Today in the PD, you can read about what we knew was coming in the news from NEORSD.

Three articles in the Sunday, January 14, 2007, Cleveland Plain Dealer really caught my attention. 1. "Power shifts, and a fast-track bill is derailed"; 2. "Gloomy forecast" and 3. "Lost confidence in Bush? So has he"  - especially the last one, where Elizabeth Auster writes, about President Bush, that "he now seems shaken by the prospect that his vision of a free and stable Iraq may be fading along with his power to achieve much else." Because of this, despite "Gloomy forecast", I expect most important aspects of the Cleveland, Northeast Ohio, Ohio, US and global economy to improve dramatically over the next 2, 4 and 10 years. In fact, I can't think of an area where there won't be significant improvements. Think of the growth I expect like when an economy is freed from a dictatorship and people are allowed to be free and thrive - markets open up - that is America, now that Bush has been replaced by democracy.

Global warming hits home in my daughter's self portrait.  R We Listening?

Michael Scharf, Case Law Professor and international consultant on judicial affairs and human rights spoke at the City Club today, speaking on the process and trial of Saddam Hussein. However, the big news was his concern that the President's "surge policy" could support efforts in Iraq to isolate the Sunni minority population and create an “80% solution” that embraces isolation and ethnic cleansing by the Kurds and Shia majority coalition. This is the first we've heard about that risk by a knowledgeable international affairs expert (Scharf served in the State Department of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton). If the US embraces or even tolerates isolation of the minority and an “80% solution” by the majority against the minority, it would reverse US policies in place during the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, in which the US aggressively opposed isolation and ethnic segregation. I expect will hear more of this in the weeks ahead as Congress delves into the specifics of the surge proposal.

My hero, the man whose ideas expanded my own is interviewed here about his life and work. I had the opportunity to work with one of his very first dancers, Albert Reid when I was a 15 year old bunhead at a summer ballet school in Saratoga, NY. Needless to say, it changed my life and the course of my life’s work and world view.  So now that I have ended my career as artistic director of a modern dance repertory company here in Northeast Ohio, I, like Merce, am still dancing and still seeing dance even though I may not be entering theaters to do so as often as before. Now for example I head out for the dance of dog walking. Today, the lighting design is especially brilliant.

I'm just old enough to remember Watergate, and Nixon's resignation, and President Ford pardoning him, and Chevy Chase spoofing Ford throughout his presidency, and the end of the Viet Nam War, and then Ford was gone, defeated by Carter. Ford died December 26, 2006, and the headline in the Plain Dealer the following day was "The Accidental President." The news also referred to him as "a healer", taken from the title of Ford's autobiography "A Time To Heal". To me, his legacy was not especially memorable, until I learned Ford had conducted a series of interviews with Watergate investigative reporter Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post, to be published after Ford's death, which make public Ford's exclamation "Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq." This was published in the Washington Post December 28th, and spread like wildfire, and is certainly Ford's greatest contribution to world peace imaginable.

Cleveland Vision's Bill Callahan hosts a remarkably insightful blog called Cleveland Diary where he digs deeper into fascinating regional economic issues than anyone else on Earth, in a very precise and reputable way. Today, he posted a fasinating revelation that "NOPEC natural gas will be 33% higher than Dominion East Ohio next month", because "Dominion’s current residential rate of $12.49 per mcf will fall to around $9.90 starting in mid-January" while "the rate charged by the Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council (NOPEC) — at $12.68, already higher than East Ohio’s — is going up next month to around $13.13." He goes on to point out, "So tens of thousands of residents of Cleveland and other NE Ohio cities who were automatically “opted in” to the NOPEC supply deal last Spring by our cities, and didn’t go to the trouble to opt out — either because they believed in the promised savings, or weren’t sure what to think, or just didn’t understand the system at all — will now be paying 33% more for NOPEC gas than they’d be paying as Dominion East Ohio customers." Well, by some stroke of luck, I'm still a Dominion customer... I sure didn't understand the system at all.

