More conservative (NOT Ron Paul paleocon, more semi-Reaganish/Gingrich-neocon) than Republican right now. Don't equate the two, please.
I'm not sure how hard I'm willing to work to separate a person's views from their actual actions in voting. Feel free to vote for whomever you wish, but don't try to divorce yourself from the actual results of their actions based on vague philosophical differences. Republicans gladly embraced Bush as one of their own through all of his failed policies, and they're only starting to reject him now that those policies have been shown to be failures. I didn't hear many Republicans who are now washing their hands of Bush saying anything like, "This is a good idea, but he's doing it the wrong way" much less "This policy is not conservative and is doomed to failure." I do, however, see a lot of retroactive stamps of disapproval.
I see an astonishing lack of ownership being asserted by the people who voted to bring these policies about, and I get pretty close to being offended when people say, "I'm a conservative, but not a Bush conservative, even though I supported him and everything he did until his ideas proved to be stupid in the real world."
I don't know where you're posting from, but in the US, there's no such thing as "police protection".
I'm in the US. I see police making a significant effort to protect life an property around me on a regular basis.
According to the Supreme Court, the police have no duty to protect a person from harm, even if the person in question has a restraining order against an abusive ex.
I think that you may only have read the headline or skimmed the article. The ruling was far more narrow and legalistic than that, and the end result is not that the police get paid to do nothing. This seems like the type of hysterical nonsense that might be written up in a pro-militia newsletter--designed to scare people into hoarding canned beans and ammunition when the reality is that it was simply a ruling on a technicality of constitutional law and is unlikely to have any real-world effect on the average person.
Protect yourself; the police don't give a damn about you. Don't expect a law enforcement officer to protect you.
I strongly suspect that you've never been to or really thought about places where the really isn't any police protection, or where the police are so corrupt that they're just as dangerous as (or indistinguishable from) organized criminals. That covers a huge portion of the world, and we're lucky not to be part of it. If you haven't been robbed at gunpoint or had somebody close to you murdered, odds are pretty good that you live in a society that provides some sort of law enforcement. Lots of places have tried going the "private army/police" route, and you end up with what looks remarkably like feudalism at best and anarchy at worst.
As for roads, I'd have to think about it. As I understand it, road construction and maintenance would be a natural monopoly. It probably isn't practical for two competing companies to maintain the roads in a given geographical area. However, I see no reason to trust road construction to the government, which has no incentive to squeeze as much value as possible from every dollar of revenue.
The government also has no incentive to wring maximum profit out of each road, to make roads in different areas incompatible across geographical regions, to design road systems to maximize toll prices rather than maximizing efficiency, or to cut corners on safety in the name of profit. The reason I suggest we trust the government with the responsibility of making roads is because governments have been doing a great job of doing just that for thousands of years and nobody has come up with a workable (much less convincing) plan to privatize the system.
People bitch and moan about government monopolies on one hand but seem to have no problem with a quasi-government natural monopoly being unregulated to the point where it has the worst properties of both government and private industry. I simply can't figure that one out. I can only chalk it up to the natural, knee-jerk "Government bad!" response of a lot of people who haven't bothered to look at the history of the world and decide whether other systems worked better.
So why bring that point up only to use is as a "I point my finger at you" when you can just as well wave it around on most of the population.
Personally, I hope to hold my elected officials to a higher standard than the average American who can't find Iraq on a globe. The voters believe a lot of stupid things, but our leaders are supposed to be of above average intelligence, have access to far more relevant information, and have support staffs who can help them make sensible decisions. How they missed something that I, a computer geek who had access to nothing more than a knowledge of recent history and current public news outlets, saw plain as day I will never understand. Even more stunning is the fact that they come back to us and tout their ignorance when explaining why they did such a stupid thing. "If I had only known then what I know now..." If you had known then what you know now, you'd have been competent.
Maybe I'm just a good guesser, but if you can't figure out the ramifications of your foreign policy with at least as much accuracy as I can from my couch, I don't see any reason to elect you over any other random yahoo.
I'm interested in how you apply that argument to things like police protection and roads. Clearly, there's a distinction between those things and health care for most people who use your line of argument, but I haven't seen anybody effectively articulate it. One is a moral outrage and the other just totally makes intuitive sense to them.
Virtually 100% of medical advances come from the US. ..
