R O K O V O K O

4/21/07

CONSUMING PASSIONS: Fluid Notions

5 Tips to Avoid Getting Ripped Off While Traveling

From Gadling

So you're on vacation, having a great time, soaking up the rays -- whatever it is you do to relax -- when you realize you've been had. You don't know who, or how, but yo ur passport is gone, your laptop is on a black market somewhere, and you're stranded in the middle of nowhere with no identification, no money, and no idea what to do.

If you've traveled, chances are you've thought about what would happen if you were robbed while on the road; It may have even happened some of you. Keeping yourself out of trouble doesn't have to be a pain, and with just a few precautionary measures, you can keep yourself, and your valuables, safe while traveling. Remember that the point isn't to travel in fear, but to take caution and be prepared. Here are a 5 tips to avoid getting ripped off while traveling.

Wear a money belt. Placing all of your ultra-important items -- money, plane tickets, passports, credit cards -- into a pouch that straps across your waste and under your pants keeps them out of reach of pickpockets, pu! rse-snat chers, and backpack-bandits. Rick Steves has a decent one on his website for $12.95, and it's totally worth the cost. It may seem like a pain to wear at first, but I can assure you that it'll be more painful when you lose your wallet and passport and are forced to replace these essential items when you should be enjoying your time on the road.

Look inconspicuous -- try to not stand out. Thieves target tourists, so the less tourist-like you come across, the less likely you'll be targeted. This can be hard to do, especially when you've got a 50lb pack on your back -- but a few simple changes in your dress can make all the difference in the world. Don't try to disguise yourself as a local, because chances are you won't fool anyone. Instead, minimize the amount of "loud" clothes you wear; avoid bright colors that stand out, or t-shirts wit h clever, English messages on them. When I'm traveling internationally, I usually wear drab clothing with no text or logos whatsoever. While this might not necessarily keep me from looking like a tourist, I will look less like one in comparison to other clothing-unconscious travelers around me.

Don't get drunk alone. A lone drunkard stumbling down a poorly-lit street is a prime target. If you're out partying in an unsavory or tourist-heavy area, stay in a group -- even if you're traveling solo. If you must walk alone, try not to appear as drunk as you probably are. Avoid stumbling, slurring your words, or shouting at dogs.

Keep personal gadgets hidden. Why advertise to everyone what an expensive came ra or mp3 player you have? If you're traveling with a laptop! , avoid using it in crowded coffee shops or bustling Internet cafes. Have an iPod? Buy different headphones. Those iconic white strands coming down from your ears shout, "I have an expensive mp3 player in my pocket!" so pony up for a pair of black headphones. Who wants an old Walkman anyway, right? Enjoy your travel gadgets, but don't flaunt them.

Learn the scams of your destination before you go. Tourists are scam targets pretty much everywhere in the world, so before you go, fire up Google and see what you find. For instance, searching for "India scams" brings up an entire forum dedicated to scams and annoyances in India. If you learn what's out there first, you'll quickly recognize the well-tested scam while on the road and avoid it without the trouble. You'd be surprised how many people leave for vacation without doing some research on this.

And get over the whole "I'm a traveler, not a tourist" bit. If you're not on your home turf, you're a tourist -- it's just a word. You know it, I know it, and the goonda trying to rip you off knows it. Swallow your pride and stay safe!

CHASING RAY: History's Fine Lines

Sins of the Innocent
By Mireille Marokvia
Unbridled Books

Farthing
By Jo Walton
Toor Books

By Colleen Mondor
from Chasing Ray

Mireille Marokvia’s memoir Sins of the Innocent provides a perspective of World War II that I don’t think has been presented before. Marokvia is French and met her future husband, a German artist, in Paris in the 1930s. They were part of the Hemingwayesque group that the city was infamous for in the years before the war -- all witty repartee and glamorous creativity. Bit by bit, however, Mireille and Abel found themselves unable to ignore the news coming out of Germany and the rest of Europe. Friends abandoned the Continent; at one point a friend sends Abel a ticket to Argentina, pleading with him to leave, but the two lovers did not think it would get so bad, or that the badness would get close to them. News of the Munich Agreement in 1938 galvanized them. “No war,” she writes, “There would be no war. That was all we saw. And Czechoslovakia? Sacrificed / yes, yes, but peace, we had ‘won’ peace!” They had a victory banquet with friends in celebration. “We had several victory banquets,” she writes.

