The Christian Argument for Obamacare

Posted on 11 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

From my understanding, the ACA mandate requires everybody to have insurance because the healthy people pull up the sick people. Right? And as a Christian, my whole philoophy in life is to pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate: that’s what it does — the healthy people pull up the sick.

If we take those people and we put them in high-risk insurance pools: they’re costlier and there’s less coverage for them. That’s the way it’s been in the past, and that’s the way it will be again. So we are effectively punishing our sickest people.

And I want to know why not instead of fix what’s wrong with Obamacare, make companies like Aetna, that pulled out and lied to their consumers about why they pulled out, and said they pulled out because Obamacare was too expensive, but they really pulled out because of a merger, why don’t we expand Medicaid? And have everyone have the insurance?

–Jessi Bohon at Diane Black’s Townhall
Seen on The Majority Report and Time.

See also: this more impassioned question, “How can I trust you to do anything that’s in our interest at all?”

Image cropped from frame of The Majority Report. Licensed under Fair Use.

President Donald Trump’s Bad Day

Posted on 10 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Even for President Donald Trump, the past 24 hours have been tumultuous.

There was the court ruling that kept his most sweeping policy initiative (thus far) frozen. There was the ethical breach by a top aide who promoted Trump’s daughter’s products. There was a report that another top aide mischaracterized his contacts with the Russian ambassador. There was a reversal on Trump’s stated plans for Taiwan policy aimed at pleasing China. There was a report that Trump paused a call with Vladimir Putin because he didn’t know what a major nuclear arms treaty was. And there were Twitter attacks on two senators, including one Republican.

Whew.

Trump’s own top-billed event of the day was a photo op in which he signed three basically toothless executive orders on crime. As German Lopez explains, all these orders do is create various “task forces” or demand plans be written to address various issues. That’s a classic politician trick to create the impression of bold action when what’s actually happening is not-so-bold punting…

–Andrew Prokop
President Trump’s Chaotic, Leaky, Feud-Filled Past 24 Hours

Image cropped from one at WhiteHouse.gov. Should be in the public domain but might be licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Forensic Pseudoscience — Oppression of the Poor

Posted on 10 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Two years ago, Radley Balko at The Washington Post wrote a really important article that bears revisting, A Brief History of Forensics. I’ve never been one to watch those forensics dramas on the television. Just the same, I didn’t know just how screwed up the state of forensics was. It seems that many parts of forensics are not settled science, or in fact, science of any kind at all.

Balko is most interested in bite mark analysis. Having managed a dental office for a couple of years, I found it interesting that this is a particularly gloomy area of pseudoscience. “There has yet to be any scientific research to support the notion that the marks we make when we bite with our teeth are unique. But even if we could somehow know that they are, we still wouldn’t know how those unique characteristics are distributed across all of humanity. And even if we knew those things, we still don’t know if human skin is capable of recording and preserving a bite in a way that would allow those markers to be identified.” That last one is the killer as far as I’m concerned: how is it that we could have been relying on such analysis without ever having answered such a fundamental question?

Forensic “Scientists” Don’t Look for Truth

The reason that Balko gives for this state of affairs is that forensic “scientists” are not interested in questioning the basis of their work. As he puts it, they are focused on “solving cases.” I don’t like that phrase. Better would be: “closing cases.” Because it really does seem that no one — not the prosecutors, the police, or the forensic “scientists” — are interested in finding the truth. As far as they are concerned, they already know the truth.

It’s like the line in The Usual Suspects, “To a cop the explanation is never that complicated. It’s always simple. There’s no mystery to the street, no arch-criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you’re gonna find out you’re right.” And that’s largely true, but it blinds them in cases where things aren’t simple. And it turns forensic “scientists” into little more than apologists, simply arguing for whatever theory the police are pushing.

Forensics Isn’t Science

The actual history of forensics is that of a field developed by people in the criminal justice system. And it has worked just the opposite of the way that science works. When a scientific theory becomes established, scientists have an incentive to beat away at it and find holes in it. That’s how you become a successful scientist. In forensics, once a theory becomes established, no one dares question it. Balko put it this way, “A fingerprint analyst testifying for the defense might disagree with a fingerprint analyst for the prosecution, but he isn’t going to call into question the premises on which the entire field of fingerprint analysis is based.” And in case you were wondering: yes, there are now people outside the field calling into question the reliability of fingerprints — evidence that has sent countless people to their deaths at the hands of the state.

