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Archive for the tag “Reason.TV”

18 May 2013

West Wing Weak

The Obama White House has released the latest installment of its ongoing and self-congratulatory video series, West Wing Week. But despite touting itself as “your guide to all things 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,” the new episode seems to be missing some of the key stories that have hit the headlines over the past few days. There’s no mention, for instance, of Benghazi or the AP phone tapping – and the IRS scandal is barely mentioned in passing.

Perhaps the White House is just too busy completely redacting documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act to fully document its recent highlights. In a surge of civic pride, Reason TV is happy to offer “West Wing Weak,” our look back at the administration’s past seven days.

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16 May 2013

Feds Push Insane Speech Codes

“It is so broad that it turns every single student and every single faculty member on campus, at least arguably, into harassers,” warns Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He’s talking about sweeping speech codes just imposed by the Departments of Justice and Education on virtually every college campus in the United States.

The new mandate was revealed in a letter from the DOJ and DOE to the University of Montana that states “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct.” The new rules apply to all colleges and universities receiving any sort of federal money, including Pell grants, federally backed student loans, and more. The letter contends the conduct in question need not be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation.” That means that there is effectively no check on what might count as harassment. Course materials, overheard comments, stupid jokes – it’s all potentially actionable.

Lukianoff, the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, hopes that “this is the last straw that causes the universities themselves to start pushing back against this ridiculous over-regulation.” H/T Reason.TV

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14 May 2013

Here Come the Cameras

You have already seen the private security footage that sparked the manhunt of the two Boston terrorism suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The footage shows the value of cameras in fighting terrorism.

After the images were released by the FBI, representative Peter King of New York praised surveillance cameras, calling them, “a great law enforcement method and device,” and New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, “The more cameras the better and I think the privacy issue has really been taken off the table.”

But civil liberties advocates like Peter Bibring of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California say that there is a big difference between obtaining private security footage and government-run cameras like those praised by Rep. King and Commissioner Kelly. H/T Reason.TV

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10 May 2013

Technology: The Tsunami Ahead

Advances in technology are accelerating so rapidly that few of us can keep up, and certainly not colloquial governments or legal systems or educational institutions grounded on premises honed a century or so ago. “All of the structures that we use to run the world today— our civics, our politics, our legal systems, healthcare, education— are all structured for a world 100 or 200 years ago, not for the world of today. So we think we’re in for a lot of disruption,” says Salim Ismail, founding director of Singularity University.

He talks with Reason.TV’s Tracy Oppenheimer about the pitfalls lying ahead, while also discussing such new promises and innovations as crowd funding, the next steps in technological expansion and how we’ve entered an information-based age.

 

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06 May 2013

Breitbart’s Awakening

Fox Business correspondent and Reason TV contributor Kennedy speaks with Andrew Marcus, director of the 2012 documentary Hating Breitbart. Both discuss Breitbart’s role in the ACORN controversy, the resignation of Shirley Sherrod and the undercover videos of James O’Keefe.

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04 May 2013

Protectionism Hurts Hawaii

Reason TV sat down with Ken Schoolland to talk about the Jones Act, federal legislation that restricts non-US shipping vessels from engaging in commerce in domestic shipping lanes. Schoolland argues that this protectionist measure is crippling the Hawaiian economy. He is a professor of economics at Hawaii Pacific University and scholar at the Grassroot Institute.

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01 May 2013

New York’s Nanny Freaks

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a diehard nanny, but he’s certainly got plenty of company among New York’s seemingly bottomless pool of control freaks. Reason.TV’s Nanny of the Month for April comes from Eastchester, New York where a local official wasn’t satisfied with outlawing traditional fast-food joints like McDonald’s and Burger King. He decided to kick it up a notch and shield locals from “fast casual” restaurants like Panera Bread and Chipotle. And to think these newcomers, with their earth tones and organic offerings, thought they could stave off the taste police!

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30 Apr 2013

Immigrants Good for Economy

The Senate’s “Gang of Eight” proposed immigration reform plan will likely take a look at how to make it easier for high-skilled immigrants to gain legal status in the United States. Reason Foundation senior analyst Shikha Dalmia gives five reasons why low-skilled immigrants are good for the economy too.

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29 Apr 2013

The Sounds of Capitalism

UCLA ethnomusicology professor Tim Taylor talks with Kennedy from Reason.TV about the rise of music in radio advertising and the early days of television. Taylor is the author of a book — The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music and the Conquest of Culture.

From the early days of radio through the rise of television after World War II to the present, music has been used more and more often to sell goods and establish brand identities. And since at least the 1920s, songs originally written for commercials have become popular songs, and songs written for a popular audience have become irrevocably associated with specific brands and products. Today, musicians move flexibly between the music and advertising worlds, while the line between commercial messages and popular music has become increasingly blurred.

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27 Apr 2013

Conservatives: Embrace Science

Let the liberals be Luddites. Let Democrats be the Chicken Little, sky-is-falling party. Joshua Jacobs, co-founder of the Conservative Future Project, is reaching out to Republicans, urging them to embrace an open-ended future filled with driverless cars, stem-cell research and private space exploration.

If that sounds like a tall order for a party whose leading presidential candidates in 2012 waffled on whether they believed in evolution, you’re right. But Jacobs argues forcefully that the GOP is no less anti-science than the Democrats and actually has a long history of pushing scientific and technological innovation.

Nick Gillespie sat down with Jacobs in Reason’s D.C. studio to talk about how conservatives might stop standing athwart history yelling stop and march boldly into the future.

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