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Actually, the timeline goes a bit like this: Sunday: McCain denies links between his campaign manager Rick Davis and Freddie Mac Tuesday: The New York Times runs a story on Rick Davis receiving $500,000 from Freddie Mac Wednesday: McCain suspends campaign Who says it was anything malicious? Maybe McCain just can't run his campaign without his campaign manager. There's no direct evidence, but it is rather odd timing.

Did anyone notice McCain suspended his campaign and went to work on the financial crisis shortly after it was revealed that McCain's campaign manager had received nearly $500,000 from Freddie Mac?

Doesn't seem like it worked out that way: http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/25/news/economy/deal_reached/index.htm?postversion=2008092513&eref=rss_topstories

PRAVDA, it means "truth"

JP Morgan acquires Washington Mutual: http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/25/news/companies/JPM_WaMu/index.htm?postversion=2008092519&eref=rss_topstories Uggghhh....

Doing my usual "catch up on this week's Daily Show in a single night" thing I was intrigued by Bill Clinton's suggestion: Charge interest?

Something tells me your budget wasn't $700,000,000,000

It can't stream video files over the network by default

I agree to the bailout in principle. However, this certainly feels like rushed legislation that hasn't been properly vetted or scrutinized.

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/09/23/bailout-paulson-congress-biz-beltway-cx_jz_bw_0923bailout.html Are you kidding me? The $700,000,000,000 figure didn't actually come from any sort of calculation? They just pulled it out of the air? "What's the biggest number you can think of?" "$700 billion?" "Sounds good to me!"

The forces that changed and the unforeseen effect was that of subprime loans and secondary lenders. In the past the role of mortgage lending was relegated to banks. In the '80s that changed, to the point that S&Ls could give out mortgages. But at least S&Ls also balanced their losses with savings accounts. Also, the government created government-backed secondary lending agencies in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Something changed remarkably at the start of this century. Secondary lenders, lenders who dealt only in debt, not even in savings or checking accounts, and only in mortgage debt started springing onto the scene. These lenders existed once at the behest of the government itself, but thanks to deregulation they started being private entities. I'm talking about corporations like New Century Financial, previously touted as "a new kind of blue chip", who began wholeheartedly exploring the subprime mortgage market. This was brand new virgin territory, previously verboten by government regulation, but with that out of the way, it's a frontier of unexplored opportunity! Except later, that regulation was shown to be prudent. New Century Financial cratered. Toxic subprime debt soon started dragging down every part of the financial sector. This is debt that was previously banned by federal regulations. Now it would certainly seem like it was banned for good reason. You yourself were a subprime mortgagor, were you not? Were you able to obtain such a loan before 2000ish? Do you think that loan worked out well for you? Would you recommend subprime loans to your friends?

Actually, the provisions of CRA were relaxed in 2004 and 2005. It intensified after the CRA provisions were changed. One possible explanation is that secondary lenders started giving out more subprime loans when they felt there'd be less competition from banks. I really don't think you can support that position. I think if CRA were never passed we'd still be in this mess. The CRA regulation states that it is anticipated that banks can fulfill their CRA obligations with loans "on which the banks expect to make a profit." It's not as if the law was compelling banks to give out bad loans. My main question to you would be: why did CRA only become a problem now, some 40 years after it was passed?

Well, look at Johnny come lately. McCain says he's suspending his campaign and wants to postpone the presidential debates scheduled for this friday: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/mccain-suspending-campaign-wants-to-postpone-debate-2008-09-24.html What... the... hell? I'm not downplaying the seriousness of the financial crisis, but this is absurd. From what I can tell, McCain wants to push the $700 billion bailout through, and is going back to Washington to do so. Ugh.

