Reason articles from February 2004

Reason archives from February 2004

Control freaks.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
February 1, 2004... THE THEME OF this issue might be dubbed "control freaks." Several of this month's stories unmask ways in which the relatively powerful try to boss around the relatively powerless--typically with impunity and almost always in the name of some...

Beyond Public and Private.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... As someone who has successfully opposed formation of two local Business Improvement Districts (BIDS) in San Leandro, California, I was disappointed by Jesse Walker's article ("Beyond Public and Private" November), which betrayed a lack of...

Roy Moore's monument.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... In her article on Judge Roy Moore's attempt to keep a monument to the Ten Commandments in Alabama's state judicial building ("Roy Moore's Monument," November), Cathy Young ignored the 10th Amendment. While some federal-power-grabbing Supreme...

The Spam Wars.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... Wendy Grossman's "The Spam Wars" (November) was interesting and informative. However, I believe that the economic methods for fighting spare were given short shrift. One of the reasons the "penny per e-mail" method is too often dismissed is...

Queer science.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... In her review and indictment of J. Michael Bailey's book ("Queer science" November), Deirdre McCloskey uses no evidence to refute his findings. Furthermore, she fails to explain just how any of Bailey's theories would be harmful to the...

Reason news.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... We're happy to announce that with this issue, Jesse Walker becomes managing editor of reason. Brian Doherthy, returning after a six-month leave to write a book about the Burning Man festival due out from Little, Brown and Company this summer,...

The gipper and the hedgehog.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... Glenn Garvin writes that Jimmy Carter has a degree in nuclear physics ("The Gipper and the Hedgehog," November). Carter does not have a degree in nuclear physics, nor does he have a degree in physics. Carter has a B.S. from the U.S. Naval...

Where the wild suits are: satire as "libel".(Citings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... IF THIN-SKINNED Texas officials get their way, the satirists at The Onion had better watch out... or at least begin printing "Just Kidding" in huge red letters across each page. In 1999 Denton County Judge Darlene Whitten sentenced...

Sweatshops forever: oppression raises wages.(Citings)
February 1, 2004... WANT TO IMPROVE the lives of poorworkers in developing countries? Then rush out an d buy a pair of Nikes or Levi Strauss jeans, says a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors decided to test the burgeoning...

25 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... "It's all too easy to be lulled into a false sense of optimism by the success of airline deregulation.... Despite studies showing the immense cost of regulation... most of the agencies are solidly entrenched not just in the political system...

No-confidence votes: copyrights vs. public debate.(Citings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... ELECTRONIC touchscreen voting was supposed to rescue us from the vagaries of butterfly ballots and dimpled chads, but e-voting is turning out to have its own share of problems. And far from displaying the openness that is the hallmark of a...

Only rock 'n' roll? radio killed the Soviet star.(Citings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... THE FALL OF communism has been attributed to many factors, from the system's economic failings to the hard line taken by Ronald Reagan. Hungarian ambassador Andras Simonyi, who in November spoke at Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,...

Quotes.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... "Good taste is the worst vice ever invented." --Dame Edith Sitwell, English poet and eccentric, in New Zealand's Christ-church Press, November 1, 2003 "The best way to end this problem and the war it has brought us is to legalize...

Source.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The world's power-house economy to beat is... Finland's? So says the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report, which ranks the long-term growth potential of 102 countries by examining the macroeconomic environment, public...

Brickbats.
February 1, 2004... Moscow authorities are considering a ban on all public kissing, even between spouses. Video store owner Marty Arno faces $6,000 in fines because health inspectors caught him with an item banned in New York City businesses: an ashtray. ...

Junkman jailed: is outsider art a crime?(Citings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... ALAN DAVIS, 47, says he's a political prisoner. The Florida artist spent more than a decade refusing the Seminole County authorities' demands that he clean up his yard, which until November was cluttered with airplane and auto parts, wood and...

Sin of wages: living wages, killing restaurants.(Citings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... BETWEEN ever-expanding "estimated" tax targets for tip income, draconian restaurant licensing restrictions, and proposals for menu labeling laws, you might think governments had already done their utmost to eliminate waiting tables for tips as...

Balance sheet.
February 1, 2004... Protected Shirt A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit unanimously rules that a Virginia middle school had no good reason to ban an "NRA Sports Shooting Camp" T-shirt just because it had a gun on it. The school district...

Big-Spender Bush.(Data)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... George W. Bush is a fiscal conservative, right? Maybe not. Federal discretionary spending, which grew at an annual average of 2.4 percent during the 1990s, was up 12.5 percent in fiscal year 2003. Since 2001, total federal spending has grown by...

