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This Day in History: Vast Wasteland

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:35:00 EDT

On this day in 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow proclaimed American television a "vast wasteland" in a speech to the American Association of Broadcasters.

In 1961 there were 3 channels, nearly all Americans still watched TV in black and white, and while vast might not be especially accurate, it was the wasteland part that caught the American public's attention.

Here's Minow:

When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

The whole speech is pretty fascinating. It's a snapshot of attitudes from a different era.

But things were already looking up in 1961: ABC's Wide World of Sports debuted, as did The Avengers. NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies got rolling with Marilyn Monroe's How to Marry a Millionaire.

47 years later, the vast part is no longer debatable, but we keep going at it on the wasteland question.

Part of Minow's fear was due to the shared view that broadcast spectrum was horrifically restricted:

I did not come to Washington to idly observe the squandering of the public's airwaves. The squandering of our airwaves is no less important than the lavish waste of any precious natural resource.

Needless to say, we seem to have found a work around on this question.

There'a also an interesting early statement on corporate social responsibility, which could easily be mistaken for something playing on CNBC as we speak:

You [broadcasters] can tell your advertisers, "This is the high quality we are going to serve -- take it or other people will. If you think you can find a better place to move automobiles, cigarettes, and soap, then go ahead and try." Tell your sponsors to be less concerned with costs per thousand and more concerned with understanding per millions. And remind your stockholders that an investment in broadcasting is buying a share in public responsibility.

Read or listen to the whole thing here.

Liberty for All

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Last week, South Dakota election supervisor Kea Warne announced that state voters will have the opportunity this November to accept or reject one of the nation's strictest anti-abortion statutes, a proposed law that would completely ban the practice except for narrowly defined cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. Sponsored by the group VoteYesForLife.com, which gathered well above the 16,776 signatures necessary for inclusion on the fall ballot, Initiated Measure 11, as the proposal is known, puts the question of abortion rights directly in the hands of state voters. If they vote yes, doctors who perform illegal abortions will face up to 10 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines. But should it matter what the voters think?

Look at it like this. The United States Constitution guarantees a number of specific individual rights, including free speech and the right to keep and bear arms. But what about those rights that aren't listed? Do we have the right to drink apple juice? How about the right to grow a mustache? More crucially, what about the right to be left alone? The Constitution mentions none of them. So if a majority of voters agree that we don't possess these (or countless other) rights, what's to stop the government from restricting our liberty?

The answer for many conservatives, and some libertarians, is nothing. Take Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). An outspoken foe of abortion, Paul favors turning the issue over to the states, where local preferences would trump a one-size-fits-all federal policy. Even pro-choice libertarians might like the sound of that. But consider the full ramifications of Paul's majoritarian position. Responding to the Court's disastrous decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which allowed the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to acquire private property seized via eminent domain under an "economic revitalization" plan, Paul argued that the Supreme Court should have simply refused to hear the case. "The issue," he maintained, "is the legality of the eminent domain action under Connecticut law, not federal law....The fight against local eminent domain actions must take place at the local level."

While Paul is certainly right that eminent domain abuse must be aggressively fought on the local level, he's wrong that we should skip the federal fight. As the Fourteenth Amendment declares: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Yet in Paul's mistaken opinion, this potentially libertarian amendment has no impact on the actions of state or local governments. Legal historians, however, have long agreed that the Fourteenth Amendment was originally meant to apply the Bill of Rights (and other natural rights) to the states.

Similarly, conservative former federal appeals court judge Robert H. Bork has attacked the Supreme Court for "inventing" rights and "usurp[ing] the powers of the people and their elected representatives." Bork is referring to two cases here. First, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court struck down that state's ban on contraceptives, holding that the law violated the "zones of privacy" created by the Constitution's "various guarantees." Second, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Court recognized the right to an abortion within the privacy rights guaranteed by Griswold.

For Bork, the absence of the word privacy in the Constitution means that the document does not protect it. But what about the Ninth Amendment, which states: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In other words, the Constitution itself recognizes that we possess far more rights than any document could ever list, a situation that the legal scholar Stephen Macedo has likened to islands of government power "surrounded by a sea of individual rights." If Bork had his way, we'd all be drowning in a sea of government power.

Which brings us back to the voters of South Dakota. There's nothing inherently noble about a majority of people agreeing on a particular issue. Indeed, bad ideas often prove more popular than good ones. It's only when popular majorities are anchored to the idea of inalienable rights that they're most entitled to our respect. Without that underlying commitment to individualism, majority rule can and frequently will degenerate into the loss of liberty for unpopular minorities. The racist policies of the Jim Crow South, after all, were often extremely popular among white voters.

So before we get too misty over the will of the people of South Dakota, let's remember that James Madison warned us about the tyranny of the majority, not the tyranny of unfettered individual liberty.

Damon W. Root is a reason associate editor.

Radicals for Interventionism

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Fareed Zakaria, an intelligent fellow, lets hyperbole get the best of him in the Washington Post, in a discussion about John McCain's big foreign policy speech last month:

It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years.... [T]hat the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries.

Why is this hyperbole? Because kicking the Russkies out of an international talking club is not remotely as radical or consequential as, say, articulating a doctrine for pre-emptive war across multiple fronts several years before it occurred to George W. Bush.

Zakaria goes on to make a good point and an arguable point, respectively:

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous--that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

Why, this almost seems like a bracing slap across the kisser of a man who foreign-policy chin-strokers like Zakaria usually adore! Until you read the next paragraph:

I write this with sadness because I greatly admire John McCain, a man of intelligence, honor and enormous personal and political courage. I also agree with much of what else he said in that speech in Los Angeles. But in recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic, alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense. His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.

Here's a new experiment for our journalistic pals: Try to write a piece about John McCain as if you didn't greatly admire him, and instead had only to go from his actual words, votes and initiatives. (In a few months, we'll repeat the exercise with Barack Obama.) One probable result: There would be much less of this alleged neoconservative/realist "schizophrenia," since there ain't been much of anything "realist" about McCain's foreign policy in over a decade. (And indeed, Zakaria provides zero evidence of "realism" from McCain's speech.) It's funny; "neocon" has become so debased and misused a term, that I bet there are many people who just find it impossible to believe that it can very accurately apply to someone they actually admire.

My reaction to the first wave of silly reaction to McCain's foreign policy speech here.

30 Years Ago in Reason

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:30:00 EDT

“The luckiest beneficiaries of [Ayn Rand’s] work are the people who read her and never see her, never meet her, never have any reason to deal with her in person. Then they get the best of what she was.”
—Nathaniel Branden, “Thank You Ayn Rand, and Goodbye”

“How many businessmen have you heard in the past 10 years who have been willing to stand up on some public rostrum and take issue with governmental policies? Many a businessman gets up and expresses general sentiments in favor of free enterprise and of competition, but very few get up and criticize particular measures taken by government. And I don’t blame them. They would be fools to do it!”
—Milton Friedman, “Which Way for Capitalism?”

“Ten years ago, all the libertarians in the country could fit comfortably into a medium-sized living room; now we are a large, growing, and multifaceted movement, making an increasingly vivid impact on American thinking, attitudes, and institutions.”
—Murray N. Rothbard, “Out of the Living Room”

Red Meat for H&R Commenters

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:56:00 EDT

Have at it, gang.

Early line: Over/under at 400 comments.

UPDATE: Hoax-a-rific.

Decent Political Commentary in Entertainment Weekly. Really.

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:32:00 EDT

Stephen King uses his regular Entertainment Weekly column to score some points against the latest push to ban the sale of the really good kind of video games to minors in my current base of operations, Massachusetts. Here's the master of horror on why he's freaked out by video game bans:

What makes me crazy is when politicians take it upon themselves to play surrogate parents. The results of that are usually disastrous. Not to mention undemocratic....
What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It's easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud.

