The other day our friend MentalSwitch offered up a delightful little post entitled “Hello Nurse!” It featured a photo of an attractive model dressed as … well, hell, rather than me trying to describe the shot and failing miserably, why don’t you just click on over there and see for yourself. But before you do, please be forewarned that the photo is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

Ahem. Well, actually, its worksafeness (or unworksafeness thereof) became the topic of some discussion here. Initially the pic was posted without a cut, meaning that the image itself would appear on the front page of S&R. Later, after some complaint and brief deliberations, we moved it behind a cut with the dreaded “NSFW” tag, indicating that the content would most certainly get you fired if it were accidentally viewed by any decent, God-Fearing American^® co-worker. And since way too many of our readers work in places where others might be looking over their shoulders, this was a practical concern. As one colleague put it – and we’ll let that colleague name himself if he wants to – “if the wrong person had walked behind me with that image up on my screen, I could have been walked out the door that day, no appeal.” Full Story »

America’s democratic ideal doesn’t work perfectly. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and in these cases it feeds our cynicism to the point where we’re tempted to conclude that the very possibility of true freedom is a sham. I know whereof I speak, because there are few people out there more soaked in bile than I am.

Still, this whole “marketplace of ideas” is a marvelous concept. Perhaps the most marvelous concept in history. Drawing on the Miltonian belief that if people are allowed to enter the agora and freely state their cases, then “the truth will out” (that is, an educated and informed citizenry will unerringly perceive the truth and that weaker ideas will be disregarded in favor of stronger ones), our nation’s founders crafted a Constitution that assured people the right to voice their opinions, free from government intrusion. Full Story »

According to Fortune Magazine, the largest American company in 2009 was Exxon Mobil Its total revenues were $442.85 billion. Second was Wal-Mart, with total revenues of $405.61 billion. Rounding out the top 10 were Chevron ($263.16 billion), ConocoPhillips ($230.76 billion), General Electric ($183.21 billion), General Motors ($148.98 billion), Ford Motor ($146.28 billion), AT&T ($124.03 billion), Hewlett-Packard ($118.36 billion), and Valero Energy ($118.30 billion).

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world. Full Story »

“The culture wars are over,” says journalist Charles Pierce, “and the idiots have won.”

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

Full Story »

I am a citizen of the United States of America. In this country, I can criticize my government as intelligently, as profanely, or as stupidly as I wish. I can call the president of the nation an unintelligent, uninspiring, and incompetent leader — which I have done. I can call my representative in Congress a buffoonish party hack — which I have done — and urge his removal from office by the voters. I can attack the policies enacted by government at all levels as often as I wish.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.
Full Story »

Part twelve in a series

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. Full Story »

Over the past nearly four years, nearly 2,600 posts have appeared on Scholars & Rogues, almost all researched and written by the 15 folks whose names appear on our writers’ bio page. S&R writers have devoted thousands of hours to the task of filling this space.

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?
Full Story »

This year large metropolitan newspapers have folded in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson. More will likely follow. Journalists at the Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Citizen joined the 10,000 print newsies downsized or bought out from print newsrooms over the past few decade. Media pundits (including me) cluck-cluck incessantly over these democracy-wrenching signs of the impending journalistic apocalypse.

But readers in those cities still have print options for newspapers providing some local news.

Not so in the mountain town of Carbondale, Colo., whose population about equals its elevation. The Valley Journal, founded in 1975, had its plug pulled in March, reports DeeDee Correll of the Center for Rural Affairs. The 6,000 residents had no other sources of local news.

Their solution: Publish a newspaper themselves.
Full Story »

I expect the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a newspaper I’ve long admired, to go belly up — even though I have no specific information about its finances and whether it is, indeed, in danger of folding.

But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?

I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.

I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny.
Full Story »

There are some wonderfully descriptive and colorful words I’d like to hear on television. I know that they’re being uttered; after all, most of us can read lips to a certain degree.

Our ears may hear bleep, but our eyes see lips moving that say shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker. Sometimes our ears will gather additional evidence. They will hear mother followed by bleep instead of fucker. Sometimes the ears will detect ass followed by bleep or bleep followed by hole but never the compete asshole. But the ears never hear cock followed by bleep or bleep followed by sucker because, it seems, Almighty Television Execs think cocksucker is so reviled a concept as to ever be partially bleeped.

I rarely view pricey premium channels such as HBO or Showtime. But my friends who can afford such luxuries assure me that there’s rarely if ever a bleep to be heard. It’s shit and fuck and motherfucker and cocksucker, etc., as far as the eye can see (or, rather, the ear can hear).
Full Story »

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Full Story »

Michelle Malkin, and her commenters, are complaining that Obama supporters have desecrated the flag. She’s right, of course – that’s technically flag desecration, and she’s got the Flag Code section quoted to prove it.

