This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. If you are old enough you may remember where you were at that time and what it was like. I remember VERY well because I was on my way to the crippled plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our President at the time, Jimmy Carter, was also a micro-manager and a former nuclear engineer: he wanted his own eyes and ears on the scene. Our little group eventually coalesced into the Presidental Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, who was also the co-author of BASIC.
The lessons of Three Mile Island have been, for […]

“Where are the tumbrils?” asks my friend Adam Smith.If, like me, you have no idea what is a tumbril, it is a type of horse cart used during the French Revolution to transport condemned prisoners to the guillotine for beheading.What Adam wonders is how we can get so deep into such a hellacious financial crisis without finding at least a few bad guys to behead?

We’re seven weeks into the Obama Administration and still looking for a way out of both the banking and housing crises. TARP didn’t seem to work, at least not as its designers intended. The new housing plan hasn’t been well received and now that more details are out you’d think there would be an even more negative reaction, but the press doesn’t seem to have even noticed the details were released last week.