Claudia Arrau. Photograph courtesy Diane Smith.

Unleaded Cats
Is your cat UNLEADED? Here's what you need to know about Lead Poisoning.

Ted Kreiter, Executive Editor of The Saturday Evening Post noticed something wrong with his award-winning American Silver Tabby. Catamus lost about half of his body weight over a period of "a month or two, at least." When Catamus would finish eating, he'd throw up. The last thing for which the veterinarian tested turned out to be the cause: lead poisoning.

 Until a few days ago, I smoked steadily for the past 18 years... at a pack a day, that represents about 6570 packs... 131,400 or so nails in my coffin, at a lifetime cost of around $25,000. If I have cancer as a result, the cost to myself, family and society will be much higher. Now that I am working through withdrawal from addiction to smoking, it is a good time to hate all those who are responsible for the fact anyone in my lifetime has smoked at all, and that over the next 100 years a billion people will die as a result. Hate them all... spit on their graves... from Jesse Helms ("Washington's Number One Guardian of the Health of the Cigarette Industry") to the Marlboro Man (several, actually, who died of cancer) and so many potentially good farmers made wretched in government subsidy and greed by evil industry, politics and lawyers. The only real winners from that misfortune are the greatest losers in NEO, Jones Day, who make ungodly money to kill smokers with strategies like: "The key defense strategy in smoking and health litigation is (and must be) to try the plaintiff."

Over the next many years and decades, NEO will need quality "independent" journalism to cover lead poisoning, air and water polluters, and other toxic conditions here, which are caused by globally-dominant corporate interests like Jones Day and Sherwin Williams, which have significant influence on the economy on their "home field" of NEO. While I don't see transformational impact coming from any current independent NEO media forces, I came across a 2000 article in the Columbia Journalism Review that offered a best case perspective on Newhouse, the Plain Dealer owners, which should be revisited as we welcome a new publisher... the premise: "When good editors come together with the Newhouse management philosophy, better newspapers result." What about the impact of new publishers?

The purported independent Newhouse management philosophy and Plain Dealer transition to new, non-NEO publishing-leadership suggest the PD is well positioned and may be ready and able to address the issue of lead poisoning and other environmental crises here, even as the PD and Newhouse depend on polluters for significant advertising revenues, and have big business connections with polluters' attorneys, and have political agendas themselves. In fact, I believe for the future it will prove to be an advantage for NEO that we have one monopoly print newspaper, which is part of an independently-owned publishing conglomerate managed from afar, staffed with editors and a publisher from afar, as it is unlikely any of that may be corrupted by local political or business interests. The White House is an entirely different matter, for different analysis.

But, it occurs to me, the Newhouse family made a bold move in selecting Doug Clifton as editor of the PD, some six years ago, and NEO has been rewarded with better journalism. Now, we have a new publisher and that opens up more opportunities for progress in our community. Say what you may, but print is not dead, and the daily Plain Dealer has a very strong influence on all aspects of daily life in NEO. And, like a law firm, the PD should include with every article whether they have a conflict of interest covering that subject... if they make money from advertising from this drug company, or that big box retail chain, or a journalist lives in a township they cover, or a newspaper publisher is on the board of this hospital or that university... all that should be disclosed, with intelligence. In fact, I'd like to know the religious orientation of journalists - denomination and degree of practice - especially if they are covering politics and influencing votors. All this should be registered in thorough, standardized profiles, available on-line, and mapped and linked to the journalists' published print and electronic material for coninuous disclosure.

If NEO is to become at all desirable and attractive as a new economy community, throughout the years and decades ahead, we need radical change regarding pollution and toxins in our environment, promoting recovery from past industrial policies that have contaminated our community and society. For that to occur, the Plain Dealer must help educate the people on the realities of today's dangerous state here, and point leaders and followers toward a cleaner future, without concern for any other conflicts of interest. The Newhouse family seems to allow such independence of their papers and staff, so it seems entirely up to the Plain Dealer leadership and journalists themselves to control the health of their readers and the public at large. That is an immense responsibility, as our lives are literally in their hands. Read more about who own their hands, below:

WIND TURBINES SOLD IN BIG BOX STORES

Canadian Tire stores are located in big box mall slots all across Canada.   If you aren’t familiar with Canadian Tire    http://www.canadiantire.ca/index.jsp , they are a hybrid of  tire/battery sales/service, auto parts, hardware and paint, home wares, lawn care, bbq, and sporting goods.   Canadian Tire’s gimmick is their issue of  “Canadian Tire Money” as a premium on every sale to be used against future purchases.  Your kids usually end up with it. 

Do you realize that "The removal of lead from gasoline in 1990, regarded by many as one of the major public health triumphs of the 20th century, had an immediate impact. Between 1976 and 1994, the mean blood lead concentration in children dropped from 13.7 mcg/dL to 3.2 mcg/dL, in direct proportion to the amount of tetraethyl lead produced. One could want no clearer testimony to the efficacy of a well-conceived and consistently applied public health policy." Further, "there is a dose response relationship between lead in bones and self reported delinquent behavior in children - grounds for an arrest" and "study of prisoners in Cincinnati finds strong relationship between bone lead and number of arrests" and "statistical analysis of lead in environment vs. murder rate 21 years later is very powerful". So violent and irational behavior is an outcome of lead poisoning. Beyond the statistical proof of how this impacts society, and each of us, REALNEO's Phillip and I have seen the impact in a clinical setting, by visiting the Lead Clinic at MetroHealth and speaking with patients there, and their families, and our observations were highly disturbing.

July 17 – 21 is Ohio Lead Awareness Week. We would like to invite you to participate in the March for Lead Safe Living. This event is planned by the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council to make people aware of the issues of childhood lead poisoning, and to let people know that we can do a better job in eliminating these problems. The Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council, co-chaired by the Cleveland Department of Public Health, Cuyahoga County Board of Health, and Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry, along with over fifty community partners, is committed to eliminating childhood lead poisoning by the year 2010.

Location

Voices and Choices is a groundbreaking initiative of the Fund for Our Economic Future to develop a far-reaching, comprehensive regional dialog for setting a course for our region's future that will produce more jobs and create better economic opportunities for our families and businesses. Voices & Choices is also educating hundreds of thousands of people about the realities facing the regional economy.

Today's editorial by Dick Feagler on taxing smoking for the arts, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, really makes me think about the unfathomable death and destruction on this planet from humans' use of tobacco, and the evil killers who are to blame for all those deaths. The British site Action on Smoking and Health estimates that between 1950 and 2000 around 60,000,000 people worldwide have died from tobacco-related diseases. That is a shocking number, but a fraction of the 100,000,000+ who have died from tobacco over all time. But still I've been willing to remain an addict to tobacco and smoke... until Feagler's column made me picture myself dying like he may, from smoking. Feagler wrote:

I've smoked off and on (mostly on) for 50 years. My tarred lungs helped build Gateway and Cleveland Browns Stadium. I was an addict. I didn't mind until the doctor told me, "Stop it today." We can't discourage smoking on the one hand and cash in for it on the other.

The more I read about the environment and Ohio the more alarmed I become. It is not just that we are a toxic place, which we are, but that we have been a world-leader making the world toxic and continue in that leadership position today. Fpr examples, we are now the third most polluting state in America, promote very dirty coal as the future of energy, do not as a state take alternative energy seriously, and have significant issues with lead poisoning, including a long, disturbing history of causing that problem for all the world. You probably already know a major defendant in litigation over lead poisoning in America is Cleveland's own Sherwin Williams, and the top litigators for the lead and paint industry against the world are Cleveland, Ohio's Jones Day, and that we have some of the highest lead poisoning rates in the country, but would you have imagined Dayton was the world center of making lead additives for gasoline, which caused the worst worldwide distribution of toxin ever (which was the fault of General Motors), that  Kettering Laboratory on the University of Cincinnati Medical campus was named for the GM research director personally to blame, Charles F. Kettering, director of research at General Motors, and a young assistant professor of pathology at the University of Cincinnati, Robert Kehoe, corrupted the scientific understanding of lead from 1923 into the 1960s, as director of Kettering and agent of the lead industry.

Fortunately, times have changed in Cincinnati as the world expert on the dangers of lead is now Dr. Bruce Lanphear, The Sloan Professor of Children's Environmental Health and the Director of the Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati. Consider the highlights below from  his recent presentation at the Cleveland City Club about lead poisoning, and then read the "Special Note on the Evolution...", as we may not move on to better tomorrows, as a society, without first understanding from where we came, and how we became who and what we are, being toxic and fooled today.

the average I.Q.s of American adults (and you reading this) were most certainly diminished from past lead exposure (especially if you lived in the days of leaded gas)... average I.Q in America is going up, as we eradicate lead 1,000s of NEO children are exposed to hazardous levels of lead in their daily lives today Low income people are most adversely impacted but children in all socio-economic classes are poisoned Often affluent homeowners poison their own families by renovating while living at home, or not properly cleaning after renovations Children pay for lead exposure through diminished productivity throughout life - in very high doses, victims lose their lives (there was a case of this in the past few weeks). Over the past century, American society and government have not addressed lead  effectively, so Americans and our society today must accept responsibilty for the diminished capacities of untold 100,000s of victims and we must pay a $multi-biillion cost for remediation, as well as suffer lead-poison related societal problems like high crime and failing education systems, to say the least. Most tragic, the overall problem was largely avoidable (Europe outlawed lead in the early 1900s), and most individual cases of lead poisoning today are avoidable. If you have or care about kids, you need to read more...

I am really appreciative, this morning. After posting what was certainly the saddest news I can imagine, about the hardship my staff has suffered as a result of a lack of appreciation from my former business associate, Peter Holmes, I opened up this week's CoolCleveland and found that their crew had featured TWO postings from REALNEO. I am very touched and thankful to Thomas and his team for noticing REALNEO and taking an interest in the thoughts posted here - thank you. Please show appreciation back to CoolCleveland... if you are not a member, see what you've been missing... subscribe at CoolCleveland - all free - this is a real NEO must,  and send feedback to CoolCleveland letters at the links below, and supporting the upcoming CoolCleveland/Tech/Ingenuity party at Fat Fish Blue, July 13, and the Ingenuity Festival, as described below... but first, here's the nice write-up about REALNEO from CoolCleveland today, July 5, 2006:

In a really fascinating development, the Plain Dealer attempts today to structure a deal whereby Cleveland citizens accept the idea that the former press secretary to the very dubious former Mayor Mike White, highest-level PR-statute Nancy Lesic is now under contract with the President of the Cleveland City Council, for $48,000, while also being PR-statute  to the Port Authority, and the Clev

While at a meeting in the City Hall Red Room last year, among portraits of many past Cleveland mayors, I asked then Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell's Chief of Staff Chris Ronayne who was Cleveland's best mayor ever, and he said without hesitation Tom Loftin Johnson (b. July 18, 1854 - d. April 10, 1911), who was mayor from 1901 to 1909. I didn't know much about Johnson nor think much more about him until I grew completely disgusted with the inane puffery in the Cleveland Plain Dealer demanding we the public bend over and take ODOT's obliteration of downtown Cleveland, Wolstein's destruction of the Flats, Stark's WalMarting of the Warehouse District, Carney's corruption of the Port Authority, and now Volpe's Disneyfication of Public Square, driving me to stand up and seek reality at the roots of this one-paper-chase misplanting of bad planning seeds into our social subconsciousness, so greedy developers may destroy our civic  mind, heart, and soul. So, I ask you the public to consider, will any of these corrupt land-grab developments serve the masses. or have we strayed so far from the world Tom Johnson left us that we are again just a low-class, groping, leaderless, blind, selfish, forsaken party to few, as Tom Johnson found and fought at the beginning of the last century? For the answers, join me at Public Square below...

