Reason articles from July 2002

Reason archives from July 2002

Editor's Note.(Editorial)
July 1, 2002... IF, AS THIS month's cover story suggests, we are what we drive, then I've got some explaining to do (see "Four-Wheel-Drive Fantasies," page 26). Consider the cars I've owned since I got my driver's license 22 years ago. They include a 1970...

Letters.
July 1, 2002... Sound judgment Cathy Young calls the Deaf Pride movement a "reductio ad absurdum" ("Sound Judgment," April). Is that Latin for nucking flits? Deaf parents refusing to allow their deaf daughter a cochlear implant for "cultural" reasons is...

Child labor lost. (Kiddie Umpire Crackdown).(playball)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... THE MOST SUCCINCT critic of overly restrictive child labor laws in the U.S. turns out to be a kid himself. "It kind of stinks," 12-yearold Brian Clennon told the Chicago Tribune, "because there's absolutely no point to [working] if you're...

Disappearing divide. (The Poor get Connected).(more people going online)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... IN RESPONSE TO a new survey gauging Americans' online activity between 1997 and 2001, the pressure group Children's Partnership cited a continuing digital divide. On one side, said the partnership in a February report, are the connected,...

Internet toolkit. (Social Capital Online).(one-economy.org)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... SOME DON'T THINK the digital divide is closing fast enough. Among them is the Washington, D.C-based nonprofit one-economy.org, created in July 2000 to help low-income Americans get online. But far more interesting is the Web site's attention to...

Green grants. (Bureaucratic Spending Spree).(pork barrel)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... THE ENVIRONMENTAL Protection Agency (EPA) is legendary for tangling up businesses in red tape. Yet when it comes to passing out millions in taxpayer money, it exhibits a casual, devil may-care attitude. In 1999 the agency passed out $1.3...

Wireless revolution. (Defiant Indians).(native indians demand to be allowed to use spread spectrum technology)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A BAND OF American Indians is about to challenge the Federal Communications Commission (Fcc), using their reservations' sovereignty to embrace technologies blocked by the U.S. government. Government regulations assume that radio...

Great white choice. (Canadian Vouchers).(education)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... MANY AMERICANS CRY out for Canadian-style state-financed and state-managed health care. But they might instead consider importing the Canadian Approach to school choice. The experience of our neighbors to the north may point the way toward...

Higher learning. (Campus Drug Wars).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... AT A RECENT drug legalization rally at the University of California at Los Angeles, defiant students smoked joints on the grass. Meanwhile, sober administrators circulated yellow flyers warning that drug convictions are grounds for denial of...

Less than zero. (The Real Cost of Smoking).(report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... SUPPOSE YOU EARN $100,000 a year, invest well, and decide to retire at 65 rather than 70. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), you have just cost "society" half a million bucks. In an April 12 report, the...

25 years ago.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... "It is a myth democratic political procedures and what our elites are pleased to call foreign policy 'effectiveness' reinforce each other. In fact, there is a trade-off." Earl C. Ravenal, "Non-Intervention: A Libertarian Approach to...

"War on terror". (Source).(beyond the war on terrorism; China)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Chinese government has contributed to the "war on terror" by amping up the political and religious repression of ethnic Ulighurs, Muslims in the country's far west Xinjiang province. Acting on new anti-terror legislation authorities have...

County Commissioner Ronda Storms of Hillsborough, Florida, has made a name for herself by compaigning against sexually explicit material. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... County Commissioner Ronda Storms of Hillsborough, Florida, has made a name for herself by compaigning against sexually explicit material. These days she's in trouble for distributing it. In April, Storms received an e-mail that contained a nude...

Police arrested a man in Birmingham, England, for throwing an object. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Police arrested a man in Birmingham, England, for throwing an object onto the field during a soccer match between the Chelsea and Fulham teams. Fulham manager Jean Tigana was hit by the dangerous projectile-a stalk of celery.

Doug Nicoll faces a year in jail and $2,500 fine. (Brickbats).(penalties for trimming wetland plants)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Doug Nicoll faces a year in jail and $2,500 fine. His crime? Trimming the bushes on his property in Norfolk, Virginia. Nicoll didn't know the property had been designated a wetland, where city law says it's illegal to cut or remove plants...

Delegates to British Common wealth conference on democracy. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Delegates to British Common wealth conference on democracy and the media voted down resolution to condemn Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's crackdown on independent media. Britain, India, and Australia backed the move. But African members of...

An Egyptian court has ordered that posters for the movie So That Our Lord May Love Your be taken down. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... An Egyptian court has ordered that posters for the movie So That Our Lord May Love Your be taken down. The ads feature scantily clad women near the word Lord. "This contradicts religious and spiritual values in Egyptian society," the court...

Cuba has banned sales to the public of computers, along with photocopiers, printers, and mimeograph machines. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Cuba has banned sales to the public of computers, along with photocopiers, printers, and mimeograph machines. Officials have rufused to comment on the move, other than to blame Cuba's lack of computers on the U.S. economic embargo. But the...

Norway's government has unveiled a plan to mandate that corporate boards be at least 40 percent female. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Norway's government has unveiled a plan to mandate that corporate boards be at least 40 percent female. State-run companies have a year to comply other companies must meet the quotas by 2005. To be fair, the measure would also Mandate that at...

