Reason articles from February 2002

Reason archives from February 2002

Editor's note.
February 1, 2002... "WRITE WHAT YOU know" is the standard--and useful--advice given to all budding fiction writers. Unfortunately, that bit of wisdom is often lost on journalists and can lead to stories that are at best woefully uninformed and at worst wildly...

Letters.
February 1, 2002... Anti-Antitrust Hurray to Joseph Bast and David B. Kopel for their common sense on the Microsoft case ("Antitrust's Greatest Hits," November). As one who writes for the computer industry and consumers, I find it's often necessary to...

Naked retreat: Not in Kansas Anymore. (Citings).(nudist camp frequented by gay men, lesbians, pagans, refused permit, Toganoxie, Kansas)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... "THE PAGAN COMMUNITY is convinced it's about religion, the gay and lesbian community is sure it's about sexuality, and the naturists are certain it's about nudity," someone named Clarity wrote in a letter to users of Camp Gaea, a controversial...

25 years ago.
February 1, 2002... "One [Red Cross] official says, 'It's wrong to buy and sell blood like cabbages.' Maybe. Of course, there never seems to be any shortage of cabbages." Bill Birmingham, "Quickies" "The hippie has the right to take marijuana, walk naked...

Mission Creep: Defining Terrorism. (Citings).(Russia's war on Chechnya)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... AS THE U.S. government moves past the Afghan stage of the War on Terrorism, it will need to choose its battles cautiously. Various countries are likely to invoke the new global mandate against terror to justify egregious and unwarranted...

Patriot games: Protecting Civil Liberties. (Citings).(civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... WE'VE ALL HEARD the alarming news for civil liberties contained in the massive USA PATRIOT Act rushed into law in November. (It's an acronym, believe it or not: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to...

Train wreck: Deriding the Rails. (Citings).(National Railroad Passenger Corp. forced to reorganize, develop liquidation plan)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 1, 2002... IN NOVEMBER, THE Amtrak Reform Council concluded that the federal passenger rail service is "not capable of delivering the improvements...that are needed."The 6--5 vote came just as many Amtrak routes were packed for the first time in years, as...

British officials. (Brickbats).(officials create traffic jam in process of trying to recruit traffic police)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... To attract new recruits for the traffic police, British officials planned a TV commercial extolling their good works. To film the spot, they cordoned off part of a major highway at rush hour, backing up traffic for miles in several directions.

Florida highway patrol. (Brickbats).(officer has anxiety attack)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... When Florida Highway Patrol officer A.J. Renard pulled over a Nissan Maxima for speeding, he felt that the driver, who was of Middle Eastern origin, behaved strangely. "Some people yell at us, and some don't say a word. But this man was...

Foil potential terrorism. (Brickbats).(names removed from government buildings, Dutchess County, New York)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Hoping to foil potential terrorism, officials in New York's Dutchess County have removed the names from several government buildings, most prominently the County Office Building in Poughkeepsie. Presumably, the extra security around the...

Violence in Video Games. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Germany is notorious for its censorship of violence in video games. Many violent games are heavily edited for the market. Others are banned entirely. But that still isn't enough for officials in Goettingen. They've slapped a 700 percent higher...

China's Internet users get their access through Internet Cafes. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 1, 2002... About 20 percent of China's Internet users get their access through Internet cafes. But their ability to view uncensored news and entertainment is being seriously curtailed by a government crackdown on such spots. Some 40,000 police officers...

London's five "metric martyrs". (Brickbats).(pounds vs. grams)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... London's five "metric martyrs"--arrested for weighing their wares in pounds instead of kilos--are fighting in court to overturn their conviction. Not even the tyrannical Henry VIII tried to prohibit the sale of bananas by the pound, they argue....

"In no other industry do we allow children in the workplace". (Brickbats).(Transport and General Workers' Union against farmers' children working)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... For centuries, the children of farmers have pitched in with the family business. For one British union, that constitutes exploitation. "In no other industry do we allow children in the workplace," says Barry Leathwood, of the Transport and...

The original sequence to I Love Lucy hasn't been seen in almost 50 years. (Brickbats).(Phillip Morris)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... The original opening sequence to I Love Lucy hasn't been seen in almost 50 years. And thanks to federal rules, it may never be seen again. For the 50th anniversary of the show's debut, the cable channel TV Land wanted to restore the original...

Testing Frenzy: Drug War Idiocy. (Citings).(Tecumseh School Districy of Oklahoma's strict drug testing policies)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... THE TECUMSEH SCHOOL District of Oklahoma doesn't have a documented drug problem. Nevertheless, it has one of the strictest school drug-testing policies in the United States--so strict, in fact, that the Supreme Court will decide this spring...

Cuban confusion: Embargoed truths. (Citings).("Report from Havana: Time for a Reality Check on U.S. Policy toward Cuba" report)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... How WELL HAS the decades-old U.S. embargo of Cuba worked? The official story is that the 39-year-old time-out imposed on our island neighbor to the south of Florida has successfully isolated Fidel Castro and friends from the rest of the world....

