Sommaire pour June 2022 de Reason

LIKE MANY STATES, North Carolina punishes drivers with unpaid fines and fees by suspending their licenses. But as a result of a successful legal challenge to that policy, roughly 185,000 North Carolina residents may be eligible to have their driver’s licenses restored. The Charlotte Observer reported in March that a federal judge had approved a settlement in a long-running class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of North Carolina. The ACLU argued that North Carolina’s policy violated the due process rights of drivers who were too poor to pay. Under the settlement, residents whose licenses were suspended will have a chance to persuade a judge that they could not afford to pay their fines. The settlement will reduce “the harms of the unnecessarily harsh and punitive…

IN MARCH, SEN. Rick Scott (R–Fla.) surprised many in Washington, D.C., by releasing an 11-point plan for what the GOP would do if the party retakes power in 2022, bucking Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s preferred strategy of bashing the Democratic agenda without offering much in the way of specific alternative policies. Scott’s very first priority was education. “Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them,” states action item one. Much of the plan is standard red meat. But it’s telling that school choice has risen to the very top of the GOP agenda, even as the surrounding action items—highly specific demands for control over curriculum and classroom culture—betray a Republican approach that…

MIKE SOLANA IS a vice president at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has invested in a number of businesses that you probably know well, from Airbnb to Stripe. He runs the firm’s branding, working to attract young investors and companies. He’s also an outspoken critic of moralizing, pessimistic tech journalism, a theme he hits frequently in Pirate Wires, his irreverent, pointed Substack. And he hits bigger themes too. “This whole entire question of what is true has really animated me for the last few years,” he says. “High-level, I care about freedom.” “Libertarianism was the animating political philosophy in my life, starting in high school,” says Solana. His political journey included a drift into “scary leftism” briefly during college and a brief embrace of anarcho-capitalism, which is how…

“WE’RE NOT JUST fighting an epidemic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020. “We’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous.” Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney expand on that concept in The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Since Simon is a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where Mahoney currently serves as executive director, it is not surprising that they see state efforts to suppress inconvenient information as part of the problem that Tedros described. That makes sense, since authoritarian governments in countries such as China and Russia contributed to the “infodemic” by censoring, discrediting, and intimidating…

Today, “if you ask a semieducated young person to identify the root cause of most American problems, there’s a strong possibility they will say, ‘Capitalism.’” In the ’90s, the more probable answer “would have been commercialism.” So observes the wide-ranging culture critic Chuck Klosterman in The Nineties: A Book. Without pronouncing judgment on the shift, the book riffs on it for a few pages before morphing into an analysis of the song “Achy Breaky Heart,” then segueing to Garth Brooks, Seinfeld, and Titanic. That’s the overall experience of reading The Nineties—a collection of breezy and dryly humorous dispatches from our current moment about iconic events, artifacts, postures, and controversies from three decades ago. There’s Nirvana and the first Iraq war; Google and steroids in baseball; American Beauty, Ebonics, and Waco;…

If you’ve ever thought that what Settlers of Catan really needs is a more robust market mechanism and a heavier emphasis on industry rather than pastoral utopia, Raccoon Tycoon has you covered. Would-be tycoons in this board game attempt to fuel an adorable woodland industrial revolution by initially building up piles of resources. Unlike in Catan, the value of your wheat, wood, iron, coal, manufactured goods, and luxuries will fluctuate depending on what has recently been bought and sold in the game’s marketplace. See that an opponent is stacking up a big pile of coal? You can tank his potential profits by selling your own coal supplies, lowering the price he’ll receive (or forcing him to wait to sell until prices recover). Did wheat just hit a new record high?…

WILLIAM RUGER, WHO holds a Ph.D. in politics specializing in foreign policy, is the newly appointed president of the American Institute for Economic Research. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he was a prominent voice in calling for U.S. withdrawal from that country. He was picked by former President Donald Trump to be ambassador to Afghanistan, but his nomination was never voted on. Ruger supports “libertarian realism” in foreign policy, holding that America’s interventions abroad should be focused on defending a narrowly defined national interest. In March, Ruger went on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie to discuss NATO expansionism, what role the U.S. should play in the Russia-Ukraine war, and whether punitive sanctions actually achieve what they are intended to. “The history of sanctions shouldn’t leave anyone all…

