Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Recently, the Wall Street Journal refused to publish a letter on the subject of climate change that was signed by 255 scientists—all of whom are members of the United States National Academy of Sciences. The WSJ chose instead to publish an opinion piece titled No Need to Panic about Global Warming that was written by 16 “other scientists.” It has been reported that the 16 “other scientists” include engineers, a physician, a retired airplane designer, a retired electrical engineer, and astrophysicists. Also included among the “No Need to Panic” authors are two men—one who questions whether smoking causes cancer (Richard Lindzen) and another who does not believe that asbestos is a health hazard (Claude Allegre).
According to Media Matters, most of the scientists who signed the WSJ op-ed do not publish peer-reviewed papers on climate research. In addition, more than a third of them have links to fossil fuel interests.
Peter Gleick, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow, wrote an article for Forbes descrying the WSJ’s actions.
Gleick wrote:
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.”
Serious doubt has been cast on the actual expertise on climate science of the signers and on the accuracy of the content, here and elsewhere, and the strawman arguments and technical flaws of their opinion piece are evident to anyone actually versed in the scientific debate. For example, their op-ed has fundamental errors about recent actual temperatures, they use false/strawman arguments that climate scientists are saying climate change “will destroy civilization,” they launch ad hominem attack on particular climate scientists using out-of-context quotes, and so on. Formal responses are in the works, and will be available from a variety of groups in the next day or so. [Just as an example, as pointed out here previously, and at the Union of Concerned Scientists: the authors claim there has been a “lack of warming” for 10 years. The reality? 2011 was the 35th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.]
But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.
Climate Change and the Integrity of Science, the letter that was signed by the 255 scientists, spoke of their concern about the recent escalation in assaults on scientists—especially climate scientists. They said that the assaults on both climate science and scientists came from climate change deniers who “are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.” The scientists called “for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.”
Not long ago, I was disheartened to learn that climate scientists in the United States and in other countries have become victims of cyber-bullying. In 2010, Douglas Fisher wrote an article for Scientific American titled Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned. Fisher spoke of how climate researchers have to purge crude and crass emails that they find in their inboxes every day. Some consider purging such correspondence as a task they must deal with as part of the job of being a climate scientist. Others, however, “see the messages as threats and intimidation—cyber-bullying meant to shut down debate and cow scientists into limiting their participation in the public discourse.”
Clive Hamilton, an Australian author and academic said, “The purpose of this new form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate.” Gavin Schmidt, a scientist who works for NASA, said that “organized, ‘McCarthyite’ tactics aimed at specific scientists by various groups can be stressful.” He added “‘Frivolous’ Freedom of Information Act requests can tie up considerable quantities of researchers’ time.” Schmidt claims that the worst things of all are the “‘intimidating letters’ from congressional members threatening dire consequences to scientists working on climate change.”
Last month, MIT scientist Kerry Emanuel, a Republican and the director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, received a “frenzy of hate male” after a video that featured an interview with him was published by Climate Desk.
**********
VIDEO LINK: Not all Republicans are climate deniers (In the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, former Rep. Bob Inglis, MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, and other Republicans talk about why climate action is a conservative value)
**********
Mother Jones reported that the emails contained “veiled threats’ against Emanuel’s wife—as well as other “tangible threats.” Emanuel said, “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.” He added, “What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all. I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”
The Guardian reported last June that Australian climate scientists had been receiving death threats. As a response to the large number of threatening emails and telephone calls, the Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra moved some of its “leading climate scientists to a secure facility…”
Ian Young, ANU’s vice-chancellor, said, “Obviously climate research is an emotive issue at the present time. These are issues where we should have a logical public debate and it’s completely intolerable that people be subjected to this sort of abuse and to threats like this.” Young added that “scientists had been threatened with assault if they were identified in the street.”
Canberra Times reported last year that more than 30 researchers in Australia—including ecologists, environmental policy experts, meteorologists, and atmospheric physicists—told the paper that they had been receiving a “stream of abusive emails threatening violence, sexual assault, public smear campaigns and attacks on family members.” Some of the scientists installed upgraded home security systems and switched to unlisted phone numbers because they were fearful that their homes and cars might be damaged.
