PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION AT THE END OF THIS BY FOLLOWING THE LINK. The petition can also be found at http://www.change.org/petitions/let-the-end-marijuana-prohibition-act-ge...

The Other Night I Remembered A Dream - And I Never Remember Dreams. This Was Serious.

Evelyn and I were sitting in the foyer of our home talking, at night, when gunmen in black masks suddenly rushed through our front door. We dove to the ground and lay there wondering what would happen. Suddenly there was a nine millimeter pushing forcefully against my forehead.

Then, I felt a numbing pain in my back and I could feel something was sucking the life out of my spine - and thank God I awoke.

Now I have been stabbed in the back so many times by so many people in Cleveland it is made of steel. I'm in the middle of showdowns with liars and cheaters all over town and the country - no big deal. No - this was near and dear. Big surprise to find out the chairman of realNEO Jeff Buster has been in hyper-back-stab mode and trying to destroy My realNEO. Your realNEO!

IntraCom/UCANX Update: GROHIO Sprouting - States of Emergencies - On the road again - BTWs

1. Ohio-based Board members have spent lots of time this week meeting and discussing options for development of the cannabis industries in Ohio - dozens of emails a day - and we have made various outreaches in our own ways. We'll compile a report for the board.

   In brief, while we agree Ohio is a perfect place to base the hemp industries, and it looks the same for MMJ, assuming Lewis' campaign is successful, the politics of Northeast Ohio have been and still are so corrupt, corrupting so much here, we are not confident leaders here will make good decisions. We have certainly not thrown in the towel - we have been focused on Cuyahoga County, VC-types, and the broader community... which is very receptive. Next week, we will expand our focus away from Northeast Ohio, to a broader state-wide exploration.

   Feel free to start reaching out in your states as well, as I can't guarantee Ohio leadership will make the right decisions, and we need to be prepared for serious action ahead.

The field of ESTA-1 variety hemp, showing the relatively weed free ground below the plants.
Ontario, CANADA's Renfrew County - the farm of John and Rae Ann Briscoe - Harvest 2006

Dear President Obama,

I'll be brief, here. The Environmental Protection Agency has further correspondence from me regarding government incompetency in Northeast Ohio, you may want to investigate.

Today, I am writing out of concern for your apparent lack of familiarity with basic science and technology. I don't know where you are from, but in America the Earth is round, and hemp grows here by God! You have scientists in your employ who will confirm that, and that hemp may easily be grown by American farmers without setting off a wave of reefer madness.

Your Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, may confirm modern information technology enables monitoring of just about anything and everything on Earth, down to the nanoscale, including big fat hemp plants, so there is adequate technology in existence today to guard hemp crops against drug dealers more incompetent than DEA agents, who may mistake hemp for marijuana, or who are moronic enough to commingle the two.

realNEO Matters - April 2011 web statistics of primary economic development portals in Northeast Ohio

Since the 1990s, my personal professional mission has been "To Optimize Information Technology for All".

I've helped the world's greatest organizations optimize IT for all their stakeholders, as a consultant working around the globe, and I am enabling Ohio and the world to optimize IT for all citizens, as an information technology innovator in my home of Northeast Ohio. One important expression of my mission to optimize IT for all is realNEO.US - Regional Economic Action Links for North East Ohio - which I founded in 2004, moved into the dysfunctional but living Real Coop co-operative owned structure a few years later, and have since used to transform the information, technology, insight and action of the people of the world interested in Northeast Ohio, and the world.

I recently received an email from Bill Densmore, co-director of Journalism That Matters, inviting me to "Create or Die 2", offering a nice global opportunity to share the realNEO story more broadly. Journalism That Matters is "an evolving collaboration of individuals supporting the pioneers who are shaping the emerging news and information ecosystem" - Create or Die 2 is about "Disrupting the Status Quo with Journalism Innovation and Entrepreneurship" - and I can't imagine initiatives that fit better with realNEO and my mission.

Ron Paul's signature on hemp paper version of the Industrial Hemp Farming Act.

realNEO readers are among the first to see "The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011, To amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude hemp from the definition of marijuana, and for other purposes", signed by its sponsor, US House Representative of the 14th District of Texas Ron Paul, around 1 PM today, May 11, 2011, and introduced to the US House of Representatives to be enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 112th US Congress.

As Paul previously concluded, in a a statement for Hemp History Week: "The federal government should change the law to allow American farmers to grow this profitable crop as American farmers have through most of our nation's history.  I plan to reintroduce the Industrial Hemp Farming Act next week."

Paul clearly is a man of his word. Above is "The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011"... on hemp paper, and below is Ron Paul signing the bill. 

US veterans and their friends and families turned out by the 100s for the 2011 Cleveland Medical Marijuana Rally

I can't ever remember enjoying converging with 1,000 or so amazingly diverse Clevelanders so much as I did Saturday afternoon, May 7, as Northeast Ohio held the 2011 Cleveland Medical Marijuana March and Jobs, Peace and Freedom Rally. The crowd created the buzz of a perfect championship game day - Cleveland was in the World Series again.

