Some things just never line up quite the way you’d like, and in my case I think this event is one of them. I’d like to be able to get a distant shot of the capitol with the planets beside it while their alignment is as close as possible, but available vantages and prevailing sky conditions have conspired against me. Oh well, I think I got a couple of decent shots. It’s time to move on to another challenge.
My friend Rob and I are not the only ones noticing that there are two Heidi Heitkamps running for office this year: there’s the relatively conservative, “North Dakota Values” type of Heidi Heitkamp running here in North Dakota, while there’s a “leftest of the leftists” Heidi Heitkamp running on the national stage.
She’s been going on a magical mystery tour with a bunch of leftist Democrat women “standing up for women’s rights” out of state, while claiming support for a religious exemption here at home. Notice in the Fargo Forum article I linked here, that even the stenographers and apologists at the Forum are forced to point out that she’s one candidate here and a totally different candidate nationally…although from a sympathetic point of view (natch).
Lest you forget, here’s Heidi addressing a bunch of her “progressive” buddies and union front groups after Obamacare was stuffed down our throats against the wishes of a vast majority of North Dakotans:
By the way, North Dakota has a LOT of people who profess one manner of religious faith or another…does Heitkamp really think that they’ll enjoy being forced to finance the sexual habits of everyone else including abortion-inducing drugs? Apparently she does, at least outside of North Dakota’s borders where she espouses that view.
Then you’ve got good old Gaylord “Kent” Conrad. For years he harped on President Bush about deficits that look like a monthly allowance next to the spending habits of the Democrat-controlled Congress since 2006. At President Obama’s behest it’s only gotten worse, with deficits so huge they have to be expressed in numbers typically only used in astronomy!
Don’t expect any accountability on these folks, either: Kent Conrad has been under ethics investigation forever, but the Democrats have buried it the best they could…even to the point of changing the locks on the committee room doors so that Republicans couldn’t join the investigation hearings! The Democrats have so far managed to whitewash the whole thing and claim nothing happened. How did this appear in the North Dakota media? It didn’t, until:
Which brings me back to my original point: you cannot afford to elect a Democrat, not even for dog catcher or meter maid. Why? You don’t want to be responsible for advancing their political career even one tick, because before you know it you’ll have a Byron “Abramoff Skybox” Dorgan, Kent “Countrywide Mortgage” Conrad, Earl “Union Owned & Operated” Pomeroy, or Heidi “Two-Face” Heitkamp.
Regardless of how Heidi Heitkamp campaigns in North Dakota, or what she really believes, look at how she already behaves outside the state! At this very moment she’s walking in lockstep with radical leftist Democrats who have next to nothing in common with the values of the average North Dakotan. They’re the ones whose money and support she needs to try to get elected, and they are the ones to whom she will be indebted if (God forbid) she ever gets elected. Who do you think she’ll listen to before voting on legislation: you, or the Democrat Party machine which she needs to keep her in office?
If you think that a Senator Heitkamp would be any less duplicitous as Candidate Heitkamp, then you’re fooling yourself. If you doubt me, simply look at how Dorgan, Conrad, and Pomeroy played that same two-faced game for decades. They’d throw on a flannel shirt when they come to ND, talk about “our North Dakota way”, then jet-set back to Washington and vote 90% of the time with Kennedy, Pelosi, et al…while getting most of their campaign funding from out of state.
If you still aren’t convinced, let me put it another way:
– People who support abortion, including “partial birth” abortion where a child is delivered up to the neck and then killed with a spear to the brain, even to the point of killing a child who survived an abortion because “that was the mother’s original intent” anyway – vote Democrat.
– People who hate oil, coal and gas, want us to pay European gasoline prices ($8-10/gallon), want to shut down American power plants and kill American oil exploration while handing out billions to their “green energy cronies” – vote Democrat.
– People who want to promote homosexuality in schools, including “fisting” and other techniques (such as the group Obama’s “Safe Schools” czar founded) – vote Democrat.
