Guns? $6 Billion? What a lucrative industry?

The US gun and ammunition manufacturing industry includes about 300 companies with combined annual revenue of about $6 billion. Major gun and ammunition manufacturers include Browning Arms; Freedom Group (which includes Remington Arms, Marlin Firearms, and Bushmaster Firearms); Olin; Alliant Techsystems; Sturm, Ruger & Company; and Smith & Wesson. The industry is highly concentrated.

Guns do kill people!

Columbine, Denver theater, Wisconsin Sikh temple, streets of Syria and Egypt! You do the math. Mental illness, fanaticism, and dictatorships always exist. But so many would not be dead if there were no fire arms. Stop the guns. The right to bear arms is an outdated ideology that was in reference to self protection not the fun of hunting nor ordering as many as one desires online nor one country selling them to another for a hefty profit. it is 2012, it is to time to reevaluate.

Darkest moments of the Olympics:Wajdon Shaherkani

Please stop and reflect on what is happening to a 16 year old wojdan?
I so understand and empathize with her terror, conflict, and pain during the longest 2 minutes of her life.

Women are being used as pawns even in 2012. Wojdan's Judo competition was another incident of a disgusting, self serving and publicly condoned female abuse & humiliation. She, a young innocent girl pays the price for men to seem tough and to resemble true leaders. To change history does not include play pretend. This is as bad to the female psyche as female gentile mutilation is to her body.

Has anyone stopped to think what has happened to Wojdan? How scared she must be? The Saudi national television is calling her a prostitute! She is not allowed to talk to any press, some man speaks for her, she is treated as a show horse, lips sealed, head covered, paraded, shamed and objectified.

She has never competed, never seen crowds, never left the country, never been to any games, never removed her hijab, never seen the Olympics???? Never seen a woman drive!

As a female, she was raised to please and to be hidden behind closed doors. She was branded as second class citizen, good only to serve her man while he is enjoying independence. She is now supposed to compete but be sweet and kind, worry about a strand of hair and be subservient to any aggression/ competition coming her way? Why would one throw an unprepared teen in such competitive arena? The terror of judgement of her hair showing from the ridiculous head cover, "hijab", was greater than her Olympic loss. My heart breaks for her.

Furthermore, using teenagers for the Al Sauds or other individuals to seem open minded is the most shameful form of child abuse I have ever encountered.

I hope this incredible young lady stays whole, turns out to be a fighter for women as a result of this experience and break all barriers of female oppression even if it is all sadly " in the name of GOD".

Follow up on the FDA

THE NY TIMES
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
July 31, 2012

WASHINGTON — As he often did, Dr. Robert C. Smith was hammering away at his bosses at the Food and Drug Administration in the most caustic of terms at a meeting to address his concerns about the approval of medical devices.
With seven fellow scientists seated behind him in support, Dr. Smith charged that managers “are not following the law, not following the science, not following F.D.A. core values,” according to notes of the 2008 session. He glared at a supervisor, who sat fuming in front of him.
Dr. Smith — radiologist, lawyer, litigant and the man now at the center of a spying scandal at the F.D.A. — is in some ways typical of that peculiar Washington phenomenon known as the whistle-blower: He pressed charges of government abuse, battled with his bosses, and ultimately was shown the door amid lawsuits and investigations.
But he took his role to an extreme, according to former colleagues, scorning negotiations, making enemies of critics and papering Washington with complaints, which helped sow chaos at the agency. One co-worker compared his efforts to “a mutiny.”
This month, F.D.A. officials came under fire from Congress after disclosures that they had begun a surveillance operation monitoring the e-mail of Dr. Smith and four other employees as they wrote to their lawyers, lawmakers and even President Obama. Dr. Smith’s scorched-earth tactics had so unnerved managers that they, too, resorted to extreme measures, and the monitors ended up producing a sort of enemies list of 21 agency critics, including Congressional officials, academics and journalists.
Some 80,000 pages of documents intercepted in the spy operation — many of them e-mails from Dr. Smith seeking help from scientists, politicians, reporters, academics and others — detail his campaign to expose what he claimed were harmful practices at the F.D.A. The documents, accidentally posted online by an F.D.A. contractor, reveal a four-year process of estrangement between Dr. Smith and his bosses.

Cortisol and Infant Development? No more distressed infants PLEASE.

It is now a scientific fact that an infant left in distress for 45 seconds requires over 10 to 15 minutes of recovery from excess cortisol secretion. Infant brains & CNS is directly impacted by the levels of Cortisol,  induced by stress, during critical periods of the first 24 months of development . Whether Autism is a message of overdrive in-utero or post birth, it is still significant that a system on overdrive is always a system at risk. We can do something about the future now. 

Saliva and Pupil Size Differences in Autism 

Show System in Overdrive

ScienceDaily (July 12, 2012) — University of Kansas researchers have found larger resting pupil size and lower levels of a salivary enzyme associated with the neurotransmitter norepinephrine in children with autism spectrum disorder

"Norepinephrine (NE) has been found in the blood plasma levels of individuals with ASD but some researchers have questioned whether these levels were just related to the stress from blood draws.

The KU study addressed this by collecting salivary measures by simply placing a highly absorbent sponge swab under the child's tongue and confirmed that this method of collection did not stress the children by assessing their stress levels through cortisol, another hormone."

However, even though the levels of the enzyme, salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), were lower than those of typically-developing children in samples taken in the afternoon in the lab, samples taken at home throughout the day showed that sAA levels were higher in general across the day and much less variable for children with ASD.

"What this says is that the autonomic system of children with ASD is always on the same level," Christa Anderson, assistant research professor, said. "They are in overdrive."

The sAA levels of typically-developing children gradually rise and fall over the day, said Anderson, who co-directed the study with John Colombo, professor of psychology.

Collecting sAA levels has the potential for physicians to screen children for ASD much earlier, noninvasively and relatively inexpensively, said Anderson.

But Anderson and Colombo also see pupil size and sAA levels as biomarkers that could be the physiological signatures of a possible dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system.

"Many theories of autism propose that the disorder is due to deficits in higher-order brain areas," said Colombo. "Our findings, however, suggest that the core deficits may lie in areas of the brain typically associated with more fundamental, vital functions."

The study, published online in the May 29, 2012Developmental Psychobiology compared children between the ages of 20 and 72 months of age diagnosed with ASD to a group of typically developing children and a third group of children with Down Syndrome.

Both findings address the Centers for Disease Control's urgent public health priority goals for ASD: to find biological indicators that can both help screen children earlier and lead to better understanding of how the nervous system develops and functions in the disorder.

Colombo is the director and Anderson is research faculty member of the University of Kansas Life Span Institute that focuses on neurodevelopmental and translational research across the life span