You know who is behind the 5 Hour Energy drinks? Turns out he is an Indian-American who spent twelve years living as an ascetic monk in India. He got the idea from attending a supplement trade show and now he's worth well over a billion. Not too shabby.

The media is misrepresenting the Citizens United decision? I wonder why? Especially when you consider that most of them are corporations... An excerpt:

There are two media myths and inventions that are most commonly cited.

Myth 1: The Court invalidated disclosure requirements in political advertising, thereby allowing donors to remain anonymous.

Wrong. The Court ruled just the opposite and upheld, by an 8-1 vote, the McCain-Feingold requirement of identifying donors.

Myth 2: That the Court’s ruling in Citizens United opened the door to wealthy individuals like Sheldon Adelson to pour millions of dollars into PACs.

Wrong again. The Citizens United ruling had NOTHING to do with the ability of individuals to spend their money to support candidates. That had been decided back in 1976, when the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment protected the right of individuals to make unlimited independent expenditures supporting or opposing candidates for federal office. In Citizens United, the Court ruled that corporations and unions were entitled to the same rights.

But do read the whole thing.

If You Thought SOPA Was Bad, Just Wait Until You Meet ACTA:

Few people have heard of ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, but the provisions in the agreement are just as pernicious as anything we saw in SOPA. Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.

Many of these countries have already signed or ratified it, and the cogs are still turning. The treaty has been secretly negotiated behind the scenes, with unelected bureaucrats working closely with entertainment industry lobbyists to craft the provisions in the treaty. The Bush administration started the process, but the Obama administration has aggressively pursued it.

It doesn't even seem real, reading this. And then you find out that President Obama signed this treaty in October, with little regard to its potential effects on internet freedom. Even more chilling is the fact that the Administration has recently asserted that the treaty relates to executive authority, and shouldn't be subject to Senate approval, which is clearly unconstitutional given the Constitution's directive for Congress to regulate patents. It looks like the global internet community must remain ever more vigilant in opposing this international undemocratic power grabs. Write or call your Senators today!

Who needs SOPA when they can already do things like take down Megaupload in other countries? In my mind, doing this the day after the wikipedia blackout, was the government and Hollywood's way of saying "Oh yeah? You think you can protest our internet domination plans? Well screw you, internet users!" Also, other tech companies have to be wondering, how the hell is the whole concept of the cloud even legal if Megaupload isn't?

The Supreme Court has unanimously decided that a warrant is required to track someone with a GPS device. This is a great decision, but it is too bad they didn't go further and deal with GPS tracking of wireless devices. Still, take what freedoms you can get from Washington in this era.

Jeffrey Zients is Obama's new acting director for the Office of Management and Budget. He is also an alum of Bain & Co. He will replace Jack Lew, a former Citigroup mortgage derivatives trader, who has moved on to become Chief of Staff for the White House. Remember all this when Obama starts criticizing Romney later this year for his extensive history with Bain. You can be sure most of the media won't.

U.S. threatens Spain with blacklist for not implementing site blocking law? Great, now we are strong-arming other countries into doing the bidding of the RIAA and MPAA. I really am coming around to the view that the corporations (in this case the media ones) control this country. It is a shame. And there is no one on the horizon even discussing changing the status quo, other than potentially Ron Paul, and he is unelectable.

Think twice before bringing a gun to New York, as a few well-meaning folks have learned recently:

Ryan Jerome was enjoying his first trip to New York City on business when the former Marine Corps gunner walked up to a security officer at the Empire State Building and asked where he should check his gun.

That was when Jerome’s nightmare began. The security officer called police and Jerome spent the next two days in jail.

The 28-year-old with no criminal history now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of three and a half years in prison. If convicted, his sentence could be as high as fifteen years.

Jerome has a valid concealed carry permit in Indiana and visited New York believing that it was legal to bring his firearm. He was traveling with $15,000 worth of jewelry that he planned to sell.

Scary stuff in a country where the 2nd Amendment is supposedly in force.

