When I first posted this on Flickr in July 2008,  I said that I expected criticism for the content from right-wing elements of the American political spectrum.  The picture of the Polar Bear family that I had on Flickr brought personal attacks against me.  I think I mentioned at the time that I was called a lot of names and was accused of wanting to cause “millions of Americans” to lose their jobs because of my concern about polar bears.  Weird, there is no connection, these are crazy ideas!  This brought in the whole right-wing oil drilling lobby.  I said nothing about drilling for oil but all of these "oil drillers" were saying on my photo of Polar Bears that I was advocating such a policy.  This is totally off the wall.  And the attacks became personal and threatening.  After the final one, I was feed up with it and I placed the following statement on my Polar Bear picture on Flicker:

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE THAT THREE ALMOST IDENTICAL PIECES OF RIGHT-WING PROGANDANDA COULD BE PLACED ON MY SITE BY THREE DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS BY COINCIDENCE. 

After I put this on the Polar Bear Family picture,  the next morning my Flickr account and all the photos on it had been deleted.   This will never be allowed to occur again.  If it did, there wouldn't be a Flickr remaining to post hate comments on.    Believe it or not. 

People who aren’t familiar with U.S. politics don’t understand that there are extreme right-wing groups here.  The American Nazi Party for example; The KKK; so-called Christian Fundamentalist extremists.   They stalk and kill people.  I had to protect myself, my wife and property.  They must have some high-level connections with flickr to get this done.  Flickr allowed them to put threatening and right-wing political propaganda on my photos.  I never put anything on anyone else’s photos.  If I were to decide between keeping polar bears alive and these humans alive, good bye humans, it's been interesting to know you.  So don't give my any grief about polar bears attacking human beings.  When I count the votes the bears have it.

The original story is below.
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I had a picture of a female polar bear and her two cubs standing on an iceberg in the middle of the Arctic Ocean looking across the open sea for…something which didn’t seem to be there.  I decided to put this on flickr and add some comments.  This is going to be the story of what happened to me after I did that.

These were the first comments I made with the picture:

This image consists of a polar bear family which includes a mother and two cubs. Unfortunately polar bears aren't good swimmers when far from shore and many are becoming isolated on the sea ice as seen here. When they are forced to swim to another portion of sea ice or to shore over the open sea, they frequently drown. The mother drowns and her cubs drown.

[To suggest differently would be analogous to asking the Project Mercury astronauts to fly the Apollo 8 spacecraft to the moon and return safely to earth. Such geniuses some of you are. It is amazing how ideological bias warps rational thought. There is a reference I cite below which documents that the bodies of drown Polar Bears and being found in the Arctic Ocean at this point in time.]

During summer and in general, the sea ice is receding in the Arctic. This means the bears have to go further north to locate their primary food source, other marine mammals. So when the sea ice melts, as it now is doing (the reason doesn't matter, it is simply an observable fact), the bears are trapped on the ice with no way to get back to land. The end result is that polar bears are finding it more difficult to locate their primary food source. Among other things, this leads to lower birth weights. Unlike some other bears in the Arctic, polar bears do not hibernate in winter so they require food the entire year.

Right now, the future for polar bears does not look too good. If current trends in global warming continue and sea ice recedes more and more, they could be extinct in 20 years.

Then I provided some excellent video links featuring polar bears.   A very young polar bear cub and mirror.   While it is probably lonely for its mother in a zoo, its natural habitat is also becoming threatening to its existence.   The good news is that this cub has grown up and has quite healthy desire for food.

I received a lot of favorable responses to this which the members of the hate groups could read before the comments were deleted by someone in Flickr.  I mean, I guess they can read. 

There were a few problems that some people had though.  So I had to reply to this.  So I made my first effort at responding to the criticisms of what you see above engendered.

I don't want to take the focus away from the issue of Polar Bears as an endangered species, I'm putting these comments separately.  When I undertook this project I expected to receive criticism from the vested interests who have for so long denied the existence of global warming and the threat to polar bears if the Arctic sea ice melts.  Especially so if the addiction to carbon based fuels is a primary cause of global warming and the disappearing sea ice in the Arctic. Some of it has gotten pretty insulting, vulgar and obscene. 

One person in particular has told me that polar bears are "great swimmers" and would have “no problem” swimming over miles and miles of open sea to travel from sea ice to shore or one portion of sea ice to another.  So maybe they shouldn't be on the endangered species list at all. The guy said they “have the same DNA as brown bears.”  I think he is a little over his head on this one and maybe confusing me with Barry Scheck the human DNA expert who solves crimes, I don’t know.

To me relevance is lacking here.  Even if this is true, so what?  Brown bears live in much lower latitudes and their diet consists mainly of fish.  Salmon to be exact, which they find in rivers, not oceans. Furthermore they hibernate in winter.  The whole point was the “brown bears and polar bears swim... a little or sometimes a lot, it really doesn't matter.  And they have the same DNA?!?”  Oh wow, I didn’t know about that DNA thing.  Thanks so much for passing that info along.  So back to melting sea ice.  Is some creatures’ DNA involved in that?  Is this like a missing installment from the X-Files maybe? 

In any event, maybe polar bears can just evolve into something like a whale and swim through all the world's oceans. Oh… swimming along the shore is not the same as navigating over dozens and dozens of miles of open sea.   When polar bears swim, it is for usually for relatively short distances along the shore although at times healthy adults do swim over long distances of open sea water.  They are a very intelligent and resourceful species.  However the title of the article says a lot.  Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts.

Another issue that seems appropriate to bring to the table now is what is diminishing oil supplies, leading to huge increases in the price of oil and concomitant oil exploration in risky places just to keep gigantic profits for oil companies and investors, doing to you  and your ability to live a comfortable and secure life with a future for your children.  Just what is “national security”; if citizens have to burn their furniture to keep from freezing to death in the winter? 

