Reason articles from October 2007

Reason archives from October 2007

Beyond econ. 101.(Editor's Note)
October 1, 2007... THIS MONTH'S COVER story, "The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters" (page 24), offers a provocative explanation for why so much of our country's economic policy is screwed up: Voters are basically idiots when it comes to understanding basic...

Presidential scouting reports.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 1, 2007... Gov. Bill Richardson has indeed reduced New Mexico's top income tax rate from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent, but calling him "one of the country's most tightfisted executives" is a bit of a stretch ("Presidential Scouting Reports," June). ...

Wikipedia and beyond.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 1, 2007... Initially I was irritated by the statement in "Wikipedia and Beyond" (June) that "Answers.com is composed almost entirely of Wikipedia content reposted with ads." After all, we've licensed and integrated 179 other dictionaries, thesauruses,...

An epidemic of meddling.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 1, 2007... In "An Epidemic of Meddling." (May) Jacob Sullum states that people who don't want to pay for the dangerous behavior of others shouldn't support taxpayer-funded health care. Most people already are paying for the behavior of others, however,...

Dateline's predators: NBC's catch and release program.(Citings)(National Broadcasting Company's 'To Catch a Predator')(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... DATELINE NBC'S hit spin-off To Catch a Predator may be the first TV show to become a hit by setting up real-life stings. Members of the vigilante group Perverted Justice pose as minors in Internet chat rooms and attempt to lure men into meeting...

Official witches: magic monopoly.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... THE WITCH trials wrapped up 315 years ago, but the city of Salem, Massachusetts, is still basking in the publicity. Every October brings a month-long Halloween celebration, Haunted Happenings, when the town is flooded with tourists and...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... "Jeremy Rifkin's People's Business Commission invaded a National Academy of Sciences forum on recombinant DNA last March chanting, 'We shall not be cloned.'" --Robert Poole Jr., "The Scientists' Faustian Bargain" "Some Washington wags...

Bad touch: hands off at school.(Citings)(Kilmer Middle School )(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... IN JUNE, Kilmer Middle School reprimanded 13-year-old Hal Beaulieu. The offense: hugging his girlfriend. The Virginia public school's rules include an unqualified "no physical contact" policy. According to a report in The Washington Post,...

Safe Email 4 U! The Constitution applies online too.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... IN 2005 the U.S. government was investigating Steven Warshak, a pusher of penis enlargement pills and diet drugs, for wire fraud and other crimes. Invoking the Stored Communications Act, it ordered Yahoo and NuVox, two Internet service...

Gone fishin': stream rentals restore trout.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... THE UPPER reach of Montana's Wasson Creek is home to a purestrain population of westslope cutthroat trout. But overzealous irrigators regularly dried up the creek downstream during the summer. This kept the trout from migrating to and...

Quotes.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... "I, Bob Riley, Governor of Alabama, do hereby encourage citizens of Alabama to pray daily for rain and proclaim June 30-July 7, 2007 as Days of Prayer for Rain. During this time, l encourage all Alabamians to pray individually and within their...

What's your source for that?(List)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... Andrew Breitbart describes his job function as "Matt Drudge's bitch," but he's being modest: He's the man behind the curtain at The Drudge Report, stirring up the site's signature mix of scandal, box office returns, wire stories, and political...

Stay in the Stasi Suite: communist nostalgia.(Citings)(Ostel hotel)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... ATTENTION Berlin-bound students and backpackers: For a mere 38 euros ($50), the impecunious traveler can decamp to the Ostel, a new budget hotel in the city's hip Mitte district. The rooms are spartan: a rotary telephone, bunk beds, a...

Name check: immigrants in the dark.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... SINCE 2002 immigration officials have required that the FBI check all immigration applicants against its investigational files--everyone from immigrants whose countries of origin are designated sponsors of terrorism to Mexican immigrants who...

Nosy neighbors: U.S.-Mexican wiretap cooperation.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... THANKS TO a $3 million grant from the U.S. government, Mexican officials are expanding their ability to monitor email messages and telephone calls. Among other things, the new Communications Intercept System will allow the government to keep...

Get the Picture? Patent intimidation.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... BACK IN mid-2006--an epoch ago in the consumer electronics field--Toshiba and Canon wowed the trade show circuit with a next-generation flat-panel TV. Turning to old cathode-ray tube technology for low power consumption and inky, cinema-like...

Brickbats.(Citings)
October 1, 2007... In London, England, the Ealing Council is spending $285,000 a year for plainclothes police officers to hunt down people who put their trash out too early. Starting July 1, anyone wishing to buy beer in a Tennessee convenience store or...

