Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

Things I have gleaned from my Twitter feed [on March 20th]: It is the second anniversary of the death of Arthur C. Clarke. Things that are noticeably absent: Any mention that today is the 7th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.

But let’s forget Twitter for a second — though it’s a great measure of where the hive mind is focused — and turn to some more “reliable” news sources. There’s not a single op-ed in the New York Times today to mark the anniversary, or pontificate on where it all went wrong (update: there is a photo slideshow from this weekend’s Magazine). Nor the Wall St. Journal to tell us what went right. Nothing in the Washington Post either. Nor the LA Times. I can’t even find a single link on Drudge. Perhaps even more shocking is that I can’t find anything on Andrew Sullivan.

It’s almost as though where the media is concerned the Iraq War didn’t happen.

Well, Robert Greenwald did not forget: Iraq: Thousands Dead, $747.3 Billion Spent And Not Any Safer

Here’s a study to file under “unworkable but very cool.” A group of Japanese researchers has developed a mosquito that spreads vaccine instead of disease. Even the researchers admit, however, that regulatory and ethical problems will prevent the critters from ever taking wing — at least for the delivery of human vaccines.

Scientists have dreamed up various ways to tinker with insects’ DNA to fight disease. One option is to create strains of mosquitoes that are resistant to infections with parasites or viruses, or that are unable to pass the pathogens on to humans. These would somehow have to replace the natural, disease-bearing mosquitoes, which is a tall order. Another strategy closer to becoming reality is to release transgenic mosquitoes that, when they mate with wild-type counterparts, don’t produce viable offspring. That would shrink the population over time.

The new study relies on a very different mechanism: Use mosquitoes to become what the scientists call “flying vaccinators.” Normally, when mosquitoes bite, they inject a tiny drop of saliva that prevents the host’s blood from clotting. The Japanese group decided to add an antigen-a compound that triggers an immune response-to the mix of proteins in the insect’s saliva.

Read More on ScienceNOW

Nineteen people were hurt, and Harrison has been involved in five accidents in the last three years according to KTRK-TV Houston. Below is the raw footage of the “accident” below from the AP:

With health care a source of fierce debate in America, a movie like Repo Men was bound to be made. A bloody satire of the marriage between medicine and capitalism, it’s about repo men who collect on overdue artificial organs.

A cult musical about this same topic, called Repo! The Genetic Opera, came out last year, though Repo Men itself was based on a novel called The Repossession Mambo. The idea of scary semi-serial killers who kill to repossess mechanical organs seems to be in the air. Indeed, one of the best parts of Repo Men is the way it captures the sentiments of millions of people who feel dicked over by hospitals and medical insurance companies right now. But the movie’s strength is also its problem: Evil medical corporations are a pretty easy target, and Repo Men gives us a black-and-white view of a problem that is in reality all shades of gray.

Read Annalee Newitz’s review of Repo Men on io9.com

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.

Read More on Yahoo Green

Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.

Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.

Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont received the first Social Security payment on January 31, 1940.

I have never had any expectations I that ever will collect Social Security … let’s see how Congress deals with this crisis (again). This entitlement system (from an accounting standpoint) sure does hope you die before you get old…

STEPHEN OHLEMACHER writes on the AP via Yahoo News:

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It’s time to start cashing them in.

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

In a scene reminiscent of non-violent civil rights confrontations from the 1960s, Ohio Tea Partiers quickly turned ugly when facing off with health care advocates in front of Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s office Tuesday.

In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson’s disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, “I’ll decide when to give you money!”

See and read more on the Columbus Dispatch

Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

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The United Nations’ International Labor Organization has revealed some horrifying stats:

The ILO estimates that approximately two million workers lose their lives annually due to occupational injuries and illnesses, with accidents causing at least 350,000 deaths a year. For every fatal accident, there are an estimated 1,000 non-fatal injuries, many of which result in lost earnings, permanent disability and poverty.