King tosses in a gratuitous what-we-really-need-is-gun-control point at the end, but he comes out strong for "plastic videogame guns," which is still pretty good.

reason on King here. And on The King here. And on Dr. King here.

Pirate Capitalism

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason, New York: Free Press, 279 pages, $25

In a well-publicized speech two years ago, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney said, “We understand now that piracy is a business model.… Pirates compete the same way we do —through quality, price, and availability.”

Sweeney wasn’t thinking about Jack Sparrow, the fictional hero of Disney’s cash cow Pirates of the Caribbean. She meant the consumers and capitalists who pull music, words, and video out of the culture and remix, recast, and resell them.

It used to be easy to tell the pirates from the creators. Record labels sold CDs; Napster distributed music for free. Studios made movies; bootleggers taped opening nights in theaters and sold DVDs on the street the next morning. But postmodern piracy is more than mere bootlegging. In its best manifestation, it is the creation of brand new products cobbled together from the sights and sounds of contemporary life—including those sights and sounds disseminated by billion-dollar entertainment corporations.

In order to keep up with the pirates, more and more media companies have started to copy and co-opt their tactics. They’ve done this so well and so thoroughly that it’s getting hard to tell where piracy ends and good marketing begins. These increasingly blurry lines are making the entertainment industry nervous and conflicted. In The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, Matt Mason of Vice magazine tells the stories of early mix-tape mavens, turf-protecting graffiti artists, and retro sneaker designers while analyzing the ways that big companies compete with, fight off, and (increasingly) embrace culture pirates.

Mason concentrates on edgier industries, but we need look no further than Disney’s multi-billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for a prime example of a decades-long saga of a major corporation first plagiarizing itself and then encouraging others to do the same.

It began in the late 1950s, when someone at Disneyland dreamed up a wax museum of history’s great pirates, sort of a seafaring Madame Tussaud’s. After the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the herky-jerky robot motions and pre-recorded audio of “animatronics” became all the rage. Disneyland’s wax-pirate exhibit slowly evolved into a creepy, scary, kitschy wonder: a shadowy boat ride through larger-than-life animated pirates going about their dirty business.

After a few decades of mooring itself into the subconscious minds of American children—who among us didn’t duck when the fake cannonballs whistled by?—the Pirates of the Caribbean resurfaced in the early 1990s as a screenplay pitch from Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, whose previous projects included Aladdin and Shrek, paradigmatic specimens of the self-aware, self-referential, pop-literate era of animated features.

In 2003, Disney finally turned the adaptation of the theme-park ride into celluloid. The rest is history: Swaggery drunk Johnny Depp (in a character openly lifted from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards) spawned a trilogy of films, the second of which made an astonishing $1,066,179,725 in worldwide box office. Halloween costumes abounded, some Disney-issued and some not. Some were simply labeled “pirate” but looked a lot like Sparrow/Richards.

At least eight video games inspired by the film have appeared, with varying degrees of official sanction. A mobile phone game released by Disney’s Internet unit received lackluster reviews while a popular, unauthorized Xbox game borrowed the title, The Black Pearl, and little else. But instead of suing the peglegs off their unauthorized competitors, Disney simply pulled alongside and joined the melee with its own (free) Pirates of the Caribbean online role-playing game, fighting it out on the pirates’ own terms. Disney has stopped seeing at least some of the world’s pirates and remixers as thieves, and started seeing them as opportunities for a vast, multi-faceted marketing campaign.

Using the customizable characters from the role-playing game, fans were soon creating original YouTube videos—digital clips of pirates skewering British officers on their cutlasses, for example—from within the world of Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Some of the best were made by the 10,000 fans given passwords for the beta test of the online game at a pre-screening of the third movie, making them officially sanctioned pirate remixers (many of whom take their role literally, showing up to the screening in eye patches and tricorns).

Lots of these fan-fiction films have developed narratives of their own. They are part of a growing movement of machinima, where fans use video game environments to create their own animated movies, many of them borrowing characters or settings from Hollywood blockbusters. Meanwhile, the unauthorized Xbox game has in turn become the basis for 14 (and counting) user-modified versions at the PiratesAhoy.com online community.

In 2006, completing the great circle of recycling, Disneyland altered the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride to include an animatronic Johnny Depp.

In an effort to explain this mash-up landscape, Mason turns, with mixed success, to the last days of disco, to the early days of tagging New York subway cars, and to economic game theory. The most apt parallel, though, is to an industry known for its fickleness. Video and music companies are slowly realizing something that the world of fashion—with its markedly more relaxed attitude toward intellectual property—has always known. In the words of Coco Chanel, who long ruled the fashion world with an iron fist and a quilted handbag, “a fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.”

In a 2006 Virginia Law Review article, “The Piracy Paradox,” Kal Raustiala and Chris Springman made the case that “induced obsolescence” is the fashion industry’s healthy way of shrugging off the impact of copying while still remaining relevant. Logos can be protected —via trademark law, not copyright—but there’s nothing illegal about selling a purple head-scarf that looks a lot like the purple headscarf in Ralph Lauren’s last collection. Ralph simply announces that eyepatches are all the rage now and purple headscarves are so last season. This keeps fashion fresh and the industry strong, all with very weak intellectual property protection. As Coco said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

This isn’t to say that all designers sit idly by while $30 versions of $5,000 purses show up on the street. The Paris-based Hermès in particular has been aggressive about protecting its logos and certain additional trademarkable design elements. Still, the relationship between Chinese knock-offs and couture may be mutually beneficial in the end.

“We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward,” Disney’s Sweeney said in her speech. Mason puts it another way, using awfully similar language: “Pirates have taken over the good ship capitalism, but they’re not here to sink it. Instead, they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of Reason.

Name that Vice-Presidential Candidate

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:18:00 EDT

What politician, whose name is currently being kicked around for vice president under McCain, said this?:

"If you go back to 2000, when I helped the president in the campaign, I said that I was, in effect, kind of Libertarian on this issue, and meaning by that that I have been concerned about a government role in this issue."

reason contributor and Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi has the answer.

Update: The Wash Post is reporting that Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and the "Leave Us Alone Coalition" has said that Condoleezza Rice would "would be a great president....[and a] great vice president."

Another Isolated Incident

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:19:00 EDT

Two, actually. Both involve police intercepts of packages using the DHL delivery service on the campus at Duke University.

In the latest, police intercepted a package of marijuana bound for a fraternity house, then raided the place in full SWAT attire when one of the fraternity members signed for it. One of the residents describes the raid:

I am writing to share both my relief over the dropped charges against my housemate, senior Eric Halperin, as well as my continued anger at the blatant abuse of power by the Durham Police Department. On the morning of Feb. 27, our home off East Campus was raided by a team of State Bureau of Investigation agents and members of DPD. Without warning, our front door was knocked down and a handful of fully armed officers entered our home. Subsequently, we were ordered to the ground at the behest of assault rifles, dragged across the floor, hand-cuffed and forced to strip naked. In carrying out their search warrant, police officers destroyed hundreds of dollars of our personal property. Upon failing to find anything incriminating, my friend, Halperin, was falsely charged with drug trafficking without any investigation or evidence, except his signing for a DHL package not addressed to him.

It took a month, but police have now dropped all charges against Halperin. The earlier incident followed almost the same formula, except it took place in a dorm room. In that case too, the charges against the Duke student were dropped.

Even assuming it's appropriate to arrest a college student who signs for a package of marijuana addressed to someone else, why the SWAT tactics? Did the police department really think the fraternity was going to put up a fight? (Note: It was also the Durham police department that gave us this photo—discussion on that here.) Last month, there was a similar incident at LSU, in which a SWAT team raided a college student's home based on an anonymous tip that there might be some pot inside. They found nothing.

For some righteous outrage on the case, check out the "Liestoppers Board," a site set up by the parents of the wrongly accused Duke lacrosse team.

