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ARMED ATF & IRS AGENTS HIT MONTANA GUN STORE WITH “SOVIET-STYLE INTIMIDATION RAID”

Heavily armed agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) raided a gun store in Great Falls, Montana, last week in what was described by a local lawmaker as a “Soviet-style intimidation raids.”

Tom Van Hoose, the owner of Highwood Creek Outfitters, told the local media outlet KRTV that 20 heavily armed agents swarmed his gun shop on Wednesday morning, confiscated 13 years of 4473 forms, and copied the firearm acquisition and disposition book.

“The fact that they think we make so much money as a gun business that they had to come investigate all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars whatever it is we supposedly absconded with, anybody that knows the margins in the gun business knows they’re not that high,” said Van Hoose.

He said the reason for the raid is unclear. He believes it could be part of a nationwide trend by Biden’s ATF:

“I can only assume that it’s because of the style of weapons that we have and the press that’s so against them.

“The current administration seems to be hell-bent on getting those guns out of the hands of average Americans.”

Van Hoose spoke to the firearms blog The Truth About Guns, stating that the IRS claimed he had underreported and failed to report millions of dollars of income. The shop owner denied the accusation.

On Friday, Congressman Matt Rosendale sent a letter to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, asking for answers and calling the raid “outrageous.”

“Under Director Dettelbach’s leadership of the ATF, a pattern of intimidation and harassment against hardworking Americans has emerged – Montanans will not tolerate these political witch hunts. I remind both Director Dettelbach and Commissioner Werfel that Congress has the power of the purse, and I will ensure that funding for these agencies is not weaponized against the American people,” Rosendale said in his letter.

He continued: “I request that the ATF and IRS cease conducting these Soviet-style intimidation raids.”

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American Medical Association says BMI is ‘racist’ because measurement was designed based on white bodies in the 19th century

A leading US medical organization is urging doctors to ditch body mass index (BMI) as the primary measurement for a healthy bodyweight, citing its ‘racist’ roots. 

The American Medical Association, the largest organization of doctors in the US, said the metric has been used for ‘racist exclusion’ and fails to consider differences in body composition that vary based on race and sex.

Body mass index (BMI), devised by a white man considering white bodies, is measured by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms or pounds by the square of height in meters or feet, and it has been deeply ingrained in the medical system as a way to measure population health more broadly.

But on an individual level, BMI does not take into consideration relative body shape and how fat is stored. For instance, Asian people who fall within a ‘healthy’ BMI range are still at a high risk of diabetes. 

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Ancient Egyptian followers of a deity called Bes may have used hallucinogens

An ancient Egyptian vase in the shape of the deity Bes showed traces of chemical plant compounds known to produce hallucinations, according to a recent preprint posted to Research Square. The authors suggest that members of the cult of Bes may have consumed a special cocktail containing the compounds to induce altered states of consciousness.

There is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes not just ancient Egypt but also ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have also been known to participate.

Lacing the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens may have helped an ancient Peruvian people known as the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire, according to a 2022 study. As previously reported, the use of hallucinogens, particularly a substance derived from the seeds of the vilca tree, was common in the region during the so-called Middle Horizon period, when the Wari empire thrived.

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Your Tax Dollars at Work: Military Monitors Social Media for Mean Posts About Generals

The U.S. Army’s Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s equivalent of the Secret Service, now monitors social media to see if anyone has posted negative comments about the country’s highest-ranking officers.

Per a report by the Intercept, the PSB’s remit includes protecting officers from “embarrassment,” in addition to more pressing threats like kidnapping and assassination.

An Army procurement document from 2022 obtained by the Intercept reveals that the PSB now monitors social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers under its protection, as well as for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats.

“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB” — Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch — “requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security in order to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts and positive or negative sentiment relating specifically to our senior high-risk personnel.”

Per the report, the Army intends not just to monitor platforms for “negative sentiment,” but also to pinpoint the location of posters.

