Under the category, “There’s no free lunch,” Siddharth Kara, a British Academy Global Professor, has written “Cobalt Red,” the ultimate expose about the underbelly of today’s progress.

            Like historical books regarding the human toll movements like the Industrial Revolution represented in the name of progress, this book reveals the hidden cost of our current technological advances. It also exemplifies and uncovers the brutal realities that accompany this current technological transition.

            All our battery powered devices require cobalt. As the author states, “Although the scale of destruction caused by cobalt mining in the name of renewable energy is without contemporary parallel, the contradictory nature of mining is nothing new.”

            When I first became the CEO at a small hospital originally built for coal miners and their families, it seemed like a good idea to create an historic wall of fame featuring the portraits of the original presidents of the hospital. Immediately after having our maintenance employees hang those pictures of the leaders from the height of the Industrial Revolution, I began getting complaints.

            I was angrily informed that some of the still-surviving widows of deceased coal miners objected to any glorification of these men. They accused them of having hired some physicians to lie and say their husbands had died of asthma rather than black lung. That was done, according to them, so the families would not get black lung insurance benefits post-mortem. Some of the offended spouses even told me they had to have their husband’s bodies exhumed to prove they had died of black lung disease.

            Of course, the gory details of progress created by the Industrial Revolution as it related to the humans involved in mining coal or making steel were often either taken for granted, overlooked, or simply accounted for like the first wave of warriors in a war involving only bows and arrows. They were considered “the arrow catchers,” collateral damage, the price of progress.

            “Cobalt Red” does a deep dive into the current horrors our contemporary revolution is causing. With climate change deniers on one side and world ending climate catastrophe predictors on the other, it feels like the rock and hard place we’re currently faced with regarding the future of mankind has once again put us in a no-win position fed by greed in the name of progress. This journey to create a new world order sans fossil fuels, though potentially unavoidable, is also creating enormous levels of suffering and dying.

            Because internationally, most of these mines are considered artisanal or small-scale mines, they are referred to as ASM mines. Unfortunately, these are not small, well controlled and properly run mines. Not unlike the little coal mines that were all over Western PA at the turn of the Twentieth Century, these mines are typically staffed with a workforce that is exposed to hazardous conditions with only rudimentary tools.

            There are currently about 45 million people around the world directly involved in ASM mining which, according to Kara, represents about 90 percent of the world’s total mining workforce. Of course, their work does not just involve cobalt. They are also mining for tin, gold, diamonds, sapphires, and tantalum.

            The author states his findings in this book very clearly, “There are many episodes in the history of the Congo that are bloodier than what is happening in the mining sector today, but none of these episodes ever involved so much suffering for so much profit linked so indispensably to the lives of billions of people around the world.”

            The next time you look at your smart phone, your smart pad or watch, or you fire up your computerized car, just understand that the billion- and trillion-dollar companies who are buying the products of these miners must be aware that there is no clean supply chain that ameliorates the “suffering from oppression accompanied by unimaginable barbarities responsible for the destruction of life.” Once again, corporate greed is a matter of life and death. 

For the past 30 years, I’ve felt like a healthcare time-traveler.

Maybe that was because I took such a circuitous route getting there through education, the arts, and tourism, or maybe it was because I’m a musician whose brain was just wired differently.

Regardless, I’ve spent the past three decades proposing ideas that may or may not someday be implemented.

This afternoon, I ran across an article that I had written a decade ago that began with an idea I had been cultivating for 16 years.

It started with this sentence: Periodically, my life intersects with certain realities that previously did not seem to even be a consideration.

This article was about a potential project that involved the networking of approximately 20 rural hospitals via web connectivity.

The purpose of the network was to create a virtual health system that was not dominated by one super tertiary power, the normal health system model which is an ego-centric model that typically takes away the “Community” from community health care.

The network of small rural hospitals that I was studying had, in order to meet their overnight radiology needs, spent about $21 million for teleradiology connectivity to Australia.

My proposal suggested not limiting this to radiology. With that in mind, I proposed the viability of web based technology for cardiology, dermatology, oncology, and a dozen other specialities via telemedicine.

That very day, I saw an article by Christopher Lawton of the Wall Street Journal, who wrote “Cough, Cough. Is There A Doctor in the Mouse?” regarding the use of web services that allows patients to communicate with doctors via online video, text, chat or phone.