Actual Scientific Forensics

The only kind of forensics that actually did come out of a scientific field and not criminal justice is DNA analysis. And this is really interesting: when forensic analysts are talking about bite marks, for example, they talk about certainty. The same goes for fingerprints, bullet lead composition, voice “prints,” and on and on. “[T]he one area of forensic science in which you will see experts testifying about probability is DNA Testing.” Of course, Balko is careful to note that this doesn’t mean that these other kinds of analyses are useless. But just like with eyewitness testimony, people are often convicted — even killed — because of the word of a single analyst based upon suspect science.

Balko thinks that the solution is to take forensics evidence out of the hands of judges who have no experience that would allow them to determine if these techniques were solid science or just pseudoscience. He wants to put it in the hands of scientific review boards. While I think that would certainly be an improvement, we have a much bigger problem. We have an entire justice system that is inherently unjust.

A Much Bigger Problem

People forget the first federal drug law — Harrison Narcotics Tax Act — was explicitly racist. It was a doctor who testified to the “fact” that, “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” Similar things were said about the Chinese with regard to opium, and later, about Mexicans and “marijuana.” There will always be an underclass that the government will always oppress. To me, we need to rethink our harsh sentences in the light that many people convicted are innocent; the laws are unequally applied; and the laws themselves criminalize things that powerless people like to do.

Bearing all these things in mind, the powerful need to let go of their certainty. But that will never happen. Of course, it may also be that in a century, people will still be put to death based upon bad bite mark science. So let’s try to stop that, but we need to push much further.

Image cropped from Radley Balko by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Nordstrom Gain 4 Percent on Trump Attack

Posted on 09 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Michael Hiltzik - Nordstrom President Trump staged another tweet attack on an American corporation on Wednesday, this time raking Nordstrom Inc for the supposed crime of dropping his daughter Ivanka’s fashion line.

At about 10:51 am New York time, Trump tweeted, “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!”

This attack follows Trump tweets aimed at Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but there are a few especially notable aspects to it. First, it was entirely personal: the critiques of Boeing and Lockheed were at least ostensibly related to public policy — he was questioning the cost of Defense Department procurements from those companies. But there’s no public policy aspect to whether Nordstrom continues to carry Ivanka’s merchandise, only the question of how much lucre flows into the Trump family’s pocket.

Second, this tweet was particularly incoherent. What could Ivanka’s being “a great person” have to do with Nordstrom’s business decisions, even assuming for the sake of argument that it’s true?

Third, and perhaps most important from a business standpoint, the market impact of Trump’s tweet was especially evanescent. The big retailer’s stock took a hit around the time of the tweet, falling about 0.65% to $42.47 as trading volume soared from about 6,700 shares in the minute or so before the tweet dropped to roughly a half-million shares during the four minutes that followed. But the action was over soon thereafter; by 2:01 pm New York time, Nordstrom was back above its pre-Trump peak. The shares closed at $44.53, a gain of more than 4% on a day when the rest of the market was essentially flat.

–Michael Hiltzik
Nordstrom Stock Shrugs off Trump’s Tweet Attack, Showing He’s Become a Paper Tiger

Image of Michael Hiltzik cropped from one at The Los Angeles Times. Licensed under Fair Use.

Dealing With Copyright in WordPress

Posted on 09 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

As many of you know (or have noticed), over the past two years, I’ve gotten very serious about copyright on this site. It’s not just a question of the law. I want to do right by people. I don’t like them taking my stuff and I don’t want to take their stuff. The whole issue was very big to me, but it became very personally one year ago when I got some email from the great photojournalist Leif Skoogfors. The moral and legal aspects of using other people’s work are very clear. The practical aspects are, well, a nightmare.

The biggest problem that I have is that there are almost 8,000 articles on Frankly Curious — the vast majority of them with images. And of those, at last 6,500 of them were published before I had my copyright awakening. Now even in those early days, I did my best to use what I thought were public domain images. And when using images that I knew were commercial, I did my best to do so in a way that would fall under the vague notion of Fair Use.

But it turns out that I was badly mistaken about what represented public domain. I think I was better on the Fair Use issue. But regardless, I have several thousand images that really need to be inventoried and dealt with. And I’m doing this: slowly and in a totally haphazard way. But I’ve come up with some ways to avoid these problems in the future.