Honey, Remember Our First-Time Offense?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:55:00 EDT

This 20/20 story aired a couple weeks ago, but I missed it: John Stossel tells the tale of a Texas man condemned to a life of stigmatization as a "sex offender," lumped in with child molesters and serial rapists, because he had consensual sex with his not-quite-16-year-old girlfriend when he was a 19-year-old high school senior. A state legislator defends the registration requirement for a man whose "victim" is now his wife, saying the law is the law, we're a nation of laws, and too many people in America expect a second chance when they do something wrong.

More on sex offender registration requirements and residence restrictons here, here, and here.

[Thanks to Veronique de Rugy for the tip.]

I'm With Stupid

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On April 29 a grassroots army of teenaged billboards, provocatively packaged in combed cotton agitprop, will be deployed across the land. Their goal? Raise consciousness, spark discussion, and, if all goes according to plan, get thrown out of class. The occasion is the sixth annual National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day.

“When school administrators harass students, tell them they can’t wear the shirt, it raises awareness,” says Erik Whittington, director of Rock for Life, the group that organizes the event. “The media gets ahold of it. The word gets out. The more people who hear the phrase on the shirt, the more we educate people.”

This year, Whittington says his organization has big plans. To promote Pro-Life T-Shirt Day, they’re creating a Rock for Life website where the young pronatalist participants can network with each other. It’ll be like MySpace or Facebook, except that instead of connecting over a common interest in drunken snapshots and copyright infringement, the teens will bond via a shared passion for fetuses. Even with such Web 2.0 accessorizing, however, the key to the event’s potency remains the all-powerful T-shirt. “It has abortion in big letters,” says Whittington of this year’s model. “Then we have three graphics side by side. The first two are images of small children in the womb at early stages. The third image is blank. Under those images, it reads, Growing. Growing. Gone.”

Considering all the incendiary polemics that characterize both sides of the abortion divide, this rhetorical dinger is fairly benign. Yet some kind of escalatory alchemy occurs when free speech is wedded to casual wear; the mildly provocative becomes untenable, the sophomoric too obscene to bear. Compared to sexier media devices like, say, the iPhone, T-shirts are pretty clunky. Their storage capacity is limited. They’re not Bluetooth-enabled. And yet they boast a sense of intimacy and authority few other content delivery systems can match. They come, after all, with a living, breathing byline attached. They’re far more mobile than other forms of meat-space spam, such as billboards and posters; they literally get in your face.

In January of this year, several visitors wearing T-shirts emblazoned with various impeach-Bush-and-Cheney messages claimed that security guards at the National Archives Building—the place where the original version of the First Amendment now resides—barred them from the premises. In 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Kuwaiti government sentenced one man to 15 years in jail simply for wearing a Saddam Hussein T-shirt. Today in the United States, we’re far more enlightened: Selling a T-shirt inscribed with the names of military personnel who died in Iraq will only get you a maximum sentence of one year in Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Are you against sodomy or breast cancer? In favor of “hot moms” or John Edwards? In 2007 each of these convictions got at least one high school student kicked out of class. In Wisconsin, Edgerton High School enforces a zero tolerance policy against Insane Clown Posse T-shirts. In Aurora, Illinois, all it takes to earn a trip to the principal’s office is a T-shirt with a large dollar sign on it.

How did endorsing capitalism or B-list presidential candidates become so controversial? In the 1980s and ’90s, hoping to crack down on intracurricular violence and crime, a growing number of schools resorted to the sartorial communism of dress codes and uniforms. As President Bill Clinton put it in 1996, “If it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.” In the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, message T-shirts and any other style of dress that undermined the notion that high school students were the new maximum-security inmates fell under suspicion. In the wake of 9/11—Columbine for adults—this attitude spilled over into our malls, airports, and presidential town hall meetings.

It’s not just high school massacres and terrorist attacks that have left us so intolerant of our fellow citizens’ chests. During the last decade, pretty much every major media innovation—Fox News, Google, Napster, iTunes, Digg—has involved filtering information more precisely, giving us more and more control over the data we ingest. But that uncompromising raw-foods zealot at the organic farmer’s market whose shirt reads “Chewing is murder”? Or the perky fetus hugger who wants you to know that “Mean abortionists suck”? Steve Jobs hasn’t figured out a way to delete them from your life yet.

“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” the satirist Fran Lebowitz quipped in her 1978 essay collection Metropolitan Life, published when message T-shirts were enjoying their first wave of cultural ubiquity. What this sentiment doesn’t acknowledge is that it’s exactly because people don’t want to listen to us that the drive-by evangelism of T-shirts is so enduring. Body-borne messages can’t be muted, fast-forwarded, unsubscribed, banished to the “ignore” list, opted out of, or dumped in the recycle bin. Unlike telemarketers or Jehovah’s Witnesses, they don’t invade anyone’s privacy. Their zero-decibel proselytizing is simultaneously low-key and obtrusive, forcing any innocent bystander we share an elevator with to contemplate our thoughts on gun control, illegal immigration, and the availability of low-cost moustache rides.

Instead of avoiding such encounters with the dye-sublimated Other, we should embrace them as a kind of civic spinach: While we may not enjoy them, they’re good for us. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the landmark 1969 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court determined that high school students have a First Amendment right to express political and social opinions in school settings, Justice Abe Fortas observed that “any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance. But our Constitution says that we must take this risk; and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom—this kind of openness—that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious society.”

In the late 1990s era of no-logo vogue, cultural commentators fretted that the once-democratic medium of the T-shirt had been co-opted by corporations, and that T-shirt buyers were concerned only with raising the planet’s Hilfiger consciousness and saving the FUBUs. “The slogans on contemporary T-shirts are increasingly meaningless,” the novelist and columnist Russell Smith observed in The Globe and Mail in 2000. “Most of them are simply the brand name of the T-shirt itself.”

Now that our T-shirts are so blithely outspoken—and deliberately offensive—on every issue from Medicare to Britney Spears, it sometimes seems as if we’d like to ban our way back to a more sartorially decorous era. Ultimately, however, the T-shirt skirmishes that continuously erupt are oddly reassuring. Can the public schools be as out of control as they’re often alleged to be if all it takes to get suspended from one is an “I ♥ My Wiener” shirt? Has our public sphere grown as hopelessly coarse as our loudest cultural scrub maids insist if a shirt featuring a faux fishing theme and the phrase “Master Baiter” is enough to make Southwest Airlines ground you?

Shouldn’t we take comfort in the fact that so many high school students are ready to fight for their right to champion the unborn, maternal hotties, and whatever else they can think of to test the limits of Tinker v. Des Moines? T-shirts may intrude upon our lives in the public sphere, but they’re also our most vivid reminder that free speech is woven into the fabric of our culture.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Jane's Says: Iraq Only 22nd Most Unstable Country

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:14:00 EDT

Touted by a Wash Times story on soon-to-be-released report from Jane's Information Group, the respected rater of safety in countries:

Despite an insurgency and sectarian strife dating back to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Iraq is listed by Jane's risk analysts at 22nd among the world's 235 countries, territories and political entities, on par with countries such as Burundi and Nigeria.
"There's no doubt that Iraq right now has perhaps the world's most virulent insurgency within its borders, but the country has its strengths as well," said Christian Le Miere, managing editor of Jane's Country Risk, the journal that compiles the rankings.

The Palestinian territories are most unstable, followed by Afghanistan, Haiti, and seven African countries in the top ten. Pakistan is 28 and North Korea is 45th for those keeping score. The Vatican and Sweden are the most stable. Where's the U.S.--what with that porous border and all them guns? Look it up.

More here.

NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament Brackets...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:45:00 EDT

Let the bitching and moaning, and obsessive viewing, begin.

No. 1 seeds include three predictables (North Carolina, Kansas, and UCLA) and one less-so (Memphis, though ranked No. 1 for a good chunk of the season).

Printable bracket diagram here.

Women's bracket to come.

