Search, Resources and Helpful Links

[Body-by-Guinness]

As I browse around the 'net I often find interesting and helpful links. Figured I'd start a topic where such info could be posted. For instance, found a quick easy source for biographical data at the following URL:

http://www.nndb.com/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Allows you to search for radio stations around the world. Cans search by state, country, format, or call letters:

http://www.radio-locator.com/

A couple price search engines:

http://www.streetprices.com/
http://www.pricescan.com/
http://www.pricewatch.com/

Free sex offender search:

http://criminalcheck.com/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Eureka Alert is a site that compiles recent scientific findings. They can be found at:

http://www.eurekalert.org/

[Crafty_Dog]

a  friend writes
-------
If you thought the Google Maps were rather interesting, check these out (as it takes it in for a deeper picture imo).

http://terraserver.microsoft.com - Can view aerial pictures of properties where you can zoom in to see the neighborhood.

http://yp.a9.com - Can view business addresses / commercial properties from the front along with viewing what the other businesses around the area look like.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Interesting and well organized site containing stories about leading edge physics and technology news. Check it out at:

http://www.physorg.com/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Very comprehensive site devoted to second amendment and gun control issues:

http://www.guncite.com/

[isthereadog?]

http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ which integrates GasBuddy (http://www.gasbuddy.com) with Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) to provide a searchable index of gas prices nationwide, overlayed on Google Maps.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Search for registered sex offenders by address, zip code, etc. and have the results displayed on a map at:

http://mapsexoffenders.com

[Body-by-Guinness]

Perhaps misfiled, but this librarian got annoyed with junk faxes and so used various resources to put a lien against the faxer's private aircraft. Pretty good humor.

And You Thought Late Fees Were Bad

Matthew O'Neil, a librarian at Palm Harbor Library in Palm Harbor, Florida, hates junk faxes. He's channeled his disgust for one particular fax blaster into small claims court.

His reward? A private airplane. His tale:

Over the course of the last few months I have received unsolicited facsimile transmissions from one particular fax blaster. The number for removal and the number to fax back the advertisements for health insurance, mortgages, hot leads, selling my business and so on is also in my area code. The telephone number is not serviced by the local exchange carrier (Verizon) but a competing local exchange carrier (CLEC)

After the first fax on August 7th I called the ?removal? number on the fax but it was busy. I tried about six times but it was always busy. I used nanpa.com to find out who serviced the number and complained to them (the faxer?s phone company). The faxes continued. I filed 1 small claims suit against the sender and subpoenaed the records of the CLEC (competing local exchange carrier- the faxer?s phone company) they sent me the records within 3 hours of receiving the subpoena. It seems that other had complained about the illegal faxing as well.

When I found out who was really sending the faxes I decided I should use my librarian super powers to find out more about them. I found out that they are incorporated in Florida (using sunbiz.org and lexis-nexus) I found out the corporation holds assets in corporate name. The corporation has only one officer and for some reason he put both an automobile and an aircraft in corporate name (thanks to lexis-nexus). I don?t have any idea why he didn?t put them in his own name so creditors could not attach them.

So since I knew there were assets to attach I filed one additional small claims action for each illegal fax for a total of ten. The law limits the damages to $500 for each fax sent. However if there is an egregious violation they allow treble damages. So I filed 9 additional small claims actions against the same party- each fax must be a separate action.

The legal requirements were a bit of a pain in the arse, but nothing a librarian couldn?t handle. I served the resident agent of the corporation as required. We had a court date scheduled. I went to court and full well expected these geniuses to show up as they called me and asked me to dismiss the suit. I said for $1000 to the Leukemia Society (this is called an offer in compromise). They never called back. Well they never showed up in Court either. In the pre-trial conference I met with the hearing officer and asked for treble damages and costs as I the violations were egregious, I have to change my telephone number, and I had made an offer in compromise to mitigate damages. Well the hearing officer looked at my information and immediately transferred it to the judge. (In Small Claims they try to mediate things rather than punish people). A few days later after the notice of hearing was served upon myself and the registered agent a conference was held with the judge ?. Guess who was there! Yep just me and the nice judge.

So the judge and I chatted for ten minutes or so in case they were stuck in traffic, then he tried the removal number on the fax and it was amazingly busy. So the hearing began and I presented all of my evidence and since they were not there they presented none of theirs (a default judgment would have garnered me only minimal damages so I asked to proceed in absentia), The judge asked me a few questions about my fax machine, what kind of toner (I use a roll which is quite expensive as opposed to the new laser faxes) and if I changed my fax number solely because of this.

