The German Elections

28SEPT'09–The Germans went to the polls in record lows and voted more than ever for special interest parties. The big winners were the pro-pocketbook Free Democrat Party (FDP), the reformed communist The Left party, and the environmentalist Greens.

The two traditional Volksparteien, the CDU with its Bavarian sister CSU, and the SPD, received only 58% of the vote. Compare that percentage to 78% in 2001, 82% in 1987, and over 90% in 1972.

Commentators called the election results, 'historic.' Angela Merkel, the German chancellor famous for her gift of non-expression, glossed over any historicism by grinning into cameras exactly as accustomed. Her message being: read my lip gloss.

Brüchige Brückentechnologie
Chancellor Merkel, a DDR-degreed physicist, is nuclear power pro-nostalgic. The CDU platform paper calls it a 'Brückentechnologie' (bridging technology). Her new coalition partner, the FDP, uses a slightly different term: 'Übergangstechnologie' (transition technology).

Both words mean this: the German nuclear phase-out implemented by Gerhard Schroeder's SPD-led government will be pushed-back, reactor licenses extended beyond the law's 2021 cut-off.

Another important legacy of the Schroeder SPD/Green coalition government is the Renewable Energy Sources Act. This key law, authored by Nuclear-Free Future Award recipient Hans-Josef Fell, obliges grid operators to pay fixed feed-in tariffs for electricity won from renewable sources.

This lucky law has gained popularity all across the German political spectrum – even the FDP has come to see its far-reaching importance: fixed feed-in tariffs, creating thousands of Green jobs, have helped Germany become the world's first address in wind technology.

Still, using the recovering economy as an excuse, the Merkel-Westerwelle government will short-sightedly shorten renewable energy subsidies, particularly to solar power, which runs on panels 'Made in China.'

The happy fallout of Germany's change of power is Guido Westerwelle's – the first openly gay leader of a mainstream German party (FDP) – insistence that the USA remove its last nuclear warheads from German soil. Westerwelle is Merkel's foreign minister shoe-in.

--Craig Reishus

5JUL'09–Shoppers stared into the dark, hospital emergency generators suddenly powered on, and the right of way at intersections was returned to the rule of the loudest horn, as a major power outage rolled across Hamburg on Saturday.

"It was like kids were messing with all the light switches," reported one onlooker.

According to a spokesperson from Vattenfall, the Swedish company that operates the Kruemmel nuclear power plant, the blackout was sparked by an incident involving a unit transformer. He added: "No increased levels of radioactivity were released into the environment."

The mishap-prone Kruemmel nuclear power plant, located some 12 miles southeast of Hamburg on the River Elbe, was granted permission to rejoin the energy grid only two weeks ago, following a two-year standstill for needed maintenance and new safety measures in the aftermath of an unexplained transformer blaze.

Embarrassing for Vattenfall is that this fresh incident, characterized as "grave" by the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Social Affairs in Kiel, was first detected by protestors monitoring the facilities' discharges into the Elbe.

Vattenfall supervisors later confirmed the transformer mishap, which stood at the head of a series of events that forced the plant to automatically shut down.

Vattenfall has long been under public scrutiny for downplaying major problems at its nuclear power plants.(CR)

Speaking of Kruemmel:
Inexplicable leukemias rock small German rural region

7JUL'09–GEESTHACHT, Germany (AFP)–For 20 years, children from a small rural northern German region – where Alfred Nobel invented dynamite – have been contracting leukemia at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world and no one knows exactly why.

Nineteen cases of leukemia among children under 15 have been recorded since 1989 in the region of Elbmarsch, some 30 kilometres (19 miles) from the city of Hamburg, three or four times the average rate. More from Arnaud Bouvier...

Global Space Zero

4 May'09–At Reykjavik the world once stood on the brink of total, all-out nuclear disarmament. The year was 1986, and across the negotiating table Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev regarded each other eye to eye. Reagan was the first to flinch. He refused to give up his dream of a "shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from the rain." Gorbachev foresaw the U.S. militarization of space. The prospect of a world without nuclear weapons was shot down by the very system that sought to make the threat of incoming missiles obsolete.

