Reason articles from March 2003

Reason archives from March 2003

Learning from history. (Editor's Note).(Editorial)
March 1, 2003... "I DID READ the review and thought it rather contradicted the title of your magazine. Among other things it...completely misstated the thesis of my book. It seems that anything can get into print." This sort of curt missive from offended...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2003... E Pluribus Umbrage Tim Cavanaugh, author of "E Pluribus Umbrage" (December), finds it amusing that in the midst of the church's priest scandal, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights "alerted its 300,000 members to a grave...

The art of self-defense: gun control on trial. (Citings).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... TOM PALMER, A writer and researcher at the Cato Institute, believes he owes his life to a 9-mm semiautomatic. One evening in the early 1980s, he and a male friend were walking through a Los Angeles neighborhood when a group of young men...

Safety hook: the politics of "drugged driving". (Citings).(U.S. drug enforcement)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... IF JOHN P. WALTERS has his way, Friday night tokers will no longer be fired for failing Monday morning drug tests. Instead they'll be arrested on the way to work. At a November press conference the federal drug czar announced an...

25 years ago in reason. (Citings).
March 1, 2003... "The CIA has experimented with mind-control, telepathy and other parapsy-chological techniques. The agency even went so far as to hire John Mulholland, the New York magician, to help teach what Admiral Turner has called "aspects of magicians'...

Poking the camera's eye: total surveillance awareness. (Citings).(Who watches the watchmen?)
March 1, 2003... WHO WATCHES THE watchmen? One possible answer: We all should. This answer animates World Sousveillance Day (WSD), which took place on December 24. (Sousveillance is a neologism meaning "sight from below" or "undersight"). On that day,...

Hot water: of power plants and manatees. (Citings).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... ENVIRONMENTAL activists are usually happy when power companies close down coal-fired electric plants in favor of cleaner, more efficient ones. But that's not currently the case in Florida, where, in a textbook example of the law of unintended...

Source. (Citings).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Check out Hit & Run, reason online's staff weblog, which delivers "continuous news, views, and abuse" at www.reason.com/hitandrun/. Launched in December, the site has been hailed as "lively and interesting" by The Wall Street Journal's Opinion...

Drop your pants: mooning on the wax? (Citings).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... AN AUSTRALIAN MAN who mooned a police cruiser is defending his action in a Queensland court. Twenty-year-old Ernest Togo and his lawyer argue that bearing one's buttocks to uniformed officers is well within an Aussie's constitutional rights to...

Do you know the cost of San Jose? The high cost of low growth. (Citings).(Housing costs)
March 1, 2003... THE DUBIOUS HONOR of fastest-rising housing costs during the last 25 years belongs to San Jose, California. Housing prices there grew 936 percent over that period, beating out even legendarily expensive San Francisco's 821 percent growth. ...

Balance sheet.
March 1, 2003... Kidnap Care The Illinois Supreme Court fixes a glitch state lawmakers created in their frenzied show of opposition to underage drinking. State law required people to commit felony kidnapping--by forcibly stopping any drinker under 21 from...

Police in White Oak, Texas, pulled a woman over for a possible DUI. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Police in White Oak, Texas, pulled a woman over for a possible DUI. But they wound up charging her for something much more, um, serious. Kathy Grubbs was found to be traveling with 17 "obscene materials and obscene devices." In other words,...

John W. Pierce, a Virginia mail carrier, faces up to 25 years in prison for not delivering mail. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... John W. Pierce, a Virginia mail carrier, faces up to 25 years in prison for not delivering mail. Authorities hauled away three nine-ton truckloads of mail from his home. They found additional undelivered mail at a self-storage container Pierce...

Canadian Natural Resources. (Brickbats).(Minister pushes greenhopuse gas treaty, drives SUVs)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Canadian Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal is leading the nation's efforts to ratify the Kyoto treaty limiting greenhouse gases. He's also the proud owner of two sport utility vehicles--General Motors 4x4s, to be precise. He has one for...

At least 12 SWAT team officers crashed through the door of a San Antonio apartment. (Brickbats).(Special weapons and tactics units (Police))(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... At least 12 SWAT team officers crashed through the door of a San Antonio apartment. Screaming obscenities, they pummeled and handcuffed the occupants, then tore the place apart looking for drugs. Only afterward did they realize they'd raided...

Three members of Madrid's regional legislature were caught surfing the Internet for porn during a debate on domestic violence. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Three members of Madrid's regional legislature were caught surfing the Internet for porn during a debate on domestic violence. Miguel Angel Perez-Huysmans, Manuel Troitino, and Coloman Trabad are all members of Spain's ruling conservative...

Mehmet Emre Gul, son of Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, has received his draft notice to serve in that nation's military. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Mehmet Emre Gul, son of Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, has received his draft notice to serve in that nation's military. But the younger Gul is just 11 years old, seven years younger than the minimum age for the draft. The defense...