Then I made a motion to merge all the cases into one hearing (as 10 copies of everything had gone out with the same date and time on them) the judge thought this was just spiffy, as it would save the Court time. I moved for treble damages and noted that their failure to show up after being properly served was contempt for the process and for the Court itself. I figured it would fail and I?d simply get default judgments X 10/ Well it worked. I asked for no stay of the execution beyond statutory requirements and was given that as well.

I figured as the nasty faxers would contact me in the interim, as there is a waiting period before judgments can be enforced. Well they never did. I guess they thought I was joking around.

So Monday I took my paperwork and a check for $800 to the sheriff and asked that they execute the judgment against the company. I asked that they seize a Cessna 340, a Lexus, and cash assets of the defendant. So the sheriff stamped and stapled and filed and collated the paperwork. Today I found out that they have seized the aircraft the corporation owns and will sell it at public auction next month.

I will get my money! The defendant has ignored all of the notices given to him and the time for appeals has passed. If no one bids higher than the judgment at the public auction the aircraft is mine. I was awarded $1500 for each fax, plus filing fees for each case of $155, plus fees for copies, printing, certified mail and the like. The total is $16837.32. I think I?ll come out OK since the aircraft is valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars and it is chained to the ground until after the sheriff?s sale. Oh, and I get back the $800 I paid the sheriff too.

Moral of this story:
1) Don?t screw with the librarian
2) Libraries- take action on your unsolicited faxes- they are illegal.
3) Reference tools are your friends!

Oh and it is all going to the Leukeima Society less my costs. In fact if they were nice and reading this I would settle for a ckeck for $10K to the Leukemia Society and my costs reimbursed ($10*$155, $800 plus misc postage and copying less than $200)

Epilouge:

Friday October 14, @03:43AM    [ #3771 ]
What was here has been settled. I have entered into an agreement that makes me whole, and provides a charitable donation. However in the settlement agreement I was asked not to discuss the particulars of the case. I agreed to remove my previous post from LISNews as the company could possibly be identified. (even though I left that detail out)
I can say that I am more than pleased with the outcome.

845 PM - still waiting for the fax they promised by the end of business. Fax is on and paper is in the machine (this fax I let them send it is the satisfaction of judgement.) I'm not signing anything until the checks arrive

9:30AM Saturday The fax really was there, the paper was just not in exactly right to print.

Two things I learned for next time.
If you file multiple suits serve them individually. If you put 9 of them in one envelope and send it certified mail to the defendant they may argue improper service.
Even if you have a judgement the defendant can appeal. If the judgements combined are more than the limits of small claims court then they can ask to have it transferred to county or circuit court (I don't know if it will be transferred but just something to consider.)

So if I have to sue someone in small claims court again for several things that happen over several days I'll file each one on a different day and serve them independent of one another.

I'll try and post the story again after I tidy it up.... or at least post how I went about doing it. I just don't want to torque anyone off, even though I have the fax I don't have the checks.

[Tom Stillman]

Let us digress.      www.toontracker.com

[Body-by-Guinness]

Murder stats broken down in various useful manners. Check it out at:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html

[Guard Dog]

Very useful!  Thank you!

Gruhn

[Body-by-Guinness]

A couple extremist links and a Scientific American piece about Islamofascist use of the web.

http://jihadwatch.org/
http://www.extremistgroups.com/links.html


December 26, 2005
   

Virtual Jihad
   

The Internet as the ideal terrorism recruiting tool
   

By Luis Miguel Ariza
   

If you read Arabic and want a degree in jihad, click on www.al-farouq.com/vb/. If you're lucky--the site disappears and reappears--you will see a post that belongs to the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF). It announces the "Al Qaeda University of Jihad Studies." According to Ahmad al-Wathiq Billah, the GIMF "Deputy General Emir," students "pass through faculties devoted to the cause of the caliphate through morale boosting and bombings," and the site offers specialization in "electronic, media, spiritual and financial jihad."

The Internet has long been essential for terrorism, but what has surprised experts is the growth of such Islamist (radical Islam) and jihadist sites. Their continuing rise suggests that recruitment for a "holy war" against the West could proceed unabated, despite capture of key leaders.

According to Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel, the number of all terrorist Web sites--those advocating or inciting terrorism or political violence--has grown from a dozen in 1997 to almost 4,700 today, a nearly 400-fold increase. (By comparison, the total number of Web sites has risen about 50- to 100-fold.) The enumeration includes various Marxist, Nazi and racist groups, but by far the dominant type, according to Weimann, is the Islamist-jihadist variety, which accounts for about 70 percent.