In her Reagan psychobiography, Way Out There in the Blue, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Frances FitzGerald makes the case that the 40th US President was predisposed to believe in the power of particle ray cannons and laser beam gizmos because, in the 1940 film "Murder in the Air", he played a secret agent assigned to protect a miraculous weapon "capable of paralyzing electrical currents and destroying all enemy planes in the air." He had internalized the role.

But at the Nuclear-Free Future Award we wonder if Reagan's dysfunctional Star Wars fantasy didn't arise from a worldview even more profoundly Hollywood. Mikhail Gorbachev tells an anecdote that never fails to draw incredulous chuckles. He remembers:

"We went on a walk just the two of us. Before the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, 'What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?'"

"I said, 'No doubt about it.'"

"He said, 'We too.'"

The legacy of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative is the most costly weapons program humankind has ever underwritten. A much abbreviated ABM system passes PR tests only when it has the answer book to study in advance – yet still can spectacularly fail. Now packaged as a protective shield against missile launches from rogue states, the Cold War relic continues to poison negotiations with Russia at a time when important weapons treaties are due to expire.

Barack Obama announced his 'Global Zero' initiative before cheering throngs in Prague. His historic speech also contained an appeaser to neo-Cold War agitators embedded in the military complex back home: "As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system..."

President Obama has revived the prospect of a world without nuclear weapons. But if his vision is ever to be realized, the U.S. must go the whole way, must preempt valid Russian objections by strategically striking Reagen's folly from the U.S. military budget. Obama must add a 'space' before the 'zero.'

–Craig Reishus

FEB.26'09–...Michael Binder [CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission] said there is about 65 tonnes of heavy water at Chalk River and he likened the 47 kg December leak to faucet trouble in your home.

"You know: drip, drip, drip. It's of the same order of magnitude"....

Commentary from Dr. Gordon Edwards:

What is described as a "small" leak of heavy water is actually a rather large discharge of radioactive tritium, into the environment. Each kilogram of heavy water used as moderator in the NRU reactor contains about one trillion becquerels of tritium. A trillion is a thousand billion; it is also a million million. A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity; it indicates that one radioactive disintegration is happening every second.

A trillion becquerels is a huge amount of radioactivity. The heavy water steam that escaped into the atmosphere on December 5, 2008, included about four-and-a-half trillion becquerels of tritium. The steam that was "ventilated" on February 22 included about 11 trillion becquerels of tritium.

Meanwhile, about 28 trillion becquerels of tritium in liquid form is being slowly released into the Ottawa River, the source of drinking water for millions of people.

Yet the regulatory agency says this is of "no concern" and that there is "no risk" to the health and safety of Canadians or the environment. Such a statement is scientifically indefensible. There is no safe threshhold level for any carcinogenic substance, and the number of cancers caused by such exposures is directly proportional to the number of people so exposed.

To deliberately dump a known carcinogen into the drinking water of a large population is not protective of health and safety. For the regulatory agency to allow such actions and to dismiss the legitimate health concern is to make a mockery of their legal mandate – which is not only to protect the health and safety of Canadians, but to "disseminate objective scientific information" on the nature of the risks.

When they say that their policy is to keep all exposures to radiation "as low as reasonably achievable", they obviously don't take that policy very seriously.

Dr. Gordon Edwards,
recipient of the 2006
Nuclear-Free Future Education Award,
is the president of the Montreal-based Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR)

16SEP'08–I had breakfast with my cousin David and his wife Susan last week at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the posh Munich address Tom Cruise prefers whenever in town. David, "the genius" of our bargain-hunting clan, was paying a call on an important client of his Minnesota computer parts brokerage firm. David and Susan had found a sweet, affordable vacation package that included a luxurious BMW sedan.

The Bayerischer Hof transforms into a fortress each February to host the annual Munich Security Conference. Putin, McCain, Kissenger, Rumsfield, ElBaradei.., stroll the hotel halls with unmolested smiles, the heart of Munich being a safehouse from the discontents of globalization. Last February the Nuclear-Free Future Award organized a concurrent alternative gathering a few peaceful blocks away, screening the film Deadly Dust by Frieder Wagner at the City Cinema. Deadly Dust = ingestible particles of DU, depleted uranium.