Image Copyright

Most of the images that I use on this site are licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses. In these cases, it’s fine to use the images, but I have to provide attribution. As a result, at the bottom of new pages, there is a horizontal rule with small, italicized text explaining what I’ve done. A good example is what I did for Conservative Mum: Portrait of a Serial Troll:

Conservative Mum image created with Angry Zombie Rage Blood Halloween by English Like a Native. It is in the public domain.

That’s just what’s required. But what I’m doing to make my life easier in the future is using WordPress’ Description field in the ATTACHMENT DETAILS form. For this image, I added “PD,” for public domain, to the field. (Given that I altered it, the image may not technically be in the public domain. But from my perspective it is.) I then copy all the licensing text above, so that if I use the image again, I can just copy and paste it into any article where I use it.

Copyright Display

In order to get the licensing information to display in this way, I’ve created a CSS class called copyright. I then attach it to a div tag and the rest works like magic.

The CSS is very simple:

.copyright
{
  margin-top: 1em;
  border-top: 1px #999 solid;
  font-style: italic;
  font-size: 0.8em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}

That all makes my life a lot easier. Normally, I add the copyright text before I add the image itself. It’s something I enjoy doing. This may be because of all my misdeeds in the past. I feel good doing what is right. This is doubtless why I document public domain images, even though I am not legally required.

Video Copyright

With video, things are different. I don’t actually publish video; I just embed it. But copyright still plays a major role. I am constantly dealing with pages that include some bit of embedded video that disappears — usually because of a copyright issue. Sometimes, I have to replace them — or, in rare cases, delete them altogether. (See, for example, A Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch.)

A problem I run into a lot, however, is figuring out what the video was. Generally, I don’t want to read the whole article. And that’s often what’s required so I can conjure what I was thinking when I wrote it. And sometimes I can’t even manage that. So I’ve decided to provide captions for my videos. Like this:

From DailyMotion: Porky’s Duck Hunt.

Documenting Videos

When I first used that video, it was in Anniversary Post: Daffy Duck Is Born! And there is really nothing to go on regarding what the video is except for, “Daffy Duck V 1.0: Anyway, here is the short that started it all…” Okay, so I would know to find the first Daffy Duck cartoon. But you get the idea.

This is accomplished in much the same way:

.youtube-center
{
  margin-top: 1em;
  text-align: center;
  font-style: italic;
  font-size: 0.8em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}

The only problem with this is that if the text is long enough, it won’t wrap at the same width as the video. This would be trivial if all the videos were the same width. But they aren’t. I’m sure I could work this out, but I don’t feel up to spending the time on it. Plus, because of server-side caching, I’m having enough problems. And I don’t think this is going to be an issue in the vast majority of circumstances.

So there you have it: my solutions to the practical problems that result from trying to do copyright correctly. It’s all a bit of a pain. But images add so much to the experience of visiting the website. I know that I’d be bored looking at the site if it didn’t have the images that it does.

Afterword

Because of server-side caching and my content delivery network, it is possible that the video above will be display incorrectly. I’m still trying to figure out how to do caching correctly. Maybe when I do, I’ll write about it here. I do know that I don’t have my caching set up properly here. It’s just a question of time.

Phantom Lady and Reproductive Choice

Posted on 08 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Deny me the right to make choices about my own body - Paul Day

This image was photoshopped by the comedian Paul Day. (You can learn all about him in the update to my article, Billy Bob Neck in Heaven?) I thought it captured rather well the conservative mentality that all women secretly desire an Aryan demigod to tell them how to live their lives so they don’t have to worry their pretty little heads.

I don’t know who drew the original panel. It’s a classic style. Even Johnny Craig used it in some of the most ghoulish of EC Comics’ horror titles. But what I find really interesting is that if you go back before 1954 and the establishment of the vile Comics Code Authority, there were a lot of racy comics. Consider how Phantom Lady was portrayed:

What’s important here is the idea of women as nonthreatening helpers, just waiting for a man who they can follow. This was only ever an image that the power elite and its status quo chorus pushed on the rest of us. It was never real. Of course: Phantom Lady is explicitly a character of male fantasy. But the neutering (Spaying?) of the character is all about the proper role of women in society. Mae West was out and Barbara Billingsley was in.

