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Piers Morgan brings gun-control crusade to Katy – Houston Chronicle.
A Katy gun store and shooting range provided the setting for Monday’s episode of CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight,” which featured Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, State Sen. Dan Patrick and rocker and National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent.
Since December’s Newtown, Conn., massacre in which the shooter killed 20 children, six school employees, his mother and himself, the cable program has been engaging in the debate over firearms with “Guns in America” shows.
The verbal sparring in Texas, which was described as “Gun Country,” explored the question: Does anyone in America really need an AR-15 assault rifle?
The episode opened with Morgan wearing protective gear at Tactical Firearms as he tested several weapons, including an AR-15 and a gun that can unload 900 rounds per minute. The talk show host spoke with business owner Jeremy Alcede, who explained why the sales of firearms have surged as President Obama and congressional leaders consider tightening gun regulations.
“They want it because they are law-abiding citizens and they know it is legal to purchase now,” Alcede said.
‘Meet force with force’
Abbott said Texans need access to firearms to protect themselves against home intruders and violent gangs. He added that thousands of ranchers along the border need guns to guard against drug cartels.
“They deserve under the Second Amendment to meet force with force,” the attorney general said.
Abbott and Patrick, both Republicans, do not support universal background checks, which the attorney general said “are not working.”
Abbott added that tougher enforcement should focus on “ensuring that criminals and those who have mental issues do not get their hands on guns.”
Morgan said his guests’ opposition to more gun control, as proposed by the president, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and others, was a “disturbing reaction to the murder of 20 young children.” But his guests pushed back on what they interpreted as hyperbole and ignorance about firearms as well as American culture.
State Sen. Dan Patrick defended the AR-15 as a “personal defense weapon” and said that he owns one.
“It is a weapon you can fire multiple times to defend yourself,” he said. “You don’t know how many bullets you’re going to need to defend your life and family.”
Morgan, who has taken a position on the gun control issue, constantly interrupted Abbott, Patrick and conservative radio host Ben Ferguson, but let Nugent, the final guest, finish his points with consecutive sentences.
“You don’t understand that it’s a simple inanimate tool,” the entertainer told Morgan.
‘Bureaucracy gone mad’
Nugent also questioned Morgan’s assertion that America has a gun problem.
Though 100,000 people die annually from gunshot wounds in the United States, Nugent pointed out that the figure includes 18,000 suicides and “bad guys shot by cops and intruders shot by home-owners.”
“Leave us the hell alone,” Nugent said, referring to law-abiding gun owners. “The government doesn’t need to know who has what … That’s a bureaucracy gone mad.”
Aim high in steering – look ahead as far as you can see and position the car for the terrain of the road
Get the big picture – what is going on in front as far as you can see, what is going on at either side as far as you can see ahead, what is going on behind you as far as you can see
Keep your eyes moving – check all mirrors every 10 seconds
Leave yourself and out…..leave space between you and others to go around or off the road to the right, don’t get the car in a position you can not escape
Make sure they see you – driving lights on all the time, make eye contact at the 4 way stops, toot your horn, flash you lights, better pissed off than dead
Here’s a link to an ol’ skool friend with some recent Trance mixes he uploaded to Spreaker. Check them out.
If you’re on the prescription drug Zoloft, it’s a good thing you’re not a fungus! Scientists experimenting with the effects of the best-selling anti-depressant have discovered that the well—known pharmaceutical has a major toxic effect on yeast cells. It distorts their normally curved membranes and triggers the cell to start eating themselves.
According to pharmacologist Ethan Pearlstein of Princeton University, yeast doesn’t have any serotonin, so there’s no reason to expect any effect, let alone such a bizarre suicidal one. According to Pearlstein, a molecule of Zoloft “…should be completely innocuous to a yeast cell, the way an antibiotic would be innocuous to a viral infection.” What exactly the clinical implications are, of this self-destructive response to Zoloft, for patients taking the drug, remains to be seen, but the unexpected findings has pharmacologists salivating at the prospect of new targets for the next generation of anti-depressants. In the words of author Pearlstein: “Altogether, our work suggests that the serotonin-based theory might be an oversimplification and that the cause of depression is not a closed story.” The question of whether or not this toxic effect on yeast can make Zoloft an effective anti-fungal agent has not yet been addressed, but it may be something that pharmaceutical companies will be looking into for future research.