I'm wondering where you get your numbers on this. I wouldn't be surprised if the US was #1 in R&D per capita, but I strongly suspect that it's not as lop sided as you claim, especially when one differentiates between the basic research that discovers the cures and the research that goes into productizing the drug.
Most of the cost of medical care in the US can be traced to R&D costs.
Again, I'm interested in where you're getting your numbers. As far as I can tell, the pharmaceutical industry is spending at least as much on advertising as it is on R&D annually (although they make it rather difficult to tell with how they do their accounting). Add to that the fact that they're about the most profitable industry you can possibly be in, and that's pretty good evidence that a large chunk of our cost differential is going to things that don't directly affect our health.
I know that our leaders have trouble expressing themselves as a whole, but please don't let their spelling mistakes become yours. Or were you just being an ass?
Exactly! They believe (in the affirmative sense) that no gods exist without feeling the need for proof, i.e., they have faith in the non-existence of god(s) in exactly the same way that religious people have faith in the existence of them.
This may be accurate based on pure definitions, but I think that people use this gambit to imply that atheism is more of a leap of faith than it really is. One doesn't say that not believing in unicorns is an act of faith even though it certainly is. It rubs me the wrong way when I read something that essentially says, "Oh, I'm sensible because I'm an agnostic not like those crazy fire-breathing atheists who take the non-existence of gods as an article of faith!" There's the faith that it takes to say that you don't believe in unicorns, and then there's the faith that it takes to adhere to specific tenants of religion. The two are decidedly not the same, even though they technically meet the dictionary definition of the word "faith". I don't think that most atheists really display the latter.
I don't consider "preserving the nation" as being worthwhile. Actually I don't like national borders and believe people should be able to live wherever they want so long as they can afford it. All borders are are imaginary lines drawn on maps.
Well, yes, if you're against having a nation as such, I can see how a lot of leaders who most people consider very good might rub you the wrong way. Likewise, somebody who thinks that profit is a bad thing might consider Jack Welch a terrible CEO. I'm not sure where that puts us in a discussion of who is a good CEO, though.
The only good thing I can think of Lincoln did was end slavery. However as slavery was economically unsustainable it would have ended without the Civil War, which was not about slavery but was about states rights.
Of course. And the fact that the state's right in question was slave ownership is completely orthogonal. I've had this discussion before, and while I agree to some extent, I think that it's strongly whitewashing the issue.
Can you provide any other good things Lincoln did? There may be more but my memory is bad, and no I don't consider keeping the US whole good in and of itself.
I'd say that he was fairly well absorbed with the whole "preserving the union" thing. So if you don't consider that a worthwhile goal, I can see how you might consider him a do-nothing President. If you work under the assumption that it was, in fact, a worthwhile goal, I'd say that it's hard to dispute the fact that he did it deftly, showing admirable wisdom and leadership in the process. It was not an easy nut to crack, and there were a lot of places where lesser leaders would have misstepped. I don't think that any president in recent memory could have pulled it of.
Lincoln tried to suspend habeas corpus as did Bush Jr whereas Thomas Jefferson fought against the Alien and Sedition Acts believing they were unconstitutional.
He also has a few notable accomplishments on the "good" side of the scorecard. That, and he was dealing with the dissolution of the country at the time. Not perfect, but on the whole, pretty damned impressive.
If evolution is fact, explain the bombardier beetle. How can an animal evolve into something that is self destructive? How could a horse have evolved? Their hearts are pumped by their footsteps... literally, their hooves were designed / "evolved" (yeah rigth!) into an organ that helps move blood throughout their bodies.
Has it occurred to you that the two "facts" you've just suggested might simply not be true? Reconciling things that aren't true with theories that are based on reality can present some problems. Some time on Google may help.
My wife and I have a gene pool that our children will pull from. When that child is born, it will lack genetic information that previously existed between my wife and I. The child will either get a dominate or a recessive gene from me, and one from my wife. It cannot get a dominate gene if my wife and I did not already have it. So if both my wife and I had a dominant gene and a recessive gene and the child only has recessive, then information has been lost in this localized environment. This may make the child better suited, and it may not. Survival of the fittest will come into play and weed out poor combinations.
I hereby challenge you to define "information" in such a way that it can be measured objectively to verify your claims. This claim gets thrown around a lot, but without a meaningful definition for the word, it's just so much nonsense. I have a hard time throwing away 150 years of hard research on a hand-wavy information theoretic argument that doesn't define its terms.
