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Earth, 1946: World War II is over and the Cold War looms. The result, at least for the victorious industrialized nations, is a combination of euphoria with an undercurrent of growing existential dread. And yet, in the long run these seemingly-conflicting emotions lead to the same end, economically: spend freely.

The key to this paradox is the nature of the new threat, largely unprecedented in human history: nuclear annihilation. Humanity lives under imminent threat of destruction, as often before, except now destruction is for practical purposes likely to be over in an instant. As Albert Camus wrote, in The Fall:

I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-Bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

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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…

Well, it’s been about a decade since Ben offered up an ever-moving juicy web-hole for us to cram angry anti-Bush statements in, and what a decade it’s been. Wars, wars, wars and depressing political decision after depressing political decision have beaten most of us into some sort of adulthood, and for those already there, into some new kind of middle age.

Looking back over old SB material, I can’t help but feel like the “Aught’s” are a lost decade with little societal progress to speak of. I don’t think easier web access and the ability to “blog” from anywhere on the planet (Iran, I’m looking at you) really counts as anything more than a small evolution. Blogging about horrible atrocities still feels as frustrating as it did ten years ago, maybe more so now as the signal to noise ratio is so bad. I must admit that twitter now fills the obsessive-compulsive need to know what’s going on right now, and it’s easier than the endless surfing I did in 2000. There are more numbers after the names of my gaming consoles, and I have a thin tv big enough to double as a dining room table. Perhaps saying there’s little progress is overly-negative, and what’s astounding to me is the slow pace and appalling cost.

It leaves me wondering what the alternate reality of Gore ’00 would have brought us? Would we have even been attacked in 2001? Without the Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan expenditures, how would the collapse of the “housing bubble” turn out? Would we be driving flying cars run by Mr. Fusion and floating around on hoverboards? Only 5 years till Marty and Doc Brown arrive, now I just need to decide on what events I should have gambled on!