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IRS agent accidentally shot, killed by fellow agent during training at gun range

An agent with the IRS is dead after being accidentally shot by another agent during a training exercise Thursday at a federal gun range, according to officials.

Arizona’s Family reports a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incident occurred at its gun range in the Phoenix area. The gun range was reportedly being utilized by multiple federal agencies at the time of the shooting through an interagency agreement.

A spokesperson said no Federal Bureau of Prisons employees were injured.

Charlotte M. Dennis with the Phoenix Field Office of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division confirmed she was aware of an “incident” involving a special agent.

Dennis said the agent was taken to the HonorHealth Deer Valley Medical Center where they died.

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The Real Risks of Doing Business in China

This June in London, I hosted the first two foreigners to have served time in China’s prisons and gone public about it. There may well be at least 5 million prisoners in China (excluding those in the prison camps of Xinjiang and Tibet), according to former foreign correspondent turned due diligence investigator Peter Humphrey, many of them there for trivial or indeed political reasons, and at least 5,000 are foreigners. As the Biden administration continues a series of visits to Beijing, seeking a diplomatic reconciliation that the Chinese leadership seems to have little interest in, foreign officials should keep the plight of Chinese prisoners in mind.

Humphrey, together with Romanian theologian and teacher Marius Balo, came to London to testify in the British Parliament on forced labor, denial of health care, psychological torture, and mistreatment. Humphrey, who spent 48 years working on China, served two years in China’s prisons on trumped-up charges of “illegally acquiring personal information” of Chinese nationals—as a result of his work as a corporate due diligence investigator—and was denied medical treatment for prostate cancer.

As a result, his cancer was exacerbated, and he fought a life-and-death struggle with the illness for five years after his release. Balo, who served eight years in China’s prisons on false charges of complicity to contract fraud and was released last year, watched at least two fellow foreign prisoners die due to denial of medical care. “The Chinese prison system weaponizes prisoners’ health as an instrument to extort confessions, refusing to provide medical attention to prisoners who refuse to admit guilt,” Humphrey explained.

As the United States seeks to reset its relationship with China, and other democracies wrestle with how to address the challenges posed by Beijing, they must not forget China’s prisoners. Often we think of prisoners of conscience—dissidents, religious practitioners and the millions of Uyghurs and Tibetans in China’s gulags—but Humphrey and Balo are reminding the world that ordinary prisoners detained for alleged crimes are also victims of human rights abuse in China. “In their aggregate,” Humphrey said, “the harsh conditions in China’s pre-trial detention facilities and prisons add up to torture.”

There is simply no access to justice, for a start. “Among the millions of prisoners in the system, not a single prisoner has had a fair and transparent trial. Not a single one,” Humphrey said. “Sentences tend to be reckless, inconsistent, and disproportionate to any offense. So the entire system is arbitrary and subject to the whims of Communist Party officials. The system works in favor of anybody with connections to use the law to bash people they dislike.” Balo agrees. “Justice in China is always based on someone’s whims, the party’s whims, expressed through its foot soldiers,” he said.

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Red Meat Allergies from Tick Bites Are on the Rise. It Fits Conveniently into an Agenda

Dairy and red meat allergies may now be the 10th most common food allergies in the U.S., according to CDC estimates.  In case you haven’t heard, alpha-Gal syndrome is on the rise, and it’s still largely unrecognized.

What is this new syndrome?  Who needs to avoid red meat and dairy?  Might something else be going on here? Let’s look a little deeper at how a simple tick bite can have lifelong, devastating effects – and not just from Lyme disease.

What is alpha-Gal syndrome?

Alpha-Gal syndrome begins with a bite from an infected tick or chigger.  The tick or chigger bites some kind of mammal and ingests its blood, which contains alpha-Gal, a type of sugar molecule.  If that tick or chigger goes on to bite a human, it can transmit some of the alpha-Gal-tainted blood to the human, which may then trigger an allergic reaction to red meat or dairy products.

One of the stranger things about alpha-Gal syndrome is the time in which it takes for symptoms to present themselves.  It typically takes a few months after the tick bite for the person’s antibodies to alpha-Gal to build up, and then it is often several hours after a person eats meat that they have their allergic reaction. (source)  The time delay makes diagnosis really difficult because victims often feel like their allergic reactions appear out of nowhere.  Before people knew what to look for, an alpha-Gal syndrome diagnosis took some sleuthing.

Alpha-Gal is something to be aware of, particularly since it can be triggered not only by meat and dairy but also drugs containing mammal products, and even carrageenan, an Irish moss used as a food thickener.  If you’ve got allergic reactions you can’t explain, you could ask your doctor about getting a blood test to rule this out.

However, for those of us familiar with all our allergies, this is not something to lose sleep over.

In fact, overdiagnosis of alpha-Gal syndrome may be a bigger concern.  Detailed studies have shown that about a third of the American population has antibodies to alpha-Gal, which means they’ve already encountered it somewhere.  And yet the overwhelming majority of us can eat red meat without ill effects.