Soft tissue and DNA surviving millions of years is but one example against the long time needed for evolution.
Your phrasing of that suggests that you haven't actually read the details of what was discovered, or what you've read has come from the rather sensationalistic popular press version.
Not to mention never having observed a mutation creating new genetic information or the math problem associated with sequential mutations needed to create a new structure.
I believe I've challenged you on this before, but here it goes: Define information in an objectively quantifiable way and we'll talk about your claim. If you can actually pull that off, you'll be the first person I've ever seen do it. In fact, you'll be the first person I've ever seen attempt it. I'm also interested in seeing the "math problem" you allude to.
I agree that we don't need to force religious beliefs into the classroom but what's wrong with presenting evolution as still a theory and not a fact?
That's what they do. If they're not doing that, they're not teaching it correctly. The problem is when people propose that the "solution" to that problem is bringing nonsense like ID into the equation.
What's wrong with showing it's shortcomings with hopes that they can be explained or refuted? Isn't that what science is really about?
Yes, that is what science is all about, and that's what good science educations do. However, the problems with evolution are questions about its mechanisms and details rather than whether or not it actually did happen. Anything else is fringe science that has no real place in the classroom any more than the "theory" of homeopathy belongs in health class or the idea that the holocaust never happened belongs in history class. Sure, these are ideas that adults (often intelligent ones) hold, and they can be debated, but they're fringe ideas that can be debated in the real world among adults instead of clouding the education of children.
That's an interesting take on it. How far back to the creationists' trees currently go?
I suspect that this will be case of the trees creeping back farther and farther as more genomes are sequenced and compared. Very similar to old time creationists, "Nothing ever changes" becoming, "Well, things change, but only a little" then, "They vary based on their own genomes but mutations always kill you" then, "Well, there are neutral mutations, but no beneficial ones" then, "Well, there are beneficial mutations, but they don't add 'information'" then, "OK, some 'information' can be added, but it's rare and it's not enough and when they do happen, it's because of The Designer."
The arguments get more sophisticated and nuanced as their older forms are refuted, and while there are still throwbacks who make the older claims, the newest and slickest organizations avoid those pitfalls. I suspect that if what you're saying is the current popular argument, we should be seeing a lot of bickering about what constitutes a "kind" in the coming years as the more progressive creationist organizations travel farther up the trees and the more stubborn ones stand firm.
The analogy fits perfectly; I've experienced God, so there's no way I'll be argued out of belief by someone who has not experienced God, any more than you could be argued into believing Red doesn't exist by a man blind from birth.
I can see how a religious experience can be very compelling for the person who experiences it. I'm surprised, though, that so many expect it to hold weight for their particular religion when discussing it with somebody else. I can think of people who have had religious experiences that lead them to completely different and incompatible religions, and I have no reason to believe that one is more legitimate than the others.
I will say that if I had such an experience (I have not), the fact that others claim equally powerful and incompatible ones might give me pause. I'm not sure how I would reconcile it, really. Doubting that another person's very convincing religious experience is as "real" as my own seems to me very similar to believing that I love my wife more than my friend loves his. Sure, I feel like it may be the case, but deep down, I know that he feels the same way about me and neither one of us is likely to be right.
Yes, I know it's heresy to admit being a Christian [kuro5hin.org] at slashdot, where athiesm is the site relgion and its proponents will stone with mod points anyone who dares believe that God exists, so mod me down.
I totally would, but I don't have mod points and there's no, "-1 Tiresome would-be martyr with a persecution complex" option.
"Why do human programmers put non-functional 'comments' in their code?"
It's not a terrible point, and I have seen creationist programmers make exactly that point. The only problem with it is that non-coding DNA differs between organisms in such a way that it implies mutations over time. It's an indicator that the DNA did have a common source way back when, and that over time, the commonalities that aren't crucial to its function have changed. That doesn't agree with the simultaneous creation ex-nihilo "model" that many of them support.
I suppose it can be made to be consistent with the "guided evolution" model that many ID supporters like. Then again, why "guided evolution" when evolution alone will suffice? We don't see "guided gravity" when gravity alone will suffice.
Also like I said you didn't belive anything they said. You didn't disspove anything they said either. Instead you put up this fantastical straw-man argument and shot it down. AiG doesn't reject atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology or geology but go ahead and keep thinking that.