In a paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, doctors describe the fungicidal effects of Zoloft on three patients being treated for depression with concomitant vaginal yeast infections. Apparently, all three patients experienced improvements in symptoms associated with their fungal infections while taking the anti-depressant medication. The researchers concluded: “The potential offered by sertraline (Zoloft) against fungi is sufficiently great to merit further studies by investigators in the field of infectious diseases…To support potential systemic use, animal models and clinical trials are highly warranted.”
Via: http://pharmacistbensblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/if-youre-on-prescription-drug-zoloft.html
Scientists at Warwick Medical School have made an important discovery about the mechanism controlling the body’s ‘fat switch’, shedding new light on our understanding of how proteins regulate appetite control and insulin secretion. research, led by Professor Victor Zammit, Head of Metabolic and Vascular Health at Warwick Medical School, found that the enzyme known as ‘Carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1A’ CPT1 has a switch which is thrown depending on the composition and curvature of its cellular membrane. This is the first time such a mechanism has been described and may possibly be unique, reflecting the importance of this protein to cellular function.
CPT1 is the key protein that regulates fatty acid oxidation in the liver and is critical for metabolism. Its activity determines whether individuals suffer from fatty liver in one extreme or ketosis in the other. Professor Zammit explained: “Knowing that the CPT1 enzyme can switch and what controls it will ultimately lead to a better understanding of why some people appear to have a speedy metabolism and others struggle to curb their appetite.
“We are making great inroads to understanding the science behind our metabolism and how at cellular level it changes according to the influence of different factors — be they nutritional or hormonal.”
The importance of this work on clinical practice is that, having discovered the molecular mechanism, it should now be possible to design drugs that flick the switch of CPT1 in one way or the other, depending on the requirements of individual patients and the tissue that needs to be affected. For example, drugs can be developed for patients suffering from diabetic keto acidosis, a condition when insufficient insulin caused the body to start breaking down fat, so that the enzyme is inhibited to oxidize fewer fatty acids.
“This would be a major breakthrough in tackling the obesity crisis we now face,” added Professor Zammit.The research, conducted in association with the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA has been published in Journal of Biological Chemistry.
The research, conducted in association with the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA has been published in Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Here is another reason to push SSRI’s.
UCLA researchers have come across an unexpected potential use for fluoxetine — commonly known as Prozac — which shows promise as an antiviral agent. The discovery could provide another tool in treating human enteroviruses that sicken and kill people in the U.S. and around the world.
Human enteroviruses are a group of viruses that are responsible for various life threatening infections, such as Polio and encephalitis. While immunization has greatly reduced Polio, no antiviral drugs exist today that can treat these kinds of infections.
In light of Fluoxetine’s history of adverse effects and its use in the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders, and some personality disorders, the research team found that it warrants additional study.
“The discovery of the antiviral activity of fluoxetine is very significant and draws our attention to… other psychogenic drugs,” said Robert Damoiseaux, one of the scientific directors at the California NanoSystems Institute. “Part of our follow-up work will be… fluoxetine and other drugs of the same class…”
Researchers found that fluoxetine did not protect from infection. Instead, it reduces the virus’ ability to replicate and corrupt host DNA.
The study was published on July 2 in the journal of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy; funded by grants from the Today’s and Tomorrow’s Children’s Fund and the UCLA Department of Pediatrics Nano Pediatrics Program.
Source:
University of California – Los Angeles (2012, July 27). Fluoxetine (a.k.a. Prozac) is effective as an anti-viral, study suggests. ScienceDaily.
Fluoxetine — a.k.a., Prozac — is effective as an anti-viral, study suggests.
In electrical brain-stimulation technique used to treat Parkinson’s disease and chronic pain appears to enhance human memory as well, according to a tiny but intriguing new study that bolsters hope for one day developing a nondrug treatment for memory problems, including ailments like Alzheimer’s disease.