Female Power Isn’t Safe

The reason that things like Paul Day’s image above works is because we know all those “safe” comic book representations of women were a crock. Just the same, today Phantom Lady is about as close to soft-core porn as you are likely to see. But even in that, she has a power that would terrify the American man if she weren’t confined to the pages of a comic or any other non-threatening media. No man would try to deny her reproductive choice. And that’s why conservatives want to portray women as dictated by the Comics Code. If that’s who women are then we men really do need to step up and make all the decisions.

It’s not surprising that the most conservative of men find pornography so titillating. Whether it is some Baptist minister or Osama bin Laden, the fantasy of explicitly sexual women is very appealing. But these same men are far too afraid of this same power in real life — both explicitly because such women would never find such cowering men attractive and implicitly because of what such women would expect in other areas of life — namely: equality.

Hermann Göring on Manipulating Democracy

Posted on 08 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

—Gustave Gilbert
Nuremberg Diary

Ayn Rand Was Wrong About Self-Interest

Posted on 07 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

“Ayn Rand is my hero,” yet another student tells me during office hours. “Her writings freed me. They taught me to rely on no one but myself.”

As I look at the freshly scrubbed and very young face across my desk, I find myself wondering why Rand’s popularity among the young continues to grow. Thirty years after her death, her book sales still number in the hundreds of thousands annually — having tripled since the 2008 economic meltdown. Among her devotees are highly influential celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and Eva Mendes, and politicos, such as current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican [Senator] Ted Cruz.

The core of Rand’s philosophy — which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels — is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. This, she believed, is the ultimate expression of human nature…

One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

Perhaps another way to look at this is to ask why our species of hominid is the only one still in existence on the planet, despite there having been many other hominid species during the course of our own evolution. One explanation is that we were cleverer, more ruthless, and more competitive than those who went extinct. But anthropological archaeology tells a different story. Our very survival as a species depended on cooperation, and humans excel at cooperative effort. Rather than keeping knowledge, skills, and goods ourselves, early humans exchanged them freely across cultural groups.

When people behave in ways that violate the axioms of rational choice, they are not behaving foolishly. They are giving researchers a glimpse of the prosocial tendencies that made it possible for our species to survive and thrive… then and today.

–Denise Cummins
This Is What Happens When You Take Ayn Rand Seriously

Image altered from one at Huffington Post. Licensed under Fair Use.

We Are Our Own Jailers

Posted on 06 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Hexleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their pubic business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

—Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death

Veep and the Pathetic Notion of Meaning in the US

Posted on 05 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Last night, I put on the third season of Veep. It’s the show where Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice-President Selina Meyer, and she and her staff behave with about as much competence and integrity that I fear is typical of Washington. Whereas I hate watching mathematicians in movies, because no screenwriter understands what they do, we do understand what politicians do: they get elected — and that’s all that matters in the job.

The best part of season three of Veep is where Meyer is trying to figure out where she stands on abortion rights. Of course, she knows where she stands personally. But every public opinion has to be thought over excessively. Much of the comedy comes from the fact that this is all fruitless. The moral of the series is that it’s better just to do what you believe in. But in the show and reality, politicians are too wedded to the importance of their job titles to do that.

The Self-Importance of Little People

If this sounds familiar to regular readers, it should. It is the Paradox of Power, which I have written about before. Politicians normally only have power so long as they don’t use it. But the question on my mind is why that is. Who wants to have this kind of pretend power? As Jack Stanton says in Primary Colors, “Plenty of people playing this game [are] willing to sell their souls, crawl through sewers, lie to people, divide them, play on their worst fears for nothing! Just for the prize.”

What comes across to me in Veep is the self-importance of all the people involved. And that isn’t just politics. This is even more true of people in Hollywood. But at least they are truthful enough to admit just how vile they are. (Note: this is not all the brown-nosing that goes on during media tours; you need to watch documentaries or listen to director’s commentaries.) But the truth is that politics and Hollywood are just really public expressions of this. This kind of self-importance is actually everywhere in the business world.

Money as Game Counter

This is why people work so much in the United States. It’s amazing to see managers at Big Lots who act like they are doing heart surgery on children. They’re just selling stuff! I’m not saying that this is worthless. I have an unreasonable love of Bumble Bee Snack on the Run Chicken Salad with Crackers Kits. But perspective is in order!

