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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
2muchcoffeeman writes "The cause of the great increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s may have been isolated: lead. This leads directly to the reason for the sharp decline in violent crime since then: lead abatement programs and especially the ban of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline starting in 1996. There are three reasons why this makes sense. First, the statistics correlate almost perfectly. Second, it holds true worldwide with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Third, the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person's ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility. Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation."
Yup. If the study were true, China would be one of the most violent countries on Earth. Rich people can afford better products, ie, products with less led in them. Rich people have other, non-violent, ways of stealing large sums of money. I personally believe that the arrival of the internet, cheap entertainment be it games or porn, and easy access to information, has kept people busy at night. And porn and possibly less stressful masturbation has helped release a lot of pent up sexual energy.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Not to mention the spectacular semi-permanent decline in the economy since 2007 has not resulted in a permanent spectacular increase in crime.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's dumb. Poor people from the early 80's might not have had X-boxes, but they did have video games (Atari, Intellivision and Odyssey systems spring to mind, not to mention arcade games which were just taking off). Plus (and this applies even if you go back before the 80's) there was still TV, books, magazines, radio, and so on. Sorry, but 20th-century crime rates can't be blamed on a lack of entertainment options for the poor. At least not by anyone who 1)is being honest and 2)knows what the fuck they're talking about.
The uncomfortable truth is that there is very real evidence that society poisoned those people and THEN punished them for the natural consequences of that poisoning.
We're talking about data here (not the plural of anecdote) and it is statistical, not 1to1.
Before you try to make something out of the statistical nature, note well that radioactive decay is statistical in the same way.
I predict that this will be almost entirely ignored because it IS an uncomfortable truth, it presents a non-punitive measure to fight crime that doesn't fund the police, it suggests a level of liability against GM and the oil companies that they could NEVER pay off (and worse, much of the money is due to poor people) and finally, it significantly shrinks the pool of people that others can feel morally superior to while dumping on them.
There was lead in paint for two reasons. Pigment and anti-fungal.
White lead paint was fairly high in lead and was pretty bad for kids that ate it. All the other colors only had a trace for it's anti-fungal properties. Initially they replaced the anti-fungal lead with mercury, not sure if that's still true. There was an argument for removing the lead pigment but leaving the traces.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Weren't the Romans unable to conquer germanic tribal 'barbarians'? If I recall correctly that wasn't for lack of trying.
Read ur Gibbon etc...
The romans were geniuses at "doin stuff" with coasties. They knew exactly what to do with coastie farmers and merchants in warmish climates. Oh boy did they ever, they built a whole empire out of them. They had no idea what to do with forest dwellers and prairie horse riders. at all. Like a cultural blindspot.
The german campaigns were rome's Vietnam. Well either that or the isle of brittania. They never lost a battle (well, with one isolated very famous incident in the Tuetenberg forest), at least until centuries later in the demographic collapse when they were hopelessly outnumbered. They always lost the war, (almost) never lost a battle. And every time they won, they looked at their hard fought land, said WTF and went back home, until they had to do it all over.
Every generation or so for centuries it was something like:
"Look guys, we've won ourselves some trees"
"Oh? Olive trees? No?"
"Well WTF are we suppose to do with them? F it lets go back across the Rhine to civilization."
As for the horsemen thing they never really figured out what to do with the Parthian empire either, as I recall Hadrian simply gave up conquered horsemen land. Yeah the rich romans had horses, they had no idea what to do with cultures where everyone was a horseman.
They've got a well deserved rep as master administrators... of warm coasties. They were a belly laugh as administrators of forest dwellers and horsemen cultures.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One of the best explanations of this I have heard comes from John Keegan. Basically, Rome was able to conquer settled, agriculture lands. There was enough civilization that Rome could coopt the local government to extract taxes to build roads, raise armies etc. With its forests Germany did not have the large densely populated settled areas that Rome needed for success.
Scotland with it’s cattle headers and it’s a different story. Each clan it’s own. Most of the wealth is on hoof – so it disappears into the wilderness. Less impressed with roads because cattle don’t need roads. Etc. Rome gave up and built a wall.
Apparently the romans were not poisoned by lead...
From wikipedia:
"The great disadvantage of lead has always been that it is poisonous. This was fully recognised by the ancients, and Vitruvius specifically warns against its use. Because it was nevertheless used in profusion for carrying drinking water, the conclusion has often been drawn that the Romans must therefore have suffered from lead poisoning; sometimes conclusions are carried even further and it is inferred that this caused infertility and other unwelcome conditions, and that lead plumbing was largely responsible for the decline and fall of Rome. In fact, two things make this otherwise attractive hypothesis impossible. First, the calcium carbonate deposit that formed so thickly inside the aqueduct channels also formed inside the pipes, effectively insulating the water from the lead, so that the two never touched. Second, because the Romans had so few taps and the water was constantly running, it was never actually inside the pipes for more than a few minutes, and certainly not long enough to become contaminated. The thesis that the Romans contracted lead poisoning from the lead pipes in their water systems must therefore be declared completely unfounded."
I would love to hear a scientific (not political) discussion of how they screwed up.
Well, one could start by looking into the seemingly disproportional effect lead would have to have on males vs females if their theory were to hold any water.
The offending rates for females declined since the early 1980's but stabilized after 1999. Offending rates for males peaked in the early 1990's, fell to record lows,and stabilized in recent years. Female murder rates show no characteristic peaks related to the peak exposure to lead.
Chart Here.
Data here.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The specific risks and effects of TEL were known as early as 1923, when the inventor took a prolonged vacation to cure lead poisoning. Here are excerpts from the wikipedia article for Thomas Midgley, Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
[...] In December 1921, while working under the direction of Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of TEL to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.
[...] In 1923, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote in January 1923, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He went to Miami, Florida for convalescence.
[...] However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." Over the course of the next year, eight more people would die at DuPont's Deepwater, New Jersey plant.
[...] On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference.
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