And let me make a salient point, regarding reason's general philosophy: All these athletes should be getting paid something approaching their market value (which in many cases wouldn't be much more than a scholarship). And as much as I really love college sports and will be glued to the tube from here on out (rooting against at least three of the four No. 1 seeds), I agree with Milton Friedman that there's something fundamentally retarded about the whole concept of mixing higher learning with essentially pro-level sports. (And I should say that there's a similar problem at the K-12 level too, where sports always takes away from more clearly educational programming and culture; and I say that as a multiple letter-winner, not a sports-hater).

Incarceration Nation

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:13:00 EST

Ron Bailey beat me to the punch on the new Pew study showing that 1 in 99 American adults are behind bars.

A few thoughts:

It's a staggering figure that by far and away leads the world, both in the total number and in the percentage of the population in prison.

And while there's certainly some truth to the theory that throwing lots of people in jail is in part responsible for the drop in violent crime over the last 15 years, the story's a bit more complicated than that. As the Washington Post explains in the article linked above, a state like Florida, which has been giddily locking people up for two decades, has experienced only a slight drop in crime over that period. New York, on the other hand, has experienced a substantial drop in crime since the early 1990s, but the state's prison population is the lowest its been in 15 years.

The violent crime rate has also inched back upward the last few years, even as prison populations have continued to soar.

Strangely enough, the Washington Post story on the study says (correctly, I think) that we're finally starting to see reform in sentencing law, as well as some consternation from elected officials about our shamefully high incarceration levels. But not because our political leaders are suddenly concerned about civil rights, or the humanity of keeping one percent of the country in lockup. It's more because supporting a prison system that's bursting at the seams has become a drain on state budgets.

Whatever it takes, I guess. It'll also be interesting to see what happens when the nonviolent drug offenders we locked up in the 1980s with mandatory minimums start getting released.

Are Farmers Stupid, or Deluded, or Both?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last week, the ideological environmentalist group Friends of the Earth (FOE) launched another attack in its misinformation campaign against biotech crops. FOE's latest salvo is its report "Who Benefits from GM Crops?," issued explicitly to counter the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications' (ISAAA) annual global assessment of biotech crops. FOE claims biotech crops yield less than conventional crops, harm the environment, are technologically stagnant, have done nothing to help poor farmers, and are monopolized by a few giant corporations.

The ISAAA 2007 report on the global status paints a far different picture. The ISAAA notes that farmers around the world continue their rapid adoption of biotech crop varieties. In 2007 the global planting of biotech crops rose to an all time high of 282 million acres, a 12 percent increase over 2006. In addition, the number of farmers choosing to grow biotech crops rose from 10.3 million in 2006 to over 12 million in 2007. The ISAAA report notes that 11 million of the biotech growers are resource poor farmers in developing countries, the majority of whom cultivate insect-resistant cotton. Biotech crops are now planted in 23 countries, and 29 others have approved the import of biotech food and feed.

Let's look at FOE's claims about the alleged faults of biotech crops.

Do biotech crops yield less than conventional crops? FOE is artful in its use of data. Some biotech varieties did initially impose slight yield penalties when compared to conventional varieties. This occurred because breeders improved conventional varieties during the years it took biotech crops to be approved by regulatory agencies. Even so, farmers adopted slightly lower yielding biotech crops because they were cheaper to grow. Biotech crops need fewer pesticide applications and require less plowing. A 2006 study by the British agricutural and food economics consultancy, PG Economics, found no impact from biotech on soy yields while cotton and corn enjoyed higher yields. Even though biotech seeds cost more, overall lower production costs more than make up for the initial expense. The PG Economics report estimates that biotech crops have increased farm incomes by $27 billion since 1996.

Do biotech crops harm the environment? FOE claims that biotech crops use more pesticides than conventional varieties and it identifies crops resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (aka Roundup) as the chief offenders. Farmers kill weeds without harming their biotech crops by spraying with glyphosate. The PG Economics study found that the adoption of biotech crops reduced the use of pesticides since 1996 by 224 million kilograms (493 million pounds), or just about 7 percent.

In addition, herbicide resistant crops enable farmers to switch to no-till farming which dramatically reduces soil erosion. In fact, an August 2007 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that "no-till farming can build soil fertility even with intensive farming methods." However, some regions experienced an increased use of glyphosate as farmers shifted to no-till agriculture. So if glyphosate applications are going up, is it harmful to the environment or human health? Not even the hyper-cautious Pesticide Action Network puts glyphosate on its list of "bad actors." Nor does glyphosate linger in the environment—it is rapidly degraded by soil microbes with a half-life of a week to several months, which is shorter than many of the herbicides that it replaces.

FOE also claims that spraying biotech crops with herbicides is forcing the faster evolution of herbicide resistant superweeds. Just as bacteria eventually evolve to resist antibiotics, so too do weeds evolve to resist herbicides. This process started with the introduction of modern herbicides after World War II, well before the advent of modern biotech varieties. Fortunately, biotechnology is a fine tool for developing new ways to control weeds.

FOE argues that crop biotechnology has stagnated and correctly points out that the vast majority of biotech crop varieties incorporate just two traits: insect resistance and herbicide tolerance. These traits are valuable to farmers though they don't not offer obvious benefits to consumers. If few new biotech crops have yet to make it to the tables of consumers, FOE can take a good bit of the credit. FOE and other ideological environmentalists have campaigned tirelessly to block the development and spread of new beneficial biotech crop traits. FOE does its best to stop biotech in its tracks and then turns around to assert that researchers have developed nothing new.

However, FOE will soon not be able to make that hypocritical claim. Biotech researchers are now incorporating traits for drought resistance, salt tolerance, and one which enables plants to thrive on half a dose of nitrogen fertilizer. Crops with these traits will be particularly valuable for poor farmers in developing countries. Despite FOE's opposition, "Golden Rice," which has been genetically improved to help prevent vitamin A deficiency, which blinds 300,000 to 500,000 poor children each year, should become available by 2011. In addition, researchers are creating crops that provide enhanced nutrition such as tomatoes with increased folate.

Anti-biotech campaigns by activist groups like FOE have succeeded in frightening the governments of many developing countries into banning biotech crops. Nevertheless, biotech crops have been embraced by poor farmers around the world—whenever their governments will let them. The World Banks's World Development Report 2008 (WDR) notes that second-generation biotech crops are now making their way to the market. The WDR reports, "Transgenic rice, eggplant, mustard, cassava, banana, potato, sweet potato, lentil, and lupin have been approved for field testing in one or more countries. Many of those technologies promise substantial benefits to poor producers and consumers."

And finally, FOE complains that biotech seeds are monopolized by a few large companies. Again, FOE activists should look in the mirror to find the culprits behind this industry consolidation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of startup and well-established seed companies that aimed to develop agricultural biotech exploded. But, as we've seen, crop biotech ran into a buzz saw of environmentalist opposition, especially in Europe. Consequently, since biotech seeds are relatively low in value compared to biomedical treatments, small crop biotech companies withered and the industry consolidated into fairly large companies, chiefly Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta and Bayer. St. Louis, Missouri-based Monsanto dominates the market for biotech seed. Some 60 percent of all biotech improved seeds contain traits developed by Monsanto. FOE is certainly responsible, in part, for Monsanto's exploding profits.

Finally, let's revisit the title of FOE's new report: "Who Benefits from GM Crops?" As the ISAAA report clearly shows, millions of farmers around the world think that they benefit from biotech crops. Since this is so, FOE can only conclude that these farmers are either stupid or deluded or both. If biotech crops did not deliver their promised benefits, farmers around the world would not be adopting them at exponential rates. Not even FOE's most determined efforts to spread anti-biotech misinformation can obscure this plain fact.