Our biggest problem is our obsession with money. The truth is that many people really don’t care about what money can do; they care about money itself; they see money the same way they do chips in a friendly poker game: a way of keeping score. This is a conservative/libertarian way of looking at value: something is worth exactly what someone will pay for it. It should be obvious that this is specious. Here’s just one example: personally caring for a dying loved one has great value that is in no way equivalent to hiring a nurse to do it for you. This is not an issue that we should even have to debate.

Whither Meaning?

This is all related to issues of meaning, of course. As a culture, we get too much of our meaning from our work. That was fine when work came with dignity. But thanks to people like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, we live in a society that is in no way subtle about telling people that their work is unimportant if they don’t make a lot of money.

So we have this Veep notion of what work ought to be. We have people who are doing jobs that are no more important than the work done on an assembly line. But they think it is more important. What will they think as they prepare to die? It can’t be much more than, “I helped a politician stay in power, even though she never used that power to do anything of value.” For any thoughtful person, that would be devastating. But just like the manager at Big Lots, these characters are not thoughtful. They will have wasted their lives, but they will never be aware of it.

Veep and Meaning

Chattel slavery came into existence in the United States as a way of controlling poor whites. As long as you can keep people looking down and feeling good that at least they aren’t as bad off as those people, they will never look up and question those at the top. Selina Meyer’s success is a matter of luck. And the show (to its credit) understands this, with its overuse of deus ex machina. Meyer’s political career is over? How about if the president steps down to care for his wife and Meyer is just named president?

It’s interesting that the only man on the show who seems to have any notion of real value, the president, is not in the show. Of course, that’s a good thing. I can’t imagine a real-life president stepping down to take care of his suicidal wife. As Donald Trump would tell you, he’d won the ultimate prize. What does a wife’s health matter in that case? You can always get another wife. The president is the most powerful man in the world — even if he doesn’t use that power as he would like.

Money and power. That’s all we value. And it will be the death of us.

Image of Veep DVD is taken from Amazon and licensed under Fair Use.

People Argued Jewish Refugees Were Dangerous Too

Posted on 04 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

On April 30, 1941, a Jewish man here in Amsterdam wrote a desperate letter to an American friend, pleading for help emigrating to the United States.

“USA is the only country we could go to,” he wrote. “It is for the sake of the children mainly.”

A volunteer found that plea for help in 2005 when she was sorting old World War II refugee files in New York City. It looked like countless other files, until she saw the children’s names.

“Oh my God,” she said, “This is the Anne Frank file.” Along with the letter were many others by Otto Frank, frantically seeking help to flee Nazi persecution and obtain a visa to America, Britain or Cuba — but getting nowhere because of global indifference to Jewish refugees.

We all know that the Frank children were murdered by the Nazis, but what is less known is the way Anne’s fate was sealed by a callous fear of refugees, among the world’s most desperate people.

Sound familiar?

–Nicholas Kristof
Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl

Image cropped from Nicholas Kristof at the 2014 Texas Book Festival by Larry D Moore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

My First Google Featured Snippet!

Posted on 03 Feb 2017 by Frank Moraes

Don Quixote Translations Featured Snippet

What you see above is a screen capture of a Google featured snippet for the search “Don Quixote translations.” I’m presenting it because it is taken from my webpage, Don Quixote in English Language Translation. It is the first time that I’ve ever been so honored, and I’m thrilled about it. I’m pleased both because it has to do with my pet subject — Don Quixote — and also because I’ve been working on getting more attention for my writing on this subject.

A Featured Snippet? Me?!

But I never even thought that my work might be used in a featured snippet. For one thing, they are usually found in searches that are more question-based. For example, “Who wrote Finnegans Wake?” But I suppose that “Don Quixote translations” is an implied question.

Regardless, I learned something about having this featured snippet: it’s great for traffic! The webpage that it links to has gone a little crazy the past couple of weeks. It’s now in my top five most visited pages. And that’s saying a lot when you consider that there are almost 8,000 pages on Frankly Curious. I’m nothing if not a writing fanatic. But over the last couple of years, I’ve learned that creating a lot of content — even reasonably good content — isn’t enough to rock Google’s world.

