The LANL SWEIS Site has suddenly moved.

The document on public record, the adoption of which remains subject to consideration of submitted public comments (prior to 20 September), outlining the National Nuclear Security Adminstration's plans to quintuple production of Plutonium pits (the "triggers" for nuclear warheads) at Los Alamos National Laboratories, is now at http://www.doeal.gov/laso/NEPASWEIS.aspx, which is absolutely NOT the URL it was located at (to which I'd previously linked) when I posted beforehand.

Assuming all is right with your browser and operating system, you *should* in theory be transferred upon clicking any previously included link to the SWEIS to that very same site. In practice, you might quite well get stuck in cyberspace forever (ah, the joys of Microsoft Windows and its OS monopoly) -- in which case, please click the above link.

We can only hope that after what I've gone through to get a printed paper copy of the document in question that it hasn't changed substantially.

Why the NNSA might suddenly have changed the URL in the middle of the limited public comment period remains far beyond my mere layman's comprehension. A mere citizen might be forgiven for suspecting that they don't really *want* the public comments in the first place, or that "public comments" might undermine the current administration's notions of what "National Security" really entails -- regardless of the wishes of the citizens of the nation whose "national security" is actually at stake.

I choose to believe otherwise. In my thinking, the NNSA has produced the LANL SWEIS in a good-faith effort precisely to encourage public comment. Let's face it -- I'm not really that important, and the NNSA surely wouldn't change the URL to a vitally important public document just knowing that little old me planned on spending a whole weekend at the 32nd Annual Santa Fe Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Festival, now would they?

Speaking of which, it was fantastic.

It's here.

My copy of the Draft LANL SWEIS arrived in the mail today -- all three bound volumes of it, not counting the summary. The NNSA will accept public comments on it (and requests for free copies, as well) at LANL_SWEIS@doeal.gov until 20 September.

If adopted in full, the NNSA's preferred "expanded operations alternative" will quintuple annual production of Plutonium pits (nuclear warheads' primaries, or "triggers") at Los Alamos within five years' time, and result in the construction of a $1 billion dollar, above-ground Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) building for which ground has already been broken. New Mexico's senior Senator Pete Domenici (R) has already secured funding for this new nuclear weapons factory from Congress.

The mail clerk at Science Applications International Corporation (which is contracted to send out requested copies of the EIS) seems to have dropped a digit from my mailing address. Bravo to the U.S. Post Office for getting it to me, regardless.

Whoever you are, and whatever you think, please take a few minutes to learn about the issue and let them know what you think.

Regular readers who miss my personal blog are temporarily advised to visit the RMC Supplement.

Some good news.

Under pressure, the NNSA extended the public comments deadline by 15 days for the Draft LANL SWEIS. Not much, I know, but it helps! The damn thing is three hefty volumes.

We now have until 20 September to tell 'em what we think of their preferred "expanded operations alternative" to ramp up production of nuclear warheads to five times current annual levels within five years. You can email them at LANL_SWEIS@doeal.gov. Phone numbers, fax numbers, and snail-mail addresses are all listed a few posts back. You can also get 'em from the website linked above, or of course, from the SWEIS itself, which I hope everybody reads. It's fascinating stuff; besides which you already paid for it with your tax dollars, so why not get one?

I did hear back from a nice lady asking whether I wanted the "hard copy" I'd requested on CD or on paper, so if you're askin' for a copy, it's good to be as specific as possible so you get it in time. They seem to be very literal-minded in that office -- who can blame 'em, seeing as all life on this planet's kind of in their hands right now. But please, I beg of you, be nice to the office people.

It comes down ultimately to Congress, which sets the mission for the Los Alamos. NNSA only considers options that fulfill the congressionally mandated mission. NNSA definitely needs to know what you think, but so should your elected representatives in Congress.

And in the end, what Congress does depends substantially on what we tell our Congressmen and Senators we want from them.

Or doesn't it?

Awful sounds.

The ferals are going mad with the rain. There's no place dry for them but they're all old enough at this point to be wild enough to not let me approach 'em past a certain point. Not a damn thing i can do for 'em. There've got to be a dozen of 'em in that building.

The good news is i've got my first lyric out of this. Two verses in two stanzas each with a refrain of which one word changes each iteration. It ain't poetry to rival Milton's but it says what needs to be said and matches the music nicely. Now if only I can come up with fifteen more verses I'll have a decent little song.

I'm not sure which sound more inspires terror in my neighbours -- the feral cats wailing for help they won't let us give 'em or me trying to sing a song.

More catastrophic flooding.

Beautiful day all day. Then a few big raindrops. Five minutes later it is coming down in sheets. Then suddenly the sixtly-mile-an-hour winds. Right as I wade out halfway up to my knees to close the windows the hail starts. I run out a second time after the hail stops (but it's still raining) to open up the laughably ineadequate flood drains the ^&*#$% Roto-Rooter guys always put caps on. Borrowed the neighbour's hacksaw to saw off the top of one they screwed on way too tight. Rained for under forty minutes but all the apartments are standing in about half a foot of water. There's water inside but not much. Heh. Like even just a little's good. It was blown in by the high winds. Felt just like being in a hurricane. All the musical instruments are off the floor and I was planning on running them and the cats out to the car.