The death toll at work, much of which is attributable to unsafe working practices, is the equivalent of 5,000 workers dying each day, three persons every minute. This is more than double the figure for deaths from warfare (650,000 deaths per year). According to the ILO’s SafeWork programme, work kills more people than alcohol and drugs together and the resulting loss in Gross Domestic Product is 20 times greater than all official development assistance to the developing countries.

Each year, 6,570 US workers die because of injuries at work, while 60,225 meet their maker due to occupational diseases. (Meanwhile, 13.2 million get hurt, and 1.1 million develop illnesses that don’t kill them.) On an average day, two or three workers are fatally shot, two fall to their deaths, one is killed after being smashed by a vehicle, and one is electrocuted. Each year, around 30 workers die of heat stroke, and another 30 expire from carbon monoxide.

Although blue collar workers face a lot of the most obvious dangers, those slaving in offices or stores must contend with toxic air, workplace violence, driving accidents, and (especially for the health-care workers) transmissible diseases. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration warns that poisonous indoor air in nonindustrial workplaces causes “[t]housands of heart disease deaths [and] hundreds of lung cancer deaths” each year.

But hey, everybody has to go sometime, right? And since we spend so much of our lives in the workplace, it’s only logical that a lot of deaths happen — or at least are set into motion — on the job. This explanation certainly is true to an extent, but it doesn’t excuse all such deaths. The International Labor Organization says that half of workplace fatalities are avoidable. In A Job to Die For, Lisa Cullen writes:

In the workplace, few real accidents occur because the surroundings and operations are known; therefore, hazards can be identified. When harm from those hazards can be foreseen, accidents can be prevented….

Most jobs have expected, known hazards. Working in and near excavations, for example, poses the obvious risks of death or injury from cave-in …. When trenches or excavations collapse because soil was piled right up to the edge, there is little room to claim it was an accident.

References: International Labor Organization. “Workers’ Memorial Day Ceremony to Focus on Emergency Workers, Firefighters.” Press release, 24 Apr 2002. • Cullen, Lisa. A Job to Die For: Why So Many Americans Are Killed, Injured or Made Ill at Work and What to Do About It. Common Courage Press, 2002. This book uses the following as its sources for the US statistics I’ve cited: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Costs of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses by J. Paul Leigh (University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

ALLEGATION: Lady Gaga is a pawn of the Illuminati and a peddler of the occult. Her music video “Telephone” is a brazen attempt at recruiting teenagers into mind control programs.

LADY GAGA IS: “A mind-controlled drone who kills people”

“TELEPHONE” VIDEO IS ABOUT: “Ritual murder of average Americans in a diner by mind-controlled slaves” and “mind control, a covert practice used by the military, the CIA, religious cults and the Illuminati elite. It is used to program human beings to become mental slaves and to execute specific tasks.”

LYRICAL EVIDENCE: “By ‘kinda busy’, Gaga means she has dissociated from reality. Real life is calling her brain but she ‘has no service’, she’s not there. Gaga is not thinking or talking for herself anymore, her head and her heart have been dissociated from her core personality due to [Illuminati/CIA] Monarch programming.”

Listen to “The Lady Gaga Code” on Disinformation World News

Read Vigilant Citizen’s The Hidden Meaning of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”

Read Max Fisher’s analysis on the Atlantic Wire

WASHINGTON — In May 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.

Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.

So he hired an attorney — not because he wanted to sue anyone; on the contrary, the shy African-American teenager expected his insurance was canceled by mistake and would be reinstated once he set the company straight.

But Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, ignored his attorney’s letters, as they had earlier inquiries from a case worker at a local clinic who was helping him. So Mitchell sued.

Read More: Reuters

Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted on the whistleblowing site.

The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org — An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.

“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.”

Read More on WIRED’s Threat Level

According to the 2,200-page court examiner’s report this practice, known as “Repo 105″ (“Repo”? Really, why not call it “Steal 105″?), was like “a drug” propelling the bank to conceal the true nature of its financial health.