Scotsmen such as David Hume and Adam Smith pondered the origins of civil society and the limits of reason. (Brickbats).(Scottish law against materials intended for encouraging sexual activity)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Scotsmen such as David Hume and Adam Smith pondered the origins of civil society and the limits of reason. Modern Scotsmen, or at least Scottish police, are devoting a great deal of mental effort to an even more stimulating inquiry: When does...

Green earth. (Data).(Globalization and the environment)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... "Globalization has profound negative impacts on the natural environment," declares Citizen Works, an activist group that Ralph Nader founded in 2001. Is it true? "Measuring Globalization," a study in the January/February 2003 issue of...

High road: is marijuana a "gateway"? (Citings).
March 1, 2003... BY THE 1950s, Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger had backed away from his claim that marijuana turns people into murderers. Instead he began arguing that it turns them into heroin addicts. "Over 50 percent of those young...

Locking up movies: master of the public domain? (Citings).(Copyright law)
March 1, 2003... SOME CRITICS CLAIM that movies came close to perfection in 1928, the last year of the silent era, only to be dragged back down when directors had to figure out what to do with sound. Unfortunately, if you'd like to check this claim against...

Creatures of the mall. (Soundbite).(cultural writer Thomas Hine)(Interview)
March 1, 2003... Anti-consumerist critics don't merely have billion-dollar ad campaigns working against them, argues cultural writer Thomas Hine, author of the witty and informative I Want That: How We All Became Shoppers (HarperCollins). Such shopping nags are...

Dixiecrats triumphant: the secret history of Woodrow Wilson. (Columns).
March 1, 2003... IT WAS INAUGURATION Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played "Dixie." The Chief Justice of...

Guilty by association: note to conservatives; most immigrants aren't terrorists. (Columns).
March 1, 2003... SHORTLY AFTER TWO men were arrested in last October's sniper shootings, ending a crime spree that had terrorized the D.C.-Baltimore area and left 10 people dead, a detail emerged that galvanized a large segment of the American punditry. One of...

Amphetamine psychosis: a delirious take on the latest "new drug of choice". (Rant).("Plague in the Heartland," by Paul Solotaroff criticized)
March 1, 2003... TIME WAS THAT connoisseurs of drug war propaganda contented themselves with fare such as Reefer Madness, Dragnet reruns featuring acid-eating hippies, and health class films such as 1968's Marijuana, a Just Say No sermonette featuring a...

Disarming history: how an award-winning scholar twisted the truth about America's gun culture--and almost got away with it.(Michael Bellesiles criticized)(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2003... "Real historical writers probe factual uncertainties, but they do not invent convenient facts and they do not ignore inconvenient facts. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts." William Kelleher Storey,...

Creation myths: does innovation require intellectual property rights?
March 1, 2003... THE MOST FORCEFUL performance at last year's Grammy ceremony was a speech by Michael Greene, then president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Speaking not long after the 9/11 attacks, Greene gravely warned of a worldwide...

Big fat fake: the Atkins diet controversy and the sorry state of science journalism.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2003... IT WAS EXACTLY what millions of obese Americans wanted to hear: Diet guru Robert Atkins has been right all along; conversely, the "medical establishment" that has routinely criticized him has been entirely wrong. Unlimited-calorie, high-fat...

Come hear Uncle Sam's band: the hippie capitalism of the Grateful Dead.(A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, by Dennis McNally, New York: Broadway Books, 684 pages, $30 ROBERT HUNTER, LYRICIST for the Grateful Dead, was interviewed in the 1990S by someone who wanted to know where that...

American culture is not dominating the globe. (We Aren't the World).
March 1, 2003... In the mid-199os, the well-known French filmmaker Claude Bern warned that without protection from American cultural exports, "European culture is finished." He had plenty of pessimistic company. In that era, French Culture Minister Jack Lang...

Global speculators: a billionaire and a Nobel laureate want to fix international trade agencies. Why bother?(George Soros on Globalization)(Globalization and Its Discontents)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... George Soros on Globalization, by George Soros, New York: PublicAffairs, 191 pages, $20 Globalization and Its Discontents, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York; W.W.Norton & Co., 282 pages, $24.95 WHEN THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF)...

But is it outsider art? A prominent painter flunks a purity test.(Joe Coleman)
March 1, 2003... IT MAY BE impossible to define outsider art adequately, but I'll try. It is eccentric, engaging, and often apocalyptic. It stands outside the standard schools and movements, and it is produced by artists who are usually self-taught and often...

Unreal thing. (Artifact).(Mecca-Cola)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... HATE THE U.S.? Live in Europe? Then drink Mecca-Cola, a new brand aimed at slaking Europe's anti-American thirst. The label may look like Coca-Cola's, but it urges, "Don't Drink Stupidly, Drink with Commitment!" French-Tunisian founder Tawflq...

The 2002 elections: much sound, little fury.
March 1, 2003... "Now we can look forward to more obscene tax cuts for the rich, wholesale rape of the environment, huge deficits, obstruction of any investigation into corruption and a packed judiciary." Letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 2002....