[WISH8tv] BOONE COUNTY, W. Va. (WFLA/CNN) ‐ Police in West Virginia say they’re seeing a dangerous trend in Boone county.
Authorities say some drug abusers are using wasp spray as an alternative form of meth and the practice may have contributed to several overdoses.
On Friday, stores in Boone County reported selling nearly 30 cans of the spray.
Physical effects of using wasp spray include erratic behavior and extreme swelling and redness of the hands and feet.
"From what we’re being told, if you use it, you know, you might use it one or twice and be fine, but the third time when your body hits that allergic reaction, it can kill you," Sgt. Charles Sutphin said.
The challenge is how to treat these symptoms and prevent the use of this legal, cheap product for harm.
"It’s a cheap fix, and you don’t know what their overall result of their usage of this is going to be," Sutphin said.
[PJ] Appearing on CNBC Wednesday, Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary raved about the state of the U.S. economy, based on his more than 50 "Shark Tank" companies.
"Most of the Sharks have a similar portfolio," O’Leary told CNBC on Wednesday. "It’s an amazing index on America’s economy because they’re almost in every state, in every sector."
O’Leary along with investors Mark Cuban, Robert Herjavec, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner and Daymond John put up their own money on "Shark Tank" to buy stakes in start-ups looking for capital and influential business partners.
"I can report to you, on a private basis, I’ve never seen a stronger economy in my life," contended the 65-year-old O’Leary. "This is fantastic with what’s going on."
Trump has repeatedly acknowledged the strength of the economy on his watch, but 2020 Democrats have been working overtime to convince voters that the economy isn’t doing well at all. Since Democrats are having a harder time denying the strength of the economy, they’ve been attempting to push the narrative that it’s only working for the super rich, which is completely false.
[SultanKnish] Politics has its style and its substance. Style requires the 2020 candidates to stump in New Hampshire diners and eat corn dogs at Iowa fairs. These stylistic rites of passage in American politics are on the verge of irrelevance as the kingmakers in California push up their primary and as the effort to eliminate the electoral college gains traction among the 2020 Democrats and, more importantly, their donors.
Forget the New Hampshire diners and Iowa corn dogs, the truth can be found if you follow the money.
The 2020 race is all about touting the democracy of small donors with a 130,000 donor threshold for the third Democrat debate. But certain zip codes keep coming up for the top Democrat candidates. The 100XX zip codes of Manhattan, the 90XXX zip codes of Los Angeles, the 94XXX zip codes of San Francisco, the 98XXX zip codes of Seattle, the 20XXX zip codes of D.C. and the 02XXX zip codes of Boston.
These are the core zip codes of the Democrat donor base. They are the pattern that recur in the campaign contributions lists of the top Democrats. And they explain the politics of the 2020 race.
Providing free health care for illegal aliens at taxpayer expense may not be very popular nationwide, but is commonplace in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston. Gun control is a loser nationwide, but a sure thing in the big blue cities. Even proposals to take away private health plans, allow rapists and terrorists to vote from prison, and open the border pick up more support there.
The 2020 Democrats aren’t speaking to Americans as a whole. Instead they’re addressing wealthy donors from 6 major cities, and some of their satellite areas, whose money they need to be able to buy teams, ads and consultants to help them win in places like New Hampshire and Iowa.
New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles show up in the top 5 donor cities for most of the top 2020 candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg. Boston shows up in the top 10, not only for Bernie and Warren, but for Kamala and Buttigieg. Seattle appears in the top 10 for Bernie, Warren, and Buttigieg. Washington D.C. features in the top 10 for Bernie, Booker, Warren, Kamala, and Buttigieg. And the rest of America doesn’t really matter.
#1
These donors come from the two groups in our society that are most estranged from social reality: techies and university employees.
People working in these two environments live in a fairyland of virtue signaling.
Their disdain for the military and for manufacturing physical things is grounded in almost total ignorance.
They loathe religion, sneer at traditional European and western culture, hate Israel and think "white supremacy" lurks behind any opposition to identity politics idiocy.
At the same time they are a protected class that offers our politicians a cushy and lucrative landing pad after their Washington tour's finished.
[Aljazeera] Multinational corporations are increasingly encroaching on the functions of sovereign states.
"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today ... The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business."
The famous monologue from the film Network delivered by actor Ned Beatty in 1976 reflected growing anxiety at the time that corporate power could eventually overturn democracy. Today, what was feared 40 years ago is becoming a reality. Corporations have become the nations of the world and they increasingly act as such.
Last month, Facebook announced that it is introducing its own currency, Libra, which the more than two billion users (or "citizens") of the platform will be able to use to pay for goods and services.
The announcement comes at a time when the monetary policies of countries across the world have increasingly accommodated the interests of big corporations and the wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. This has led to both unprecedented deregulation, which has caused repeated economic crises, and the subsequent imposition of severe austerity measures hurting the livelihoods of millions of citizens.
Facebook's cryptocurrency initiative signals that this issue will assume even bigger proportions. For millennia, one of the defining features of sovereignty has been the minting and circulation of state-specific currency. Corporations like Facebook are now taking over this prerogative from governments. But monetary policy isn't neutral: It is one of the main levers for the distribution of wealth and privilege.
Facebook has given its assurances to US lawmakers, claiming the company wants to "do this right". Libra will initially be just a payment method, anchored to a basket of hard currencies, and not an autonomous coin - or so has been promised. But during a July 16 congressional hearing, Facebook executive David Marcus struggled to answer questions about how this new currency would be regulated.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.