After arriving, David and Susan turned down the BMW – it was worth nearly 100,000 Euros, Germany's Autobahns can be intimidating, and the vacation package included no car insurance. They decided to rent a "normal" car, an insurable Opel Corsa, and planned on hitting Neuschwanstein and Garmisch that afternoon. After we caught up on each other's lives, the lost and found of years whizzed by, our conversation turned to the upcoming election. Both David and Susan would be voting for McCain. Why? David's response: "Obama is way too out there. My situation right now is better than okay, and the change McCain represents means nothing bad for me."

I could understand that. David and Susan hail from God's country, have two delightful kids, and McCain's Washington reforms add up to a pledge to uphold the status quo. His plans for the energy sector – building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030 – won't affect their family: no new reactor will be erected within wind of their Prior Lake home.

No community in the region wants to add its name to Minnesota's historic trio of potential terrorist targets – the leukemia generator at Monticello and the two at Prairie Island – facilities producing radioactive waste that needs to be carefully monitored for the next 160,000,000 years (40,000,000 presidential terms).

Candidate McCain won't be around for most of that duration. Neither will David or Susan, and neither will I. But let's suppose that some life will be. Or let's suppose that it's just 40 presidents down the road, and there's plenty of humans left around angry about the severe tonnage of toxic nuclear waste left behind by McCain's energy initiative. Looking back, who would they have twisted our arms to vote against?

With the economy bellying up to the brink of implosion, both McCain and Obama have other things on their mind than winning the votes of future generations. (President Bush should have a marble plaque on his desk etched with the words: "The Buck Stalled Here".) The nearly trillion dollar tourniquet for lenders (both predatory and non) only stops the bleeding for the time being. Real change must happen, a new set of economic policies implemented that embraces a future sustainable for human beings, and not just markets. Part of that sustainability means a vital shift of attitude towards energy consumption – and to accomplish that we need visionary leaders. Good people like David and Susan might suffer some privations of habit – their electricity bills might suggest that they pull the plug on the deep freeze sweltering in the garage all summer, plus turn off the infrared standbys on the six household TVs... but not even Nader is urging Minnesotans to buy bananas grown locally.

For the sake of the best bargain in the long run: NO to McCain's energy vision, NO to McCain.

27AUG'08–If George Bush did anything for this country, he made us hungry for change.

He made Barack Obama possible.

Our family too had an empty seat at the table for the serviceman missing, the boy who would never return.

Or maybe he wouldn't have been a serviceman at all, but a baker, or an Electric Sun franchise owner, or a preacher proud of his tractor, or yet another Clark Kent drifter now living in NYC.

I saw the best minds of my generation give up and go to law school...

But sometimes the long shot's the only hole out, and I really miss all those innings of playing ball with him in the street, Rook on the front stoop, the basketball hours in the driveway, the toasted tuna fish sandwiches and Cheetos lunches we ate except for some of the crust in front of the TV downstairs.

Like me, he knew the world wasn't the place it was supposed to be, and would have had a set of clubs with heads most forgiving.

But it would be wrong to blame on Bush all the bad news that's bound to creep in.

Just like it would be wrong to blame Madonna.

And the more I think about it, the less a doubter I become, because you can only sleep on stuff like this without bringing in religion.

Don't believe me?

Let's ask somewhere else. Let's hope we can have the next DNC in Window Rock, Arizona. To even explore nuclear power as part of the mix out of the energy fix cries out to high heaven. It's not that we don't have the science to ignore the waste forever – we don't even have the technology to plunder uranium cancer-free from the earth.

That's the news I'd like to pass on to Pepsi Center.

--Craig Reishus

August 6, 1945. "Auweh!" groaned Albert Einstein, despondent, when he learned that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. An expression of deep-felt guilt? Six years and four days earlier the brilliant physicist had signed his name to a letter to President Roosevelt warning:

"...that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

"This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable--though much less certain--that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory"...

Einstein had grave moral reservations about building an atomic bomb, but the thought of Nazi science achieving the weapon first filled him with dread. Although the famous Einstein-Roosevelt letter, which was primarily drafted by Leo Szilard, solved no hurdle of physics on the way to designing the Bomb, had it gone undelivered neither Little Boy nor Fat Man could have been engineered in time to end The War to End All Wars II.