Disclosure: I used to own some Monsanto shares years ago. It looks as though I should have held onto them. I don't own any other crop biotech stocks. I grew up on a farm and I can tell you that plowing and weeding are not all that much fun.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Hillary Mortgages the Future

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

You will count speed as a virtue if you're going through a home remodeling, clicking on an Internet link or drafting a cornerback. But presented with looming calamity, most of us would much prefer one that moves slowly. Which is why there is no comfort in hearing that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, she will be "ready on Day One."

In her campaign, she presents herself as an experienced hand with a penchant for practical solutions, suggesting that her opponent, Barack Obama, dispenses nothing but vaporous oratory detached from the real world. When it comes to the mortgage meltdown, though, her policy rests on the assumption that upon arriving in the Oval Office, she'll open the closet and find a magic wand.

Obama, by contrast, acknowledges the bitter truth that when government regulators clamber into a carriage, it can easily turn into a pumpkin.

Their approaches to the problem are not an aberration but a symptom of a larger difference. Obama is not a staunch free marketeer, but he grasps the value of markets and shows some deference to economic laws. Clinton, however, tends to treat both as piddly obstacles to her grand ambitions.

You don't have to take that from me. Some on the left see the Illinois senator as suspiciously unenchanted by their goals and methods. Robert Kuttner, an economics writer and co-editor of The American Prospect, scorns Obama's advisers as "free-market guys who want to use markets to somehow solve social problems, which is like squaring a circle." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman denounced Obama because his health care and fiscal stimulus plans "tilted to the right" and concludes he is "less progressive" than Clinton.

If progressive means issuing dictates that prevent informed people from entering into mutually agreeable and economically valuable transactions, that is undoubtedly true. Many liberals prefer to rely more on command and control. Nowhere is the contrast between the Democratic contenders more vivid than on how to deal with the fallout from the epidemic of mortgages gone bad.

Clinton has a stunningly simple solution, as stated in one of her TV ads: "freeze foreclosures" for 90 days and "freeze rates on adjustable mortgages." Those are a perfect answer, assuming this is the question: How can the government reward irresponsibility, discourage mortgage lending and raise the cost of financing a home?

After all, it's easy to pass a law prohibiting lenders from foreclosing. But the first result of that would be a lot more borrowers deciding that paying the mortgage is no longer the highest priority. Those who have practiced strenuous frugality in order to meet their monthly obligations would get nothing, and those who behaved recklessly would prosper.

The second result would be to choke off the flow of credit. When a bank makes a loan, it needs some assurance of being repaid. When it isn't, foreclosure offers a way to minimize its loss. If Clinton blocks that option for a time, banks will be markedly less eager to offer loans—particularly for anyone with a less than perfect credit history.

Then there is the matter of the interest rates future borrowers will have to shoulder. Lenders offer adjustable-rate mortgages, which carry low rates in the early years, in the hope of reaping higher rates later on. If a President Clinton were to void the second part of these deals, many mortgage companies would stop offering the first part, in effect saying: Freeze this.

Obama is not willing to let this turbulent market sort itself out without the intervention of government, but he offers nothing remotely as alarming as Clinton's dual freeze. Among his main proposals are tougher enforcement of laws against fraud and deception and mandates for "easy-to-understand information" for borrowers -- ideas few advocates of economic freedom would find objectionable.

More important than what he advocates is what he doesn't. His chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, told me that Obama thinks "we shouldn't have a blanket policy of bailing out everyone." In formulating remedies, Goolsbee says, "you have to think how not to reward bad behavior."

In Clinton's world, that is not a concern: The government can take from the lenders and give to the borrowers without any unwanted consequences. Now who's telling the fairy tale?

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Scientists Create Worms that Can Live the Equivalent of 800 Years in Human Years

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:11:00 EST

Last week, researchers at the University of Southern California reported that they had created a fungus that could live 10-times longer than normal--the equivalent of a human living 800 years. Now another team at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) have tweaked nematode worms so that they also can live 10 times longer than normal. Usually nematodes curl up and die after two to three weeks. Some of the UAMS' genetically modified worms live up to nine months.

The researchers note that translating earlier anti-aging worm research into mammals (mice) has boosted rodent longevity, but not by nearly so much. Still, UMAS geriatrician Robert Shmookler Reis notes,

Worms have a short lifespan to begin with, so it seems to be relatively easy to prod them to live longer. Other mutations, which extend the life of C. elegans up to 2.5-fold, give a much smaller benefit in mice."...

“The important thing is that we now have a pretty good idea of what we should try in order to increase mouse lifespan by 50 to 100 percent. We are on a path now that might lead to similar gains from a single genetic change or drug given to mice, and eventually to a treatment that could benefit humans.”

The race is on now for the Methesulah Mouse Prize.

Choose Life

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:51:00 EST

The abortion debate has raged since 1973, when the Supreme Court gave abortion constitutional protection, but the basic law of the land has proved immutable. Abortion is legal, and it's going to remain legal for a long time.

Laws often alter attitudes, inducing people to accept things—such as racial integration—they once rejected. But sometimes, attitudes move in the opposite direction, as people see the consequences of the change. That's the case with abortion.

The news that the abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level in 30 years elicits various explanations, from increased use of contraceptives to lack of access to abortion clinics. But maybe the chief reason is that the great majority of Americans, even many who see themselves as pro-choice, are deeply uncomfortable with it.

In 1992, a Gallup/Newsweek poll found 34 percent of Americans thought abortion "should be legal under any circumstances," with 13 percent saying it should always be illegal. Last year, only 26 percent said it should always be allowed, with 18 percent saying it should never be permitted.

Sentiments are even more negative among the group that might place the highest value on being able to escape an unwanted pregnancy: young people. In 2003, Gallup found, one of every three kids from age 13 to 17 said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. More revealing yet is that 72 percent said abortion is "morally wrong."

By now, pro-life groups know that outlawing most abortions is not a plausible aspiration. So they have adopted a two-pronged strategy. The first is to regulate it more closely—with parental notification laws, informed consent requirements and a ban on partial-birth abortion. The second is to educate Americans with an eye toward changing "hearts and minds." In both, they have had considerable success.

Even those who insist Americans are solidly in favor of legal abortion implicitly acknowledge the widespread distaste. That's why the Democratic Party's 2004 platform omitted any mention of the issue, and why politicians who support abortion rights cloak them in euphemisms like "the right to choose."

But some abortion rights supporters admit reservations. It was a landmark moment in 1995 when the pro-choice author Naomi Wolf, writing in The New Republic magazine, declared that "the death of a fetus is a real death." She went on: "By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity."

The report on abortion rates from the Guttmacher Institute suggests that the evolution of attitudes has transformed behavior. Since 1990, the number of abortions has dropped from 1.61 million to 1.21 million. The abortion rate among women of childbearing age has declined by 29 percent.

Those changes could be the result of other factors, such as more use of contraception: If fewer women get pregnant, fewer will resort to abortion. But the shift is equally marked among women who do get pregnant. In 1990, 30.4 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion. Last year, the figure was 22.4 percent.

Pro-choice groups say women are having fewer abortions only because abortion clinics are growing scarcer. But abortion clinics may be growing scarcer because of a decline in demand for their services and a public opinion climate that has gotten more inhospitable.

This growing aversion to abortion may be traced to better information. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, most people had little understanding of fetal development. But the proliferation of ultrasound images from the womb, combined with the dissemination of facts by pro-life groups, has lifted the veil.

In the new comedy Juno, a pregnant 16-year-old heads for an abortion clinic, only to change her mind after a teenage protester tells her, "Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. It can feel pain. And it has fingernails."

Juno has been faulted as a "fairy tale" that sugarcoats the realities of teen pregnancy. But if it's a fairy tale, that tells something about how abortion violates our most heartfelt ideals—and those of our adolescent children. Try to imagine a fairy tale in which the heroine has an abortion and lives happily ever after.

