Smart Wheels – Part I

I understand none of the science of course.  But if it works, this car would run on 8 grams of thorium — for a century.  Whether or not this particular breakthrough pans out, I’m telling you: if we don’t screw it up in the next decade or three — a fraction of an instant in geological time and not much more than that even in human time — the future will be all but unimaginably bright.

Of course, that’s a big if.  And perhaps we should look to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and the climate change denier who chairs the House climate change subcommittee for direction in getting from here to there.  Maybe it’s all in Ayn Rand’s epic comic book that Paul Ryan actually takes seriously and whom Rand Paul seems to have been named after (but from whose views Ayn Rand disciple Alan Greenspan long-since distanced himself).  Maybe the Tea Party guys who actually wanted to shut down the government and who think the federal budget should be run like a household budget — that we shouldn’t borrow to invest in our future (would they have voted against borrowing to win World War II? why is it better to borrow to blow things up than borrow to build things that will last 100 years?) — maybe they are the visionaries.  But something tells me that, for all their genuinely good intentions — Sarah Palin thought she was qualified to run the world in the event of John McCain’s demise, and he thought so, too — they are the problem, not the solution.