Reason articles from November 2007

Reason archives from November 2007

Prohibition, old and new.(Editor's Note)
November 1, 2007... IN MANY WAYS, these are great days to be a tippler. Never have Americans had more varieties of beer, wine, and booze to choose from. As Jay R. Brooks noted in reason last year, "There are more than 1,400 breweries in the United States, up from...

'You can't see why on an fMRI'.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... I read Brian Doherty's "'You Can't See Why on an fMRI'" (July) with a great deal of interest and found that it closely mirrored my own thoughts on the subject. As a practicing physician and physicist with some experience in medical psychiatry,...

The minority leader.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... Diogenes' famed search for an honest politician would have ended after reading David Weigel's "The Minority Leader" (July), in which he asks the question, "Is Sen. Tom Coburn an extreme social conservative, a libertarian hero, or both?" I would...

Claiming Paine.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... I chuckled at Katherine Mangu-Ward's remark ("Claiming Paine," July) that Ronald Reagan had relied on the radical Paine in his 1980 acceptance speech: "[Tom Paine] wrote, during the darkest days of the American Revolution, that 'we have it in...

Leftists for Hayek.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... Steven Horwitz's review of Theodore A. Burczak's Socialism After Hayek is unwarrantedly generous to the author ("Leftists for Hayek," July). Burczak appears to have missed the last 20 years of F.A. Hayek's life, during which he described in...

Reason news.(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... We're pleased to announce the publication of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, by former reason staffer Matt Welch. The book, based in part on a feature Matt wrote for the April 2007 issue of reason, is to be published October 16 by Palgrave...

Spliff split: candidates on marijuana.(Citings)(presidential candidate's views on the therapeutic use of marijuana)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... ON JULY 25, the same day the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided 10 medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles County, the U.S. House of Representatives once again rejected a measure aimed at stopping the DEA'S interference with the...

Post-Soviet sex: mating for the motherland.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... RUSSIA IS facing a dramatic population dip: During the next 10 years, the country's population is expected to shrink by I million annually. Scholars blame disease and poor health habits for this unsettling population loss. In response, at its...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Quotations from past issues of the publication Reason)(Quotation)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "It is some form of schizophrenia that KGB psychiatrists diagnose in dissidents, and, where Western psychiatrists seek funds to discover the genetic cause of this ghastly disease, their Soviet colleagues gleefully...

Free drugs! Companies compete on cheap meds.(Citings)(discount stores offer cheap prescription drug plans)
November 1, 2007... LAST JULY, Wal-Mart launched a $4 prescription drug plan, offering a month's supply of about 140 generic medications for the cost of a Happy Meal. According to the company, "The medicines represented are used to treat and manage conditions...

Dating discord: out of tune with eHarmony.(Citings)(sexual discrimination case filed against a social networking site)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... EHARMONY, the dating site of choice for those looking to get hitched, has a longstanding "straight people only" policy. In May, Linda Carlson sued the site because of it. Her application was denied after she tried to use the site to meet...

Quotes.(Citings)(Quotation)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... "What if someone started one of these sites in the six months that we're not in session? We were able to proactively legislate for society." --Delaware state Rep. Melanie George Marshall (D-Bear/Newark), on her vote to ban the nonexistent...

An economist at the movies.(List)(George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen's list of libertarian movies)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University and a small/ libertarian. On his popular blog Marginal Revolution and in his new book Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate...

Let 'em roam: more immigrants, less crime.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... DESPITE popular prejudices to the contrary, a new paper reports that immigrants in the U.S. are far less likely to end up locked in a public institution than the native-born, with an incarceration rate one-fifth as high. [ILLUSTRATION...

Speed for sale: highway robbery in France.(Citings)(implementation and abuse of France's points system used to punish over speeding drivers)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... FRENCH President Nicolas Sarkozy came to power in May promising "market-based reforms." Several months later, at least one French market has taken off: the trade in speeding penalties. A clean French driving license starts with 12 points....

Persecuted pills: fake felonies in Florida.(Citings)(Florida's law against using prescription defense in drug charges)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... IN 2004 police in Tampa, Florida, found 58 Vicodin pills and a misdemeanor amount of marijuana in an illegally parked bread truck. Prosecutors charged the driver, 45-year-old Mark O'Hara, with felony drug distribution not for the pot but for...

Does 21 save lives? Drinking ages and traffic fatalities.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... THE MAIN argument for the de facto national drinking age of 21 is that it saves lives. In a recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron and Yale Law School student Elina Tetelbaum cast...

Brickbats.(Citings)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There's no sign telling you not to take a photograph of the building at 3701 North Fairfax Drive in Arlington, Virginia. But if you do, expect to be stopped by a police officer, have your personal information...

Begging pardon.(Data)(statistics in presidential pardons)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Despite his recent decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, an administration official convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, George W. Bush has made remarkably little use of his clemency powers. That hasn't been...

Bad air: the sick man of Korea.(Citings)(Kim Jong-Il's ban's on smoking in North Korea due to his failing health)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... AFTER quickly conquering the capitals of Western Europe, the smoke-free Weltanschauung has spread to Pyongyang, the capital of Stalinist North Korea. According to the BBC, Kim Jong-Il has imposed a harsh public hermit kingdom to shield "Dear...