WHEE!!! Now it's coming down in sheets again. It had just started to recede. Nothing more I can do I guess. The drains are all as open as they can be and heh we are screwed. The landlord came up but didn't get out of his car since getting to the apartments would have involved wading into the muddy water. I don't know why I feel like I might be catching a cold. We seriously need sandbags. Or hell, a five-foot concrete retaining wall around this whole complex of little buildings. Or hell. A STORM SEWER. (What a concept!) We sit on little duplex islands in lagoons on the bosque. It's so unbelievably charming and so terrifyingly threateningly WRONG all at once. I want to take a bath but it's kind of dumb to when the water outside comes up higher than the drain in the bathtub. Maybe I'll change into my bathrobe and play music for the floods of the apocalypse. The thunder will be my rhythm section. It keeps rhythm as well as I play the guitar.

Jam session today was GREAT. I'm GETTING it. The right hand just kinda strums stupidly but everyone's watching everyone else's left hand anyway so what the hell. People way the hell more experienced than me were looking at me not in the "what the hell is he playing now" way but in the way of people trying to figure out which chords to play when I was following someone else without a problem who they couldn't quite follow. Good thing I tried to learn the banjo first 'cause it gives me that edge in that I can follow chords on guitar from banjo players when they're leading the song. Need not to miss any more of those. Strange to say but I walk out just feeling cleansed of all the weirdness that built up the week before.

This is why I call it "random".

Marvellous times. Today spent all at home. I'm under such extreme, irrational anxiety when I leave the house it's safer to stay in. I'm in the frame of mind right now where to walk out is to make myself "vulnerable" to "things" -- outside forces, like lightning, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, famine, nuclear war. You see, from inside those are all just things to watch through my windows. The Mexican neighbours' kids might offer me meat or green chiles from the grill which would mean I'd have to be social which I can not bear. They did invite me -- worse than a lightning strike -- and I was as nice as I could be but I turned down the offer. I am a fool. It smells so good it hurts. But I can't bear to do it. I put some rocks around one of my cactuses and went right back indoors. I've finally got it to where I can walk out buckets of water to a single spot near the back door and irrigate the whole front garden without wasting any steps or water.

Not smoking on weekends. Am now pretty well established as a weekend nonsmoker. Ridiculous state of affairs if ever there was one, but there you have it. Spend all week undermining my own health and all weekend with a racing mind because I will not smoke. I'm dragging out the withdrawl and going back to smoking which is nastier to start up each and every time and then starting "not smoking" fresh from scratch again and always getting nowhere (at least so far). If I can make it three days or a week without smoking myself I'll be fine. I hate how much of my time and effort and energy goes into dealing with addictions 'cause it really is one of the lowest forms of human endeavour. I guess the lesson in that should be "don't smoke that next cigarette, then, and in a week or two or so it will hardly come up at all". I'm around smokers at work and at home so that can make it harder, though in theory it's not my business if other people want to be stupid. Heh.

I've got cigarettes in the house but I won't smoke 'em. If I do it'll be three times as hard to not smoke the next time I do this. What makes it *pleasant* is I *feel* the poisons leaving my body. Really the not smoking is sane, the smoking is insane; a few hours or days with a racing and mind and fear of people beats cancer. The little voice creeps in -- "you're failing miserably" and makes me want a cigarette. See I haven't had one since yesterday at this point and in those 24 hours I've done nothing to free India from British rule and therefore I'm not good enough or worthy so the only thing to do is smoke a cigarette. That's about the kind of thinking in my head. That and "the neighbour kids are trying to be freindly and that's a bad thing" thinking. The only way out of it is this sort of "meta-meta-meta" thinking -- getting to where you're always pushing the perspective out a notch or two to judge your judgements and be able to say "this is right" and "that is wrong". Just doing that keeps me more than adequately busy. Weird emotional stuff comes up when I stop smoking that I won't even go into on here.

Just cured my big cast iron skillet. Filled the place with smoke. Awful. Now letting it cool off before I wash it. Then I plan to make some quesadillas in it. Nothing much more here to report.

WOW. Biggest 18-wheeler EVER just turned around out front. Practically a grain silo on wheels. Totally decked out with lights. Trailer said "Oakley, Little Rock", so I guess it's one of Bruce Oakley's.

Amazing speech on KUNM this evening by Greg Palast. *Now* that mysterious letter I got from the Republican party in Texas makes sense. It was *not* standard issue campaign material. I've still got it somewhere and responded with a completely flippant Felix the Cat card to Governor Bush with a copy of the letter enclosed. He's finally stopped sending invitations to events to my parents.

