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.

It is interesting to see published in Crain's Cleveland Business today Study advocates creation of NEO Food Authority to aid in localizing region's food supply that reports "A comprehensive study that examines the state and potential of Northeast Ohio's food economy calls for the creation of a NEO Food Authority that would facilitate a 25% shift in localizing the region's culinary and agriculture systems." That's the leading recommendation I made in my Preamble: Real Co-op for Open Food, Information and Community Development 2009, which I developed with one of the authors of the study Crain's references today, Brad Masi, about two years ago.

To optimize value in these critical sectors, I have recommended Cuyahoga County convene and sponsor overarching Greater Cleveland Food and Information Advisory Councils, like and associated with the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council, and county leaders should take active roles leading the councils and in planning these multi-billion-dollar sectors of our economy and society... we must not entrust the leadership, innovation, financial engineering and decision-making control to under-engaged government and over-engaged foundations, academe, industry and non-profits.

Planning these sectors should not happen behind closed doors in any ways at all, as has been the case in the past.

Crain's is reporting on "Economist Michael Shuman, who is part of the local and national consulting team that has conducted the Northeast Ohio Local Food Assessment, presented the study's findings Tuesday, Nov. 16, to a sold-out meeting at the City Club of Cleveland." Apparently, a bunch of Foundation-paid consultants have finished planning local foods behind closed doors.

The report is found at the NEO Food Web portal - you must register for access, which seems open to the public, and Drupal.... see Summary of NEO Local Food Assessment and Plan after you have set up an account... or just click the following link for a 354 KB .PDF of the "summary" report (the only report posted)... Summary of The 25% Shift- Northeast Ohio Local Food Assessment and Plan.

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) - Dozens gathered at the courthouse steps in downtown Dayton on Saturday, to push for laws to legalize medical marijuana.

There was an important public health and social justice activist gathering in Ohio, this past weekend - groups supportive of legalizing medical marijuana in Ohio gathered at Courthouse Square, located at the corner of Third and Main Streets in the heart of downtown Dayton in support of H.B. 478, Ohio’s Medical Compassion Act that will allow for the medicinal use of cannabis.

OCA Image TV Episode 6 - Cleveland Asian Town Community from Johnny Wu on Vimeo.

November 14, 2010, AlterNet featured an important article by G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting: Workers, Be Careful: Facebook Snoops Looking Over Your Shoulder - Corporations and government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, are increasingly using new communications tools for surveillance purposes. In this report, Schulz profiles "a new company called Social Intelligence billing itself as a social media private eye will observe your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other online accounts on behalf of employers to make certain you’re not a liability."

    Background checks involving criminal records and credit histories are typical and even expected of many major employers responsible for children, nursing homes or public safety.

    But the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company takes this concept to a new level offering an automated tool that mines social media content for troubling signs. Search filters can be customized “to reflect corporate culture,” and additional manual reviews are conducted by “social media experts.”

    A display tells the human resources manager in your workplace how many “negative” hits are uncovered, placing the names of both job applicants and active employees next to red flags like “drugs/drug lingo,” “gangs,” “poor judgment” and “demonstrating potentially violent behavior.”

    Social Intelligence is the latest in an ever-expanding movement by both corporations and government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, to use new communications tools for surveillance purposes. Some of the most provocative examples yet emerged only in recent weeks.

As I prepare to head from Cleveland to San Francisco for the largest sustainability event in the world - The Green Festival - I'm packing some of my favorite bright green products from Northeast Ohio, including a Hemp n' Berry Bar from Plant Kingdom, of Akron, for the road. Bought at VERY OHIO PROUD bright green coffee roasters and retailers Phoenix Coffee, this healthy organic treat proudly boasts it is OHIO PROUD - and I'm proud of that.

Dear President Obama, I guarantee one ingredient in this Ohio Proud product is not from Ohio, or even America-proud - the first ingredient listed on the label - "Sheeled Hempseed (certified organic)". Ask your wife about "H" "E" "M" "P"...

It's a toss up to me between my two favorite assets in Cleveland - The Cleveland Orchestra or the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) - so I am always interested in unique perspectives on those worlds. The CMA is especially interesting right now as they near completion of a massive expansion, that is going very well, and they bring a new Director on board - from the Canadian Museum of Art - David Franklin.

In this week's Scene Magazine, Michael Gill offers the most informative and interesting perspectives on recent CMA developments I've seen, with THE MONEY BUSINESS - The art museum's new boss gets a crash-course in American arts funding.

I've had a good feeling about Franklin from all I've read, and this adds to my enthusiasm. He seems like a personable family man who will integrate with and celebrate with the community rather than hover above, as is so often the case with people in such lofty places - we'll be seeing much human interest in this family in the community, and expect people will appreciate the additions to the community - and neighborhoods of Shaker, where the Franklins have settled.