They were ready to celebrate what they were desperate to have, and in reading about her excitement, her relief, one begins to care very deeply for naïve Mireille and her husband. They don’t know what’s coming, but we do, and we wonder just how a French woman and German man will possibly navigate those events together. That struggle for survival is what makes up the bulk of the story, and what gives it a narrative dynamic that is unlike any other memoir about the war years on the market today.

In other words, Suite Française my ass. Mireille Marokvia might not have a suitably sad story complete with lost manuscript, hidden suitcase and death to accompany it, but she did more than most: she survived. The fact that she accomplished this at all is impressive, but when you consider that she did it as a French woman in Germany who was opposed to the fighting, it makes her life seem almost like a miracle.

They went to Germany because of a visit from an old friend of Abel’s. “How I disliked him!” writes Mireille. “I still do!” He brought news that Abel’s widowed mother was quite ill and needed him at home right away. It was two months since Chamberlain’s agreement; they thought war was averted. They would only go for six months, Abel promised, and then they would return to France. Mireille believed him and really she had no choice. His mother was sick and needed her son, and so of course, his new wife went with him. They stayed in Germany for the next eight years.

In the chapters that follow Mireille explains how two people who were against the war managed to survive while not being arrested as traitors. The story rarely dwells on the Holocaust, as it was not something the couple was largely aware of. The author remembers an anti-Semitic film and, later, a young Jewish co-worker with a child whose identities she helps to hide. But mostly Sins is about day-to-day living, about people who found ways to shop for little food and make meager dinner parties so they could still spend time together and pretend everything had not changed forever. It’s about having a job during the war, and being an artist in a place where art barely exists. Sins of the Innocent is the story of the German home front that has been rarely told to Western readers.

For every recollection of an evening out with friends or move to a new apartment, the author throws a deeply insightful comment that goes a long way towards expressing what Germans were thinking during the war. After Abel is questioned by the Gestapo (with a French wife his loyalty came into question), the two of then struggle to put the episode behind them. “As time passed and nothing else happened, we became carefree again -- as animals do, I suppose, when scents left by the hunter have blown away.”

On a more practical note, she reveals the blind devotion to all things good about Germany exhibited by most of the people around them. After Hitler invades the Soviet Union, cries of “Christmas in Moscow” are heard everywhere. And while it is clear that the Germans know their history enough to recall Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia over 100 years before, they are eager to explain to the French woman how different things are now. “Hitler was another kind of conqueror, a modern conqueror who possessed modern means. And anyway, what had been disastrous for Napoleon’s army was the retreat. The Germans do not retreat.”

It was early in the war still and they had a lot to learn. But Mireille, whose own great country had surrendered in a shockingly quick manner, has her suspicions. She keeps them to herself of course, because to do otherwise would be suicidal, and she is a woman determined to survive.

It was purely by coincidence that while I read Sins of the Innocent I was also deeply immersed in Jo Walton’s alternate history novel, Farthing. In that world, England negotiates a peace treaty with Germany in 1941 and thus abandons Western Europe to Hitler’s Germany. Jews are forced to wear the yellow star on the Continent and there are rumors of forced labor camps. An underground railroad of sorts is established across the Channel and Lucy Kahn, whose parents are some of the most powerful people in England, has married a Jewish man who unobtrusively does what he can to help Jews, both refugees and British natives like himself. Lucy and David think they are fine, that in spite of the occasional social insult the Kahns, just like the rest of England, will be just fine. Then there is a murder over a long party weekend at the parental estate, Farthing. Walton takes the cozy British murder mystery and turns it on its ear.

Farthing is in many ways the flip side of Sins of the Innocent. Mireille Marokvia’s life was similar to Lucy’s at first -- safe on the surface but never more than one wrong move away from going to hell in a hand basket. She came from a country that gave in to Hitler; and if there had been no Winston Churchill, no steadfast steely-eyed determination on the part of the British people, then maybe she would have lived the rest of her life in a world that lived and died at his whim. It makes one wonder just how long the German people would have been able to deny the truth of what Hitler’s world demanded if that had happened. In Lucy’s case, the denial seems to be eternal and ultimately even those whose eyes become awakened to the dark political machinations at work in the British government find themselves paralyzed by the thought of the personal sacrifices necessary to change their world.

