Every day I log into this account and check some of the statistics. Apparently I’ve done something right because search engines are leading folks to some of my older posts. Granted, there’s a few that are controversial, like my original comments about Life Church. That article has gotten multiple hits almost every day since I posted it. Oddly, my subsequent additions on the subject are largely ignored.
Some of my other past articles receive a little attention, too. More than a single hit in one day indicates a certain amount of interest out there in the virtual world. Sadly, I also find that some of the links have died. It’s especially rough when I linked to something I thought was really important. An example would be anything related to the Delphi Technique for manipulating people. It’s a method developed back in my youth by the Rand Corporation for steering public perception through silencing dissenting voices. You can find the original material on Rand’s site today using your favorite search engine. More importantly is that you learn about it from someone who wants to help you defeat this thing.
I read about that way back around the turn of the millennium when researching how lefties had seized control of local education districts. It’s a good thing I read that — it was used on me a couple of times since then. It was once a specialized weapon, but now has taken its place in the common lore of political rhetroic. Still, you don’t often encounter folks who actually do it well. The first time it came from a source so totally unexpected — a fundamentalist Christian — that I left the forum in disgust. The second time I was better prepared, because it happened while I was trying to find a path to service at Life Church. One of their “deacons” used it on me, and no surprise, because he was a professional educator. It shows up quite often in public education politics.
The author of the study I rely on most was Lynn Stuter. Her articles on various sites stop sometime in 2013, after which she seems to have disappeared from the Net. She’s about three years older than me (she was born in 1953), so there’s no telling what happened. At any rate, I’m ever so grateful for the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. I use it often enough to find stuff I worry might have been lost. In this case, I was able to go back to a snapshot of her own website and grab copies of the stuff that I use most. I have my laptop setup to print to PDF files and that’s the way I store a lot of stuff that is important to me but without wasting paper.
So if there’s something out there you think matters and the site is gone, try the Way Back Machine.