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As Violent Crime Skyrockets, Cops Arrest Innocent Man for Chalking Sidewalk Without a Permit

Earlier this year, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus presented his crime report to a public safety committee. It showed that crimes against people, property, and society skyrocketed in 2022 when compared to the previous year. McManus told city leaders he is ‘strongly concerned’ about the violence.

“With homicide, we saw a pretty dramatic increase of 43%,” said McManus. “[There were] 231 homicides in 2022.”

One would think that given this shocking increase in criminal behavior that police would turn their efforts to prevent such things. But one would be wrong.

In the throes of this stark rise in crime, where law enforcement officers can’t even be bothered to respond to 911 calls about serious offenses such as stolen vehicles and assaults, the Leon Valley Police Department found the time and resources to apprehend an innocent chalk artist. This artist was arrested on public property, moments before a storm, for the crime of sketching non-permanent designs on the sidewalk. Yes, you read it right.

Lakey Hinson, a chalk enthusiast and the victim of this absurd overreach of authority, was merely adorning a public pavement in front of the Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union one balmy afternoon on May 15. He was interrupted mid-art by officers Jorge Breton and Alan Gonzalez. The veteran officer and his trainee had embarked on this adventure in response to an anonymous tip of ‘public property defacement’, as narrated by the Express-News.

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Liberals Still Vastly Overestimate Police Shootings of Black Men

After the death of George Floyd on 25th May 2020, America was rocked by weeks of protests and rioting – 25 people lost their lives and property damage totalled $1–2 billion.

The protestors’ main grievance was “systemic police racism”. As the media reported endlessly at the time, black people make up around 30% of the victims of police shootings despite comprising only 13% of the population. Black people, it was said, could not even walk down the street without fear of being gunned down by a racist police officer.

Yet the narrative was flawed. After all, victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male, but this doesn’t mean the police are sexist against men. It is simply that men are more likely to get into situations where a police officer ends up shooting them.

What’s more, activists were vastly inflating the numbers. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting database, only 12 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 –in a country of 330 million.

We now know that part of the problem was innumeracy.

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“We Are Restricting Freedom… For The Common Good”: Irish Green Party Calls For Limiting Free Speech

The Irish Green Party followed many on the left around the world, including our own Democratic Party, this week and came out for censorship and speech controls. Indeed, the party went full Orwellian as its chairwoman Pauline O’Reilly called for “restricting freedom” to protect it.

O’Reilly’s comments are part of the introduction of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022. We previously discussed this massive assault on free speech.

The legislation that would criminalize “incitement to violence or hatred against” people with “protected characteristics,” as well as “condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.”

Limiting free speech has become an article of faith for many on the left. I have written about my distress (as someone who grew up in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago) in watching the abandonment of free speech values by the party. Democratic leaders now uniformly call for censorship and speech regulations. President Biden even charged that companies who refused to censor opposing views on social media were “killing people.”  Others have denounced free speech as “a white man’s obsession.”

The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom.  It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.”

That effort was on full display this week in Ireland with this anti-free speech legislation.

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Titanic submarine used to take tourists to see wreck goes missing sparking search

A submarine used to take tourists to view a wreck of the Titanic has gone missing in the Atlantic Ocean.

A search and rescue mission is currently underway, the BBC reports. It’s currently unknown if there were any people on board the submarine at the time.

Paying tourists can take trips in small submarines to see the sunken wreck of the Titanic.

The famous wreck, which sits 12,500ft below the surface of the Atlantic, is around 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

After its discovery in 1985, the wreck has been extensively explored by divers and submarine crews.

Last year, it was reported that one such excursion run by OceanGate cost a group of guests $250,000 to take the submersible 2.4 miles down to where the wreckage lays on the seabed.

Last year’s mission was 10 days long, with eight of those days at sea, a tourist brochure read. Each mission has just six people on board, known as “mission specialists”.

Earlier this year, the company said it planned an expedition to the wreck for Summer 2023, which would further document the Titanic and its “rate of decay”.

Their mission plan reads: “Given the massive scale of the wreck and the debris field, multiple missions performed over several years will be required to fully document and model the wreck site.

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