From Auweh! forward, Albert Einstein warned of the destructive power that had changed everything except our modes of thinking. He deeply resented being called "the Father of the Atomic Bomb," and often remarked to his circle of friends at Princeton that if it had not been for the fearful madness going on Germany, he, a convinced pacifist, would never have lifted a finger to hasten the Manhattan Project's founding.

During his last years, his health declining, Einstein witnessed the creep of Red hysteria that led to the FBI witch-hunts and the McCarthy hearings. He confided in a letter to his longtime friend Queen Elisabeth of Belgium:

"While it proved eventually possible, at an exceedingly heavy cost, to defeat the Germans, the dear Americans have vigorously assumed their place. Who shall bring them back to their senses? The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: people acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil. And one stands by, powerless"....

Auweh!

Hiroshima Day, 2008
--Craig Reishus

Aug. 3, 2006--Koan: What is the color of a flashing red alert conked out by a power blackout?

On July 25th a bolt of lightening struck some eighty miles north of Stockholm knocking the Forsmark nuclear power plant from the electric grid. Control room personnel were tossed from the nuclear reactor info loop when their computers crashed and the emergency back-up system failed to kick in as scripted. For over twenty-one minutes scrambling technicians had no way of telling what was happening inside the reactor. Not until twin emergency backup electric generators were powered on manually was the impending possible meltdown averted.

Investigations into the near catastrophe indicate that the reason why the two electrical power generators initially failed was because workers had crossed up the wiring while performing scheduled maintenance. "The technicians didn't know in what order the cables should be re-connected – and had no manuel for their task," explained Forsmark plant spokesman Claes Inge Andersson.

Forsmark is no state-run, bride-of-Frankenstein nuclear reactor shooting sparks each week (like the doomsday machine installed at Temelin), but a modern Western nuclear power plant managed by E.ON, an energy concern based in Dusseldorf with nuclear power plants scattered across "Old Europe." Solid-thinking guys, if you can believe their PR.

So go figure: a simple bolt of lightening plus a pair of crossed-up wires, and suddenly a vast sweep of Sweden is on the edge of being made uninhabitable for a stretch of time longer than Homo sapiens has so far stalked this planet upright.

The answer to the koan? Close your eyes and stare into the space between the flashes. How can we possibly foresee the unforeseeable? How can we rule out the bolt of lightening or the tsunami wave, the mouse in the ventilator or the pair of crossed-up cables? What complex fail-safe mechanism can withstand the blindside breach of one simple human error? You don't have to be Homer Simpson to feature for yourself the color of the catastrophe that lies around the corner.

"The flaw in nuclear power plants is their complexity," said Michael Sailer, a nuclear energy expert at the Institute for Applied Ecology in Darmstadt near Frankfurt. "Based on the complexity principle alone it is impossible to test all the contingencies with nuclear power."

"Someday, when we experience our next major accident," Sailer continued, "it will likely happen because of a disruption like this one."

The opinions expressed in "Column as you see 'em" are those of its author.

Oct. 15, 2005--People ask why do you write this column, and the only polite answer I care to give is that it sure beats hauling gravel back in northern Jeb country, a hot dusty gig that likewise means either seasonal employment or seasonal unemployment, depending on how much it bothers you to pick up which check, my feeling going something like this: it is the mended wallet that buys the bulb that saves the dike that spares the house. So crown me head of FEMA!

Because believe you me I see it coming. There is absolutely no doubt that the world has been made more dangerous owing to the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) schizophrenic mission of at once controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons while at the same time promoting the use of nuclear energy. A marvel, then, to travel to the Nobel Institute in Oslo for the 2005 Nuclear-Free Future Awards and learn from Morten Bremer Mærli, Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, that – as regards the question whether any link exists between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons – "the jury still is out."

Were it not for the questions from the audience, questions from the likes of Karl Grossman and Mathilde Halle and Preben Maegaard plus a few Norwegian activists and doctors whose names I lost in the Nobel auditorium's acoustics, we could sum up the first half of the Nuclear-Free Future Award/IPPNW-Norway/Nei til atomvåpen (NTA) symposium, Towards Nuclear Free, as so much PowerPoint sedative. Neither Mærli nor the other pre-coffee break speaker, Eiliv Lund, an epidemiologist at the University of Tromsø, had read the fresh IAEA-WHO Chernobyl report, yet both seemed relieved to learn that "science" had finally arrived at some "real" numbers (see Rosalie Bertell).