ON FEBRUARY 14, 2022, Oregon’s NuScale Power signed an agreement with the Polish mining and processing firm KGHM to deploy NuScale’s innovative small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in Poland by 2029. At the U.N.’s Glasgow Climate Change Conference in November, NuScale contracted with a Romanian energy company to deploy its SMR technology in that country by 2028. NuScale has signed similar memoranda of understanding with electric power companies in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine. This kind of advanced energy technology will likely be powering homes and businesses in Europe before the first reactor is completed in the United States. That’s because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is in no hurry to help. NuScale’s SMR technology did receive an NRC staff “standard design approval” in September 2020. But that…

DURING THE LAST year, several professional athletes and two big-city mayors announced that they would take a portion of their salaries in bitcoin. If you get paid via direct deposit and are bullish on bitcoin, you too can turn your salary into satoshis. (There are 100 million satoshis in a single bitcoin.) For most of us, getting paid in bitcoin doesn’t mean our salary is denominated in bitcoin. Rather, it means your employer directly deposits part of your fiatdenominated paycheck into a bank account connected to a crypto exchange, which then uses the money to purchase bitcoin and deposits that amount into your crypto wallet. Coinbase, the most widely used cryptocurrency exchange, rolled out this direct deposit function in late September. Users can print the direct deposit paperwork from Coinbase’s…

LAWMAKERS STUFFED MORE than 4,000 pet projects, totaling more than $8 billion, into an omnibus federal spending bill passed in March. But wait, didn’t Congress ban earmarks back in 2011? Yes, a Republican majority in 2011 banned earmarks, also called pork-barrel spending, in response to scandals like Alaska’s $398 million “Bridge to Nowhere” and the earmarkrelated crimes of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But because the rules Congress sets for itself apply only if Congress wants them to, the earmark ban has gone the way of other fiscally conservative reforms of the Tea Party era, such as discretionary spending caps. That means federal taxpayers will contribute $1.6 million to a Roger Williams University program intended to promote the “development of equitable growth of shellfish aquaculture” in Rhode Island; $800,000 to help build…

“CROCODILE!” CÉLIA CASTRO Pinheiro calls back to her husband as she steps into knee-deep water of the Rio Negro, a tea-colored river that begins in the Colombian mountains and flows into the Amazon below the Brazilian city of Manaus. Castro Pinheiro wades cautiously ahead, holding a machete high, worried less about carnivorous beasts and more about the condition of her fish trap, known as a fyke. When she reaches the bag net structure, about 4 by 2 meters in size, she sees the wooden struts are broken and the net torn to shreds. This is bad news: Thousands of fish, several days’ catch, have either escaped or been eaten by the crocodile. “It was a young one,” Castro Pinheiro says of the creature, with surprising composure, “no more than two…

Despite caricaturing (some) gun owners, Nick Mamatas’ conspiracy-fueled science fiction novel The Second Shooter avoids moralizing in favor of dark humor. His protagonist is Mike Karras, a cynical anarcholeftist writer working on a book about mass shooting survivors who claim to have seen second gunmen where official reports say there were none. Karras lives for the dopamine hit of checking his notifications, but never likes what his phone shows him. His arch-nemesis is not a shadowy government agency, but the conspiracy theory–obsessed host of an internet radio show and his devoted fans. As he travels from the site of an active domestic terror attack in the Midwest to the aftermath of a church shooting in the Bay Area, Karras finds himself becoming a character in the eerie string of violent…

The Batman isn’t an anti-Batman screed, nor is it an overt identity politics rant. The overlong movie is too sprawling, too messy, too unfocused to seriously explore a single Big Theme. But it does seem to question whether being Batman is the right choice for a billionaire playboy who wants to produce social change. It’s a Batman movie that comes across as uncomfortable with the whole idea of Batman. Yes, it offers grit and gloom and classically Batman-esque moments, but it also frequently undercuts them, as if to suggest that the underlying idea of the character is kind of silly. Throughout the movie, there are invocations of whiteness and privilege, networks of urban corruption, and a mayoral race between a young black woman and an older white man. (The latter,…