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The family of a pregnant Colorado woman fatally shot by police sues the officers

The family of a pregnant Colorado woman fatally shot by an Arvada police officer after she was mistaken for a shoplifter said in a lawsuit that the killing was “patently unreasonable.”

The family of Destinee Thompson, 27, of Denver, is seeking unspecified damages in the suit filed against four officers and a sergeant Tuesday, two years after Thompson was killed as she tried to drive away from officers who had surrounded her car.

She was leaving an Arvada motel on Aug. 17, 2021, when several officers approached her, saying they were looking for a Latina who had brandished a knife as she was stealing a cart full of merchandise from a Target store, according to the suit, filed in District Court in Denver County.

The actual suspect, who also had stolen items from the store two days previously, had a chest tattoo, she was wearing a white tank top, and she allegedly had gone to the motel, the suit says.

Thompson, who was wearing a white tank top but did not have a chest tattoo, was leaving the motel to eat lunch as officers arrived, the document says.

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Magic mushroom dispensaries multiplying in southwestern Ontario, with no cap in sight

Flying in the face of local law enforcement, a chain of illegal brick-and-mortar magic mushroom dispensaries with locations in London, Windsor, and across the province is expanding to more local municipalities, strengthening a trend reminiscent of the pre-legalization cannabis market.

A recently opened storefront in St. Thomas is the latest move for FunGuyz, the entity that runs at least 13 dispensaries in Canada and one in Detroit, with a spokesperson suggesting other nearby small towns may be next.

“We’re looking at Sarnia, Strathroy, smaller cities surrounding London,” said a spokesperson who identified themselves only as Edgar and said the St. Thomas store opened last week.

In the past, different spokespeople for the company have all identified themselves as Edgar, or Edgars Gorbans. When asked if the name was real by CBC Windsor in early August, one spokesperson claiming to be named Edgar Gorbans said  “could be,” and “of course not.”

The latest expansion comes despite recent police raids at FunGuyz stores. London Police raided the local store in early July, whereas Windsor Police have raided their local store multiple times, and issued an arrest warrant for the store’s owner, who they identified as Edward Gorbans. 

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Medical Marijuana Use Linked To Improved Quality Of Life And Better Job Performance For People With Neurological Disorders, New Study Finds

Medical marijuana use is associated with improved quality of life—including better job performance, sleep, appetite and energy—according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of West Attica in Greece published the study in the journal GeNeDis Neuroscientific Advances on Wednesday following an analysis of survey data from medical cannabis patients with neurological disorders.

“Medical cannabis has been used to relieve the symptoms of people with various chronic diseases,” the authors said. “Despite this, it has been stigmatized.”

The study showed that a majority (58 percent) of respondents said medical cannabis is an effective treatment for their condition.

Among that group, 96 percent said that marijuana decreased their symptoms, 88 percent said it improved their “ability to perform their professional duties,” 79 percent said it enhanced their sleep, 71 percent said it improved their appetite and 68 percent said it increased their energy and vitality.

“Our participants exhibited very few restrictions in activities due to emotional difficulties, a moderate general health status as well as moderate vitality and energy,” the study authors said. “Participants, who reported a longer period of receiving medical cannabis, reported statistically significant more energy and vitality, but also better mental and general health status.”

The clinical questionnaire and SF-36 Health Survey scale that respondents completed also asked about their openness about using cannabis for therapeutic purposes.

A strong majority (85 percent) of medical marijuana patients said that they’ve disclosed their use to family—and 93 percent said that they “enjoyed their support.” However, 81 percent said that they haven’t been open about their cannabis use in their “social environment” such as their workplace.

“Appropriate knowledge could significantly help health professionals in the field of planning and implementation of personalized nursing care in order to achieve optimal therapeutic outcomes,” the study concludes.

The findings are consistent with other recent research indicating that cannabis can play a role in improving general wellbeing.

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US Space Force creates 1st unit dedicated to targeting adversary satellites

The United States Space Force has activated its first and only unit dedicated to targeting other nations’ satellites and the ground stations that support them.

The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) was activated on Aug. 11 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. This unit is part of Space Delta 7, an element of the U.S. Space Force tasked with providing intelligence on adversary space capabilities. It’ll do things like analyze the capabilities of potential targets, locate and track these targets as well as participate in “target engagement,” which presumably refers to destroying or disrupting adversary satellites, the ground stations that support them and transmissions sent between the two.

Lt. Col. Travis Anderson, who leads the squadron, said in a Space Force statement that the idea of a dedicated space targeting unit has been years in the making. “Today is a monumental time in the history of our service,” Anderson said. “The idea of this unit began four years ago on paper and has probably been in the minds of several U.S. Air Force intelligence officers even longer.”

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It’s Time to Decriminalize Personal Possession of All Drugs. Yes, All of Them 

Drug addiction is a chronic disease. It alters the way the brain works, stripping people of self-control and their ability to resist further drug consumption. Yet unlike responses to other diseases, in the United States, arrests and incarceration serve as the primary treatment for drug addiction.

This approach has been a failure. It’s time to treat drug addiction as a public health matter and not a criminal law one. This begins by investing in a treatment infrastructure and decriminalizing the personal possession of drugs.

