Daily Blague

My horizons have been broadened this weekend, and now they include The Biscuit Report. (Finally, someone who agrees with me about William Safire!) I'm going to throw away this site's Mission Statement and replace it with the following:

Private intellectuals are people who think about public policy, politics, 'issues', philosophy, the meaning of life, and all that stuff on, amazingly, their very own time. Living the examined life and all that. They are likely to be paid to think in their day jobs, but to think about things like UML diagrams, brand visibility, bond markets, databases, or other things that are important only in so much as they fuel the economy and provide a paycheck (and, if you're very lucky, health insurance...). But while some company is leasing their brain, theoretically at 100% CPU time, they actually have a lot of other processes going on in the background, thinking about the stuff that really matters. And they come home and blog about it, or blog about it at work when they are supposed to be working on a slide presentation, and maybe their blogs don't get much traffic, but in having to write down their thoughts they get to organize them, they make sense of the information overload caused by too many newsfeeds, and maybe some readers read about things they wouldn't otherwise read about, and think about things they wouldn't otherwise think about, and so the blogging of private intellectuals, we amateurs, is a kind of grassroots movement to make serious thinking into a national pasttime, so that we can become again, perhaps, a nation of informed citizens

I hope that Biscuit has just outlined your reasons for paying attention to this site.