The collapse of “venerable” Wall Street investment house Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Here’s Dylan Ratigan and Eliot Spitzer making sense of what is clearly a crime against the economic health of the United States:

Generally a headstone conveys two very basic facts about the person interred below it — their name plus the two most important dates of their life. Thanks to some new technology, headstones can now convey much more that: a photo and note written by the deceased, delivered right to your phone.

The product is called RosettaStone and comes from a company called Objecs. If you were to purchase a RosettaStone, you’d receive what looks like a granite iPod with a few symbols visible on the outside and a microchip embedded on the inside. That device is then secured into your headstone so those symbols can be seen by visitors (each symbol represents an area of your life you want to share info on).

When your great-great-great granddaughter stops by sometime in the next century and wants to know who you were, she’ll touch her NFC-RFID enabled cellphone (or whatever device we’re using by then) to one of those symbols on the granite iPod-looking device on your headstone and she’ll get your note.

Read More on Discovery News

The president will refuse to make fund-raising visits during November elections to any district whose representative has not backed the bill.

A one-night presidential appearance can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds which would otherwise take months to accumulate through cold-calling by campaign volunteers.

Mr Obama’s threat came as the year-long debate over his signature domestic policy entered its final week.

Mr Obama is personally telephoning congressmen who are still on the fence this week, in between several personal appearances devoted toward swinging public opinion.

Read More on the Telegraph

Andrew Breitbart has been waiting 45 minutes for a filet mignon. He drums his fingers on the table in this plush Italian restaurant off Times Square, a place where the media types he regularly trashes used to flaunt their expense accounts — back when they still had them. Breitbart looks around for a waiter and launches into a stem-winder about collusion between Hollywood and the press — the “subtle and not-so-subtle use of propaganda to make a center-right nation move to the left.

“It’s not just the nightly news,” he says. “You’re also getting television shows that reflect the same worldview, where Republicans are always the bad guys. Al Qaeda’s never the bad guy. The Republican is always the bad guy.”

From anyone else, this would be just talk — or talking points. (No terrorist bad guys on TV? Really?) But Breitbart is one of the people who rams those points into the popular consciousness. Until last September, the beefy 41-year-old with graying blond hair was a largely covert power in the right-wing media, the hidden hand behind the popular Drudge Report who also, weirdly, cofounded the liberal Huffington Post. But then he struck out on his own. Today his collection of Web sites draws more than 10 million readers a month. He has a book deal worth more than half a million dollars, and he’s a regular presence on Fox News — where he’s headed later tonight, in fact. The covert thing is out the window.

The filet finally shows and Breitbart digs in, ignoring the risk to his mustard-colored sports coat. “The idea is that I have to screw with media, and I have to screw with the Left, in order to give legitimate stories the ability to reach their natural watermark,” he says.

Image: Wikipedia via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Read More on WIRED

The reason I say “fun” post is it’s very unlikely a Nemesis star does exist, as we have been able to figure out masses and orbits in the solar system with a high degree of accuracy for quite some time. Meaning if an object this massive was this close — Nemesis is thought to be a red dwarf star or brown dwarf — we’d have to account for it in the astronomy.

In any event, I do expect Nibiru devotees to disagree with this opinion, or if/when WISE doesn’t find it.

Charlie’s post refers to an article in Astrobiology Magazine, which is sponsored by NASA. Check out what they have to say, Leslie Mullen writes:

Is our Sun part of a binary star system? An unseen companion star, nicknamed “Nemesis,” may be sending comets towards Earth. If Nemesis exists, NASA’s new WISE telescope should be able to spot it.

A dark object may be lurking near our solar system, occasionally kicking comets in our direction.

Nicknamed “Nemesis” or “The Death Star,” this undetected object could be a red or brown dwarf star, or an even darker presence several times the mass of Jupiter.

Why do scientists think something could be hidden beyond the edge of our solar system? Originally, Nemesis was suggested as a way to explain a cycle of mass extinctions on Earth.

The paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski claim that, over the last 250 million years, life on Earth has faced extinction in a 26-million-year cycle. Astronomers proposed comet impacts as a possible cause for these catastrophes.

Read More in Astrobiology Magazine

Each of us was the grand prize in an ultimate reality competition, the amazing race a sperm makes on the road to fertilization.

Millions of sperm compete while overcoming armies of antibodies, treacherous terrain and impossible odds to reach their single-minded goal.

To illustrate the full weight of the challenge, Sizing Up Sperm uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their marathon quest to be first to reach a single egg.

Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

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The earthshaking news appeared in the medical journal Human Reproduction under the impenetrable headline: “Mitochondria in Human Offspring Derived From Ooplasmic Transplantation.”

The media put the story in heavy rotation for one day, then forgot about it. We all forgot about it.

But the fact remains that the world is now populated by dozens of children who were genetically
engineered. It still sounds like science fiction, yet it’s true.

In the first known application of germline gene therapy — in which an individual’s genes are
changed in a way that can be passed to offspring — doctors at a reproductive facility in New
Jersey announced in March 2001 that nearly 30 healthy babies had been born with DNA from
three people: dad, mom, and a second woman. Fifteen were the product of the fertility clinic, with
the other fifteen or so coming from elsewhere.

The doctors believe that one cause for failure of women to conceive is that their ova contain old
mitochondria (if you don’t remember your high school biology class, mitochondria are the part of
cells that provides energy). These sluggish eggs fail to attach to the uterine wall when fertilized.
In order to soup them up, scientists injected them with mitochondria from a younger woman.
Since mitochondria contain DNA, the kids have the genetic material of all three parties. The DNA
from the “other woman” can even be passed down along the female line.

The big problem is that no one knows what effects this will have on the children or their progeny.
In fact, this substitution of mitochondria hasn’t been studied extensively on animals, never mind
Homo sapiens. The doctors reported that the kids are healthy, but they neglected to mention something crucial. Although the fertility clinic’s technique resulted in fifteen babies, a total of seventeen fetuses had been created.

One of them had been aborted, and the other miscarried.

Why? Both of them had a rare genetic disorder, Turner syndrome, which only strikes females.
Ordinarily, just one in 2,500 females is born with this condition, in which one of the X chromosomes is incomplete or totally missing. Yet two out of these seventeen fetuses had developed it.

If we assume that nine of the fetuses were female (around 50 percent), then two of the nine
female fetuses had this rare condition. Internal documents from the fertility clinic admit that this
amazingly high rate might be due to the ooplasmic transfer.

Even before the revelation about Turner syndrome became known, many experts were appalled
that the technique had been used. A responding article in Human Reproduction said, in a dry
understatement: “Neither the safety nor efficacy of this method has been adequately
investigated.” Ruth Deech, chair of Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, told
the BBC: “There is a risk, not just to the baby, but to future generations which we really can’t
assess at the moment.”

The number of children who have been born as a result of this technique is unknown. The
original article gave the number as “nearly thirty,” but this was in early 2001. At that time, at least
two of the mutant children were already one year old.

Dr. Joseph Cummin, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Western Ontario, says that
no further information about these 30 children has appeared in the medical literature or the
media. As far as additional children born with two mommies and a daddy, Cummin says that a
report out of Norway in 2003 indicated that ooplasmic transfer has been used to correct
mitochondrial disease. He opines: “It seems likely that the transplants are going on, but very, very
quietly in a regulatory vacuum, perhaps.”

Reference: Genetically-Engineered Humans. Barritt, Jason A., et al. “Mitochondria in Human Offspring Derived From Ooplasmic Transplantation.” Human Reproduction, 16.3 (2001), pp 513-6. • Email communication from Dr. Joseph Cummins, 4 June 2003. • “First Cases of Human Germline Genetic Modification Announced.” British Medical Journal 322 (12 May 2001), p 1144. • “Genetically Modified Human Babies?” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 8 May 2001. • Hawes, S.M., C. Sapienza, and K. E. Latham. “Ooplasmic Donation in Humans: The Potential for Epigenic Modifications.” Human Reproduction 17.4 (2002), 850-2. • Hill, Amelia. “Horror at ‘Three Parent Foetus’ Gene Disorders.” Observer (London), 20 May 2001.

