Beware of the silent hate
The accumulation of factors that hold you down that you are not aware of, including the self: silent hate.
Beware
Build on the truth.
July 05, 2008
July 04, 2008
XXL Mayan Hammock (YELLOW) as seen in GQ Magazine
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Lead-ing to violence( MESSAGE)
Published on May 29th, 2008 by karan
A study published in the journal, PLoS Medicine has linked lead exposure to criminal behavior. The more your child gets exposed to lead in their early ages the higher the chances of them becoming a criminal later in life.
Criminal behaviors are associated with elevated blood lead levels that are found both in the child and the pregnant mother. Several pregnant women were recruited from areas that had higher rate of lead poisoning in children’s. 250 new born out of the 376 were selected for the study. Children’s, lead exposure level were noted down and when they reached the age 19 to 24 about 157 were asked to undergo MRI brain scan.
It was found with higher lead exposure certain part of the human brain reduced in size, that particular part of the brain is responsible for attention, complex control, decision making, solving problems, controlling emotions, social & personal behavior regulations. The effects of lead exposure were stronger in male.
It should be noted that previous studies have related atmospheric lead levels and leaded gasoline with criminal behavior.
Kim Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati and co-author of this study said
I never would have thought that we would be seeing these effects into the later 20s, I’m actually quite astounded and quite worried about this. Although lead levels have been going down in this country, a large proportion of the population now in their 20s and 30s had blood levels in this neurotoxin range.
He also added that
In essence, we stripped away the variants that could be accounted for by early home environment — their health at birth, mother’s ingestion of drug and alcohol during pregnancy, their own ingestion of drugs postnatal and as adolescents and as young adults. Lower income, inner-city children remain particularly vulnerable to lead exposure. Although we’ve made great strides in reducing lead exposure, our findings send a clear message that further reduction of childhood lead exposure may be an important and achievable way to reduce violent crime.
ARTICLE
Brain Damage from Lead Poisoning as a Criminal Defense
Jenna Rosania
Last summer, I worked at the California Appellate Project (CAP) in San Francisco, CA, which is a non-profit law firm working for indigent death row inmates who are approaching their appeals. We assist the counsel appointed to the inmates for their appeals and we collect records that might help their case for mitigation of culpability for their crimes so that their sentences might be reduced. This work is very dependent on sources of information outside the legal system that deal with causes of behavior, such as effects of abuse and trauma and exposure to violence; in general the effects environment can have on the brain. We argue that when the brain is damaged in areas that effect judgment, planning, decision-making, and other areas that dramatically influence people's actions, the resulting crime is caused by the brain, not by the free will of the person committing the crime. This is usually acceptable by the legal system as mitigating of the personal culpability of offenders, and is thus validated by the most basic foundational institution organizing our society.
I also worked at Clean Water Action (CWA), located a city block away
from CAP, so during my summer I became completely immersed in both
criminal justice and public health issues. I learned the value of
replacing naïve idealism with optimistic realism when it comes to
issues of public health. I feel that this is also a useful attitude
when approaching the criminal justice system, because I believe the
justice system is always changing, if very slowly, and that it is our
job to help it progress in the right direction.
Therefore, I am very interested in the implications lead
poisoning can have on the way our society handles deviance. Looking at
the issue of lead poisoning in Philadelphia is a pragmatic way to deal
with the anti-death penalty cause because it allows one to explore the
roots of violent crime in society. When some of the underlying causes
of crime, such as lead poisoning, can be obliterated from society,
perhaps the purpose and need for capital punishment in our society may
eventually be negated as well. Therefore, it is important to gather as
much information that we can call "truth" as possible, so that the
greater knowledge the scientific world can supply can be applied to
institutions that could use that knowledge to more aptly manage,
organize, and cohere society.
Lead poisoning has been an epidemic in the city of Philadelphia for decades (1).
It is estimated that 2.2 percent of all preschoolers in the US,
totaling approximately 434,000 children, have elevated lead levels
sufficient to interfere with their neurological development (2).
Studies about lead exposure in Philadelphia show that 5 percent or
5,000 of all Philadelphia children between the ages of six months and
five years have lead levels in their blood capable of causing learning
and central nervous disorders (2).
Once used as an additive for house paint and plumbing alloys, lead was
banned from use in homes and public institutions by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) in 1978, after human exposure to lead was
connected to a host of physiological and neurological disorders. As I
researched the well-established harmful effects of this pervasive toxin
on those exposed to it, I was surprised to find that human exposure to
lead continues to be a crisis of public health, criminal justice, and
environmental racism. Few people have been able to create enough public
and federal support for its complete elimination in schools and
housing, perhaps due to the expense of remedial measures and the fact
that those who suffer most are poor minorities in the inner city with
little political organization and influence.
The people who are usually exposed to lead tend to live in older
homes and come from poorer families who cannot afford to replace the
two most common sources of lead to children in their homes, lead paint
and lead plumbing (3).
Although lead can affect several areas of the body, the neurological
damage is often quite severe for individuals exposed to even slight
amounts of lead during brain development. This damage often results in
behavioral problems, reasoning and attention deficits, and low IQ and
mental retardation; conditions that occasionally lead to deviant
behavior. The National Mental Health Information Center of the US
Department of Health and Human Services state: "Many environmental
factors...put young people at risk for developing mental health
disorders...[including] exposure to environmental toxins, such as high
levels of lead..." (4).
In neighborhoods where lead exposure is so common and unavoidable due
to the impoverished state of the inhabitants, the lead exposure of the
children that develop neurological deficits and subsequently exhibit
deviant behavior must be considered when determining their degree of
culpability for a crime. If the physical state and composition of the
brain determine the behavior of an individual, a brain damaged by lead
poisoning can be the source of socially abnormal behavior.
