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You almost had me there, Andrew Sorkin. Financial crises, the boom and bust cycle, hey-ho; that’s life, right? Strikes and gutters. We can never prevent the next one because each one is different, and just like the army, regulators end up always prepared to fight the last war.

I was buying it.

Then you tried to cap things off with a neatly topical quote, and I woke up:

In his memoir, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, recalled telling President George W. Bush in 2006 that it was impossible to spot a coming financial blowup.

“We can’t predict when the next crisis will come,” Mr. Paulson told the president. “But we need to be prepared.”

Whoa. Whoooooooah, there, hold on just one second. Uhm, sir? I remember 2006. I remember that the irrational underpinnings of the mortgage market bubble were quite apparent to an awful lot of people, even if those people happened to mostly work outside of the Dept. of the Treasury. I remember “Flip This House” and “Flip That House,” and I remember people laughing at the term “NINJA loan,” invented for the large number of mortgage recipients with “no income no job (and no) assets.”

Gosh, that one was so funny.

Plenty of thinking people were quite well aware, however, that clever acronyms or no, America’s financial sector was dancing atop a rumbling volcano. The fact that nothing was done to move us to safety was not the result of forecasting economic perils being inherently impossible. It was the result of spineless, useless, worthless, brainless and gutless tools being in positions of “leadership,” with an assist from a journalistic “watchdog” too hopped up on goofballs to offer up even one good “bark.”

Unfortunately, though, Mr. Sorkin’s larger message that the next economic crisis will be along sooner or later is very likely to be proven true, even if his suggestion that the last one was unforeseeable is baloney. Those who do not learn from history…

The History Channel has some good shows, these days. I’ve always appreciated History, but back say a dozen years ago we called it “the Nazi channel” and it was not an unfair label. (Not in terms of political content but rather because it seemed like at least nine out of ten programs featured World War II.)

Nowadays, though they may stretch the original concept of History somewhat, they’ve got some good things going on. Iowa’s own American Pickers, the brilliant Pawn Stars and, in its fourth season, Ice Road Truckers.

I do like IRT, a lot. If the show has lost a bit of the raw newness of seasons 1 and 2, well, it has added Lisa Kelly, which is worth quite a bit, in my humble opinion. And paterfamilias Alex’s goofy, barking laugh still brings a smile to my face every time.

Yet, as much as I enjoy the show, I can’t help occasionally considering that all of the daring, the risk-taking, the sheer determination to overcome some of the worst that nature can throw at man, all of that is applied in pursuit of what in the big picture is a really dismally stupid endeavor.

Courage, quick thinking and impressive feats of engineering are combined to maintain an operation up near the frozen top of the world, and for what? For the same thing that similar marvels are harnessed to operate beneath the bottom of the ocean. For the maintenance of an energy supply source which, aside from imperiling human civilization’s future, is simply a dead end.

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This began as a comment on a post by a friend of mine, but at some point I realized that it was really turning into a post of its own. Readers may nonetheless wish to begin with the thoughts of Mr. Sean Kleefeld, here, in which he writes on the idea of innovation, and remarks that: “if the landscape changes around me, that’s no one’s fault but my own if I can’t find a place in it.”

Which, to me, seems an awfully harsh standard, excluding even a shred of sympathy. Also kind of an odd standard, given that his post mentions, multiple times, the concept of people needing to be taught how to learn; I’m not sure how that squares with the idea of absolute and total individual responsibility.

In any event, as I have suggested at other times, I have doubts that the notion is even practical, never mind desirable. (Darwinian selection is something of a dangerous concept when applied to human society; it’s a short step from explaining brutal conditions to justifying them.)

And, whether or not we as a society need or want genuinely constant innovation (and setting aside questions of what really amounts to true “innovation” and how much value it has), I don’t believe our society is remotely prepared for it. (more…)