Government created the financial market climate responsible for the risky loans that should never have been given. Yet government has now appointed itself the savior that will rescue us from bad decisions made by government. How this guy can be so far off base is amazing.

Self-reliance. Individual responsibility. A faith in free markets and a belief that people should have the opportunity to fail or succeed on the basis of their hard work and ingenuity. These are qualities that have been as central to the national identity as they have been to the American economic model.

Which is why it is so extraordinary that the government now finds itself hip-deep in the direct management of the financial system, rescuing four of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and now Lehman Brothers — from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments.

This unprecedented intrusion of government is coming in the waning days of the administration of a Republican president who made privatization, deregulation and a faith in free markets the centerpiece of his economic policies and of his political agenda.

In case you don’t know it Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the federal government.

In recent months, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance lenders have come under increasing scrutiny at the hands of Congress, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, nicknamed Freddie Mac, have operated since 1968 as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This means that, although the two companies are privately owned and operated by shareholders, they are protected financially by the support of the Federal Government. These government protections include access to a line of credit through the U.S. Treasury, exemption from state and local income taxes and exemption from SEC oversight. A recent accounting scandal at Freddie Mac that resulted in the replacement of three of the company’s top executives has led to mounting concerns over the privileged status these GSEs enjoy in the marketplace.

Let’s say your daughter got raped. Would you hire the rapist to provide your daughter therapy? That’s as silly as bringing in the federal government to fix the problems it created by allowing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make irresponsible loans under the protection of law.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Initially, Fannie Mae operated like a national savings and loan, allowing local banks to charge low interest rates on mortgages for the benefit of the home buyer. This lead to the development of what is now known as the secondary mortgage market. Within the secondary mortgage market, companies such as Fannie Mae are able to borrow money from foreign investors at low interest rates because of the financial support that they receive from the U.S. Government. It is this ability to borrow at low rates that allows Fannie Mae to provide fixed interest rate mortgages with low down payments to home buyers. Fannie Mae makes a profit from the difference between the interest rates homeowners pay and foreign lenders charge.

Let me be bold. If this cycle of hiring the problem creator to manage the problem continues, foreign armies will one day arrive here to collect the debts we are unable to repay.

Meanwhile a retard named Steven Pearlstein prattles on about free markets with nary a glimmer of understanding.

If these actions had been taken in Moscow, Paris, Beijing or even Brasilia, they would have seemed merely confirmation of long-standing socialist instincts and traditions. But in Washington, they are revolutionary. As with the Great Depression, it has taken a full-blown financial crisis to shake the faith that free markets will always deliver better outcomes than politicians and bureaucrats.

What free market you moron? Franklin Delano Roosevelt set the stage for the socialist controlled market in 1938! The current conditions are the direct result of government interference in free markets. Your advocating more government interference is akin fighting a fire by pouring fuel on it. What the hell is wrong with you people?

People have always been afraid of things they don’t understand. They’ve made many dire predictions of doom and gloom. Thankfully, most of those turn out to be wrong. Hopefully that will be the case with the Large Hadron Collider.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.

Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.

The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.

On September 10, 2008 we’ll find out whether the latest end of the word predictions are right. I’m expecting a very large explosion - of knowledge about the nature of matter.

Remember the movie Gattaca? We’re getting closer.

The gene AVPR1a codes for the arginine vasopressin receptor 1A which influences altruism, monogamy, and other behaviors. Genesis Biolabs wants you to test your prospective spouse for versions of AVPR1a to discover if he or she will be altruistic toward you. But what if a woman wants a man who will be ruthless in his pursuit of higher positions in a corporation?

Screening for the “ruthlessness” gene is likely an indicator of marital happiness. Marriages born out of mutual respect and mutual interest rather than self-interest are much more likely to succeed and probably less likely to end in divorce. Is your fiancé just after your money? Those with the “ruthlessness” gene may very well be. Those with the altruistic version of AVPR1a probably aren’t. Ruthless people will lie, cheat and steal to get what they want. Genetics may not be a guaranteed indicator of human behavior and motivation [genetics is only one half of the nature vs. nurture debate] but genes don’t lie. Before you make a lifetime commitment, have your fiancé tested.

What if an ambitious high status man wants a woman who will give his offspring genes that will make his kids hard chargers and ruthlessly ambitious? People could easily use this test for reasons opposite of the marketing pitch for it.

The research that led to this test came out only 9 months ago. In a few years we’ll know of dozens of genes that influence fidelity, ruthlessness, and assorted other characteristics relevant to

Jerusalem, December 6, 2007 – Are those inclined towards generosity genetically programmed to behave that way? A team of researchers, including Dr. Ariel Knafo of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes that this could very well be the case.

Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to give away money, the researchers found that those who chose to give away some or all of their money differed genetically from those involved in the exercise who chose not to give their money away.

The scientists conducted the experiment with 203 online “players”. Each player could choose to keep the equivalent of $12 he was allocated, or to give all or part of it to an anonymous other player.

Those involved also provided DNA samples which were analyzed and compared to their reactions. It was found that those who had certain variants of a gene called AVPR1a gave on average nearly 50 percent more money than those not displaying that variant. The results of the study were published online recently in the research journal Genes, Brain and Behavior.