Balance Sheet.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Question Time Two Oregon cities refuse federal requests that they question 5,000 foreigners about terrorism. Officials in Portland and Corvallis say they cannot simply question people without cause. They argue further that police would be...

Oil change. (Data).(United States oil consumption)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 1, 2002... As the media exposed our Saudi Arabian allies as double-dealing despots, attention has turned to the practical: Can the United States live without Saudi oil, which, at 1.6 million barrels a day, accounts for 14 percent of our imports? The...

Weak choice: The abortion pill. (Citings).(Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation survey on Mifepristone use)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 1, 2002... ONE YEAR AFTER the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the abortion pill Mifeprix, better known as RU-486, the Kaiser Family Foundation has released numbers regarding its actual availability to American women. In a national survey...

Space pork: NASA Watch. (Citings).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... FACED WITH A coming budget crunch, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is toying with a controversial solution: Sell off the space shuttles. An October BBC report explains why the Bush administration is leaning toward...

Dismal humanists. (Soundbite).(Brief Article)(Interview)
February 1, 2002... The eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle famously castigated economics as "the dismal science." The epithet first appeared in his 1849 screed, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question"--in which the "humanist" attacked free-market economists for...

Club Anarchy: Why high school sucks. (Citings).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... THEY DON'T CARE much for anarchy at Sissonville High. Late in 2001, the West Virginia school barred 15-year-old Katie Sierra from starting an Anarchy Club, then suspended her for three days when she leafleted students to join the club anyway....

Misunderestimating the public: Press gatekeepers may fret about information, but the average Joe is swimming in it.
February 1, 2002... IF YOU'VE SPENT any time perusing the news lately, you might get the impression that the American media are now All War, All the Time. Don't be fooled. Here inside the Beltway, the media continue to scrutinize every possible facet of a topic...

Excluded evidence: The dark side of rape shield laws.
February 1, 2002... MANY CONTINUING THREATS to civil liberties in America are completely unrelated to terrorism or to national security. Furthermore, many civil libertarians are silent about these abuses, because they are motivated by "progressive" goals--such as...

The Media and GI Joe: How the press gets the military wrong--and why it matters.
February 1, 2002... BACK IN OCTOBER, when U.S. Army Rangers first started to fight on the ground in Afghanistan, Washington Post reporter Greg Schneider drew the job of explaining the role of those elite infantrymen to the paper's readers. Drawing on Army manuals,...

Prescription panic: How the anthrax scare challenged drug patents.
February 1, 2002... BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, U.S. policy toward pharmaceutical patents was clear: The interests of the patent holder came first. However, the anthrax scare that surfaced in October has managed to shake that policy to its roots. By the time the shaking...

Threatened by success: One charter school's fight against the education establishment.
February 1, 2002... IN 1998, EDISON SCHOOLS INC., the country's leading for-profit school management company, took over one of San Francisco's worst schools, coincidentally named Thomas Edison Elementary. By its third year, the K-5 school, now renamed Edison...

Watching the numbers: Unlike district schools, Edison Charter must succeed to survive.
February 1, 2002... WHILE RISING TEST scores on California's statewide test saved Edison Charter Academy from takeover by the San Francisco Unified School District, falling test scores have now put the charter's future at risk. Spring 2001 test scores were...

Teen-Demon Tracts: Why baby-boomer parents fear their children.
February 1, 2002... The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need From Parents to Become Adults, by Terri Apter, New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 288 pages, $24.95 Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child's Life, by James...

Uneasy ride: The cultural contradiction of Charlie Daniels.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... When Country Music Television held a benefit for the victims of the September 11 attacks, one performer who'd been invited didn't appear. Charlie Daniels had hoped to play a new song at the October concert, but organizers worried that its...

Debunking Green Myths: An environmentalist gets it right.
February 1, 2002... The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, by Bjorn Lomborg, New York: Cambridge University Press, 496 pages, $27.95 MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM, born of the radical movements of the 1960s, has often made recourse...

The Potato Whisperer: Surprising wisdom from a greenish gardener.
February 1, 2002... Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, New York: Random House, 271 pages, $24.95 IN BOTANY OF DESIRE, Michael Pollan examines the coevolution of plants and human beings from what he acknowledges is "a somewhat unconventional angle: I take...

Gilligan vs. Homer Simpson: Pop culture gets globalized.
February 1, 2002... WHEN THE Los Angeles Times named Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield) one of the best books of 2001, it was almost certainly the first time that such a commendation was lavished on a...

Aesthetic karma. (Artifact).(Buddhist sculpture destroyed by Taliban)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... SHOULD THE BUDDHAS destroyed last spring by the Taliban be rebuilt? A group called the New 7 Wonders Society wants to recreate the bigger of the two blasted statues, with the support of a U.N.-recognized Swiss institute concerned with Afghan...

Service Economy: First-draft suggestions for a real draft proposal.(humorous treatment of United States draft policy during Afghanistan Conflict, 2001)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... "FOR THE FIRST time in our history we are entering a war of significant size...without drafting young men to fight the threat," Charles Moskos and Paul Glastris wrote recently in The Wasbington Monthly. For Moskos, a Northwestern University...