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

VATICAN CITY — Germany’s sex abuse scandal has now reached Pope Benedict XVI: His former archdiocese acknowledged it transferred a suspected pedophile priest while Benedict was in charge and criticism is mounting over a 2001 Vatican directive he penned instructing bishops to keep abuse cases secret.

The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict’s handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977–1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes — a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.

Benedict got a firsthand readout of the scope of the scandal Friday in his native land from the head of the German Bishop’s Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who reported that the pontiff had expressed “great dismay and deep shock” over the scandal, but encouraged bishops to continue searching for the truth.

Hours later, the Munich archdiocese admitted that it had allowed a priest suspected of having abused a child to return to pastoral work in the 1980s, while Benedict was archbishop. It stressed that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger didn’t know about the transfer and that it had been decided by a lower-ranking official.

Read More: AP via Yahoo News

Despite medical marijuana being legal in Michigan, WalMart has fired a cancer patient and former employee of the year who tested positive for the drug, which was recommended by his doctor.

“I was terminated because I failed a drug screening,” ex-WalMart employee Joseph Casias told WZZM-13.

In 2008, Casias was Associate of the Year at the WalMart store in Battle Creek, Mich., despite suffering from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor. ​At his doctor’s recommendation, Casias legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.

“It helps tremendously,” Casias said. “I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person.”

Casias said he went to work every day during his five years at WalMart. “I gave them everything,” he said. “One hundred and ten percent every day. Anything they asked me to do, I did. More than they asked me to do. Twelve to 14 hours a day.”

Then Casias sprained his knee at work last November. During the routine drug screening that follows all workplace injuries, marijuana was detected in his system. Casias showed WalMart managers his Michigan medical marijuana card, but was fired anyway.

Read More: Toke of the Town

Great video from the Hungry Beast. If you’re in Oz you can watch here, otherwise see below:

Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam in 1966

Dan Rather writes on the Huffington Post:

I must confess that until recently I had no idea what Twitter was. Even now, I’m not completely sure how it’s best used. When I want to post something, the younger, more tech-savvy people in my office help me out. But I do know this: if you searched Twitter for “Dan Rather” over the past few days, you probably could guess why I feel the need to write this column.

It started this past Sunday when I appeared on Chris Matthews’ syndicated talk show. I’ve known and respected Chris for many years and I enjoy doing his show. I take the train down from my home in New York to Washington D.C. and as I approach Union Station my thoughts often turn to the years I spent covering the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. It was a turbulent time for the country and a formative period for me as a reporter and a young father.

The Washington of that time was a far different place. In some ways it was better: less politically rancorous, more collegial. In many ways it, and the country it represented, was much worse. African Americans were still very much second-class citizens. Women held few positions of power. We smoked more, polluted our environment more, and accepted social mores that anyone who has seen Mad Men knows are embarrassingly outdated.

Read More of Dan Rather’s article in the Huffington Post

Smith County (East Texas) judges and juries have long had a reputation of meting out severe, some might say ridiculous, punishment for drug convictions. And Henry Wooten’s case is no exception: the 54-year-old Tyler man was sentenced to 35 years in prison for possessing slightly more than four ounces of pot. Wooten actually got off easy — the prosecutor asked the jury to give him 99 years. (We just hope TDCJ can free up room for this menace to society; maybe the state can release a child molester or serial arsonist to find a cell for Wooten.)

While the sentence may be asinine, we can’t help but feel Wooten brought much of this upon himself — mostly by choosing to be both a pothead and live in Tyler, when clearly that calls for an either/or scenario. But Wooten could have taken at least a few steps to minimize his chances of being busted so easily, and Hair Balls would like to lay out a few of these so that other lovers of the weed in Smith County can take heed.

Read More: Houston Press