The war in Iraq provides plenty of motivation for radicals, and the Internet appears to be facilitating them, even if legitimate governments shun them. "We are talking about groups that are opposed and persecuted all over the Arab and Muslim world, so the Internet becomes the only alternative to spread their messages," says Reu ven Paz, director of PRISM (Project for the Research of Islamist Movements), a watchdog group in Herzliya, Israel. The spread "is like an attempt to create a virtual Islamic nation."

Scott Atran, a research director at the Jean Nicod Institute of the CNRS in Paris, studies the group dynamics of terrorists. He notes that the attackers of Madrid, London and Bali were autonomous groups, like "swarms that aggregate to strike and then vanish." The open, anarchic structure of the Internet supports this "chaotic dynamics" modus operandi as a way for militants to recruit new members and look for goals or inspiration. "Without the Internet, the extreme fragmentation and decentralization of the jihadi movement into a still functioning global network just would not be possible," Atran argues. "I think we can expect more independent attacks by autonomous groups because of the Internet."

Atran cites the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004, as a good example: a computer of one of the attackers showed evidence of systematic downloading from the same site that delivered a document entitled "Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers," which had circulated on the Net some months before the massacre. Among other charges, the document called for attacking Spain to force a withdrawal of that nation's troops from Iraq.

Atran, who has interviewed several radical jihadists, says that the Internet has spread a homogenized, flat notion of Islam, one that has little to do with Islamic tradition. The militants express a message of martyrdom for the sake of global jihad as life's noblest cause. "I was very surprised to find, from the suburbs of Paris to the jungles of Indonesia, that people gave to me basically the same stuff, in the same words," Atran says.

Combating the problem might come at the expense of the freedom expected on the Internet. Weimann has argued that data mining could sniff out jihadists or remove information before would-be terrorists see it. Marc Sageman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a former CIA officer, notes that the nature of Islamist-jihadist sites could be turned against them. "In jihad, with so many Web sites, you have many potential messages, and you do not know what is true," he remarks. This lack of authenticity, he notes, could serve as a basis for a misinformation campaign to foil jihadists.

Atran thinks it may be possible to fight the virulent ideas not just with a fist but also with an outstretched hand. The chat room could serve as a forum for life-affirming ideas as it does for terrorist ones. Convincing jihadists of alternative values would be a long process, he admits. But "I have seen groups of mujahedeens" transformed from fighters to community helpers. If that conversion works in physical space, he says, "I do not see any reasons why we cannot do that in cyberspace."

[Body-by-Guinness]

Link where you enter the serial numbers off of dollar bills to see where they've been.

http://www.wheresgeorge.com/

And a piece about how the data is used:

Banknote tracking helps model spread of disease
18:15 25 January 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight

 
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organisation
Amaral Research Group, Northwestern University
Where's George

Tracking the movements of hundreds of thousands of banknotes across the US could provide scientists with a vital new tool to help combat the spread of deadly infectious diseases like bird flu.

Modern transport has transformed the speed at which epidemics can spread, enabling disease to rip through populations and leap across continents at frightening speed.

However, scientists possess few mathematical models to help them understand these movements and how this might govern the global spread of disease. To a large degree, this is because tracking the movements of so many people over such a large area is next to impossible.

But now physicists from the Max Planck Institute in G?ttingen, Germany, and the University of Santa Barbara, California, US, have developed a model to explain these movements, based on the tracked movements of US banknotes.

Dirk Brockmann and colleagues used an online project called www.wheresgeorge.com (George Washington's image is on the $1 bill) to track the movements of dollar bills by serial number. Visitors to the site enter the serial number of banknotes in their possession and can see where else the note may have been.

The team tracked 464,670 dollar bills across the US using 1,033,095 individual reports. The fact the notes are carried by people suggests it is a good way of modelling other things that people may carry, including disease.

Piggy bank

The researchers noticed that the bills' move according to two mathematical rules, each known as a power law. One describes the distance travelled in each step of the journey, the other the length of time spent between journeys.

While most notes travel a short distance each time, there is a slim probability that it will leap a very long distance ? perhaps carried from one side of the US to the other in the wallet of a passenger taking a flight. Secondly, while some notes move on quickly, there is a fair chance that it will remain in one place for a long period ? for instance stuffed into a child's piggy bank.

