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It was almost 10 years ago to the day that I wrote the column, “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.” It caused such a media firestorm that I started a blog in response: Free-Range Kids. That blog eventually became a the Free-Range Kids bill, which specifically allows parents to let their kids run errands, play outside, and even wait briefly in the car without fear of arrest. As the Deseret News explained:

The bill, which Gov. Gary Herbert announced Friday that he’d signed, specifies that it isn’t neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car. The law takes effect May 8.

Utah’s law is the first in the country, said Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term free-range parent. A records search by the National Conference of State Legislatures didn’t turn up any similar legislation in other states. …

Skenazy, who wrote the book “Free Range Kids” after writing about letting her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway alone, has said the law is a good way to reassure parents who might be nervous about their parenting decisions.

Read the rest of the story here, and then pass it along to your legislators: your state could be next. Here is a template of the Let Grow Proclamation you can take to any elected representative, even a local city councilperson.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was formed during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement to keep track of shadowy hate outfits, racists and extremists spreading vile propaganda against various ethnic and other groups. It was a worthy goal—so long as it lasted. In recent decades, the organization has taken to doing hit jobs on intellectual opponents who deviate from the liberal orthodoxy.

SPLC’s latest victim is conservative feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.

I don’t always agree with Sommers’ brand of feminism, but to allege as the SPLC does that she is a peddler of male supremacy is ridiculous, I note in my column at The Week. She is wrong about some things and right about others. But instead of refuting her ideas, SPLC tried to demonize her with guilt by association.

Such tactics combined with SPLC’s ridiculously loose criteria could potentially snag anyone who doesn’t fully buy the Social Justice Warrior agenda. Even the Dalai Lama might find himself on the SPLC list of hate monger given that His Holiness considers homosexuality “sexual misconduct.”

Go here to read the piece.

San Francisco is set to become a little less stylish today. This afternoon, the city’s Board of Supervisors will vote on an ordinance banning the sale of any product containing animal skin with “fur, fleece, or hair” attached to it—everything from mink stoles to rabbit foot key chains. The measure is expected to pass.

Violators would receive a $500 fine for their first fur offence, rising to $750 for a second and $1,000 for any violations thereafter. The ban exempts sales of used furs in second-hand shops, pawn shops, and nonprofits. The personal possession of furs purchased outside the city will also be permitted, as will fur products intended for use by cats or dogs.

The measure would go into effect January 1, 2019.

“It is unfashionable to take the life of another living creature for the purpose of wearing them,” the bill’s sponsor, Supervisor Katy Tang, declared in a press release. The bill’s purpose, according to the release, is to send a message that “the violence these animals endure for the purpose of becoming clothing and/or accessories is not consistent with the values of our city.”

Tang, a professed vegetarian who has told the San Francisco Chronicle that she indulges in the occasional purchase of leather shoes, has also advanced an environmental argument. Her legislation hypes the dangers of the million or so pounds of mink feces produced by fur farms in the United States each year, which reportedly add unhealthy levels of phosphorus to the ecosystem.

Cutting down on the scourge of mink feces will not come cheap. The San Francisco controller estimates that the city’s retailers will lose $11 million in sales annually thanks to the ban. The Chamber of Commerce is more pessimistic: Based on a survey of city retailers, it suggests a ban would cost $45 million a year.

According to the Chamber, roughly 50 retailers sell fur products in San Francisco, with some businesses relying on fur for some 75 percent of overall sales. At least two businesses reported over $4 million a year in fur sales, according to the Chamber’s survey.

San Francisco will be the first major U.S. city to ban fur sales. Two other California towns, West Hollywood and Berkeley, passed similar bans in 2011 and 2017, respectively.

A Scottish court convicted Youtube personality “Count Dankula” of a hate crime for posting a joke video of his girlfriend’s dog giving the Nazi salute.

Count Dankula, whose real name is Mark Meechan, was released on bail earlier today and will be sentenced next month, according to Breitbart.

Just before the verdict, Meechan told his fans: “If worse comes to worst and everything goes fucking terribly, keep fighting for free speech, the great meme war.”

The video that got Meechan in trouble was posted on Youtube in April 2016. It depicts his girlfriend’s dog, Buddha, responding to Meechan saying “want to gas the Jews?” over and over again. Meechan also positions the dog to be watching an Adolf Hitler rally on the computer, and to perform a Nazi salute. As Reason‘s Christian Britscghi reported earlier, Meechan claimed his sole intention was to troll his girlfriend, who was “always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is.”