Dr. Herbert Needleman of the Psychiatry Department at University
of Pittsburgh has conducted several studies in the past decades dealing
with children's exposure to lead, sources of lead exposure, and social,
behavioral, and neurological consequences of lead exposure. In 2002 he
examined 194 youths convicted in the Juvenile Court of Allegheny
County, PA, and 146 non-delinquent controls from high schools in
Pittsburgh, PA. Lead levels measured from the tibias of the subjects
using K X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy revealed substantially higher
lead levels in the bones of the delinquent youths at an average of 11
parts per million (ppm) compared to 1.5 ppm in the non-delinquent group
(5).
Dr. Needleman described this study, which was the first to show lead
exposure is higher in convicted delinquents than in non-delinquents, as
a positive step towards connecting lead poisoning with delinquency,
stating "This study provides further evidence that delinquent behavior
can be caused, in part, by childhood exposure to lead. For years
parents have been telling their pediatricians that their children's
behavior changed after they were lead poisoned, and the children became
irritable, overactive and aggressive" (6).
Dr. Needleman's groundbreaking work in the area of lead exposure
and behavior warrants further investigation into the area of
responsibility for behavior when an affected individual commits crime.
According to all the studies, lead poisoning is a disease of poverty
and is in no way the fault of the person afflicted. Therefore, the
effects of lead poisoning, increased aggressive behavior, low
intelligence, learning disabilities, and anti-social behavior, all of
which are known predictors of crime, should be mitigation of the
culpability of the offenders afflicted with lead poisoning.
The neurological damage resulting from exposure to lead can
result in abnormal behavior, exhibited through increased irritability
and violence, learning disabilities, mental retardation, and other
functional difficulties. The social effects of these abnormal behaviors
through disciplinary actions, peer isolation, falling behind in school,
drug abuse, domestic abuse, and a lack of understanding about the basis
of an individual's impairments may also compound the neurological
damage, resulting in psychological trauma, which studies show can cause
other types of brain damage (7). Additionally, lead exposure is known to cause attention problems for children (8)
making academic success and effectively adapting to society difficult.
All these conditions have been known to result in an individual's
inability to function in society or possess adaptive skills. Inability
to function in society often results in deviancy of various kinds, and
at times the deviancy that is a symptom of an individual's neurological
damage is so seriously a breach of the mores of social structure that
it is viewed by our legal system as criminal.
A question that arises when assessing degrees of criminal
culpability is whether all crimes can be traced back to some mitigator
that makes it inappropriate for the application of harsh penalties to
an offender under the Eighth Amendment, which states no one be exposed
to cruel and unusual punishment sanctioned by the state. A professor at
the University of Illinois School of Law, Michael S. Moore, commented
that such an argument leads to the "absurd conclusion that no one is
responsible for anything" (9).
The question is particularly important as the knowledge about
predictors of criminal activity increases, and includes more and more
mitigating factors that wouldn't previously have been acceptable
excuses for crime. In the case of lead poisoning, the statistics for
the number of children exposed to lead before it was as relatively
controlled as it is today means that now those children who may be
committing crimes as adults will be a significant population of the
criminals who are subjected to the justice system, and a substantial
group of offenders may be collectively excused for their crimes due to
the pervasiveness of lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning has been epidemic in the city of Philadelphia for decades. Although it would seem the problem of lead in the US as well as in Philadelphia is being ameliorated and that the numbers of children being exposed is decreasing, the children who were affected by the high doses of lead far more common and rampant in the last century are now adults, trying to function in society with the effects of their exposure. In addition, those children who are currently being exposed to lead need a society that will be able to better understand the implications of this environmental toxin for delinquency and execute justice more effectively when they become adults. Human exposure to lead continues to be a crisis of public health, criminal justice, and environmental racism, and what is necessary for its complete elimination in schools and housing is a change in people's attitudes about the extent of lead poisoning in order to gain more public and federal support and make this problem of poor minorities in the inner-city with little political organization and influence everyone's problem.
References
1) US Department of Health and Human Services, The Nature and Extent of Lead Poisoning in Children in the United States: A Report to Congress 1 (July 1988).
2) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2003. Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. NCEH Pub. No. 02-0716.
3) Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 1991. Preventing Lead Poisoning in Young Children: A Statement by the Centers for Disease Control. Atlanta, GA.
4)US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHSA), National Mental Health Information Center, under heading, "The Causes are Complicated."
5) Needleman, Herbert L., et al.. 2002. Bone Lead Levels in Adjudicated Delinquents: A Case Control Study. Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Vol. 24.
6)Lead link to youth crime, BBC News Online, 7 January, 2003
7) Rosen J. F., Mushak P.. 2001. Primary Prevention of Childhood Lead Poisoning — The Only Solution, New England Journal of Medicine, 344.
8) Minder, Barbara, et al.. 1994. Exposure to Lead and Specific Attentional Problems in Schoolchildren. Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 27.
9) Moore, Michael S. 1985. Causation and the Excuses. California Law Review, Vol. 73, pp. 1118-1119.
ARTICLE
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BLADETECH 
"Your mind is your primary weapon."-autogenic breathing
RICKSON GRACIE ON BREATHING
A lesson for the independent thinker
In the book The Dip : A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
by Seth Godin,
it discussed the road to success, and how quitING the right things are essential to winning.
We just need to recognize where success is, and that only will occur when we know our purpose(higher purpose). So we know why we are and to, too.
Build on the Truth.
PEACE
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Activate Drinks: NOTCOT Review from Jean Aw on Vimeo.
