Inhaltsverzeichnis für December 2020 in Reason

IN WASHINGTON, D.C., it is common to hear that anyone who opposes the federal rescue of states experiencing budget issues due to COVID-19 must be out of his or her mind. Newspapers are running story after story about how, in the absence of such bailouts, state and local legislators are forced to slash funding for services. But if you decide to shed tears for these poor states and cities, let them be crocodile tears—as those are all this tale of woe deserves. Consider a recent New York Times article, “With Washington Deadlocked on Aid, States Face Dire Fiscal Crisis.” The report tells us: “Alaska chopped resources for public broadcasting. New York City gutted a nascent composting program that could have kept tons of food waste out of landfills….In Maryland, the…

DOROTHY DAY’S FIRST jail stint, in 1917, was a brutal experience arising from a protest for women’s suffrage. Behind bars she embarked on a hunger strike and came to know the misery of forced feeding. Women eventually got the vote. But Day, an anarchist, never cast a ballot in her life. She would go on to become a radical icon, famous for her work with the poor and her protests against racism, nuclear weapons, and war. A socially conservative Catholic, Day frowned on the casual sex rampant among her acolytes in the ’60s. Yet she had ended her first pregnancy with an abortion and her only marriage by divorce. A hard-drinking libertine in her youth, she is today under consideration for sainthood. Day bowed meekly to the authority of the…

POLICE OFFICERS IN Texas heard some terrifying news on June 26, 2018: Antigovernment flyers poisoned with a deadly opioid had been placed on Harris County Sheriff’s Office squad cars, and a sergeant who had touched one was en route to the hospital with overdose symptoms. The incident set off a flurry of media coverage, and police as far away as Maine and Massachusetts received alerts about it. Only it wasn’t true. Three days later, a laboratory analysis found there was in fact no fentanyl on the flyers. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office blamed the panic on a problem with field test kits. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, is involved in nearly half of drug-related deaths in the United States, according to…

Publication Title: Reason Publication Number: 0048-6906 Filing Date: 10/1/2020 Issue Frequency: Monthly, except combined issue of August/September Number of Issues Published Annually: 11 Annual Subscription Price: $38.50 Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: Reason Foundation, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230 Contact Person: Jacqueline Smith, 203-945-2042 Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: Reason Foundation, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230 Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Mike Alissi, Reason Foundation, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230. Editor: Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason Foundation, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230. Managing Editor: Stephanie Slade, Reason Foundation, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230. Owner: Reason Foundation, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90230 Known Bondholders,…

In the fifth century A.D., Pope Gelasius declared that Christians have dual citizenship under “two sovereigns,” one divine and one temporal, that must not be combined. In the 11th century, a monk and future bishop argued that people are released from submission to any king who “transgress[es] the contract by virtue of which he is chosen.” In the 12th century, the canonist Gratian wrote that “princes are bound by and shall live according to their laws”—a departure from the previous understanding that royals were above legal formalities. In the 13th century, St. Dominic asked that his 12 monasteries elect delegates to convene and write the rules that would govern the Dominican order. In America on Trial, Westminster Institute Director Robert R. Reilly cites each of these examples to show that…

Would you accept a marriage proposal from a person you met online or on vacation, then move to another country in order to tie the knot? Probably not. But you might be interested in a TV show about people who did. TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After? follows six couples whose marriages were the culmination of the K-1 visa process, often called a “fiancé visa,” which gives foreign nationals 90 days to marry their visa sponsor upon arriving in the United States. A spinoff of the original 90 Day Fiancé franchise, Happily Ever After? provides a blunt and honest look at this situation that roughly 30,000 couples deal with each year. Some of the pairings embody Larry David’s definition of a good compromise (“no one is happy”) while a…

The San Diego Police Department has issued 82 citations for “seditious language” since 2013. Because such citations are considered infractions rather than misdemeanors, those cited under the law are not entitled to a jury trial or legal counsel. After an investigation by local media, the department ordered officers not to enforce a century-old city ordinance banning such speech. Kentucky resident John Pennington faces a fine of up to $569,000 and up to six months in jail after being caught sightseeing in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. Canada has closed its borders to U.S. travelers to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. It will allow U.S. residents to drive through Canada to Alaska, but they must take the most direct route. Officials with California’s East Side Union High School District…

ROLLING ELECTRIC POWER blackouts afflicted roughly 2 million California residents in August as a heat wave gripped the Golden State. At the center of the problem is a state policy requiring that 33 percent of California’s electricity come from renewable sources such as solar and wind power, rising to a goal of 60 percent by 2030. Yet data showed that power demand peaks just before the sun begins to go down, when overheated people turn up their air conditioning in the late afternoon. Meanwhile, the power output from California’s wind farms in August was erratic. Until this summer, California utilities and grid operators were able to purchase extra electricity from other states. But the August heat wave stretched from Texas to Oregon, so there was little to no surplus energy…