Reconstruction mess: adventures in nation building.(Citings)(Gordon Tullock's book called The Politics of Bureaucracy)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... COULD anyone have predicted the failures of reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan? According to a new working paper, the public choice theorist Gordon Tullock did just that--in 1965. Chris Coyne, an economist at West Virginia University...

Zombie farmers: subsidies for the dead.(Citings)(Government Accountability Office report on subsidies given by the United States Department of Agriculture to dead farmers)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... A JULY report from the Government Accountability Office found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) paid more than $1 billion in subsidies to 172,801 dead farmers during a six-year period. Assuming there are no zombies piloting...

The man who wanted to be left alone.(Soundbite)(Martin Manning, a character in the novel Mean Martin Manning by Scott Stein)(Interview)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Scott Stein's satirical novel Mean Martin Manning (ENC Press) is about a reclusive man who retired early from a career in advertising and has spent a couple of decades holed up in his apartment, subsisting largely on...

John Edwards vs. the lobbyists: a presidential candidate promises to clean up Washington--by trashing the First Amendment.(Columns)
November 1, 2007... IT WAS NEARLY an hour into the candidate forum at YearlyKos, an annual convention of liberal bloggers, when John Edwards finally decided to go for the jugular. Chopping the air with his hand, bobbing his head like a racehorse, the former...

Amusing ourselves to depth: is The Onion our most intelligent newspaper?(Columns)(Column)
November 1, 2007... IN AUGUST 1988, college juniour Tim Keck borrowed $7,000 from his mom, rented a Mac Plus, and published a i2-page newspaper. His ambition was hardly the stuff of future journalism symposiums: He wanted to create a compelling way to deliver...

Get government out of the bathroom! How the GOP should respond to the Larry Craig scandal.(Rant)(effect of sex scandals on the Republican Party)
November 1, 2007... IT'S A SHAME that Idaho Sen. Larry Craig didn't draw on his own political principles to defend his right to engage in consensual sex in toilet stalls with men. Or with women, for that matter: The 62-year-old Republican is the married father of...

Prohibition returns! Teetotaling do-gooders attack your right to drink.(drunk driving laws)(Cover story)
November 1, 2007... ON A MAY NICHT IN 2005, Debra Bolton, a lawyer and single morn from the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, was leaving the Cafe Milano in Georgetown after socializing with some friends. She had driven her SUV only a few hundred yards...

'The trouble is the West': Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, immigration, civil liberties, and the fate of the West.(Interview)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IT WAS A HEINOUS murder that made the best-selling memoirist Ayaan Hirsi Ali internationally famous, but she was neither the victim nor the perpetrator. The corpse was that of Theo van Gogh, a writer and filmmaker...

CSI: Mississippi: a case study in expert testimony gone horribly wrong.(crime scene investigation)(Case study)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN A REMARKABLE capital murder case earlier this year, the Mississippi Supreme Court, by an 8-to-1 vote, tossed out the expert testimony of Steven Hayne. The defendant was Tyler Edmonds, a 13-year-old boy accused of...

Breaking up the forensics monopoly: eight ways to fix a broken system.
November 1, 2007... America's forensics system, the part of our criminal justice system responsible for scientific examinations of crime-scene evidence like fingerprints and DNA, is rife with errors. Some mistakes, like botched tests or erroneously interpreted...

Eight million sots in the Naked City: how prohibition was imposed on, and rejected by, New York.(Book review)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, by Michael A. Lerner, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 351 pages, $28.95 The Diary of a Rum-Runner, by Alastair Moray, Mystic: Flat Hammock Press, 193 pages,...

Much ado about shopping: samizdat chick lit in Saudi Arabia.(controversy about Rajaa Alsanea's novel about Saudi Arabian girls called, Girls of Riyadh)
November 1, 2007... Last year a group of fundamentalist Muslims in Saudi Arabia filed suit against an author whose novel, they declared, was "an outrage to the norms of Saudi society." The book was too controversial to be published in Saudi Arabia itself, but...

The caudilio in his labyrinth: Hugo Chavez and his enablers.(Hugo Chavez)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Hugo Chavez, by Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, New York: Random House, 352 pages, $27.95 IN AN AUGUST address carried by flat on all of the nation's television channels, Venezuela's authoritarian president, Hugo Chavez Frias,...

The day of the flying fish: globalization and the making of modern sushi.
November 1, 2007... FOR TRADITIONALISTS in 19th-century Japan, a new sushi place was a sign the neighborhood was going to hell. In 1852 one writer grumped about the proliferation of sushi stalls in booming industrial Tokyo. The McDonald's of their day, the stalls...

Licensing global terror.(Artifact)(specialty license plates that bear the phrase Global War on Terrorism)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As ANY FAN of Oklahoma! could tell you, the hot ride in the Sooner State used to be the "little surrey with the fringe on the top." (A surrey is a covered four-wheeled carriage.) These days, Oklahomans can pick from...