Author: admin

In 1993, Pei Lin Liang, an immigrant from Guangdong province and
a former noodle factory deliveryman, started a local van service in
New York City that would later become Fung Wah, the very first
“Chinatown bus” company. Liang deserves credit for launching a
revolution in “curbside busing”—in which motor coaches pick up and
drop off passengers right off the street—now the
fastest growing mode of intercity travel in the U.S.

Last March, the U.S. Department of
Transportation forced Fung Wah to halt its operations, which was
part of a broader safety crackdown on the industry. As Reason

reported last year, the closing of Fung Wah was the result of
regulatory incompetence—but an even greater injustice is what’s
happened in the year and a half since.

View this article.

One of the
things that has contributed to the freak out against ISIS is that
it is attracting recruits from the West. Many commentators worry
that these Westerners are a product of liberalism’s spiritual
weakness—its inability to provide a “transcendental” purpose, a
cause to die for. And if ISIS is not defeated decisively, they
fear, liberalism will only look weaker, producing a loss of
confidence and an existential crisis in the liberal West.

But if anything bespeaks a loss of confidence, it is what counts
as an “existential crisis” now, notes Reason Foundation senior
analyst Shikha Dalmia.

View this article.

One of the
things that has contributed to the freak out against ISIS is that
it is attracting recruits from the West. Many commentators worry
that these Westerners are a product of liberalism’s spiritual
weakness—its inability to provide a “transcendental” purpose, a
cause to die for. And if ISIS is not defeated decisively, they
fear, liberalism will only look weaker, producing a loss of
confidence and an existential crisis in the liberal West.

But if anything bespeaks a loss of confidence, it is what counts
as an “existential crisis” now, notes Reason Foundation senior
analyst Shikha Dalmia.

View this article.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that
California has seen
over 8,000 cases of whooping cough so far this year, of which
267 required hospitalization, including 58 in intensive care. Three
infants under two months of age of died of the disease. Why?
Because rich, clueless idiots are refusing to get their kids
vaccinated.

The Hollywood Reporter checked filings for personal
belief exemptions in tony school districts and found:

The region stretching from Malibu south to Marina del Rey and
inland as far as La Cienega Boulevard (and including Santa Monica,
Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills)
averaged a 9.1 percent PBE level among preschoolers for the 2013-14
school year — a 26 percent jump from two years earlier. By
comparison, L.A. County at large measured 2.2 percent in that
period. Many preschools in this area spiked far higher, including
Kabbalah Children’s Academy in Beverly Hills (57 percent) and the
Waldorf Early Childhood Center in Santa Monica (68 percent).
According to World Health Organization data, such numbers are in
line with immunization rates in developing countries like Chad and
South Sudan.

Earlier this month the Los Angeles Times
investigated the falling vaccination rates among children in
various Southern California school districts. The reporters
found:

California parents are deciding against vaccinating their
kindergarten-age children at twice the rate they did seven years
ago, a fact public health experts said is contributing to the
reemergence of measles across the state and may lead to outbreaks
of other serious diseases.

The percentage of kindergartens in which at least 8% of students
are not fully vaccinated because of personal beliefs has more than
doubled as well, according to data on file with the state. That
threshold is significant because communities must be immunized at a
high rate to avoid widespread disease outbreaks. It is a concept
known as herd immunity, and for measles and whooping cough at least
92% of kids need to be immune, experts say. …

Exemption rates vary greatly by area and school. Los Angeles
Unified kindergartens, for example, had an overall exemption rate
of just 1.6%, although there are several in the district where more
than 8% of students have belief exemptions. At Santa Monica-Malibu
Unified, the overall exemption rate was 14.8% and at Capistrano
Unified in south Orange County, it was 9.5%. At nearby Santa Ana
Unified only 0.2% of kindergartners had exemptions on file.

In Los Angeles County, the rise in personal belief exemptions is
most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, The
Times analysis shows. The more than 150 schools with exemption
rates of 8% or higher for at least one vaccine were located in
census tracts where the incomes averaged $94,500 — nearly 60%
higher than the county median.

The article also reports in the Montecito District in Santa
Barbara that the exemption rate is 27.5 percent; Santa Cruz
Montessori it’s 22.6 percent.

While some might write off vaccine refusniks as voluntarily
engaging in Darwinian selection, the problem is that they are
putting others involuntarily at risk. As I explained elsewhere:

Vaccines do not always produce immunity, so a percentage of
those who took the responsibility to be vaccinated remain
vulnerable. Other defenseless people include infants who are too
young to be vaccinated and individuals whose immune systems are
compromised. In America today, it is estimated that about 10
million people are immuno-compromised through no fault of their
own.

This brings us to the important issue of “herd immunity.” Herd
immunity works when most people in a community are immunized
against an illness, greatly reducing the chances that an infected
person can pass his microbes along to other susceptible people.

People who refuse vaccination for themselves and their children
are free riding off of herd immunity. Even while receiving this
benefit, the unvaccinated inflict the negative externality of being
possible vectors of disease, threatening those 10 million most
vulnerable to contagion.

Vaccines are like fences. Fences keep your neighbor’s livestock
out of your pastures and yours out of his. Similarly, vaccines
separate people’s microbes. Anti-vaccination folks are taking
advantage of the fact that most people around them have chosen
differently, thus acting as a firewall protecting them from
disease. But if enough people refuse, that firewall comes down, and
innocent people get hurt.

Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle
when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other
man’s nose begins.” Holmes’ observation is particularly salient in
the case of whooping cough shots.

Infants cannot be vaccinated against whooping cough (pertussis),
so their protection against this dangerous disease depends upon the
fact that most of the rest of us are immunized. Unfortunately, as
immunization refusals have increased in recent years, so have
whooping cough infections. The annual number of pertussis cases
fell from 200,000 pre-vaccine to a low of 1,010 in 1976. Last year,
the number of reported cases rose to 48,277, the highest since
1955. Eighteen infants died of the disease in 2012, up from just
four in 1976.

For alternative opinions about vaccine refusal see
Reason’s debate, “Should
Vaccines Be Mandatory?“

Seventeen year old Christian Sierra was fatally
shot by police in Purceville, Virginia, after the teen allegedly
lunged at cops with a knife. Police were responding to a call
asking for help with the suicidal teen.

Authorities are expected to rule on whether the shooting was
justified this moon. “We’re shooting for the end of next week if we
can coordinate with Virginia State Police and get an opportunity to
reach out to the family,” said the city’s attorney, Jim Plowman,

according to the Loudoun Times, which also reports
that an anonymous citizen’s group called “Your Citizens of Loudoun
County” sent several emails to Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) calling for
independent investigations of police shootings and mandatory crisis
training for cops.

The emails do not appear to be online—a Google search for “Your
Citizens of Loudoun County” brings up only the Times
story—but it did yield a response from Purceville’s volunteer
rescue squad chaplain, Tim Simmons, who called the emails Marxist.
The Times
reports:

In a response to the group and the Rev. Dr. Jack Stagman,
president of the nonprofit America Restored, [Simmons] called the
correspondence to the governor “the same kind of agitprop that
stoked the fires of rioting and looting, mob violence and the
tearing of the social fabric in Ferguson so recently.”

“I’m astonished you [Stagman] would associate yourself, and the
people who stand with you in local Christian leadership, with this
kind of Marxist propaganda waged against our local law enforcement
and civil structures,” Simmons said in the email, forwarded to the
Times-Mirror earlier this week. 

Sierra’s family says the officers who shot Christian did not
have crisis intervention training. Loudoun County Sheriff Mike
Chapman says the training program is voluntary, and that some cops
consider it a waste of time. While the sheriff says the training is
costly, he argues it also saves taxpayer money by reducing the
necessity of medical interventions and associated costs.

Related:
Four issues to focus on when considering police reform.

Yesterday the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration (SAMHSA) released the
results of the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health
(NSDUH). As I
noted a couple of weeks ago, when SAMHSA gave us a preview of
those data, the number of respondents who reported using heroin in
the previous month fell by 14 percent last year, despite
ever-rising concern about a new “heroin epidemic.” While NSDUH
probably
misses a substantial number of heavy users (exactly how many is
unclear), the trends identified by the survey still should indicate
whether heroin consumption is on the rise or on the wane (as both
government officials and journalists tend to assume). Hence
it is instructive to compare past-month heroin use measured by
NSDUH (in thousands of users) with mentions of a “heroin
epidemic” in the newspaper and wire service articles collected by
Nexis:

On the face of it, there is no obvious relationship between the
level of heroin use and the level of press attention to it. Notice
that the spike in 2006, when the number of past-month users was
higher than it has been in any year since then, seems to have
prompted no journalistic response whatsoever. The more gradual
increase seen after 2009, by comparison, coincided with an initial
drop in “heroin epidemic” mentions, followed by a slight increase.
Then the number of mentions skyrocketed, rising from 82 in 2011 to
273 in 2012 and 633 in 2013. So far this year there have been
nearly 2,300 references to a “heroin epidemic” in these
news sources, reflecting the tremendous attention attracted by the
actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death
on February 2 (which was
caused by “mixed drug intoxication” but generally attributed to
heroin alone). That single incident seems to have generated more
talk of a “heroin epidemic” than everything else that happened in
the previous 12 years. In any case, coverage of the putative
epidemic really took off around the time when heroin use started to
fall.

This disconnect between drug use and public alarm about it is a
pretty familiar phenomenon by now. Ronald Reagan ramped up the war
on drugs at a time when drug use was already declining. His
successor, George H.W. Bush, gave his
“bag of crack” speech years after cocaine consumption peaked
(as measured by NSDUH’s predecessor, the National Household Survey
on Drug Abuse). Just as Hoffman’s death seems to be the single most
important factor driving the recent explosion in press coverage of
heroin, the 1986 death of basketball player Len Bias, at a time
when cocaine use was falling, drove the political panic that gave
us insanely disproportionate
federal crack sentences (even though Bias
snorted cocaine rather than smoking it).

As the sociologist Nicholas Parsons
points out in his recent book
Meth Mania, press panics about speed likewise have been
only tenuously related to the number of people consuming it.
Parsons found that coverage of methamphetamine
in Time and The New York
Times shot up in 1967, driven largely by a single
incident: the rape and murder of Linda Fitzpatrick, the 18-year-old
daughter of a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, couple who dropped
out of an exclusive private school and reportedly got hooked on
Mephedrine. In that respect, Linda Fitzpatrick was the Philip
Seymour Hoffman (or Len Bias) of her day.