In May I published a post on the BlogCatalog blog about when and why to link to sources. Since that time I’ve found two scraper sites that have copied the darn thing verbatim. It’s nice that the internal links in this post lead back to my blogs, but I’m not happy about having my name associated with garbage sites. It’s almost enough to put a person off blogging altogether.

I suppose I just have to hope that if anyone who knows me finds these splogs, they will also realize that I never would write for them. Yeah right. I am constantly amazed by how little sophistication there is about the internet out there, including among the educated.

At least those scraper sites won’t get hits for Google searches for Mark Stoneman, not on the first page anyway. Too many other hits come up first, both for me and others who share my name.

Of course, this makes me wonder why sploggers bother, but I suppose the answer to that is the same as the one that explains spam: it’s so darn easy to do. Sploggers might even be able to purloin their hosting space, just like major spammers steal computing resources.

Looking out the window from my commuter train last week, I was surprised by how many cars I saw on the road with only one occupant. With gas at well over $4.00 per gallon in my area, I guess many people still have money to burn. Or perhaps many of them don’t know how to kick old habits and join car pools, especially not if they’re living on their own little plot of land far away from work and wherever their other colleagues live.

Still, many of my train rides during rush hour this summer have been standing room only, so some people are getting smart. It has seemed more crowded than usual to me, and anyone else on the train I ask about that agrees. Washington area commuter bus services have reported a marked increase in bus ridership, and they are planning to buy new busses. Meanwhile, Metrorail set another record on Friday, July 11th, with 854,638 passengers. I’m glad of that, though my twice weekly commutes to Fairfax this summer have been more than a little stressful. I am not sorry I don’t have to go out there again until the end of August.

Some DC Area Transportation Links:

• Metro—bus and train information and schedules for routes run by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro)
• CommuterPage.com—useful page for finding the various other transportation networks in this area; includes a news feed
• District Department of Transportation
• Bike Washington

In connection with the current brouhaha over the New Yorker’s Barrack and Michelle Obama cover, The Reliable Source of yesterday’s Washington Post reports that the satire in “Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” went right over the newspaper’s metaphorical head when it first appeared. The Post’s Feb. 21, 1964 review of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece was entitled “Film with A-War Theme Creates New World Problems for U.S.” (For those of you too young to remember, the one-letter prefix in “A-War” meant “Atomic,” just as “A-bomb” referred to the atom bomb and “H-bomb” to the hydrogen bomb.) Apparently the comedic possibilities of a nuclear holocaust were off-limits. According to the review, the film’s supposedly “anti-American” tenor “completely neglects the vast precautions aimed at preventing just such a possibility.” And the ultimate indictment: “Moscow gold could not have purchased a better piece of propaganda.”

The last statement makes me wonder what the reviewer was doing when the Russian premier played the emotional drunk who revealed the ultimate deterrent, a doomsday device that no one could turn off and that no one in the West had known existed. Be that as it may, the Reliable Source reminds us that others felt differently than the Post, for the movie won four Oscar nominations. And nowadays the American Film Institute ranks it third for all-time funniest movies and thirty-ninth for all-time best films.

Here’s the original trailer by Pablo Ferro:

Presidential campaign satire has begun in earnest, and some of it is being taken far too seriously. This is one Obama supporter who finds the already infamous New Yorker cover for July 21st funny. But if that was too much for you, maybe you will still enjoy this new video by JibJab.

I also think Saturday Night Live should be making new shows during this campaign season. To heck with their summer vacation. We need them and anyone else who can make us laugh. Regular readers of my blog know that I take politics seriously, but trying to survive a presidential campaign season without hilarity is too frightening an idea to consider.

The usual reason to build internal links into blog posts is so the reader can dig deeper into your blog to find related information. I recently did this elsewhere with “What Ingredients Must an Essay Contain?.” A guest post I did for BlogCatalog, “Do You Link to Your Sources?,” follows a similar principle with one such link, but that link leads back to my own blog. The guest post also ends with a short sketch of who I am and includes links to my blogs. These links might have netted me some new visitors, and they certainly provided new relevant backlinks, which can help increase my rankings in Google’s search results.

Something I was not expecting (because bad things only happen to other people, right?), but which Dane Morgan had pointed out on the BlogCatalog forums, is that these links can benefit you if someone decides to steal your content. They give you backlinks and lead readers back to the original author of the content. I just earned backlinks this way for my guest post, so maybe I shouldn’t let the theft bother me too much. The only downside is that my name is on this blog, as if I had chosen to write for the thing. Too bad. (No, I am not going to link to the thieves here and reward them.) I have written to the people who are hosting it. Meanwhile, this theft is one more reason for readers on the internet to be circumspect about many websites. Just because one might have good content, does not mean the that the content belongs to that site. This is one factor I had not considered when offering advice to my students about how to determine the reliability of a website, though such sites seem to fall short in other ways anyway.

Why don’t thieves remove telltale internal links from their posts? I suspect that some don’t know that what they are doing is wrong. Isn’t stuff on the internet free for anyone to use in any manner they see fit? Of course not, but that is a subject for another time. I think the main reason for not removing links is because the thieves just subscribe to certain blogs via RSS feeds and then automate the delivery of that stolen content to their own sites, which are frequently nothing more than splogs. They are concerned with quantity, not quality, and they do not want the production of this content to take up any more time than absolutely necessary.

