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“I Just Want To Sell Titty Pictures”: Sex Workers F**ked By Crypto

Sex workers – who frequently face financial discrimination, losing access to payment apps and banking apps such as PayPal, Venmo and CashApp due to their profession – began using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin as an alternative for payments, which bypass traditional banking systems and avoid service fees from platforms such as OnlyFans.

According to data by the Free Speech Coalition, 2/3 of sex workers have lost access to a bank account or financial service, with 40% having an account closed within the last year, Wired reports.

“I just want to sell titty pictures,” said Allie Eve Knox, a professional dominatrix and fetish performer. “I never wanted to be an expert in financial discrimination.”

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Given the systemic discrimination throughout the banking sector, many sex workers have turned to cryptocurrencies as a means of both storing wealth and accepting payment. For a while, things were great. Digital currencies allowed customers to pay discreetly without supplying personal information, while sex workers now had a way to bypass the banking system entirely.

Knox, for example, began accepting crypto in 2014 – holding up a QR code through which viewers could tip her in crypto.

Another sex worker, former escort-turned-porn star Lira Roux, told the outlet that she began to accept crypto in 2015 at the request of clients. Initially, she would exchange the crypto for dollars, however when new laws came into effect – after which many adult-friendly advertising sites were barred from accepting regular money – she began to pay for ads with crypto too.

“By and large, crypto is useful for people that aren’t being taken care of properly by the government,” Roux said. “For sex workers, who aren’t well-served by banks, it becomes a useful option.”

Now, thanks to regulatory scrutiny which has gone into overdrive since the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, sex workers are ‘bumping up’ against limitations – and are finding that ‘decentralized’ crypto is no more detached from the banking system than traditional currency – as sex workers are finding it increasingly difficult to convert crypto into dollars. Typically, this is done via an exchange, which then allows one to withdraw to a traditional bank account. Sex workers are now being banned from crypto exchanges.

“You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” said Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.”

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Cannabis Doesn’t Increase Heart Attack Risk

Middle-aged adults with a history of cannabis use over the previous year did not have a higher risk of suffering a heart attack, according to the results of a recent study by researchers at the University of California in San Diego.

The new study, “Associations Between Monthly Cannabis Use and Myocardial Infarction in Middle-Aged Adults: NHANES 2009 to 2018,” was published on August 7 in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Cardiology, found that a history of cannabis use over the previous year was not associated with an elevated risk of myocardial infarction (MI) among a nationally representative study of nearly 10,000 adults aged 35 to 59. Additionally, study participants who reported using cannabis in the month before experiencing an MI, also commonly known as a heart attack, showed a lower risk compared to participants who had not used cannabis recently.

“In a representative sample of middle-aged US adults, a history of monthly cannabis use for more than a year before a myocardial infarction was not linked to a subsequent physician-diagnosed MI, after accounting for cardiovascular risk factors,” the authors of the study wrote. “However, when considering recent use, the odds were three times greater if no use was reported in the past month.”

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50% of trans-identifying biological males in Wisconsin prisons convicted of sex crimes

It has been revealed that half of the trans-identifying biological males currently serving out sentences in Wisconsin prisons have been convicted of at least one sex crime.

The statistic was uncovered by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project during its analysis of Wisconsin Department of Corrections data obtained via an April 2022 public records request.

According to the report, of the 161 trans-identifying biological males in prisons across the state, 81 have sex crimes on their record. 

There are a wide range of acts deemed sex crimes under Wisconsin law. They include adultery, incest, sexual exploitation of a child, forced viewing of a sexual act, rape, sexual intercourse without consent, sexual intercourse with a child, indecent behavior with a child, enticing a child, public fornication, and more.

The report did not divulge exactly which crimes the 81 inmates had been convicted of, though details of certain cases have been previously reported on.

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Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services Refuses to Answer Questions About Anti-Porn Law’s Mandatory ‘Warnings’

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services has declined to confirm or deny whether the “health warnings” mandated by the state’s recent anti-porn age verification law are supported by any official documentation or statement produced by that office.

