A Big Fat One

You know, just when I gave ol’ Beelzeblog the benefit of the doubt, or, if you prefer, the judgment of charity, I suddenly discover documented proof that I erred unnecessarily on the side of kindness.

Of course, I speak of Sunday’s post (“Copyright Dealies”) where I republished the Fearless Leader’s taunt of Drs. Quinlan and Ramsey in the matter of their factual rebuttal to his and Wilkins’ loathsome revision of American history, when he wrote:

At the top of their paper is the most interesting copyright notice I have ever seen. After the normal copyright dealies, it says, “Please do not cite, quote, summarize, or otherwise reproduce without permission of the authors.” Not being a professional historian myself, I am unfamiliar with this kind of restriction. (emphasis added)

Yesterday I was thumbing through more data on my hard drive and discovered the original pdf that the University of Idaho freely distributed on their website during Wilson’s little slavery problem, and I noticed that the copyright notice doesn’t even remotely resemble Wilson’s characterization of it. Now, I could be wrong. The UI distributed hard copies of the pamphlet (mine is stuffed in a box somewhere in my garage) and it’s possible that those versions were not generated from the pdf, but that strikes me as unlikely. It seems even more unlikely when you note the exceptionally simple copyright notice on the pdf (below) and the strong probability that they would have taken extra precautions on the electronic version of their document because it would receive wider circulation than any hard copy. But again, I could be wrong.

Here are the first and last pages of Drs. Quinlan’s and Ramsey’s response to Wilson and Wilkins:





I wonder if it’s consistent with the Fearless Leader’s personality to tell a big fat one about someone else in order to make himself look that much more impressive. I sure hope not.

Thank you.