In these apocalyptic times, neither expert studies nor radiation warning signs posted on chain link fences nor retirees making ends meet by working crossword puzzles behind one-way watchman glass can assuage our growing angst. Turnkey nuclear laboratories are not the stuff of flying carpets and magic lamps ever since A.Q. Khan opened up his Oriental WMD Bazaar. The sloppy IAEA roster of stolen or missing fissionable materials can only hint at the true cipher of weapons grade materials already delivered to rogue hands. Not only plutonium or enriched uranium, but also neptunium-237 and americium – found in spent uranium fuel – can engine nuclear bombs. There is estimated to exist more than 140 tons of these latter two elements in 32 countries – that's enough to construct some 5000 nuclear devices. Any civilian nuclear waste processing facility can extract either of these elements to build nuclear bombs without tripping over a single IAEA safeguard.

The direct antecedent cause of the coming catastrophe will not be the dedicated military program of the five classic nuclear chums, but rather the UN program "Atoms for Peace."

So mend your wallet and plant your tulip bulbs – it's too late to call in the jury.

The opinions expressed in "Column as you see 'em" are those of its non-gravel truck driving author.

Letter to The Guardian, Saturday, 20 June 2009

In his Friday interview (E.ON chief strives to generate debate about green goals, 19 June) Dr Paul Golby of the German power company, which wants to build several new nuclear power plants in this country, remarks that nuclear waste storage tanks are "secure" and "nuclear waste is actually quite stable". A day earlier, Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), operator of the giant Sellafield nuclear waste storage and processing plant, proudly announced it had finally halted a radioactive leak at the plant – after half a century. The toxic liquid has been seeping from a crack in one of four huge concrete waste tanks, which in the past processed radioactive effluent, before being pumped out into the Irish Sea. NMP presents this as a triumph of technology. Another way of characterising it is a national disgrace.

Dr David Lowry
2001 Nuclear-Free Future Award recipient
Co-author, The International Politics of Nuclear Waste, Stoneleigh, Surrey

3 DEC'08 (AP)–US panel presents sobering report on WMD threat

"You can see I have a pile of notes because we have such a communication backlog and that's why we're working on that issue in the forefront along with everything else that needs scrutiny, and why I'm conducting this orientation. Stay calm. Stay indoors. Help is bringing respiratory masks and protective suits and the other amenities so that you can proceed from that point on. Until we reach that point, you have to make some decisions about what's going on and what you're going to do about it, and then stick with those reactions which I'll be outlining today.

"First of all, the coordinated effort is on-going and composite. Inmates escaping on the Interstate, we are there. Looters and other criminals, we'll catch up to you. Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless gas, and many buildings are compromised – we are keeping an eye on this issue as well. So it's not just the radioactivity that's on everybody's minds. What you have to realize is that this is an incredibly fluent situation, no matter which direction you turn, which accounts for much of the vertigo action we're witnessing in retrospect, both pro and con. In the final analysis, just remember that it's all about bringing home the ducks. Sometimes you have to pull up your pants, tighten your belt, step up to the plate, and not take the beaner. You have to charge the mound. In the meantime our mission is to bring home every duck that we can – standing up if possible.

"One big self-made problem stranding dozens is how people react to unfolding events, now and historically. Yes, there have been incidents and yes, the Sheriff has made the operational decision not to deputize more volunteers. Let me just add that we've increased our incarceration capacity by 70%. Rest assured that our total safety mission commitment includes providing total safety for those who have not yet experienced the reestablishment of law and order. We've brought in trailers and erected electric fences. The rest is a matter of common sense, keeping away from the windows, and not projecting what you think on FEMA scholars and others in positions of high-up authority.

"How many of you have ever seen Beau Geste? (That's what I woke up thinking about last night.)

"Or another thing straight off: a small dose of radioactivity does not make you immune to a large dose. Reports of radiation parties being held in compromised buildings evinces ignorance and the plain bad judgement normally associated with youth. Radiation, although it can impair your immune system, is not a virus like the German measels or the Asian plague. And no, you cannot get high from streams of alpha particles! So if you get an invitation to attend one of these hot gatherings, relay to the person extending said invitation that you say no to radiation because you don't think it's cool. Or, should a clique or gang approach you, tell them that you think a mind is a terrible thing to turn into nuclear waste. This message needs to conquer the streets. If you're gifted with beats, please pitch us something. This could mean revenue, which means you wouldn't have to think of what you do with your Casio as just being a hobby.