But if you’re all pissed off about that, how about Olympic athletes wrapping themselves in the flag? Or flag napkins? Or a car painted as a flag? Flying a flag in the rain or leaving it up overnight unlit? Flag beach towels? Flags on campaign buttons? In every case, that’s mistreatment of the U.S. flag, according to the Flag Code. Full Story »

I’m continually appalled, although no longer surprised, by what both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (”the conflict” from now on) are willing to do. Islamic Jihad sends a suicide bomber and blows up a bus loaded with Israelis who’s only crime is being Israeli – Israel bulldozes the bomber’s family’s home. Israeli special forces assassinate a leader of Hamas – Hamas responds with Katyusha rockets launched willy-nilly at Israeli towns. Hezbollah kidnaps Israeli soldiers – Israel invades Lebanon and cluster bombs on entire Lebanese villages.

It’s been going on for so long now that we can’t even assign blame anymore. I got pull-off-the-road-and-calm-down furious on Monday when, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered Monday afternoon, a Gaza politician claimed that either a) Israeli collaborators had launched the rockets into Israel as a pretext or b) there had been no launches at all and Israel was faking the whole thing. And I got just as furious this morning when I the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. refused to admit that Israeli commandos had been assassinating Hamas leaders during the cease fire in yet another NPR interview.

Hammurabi came up with the first written code of laws – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And the result of following that law is that Israelis and Palestinians have each become toothless, blind, deaf, mute, and stupid. Full Story »

George Denis Patrick Carlin was a goddamned hypocrite, and I loved him for it.

In the latter part of his long and storied life and career, the late standup comedy legend came off as a crusty, irate, disappointed, extremely cynical bastard who freely admitted he’d given up on the hopeless human race and reveled in its plentiful fuckups and contradictions.

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. This country is finished.” – GC

Offstage though, Carlin was a kind-hearted, selfless, encouraging friend to myriad pluggers on the comedy circuit. His daughter and colleagues say he was nothing like the persona he developed in the face of advancing age and frustration with the agonizing lack of progress in the nation he loved as much as he lampooned. Full Story »

Merry Christmas to the readers of Scholars & Rogues! This is a personal greeting – and I thus hereby issue a disclaimer that it does not speak on behalf of nor represent the intentions or persuasions of all of my blogger colleagues here at our joint endeavor.

But I’d like to offer this wish of seasonal cheer, no strings attached. No agenda, no proselytizing, no offense. Just the outpouring of a full and warm heart on the 25th of December.

It is Christmas Day, and my heart’s naïve hope is that it could stand for what it is ought to be in the broadest cultural sense – an occasion to wish peace on earth and good will to all. Whether or not one believes in the incarnation of Jesus Christ as God come into human history, the nativity myth is filled with simple beauty, and the ancient yuletide traditions it has become associated with have for centuries celebrated the triumph of light over darkness in a bleak world. To say “Merry Christmas” is, for me, to affirm that light and share its spirit with others, whether or not we embrace the same religious practices or none at all. Full Story »

by Michael Tracey

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

So on to the really interesting part: what has it all meant, what do I take away from this curious episode in my life, and from a decade-long involvement not just in the narrative around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the cultural ecology out of which that narrative climbed?

Henry James once wrote that to be an American is a complex fate, a sentiment I’d like to amend by suggesting that to be alive is a complex fate, pulled asunder as we are by the competing forces of deep, unspoken Neolithic urges, the demands of the caring heart and struggles in usingdavid the Rational mind, all elements present in the World of JonBenet.

Three general issues suggest themselves: Full Story »

Part two in a series.

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

- Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”

When all is said and done, nothing communicates the racism and knee-buckling stupidity of all-too-wide swaths of our nation quite like video. So if you don’t trust me to tell the truth about these folks, maybe you’ll trust their own words.

Full Story »

Part one in a series.

Listen to the victim, abused by the system
The basis is racist, you know that we must face this

In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.

I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Full Story »

AN ESSAY ON MURDER, MEDIA MAYHEM AND
THE CONDITION OF THE CULTURE

by
Michael Tracey

FOR PATSY RAMSEY, SHERRY KEENE-OSBORNE, and BARB SMITH
Courageous and Good Ladies All

* * *

This long essay was originally intended to be a short memoir. It did not work out that way. It has evolved, for good or ill, into a work of parts, and can be read as such.

* * *

Full Story »

The city council of San Francisco has issued an ordinance that pharmacies are not allowed to sell tobacco products. The intent is to eliminate mixed messages about a pharmacy, ostensibly devoted to healing people, selling unhealthy tobacco. But two companies are suing the city of San Francisco in federal court to overturn the ban. The first, Walgreens, is suing because only stand-alone pharmacies are affected by the ban – grocery stories and big-box stores with pharmacies are not affected. Their legal logic is that the tobacco sales ban is discriminatory toward stand-alone pharmacies, and they have a point. Whether it’ll hold up in court is another question (the federal judge refused to delay the ban, due to start on October 1, while the lawsuit is being heard), and one I’ll not even attempt to address.

The second company, Philip Morris, is suing using a totally different legal logic. They say it’s an unconstitutional abridgment of their First Amendment right to free speech. Full Story »