Vigilant Solutions is a private company that is in the business of collecting and storing high resolution pictures of license plates.  It has taken around 2.2 billion of these license plate photos to date, according to this January 27th article from The Atlantic.  When a picture of a license plate is taken, the location of that plate, as well as the time, is also stored.  Vigilant captures around 80 million new images per month, and it is selling this information to the police.  3,000 law enforcement agencies are the happy customers of Vigilant Solutions, according to the Atlantic article.  That’s 30,000 police officers that have access to that database.  Instead of obtaining a warrant from a judge to install a tracking device on your car, they can just access a database that has continually-updated information on your whereabouts via Vigilant’s photos.

Now, according to this Reason article, Vigilant Solutions is installing its cameras on certain Texas police cruisers that syncs with a government warrants database and lets the cop know who has an outstanding warrant.  The cop has a credit card reader conveniently installed in his cruiser so those with outstanding traffic fines can pay immediately.  Oh, and the reader has a 25% service charge, payable to Vigilant Solutions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has introduced an open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS, in case Obama wants his Iraq War before he leaves the White House.

Ammon Bundy associate LaVoy Finicum was gunned down after emerging from his car with his hands raised.  From the video it appears to be another case of trigger-happy Federal agents eager to kill.  It’s tragic that it ended in even one death, but when you take up arms against the State, this outcome should be expected.

I don’t want to analyze the details of the Bundy rebellion, I want to make a point, which is this: government loves when it’s critics pick up weapons against it.  The State thrives when its enemies put down logic, reason, and persuasion, and instead pick up a gun.  Violence is not the answer to restoring liberty; passionate persuasion is.  Peaceful, passionate, relentless persuasion on behalf of liberty is what the State fears most of all.  The case against the oppression the political class inflicts on the citizenry is airtight, it does not need violence to back it up.  On the contrary, resorting to a feeble show of force increases the credibility of the State.

The State is always looking for the excuse to extinguish the lives of its critics.  If you pick up a gun and threaten violence against it, you’ve given them exactly what they were looking for: the excuse to murder you.  Just like an out-of-control cop who is looking for any reason to beat you into submission, so the State looks for any reason to destroy your life.  Don’t give them that reason.

The political class fears a peaceful, articulate, organized, unstoppable movement for greater liberty, not a ragtag group of armed men who storm a deserted wildlife refuge.

Chicago police have been sabotaging their own dashcams for years, apparently so as not to capture evidence of official criminality.  Case in point: five police cars were on the scene when Laquan McDonald was gunned down by Officer Jason Van Dyke, but only two had functioning dashcams.  None of the five captured audio, which must be easier to disable.  If it’s that easy to disable these monitoring devices designed to provide accountability, how easily will it be for a cop to “disable” a bodycam during an altercation that the officer would rather leave no damning evidence?  “Body cameras for every cop!” was the declaration from on high after the Ferguson protests, but it now sounds more and more that “police accountability” is going to turn into another cash cow for some lucky contractor.  Just look at the Taser industry.  Oh, Taser International nabbed the lucrative bodycam contract for 22,000 London officers in November of last year.

Here’s his Friday column on elite hatred of, and therefore our cautious admiration of, Trump and Sanders.

I’m unable to see in Trump or Sanders anything more than entertainment value, despite their tepidity to indulge in the extremely hawkish rhetoric of their competitors.  Wasn’t Obama seen as “anti-war” before he gained control of the reins of power?  The Peace Prize winner proceeded to unleash a hellstorm of almost indiscriminate drone strikes across the Middle East, strikes that kill innocents “90% of the time”, according to the Intercept‘s Drone Papers series.

If Trump or Sanders ends up in the White House, how likely is it that they’ll stick to whatever quasi-antiwar statement they made once or twice throughout their campaign?

I miss Ron Paul.

Private companies alleviate Flint’s water woes, infuriating liberal writers

Libya, transformed into a blazing dumpster fire, is about to get another dose of Uncle Sam’s airstrikes

Did a weaponized flu virus escape a US lab in the Ukraine?

Despite the rhetoric of imperial warmongers, Iran might not be so evil after all

No surprise here: DEA agent hires TSA employee to steal cash from luggage, promises a cut of the profits