A very cool thing from Time online. Vent your spleen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That should clear a few things up. It still seems difficult to comprehend whatever it is that might be happening in economy and politics. Bernard Keane wrote a superb little thing midweek (and I’m not just saying that coz I pay him), ridiculing this collective sense that the markets might somehow be used as a leading indicator. This was, he thought, like seeking directions from a jibbering lunatic. Like seeking directions from a room full of hysterical jibbering lunatics all attempting to talk at once methinks. I get the sense that we are standing, stock still in a wheeling tempest of ridiculously destructive potential. It’s hard from that vantage point to get a sense of the storm’s course, or of the damage it might be doing somewhere out there in the dark and wild wind and rain. The economy goes tits up, and then there’s whatever it is that might be happening to the exhausted ecology of the place. Lets hope that somewhere on the planet is someone capable of walking, chewing gum and offering stirring words of encouragement. All at once.

Didn’t The Who turns out to be knob jockeys? That said, there has never been a more perfect dolloping, srtingy bass sound than this one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings. Like most humans, most of the time, they did some very foolish things. On the whole, the greater the earlier reputation for omniscience, the more serene the previous idiocy, the greater the foolishness now exposed. Things that in other times were concealed by a heavy façade of dignity now stood exposed, for the panic suddenly, almost obscenely, snatched this façade away. We are seldom vouchsafed a glance behind this barrier; in our society the counterpart of the Kremlin walls is the thickly stuffed shirt.

Ah Galbraith. Panic has run amok on the world’s markets just now restrained only by the donation of federal money and the intervention of various statutory agencies. It makes you wonder how it is that the market can be so free and unfettered in the uptimes, then so socialised on the way down.