Do you want your wife giving all your hard-earned money away to charity? Do you want your husband to be an easy mark when his loser brother comes begging for money? I expect scientists will find genetic variations that contribute toward selective altruism for offspring and other genetically very close relatives. Maybe a woman will prefer a husband who is genetically more inclined to sacrifice for the kids and not for strangers.

Designer people are coming - it’s just around the corner on the time scale. I expect to be alive to see the first designer children pop out of the lab. I’m hoping to be present when society can produce a replacement body that I can swap myself into. I’m imagining and existence without back pain and the other physical ailments that sometimes plague me.

Other people will be imagining other things.Imagine a six-breasted showgirl or an eight legged marathon runner. As we unlock more and more genetic codes, these things step out of imagination and into reality.

Don’t worry though - the herd will stomp on the creativity once it realizes what is going on. Your ex-wife won’t want you to design a replacement that doesn’t talk back and wants to have sex all the time. The neighborhood busybodies will fume and rage when they realize you intend to design the kind of children you want. Your local church will sermonize against tinkering with plans for a replacement body. Politicians will write reams of rules and change them on a whim.

It’s going to be an interesting century. I’m rooting for the creative types to win. If you want to live your next life as a zebra centaur who can leap tall buildings that should be your choice. Everyone deserves a dream.

You may not have noticed, but America is in trouble. Our credit is overextended. Our military is overextended. Our welcome in the rest of the world is overextended. Civil liberties are disappearing and it’s only a matter of time before people start vanishing too. As a group, we’re getting fatter and lazier. Our political system is broken to the point that many people don’t think it can be repaired. There are not enough significant differences between the two parties in charge to matter in the long run. Both of them are driving us inexorably towards a point where we’ll either be a giant modern day version of a plantation or, depending where the technology goes, the majority of us will be converted into Solyent Green to feed the elite class. Anyone outside the two-party umbrella is marginalized or criminalized or simply ignored, depending what’s most expedient.

Jack Cafferty gets at least half of the picture.

It’s more than symbolic that when a million Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, the Republican candidate for president has lost track of his holdings.

McCain surrounds himself with people like former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners” and said we are only suffering a “mental recession.”

That’s the same problem the Republican Party has. It has lost track of what it used to stand for: small government, a disciplined fiscal policy, integrity.

In a way, the perfect storm of a rapidly changing population — old white people aren’t going to be in the majority very much longer (and isn’t that who most of the Republicans are?) — has combined with the total abdication of principles, Republican or otherwise, of arguably the worst president in the nation’s history to mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as we know it.

The Democrats will be in charge of both the legislative and executive branches soon. This means they’ll have some opportunities to take over the judicial again. Things will change, as they always do, but not for the better. Government doesn’t offer inspiration. Government isn’t good at hope. Government has no idea what creative vision is and it doesn’t do invention well. When all you offer as a solution to every problem is more government, then the overriding problem becomes how much government you have. We’ve reached that point.

Instead we can expect the police state to continue to grow. Concepts like zero tolerance, a “war on terror,” the continual decline of individual choices, more monitoring technologies and the ongoing dumbing down of citizens as the rise of the nanny state continues. That’s what I predict when the ball passes from the Republicans to the Democrats.

At least that’s what Aubrey de Grey believes. I want to believe it as well. I am not interested in dying at this time. Transhumanists may not be in the media spotlight now, but it’s likely the future will change that.

…James Hughes, an administrator and instructor at Trinity College in Hartford, is a leading transhumanist theorist. The executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded when he was the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, Hughes has written several books on transhumanist ideas, including Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.

It would appear that Hughes, a buttoned-down professor-type with a close-cropped goatee, is dealing with ideas better suited to science fiction than the real world. However, he traces transhumanist history back to old, earth-bound traditions.

“It goes back to the enlightenment, about 400 years or so,” Hughes said. “And when you go back to those original ideas, you see a number of things emerging, among them the notion that science and tech can be applied to human affairs, and things can be engineered and improved upon.”

While the average earth dweller of 2008 may feel uncomfortable with the idea of engineering a human being they will still pay for LASIK surgery or a hip replacement. If they could safely and cheaply replace the human heart with a model that wasn’t prone to spasms we call heart attacks that often lead to death, most people would get the replacement put in without much serious consideration. In the next two decades, we should see a massive increase in the number and type of life extending, life quality enhancing surgeries available. This is assuming we can avoid universal health care, which will cause stagnation, in my opinion. I am unaware of pioneering surgeries recently developed in France or Britain. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that government socialized health care is statist in nature.

There is no reason not to expect to live 150-200 years if you are 20 today and in good health. Assuming you’re not a partner in a meth lab, wearing a soldier’s uniform or engaged in extreme sports, you have a shot at living a very, very long time in comparison to people born 50 years ago. Depending on social upheaval and battles over the world natural resources you might live to see the middle or the end of the millenium.

Many people are not interested in this idea, particularly those who have not yet faced death and found it to be a distinctly unpalatable notion. For those among you who do not believe in one or another of the various death cults of the world, I highly recommend keeping an eye on the activities of the Methuselah Foundation.

Stem cell research is just the beginning of the end of aging.