Although the movements of individual bills remain unpredictable, the mathematical rules make it possible to calculate the probability that a bill will have travelled a certain distance over a certain amount of time. "What's triggering this is our behaviour," Brockmann told New Scientist. "That is what you need if you want to build quantitative models for the spread of disease."

Very, very important

Brockmann admits that the movement of money may not perfectly mirror that of people. For one thing, he says, it may be that only certain types of people are interested in seeing where their bills have been and entering that on www.wheresgeorge.com. However, he says comparing the model to publicly available information on passenger flights and road travel suggests that it is accurate.

Luis Amaral at Northwestern University, US, believes the study could indeed prove very useful to epidemiologists. ?Understanding the way people move can be very, very important for developing strategies for fighting disease," he told New Scientist. "It seems like a very cool study."

But Amaral also says that the comparison between banknotes and disease is far from perfect. "Banknotes do not reproduce like a disease," he notes.

[Crafty_Dog]

www.gutenberg.org
 
Get ebooks for free.  15000 titles. Classics and others.  All types of subjects.  New and old.

[Crafty_Dog]

Get to a human, not more prompts!


http://gethuman.com/tips.html
http://gethuman.com/us/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Took me a while to confirm that this site is straight up and not a put on:

Ask an Imam:

http://islam.tc/ask-imam/index.php

An example:

What is the islamic understanding about democracy, Is there any place for it in islam.   

The common form of democracy prevalent at the moment is representative democracy, in which the citizens do not exercise their right of legislating and issuing political decrees in person, but rather through representatives chosen by them. The constitution of a democratic country will be largely influenced by the needs and wants of its people. Thus, if its people want casinos, bars, gay marriages, prostitution, etc. then with sufficient public pressure, all these vices can be accommodated for. From this, it becomes simple to understand that there can never be scope for a democratic rule from the Islamic point of view.

and Allah Ta'ala Knows Best

Mufti Ebrahim Desai

Answer 15522

[Body-by-Guinness]

Guide to Iran's military capabilities:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iran/

[Body-by-Guinness]

England's Royal Society has made all of it's publications since 1665 available online. Some of science's greatest discoveries are documented here.

www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk

[Body-by-Guinness]

Interesting site with various interactive maps charting terrorist incidents, groups, leaders, etc.

http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp

Kind of amusing to scan through the groups. Ever heard of the "Action Committee of Winegrowers?" How 'bout the "Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors?"

[Body-by-Guinness]

A site that tracks online efforts to quash speech, file sharing, etc:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Link that shows worldwide piracy hotspots:

http://www.icc-ccs.org/index.php?option=com_fabrik&view=visualization&controller=visualization.googlemap&Itemid=89&phpMyAdmin=F5XY3CeBeymbElbQ8jr4qlxK1J3

[rachelg]

www.librarything.com is a book cataloguing social network site and  one of my  favorites "places"

It is free for the first 200 books you catalog.   They also have great recommendations and  free books through their reviewer program. I have received 4 free books

http://www.goodreads.com is much more social book cataloging site.   I use it a lot for my book group and for finding out what my friends are reading.

www.bookmooch. com --- a bookswapping site
I find it much easier to get rid of books when I know they are going to a good home  and I have received some really nice books in exchange.

www.booktour.com    shows local author visits in you area

[Body-by-Guinness]

Find out what your favorite, or least favorite, congresscritter is uttering:

http://legistalker.org/

[rachelg]

A very long list--
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/free-online-college-courses/



Books shared by the signers of the  Declaration of Independence!

http://www.librarything.com/ll/signers/0/1

[Body-by-Guinness]

I've just bopped around the site a little; looks like it could be an good resource:

OpenRegs.com vs. Regulations.gov: .Com Wins!
Katherine Mangu-Ward | July 16, 2009, 11:09am
Remember Regulations.gov? It was launched by the federal government in 2003. While it's a nice symbolic step for transparency, the site is poky, has a bad interface, and (in my experience) has a pretty spectacular record of not being about to locate the reg you're looking for. It's basically the online equivalent of a bored lady on the phone saying "I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't have a record of that."

Not to worry: A new privately run site, OpenRegs.com, launched yesterday. The very sexy-looking site is the brainchild of Jerry Brito of the George Mason's Mercatus Center (also one of my fellow bloggers at the world's foremost libertarian food blog, Crispy on the Outside), and Peter Snyder, a Chicago-based programmer. You can track specific agencies or specific topics.

