‘I just wanted the day off’: School children admit they used climate change protests as an excuse to skip class – as Melbourne crowd hits 100,000 during mass ‘save the planet’ strike. By Kelsey Wilkie.

More than 300,000 people have flocked to climate change rallies in 110 towns and cities across Australia, calling for governments and businesses to act immediately. …

Stephen Green:

Everybody knows this, even the organizers. The real message being sent isn’t to the viewers, but to the young participants: “Mouth our platitudes and we’ll cut you some slack.

The new religion honors others who repeat the platitudes of the propaganda machine.

Joanne Nova:

Every kind of motherhood spirit and mass delusion was at the Global Climate Picnic today. It was all things to all people, a day to absolve guilt about living rich, while simultaneously earning social status miles in the Flying Socialite Program. (Or perhaps that’s the Flying Socialist Program). The Climate Picnic was green and fluffy, nice and sunny, and a walk in the park with the distant promise of free perpetual motion machines. What’s not to like about a day off school feeling like a rebel for conforming with the throng? It was a chance to complain about corporate greed, and do a cathartic exorcism of smoke and black stuff, which everyone knows must be bad. It was a spiritual event, a social event, and faked up as a science event too. The dumb could feel smart, the rich could feel pious, and everyone could feel so important. They were of course superheroes saving the whole goddam planet. … With rather meaningless lives in a civilization they’ve been taught is a toxic imperial invader, the gullible, the lost and the resentful were easy pickings to be swept up into a fake movement promising salvation, better weather, nicer insects and less jellyfish. The nonsense runs wild, and placards prophesy a dying Earth in a game of theatre designed to spook weak politicians. This was climate propaganda week after all. These people were part of the advertising.

How many would have turned out if the protest had been held on a weekend? Which would have been the responsible thing to do.

UPDATE: