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Put simply, there have been those who for the last decade or so have been busy sewing the seeds of this disaster.

Republicans have been busy working for less market regulations, and now we get the bill for it. 3000 dollars per American. 12 000 dollars for a family of four.

The regulators are there to ensure this sort of thing doesnt happen. They are insurance.

You can always save money by not having regulators, but then you really have noone else but yourself to blame when you find that the unregulated market has run amuck.

Whoever wins the next election is financially screwed. However it really doesnt make much sense to vote for a man like McCain, after all, it is primarily the policies this man advocated that are responsible for the current financial crisis. This has just cost me about 3000 dollars if Im lucky, my job if Im not.

Not unlike Iraq really? Remember McCain, the military man saying before the invasion how it was going to be easy, sunni n shia never fought, we will be greeted as liberators etc?

You cannot question the grit of a man like McCain, however being tortured does not count as experience at military leadership. Indeed it appears that on most issues on which McCain has expressed a military opinion, he has been critically wrong.

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The Bullshit:

2012 is sometimes claimed to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or apocalypse). Many esoteric sources interpret the completion of the thirteenth B'ak'tun cycle in the Long Count of the Maya calendar (which occurs on December 21 by the most widely held correlation) to mean there will be a major change in world order. * Polar Shift is a theory that on December 21st 2012 Earth will experience earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other natural disasters.

Accordingly, several eclectic authors claim that a major, world-changing event will take place in 2012: * The 1995 book The Mayan Prophecies linked the Maya calendar with long-period sunspot cycles. * The book 2012: Mayan Year of Destiny claims the Maya may have been instructed in their wisdom by discarnate entities from Orion and the Pleiades. Contact was maintained through shamanic rituals conducted in accordance with the movements of planets and stars. * However, Mayan priests living and working in Guatemala aver that the so-called Mayan Prophecy for 2012, as touted by various foreign New Agers who have no knowledge of Mayan culture, language, or religion, is twaddle. * The 1997 book The Bible Code claims that, according to certain algorithms of the Bible code, a meteor, asteroid or comet will collide with the Earth. * The book The Nostradamus Code speaks of a series of natural disasters caused by a comet (possibly as above) that will allow the third Antichrist to disperse his troops around the globe under the guise of aid in preparation for a possible nuclear war, although in the strictest sense it is unspecific as to nuclear war or some other natural or man caused destruction. * The book The Orion Prophecy claims that the Earth's magnetic field will reverse. * The 2005 book Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Ecstasy by Geoff Stray reviews several theories, prophecies and predictions concerning 2012 and finds where authors have used faulty information or have bent the truth to fit their theories. * The 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck discusses theories of a possible global awakening to psychic connection by the year 2012, creating a noosphere. * The 2007 book Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End by Lawrence Joseph does not make any specific new predictions, but it reviews a number of 2012 predictions made by various sources, and presents arguments for the possible existence of dangerous positive feedback loops involving solar storms, Earth's magnetic field, cosmic rays, hurricanes, global warming, earthquakes, and supervolcanoes that may be on the verge of erupting.

Other prophecies and apocalyptic writings and hypotheses for this year include: * Terence McKenna's mathematical novelty theory suggests a point of singularity in which humankind will go through a great shift in consciousness. * The Prophecy of the Popes, attributed to Saint Malachy, speculated that Pope Benedict XVI would reign during the beginning of the tribulation of which Jesus spoke, and sometime later a future pope described in the prophecy as "Peter the Roman", the last in this prophetic list, would appear, bringing as a result the destruction of the city of Rome and the Last Judgment. * Some proponents of a peak oil catastrophe place major events in 2012. Richard C. Duncan's book The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road To The Olduvai Gorge claims that the Olduvai cliff will begin and permanent blackouts will occur worldwide. Several studies predict a peak in oil production in or around 2012. [10] [11] [12] * Some alien-enthusiasts (e.g. Riley Martin), along with some new-agers, believe 2012 to correspond approximately with the return of alien "watchers" or "caretakers" who might have helped the first human civilizations with developing their technology and may have been waiting for us to reach a higher level of technological and/or social advancement. Beliefs range from the extra-terrestrials having benevolent purposes — such as to help human society evolve — to malevolent purposes — such as enslavement of mankind and/or manipulation. * There is a Hindu following indicating the appearance of an Avatar (God in human form) with God-like powers who will herald a new age. A website to this effect appears at: End of the World 2012.

The Truths:

It's snowing on Mars and winter is icumen in - to misquote the Middle English paean to springtime.

Scientists studying the coded signals from the lander Phoenix on the planet's arctic surface detected the snow falling lightly from clouds drifting across the sky some 2 1/2 miles above the spacecraft, said James Whiteway, an atmospheric scientist from York University in Canada.

"Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars before," he said.

Whiteway, whose team built the weather station aboard Phoenix, said the ice crystals appeared to vaporize before they reached the red Martian ground.

Not that snow was unexpected. Whiteway said his instruments have watched the clouds drifting across the horizon every morning after the sun rises. His Lidar instrument - an acronym for laser detection and ranging - on the spacecraft shoots a green laser beam up into the clouds 100 times a second, and the falling snow reflects brightly in each pulse.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists continue to decipher the signals sent back to Earth from Phoenix, now busy analyzing the soil and ice on the planet's surface.

In a telephone briefing for reporters Monday, the project's chief scientist, Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, said that five months of rooting around in the soft and dry soil of the landing site with the spacecraft's mobile robotic digging arm has confirmed that there's a "skating rink" of water ice a little more than 2 inches below the red soil.

That surface soil itself seems so dry remains a mystery.

Measurements of the ice indicate it has an alkaline level - known as pH - of 8.3, and is very similar to seawater, said Michael Hecht, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. There also appears to be plenty of calcium carbonate in the tiny particles of the icy soil, he said.

Additionally, there are signs of several clay minerals whose sheeted structures hold molecules of water vapor, said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, whose miniature ovens aboard Phoenix heat the soil and ice to drive off identifying vapors.

"We can now begin rewriting the book of Martian chemistry," said Hecht.

The scientists must work fast now, for winter is indeed approaching. During the spacecraft's first three months on Mars, the sun never sank below the horizon, leaving plenty of solar energy for Phoenix to power all its instruments. Now, however, the sun sinks beneath the horizon for more than four hours every Martian night, according to Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager and chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's also getting colder, and that drains power from the instruments because they must be kept warm in order to operate, he said.

Before the end of October, Goldstein said, there won't be enough power left to keep the lander's robotic arm operating, so digging into the soil and scraping ice samples from beneath the soil will have to stop. By November, Phoenix will be standing rigidly in the pitch dark, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will encase it in ice like some otherworldly frozen mummy - at more than 150 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

That should make a weird picture, and Goldstein said the Phoenix team will ask NASA to have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high above send images to Earth of what it looks like.

There isn't much chance that Phoenix will recover once sunlight returns next year, Goldstein said. His engineers have created a "Lazarus mode" software program to wake the spacecraft up.

"But I don't really believe it's possible," he said.