“And so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi,” said Meechan. “I’m not a racist by the way, I just really wanted to piss her off.”

Police arrested Meechan for violating Section 127 of the U.K. Communications Act, which prohibits “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing” electronic communications. At the trial, Ephraim Borowski, director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities and a witness for the prosecution, offered the following testimony: “My immediate reaction is that there is a clear distinction to be made between an offhand remark and the amount of effort that is required to train a dog like that.” But the video presents little evidence that the dog underwent some sort of rigorous programming. (My dogs respond positively to pretty much everything any human being says, as long as it’s uttered in a friendly tone.)

Meechan has claimed that this trial is about defending the right to make offensive jokes, and engage in free speech more generally. Unfortunately, the U.K. doesn’t have the First Amendment—such speech would undoubtedly be protected in the U.S., where the Supreme Court has routinely thwarted the government’s efforts to punish even the vilest kind of expression.

It may very well be the case that the Glasgow judge was right about the facts of the case, and that Meechan broke the law. But it’s wrong, as a matter of moral principle, to lock people up for engaging in hate speech. It’s particularly wrong here—but it would be wrong even if Meechan was a legitimate Nazi sympathizer.

Yesterday I wrote about the so-called campus free speech “crisis,” and why I think there’s solid evidence that some young people—the most radical activists, in particular—are turning against the First Amendment. Kids today are more favorably disposed toward some kinds of speakers that used to be considered offensive—communists, gays, atheists—but many remain willing to support censorship of racists and other deplorable persons. Of particular concern is their attitude toward hate speech: Current college students were evenly split on the question of whether the government should prohibit hateful expression.

Liberals and civil libertarians must continue to challenge this attitude if we don’t want to end up living in a country where the state imprisons people for making idiotic but harmless Youtube videos. Meechan’s conviction is an odious reminder that such places exist, even in the most advanced, progressive, and supposedly tolerant corners of the world.

Los Angeles may be about to reverse course and approve a plan that would make public body-camera footage of some police incidents.

The Los Angeles Police Department has been operating under a policy that treats police body-camera recordings as though they are not public records. As a result, the LAPD has absolutely refused to release such recordings to the public without a court order.

The LAPD persisted with this policy even after getting a $1 million federal grant to pay for the body cameras. So the taxpayers shelled out for the expensive system but officials refused to provide the government transparency that was the reason for demanding the cameras in the first place.

Under a new policy that the city’s Police Commission is expected to approve today, the LAPD will release video evidence of what they describe as a “critical incident” within 45 days, or even earlier if the police chief decides it’s in the public interest.

The policy defines a “critical incident” as: Any officer-involved shooting, regardless of whether anybody was hit; any use of force resulting in death or bodily injury requiring hospitalization; deaths in custody (unless there’s no preliminary evidence of use of force, misconduct, or violent behavior by the detainee); and any other encounter that the police chief or the commission deems in the public interest.

The policy also includes privacy protections to safeguard the identities of juveniles and victims of some crimes, including redactions and blurring of faces as necessary. The policy also allows for the delay of video release to protect the safety of people (including police officers involved) and to protect sources of ongoing investigations. The policy requires specific, fact-based explanations for any delay request and requires unanimous approval by the police chief and the commission. We will have to see how that actually gets implemented in practice.

This is an excellent first step in moving away from terrible policies that subvert the purposes of body cameras, which are to help both document what happens in encounters between police and citizens and to properly hold all parties involved for misbehavior.

We’ve seen what has happened in North Carolina as a result of a state law that shields body camera footage from public records laws unless judges order their release. In Greensboro, police and a local judge blocked the release of footage of a teen’s violent arrest by police. The judge said this was to protect the reputation of the arrested teen and his family, even though the family itself was petitioning the court for its release. A police officer in Asheville, meanwhile, faces charges for beating an alleged jaywalker, but only after the body camera footage was leaked to a media outlet.

Even under the LAPD’s restrictive policy, we were starting to see leaks. Last November, footage got out that seemed to reveal a police officer planting cocaine on a suspect stopped for a hit-and-run crash. Note that such video footage still would not necessarily be released under the new policy, so there’s still more work to be done.

Read the policy draft here.

