Blackmail Note

I was sitting at the computer in my computer art and design class at UAA this afternoon when someone walked in and handed me this note.

Ripped off by Sarahpalinvalues and Plagiarism Today to the Rescue

I guess there is some sort of twisted rightness about being ripped off by something called Sarahpalinvalues (SPV). Here's the story. Other bloggers, help me out here, please.

Someone got to my blog from this link. If you go there, you'll see this:

Would Your Mother Make a Good VP?

Posted on September 10th, 2008 by Content Keyword RSS

I got asked in a telephone poll yesterday whether I viewed Sarah Palin favorably. How do you answer that? Fortunately, the pollster was pretty loose and accepted my non-responsive answer of, Yeah, I'd like her to stay my governor. You may love your mom and still not think she'd be a good vice president or president. Rating Palin as a Person My first personal interaction with Sarah Palin - an early political talk and question and answer session at the University of Alaska Anchorage being the

Well, that's a post from What Do I Know? But there's nothing on there to tell you. Only if you click on the title will you get sent here. But the first time someone would see this post would be on their main page. Click on the title and you get to a second SPV page. Only then will clicking the title get you to the original source.

OK, fellow bloggers. This is not just about my post. All their posts are used without citation from other blogs. They're simply taking our posts to generate traffic for their ads. Here are a few other blogs that have also been ripped off. I'm listing them in hopes they'll see this and send in DMCA letters (see below.)

No Ordinary Moment and here's the ripped off version.
Corrente and here's the ripped off version.
Eternity Road and here's the ripped off version.
Brothers Judd.com and here's the ripped off version.
The Burnside Writers' Blog and here's the ripped off version.
Morialekafa and here's the ripped off version.
Dandelion Salad and here's the ripped off version.

They do give credit to larger organizations like USA Today and Huffington Post, but not not smaller blogs. Other sites (see Blognetnews for example) carry pieces from other blogs, but the legit ones tell you where they are from and have links to the original on the first page you get to.


OK, so what do we do about it?



Googling, I found this post at tech blog mikeduncan.com where the blogger complains (far more eloquently than I have) that his post has been ripped off and posted at a tech site that takes stuff from other sites and posts it as their own. He at least is mentioned and linked, but as a having a 'similar post." Most important, he has about 80 comments, including this one:

#17 Jonathan Bailey on 03.24.08 at 4:42 pm

I’m sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It’s becoming more and more common I’m afraid, not just in the tech world, but pretty much all lines of blogging it seems.

As someone who has handled over 600 of these types of cases, I can say with some certainty that there is no need to hire an attorney, taking these guys down is a pretty simple matter. In this case, you should be able to send a DMCA notice to their host by using the email address legal at contegix.com.

If you need any help with that, let me know. I’ve got stock letters on my site and I can help draft it if needed. You can also send the notice to the search engines as well if you want to launch that kind of an attack first.

Just let me know if there is anything In can do and I’ll gladly assist!

Baily's link takes you to Plagiarism Today.

Plagiarism today has lots of resources for taking care of this. Basically, write letters to the site itself and to the host and tell them to take down the material. He even has a page with stock letters to send.

But one does have to find out where to send this. Plariarism Today has a page on that too. I'm going to post this for now and will read that page more carefully to see if I can figure out that information. Maybe someone will jump in and help me figure that out.

I'm hoping some of the blogs I've listed will see this and contact me so we can get as many letters in as possible. It's not just about my post. Ideally Sarahpalinvalues will put up the names of ALL of the blogs and webpages they steal from, not just the big ones that will (or have?) notified them. And that the first link goes direct to the original website, not to another page on their own website.


I'll either add further information here or on a new post.

Random Shots at the Beginning of Fall (in one case after the fall)

Lesson of the day: Do not pick up the peppercorn container by the top.
(This is the after-the-fall pic)

Sunday night before dinner from the Thai Kitchen parking lot.

And again after dinner.

Monday afternoon after class - the UAA library.

Looking down the street to the west.

It does bother me how urban features like street lights interfere with my views, but since they are part of my life, I've decided to not crop them out.

Important Boraas Article on Palin's National Fundamentalist Ties

Saturday's ADN article by Kenai Peninsula College Professor Alan Boraas' article on Sarah Palin outlines ties between Palin and Billy Graham's son Franklin Graham, the hiring of Chuck Kopp (to replace the fired Walt Monegan, only to be withdrawn when old sexual harassment issues arose), and Jerry Prevo (Alaska's version of Jerry Fallwell), and others. It's worth reading:

Kopp hiring proved Palin's fundamentalist street cred.