– People who want freedom from religion instead of freedom of religion… people who think “separation of church and state” (which appears in NO official document) applies to banning prayer from schools or the Ten Commandments from public property, but does not apply to the goverrnment forcing churches to pay for abortions against their doctrines – vote Democrat.
– People who want to “reinterpret” or abolish the 2nd Amendment and disarm the American people – vote Democrat.
– People who want to tell a landowner what they can and can’t do on their property if they discover an endangered bug, vermin, or other critter on it – vote Democrat.
– People who scream “keep your laws off my body” but want to force their government healthcare system on yours – vote Democrat.
– People who scream “keep the government out of my bedroom” but want you to pay for what they do in there – vote Democrat.
– People who claim that America is the source of evil in the world, want to dismantle our national defenses, and treat dictators and Islamic theocracies as moral equivalents to the United States – vote Democrat (or Ron Paul).
I could go on and on, but you get the picture…and it ain’t pretty. It doesn’t matter if some local Democrat candidate sounds somewhat decent in their campaign for local or state office: at the end of the day, they’re beholden to the activists and perverted ideologies I listed above.
North Dakota Democrats have to follow their party leadership and ideologies, which is the same bunch of twisted activist radicals who have put us in this current predicament. You elect a Democrat, you’re giving all the above a foot in the door…a foot which will someday occupy the boot on your neck.
I’m a firm believer in applying enough bandwidth to make the video look decent in detail. I’d love to put it on YouTube or Vimeo, but there are problems with that. As a result, I’m hosting it myself in Flash Video (FLV) format. This will display on pretty much every device out there EXCEPT my beloved Apple devices – iPod, iPhone, iPad… bummer, but at least I maintain ownership of my content.
What’s that, you say? YouTube and Vimeo assume ownership of your content? Not exactly…but what they DO assume is a perpetual license to keep, use, distribute, and make new videos from your content. Once you upload to them, you’re without any rights whatsoever.
Here’s how you sign your rights away by uploading to YouTube, according to their Terms of Service page:
“However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in video Content you submit to the Service terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your videos from the Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of your videos that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in user comments you submit are perpetual and irrevocable.“ (YouTube Terms of Service page)
Vimeo’s policies are equally disturbing:
“By submitting a video, you grant Vimeo and its affiliates a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license and right to copy, transmit, distribute, publicly perform and display (through all media now known or hereafter created), and make derivative works from your video for the purpose of (i) displaying the video within the Vimeo Service; (ii) displaying the video on third party websites and applications through a video embed or Vimeo’s API subject to your video privacy choices; (iii) allowing other users to play, download, and embed on third party websites the video, subject to your video privacy choices; (iii) promoting the Vimeo Service, provided that you have made the video publicly available; and (iv) archiving or preserving the video for disputes, legal proceedings, or investigations.” (Vimeo Terms of Service Page)
So…have you uploaded something containing yourself, your kids, your friends, or anything else personal to you? Congratulations; you just signed away your rights to it. But it gets even worse; check out these two clauses:
“To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless YouTube, its parent corporation, officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney’s fees) arising from: (i) your use of and access to the Service; (ii) your violation of any term of these Terms of Service; (iii) your violation of any third party right, including without limitation any copyright, property, or privacy right; or (iv) any claim that your Content caused damage to a third party. This defense and indemnification obligation will survive these Terms of Service and your use of the Service.”
and,
“You will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Vimeo and its affiliates, directors, officers, employees, and agents, from and against all third party actions that: (i) arise from your activities on the Vimeo Service; (ii) assert a violation by you of any term of this Agreement; or (iii) assert that any content you submitted to Vimeo violates any law or infringes any third party right, including any intellectual property or privacy right.”
“Indemnify” means that if you post a video and someone decides to sue you for some reason – that could be that you used an Enya track without license, you showed someone in the video who did not give you permission to post their likeness on the Internet, or somehow otherwise prompted someone else to legal action – not only do you hold YouTube and Vimeo unaccountable, but you also agree to pay their legal expenses if they get sued for hosting your content. Do you have the money to pay for YouTube’s (ie, Google’s) or Vimeo’s legal team?