I think he knows he's burning all his bridges and honestly just doesn't care. He's pathologically criminal: nothing anyone tells him will ever change his mind about anything he thinks he knows better about -- it's called "the divine right of Kings" and England fought a bloody civil war to depose James I who claimed the right before the Americans came along and did their own little Declaration of Independce thing way later. Besides being a usurper, the way Governor Bush runs a government is a step back to the sixteenth century. He definitely needs to spend the rest of his life in prison for the purposes of national security.

But back to the letter, and its intended purpose -- it would seem my name was on one of their caging lists. They'd send those letters out with "do nor forward, return to sender" orders on 'em, and if they came back, listed the person's nondeliverable mailing address as a reason to challenge the validity of those votes, concentrating their efforts on racial and ethnic minority precincts (in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act). My address is ridiculously long, but it is deliverable.

2004 was the worst year ever, for me, and the election was a big old ugly part of it. Think "threats, harassment, and destruction of personal property". That bad.

But finally I know what that vaguely threatening letter was really about. At the time I thought it was 'cause they were "concentrating" on me for being a Nader voter or that I was on some list of people who'd visted the governor in Austin on this or that occasion. *That* is "conspiracy theory" thinking at its worst -- pure paranoiac "oh I'm so important that I've got this letter sent to me specifically". When you've got people slashing your tyres and waving hollow-point bullets in your face on a daily basis (as I did, at the time) a little bit of paranoia's understandable.

The real criminal conspiracy was actually much simpler and more rational than what I had imagined. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time -- living with Navahos and Mexicans and queers and Democrats as far as the eye can see.

I've got to call city information. The buzzing light pole is driving me crazy. I don't know who handles it but it's a 24-hour nuisance.

Quick followup on gym raid.

Equality New Mexico issued a statement of the "cautious but hopeful" variety on the recent DPS gym raid in one of their more-or-less regular emails, which reads, in part:

While EQNM is not involved in any of the criminal issues that resulted from the July 4th weekend raid, we are actively investigating the targeting and unfair treatment of LGBT individuals. A recent article in the Alibi stated that the ACLU has dropped this matter. This is untrue. ACLU is no longer involved in any of the criminal matters, and those with matters pending have been advised to retain individual counsel. EQNM and the ACLU have interviewed several of the patrons who were at Pride Gym on the night of the police raid, and there is an ongoing investigation into potential civil claims. ACLU has already sent a document request to the Department of Public Safety and has investigated all of the deadlines for filing a civil claim. EQNM will continue to work closely with ACLU. Cases such as this often take time, but rest assured, the case has been neither dropped nor forgotten.

Let's hope not. DPS has been targeting the gay community in this state for years. It's time they stopped.

The criminal facts of the raid were so messed up to begin with that Leo's criminal case was a "bad" one from the standpoint of civil rights organizations working in a state where major party politicians run on tough DWI platforms and little else of substance. Leo's a great guy but he's not exactly Rosa Parks -- meaning well established, universally respected in the community, and above suspicion of ever having done anything wrong. Amongst faggotry, no one is. Among minorities, we are the people of the bars.

That is what happens when the primary legal tool employed by gay-bashers in state government remains the Liquor Code. Enforcement of Liquor Code provisions tends, by the nature of the business it regulates, to be random and arbitrary -- except in the established patterns and practices of DPS repeatedly targeting gay institutions (now including non-licensed premises establishments) for selectively stepped-up enforcement. They get away with whatever they want because in this community no one's record is totally spotless.

It's possible the facts of this particular case won't even provide grounds for a good, solid, civil suit. I'm hoping they will, of course, and more realistically hoping that EQNM and the ACLU are as "on top of" things next time something of this sort happens as they were this time around. Of course I know these cases can drag on for years. (Just ask me about the phone call I received from the Los Angeles Police Department in Texas three years after the events of 22 October, 2000 about which they were asking.) It's also possible for the issue to get swept underneath a rug and forgotten.

If you're reading this and you're with the ACLU or EQNM, you have my deepest gratitude for having taken things this far, and this free advice from me: whatever brick wall you might hit, don't put the files on this in storage yet. DPS will strike again. They always do. Check back about the same time next year.

In the meantime, we can let DPS and the bigoted pervert Deputy Director of its Special Investigations Division (his name's Jim Plagens) know we're watching them like hawks.

A patent absurdity.

Typical of EISes, the purpose of the document is not to honestly and fairly assess environmental impacts of different options the NNSA could choose to follow so much as it is to justify and advocate for the predetermined "preferred alternative" from the three options presented that the NNSA is ostensibly considering. Much of the summary (and yes, that's just how far I've gotten so far) is all about why the "expanded operations alternative" is supposed to be better for the environment than the "reduced action alternative".

