Reason articles from June 2002

Reason archives from June 2002

Editor's note.(cloning)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... IF THEY SURVIVE...will we? That was the spooky come-on for The Boys From Brazil, the popular 1978 movie that served as many people's introduction to cloning and other forms of genetic manipulation. What a downbeat primer: Based on the Ira...

Letters.
June 1, 2002... Wither Iraqi Sanctions? I was impressed with Matt Welch's "The Politics of Dead Children" (March). It convincingly demonstrated the real impact of sanctions and deserves to set the tone for all coverage going forward. However, it also left...

Correction.
June 1, 2002... In "Speaking Lies to Power" (May), Ralph Nader's book Crashing the Party was misidentified.

Laff riot: Tyrannical television? (Citings).(art imitates life)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... THE NEW AIRPORT security regime has a friend in ABC. The TV network threatened in March to ax a planned episode of The Drew Carey Show. In it, the show's two resident idiots--who also happen to be Drew's best friends--take jobs as airport...

X-Ray specs: Secure skin show. (Citings).(airport security equipment)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... IF THE FOLKS at ABC would loosen up, they might find some funny fodder in the latest in airport security: a prototype next-generation scanning system that works by looking through a person's clothes. The machine, dubbed a "virtual strip-search"...

Policing dissent: Political spying. (Citings).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... WHEN THE STANDUP comic Lenny Bruce started getting busted for obscenity, he worked his court transcripts and police reports into his act, reading them aloud in lieu of telling jokes. There may come a day when Denver dissidents find similar fun...

Rotten Denmark: Immigration trends. (Citings).(tougher immigration laws proposed)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... To DEPORT OR not to deport? That is one question--among others--now being considered by Danish politicians in the wake of last year's right-wing landslide. Last November Pia Kjaersgaard, a grandmotherly, Nordic version of Pat Buchanan, led the...

Source. (Citings).(Bjorn Lomborg, author)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Bjorn Lomborg, author of the litany-busting Skeptical Environmentalist, is now defending his book online against a massive barrage of criticism. The defense, originally posted at Lomborg's site, www.lomborg.com, includes a point-by-point...

Gender bender: Marriage rights. (Citings).(same sex unions invalid in Kansas)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... TRANSSEXUAL WIDOW J'Noel Gardiner, whose 1998 marriage was recently declared invalid in Kansas, has never welcomed media attention. In one of few comments to the press during the three-year run of her case, she told the Kansas City Star, "It's...

Drugged trails: Medicated until proven guilty. (Citings).(court decision could lead to forced drugging of prisoners)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... A FEDERAL APPEALS court delivered a decision in March that could open the floodgates of forced drugging of prisoners--even before they're proven guilty of any crime. Charles Sell has been held without bond pending trial since early 1998....

Last February, about 20 British Marines went a bit off course during an exercise. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Last February, about 20 British Marines went a bit off course during an exercise. They were supposed to land on Gibraltar. Instead, they invaded Spain. Locals quickly informed the marines that they were in the wrong pais.

Jack Weigand wanted a new laptop, so he ordered one from Dell and was given a delivery date of February 21. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Jack Weigand wanted a new laptop, so he ordered one from Dell and was given a delivery date of February 21. The day came and went, and no computer arrived. Dell had canceled his order: Weigand is a gun dealer, and the company says it is...

When Londoner Colin May heard noises in his backyard, he went out to inspect, grabbing a knife in case it was a vandal or burglar. (Brickbats).(misunderstandings lead to police mistreatment)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... When Londoner Colin May heard noises in his backyard, he went out to inspect, grabbing a knife in case it was a vandal or burglar. Instead of meeting a thief, he was jumped by police officers, who had been called by a neighbor. Unaware the men...

The letterhead read Tony Sanchez for Goneror, and it went downhill from there. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The letterhead read Tony Sanchez for Goneror, and it went downhill from there. As you may have guessed, Texas Democrat Sanchez actually wants to be the state's governor. But a campaign thank-you letter to the Texas State Teachers Association...

Norway's Socialist Left Party wants a new Samsung mobile phone withdrawn from sale. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Norway's Socialist Left Party wants a new Samsung mobile phone withdrawn from sale in the country because it has a body-mass calculator and counts calories. The party worries that the phones could hurt the self-esteem of the overweight,...

Roy Moore is the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, but he isn't known for judiciousness. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Roy Moore is the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, but he isn't known for judiciousness. He first gained prominence as a trial judge in Etowah County when he defied a state order by posting the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. This...

Fairfax City, Virginia, has banned children from playing in city streets. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Fairfax City, Virginia, has banned children from playing in city streets, and has already removed scores of illegal basketball hoops. Sadly, Fairfax City isn't alone. Towns across the nation have moved to ban once-common street games. Backers...

Balance sheet.(current events)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Border Busters Congress slaps the INS for slapping whistleblowers. The agency had transferred and threatened employees who said the borders were a mess. Seed Scene Biotech firms Syngenta and Monsanto pledge to make public aspects...

Government wages. (Data).(earnings of top-tier presidential appointees)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
June 1, 2002... The relative wages of top-tier presidential appointees are in decline, frets a Brookings Institution study released in March. In 1969, top government officials earned 5.6 times what the average American family took home. By 2000, the $121,600...