Can we blame Mireille’s husband then for finding a way to work for the German government through the war or her for finding a way to peacefully survive it in the country? There was no joining the resistance or hiding Anne Frank’s contemporaries in the attic for Mireille and Abel; they chose to live as if there was no war, to fight social battles, to provide aid and comfort in a few small ways, but largely just to get through it. The truth is that usually that is how it works. They live through it and maybe later they write very enlightening memoirs about how it was, how terrifying and horrifying and deeply, intensely, personally tragic the war was. And that’s fair enough, right? Farthing is fiction, it’s what did not happen and so, really, must we take it to heart? “All the demons are on the loose right now,” Mireille was told by an acquaintance during the war. “Don’t listen to them. Lie low and wait. Demons do not last.”

But they do in Farthing and truth be told they were mighty damn close to winning it all in World War II. It’s just an English murder mystery at its heart though, right? A politician dead in a guest bed, an overly histrionic wife, a rumored affair; it’s really no different from Agatha Christie’s best. Except this isn’t Dame Agatha’s England. This is the one where Mireille never got to go home, where Abel probably was shot for not being a patriot, and where that Jewish girl she worked with didn’t find a safe house in the country.

The fine line between truth and fiction is glaringly obvious in reading these two books together, and what one author knows from experience and another fears for the future makes for utterly compelling reading. Mireille Marokvia lived through a war as a smart and gentle woman who wanted only peace. But Jo Walton knows the biggest truth of all: that Marokvia’s survival was due largely to the sacrifices that so many others made to guarantee that peace would come. Farthing is for them, as much as any historic book on the war can ever be. It is the warning of what might have been just as Sins of the Innocent is a gripping memory of what should never again be.

4/19/07

OPINION: Obama, the Humanity!

Reprinted from Townhall.com

By Jon Sanders
Thursday, April 19, 2007

Hours after the Virginia Tech massacre, Barack Obama spoke at a campaign stop in Milwaukee. Obama could have shown compassion unalloyed with politics, what one hopes to find in a leader when disaster strikes. But he didn't. In the grand tradition of leftist orators, Obama repackaged the awful news of the day to "reflect" on his own political themes.

"I hope," the candidate said about the massacre, "that it causes us to reflect a little more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms all the time in our society: we glorify it, we encourage it, we ignore it, and it's heartbreaking."

In other words, some deranged madman just perpetrated the greatest shooting massacre in the nation's history, and Obama wants us to "reflect" on whatever "violence in various forms" that he can say we're responsible for. While people were crying on each other's shoulders in Blacksburg, tensely waiting by hospital beds and telephones, or gathering in candlelight vigils across the nation, this character was in Milwaukee trying to put the national nose in a corner to think about what we've done. (Any similarity between Obama's reaction and killer Cho Seung Hui's note "You made me do this" revealed later is sickly coincidental.)

Then Obama went into a litany of the other forms of violence that he said "we're going to have to think about." His comments, delivered with long, thoughtful pauses that belied their callous oblivion, came out more like a parody of a Democrat usurping current events for political gain than something from a serious candidate.

"It's not necessarily physical violence," he said, "but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways." That was the windup; here's the pitch:

"Last week the big news obviously had to do with Imus, and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters... There's the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country, they've lost their job and they've lost their pension benefits and they've lost their healthcare, and they're having to compete against their teenage children for jobs at the local fast-food place paying $7 an hour. There is the violence of children whose voices are not heard in communities that are ignored, who don't have access to a decent education, who are surrounded by drugs and crime, and a lack of hope. So there's a lot of different forms of violence in our society ..."

To recap: Because some deranged lunatic just shot up a college campus in a way never before witnessed in America, candidate Obama thinks we need to use the occasion to reflect on Imus and pensions and the minimum wage and stuff.

By the same ridiculous standard, one finds there's also a "violence" in big-government blowhards immediately seeking to capitalize politically on the slaughter of innocent college students. "It's not necessarily physical violence," but what should we call it when someone perpetrates on us a disgusting analogy that compares hate speech, job loss to outsourcing, losing health insurance, taking a minimum wage job, poor education, lack of "hope," etc. to real, horrific violence?

Also by the same standard, this May 6 will mark the 70th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster. I hope that the memory of it causes us to reflect a little more broadly on the degree to which we do accept gasbags in various forms all the time in our society.

Jon Sanders is a policy analyst and research editor at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C.

OPINION: Repeal the Second Amendment

Reprinted from Salon

The best way to reduce the odds of another blood bath like the one at Virginia Tech is to amend the Constitution and abolish the right to bear arms.

