Hard-to-See Crazy Hand

Paraphrasing and elaborating on something I recently heard on NPR while pushing the station wagon back from the grocery store:

The best way to get rid of weapons-grade nuclear material is to dilute it down to reactor grade and then burn it up in a power-plant. We had a program in which we bought old Russian warheads and used the good stuff in American reactors, and the program paid for itself. Thousands of warheads were thusly destroyed. Electricity was produced.

I do not like nuclear waste any more than the next guy but seems to me that was not an all-bad program.

The radio talkers implied that the program was no longer in use.

Also, I heard two local guys on this area's Air America AM station (1010 KXXT Phoenix) discussing the way things would probably have turned out had we been wise enough to follow the energy plan laid out by Jimmy Carter way back when.

Interesting in itself, that.

Of course, because his brain was covered with aluminum plaque, Reagan rolled back development of all of Carter's progressive ideas that would have saved us, well, probably a war or two, and several trillions of dollars.

But the real point the M & M radio guys were making was that the market is just plain stupid. After we've wasted half of the petroleum on the planet, after we have soiled the enviroment, after we have enriched Madrassas full of religiously insane future suicide-bombers, after we have initiated a war of aggression to secure a distant oilfield, after, after, after all that... the market responds.

Voila! A few people are buying smaller cars.

The invisible hand of free market capitalism is guided by madness.