Thus, from page S-48 of the 117-page Summary of the Draft LANL Site-Wide EIS:

The Mexican spotted owl [an endangered species] would also be affected if the RLWTF [Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility] were to cease discharging effluent. This would likely reduce the extent of perennial and intermittent stream reaches and associated wetland and riparian habitat thereby reducing the abundance and diversity of prey species.

Right. Because the natural habitat of the endangered Mexican spotted owl is -- what else -- radioactive liquid waste effluent! I wonder how the spotted owls survived for thousands of years before the LANL's RLWTF started discharging radioactive liquid waste effluent into where they lived. The way they put it, you might be forgiven for thinking that like in some '50s B-movie the spotted owls were just endangered to begin with 'til the radioactive liquid waste effluent made 'em grow to superhuman dimensions and prosper and take over a whole region, endangering the innocent civilians unfortunate enough to reside in the small rural towns where they proceeded to extend their dictatorial control. Hoot!

There's a book out there somewhere by the title "Toxic Sludge is Good for You". I've never read it, and never took it seriously enough to think I'd actually see that statement in a government document purporting to be an Environmental Impact Study. But there you have it!

According to the NNSA, radioactive liquid waste effluent is vital to the health and well-being not just of the dreaded Mexican spotted owl (I think the Minutemen Militia are against "wetback owls" too, on general principal) but of "wetland and riparian habitat" in general. Without radioactive liquid waste effluent, "the abundance and diversity of prey species" will be adversely affected. And who isn't for "ABUNDANCE" and "DIVERSITY" (even if just of radioactive mice, lizards, and rats)?

So -- be forewarned -- if you support the "reduced operations alternative" in the SWEIS you are declaring that you're opposed to "abundance" and "diversity" and therefore it stands to reason you stand in favour of "scarcity" and "narrowness". Therefore, if you oppose the "expanded operations alternative", you must be a terrorist, since in the famous words of our own unelected so-called president you're either "with us or against us".

Lots of string.

A perfectly delightful broadcast transcript can be found at:

Ralph Nader on Lamont's Antiwar Win in Connecticut and Lieberman's Vow to Run as an Independent

Yes, forgive me please, I'm taking something of a break. Seeing my hometown flooded out was, heh, a trifle trying! Between that and the LANL SWEIS and learning the hard way (as always) how to verify benefits and eligibility for patients I'm stretched a little tiny bit more thin than usual these days.

Meeting Mrs. Sheehan was grand, but it wasn't an "I heard her rouse the madding crowd" moment that I can write to NPR about in thirty years complete with soundclips they can steal unattributed from the Pacifica Radio Archives. More like we were both fishing out three thousand floating lanterns from Ashley Pond Pond in Los Alamos after all the weekend armchair activists who'd lit them had long left.

Ashley Pond Pond stinks to high heaven regardless whether Robert "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" (Vishnu) Oppenhiemer ever skated on it when it froze in the winter. Nothing quite like getting covered in wet goose shit (and then wondering where to find a push-broom in Los Alamos after ten PM) to remind oneself that one is really serious about a thing -- and that a hick town in New Mexico is still a hick town in New Mexico even if the atom bomb just happens to be the reason for the hick town to exist in the first place, and all the community theatre and chamber music in the world won't change it.

One lantern for each hundred dead at Hiroshima (by the most conservative of estimates). The casualty numbers have never been so real. Each paint-stirrer equals 33.3 human lives. Each toothpick equals the deaths of 16.65 innocent civilians, counting only those who died more or less right away. I spent a good two hours along with many, many anonymous others disassembling those little floating lanterns in my best "assembly line" mode learned from the countless hourly wage/piecework jobs I've worked over the years. So yeah, I'm sorry that your grandpa died so horribly, but this is my tribute to him, slightly less than one seventeenth of the quarter second it takes me to pull a toothpick out from a single paint stick. NEXT!

I pass on these undying words of wisdom to you from Cindy Sheehan herself, uttered as she worked right next to me on the pond: "lots of string" and "very wet". To her, my own words were "smells awful", plus perhaps a few that will now be lost forever to posterity. Ah yes, a meeting of the minds on equal grounds if ever there was one!

Please let the NNSA know what you think of their plan to quintuple production of Plutonium pits (nuclear warhead "triggers") at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It need not take more than a minute to email them, and if you think your comments count for nothing, then you've clearly never read an EIS. Public comments do count. The deadline in 5 September.

What I want to see is the NNSA take the "reduced action alternative" while extending the deadline for public comment. What you may want may well differ once you've read the SWEIS. That's your business. Maybe you have an interest in seeing nuclear weapons production quintuple over the coming five years -- fine, so be it. But damn it let 'em know what you think, regardless.

If you think I'm into complicated stuff...

then you clearly haven't read the Independent's article:

Retrial of Nurses & Doctor in AIDS Case Adjourned

on which I genuinely have nothing whatever to say since I don't know a damn thing about it.

Nuclear weapons are *easy*.

I'm alive.