Police in the United States make 1.16 million arrests a year for drugs. The vast majority of these arrests, 87 percent, are for personal possession or use of drugs, meaning that police arrest a person for drug possession, not drug selling, every 32 seconds. Drug arrests represent the number one activity that police engage in, at nearly 2.5 times the volume of arrests for all FBI-classified violent offenses combined (homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). Despite people of all races using drugs at similar rates, Black people comprise 27 percent of all drug-related arrests—even though they make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population. There are about 350,000 people incarcerated in jails and prisons for drugs.

Yet for all these arrests and incarceration, we have little to show for it, other than more people in handcuffs and jail cells. New data released just last month revealed that nearly 110,000 people in the United States died from drug-involved overdoses in 2022, compared to fewer than 20,000 in 1999. The CATO Institute estimates that taxpayers spend approximately $47 billion a year on drug prohibition. In the 23 years that drug overdoses rose from 20,000 to 110,000 a year, taxpayers spent more than $1 trillion.

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Hollow Earth: A Journey Through 3 Centuries of Conspiracy Theory

In early summer 2007, a Utah river guide named Steve Currey planned to head an expedition the likes of which we don’t often see nowadays.

In the 21st century, our planet (or at least it’s surface) feels trodden, long since mapped, and thereby stripped of its greatest mysteries.

Surely, we would already know if there were a gaping hole at the North Pole that leads to a lush inner world. Yet Currey, a champion of the centuries-old “hollow earth” theory, chartered a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker on the premise that we don’t know.

Championing the Hollow Earth Theory

Between June 26 and July 19, Steve Currey intended to sail the North Pole from Murmansk to the precise coordinates at which he expected to find the entrance to interior Earth.

For $20,000 apiece, 100 passengers were invited to join “this historic voyage.” However, a year before his scheduled departure, Currey died suddenly of brain cancer, and the trip was canceled.

In the years since, an engineer named Brooks Agnew has taken up the mantle (pun intended) of offbeat Arctic exploration. The North Pole Inner Earth Expedition is ostensibly still afoot, though logistical details are scarce.

In a 2022 interview, the new leader framed his quest as a dispassionate, empirical endeavor. “What’s the truth? It’s difficult to tell,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons we want to do this expedition. Let’s prove or disprove the biggest myth in human history.”

Ancient Hollow Earth Beliefs

Agnew is right about one thing: the mythological ubiquity of subterranean realms. Hades to the Greeks, Duat to the Egyptians, Hell to the Christians, and so on.

Of course, any mainstream geologist will tell you that science has already disproven these ancient yarns — it’s not at all “difficult to tell.” With perhaps a passing nod to folkloric whimsy, they will explain that the Earth consists of a thin crust, a rocky but flowing mantle that drives tectonic activity, an outer core of molten liquid and an inner core of solid iron and nickel.

That’s the expert consensus, grounded in seismic data from earthquake monitoring and other lines of firm evidence. But there was a time when brilliant thinkers, lacking the advanced instruments of modern researchers, found a hollow Earth not just possible but plausible.

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Thailand’s Pheu Thai Party pledges to give citizens digital currency handout with 6-month expiry date, must be spent within 4km of home

The proposed ~$280 handout has all the hallmarks of a programmable CBDC, including expiry dates & geolocation-based restrictions: perspective

Thailand’s Pheu Thai Party says that once it came to power, it would give all citizens 16 years and older a handout of approximately $280 that could only be spent within four kilometers of their homes and would expire after six months.

In a move intended to both stimulate the economy as well as lay the foundations for a digital economy, the 10,000 baht (~$280) programmable handout would be sent to the digital wallets of each eligible citizen that had the application on their smartphone.

For those without the smartphone app, Pheu Thai Party deputy secretary-general Paopoom Rojanasakul said, “There would be no problems […] as they could use their national ID card to get a personal code instead,” the Bangkok Post reported.

“Rojanasakul, who is also the spokesman for its economic committee, said that a Pheu Thai-led coalition government in the making would implement the promised policy once it comes to power,” according to The Nation.

The proposed handout was originally announced in April, but it was put on pause after the Pheu Thai Party came in second in the May 14 election, but the policy was revived last Friday.

“The Pheu Thai party, which won the second-highest number of seats, will lead a government”“Thailand’s Pheu Thai Party Takes Control—But at a Long Term Cost,” Joshua Kurlantzick, Council on Foreign Relations

Thailand’s prime ministerial vote is expected to take place sometime between August 18 and 22.

According to Reuters, “Pheu Thai will nominate for prime minister Srettha Thavisin, a former real estate mogul with no political experience up until the election.

“To succeed, Srettha needs support from more than half of the joint lower and upper houses, an outcome far from certain.”

The Pheu Thai Party was the runner-up to the Move Forward Party in the election last May, and the two parties formed a short-lived coalition before splitting in July.

“With Move Forward now consigned to the opposition, it is almost certain that Srettha will be confirmed as prime minister,” writes Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) senior fellow Joshua Kurlantzick.

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