-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 14:10:52 -0500 From: "Jeff Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Reason Express List Member <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Reason-Express: REx23, v2 Welcome to Reason Express, the weekly e-newsletter from Reason magazine. Reason Express is written by Washington-based journalist Jeff A. Taylor and draws on the ideas and resources of the Reason editorial staff. For more information on Reason, visit our Web site at www.reason.com. Send your comments about Reason Express to Jeff A. Taylor ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and Virginia Postrel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). 1) The Endless Balkan Endgame 2) Open Access or Open Season on Common Sense? 3) The Hate Crime You Didn't Hear About 4) Quick Hits REASON Express June 8, 1999 Vol. 2 No. 23 - - Peace In Our Mind - - The on-again, off-again settlement with Yugoslavia is already shot through with holes. A fairly gaping one is convincing the Kosovo Liberation Army to close up shop and behave. "We would like them not to try to impede the withdrawal of the Serb forces...if they are leaving sincerely and properly," says NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. This from the chap who has spent the past few weeks at a podium telling the world what bloodthirsty butchers the Serbs are. Perhaps he thought the KLA would toss garlands and not grenades at Serbian columns. And that is but one problem. The deal the Russians and Finns brokered puts the United Nations, not NATO, as NATO had previously insisted, at the center of any post-conflict clean up. Putting aside the rather disturbing notion that the U.S. fought a war over which team of international bureaucrats would be in charge, going to the U.N. means going to Russia and China. Most importantly, what NATO thought was an agreement to end the fighting seems to be taken by the Serbs as merely a blueprint for further negotiations. They say they need more time to pull out. NATO says such demands show Belgrade is just stalling. The real kicker is that once some kind of "agreement" is reached, U.S. involvement does not scale down--it scales up. Troops will be needed to police or enforce the agreement--tens of thousands of them. The war is over. Send more troops. http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/kosovo_main990606.html ************************************************************* - - Open All Night - - The latest high-stakes Web battle is over cable Internet service. Service providers want to force the cable guys to offer their services along with their own as new cable access plans are rolled out in the coming months. Last week the ISPs cheered a decision by a federal judge in Oregon which allowed the requirement to be placed on cable operators in two jurisdictions. The ruling allows the city of Portland and county of Multnomah to force AT&T to let AOL and other providers ride its cable into the homes of customers. The jurisdictions said they acted as a condition of AT&T's $48 billion acquisition of cable operator Tele-Communications Inc. AT&T had planned to offer customers only its own @Home Corp. cable Internet service. That set U.S. District Judge Owen Panner to thinking, with disastrous results. "The open access requirement is within the authority of the city and county to protect competition," Judge Panner wrote. Judge Panner also rejected arguments that federal law prohibited the city and county from acting, and that open access violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, and violated the First Amendment. No time for that when there's law to be made. So it has come to this: "open access" that depends on locally granted and protected monopolies, the very monopolies which are the root of all complaints about cable. Price? Jurisdictions with more than one servicer have lower cable bills. Must carry? Wouldn't be any issue absent the monopoly: Some franchises would carry locals, some wouldn't. Service? Only the intrusion of the dish networks has begun to change cable's view of consumers to something other than fish in a barrel. But local governments insist on the monopoly arrangement because it nets them easy money, often five percent of gross revenues for the service. When the Mafia does it, it is called protection money. Meanwhile, Internet Ventures, a California ISP, is petitioning the Federal Communication Commission to force the cable guys to throw open their nets. The FCC has steadfastly tried to steer away from this hornet's nest for no other reason than any decision would bound to be appealed, thus further delaying the spiffy new services the FCC keeps assuring the public are on the way. But Internet Ventures is trying to change that. It argues that the 1984 "must carry" rule--the one that said cable has to offer local over-the-air broadcasts--applies to ISPs too. Or in other words, the Internet is one big broadcast channel. Clearly it isn't--it is endlessly mutable by the end user, whereas that nutty local weatherguy can only be endlessly muted--and the FCC is not likely to fall for this. But throw enough nutty stuff at the FCC and they are bound to crack. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,37409,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.j http://cnnfn.com/digitaljam/wires/9906/04/isp_wg/ At least one ISP honcho, EarthLink's Sky Dayton, prefers competition to government allocation of net resources http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0614/6312050a.htm ************************************************************** - - All the News That's Fit to Miss - - The TV trucks and Live Eyes must have broken down on their way to Northfield Mount Hermon School. How else to explain their absence from the exclusive Massachusetts prep school, recently ground zero for a vicious hate crime? A 17-year-old boy was assaulted by two classmates who used a pocketknife to carve the word "Homo" in his back. The flashpoint was particularly absurd. The victim liked the music of British glam rockers Queen. The attackers didn't, calling it a "gay band." Then again, perhaps the crime didn't fit the media's script. Mt. Hermon is a well-known liberal school, with a history of social activism. Paul Stookey of the folk harpies Peter, Paul, and Mary spent last winter teaching songwriting, computers, and spirituality at the school. His wife is a school chaplain. In 1996, the school hosted a three-day contemplative retreat following the death of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. Overall, graduates are well-known and popular figures. Transfer the same attack to a Southern or Mountain West school--heaven forbid a conservative religious one--and talk of a "climate of intolerance" would be on every reporter's lips. The unfortunate truth is that narrow, malformed minds do not heed geographic boundaries. They can even crop up in pleasant communities without tainting everyone who comes in contact with them. How or why this happens is a complicated story. And complicated stories are the hardest ones to tell. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/155/metro/Hate_attack_shocks_a_prep_scho ol-. shtml Robert O. Blanchard says the media bought the hate state myth when they went to Wyoming in search of gay haters at http://www.reason.com/9905/fe.rb.the.html ************************************************************* QUICK HITS - - Quote of the Week - - "None of these people remember anything anymore. We're going to write it down next time," Livermore (Calif.) Mayor Cathie Brown, on the city's inability to find a time capsule from 25 years ago. Metal detectors, probes, and two foot-deep holes failed to uncover the capsule buried somewhere in a city park. http://www.hotcoco.com/news/frontstories/moi99629.htm - - Comfortably Numb - - The University of Minnesota will refund $11,000 in National Institutes of Health grant money for pain research involving cocaine after the man leading the experiments died April 28 of a cocaine overdose. Dr. Keith Kajander, 45, had bought 140 grams of medical grade cocaine for dental pain research. An audit of his lab work could not account for all the cocaine. Kajander was licensed by the Drug Enforcement Agency to have cocaine. Police records show the paramedics responding to Kajander's home were told by his wife that he had a history of cocaine use. http://www.startribune.com/cgi-bin/stOnLine/article?thisSlug=kaja04 - - Mama Mia, Thatsa Good Stuff - - Two teenagers in Maryland were charged with selling oregano to other kids, who believed it to be marijuana. http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/editorial/story.cgi?section=news-marylandsu n&st oryid=1150080220619 ############################################################## REASON NEWS Sign up for notification by e-mail of Reason media appearances and Reason events by sending a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "notify" in the subject line. 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