The site also encourages commenting and offers tools to facilitate the exchange of gossip about each agency, which you'd better believe is frowned upon over at the .gov site.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Can't vouch for the numbers, but it's an interesting execution:

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Interactive map showing current reported flu cases:

http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Cool link that shows what sort of migration is going on in the US, county by county. Click on LA county to see some major movement. . . .

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html

[G M]

http://blog.american.com/?p=15579

More on BBG's post above.

[Mick C.]

Fascinating collection of U.S. WWII propaganda posters from the Northwestern University collection:

http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/wwii-posters/

[Crafty_Dog]

Good to see you here Mick C!

[Crafty_Dog]

How would you have written the encyclopedia entry about last week's news that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first published in 1768, has stopped putting out a printed version? The media naturally focused on this fact alone—the loss of the printed volume. The more interesting story is whether Britannica can survive online.

Those of us who grew up with the leather volumes tend toward nostalgia. In the pre-digital era, Britannica was the definitive way to impart and search information. The surprise is that for many people Britannica remains a key way to find authoritative knowledge online at a time when Wikipedia is a top-10 website.

In the peak year of 1990, 120,000 sets of the printed Britannica were sold; only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold. Yet a company representative says 500,000 subscribers pay some $70 a year for unlimited access to its website. This means that despite the free alternative of Wikipedia, more people pay to access Britannica online annually than paid for the print version in any year. The company estimates that "tens of millions of people around the world" also have access to the online version through their library, school or college.

This is remarkable considering the great success of Wikipedia, which covers many more topics—in English, four million versus the Britannica's fewer than 100,000—by letting anyone post or update entries, with mostly volunteer editors vetting the results. Britannica hopes there is a place for a brand that claims to be authoritative instead of crowd-sourced.

Britannica has 100 full-time editors who have worked with contributors over the years such as Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman and Alfred Hitchcock (who replied "98.6" when asked by Britannica to list his degrees on its contributor information form). Britannica's marketing division says, "There's no such thing as a bad question—but there are bad answers." In 2008, company president Jorge Cauz told the New Yorker, "Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Juilliard School." (This quote appears in the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Cauz.)

Enlarge Image

CloseGetty Images
 
NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 14: Encyclopedia Britannica editions are seen at the New York Public Library on March 14, 2012 in New York City. Encyclopedia Britannica announced it will be ceasing its print edition of reference books for the first time in its 244-year history to focus solely on digital versions. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) <<enter caption here>> on March 14, 2012 in New York City.
.An anecdotal comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia shows the value of the premium source, but also the generally high quality of the crowd-sourced edition. The Britannica entry on itself comes to 30 pages when printed out, while Wikipedia has 23 pages; Britannica covers Wikipedia in three pages while Wikipedia has 39 pages on itself. The Wikipedia entry on the solar system, at 23 pages, is twice as long as the Britannica version. Evolution has a 61-page entry in the Britannica, by a University of California scholar, while Wikipedia has 44 pages, including an exhaustive 288 footnotes.

Still, length is not always the best indicator of value. Britannica has a well-crafted, six-page entry on economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, compared with a 15-page Wikipedia entry that includes random anecdotes alongside more serious analysis, reflecting the group wiki-effort based on consensus rather than a unified approach to a topic.

On the other hand, if you're more interested in actress Salma Hayek, Britannica has less than one page ("known for her sultry good looks and intelligence"), compared with Wikipedia's 11 pages, which include exhaustive detail on her films, TV appearances and charitable work. If you're interested in the foot ailment Morton's Neuroma, Wikipedia has a more complete entry than the Mayo Clinic's, and Britannica has none.

The Wikimedia Foundation that oversees Wikipedia has its own worries. Its strategic plan, posted online, says its biggest risk is the declining number of volunteer editors. Many entries include cautions that the reliability of information hasn't been confirmed. "Declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects," the group says. "The success of the projects is entirely dependent upon a thriving, healthy editing community."

Another related issue: "Risk of editorial scandal can't be mitigated; there is an inherent level of risk that we cannot sidestep." This is especially true as Wikipedia adds new languages and countries, including many that censor results. It's not clear that the volunteer model is sustainable, though few would have imagined that Wikipedia could grow to have a goal for this year of serving one billion online readers with 50 million articles in some 280 languages.

Britannica remains a profitable business, especially after dropping its print version, but to survive it will have to be the most accurate source—and make the case that authoritative sources matter. For Wikipedia, the challenge is whether volunteers can sustain what has become the world's largest compendium of facts and sometimes knowledge.