Of interest in Gill's informative reporting are some financials on the museum and it's operations, including - "Its largest and most dependable source of public funding — the cigarette tax — is just a $1.5 million fragment of the museum's $30 million overall budget". As the museum is one of the greatest in the world and one of few that are FREE - YES FREE - I'd say this is one public expenditure worth spending... although I strongly oppose this sin tax. I'd prefer to offer them some SALES TAX, de la MedCon.

Last night's election gives way to a Republican Majority in the House of Representatives while Democrats will retain control of the Senate.

This split control of Congress will be a challenge, but we have no intention of ceding America's future to Big Oil.

Do you?

We've worked too hard to turn back now.

I want to thank and acknowledge the tens of thousands of you who volunteered with the Sierra Club and local campaigns across the country. While there were some painful losses, your presence in campaigns across the country bolstered our champions and helped drive our agenda forward.

The question is, which side will the new House Republican Majority choose? Will they bow to the Big Oil and Coal interests who expect a return on their $247 million investment in the elections? Or will they listen to what Americans want: clean energy jobs that will lift our economy up.

I'm pleased to report I will be covering for realNEO the 17th Annual Hemp Industry Association (HIA) Conference in San Francisco, California - November 8, 2010.

Please see the enclosed press release for details and contact me at norm [at] realneo [dot] us if you have any specific issues or questions you would like me to explore for this community. I look forward to sharing with the world the important work of this association, representing a near-half-billion-dollar industry that is just taking off in America and worldwide.

Hemp Industries Association to Meet in San Francisco November 8th for Annual Convention

17th Annual Convention to follow San Francisco Green Festival – Rare Historical
Documents on Hemp Research by USDA will be on Display

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – The 17th annual convention of the Hemp Industries Association (HIA) will be held on November 8th at the Holiday Inn Civic Center in San Francisco, CA. The HIA represents a fast growing and environmentally sustainable industry that is creating new jobs, with an estimated $400 million in sales in 2009, despite a federal policy that outlaws hemp farming. Business leaders of the North American hemp industry will meet in San Francisco to map out plans for bringing back hemp farming in the United States, to present updates on industry developments, and to share new data about expanding markets.

Amazing! Ohio has an opportunity to be #1 in the world developing a new industry - a new economy - better and different than anywhere else in the world - ahead of the other 49 states in America and every other country in the world - as citizens of California foolishly failed to pass Proposition 19 today.

Supporters include the California branch of the NAACP, state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, the California Young Democrats, the Republican Liberty Caucus, the California Council of Churches, and several big labor unions.

"The Obama Administration has been clear in its opposition to marijuana legalization because research shows that marijuana use is associated with voluntary treatment admissions for addiction, fatal drugged driving accidents, mental illness, and emergency room admissions," Kerlikowske said.

What tools of old economy polluting industry our PROGRESSIVE (sic.) Democrats have proved to be!

I can't wait for 2012 and the next Presidential election! The next two years are going to be fun, for a change... I love a GOOD WAR.

I once told an supposedly "green" friend that in the future he will not get to jet off to India or Brazil if he can afford, as that will not be ecologically responsible. He nearly cried.

Flying Is One of the Worst Things You Can Do for the Environment -- So Why Do So Many Well-Intentioned Folks Do It?

It's not easy being "Green" - that is life... as highlighted here, and provided in full below, from AlterNet:

The trouble with this is that flying is the single most ecologically costly act of individual consumption, one that requires the exploitation of large amounts of environmental and human resources. In a world of deep inequality, it thus also speaks to privilege -- most notably what we might call ecological privilege -- and its ugly flipside, disadvantage.

Moreover, the climate-destabilizing effects of air travel -- per passenger mile -- dwarfs that of other modes because of the enhanced climatic “forcing” it brings about: due to the height at which planes fly combined with the mixture of gases and particles they emit, conventional air travel detrimentally impacts global climate approximately 2.7 times more than that of its carbon emissions alone, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

To those who don't understand the change that is occurring in the civilized world, outside Ohio, consider this new product line from Colorado and realize if you are in Ohio you can't have any - you can't have the health benefits - you can't be an entrepreneur to compete with this product line - you can't innovate in this space - you can't hang out with these innovators or their class of people - you can't access their markets, customers or investors - because you live across the cannabis divide from civilization, in corrupt, coal-brained Ohio.

But you WILL have lots of pollution from coal-burning in your lungs, in Ohio!

Smart? No! Grohio!

Marijuana Soda Provides a High Without the Smoke

One Colorado soda company has developed a line of sodas that have an unusual ingredient: marijuana. Dixie Elixirs has made their drinks available to anyone with a prescription for medical marijuana.