The year was 2009.

The organization I proposed this solution to rejected it as too progressive and today those 20 hospitals are still struggling to provide advanced specialty services.

Meanwhile, as we attempted to navigate COVID-19, telemedicine became not only popular but was also funded by insurance and has become extremely essential and life-saving.

About five years ago, I was tasked with creating an international seminar on integrative psychiatry which was aired on PBS in the Greater New York City area.

We had psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counselors, patients, and patient families who heard medical doctors from numerous foreign countries and the United States describe the incredible progress they had made with patients when they introduced integrative modalities to their practices.

These included music, art, movement, and meditation as part of their treatment plans.

Nothing big came out of that ground-breaking program either.

My next big effort was in pharmacogenomics where scientists test 300 of your 30,000 genes and then can tell you definitively which medications will or will not personally work for you. Twenty years later, that science is just beginning to be taught in pharmacy schools.

These types of rejected ideas have often made me wonder what my purpose was here on this planet. If leadership didn’t respond, if they listened but didn’t act, what good was it to be a thought-leader whose programs were clearly directed toward the future?

Then it hit me. I was put here to plant seeds, to make people think, to explore not what is but what could be.

It was only a few years ago when I offered two programs on Blue Zones at the Connellsville Canteen and Fayette County picked up on that theme and is making progress in this area of healthy living.

Consequently, I’m going to continue to try to get people to look ahead to ideas that could make our lives better, to challenge our status quo, to think positively.

Maybe like Johnny Appleseed who was credited with planting apple trees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia and Ontario, that vision to plant trees that would flourish after he was no longer there to enjoy them seems like a reasonable plan with a positive outcome.

           Recently, I had been invited to address a selective group of  Deans and Directors from a local university and independent hospital. My presentation was centered on, “The Role of Integrative Health and Medicine in Rural Hospitals,” and it was  based on my work in wellness and prevention. I defined our efforts at both Windber Medical Center (now the Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center Windber) and then nationally with the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine.

            Because my goal was to help build a stronger commitment to preventative health and wellness at both organizations, I addressed how a combined effort between these two strong neighboring not-for-profits could foster improved health in their workplace for their employees, for their patients and university students, for the citizens in the communities they served, and finally, for the students in their local school districts.

In the book “Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers” Robert Sapolsky exposes us to the concepts of stress management and biology. When addressing diet and stress management, he gives the example of a young lawyer who decides that “red meat, fried foods, and a couple of beers per dinner constitute a desirable diet, and the consequences are anything but clear. Half a century later, maybe that attorney is crippled with cardiovascular disease, or maybe he’s taking bike trips with his grandkids.”

As Sapolsky stated in Zebra’s, “We are certainly aware of the extraordinary amount of physiological, biochemical, and molecular information available as to how all sorts of intangibles in our lives can affect very real bodily events.” My presentation was directed toward the steps we, as education and healthcare professionals, can take to assist our stakeholders in their life-journey.

Because “sustained psychological stress is a relatively recent invention mostly limited to humans and other social primates, we can experience wildly strong emotions linked to mere thoughts.” These fight-or-flight emotions were originally intended to assist all mammals during their lives but especially when being chased by saber tooth tigers. (That doesn’t happen much anymore.)

            The purpose of my presentation was to provide them with the tools needed to help deal with our daily ongoing stressors. It’s all about diet, moderate exercise, non-judgmental social support, and stress management via mindfulness activities. In many cases, we can decide every day in every way what should be worth dying over and, for the most part, determine what types of things knock us out of our homeostatic balance?

            Inactivity can be as harmful as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Obesity kills as many people as smoking which is life-ending annually for over 450,000 people in the United States alone, but stress? There’s no limit to the amount of people who are harming their health and limiting their futures by not learning any type of mind-calming, stress management techniques. It doesn’t matter if it’s yoga, the rosary, worry beads, meditation, or calmly nurturing a pet.

            Sapolsky goes on to explain the various “nuts-and-bolts factors” that will help determine which of these outcomes will occur. He explores the liver’s role in the making of cholesterol, the enzymes in fat cells, and potential congenital weaknesses. Then he hits the motherload, which is personality and how we individually deal with the stress generating problems between the mind and body.

