Didn't find the post so odd, but was more interested in his speculative comments than in his blame-assigning.

May have more to say later, but it's off to jury duty for me in a minute. On your question about the site feature, yes, the click-to-source is intentional. Could go either way on it. If I were commenting on the items rather than just "noting and quoting" them, I might go with the other mode, but seems less like "stealing content" this way. At the time I implemented the feature at OT, I hadn't yet coded it in as nearly foolproof a way for the aggregator-curator. If I had it do over, I might choose link-to-source for OT, too, but differences over the feature itself were part of what led to my separation from the site, and I think a link-to-source approach would have accentuated them.

BTW, did you ever hear back about Electronic Atomic Geography?