I had a mind-shattering epiphany last night, a nightmare vision that I have to share with you all. I find that I can no longer, in good conscience, support Senator Brownback directly in his campaign for the Presidency. Instead, I feel compelled to endorse Michael Huckabee, the candidate who will “tack” Brownback into office.
Last night, I was praying in the closet (as usual). I prayed to the Lord for a Brownback victory, and that President Brownback be given the power to smite the enemies of God. Suddenly, it seemed to me that a yawning abyss opened before me. Within, I saw a nightmare city I can’t describe, and don’t want to.
Unutterable dark emanations of unspeakable horrors that cannot be named, cannot be grasped by the rational minds of Children of God loomed before me. These witch-lights showed a scene of utmost depravity, of inconceivable blasphemy. Women and children cavorted with dogs, goats, donkeys, and men of all tribes, religions, and deviancies. Drug dealers ran open-air forums, even injecting passing policemen with their sinful wares with complete impunity. Churches were draped in gasoline-soaked American flags, then set afire. Terrorists roamed the streets in jeeps, shooting anyone who wore a crucifix or made the Sign of the Cross. The Democrat Party had a special torture center for Americans who dared to vote their conscience, which they let Al Qaeda run for them.
It was horrible. As I stared down into this unimaginable den of iniquity and abomination, I felt my mind beginning to cross over the threshold into madness. Then an angel came to save me. A sudden fluttering of light, the abundance of feathers, and lovely morningsongs from Heaven pulled me back from the brink. I looked up, and found myself staring into the face of the harbinger of Ultimate Beauty.
“Sisyphus, I am a messenger from God,” he said. “This horrifying thing you see before you is the city of San Francisco, in the year 2011, should the Democrats win the election. What is worse, the leftards will use the thought-control technology they’ve been quietly perfecting for the last 50 years to beam this filth from the sin-centers of San Francisco and Manhattan directly into the minds of young people from Iowa, Kansas, and the other wholesome parts of the country. God has sent me to tell you that this cannot be allowed to happen. He has offered the crown to Senator Brownback, but like Saul before him, Brownback has proven unworthy of it. Therefore, as He did with David, God has anointed Huckabee to be His chosen king on Earth. You, His faithful servant, must obey His edicts.”
Then the angel disappeared, the Hellish vista vanished, and I found myself screaming and crying in my closet.
I feel I cannot, in good conscience, show a stiff neck to Heaven. I must alter my endorsement, switching it to Governor Huckabee. My hope is that this move will cause Brownback to relent, to reenter the race and allow God to grant him victory. God may yet be clement. God is merciful, and we must all pray that Brownback will cease to anger Him. I also harbor a secret hope that President Huckabee will appoint Brownback his Vice President in a move to allay Catholics, then find himself forced to step down while in office. God may yet secure the Presidency for Brownback in such a fashion.
Those are my secret hopes. But one cannot go against the Will of God. Therefore, I am changing my endorsement to Michael Huckabee. A good man, who will make a great President. And if Brownback can’t take over, maybe God can at least see to it that Huckabee converts to Catholicism himself before 2016. One can always pray for the best for one’s friends and allies.
Fake Blogs
Tags: black hat SEO, blog scrapers, blog scraping, blog spam, comment spam, fake blogs, faux blogs, flogging, internet pollution, scraper sites, scumbags, scumbuckets, SEO, spamming, trackback spam
Spam comments normally either say something short and stupid or long and stupid, having nothing to do with the topic and link back to their own websites hawking discount pharmaceuticals (viagra, cialis, phentermine, methamphetamine, etc.). Spam comments often contain dozens if not hundreds of links, usually to porn sites. These are annoying enough, but fairly innocuous and easy for the spam filter to catch. I have been documenting some of the stupider spam to hit our filter for quite some time.
Fake blogs are a different beast altogether. Fake blogs tend to be of the news aggregator type. Basically they grab a bunch of text from someone else’s blog post and try to get a trackback from their target. We delete these trackbacks immediately. Why? First of all, it pollutes the comment sections. Second of all they attempt to drive traffic to their own sites, again hawking pharmaceuticals, porn, phoney insurance, etc. Linking to these fake blogs would also boost their site ranking. This I will not do.
One of the main problems with these fake blogs is that they obfuscate search engine results. The content that we produce here appears on dozens of fake blogs trying to get traffic based on our material. That is their purpose, after all. They want to get you to their site, so they can serve you advertising and try to fool you into buying their worthless crap.
Search tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search need to make the attempt to or do a better job of filtering these fake blogs from their search results. To see the kind of fake blogs I’m talking about, take a look at blog reactions you’ll find on Technorati or Google Blog Search. Blogs with names like “auto insurance quote,” “ephedra,” “order codeine,” “b1g p3n1s” and the like are these fake blogs I’m taking about. “University Update” is another fake blog that’s been around for many months and has been consistently leeching off our valuable and thought provoking content.
Typically these automated posts begin with “_ wrote an interesting post today on _. Here’s an excerpt: …” or “Wow! While surfing the net today I found a great post written by The Queen of England. Here is an outline: …” (Note: They almost always get the author’s name wrong.) And they not only link to and steal the content of our posts, but they routinely link to individual comments, even the stupid ones. Example: “Wow! Spacebrother wrote a really interesting post today. Here is an excerpt…” There’s several things wrong with that, least of all that Spacehippie has never written anything of interest in his entire life.
I know this post about Internet pollution is rather technical in nature, but to make it simple: those who run fake blogs and blog spambots deserve to be shot dead. Any questions?
And don’t answer with “I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting.” TIA.
Update: More general information about this annoying subject can be found under these topics: blog scraping, scraper site, comment spam, spamdexing. Even more generally, the word “scumbag” applies quite nicely.
This is not the purpose of free blogs and this is not the intent behind fair use. TTSAY is a douchebag and a leech. Blog providers should really crack down on this disgusting conduct before people are drowning in this cesspool of useless duplicated content and abandon blogs altogether.
– Psycheout