Ethnic engineering: Little white Indians. (Citings).(California elementary school claims some students as Native Americans to get federal funds)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL in the small Sierra Nevada town of Colfax, California, entered the era of educational accountability this year when the state withheld $31,000 in special funds on the grounds that 69 American Indian students had failed to...

Government smokes: The tobacco settlement. (Citings).(some states invest tobacco settlement funds in tobacco companies)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... HOW ARE STATES using their tobacco settlement windfall? The Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) recently surveyed state treasurers to find out. It found that seven states--Texas, Connecticut, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota,...

Immigration advocate. (Soundbite).(journalist Michael Barone)(Brief Article)(Interview)
June 1, 2002... Critics of immigration argue that today's newcomers are changing the character of America for the worse. Sure we're a nation of immigrants, they'll allow, but the past waves of immigrants came from European stock and were assimilated. Today,...

Family matters: Welfare reform has liberals and conservatives calling for government action. (Columns).
June 1, 2002... LATELY, I'VE BEEN questioning why I'm not an enthusiastic modern liberal, a real let's-call-in-the-government-to-do-good-things progressive. After all, I relish the world that the forces of liberalism seem to have produced. The liberationist...

Our bodies, our scholarship: Unwomen, "happy" marriage, foreign male elements, and women's studies. (Columns).(women's studies courses)
June 1, 2002... WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAMS are rife with radical feminist ideology concludes a recent report by the right-of-center Independent Women's Forum (IWF)--a revelation about as shocking as the news that rap lyrics contain a lot of raunchy language....

Violent reruns: Our faults lie not in our TV stars but in ourselves. (Rant).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... REMEMBER THE ROTTEN '70s TV series The Incredible Hulk? Based on a Marvel comic, it followed the bathetic journey to the end of night of one David Bruce Banner, who famously got belted by gamma rays and thereafter turned into a musclebound,...

John Ashcroft's power grab: The saga of a troubled--and troubling--attorney general.
June 1, 2002... WREN U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL John Ashcroft was eight years old, his father, J. Robert Ashcroft, took the boy up in a Piper Cub airplane. Then Dad blessed young John with a special treat. "John, I'd like you to fly this plane for a while," he...

The clone wars: A reason online debate.
June 1, 2002... WHAT IS THE CASE for allowing genetic and other biological manipulations with the potential to change human beings? As stem cell research, cloning, and other technologies develop, perhaps no other question is more central to our future as a...

Cyberspace's legal visionary: Lawrence Lessig on the fate of copyrights and computer networks in the digital future.(Interview)
June 1, 2002... FEW INTELLECTUALS HAVE influenced the way people think about cyberspace as much as Lawrence Lessig. His first book, Code and Other Laws OF Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999), was described by one critic as "a direct assault on the libertarian...

Foul ball: How a communist dictatorship and a U.S. embargo has silenced a Cuban historian. (Culture and Reviews).(Severo Nieto)
June 1, 2002... GEORGE W. BUSH would love to be the president who finally topples the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. He also probably wouldn't mind winning Florida by a somewhat more comfortable margin in 2004, or seeing his brother Jeb get re-elected governor...

Che's secret diary: The guerrilla hero as a dispirited racist.(Ernesto "Che" Guevara)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Mike Tyson's mighty rib cage boasts a sizeable tattoo of the late Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a testament to Guevara's status as the marker of subversive cool. It's a safe bet that Tyson hasn't read The African Dream, Guevara's recently released...

Is a cancer growing in the bowels of liberalism? (Tolerating Freedom).(The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit;)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A.J. Conyers, Dallas: Spence Publishing, 266 pages, $27.95 Two Faces of Liberalism, by John Gray, New York: The New Press, 161 pages, $25 HOW SHOULD HUMAN...

The devil and Daniel Ellsberg: From archetype to anachronism.(Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg)
June 1, 2002... Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, by Tom Wells, New York: Palgrave, 692 pages, $32.50 IN 1973, AS his world began falling apart, Richard Nixon demonstrated his rhetorical prowess to his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. The...

Everyone's a critic: Don't shed any tears for cinephilia.(film criticism)
June 1, 2002... DIDN'T LIKE BRAVEHEART? You have a soulmate in cyberspace, and he posted his thoughts on a now-defunct interactive Web site. "I know it has won an oscar," he writes, "but I think it's too long and too bloody, I had to be covering my eyes every...

Norrath Paribus. (Artifact).(setting for online game EverQuest)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... THE ROSTER OF nations is larger than you'd guess from the membership list at the U.N.: There are semisovereign statelets at sea, tonguein-cheek micro-monarchies in the suburbs, even make-believe sultanates on the Web.According to a recent study...

Wildlife, too, under siege in Zimbabwe.(Robert Mugabe assault on private property takes toll on wildlife)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Recently elected Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has clearly indicated that he has no intention of respecting property rights or the rule of law. His "terror teens" have brutally killed innocent people, and his "land reform" plan demands...

25 years ago. (Citings).
June 1, 2002... "There is a tendency among the ideological to believe not only that they possess the Truth in ideological matters but that even the least important matters must conform to their axioms." --Dennis Turner, "Investment or Ideology?" "In...