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From this:

"...the opinion of many scientists was that some 90% of the three billion DNA letters in our cells has no function at all--calling it “junk DNA.” Now, a ten year follow-on research project is beginning to publish discoveries centered within this so called junk DNA code. Like the complex rule base of an expert system on a computer, it is now estimated that 80% of our DNA contains a “complex network of regulatory switches that control how cells interpret the genetic instructions contained in DNA.”"

-and-

US Patent #4,318,184:
1982 patent that relates to generative process planning derived from design and material specifications.

"This interlocking network of regulatory switches that control gene activity certainly seems to me to be similar to an expert system. An expert system is carefully designed, with complex interactions between the rules of the system, often based on man-centuries of research and experience. As a programmer, it would be ludicrous to think that complicated programming logic similar to the production expert systems we worked on in industry could “write itself,” without intelligence or design."

Yet, that's exactly what's happened with DNA, over millions of years, from a pool of primordial sludge of amino acids and RNA to where we are now, a veritable feast of complex organisms. As a technological culture we're about to the point where growing earlobes on the backs of laboratory mice is done for giggles these days. All we're doing is rewriting some code, albeit using a soup of chemicals and an electric charge in lieu of a keyboard. And by applying the language of the engineer to the biological process, chemical engineers are able to con us all by demanding royalty with menaces on the use of something we were all born with.

Are you saying Republicans are blameless in this mess?

The only thing, that Republicans can be blamed for is not fighting the Democrats hard enough on this issue. Creating the problem in the first place, and resisting the (too-weak) attempts to solve it earlier is all the fault of Democrats. Enjoy.

They [banks] just don't have any voice in the government, right? Nobody ever listens to them or gives them what they want, right? They certainly weren't making ridiculous profits for years and lobbying for the ability to take even more crazy risks, right? Right?

Wrong. Banks did have a voice in the government, and they kept complaining — since CRA's inception — that we can't be expected to give mortgages to those, whom federal (that is Fannie Mae's) regulations would not approve. The government's reaction, in 1999 was to change the federal regulations — instead of making it easier for the banks to fight off the undue pressures.

When it became possible to off-load the bad securities to Fannie Mae, the banks did make tons of money. So what? The point was, the mortgage crisis was the fault of the Federal Government — Clinton's, not the evil Bush's...

Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan.

Sure — I agree with you... Actual income and the amount of savings are just parts of the picture — banks have spent decades figuring out their formulas. They already want to give mortgages, because it is profitable (in a Capitalist society anyway), so the bank, that overestimates the risk (and thus turns away some good customers) loses to competitors. In a free society, though anyone ought to be able to set their own standards and thresholds...

What the article was talking about was that lowering the requirements: ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

See, "many borrowers" are "a notch below", our standards, so let's lower our standards. This was not done to make money (a properly Capitalist mind would've rejected it in a heartbeat), but to "help people"... And, hey, it worked against soo well, one may suspect Clinton and the rest of the people pushing this in 1999 to have done this on purpose. Oh, and then — the masterminding brilliance of hanging this catastrophe around McCain and Republicans! Evil anti-Capitalist geniuses...

Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage.

$100k per annum is not poor. Average salary in the US was just over $42k (gross) in 2005. Your using this number suggests, you don't really have a grasp of facts...

there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores

Of course, there was, even if nobody said so outright. You don't need to explicitly demand lowering standards — it is much easier to simply accuse the lender of racism... Since the CRA's inception in 1977, it is estimated, the banks have given at least $10bln to the non-profit groups (such as ACORN) — to keep the pressure at tolerable levels. But $10bln is nothing — just "the cost of doing business", passed onto the rest of us.

The banks were paying these assholes off, resisted suicidal changes to their risk-assessment and remained profitable. Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load crappier mortgages to the Fannie Mae. When this happened, the banks caved in, because their risk went down dramatically — they no longer had to keep the crappy mortgage, which they wouldn't have given without undue pressure in the first place, on their own books...

And thus the bubble began to inflate. There were suddenly fewer homes, than people able to buy them, which increased the prices. Our efficient Capitalist economy responded immediately with feverish construction activity. There were some early warning signs, but they were ignored. People unable to keep up with payments could refinance for a while (because the market values of their homes kept increasing), but that's not indefinite either. Banks' attempts to foreclose were met with the same resistance from the same non-profits — including the brilliant idea of littering the lawns of bank-executives with plastic sharks, and more of the same race-

By the same logic you can't blame the bankers who ruined the world economy

You can't blame them, but for a different reason. The seeds of the devastation were planted in 1999, when the congressional Democrats forced Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac to lower their lending standards — suddenly, millions of people, who hitherto would not qualify for mortgage, were able to obtain one. The same supply of the real estate now faced a spiked demand, which in our highly efficient capitalist economy resulted in spike of both prices and building activity to meet the demand.

Unfortunately, helping the poor qualify for mortgage does not help them pay it off. That the Democrats were able to blame Republicans (whose only fault was in not fighting against it hard enough) for this is a spectacular feat of mind-manipulation...

What about the much-maligned easing of banking regulations? Nope, that's not, what caused the problem — even if it exacerbated it. Would you blame a powerful engine for an accident, when the car slams into a log lying across the highway? Sure, if it weren't running at high speed, the driver could've stopped safely without hitting the obstruction. But the blame is solidly on those, who placed the log across the road, not on the car-maker, that gave you the speedy vehicle...

When we repealed the (very good) legislation enacted in response to the Great Depression, we restore to market to its natural boom-bust cycle.