The prevailing view used to be: Abortion may be evil, but it's necessary. Increasingly, the sentiment is: Abortion may be necessary, but it's evil.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Huckabee Gets Biblical

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:12:00 EST

In a Beliefnet interview, Mike Huckabee elaborates on his comment that "what we need to do" is "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards." He says he was referring specifically to amendments banning abortion and defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman:

People sometimes say we shouldn't have a human life amendment or a marriage amendment because the Constitution is far too sacred to change, and my point is, the Constitution was created as a document that could be changed. That's the genius of it. The Bible, however, was not created to be amended and altered with each passing culture. If we have a definition of marriage, that we don't change that definition, that we affirm that definition. And that the sanctity of human life is not just a religious issue. It's an issue that goes to the very heart of our civilization of all people being equal, endowed by their creator with alienable [sic] rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That was the point. The Bible was not written to be amended. The Constitution was....
I don't think that's a radical view to say we're going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we're going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what's been historic.

If "the Bible was not written to be amended," what's the New Testament all about? And if Huckabee wants to stick with the biblical definition of marriage, why does he imply that a marriage consisting of "a man and three women" is some newfangled challenge to the family arrangements endorsed by God? According to the Bible, Abraham sired one son with Hagar (his concubine) and one with Sarah (his full-fledged wife) while they were both living and had more children with Keturah after Sarah's death. Jacob had two wives (Rachel and Leah) and two concubines (Bilhah and Zilpah) at the same time, producing children with each of them. Moses apparently had two wives (Ziporrah and "the Ethiopian woman"). David and Solomon each had a bunch. (More examples here.) As far as abortion goes, the Bible (the "Old Testament" part, at least) has nothing clear to say about it one way or another. It seems Huckabee, despite his firm stance against amending the Bible, is doing exactly that, based on his own moral intuitions, and he wants to treat the Constiution in a similar manner.

The Amateurs' Hour

david@davidharsanyi.com (David Harsanyi) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:17:00 EST

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, New York: Currency, 228 pages, $22.95

Andrew Keen’s website claims, without a hint of humility, that he’s “the leading contemporary critic of the Internet.” No kidding? The entire Internet? A curious reader might wonder whether such an all-inclusive battle is similar to taking on, say, “music” or “radio waves.” It is.

More specifically, Keen’s depressing book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, laments techno-utopianism, free content, and the rise of citizen journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and critics as cultural arbiters. It is a book, in other words, of spectacular elitism.

Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned full-time critic of user-generated Internet content, argues that our most “valued cultural institutions” are under attack from the hordes of lay hacks, undermining quality content with garbage. His central argument is—to pinch a word he loves to use—seductive. He’s right that the Internet is littered with inane, vulgar, dimwitted, unedited, and unreadable content, much of it fueling outrageous conspiracy theories, odious partisan debates, mindless celebrity worship, and worse. And then there’s the stuff that’s not even entertaining.

Keen refuses to confess that there’s even a smattering of intellectually and culturally worthy user-driven content online. If you do find something decent in the “digital forest of mediocrity,” he attributes it to the infinite monkey theorem: Even simians, if permitted to indiscriminately hit a keyboard for an infinite amount of time, will one day bang out Beowulf or Don Quixote. (Silly me, I was under the impression that monkeys had hatched the idea for VH1’s Scott Baio Is 45…and Single.) Apparently, these monkeys are discharging so much free content into the cyber-strata that they threaten to bury culturally significant work, dilute good craftsmanship, and cost me, a journalist and “cultural gatekeeper,” my job. So I guess I’d better take Keen’s thesis seriously.

Keen isn’t entirely wrong—of over the estimated 175,000 new blogs created each day, just a miniscule fraction are worthwhile—but in the midst of cobbling together statistics and disaster stories he ignores an otherwise promising tale of job creation, mass creativity, and the democratization of the media. He also fails to acknowledge that the rise of Web 2.0—Internet-based media, such as blogs, in which the content is largely generated by the users themselves—was prompted precisely by the lack of choices and quality programming from those gatekeepers he so adamantly defends.

Not long ago, I was presented a firsthand view of the gloomy fallout from Web 2.0. Another downsizing had fallen upon the newspaper industry, including my paper, The Denver Post. Colleagues and friends of mine were instructed to clear their desks and find a new line of work. Keen grieves over the fate of my well-trained coworkers. He pins the blame on a bunch of schmucks knocking out third-rate musings on politics and culture. How can The New York Times, with its multi-million-dollar operational budget, compete with a blogger, who typically operates for pennies in his or her spare time?

We can agree, to a point. There are plenty of schmucks out there. But the ability to receive only the content you want while ignoring the rest of the package, combined with the migration of ads to services like Craig’s List, has done far more damage to newspapers than any pajama-clad scribblers ever could. And since the citizen journalist relies heavily on more traditional journalistic sources, I doubt the industry is nearing its demise. (In fact, by acting as freelance fact-checkers, all those bloggers have arguably transformed the medium into a more reliable dispenser of the news.)

In the face of economic realities, newspapers have been co-opting the blogger model—transforming a once-rigid daily newsroom cycle into a constant, 24-hour process, constantly posting updates, using video and audio as well as text, and bringing on bloggers of their own. Meanwhile, many high-profile bloggers, looking for ways to make their sites financially viable, are moving toward an old-media model, emphasizing professionalism and co-opting some of the conventional elements of news services. From the megapopular left-leaning Huffington Post to the conservative-oriented Pajamas Media, bloggers have pooled their talents and transformed into news agencies.

Whatever Keen (or I) may believe the future holds, it’s not society’s job to ensure that journalism remains profitable. It’s journalism’s job to entice readers and viewers with a product that’s worth the price of admission. These struggles, as important as they may be to some of us, do not signal the cold-blooded murder of “our culture.”

That brings us to Keen’s most glaring weakness: his lack of faith in the culture he defends. Keen is concerned not just with journalism but with a wider range of creative expression, from film to music. Readers of The Cult of the Amateur may be surprised to learn that the barbarians capable of obliterating thousands of years of Western culture in their spare time are a horde of porn-addicted, gambling-happy, ungrateful, musically challenged yokels. What worthwhile culture could be so easily knocked off its perch?

Like most snobs, Keen doesn’t have much confidence in markets either. To accept his argument, we must believe that the common consumer, able to make thousands of informed decisions in everyday life, can’t differentiate between crap and Cristal when the choice is made on a computer screen.

In other contexts, Keen is a romantic. Consider his rhetoric regarding the supposedly bygone local bookstore. (A quick search of BookSense.com, a site sponsored by independently owned bookstores, shows five such stores within a 10-mile radius of my home.) “Instead of 2,500 independent bookstores with their knowledgeable, book loving staffers, specialty sections, and relationships with local writers,” Keen writes, “we now have an oligarchy of online megastores employing soulless algorithms that use our previous purchases and the purchases of others to tell us what to buy.”

Shopping at the convivial local bookstore might be a heartwarming experience, but the notion that such places offer us better choices is a fantasy. On Amazon, you can perform super-exact searches or browse endlessly (so at some point even the commoner may stumble across something worthwhile). You are guided not only by rough algorithms but by book lists and reviews written and compiled by other human beings who share your hyper-specific interests. And aren’t Amazon’s reviewers, list compilers, and bloggers a lot like helpful, educated bookstore staffers, leading us, by hyperlinking, to stories and ideas we otherwise might never have known about?

But Keen’s most persistent grievance is that free content undermines the accuracy of information. “Can a social worker in Des Moines really be considered credible in arguing with a trained physicist over string theory?” he asks, referring to Wikipedia, the online, user created encyclopedia. “Can a car mechanic have as knowledgeable a ‘POV’ as that of a trained geneticist on the nature of hereditary diseases? Can we trust a religious fundamentalist to know more about the origins of mankind than a PhD in evolutionary biology?”

Well, yes and no. I, of course, have the prerogative to trust whomever I want. In the same way I once gathered my news from The National Inquirer and listened to Art Bell’s late-night radio broadcasts for clues to my place in the universe, today I can ferret out similarly useless information webwide.