"Another report we're picking up is people thinking or wondering: why do the inmates get water and food and the radiation protection when we don't get water and food and the other amenities? Well, it's because they are charges of the public and the people who are in the churches and other large dwellings of choice are not. Unfair? I can assure you that no one who knows what inmates get would want to eat it. It's not that someone spits in it, it's just not stuff you'd want to open up a can and see. Water is another issue, and it's the same thing with the suits and respiratory devices.

"Thinking about children and those who need medicine – let's get them to the next point of safety, where they can experience the amenities that they've been missing. Let's get them there. That's our task. We are, however, asking our volunteers not to go into some districts at this point. Before we engage volunteers in our overall task, they have to have some emergency training – and that includes emergency firearms training. Before deployal, you have to know that it's tedious, it's dangerous, and getting a volunteer suit and respiratory device and emergency firearm does not add up to carte blanche status. Girls? Sure. But what we don't need are a lot of volunteer people making more reports, and they tend to be the girls. Again, volunteers will receive nametag authorization, but the Sheriff's office no longer extends badges, so if that's your motivation be aware of this as well.

"I can assure you that we're working with computers and formulas and mapping devices – that's how, these days, you get gas masks and suits and the other amenities out to the people. Tomorrow we're going to start a new survey that should win us more ground. The problem is that a lot of this buckles behind you the moment you move on. That's why we're waiting until tomorrow with the new survey because this issue also needs to be self-addressed. Before I forget, remember that before reentering a structure, or entering one for the first time, you should always shower down your suit with soap – Fels Naptha heavy duty laundry bar soap if available. We've got plenty of it, and we're distributing tons of this amenity out there as well. Fels Naptha has been shown to work, which a lot of you probably remember from Scout camp and chiggers, the cold wade out a few feet into the lake for the abrasive scrub in the morning, and we're very grateful to the people at Fels Naptha for donating their large store of unused bars. I know that I'm personally going to be using this stuff well down the road from here.

"Evacuation? The best thing is to stay put where you are right now until other logistics can be worked out. Ice, forget it. Gasoline is another thing. But business partners have found water and are supplying it where they can at very little profit to themselves. We're grateful for that as well, although it's not entirely donated. If you are a hobby ham radio operator, please help us get this message out there into the hands of those who maybe have no other form of communication. O! People ask me what's the status of the citrus? The fallout just take the oranges away as well? We've got orange tree devastation out there on top of everything else? Well, duh! And don't eat the food from your gardens unless you're a fairly advanced senior. I just wanted to address that issue before it popped back out of my mind, and impress it on those who are wondering what's to eat, what not. (I haven't caught many winks either. Later, if time allows, I want to get back to me lying awake thinking about Beau Geste, the connections. But let me let this cat out of the bag right now: the Telly Savalas character speaks to our situation.) (Lord of the Flies in many ways also.)

"Music and missing school supplies and medical records, don't worry about that. That's our job. Library books not returned will not be labeled overdue. Such amnesties will help reestablish normality sooner. Just thinking aloud, it might take years before we can find out everything we can possibly access which may or may not include everything, and maybe the whole idea of a library system is out-dated. I would say, if you have a library book keep it. That's what I would do, but maybe I'm sticking my neck out here, so maybe it would be better to bring it back, but I want to impress on you that it's not a worry at this juncture of time. For now, simply picture your least favorite librarian telling you: "you have a holiday from all book penalites." Enjoy it for what it's worth and leave it at that.

"Getting back to the people who need medicine: we're setting up shelters. But that coalesces alternatives that don't look much better in the short-term. A shelter doesn't solve anything except now there's a shelter. First you have to get the people there. And if they need medicine than they need some type of certification that says so. We're working on that. It's the same thing for those people on payrolls. We hope that some process can be utilized by people who cannot find other alternatives, and that we can get it implemented without going through all the red tape these things normally require. I would suggest for now simply getting in your application. It can't hurt, and might get you to the front of the line once we offically 'squad up' – which is another key goal challenge phase we're extending anticipatory feelers towards even as I speak.