Already, we've spent more than $1 trillion in Iraq, not counting the $700 billion consumed each year by the Pentagon budget.
And spending in Iraq and Afghanistan now comes to more than $3 billion weekly

There is an important update on the cost to Americans of the war in Iraq and Afghanista, published in the Daily Beast October 27, 2010 - How the Wars Are Sinking the Economy - reporting "Nobel Prize recipient Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget guru Linda J. Bilmes are revising their original $3 trillion war cost estimate. As Bilmes reports, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are at least 25 percent costlier than previous projections—the cost of the wars will reach between $4 trillion and $6 trillion."

They frame these costs from the perspective of the burden the wars place on our economy, which will peak in about a half-century:

For example, we recently analyzed the medical and disability claim patterns for almost a million troops who have returned from the wars, and, based on this record, we've revised our estimate upward to between $600 billion and $900 billion—a broad specter, yes, but certainly also a significant upward tick from our earlier projection of $400 billion to $700 billion, based on historical patterns.

Similarly, our estimates for the economic and social costs associated with returning veterans can be expected to rise by at least a third—the staggering toll of repeated deployments over the past decade.

These poll results, just released today, explain why I will vote and I will vote ANYTHING BUT REPUBLICAN - followed by ANYTHING BUT CONSERVATIVE - followed by ANYTHING BUT 65+ OLD FART... those groups of people are found by most recent Gallop polling to be most likely to be flat-Earther anti-science tools of industry and are not welcome as leaders of my society.

Those I will seek out to vote for will be, in the following order, LIBERALS, THOSE 18-49, from the WEST, DEMOCRATIC and INDEPENDENT, as they poll as most real about public health, liberty, economics and freedom... which is what the issue of legalization of marijuana and hemp is all about.

How I shall ultimately cast my most important ballot is with my feet, choosing to move where I find people most like myself, being liberal, Independent, young (at heart) and West... until Ohio shakes its old-fart conservative Flat Earther failure and gets real.

I just received an after-the-fact announcement from President Obama's U.S. Department of Energy that Obama Administration Hosts Great Lakes Offshore Wind Workshop in Chicago with Great Lakes Wind Collaborative, reporting on "a workshop with the Great Lakes Wind Collaborative in Chicago on October 26 – 27, 2010, focused on the siting of offshore wind power in the Great Lakes. The two day workshop brought together wind developers, Federal and state regulators, environmental advocates, and other regional stakeholders to discuss methods for ensuring greater clarity, certainty and coordination of Federal and state decision-making for offshore wind development in the Great Lakes."

Yet, on September 14, 2010, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Bechtel among developers selected for building a Lake Erie wind farm off Cleveland's coast, stating:

The company that built Hoover Dam, the tunnel under the English Channel and 23,000 other gargantuan projects around the world is going to build the first wind turbines in Lake Erie. Bechtel Development Co. of San Francisco is one of three companies chosen to construct and own the five-turbine demonstration project about 7 miles off shore at an estimated cost of $100 million.

Small by wind farm standards, the five-turbine cluster has been proposed as the precursor to erecting thousands of turbines in the lake -- and jump-starting an entire industry in Northeast Ohio.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, who has chaired the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force for more than four years, agreed that the idea has always been jobs, not electricity, at least not at this point.

As October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, citizens of Ohio should reflect upon the words of Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and his official state policy on Medical Marijuana - “The governor feels that the predominant opinion of the medical community is that there are existing medicines available that provide appropriate patient care“... “So based on that opinion and the current research, he feels this type of legislation doesn’t seem necessary or warranted“ - and realize he is DEAD wrong - "the latest research is proving that cannabinoids, as part of this bodily system, play a mitigating role in breast cancer." That is consistent with historical findings that cannabinoids may have cancer-fighting qualities:

What begs discussion on the occasion of California’s historic vote, which the whole world is watching, is that cannabis has been shown in hundreds of laboratory studies over the past ten years not only to be physiologically harmless, but also to be the most potent anti-cancer agent found in nature. No other natural substance holds the cancer-stopping power of cannabis and that's a proven fact.

In addition, cannabinoids, the active ingredients in marijuana, shrink and prevent the spread of tumors far more effectively than synthetic chemotherapy agents, for the simple reason that they destroy cancer cells without damaging healthy cells, a feat that widely prescribed chemotherapy cocktails can't duplicate.

Dan Moore continues the quest for developing/encouraging/supporting company "founders" as we kick off the next  session of FOUNDERS CAFÉ:

• How to find "unmet needs" in the market place. The message will be the ideas that are most successful are often needs that are out there "hiding in plain sight."
• Discuss sources of unmet needs and how to determine whether a perceived need is truly a need.
• Discuss how to fund very early stage ventures.