Ted's Three Sullivans

There are three Sullivans connected with the Ted Stevens trial - the Judge, and one attorney for the defense and one for the prosecutor.


The Judge: Emmet Sullivan

The photo and information are from the excerpted from the D.C. District US Courts website where the photo is credited to Beverly Rezneck.

• Judge Emmet G. Sullivan was born in Washington, D.C. and attended public schools in the District of Columbia until his graduation from McKinley High School in 1964. In 1968, he received a from Howard University and, in 1971, a from the .
• Howard University, Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science,1968
• Howard University School of Law, Juris Doctor Degree, 1971
• In 1973, Judge Sullivan joined the law firm of Houston & Gardner. He subsequently became a partner and was actively engaged in the general practice of law with that firm until August 1980, when his partner, William C. Gardner, was appointed as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Thereafter, Judge Sullivan was a partner in the successor firm of Houston, Sullivan & Gardner.
• appointment by President Ronald Reagan to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia on October 3, 1984
• On November 25, 1991, Judge Sullivan was appointed by President George Bush to serve as an Associate Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
• On June 16, 1994, Judge Sullivan was appointed by President William Clinton to serve as United States District Judge for the District of Columbia.

Brendan Sullivan, Defense

Georgetown University, A.B., 1964

The photo and text are from the Williams and Connolly LLP website:

Brendan Sullivan is a senior partner at the firm with nearly forty years of litigation experience in federal and state courts throughout the country. Mr. Sullivan is recognized nationally as one of the best known and most able trial lawyers in America, with an extraordinary record of successes. His principal areas of practice include all types of complex commercial litigation, including securities, antitrust, banking, RICO, and license disputes; the defense of major law firms in malpractice cases and the defense of accounting firms; products liability and mass tort; will contests; as well as high-profile criminal litigation. Typical clients include Fortune 500 companies involved in criminal investigations, litigation, or government regulatory matters.

Edward P. Sullivan, Trial Lawyer, Public Integrity Section, US Department of Justice


The photo is courtesy of Dennis Zaki at AlaskaReport.com. I found out in the previous trials that it is hard to get information on the Anchorage based and Public Integrity Section (PIN) Department of Justice attorneys. The websites have nothing. Edward Sullivan is a very common name and Googling doesn't seem to yield much. There is a law review citation, but I couldn't find the actual article in the Syracuse Law Review and there is no guarantee that this is the same Edward P. Sullivan, but the timing is reasonably close. Edward P. Sullivan, Reshuffling the Deck: Proposed Amendments to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 45 Syracuse L. Rev. 1107, 1126 (1995).

Here is information on the PIN:

Public Integrity Section

The Public Integrity Section oversees the federal effort to combat corruption through the prosecution of elected and appointed public officials at all levels of government. The Section has exclusive jurisdiction over allegations of criminal misconduct on the part of federal judges and also monitors the investigation and prosecution of election and conflict of interest crimes. Section attorneys prosecute selected cases against federal, state, and local officials, and are available as a source of advice and expertise to other prosecutors and investigators. Since 1978, the Section has supervised the administration of the Independent Counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act.

The Beginnings of the Wasilla Library - Edith Olson's The Library and I

Last week at the Loussac Library Alaska Room I found the book The Library and I
by Edith Olson. It tells the history of the Wasilla library from 1938 until she left Alaska in 1959. I did try to contact the publisher, but it appears to no longer exist. I also tried calling an Edith Olson I found in Washington State.

While I was initially interested in this because of the discussions of Sarah Palin, when she was Mayor of Wasilla, firing the Wasilla librarian, the book seems to have nothing that is relevant to that issue at all. However, these two chapters are an interesting look at early Wasilla and the way the library came into existence.

The Library and I - Upload a Document to Scribd

American Idol Style Poll on Palin's Eligibility

So it comes to this. PBS has a poll that asks: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be VP?



[Poll as of 12:30pm (Alaska Time) today]



The email I got said:

The Right is having people vote that Palin is qualified


PBS has a poll that asks: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be VP?

Let's turn this around..... You don't have to give your name or

email address in order to vote. It's very simple.

