For those of you following the election, you might find some humor in how confusing it all has become over the last several days. You might have read the story of how Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin accused Barak Obama as being friendly with terrorists.
Imagine my shock when I found out that she was referring to Obama’s connection to Weather Underground!
Imagine my shock when I found out that she was referring to Obama’s connection to Weather Underground!
It took a minute or two of reading the whole story before I was laughing.
Where did all this come from? That is where I find the humor…
In 1969, a small group of college student left radicals announced their intentions to overthrow the U.S. government in opposition to the Vietnam War. Mr Obama once served on a charity board with an ex-member of this US-based militant group called Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, now a University of Illinois professor.
The group was intitially known as “The Weathermen” and later the “Weather Underground Organization”. The group was an American radical left organization founded in 1969 by leaders and members who split from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The group organized a riot in Chicago in 1969 and bombed buildings in the 1970s.
They took their name from the lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," from the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues". They also used this lyric as the title of a position paper they distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969, as part of a special edition of New Left Notes.
The Weathermen were initially part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) within the SDS, splitting from the RYM's Maoists by claiming there was no time to build a vanguard party and that revolutionary war against the United States government and the capitalist system should begin immediately. Their founding document called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements to achieve "the destruction of US imperialism and achieve a classless world: world communism."
Now, I am not political, but could not resist posting a blog about this and making sure that we had our facts straight…
Since 1995, “Weather Underground” has meant a completely different thing. Weather Underground is a commercial weather service that provides real-time weather information via the Internet. Weather Underground provides weather reports for most major cities across the world on its Web site, as well as local weather reports for newspapers and Web sites. Most of its United States information comes from the National Weather Service (NWS), as information from that agency is within the public domain by federal law. The Web site is available in many languages, and an ad-free version of the site with additional features is available for an annual fee.
Here’s some more of the humor… Weather Underground is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan's Internet weather database.
Now, I am not political, but could not resist posting a blog about this and making sure that we had our facts straight…
Since 1995, “Weather Underground” has meant a completely different thing. Weather Underground is a commercial weather service that provides real-time weather information via the Internet. Weather Underground provides weather reports for most major cities across the world on its Web site, as well as local weather reports for newspapers and Web sites. Most of its United States information comes from the National Weather Service (NWS), as information from that agency is within the public domain by federal law. The Web site is available in many languages, and an ad-free version of the site with additional features is available for an annual fee.
Here’s some more of the humor… Weather Underground is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan's Internet weather database.
The name is indeed a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1960s militant radical leftist student group the Weather Underground, which also originated at the same university.
Jeff Masters, a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Michigan, working under the direction of Professor Perry Samson, wrote a menu-based telnet interface in 1991 that displayed real-time weather information around the world. By 1992, the two servers they used were the most popular service on the Internet. In 1993 they initiated a project to bring Internet weather into K-12 classrooms around the country.
In 1995 the Weather Underground, Inc. evolved as a commercial entity separate from the university. It has grown to provide weather for print sources, in addition to its online presence.
Today, the KHAS Chasing4Life Chase Team still recommends Weather Underground to attendees at events as the very best source for weather and utilizes the service as a part of our tracking center, educational events and in monitoring weather on a daily basis.
Around our Tracking Center, the name Jeff Masters is spoken almost everyday, considered by our team to be one of the most accurate sources for weather forecasts.
Well, all that to say... I am very relieved to find out that one of our favorite weather monitoring sources has not been compromised by terrorists...for a minute there, I was worried...