AS THE STREETS of various U.S. cities descended into disorder set off by anger and anguish over police brutality, the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically surrender large chunks of their fortunes and freedom to the government seemed out of reach. Some protests devolved into generalized orgies of destruction and even arson—the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities, and an act committed with careless glee dozens of times. In the public debate between angry forces on the left and right wings, too many Americans insist on recapitulating the stark choices Germany seemed to offer its citizens between the world wars a century ago: a controlling, decadent left out to destroy private property, and a right embracing harsh, violent authoritarianism and viewing outsiders of all…

LAST SUMMER, WHEN the short-lived “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in Seattle renamed itself the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” one protester explained to a reporter that the acronym CHOP was a tribute to the Reign of Terror in France more than 200 years ago. “What happened to the people who did not get on board with the French Revolution?” he asked, to which the assembled crowd responded, “CHOPPED!” This scene was just one manifestation of the guillotine fad that has been sweeping America’s resurgent progressive left. #Guillotine2020 is an actual hashtag on lefty Twitter, mostly (if hyperbolically) dedicated to the malfeasance of Republicans, rich folks, and other baddies. DIY guillotines have been popping up at protests, including ones outside the White House and the Washington, D.C., mansion of Amazon CEO Jeff…

THE BEST BOOK ever written about baseball is Ball Four, Jim Bouton’s irreverent look at the 1969 baseball season. Over the course of the year, Bouton bounced from the New York Yankees, his club of seven seasons, to the minor leagues to the short-lived Seattle Pilots to the Houston Astros, trying to hang on as a big-league pitcher several years past his prime. Edited by sportswriter Leonard Shecter and published in 1970, Ball Four is a work of genuine iconoclasm, the first widely read account of life in the Major Leagues that was not written in hushed tones. By the time Bouton’s book was released, Major League Baseball had spent decades as the grand dame of American professional sports. Perhaps no aspect of American life was written about as reverentially…

WHEN JURISDICTIONS ACROSS the United States responded to the COVID-19 epidemic with broad lockdown orders in March and April, home delivery services lacked the manpower to keep up with the explosion in demand. Stores and companies such as Instacart went on hiring sprees; in some areas, it was very hard, if not impossible, to get goods delivered. You know what might have made things a bit easier? Drones. It has taken years for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to allow the use of unmanned aerial devices for commercial delivery. Over the course of a decade, we’ve gone from a complete ban to slow, heavily regulated, and restricted initial testing. At the end of August, the FAA finally gave Amazon approval for its Prime Air drone delivery fleet. It did that…

THE DEFINING MOMENT in the “rules for thee but not for me” ethos of the ruling class during the COVID-19 pandemic may have come when Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist behind Britain’s lockdown policy, met with his married girlfriend in defiance of the restrictions he promoted. Eager to threaten the common people with penalties if they failed to socially distance, he saw no reason to inconvenience himself the same way—although at least he conceded that propriety required him to resign his government post when the trysts were discovered in May. “He has peculiarly breached his own guidelines, and for an intelligent man I find that very hard to believe,” marveled Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a prominent member of the ruling Conservative Party. “It risks undermining the Government’s lockdown message.” Well, yes.…

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has pushed the envelope of its executive authority once again by issuing a blanket eviction moratorium that applies to all rental properties nationwide. The order, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in early September, says tenants earning up to $99,000 ($198,000 for joint filers) cannot be evicted for failing to pay their rent, provided they tell their landlord in writing that they have made every effort to obtain government assistance, that they have lost income or received extraordinary out-of-pocket medical bills, and that their eviction would force them into homelessness or into a crowded living situation. Landlords can still evict tenants who engage in criminal activity on the property or who pose a risk to public health or safety. Property owners who try…

IN 1993, JONATHAN Rauch wrote Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, an influential defense of free speech and open inquiry that was excerpted in Reason. The book took aim at would-be censors on campus and off and made a staunch case for the virtues of radical speech. Reviewing Rauch’s book in The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that “what sets his study apart is his attempt to situate recent developments in a long-range historical perspective and to defend the system of free intellectual inquiry as a socially productive method of channeling prejudice.” Nearly 30 years later, attacks on free thought have persisted and in some ways become even more pervasive as cancel culture has become part of the American lexicon. We live in a world where…

When are nude scenes essential in film, and when are they gratuitous, designed not to advance a plot but to snatch more from the wallets of hungry, titillated viewers? Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies takes this question seriously, exploring Hollywood’s working conditions before the business developed clearer expectations about the need for contracts detailing how much breast or cheek an actress must show to earn her paycheck. Some roles, like Erica Gavin’s portrayal of a nymphomaniac in Vixen! (1968) or Sylvia Miles’ lusty Manhattan cougar in Midnight Cowboy (1969), would feel wrongly puritanical without some skin. Nudity can be a crucial storytelling tool in certain contexts. Yet Miles explains that the requisite toplessness was sprung on her, not agreed upon beforehand. The late Maria Schneider, discussing a…