Government Energy and Climate Policies that are to blame here for this.
Lessons?
How about not flooding the housing market with immigrants so that substandard stock like Grendel can be demolished?
But without cladding this building would not have burned like this. —–I get your point about immigration of course.
The lesson? That ‘stopping’ climate change is more important than Human life.
But for ‘reducing the carbon footprint’ of that block of flats, exterior cladding would not have been fitted and the whole train of events that followed, would not have happened.
The lesson. Get the hell out if there is a fire because no one else will be care.
Do it on the cheap and keep your mouth shut and if anything happens then run for the hills. That is the British model baby, cover your own ass as they say. You sold out the virtue of your country long ago and it isn’t coming back.
You sold it all. Remember Sid in the 1980s when it was all about privatization and a shareholder democracy. Share ownership is more concentrated that ever. Most Brits don’t have a few hundred put aside to cover a basic emergency like a new washing machine or fridge. Paycheck to paycheck and virtually nothing left once the rent and bills are paid. What kind of life is that?
I am so tired of people writing that cliched and fatuous statement every time humans behave predictably irresponsibly to a criminal degree.
“We Still Have Not Learned” that people do bad things and other people let or help them. Hitler did not kill millions of Jewish or disabled people and political opponents in concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands of Germans did it directly and indirectly. And millions of other Germans played their part too.
Germans do not have the monopoly on being evil.
Grenfell is one more example of what humans do.
The lesson no one learns is how does anyone stop people behaving in an evil manner?
Or is the lesson that we will all just let them and be in small or big ways complicit in the evil and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it happening all over again ….
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again.
’They’ don’t learn, ‘they’ don’t have to, just play the blame game and pass the cost onto residents to replace deadly cladding
They don’t want to learn, because that would mean admitting to someone being culpable, to having transparency and accountability.
Those “in charge” want none of those things, but are more than happy to keep receiving the bungs, the honours (knighthoods, Lordships), and fringe benefits.
If something goes wrong (as it will and does), then its just a frantic scramble to find someone (anyone) to pin the blame on.
Public office should by default mean responsibility, culpability, transparency and accountability. It also means you are a servant (not master) of the public, your responsibility is first and foremost to them – the people you serve!
And ‘responsibility’ includes knowing what you are doing.
There are too many ‘being responsible’ that haven’t a clue about about ‘the basics’.
For example, the A’ level Physics course provides enough information to understand that, with current technology and affordability, windmills cannot provide a reliable source of Electricity for the UK, now, let alone after NET Zero has been implemented, with petrol/diesel/gas energy sources being abandoned.
Yet, Miliband plough on.
And, hopefully, most secondary school should be able to TEACH the subject. And, according to wiki, he has a A’ level in Physics!
No wonder our country is doomed.
Very interesting article.
Except for one section:
“Almost all flats in England and Wales are sold as leasehold. The leaseholder doesn’t own the flat, just the right to inhabit it for a set number of years and the obligation to pay for all repairs and maintenance. The person responsible for carrying out that maintenance will be your freeholder, who will certainly collect your money, but may not spend it on the repairs you need. And if they don’t, again how are you to know?…
unless leasehold is radically reformed to give flat owners control of the management of their own homes, we will never be sure we aren’t creating yet more death traps.”
Leaseholders ALREADY HAVE THE LEGAL RIGHT to take over management of the building if they wish. Does that necessarily lead to better management? Or does it sometimes lead to more cost cutting to keep maintenance charges down?
And in how many cases do leaseholders actually want to make the effort to deal with that management?
Control by leaseholders is not a panacea, especially as most of them typically can’t be bothered to take an interest in the management of their building and just want someone else to worry about it.
So what’s the answer? I don’t know, but the fashion for whining about the leasehold system definitely isn’t it.
Wrong wrong wrong. Leaseholders do not necessarily have Right to Manage. Especially if there is any commercial content in the building. I’m not saying RTM can’t go wrong. Of course on rare occasions, it can. But if the board of a RTM company mismanages funds or does not attend to repairs in a timely manner, the leaseholders can replace them. Also they have rights to see documents supporting accounts. Freeholders cannot necessarily be replaced. And try interrogating their accounts and see how far you get. Our freeholder removed £600k from our reserves and we cannot find out where that money went, without going to court. We have to go to court just to get our windows cleaned. Leasehold is a scam, an absolute and utter disgrace that should have been outlawed decades ago.