One researcher even spoke of “receiving threats of sexual assault and violence against her children after her photograph appeared in a newspaper article promoting a community tree-planting day as a local action to mitigate climate change.”
One climate scientist, who did not want to be identified, told ABC News that a dead animal was once left on his doorstep. He said he now travels with bodyguards at times. David Koroly, a professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Science, told ABC that he receives threats whenever he is interviewed by the media. He said, “It is clear that there is a campaign in terms of either organised or disorganised threats to discourage scientists from presenting the best available climate science on television or radio.”
Addendum: An Excerpt from Cowards in Our Democracy: Part 1, Written by James Hansen, Climatologist and Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability.
Distinguished scientific bodies such as national science academies, using the scientific method, can readily separate charlatans and false interpretations from well-reasoned science. Yet it seems that our governments and the public are not making much use of their authoritative scientific bodies. Why is that?
I believe that the answer, and the difficulty in communicating science to the public, is related to the corrosive influence of money in politics and to increased corporate influence on the media.
SOURCES
Climate Change and the Integrity of Science (Science Magazine)
WSJ Publishes Op-Ed From 16 Climate Deniers, Refused Letter From 255 Top Scientists (ThinkProgress)
Climate Scientists Rebuke Rupert Murdoch: WSJ Denier Op-Ed Like ‘Dentists Practicing Cardiology’ (ThinkProgress)
The rise of anti-science cyber bullying (ThinkProgress)
MIT Climate Scientist’s Wife Threatened in a “Frenzy of Hate” and Cyberbullying Fomented by Deniers (ThinkProgress)
Price Of Truth: Limbaugh Operatives Encourage Abusive Hate Mail At Female, Evangelical Climate Scientist (ThinkProgress)
Climatologist James Hansen on “Cowards in Our Democracies” (ThinkProgress)
Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1 (Columbia)
The Journal Hires Dentists To Do Heart Surgery (Media Matters)
Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal (Forbes)
Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned: Researchers must purge e-mail in-boxes daily of threatening correspondence, simply part of the job of being a climate scientist (Scientific American)
While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower (Discover Magazine)
WSJ War on Climate Science continues with 16 prominent (but not in climate science) Scientists (Firedoglake)
Australian climate scientists targeted by death threats (Climate Science Watch)
ABC World News: Climate Scientists Claim ‘McCarthy-Like Threats’ (Climate Science Watch)
Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers: ExxonMobil cash supported concerted campaign to undermine case for man-made warming (The Independent)
rafflaw,
Your guess is as good as mine. Have anyone in mind?
raff
bwhat?
Heartland and Hypocrisy; Gleick And The Real Climate Debate
By Steve Zwick
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/02/21/heroes-and-zeroes-in-the-heartland-gleick-says-he-leaked-docs/
Excerpt:
Noted hydroclimatologist and author Peter Gleick has spent his adult life measuring the impact of climate change on water resources. Last night, he took one for us all when he put his career in jeopardy by revealing that it was he who acquired and leaked documents to DeSmogBlog and others showing how the Heartland Institute – one of the loudest voices in the climate-change-denial choir – gets and spends its money.
In so doing, he delivered a massive body blow to the denialsphere and moved the world closer to finding a solution to the climate-change challenge. That’s because his find exposes yet another piece of the denial machine that has been assembled over the past two decades to discredit legitimate climate science. It renders their utterances irrelevant, and provides yet more evidence that Heartland’s activities aren’t those of a charity, but of a PR agency acting on behalf of a few deep-pocketed paymasters who stand to lose if the world acts to mitigate climate change.
Heartland responded first with holier-than-though threats against the media for posting the memos:
“It was an outrageous violation of ethics and the law,” wrote Heartland president Joseph Bast, in an e-mail threatening legal action against media outlets that make the documents available for download. “It doesn’t matter what you believe about climate change, or if you are a liberal or a conservative. You ought to understand and denounce this unethical behavior.”
It then attacked Gleick:
“Gleick’s crime was a serious one,” wrote spokesperson Jim Lakely in an e-mail to reporters this morning. “The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety… A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.”
