James, I was in San Francisco and saw the tail end of the demonstrations. My best friend Nathan saw the brunt of it.
42,000 seems like a very just and reasonable estimate for the size of the total march. Then all of the reasonable people went home (when the permit was up) and there were left some ~300-odd total idiotic wackos (one proclaiming "technology is destroying us! culture is destroying us! we must smash civilization!" to much cheering and being immediately followed by a speaker emphasising the need for "increased research and development of solar cars" to cheering from the same people). The photos may have been of this group. I, for one, took a few photos of this group and the assorted police. There were, at no point in time that I could see, a mere group of forty people participating. There were well over 40 police officers alone, some horseback mounted, many in cars, many on motorcycles, some in paddywagons, and a HUGE number on foot, marching about like soldiers. The media is not pulling the wool over your eyes on this one. Think about it -- you really can't get away with misrepresentations of that magnitude. They may be fooling us in other regards, but this is not one of those. -david