Trip down to El Paso was very wet. Took some pictures, may post here someday. As it is I've been running almost a week now on too little sleep and I am going slightly mad. Downloading the 4.3 Mb Chapter 4 of the EIS as we speak, which may take all night. The table of contents alone is 47 pages long. The first public hearing is tomorrow. Heh. David's with me. We met Cindy Sheehan in Los Alamos last night. I'm loopy and exhausted and I need to prepare food so with apologies to everyone who's written or commented I just can't devote the time I need to do online things right, right now.

An objectionable statement.

Sure hope you crazy readers are up for a heapin' helpin' of Alphabet soup. Here goes!

So anyway the Los Alamos Site Office (LASO) of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) just published, with zero public notice, its new Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS).

Not "Study", as usual for EISes, but "Statement". They're not weighing their options, they're telling you what they're gonna do. They're still required by law to take public comments, whatever "S" word they use, but they're only giving us 'til 5 September to respond, which is just patently absurd. Still, you can absolutely let 'em know just what you think.

The contact info's all right here, and if you're so inclined, a one-line "Mr. Horse" response will quite suffice. I've done it. It does work. Even complaining about the short deadline can make a concrete difference. Getting them to send you a hard copy of the EIS is great -- it makes them spend time, money, and other resources on getting that to you that might be otherwise be far less well engaged. It also lets them know -- and Congress -- that they're absolutely being watched. You can bitch and moan about how fucked up the government is, give yourself a headache, and accomplish nothing, or you can take literally one minute, shoot off an email, and by so doing actively engage in public oversight of it.

Sound like fun? Sure does to me! Let's see. How did we get to where we are today?

Well, once upon a time, believe it or not, humanity was content to kill eachother off without the aid of nuclear weapons. They found sufficient joy in brutalities that stopped far short of fallout clouds circling the earth for generations spreading death and disease throughout the entire bioshphere that they just never dreamed up, let alone built, much less ever used, such a weapon. Your parents and grandparents may even remember this now long-forgotten happy time in the far ancient past.

Then the ingenious United States, driven by a pioneering spirit and mobilized for war developed just such weapons and deployed 'em -- not just once, but twice -- against civilian populations.

Then the U.S. joined up with the U.S.S.R. and together had this fun little game that they called the "Cold War" because it was based on the premise of "deterrence" rather than actual fighting. In theory, because of "mutually assured destruction" in the event of a nuclear war between these two ostensible rivals, neither side would ever strike first. Great idea. Great fun.

Meanwhile they built more and bigger toys and showed them off to eachother constantly. They eventually built up enough nuclear warheads to destroy all life on the planet several hundred times over. Hence the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), based on the not unreasonable premise that we probably don't really need enough nuclear weapons to destroy, well, everything forever. And then there was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) since all the little men playing "see, mine is bigger than yours" proved so insanely dangerous in itself. But then the Soviet Union sorta fell apart, leaving the U.S. the only nuclear superpower on earth -- and the only nation in the history of man *ever* to have *used* nuclear weapons against human beings.

Enough backstory. When I walked in, the NNSA was looking for a site for a brand spankin' new atom bomb factory called the Modern Pit Facility (MPF), and was considering Carlsbad, Los Alamos, Tennessee, Livermore, Amarillo, and one more place that I forget maybe some place in Washington State. Since I grew up a mere 150 miles from Carlsbad and didn't want it there, I read the scoping report or EIS or whatever it was and wrote 'em a nice little note urging them to "take the no action alternative" (or something like that). Lots of other people did much the same and it all went on public record.

Between all of us doing that, surprise, surprise, Congress ultimately rejected MPF, which means that the legislative branch does generally understand it's in nobody's interests for the U.S. to abrogate the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by setting up a brand new factory to manufacture Plutonium pits for nuclear warheads at the same time we're going after Iran for presumptive noncompliance with the same exact treaty while we've got somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15,000 perfectly marvellous pits stored at the Pantex site bunkers in Amarillo. (Or at least they understand that if they did they'd face an uphill battle come election time.)

Rocky Flats, of course, got shut down when that incredibly brave woman (whose name I'm sorry I've forgetten and who's now got some nasty cancer her coworkers gave her -- ask me about her thyroid medication pill bottle, sometime) blew the whistle on sloppy Plutonium handling and widespread contamination that got the FBI to raid the place before it finally got shut down. So now, poor little United States, we *only* have the capacity to manufacture 20 Plutonium pits every year, and we only have that "reduced" capacity at -- you guessed it -- Los Alamos National Laboratory.

A "pit" is basically a highly polished sphere of Plutonium, about the size of an orange or grapefruit and weighing in (I believe) around eleven pounds, and serves as the "trigger" in a nuclear weapon many orders of magnitude more powerful than the downright primitive "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" designs we used to such pretty effect in the 'forties. I *think* it's surrounded by two hemispherical Uranium "tampers" -- but whatever. The point isn't how to build one (which I'm more than happy not to know a thing about). The point is that without the pit you don't have a fissionable core. Without a fissionable core you might well have a "dirty bomb" (like the depleted Uranium (DU) munitions the U.S. is so fond of using overseas these days) but you won't have a real, honest-to-god nuclear weapon of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki variety that can incinerate millions of people at a time while making a really very lovely puff of smoke.