Image source: Wikipedia Commons

In Photos from Northern Norway, Thomas Laupstad has posted two pictures of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) feeding their young. The first one captures the parent in midair, just before landing outside the birdhouse. The second shows the parent with its beak in the baby’s mouth during feeding. Be sure to click on the photos to see the large versions. See also the pictures of an enormous cod. The blog includes pictures not only of wildlife, but also plants and landscapes from Thomas’ home north of the arctic circle.

People in the Sun is a personal blog with sardonic tone of voice that I enjoy. In late June he published My Cemetery Story. This Baltimore resident and one-time New Yorker used to be in the Israeli army on duty in Palestinian lands, which is also the setting for this tale. Check out his other army posts too, some of which deal with Lebanon. They are frank, blunt, and not a little startling. Like his posts in general, they capture little things that matter.

Getting health care in this country can be a trial. Kathy Frederick writes More Ventrogluteal Fun, in which she gets a shot with the door open for the world to see. Instead of indignation, she musters up some humor and we get to laugh with her on The Junk Drawer.

I love the pictures that Bobbie Sullivan posts on The Right Blue, a blog about her lifelong passion for diving. Her most recent post, Blue Spotted Stingray at Pulau Sipadan, is without any words, though she writes engaging posts as well. See for example, On a collision course with critters in the sea.

And please permit me a shameless plug for one of my own posts on Clio and Me. In honor of the Independence Day, I link the Declaration of Independence to both relevant antecedents in seventeenth-century English history and the Enlightenment-inspired Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French Revolution. The piece is called Why I like the Declaration of Independence.

Previous edition: Miscellany from the Blogosphere #1

One thing I have not noticed in gun debates in this country is the issue of deadly force. Let me explain what I mean by referring to my own experience in the army back in the 1980s. In those days we received special training before guarding tactical nuclear warheads in Germany, because we performed this guard duty with live ammunition. The training didn’t entail target practice, as we already received that in our normal training regimen. Instead there were formations to practice in the event of civil unrest, and, more to the point here, there were classes where we had to learn what deadly force was. It boiled down to this: if deadly force was authorized, it meant we could use the minimum amount of force necessary to deal with an intruder. Let me repeat that: the minimum amount of force necessary. In other words, just because we had the capability to shoot and even kill someone didn’t mean we were authorized to do so under all circumstances.

In the current gun debates, I hear a lot of talk about the right to defend oneself and one’s property, but I am wondering just what that right might entail. While I am pretty clear in my own mind that the right to own a gun does not also convey the right to become an executioner, I am less certain that all gun owners and advocates are clear on the concept of deadly force as I have outlined it above. It seems to me that if the state can regulate the acquisition and use of firearms, it must also mandate appropriate training to ensure that gun owners realize that a license to own a gun does not amount to a license to kill. It seems to me that courses that address the legitimate use of deadly force need to be mandatory. Perhaps they are in some places and will be in my city. I don’t know. What I do know is that the topic doesn’t come up when people argue that guns are good for public safety and order. That deficit worries me.

I offer this old sketch from Monty Python in honor of summer, when I’m busy with academic work, while the sun is shining, reminding me that there are other things in life too. The sketch points to the limits of philosophy, but the joke only works if you’ve suffered through some of this stuff yourself. So maybe our laughter proves that this philosophy had some meaning after all? Then again, if I’m philosophizing about Monty Python, I might be missing the point. :)

The New York Times reports that Chief Justice Roberts quoted Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in a decision this week, albeit incorrectly and out of context.

The chief justice wrote, “The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing.” His citation: “‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).”

Dylan’s own wording was actually “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

The New York Times suggests that this citation might be the sloppy work of clerks who rely too much on the internet. I wonder if it is how Supreme Court judges these days can make a joke, since the statement it purported to support was one of logic that might not require a citation. Either way, I don’t know whether to laugh or scratch my head and ask what the hell Roberts was thinking.

Tangentially related post: Do You Link to Your Sources?

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads thus:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

I was startled by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision on the District of Columbia vs. Heller this week, which declares gun ownership a right guaranteed to individuals under the Constitution, but I suppose I wasn’t surprised, at least not after I got past that initial moment. I still do not understand why the first part of the Second Amendment is now a meaningless technicality. It’s also not completely clear to me that “the people” refers to individuals and not the collective of citizens who comprise the sovereign. And what about the word “state” in that amendment? DC isn’t a state, though it would certainly like such rights, in order to have representation in Congress. At the same time, I was relieved to hear that Justice Scalia concedes the right of local jurisdictions to regulate gun ownership. The question now is where that line may be drawn.

Maybe later on I’ll have time to do more than read about the decision in the papers and actually read the decision itself. Meanwhile, gun advocates have had their say in a discussion I started on BlogCatalog. So have gun opponents. I’m not sure to what extent that discussion was representative, though it was at least fairly civil, which is an accomplishment considering how bad that forum was a couple weeks ago.

Now I’m wondering what laws DC will come up with in the three weeks it has to bring its laws into conformity with the court’s decision. No, I do not want to buy a weapon myself, but I am wondering how easy it will become to do so legally and what restrictions on being armed in public might still apply in my city.

Update, 7/1/2008
Please also read the comments for this post. Besides seeing what my other readers have said, you’ll find some additional information and reflection from me.