I've also been called a lot of nasty names because of the picture I posted with these comments.  Here are the facts on that:  I took the picture with my camera.  It is on my website and everything that is on my website, the entire site, photographs and content, is copyright 1999-2008 Barry K. Wright. If you read my Flickr profile, the same provisions apply to what I choose to present there and this is on record with the Library of Congress of the United States. 

Because of what has happened, I am saying nothing more about my image sources other than I have never made this public and do not intend to do so.  Anyone who doesn't like that can deal with the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  Actually this controversy with an oil company front or someone who is insanely jealous of me has just made the issues more clear to everyone.  And you know, you may think I’m stretching things in the previous sentence, but when I looked more into the background of the person who said it, I’m 100% sure I’m not.  He’s pretty strange, I did a lot of looking to formulate that.

I thought that was it, I wouldn’t have to deal with any more strangeness.  I was wrong.

The next time I looked at my polar bear content I saw that someone was asking me to sign a petition. He put a link to this petition as a comment in my polar bear content.  The verbiage seemed like the subject line from spam email.  “You need to sign this petition.” 

Oh really... Well my first thought was that it would be something reflecting my own views and those of everyone else who had commented with the one exception duly noted. But when I read it, it was advocating more drilling for oil in the United States saying that this would lower the price of gasoline at the pumps and save Americans money. Well if I'm not mistaken, that is the exact position of the oil drilling interests we all know so well.  I don’t want to mention names but let’s see former VP of the U.S.(the totally insane one) , the former President of the U.S., and a major party candidate for President of the U.S.  That would be John McCain as this was originally written before the 2008 presidential election.  In any event, everyone knows these guys right? Good, then I don’t need to mention any more names as doing so is sickening as one is forced to recall the damage they caused to all life on this planet. 

Can you believe it, these people actually watch network television and this is one of the propaganda agencies they watch:

Wow, just imagine what Hilter could have done with Fox News. 

Anyway this guy asking me to sign the petition must have really thought I was as gullible as a photo I was using then for my Flickr "Buddy Icon."  Actually that picture is me when I was much younger.  I can tell you that I wasn’t gullible then either.  And after that picture was taken, my parents sent me to college where I earned an undergraduate and graduate degree at a time that “Phoenix” was only something from Greek Mythology and a city in Arizona.  Get my point?

I had to answer this and spend some more time typing in order to do so.  This is what I said:

No, don't you understand? Drilling for oil, using carbon based fuels, buying cars that burn lots of gas, this is the problem and is a strategy for losers. You've got to break the cycle and move to alternate energy ASAP. Just how long do you think oil is going to last? There were studies in the 1970s that said the world was going to run out of oil sometime in the 21st Century.

Regardless you surely don't think prices at the pump will go down if we drill for more oil? Our military uses the most oil of any single entity. So do you want more wars? Ongoing wars? Decades and decades of wars? No prices aren't going down, the oil companies control prices and they like them high like they are now because they are now recording the most gigantic profits in their history. Why don't you read the news and become informed before you open your mouth?

Anyway this has to end. The United States has to become energy independent and move to an energy economy that isn't based on fossil fuels. Perhaps you don't believe there really are fossils so to put it differently, it's that black liquid stuff that is deep underground. Sorry but that's the only option other than more suffering and death. If you enjoy that sort of thing, maybe you should see a doctor. Personally I'm not into that at all and I'm also not interested in reading any more of your political propaganda. So keep it off my site.

If you had read my profile before putting your politically charged comments attacking me about this, you would know that what you said is now off my site.

It is really convoluted logic to claim that diminishing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is responsible for gasoline prices in the United States reaching an historical high. Without even mentioning a cause of diminishing sea ice, if one opposes continued oil drilling for what might be a totally unrelated reason to melting ice, I was accused of wanting to hurt poor Americans who can't pay that $4+ a gallon for their weekly (semi-weekly??) gasoline fix.

However here is news all over again. As I said above drilling for oil is a strategy for losers. Want me to say it again? Drilling for oil is a strategy for losers.

Why is that?  Well the world is running out of oil (saying it differently would be there isn't much oil left anywhere) and even if we do nothing, and let all the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean melt, let Polar Bears become an extinct species and coincidentally allow the mean temperature of the earth to continue on an upward trend - none of this - will cause the planet's supply of oil to increase or lower its price per barrel. Nope, not a nickel lower. There is no connection between those events. It's the oil companies that are making the huge profits because the price of gasoline is so high. And right now the oil companies are setting the price of gasoline pretty much wherever they want. They still want to keep you hooked of course, they don't want you to get too wise.

And before someone got onto another political agenda binge, I said that I'm not a big fan of Ethanol or "clean coal" (sic) either. Ethanol at least doesn't require drilling under the ground, so it should be less expensive to obtain. It needs more research though and that is the whole point of doing an energy independency study: what are the best alternatives to Fossil Fuel? Supposedly Dick Cheney did that with his oil company comrades in 2001 but the end result was an energy de-independency study. I hope you’ve enjoyed the past 8 years.

Yeah, that's what I said, just go back and read it again.   Here is a like to the story on Flickr.  And for this logical reasoning, I've was called all kinds of names by (1) people who have an authoritarian personality complex with all its derivatives; or (2) people who find the established science of biology too complex to comprehend which no doubt causes them great discomfort when trying to fall asleep after a hard day’s work. These people mean nothing to me now.

I'm going to offer a second opinion. And here it is suggested that political partisanship might be another factor causing these people to do this.   Ahh yes, Driller Instinct.

For some time this entire article was published in world wide media and is now on Facebook as well as several other places that I'm not obligated to reveal.  To put it simply: it isn't going to disappear and neither am I.