At the 2011 Cleveland Medical Marijuana Rally, medical patients experienced an historic moment of personal freedom and liberty, in peace, and went home healthier - we all saw Cleveland may actually win the world championship, for the first time in our lives - as Ohio... an agricultural, healthcare, industrial and education powerhouse... realizes we must take our rightful place in the Cannabis Economy!

Thanks to Laura McShane for pointing out an excellent article on lead poisoning research at Case Western Reserve University, in the Fall/Winter 2010 Think Magazine - with multimedia features - on-line at Getting the Lead Out: Fifteen years after being effectively removed from the U.S. market, the prolific danger of leaded gasoline becomes clearer. 

This reports on Childhood lead exposure and uptake in teeth in the Cleveland area during the era of leaded gasoline - a recent Case Western Reserve University-affiliated analysis of the lead burden of Cleveland children through the period when leaded gasoline was introduced and later phased out (from about 1930 to 1990), surfacing critical implications.

Comparison of relative temporal changes in lead concentration in tooth enamel and lake sediments, and relative changes in the total amount of lead additives to gasoline. Maximum absolute values and symbols are:  4.94 μg/g (teeth, smoothed data, uninterrupted line), 72.7 ppm (“new core Lake Erie sediment, triangles), 41.1 ppm  (Graney et al., 1995 Lake Erie sediment, open circles), and 253,000 mt of lead additives to gasoline produced in the US, closed circles (see Methods).

Data provided by U.S. Census Bureau.

Cleveland Sees Plunge in Population, reports the Wall Street Journal today, announcing: "A larger-than-expected exodus from Cleveland during the past decade shrunk the city's population by 17% to about 397,000, according to U.S. Census data released Wednesday." That's right, Cleveland's population has crashed below the 400K floor for the first time since around the start of the 20th Century, which triggers all sorts of unsustainable, shrinking, un-re-imaginable financial and political realities for leadership and citizens here.

Perhaps the only silver lining is that this proof of Cleveland political and leadership failure will have a significant price of leaders' heads. From the Wall Street Journal:

Political observers said the decline could tilt the balance of political power in one of America's most hotly contested swing states.

"Ohio is expected to lose two congressional districts, and this big decline in Cleveland suggests that both could come out of northeastern Ohio," a Democratic stronghold, said John Green, a University of Akron political-science professor.

Good morning,

The state of the American education system today is unacceptable. As many as one quarter of American students don’t finish high school. We've fallen to ninth place in the proportion of young people with college degrees. The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

For the sake of the next generation, and America's economic future, this has to change.

At the beginning of the 21st Century - a time when the pace of global evolution was certain to be astounding in every way, in accelerating change each day - especially as driven by transformational new Information Technologies (IT) and services - a serious, young college computer science student wrote some historic collaboration software, in his dorm-room, to help his fellow students communicate more effectively in their evolving, un-tethering, socially-networked world, and that software has been helping citizens freely interconnect with greater impact each day since, to save the world.

The early days of this software are beloved, in real geek-lore:

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University students, so two students set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share one of the students' ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired the other student to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after that student moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website on-line so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for a suitable domain name...

Sunset over Lake Erie from Whiskey Island, on a nearly perfect Summer's day. Dedicated to Citizen Ed Hauser.

Dear Mr. Wolstein,

Please hold off on using the Forum Architects' plans for your redevelopment in the Flats, as much has improved in the prospects for this city and region since they were conceived - there is new energy, life and opportunity coming into Cleveland that will improve the prospects for this most important historic site that I've been vocal in my disappointment to see go.

As you are moving forward in new directions, Cleveland and regional leaders including myself must move forward in many new directions previously inconceivable. As such, planning needs frequent re-visioning - and may in fact be open sourced, real-time and community enabled with world class information technology, which we'll be developing more of in Northeast Ohio in the future.

Most significant, we are in the process of removing from our community the dangerous pollution emitted from the coal burning at FirstEnergy Lake Shore (already decommissioning), MCCO, in University Circle, and Cleveland Thermal, next door to your site (your greatest liability, easily made an asset), and the outrageous environmental injustice from Mittal and some other industrial operations - and the direct and fugitive emissions from the mobile pollution sources servicing them - ships, trains and trucks  - that are just not safe for dense urban neighborhoods, which we must save and restore. There are economically viable solutions to all these challenges - it does not need to be this way!

Dear Mr. Mowry, Chief Information Officer, Cuyahoga County, Ohio:

Welcome Home.

Without a doubt, you hold the most opportune and important office in the region, today, and I wish you great success.

As I informed the Very Reverend Lind, of Trinity Cathedral, I am posting this outreach for the help of her good people to move Cleveland Thermal and so Cleveland beyond coal. Please reach out to these friends of the community with your words of support for a cleaner, safer, healthier, more prosperous Cleveland and NEO for all, beyond coal.

Dear Reverend Lind and supporters of Trinity Cathedral:
Norm Roulet <norm [at] realneo [dot] us>     Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 4:01 PM
To: tlind [at] dohio [dot] org
Cc: Nachy Kanfer <nachy [dot] kanfer [at] sierraclub [dot] org>
Dear Very Reverend Lind and supporters of Trinity Cathedral:

I appreciate your presence and good work in this community, and know you are prominent preachers for goodness, on a good Earth.

It has come to my attention that Trinity Cathedral is a customer of the Cleveland Thermal coal steam plant in the Flats, providing excessively-polluting utilities to your facilities on Euclid Avenue - that is featured on their website at http://www.clevelandthermal.com/services/case-studies

Cimperman for Congress 2008 - Top Donors - featuring Charles Evans from Dominion Cleveland Thermal for $2,000 - I assume the DiSanto, Frederick D. of Ancora Advisors LLC listed here for $2,300 is the same Ancora of Grenwich, Connecticut that bought Cleveland Thermal from Dominion in 2004:

RICHMOND, Va., July 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Dominion (NYSE: D) announced today that it has agreed to sell Dominion Cleveland Thermal to Ancora Management LLC of Greenwich, Connecticut. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter of 2004. Terms of the sale were not disclosed and the sale is subject to regulatory approval.

Look at all the other corrupting industrial and developer scum on Cimpermans buy-list who have been screwing Cleveland... wonder what each one wanted in return for their $1,000s... lucky Cimperman lost by a mile. Time to rid Cleveland of the power of all these self-serving, citizen-killing parasites forever!
 

Top 100 Donations/Contributions in the '08 Election Cycle to
JOE CIMPERMAN FOR CONGRESS

Name/ Location	Employer/ Occupation	Contribution $ Amount	Primary/ General	Date
Adams, Al T. Cleveland, OH 44114	Baker/Attorney	$2,300	P	02/12/2008
Alexander, Anthony Akron, OH 44308	FirstEnergy Corporation/President	$2,300	P	02/28/2008

An ambient film of real NEO people walking, shot from outside the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper headquarters, featuring late afternoon activity in the newsroom as seen from Superior Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, realNEO... "Schism" by TOOL is playing in the background, accompanied by the sounds of realNEO..

I've often wondered why the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been so disrespectful and harmful to me - I believe the following documents will explain - The Cleveland Plain Dealer is a Cleveland Thermal customer and so Cleveland Environmental Justice criminal - I know the Pieces Fit!

Document Record

View Image

Date Filed:  Document Type:  Number of pages:  Case Numbers:  Summary: 

2/5/1997 7:20:03 AM

TX-Text

000012

89-0362-HT-AEC

Alternate energy steam service agreement between Cleveland thermal Energy and The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, filed on behalf of applicant by S. Howard. (12 pgs.)

Google Analytics of weekly realNEO visits and pageviews from December 01, 2008 to January 26, 2011

As I've reported over the past year, while sharing realNEO site statistics with members - most recently, in November, marking our 7th year - realNEO traffic demonstrates very consistent month-to-month and year-to-year growth for visitors, visits and pages viewed. Where there are dips, like each Christmas holiday season, there is year-to-year growth - we've always had strong, consistent, steady performance as illustrated above, since December 2008 (the first month we had reliable Google analytics).

Nicole Foss will be speaking on A Century of Challenges: Building Local Resilience in an Era of Economic Turmoil & Resource Depletion.  She writes at www.TheAutomaticEarth.blogspot.com under the pseudonym Stoneleigh.  The talk will be held at First Church in Oberlin,106 N.

Google Analytics Traffic Data for realNEO.us for October 19 - November 18, 2010 (31 days)

Based on Google Analytics of realneo.us traffic, we are now at a level that exceeds 500,000 unique visitors and 1,000,000 page visits per year, and both metrics have been growing steadily for as long as we have tracked our web traffic metrics... so expect realNEO.us to exceed 1 million hits per year forever hereafter. By how much we exceed these metrics, with what growth rate for the future, is up to our members and community who create the content here that now attracts over 1,000,000 reads a year.

2010 REALNEO Mid-Year Update at 12,594 Nodes; 25,366 Comments; and 8,984 Members... many who are Trolls

Since around the beginning of 2010, when realNEO.US had been stable long enough to have fairly accurate statistics of our web-traffic - based on over a year of tracking with Google analytics and consistent data on Compete.com - I have been providing members with regular analyses of various metrics of our web traffic, for community insight. These updates include:

Ed Hauser drove community opposition to the current ODOT bridge planning disaster,
just as he drove opposition to port planning on Whiskey Island, and demolition of the Breuer -
seen here in November, 2005, videotaping Paul Alsenas describing a better vision HE lost

As Steven Litt points outs out in the Plain Dealer today, as he slams all the designs and design processes leading to the $3.5 billion boondoggle that is the Cleveland ODOT I-90 bridge replacement disaster...

Several years ago, ODOT rejected a brilliant urban design proposal by Cuyahoga County Planning Director Paul Alsenas, which called for building a single new east- and westbound span further south of the existing right-of-way.

The Alsenas concept would have opened up new land for development around Gateway and shortened the total length of the bridge, producing savings in construction and long-term maintenance.