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post has a great perspective on the Orwellian STOP Act, which will essentially eliminate free speech on the internet if passed in its current form, along with running contrary to numerous other Constitutionally guaranteed rights:

Harvard law professor and Supreme Court advocate Laurence Tribe (whom I don’t always agree with but who takes the Bill of Rights quite seriously and was instrumental in developing the jurisprudence that confirmed the Second Amendment is an individual right) has submitted a memo detailing the multiple ways in which SOPA runs afoul of the First Amendment. For example, “SOPA provides that a complaining party can file a notice alleging that it is harmed by the activities occurring on the site ‘or portion thereof .’ Conceivably, an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement. Such an approach would create severe practical problems for sites with substantial user-generated content, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and for blogs that allow users to post videos, photos, and other materials.”And likewise: “The notice-and-termination procedure of Section 103(a) runs afoul of the ‘prior restraint’ doctrine, because it delegates to a private party the power to suppress speech without prior notice and a judicial hearing. This provision of the bill would give complaining parties the power to stop online advertisers and credit card processors from doing business with a website,merely by filing a unilateral notice accusing the site of being ‘dedicated to theft of U.S. property’ — even if no court has actually found any infringement. The immunity provisions in the bill create an overwhelming incentive for advertisers and payment processors to comply with such a request immediately upon receipt.”

Rep. Issa(R-CA) and Sen Wyden(D-OR) have introduced a competing bill(the "Open Act") that is a lot more restrictive in its languange, not to mention respective of the Constitution, but it remains to be seen if the Congressional sponsors pushing the STOP Act will accept this alternate version. This is because their pay masters, the RIAA and MPAA, are heavily invested in remaking(destroying?) the internet to line their own pockets.

And, of course, it is no coincidence that the largest donations from these organizations have gone to the STOP Act sponsors, chief among them Rep. Lamar Smith(R-TX), who must be either unaware or unconcerned that he is doing the bidding of two organizations that operate contrary to the beliefs and ideals of the majority of the constituents that elected him. Hopefully a primary challenge is in order.

Meanwhile, it is no surprise that former Senator Chris Dodd heads the MPAA. These career politicians take any opportunity to further screw over all Americans while enriching themselves.

While pedophile Jerry Sandusky generates front page news daily, there is surprisingly little being said about the recent Hollywood pedophilia charges. Disturbing.

Canada opts out of Kyoto Protocols. This decision was expected, but just goes to show how unreasonable the restrictions of Kyoto are on signees, while allowing those who refused to get involved, like China, India, and the US, to do whatever they want. Canada has also recognized that economic development outweighs cutting emissions, which given worldwide financial conditions, seems like a prudent course of action. But this hasn't stopped the UN from suggesting a worldwide climate tax. The environmentalists never seem to let reality get in the way of their delusions of shutting off all emissions and eliminating growth worldwide, despite the fact that first world countries overwhelmingly respect their natural environments much more than developing countries, and the proposed restrictions would keep billions stuck in abject poverty while making the elites feel good about themselves taking actions that won't change anything in the long run.

Tilting at windmills?

Minnesotans for Global Warming report that in the last 30 years, the United States has had 14,000 wind turbines abandoned. Apparently, once the subsidies and the wind run out, these 20-story high Cuisinarts are de-bladed and retired. This means more bats and migratory birds will live.

From Minnesotans for Global Warming: “The symbol of Green renewable energy, our savior from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or the wind speed is too high.”

Canada is looking to sell more oil to the Chinese, now that Obama has pushed back until after the 2012 election the decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, to be built from Alberta to Texas. When environmental concerns override every other practicality, it is no surprise we maintain such a high level of unemployment. And of course we can just keep buying oil from Venezuela and the Saudis...