"Schools have declared vacation. We have worked closely and on-going with superintendents and misplaced children and parents and people needing medicine in those districts accessible to us, and they already know this. Let me give you one quick, clear example: if you send your children to school they are going to be greeted by stragglers in empty classrooms. Another issue is that when land values disappear, how will people get their hands on financial re-compensation? Remember that the federal and state governments are there for unfolded events exactly like these. We actually have new lists, some added by staff just today, and some within the last few hours, and we need that sort of help around the clock, not only in the property affected areas, but in every aspect of what we're undertaking. So we're also very hopeful about that as well.

"In this time of great turmoil one thing that has to happen is law and order has to be restored. This is perhaps the most vivid upwelling of non-law-and-order anyone would care to witness and why I keep returning to it. If you are committing crimes, we are looking for you, and we are ready to accept you into our system and teach you the old rules that you should have learned long ago from the business end of a belt. No expense will be spared until the criminals have been removed from the streets and placed in trailers behind electric fences. We have to win back the hearts and minds of a lot of people who are out there scared, disappointed, miserable, and that's the good deed we want to perform today, day after day, each and every day, until we get this situation alleviated. The third point I want to make is that our hospitals are under stress. That's bad, but the airport is open, planes are perhaps not landing, but they are flying away. We have an abridged system out there, but we are learning to deal with it, and that's not always easy and continually presents new on-going shortcomings and occasions for belligerence. I would like to make that a very big point and ask that people spread the word so that we can tackle this issue like we always have whenever anything like this arises, however rarely – if ever, as in the case of the unfolded events we're presently addressing.

"Was this event anticipated? The disaster is of such a magnitude, and not just here – who bothers to think like that? Who would occupy their beautiful minds with such heartache and flotsam and citrus devestation and everything else you can imagine? Over and over again, this is only what I can say – one: resolve of the criminal situation is paramount; two: electronic food stamp people and those with electronic access to medicine should have it by the end of next week; three: if you are in a hospital, transport looks promising, so don't complicate matters by moving from where you are; four: keep the kids out of the schools so that this disaster situation can assume a human face superintendents can intelligize; five: overdue penalties on library books have been waived for the present, and we're addressing the issue of people on payrolls; some more to five: if you are a homeowner and your property is no longer viable, because of the unfolded events, which I cannot reiterate enough, then fill out a application and get it in (I want to stress here that homeowner's insurance is not going to cover anything, because this qualifies as an act outside of coverage, and that's something only governments can make redeemable); six: a small dose of radioactivity does not make you immune to an overdose, so be sure to scrub with Fels Naptha any food that has come into contact with the great outdoors unless you are a fairly advanced senior and are desperate for nutrition.

"Again, the bombs were not thermonuclear, there was no mushroom cloud or other such attributable signs, so that's not the worry here. We are closely monitoring the radioactivity and we've monitored plenty of spikes but outside of the initial devastation they're not going to kill anyone short-term. The other thing to do is remain calm and indoors or in church or in public centers and lobbies if you've already proceeded to them. There's no plan up and ticking about when the electric grid will go back online, but we're working on that, and let's just be grateful that the events unfolded beneath balmy skies, and that the armory had so many emergency electric generators, which I think will silence a lot of pork barrel critics, and has kept loads of perishable foods from perishing. The news is not all bad! Another satisfactory thing I want to report is that we haven't seen anything approaching the anticipated police and fire department desertals a lot of us were picturing when thinking back. So when you see a public official please say "thank you" and give him or her a great big hug.

"This just handed to me: several ham-operators have radioed in that Telly Savalas did not appear in Beau Geste. Let me respond to this at once, because it clearly misses the point I wanted to make shortly, which would have been about the chain of events set off by the original mysterious theft. Because of it, at no fault to themselves other than sheer virtuousness, three brothers are sped by fate to the sands of the Sahara where they are placed in the hands of a sadistic actor (to my mind Telly Savalas). I don't want to spoil the ending for anybody, but it's nearly the same haunting scene as at the beginning, except now the corpses are no longer gratuitous and the sound of the bugle is lump-provoking because now you understand the subtrafuge of the lone brother who survives (not Peter O'Toole). This was the parallel I wanted to connect with, not who played what role or in this case who didn't.

