Reason October 2022의 목차

HERE’S A TIP: If you have some radical political views and an acquaintance reaches out, encourages you to act on your convictions, and maybe offers to introduce you to a guy who can sell you some bomb parts, don’t take him up on it. That guy’s almost definitely working for the feds. For the past two decades, the FBI and federal prosecutors have brought case after case against would-be radicals who were ratted out by informants. They have been enormously successful in obtaining convictions in these cases, despite persistent criticisms that the FBI uses unscrupulous informants, conjures up the very plots it disrupts, and entraps defendants who have little to no ability to actually carry out a terror attack. It looked like the case against the Michigan militia members who allegedly…

IN FEBRUARY, THE software engineer and blogger Dmitri Brereton wrote an essay titled “Google Search Is Dying” for his personal website. His two main arguments are that Google’s advertising is messy and dominates the results page, while the actual search results are mostly junk sites that have been reverse-engineered to rank highly. If you have never searched for something on Google and felt deeply dissatisfied by what it showed you, Brereton essentially argues, you are living in the Matrix. “What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search,” he writes. “You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.” I was living in the Matrix. Then, two days into my 5-month-old’s ear infection, I…

IN MAY, NEW Jersey became the first state to ban single-use bags made from plastic or paper in large grocery stores. The new ban lumps both types of totes together, but one is actually worse for the environment than the other. Which one? Paper bags. Surprised? Let’s delve into the data underlying the case for plastic over paper. A 2005 life-cycle analysis commissioned by the Scottish government found that manufacturing paper bags consumes 10 percent more energy than manufacturing conventional plastic bags, uses four times more water, emits more than three times the amount of greenhouse gases, generates 14 times more water pollution, and results in nearly three times more solid waste. A 2007 study commissioned by what is now the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, an industry group, found…

COLLEGE STUDENTS INVESTIGATED for sexual harassment or assault will once again be stripped of due process, thanks to new regulations released by the U.S. Department of Education in June. The new rules, which apply to investigations under Title IX, part of a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, rescind rules crafted and implemented by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during the Trump administration. They mark the return of the “single investigator model,” which empowers a single college administrator to investigate, judge, and sanction alleged misconduct. The Biden administration regulations also require schools to apply a “preponderance of the evidence” standard when investigating complaints. Under that standard, investigators must find an accused student guilty if they conclude it is more than 50 percent likely that the allegations are true.…

LAST YEAR A team of Harvard scientists had an idea involving a large balloon and a small amount of chalk dust. They devised an experiment in which a weather balloon would release less than 2 kilograms of calcium carbonate about 12 miles above a Swedish Space Corporation facility near the arctic town of Kiruna, or possibly a tiny quantity of sulfate particles, equivalent to the amount released in a single minute by a typical commercial aircraft. These plans were greeted with utter panic. Activist groups declared the “risks of catastrophic consequences” were too great, and there were “no acceptable reasons” for allowing the project to go forward. Experimenting with this technology, they claimed, has “the potential for extreme consequences, and stands out as dangerous, unpredictable, and unmanageable.” The Swedish government…

IN CARCERAL CON, Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg reject “the popular but erroneous notion that the massive harms and injustices of the criminal legal system can be reformed as a standalone project.” Whitlock, an activist, and Heitzeg, a sociologist, are pushing back from the left against the “bipartisan consensus” on criminal justice reform: the general agreement among many moderate liberals and conservatives that the government should reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders and improve reentry services for people leaving prisons. Whitlock and Heitzeg contend that a network of well-funded nonprofit foundations and advocacy groups manufactured this consensus and that its proposed reforms will only further entrench the current system’s injustices. Carceral Con is the latest of several recent books advocating abolition of police and prisons. Abolitionist Mariame Kaba published a collection…