Kick'Em while they're down.(Data)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... Rich, white property owners are disproportionately hurt by eminent domain abuse. Just kidding. A new report from the Institute for Justice looked at 184 areas where the use of eminent domain was approved for private economic...

Google on guard: your jungle home security system.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... WHEN THE government failed to enforce their land rights, the Surui Indians of northwestern Brazil found a more reliable ally: Google. Property rights in Brazil are a mess of competing claims, with ranchers, rubber tappers, Indians, and...

Chinese cha cha: dance dance revolution.(Citings)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... THANKS TO Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's, The Guardian reports, Chinese waistlines "have expanded almost as fast as the Chinese economy." The solution? Mandatory dance lessons. The Chinese Ministry of Education has added a dance...

Filming for freedom.(Soundbite)(Interview)
October 1, 2007... The Moving Picture Institute is the AV department for the vast libertarian conspiracy. It funds films celebrating liberty, it trains young filmmakers, and it helps them make connections in the mainstream. Its projects range from Zabbaleen, a...

Tuning out the world: protectionism takes root in both parties.(Columns)
October 1, 2007... BERNIE SANDERS, THE independent senator from Vermont, is the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress. Lou Dobbs is a close-the-borders CNN host who donated $1,000 to George W. Bush's first presidential campaign. But when they met on Dobbs'...

Bleeding into the mainstream: how John McCain popularized human cockfighting.(Columns)(Ultimate Fighting Championship)
October 1, 2007... LAST DECEMBER AT Ultimate Fighting Championship 66, in the first round of a many-holds-barred, mixed martial arts grudge match between the evenly weighted gladiators Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz, the former floored the latter with a gloved...

Flying blind in a red-tape blizzard: how George W. Bush became the regulator in chief.(Columns)
October 1, 2007... ATTENTION, FANS OF smaller government: Ever helpful, this correspondent has found yet another reason to be unhappy with President Bush. He appears to be the biggest regulator since the Nixon-Ford years. In June the Mercatus Center at George...

Learning to love the imperial presidency: how conservatives made peace with executive power.(Rant)
October 1, 2007... "I TOOK AN oath, and I take that oath to the president very seriously," former White House aide Sara Taylor told the Senate Judiciary Committee during the summer hearings on the U.S. attorneys purge. Taylor's statement prompted an indignant...

The 4 boneheaded biases of stupid voters: (And we're all stupid voters.).(Cover story)
October 1, 2007... ALMOST ALL the "respectable" economic theories of politics begin by assuming that the typical citizen understands economics and votes accordingly at least on average. By a "miracle of aggregation," random errors are supposed to balance...

Is industry-funded science killing you? The overrated risks and underrated benefits of pharmaceutical research "conflicts of interest".
October 1, 2007... IN 2004 GLAXOSMITHKLINE became the first major drug manufacturer to publicly disclose all the data from clinical studies of its products, including information that is usually treated as a trade secret. It was responding to a lawsuit by Eliot...

The next Iranian revolution: how armed exiles are working to topple Tehran's Islamic government.
October 1, 2007... IN A GREEN VALLEY nestled between snow-capped peaks in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq is an armed camp of revolutionaries preparing to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. Men with automatic weapons stand watch on the roofs...

Creative Destruction vs. the New Industrial State: the "embedded" capitalism of Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith.(book reviews)(Book review)
October 1, 2007... Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas K. McCraw, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 719 pages, $35 The New Industrial State, by John K. Galbraith, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 518 pages,...

That's what little boys are made of: a "dangerous" book for adventurous boys--but not girls.
October 1, 2007... A British import called The Dangerous Book for Boys has been soaring on the American bestseller lists. The book, by the English brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, revels in retro, conjuring up a pre-computer idyll of hunting, skipping stones,...

Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt: what FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the '30s.(Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939)(Book review)
October 1, 2007... Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, by wolfgang Schivelbusch, New York: Metropolitan Books, 242 pages, $26 ON MAY 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of...

From sky flivver to Hydropolis: what happened to the science-fiction future?
October 1, 2007... IF THIS IS the future, someone forgot to stock it properly. Where are the personal service robots, the moon vacations, the self-contained cities rising out of the smog? What happened to all those sci-fi prophecies? In Where's My Jetpack?...

Forbidden clothes.(Artifact)(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... THE FLAGSTAFF activist Dan Frazier sells this shirt, which superimposes the phrases "Bush Lied" and "They Died" over the names of 3,000 U.S. troops killed in the war with Iraq. The clothes prompted the Arizona legislature to pass a law banning...