By Walter Shapiro

Apr. 18, 2007 | Fifteen unambiguous words are all that would be required to quell the American-as-apple-pie cycle of gun violence that has now tearfully enshrined Virginia Tech in the record book of mass murder. Here are the 15 words that would deliver a mortal wound to our bang-bang culture of death: "The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed."

Even Pollyanna on Prozac would acknowledge the daunting odds against repeal. Steering an anti-gun constitutional amendment through, say, the Montana or Missouri legislatures (approval of three-quarters of the states is required for ratification) would be a task on par with cleaning the Augean stables. But the benefits of separating gun owners from their extraordinary constitutional protections should not be ignored. Without the Second Amendment, firearms could be regulated by the federal government in the same fashion as any other potentially dangerous devices, from coal-mine elevators to single-engine planes. While there is no way to guarantee that another Cho Seung-Hui would be deprived of access to a Glock, hitting the delete button on the Second Amendment surely would lower the odds against future mayhem.

Questioning the very existence of the Second Amendment would also transform the increasingly sterile congressional debates -- when they even occur -- over firearms. Gun control has become one of those quixotic crusades that conjure up noble intentions, overblown rhetoric and political defeat. The cause seems as moribund and musty as a Dukakis sticker on a Volvo. Congress even lacks the political gumption to revive the expired Clinton-era ban on assault weapons, firearms that are more useful for storming beachheads than hunting deer. Instead of regulating guns, the Republican Congress moved boldly in 2005 to shield gun manufacturers from class action suits. And just last month, a federal appeals court overturned the no-nonsense District of Columbia law outlawing handguns as a violation of the Second Amendment.

Despite a decade-long string of such political victories, the National Rifle Association still revels in the apocalyptic imagery of liberal jackboots trampling on the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of gun-loving patriots. After the Democrats took control of Congress last November, the NRA issued a brochure that began ominously, "Second Amendment freedom today stands naked in the path of a marching axis of adversaries far darker and more dangerous than gun owners have ever known."

Small wonder that liberals have become timorous under fire from the NRA militants. When even the most modest reforms -- such as regulating gun sales between private individuals -- are ridiculed as radical nostrums, it is hard for politicians to justify squandering their political capital on a seemingly hopeless cause. Frustrated by the constraints imposed by the right-to-bear-arms language in the Second Amendment, proponents of gun-control legislation have always worked on the margins. "Close the gun-show loophole" is not likely to be remembered as one of the most stirring slogans in political history.

The result has been a blunt form of cost-benefit analysis among politicians. If federal gun-control efforts mandating background checks and waiting periods do not solve the larger problem of too many unstable Americans shooting first and asking questions later (insert Dick Cheney reference here), why risk political defeat to uphold and expand these modest laws? Even in the battle to save lives from gun violence, senators and congressmen are understandably reluctant to gamble with their own careers.

Since the NRA would probably claim that legislation to ban private possession of atomic weapons is part of a plot to destroy the Second Amendment, maybe it is time for liberals to stop denying the charge. Authenticity and truth-telling often work better in politics than weaselly and palpably insincere statements like, "No one is more dedicated a hunter and lover of the Second Amendment than I am, but..." If gun-control advocates are going to be hanged in effigy for their views, they should at least have the momentary enjoyment of making a speech from the scaffold expressing their true sentiments. Without having to endlessly fret about the constitutionality of any regulatory effort to reduce gun-related deaths, liberals might be able to directly discuss the benefits of such legislation in terms that even open-minded members of the NRA might appreciate.

Looking at the Bill of Rights with more than two centuries' hindsight, it is simply irrational that firearms have a protected position on par with freedom of speech and religion. Were Americans -- liberal or conservative -- writing a Constitution completely from scratch today, they probably would agree that something akin to "freedom to drive" was more far important than the "right to bear arms." The rights of state militias (which many liberal legal theorists argue is the essence of the Second Amendment) are as much a throwback to an 18th century mind-set as restrictions on quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime (the little-remembered Third Amendment).

At the moment, of course, repealing the Second Amendment seems as politically plausible as welcoming Iraq as the 51st state. But think of how many other causes have gone from the radical to the routine in a single generation. Not even a decade ago, civil unions for gay couples seemed laughably utopian. Now it is the bipartisan middle-ground position in both parties (insert second Cheney reference). When the conservative Federalist Society was founded in 1982 with the goal of combating the liberal tilt to the federal judiciary, not even its founders could have imagined how successful they would be a quarter-century later.