In the case of the video above, I take it (as with all my photography) very personally. That’s why I typically put those annoying watermarks on my photos; I got tired of seeing them pop up on people’s website or MySpace pages. I have no desire to give Google, Vimeo, or anyone else a legal license to do whatever they want with it. And, although I’m using the music under license, I don’t want to possibly expose myself to some huge corporation’s legal expenses.
By the way, Facebook has similar language but within different parameters (ie, subject to your Privacy settings). When it comes to Pages, which is how my blog operates there, it appears that Facebook makes no such assertions. Otherwise no other corporation would open up a Page there on Facebook because they’re not willing to relinquish their intellectual property rights either. However, if your personal Facebook account is public, so is your data – photos, posts, whatever – and you give them the rights to use them accordingly.
I have posted stuff to YouTube in the past, but not stuff that’s personally important to me. The exception to that would be my tribute to Sergeant Steve Kenner of the Bismarck PD, a video that I wanted to share with the community. When it comes to things like this though, where I want to reserve all rights of ownership and use, I’ve got to host it myself and suffer some compatibility issues. It doesn’t work the best across all platforms, but it remains mine.
To add to the fun, the auroras really turned it up a notch just as I set up to photograph this old windmill. I took advantage of the whole evening and morning. Trust me…I’ve still got plenty more where this came from. 🙂
Things REALLY got hopping, even enough to overcome the light of the full moon directly overhead. I had multiple cameras going to shoot the event, shooting stills and a time-lapse video I hope to work on over the weekend.
You can expect a lot more of these photos in the near future!
I had to chuckle when I spotted this sign in an extremely remote location. In fact, after two weeks my truck is still dropping mud from the section line road adjacent to this property. I don’t even recall whether or not there was some old dilapidated farmstead or other intriguing subject beyond this sign…I simply remember finding the annotation quite amusing. I don’t think I’d want to test the landowner’s resolve, either!
Winter didn’t exactly go as planned, but my little guys did eventually get to build a couple of little snowmen this week. They’re both old enough to ride little bikes now, and are expressing a desire to go stargazing so I anticipate big things this summer! I can’t wait to get started.
You know the Democrat Party has really screwed things up when normally reserved North Dakotans are putting up displays like these and attending protest rallies in the hundreds. Normally we just go about our business and want to be left alone, so for a political party to elicit these kinds of reactions speaks volumes.
Since we got cheated out of the blizzard that everyone was anticipating last night, I thought I’d share a few pictures I took of the nasty spring storm we received in Bismarck-Mandan back in 1997. This was a particularly wicked storm, as the snow was very fine and icy. It packed in so tightly that the roads had to be cut open with snowblower-equipped payloaders, instead of simply plowed.
At the time I lived north of Century in the vicinity of Montreal Street. Since only the major roads were cut open, I had to hike around six blocks down to Century Avenue, where the big KFYR-TV 4×4 engineering truck was waiting to transport me to work. As you can imagine, we were pretty busy in a news capacity at that point.
It was a surreal walk down to Century Avenue. The snow was taller than even full size pickups parked along Montreal Street, and as I walked down the road I noticed that I wasn’t leaving any footprints. The snow was made of such fine snow crystals and packed so tightly that I wasn’t breaking through the surface. Every now and then I’d see part of a pickup cab poking up through the snow, but for the most part I couldn’t even tell where the street was, much less where cars were parked.
After the roads were beginning to clear, a crazy friend picked me up in his Escort GT and we went out to document the whole thing. At this time I had merely a little Canon point-and-shoot film camera, but I think it tells the story:
It was a Saturday storm, and I remember being quite put out at having some of my motorcycles stranded at the Hall of Ports for the annual Freedom Riders Motorcycle Show! At least I got to bring home some trophy hardware later.
Anyway…if you’re feeling slighted by the lack of blizzard conditions (especially after all the hype over the last few days), maybe this will help get you through it!