            We know that the predominant diseases we deal with today are those resulting from, as the author explains “a slow accumulation of damage—heart, cancer, and cerebral vascular disorders.” We’ve also come to learn the fact that these inflammatory diseases are fed by a “complex intertwining of our biology and our emotions.” And there is zero doubt that “extreme emotional disturbances can adversely affect us.” In other words, “stress can make us sick.”

            Bottom line? Find what stops your amygdalae from pushing your emotional buttons to stop making you think that a tiger is chasing you.

            My former Chief Operating Officer, a former emergency room physician, used to look at me when I was stressed and say, “Everything’s okay. No one died.”  And, indeed, it was, and even I’m still here.

In the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a down-on-his-luck private eye, Eddie Valiant gets hired by cartoon producer R.K. Maroon to investigate a scandal involving Jessica Rabbit, the wife of Maroon’s biggest star, Roger Rabbit. But when Marvin Acme, the owner of Toontown, is found murdered, Judge Doom vows to catch and destroy Roger. If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s time because the country is currently going through a similar experience with the Former President, Donald Trump. Our country may be Marvin Acme, and the January 6th committee Judge Doom, but who is the real villain?
Trump has had some horrific luck during his lifetime where, even though he questionably inherited, many millions of dollars from his real estate-mogul father’s estate, there are those who have analyzed how those funds were used and claim his life would have been better, he would have been wealthier, and even more positively perceived by everyone if he had just invested that inheritance and lived comfortably from the interest generated.
If you look at his history of failed businesses, it’s a lot longer than even his history of failed marriages. I’m sure just paying off his ex-wives, his other misadventures with the ladies, and his myriad lawsuits from not paying contractors and craftsmen for the work done on his various bankrupt buildings, he could have lived luxuriously forever. Stack on top of that the failed Trump Airlines, Casinos, University, Steaks, the Trump Game, Trump Mortgage Company, Trump’s Corporate Communications Company, Trump Travel Site, Trump Tower Tampa, Trump mattresses, Trump Vodka, and even Trump Cologne. Per Forbes, “Trump claimed that his brand and brand-related deals were worth some $3.3 billion. Forbes valued his brand at less than .04% of that amount.” And went on to say, “Trump has repeatedly stood for half-baked schemes, shoddy work, and sketchy characters.” The poor guy just can’t catch a break.
Unlike Eddie Valiant, however, the former twice-impeached, disgraced president had been exposed to a philosophy of living from, among others, his famous Pastor, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale and other mentors and influencers such as his attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Roy Cohn, chief counsel to the infamous U.S. Representative Joseph McCarthy. Philosophically, he believes whatever the outcome is, never admit defeat. Not unlike Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propogandist who succeeded Adolf as Chancellor of Germany for one day before he and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide, Trump discovered you can win over the masses by using provocation to bring attention. There was a link between all of these men that seemed to inhabit our former president’s psyche. If you do fail, never admit you failed, which was Rev. Peale’s “Power of positive thinking” on steroids, Then, make sure there are people upon whom you can place blame even if you have to fictitiously create them, and Goebbels’ if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it no matter how ridiculous it is.
Well, the January 6th Committee is carefully unpeeling the Trump onion by using not only his closest advisors, appointed leaders, and former allies, but also his oldest daughter and her husband to demonstrate what he knew, when he knew it, and how he selectively chose to ignore them. He did this to perpetrate the greatest scheme in American History by refusing to secede power and step down as President through igniting the ire of the masses via his “big lie” about a stolen election. According to the witnesses, he skillfully used his accusations and provocations to generate a quarter of a billion dollars designated to defend his presidency but instead spent it on his hotels, and to elect and buy candidates who would be loyal to him.
We don’t know how this real-life movie will end. Will Judge Doom or Merritt Garland press charges? Will autocracy replace democracy? In this case, it’s up to you.

As I sort through my thoughts, I look down at my hands and remember how small they once were,

When my Mom would hold on to each one of them tightly and happily swing me around.

Just like every young kid, my whole world was still new, filled with laughter, with love and with her.

She would hug me and hold me, and sometimes she’d scold me, but then kiss away every frown.

