Thorium is an inexpensive and readily available element that can be used to create nuclear reactions with no risk of a melt down, improved efficiency with fewer dangerous byproducts than uranium, and no dangerous byproducts that can be used to create weapons.  In short, Thorium powered energy is real and can do what the “clean coal” movement dreams of doing.  

China and India already are making investments in Thorium reactors, but America has thus far lagged far behind spending just $250 million to begin to develop this.  The Wired Magazine Article Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke gives an excellent overview of this exciting development.

Is Thorium the answer to safe energy independence in America?  I certainly hope our country will invest more money to develop this energy source.

As owner of Colorado Health Insurance Brokers, I may not be the most impartial person on the planet but I am getting really sick of President Obama’s repeated attempts to demonize the health insurance industry.   The reason why we have so many people that are uninsured or that struggle to pay their premiums isn’t because of greedy insurance companies, it is because the underlying costs have been spiraling out of control for years.

Putting the hammer down on the insurance companies won’t fix the problem any more than killing the canary in the coal mine would make the coal mine any safer.  Rising insurance premiums are the leading indicator of the bigger problem.

Unless Obama has the courage to address the cost side of the equation the increased insurance regulations he has proposed will drive up costs for people that buy their own insurance.  Providing government subsidies to provide the illusion that premiums are affordable is an expensive band-aid.  Without addressing the cost side of the equation those subsidized costs will be eaten up by health services inflation and we’ll be in the same boat we are now in a relatively short time frame.

Saw a message on the ticker of a local news show suggesting that viewers send a text message to donate $10 for the relief in Haiti. Later that I day I learned that the phone company takes a cut of that and it can take 3 weeks for your money to get to the charity. They suggested you are better off going directly to the web sites of trustworthy charitable groups to make donations.

Today Google threatened to pull out of China after suffering from repeated attacks that originated in China.  It seems that Chinese hackers have been trying to hack the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.   Google is contemplating closing the doors on its China based operations altogether.   It appears the attacks were orchestrated by the Chinese government.

“I think that with the increasing demands that were being placed on Google vis-à-vis censorship combined with these very troubling cyberattacks, Google reached a tipping point,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “It is a principled decision.”