False. Boom-bust continued after the WW2. We still have not hit some of the lows, that we've seen in the second half of the 20th century. For example, these days, the unemployment rate is yet to hit the 1982 levels of 10.8%...

The current bubble came not from lack of regulation, but from inflated real-estate prices. That inflation is a direct consequence of government regulation — forcing the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy lower-quality mortgages (all in the name of "helping the poor", of course).

The people, who weren't previously qualified for a mortgages, suddenly could get one, increasing demand for houses. This pushed up the prices for all real estate and the rest is better known... As usual, government's meddling in the free market proved damaging. Highly so this time.

That Obama-supporting news media managed to hang this around McCain's neck last year is a phenomenal show of mind-manipulation...

these people gave us 50 years of prosperity

Wrong again... I must wonder, if your historical revisionism is part of a troll... Only the 28 years from 1945 to 1973 are considered booming. By the end of 60ies we were going off of the Gold Standard (dollar become fiat money) and, sure enough, inflation ensued in the 1970ies.

The regulation, that you lament so much, made our markets more efficient. Unfortunately, the government's meddling in the mortgage-rules has set this wonderfully efficient market in the wrong direction... Think of it this way — would you blame the car-maker for giving you a faster engine, if your car hits a log on the highway? Sure enough, if you were still riding a buggy, you would've stopped before the log and avoided the accident...

According to this theory Fannie Mae should be the only financial institution that got into trouble.

And it was the first one to be taken over by the taxpayer, yes.

The real root of the problem was the 2004 SEC change that allowed investment banks to double their amount of leverage

This and other things may have contributed, but were not "the root". The root was, no doubt, planted in the Clinton era by the events I bring up. There were, to be sure, other mistakes made by participants of the free market, but they all stemmed from the same now-misconception: that somebody somewhere lending their own money was checking the people's credit-worthiness and inspecting the properties mortgaged. This was a perfectly fine assumption up until the discussed change in Fannie Mae's mission. The free market just didn't realize, how bad the government's meddling can be with banks happily issuing mortgages, they knew, the would be able to sell to FM for profit. This led to seemingly-unending rise in the housing prices, which affected even the mortgages not sold to the taxpayer — as credit-worthy applicants found themselves competing with government-sponsored "a notch below" people.

This giant national nightmare is clearly the fault of a Republican administration that allowed this change in regulations.

A more partisan statement is hard to imagine. Let's ignore the 1990-ies folly of the Democrats and their uber-Left cohorts, and blame the subsequent Republican administration instead.

We'll never finish the debate over whether the folly was "the root" — as, I'm sure, you'll keep finding little subsequent bits to blame — so let's just agree, that it was indeed a folly. To give mortgages to people, hitherto unqualified to receive them, for political (and/or charity) reasons was stupid. They did not suddenly become able to repay them — they moved into the houses, and ended up unable to pay. The agony was extended for a few years, as the prices kept rising and they were able to refinance over and over (the most popular subject of spam-emails for a while), but ended up "underwater" anyway. So, the "charity" hurt them at the end, and the only people benefiting are the said Democrats, who are now busy blaming the disaster on the Republicans...

The Bush administration cost America something like $15 Trillion in lost equity value in just its last 4 months.

Awesome... Despite the crisis being repeatedly tracked right to the sadly-successful efforts by Democratic Party and "community organizers" to loosen lending standards to provide mortgages to people, who can't pay them off, out comes someone like yourself to lay the blame on the Republican administration...

The 1999 article, which NYT has completely forgotten about, of course, reads: Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people [...] there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required

Ten years later Clinton's chickens are back to roost... Bush's they aren't.

But every THIRD day, Obama would get THREE stories and McCain would only get TWO stories.

Yeah, and you're going to complain about the press "favored" Obama?

Actually, yes I will, because McCain's losing ratio was less than his "coverage" ratio. And then, of course, there is the content of the stories — it is not just the quantity, you know... And that's been near-universally in Obama/Biden's direction.

For example, think of the word "gaffe" for a second — it is more famous already, than the word "snafu" was at the end of Clinton's term. Every mistake made by Biden — from an actual gaffe ("Hillary Clinton would've been a better choice") to a flabbergasting moronity ("We and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon") — has been smoothed-over by the press, while Sarah Palin's inability to name another act by her boss (she did name one) was replayed on comedy and "news" channels umpteen times.

Isn't it natural that the winning candidate will appeal to the journalists more aswell, than the losing one?

Didn't work for Bush in 2004 that well, did it?

Especially in a historic election as this one.

The only thing making this election more historic than all earlier ones is the dishonesty of grotesque one-sidedness of the main media's coverage.

Orson Scott Card has a tremendous article, http://ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html, which points out whose fault the current economic crisis is:

"The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party."

And high gas prices are mainly a result of environmentalists and other terrorists.

At least CodeWeavers's public stupidity is costing them money. I plan on downloading their shit many more times than necessary.

Orson Scott Card, has been stirring things up recently, and makes some damning statements regarding global warming, saying it is time for scientist to abandon the faked data of the "Church of Global Warming".

It is time for us to laugh at the ideologues who try to pretend that any criticism of Global Warming alarmism is idiotic and unscientific. They are the ones who ignore the data; they are the ones who believe on faith alone, without evidence; and, most important, they are the ones who are trying to stifle the opposition without answering it.
The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets.

1. men who get excited by/about women
2. men who get excited by/about men
3. women who get excited by/about men
4. women who get excited by/about women