In 2015, Reason got hit with a subpoena after online commenters said some unkind things about a federal judge. The signature on that subpoena (which was quickly followed by a gag order) belonged to Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time. Bharara has gone on to modest acclaim as a podcaster and pundit, and now apparently as a children’s book author. Justice Is…. purports to be “a guide for young truth seekers.” At 187 words, 13 of which are the word Justice, the text of the book is only a few words longer than this review and the prose is subpar even for the unpleasant genre of political celeb kid lit. This book was never going to get a glowing review from Reason,…

“Written with his customary verve and eye for telling details, Disneyanity is a useful compendium that guides its reader through both classic and lesserknown films. Brode’s argument that Disney ‘magic’ has represented a kind of liberal civil religion for generations of fans offers a compelling way of understanding the abiding appeal of Disney’s films with a fresh perspective.”-Cyrus R. K. Patell, New York University/NYU Abu Dhabi “A book for both academics and Disney fans, Disneyanity offers readers a cogent and thought-provoking meditation on Disney Magic as Religious Belief. Through a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the studio’s films Brode demonstrates that the studio has honed its own brand of popular faith, one that now provides ‘nearly everyone with what specific religion once did: an optimistic vision of a world redeemed.’”-Susan…

CASTLEBERRY, ALABAMA THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS recently investigated the tiny town of Brookside, Alabama, a place “with no traffic lights and one retail store [that] collected $487 in fines and forfeitures for every man, woman and child.” Income from fines and forfeitures comprised a whopping 49 percent of the town’s budget. Lawsuits allege that Brookside police officers made up charges to soak vehicle owners for thousands of dollars in fines. Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth is asking for an official state audit of the town and its police force. That doesn’t bode well for Brookside officials, in light of some recent history and similar stories across the country from decades past. In 2017, the News reported that Castleberry, Alabama, with a population of about 500, was generating revenue through what amounted to…

THERE’S A SIMPLE story about life before civilization, retold by evolutionary scholars and New York Times bestsellers like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow summarize it skeptically in their big new book, The Dawn of Everything. Long ago, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, “living…in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small.” We did this for hundreds of thousands of years, until an Agricultural Revolution fed an Urban Revolution, which heralded civilization and states. That meant “the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy,” but also “patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions, and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.” Or perhaps,…

Anna Delvey, a German heiress who claimed a considerable trust fund, floated through New York City’s wealthiest circles in the mid-’10s. She had a habit of forgetting to pay for luxury hotel bills, and once she even stole a private jet. In reality she was Anna Sorokin, a middle-class Russian-born immigrant, loaded with more chutzpah than money. Inventing Anna, a Netflix miniseries created by Shonda Rhimes, fictionalizes Sorokin’s story in a way that might be dramatically powerful but is morally problematic. The show seems designed to imbue the audience with empathy for a naive though rude girl rather than allowing viewers to harshly judge a convicted criminal who used her friends to prop up her overinflated sense of self. Caught with her hand in the City National Bank cookie jar,…

15 YEARS AGO June 2007 “[Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales is optimistic about the internet too. ‘There’s a certain kind of dire anti-market person,’ he says, ‘who assumes that no matter what happens, it’s all driving toward one monopoly—the ominous view that all of these companies are going to consolidate into the Matrix.’ His own view is that radical decentralization will win out, to good effect: ‘If everybody has a gigabit [broadband internet connection] to their home as their basic $40-a-month connection, anybody can write Wikipedia.’” KATHERINE MANGU-WARD “Wikipedia and Beyond” 25 YEARS AGO June 1997 “While not exactly new, this trend has been intensifying over the past two decades or so, lurching from isolated scares about poisoned Halloween candy in the 1970s and child abduction in the 1980s to a generalized calculus…