Letter to Google's Director of Litigation Concerning Removal of Material from This Blog

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

July 21, 2020

Catherine Lacavera, Director

IP and Litigation

Google LLC
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Sent via Certified Mail

Dear Ms. Lacavera:

I have been using Google’s Blogger for more than ten years. On July 20, the posts  I wrote from January 31 to July 20 were removed from the blog. I would like an explanation as to whether Google removed the material; if so, why Google removed the material; and of Google’s position on its right to remove the material. 

On July 20, I posted the name and address of a New York Times editor whom Tucker Carlson had named as having revealed or having been about to reveal Carlson’s name and address.  I would like to know whether Google views publication of this information as a violation of its terms of service, why, and whether you see a distinction between the Times’s revealing Carlson’s information and my revealing a Times editor’s information.  Also, I would appreciate your comment on the Times’s policy and why you think Google’s is better.

As well, I would appreciate confirmation that Google rather than an outside hacker removed the material from my blog, which is at http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/ .

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

 

Freda Bernstein Langbert, RIP

My wife of almost 24 years, Freda, died on January 26. My love for her will never die. The funeral will be today, Friday, January 31, at the Gromley Funeral Home in Phoenicia, NY.  Her obituary appears in the Kingston Daily Freeman. A number of local poets and one of her family members have expressed an interest in  collecting her poems and turning them into a book. I have begun putting them in touch with each other and planning the project.

There are stars whose light reaches the earth only after they themselves have disintegrated and are no more. And there are people whose scintillating memory lights the world after they have passed from it.  These lights--which shine in the darkest night--are those which illuminate for us the path.

--Hannah Senesh

Shakespeare on Dershowitz

Toward the end of  Shakespeare's Henry V, Fluellen, King Harry's self-appointed mentor, remarks on the king's glorious victory at Agincourt:

FLUELLEN

By Jeshu, I am your majesty's countryman, I care not
who know it; I will confess it to all the 'orld:  I
need not to be ashamed of your majesty, praised be
God, so long as your majesty is an honest man.

What Dershowitz did in his speech yesterday is outline in vivid terms the contours of duties of public officials to the public and to the nation, both in economic and in democratic terms.  No one has fashioned a regime of fiduciary duty of elected officials, but it needs to balance these concerns.  Dershowitz is not only resolving the impeachment debate but also outlining a doctrine of what the public ought to require of democratically elected politicians.

Dershowitz is now the most illustrious alum of Brooklyn College. I need not be ashamed, praised be G-d.

Didion on Conformity

"I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends on one's mastery of the language."

--Joan Didion