Don't laugh, but I am actually starting to buy bank stocks - albeit very selectively. Hey, someone had to say something that is not all doom, y'know somethign to give the kids some hope.

Derivatives detonations are destroying financial markets globally. The UK just seized foreign bank assets. And the nikkei dropped 900 in minutes. Not the right time to buy anything.

oh well...now when Portland goes belly-up they can blame it on this catastrophe.

For every stock seller today there was a buyer ready to instantly collect the spoils. Why not, they already own our real property?

Yeah I picked up UMPQ and a little CACB. Regional plays, right? Hopefully they do better than my tech picks...

I also grabbed a chunk of ATVI. My generation could be living on government cheese but we'll still find a way to pay for the next cool video game.

There will be government cheese right? Would be a shame if they went broke before I did.

You mention food: Isn't that where the credit crunch could crunch the hardest? I thought most big farmers borrowed to plant the next crop. No loans, no food?

I'm always amazed when people who parade around so arrogantly - like the Wall Street cabal - turn out to be so incompetent at what they do. It's beyond shocking, and of all the ridiculous inventions they've come up with, none tops derivatives.

Derivatives are the craziest financial things I've ever heard of. We're talking up to 1,000 TRILLION in exposure here for something that doesn't really help anything.

The world economy is something like 60 trillion annually so this....well, you could take acid and not dream up something this insane.

It's like one of those absurd satires of a real part of the world. War had the novel "Catch 22". The bomb had "Dr. Strangelove".

The markets have derivatives, but instead of something from a satirical book, they are real. Unbelievable.

I feel so sad. I've been talking this talk about putting food by, and growing our own by working together, and making our own electricity, and so on and so forth. For quite a while now, facing furious ridicule.

I don't know why common sense sounds so unintelligible to folks.

Perhaps it is impossible to help whoever is unhelpable, or refuses to accept it. But just screw the fedrule gov't. Don't pay the taxes anymore, as Republicans have been saying, (and apparently doing). Throw away our Monopoly dollars. Just toss them out the window. It clears the mind wonderfully; then let's start in together working things out in our area for ourselves.

Here's a pretty ditty that could have something to do with it; ('it' being trying to make the dead past survive as a future life). Probably each of us is reminded of other people when we read this, but also, I was looking to see if I could see myself in it.

Why It's Hard to Change People's Minds, By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet, October 7, 2008.

A long time ago, Mark Twain told us: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Entwined in Twain's train of thought, is an implicit -- and important -- distinction: the difference between being uninformed and being misinformed.

Today, there's scholarship to back up Twain's theory that being ignorant isn't as troublesome as being certain about something that "just ain't so."

Ignorance can be educated. But what's the antidote to misinformation? Correct information? Not exactly -- according to political scientists ....

While it may seem like common sense to think misinformation can be countered by giving people the real 411, ... research indicates that correct information often fails to reduce misperceptions among the ideologically-committed, particularly doctrinaire conservatives.

That's something many readers of this column understand intuitively after having seen ...

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Y'know, the best thing would be if we simply said we don't know what happened on 9/11 -- then we could find out. Instead, there is the monstrous media push to make everyone think the wrong things about it, repeated and repeated, over and over -- so then the force-fed misperceptions are harder to undo.

9/11 was a 'false flag' hoax planned and staged by Bushies to get us and our tax money 'going for' world oil 'wars,' and it has (as they planned) ruined the global financial system which has been built up on oil since it started, 1900-15, at the same time (and for the same reason: oil, 'black gold') that the Fed.Reserve was invented, 1910. And Mark Twain died, 1911.