I don't bother with conspiracy theories when I can avoid them, but today
I went into a coffee place and they had a question posted by a register
for a get it right and save a whole ten cents. I usually know the
correct answer, and I did today. The question was "Which branch is the
Federal Reserve part of?" Obviously it is part of the Administrative
branch. The clerk looked at the answer, and it said that is was
privately owned. I was shocked that they would have that. I thought that
foolishness was straightened out years ago. But apparently there still
are people who don't know that the Fed is an independent agency of the
federal government.
A simple search brings up a number of results that clearly explain that
the Federal Reserve System belongs to the Federal government. The Fed
even turns over its profits to the Treasury Department. But I was
looking for the kind of morons who think that the Fed belongs to the
Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Well a little farther down the page I
found one (http://www.save-a-patriot.org/files/view/whofed.html) that claims that it is a collection of banks controlled by the Rothschilds, etc. Then there's this one: http://www.dailypaul.com/77899/the-p...serve-bank-are
Well, that's more than enough of that idiocy. The Federal Reserve System
was established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and amended a number
of times. Those acts are incorporated in Title 12 of the U. S. Code
(links below (The information at the Fed probably is easier to work
with.). The Chairman of the Fed is appointed by the president and
confirmed by the Senate.
The Federal Reserve System was established for two purposes: for the
clearing of transfers (checks, etc.) and to keep the currency stable.
This was a response to the Panic of 1907 during which most of the
clearing banks went belly-up, and the banking system was all but
insolvent, because there was no “lender of last resort”. If you find
economic systems interesting reading, then read about that panic; it was
horrific. Many people don’t realize that the Fed is the main clearing
bank in the U.S., because it does such a good job that money transfers
are almost invisible. I would prefer if checks were still checks, but
they became EFT’s (Electronic Funds Transfers) several years ago to
speed the system.
The Fed hasn’t been as good at stabilizing the currency. If it did, then
there would be no inflation or deflation, but there is a good reason
for the lack of stability. The Treasury Department issues bonds, bills,
and notes of maturities from one month to thirty years. Thirty year
bonds are repaid with dollars that are worth less than half of the
initial price of the bond due to inflation. Treasury saves money, and
the investors got their money through the interest payments over time,
so they feel that they are compensated.
I have never figured out why some people think that the Federal Reserve
System is privately owned. It serves a public function, and it turns in
its profits to the Treasury. It is an independent agency, but it has to
be rather independent to carry out its functions. Many people (including
me) disagree with how the Fed carries out some of its functions, and
there probably will be more disagreements in the future, because the Fed
has started regulating banks, and that may be a conflict of interest.
After a little more research I think that some people think the Fed is
privately owned, because they never bothered to read the Federal Reserve
Act (Title 12 of the U.S. Code). And they misunderstand the nature of
the capitalization of the regional Federal Reserve Banks. Member banks
are required to deposit as much as fourteen percent of their capital
with the Fed, and the Fed is required to pay six percent annual interest
on that money. (The Fed can and has varied the reserve requirement.) In
some places that money is called “preferred stock”, because, like
preferred stock, the interest is paid before other expenses, but this
preferred stock does not carry any ownership interest with it, as is
true of some preferred stock of businesses; this money is more of a debt
obligation.
After reading the article “10 Things That Every American Should Know
About the Fed” (link below) I understand that the origins of the
conspiracy theories about the Fed are mostly results of ignorance, but
that article had a valid point also. On the other hand, The Fed is
supposed to stabilize the banking system, so it has bailed out some
banks, and that can be spun so that they were helping their friends. If
one holds the delusion that the Fed is privately owned, then many of its
actions look different from how they look when one realizes that the
Fed is an agency of the Federal government.
One of the valid complaints (complaints that I consider valid anyway) is
that they have a revolving door with some of the large financial
companies, so they are regulating companies that belong to their friends
and that will hire them after they leave the Fed. I also disagree with
the bailouts of large banks in 2008 and 2009; those companies should
have been put through bankruptcy just like any other company. The excuse
was that the economy would have been disrupted, but it was disrupted
anyway, and it gave the appearance that the government favors large
companies at the expense of small companies and individuals.
It is completely clear is that the Fed has not communicated effectively
with the citizens. There is no reason why any sane person would think
that the Fed is privately owned, and that fallacy should have been
addressed and put to rest. Unfortunately, many of the people who think
the Fed is privately owned have cognitive problems, so it may be
impossible to completely end that idea.
