In Iowahawk’s deathless phrase regarding the establishment press, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” Here it is a weekend and a couple of working days after the release of the notorious and long-awaited FISA memo, and the relatively conservative side of the blogosphere is still happily chewing it over. Doubtless the professional national media wishes the whole matter would just go away already, just because. Frankly, the whole matter reminds me of the swiftboat veterans and the matter of John Kerry’s service in Vietnam.
Blogging
Their Own Worst Enemy
A discussion at According to Hoyt this last week developed from a long look the recent so-called “woman’s march”; an event which appeared to really be an open-air scream therapy session for a certain subset of the human population. They had the opportunity to mingle with others of their ilk, dress up in pink hats and vagina costumes and inform the rest of the world (yet again) of their acute unhappiness that Hillary, the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua, formerly known as Her Inevitableness had not been able to win an election rigged in her favor, and that Donald Trump was currently the President of the United States. MS Hoyt speculated on what, exactly, the protesters were on about; what rights were imperiled, exactly? What did all the feel-good, content-free slogans have to do with anything in the lives of real, live women and men working for a living? And how did dressing up as an anatomically sort-of-correct vagina have to do with anything, in the real world. And in the long run, weren’t such pointless demonstrations of hysteria actually counter-productive, in that genuine misogynists would point to them as proof positive that women were too flighty, too emotional, too damn silly to manage anything, let alone their own lives.
Neptunus Lex – The Epilogue
After the Neptunus Lex website went down, shortly after his fatal accident, it very fortunately turned out that someone had saved most of the posts offline. For the last several years, Bill Brandt has been posting these restored posts, on an almost daily basis, at The Lexicans.
Sadly but inevitably, Bill has now come to the end of the saved posts. He has some eloquently-written concluding thoughts here.
Great job Bill, I’m really glad you’ve done this.
We can hope that perhaps some additional Lex posts will show up somewhere in the odd corners of the Internet.
CP-1 Diamond Anniversary Meetup(s)
I have decided to attend various events around the 75th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 and will therefore be in Hyde Park for about 48 hours, from late afternoon Thursday 30 November to late afternoon Saturday 2 December. As of now, the one known gathering is lunch at Valois, 1518 E 53rd (Harper Court, just west of Lake Park and the Metra Electric tracks), at 1 PM on Saturday.
Others are possible, however. I will be at the physics colloquium on Thursday afternoon in Kersten (SW corner of 57th & Ellis) and was thinking vaguely of pizza at Giordano’s (on Blackstone just south of 53rd) afterward, which means 6-ish. I expect to spend much of both Friday and Saturday mornings prowling the bookstores on 57th, and should also be free after around 7 Friday evening, when what seems to be the main event wraps up at Mandel Hall.
In general, respond in comments, and graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) around here for official events.
Summer Rerun: Freedom and Fear
(Working on a fresh new history trivia post, delayed in completing by … whatever. Real life, completing the next book. This reprise post is from 2011.)
I started following what I called “The Affair of the Danish Mo-Toons” way back at the very beginning of that particular imbroglio, followed by the ruckus last year over “Everybody Draw Mohammad” and now we seem to have moved on to the Charlie Hebdo fiasco – a French satirical magazine dared to poke fun at the founder of Islam … by putting a cartoon version on the cover of their latest issue, with the result that their offices were firebombed. I think at this point it would have been fair to assume that representatives of the Religion of Peace would respond in a not-quite-so peaceful manner, so all props for the Charlie Hebdo management for even going ahead with it – for even thinking of standing up for freedom of thought, freedom of a press, even freedom to take the piss out of a target. (The following is what I wrote last year – still relevant to this latest case)