Nuclear March Madness

President Obama’s pick of Kansas to win the March Madness collegiate basketball tournament ended with their defeat by Virginia Commonwealth University this past Saturday. He must know how the Jay Hawks are feeling because he is entangled in his own March Madness that will continue after this month ends.The expanding nuclear meltdown disaster from Japan’s cluster of nuclear plants gets worse by the day, yet President Obama continues to reassure the nuclear industry that he supports more plants guaranteed by the U.S. taxpayers because Wall Street otherwise will not risk loaning billions of dollars per plant.Mr. Obama, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and their atomic power allies say that they’ll learn from the Japanese failures and make the U.S. plants safer. That puts off the urgency to act for an indefinite period.What Mr. Obama should realize is that Japan’s human and economic catastrophe was a gigantic wakeup call to stop playing Russian roulette with the lives of millions of Americans and swing into action. First, he should shut down any plants near large population centers where untested evacuation plans are tragic farces. That means San Onofre and Diablo Canyon in California and the troubled Indian Point plants 26 miles from Manhattan that are near active seismic faults. That means closing all aging nukes as recommended by Russian scientist Alexey Yablokov (a member of the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences), who had a news conference in Washington last Thursday (ignored by the major newspapers and network television but covered by CNN and C-SPAN) regarding 5,000 scientific papers in Slavic languages on the consequences of the 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl (See his report at https://books.google.com/books?id=g34tNlYOB3AC&lpg=PP1&ots=O15UeQYVf5&dq=...). He estimated at least 1 million lives have been lost since.Second, there should be an immediate analysis of substitute electric generating capacity and the many ways to reduce energy waste so as to close out the uneconomic, unnecessary and unsafe nuclear industry forever (see www.RMI.org).Corporations must not be allowed to jeopardize the habitability of American land and the lives of the American people with a technology that’s only purpose is to boil water to produce steam. An area half the size of New Jersey around Chernobyl is uninhabitable with abandoned towns and villages. The Japanese, with reactors manufactured by General Electric (whose $14.2 billion in profits escaped taxation last year and got $3.2 billion in tax benefits) are in the early stages of figuring out how many square kilometers will have to be abandoned by families and workers.Yesterday, New York Times reporter George Johnson wrote: “With radiation, the terror lies in the abstraction. It kills incrementally — slowly, diffusely, invisibly. ‘Afterheat,’ Robert Socolow, a Princeton University professor, called it in an essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ‘the fire that you can’t put out.’”Professor Socolow works on energy conservation and renewable energy. He and hundreds of other experts know that efficient renewable technologies and conservation can substitute more safely and more efficiently far more megawatts than 104 nukes are producing now from their deadly hot radioactive nuclear cores. It is way past time to end this government-guaranteed, corporate Mutational Madness once and for all. On Capitol Hill, President Obama still is surrendering to House Republican extortions in return for them agreeing to extend every three weeks the budget resolution so as to avoid a government shutdown. The president simply doesn’t know how to throw the Republican know-nothings on the defensive by discrediting their craven, inebriating ideology of fact-starved abstractions. He prefers to do his fighting overseas.While on the other side of the world, the wars of Obama have added Libya, notwithstanding Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed disclination to start this latest attack, before it started. Again, no end strategy and no candor to tell the American people and their Congress that the no-fly zone is moving into a full-fledged attack, under NATO cover, with ground forces aided by U.S. special forces already in Libya. So much for our Constitution’s allocation of authority. Long ago, humanitarian interventions should have been initiated by an independent United Nations standing military capability pursuant to the appropriate U.N. resolutions. After all, more than 190 countries — just about all the countries of the world — are members of the U.N. and adhere to the U.N. Charter, which has the force of international law upon signatory countries. You would think that King Clinton, King Bush and King Obama would have advanced this concept to relieve the American Empire of some of its burdens. Then our government could pay more attention here to saving lives and advancing health by reducing the millions of preventable deaths, injuries and diseases from toxic pollution, occupation perils, hospital malpractice and infections, product defects and poverty. Imagine real health care for all! Consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader grew up in Winsted and is a graduate of The Gilbert School.

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Club baseball at Fuessenich Park

Travel league baseball came to Torrington Thursday, June 26, when the Berkshire Bears Select Team played the Connecticut Moose 18U squad. The Moose won 6-4 in a back-and-forth game. Two players on the Bears play varsity ball at Housatonic Valley Regional High School: shortstop Anthony Foley and first baseman Wes Allyn. Foley went 1-for-3 at bat with an RBI in the game at Fuessenich Park.

 

  Anthony Foley, rising senior at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, went 1-for-3 at bat for the Bears June 26.Photo by Riley Klein 

 
Siglio Press: Uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature

Uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature.

Richard Kraft

Siglio Press is a small, independent publishing house based in Egremont, Massachusetts, known for producing “uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature.” Founded and run by editor and publisher Lisa Pearson, Siglio has, since 2008, designed books that challenge conventions of both form and content.

A visit to Pearson’s airy studio suggests uncommon work, to be sure. Each of four very large tables were covered with what looked to be thousands of miniature squares of inkjet-printed, kaleidoscopically colored pieces of paper. Another table was covered with dozens of book/illustration-size, abstracted images of deer, made up of colored dots. For the enchanted and the mystified, Pearson kindly explained that these pieces were to be collaged together as artworks by the artist Richard Kraft (a frequent contributor to the Siglio Press and Pearson’s husband). The works would be accompanied by writings by two poets, Elizabeth Zuba and Monica Torre, in an as-yet-to-be-named book, inspired by a found copy of a worn French children’s book from the 1930s called “Robin de Bois” (Robin Hood).

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Cycling season: A roundup of our region’s rentals and where to ride them

Cyclists head south on the rail trail from Copake Falls.

Alec Linden

After a shaky start, summer has well and truly descended upon the Litchfield, Berkshire and Taconic hills, and there is no better way to get out and enjoy long-awaited good weather than on two wheels. Below, find a brief guide for those who feel the pull of the rail trail, but have yet to purchase their own ten-speed. Temporary rides are available in the tri-corner region, and their purveyors are eager to get residents of all ages, abilities and inclinations out into the open road (or bike path).

For those lucky enough to already possess their own bike, perhaps the routes described will inspire a new way to spend a Sunday afternoon. For more, visit lakevillejournal.com/tag/bike-route to check out two ride-guides from local cyclists that will appeal to enthusiasts of many levels looking for a varied trip through the region’s stunning summer scenery.

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