The more significant point, one that Keen ignores, is that the Web 2.0 explosion has provided me with something I’ve never had before: access to ongoing discussions between and among trained physicists, trained geneticists, and religious fundamentalists. Laymen as well as experts are now invited to sit in on these conversations. On occasion, the amateurs get it right, triggering dramatic results. Matt Drudge can announce the Monica Lewinsky scandal while Newsweek dithers about publishing it. Or a blog like Little Green Footballs can help catch Dan Rather peddling forged documents about the president’s service record. Rather than undermining information, this new access has expanded users’ understanding of the world.

Keen raises the stakes of his argument when he blames some of society’s serious ills on the Internet. He asserts, for instance, that the “tasteless nature” of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have “infested” Web 2.0 with “anonymous sexual predators and pedophiles.” No doubt a small fraction of those who participate in social networks are sexual predators and pedophiles—roughly the same as the percentage of people in local bookstores, playgrounds, and libraries who are sexual predators and pedophiles. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard an advocate for children’s rights blame libraries and playgrounds for sexual abuse.

Despite a heavy load of scaremongering, Keen claims he’s not a “techno-moralist” but a “techno-scold”—as if there’s much of a difference. The problem, he maintains, is that those involved in Web 2.0 live in an echo chamber. “There isn’t a debate, and there isn’t a conversation,” he says. “They’re just listening to themselves.” If only mainstream media outlets had debated their future as often and as intensely as bloggers debate theirs, we might not have needed Keen’s book.

David Harsanyi, a Denver Post staff columnist, is the author of Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America Into a Nation of Children (Doubleday/Broadway).

Flunking a Religious Test

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:37:00 EST

Mitt Romney is worried about religious intolerance. He fears religious and nonreligious people will unite to punish him because of his Mormon faith. He thinks it would be much more in keeping with America's noblest traditions if Mormons and other believers joined together to punish people of no faith.

On Thursday, Romney showed up at the George H.W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, to announce that even if it costs him the White House, his Mormonism is non-negotiable. That came as a relief to those who suspected he would defuse the issue by undergoing a Methodist baptism.

Like John F. Kennedy, who said in 1960 that the presidency should not be "tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group," Romney said there should be no religious test for this office. "A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith," he said.

Rejected because of his faith, no. But rejected for his lack of faith? That's another question. Romney evinces a powerful aversion to skeptics. "We need to have a person of faith lead the country," he said in February, which sounds like a religious test to me.

In case anyone doubts his inhospitable stance toward freethinkers, scoffers and Sunday-morning layabeds, his speech confirmed it. Nowhere did he make the slightest effort to suggest that anyone unsure of the existence of God has anything to contribute to our democratic dialogue. In fact, he went out of his way to denounce decadent European societies "too busy or too 'enlightened' to . . . kneel in prayer."

When he said "we do not insist on a single strain of religion—rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith," he drew a line that excludes those professing no creed. Zoroastrians and Taoists in, agnostics out.

As he sees it, any American who doesn't worship at least one god is eating away at our democratic structure like a hungry termite. He quoted John Adams: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people." Romney went further: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. . . . Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

He ignores evidence that the framers thought otherwise. The Constitution they so painstakingly drafted contains not a single mention of the Almighty -- unlike the Articles of Confederation, which it replaced. A 1796 treaty, signed by that very same John Adams and ratified by the Senate, stipulated that the U.S. government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

If the founders thought religion was indispensable to a free republic, why does the national charter say "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office"? Wouldn't it have made more sense to include a religious test?

Romney's theory that faith is essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world. Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often sponsored,
oppression in Europe and elsewhere.

The former Massachusetts governor makes equally imaginative claims about those who champion church-state separation. He believes they "are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism." Oh? You would look long and hard to find any secularist or civil libertarian who thinks the government should officially espouse atheism or encourage Americans to abandon religion.

Believers insist on keeping "In God We Trust" on our currency. Where are the nonbelievers who want to replace it with "There Is No God"? Secularists don't expect the government to take their side—only to practice neutrality. They think 1) all Americans should be free to practice the religion they choose and 2) none should have the active assistance of the government.

But neutrality between belief and nonbelief is something Romney can't abide. He thinks the government must be firmly and vocally on the side of religion. Only when it comes to Mormonism versus other religions does he recognize the value of neutrality as a principle. Isn't that convenient?

In the end, though, Romney accomplished what he set out to do in this speech. Henceforth, no one can possibly justify voting against him because he's a Mormon. Not when he's provided so many other good reasons.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Questioning the Need for the Federal Reserve

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:13:00 EST

At the New Republic's web site, Alvaro Vargas Llosa uses the federal raid on the Liberty Dollar as a hook to ask: do we really need a Federal Reserve? He namechecks libertarian economist greats Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman on the way. An excerpt:

All in all, financial instability has been far greater since the creation of the Federal Reserve. What did the Great Depression teach us? Essentially that even with the best of intentions, it is impossible for the authorities to manage the supply of money in accordance with the exact needs of the economy......
The current housing market and debt market crises are in good part the children of the Federal Reserve. By cutting rates 13 times between 2001 and 2003, and then keeping them very low for years, monetary policy contributed to the housing bubble. That is not to say other factors--including financial instruments that made it difficult to see that the underlying foundation was not as solid as it seemed--did not play a part too. But, once again, the Fed has turned out to be a factor of financial instability.
In this context, Norfed's attempt to prove to the Fed that the market is ready to trust private currency backed by gold is a welcome occasion to take a second look at some of the economic institutions we take for granted.

Past Liberty Dollar raid blogging here and here.

Virginia GOP Demands Loyalty Oath

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:04:00 EST

Apparently worried that independents and Democrats will cross over to vote for a certain Texas congressman in the state's open primary, the Virginia GOP is requiring voters to sign a pledge of loyalty before they'll be allowed to vote. The pledge says that in exchange to be being permitted to vote in the primary, the voter promises to support whomever the GOP ends up nominating for president.

The pledge isn't legally enforceable, of course. It's also insulting. Only the most slavish party loyalist would commit a year in advance to voting for any one of the GOP's seven candidates, no matter what happens between now and then, solely because of the (R) in front of his name.

Given the Virginia GOP's legislative record over the last several years, it also isn't exactly clear to what principles voters would be pledging their loyalty, other than contempt for gay people.

They should probably be more concerned about requiring elected Virginia Republicans to pledge an oath to a rudimentary belief in limited government.

"Hey Meaty, You're Making Me So Hot!"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:00:00 EST

There's something about vegetarianism that co-opts other causes—animal welfare, health, yogic meditation. Everyone seems to want to have a side of philosophy with dinner these days. The hottest, newest cause to be assimilated into the vegetarian-anti-industrial complex is global warming. Environmentalists and vegetarians have long maintained excellent relations, but the dawning of broader awareness about fossil fuels expended in food production and the other environmental impacts of farming have brought the two causes into an extremely cosy relationship.

And behold the strange offspring of that alliance:

The sweaty woman featured above is Heather Mills, the very-soon-to-be former Mrs. Paul McCartney. She was glamour model before she lost her lower leg in a motorcycle accident, and she recently strapped on her dancing leg and competed to excellent effect on Dancing with the Stars. She's tabloid famous, but she has put her fame to some good use: Her Adopt-a-Minefield charity campaigning deserves the high praise it has won her.

In the midst of her messy, minutely chronicled divorce—and just after her public relations rep quit and the law firm that was representing her in the divorce made the unusual decision to "fire" her as a client for being a little too chatty with the press—she has launched this bold, strange new campaign for environmental veganism.

The idea, it seems, is to convince people who bike to work, buy carbon offsets when they fly, and only exhale CO2 when they absolutely must that they're still terrible environmentalists. They simply haven't given up enough. Meat will have to go as well. And eggs. And milk.

