I'll preface any praise of "Tremont West Development Corp. development director charged with assault" - coverage in the Plain Dealer of the assault of Guy Templeton Black, by Sammy Catania - by posting reporter Mark Gillespie's comment on his own blog about his own work - Mark Gillispie, The Plain Dealer - August 27, 2010 at 1:13PM - "xxoo: Thanks for commenting. I understand your concern, but this is not a news article that will appear in the print edition of The Plain Dealer. It is an item that has been posted solely to my Inside Cleveland Hall blog. Reporters who have blogs use them to post items that might not hold much interest to our broader readership but might have relevance to some Cleveland.com readers. That's the beauty of the digital age. Thanks again for reading and commenting".

Mark is responding to a TROLL on Cleveland.com that set up an account to post "xxoo August 27, 2010 at 1:01PM - So much ado about nothing. Is this really worthy of a news article - or is this just a gossip column?"

That is what is pathetic about poor use of technology in the digital age... it allows corporations and special interests to use TROLL accounts places like Cleveland.com to post anonymous diversions of public knowledge from fact to fiction, and to temper public response to news that is in fact deserving of outrage.

A kitten would get eaten-alive, at my house... but a tough alley cat, from the streets... like Hill Billy, featured here... would stand a chance on Roxbury. I'm thinking about it, as we have mice, my wife loves cats (I can tolerate a cool one), and there are 100s of homeless cats at the APL (AKA Dog Pound) that need good homes. Even i can offer a better life for a cool cat than the pound - for a dog-smart, fast cat, that is.

Location

Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter Headquarters, on the fringe of the University of Texas campus in Austin, Texas

A few days after attending the EPA public hearing regarding the renewal of the license for Medical Center Company to continue burning coal in University Circle - which was OPPOSED by representatives of the Sierra Club, Environmental Health Watch, Earth Day Coalition, Women Speak Out For Peace and Justice, and all citizens who testified - I met with Neil Carman, Ph.D., the Clean Air Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, in Austin, Texas, to discuss real NEO air pollution issues, the MCCO licensing situation, and next steps for improving the environment in Northeast Ohio.

Dr. James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, considered by many to be foremost climatologist in the world

As Northeast Ohio leadership MUST forcefully involve citizens as activists against the harm caused in our community and worldwide by pollution here, and address the resulting economic and public health damage here, it is important to reflect on what is an environmental activist, and how people may become actively engaged in community redevelopment through environmentalism.

Facts prove it is unsafe to live near the Arcelor/Mittal Cleveland Works steel mill, and citizens of Northeast Ohio have reasons to be concerned about 100s of other major toxic pollution point sources in the greater Cleveland area, yet our regional pollution monitoring has been broken since 2003, and is broken today, and citizens and the media do not care at all. How is it possible the people living in one of them most polluted places in America do not care about public health - about their own health? How did citizens here become such nihilists?

Northeast Ohioans must rise up from metal and soot ashes still being spewed upon us by excessively polluting toxic industrial forces that have corrupted local politics and destroyed the region and the lives of those living here... yet leaders and citizens here do not care.

Scene writer Michael Roberts provides the world a great service with his August 25, 2010, summary overview of the corruption and evil that has defined the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, Cleveland city hall, the Cuyahoga county commissioners, and "failed leaders in almost every quarter of the community", including at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Foundation, throughout the 21st Century - anyone interested in real NEO must READ "Port in a Storm - How years of bungling and self-interest robbed Cleveland of its future".

If you have ever doubted the most extreme claims of the failure, incompetency and corruption of our Mayor, County commissioners, and their appointees and co-conspirators in crimes, as expressed throughout the decade by Citizen Hauser and so many other honest real Northeast Ohio visionaries, on realNEO and elsewhere in the free-speech world...  read Roberts' excellent article on the Port in a Storm and realize the following observations are direct reflections on all leaders and citizens of the region, and we are pathetic:

"The real tale of the waterfront is one of conflict, greed, wasted public money, and sheer incompetence on the part of the port board, city hall, and the county commissioners."

It is such a sensitive situation that many sources with ties to it have requested anonymity for this story. Cleveland, it seems, is populated not by outspoken visionaries, but by many who suffer in silence, fearing ostracism or political and civic retribution.

In a way, it is a sad tale of a city adrift with failed leaders in almost every quarter of the community, people who have squandered the dream of a world-class waterfront and a better place to live.

Without Jackson's thoughtless indulgence, the fiasco would not have flowered. The Greater Cleveland Partnership stubbornly supported the plan and in doing so demonstrated its lack of business acumen; the venerable Cleveland Foundation funded a portion of the effort, displaying its lack of common sense.

I received a press release from the EPA today - DOE Announces Nearly $120 Million to Advance Innovative Weatherization Projects, Highlights Progress in the Program Nationally - highlighting $120 million in Federal stimulus funds going to 102 organizations across America to drive innovation under the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Weatherization Assistance Program... and none of the awardees are in Ohio (see list below). Linked to this article about this program is a table of homes weatherized around the county as of June 2010, through Federal stimulus funding, and Ohio is well represented - and I believe our house in East Cleveland was weatherized through such funding - it is disturbing no Ohio programs are part of this latest round of funding...! Why not?

The Ohio LinuxFest is proud to announce that registration is now
open for Ohio LinuxFest. The schedule has also been announced,
and this year will feature a fantastic line-up of talks for new
and experienced Linux users. The 2010 Ohio LinuxFest takes place
in Columbus, Ohio at the Greater Columbus Convention Center from
September 10 through September 12.

Location

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:

As I explain to "outsiders" what obstacles to true economic development we are confronting here in Northeast Ohio, I point to the concluding half of my "Preamble: Real Co-op for Open Food, Information and Community Development 2009", where I explain "you can't manage what you don't measure. Leadership here does not want to be measured." 

At that time - February, 2009 - I explained the risk from having poor local leadership was greatest then, as we had just brought into office a wonderful new President, who must stimulate bad local, state, national and global economies... we had tough battles ahead requiring good local footsoldiers, as $ billions in NEW federal funding initiatives was flowing our way.

They raise the stakes, in exploitation of the difficult economic times here, by attempting to corrupt the good will of our new President.

It is worth noting that two days after 70+ Cleveland-area citizens came together in unified citizen action and opposition against coal burning in their neighborhood of University Circle, the EPA sent out a press release that "President Obama’s Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), co-chaired by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE), delivered a series of recommendations to the president today on overcoming the barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years" and "the report concludes that CCS can play an important role in domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions while preserving the option of using coal and other abundant domestic fossil energy resources."

That conclusion will be at the center of intense debate, experimentation and demonstration, to the tune of $10s billions, over the ten year vision of this policy statement, until some event brings such spending to a stop - science and economic reality push innovation above the industrial din of mountaintop removal and churning urban furnaces.

Federal clean coal funding is the stimulus for plans like MCCO was developing to continue burning coal into the future, and expand coal capacity to DEMONSTRATE innovative clean coal technologies (which are not yet in practice here). Such visionary science has a role in the big system of solutions for the world, but delays clean energy innovation of the type that would offer immediate human benefits in communities like Cleveland that cannot wait for the bleeding edge to arrive... too much real bleeding from environmental injustice here right now.