Thanks to readers of Reason, Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, and other random strangers who had never met him, Elias Zarate was able to pay off a $1,500 fine (plus another $600 in fees) imposed by Tennessee’s haircut cops.

What crime warranted such a stiff penalty? Zarate cut hair without a license—that’s a violation of Tennessee Cosmetology Act code 62-4-108, which requires all licensed barbers to have a high school diploma. What’s finishing high school got to do with being a good barber, you may ask? Well, nothing, but Tennessee is one of 13 states to require completion of high school as a prerequisite to getting a barber license

As Reason reported in January, Zarate dropped out of high school midway through the 12th grade to help raise his two younger siblings—their mother had died in a car accident and their father abandoned the kids to tenuous living arrangements with relatives—and ultimately got a job working as a barber in Memphis. Zarate loved the work and there’s no indication that anyone complained to the state board about his skills with a razor and scissors. After getting busted, Zarate approached the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners, hoping for some help with getting a legitimate license. They slapped him with a fine and told him he’d have to go back to high school before he could work again.

“I was thinking, how am I supposed to pay for this fine, you know, because they’re stopping me from working,” Zarate told Reason.

And that’s where this story goes from being yet another reminder about the arbitrary awfulness of occupational licensing laws to something that might just restore your faith in humanity.

With the help of licensing reformers at the Beacon Center of Tennessee, a free market think tank, Zarate set up a GoFundMe account to help pay off his fine. After our story about his situation—and a clutch tweet from Pai—the page was flooded with donations.

“You can restart the heart of a pulseless, unbreathing person without a high school diploma, but you cannot cut hair.” @EricBoehm87 in @reason on a case of occupational licensing and economic opportunity in Tennessee. @BeaconTN H/T @senatorshoshanahttps://t.co/iG8m8Rwu8C

— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) January 20, 2018

Zarate ended up raising more than $3,200, with most of it coming in the form of small donations from people who likely have never met him and never will. Take a minute to read through some of the comments on the page and bask in the collective middle finger being raised to the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners.

“I just want to thank everybody who donated, it means so much to me,” says Zarate in a video posted by the Beacon Center. “I just want to be able to get into barber school and make everything right with the state and provide for my family.”

But now that Zarate has paid off his fines—he did so on Friday of last week—he’s still no closer to having a career as a barber. Righting that wrong will require action from the state legislature.

After Zarate’s story became public, Gov. Bill Haslam called for a bill to reduce the educational requirements for a barbering license. Legislation introduced in the state House and state Senate would require the completion of 10th grade—the same standard that applies to cosmetology licenses in Tennessee—before an applicant could get a barber license, rather than requiring the completion of high school.

It’s not clear why there should be any educational requirement attached to a barber license. Cutting hair well does not require knowledge of trigonometry or a careful study of the meaning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Proper sanitation for the equipment used by licensed barbers—the only thing that could remotely be considered a reason for government to intervene—could be, and indeed is, taught during the mandatory training that all barber licensing applicants must complete in Tennessee. It is not taught in Tennessee high schools.

The closer you look, the less sense it makes. You can become a licensed emergency medical responder in Tennessee without a high school diploma—indeed, you can do it with far less work than is required to become a barber. Getting an EMR license in Tennessee requires only that an applicant can “read, write, and speak the English language,” according to Tennessee Department of Health guidelines.

Zarate is hardly alone when it comes to facing the wrath of the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm, examined meeting minutes and disciplinary actions for the board and found that it had levied $100,000 in fines against dozens of braiders in 30 different hair shops and salons since 2009. “All of those violations,” wrote Nick Sibilla in Forbes, “were for unlicensed braiding; none were triggered by any health or sanitation violation.”

Individuals pitching in to help a guy like Zarate is a heart-warming story; but the reality is that state boards can issue more fines than could ever be paid off in such a fashion. Eliminating unnecessary licensing laws that have nothing to do with public health and safety is the only way to ensure that barbers, hair braiders, and cosmetologists in Tennessee and elsewhere have the freedom to pursue their careers without fear of the haircut cops.

“We are saving more of the unborn than any state in America, and what better thing can we do?”

That’s what Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said as he signed the nation’s strictest law regarding abortion. The only exemptions in House Bill 1510, reports the Clarion Ledger,

are if a fetus has health problems making it “incompatible with life” outside of the womb at full term, or if a pregnant woman’s life or a “major bodily function” is threatened by pregnancy. Pregnancies resulting from rape and incest aren’t exempted.