What Google Wants

Google claims to love people like me: people who just create content without worrying about search engine optimization (SEO) and all that. But there are things that Google likes. It is, after all, just a computer algorithm. One thing it likes is old stuff. Just being around for a long time says to Google, “This is a website that is worth paying attention to.” And that makes sense. For every active blog, there are probably a hundred that people started for a short period of time and then abandoned. Frankly Curious is in its eighth year of active (and often hyperactive) publication. It does say something positive of a site that it continues on.

Of course, that has nothing to do with Google rewarding the site with this featured snippet. In fact, you can forget all about the featured snippet. The real issue is ranking. About six months ago, this page only ranked about 50th for the search term “Don Quixote translations.” Now it ranks 4th. I owe this increase in search rank to a WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. It does things like tell you if what you’ve written is long enough, if you have enough mentions of your focus keyword (or too many — which seems to be a bigger sin), and whether you have images. It’s really kind of a nag.

Yoast to the Rescue!

But one thing it does is check to see if you’ve written about a subject before. And it will report, “You’ve used this focus keyword X times before, it’s probably a good idea to read this post on cornerstone content and improve your keyword strategy.” The idea is that Google is much more interested in you writing one long article about Don Quixote than 40 short articles about it.

This idea took a long time to get into my head. But finally it started to make sense. Anyway, I had wanted to write a long article about Don Quixite for a while: a single page where people could get a basic introduction to the the book, along with information about which version they should read. In other words: I wanted to write the article that I wish had been around when I first decided to read the book. And the material was there; it was just scattered over about 40 articles. I could see why Google wanted me to do things differently.

Combining Content

The truth is that I haven’t even finished the article. I’ve only managed to take three articles and combine them. (Note: when I say combine them, I don’t mean copy them; I mean address the same material as I see it today (which is somewhat different than it was at the time). Doing this alone made the page increase its ranking substantially. But the new page was still competing for Google’s love with the other pages.

Nowhere was that as true as with my first article, “About to Read Don Quixote.” And that was particularly embarrassing, given that it was a cheeky article that shows off just how little I knew. It also only featured six of the translations — not the 13 major translations that I now discuss. And to make matters even worse, those original translations did not include my far more informed favorite by John Rutherford.

Power of the 301 Redirect

Luckily, Google allows websites to use a really powerful tool: the 301 redirect. A 301 redirect tells anyone going to a particular page that it has moved permanently. I’ve known about these since at least 2000. But I always thought that the redirects had to be the same page. Of course, that makes no sense. I’m constantly rewriting pages and they remain the same page. So I was able to redirect that old, cheeky article to my new, far more knowledgeable page. (Because I can’t bear to throw anything away, the entire original article is in a footnote in the new article.) And in the process, I applied all the link “juice” of that old article to the new one.

Before I did that, the two articles were always ranking at 11 and 12 (more or less) for this search term. But when the 301 finally went through (it seems to take a month or more for Google to really figure it out), suddenly I found myself at position 4 with my very own featured snippet. And the sites that beat me out are behemoths: online-literature.com (Alexa ranking: 35,153), GoodReads.com (Alexa ranking: 328), and Amazon (Alexa ranking: 8). So I’m very pleased. Now I’d like to go after “best Don Quixote translation,” where I’m ranked at number 7.

So I’ll Worry About SEO — A Little

What I figure is that if I continue adding to the page (there’s lots more to say), and put in 301 redirects for the roughly 40 other pages, I might be able to get to the top of the list for both searches. And why not? The truth is, I don’t think there is anyone who knows more than I do about Don Quixote in English — at least not anyone who is writing about it on the web.

The whole thing makes me think that if I took this approach to all of my random articles on Frankly Curious, I could probably increase the site traffic by an order of magnitude. I have lots of articles about old blues. Maybe I should synthesize that. I’ve written a lot about Looney Tunes. Same thing — although I already rank number one for “Bugs Bunny hare” for my article, Bugs Bunny: Rabbit or Hare? (the single most popular page on Frankly Curious). And I’ve written a lot about idiosyncratic or psychotronic film. But in that case, I’ve decided to start a whole new website. I just purchased PsychotronicReview.com. I’ll be updating you on that in the coming months.

This is all very cool. I still care most about the ideas and the writing. But it’s nice to know that just a little bit of SEO work can greatly increase your audience. Or at least you can if you’ve been writing like a madman for the last decade.

Screen capture of “Don Quixote translations” featured snippet licensed under Fair Use. Book cover licensed under Fair Use. The etching is in the public domain.