Dear Reader,

Since you have been reading AlterNet, you know that we feel very strongly about the destructive effects of the drug war. In the case of marijuana, our laws are clearly doing more harm than good.  

For a substance with many beneficial qualities and very little negative effects, tens of thousands of lives are undermined and enormous amounts of money is wasted. Somewhere around 750,000 arrests are make each year for possession of small amounts of marijuana, which seems absurd.

Legal, licensed Super Skunk and Blueberry Medical Marijuana and Cannabutter food samples from Green Depot, Denver, Colorado

In Denver, Colorado, the above medicine cabinet provides citizens economic opportunity and legal, natural, organic relief from many health ailments - in Cleveland, Ohio, the contents get citizens arrested... especially if they fit the demographic profiles targeted by new Jim Crow laws in America, designed to imprison our poor, minority, urban male population.

That reality defines The Cannabis Divide in America, which presents modern Americans with some of the greatest economic and social disparities in the history of the nation, leading to treatment and accommodations for blacks and Latinos (prison) that are inferior to those provided for white Americans (freedom), systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages (defining Jim Crow laws).

As I highlight below, from a study about criminal injustice in Northeast Ohio: "those areas that have the highest percentages of African-Americans are especially likely to be subject to police surveillance and arrests" for drug possession, leading to poorer treatment and accommodation of proportionately more blacks than whites in our inferior quality-of-life prisons.

"Of those drug possession cases in which the race of arrestee is known within Cleveland city limits, as Table 1 below illustrates, there has been a consistent magnitude of over-representation of non-whites among drug possession arrestees over the past 10 years."

This week, I was thrilled to receive the following forward-thinking message from Nachy Kanfer, Campaign Representative, Midwest States, Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign:

Hi Norm, I think we should take down Cleveland Thermal. Thoughts?

Cleveland Thermal is a major private out-of-state-investor-owned downtown Cleveland and regional air polluter that burns 10,000s tons of coal each year... emits 1,000s of tons of pollution on Clevelanders and the surrounding world each year... to benefit only large real estate investors and corporate, institutional and government customers - much like the private, out-of-license "district" coal-burning Medical Center Company (MCCO) plant polluting the community excessively a few miles away, in University Circle.

EPA Greenversations: “Preventing Lead Poisoning”

Posted on October 25th, 2010 - 10:30 AM

Picture this: You live in a gorgeous older row home in Washington D. C. Although it’s a “fixer upper”, you bought it for its unmatched Victorian charm and its unbeatable location (Who doesn’t want to live next to a cupcake shop?). You finally decide it’s time to remodel the kid’s room and update the kitchen, but your spidey-sense is going off because you know that renovating a pre-1978 homes with lead paint can have risks. What’s the next step?

• Do a search on the internet about EPA’s Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting rule

• Look for a contractor, but make sure to ask them if they are EPA Lead-Safe Certified

• Check with your pediatrician about testing your children for lead

I've learned first-hand how people become environmentalists. They realize they are being polluted, get mad as hell, and do something about it... NIMBY... Not In My Back Yard!

Learning the harm of lead poisoning in my back yard made me an environmentalist against lead poisoning in my community and worldwide.

Learning the harm of pollution from the Arcelor/Mittal Cleveland Works steel mills in my back yard made me an environmentalist against steel production pollution in my community and worldwide.

Learning the harm of pollution from Medical Center Company coal burning in my back yard made me an environmentalist against coal burning in my community and worldwide.

Which has me exploring how big is my back yard... how big is my community?

On July 4, 2006, I posted Independence of the day: May the people of NEO find freedom from "Cleveland Works" - a big picture analysis of the $ multi-billion harm caused in Northeast Ohio each year as a result of the Mittal Cleveland Works steel plant being here, and I concluded: "I propose we start working as an activist community to eliminate Mittal and Cleveland Works and all polluters large and small from our region"... leading to "When I met with my counsel about legalizing cannabis in Ohio, I explained I never bring up a problem without a solution".

It is safe to say that my 2006 posting against Mittal pollution of Northeast Ohio was my first shot in a one-website war against all excessive and unreasonable polluters in Northeast Ohio - a war that has made me about as popular here as was Patton with the Nazis.

Clevelanders are victims of uncaring totalitarian dictators who are gassing our families with toxins that are unsafe for us and our community - they are disfiguring the data that would warn citizens of this harm - they use mainstream media to propagandize for polluters - they attempt to increase the pollution for industrialists' financial gains, at great public cost - they make us sick and weak with toxins that shorten our lives - they make this an undesirable place to raise a family, and for our children to raise families - THEY must be stopped.