I would say that appeals to changing radioactive decay constants, shifts in the speed of light, and the like are rejections of mainstream physics and its results. There's really no way of spinning that. I'll listen to AiG's interpretation of fossil evidence and roll my eyes a bit because it can almost be construed as reasonable to come up with any story you want to fit the bones, but there's nothing irrefutably wrong with their interpretations in isolation. Sure, they lack explanatory power and rely on miracles, but ignoring that, they're consistent with the narrow set of data. The problem is that in the process, they go completely off the rails with the physics.
Evolutionary theory works not just with the bones that are found but with the time lines calculated for those bones. AiG's interpretation only "works" with the bones. They reject the time lines and in the process come up with some of the most fanciful and crack-headed physics I've seen outside of the time cube guy's web site. They jump from having an eccentric but logically consistent interpretation of a set of bones to unsupportable nonsense like flood geology and atomic constants that jump all over the place to support their interpretation. That's where they start having a logically untenable position, because they claims they make are thoroughly stomped by the observable data. It's not just the bones. It's observations from several other scientific fields that they have to explain away.
Also, less then 1% of fossils are ape-like yet almost every one discovered is said to be part of the line of species leading up to Homo Sapiens.
1) Of course less than 1% of fossils are ape-like. Far less than 1% of all organisms are ape-like.
2) Your claim about most fossils being classified in homo sapiens lineage is...well...false, and the AiG links don't support it. As far as I can tell, you've essentially made it up, just like you made up the claim about scientists being unsure if we're more closely related to pigs or apes. Fabricating factoids to make your point doesn't do you any good.
The website cites sources so you can check the fact yourself. I doubt you'll believe even a word it says though.
Let's just say that history has taught me to be skeptical of AiG's claims. As for your links, they're the typical AiG gambits:
1) It's all in how you interpret the evidence [neglecting to point out that people who study fossils for a living generally agree on one interpretation and people who run churches and write "science" books for the popular press agree on another].
2) The Vast Scientific Establishment is suppressing good science to keep the Truth from being known.
3) They use the phrase "the missing link" which makes biology educators weep bitter tears.
4) By rejecting most of modern physics and geology, they can shoehorn in a reasonable sounding "interpretation" of the data. And of course, for that totally reasonable interpretation to work, we need merely reject most of modern atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and geology. Then everything fits with only a few holes, and for all that effort, we get a theory with zero predictive power. Yay!
The saddest part of the whole thing is that AiG is probably the most honest and professional of creationist organizations. If an argument is totally flawed in a way that even a child can understand, they usually retract it. If it's only subtly flawed, it stays in, but that's generally true of most organizations that are more interested in doing PR than science. We can only ask so much.
Also, less then 1% of fossils are ape-like yet almost every one discovered is said to be part of the line of species leading up to Homo Sapiens.
Why, oh why, do you keep on fabricating stuff like this? If I was going to randomly make stuff up, I would at least make up claims that support my case. You need to read more Duane Gish. Now there's a man who could make up "facts" to drive his point home.
Which leads me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus) which has a picture of a 40% complete fossil which is painfully easy to tell that it is not enough information to draw the wild conclusions they do like her being covered in course hair and her facial structure since almost all of the facial fossils are missing.
So, as an expert on hominid morphology and the classification of bones, what do you think Lucy is and why?
Your argument regarding the pre-eminence of fiat currency would be more convincing if the sole source (the government) of the currency was not capable of borrowing against it's future. The situation as it stands now is that the government can say, "Look, I'll promise to pay you back in the future" when they buy something - a government bond. That bond is a claim on air, however, as there is no gold (or other fungible resource) backing it. If the government needs to pay it back, it simply prints more money, reducing the overall value.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. The people who make the budget and decide to borrow have no authority over the creation of money. The Federal Reserve makes that call, and they can just as well opt not to buy the government debt. When they do, you're correct: the debt simply inflates away and acts as a tax on cash holders. There's no rule that states that they have to, though. Allowing interest rates to rise is a perfectly fine alternative, and I suspect that it's one they'll be opting for more in the future. The important point, though, is that Congress can't simply pass a terrible budget and then make up the shortfall by demanding that the Fed inflate the debt away.
