Press release of the day, sent to my inbox:

Good morning!!

 . . . We would like to introduce our company and products to you, hope we may build business cooperation in the future.

We are a leading exporter and manufacturer with ten years’ experience in manhole cover export business, and enjoying a good reputation internationally in this line. We specialize in producing composite materials products: such as FRP manhole cover, rain grating, tree grill etc, which are made from glass fiber, quartz, resin and corundum. Until now, our competitive products had exported to many countries such as United Arab Emirates, Spain, United Sates etc. more than 30 countries.

Compared with traditional cast iron manhole cover, our burglarproof artistic FPR manhole covers have advantages as following:

1. Strictly manufactured according to EN124;

2. Zero Scrap Value-Burglarproof

3. High load capacity, exceeds the ductile iron.

4. Design with logo & decorative finish

5. Temperature resistance from -40 to 80 degree

6. Life span-more than 30 years

You are welcome to visit our website www.manhole-cover.biz to know more information. The catalogue and price list will be sent to you upon receipt of your detailed requirement. Any enquires from you will receive our prompt attention, so please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Best regards
Rock Yuan

I don’t know much about manhole covers, but they do look pretty nice.

So much libertarian goodness in this story.

On a cold, dark night on the mean streets of the UK, an undercover police officer was radioed and informed that a potential suspect was close by. Keen to do the right thing, he set off in hot pursuit. Twenty fraught minutes later, he learned he’d been chasing… himself.

The CCTV operator reported to police that someone was ‘acting suspiciously’, according to The Telegraph. Unfortunately, the officer who decided to follow up on the report was actually the shadowy figure in question.

From the Telegraph:

“The CCTV operator soon had the suspect on camera and everywhere he saw the male the keen PC was on his heels – radioing in to say he was in the same street.”

He added: “Every time the man darted in to another side alleyway, the PC was turning immediately into the same alleyway, but every time the CCTV operator asked what he could see there was no trace.”

It was at this point that the sergeant entered the control room where he recognised the junior officer.

Three stories about regulations purported to protect consumers . . . that hurt consumers.

• In Minnesota, a classic case of cartel protectionism as the owner of a funeral home owner fights the needless regulations that help others in his business gouge grieving families. My favorite part of this story is when the head of the rent-seeking trade organization uses the phrase “entrepreneurial dynamo” . . . as an insult! He’s hard working! He’s winning customers by charging them less money! He must be stopped!
• Fox News looks at the infuriating regulatory barriers innovative tech start-ups are facing. The “Uber” ap, for example, lets you summon a black cab from your phone, track how far it is away, and pay through your phone. Great, right? Not according to the historically corrupt (allegedly!), terrified-of-transparency D.C. Cab Commission: “They’re operating illegally, and we plan to take steps against them,” says D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton. “What they’re trying to do is be both a taxi and a limousine,” Linton has said. “Under the way the law is written, it just can’t be done.” The cab/limo distinction is nonsense. It’s only important to cab and limo companies who have a financial interest in keeping them separate. There are more examples at the link.
• A federal judge has ruled against a motion to dismiss the lawsuit some independent Nashville driver services have filed against the city’s new livery regulations. My intern Jessica Greene wrote about these blatantly protectionist regulations a couple months ago. The regulations require all driver services to charge a minimum of $45 per ride, which could be double what some independent driver services were charging. And proponents of the regulations—mostly bigger driver services already charging that much—of course say the regulations are vital to “protect consumers from ‘rogue taxis.’”

And of course it’s not just consumers who get hurt. The Nashville regulations will likely put several immigrant and minority-owned private car service companies out of business. (“Companies” probably gives the wrong impression. Most of them are one guy, one car.)

• New report: U.S. drones are attacking people coming to the aid, attending funerals of victims of prior drone attacks.
• Muslim man’s text message to co-workers to “blow away” competitors at a trade show leads to arrest, raid, detention of his colleagues at the U.S.-Canadian border.
• New Hampshire bill would protect the state’s legislators from “bullying.”
• NY Times hosts a symposium on unpaid internships in which four out of the five invited panelists hold the same position. Sorry, but an unpaid internship in a prestigious profession isn’t akin to working in a coal mine. While we’re at it, using Facebook also is in no way comparable to sharecropping.