Yes They gave out excessive numbers of bad loans. The CRA wanted them to make an incomprehensibly diverse smorgasbord of new loan products with punitive terms which were confusing to borrowers? Yes, although the were the unwitting stooges, not the masterminds of this mess. They were given deals too good to be true. They didn't stop to question it. Then they paid the price. You're honestly blaming this on too much regulation? Half of all subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies like New Century Financial which were not regulated by CRA at all, and thus had no government obligation to offer credit to minorities. These companies made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA banks. Also, the weakening of the CRA in 2004 was followed by an increase in subprime lending. If the CRA were really compelling lenders against their will to give out bad loans, wouldn't we have seen a decrease? The degree to which the CRA impacted the subprime mortgage crisis is debatable, but I really don't see it as a major contributing factor. More I see the vast explosion of secondary lenders, at the behest of deregulation which expanded the potential loan products they could offer, as the impetus, and a massive explosion of subprime lending as the primary cause. This explosion in subprime loans wasn't the result of compulsion by draconian government regulations. The lenders brought it on themselves. Here's an article on the subject: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis

This is what you use to play movies on a hacked XBox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbmc

There's a lot to be said for having one computer that you take everywhere with you. My desktop is my laptop and it pretty much goes everywhere I go. I tend to farm out tasks for devices specific to them. I have a hacked XBox for movies, an AirPort Express for music, and a dedicated storage server with all my precious data.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a0c_1222057090 This is pretty absurd

If your definition of "connection" is "possible ways to walk the graph from node/neuron A to arbitrary node/neuron B", then yes, that's true. That's not a very useful definition of "connection". By that logic my sewage is connected to your drinking water.

Only if you make your own luck. Chance favors the prepared mind.

Considering the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter, we'd need near lightspeed or faster-than-light travel to colonize the entire galaxy in 120,000 years.

You want a mnemonic device for remembering the parts of the cerebral cortex? I don't think I could even name more than the neocortex and the allocortex. What parts of the cerebral cortex are you even thinking of?

Something tells me no one at that school district is familiar with Tinker vs. Des Moines. "Paperwork submitted by the school district says Daxx Dalton was not suspended for wearing the shirt, but for willful disobedience and defiance." Uh huh, this after giving him the choice of changing his shirt, turning his shirt inside out or being suspended. It's the canonical hippie scent, an abrasive herbal musk intended to cover up the hippie stink that comes from not bathing.

The Penrose-Hameroff proposal has been widely criticized by the scientific community. The foremost refutation comes from Max Tegmark in his paper "The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes". Our brains are composed of structures too large to exhibit distinctly quantum mechanical properties. The role quantum physics plays in living organisms is nondistinct from the role it plays in any other matter. Living organisms are composed of relatively large structures compared to the quantum scale, and classical physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics are more than sufficient to understand how living systems work. There have been no great mysteries in biology which necessitate a quantum mechanical solution.

Last week was a pretty bad one for the country, and also for John McCain. He did not weather the news of collapsing financial institutions well, and you don't have to take my word for it. Take it from that tie dye-wearing patchouli-smelling hippie, George Will: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/AR2008092202583.html? He echoed similar sentiments in an ABC news panel, for those of you who prefer the teevee to reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzc0re_3hQw George Will both calls McCain "unpresidential" and suggests his populist tactics involve capitulating in order to be popular, which isn't becoming of a leader. Last week McCain said if he became president he'd fire SEC chairman Chris Cox, even though he doesn't have the authority to do so. He said the fundamentals of the economy are strong as major financial institutions were collapsing around him. He said he would champion regulation of Wall Street, after years of pushing for deregulation, and his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. And, to top it all off, he fell behind in the polls. According to http://fivethirtyeight.com McCain has lost his lead in Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, and Virginia, all key battleground states. Obama has rebounded to above his post-convention bump. I expect the race will remain fairly close, but for the time being McCain has stumbled.

That's a good point, but... Clinton certainly exercised his veto power quite healthily when President, something Bush did not do, and the predominantly Republican Congress under the first 6 years of Bush managed to completely undo what happened during the Clinton years. Fortunately it's easy to blame 9/11, right? Really? What about the first 6 years of Dubya?