The post you're responding to, while not totally accurate, isn't totally off base either. The Board of Governors consists of government appointees. The Federal Open Market Committee consists of the Board of Governors plus a minority of the presidents of individual Federal Reserve Banks. The government appointees outnumber the private industry appointees on the committee. The Federal Reserve Banks are subject to oversight by the Board of Governors, and they're non-profit entities. The whole system is a mix of public and private with a lot of public oversight and some private input. The idea that it's a private cabal of men printing money and making themselves rich is not an accurate picture of the system.
GAO (General Accounting Office). I'd like to see where your numbers are coming from.
Link, please. I flatly don't believe that the GAO says anything of the sort. Just looking at some of the Fed's numbers doesn't give any indication that what you claim is true. Everything I've been able to find says that foreign ownership accounts for about half of our outstanding government debt, and of the government debt that is held by government entities, most of it is held by trust funds. Generally, when I hear a claim like yours, it's usually connected to a post that badly misunderstands how the Federal Reserve system works, so color me skeptical.
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I see an astonishing lack of ownership being asserted by the people who voted to bring these policies about, and I get pretty close to being offended when people say, "I'm a conservative, but not a Bush conservative, even though I supported him and everything he did until his ideas proved to be stupid in the real world."
I think that you may only have read the headline or skimmed the article. The ruling was far more narrow and legalistic than that, and the end result is not that the police get paid to do nothing. This seems like the type of hysterical nonsense that might be written up in a pro-militia newsletter--designed to scare people into hoarding canned beans and ammunition when the reality is that it was simply a ruling on a technicality of constitutional law and is unlikely to have any real-world effect on the average person.
I strongly suspect that you've never been to or really thought about places where the really isn't any police protection, or where the police are so corrupt that they're just as dangerous as (or indistinguishable from) organized criminals. That covers a huge portion of the world, and we're lucky not to be part of it. If you haven't been robbed at gunpoint or had somebody close to you murdered, odds are pretty good that you live in a society that provides some sort of law enforcement. Lots of places have tried going the "private army/police" route, and you end up with what looks remarkably like feudalism at best and anarchy at worst.
The government also has no incentive to wring maximum profit out of each road, to make roads in different areas incompatible across geographical regions, to design road systems to maximize toll prices rather than maximizing efficiency, or to cut corners on safety in the name of profit. The reason I suggest we trust the government with the responsibility of making roads is because governments have been doing a great job of doing just that for thousands of years and nobody has come up with a workable (much less convincing) plan to privatize the system.
People bitch and moan about government monopolies on one hand but seem to have no problem with a quasi-government natural monopoly being unregulated to the point where it has the worst properties of both government and private industry. I simply can't figure that one out. I can only chalk it up to the natural, knee-jerk "Government bad!" response of a lot of people who haven't bothered to look at the history of the world and decide whether other systems worked better.
Maybe I'm just a good guesser, but if you can't figure out the ramifications of your foreign policy with at least as much accuracy as I can from my couch, I don't see any reason to elect you over any other random yahoo.
I'm interested in how you apply that argument to things like police protection and roads. Clearly, there's a distinction between those things and health care for most people who use your line of argument, but I haven't seen anybody effectively articulate it. One is a moral outrage and the other just totally makes intuitive sense to them.
Again, I'm interested in where you're getting your numbers. As far as I can tell, the pharmaceutical industry is spending at least as much on advertising as it is on R&D annually (although they make it rather difficult to tell with how they do their accounting). Add to that the fact that they're about the most profitable industry you can possibly be in, and that's pretty good evidence that a large chunk of our cost differential is going to things that don't directly affect our health.
I'd say that he was fairly well absorbed with the whole "preserving the union" thing. So if you don't consider that a worthwhile goal, I can see how you might consider him a do-nothing President. If you work under the assumption that it was, in fact, a worthwhile goal, I'd say that it's hard to dispute the fact that he did it deftly, showing admirable wisdom and leadership in the process. It was not an easy nut to crack, and there were a lot of places where lesser leaders would have misstepped. I don't think that any president in recent memory could have pulled it of.
I believe I've challenged you on this before, but here it goes: Define information in an objectively quantifiable way and we'll talk about your claim. If you can actually pull that off, you'll be the first person I've ever seen do it. In fact, you'll be the first person I've ever seen attempt it. I'm also interested in seeing the "math problem" you allude to.
That's what they do. If they're not doing that, they're not teaching it correctly. The problem is when people propose that the "solution" to that problem is bringing nonsense like ID into the equation.