"That understood, in summation, and I'll be winding up here: events proscribe impromptu provisos as they emerge. That's our agenda of working method, so I ask you to understand that and consider it before flying off the pan. I think I've already outlined everything we've accessed and assessed to this point, and we're working further, I can assure you, working to learn more, working to get the protection and amenities out to you, working to get the criminals behind electric fences, and we'll continue that course of action as capably as we can so stay indoors and stay calm and stay tuned – we'll get further orientation out to you the moment it coalesces. Thank you, that's all I have."

Some of the opinions expressed in "Column as you see 'em" are not really opinions yet still belong to Craig.

1SEP'08–Last Friday, Senator Joe McCain celebrated his seventy-second birthday by giving the nation a colorful present: Sarah Palin, his pick for vice president, the governor of Alaska with a 'naughty librarian vibe'

Remember when McCain was waging his "Lonely Fight Against Global Warming?" Well, at the top of GOP ticket things just got lonelier. In an interview not from 1988, but from last Friday, Palin, when asked what her take was on global warming and how it is affecting our country, replied:

"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made."

Now I come from rural America myself, and I know good people who believe that zoning laws are an unnecessary evil, that the Environmental Protection Agency is a communist plot, and that adding your neighborhood bear to the list of endangered species is like going into St. Paul on a Saturday night with a 'Kick Me, I'm not Pawlenty' button pinned to your butt.

And don't look to me to discredit creationist theory: in my opinion, hardcore conservative fundamentalism can really help keep a place feeling rustic – like having a two-holer out back during blue fly season.

We all want Alaska to stay outdoorsy.

But one thing that kind of makes me wonder about the solidness of this pick is that the Palins named their first-born 'Track' because he was born during 'track season.'

Track? Anti-woman's choice or not, couldn't they have stalled the contractions until the opening day of caribou? Caribou!

And how is the McCain/Palin mesh going to work out on the energy issue? The Alaskan governor is even more of a "Big Oil first" radical than McCain: Palin doesn't care where anyone drills – no refuge is sacred when it's sitting on money, and what she calls change is for government to get out of the way of the wildcat oil job effect ripple – the table dance joints, the video clubs, the meth kitchens, the assemblies Methodist and other.... Husband Todd, introduced to the nation as a "commercial fisherman" and champion snowmobile enthusiast, doubled his income last year by working for BP oil. Money. Now there's a colorful, hard-working Alaskan couple you can't accuse of conflicted interests.

Maybe next time on his birthday Senator McCain will pick out something drab for himself.

--Craig Reishus

22 Nov., '06–'New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.' Sante Fe. And for this jet-lagged traveler the clock has crashed without a blackbox. In the distance, the rugged caramel mountains are toasted golden purple by the fading, majestic light. Or is it sun-up? Whatever, the lusty scent of pine trees, juniper and sage seems directly snatched from a Southwest scratch-and-sniff travel brochure. Yes it is sun-up! And the friendly kitchen staff races about preparing a breakfast buffet featuring crispy-on-the-outside and juicy-on-the-inside carnitas, lighter than air buttermilk pancakes, tamales with organic red and green chile, homemade diced carrot apricot jam, a rainbow ceviche with tuna, fluke, and salmon – plus, for dessert, flan of organic goat’s milk. Wait a minute. Are we talking midnight brunch?

A rose in the desert I loved her so
in the Land of Enchantment, New Mexico

But outside the 'City Different' the 'Land of Enchantment Not.' The winding arroyos leading to Los Alamos are as contaminated as that city’s twisted soul. Greg Mello's billboard broadcasts: New Mexico. Nr. 1 in nuclear weapons. Nr. 1 in poverty. Coincidence? Trinity Test Site, the great promoter of the Bhagavad-Gita, still rocks the needles of Geiger counters. The Four Corners area is saturated with abandoned uranium mines and mills, many wildcat and most unremediated. Near Carlsbad, Westinghouse Electric’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) stores transuranic waste that must be handled by machines in heavily shielded rooms called 'hot cells.' Last exit radioactive waste? Dream on: that shell game is doomed to continue, in human terms, forever – or until we forget how to play (whichever comes first).

We must change direction, or we shall wind up where we are headed

More from Window Rock 2006...

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