After the 20/20 report on the end of human life on Earth, the mindless talking heads on Channel 5 11PM news did their follow-up report on the need to build spaceships to escape Earth before it is too late... how it is good for NASA... that seems to be the mindset here, to destroy the planet and leave. The more sophisticated approach seems to be to destroy the planet because god will take care of the people in the end... rapturenomics. Certainly Americans have always been very foolish about social responsibility and the environment, but they have never before had proof that their stupidity and evil have put humanity on the brink of extinction, as is the case today... these are new conditions and very different times than ever before, and by refusing responsibility most segments of American society have thus descended to absolutely new lows of stupidity and evil.

I just listened to Ronn Richard's talk to the City Club and he didn't once mention pollution or the environment as issues to NEO, the world and society, other than wanting to clean up brownfields for future development and the interest to develop new industry around "advanced energy". Funny, EcoCity Cleveland bought a table in Ronn's honor (along with some big law firms and the Cleveland Foundation), so the sustainabilitists are using some of the money they get from the foundations to show their love and appreciation back... now that is environmentalism.

I repeat, it's the soot screwing up Cleveland, and it has been such since the early 20th Century... good money avoids the pollution, leaving behind contamination and contaminated people, who are without opportunity and are harmed by industry and so unable to learn or achieve in life. How hard is that to understand?

Disrupt IT

In an interview by Tavis Smiley of Global Warming expert Tim Flannery (which was fascinating in the Tavis clearly didn't have a clue about this issue, so we watched him learn as the interview went on), Tim made the point it is up to the current generation to address global climate change or it will be too late for future generations... I don't think people on Earth today get this! Here's the quotes from the transcript... if we don't care about this, don't bother caring about early child care, education and economic development in NEO.

Tavis: What's the window here? And I don’t wanna be alarmist, but obviously, this issue is so serious that there must be a window here for when this thing is gonna implode, explode, whatever's going to happen. And I'm not trying to be apocalyptic here, but what's the window here?

Flannery: Well, look. No one can predict the future, Tavis. But we do know that we are approaching a tipping point, in terms of the way the climate system operates. The general scientific consensus is we've got a decade or two to do it. And what that means, really, is that people like you and I are in the hot seat.

Tavis: A decade or two? That's like 20 years.

Flannery: Yeah, that's right. Ten to 20 years to start making those big reductions. So it's you and I, and the present day business leaders, and present day politicians that have to make the decisions on this. We can't put it off to another generation. The damage is building quickly.

Disrupt IT

Yep, Norm... I often wonder... is it ignorance or deceit?

Is it the right hand does not know what the left is doing or is it, "You hold him; I'll hit him."

For another example, why oh why are we about to spend (we are already spending it) money to build a road (the innerbelt project) when we need to meet air quality standards and put people in jobs?
 

    Doesn't public transit make so much more sense than a quick and easy way for people to speed through Cleveland at 60 miles an hour? Are we thinking of turning the city of Cleveland into some sort of cotton farm a la Antebellum south Georgia? Folks are supposed to live in shacks and relive depression era soup lines? I mean, if the jobs are out in the burbs, how is someone with no car supposed to get to one?

With the city's population dwindling and more homes being built in sprawl-land, how would Rosa Parks make it to her day job in Solon if she could get it? Not via I77, I71, I480, I490 or I90, no suh. This is what Burroughs refers to as "distributing supplies on a grossly inequitable basis".

And I agree that we need to bring it right down to the "there's a worm in that apple you're eating" level for the mass media. Like Masumi showed us, "Gosh, it doesn't look polluted...

Time to rise and shine Cleveland leaders... wake up and smell the pollution, start thinking about the central city and how to use all the options, make a plan and share it with us. There are good minds here -- use them.