Comments on: Guns, murder, and race

By: Matthew C. Kriner

Matthew C. Kriner — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:00:59 +0000

I’ll gear this review to 2 types of people: current Zune owners who are considering an upgrade, and people trying to decide between a Zune and an iPod. (There are other players worth considering out there, like the Sony Walkman X, but I hope this gives you enough info to make an informed decision of the Zune vs players other than the iPod line as well.)

By: jim

jim — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:16:57 +0000

What is being described as race should probably be described as culture.

The most drastic cultural intervention of them all, interethnic adoption, does not change much.

By: ralph

ralph — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 16:29:09 +0000

What is being described as race should probably be described as culture. The genetic difference between Europeans and Africans are mainly adoptions that help survive the cold winters in Europe vs the hot climate of Africa. The biggest factor in violent crime seems to be childhood exposure to lead from cars using leaded gas. Since lead was removed from gasoline violent crime rates have dropped some 50% compared to its high in the 1990′s and 77% in big cities where lead exposure was the highest. Poverty is also a large factor in property crimes.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-linkfest

By: ralph

ralph — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:11:18 +0000

One thing nice about science are that things are usually resolved eventually.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:47:42 +0000

Both US major parties want a healthy population

Both US parties want to provide jobs and welfare to unemployables to vote Democrat (observe who gets hired for the TSA and DMV), thus are fond of finding problems that supposedly need government to solve.

I don’t know the truth about lead poisoning, but I do know the truth about sulfur oxide pollution. The environmental protection agency has a bookcase full of studies, mostly done by “scientists” with an intellect not much higher than that of a TSA employee, supposedly proving that very low levels of sulfur oxides cause all kind of harm.

On the big Island of Hawaii, however, the volcano pays no attention to EPA rules. The ailments alleged in the bookshelf of scientific stuides set in at high enough levels – set in when sulfur dioxide levels are about one thousand times above EPA limits, set in when the volcanic smog is so thick as to make driving dangerous.

The studies are from established nonpolitical organizations like the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The National Bureau of Economic Research is reasonably impartial, but individual papers produced by it are not necessarily so. The paper you cite argues that lead was phased out, then crime declined twenty years later. The significance is inflated by treating each state as a separate experiment, even though all states phased out lead at approximately the same time.

The main evidence in the paper published by the NBER is its citation of papers not published by the NBER

The strong evidence for the substantial association of lead with crime is Dietrich, K. N., R. M. Douglas, et al., 2001. “Early exposure to lead and juvenile delinquency,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 23 (6), p. 511-518 and a bunch of other Dietrich papers. They are in a politically correct institution, and all their papers come to politically correct conclusions.

Dietrich is in the Department of Environmental Health, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH 45267-0056, USA

The Department of Environmental Health may well be reporting the truth about lead. I don’t know one way or the other, but I know it is not reporting the truth about sulfur oxides.

By: ralph

ralph — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:32:47 +0000

Both US major parties want a healthy population so I don’t see what role politics has. Politicians could use the studies for their own purposes but so far I haven’t seen any mention of them and the effects have been so destructive and widespread I doubt that either party wants to touch the issue. The studies are world wide with some being over ten years old and show that violent crime increases 23 years after lead exposure in all of the countries studied. The middle east just recently stopped using leaded gas in most countries and the countries that still use leaded gas are Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma) and Yemen, all militaristic or violent countries. The Romans use lead acetate as a sweetener and they were known as a fairly violent empire. The author Kevin Drum is from Mother Jones a liberal paper but the studies are from established nonpolitical organizations like the National Bureau of Economic Research. One can turn on the TV any night and see senseless acts all over the country and the world but when a large portion of the population may being suffering from brain damage that would affect their reasoning the violence does make more sense. The main article has links to the studies but the links are embedded in the text near the end of the main article so they are a bit hard to find. Read the studies yourself and see for yourself if they make sense. Some are following people from childhood to adulthood and testing their lead levels as they grow up and whether they commit violent crimes, some are MRI studies of the brains of people that were exposed to lead as children.

By: Daily Linkage – March 20, 2013 | The Second Estate

Daily Linkage – March 20, 2013 | The Second Estate — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:20:38 +0000

[...] Guns, murder, and race « Jim’s Blog [...]

By: jim

jim — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 06:13:49 +0000

Possibly, on the other hand, scientific studies that produce politically desirable results are seldom true. Or to put it another way, “Scientific” studies into politically fraught issues are done by academia, and are therefore guaranteed to produce the politically correct truth, irrespective of the observable truth.

By: ralph

ralph — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 05:14:01 +0000

Apparently research seems to be suggesting that the largest cause in the rise in crime that peaked around 1990 and has been dropping so that is 50% lower now, is lead from the exhaust of cars burning leaded gas which was removed from US gasoline by 1995. Lead causes brain damage in the development of children’s brain’s which results in lower IQ, impulsivity, lack of empathy and smaller brain sizes. The cities with more cars has been most affected and has also had the steepest decline to where large cities are about as safe as small towns.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-linkfest

By: website

website — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:43:57 +0000

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