Joke for 2020:
"What are every boomer's last words?
You want fries with that?"

w.gibson: This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: The future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

The Iraq quagmire and its ever-mutating justifications show that George W. Bush is oblivious to a basic principle of his own conservative ideology: Top-down central planning -- economic or political -- is doomed to fail.

Initially, the Bush administration had pegged the war at $65-billion, total. / The New York Times reported that the civilian side of the occupation is expected to cost $30-billion over the next year. / the memorable but oh-so-ironic 1821 words of secretary of state John Quincy Adams: "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

Dick Grasso's shameful behaviour is ample evidence that things are pretty much back to normal. Capitalism did not die. The markets reopened. Executive greed replaced patriotism in a flash (maybe the two are the same), there was no mass exodus and investors went on investing.