Irma Sandovar sits in her padded leather armchair sipping hot black coffee, her brown eyes wandering from the brilliant lights of the New York skyline northward across the bay to the foaming ocean to the east.  She remembers watching the calm blue Pacific from the mountainside cottage her family had rented one summer almost thirty years ago.  The Atlantic, colder, darker, is nonetheless beautiful in its awesome power and vastness.

Irma wants desperately to understand the emotions she has been feeling.  She seems not unhappy, though far from content.  Her daughter Luz celebrated her fourth birthday today with seven children from the day care center.  Now she sleeps the powerful sleep of innocence.  Irma is happy to see her making friends. Full story »

The town of Hull, Massachusetts, is a comfortable blue-collar town on the tip of a little cape off of Boston’s south shore. At one time a fashionable resort, more recently it has been dealing with a declining tax base and an increased demand for services. Still, it’s a pleasant enough place, especially in the summer, when it attracts boatloads of tourists for summer rentals and a nice beach community. And it has a charming library, in an old Victorian building reeking with character, with an interesting book collection (some of which celebrates the town’s maritime history) and a fantastic children’s program. It’s pretty much what you want any locally municipal library to be, in fact.

Just like many other towns and cities in America, however, Hull library services have been the targets of cutbacks by the municipal government this past year. Full story »

In West Africa, they build latrines by digging a square pit, six feet by six feet. They build an open-roofed wattle wall around it, lay wooden planks across the top of the pit and cover them with six inches of dirt, leaving a hole in the center. A fellow Peace Corps Volunteers went into one of these latrines early in her tour of duty. As she squatted, the floor gave way, rotted by decay and the ubiquitous termites, and she plunged ten feet, landing in years of accumulated human waste. Stunned from the fall, and horrified to be waist-deep in a sea of maggots and shit and unbelievable odor, she screamed.

The local villagers ran to help. Full story »

The University of Colorado recently announced that it “will be phasing out its hodgepodge of logos, replacing them with a standard CU symbol.” University spokesman Ken McConnellogue says that “It’s important for the University of Colorado to be consistent and coordinated with its messages and images. In a world where people are bombarded by images and messages, we can’t afford to be fragmented and disconnected in how we present ourselves.”

I have no problems with this in principle. That said, CU got skinned. Full story »

It’s only natural that highly charged words find themselves coupled with the word “nuclear.” It’s almost as if they’re attracted by a magnetic force. Three examples spring to mind.

Holocaust: Most frequently, of course, it’s used in reference to the slaughter of Jews in World War II. When appended to “nuclear,” it describes an earth ravaged to within an inch of its life by nuclear war.

Apartheid: Originally, as we all know, it was the word for segregation in South Africa from 1948 to 1993. When preceded by “nuclear,” it describes the perception of some states without nuclear weapons that those in possession of same are keeping them (as well as nuclear energy) for themselves. And yes, it is singularly sleazy, to link the word “apartheid” with nuclear weapons. Full story »

As the Super Bowl approaches, I’m hearing a lot of talk centering around the question of which franchise is the NFL’s greatest. In some cases it takes the form of “who is really America’s team?” Whatever the heck that gets you. Other times, as with countless spirited “debates” on sports talk radio’s arguing with idiots shows, the question is a more germane “who is the greatest franchise in NFL history?” Which is actually an interesting enough topic, and one that bubbles up from time to time. This year I think we’re hearing more of it because the Super Bowl features two of the primary candidates, Green Bay and Pittsburgh, and they’re playing in the home stadium of a popular third candidate, the Dallas Cowboys. Full story »

Late Summer Up North
by Rodney Nelson

how much of today would you give to be on
the mirador in Manzanillo again
when it was only a rotting sloven port

not the warm running wind in your apartment
or the merer view of high active leafage
on the apple trees that now become your street Full story »

Scholars & Rogues recently launched its new literary journal and has so far published a short story and several poems. We’re ecstatic with the quality of the submissions we’re seeing and expect this to be a vibrant component of the overall S&R experience for a long time to come.

We want to take a moment to clear up a point of potential confusion for readers who may be thinking that S&R has always published original creative writing.

S&R has, in the past, published the occasional work of original literature, with my own poetry being the chief example. We will continue to do so, from time to time, because in addition to our broad range of political and cultural analysis interests, several scrogues are also creative writers and we enjoy sharing things with our audience here. It’s one of the things we feel sets us apart from other online outlets. Full story »

I am sitting here in Chicago, only able to get to my garage by walking through a waist-deep snow tunnel, not that getting there would do me any good since even my trusty Subaru couldn’t navigate the black diamond slope that is my alley.

So it’s time for what may become a semi-regular blog feature: Hard Truths Wednesday.

Hard Truth: Old guys need to just get out of the way.

I am 57. That’s not old-old, but I can see old from here. I spend far too much of my time on the phone with other 57 year-olds listening to them carp about how life sucks because they are unappreciated at work and the newspaper wants to cut their pay and make them work more hours and blah blah blah.

Here’s the hard truth. A 57 year-old is not worth as much as a 37 year-old. All that experience doesn’t make up for energy and enthusiasm and being in the moment. Full story »

Ah, the redemptive power of football…

by Gareth Porter

The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in Egypt is an obvious moment for a fundamental adjustment in that strategy.

But those moments have been coming with increasing regularity in recent years, and the U.S. national security bureaucracy has shown itself to be remarkably resistant to giving it up. The troubled history of that strategy suggests that it is an expression of some powerful political forces at work in this society, as former NSC official Gary Sick hinted in a commentary on the crisis. Full story »

          - Imbolc 2011, 2:17am MST

Old Ethan like a walking stick, daylong shadow:
sets him after a halfway pole
fifty mile through a
dankling woods.

October throwed his scarecoat down.
November framed those woods a house of smoke.
December painted the black days white.
Come January, the ringnecks froze in place.
Treelocked they'll sit 'til April
flumes their melted songs to the sea.

Now Midwinter:

          a milepost on a swerving road,
          a weed in a tombyard. 

Turns him 'round and marks for home.
Never know home until you get there,
never know halfways at all.

After the Iranian elections, the Department of State formally asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so that Iranian activists could continue to tweet each other and the outside world. The internet will, apparently set you free. Now there’s some evidence that early communication between activists in Egypt was facilitated by Facebook and Twitter. The condemnation when Mubarak’s regime shut down the internet was much more muted. It didn’t stop the protests, suggesting that the internet is, at best, capable of being a tool of freedom but far from a necessity.

There are more than a few reasons why the meme of Facebook revolution is silly, not the least of which being that social networking moguls have neither declared nor proven that a fundamental aspect of their tools is to facilitate freedom. Full story »

If you’ve been reading S&R for a while now, you’re probably familiar with the fact that I have issues with Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, and climate disruption denier. While he came to my attention as a result of his many errors of fact regarding climate science, my issues with Monckton are largely the result of the fact that he has labeled student activists “Hitler Youth,” has threatened legal action against his critics in transparent attempts at intimidation, and accuses his critics of resorting to ad hominem attacks while describing them as looking “like an overcooked prawn.” Pot, meet kettle.

Now, thanks to the miracle of massive databases and people who know how to code them, we have available a new Monckton debunking tool. John Cook, physicist and creator/editor of the website SkepticalScience.com has put together a page devoted exclusively to debunking Monckton’s many, many, many myths. Full story »