This comes after Heartland also threatened to launch an investigation into a retired US Air Force Colonel Gary Wamsley who, in a private e-mail to Bast, criticized Heartland’s efforts to fund climate denial in the schools.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the Colonel wrote. “The United States already has a problem in keeping up with the rest of the world in science education, and now you want to play a role in further destroying our nation as well as our planet. You are a traitor to your own country. I did not spend 30 years in the military to protect the likes of you.”
Bast responded by attacking the allegedly-forged memo – as if that were the only smoking gun in this nasty affair, which it isn’t – or if it really were an obvious forgery – which it also isn’t. and ignoring all of the other memos. Then he tried to scare the retired Colonel, who responded by posting the entire exchange on his web site.
“Since your letter is threatening, I’ve forwarded it to our legal counsel, forensics team, and the FBI,” wrote Bast. “It is important that you not delete the email from your sent file, or any other emails you may have exchanged with other people while preparing it, since this could be evidence in criminal and civil cases.”
If Heartland were an innocent victim in all of this – if it were, say, a climate scientist who found his mails hacked and his character attacked just because his findings weren’t the ones certain industries wanted to hear – well, we could understand the vitriol. But this isn’t an innocent scientist or even anything resembling a research organization. It’s a group that cheered and jeered back in 2009, and again in 2011, after an e-mail server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was hacked, and the mails were twisted and distorted to look like something they never really were.
Heartland Institute activist on climate-change curriculum: Teach the ‘controversy’
By Zachary Roth
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/heartland-institute-activist-climate-change-curriculum-teach-controversy-174255402.html
Last week, documents said to come from a conservative think tank, Heartland Institute, shed light on its strategy to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Part of its tactic: a strategy memo mentioning plans to develop a school curriculum aimed at countering “the alarmist perspective” on the issue.
The group, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, has called that memo a fake. But the activist described as leading the curriculum project, Dr. David Wojick, confirmed his lead role in the effort to Yahoo News, and called climate change “one of the greatest scientific controversies in history.”
On Monday, Peter Gleick, a prominent environmental activist and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, admitted that he had received the strategy memo anonymously in the mail, and in an effort to confirm its authenticity, used someone else’s name to obtain the other documents from the libertarian Heartland Institute. He then passed them on to a group of journalists, bloggers, and issue experts in favor of mainstream climate science to fuel the controversy. “I offer my personal apologies to all those affected,” Gleick wrote in an article on the Huffington Post.
Heartland said Monday night it is “consulting with legal counsel to determine our next steps.”
According to the strategy memo, Heartland tentatively plans to pay Wojick about $25,000 per quarter to produce a K-12 curriculum that casts doubt on whether man-made climate change is occurring. Students would be taught, for instance, that “there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather,” says the memo.
In an email to Yahoo News, Wojick said he’d noticed a lack of online resources for teaching the “climate change science debate,” adding that “almost everything teaches the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] view, with which I disagree.” As a result, Wojick said, he approached Heartland with a proposal to “teach the basics of the debate, and fill the gap.”
Wojick told Yahoo News he views it as an issue of teaching the controversy. “The fact is that while controversy is the life blood of the scientific frontier, the concept of scientific controversy is generally not taught in K-12,” he wrote. “I regard the climate debate as one of the greatest scientific controversies in history. It is so great that it cannot be ignored and is even forcing itself into the classroom.”
In reality, the science of climate change is largely settled. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, considered the world’s leading scientific body on the issue, has confirmed in several recent reports that man-made climate change is occurring and poses a threat to the health of the planet.
In recent years, Heartland has released a series of reports, written by well-known climate-change skeptics, challenging IPCC’s conclusions. But the great majority of climate scientists agree about the reality of man-made climate change.
Heartland has called the strategy document “a total fake,” which “contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.” (It has not challenged the authenticity of the other documents.) But Wojick’s email appears to confirm his leading role in the education project. A spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News.
The memo says that Wojick “has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy.” And Wojick told Yahoo News he won a grant from the Department of Energy “to develop an algorithm that estimates the grade level of science education content.”
But in a statement issued last week, the Energy Department described Wojick as “a part-time support contractor for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information since 2003, working to help the office manage and organize its electronic databases.”
