Reason articles from February 2007

Reason archives from February 2007

Attack Ads Are Good for You!(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2007... I appreciated the historical context provided by David Mark's article on negative political ads ("Attack Ads Are Good for You!," November). But I'm afraid the most powerful recent examples of the genre contradict his argument. Mark cites...

Welcome to Niche Nation.(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2007... Chris Anderson and Nick Gillespie seemed to hit a wall when it came to contemplating the impact of the Long Tail on politics ("Welcome to Niche Nation," November). Anderson says, "We have a scarcity effect in our ability to act on the political...

Lay Off the Fatties.(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2007... Thanks to Jacob Sullum for his thoughtful review of my book Fat Politics ("Lay Off the Fatties," November). Although I disagreed with a few characterizations and points of emphasis (e.g., uterine cancer deaths rates are extremely low), I...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction notice)
February 1, 2007... In "Space Travel for Fun and Profit" (January), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's COTS contract was incorrectly described as having been given to a partnership of Rocketplane and Space X. In fact, the award was divided between...

Shaq attack: SWAT teams with star power.(NBA star Shaquille O'Neal assisted police in a raid, Special weapons and tactics units)
February 1, 2007... ON SEPTEMBER 23, 2006, a SWAT team stormed the rural Virginia home of A.J. Nuckols, his wife, and their two children. As if the shock of having his house invaded by a SWAT team weren't enough, Nuckols had a second surprise: a celebrity...

No pictures, please: speed camera vigilantes.(Citings)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... THE UNITED KINGDOM is one of the most surveilled societies in the West, its 60 million citizens monitored by 4 million cameras, including 6,000 traffic cameras. The latter have touched off a wave of protests that are making politicians and...

25 years ago in reason.(Citings)
February 1, 2007... "The USPS has indicated that it would agree to legislation limiting its participation in electronic mail systems. Private telecommunications firms had worried that the subsidized Postal Service would compete with them in sending messages...

Antisocial studies: civil rights in Britain.(Citings)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IN 1998 PRIME Minister Tony Blair added the word ASBO to the British lexicon. Short for "Antisocial Behavior Order," an ASBO is a civil order that allows a judge to bar a particular individual from engaging in otherwise lawful behavior. Local...

The Kyoto poll: sanitation beats warming.(environmentalists survey of world's problems)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IN OCTOBER THE maverick environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg asked 24 ambassadors and high-level diplomats to answer everyone's favorite fantasy question: If you could spend $50 billion to better the world, what would your first priority be? In 2004...

Supersized drivers: does fat cause global warming?(researchers at the University of Illinois' report)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... FAT PEOPLE are responsible for global warming! Or so claims a study by two researchers at the University of Illinois in the October/November Engineering Economist. Industrial engineer Sheldon Jacobson and his doctoral student Laura McLay report...

Quotes.(Quotation)
February 1, 2007... "We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can't get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers. You don't have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it's not too...

Tax man of steel: dumping on anti-dumping duties.(Citings)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IN OCTOBER THE U.S. International Trade Commission held hearings on whether to revoke anti-dumping duties on steel imports from 16 different countries, including the U.K. and Japan. The duties penalize foreign steel producers for failing to...

Snap, crackle, poison? G.M. rice scare.(United States Department of Agriculture announces genetically modified rice safe to use)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IN AUGUST THE U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that some of the American long-grain rice crop had been commingled with a strain of genetically modified (G.M.) rice. Activists at Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth began talking...

Death clock: secondhand smoke hype.(secondhand smoke increases the risk of heart disease, research)
February 1, 2007... LAST SUMMER, in a press release that accompanied his report on secondhand smoke, Surgeon General Richard Carmona claimed "even brief exposure to secondhand smoke" adversely affects the cardiovascular system and increases the risk of heart...