As usual in this Internet era, consumers have the best of both worlds: They can choose to rely only on Wikipedia, or they also pay for Britannica and its online scholarship. Even without the printed Britannica, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before. We should all hope that neither Britannica nor Wikipedia will ever have to write the other's obituary.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicaprobus/33-amazingly-useful-websites-you-never-knew-existed

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.hudson.org/

Very impressed by an article I read from here, others here seem very interesting as well.

[Crafty_Dog]

As recommended on Tucker Carlson-- looks very promising!

http://www.twoweeksagonews.com/

[Crafty_Dog]

Let's take a look at this one too:

http://thehill.com/homenews/324589-news-outlet-rising-on-the-right-for-russia-coverage

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.facebook.com/iPhonePS/?hc_ref=ADS&ft[tn]=kC&ft[qid]=6410059100599741796&ft[mf_story_key]=6741903420176296475&ft[ei]=AI%4006715aab020ff0af32bfa58b134f5b61&ft[top_level_post_id]=1252387514796858&ft[fbfeed_location]=1&ft[insertion_position]=1&__md__=1

[Crafty_Dog]

Just signed up for this-- $5 a month

sofreptv.com

[G M]

http://zombietime.com/

Well worth reading.

[G M]

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

The Forest of Rhetoric
silva rhetoricae
Thank you for your patience as Silva Rhetoricae undergoes upgrades during 2016.
If you have trouble finding anything, please email rhetoric@byu.edu


How to Use This Site
FAQ
Citations & Awards
Scholarly Disciplines Served

This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, is a guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric. Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest (the big picture) of rhetoric because of the trees (the hundreds of Greek and Latin terms naming figures of speech, etc.) within rhetoric.

This site is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).

A forest is the metaphor for this site. Like a forest, rhetoric provides tremendous resources for many purposes. However, one can easily become lost in a large, complex habitat (whether it be one of wood or of wit). The organization of this central page and the hyperlinks within individual pages should provide a map, a discernible trail, to lay hold of the utility and beauty of this language discipline.

Don't be scared of the intimidating detail suggested by the odd Greek and Latin terms. After all, you can enjoy the simple beauty of a birch tree without knowing it is Betula alba and make use of the shade of a weeping willow without knowing it is in fact Salix babylonica. The same is possible with rhetoric. The names aid categorization and are more or less conventional, but I encourage you to get past the sesquipedalian labels and observe the examples and the sample criticism (rhetoric in practice). It is beyond the definitions that the power of rhetoric is made apparent.

Your input (contributions of examples, explanations, links, and bibliography, or your clarifications and corrections) is heartily welcomed.

 

How to Use this Site

If you'd like an overview of the entire "forest" (the subject) of rhetoric, consult the "trees" (major categories) in the left frame.

If you'd like to look up specific terms of rhetoric, either scroll through the list of figures of speech (or "flowers" of rhetoric) on the right, or Search the Forest (above or here).

Cross-references throughout the website will help you see the relationship between, for example, a topic of invention, such as "comparison" and its related figures of speech, "metaphor," etc.

For students of rhetoric, literature, or communication, don't forget to look at the examples of Rhetorical Analysis (at the bottom of each of the "trees").

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.scotusblog.com/

[Crafty_Dog]

https://alexberenson.substack.com/

Has appeared many times on Tucker.  Brave and solid on the Wuhan Virus and other things too.  Banned by Twitter.  Glad to have finally signed up here for info from him.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://web.archive.org/web/20211024082638/

[Crafty_Dog]

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.
Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.
Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

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[Crafty_Dog]

www.qwant.com

[DougMacG]

www.qwant.com

Thank you.  Will try it.

[Crafty_Dog]

I just started too.

Please do report back here on your experience.

[Crafty_Dog]

Been using Qwant.  So far so good.

Just saw Jason Beardsley on FOX discussing Ukraine.  Impressed me a lot.  I will be watching for him:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrbeardsley

Among his points:

* We knew this was coming so why did we not arm BEFORE?  He placed great emphasis on this.
* Referenced the mirror image of the Cuban Missile Crisis analogy
* We need to understand what the hell is the end game?  Why is it in our interest to have the Ukes as a proxy on Russia's border?
* Due to our strategic incoherence getting to this point, this is a VERY dangerous situation.  Russia/Putin unwilling to accept Ukes as American proxy on their border; pressures to double and triple down are very high.
*OTOH Putin cannot be allowed to get away with what he has done and is doing.

Serious cognitive dissonance!!!

[Crafty_Dog]

HT to CCP:

http://www.gordonchang.com/article.htm