It added: “He has never advised or conducted research for the Department on climate change or any other scientific topic, and the office he works for is not a research organization.”
RADICALS FOR CORPORATE POLLUTION: THE KOCH CARTEL & THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE
By Mark Ames
http://exiledonline.com/radicals-for-corporate-pollution-the-koch-cartel-the-heartland-institute/
Excerpt:
Yesterday, our old friends the Koch brothers were back in the news. The DeSmog Blog exposed how some of the most rancid trolls in the world of climate change-denialism are on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, one of the Koch Cartel’s early propaganda mills set up during the Reagan Era.
Among the Heartland Institute’s disinformation projects: paying schools to spread pro-pollution lies to K-12 students by “providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain.” Also memos exposed direct funding deals from the Heartland Institute to pseudo-contrarian “scientists” like S. Fred Singer, named one of America’s top climate change-denialists, who also serves in a variety of Koch propaganda mills like the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies and George Mason University.
The main thing to remember in any story involving the Heartland Institute is that it is a direct project of the Koch Cartel (you gotta admire the Kochs’ ability to generate so many bland names for their propaganda outfits, that blandness acts like a wizard’s cloaking power).
Heartland’s founder, David Padden, was an early member of the Koch Cartel. In 1977, when the Charles G. Koch Foundation of Wichita rebranded and renamed itself the Cato Institute, David Padden was a founding board member of the new Cato Institute. Padden headed a financial services firm in Chicago, Padden & Co. Chicago is the “heartland” of financial derivatives, the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that are screwing America and the world, so you can imagine the Kochs and Padden had plenty of work in Chicago. The Chicago Board is the largest financial derivatives exchange in the world—Koch sockpuppet Rick Santelli launched his Tea Party Rant while standing on the floor of the Chicago Board, blathering about “losers” who lost their homes. Another banker who was a founding board member of the Cato Institute was Sam Husbands, an executive at Dean Witter Securities, now part of Morgan Stanley. And of course, heading Cato was Charles Koch, heir to his father’s oil and chemicals fortune.
Yep, they were underdogs and rebels all right, these “radicals for corporate pollution.”
Elaine,
Anyone we know on that list of paid deniers? 🙂
Documents reveal Koch-funded group’s plot to undermine climate science
Documents leaked from the ‘free-market’ Heartland Institute reveal payments to prominent climate-change deniers, a plan to create a fossil-fuel-friendly curriculum for Kindergartners, and efforts to ‘keep opposing voices’ out of the media.
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer / February 15, 2012
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0215/Documents-reveal-Koch-funded-group-s-plot-to-undermine-climate-science
Excerpt:
Leaked documents from the free-market conservative organization The Heartland Institute reveal a plan to create school educational materials that contradict the established science on climate change.
The documents…include the organization’s 2012 fundraising plan. It lists Heartland Institute donors, from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (established by Koch Industries billionaire Charles G. Koch), to Philip Morris parent company Altria, to software giant Microsoft and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
The climate change education project is funded so far by an anonymous donor who has given $13 million to the Institute over the past five years. Proposed by policy analyst David Wojick, who holds a doctorate in epistemology and has worked for coal and electricity generation companies, the project would create education “modules” written to meet curriculum guidelines for every grade level.
Funding skepticism
Heartland focuses on free-market issues across the board, including promoting charter schools, lobbying for business-friendly finance, insurance and real estate rules and promoting prescription drug availability before full Food and Drug Administration testing.
In the area of climate change, the leaked documents revealed that the group funds vocal climate skeptics, including Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change founder Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), physicist Fred Singer ($5,000 plus expenses per month), and New Zealand geologist Robert Carter ($1,667 per month). They’ve also pledged $90,000 to skeptical meteorologist Anthony Watts, who blogs at WattsUpWithThat.com.
The documents also reveal a communications strategy aimed at “keep[ing] opposing voices out” of publications such as Forbes Magazine, where the audience is “reliably anti-climate.”