Muddy rules: when can you curse on TV.(Federal Communications Commission affirms right to swear during a newscast)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IN A RARE move away from stricter regulation of on-air speech, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reaffirmed the right to swear during a newscast. After the four major TV networks filed suit against the commission, arguing that...

Police in Treovis, England, have warned Gordon MacKillop that he could be charged under the Protection From Harassment Act.(Police England)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Police England, have warned Gordon MacKillop that he could be charged under the Protection From Harassment Act. MacKillop, they claim, placed "a garden gnome with intent to cause harassment." MacKiliop says he put the gnome, which is dressed...

Also in Great Britain, government officials say hospitals are too efficient.(government forces hospitals to maintain minimum waiting time for patients)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Also in Great Britain, government officials say hospitals are too efficient. At least six of the nation's health trusts have forced hospitals to create minimum waiting times for patients to receive treatment. Officials say the hospitals have...

In Saudi Arabia, the provincial government of Makkah has banned the sale of cats and dogs.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... In Saudi Arabia, the provincial government of Makkah has banned the sale of cats and dogs. According To the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, people were taking their pets out into public and upsetting families...

Three NYPD officers have pleaded not guilty to breaking into a Brooklyn massage parlor, ripping out a surveillance camera, and stealing a videotape.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Three NYPD officers have pleaded not guilty to breaking into a Brooklyn massage parlor, ripping out a surveillance camera, and stealing a videotape. They apparently were trying to destroy evidence that a previous prostitution bust at the...

A court found Pitchfork Records owner Michael Cohen not guilty of selling a bootleg CD, but he still can't get around 600 CDs seized by police back.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... A court found Pitchfork Records owner Michael Cohen not guilty of selling a bootleg CD, but he still can't get around 600 CDs seized by police back. In asking for the albums, Cohen agreed that some of them were bootlegs and selling them would...

Merchtem, Belgium, has banned the use of French in schools.(regulation)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Merchtem, Belgium, has banned the use of French in schools. Parents and children may speak only Dutch on school grounds. Merchtem lies in an area where Dutch has traditionally been the main language, but the number of French speakers is...

Security guards at the U.S. Air Force Academy's Air Academy High School handcuffed and detained three cheerleaders before a football game.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Security guards at the U.S. Air Force Academy's Air Academy High School handcuffed and detained three cheerleaders before a football game. Guards had allegedly spotted the three putting paper over the first five letters of a sign reading...

Scottish police investigated and a prosecutor cautioned soccer player Artur Boruc for allegedly making the sign of the cross during a game between the Celtics, Boruc's team, and the Rangers.(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Scottish police investigated and a prosecutor cautioned soccer player Artur Boruc for allegedly making the sign of the cross during a game between the Celtics, Boruc's team, and the Rangers. The gesture reportedly angered a section of the...

Where taxes are quickest.(time spent by companies in preparing and filing tax returns)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Nothing is certain but death and taxes, but just how excruciating either will be varies tremendously depending on the method. An October report from the World Bank charts how much time medium-sized companies in various countries spend on their...

Universal v. universal: copyrights and viral marketing.(Universal Studios contracts Special Ops Media)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... LAST YEAR Universal Studios decided to hype its movie Serenity by tapping the cult following of Firefly, the TV show that spawned the film. It hired Special Ops Media, a viral marketing company that specializes in creating buzz among bloggers,...

Sim pickings: real taxes on virtual worlds.(Jim Saxton proposes Internal Revenue Service to tax transactions over Internet)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... IF YOU WERE planning to pay your World of Warcraft orcs in cash, you might want to rethink your plans. In a press release issued on October 17, Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.), then chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, noted that "there is a...

In search of the average American.(conversation with author Sarah Igo )(Interview)
February 1, 2007... As this interview went to press, 63 percent of Americans disapproved of their president, 14 percent of adults believed in evolution, and 100 percent of politicians claimed to speak for something called "The American People." Americans have...