As XBIZ reported, the Republican-authored HB 1181 was passed by the Texas legislature with bipartisan support in May and will go into effect September 1.

The new Texas age verification law — part of a state-by-state campaign by religious conservatives and anti-porn activists to outlaw all sexual material online — compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function.”

HB 1181 is a much-augmented version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups.

XBIZ asked the Press Office of the Texas Department of Health and Human Services if the department could provide any documentation or statement pertaining to those warnings, and clarify whether the language of the warnings has its basis in any documentation or statement produced by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

After requesting several days to provide a reply to the query, Press Officer Tiffany Young declined to answer, deflecting the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it originated.”

XBIZ also contacted Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but received no reply to the same questions.

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Pentagon To Send Ukrainian Pilots For F-16 Training To Texas & Arizona

A US official has informed The New York Times on Thursday that the Pentagon plans to begin training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets inside the US, as part of a program which could start as early as September.

Already a program has been kicked off in the Netherlands and Denmark, which Kiev has complained has been too slow to get off the ground, also given it only includes six Ukrainian pilots. At this rate, the expected date that Ukraine could be piloting the US-made jets in battle keeps getting pushed back – from estimates of next summer to now perhaps end of 2024.

“[We’re] open to training existing pilots if capacity is reached in Europe,” a Pentagon spokesperson had initially previewed days ago, on Monday.

“That’s the condition. So, if Denmark and the Netherlands are taking the lead on training, if they just do not have the capacity … to train as many pilots as Ukraine wants to send or plans to send, then we will… help train stateside,” the earlier statement added.

But on Thursday more details have come out, apparently with a fuller US commitment, which will see training locations which includes Texas and Arizona.

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Some Drug Warriors Just Won’t Concede Defeat

There’s a fine art to refusing to learn lessons that are right in front of your eyes. A recent newspaper column demonstrated mastery of that art, managing to simultaneously acknowledge the failures of America’s drug policy while calling for more of the same. The author acknowledged that mandatory minimums do no good and then suggested that the right course of action is to prosecute drug dealers harder. But harder drug law enforcement gets you harder drug problems.

“News coverage of a Mesa police officer losing consciousness in his patrol car from an overdose certainly highlights, if sensationally, the crisis that is opioids, in particular fentanyl,” wrote Abe Kwok, editorial page planner for the Arizona Republic. “As critics such as the libertarian think tank Cato Institute note, harsh mandatory sentencing laws do nothing to blunt narcotic drugs’ effects.”

He added that “the institute pointed to a 1,500% spike in methamphetamine deaths in the United States between 2006 and 2021, following voter-approved Proposition 301 in Arizona that imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for possessing, transferring, selling, distributing or manufacturing meth.”

Kwok also acknowledged that other restrictive policies, especially limitations on opioid prescriptions “did little to slow deaths from overdoses but created their own set of problems, such as blocking access to relief for chronic pain sufferers.” This is an important point championed by the late Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network over a decade ago and still a matter of serious concern for many Americans. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally acknowledged that opioid guidelines are being interpreted inflexibly. The CDC emphasized that “some policies purportedly drawn from the 2016 CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline have been notably inconsistent with it and have gone well beyond its clinical recommendations” resulting in “untreated and undertreated pain.”

So far, so good for Kwok. Except, he refuses to take these arguments to their logical conclusion.

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Fleeing Bronx drug suspect dies when cop knocks him off scooter with cooler; sergeant suspended by NYPD

A scooter-riding suspect fleeing a Bronx buy-and-bust drug sting was killed when an NYPD sergeant smacked him with a cooler grabbed from a local family’s outing, sending the victim tumbling to his death, an eyewitness and police sources said Thursday.

NYPD Sgt. Erik Duran, an NYPD Bronx narcotics veteran who joined the force in 2010, was suspended without pay just hours after the lethal encounter, police said.

An eyewitness, a 25-year local resident, was with relatives when the clash began on Aqueduct Ave. near W. 190th St. about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Kingsbridge Heights.