Currently, federal law prohibits banning abortions before 20 weeks, which is considered the moment at which a fetus is viable. The law is being challenged by Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization:

Dr. Sacheen Carr-Ellis, in a sworn statement, said she’ll have to stop providing abortions to women past the 15 week ban, or else lose her Mississippi medical license, as House Bill 1510 requires. Carr-Ellis said women shouldn’t be forced to carry their pregnancies to term against their wills or leave the state to obtain abortions.

“A woman who is pregnant should have the ability to make the decision that is best for her about the course of her pregnancy, based on her own values and goals for her life,” Carr-Ellis said in the statement.

I realize and respect that some libertarians are opposed to abortion except when a pregnant woman’s life is endangered by bringing the pregnancy to term.

But Carr-Ellis’s perspective seems right to me, especially before viability. Personhood is a legal concept, not a scientific fact, and will always be subject to definition and redefinition as our knowledge and morality change. But despite some ambiguity, viability has a strong claim as being the moment at which personhood should be granted and the state can rightly begin to take some interest, with interventions becoming more likely as the pregnancy continues. This is roughly the thinking behind Roe v. Wade (1973), which has been revised and amended in subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court, and it also accords well with public opinion on abortion. By a two-to-one margin (61 percent to 31 percent), Americans support unfettered rights to an abortion in the first trimester of a pregnancy but that position reverses in the second trimester (27 percent to 64 percent) and drops further in the final trimester (14 percent to 80 percent). That pattern is reflected in when women have abortions, too, with 95 percent of abortions taking place by week 15. In Mississippi, “78 abortions in 2017 when the fetus was identified as being 15 weeks or older. That’s out of about 2,500 abortions performed statewide, mostly at the clinic.”

Granting pre-viability fetuses full legal rights from the “moment of conception,” the stated goal of many if not most abortion opponents, is imprecise and opens up our private lives to all sorts of invasive state interventions. For instance, prior to the new law, Mississippi counted a pregnancy as beginning with the first day of a woman’s last menstrual cycle, or about two weeks before most other states started counting. So even though Mississippi’s previous ban on abortions started after 20 weeks, it effectively meant it started at 18 weeks by the methods used in other places. Beyond that, there is a serious question of how to account for naturally occurring abortions. “Embryologists estimate that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for seven days or more is 60 percent,” notes Reason‘s Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. “The total rate of natural loss of human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the moment of conception.” If “moment of conception” becomes the legal definition, then what is to be done about the millions of “deaths” that occur every year?

In any case, the rate of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 years to 44 years has declined below what it was when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Better contraceptives and more access to them is the leading cause of the reduction, as the incidence of unwanted pregnancy is way down across all age groups. It’s also likely that increasingly tighter state-level restrictions and the reduction in the number of abortion providers plays a role, too, though given that only 1.3 percent of abortions are performed after 20 weeks, the legal cut-off in most states, it’s not clear how much impact such restrictions have. Prior to the Supreme Court legalizing the procedure, it’s estimated that between 200,000 and 1.2 million abortions were performed per year, with most of them being illegal.

The first challenge to Mississippi’s new law comes today, with a federal judge hearing arguments for and against blocking the implementation of the 15-week ban as its constitutionality is tested in the courts.

In 2013, Reason held a discussion about “Abortion & Libertarians” featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Ronald Bailey, and The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway. Take a look:

China’s government has announced that they’ll assign a mandatory government “social credit score” to everyone in the country by 2020. It will be based largely on what you do online. Say something that gets censored, you lose points. Same if you watch porn, or are late in returning a rented bike, or buy lots of alcohol.

China’s government boasts that the social credit system will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Click here for full text, a transcript, and downloadable versions.

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• A package bound for Austin, Texas, has exploded at a FedEx facility near San Antonio.
• “President Trump shook up his legal team Monday by hiring a combative former prosecutor who has publicly argued that Trump is the target of an elaborate FBI conspiracy—marking another confrontational move by the president against the rapidly mounting legal threats facing him and his administration.”
• French police have detained former French President Nicolas Sarkozy as part of an investigation into improper financial dealings with the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
• The last known male northern white rhino in the world has died.
• The Weinstein Company has filed for bankruptcy.

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