Times change, generations pass and attitudes evolve. As fears of crime recede in many places, nervous homeowners may no longer be obsessed with having a .45 by the bedside to blow away phantom intruders. There is also an implicit racial component here with the bygone Archie Bunker generation having a specific image of exactly whom they feared climbing in a window at night. Even the fearsome NRA may well sharply decline as a political force, much as once-fierce-jawed interest groups like the American Legion and the labor movement have grown increasingly toothless over the past quarter-century.

Against this backdrop, liberals should look at the firearms issue from a long-term perspective, instead of going into a fetal crouch over how gun control will play in the next election. A repeal movement would at best take 15 to 20 years to reach critical mass, so this is not the moment to play litmus-test politics and require White House contenders to take self-defeating positions guaranteed to be excoriated in attack ads in West Virginia. But this would be an appropriate time for overly earnest gun-controllers to rethink their tone and their rhetoric to better understand why their opponents are so politically adept at tarring them as elitists. After all, hunters and marksmen no more need the Second Amendment to practice their sports than archers and race-car drivers require similar constitutional protection.

Rather than ducking a debate with the conservatives over the eternal primacy of the Second Amendment, gun-control backers should embrace it. Since right-wing Republicans are zealously championing constitutional amendments on everything from abortion to a balanced budget, it would take intellectual jujitsu for them to explain why the First Amendment is worthy of improvement (by severing flag burning from free speech), but the Second Amendment unquestionably must remain sacrosanct. For only in Tom Clancy-esque mythology are weekend hunters carrying assault weapons a bulwark against tyranny. Only in a nation forged by 18th century concerns about liberty and states' rights do firearms have a hallowed place in the Constitution.

It doesn't have to be that way. Any more than we as Americans have to continually face the real-life meaning of that gruesome, blood-soaked, gun-toting word "massacre" because of the outmoded language of the Second Amendment.

4/17/07

OPINION: Target Global Warming, Target Exxon

By Paul Rogat Loeb
 
With over 1400 local events, the April 14 National Day of Climate Action, http://www.stepitup07.org/, offered a national wakeup call, with citizens in every state raising their voice. But even as we build on this powerful day to move forward, we need to talk about why it’s been so hard for Americans to recognize the climate issue’s urgency. 
 
As recently as July 2006, the acknowledgement of the crisis by ordinary Americans lagged behind not only our counterparts in Great Britain, Germany and Japan, but also behind those polled in China, India, Argentina, Nigeria and Indonesia. U.S. citizen awareness has increased significantly in the wake of this past winter’s massive storms (even before the latest East Coast disaster) and coverage of the international scientific reports. But though between 77% and 83% of Americans now acknowledge that global warming poses a serious problem, only 55% in a January Pew poll say the issue requires immediate government action, and only 47% in the same Pew poll say that they believe it’s human caused. This means there’s still serious denial. And to dismantle its architecture means taking on the key role of ExxonMobil.
 
Those who dismiss global warming’s threat have embraced a series of arguments, retreating from one to the next as they’re trumped by reality. The planet isn’t really warming, they say. If it is, it’s due to random fluctuations or sunspots, not human-created greenhouse gases. And even if global warming is real, it will bring more benefits than problems. Wherever I go, people offer up the same rationales. Some even rattle off the names of dissenting scientists, websites, or journal articles. They dismiss the 99% unanimity of international climate scientists and scientific associations by saying those sounding the warning are all on the take and probably also personal hypocrites. 
 
“They’re just giving the government funding agencies what they want,” a student in Colorado Springs told me two weeks ago. “If they don’t, they won’t get their grants.” It’s an odd concept of pandering, given the massive challenges faced by any elected leader who takes the scientific message seriously. But the deniers insist that a handful of contrarians whose views are refuted by every major scientific study are somehow more credible than the collective judgment of practically every climate scientist in the world.
 