The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, focused on seven patients with severe epilepsy whose memory abilities ranged from normal to severely impaired. They had electrodes implanted through a hole in the skull in order to detect the source of their seizures. This gave researchers the chance to send an undetected burst of current to different brain regions, known as deep-brain stimulation, and observe changes in memory.
The participants completed a task where they pretended to be taxi drivers who needed to drop off passengers at stores on different blocks. Researchers stimulated the brains of participants when they were learning the location of half the stores but not the others. Participants were tested for how well they remembered the location of the stores.
All patients, regardless of how good their memory was, saw improvement in their memory after stimulation in a particular brain region known as the entorhinal area. Stimulating areas just millimeters away showed no benefit.
The entorhinal cortex is an area of the brain that is one of the first to be damaged by Alzheimer’s. Fibers from that region transmit the sensory information to the hippocampus, a brain region critical to learning and memory. The thinking is that the stimulation enhanced learning or the encoding of memories, perhaps by resetting the electric rhythm of brain cells within the hippocampus, according to Itzhak Fried, a study author and professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv University in Israel.
The work is preliminary, and extensive follow-up is needed. But, “the hope would be that this type of approach—deep-brain stimulation—can be used to help people with memory problems,” Dr. Fried said.
For the field of Alzheimer’s research, the finding “breaks new ground,” said Stephen Salloway, an Alzheimer’s researcher and professor of neurology at Brown University who wasn’t involved in the current study. “It doesn’t provide a definitive answer; it opens new doors to exploratory treatments for Alzheimer’s,” he said.
The majority of treatments in development to treat Alzheimer’s and related dementias are drugs that target the protein amyloid, which clumps to form plaques in the brain and is thought to contribute to the disease.
The arrow shows where deep-brain stimulation was applied to this brain during tests on learning.
Questions remain about using deep-brain stimulation to treat dementia, including whether it would work for Alzheimer’s patients and at what stage of decline, whether it is safe and how long the effect will last, said Dr. Salloway. The Food and Drug Administration has approved deep-brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s and a movement disorder known as dystonia, and it is used to treat chronic pain and severe depression.
The next step is to figure out if stimulation also can help when recalling old memories, because that function can also be impaired with dementia, according to Nanthia Suthana, the first author on the study and a UCLA postdoctoral researcher.
Unlike stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s or other issues, in which the brain is stimulated continuously or repeatedly with an implanted pacemaker-like device, memory in the latest study was improved by a single burst of current when administered in the right location as memories were being formed, according to Dr. Fried.
Recent animal studies have shown that stimulating the entorhinal cortex improved the growth of brain cells in adult mice and appeared to enhance memory for locations and spatial knowledge.
In humans, evidence has been limited. A 2010 study of six Alzheimer’s patients who received continuous brain stimulation to a different part of the brain over a 12-month period suggested possible improvements in memory. And in some previous studies where the hippocampus was stimulated, memory was actually disrupted.
The notion that deep-brain stimulation may have benefits for memory was prompted in part by serendipity. In a 2008 case report, a man who was receiving experimental brain stimulation for obesity also showed improvement in his memory, which prompted excitement and calls for future research.
FBI Secretly Creates Internet Police
May 25, 2012
The FBI was rather public with its recent demands for backdoor access to websites and Internet services across the board, but as the agency awaits those secret surveillance powers, they’re working on their own end to have those e-spy capabilities.Not much has been revealed about one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newest projects, the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, and the FBI will probably try to keep it that way. Despite attempting to keep the DCAC largely under wraps, an investigation spearheaded by Cnet’s Declan McCullagh is quickly collecting details about the agency’s latest endeavor.Governmental agencies have been searching seemingly without end for ways to pry into the personal communications of computer users in America. Congressional approval and cooperation from Internet companies could be an eternity away, of course, but the FBI might be able to bypass that entirely by taking the matter into their own hands. At the Quantico, Virginia headquarters of the DCAC, federal workers are believed to be already hard at work on projects that will put FBI spies into the Internet, snooping on unsuspecting American’s Skype calls, instant messages and everything else carried out with a mouse and keyboard.Read full article
via » FBI Secretly Creates Internet Police Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!.