The Bear Facts

A piece on Edward Tufte, the guru of the visual display of quantitative information (click here)

A long overdue article on the surge of corporate greenwashing. Well-written and informative.

Click here for “Green is the color of money: Separating fact from fiction in the world of corporate greenwashing”

Check out these statistics from a letter sent today by 41 U.S. House Members to the publishers of 11 magazines : 80% of smokers start smoking before their 18th birthday.

“June 5, 2007

Ms. Anna Wintour
Editor in Chief
Vogue

Four Times Square, 12th Floor

New York, NY 10036

Dear Ms. Wintour:

As Members of Congress dedicated to advancing the health of women and girls, we are writing to express our concern over the marketing of tobacco products to young women through tobacco advertisements in women’s magazines, such as yours.

The epidemic of smoking among teens and young women cannot be overstated. We recognize that Vogue is influential among the millions of young women and girls under 18 who make-up a sizeable portion of your readership. These readers look to your magazine for health advice, information on the latest trends in glamour and style. The public service your magazine provides by offering important women’s health information is negated when, a few pages away, a reader finds an advertisement for a new cigarette marketed just for women.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company has recently introduced a new cigarette, Camel No. 9, which is clearly aimed at young women. To our great concern, R.J. Reynolds is heavily relying on leading women’s magazines, including yours, to aggressively market this deadly product to young women, including teenagers. The target audience of young women is abundantly clear from look at Camel No. 9’s chic packaging, and the stylish advertisements with roses and a slogan of “light and luscious.”

R.J. Reynolds claims that the target for Camel No.9 is current adult women smokers. Yet, it advertises Camel No. 9 in magazines like yours that have large numbers of teenage and other young women readers. As the tobacco companies well know, ninety percent of smokers begin before they are twenty and eighty percent begin before their eighteenth birthday. This translates into an astounding 2,000 new teen daily smokers per day. With over a thousand of their customers dying every day from tobacco-related disease, cigarette companies certainly knew their demographic when they referred to teens as “replacement smokers” in their internal documents.

The public health consequences of smoking are neither stylish nor glamorous. Smoking-related cancers kill an estimated 54,000 women each year and approximately 178,000 women die every year from all tobacco-related disease. Cigarette smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of infertility, preterm delivery, stillbirth, low birth weight, and sudden infant death syndrome. And the most staggering statistic of all – one out of three teen smokers will die prematurely of a tobacco-related disease.

The health consequences of tobacco use are too profound to be met with either complacency or complicity. As Members of Congress, we feel compelled to express our concern to you about how these advertisements are negatively contributing to our nation’s public health. Your refusal to publish cigarette ads would send an unequivocal message to tobacco companies and be consistent with your magazine’s long tradition of promoting women’s health.

Again, we urge you to voluntarily adopt an institutional policy of rejecting cigarette advertising aimed at young women and we look forward to further discussions with you on this matter.

Sincerely,

Cc: Mr. Thomas A. Florio, Vice President/Publisher

***Please note that identical letters were sent to the editors and publishers of the following magazines: Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, InStyle, Interview Magazine, Lucky, Marie Claire, Soap Opera Digest, Us Weekly, and W.” (Source)

Al Gore’s most recent book is remarkable. Nothing I knew about Al Gore prepared me for his sharp attack on the Bush administration, our ineffectual legislature and civic apathy. Although An Inconvenient Truth portrayed Al Gore as a powerful advocate, a politician with a pulse, The Assault on Reason is a direct, uncompromising attack on the current administration’s attack on the American experiment. Gore argues that by establishing the executive power above all others, the Republican party has compromised the integrity of the American constitution. His book thoroughly describes the administration’s encroachment on our system of checks and balances and posits that the administration was able to do so because the American public is lulled into a TV stupor in which reason and argument are used less than in the past.

The level of antipathy towards Bush is shocking but not surprising, particularly given the examples Gore provides. As the New York Times review says, “the vehemence of his language and his arguments make statements about the Bush administration by already announced candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton seem polite and mild-mannered in contrast.” To provide just some examples as described by the same review:

“In “The Assault on Reason” Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is “out of touch with reality,” that his administration is so incompetent that it “can’t manage its own way out of a horse show,” that it ignored “clear warnings” about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by “stirring up a hornets’ nest in Iraq,” while using “the language and politics of fear” to try to “drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest.”

(If you are not going to read the book – which you should – then read this review)

Gore’s book does not reveal any new encroachments by the Bush administration that have not been covered in recent books and documentaries. However, Gore’s text is the only book I’ve found that provides a laundry-list of Bush administration violations from the build-up to the war in Iraq, its disastrous post-war management, Abu Ghraib, the illegal NSA wiretaps (which allow the President to read your mail, email, check your library and financial records, listen to your phone calls and break into your house without a warrant or probable cause), its disastrous environmental, energy and regulatory policies, its mishandling of Katrina relief, the corruption scandals that roiled Congress, its endorsement of torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, its indirect support for Al-Qaeda by creating the disaster in Iraq, tax-cuts for the rich, removing church-state separation, weakening nuclear disarmament programs, Guantanamo, Halliburton, Enron… Repeatedly comparing the administration’s policies to Orwell’s 1984, Kafka’s The Trial, Gore pulls very few punches.

Despite its merits Gore’s book finishes with a whimper in the same manner as An Inconvenient Truth. After laying out his arguments and winning us over, Gore offers us a half-hearted and incomplete solution to our national disasters. In An Assault on Reason, his partial solution is the Internet – the democratic participatory medium which can allow us to reengage in reasoned debate en masse. However, he provides no resolution to how we can possibly undo the dozens of other disasters he describes from Iraq, to executive encroachment and governmental decay. This fact, combined with his light-touch, nearly absent, critique of the Democratic leadership, makes me certain that the final chapter will be Gore’s campaign platform for the 2008 presidency. After reading Gore’s book and comparing it with the current platforms of Obama, Clinton and Edwards it is clear to me that he will not stand on the sidelines – Gore has become Nader-like in his advocacy and much more radical than any of the mainstream candidates. His current absence from the presidential race is rooted in his mistrust of the mainstream media (not surprising given the 2000 debacle and his position described in his book). Gore will wait until the last moment before running and, in my opinion after seeing wimpy, compromising performances in the second Democratic debate, Gore will win the party’s nomination and consequently, the presidency.

Read the book.

[And watch this unaired mini-documentary from the 2000 campaign filmed by Spike Jonze... This is Al Gore before he developed public speaking skills through his slideshow]