These arguments emerge from the standard echo chamber of Hannity, Rush, and Fox News. But the spokespeople who articulate them in these venues and others more mainstream have been overwhelmingly sponsored by Exxon. As the Union of concerned Scientists explores in their meticulously detailed report, Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air, and as George Monbiot examines in his powerful global warming book Heat, Exxon’s strategy of using a handful of industry-funded dissenters to cast doubt on an overwhelming scientific consensus was borrowed from the fight over tobacco regulation. In 1992, a major EPA report warned of the medical harm from second hand smoke. In response, Philip Morris hired the PR firm APCO to create a supposedly independent group, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), to promote scientists who’d dispute this harm. Enlisting enough other corporate supporters so the effort didn’t seem just a tobacco industry creation, TASSC’s mission echoed the phrase from a memo of fellow tobacco company Brown and Williamson, "Doubt is our product.” 
 
As part of creating that doubt, APCO’s Steven Milloy founded JunkScience.com, which would later become a key website for global warming denial. Milloy also became associated with other key climate change denial organizations, like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which has called the Kyoto accords “a power grab based on deception and fear”), and later become a columnist for Fox. Major climate denial activist Frederick Seitz also had strong tobacco industry ties, drawing $585,000 from RJ Reynolds between 1979 and 1987 before going on to the George Marshall Institute. Exxon jumped in to support these efforts early on, as part of a more general assault on government regulation and action. As the scientific consensus around global warming began to solidify, they began funding a series of studies and spokespeople to insist that mainstream scientific opinion was sharply divided. Between 1998 and 2005 the company has invested over $16 million in challenging the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, spreading the resources among at least 43 different institutions to give the appearance of a broad chorus of dissent. Whether the Heartland Institute, Alliance for Climate Strategies, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute and George Marshall Institute, they all got major Exxon support for their role in arguing that no global warming crisis existed.  Until recently, the efforts to sow doubt have worked, with the help of a compliant media and the Bush presidency. And though a number of other energy companies also participated, ExxonMobil was the critical initiator, and remained firmly denying the crisis even as other oil companies, like BP Amoco and Shell, acknowledged the gravity of the threat.
 
Many of us know Exxon’s role in climate change denial, and have avoided buying their gas for that reason. Others have avoided the company because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But we need more than individual actions. In July 2005, major environmental groups launched an international boycott. The coordinating organization, http://www.exposeexxon.org/, has played an important role in getting the word out about the company’s role. Their petition campaign for Exxon to cease funding global warming deniers and join other oil companies in making significant investments in renewable energy has generated over a half million signatures. But their effort has mostly been a media campaign, as opposed to one focusing on grassroots organizing.
 
Even with this initial pressure, though, the company seemingly begun to backtrack. This January, new CEO Rex Tillerson claimed followed strong criticism of Exxon’s actions by the British Royal Society, US Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, and in the Union of Concerned Scientists report, by announcing that they’d stopped funding “five or six” of the groups that promoted climate change skepticism. But except for the Competitive Enterprise Institute Tillerson refused to name all the individuals and groups Exxon has given money to or specify those they’ve cut off. And he gave no reason for the shift, although an Exxon spokesman did say the adverse publicity was a distraction.

Meanwhile, the company is still paying a handsome salary to former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist and Bush Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney, who Exxon hired after he resigned following media reports of how he edited the reports of climate scientists to render them innocuous. They even sponsor a website aimed at British primary school children, featuring a cute climate skeptic robot that claims the cause of global warming remains uncertain. And ExxonMobil continues to be rated lower environmentally than every other major multinational oil company. While the company’s stated shift may be hopeful, it’s by no means certain that it’s anything but greenwashing.
 
Solving global warming will be hard enough, even without orchestrated opposition. And off course we need to focus on where we need to go, like StepItUp’s call for an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But if we only do that and ignore the counterattacks, our efforts will continue to get Swift Boated, and it will be far harder to build the necessary political will for them to succeed. Targeting Exxon pressures them and other corporations to stop trying to undermine the scientific consensus and to stop blocking attempts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions—as in a recent Competitive Enterprise Institute ad that proclaimed about CO2, “they call it pollution, we call it life.” It also highlights the roots of why so many Americans have resisted the reality of the crisis—how what many of us think this is just our personal skepticism is product of a deliberate disinformation campaign. 
 
Some questionable companies are hard to boycott—where do you start with Haliburton? But ExxonMobil has a presence in every city in this country. Their gas stations are accessible for rallies and picketing. Every dollar that their stations lose and every bit of adverse press coverage will create further pressure. 
 
