London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye.
We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper.
It’s not a mystery. It’s history.
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser.
Did anyone thought about asking this simple question of why there are less serial killers these days? Why?
Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was considering ideas for her PhD while worrying about lead paint since she was pregnant. She happened to listen to Steven D. Levitt's (of Freaknomics) talk.
She narrowed down on the topic of "early childhood exposure and crime rate" in her dissertation (which was published in 2007). Her question became the seed for Fraser's brilliant book.
This is yet another example of why it so important to meditate on why question to get at-least some of the causality behind a symptom.
The most important question for us to ask now is - what is the x in 2025 compared to x = lead in 1950 to 1990 (almost 40 years time span)?
My answer is - consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on.
Most reading this including myself will not be alive in 40 years if and when such a study comes out.
One can wait for the next 4 decades or embrace precautionary principle now and avoid those potential mental and physical effects. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Here's good excerpt from the book:
According to Patterson, the average American during of age of leaded gasoline is so filthy when it comes to lead contamination that he's comparable to Pig Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. "Thats what people look like with respect to lead," he says. "Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a superclean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair."
Not only that but Patterson calculates that the blood lead level of pre-industrial humans would have have been 0.016 micrograms per deciliter, far lower than that of anyone living in the industrial age, American, he concludes, are suffering from "enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality. He devotes himself to campaigning against lead gasoline and to proving that everything Robert Kehoe ever said or upblished about "normal levels" of lead in blood is wrong.
The issue is currently its just not American's but the whole goddamn world is stuck in processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on.
Before even reading this book just last month I wrote:
People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.
I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families.
In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering.
A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.
Take a moment and thank those men and women who fought so hard for decades to expose the effects of lead. I bet "God" will appreciate that gulping dead bodies of Turkey.
Take a moment to identify the men and women are currently fighting to expose the cognitive and physical on human beings who are stuck in consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia.
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