Word: weathermen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists." She was referring to Obama's occasional association with Bill Ayers, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who co-founded the militant group, the Weathermen. Palin was not the first to mention the Obama-Ayers connection. The Obama campaign regularly points out that Ayers committed his crimes when Obama was only eight...
...Weathermen formed as a radical offshoot of the 1960s student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). A manifesto, which circulated around a June 1969 SDS convention, took its title from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," it read, and thus became known as the Weatherman statement. While SDS promoted nonviolent protests, the Weathermen aligned themselves with violent groups like the Black Panthers. "There is no example of a peaceful road to fundamental social change," wrote Weatherman-founder David Gilbert...
...founding Weathermen came from comfortable, highly-educated backgrounds and felt the need to escape their sheltered bourgeoisie life. They moved into collectives, practiced forced sexual rotation, took weapons training, and planned attacks on the wealthy and powerful. By October 1969, the group was ready for its first major attack: four "Days of Rage," in Chicago's affluent Gold Coast neighborhood. The Weatherman boasted that thousands of student warriors would flood city streets with violence and destruction, but only a few hundred people showed up. Six Weathermen were shot and 287 arrested. The riots were deemed a failure...
Subsequent bombings of government buildings, banks and police departments lead the FBI to declare the Weathermen a domestic terrorist group. Only one explosion - a pipe bomb placed on a San Francisco Police Department window ledge in February 1970 - resulted in death. It was never conclusively attributed to the group...
When MIT professor and meteorologist Edward Lorenz realized in 1961 that long-term weather-forecasting was all but impossible, the discovery chagrined weathermen. But his underlying idea--that even the most minute aberrations could have vast repercussions on larger systems--gave birth to the modern field of chaos theory. He captured the public's imagination with the elegant concept in a 1972 paper titled "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" Though Lorenz initially used a seagull as his example, he settled on the more poetic creature, giving rise...