Imagine if enough organized effort was focused so that Exxon had to sell or close some of their stations. Or if enough Americans understood their manipulative role so that both the company and the groups they’d supported lost all media and political credibility. Think about how INFACT (now the Corporate Accountability Campaign) ran their largely successful campaigns against Nestle and GE. Or how the United Farm Workers conducted their grape boycotts. Or the successful recent campaign of Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers to get Taco Bell and McDonalds to require their subcontractors to pay higher wages to tomato pickers. These efforts didn’t just call on individuals not to buy specific products from the problematic companies. They actively organized, in communities, in congregations, and on campuses. They convinced their fellow citizens to withhold their dollars in a way that created the maximum public attention. 
 
Global warming solutions exist, and we need to forge the political will to enact them, building on existing programs like California’s “million solar roof” legislation and the climate change initiatives of the European nations. But even as public attitudes begin to shift, and major corporations like GE, Dupont and BP Amoco are at least talking about taking the issue seriously, Exxon continues to impede political progress. To prevent a future of endless climate-driven disasters, we’re going to have to keep talking about their role.
 
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See http://www.paulloeb.org/   To receive his monthly articles email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

4/15/07

STYLE BUBBLE on Uniqlo, Phillip Lim, Sarah Locke, and Karl Lagerfeld

By Susie Bubble

What? It's the U word again!

LONDON -- If I keep extolling Uniqlo's virtues and bigging them up, I'm afraid I'm going to turn into their spokesperson or something but really I can't harp on enough about them. In total, there have been 4 posts dedicated to Uniqlo. Well, what can I say! For a fairly style-complex child like me, when the simple stuff is as cheap and as good as this, what I can I say except 'More more more!' and as I have warned, the 'more' for spring is a treat indeed. The two forthcoming collections for Uniqlo's Designers Invitation Project will probably spark the most interest State-side seeing as it's NYFW faves Alice Roi and Phillip Lim. The collection is up and will be available to buy from the 20th April in all stores worldwide (do New Yorkers forsee a bit of a frenzy at their Soho flagship store?). I have to say, the Alice Roi collection is a little on the bland side. That's an odd statement considering Uniqlo's style methodology but most of it errs on the side of bad-simple save for these two dresses.

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Phillip Lim's collection however says good-simple all over. Well simple with a hit of plaid and sweet shapes and of course Lim's trademark way of making women think 'Hey... I really want to wear that...'. Once I have done my Uniqlo haul I'll have my frollocking in LA sun outfits all ready (indeed I will be gingerly venturing out to the West Coast... will I be peturbed/exalted? Who knows..). I'm also hoping to bust out with my Uniqlo Lim paired with Real Lim outfits (I have surprisingly garnered quite a few real Lim pieces). It's all a little Lim overkill and a bit '90's head to toe one label' syndrome but frankly, I just don't give a toss.

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Miró lives on

I want a happy medium between severely mminimalist and exhuberantly outrageous. Strong, bold, almost starkly so graphics on simple garments fall into that happy medium. I seem to be uncovering more and more RCA grad gems as I have completely fallen for Sarah Locke's AW07-8 collection. Combining the swirls and surrealist shapes of Miró with simple, almost austerely cut shirts, skirts and trousers. It's not print. It's not screaming out at you but it's not a shrinking violet either. The best thing is that even for such a new designer, Locke has got onto the e-boutique train and right now her spring summer 2007 collection is available to buy online. But I'm absolutely sallivating for her AW07-8 collection. Miro-esque, strong graphical garments are just the exact sort of thing I'm craving right now.

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Taking the K route

Whilst we speculate whether Hedi Slimane will move into womenswear territory, Karl Lagerfeld has launched his lower priced K diffusion line that is an androgynous range of skinny skinny sillhouettes which is contributing to the popularity of unisex/ambiguous clothing. Mr Lagerfeld says
"Today's stye is not that different for women or men. My style is very at ease with this 'ambiguity. This is the base of a wardrobe - and one can add all kinds of things and fantasies."

I'm also liking the idea of taking pieces from this as a base especially with a price range of £47 to £148. Though, I haven't quite mastered the look of androgyny as I have lamented about before, perhaps edging into it with K range isn't such a bad idea. It's like the quickie route to androgyny, all worked out for you in these looks. I'm not usually one to take the easy way out but for a style aesthetic that i find quite difficult to configure into my wardrobe, there is no shame in taking the fashion high road! I'm not sure how confident I would be rocking the complete femme Karl Lagerfeld look but a skinny tie here and a white shirt surely won't do any harm. The line will be available from July in department stores
worldwide.

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