. . . let’s make a seven-year-old child the subject of national ridicule and torment in the latest culture war skirmish!

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head, die a little inside, and console yourself with behind-the-scenes photos from the Puppy Bowl.

Today is the deadline to register for the International Students for Liberty conference later this month in Washington, D.C.

I’ll be speaking (details here). It’s a great event and a great organization. And a good chance to meet and network with other young libertarians.

They’re expecting nearly 1,000 students this year, up from just 100 at the first conference five years ago.

• Interesting question: Should federally-funded research at private organizations be available to the public for free? I’m inclined to say yes. But I’d be interested to hear if there’s an argument for no.
• Photos from London during the 1939 blackout.
• Nice story about actress Sonja Sohn’s volunteer work in Baltimore after The Wire.
• George Will on Obama’s penchant for martial rhetoric.
• Woman injured during Ogden puppycide on a pit bull.
• Your “Newt Gingrich is a hypocritical phony” story of the day.
• Related: Seven million dead Ukrainians call facile comparisons of petty election-year politics to the crimes of murderous authoritarian dictators “Palin-Esque.”

So my friend Matt Klokel has started a cool little business in which you send him your script for a comic book, pick an artist from the roster he has on staff, and he turns your script into a comic. (Just the graphics. As yet, he doesn’t offer actual printing.) It’s called C-BAD, or Comic Book Artists on Demand.

To kick off the business, he asked if I wanted to do a free five-page comic. Sounds like fun. But I feel like the opportunity would be wasted on my limited comic book experience. So I’m going to let you, Agitator readers, write the script. Here’s how it will work:

I’ll put up a post asking for ideas for the first page. You’ll post your manuscripts in the comments section. I’ll pick four or five (assuming there are at least that many), and we’ll then vote on which one wins. The next week, I’ll take ideas for the second page, which of course would need to begin where the first page plot left off. We’ll do this until we have a five-page comic book written and approved by Agitator readers. It will be posted to the web when it’s done. If there’s interest, maybe we’ll figure out a way to make printed copies available.

No real rules about plot or content. Just don’t be an asshole. And you don’t need to make me a character. In fact, from what I know of some of your twisted minds, I’d rather you didn’t! But whatever we end up with, well, that’s what we’ll end up with. This could be pretty great. Or it could go horribly off the rails. Which I guess is part of the fun.

Check here for manuscript guidelines, and here for suggestions on how to write a better one.

I’ll put up a post calling for scripts for the first page later this week. But first, we need to vote on an artist. You can check out samples of each artist’s work here.

• Ian Fleming couldn’t have invented a villain like this guy. “As head of the military’s chemical and biological warfare division, he is accused of creating viruses that would only attack black people.”
• Study says size doesn’t matter.
• Orwellian headline of the day.
• As I was reading this, I kept thinking, “There’s no way this is going where it seems to be going.” But that’s exactly where it goes. And then beyond.
• EFF’s Jillian York explains why the Twitter backlash is misguided.
• Old photos of people who look like their pets.
• No free speech on Bourbon Street.

• We have rules.
• Someone was mean to a politician on the Internet. So the politician wants to break the Internet.
• Some top-notch detective work reveals that Ice Cube’s “Good Day” was January 20, 1992.
• Art and The Simpsons.
• You aren’t good enough to own this homeless dog.
• The EU contemplates an absurd new “right to be forgotten online.” 
• So here’s my question about the Twitter boycott: Is it better for Twitter to censor Tweets in countries that require it, but be open and transparent about the censorship, or to refuse to censor Tweets, and have those countries ban Twitter entirely?

Speeches I’ll be giving in the coming months:

• February 13th, Vanderbilt University, 6:30 pm.  Topic: Police Militarization. Open to the public.
• February 19th, International Students for Liberty Conference, Washington, D.C., 10 You can register for the conference here.
• April 23rd, Vanderbilt University, 6:30pm. Topic: The Drug War. Open to the public.