You are right OS. I was looking at the big picture.
raff, not entirely true. The police penned up the protesters and took their stuff, including cell phones, laptop computers, cameras and umbrellas. Then shoved the stuff into a big pile with frontloaders and gave the protesters only minutes to recover their stuff before the frontloader shoveled all the private property into garbage trucks. That scenario was acted out at OWS protests all the way from NYC to Oakland. Many thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of privately owned electronics, tents, food and medical supplies. In fact, in several raids on OWS sites, the medical tents seemed to be the first targets, according to witnesses.
The fear in the 1% was in full view.
The Heartland Institute, according to the Institute’s web site, is a nonprofit “think tank” that questions the reality and import of climate change, second-hand smoke health hazards, and a host of other issues that might seem to require government regulation. A July 2011 Nature editorial points out the group’s lack of credibility:
“Despite criticizing climate scientists for being overconfident about their data, models and theories, the Heartland Institute proclaims a conspicuous confidence in single studies and grand interpretations….makes many bold assertions that are often questionable or misleading…. Many climate sceptics seem to review scientific data and studies not as scientists but as attorneys, magnifying doubts and treating incomplete explanations as falsehoods rather than signs of progress towards the truth. … The Heartland Institute and its ilk are not trying to build a theory of anything. They have set the bar much lower, and are happy muddying the waters.
Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council
The Heartland Institute is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of 2010-2011.[2] It is a member of ALEC’s Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force,[3] Education Task Force,[4] Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force Financial Services Subcommittee[5] and Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force.[6] James Taylor, managing editor of the Heartland publication Environment & Climate News, spoke at the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force meeting at the 2011 ALEC Annual Meeting.[6] Heartland was also an Exhibitor at ALEC’s 2011 Annual Meeting.[7] Heartland has also functioned as a publisher and promoter of ALEC’s model legislation.
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door.
***
Leaked documents
The 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy states that the Institute got $200,000 in 2011 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and nearly a million from an anonymous donor. Goals of the organization included:
working with David E. Wojick on “providing [K-12 school] curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science”;
“sponsor[ing] the NIPCC [Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change] to undermine the official United Nation’s IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] reports” including paying “a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered”; and
funding climate change deniers Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 a month), James Taylor who has written a lot about Climategate through his Forbes blog, and Anthony Watts ($90,000 for 2012) to challenge “warmist science essays that counter our own,” including funding “external networks (such as WUWT [Watts Up With That?] and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts).”[18]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute
What Elaine said. The only private property being destroyed is our planet.
Bdaman,
“You and 99.99% of the rest of the commenters here felt it was O.K. to destroy public and private property, and to cause bodily harm to others.”
That’s not true.
Bullshit.
The truth hurts and the facts speak for themselves. Sorry you feel that way.
When they were destroying private property it was for the greater good.
http://politicons.net/photos-occupy-oakland-protesters-destroy-banks-grocery-stores/
Bdaman, you are being disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst. Either that or you are the most gullible grownup I have yet to encounter.
The occupy movement has eschewed violence at every step, basing their whole movement on the teachings of Gandhi and MLK. There have been “black bloc” provocateurs at many of their gatherings. Efforts have been made to isolate the ‘black bloc’ people from the rest, but more often than not, the authorities have chosen to refuse to take action against the agents provocateur types. In fact, some of the violence instigators have been exposed as either right wing political operatives or undercover law enforcement people.
The violence has come from those in power, not the protesters. Lt. Rice and Tony Bologna come to mind instantly. The officer who nearly killed the young Marine veteran in Oakland has yet to be identified, hiding behind a blue wall of silence.
Don’t preach to me about OWS being violent. That is a blame the victim stance if I ever saw it.
I am done. I’ve had it.
My mother is 81 years old. When this 78 year old woman was knocked to the ground because of Occupy protesters Gene H’s response was she should choose better friends. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl_2WJTyE2A
“When is this kind of thing OK?” -Otteray Scribe
Never.
O.S. have already answered the question. It’s never o.k. to promote violence. If you remember just a couple of months ago I was the only one talking about the violence that the occupy movement were perpetrating on cities across the country. You and 99.99% of the rest of the commenters here felt it was O.K. to destroy public and private property, and to cause bodily harm to others. Now all of a sudden you show concern for someone being threatened with violence.
I go back to the original article and the purpose of this whole discussion. When is this kind of thing OK?