Jones Beene wrote:
Perceptive ... or were you kidding?
Its sounds almost like the kind of shrug where John Galt/Gordon
Gekko is thinking about dumping a past-life of laissez-faire,
greed-is-good capitalism in favor of the B-team?
This actually happened the other day. Alan Greenspan more or less
admitted he was wrong, in Congressional testimony. Partially wrong,
anyway, which is a huge change for him. He studied with Ayn Rand herself.
I don't care for Rand or her books, but I would like to note that her
hero, John Galt, invents a mysterious power station that outputs
electricity with no apparent source of fuel. It occurred to me many
years ago that Rand must have imagined this as some sort of nuclear
reactor. It is a standalone, no maintenance unit similar to the
Hyperion gadget that Ed doesn't trust. Now, I suppose it would be a
cold fusion reactor. If cold fusion comes about, let it be noted that
the people who discovered it and brought it to fruition, such as
Fleischmann, are about as different from John Galt as anyone can be.
So, to answer the famous question reiterated by Terry Blanton, "Who
*is* John Galt?" the answer is:
You're look at 'im, kiddo. We are him. We are the ones we have been
waiting for, as Obama puts it. [*] Not me, actually, but these old
greasers are:
http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/ICCF09.htm
A bunch of retired electrochemists. Most of them worked their entire
lives with government grants. What a disappointment they would be to
people with romantic notions about the heroic inventor!
Greenspan doesn't look much like we imagine Galt would look either.
And he did not actually invent anything, did he?
- Jed
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* FOOTNOTE. The Daily Show response to that comment is hilarious. "I
don't even know what that means, but Holy S**t I'm feeling it! . . .
Every time Barack Obama speaks, an Angel has an orgasm!")
