What's love got to do with it?

There is so much wrong with this article.

And I’m not talking about what actually happened, horrific enough as that is.
I.E.
· Women as possessions
· Violence and power wielded over someone far smaller.
· Her terror and fear
· The knife at her throat having been hung upside down.

No, I’m talking about the reportage of this event.

Catch the first wrong:

The caption under the first photo:

“Lovers’ Spat?”

Yeah, this usually happens when you have a quarrel with your partner/husband/loved one.

He hangs you upside from a balcony on the third floor. All the time. What a joker he is.

Then the next wrong and I quote:

“more tantalisingly, what they could have been arguing about that drove him to such extremes.”

Well damnit, it was all her fault. She drove him to it. She should be careful what she says. She pushes him just too far.

Note: not one word about battering or abuse.

Blog Jam

Headlines are captivating. Years from now, when any surviving archaelogists (or aliens) pour over the detritus of the worst messers in history, this is what they’ll find as remember whens from September 2008.

A mishmash from the overnight headline stew that is making the Crash of ’29 look like a church picnic in comparison. A crash long predicted. A crash waiting to happen with the financial finagling of debt and equity and foreclosures. And a new profession created: financial engineer.

It also looks like there won’t be enough deposit insurance to cover all the balances in American banks once the fun-run starts.

FDIC fund has about $50 billion to "insure" about $1 trillion in assets at the nation's financial institutions, says Roubini. "They're going to run out of money" unless Congress acts soon to recapitalize the FDIC.

Up here in the cold white north, our Bank of Montreal expert takes a bleak look at the financial fiasco and pronounces:

It might not have had the visual impact of Hurricane Ike in Texas, but Monday's shakeup on Wall Street likely is a similarly "once-in-lifetime" event.
"This is the worst I've ever seen," said Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Financial Group.
What Cooper saw was a financial meltdown with Lehman Brothers becoming the biggest bankruptcy in American history and blue-chip investment house Merrill Lynch & Co. becoming a green light discount special and taken over by Bank of America.
The result at the end of Monday was two financial giants disappearing along with the prospects for a short-term U.S. economic turnaround

And what does Bush the Dimmer have to say?

U.S. President George Bush talked about the ability of the country's financial markets to recover on their own.

Yeah, right, go tell ‘em, Georgie.

And to add to the unending fun, Hewlett Packard decides to cut 24,600 jobs.

And the pope, well, he’s all about telling us to die, and to die only, at the time chosen by God, aka the Great Invisible Cosmic Housekeeper.


And after this, it all makes sense in a surreal kind of way that 35% of people prefer their Blackberries to their spouses.



And to round everything off quite nicely, with the markets in turmoil, more suicide bombings in Iraq, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ike to clean up, bankruptcies through the roof, what are the main political contenders jawing about?

McCain says Obama didn't call Palin a pig



Yeah, the potential leaders of the so-called Free World, still in the sandbox.

Who's Yer Daddy?

It seems there is a new terrorist lurking to strike on the U.S. And this will be a devastation beyond any current threat calculations.

We're talking financial terrorism:

China's holdings of U.S. securities have increased from $300 billion in March 2004 to more than $900 billion in June 2007, the latest date for which data are available. Given America's $250 billion trade deficit with China over the past year and the steady stream of money pouring into the country from abroad, economists believe China probably holds nearly $1.2 trillion in U.S. securities today, mostly Treasuries and corporate bonds.

And that doesn't include the roughly $140 billion in U.S. securities held by Hong Kong.

And more:

Meanwhile, China, particularly through its central bank, has become the primary financier of America's budget deficit by using much of its trade surplus with the United States to purchase Treasury debt. At the end of fiscal 2007, China owned 21 percent of the U.S. publicly held debt that was owned by foreigners, and it was buying more than half of the new debt being issued by the federal government.

And more:

"What's most disturbing about the U.S. situation is that as America's debts rise higher and higher, the less influence the American government will have over the critical decisions" that will need to be made to address these imbalances," Mr. Tonelson said. "Those critical decisions will be made in Beijing, not in Washington, and they will be made to promote Chinese economic and national-security interests."

Read more of the same here.

With this kind of financial/debt imbalance U.S. autonomy is just about eroded.

We can all look forward to the new world power: The Empire of China.