I mean, without the pit, you can make nuclear weapons, but only after a fashion. People will die horribly and all, but not quite horribly enough, and not enough people, and not for long enough after hostilities have ceased to please the current messianic powers that be. Besides which, with no pit, there is no mushroom cloud, and goodness knows they're awesomely beautiful and who *wouldn't* want to see one? (If there's logic more sound than that behind this thing I can't figure out what it is.) The point is this: manufacturing an annual twenty of a weapon that's been used historically in war just *twice* is not enough for the current administration, not enough for the Bechtel-led conglomerate that's now contracted to run LANL, and so the NNSA quietly issues a SWEIS to simultaneously announce and bury its intent from public scrutiny. They are ingenious, as always.

So anyway, according to the SWEIS, pit production will ramp up to four times current capacity, making eighty pits per year for the time being. New Mexico's Senator Domenici (Chair of the Senate Subcommittee for Energy and Water Development Appropriations) has seen to it that the construction of a one-billion dollar Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement project (CMRR) at LANL is fully funded. (That's a pit production facility, folks. Remember, we got 'em to kill MPF, so they're just trying a different tactic now.) Meanwhile *existing* pit-production facilities at LANL will have their working lives extended by 20 to 30 years. And the long-term goal is to get production up to the 125-pit per year mark. Fresh nuclear wastes generated by the lab will almost double, according to the SWEIS. (I wonder how the guv'ner's "fuzzy math" works: annual pit production quadruples and eventually quintuples, but annual waste streams don't even quite double. Hm!)

The lab which currently stores at least 2.7 metric tons of Plutonium will store up to 6.6 metric tons. Eleven pounds = one pit. One pit = millions of people dying horribly. Do the math. Then tell me why we need it. I'm not being sarcastic. I want to know why.

The lab will process 87,000 pounds of high explosives every year, and blow up somewhere around 6,900 pounds of DU in "dynamic experiments". Meanwhile 2,200 pounds of highly enriched (weapons grade, not reactor grade) Uranium will be used in the fabrication of nuclear weapons components while 200 reservoirs of Tritium (which I think is "heavy" Hydrogen) will be produced each year. Over the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Smart.

And of course the lab will receive between five and ten shipments annually of radioactive wastes from other DOE (Department of Energy) sites while shipping ever more down to the Waste Isolation Pilot Program (WIPP) down in Carlsbad, which is built into saltmines that leak.

Are we supposed to be happy that they're RECYCLING nuclear weapons components? Is this the war machine's answer to sorting trash? Why does anybody anywhere ever need even a fraction of this kind of destructive power?

Thanks to the amazing people at NukeWatch for most of the information on the EIS which I shamelessly lifted from their monthly newsletter.

If you want a copy of the EIS, you too can have one of your very own! Just think what a hit you'll be with those two volumes underneath your arm at all the fashionable cocktail parties! Just pay a visit to your tax-funded National Nuclear Security Administration Los Alamos Site Office Website, where the complete two-volume EIS is conveniently divided into no fewer than 28 different PDF files for you to download and peruse at your convenience.

Or, you can write to

National Nuclear Security Administration
Los Alamos Site Office
Attn: Ms. Elizabeth Withers
Office of Environmental Stewardship
528 35th St.
Los Alamos, NM 87544

and request a printed copy. I know I did, and I can hardly wait to get it -- hopefully in time to read before the deadline for public comments hits a month from now.

Or you can fax your request to (505) 667-5948.

You can also call them at 1-877-491-4957.

Or, finally, you can just pop off an email to LANL_SWEIS@doeal.gov -- be sure to ask for a hard copy of the report (I wonder if they have one in Spanish) and if you think of it ask 'em to extend the comments deadline! It sure would help me out! I plan to read the damn thing before I comment this time around.

Rio Bravo.

The Rio Grande flooded down in El Paso. Long before the US Army Corps of Engineers channelized the river to "fix" the ever-shifting border imposed on Mexico, it used to do that all the time. Many oldtimers from El Paso have stories nobody believes about boulders the size of their servants' quarters washing down off the mountain and blocking key intersections right downtown. I believe this is the first time it's happened since channelization. I know it's the first time it's happened in my lifetime. Like the Nile, or Mississippi, the Rio Bravo is by nature a wild river that floods its banks and even changes course completely. That's why the Rio Grande Valley is fertile and has supported human civilization for thousands of years. So on one level I am thrilled to see the river yet untamed, a century and a half of man's brutalization notwithstanding. It still has a mind of its own, and we still depend on it -- not the other way 'round.