Alt business: mags for adult rockers.(Citings)(Tracks)
February 1, 2004... ON NOVEMBER 18 a music Publishing subculture that had been quietly thriving far from the bright glare of Manhattan suddenly found itself thrust into the limelight. Tracks, a New York-based "music magazine for adults," made its ballyhooed debut....

Bad report card: strange study habits at GAO.(Citings)(General Accounting Office)
February 1, 2004... DOES PRIVATE management of failing public schools make a difference? A recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report looked for a consistent trend, but with little success. Comparing privately managed public schools with similar public schools...

Patriot vs. Patriot act.(Soundbite)
February 1, 2004... For decades Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff has been one of America's most trenchant defenders of civil liberties. The most recent of his many books, The War on the Bill of Rights--and the Gathering Resistance (Seven Stories Press), was...

A week of eating dangerously: searching for detente between man and beast.(Column)
February 1, 2004... JUMPY IS THE name of my eldest son's tree frog. He is misnamed, in that he does not jump. He barely moves, preferring to bask under a heat lamp, awaiting his next live cricket. Even with lunch skittering about the cage, Jumpy barely bats an...

Hating Jews: when do anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism overlap?
February 1, 2004... LAST NOVEMBER, AN arson attack against a Jewish school in Paris prompted Le Monde, a left-leaning daily hardly known for pro-Israeli sympathies, to editorialize that "disapproval and condemnation of Israel's policy in the Palestinian...

Political body snatchers: how can you tell the evil party from the stupid party?(Rant)
February 1, 2004... AS AMERICANS INNOCENTLY continue reporting to polling places to split the difference between the nation's two political parties, the parties themselves are enacting another remake of Disney's Cartesian teen comedy Freaky Friday. The bodies of...

Principal stalin.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... JUST CALL ME "UNCLE JOE" KIDS W-WHY, PRINCIPAL STALIN! TO WHAT DO WE OWE THE PLEASURE-- I RECEIVED AN ANONYMOUS TIP THAT WE HAVE A SOCIOPATH IN OUR MIDTST... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A-HA! SO YOU WERE ABOUT TO GO ON A HOMICIDAL...

"Dominate. Intimidate. Control." The sorry record of the Transportation Security Administration.(Cover Story)
February 1, 2004... WHEN 9/11 EXPOSED the holes in American airport and airline security, the Bush administration and Congress responded with the usual Washington panacea: a new federal agency. Congress quickly deluged the new Transportation Security...

In Defense of derivatives: between Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing, the controversial financial instruments have gotten a bad rap. Here's the truth.
February 1, 2004... THREE OF THE six largest bankruptcies in American history--WorldCom, Enron, and Global Crossing--occurred between December 2001 and July 2002, shattering investor confidence and helping to knock 22 percent off the Dow Jones Industrial Average....

Injustice by default: how the effort to catch "deadbeat dads" ruins innocent men's lives.
February 1, 2004... TONY PIERCE REMEMBERS vividly the exact moment in November 2000 when the state of California began trampling on his life. "There was a loud angry pounding at my door at five o'clock in the morning" he recalls. "Very scary." It was a female...

Teenage wasteland: critics on the left and right falsely portray kids as passive victims of mass media.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's children, edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 267 pages, $29.95 Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, by Alissa Quart,...

Goodbye, Space Child: the space age's bureaucratic dreams sputtered out.
February 1, 2004... Anybody seen Space Child lately? You surely remember him: He was the big-eyed icon of a transcendent tomorrow, the trans-evolutionary infant who appears at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), after the big cosmic light...

Bush's bad foreign policy: unilateralism and remaking the world don't mix.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 238 pages, $22.95 PERHAPS NO COUNTRY in history had ever enjoyed the position that the United...

In God's country: thanks be to the American Atheist.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair, by Bryan F. Le Beau, Nero York: New York University Press, 321 pages, $29.95 BEFORE THE U.S. Constitution, before long division, before sentence diagramming, the teachers at Blessed Sacrament School made...

Every man a demiurge: a matrix of your own.
February 1, 2004... IF YOU WANT TO understand the Matrix trilogy, think of it as a capsule history of baby boom rock. The original Matrix is a three-chord riff of a movie: a simple, familiar idea--"What if reality is a great big fake?"--amplified and transformed...

Visionary art.(Architect)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... THESE SPECTACLES, auctioned in the fall by Sotheby's, are said to have belonged to J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), the British painter whose wholly original treatment of luminosity late in his career inspired the Impressionists and revolutionized...