Yes, that is what science is all about, and that's what good science educations do. However, the problems with evolution are questions about its mechanisms and details rather than whether or not it actually did happen. Anything else is fringe science that has no real place in the classroom any more than the "theory" of homeopathy belongs in health class or the idea that the holocaust never happened belongs in history class. Sure, these are ideas that adults (often intelligent ones) hold, and they can be debated, but they're fringe ideas that can be debated in the real world among adults instead of clouding the education of children.
That's an interesting take on it. How far back to the creationists' trees currently go?
I suspect that this will be case of the trees creeping back farther and farther as more genomes are sequenced and compared. Very similar to old time creationists, "Nothing ever changes" becoming, "Well, things change, but only a little" then, "They vary based on their own genomes but mutations always kill you" then, "Well, there are neutral mutations, but no beneficial ones" then, "Well, there are beneficial mutations, but they don't add 'information'" then, "OK, some 'information' can be added, but it's rare and it's not enough and when they do happen, it's because of The Designer."
The arguments get more sophisticated and nuanced as their older forms are refuted, and while there are still throwbacks who make the older claims, the newest and slickest organizations avoid those pitfalls. I suspect that if what you're saying is the current popular argument, we should be seeing a lot of bickering about what constitutes a "kind" in the coming years as the more progressive creationist organizations travel farther up the trees and the more stubborn ones stand firm.
I will say that if I had such an experience (I have not), the fact that others claim equally powerful and incompatible ones might give me pause. I'm not sure how I would reconcile it, really. Doubting that another person's very convincing religious experience is as "real" as my own seems to me very similar to believing that I love my wife more than my friend loves his. Sure, I feel like it may be the case, but deep down, I know that he feels the same way about me and neither one of us is likely to be right.
I suppose it can be made to be consistent with the "guided evolution" model that many ID supporters like. Then again, why "guided evolution" when evolution alone will suffice? We don't see "guided gravity" when gravity alone will suffice.
Evolutionary theory works not just with the bones that are found but with the time lines calculated for those bones. AiG's interpretation only "works" with the bones. They reject the time lines and in the process come up with some of the most fanciful and crack-headed physics I've seen outside of the time cube guy's web site. They jump from having an eccentric but logically consistent interpretation of a set of bones to unsupportable nonsense like flood geology and atomic constants that jump all over the place to support their interpretation. That's where they start having a logically untenable position, because they claims they make are thoroughly stomped by the observable data. It's not just the bones. It's observations from several other scientific fields that they have to explain away.
1) Of course less than 1% of fossils are ape-like. Far less than 1% of all organisms are ape-like.
2) Your claim about most fossils being classified in homo sapiens lineage is...well...false, and the AiG links don't support it. As far as I can tell, you've essentially made it up, just like you made up the claim about scientists being unsure if we're more closely related to pigs or apes. Fabricating factoids to make your point doesn't do you any good.
Let's just say that history has taught me to be skeptical of AiG's claims. As for your links, they're the typical AiG gambits:
1) It's all in how you interpret the evidence [neglecting to point out that people who study fossils for a living generally agree on one interpretation and people who run churches and write "science" books for the popular press agree on another].
2) The Vast Scientific Establishment is suppressing good science to keep the Truth from being known.
3) They use the phrase "the missing link" which makes biology educators weep bitter tears.
4) By rejecting most of modern physics and geology, they can shoehorn in a reasonable sounding "interpretation" of the data. And of course, for that totally reasonable interpretation to work, we need merely reject most of modern atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and geology. Then everything fits with only a few holes, and for all that effort, we get a theory with zero predictive power. Yay!
The saddest part of the whole thing is that AiG is probably the most honest and professional of creationist organizations. If an argument is totally flawed in a way that even a child can understand, they usually retract it. If it's only subtly flawed, it stays in, but that's generally true of most organizations that are more interested in doing PR than science. We can only ask so much.
So, as an expert on hominid morphology and the classification of bones, what do you think Lucy is and why?
The post you're responding to, while not totally accurate, isn't totally off base either. The Board of Governors consists of government appointees. The Federal Open Market Committee consists of the Board of Governors plus a minority of the presidents of individual Federal Reserve Banks. The government appointees outnumber the private industry appointees on the committee. The Federal Reserve Banks are subject to oversight by the Board of Governors, and they're non-profit entities. The whole system is a mix of public and private with a lot of public oversight and some private input. The idea that it's a private cabal of men printing money and making themselves rich is not an accurate picture of the system.