Reason articles from August 2002

Reason archives from August 2002

Editor's note.(Editorial)
August 1, 2002... WHILE READING reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey's cover story, "Forever Young: The New Scientific Search for Immortality" (page 26), I couldn't stop thinking of my parents, both of whom died within the past few years. My father was...

Letters.
August 1, 2002... Hollywood vs. the Internet I'd like to answer Mike Godwin's unasked question: "Nobody's asking ordinary people what they want" ("Hollywood vs. the Internet," May). Here are my ordinary credentials: married, middle income, late 20s,...

Anti-Drug anxiety. (Trouble at the Propaganda Mill).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... THE ALLIANCE THAT has brought us screaming lectures from a frying pan--wielding model and murder confessions from innocent-looking coke sniffers is showing signs of stress. In May a study finding that such propaganda has not reduced teenagers'...

DNA dough-re-mi. (Creative Copyrighting).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... A PRETTY GIRL may be like a melody, but the music of her DNA could have biotech companies whistling all the way to the bank. An executive at Maxygen, a California biotech firm, has suggested that if DNA sequences were converted to digital music...

30 years ago.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... "While much of the tedious homework has yet to be completed, Stanford University's distinguished Professor of Genetics and Biology, Doctor Joshua Lederberg, feels that human clonal reproduction is only a few years away." Winston L. Duke,...

Wine fine. (The Price of Drink).(Ohio law would double the price of wine)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... A FED-UP CONSUMER calls it "socialism." A fed-up retailer calls it "state-sponsored gouging." They're referring to an Ohio law that requires vintners, distributors, and retailers to jack up the price of a bottle of wine a total of 135 percent...

Second thoughts. (Ashcroft's 'Reasonable Restrictions').(John Ashcroft, General attorney; United States)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN Ashcroft has drawn harsh criticism from anti-gun activists for noting that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms. Blinded by their outrage, activists have failed to notice that his...

Sources.(www.christiansforcannabis.com)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... "Woe to those who make unjust laws," reads Isaiah 10:1-2. "Do not accuse a man for no reason--when he has done you no harm," bids Proverbs 3:29-30. Those scriptural quotations and others have been culled by the true believers at...

The ruling Communist Party. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Protests by citizens near government buildings show that democracy in Vietnam has become "excessive," the head of the ruling Communist Party says. Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh explains that citizens with complaints should confine...

The Rancho Bernardo High School. (Brickbats).(dancing uniforms)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Vice Principal Rita Wilson wanted to make sure that girls were dressed appropriately at a dance held by the Rancho Bernardo High School in suburban San Diego. Specifically, she wanted to make sure they were wearing bras and were not wearing...

Frankie Colley, 11, recently spent 15 minutes locked in a freezer at his Toledo. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Frankie Colley, 11, recently spent 15 minutes locked in a freezer at his Toledo, Michigan, elementary school after he denied throwing food in the lunchroom. He escaped only when another student let him out at the end of the lunch period. Two...

Deseret News reporter Jerry Spangler could get up to 30 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Deseret News reporter Jerry Spangler could get up to 30 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. His crime? Writing an article about a diesel spill without reporting the spill to local authorities. The accident occurred after a supplier pumped fuel into...

The National Capital Commission's Ottawa River Parkway. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Sonny Bad'aan must tear down his dream house. It cost him $500,000 Canadian to build, but according to a judge it sits too close to the National Capital Commission's Ottawa River Parkway. The house is only 4.8 meters from the NCC fence, not the...

Harold Wilson is the Canadian government's federal ethics counselor. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Harold Wilson is the Canadian government's federal ethics counselor. He's supposed to enforce the nation's conflict-of-interest laws, which are meant to keep the prime minister and his cabinet in line. But some charge that he is acting more as...

Two police officers from Raleigh, North Carolina, traveled to Wilson, North Carolina, to conduct a class on submachine gun handling. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Two police officers from Raleigh, North Carolina, traveled to Wilson, North Carolina, to conduct a class on submachine gun handling. But when they arrived, they found that their bags-- containing a handgun, a machine gun, and several clips of...

Following the strip. (Medical Privacy in Florida).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... THE FLORIDA legislature has declined to go along with Gov. Jeb Bush's attempt to turn a family problem into a problem for the whole state. In January, Bush's daughter Noelle was nabbed while using a forged prescription to procure the...

High Court. (The Private Lives of Judges).(pot and the law)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... CAN A JUDGE unwind after work by smoking pot? Phoenix judge Philip Marquardt did. Convicted twice on marijuana charges, he lost his law license in 1991. A decade later, two convicts whom he sentenced to death in the 1980s are arguing that...

Balance Sheet.
August 1, 2002... Flatland Russia's flat tax experiment succeeds. A 13 percent flat rate produced a 28 percent revenue gain in 2001, spurring a cut in corporate levies from 35 percent to 24 percent. The government also plans to simplify the rate for small...

