Police officer Lori Coppinger, in a letter to the Hartford Courant, on the horrific home invasion murders in Cheshire CT.

I have been a police officer for 25 years, and I’ve seen plenty of monsters while working on homicide, sexual assault and pedophile cases. It’s probably what led me to go back to school for a master’s in theology. I needed the spiritual world because my daily contact with crime had weakened my trust in human beings.

Dr. Scott Peck, the renowned psychiatrist who wrote “People of the Lie,” came to the conclusion after years of working with people in therapy that some human beings are born evil and stay that way. Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes are two such people.

I too asked where was God when those two monsters beat Dr. William Petit unconscious, strangled his wife, poured gasoline around a terrified 11-year-old little girl and her 17-year-old sister and then lit a match.

I tell my son that monsters don’t exist. When he gets older, he will find out that they do indeed walk this earth.

4 Comments »

Mortgage insurers MGIC and Radian announced Monday they are writing off most if not of a $1 billion joint venture. The Sowood hedge funds cratered yesterday losing 50%, over $1.5 billion, in just one month.

A French firm is closing three funds after $1.37 billion vaporized while a German bank is teetering after announcing ten days ago that all was fine. They have $11.1 billion in “financial obligations.”

Yet another Bear Stearns fund blew up, this one for $900 million, and was neither subprime or leveraged, a seriously bad portent, as if more were needed.

Gee, a billion here, eleven billion there, sooner or later, you’re talking real money. And this is just the leading edge of the financial chaos… Unregulated markets, garbage passed off as investments so everyone could continue making obscene profits, but that wasn’t enough. They had to go and leverage it, which made the inevitable collapse ever more sudden and precipitous.

The Oil Drum sums up the near future, now that financial markets are facing serious trouble. The ruling class will attempt to gouge the working class even more viciously, because if they don’t keep making enough profit to support their leveraged empires, the whole thing will blow up in their faces.

Thus, the pressures that have driven profits up (and wages down, or sideways) in recent years are not going to abate, quite the opposite; in fact, they will become even more violent as the economy slows down: in order to continue to squeeze profits out of increasingly tough, or stagnant, markets, you can expect the time-tested restructurings, downsizings, rightsizings and wage restrictions to continue with ever more viciousness.

Altogether, the politics of individual greed over those of a collective future need to be blamed.

American Leftist has some thoughtful comments about how we need to focus on the human side of this. Businesses will slow down or close. Jobs and homes will be lost. Real people suddenly without homes and jobs.

1 Comment »

Two mayors, one in a Palestinian town, the other in an Israeli town, have agreed to a joint venture to clean up the polluted river that runs between them.

Israel holds all the power in the water wars there, and can pump water from the aquifers at any time while Palestinians must beg for permission. Both have been known to sabotage the system so that cascades of sewage pour onto to others land.

Perhaps this joint venture can lead to other agreements on other issues.

No Comments »