The 30-year-old suspect, Eric Duprey, “was on the bike, moving north when the cops started chasing him,” said the 42-year-old witness, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Then he took a U-turn and was riding on the sidewalk… The cop then took my cooler, which was filled with soda cans, water bottles, and hit him.”

The victim’s wife Orlyanis Velez said police were providing her with no details of the deadly encounter.

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A LOT of Coincidences Surround the Maui Fire That Destroyed Lahaina

Maui just suffered its worst disaster, with a death toll at 115 as of Thursday and nearly a thousand people still missing. While this loss of life is tragic in and of itself, as time goes by, more questions pop up.  How did the fires begin?  How did they get so out of control?  How come damage seemed to occur almost exclusively to the natives while celebrity estates in the area were miraculously unharmed?

Why was the governor almost immediately making plans for the land?  Why has media been so restricted in what they can report on?

Officials always start by blaming climate change whenever some sort of natural disaster occurs.  I always start by assuming incompetence, and there was certainly plenty of that to go around in this situation.

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Former Trump Drug Czar Says Top Federal Officials Stopped FDA From Scheduling Kratom Amid Concern About Agency’s ‘Bias’

As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Trump administration prepared to propose federal restrictions on kratom, a number of top officials intervened, criticizing the agency’s “bias” and stopping it “on the spot” from moving ahead with scheduling, a former White House drug czar said in a new interview.

“They did not give—did not have—the entire facts. They didn’t have the science,” said Jim Carroll, who served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, or drug czar, under President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2021. “FDA did not paint the entire picture. Maybe they didn’t have the entire picture, but everyone else did.”

Carroll, who now works as a private lawyer and consultant, made the comments during a discussion with Mac Haddow, senior fellow at the American Kratom Association (AKA), during the National Conference of State Legislatures summit in Indianapolis earlier this month.

The former White House official said that as the Trump administration was considering whether to schedule kratom under the Controlled Substances Act, around 2018, FDA gave a presentation to his office that misstated the drug’s risk profile and potential benefits.

The agency was “talking about kratom being an opioid. We know that’s wrong, it’s flat-out wrong,” Carroll said. “They said that it’s highly addictive. Johns Hopkins [and] other medical, independent researchers have said it’s no more addictive than a cup of coffee in the morning, which I had before this interview.”

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Maui, Yellowknife, Teneriffe, Rhodes: Who is Behind the Spate of Wildfires Caused by Arson?

The leftist media rushed to blame a series of devastating wildfires on “climate change”. Arson was involved in several cases, however, leading some observers to question the possible motives for the spate of blazes.

Terrrible tragedy struck the city of Lahaina on Maui on Aug. 8, with at least 144 dead and 1000 people still missing, including many children. Speaking on Daily Wire, pundit Michael Knowles said that arson is “the most likely culprit … apparently, in the mind of Hawaiian officials.”

“For years now, people have intentionally set fires all over Maui. As Maui Mayor Michael Victorino noted just last year, fire and police suspect someone is intentionally setting them. Just a couple weeks ago, Hawaiian police responded to two fires on Maui. One started by an unattended cooking fire, the other, apparently, intentionally set. Shortly after which point, according to investigators, quote, a male operating a green all-terrain vehicle was seen leaving the area.”

Last week, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated they had “charged four female youths with arson” after major wildfires around Yellowknife, Northwest Territory, Canada.

“Around 10:03 p.m., RCMP officers on patrol spotted a fire near Long Lake and called the Yellowknife Fire Department. The cause of the fire has been determined to be arson. A witness in the area reported seeing two men running from the area wearing black clothing. The Northwest Territories Police Dog Service attended in an effort to track the suspects but they were not located. No further description of the men could be provided and this matter remains under investigation. 

 At 11:21 p.m., the Yellowknife RCMP received a call reporting that four females were attempting to light a fire in a small green space on Burwash Drive. RCMP officers immediately attended the area and located the four youth females. RCMP arrested all four and found aerosol cans and lighters in their possession and near the scene. Video of this incident was captured on a nearby camera at a private residence. All four of the female youths have been charged with arson.”

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