More Nice Moving Pictures...

Try this lovely video, if you can't manage to get your head around the economic blowout and the ridiculous insistence of the thundering herd that things are getting better:

Wealth and Power Video

To understand more than you did about the economic tsunami which has only begun to appear, watch this hour long video featuring economist Joseph Stiglitz and author Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine, mentioned here often), along with Third World economist Hernando de Soto. Fascinating and scary stuff, particularly when de Soto explains, in property rights terms, exactly where we are today (hint: nobody knows).

Election Aftermath

“Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein

Chaos has just this to say, beyond noting the dissonance between the national backslapping at having elected a member of the Establishment who happens to have a slightly darker skin tone and the constraint upon real action now being manifested by the chatter of the cognoscenti...not only problems and thinking at the same level, but more importantly, the same people who had hands in creating this economic crisis are now being mentioned as having roles in the new administration. Chaos cannot help but note with concern that the world seems poised to enter a catastrophic global economic shutdown (google Baltic Dry Shipping index, if you doubt), and efforts made by those who created and enabled the carnage have so far proved to be wildly ineffective and (worse) expensive. If you are not reading The Automatic Earth daily, Chaos' words may strike you as unduly alarmist, but there you go.