I’ve also tentatively agreed to give a talk about police militarization at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in October. That should be interesting.

Hilarious—and somewhat terrifying—roundup of grandiose Newt Gingrich quotes from Mitt Romney’s oppo-research people.

When did you first talk about saving civilization?

Kristol says at one point that he sympathizes with soldiers who have had to serve “two or three” tours of duty. If I’m not mistaken, we were at the “some guys have served two or three tours” point back in 2005. We’re now at five, six, and seven.

But hey, we’re almost out of Iraq! Kind of. And just in time for the war with Iran.

David Brooks coins a typically nauseating new Brooksian term, then says he wants government and politicians to be less transparent. Here’s why:

Sunshinism is a destructive ideology. Forcing people to financially undress in public is just one of those incursions that repels decent people from running for office… It also destroys people’s faith in government. Have you noticed that as democracy has become more open, cynicism has skyrocketed and the effectiveness of government has gone down the toilet?

It’s telling that (1) Brooks recognizes that the more people learn about government and politicians, the more contemptible they find both, and that (2) his solution to this is not to recognize the inherent corruption of government, and therefore to reduce its influence (Brooks is a big government conservative), it’s to keep growing government, but to also keep people from knowing how awful government really is.

Via Popehat, this is probably the most hilariously absurd regulation I’ve ever seen.

John Stossel called Florida Dept. of Revenue and was told, “A vending machine operator that does not place the notice on the machine presumably is not in compliance with the other requirements such as registration and payment of the tax.”

So why not just make it a notice of tax paid? Or registration . . . er . . . registered?

Even if we accept that incredibly stupid justification at face value, think about enforcement, here. This isn’t a requirement that you post some bar or serial code for some state inspector to verify from time to time. It’s directed at the casual consumer. But if a vending machine is in violation of the notice requirement, there’s no notice to notify the consumer that the machine is in violation. And there’s no number posted for the consumer to call. The only way this serves any purpose whatsoever is if you have a consumer who sees the notice on a compliant machine, then goes to the effort of writing it down and keeping it on his person at all times, in case he happens upon a non-compliant machine. But then to report it, the consumer would have to find some way of identifying the non-compliant machine. Location, I guess. A serial number. Then what? Does the state then send out an inspector to verify?

And assuming all that happens, you then have a vending machine owner fined for nothing more than not complying with a law requiring the owner to post a notice about the requirement to post a notice. And “teacher, you forgot to collect the homework” guy gets a cash reward.

All to protect consumers! Or something! Who cares!

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

Interesting mash-up pitting the two in a virtual debate on violent vs. nonviolent resistance.

The music selections are a bit odd.

Lots of people have sent me the video below over the last few days. Unfortunately, the video was also just written up in the Daily Mail.

It seemed suspicious to me, so I poked around a bit. Sure enough, it isn’t what it appears to be. The driver is also a cop. The two were apparently playing pranks on one another. Or engaging in some sort of role play. Which is still a bit strange, but not nearly as troubling as the video first appears.

This all happened late last summer. I’m not sure why it’s making the rounds again now.

I found this map amusing.

(Disclosure: I’m a Colts fan. Sadly, I think the Patriots have the best chance to win the Super Bowl. I still voted for the Giants.)

More here.

Always nice to see a D.C. personality with a sense of humor.

Grover Norquist: ‘I Engaged In A Week-Long Drug-Fueled Orgy With Corporate Income Taxes’

These two were on Conan last night. They made me laugh.

So I’ve just accepted an offer from PublicAffairs Books to write a book about the history of modern policing—with a focus on police militarization.

As of right now, it will probably come out early next year. Could be slightly earlier, or later, depending on how fast I write and research, the editing process, production logistics that I don’t yet understand, and whether or not the world ends between now and then.

But I’m excited to get started! As we approach a publication date, expect me to bug the hell out of you until every reader of this blog has purchased fifteen copies.