The Northern Ireland Assembly is considering restrictions on the sale and possession of crossbows. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Northern Ireland Assembly is considering restrictions on the sale and possession of crossbows. Currently anyone over 18 can own a crossbow. But in recent months severa1 people have attacked horses with the weapons.

Balance sheet.
July 1, 2002... Material Grill A federal district court judge says the Justice Department may not jail material witnesses indefinitely. "No Congress has granted the government the authority to imprison an innocent person in order to guarantee that he will...

Can't give it away. (Data).(health insurance programs for poor children)
July 1, 2002... The decentralized U.S. approach to health care financing and provision-a mix of public and private payers and providers-irks many who would prefer universal taxpayer-financed insurance. In 2000, 38.7 million Americans were not covered, with one...

Freedom's feminist. (Soundbite).(Wendy McElroy)(Interview)
July 1, 2002... Wendy McElroy is one of the nation's foremost proponents of gender quality. Yet her work--including Individualist Feminism of the 19th Century (2001) and xxx: A Woman's Right to Pornography (1995)--frustrates many feminists. McElroy, an...

Taxed happy: two economists provide legislators with another reason to boost taxes. (Columns).
July 1, 2002... LIFE IN CONNECTICUT got a whole lot happier in April. More joy has descended on New York, and it will soon spread to Maryland, Utah, and Nebraska. No, nobody's slipping Prozac into the water supply. This bliss is sponsored by state legislators,...

License to kill: men and women, crime and punishment. (Columns).(disproportionately light sentences given to women)
July 1, 2002... LATE ONE NIGHT in August 1997, a Tacoma, Washington, woman named Brenda Lee Working called her estranged husband, Michael, and told him that her car had broken down, stranding her and their two preschool daughters in a wooded area on a military...

Saddam Hussein, Novelist: A tyrant's glowing reviews. (Rant).
July 1, 2002... NOT ALL THE news from the Middle East is desperate. Here is a bit of comic relief from the BBC: Iraqi state radio announced in May that the nation will hold a referendum later this year to decide whether President Saddam Hussein should remain...

Four-wheel-drive fantasies: a defense of the SUV.
July 1, 2002... HERE COMES MICKEY MOUSE, riding in the back of an open-topped Jeep. Clinging to the roll bar with his big three-fingered gloves, he's wearing fatigues and a 10-gallon pith helmet. Donald Duck, who scandalously wears no pants, is in the back of...

Stand and deliver revisited: the untold story behind the famous rise--and shameful fall--of Jaime Escalante, America's master math teacher.
July 1, 2002... THANKS TO THE popular 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, many Americans know of the success that Jaime Escalante and his students enjoyed at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. During the 1980s, that exceptional teacher at a poor public school...

Breast men: Mexican immigrants want to fillet our chickens. The INS is determined to stop them.
July 1, 2002... AMADOR ANCHONDO-RASCON speaks in a low, soft voice, switching so fluidly from English to Spanish that I'm surprised when I suddenly don't understand what he's saying. Although he has lived in this country for more than two decades and speaks...

Doonesburied: the decline of Garry Trudeau--and of baby boom liberalism. (Culture and Reviews).
July 1, 2002... A KID CALLS the FBI'S terrorism tip line. "I am very serious," he Says. "I know of several Americans who have helped train and finance Osama bin Laden." The feds ask him for the names. "Well, let's see. First one is Reagan. That's...

This magic Mona: the medieval appeal of a modern icon. (Culture and Reviews).(Mona Lisa painting)
July 1, 2002... When Mona Lisa came to washington's National Gallery in 1963, the lines of people wanting to see her were so long that each an lover was allowed less than 30 seconds to commune in front of her. The event became notorious for its apparent...

Color schemes: can affirmative action be reconciled with liberal individualism? (Culture and Reviews).(The Anatomy of Racial Inequality)
July 1, 2002... The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, by Glenn C. Loury, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 226 pages, $22.95 GLENN LOURY is an intelligent but angry man with a mission: to explain both the origins and the persistence of racial...

New criticism: a history of the 1990s misses the good old days--and the truth. (Culture and Reviews).(The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years)
July 1, 2002... The Best of Times: America in the Clinton rears, by Haynes Johnson, New york: Harcourt, 624 pages, $27 THE YEAR 1964 came and went a long time ago, and Haynes Johnson seems none too happy about it. At least that's the impression one gets...

Can't stop the music: don't cry for the record company man. (Culture and Reviews).(Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group)
July 1, 2002... STAN CORNYN WAS a legendary executive for the Warner Music Group, famous for his soft-sell ad compaigns in the late 1960s and early '70s -- among his innovative strategies was to advertise how few copies some of his label's critically acclaimed...

A world in peaces: thirty years after Vietnam, David Halberstam misses the best and the brightest. (Culture and Reviews).(War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals)
July 1, 2002... War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals, by David Halberstam, New York: Scribner, 543 pages, $28 "FOR A BRIEF, glorious, almost Olympian moment it appeared that the presidency itself could serve as the campaign. Rarely had an...

Skin deep. (Artifact).
July 1, 2002... Behold the VeriChip, a new device the size of a grain of rice. Once implanted in you, it stores personal information and transmits it to a voyeuristic scanner. Its maker, Applied Digital Solutions, is marketing it to the medical industry,...

Supporting the drug war supports terrorists.
July 1, 2002... In recent months, the United States government spent $10 million of our tax dollars for its latest antidrug campaign. Its new pitch: if you buy illegal drugs, you're supporting terrorists because terrorists are intimately involved in the...