Table of contents for January 2016 in Reason

FANS OF APOCALYPTIC religious scenarios have plenty of rich material to work with in Seventhday Adventism, a church whose most famous contemporary member is Republican presidential co-frontrunner Ben Carson. As formulated by former member Beth S. Carpenter, writing in Mashable, Adventism’s tenets include “that the United States will follow a Biblical prophecy” in which Washington “will ‘speak like a dragon’ and persecute Adventists, aligning with the Catholic Church to force Sunday church attendance.” The pope here is the “Antichrist,” and his alliance with a fallen America will drive Carson’s co-religionists to the hills. The results will be bloody, and spectacular. I mention this not to malign Seventh-day Adventism—to the contrary, I’m gratified that yet another comparatively new and marginal church is being absorbed into the great American mainstream. If anything,…

A school district in Okemah, Oklahoma, says it is investigating why a teacher told a 4-year-old student not to write with his left hand and then sent his mother, Alisha Sands, an article saying that in many cultures, left-handedness is considered “unlucky, inauspicious and frankly evil.” Officials at Winslow Township School 4 in New Jersey suspended an 8-year-old girl for violating the dress code. The girl wore a kelly green shirt to school, and the rules allow only white, navy blue, or dark green shirts. New Mexico’s La Cueva High School has prohibited cheerleaders from wearing their uniforms on campus, saying the outfits are too revealing. The girls are still allowed to wear them at games. The Secret Service disrupted a planned vigil by forcing hundreds of children with cancer…

After a gunman murdered nine people at a community college in Oregon last October, President Obama said the solution to such violence is obvious. “It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun,” he declared. The problem with the president’s solution is that we generally do not know a gun buyer “wants to inflict harm on other people” until he does it. That reality shows the folly of relying on background checks or psychiatric intervention to prevent mass shootings. Obama did not mention any specific policy during his 13-minute speech. But he talked about making it harder for murderers to obtain weapons through legislation supported by “the majority of Americans,” which suggested he had in…

LONG BEFORE Disney bought Lucasflm in 2012, the Star Wars franchise had a significant presence in the former company’s signature theme parks. Star Tours, a bouncy motionsimulation ride set in the Star Wars universe, premiered at Disneyland all the way back in 1987. Young kids can enjoy a Jedi “training” stage show at Tomorrowland in both the California and Florida parks, complete with the opportunity to prove their lightsaber supremacy against Darth Maul. Star Wars–derived merchandise can be found in park stores, complete with Disneyfied variations such as Mickey Mouse as Luke Skywalker and Goofy as Darth Vader. While Star Wars lovers across the world celebrated news that Disney would resurrect the franchise in theaters, fans of the parks wondered what it would mean for the company’s profitable Happiest Places…

In the new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, director Stanley Nelson captures the calculated destruction of the radical Black Panther Party by federal officials, including the literal destruction of its members under a barrage of police bullets. The film illuminates the racist roots of gun control laws, the early militarization of cops, and how the FBI manipulated local police departments (and media) to see the Panthers as nothing but violent thugs. The documentary doesn’t discount the party’s flaws, from disorganization to its founder’s “maniac” side (as one former Panther put it), though it does gloss over some members’ more egregious acts of violence. But it also showcases the Panthers’ (unfulfilled) potential for subverting racist power structures via community-level self-governance and serves as a reminder of authorities’ interest…

Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, by Michael Javen Fortner, Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $29.95 We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire, by Suzanna Reiss, University of California Press, 328 pages, $29.95 In 1973 New York’s blue-blood governor, Nelson Rockefeller, declared drug treatment programs a failure and called for a newer, tougher approach, including mandatory life in prison for selling any amount of “hard drugs.” Later that year, New York lawmakers enacted legislation that, while slightly more lenient than Rockefeller’s initial bill, prescribed harsh punishments for drug crimes, including prison terms of 15 years to life for low-level drug sales and possession. In 1973, the state had fewer than 1,500 prisoners doing time for drugs; by 1999, that figure had ballooned to…

This issue features Greg Beato’s final article as a regular columnist for reason. “Yelp, But for People” (page 62) illuminates the many ways that online rating systems, for everything from brick-and-mortar businesses to gig economy service providers to eBay sellers, make the world a more efficient place. Beato, 50, has written for dozens of publications, including Wired, Business 2.0, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and his reason work earned a Western Publishing Association Maggie Award in 2011. He says he has traditionally focused on cultural issues, but “over the last couple of years” he’s “been writing more and more about the possibilities of using technological platforms and products to move beyond the realm of what government does.” Veteran British journalist Chris Taylor is the author of How Star Wars Conquered…

“Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy [sic] shit.” —email from an employee at the tech company tasked with maintaining Hillary Clinton’s “home-brew” email server while she was secretary of state, as reported by McClatchy, October 6 “What’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well, this is something we should politicize.” —President Barack Obama in a speech calling for increased gun control measures following a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, October 1 “If I don’t move, I’ll be demoted to secretary of state or something like that.” —Vice President Joe Biden, taking a jab at Hillary Clinton during remarks at the White House Summit On Worker Voice, October 7 “We are working on the presumption…