Congress declares war on the internet, via the Stop Online Piracy Act, at the behest of Hollywood lobbyists. This legislation has the potential to dramatically alter the freedom and openness of the internet around the world, allowing the government and those connected to it to shut down any website they deem offensive with no hearing whatsoever. It is like we are rushing to adopt the authoritarianism of China for the internet as quickly as possible. These tools in Washington have no idea they are seeking to regulate one of the great drivers of creativity and jobs in the modern era. Absolutely stunning. Call your Congressman today, there is no excuse not to.

UPDATE: And what do you know, all the major sponsors in Congress have received hundreds of thousands in donations from entertainment industry companies.

While people camp in the streets in protest over the actions of Wall Street, the links to our political classes that cause so much actual inequality of outcomes continue to be ignored. Just in the news today, former Democratic Senator and New Jersey Governor John Corzine made headlines for bringing derivatives broker MF Global to the brink of collapse, apparently by buying large tranches of European banking debt earlier this year. Perhaps that wasn't the smartest bet to be making? Not to worry though, Corzine has a $12 million golden parachute that pays out if the firm gets bought out, as well as an interest as an operating partner in investment firm J.C. Flowers. So he should be ok. Those who used MF Global to manage their money? They might be in a little more trouble. This should be no surprise though, given Corzine's track record managing the state of New Jersey, which was billions in debt after his four years of leadership.

Barack Obama, Drug Warrior? Yes. His campaign promises about changing that arena of American policy were appparently just hot air, as Jacob Sullum of Reason amply demonstrates:

In retrospect, there were warning signs that Obama would disappoint supporters who expected him to de-escalate the war on drugs, just as he has disappointed those who expected him to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a U.S. senator he bragged about co-sponsoring the Combat Meth Act, which is the reason cold and allergy sufferers throughout the country are treated like potential felons whenever they try to buy decongestants containing pseudoephedrine. He staunchly defended the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant Program, which has fueled the incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders and funded the regional task forces behind racially tinged law enforcement scandals in places such as Tulia, Texas. As New York Times columnist Charles Blow noted last year, this grant program, created at the end of the Reagan administration, “has become the pet project of Democrats” because it’s “an easy and relatively cheap way for them to buy a tough-on-crime badge while simultaneously pleasing police unions.” In 2006 Obama warned that George W. Bush’s attempt to eliminate the Byrne grants (which Obama revived with a $2 billion infusion as part of his 2009 stimulus package) “gives criminals and drug dealers a break by taking cops off the streets.”

Even on an issue that seemed to genuinely trouble him—the sentencing rules for crack cocaine, which treated the smoked form of the drug as if it were 100 times worse than the snorted form—Obama seemed less than fully committed. In 2007 he told a gathering of African-American newspaper columnists in Las Vegas that as president he’d appoint a panel to study crack sentences, which are imposed on defendants who are overwhelmingly black, and issue a report “that allows me to say that based on the expert evidence, this is not working and it’s unfair.” As Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson observed at the time, that was a weird thing to say, since the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the panel of experts empowered to decide what penalties are appropriate for federal crimes (within the parameters set by Congress), had repeatedly said crack sentences were irrational and unjust. Obama also wondered whether “we want to spend all our political capital on a very difficult issue that doesn’t get at some of the underlying issues.”

In the event, the Obama administration, to its credit, did support crack sentencing reform, although it’s debatable how much political capital it spent in the process. “Attorney General [Eric] Holder really wanted to see crack reform happen,” says Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, “and I think so did Obama.” The Fair Sentencing Act, which Obama signed into law in August 2010, shrank the 100-to-1 weight ratio dictated by federal law (so that five grams of crack, for example, triggered the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of cocaine powder), making it 18 to 1 instead—also irrational and unjust, but considerably less so. “That was the best that they could get out of the Congress,” says Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, “and the administration worked for that.” But by the time Obama took office, there was a bipartisan consensus, including conservative Republicans such as Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and Rep. Dan Lungren of California, that crack penalties were unjustifiably harsh. The Fair Sentencing Act was approved by unanimous consent in the Senate and by a voice vote in the House.

Read the whole thing. Sad that a man with a mandate for change couldn't even be bothered to pardon one unjustly imprisoned non-violent offender.