Reason articles from July 2003

Reason archives from July 2003

Guilty pleasures. (Editor's Note).
July 1, 2003... IN COLLEGE I had a yoga instructor named Jagdish who was, to put it euphemistically, Buddhaesque--he must have carried over 300 pounds on a six-foot frame. Despite his bulk, he was very supple, able to strike all the necessary postures for the...

Letters.
July 1, 2003... Pain and Relief I am really disappointed that reason chose to publish Melinda Ammann's "The Agony and the Ecstasy" (April), an intellectually and morally challenged article on OxyContin. Please understand that I strongly favor elimination...

Jury ragging: medical pot in federal courts. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... WHEN ED ROSENTHAL was convicted on federal marijuana cultivation charges last winter, his friends and supporters were not the only ones who were upset. So were the people who convicted him. "'I'm sorry' doesn't begin to cover it," said one...

25 years ago in reason. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... "It's always fun to watch a sacred cow get barbecued, especially when it's the FBI...Former Acting Director L. Patrick Gray (of Watergate burn-bag fame) and two lesser panjandara are under indictment for "conspiracy to deprive Americans of...

Enjoy your stay: going rate at the clink. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... GUARDS AT THE Minneapolis Hennepin County Adult Detention Center call it "the hotel," and as hotels go, it's a bargain. When 68 anti-war protesters got arrested for blocking the city's U.S. courthouse on March 25, they got a bus ride and an...

Ways to vote: electoral home rule. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... THE ADVOCATES OF electoral reform have offered many alternatives to the familiar winner-take-all system. There's limited voting, in which you have fewer votes than there are seats to be filled. There's cumulative voting, in which you cast...

Book bind: street vendor regulations. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... JOSH WEXLER AND Anne Jordan Blanton, who hope to own a neighborhood bookstore in New Orleans one day, tried to start small by selling books from a sidewalk table. The city said they would need a permit. The city also said they could not get a...

Quotes.
July 1, 2003... "Iraqis have really good food, they don't need a KFC." Stephanie Schaudel, co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness, on the terrors facing post-war Iraq, on CNSNews.com, April 11 "I think all these new deadly illnesses are springing...

Source.
July 1, 2003... Dissent lives at the local level. Ninety six municipalities and counties have passed resolutions against the USA PATRIOT Act, and so has the state of Hawaii One town--Arcata, California--has gone further, with an ordinance instructing its...

Antoine Denert, mayor of the Belgian city of Kruibeke. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... Antoine Denert, mayor of the Belgian city of Kruibeke, wants people to be a little nicer to each other. "I will set an example and start in my own village by caressing, cuddling, and kissing as many people as possible," he says. Denert also has...

Police are investigating Charles Young of La Porte, Texas. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... Police are investigating Charles Young of La Porte, Texas, whose neighbors claim he has threatened local children and pets. Young is a member of the city council.

Like many Cuban Jews in south Florida, Gilbert Tabares Gomer refers to himself as a Jewban. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... Like many Cuban Jews in south Florida, Gilbert Tabares Gomer refers to himself as a Jewban. He even put the term on his personalized license plate. Some people thought the tag was a call to ban Jews from something, so they're asking the...

Burns Middle School in Brandon. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... Burns Middle School in Brandon, Florida, suspended. sixth-grader Cortez Curtis for 10 days for bringing his mother's calculator to school. The calculator violated a zero tolerance policy on weapons, because it contains a two-inch knife as well...

Brian Harrell was arrested in Athens. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... Brian Harrell was arrested in Athens, Georgia, after police stopped him for driving with his headlights off. Harrell reportedly smelled of alcohol and had bloodshot eyes, so the police tested him for intoxication and recorded his blood alcohol...

The Indian state of Gujarat now required anyone who wants to change religions to get permission from local officials. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... The Indian state of Gujarat now required anyone who wants to change religions to get permission from local officials. The state also has banned the use of force or bribery to convince someone to convert Local Christians say the law is aimed at...

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il has ordered all triplets to be forcibly removed from their parents and dumped in orphanages. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il has ordered all triplets to be forcibly removed from their parents and dumped in orphanages. The government says the policy will help the poor. But Korean superstition says triplets, revered in Korea, may rise...

The F-16s patrolling the skies over Washington. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... The F-16s patrolling the skies over Washington, D.C., regularly make rapid descents to chase small planes. Unfortunately, they've been doing so without warning air traffic controllers. Making things even worse, most of the small aircraft the...

The Indiana Department of Revenue. (Brickbats).
July 1, 2003... The Indiana Department of Revenue intended to send four taxpayers each one check to pay interest due from amended 1999 state income tax returns But instead the department sent out 494 checks totaling $73,229.76. Indiana is running an $850...