As long as there have been political movements, people have tried to use religion to shore up support for their side. In the November 1984 issue of reason, Antony Flew lamented that churches were “forever issuing anticapitalist statements and aligning themselves with all manner of socialist and even specifically Marxist-Leninist causes.” Luckily, wrote Flew, there was now The Kindness That Kills, a collection of essays edited by Digby Anderson. According to the book, one need only look to the Parable of the Talents, a story from the Gospel of Matthew that celebrates the use of commerce to increase one’s wealth, to see “how mistaken it is to draw socialist conclusions from the Bible.” Of course, proponents of Christian socialism in turn could point to the Magnificat, a story from the…

PAUL MCCARTHY is the father of a boy born without fingers on one hand. A few years ago, McCarthy found that a $30,000 prosthesis—the only option then available—was not a perfect match for his 12-year-old son’s needs, so he went online to find a better, less pricey alternative. McCarthy’s search led to the assembly of an unlikely team: a South African woodworker, an American puppeteer, and another father in a similar situation. Thanks to the power of the Internet, the men were able to collaborate from thousands of miles apart to make an inexpensive but workable prosthetic appendage using 3D printers. Such “permissionless” innovation, in which people with big ideas for how to make the world better act on them without first jumping through regulatory hoops, is remarkable. It’s also…

At the end of 1954, the same year that the family of a youngster named George Lucas bought its first television set, Walt Disney Productions aired four one-hour films about a Tennessee congressman who lost his life at the Alamo. The company was caught completely off guard when kids went wild for their new hero, pestering parents to buy Davy Crockett–themed toy guns, sheets, watches, lunch boxes, underwear, mugs, towels, rugs, and pajamas. Most especially, they bought his signature headgear, a coonskin cap, which sold at the reported rate of 5,000 units per day in 1955 alone (the price of raccoon fur jumped from 25 cents to $8 a pound). Within one calendar year, Davy Crockett would spin off an incredible $300 million worth of merchandise, the equivalent of about…

National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden is a patriotic hero in Ted Rall’s new nonfiction comic book Snowden (Seven Stories Press). The back cover tagline: “To save your country, betray your government.” The book outlines the NSA’s vast unconstitutional domestic spying program as revealed by Snowden’s leaks, excoriating both Presidents Bush and Obama for their complicity. In wondering why Snowden became the one out of thousands of people aware of these privacy violations who exposed them, Rall credits Snowden’s burgeoning libertarian philosophy. An avowed leftist himself, Rall writes: “NSA defenders say privacy was already dead, that we share our private lives with private corporations. But no corporation has ever kicked down people’s doors, shoved them into trains, and shipped them to concentration camps. Only governments have done that.” Rall…

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, by Matt Ridley, HarperCollins, 368 pages, $28.99 Incremental, bottom-up, trial-and-error innovation yields moral progress, superior technologies, and greater wealth. Top-down mandates from centralized authorities are more likely to produce ethical disasters, technological stagnation, and persistent poverty. “Bad news is man-made, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history,” Matt Ridley writes in The Evolution of Everything. “Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves.” Ridley, a British journalist who has written extensively about science, economics, and technological progress, begins by explaining the fundamentals of biological evolution by natural selection: Biological complexity evolves through random mutation followed by nonrandom survival. Ridley then argues that the Darwinian process is a “special theory of evolution” embedded in a more “general theory of evolution that applies…

Visitors to Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center should pop into a small, dim room off the main lobby to see an extraordinary collection of documents about religious liberty. They’ll also get a chance to see that famous spelling bee word, antidisestablishmentarianism, in action. The exhibit (which runs through January) showcases the evolution of our understanding of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. While rare early copies of the Bill of Rights and George Washington’s first Thanksgiving Proclamation are show-stealers, a far more prosaic document illuminates the everyday mixing of church and state that was common in the Founding era. When he was appointed commander of Virginia’s military forces, George Washington was required to sign an anti-Catholic “test oath” disclaiming belief in such doctrines as transubstantiation, the changing of bread…

INTERNET entrepreneurs have been trying for years to create “Yelp for people,” a service that would take the practice of reductively quantifying other human beings beyond the rarefied realms of beauty contests and the National Football League draft. In October 2015, the latest aspirant, Peeple, generated a backlash while still in the elevator pitch stage. When The Washington Post reported that the app, which didn’t exist yet, would allow users to post both positive and negative reviews of anyone they interacted with, even if the reviewee hadn’t opted in to the system, humanity responded with an emphatic thumbs-down. “Since the interview with the Washington Post, I’ve received death threats and extremely insulting comments aimed at me, my investors, and my family on almost every social media tool possible,” Peeple co-founder…