But on a human level, well, they had to evacuate Anapra, which is terrible. Even tragic. Grossly unfair. I love Anapra. It's the working-class smeltertown place right smack-dab against the border fence that got screwed over bigtime when Interior Secretary Gale Norton's EPA declared most of El Paso (but mostly the moneyed neighbourhoods) a Superfund site, thanks to ASARCO's 113 years of belching tons of carcinogenic smoke (Lead, Arsenic, Antimony) all the way up to Canada, where fish died from dioxins emanating from its huge smokestack. Something like 2,000 people were evacuated from Vinton, too. Wealthy neighbourhoods were inconvenienced. Poor neighbourhoods flooded and may yet again be sacrificed on the altar of "flood control".

Emergency centers were set up in high schools and a lot of people lost their homes and everything they own. There were refrigerators floating in the streets and water up to the tops of full-sized vans. Shadow Mountain Road, which runs through a hoity-toity exurb built way too high up on the Franklin Mountains has reportedly been reduced to rubble (good riddance). Sinkholes opened up beneath the city streets, presumably from the caverns that underlie much of the city.

I've heard all this from my mother and from the local news on public radio (KUNM 89.9 FM). On NPR, of course, the only weather news they had for the day was that it hit a hundred in New York. So -- with apologies to my one reader from New York (thrilled to have you, btw) -- the beautiful, important people on the coasts have to fan themselves for a day and it makes national headlines, while thousands of impoverished Mexicans and Mexican-Americans getting flooded out of their homes makes -- you guessed it -- local public radio news. NPR can't sacrifice the precious airtime it's devoted to the so-called "human interest" story about "music from Brazil so bad it's almost good" to say a word about Anapra. You might forgive me for being just a trifle cynical about what does and doesn't make national news.

To be fair, NPR *is* relatively responsive to public criticism. They still drive me insane with their coastish airs of superiority, sophistication, and whatnot but they *have* changed, slowly, the ways that they report on important stories in response to public comment. They do respond a little bit to massive public pressure. More than you can say for CNN, Fox News, or any other multinational conglomerate owned private commercial media outlet.

What else. Supremely good guitar day today. I just started playing and played for an hour and a half without a single break. Best hour and a half I've ever played. Ever. I'd still be playing if it weren't one in the morning. (Good god I've been writing too long.) I made a discovery about the ingenious design and placement of the pickup selector switch on my Gretsch -- specifically that I can switch its positions *while* playing! Yes, I know, it *is* obvious, and goodness knows I saw the *incredible* guitarist of Amplified Heat doing some mind-bending things along that line (and many other lines, besides) in Austin way back before they even had a website (which I just discovered). They're pretty much the guys who *convinced* me valve amps were the *only* way to go when my guitar fell right into my lap.

But I've been focusing on getting good tone out of the guitar without using the knobs and switches -- you know -- how you hold and hit the strings makes all the difference in the world, and I don't *ever* want to be one of those people who uses excessive distortion and electronic tomfoolery to attempt to make up for tenth-rate playing. It fools nobody. Noise is still noise: if it's loud, noise isn't better, but worse; and all the harmonic processing of all the vacuum tubes in the world won't make three chords into four or hide the fact that you're not fretting properly or missing strings when you transition.

So what I was doing today was, again, I'm sure preschool-level stuff to most experienced guitarists, but completely amazing for me, all the more because it's not even possible to come close to doing the same thing on an acoustic instrument. I mean, you can change your sound considerably from one measure or passage to the next just by technique, but not *anything* like *that*! It's like suddenly having a whole different instrument in your hands, and then switching back, just as quickly. No break.

That little thing that I've been playing so much of lately, that started as an Irish jig or hornpipe or something until I just made it my own, has these "sections" it divides up into very neatly when you strum (which takes practice and skill to sound halfway decent, let alone look "easy"), and I've been working on doing all I could with that. I've skipped the Sunday jam sessions two weeks now just to work on this one piece of music on my own, it's *got* me *that* much in its grip! Part of me -- a big part -- wants to be able to offer something when the turn-taking comes round and hits me so I don't have to sit there and grin stupidly like I don't know *anything*.

Finally I've got it *down*. I find myself doing things that just sound right and surprising myself. Bigtime. Trial and error. Do it wrong a zillion times, then do it right, and stop because I can't believe I really did it right. Then do it wrong a zillion more times until suddenly I do it right without stopping, and then do it right again -- again -- again. By now it's natural. That "tricky" chord is not so tricky, it was just unfamiliar. Now it's not. That transition wasn't "difficult", it was just different from what I'd done a thousand times before I decided I had to learn a song with that particular transition. Now that I've done it a thousand times or more it's second nature, like the others that I'd learned before. Doing things by instinct I had tried before but found way too tricky and just moved on to something else. Then suddenly, pop, there it is, and it's flawless, but at the same time not so earth-shattering an event as to stop me dead in my tracks. There's no pause and no break in the music. I'm not stopping midsentence to say "see? I just constructed half a sentence right there, good for me!". If that's not a zen moment I don't know what is.