Rave on: how a bad bill becomes a law. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... THE RECENT PASSAGE of the RAVE act, which allows the government to hold event organizers responsible for customers' drug use, should infuriate even those who'd run screaming from one of these all-night, electronic-music-fueled dance parties....

Balance sheet.
July 1, 2003... Fleece-Rate Congress finally investigates the E-Rate program, a plan to give schools and libraries subsidized Net access. At least $200 million of the $2.25 billion spent by the program is thought to have been ripped off or otherwise...

Tough sell: school choice update. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... AT THE REQUEST of 50 desperate parents in Compton, California Assemblyman Ray Haynes (R-66th District) has introduced a limited school-choice bill. Any child within the Compton school district eligible for the free lunch program--that is, 99.9...

The spoils of war. (Data).
July 1, 2003... In April, President George W. Bush signed off on nearly $80 billion in emergency spending to pay for the war on Iraq. With that much money in play, the White House and Congress couldn't help but throw in a few extra goodies that had nothing to...

Horrors told. (Soundbite).
July 1, 2003... The cruel system of Soviet work camps known as the gulag terrorized some 18 million prisoners--and yet its history has been relatively overlooked in the catalog of 20th-century horrors. That's why Washington Post editorialist Anne Applebaum...

The big block: a secret online blacklist. (Citings).
July 1, 2003... LAST YEAR Pennsylvania passed a bill to crack down on child pornography online. The cause was uncontroversial, but the law's approach--requiring Internet Service Providers to block Web sites based on their Internet Protocol addresses--drew...

Socialized gambling: Illinois pols want to muscle in on casinos. (Columns).
July 1, 2003... CHICAGO MAYOR RICHARD Daley is talking about launching a new lakefront casino, to be owned by the city. Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is talking about seizing all existing casino licenses and having the government run the gambling...

Media critic, critique thyself: Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? Is as shoddy as the books it attacks. (Columns).
July 1, 2003... FOR MOST CONSERVATIVES, liberal media bias is a self-evident truth. For most on the left, it's a right-wing Big Lie. Last year, two bestsellers made the conservative case: Bernard Goldberg's Bias and Ann Coulter's Slander. (Much more solid--and...

Low budget: feeling blue and seeing red over a free-spending administration. (Rant).
July 1, 2003... IF MITCH DANIELS, recently departed director of the Office of Management and Budget and the putative fiscal conservative on President Bush's economic team, succeeds in his ambition to become governor of Indiana, grateful Hoosiers might want to...

The anti-pleasure principle: the "food police" and the pseudoscience of self-denial.
July 1, 2003... IN THE NORTHEAST they call it "soda." In the Midwest they call it "pop." In the South they call it "coke." At the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), they call it "liquid candy"--and they don't mean that as a compliment. CSPI...

Cutting the tripwire: it's time to get out of Korea.
July 1, 2003... AS THE BUSH administration prepared for war in Iraq, North Korea steadily raised the nuclear ante, restarting its mothballed reactor and threatening to produce a regular supply of plutonium. As Gulf War II wound down, Undersecretary of State...

Where the Shah went alone: meditations on a life under tyranny.
July 1, 2003... WHEN I WAS 5 years old and growing up in Iran, I once spent an entire weekend trying to decide whether the Shah went to the toilet. I sat at my small wooden desk, fist under chin, summoning all I knew about human anatomy and royalty, about God...

Back to the future: the nostalgic yet progressive appeal of wizards, hobbits, and Jedi knights. (Culture and Reviews).
July 1, 2003... WHEN THE CURRENT generation of American children looks back on the first decade of the 21St century; it is possible that the three names it will most readily recall will be not Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and George W. Bush but Harry...

Birth of a medium: video games, art, and moral panic.
July 1, 2003... For Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at MIT, the video game Grand Theft Auto III is a bit like Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that cineastes praise for helping create the basic grammar of the movies and simultaneously damp for...

Tear down these walls: making the case for free trade.
July 1, 2003... Free Trade Today, by Jagdish Bhagwati, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 128 pages, $24.95 Free Trade Under Fire, by Douglas A. Irwin, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 257 pages, $27.95 DOHA, QATAR, HAS gained...

Machine melee: robot combat as the 21st-century dream sport.
July 1, 2003... IN LATE APRIL I watched Los Angeles machine artist Christian Ristow and his crew lead a squad of remote-controlled killing machines through a fiery ritual of destruction. The robots ruined signs, giant heads, mannequins, and small houses with...

Selling Saddam. (Artifact).
July 1, 2003... HAVE YOU TRIED Bad Day at Baghdad yet? It's one of several competing hot sauces that associate Saddam Hussein with heartburn. (That's its label above.) "Try this one," promises Internet retailer Calido Chile Traders, "and kiss your camel...

School choice works.
July 1, 2003... Voucher advocates see parental choice as a means to an end--improving education through enhanced competition--but opponents fear such privatization would harm public schools. Early research on American small-scale voucher programs suggests that...