Last week, I had a chance to catch up with Constant Systems' Aiden Audouy for a report on their progress for basing some operations of this exciting biotech company in Northeast Ohio (see scenario here). The news for Constant Systems world-wide is all great, offering incredible opportunity in the coming months and years for NEO, may we close Constant Systems. Read on...

 The following story with its links ran in CASE Daily (Case's online newpaper) today. Do feel like you have entrepreneurial genes? I think I do! Please post your thoughts
"Do genes influence who will be entrepreneurs?"

ABC News (Reuters), June 5, 2006
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2041245

While looking for lead testing kits and information in East Cleveland, at Silvermans, I slipped into paparazzi mode as I spotted three future leaders of our NEO new economy, chilling on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. They let me snap their pictures, which will be worth a fortune when these guys are famous. It can happen, when we keep our kids lead free.

MAGNET: Regional Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network Launches Their Plan in 2006

THE KING BRIDGES OF CLEVELAND, OHIO

It is fitting that the only one of the great bridges built by the King Bridge Company still standing is in Cleveland, the home of the company, its founder and his offspring. From just after the Civil War to the end of World War I, a period of six decades, the company played an important role in building the infrastructure of the metropolitan region, particularly the links to carry surface traffic across the sinewy Cuyahoga River, the city’s most important commercial and industrial water way. Moveable bridges crossing the river on the valley floor were the earliest solutions for making the east to west connections. One of Zenas King’s earliest important bridges was the city’s first iron swing bridge built on Columbus Avenue in 1864. The next year he built a similar patented swing bridge at Seneca Street and yet another at Jefferson Street in 1871.[7] However, to prevent the clash between shipping and surface traffic, high level crossings to allow boats to pass underneath without interrupting the traffic flow were the ideal solution. Following on their earlier projects, the King Bridge Company was able to obtain the contracts, first to build the high level Central Viaduct in 1888, then later, the Detroit-Superior Bridge in 1914 to close out the company’s final chapter of Cleveland bridge-building. The Detroit-Superior Bridge, along with the Center Street Swing Bridge built in 1900 and the B&O Railroad Scherzer Lift Bridge built in 1907, all notable structures in the history of bridge engineering, remain today as the King Bridge Company’s legacy to the City of Cleveland.

Peter Garforth at The City Club of Cleveland

Location

Northeast Ohio is about to see an explosive, high profile, living, learning and enlightening force hit the scene and landscape, as area filmmakers, learning institutions and the public come together to create NEO Central - a bleeding-edge collaborative media arts center for NEO now and the future.The center will be based on like-minded initiatives around the world, and will provide shared film/media education, incubation, production, distribution, business and technology resources, and facilities, which are currently located in the historic landmark Gillota Building at 300 Central Viaduct (Carnegie) and will be expanded significantly as part of an area economic development plan. More on all of this is found in the links below, which will grow...

Greater Cleveland has a higher percentage of elevated blood level children than the national average, and many neighborhoods have significant lead poison problems. This book shares insight generated in the effort to eradicate lead poisoning in NEO, including initiative of the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council... GCLAC.

Constant Systems' Aidan Audouy and Diane Brown drew a diverse audience for a roundtable dedicated to closing the economic development loops needed to attract their company to Northeast Ohio. Roundtable attendees had the one challenge: to learn enough about Constant Systems to determine who we know who may help Constant Systems succeed here - an experiment in viral social networking, open source economic development and the power within very few degrees of separation. In other words, among the diverse thirty-or-so folks who came together for the Excellence Roundtable, we expect to be able to connect the representatives of Constant Systems with the people they still need to meet here to succeed... customers... very specialized customers, primarily in medical-related R&D, of which NEO has many, and access all world-wide.

Please come together at the Charter One Global Enterprise Center for a very special Excellence Roundtable with a specific purpose - Closing Constant Systems.

For this proactive lunchtime discussion, Constant Systems' Aiden Audouy and Diane Brown will demonstrate their technology and explore with us the factors influencing whether their company will locate valuable business operations in NEO, or Research Triangle. By being at this Roundtable, you can help them determine NEO is the best location in the nation and prove that to their CEO.

Location