As a small child I knew that my mother would love me and always would help my light shine.

And when I got scared, or felt bad, or was angry, her love like a blanket was there.

It was great to be wanted, to feel that deep comfort, to have such an innocent time,

To be swaddled in light and be filled with contentment with not even one tiny care.

When I saw yesterday that nine shots had been fired just a block from my last Pittsburgh home,

I thought first of Uvalde, the Tops store in New York, then my mind went geography bound

To the 213 mass shootings we’ve witnessed that happened just this year alone,

And I feared for the lives of my neighbors and friends, When I saw a young mom on the ground

Holding Baby De’Avry and crying for help as she cradled her son to her chest.

Her small child was the victim of a gang drive-by shooting, a repetitive story too long.

And like so many others whose names we all know, he was taken, his soul put to rest.

Yes, her baby was just one more senseless victim, collateral damage, so wrong.
So now we must do everything that we can do to stop all this carnage and pain.

Like thinking and praying, and loving and caring, but most of all taking strong stands,

To work with our towns and our government leaders because this is really insane.

Our country must find every possible way to stop wiping this blood from our hands.De”Avery

Think before you speak or just ‘Statazit’

Nick Jacobs

Columnist

As a kid, we were never allowed to say ‘shut up.’ My Italian grandmother would, however, sometimes playfully say statazit (Sta ta zeet) to my grandfather. Yeah, in Italian slang that meant ‘shut up,’ or her English translation, ‘Shut up-a u face.’ But if I ever said that in public, my Presbyterian-Quaker mother would literally end that expression with a swift kick to the pants.

Depending on who or why you say it, ‘Shut up’ can be fighting words, but gosh knows there are several times a week where it is a suppressed response. Statazit, however, is sometimes a fun way to get around being punched.

When you hear a young childless person say something like ‘I believe all kids should always eat whatever they want like gummy worms, chocolate cookies, and soda pop.’ The correct response from anyone anywhere who has any understanding of diet essentials would be, ‘Statazit.’

There was a time when we, as human beings, understood there were areas of experience and expertise about which we had little or no knowledge. That lack of knowledge rendered us as unqualified to express our opinion about the subject.

For example, I don’t know how one goes about preparing a meal that includes beef bourguignon. In fact, I’m not even sure what’s in that recipe except beef and whatever bourguignon is. Consequently, I’m not willing to consider stating my opinion about how to prepare that dish. That, however, is no longer a problem. People now continuously loudly shout out their ideas about things about which they have no knowledge. It’s like some type of arrogant ignorance.

Short of a replacement for the named devices below, I’m not an expert on what it takes to fix the garbage disposal, garage door opener, or for that matter, the front door. Therefore, you will never hear me criticizing or belittling someone who has fixed or replaced any of those things correctly multiple times.

Here’s my point. If we can agree that individual human beings are capable of developing skills from training, repetition, guidance and education that are not skills we have had the opportunity to develop in our lifetimes, we should also be willing to admit they have some deeper understanding of certain subject areas that we don’t have.

That is not a serious idea to comprehend.Do you, for example, know what complex mathematical formulas it takes for an engineer to design and build a skyscraper? No? Then, ‘Statazit.’

Why is it we are being consistently inundated with people on both sides expressing their usually baseless opinions about things they don’t understand, or about things that require knowledge they don’t have? The majority of those topics are not only complex, they are also figuratively and sometimes literally brain-busters.Yes, of course we have the right to free speech, but we shouldn’t expect society to pay for the consequences of our incorrect decisions, decisions that can both harm us and others around us for life. If you’re not sure about something, just ‘Statazit.’

Here’s the bottom line. Go to a hardware store and look at their large selection of filters. We have filters for a good reason. They protect us from dirt, germs, dust, polluted water, and other potentially harmful elements. Unfortunately, they don’t have filters for our words or our thoughts and therein is where the problem lies. Take one second and think before you speak. It’s an amazing way to appear sane, to keep from getting punched, or from having your car keyed. Sure, you can have opinions, but do some serious homework before you choose to die on any particular hill.

Just take a step back once in a while and consider what you’re passionately screaming about. It could be that you should just ‘Statazit.’ Of better still, carefully say it under your breath because someone might understand Italian and give you a Will Smith whack across the mouth.