Incompetent incarceration Death by Lockup Robby Soave DAVID STOJCEVSKI’S punishment was supposed to just be a month in jail. But after 17 days behind bars in Macomb County, Michigan, for not paying his parking fines, the 32-year-old succumbed to a toxic combination of drug withdrawal and institutional neglect. He died, naked and alone, in his cell—his demise immortalized on 24/7 surveillance footage. Stojcevski was a drug addict; at the time of his incarceration, he was on several medications to help him cope. But once in jail, he was allegedly deprived of the medicine he needed, and soon began manifesting telltale signs of withdrawal, including erratic behavior. Jail officials misdiagnosed his symptoms, thinking that he was psychotic. They placed him in a cell with other inmates deemed mentally ill, and stripped…

Companies are targeting carbonaceous chondrite asteroids because they contain plenty of water and metals. The majority of known asteroids orbit in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Near-Earth asteroids are much closer to Earth, making them ideal for mining missions. No one is actually mining yet, but Planetary Resources already has a small testing satellite in space and some ambitious plans for the “We have every expectation that delivering water from asteroids and creating an in-space refueling economy is something that we'll see in the next 10 years.” —Chris Lewicki, Planetary Resources president and chief engineer For sources visit www.reason.com/asteroidmining…

Scott Adams is the creator of the awardwinning comic strip Dilbert, which satirizes American corporate culture. More recently, he’s gained a following for his musings about the “unstoppable clown car that is Donald Trump.” In those blog posts, Adams analyzes what he sees as the GOP frontrunner’s highly effective persuasion methods. Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller chatted with the cartoonist in October. Q: What’s your fascination with Donald Trump? A: My special fascination is his ability to persuade. I have a background in hypnosis, and I see in Trump a persuasion technique that is probably invisible to the public. Q: Are there principles that you think are best applied to the way governments operate? A: My preferred model is something like business. What does business do all the time? They test…

THE PRINCETON economist Angus Deaton is singularly devoted to facts and close measurement. The latest winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Deaton is a fierce empiricist who deploys data to slay gauzy theoretical speculations on the sources of economic growth, poverty, and inequality. His work focuses on what counts as economic growth, whether money actually makes people happy, and how development aid has failed to help poor countries. One of Deaton’s studies involves the ratio between men and women, which is skewed unnaturally toward men in many poor countries. One popular theory in the 1980s was that tradition-minded families allocated more resources, chiefly food, to sons than to daughters. Deaton tested this hypothesis with data from careful surveys of how consumption changed…

$1.75 Price of a poster for the then-upcoming Star Wars at one of the first Comic-Cons in 1976 $3 Cost of a ticket at San Francisco’s Coronet Theatre on opening weekend in 1977 $7,500 A single day of voice work by James Earl Jones $15,000 Amount Fox docked from George Lucas’ pay due to overruns during flming $255,000 Box office revenue on the first day of A New Hope’s release in 32 theaters $2.2 billion Total box office revenue for all the Star Wars movies released so far 42 million Star Wars items sold in 1977 26 million Star Wars action figures sold in 1977 $10 “Donation” cost of a 3-hour training session on how to wield a lightsaber from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Knights 29 million Views on YouTube…

IN 2013, David Huntley got the diagnosis: He had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In addition to being a professor emeritus in the Department of Geological Sciences at San Diego State University, Huntley had been a marathoner, a scuba diver, and an Iron Man triathlete. For someone used to staying active, the illness— which degrades control over muscles, inhibiting walking, speaking, eating, and ultimately breathing—was hard to accept. “The horror of this disease is the months and years leading up to the end,” he told Reason TV in April. “Day by day you lose your dignity, your independence, your ability to move anything but your eyes.” ALS is fatal—we have no cure, and most people survive for just two to four years from its onset.…

“Outwit. Outlast. Outplay.” That’s been Survivor’s tagline since the TV phenomenon’s debut 15 years and 31 TV seasons ago. The slogan is about how to win the million dollar prize, but the show could be talking about itself, enduring while numerous competitors disappeared. Survivormay not be as culturally ubiquitous anymore, but it’s still on the air (can Jersey Shore say the same?) with a loyal contingent of more than 10 million weekly viewers. The most recent season is not just as good as the show ever was, but better. It survived by evolving: Gimmicky concepts that didn’t work were jettisoned, and the show expanded its strategic landscape until it was more like a popular sporting event than a reality show. Survivor isn’t about surviving in the wild; it’s about convincing…

Megan Prelinger’s Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W.W. Norton) is simultaneously a pop-science walk through the wondrous gadgets that human command of electrons produced in the 20th century; a history of the industries that brought them to us; and the story of how advertisers copping high-art techniques taught Americans how to understand and use cathode ray tubes, quartz crystals, transistors, circuit boards, computers, and bionic technologies to expand the human sensorium across the globe and then off it. From the Renaissance on, artistic energy often drifts to where the money is. This book shows tech advertising is often as meaningful, beautiful, and even avant-garde as any fine art. And it shows art and technology moving in lockstep toward “dematerialization”: As circuits shrink, conceptual and electronic…