On Sunday, December 24, 2006, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Sheryl Harris wrote a column I thought to write myself, titled "My holiday gift to you: A list of Ohio politicians who sold you out", "a list of the Northeast Ohio legislators who voted to curtail your consumer rights" by passing lobbyist, lawyer and industry-benefiting Amended Substitute Senate Bill Number 117, allowing significant corporate entitlements to soar through the Ohio legislature without community debate. The amendments are most significantly designed "to prohibit the use of enterprise theories of liability against manufacturers in product liability claims, and to include public nuisance claims under the definition of product liability claims", meaning to protect the paint industry here from liability for the public nuisance they have caused by selling lead based paint nearly a century after it was known to harm humans, as proved in their loss to the State of Rhode Island earlier this year. The amendments also protect car dealers, scam loan sharks, manufacturers, etc. from real accountability for harming the public. The legislators who are guilty of this abuse of their offices were listed in the PD article with the suggestion that is "a keepsake you could clip and save." Local blogger Jill Miller Zimon repeated the list on her excellent blog, "Writes like she talks", and I repeat it here, so it may be as present in cyberspace and available to the world as possible. We will need this list over the next many years, until all of these anti-Ohioan men and women are driven from public "service", as they have shown they do not protect public interests. By having this information in as many public places as possible, I hope we the people will be more successful protecting the public than has our legislature under current rule. The list of sell outs and further harms they cause the public is as follows, from Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Sheryl Harris:

This afternoon I came across a truly revolting locally-produced channel 5 I believe Christmas special filmed at Crocker Park, celebrating what appeared to be 1,000,000s of plastic Christmas lights a-burning, and 1,000s of plastic people a-shopping, and 100s of plastic big boxes a-selling, and that made me appreciate the humble and community-based holiday season I have enjoyed, with peaceful moments of good cheer talking with local shopkeepers I've known in some cases over a decade, wishing them joy for the new year, and hearing the same from them, like friends, and buying local little things, knowing tomorrow they will be truly appreciated, as simple as can be.

The other day I saw, in The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Crain's Cleveland Business, an announcement Case University is funding OneCleveland to put wifi in some high density, affluent commercial and residential rental and home ownership cores of Cleveland Heights. Justifying the expenditure, from Crain's: “Part of the entry into Cleveland Heights is that it’s really an extended community of Case Western,” said OneCommunity chief operating officer Mark Ansboury, and Cleveland Heights law director John Gibbon said. “It’s designed primarily as a trial for the business district, but it certainly will hit a number of residences, as well.” From the PD: "Lewis Zipkin, a major Cleveland Heights landlord" is qouted saying: "It's going to be a terrific benefit for me, my properties and the community". If I were a Case student or trustee, SBC/AT&T, the Cable company or a person living in a less affluent community, I'd have serious concerns about all of this. In fact, as my wife is a Case Ph.D. student being assessed $100s a year by Case for a technology fee, which it now seems is going to Cleveland Heights, I guess I have a right to be concerned myself.

I have been following this fascinating debate in the pages of the New York Times, the PD and on CASE Daily (CASE's online newsletter). About 2 months ago I also attended a CASE physics department symposium where Kate Jones-Smith and Ellen Landau were the guest speakers on this subject. That afternoon Jone-Smith and Landau captivated a large audience of scientists and art historians -- a group that does not often come together on this campus! On this debate I side with Jones-Smith and Landau. I think the Pollocks are real and I hope I get to see them in person someday. Fractal or not, seeing Pollock's drip paintings is an experience like no other.

read on ...

Case Western Reserve University physicists refute analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings

Courtesy of Alex Matter

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It is always a pleasure and privilege to see the Cleveland Orchestra perform at Severance Hall, but their presentation of Gustav Holst's "The Planets" was unique and special. This is a great creative set of compositions, being composed in 1914-1916 as highly expressive, at times avant-garde voyages to each of the planets known at the time, long before man had physically probed space, and no man has probed space more aptly than did Holst. And, I doubt any men and women could probe the complexities of these compositions more ably than does the Cleveland Orchestra.

"Five previously unseen candid photographs of Marilyn Monroe have now been released, with limited edition prints being distributed to select galleries throughout the United Kingdom.

The photographs are not posed, and capture the star in her most private moments- in bed, on a plane and in front of a mirror. Only 495 prints of each photo have been made, making them very exclusive.

The photos are were unveiledfor the first time today at a Marilyn-themed event at the Meller Gallery in Witney, Oxfordshire. They will be available only until Christmas."

Read the full article here: http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/862

I saw some Forestry Stewardship Certified (FSC) timber products at Home Depot.  2 years ago they pledged to sell 40% FSC certified timber products.  Last year 60%.  The word on the street is that there is not even enough supply on the street yo.

Shopping at Heights Arts Holiday Store supports local artists and the local economy, and provides unique gifts for your friends, relatives, or yourself.

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