IT DOESN’T TAKE a Ph.D. to see that oil drives conflict. Just looking at the recent history of America’s interventions in the Middle East will do. During the Tanker War of the 1980s, the U.S. Navy fought Iran to protect Iraq’s oil. Then, during the first Gulf War, the U.S. military fought Iraq to protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’s oil. After three decades of war in Iraq, the United States came full circle, with the Trump administration threatening Iran while Iran threatened Saudi Arabia’s oil. Less understood is how oil drives conflict. The popular view, espoused both by many anti-war critics and by violence enthusiasts like former President Donald Trump, is that larger countries go to war to steal the oil wealth of smaller ones. Strong consumers take what they…

15 YEARS AGO October 2007 “Government and foundations are more likely to fund earlier stages of drug development, where the risk of failure is higher. Companies jump in to sponsor drug research at later stages of development, when success is more likely. Thus it is not surprising that industry-funded research is more likely to reach positive conclusions. If a drug company’s trials regularly turned up negative findings, that would signal serious flaws in its drug discovery process.” RONALD BAILEY “Is Industry-Funded Science Killing You?” 20 YEARS AGO October 2002 “Unlike drug use, of course, terrorism is inherently criminal, a kind of aggression that no civilized society can tolerate. But the open-ended nature of the struggle against it means that the war on terrorism, unlike conventional wars, cannot be viewed as a…

LAWYER-TURNED-JOURNALIST Glenn Greenwald’s work with whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal illegal government surveillance won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. That same year he helped launch The Intercept, but he abruptly resigned six years later after a disagreement over editorial policy. In July, Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Greenwald at Freedom-Fest 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Q: You regularly inveigh against corporate media—including places you have worked, such as Salon and The Guardian. Have you changed or has the world changed? A: I think it’s mostly the latter. The main reason Edward Snowden has said that he was drawn to me wasn’t so much because of my views about privacy and surveillance, although those aligned with his. But he saw that I looked at journalism in a radically different way than…

FROM 2015 TO 2019, in response to complaints that greedy cops were indiscriminately grabbing property they claimed was connected to criminal activity, Michigan legislators repeatedly amended the state’s civil asset forfeiture laws. This year they partly reversed those reforms, making it easier to confiscate travelers’ cash in the name of cracking down on drug trafficking. Michigan previously required a criminal conviction prior to completion of forfeitures involving cash or other property worth $50,000 or less. A pair of bills that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law on May 26 lowered that ceiling to $20,000 for assets seized at airports. “Drug trafficking will not be tolerated in Michigan,” declared state Rep. Graham Filler (R–DeWitt), who sponsored one of the bills. “The men and women who keep our airports secure need to…

WHEN AN INTERNAL caucus led a self-styled “takeover” of the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at its biennial national convention this past May, old-timers recognized a recurring conflict that has riven the party since its first national convention a half-century ago. “The best analogy within the party history is 1983, when [Earl] Ravenal did not get the [presidential] nomination, and all the Cato people walked out,” says Chuck Moulton, former vice chair of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC). “We see repeatedly with different caucuses, whether it be the Radical Caucus or the Pragmatic Caucus or whatever, they will gain attention, and then they’ll leave, and then they’ll come back. There’s an ebb and flow.” From its founding in 1971 to its shock win of a rogue Electoral College vote in 1972 to…

WITH WAYS AND Means, Roger Lowenstein, the author of several popular books on finance, has tackled the Civil War. The book’s subtitle—Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War—is misleadingly incomplete, because Lowenstein covers far more than Union finance. He aims to demonstrate how the Republicans “vastly enlarged the government.” He not only describes the war’s expansion of state power across many dimensions; he celebrates this outcome as “an agenda for industry and growth, and to foster opportunity, especially for those at the bottom.” Lowenstein is an engaging, readable author, and he has consulted a wide range of primary sources and secondary literature. But he goes too far when he claims that this Republican “revolution” has been “largely overlooked.” Really? Certainly not among historians. Lowenstein’s endnotes even cite…