Peace on the border: why anti-immigration conservatives fell flat in 2006.(Columns)(Vernon Robinson)
February 1, 2007... FORMER CONGRESSIONAL candidate Vernon Robinson sounds resigned, and more than a little tired, when you ask him to explain his defeat. "The 2006 election was not a referendum on immigration," he says. "I would have liked it to be, but it didn't...

The fan fiction phenomena: what Faust, Hamlet, and Xena the Warrior Princess have in common.
February 1, 2007... BY NOW MANY people outside the peculiar world of fandom know there exists something called fan fiction--that there are reams of reader-generated stories floating around the Internet based on characters from TV, movies, and books. Fanfic has...

Smile, you're on the telescreen: universal surveillance meets universal exhibitionism.(Rant)
February 1, 2007... REALITY TV HAS many lessons to teach us, but there is one it reiterates with a frequency even parrots can't match: If you want people to behave badly, stick a camera in their faces. It doesn't matter if they're stranded on a South Pacific...

Divided we stand: what to expect from the long-awaited, much-anticipated return of gridlock.(Cover story)
February 1, 2007... As PRESIDENT BUSH astutely noted, the mid-term elections were "a thumpin'" for the Republicans. En route to losing majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP failed to pick up a single House or Senate seat formerly held by a Democrat--the...

Pot clubs in peril: are San Francisco zoning boards a bigger threat to medical marijuana than the DEA?(Drug Enforcement Administration)
February 1, 2007... ON A SUNNY SATURDAY morning last summer, the air inside the Church Street Compassion Center was thick with the scent of sweet, skunky medicine. The place felt like a neighborhood rec center. A couple of regulars were sitting on the soft, worn...

After the Damascus spring: Syrians search for freedom online.
February 1, 2007... SHORTLY AFTER I arrived in Damascus last June, Amr Nazir Salem, the minister of telecommunications and technology, told me that champress. net would be "a great site to check out." Champress was a locally produced independent news website--an...

Quotations from Chairman Milton: more than three decades of wisdom from the late champion of liberty, culled from the pages of reason.(Obituary)
February 1, 2007... MILTON FRIEDMAN, who died in November at the age of 94, was the last century's most energetic and effective advocate of liberty. He was a groundbreaking giant as a technical economist, winning a Nobel Prize in 1976. He was similarly successful...

We the living dead: the convoluted politics of zombie cinema.(Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture)(The Dominion of the Dead)(Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, by Annalee Newitz, Durham: Duke University Press, 183 pages, $21.95 Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, by Jamie Russell, Surrey: FAB Press, 309 pages,...

The National Mall goes kitsch: America's cluttered backyard shows just how hard it is for Congress to say "no.".(memorials)
February 1, 2007... Last month, several thousand people gathered on the National Mall for a "virtual groundbreaking" for a proposed memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. It's set to go up on a piece of land just off the Tidal Basin, putting it within view of the...

Our right to death: how medical breakthroughs challenge easy answers about suicide.(Unplugged: Reclaiming Our Right to Die in America)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Unplugged: Reclaiming Our Right to Die in America, by William H. Colby, New York: AMACOM, 272 pages, $24.95 IF YOU BELIEVE every person should have control of his or her mind and body, it probably seems easy to leap to a quick, smug opinion...

Realism, indignation, and American foreign policy: a radical and a neoconservative change their political stripes.(America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy)(Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, by Francis Fukuyama, New Haven: Yale University Press, 226 pages, $2; Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, by Paul...

The politics of pants: it was consumers, not marketers, that made jeans a symbol of youthful revolt.
February 1, 2007... IN THE 1950S, Levi Strauss & Co. decided to update the image of its denim clothes. Until then, the company had been depending for sales on the romantic appeal of the Gold Rush and the rugged image of the cowboy. Hell, it was still calling its...

A chilling tale of global warming.(United Nations publishes 'Tore and the Town on Thin Ice')(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... THE UNITED NATIONS has ventured into children's publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made...