Here's the link:



http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html


This is such a joke. Both sides stirring up their followers to vote. The results will mean little.

Blueberries

[This was an email from Catherine and I asked if I could post it and did she have any pictures.]

I was up in the mountains picking blueberries... finally found some! oh joy. Picked with four other women... haven't laughed that much in ages. It was terribly fun. Now I'm cleaning, freezing, making pies and crisps... the freezer is getting stuffed with berries and I am in heaven.

Oddly enough, we had a beautiful day while it was raining here! I was surprised. I picked more than I've ever picked in one outing...







almost 3 gallons... then a friend who went with gave me almost 2 more gallons as a thank you for sharing this most amazing spot...(years ago) although she's the one who found this spot due to a hurting knee and not being able to climb as high up as we usually pick.

Oh I tell you it's heaven.

Now I have to decide if I want to start one of the pies I made last night this morning for breakfast... or not... heehee.

It's a new pie day!

Fungibility

I've been getting links to the YouTube of Sarah Palin talking about fungibility and it's already up on various blogs. It's shown as an example of Palin's not being very clear. I've listened to it and I have one possible explanation of what she was trying to say. It's not easy to transcribe what she says with absolute certainty. Here's my transcript:

Oil of coal, course, is is a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, ya know, the molecules where, where it’s going to where it’s not but and in the, in the sense of the Congress today they know they are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So I believe that what Congress is going to do also is not to allow the export ban to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here, it’s gotta flow into our domestic markets first.

The YouTube description transcribes the opening as: ""Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity..."

I think she meant to say, "Oil, of course,..." but accidentally said, "Oil of coal..." and then corrected herself with " course".


Now, what is that fungibility stuff? Wikipedia says:

Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution.

And then there's the phrase

they don’t flag, ya know, the molecules where it’s going to where it’s not...

Here's my guess at what she was trying to say, based on attending the AGIA conference in Anchorage this summer. Critics how, with [of] AGIA [wanted to know how] we would be sure that Alaska's natural gas actually got to the Lower 48. It would go through Canada and then it would all be mixed with Canadian gas. So, the gas that actually went to the US, wouldn't necessarily be Alaska gas. But that would be ok, we were told, since we'd know how many cubic feet of Alaska gas went into the larger pool and how much went on to the US.

My guess is that this is what she was thinking, even though she didn't articulate it very clearly. Maybe she thought if people couldn't understand her jargon they'd think she was really smart. Some academics do that. Also, I'm not sure if the same is true for oil. We know that there are different grades of oil and they sell for different prices, so they wouldn't be fungible. But there are different qualities of natural gas as well, so I'm not sure on this. Next.

"...what Congress is going to do also is not to allow the export ban to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source..."

Grammatically, let's see if we can make this work:

"Congress is not going to allow the export ban to such a degree that Americans get stuck without oil."

It seems to me that if she meant oil wouldn't be diverted from the Lower 48 and exported to other countries, then Congress SHOULD allow the export ban.


If you haven't seen the video, you can below.

It Goes Without Saying - Mime Bill Bowers at Out North

Out North is a small theater. It holds, maybe, 100 people and we were sitting in the front row. So, I put away my camera before the show started. This is the stage. A flip chart with the names of the stories he's telling. And the stool. The rest of the space a blank slate for Bowers to paint with mime.

The title - It Goes Without Saying - is a little misleading - the mime actually talks. He tells stories of his life and why he mimes for a living starting with growing up in Missoula through gigs at trade shows, through studying with Marcel Marceau, through caring for his dying partner.

I got drawn into the stories and the mimed illustrations. A key theme was silence. His family, his community, as he tells it, didn't talk about the important aspects of life around them. This theme seemed to climax when he told us about meeting a mime in Romania, who he said was the most famous man in Romania, dubbed "The Voice of Romania." (I'm not sure I've got the title right and the "Voice of Romania" hits I got on google didn't give me any mimes, but the image of a mime being the voice of a country where repression ruled for so long is a delicious conceit.)

This was an interesting evening, delving into places I've never been. Yet I went home with a feeling of incompleteness. A one person, autobiographical show, only works if I feel I'm hearing directly from the performer's heart. After a night's sleep, I have the feeling that Bower's voice wasn't completely authentic. Maybe because he's really a mime, not a talker. Maybe he's done the show too often. My sense is that perhaps he hasn't yet found his own true voice and he's still trying too hard to get our approval instead of just his own.