Basic things, yes. But I have to figure them out on my own. That (more than the currently overextended finances) is why I don't go for lessons just yet. I'm not out to run a marathon and don't need a trainer while I'm just barely learning to stand on my own two feet. If I need to pay anyone forty bucks per half hour to tell me that I shouldn't dampen the next string over with my big fat middle finger then I've probably got no business playing the instrument in question to begin with and would be well advised to try a cello or bass viol, frets or no. (Don't they make bass guitars as well these days?)

Then suddenly today I discover that this little three-way pickup selector switch moves in the same direction as the right hand while it's strumming. IMAGINE THAT. It's not where it is and aligned like it is because it looks pretty, it's where it is because it makes good sense. I *don't* have to treat it like it's something I need stop what I'm doing and walk clear across the room in order to turn on. So I have it in the middle position for one section, then switch it down for the next one, and then switch it back for the section after that, without slowing or stopping the music itself. It's just part of the strum. It changes the voicings quite dramatically; and since I've gotten to where I can change the sounds to a considerable degree without switching a thing I can make it work *for* me, deliberately. On purpose!

If I were on organ I'd call the effect antiphonal. Since I'm not on organ I don't know what I *should* call it; so I'll call it antiphonal regardless, and let anyone who knows better be damned. But it's just like switching from the foundational diaphones to a well-rounded ensemble with diapasons, flutes, strings, and reeds to OUT OF NOWHERE straight nasards or even state trumpets (depending finally on where and how you hit the strings -- so if you're muddling them, the switch just absolutely doesn't matter).

Yes, Michael Murray playing Dunstable, Bach, Dupre, and Franck on church and concert organs is as much a model for my guitar playing as anything. That little switch can add whole different dimensions to the music, enabling impossibly, vividly clear "call and response" phrasings on ONE INSTRUMENT. The only other single instrument capable of doing that, that I know of, comprises tens of thousands of wooden and metal pipes and can't be strapped to your chest and moved around with you from place to place without a 53-foot trailer.

If you're playing *right* to begin with it can be downright shocking. It can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end (in a *very* good way). If you're playing sloppy it'll still just sound sloppy, but in different voices, therefore sloppier than if you didn't fuck with the switch in the first place, so it's best to play right, and that's that.

Let's see. How have I changed? Me, six months ago: "the guitar is a lowly and unworthy instrument, save in the hands of a veritable master of music". Today, I've played maybe a couple of months and can make train sounds and grade crossing sounds and trumpet sounds and lyrical harp sounds and driving sounds and surfer music sounds and horror movie sounds I have no right to make at all on top of organ sounds and goodness knows what else I haven't even stumbled across yet. It's a crazy mix of stuff but the point is that it's all evocative, it's all *at my command*, they're all *available* to work with, and I'm starting to piece something together in the process that does actually sound like music and has infinite variety within even the simplest outward forms.

I'm not a master of the instrument by any stretch of the imagination but I'm getting far more for the effort that I'm putting into it than I have ever gotten from any instrument I've ever played or tried to play. I can play a few things on piano and a few more on an organ. My fingers are too big for violin, although I did enjoy the cello, and could probably scratch something out on a viola if I had one handy. I can noodle around on an accordion or bandoneon and play some chords on the banjo and make a sound like a dying sheep on a clarinet. But only on the guitar can I apparently make music, and apparently, an ever-expanding range and variety of it, at that.

Plus I'm learning to use and adjust and play off the amazing harmonics that come out of the amp. There are overtones in that little Fender that I swear sound just like a theremin. I mean, they're in the strings, or the vibrations of the strings, or the magnetic fields through which the strings are vibrating, or between the cathodes and anodes in the tubes, or wherever -- but when you have the knobs set *just* a certain way and *really* get going, there's suddenly this otherworldly voice on top of and beyond what you *thought* you were playing that follows your fingers. You can't *make* the voice come. If you try you will just get a few high-pitched squeals. It just comes when you're playing correctly.

Poking around the Amplified Heat website. Damn, they've got a CD. I need it. I still need to listen to Mike's! I ge;pppp;;[t

Apologies. That last word of wisdom come to you courtesy one of my too many kittens.

I continue.

I get CDs and then don't listen to 'em 'til I can do it *right*. I listen intently, music's *never* "background noise" to me. So I get CDs and put 'em on a shelf and practically forget they're there. Driving down to El Paso I should have some time to actually *listen*. Then again, if I don't hear the interlock beep at me -- heh -- music, or jailtime, that's my choice! Damn it. So I've got to listen here at home. Or wait a few more months. Wish I could route the CD through the big speakers, do it up right. We will see.

Whoa nelly. I've run out of laptop battery. It's two AM. I thought I gave this up when I left Foxes. Later.