Author Archives: ZeldaMoritz

No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on March 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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From House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers:

Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles, and I don’t think it’s even close. They’ve been running circles around us.

This kind of knee-jerk reaction is unsurprising, but it’s also nuts. Has Rogers even been following events in Ukraine lately? The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical strategery.

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost.1 It’s a sign of weakness, not a show of strength. It’s the price he’s paying for his inability to control events.

1This is why a strong response from the West is a good idea even though it won’t have much immediate effect. Having decided that he’s willing to pay the price for his action, Putin now has to be sent the bill. It will pay dividends down the road.

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No, Vladimir Putin Is Not a Cunning Geopolitical Chess Player

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Lead and Crime: It’s a Brain Thing

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I wrote my big piece last year about the connection between childhood exposure to lead and rates of violent crime later in life, one of the big pushbacks came from folks who are skeptical of econometric studies. Sure, the level of lead exposure over time looks like an inverted U, and so does the national rate of violent crime. But hey: correlation is not causation.

I actually addressed this in my piece—twice, I think—but I always felt like I didn’t address it quite clearly enough. The article spent so much time up front explaining the statistical correlations that it made the subsequent points about other evidence seem a bit like hasty bolt-ons, put there mainly to check off a box against possible criticism. That’s not how I intended it,1 but that’s how it turned out.

For that reason, I’m pleased to recommend Lauren Wolf’s “The Crimes Of Lead,” in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News. It doesn’t ignore the statistical evidence, but it focuses primarily on the physiological evidence that implicates lead with higher levels of violent crime:

Research has shown that lead exposure does indeed make lab animals—rodents, monkeys, even cats—more prone to aggression. But establishing biological plausibility for the lead-crime argument hasn’t been as clear-cut for molecular-level studies of the brain. Lead wreaks a lot of havoc on the central nervous system. So pinpointing one—or even a few—molecular switches by which the heavy metal turns on aggression has been challenging.

What scientists do know is that element 82 does most of its damage to the brain by mimicking calcium. Inside the brain, calcium runs the show: It triggers nerve firing by helping to release neurotransmitters, and it activates proteins important for brain development, memory formation, and learning. By pushing calcium out of these roles, lead can muck up brain cell communication and growth.

On the cell communication side of things, lead appears to interfere with a bunch of the neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter receptors in our brains. One of the systems that keeps popping up in exposure experiments is the dopamine system. It controls reward and impulse behavior, a big factor in aggression. Another is the glutamate system, responsible in part for learning and memory.

On the brain development side of things, lead interferes with, among other things, the process of synaptic pruning. Nerve cells grow and connect, sometimes forming 40,000 new junctions per second, until a baby reaches about two years of age. After that, the brain begins to prune back the myriad connections, called synapses, to make them more efficient. Lead disrupts this cleanup effort, leaving behind excess, poorly functioning nerve cells.

“If you have a brain that’s miswired, especially in areas involved in what psychologists call the executive functions—judgment, impulse control, anticipation of consequences—of course you might display aggressive behavior,” says Kim N. Dietrich, director of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine….“Overall, the evidence is sufficient that early exposure to lead triggers a higher risk for engaging in aggressive behavior,” says U of Cincinnati’s Dietrich. “The question now is, what is the lowest level of exposure where we might see this behavior?”

There’s more, including a number of items I didn’t include in my article. The whole thing is worth a read if you’d like to learn a bit more than my piece covered about the brain science behind lead and crime.

1So why did I write it the way I did? No good reason, really. Partly it’s because I told the story chronologically, and the really compelling parts of the brain science story are fairly recent. Partly it’s because it just seemed to be easier to explain things doing it in the sequence I did it.

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Lead and Crime: It’s a Brain Thing

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Dot Earth Blog: Food, Genes and the Feeling of Risk

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on January 3, 2014

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The Crochet Answer Book – Edie Eckman

Wouldn’t it boost your confidence to have an experienced and confident crocheter on call, day and night, offering assistance when needed? Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to have that kind of aid, but now there is help available 24/7 with The Crochet Answer Book. Being a “good” crocheter is not about making perfectly stitched, elaborate […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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Codex: Tyranids (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

From the cold darkness of the intergalactic void comes a race of ravenous aliens known as the Tyranids, a numberless horde of super-predators governed only by the instincts to hunt, kill and feed. Each Tyranid is a living weapon, perfectly adapted to its designated function, but each creature is no more than a single cell in a vast gestalt entity controlled […]

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Following Atticus – Tom Ryan

After a close friend died of cancer, middle-aged, overweight, acrophobic newspaperman Tom Ryan decided to pay tribute to her in a most unorthodox manner. Ryan and his friend, miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch, would attempt to climb all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s four thousand- foot peaks twice in one winter while raising money for charity. It wa […]

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Penny Saving Household Helper – Rebecca DiLiberto

This handy guide resurrects the fine art of frugal housekeeping with over 500 tips on saving money throughout the home and garden. Learn creative ways to cut back, pinch pennies, reduce, recycle, and re-use. Want to save on the grocery bill? Buy the whole chicken rather than individual cuts. Get more wear out of your wardrobe? Add a dash of salt to the washe […]

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The Knitting Answer Book – Margaret Radcliffe

Every avid knitter has faced this dilemma: deep into a project at midnight, just trying to finish one more row, and, then . . . oh no, a dropped stitch three rows back! Help! If only there was a 24-hour hotline to answer every question a knitter might encounter. Well, now there is, with The Knitting Answer Book . The expert authors, Margaret Radcliffe and Ed […]

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Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

Not all battles in the 41st Millennium are massed engagements between lumbering armies and towering war machines. In the shadows of these epic conflicts, squads of elite soldiers clash – their missions no less vital, their foes no less deadly. Designated as Kill Teams by the Imperium, or by a myriad of different names for their alien and daemonic counterpart […]

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What the Dog Did – Emily Yoffe

Dave Barry meets The Secret Lives of Dogs in Emily Yoffe’s funny and insightful look at all things canine. Filled with adventures of heroic dogs, lovable and lazy dogs, malodorous dogs, phlegmatic and incontinent dogs, What the Dog Did delivers some of the most outlandish and certainly the funniest dog stories on record.

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Codex: Inquisition – Games Workshop

The Inquisition is the most powerful organisation within the Imperium. Bound by no Imperial law or authority, its agents – Inquisitors – operate in a highly secretive manner and answer only to themselves. Inquisitors use whatever means are necessary in order to safeguard the Imperium from heretics, mutants and aliens. It is not without good reason that Inqui […]

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Dot Earth Blog: Food, Genes and the Feeling of Risk

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