Building crisis. (Data).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... That housing prices have held up in the midst of the stock market downturn is considered a blessing by many economists--and by the nearly seven in 10 families that own their homes. But it's a cause of concern for local pols and academics who...

Trashing trailer parks. (No Mobile Homes?).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Two PEOPLE WERE murdered recently in Beulah in the Pines, a trailer park in the aptly named town of Micro, North Carolina. There are reports of drug dealing there, too. According to Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell, the park is "probably...

Potus and the brain. (Soundbite).(Tevi Troy)(Brief Article)(Interview)
August 1, 2002... Tevi Troy, author of intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians? (Rowman & Littlefield), has some advice for presidents: Don't be an intellectual yourself, but don't ignore intellectuals. And don't...

Road show: the rock star and the treasury secretary demonstrate the limits to aid. (Columns).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... THE RECENT AFRICAN poverty safari of U2 frontman Bono and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill taught the world many things. Chief among the lessons: Publicity stunts still work. True, the Odd Couple comparisons, all that starched shirt vs. blue...

Spin this: the trouble with Bill O'Reilly. (Columns).
August 1, 2002... To HIS DETRACTORS, Bill O'Reilly, the tough-talking host of the phenomenally popular Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor, exemplifies the meanness and vulgarity of public discourse. The leftist media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in...

Banned in brisbane: Australia is outlawing fun. Who's next? (Rant).(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... "YOU CAN'T RAISE a child in Australia," a justifiably horrified friend told me when I announced that my wife and I would be moving to her hometown of Sydney. "They've banned Grand Theft Auto 3!"--a wildly popular video game notorious for its...

Forever young: the new scientific search for immortality.
August 1, 2002... GOAT TESTICLE TRANSPLANTS. Elixirs of jade. Inhaling the breath of virgins. Injecting crushed dog gonads. Drinking radioactive waters. These are just a few of the ways people have sought to lengthen their lives and renew their vitality. The...

Needing the unnecessary: the democratization of luxury.
August 1, 2002... IF YOU WANT to understand material culture at the beginning of the 21st century, you must understand the overwhelming importance of unnecessary material. If you are looking for the one unambiguous result of modern capitalism, of the industrial...

Off the books: the benefits of free enterprise that economic statistics miss.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... AMERICA'S CONSUMER CULTURE is all around us. It's along our highways, studded with shopping malls, fast food joints, and flashy neon signs. It's in our homes, filled with gadgets, furnishings, toys, and closets of clothes. It permeates the...

Sins of the fathers: is child molestation a sickness or a crime?
August 1, 2002... WE USE WORDS to label and help us comprehend the world around us. At the same time, many of the words we use are like distorting lenses: They make us misperceive and hence misjudge the object we look at. As Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the...

Big Daddy: the dictator novel and the liberation of Latin America.(The Feast of the Goat)
August 1, 2002... The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Liosa, translated by Edith Grossman, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 404 pages, $25 IN THOSE HEADY days in 1967 when Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his fellow writers of the Latin American literary...

My sweet bore: explaining a former beatle's artistic slide.(Behind Sad Eyes: The Life of George Harrison)
August 1, 2002... As a longtime George Harrison fan--I am surely one of the five or six people in America who bought his 1982 turkey Gone Troppo upon its release--I studied with special care the reactions to his death last November. Most of the obits described...

Misunderstanding media: we all swim the torrent.
August 1, 2002... Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, by Todd Gitlin, New York: Metropolitan Books, 260 pages, $2 You MAY REMEMBER Joe Clark, an autocratic high school principal who briefly became famous in the late...

Traces of genius: is art sullied by technology?
August 1, 2002... THOMAS EAKINS (1844-1916) has long been regarded as the outstanding American painter of the 19th century; his dramatically lit portraits have even given him a reputation as the American Rembrandt. So in the 1990s, when researchers started...

Knave of torts: cooler coffee for $3 million and other lawyer bargains.(Why Lawsuits Are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law)
August 1, 2002... Why Lawsuits Are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law, by Carl T. Bogus, New York: NYU Press, 272 pages, $34.95 "WHAT'S GOOD FOR the country is good for General Motors," Charles Wilson, a former...

Dolled up: authoritarian regimes play make-believe. (Artifact).
August 1, 2002... HER NAME IS Sara, and she's the new "national doll" of Iran. Developed by Iran's Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, Sara promotes "traditional values." More to the point, she's intended to displace Barbie....

Philadelphia freedom.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2002... Philadelphia, where America's founders gathered to declare independence and defend liberty, has struck another blow for freedom--and one that could be nearly as historic. This spring Philadelphia's School Reform Commission (SRC) voted to...