The State of the World report focused on consumerism in 2004, and reported that "belching, flatulent livestock" are to blame for about a fifth of the world's production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, a figure that several subsequent reports more or less agree with, though usually not quite as colorfully.

Viva! director Juliet Gellatley reinforces that statistic: "Meat and dairy animals are the second biggest cause of greenhouse gases at 18 per cent compared to 13.5 per cent from all the world's different modes of transport combined."

Since the proportion of greenhouse emissions from transportation are similar to those produced by raising animals for food, the logic goes, having a burger undoes all the good of your virtuous bicycling, and not just around the waistline. Indeed, after they have made so many sacrifices, the prosthetic-wearing Mills says to meat-eating enviros:

Viva, the British group sponsoring the billboards, warns us "eating meat, fish and dairy amounts to a "Diet of Disaster," complete with histrionic capital letters. The basis of this claim is the idea that farm animals, cows in particular, are emitting greenhouse gasses at an astonishing rate, grazing on lots of land that could have been carbons sinking forests, and otherwise causing environmental havoc. But Viva is primarily a vegetarian outfit, not an environmental group—it cites environmental concerns as just one of four reasons to "go veggie." This might explain why they're not willing to publicize that there's a lot of middle ground on the issue of vegetarianism and global warming. It's not as simple as veganism versus and environmental apocalypse.

Like Viva, Mills mixes her environmental vegetarianism with other reasons to go veg. Or she tries to anyway. During a media appearance to promote the campaign at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park (a favorite spot for political pronouncements and the occasional loony rant since the late 19th century), Mills appeared in a green t-shirt touting veganism to speak to the people. She said: "There are many other kinds of milk available. Why don't we try drinking rats' milk and dogs' milk?" Mills later clarified that she meant to highlight that drinking the milk of any animal was unnatural and shouldn't be done at all, but the incredible weirdness of the campaign makes it hard to tell the distortions of the notoriously slapdash British press from the truth.

But does it really help either cause to equate part of an ordinary to drinking milk from rats? Will asking the bike-riding green to give up steak at dinner parties help him spread the word? Why this strange desire to bring together the self-denying, ascetic streak in both vegetarianism and environmentalism? Why guilt and accusations instead of good cheer?

As an antidote to Mills' cheeky but still depressing billboards and all that they represent, below is a list of a handful of the many promising possibilities for minimizing the methane output of cows in the works--including genetically altered bovines, better feeds for animals, and other technological solutions that can make possible a vast middle ground for those who like a steak, but would also like for there to be some ice left somewhere on Earth to chill the martini they're washing it down with.

There's the $53 million dollar Methane to Markets program to capture methane and use it for good and not evil, sponsored by the U.S. government.

Last month, Greenpeace suggested that kangaroo meat might make a better low-methane meat for those concerned about the effects of global warming.

In one of the tastiest mixed metaphors in recent memory, the Center for International Forestry Research addressed the land use issue that same year: "In a nutshell, cattle ranchers are making mincemeat out of Brazil's Amazon rainforests." (Mmm, mincemeat in a nutshell.) But here again, it's not meat-eating per se that's the problem. It's irresponsible grazing. This is an issue that can be addressed in a variety of ways, not least is giving property rights in rainforests to responsible stewards.

This is just a sample of the neat technological fixes coming down the pipeline. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, though, and it's hard to beat the image of sweaty Heather Mills. Here is the best I can offer:

Rather than forfeiting the option of the occasional juicy hamburger in the name of saving the planet, why not buy one of these patented methane harvesters for your friendly neighborhood bovine to wear? Catches greenhouse gasses from both ends!

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of reason.

The Costs of Doing Business

info@reason.com (Paul Karl Lukacs) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:30:00 EST

Business taxes in Sierra Leone total 233.5 percent of profits. Firing an employee in Nepal will cost a business the equivalent of 90 weeks’ salary, which is better than the situation in Venezuela, where firing most employees is illegal. A contract dispute requires an average of 1,442 days to work its way through the Bangladeshi trial courts.

These curiously precise statistics can mean only one thing: The World Bank has issued its annual Doing Business report on the world’s economies.

Doing Business 2008, the fifth release in the series, summarizes the often surreal difficulty of being a local entrepreneur starting a small or medium-sized corporation. For instance, Tarik, one of the businessmen profiled in the report, is a Yemeni fish exporter who would dearly love to sell fresh tuna to Germany at $5.20 a kilogram. But he has to ship most of his tuna frozen to Pakistan at $1.10 a kilogram, because complying with Yemeni export regulations takes on average a sushi-unfriendly 33 calendar days. And Yemen isn’t close to having the slowest border. Iraq takes that prize, requiring exporters to wait an average of 102 days.

The World Bank and its affiliate and co-author, the private sector-oriented International Finance Corporation, rely heavily upon statistics to tell their tale. In total, almost every nation in the world was analyzed, the principal exceptions being countries with regimes that loathe the free market (e.g., Burma, Cuba, North Korea) and pinpricks like San Marino and Tuvalu. After all the laws are reviewed and every number crunched, each country is quantified and ranked in ten different categories, then given an overall ranking on the general ease of doing business.

The winner was no surprise. For the second year in a row, Singapore is ranked as the easiest country in the world in which to start and operate a business. The Asian city-state is followed in the league tables by, in order, New Zealand, the United States, Hong Kong (which is considered separately from mainland China), and Denmark. Dead last is the Democratic Republic of Congo, edging out the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, the Republic of Congo and Burundi.

The real action is in the individual categories, which read like a gazetteer of finance ministry options, ranging from prudent transparency to contemptuous shake-downs—all spread around the world in unusual combinations. While Afghanistan, Kenya and the United States do not require an entrepreneur to deposit a single penny in start-up capital, Latvia requires a deposit equal to 22 percent of per capita income, South Korea requires a 296% deposit, and Syria wants a whopping 3,673.3 percent. New Zealand, Sweden and Thailand can each register a deed in two days, while Haiti, Kiribati and Slovenia each take more than a year.

Corporate income and payroll taxes are what differentiate economies that are merely misguided from the ravenous kleptocracies. Colombia and Tajikistan aren’t helping themselves with corporate tax burdens that hover around 82 percent, but they're bargains compared to the eight countries in which a business is expected to hand over more than 100 percent of its profits. This Hall of Shame includes likely suspects (D.R. Congo at 229.8 percent and Burundi at 278.7 percent) as well as relatively industrialized countries that should know better (Argentina at 112.9 percent and Belarus at 144.4 percent). Bottom of the barrel is Gambia, which taxes 286.7 percent of corporate profits.

In the past, libertarians have had their differences with the World Bank and its top-down interventions. “The World Bank et al.,” reason noted in 1995 while summarizing the Bank’s critics, “see capital and technology transfer as the key to growth, and fail to appreciate the economic potential of ordinary Third World citizens operating in free markets.”

The Doing Business series helps correct for the Bank’s 62 years of statist drift. By focusing on the minutia of business regulation, the Bank uses its hortatory powers to praise reformers while criticizing holdouts and backsliders. The current edition lauds Georgia (which targeted a spot in the top 25) and Egypt (which reformed in five of the ten categories) while noting that “Venezuela had the largest negative reforms.”

The Bank is employing a clever strategy, because each individual reform grants the entire business class of a country greater economic freedom without directly threatening the elites. A standard-issue military dictator is not going to conduct an open auction of the phosphate concession controlled by his family, but he probably won’t care if foreign diplomats request that he amend the banking code to allow general descriptions of inventory to be pledged as collateral.

Each quotidian reform tracked by the Doing Business report means that someone, somewhere will find it faster and less costly to create jobs and wealth. In that respect, the World Bank, of all unlikely institutions, is doing a better job of converting souls to free market capitalism than the Bush Administration.

Paul Karl Lukacs is a Los Angeles attorney who blogs about foreign affairs and travel at Knife Tricks.