It is my opinion that the Federal Reserve System should be different,
but it isn’t easy to determine what the Fed should or should not do. For
years Ron Paul tried to get a complete audit of the Fed, but that still
hasn’t happened; although the Fed issues quarterly reports (link below)
that give some idea of what is involved. The Fed has been assigned
additional functions over the years, and not all of the functions are
consistent with each other. It would be a good idea to think carefully
about how the Monetary and banking systems should be organized and
regulated. Someone should be trying to keep the currency stable, and
someone should be regulating banks, and so on. Whether there should be
one or several agencies is a question. The matter of what kind of
currency and who would emit it is also a good question, and there are
several valid answers.
What do you think? What should we do with the Fed? Sell it to the big
banks or keep it as a government agency? Or something else?
Federal Reserve Act
http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm
Also in Title 12 U.S. Code
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/chapter-3
10 Things
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...ederal-reserve
March 2014 Quarterly Report
http://www.federalreserve.gov/moneta...ort_201403.pdf
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
The End of Evolution
Whether one believes that evolution is factual or that everything was
created on October 23, 4004 BCE is of no consequence, because there has
been evolutionary change since 4004 BCE, but that may have changed
within the last couple of centuries. It is possible that human evolution
has been brought to a stop. I suspect that this hiatus will fail in the
end, but it may have some ill effects, or this hiatus may simply turn
out to be a different step in evolution. The specific matter to which I
refer is modern medicine, which effectively has eliminated some of the
mechanisms through which evolution had been operating.
More specifically, some people, who could not have survived because of genetically caused medical problems, are now living to become adults and sometimes passing on their genes that cause their disease. In addition to those conditions in the list below and on the linked list, many cancers are caused by genetic disorders that are triggered by other stimuli. By keeping alive people who would not be viable without major ongoing (or even constant) medical intervention and allowing some of those people to reproduce some of the results of millions of years of evolutionary improvement is being reversed.
It has been said that evolution ended when people started heating their places of habitation, but that was insignificant and other animals heat or at least insulate their places of residence. Many of the things that humans use are simply outgrowths of their evolutionary development, and the invented devices simply became additional tools for evolution. For example, humans invented cooking a long time ago. Initially cooking probably was a method for making carrion a little less likely to cause sickness, but cooking also led to the reduction in tooth size and made it more nutritious.
Cooking, building houses, mechanical transportation, and so on became tools for evolution and instruments for humans to do what they would have done anyway but a little more easily. Over the last couple million years humans have been slowly developing their tools and improving their methods for building houses. These things did not impede the biological systems, genes, etc. that are essential to evolution; they have been methods for evolution to operate or were until rather recently.
Humans had been altering their environment since the genus split from the other great apes, and humans are not the only species that alters its environment, so I don’t regard those changes as significant. Not even all medical practices do damage to the course of evolution. Chimps have been seen giving themselves medical treatments (see link below), and a variety of other animals eat foods that have specific medical benefits, but the extent of such treatments is rather limited (antibiotics and deworming mostly). Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to accept the medical industry as a natural outgrowth of the development of the human species, but I doubt the evolutionary value of treatments for various inherited genetic disorders that would cause death at an early age, if they were not treated. The outcome of such treatment is to help to perpetuate genetic characteristics that would not normally be passed on, because persons with those genes would not normally survive to reproduce. I am not suggesting eugenics, but I think that there has been too much medical care given to people who were not long for the world regardless of what might have been done for them. In addition, modern medicine has led to overpopulation.
I realize that there are people who think that the Earth could support even thirty billion people. But present evidence shows that it is difficult to have seven billion humans alive at once. The ability to produce adequate food for that many people is marginal at best, and, if the people who worry about climate change are right, then the resources to feed even the present population will not be available in the near future. A guess of how many humans the Earth could support effectively and with a safety cushion would be no more than two billion, roughly the Earth’s population in 1875. Although there were famines from time to time; there was adequate food production nearly all of the time. The places where there were famines had been developed and civilized for a long time and usually had local populations that pushed the local economy to its limit and any significant problem in food production resulted in a famine of some severity. Or famines were created by outside interference, as was the case in Ireland in the 1840’s. Famines were also created by invasions, and there have been periods of climate change in the past that led to crop failures; this happened during the period when the Little Ice Age was starting, resulting in cooler, wetter weather in some places, such as France where it cause crop failures. During the same era the American Southwest became dryer, and that led to the abandonment of the Anasazi cities.
During the period from 1725 (pop. 1 billion) to the present (pop. 7 billion) medicine has gone from unsanitary bleeding and other non-productive activities to being pretty darned advanced and effective, and I would contend that the improvements in medicine have been the principal cause for the increase in population. Infant and childhood mortality has gone from almost fifty percent to about ten percent, and people die in great numbers at ages greater than sixty now.
The term “sustainability” has become popular in the last few years, and I am proposing a way to make human life on Earth sustainable. The Green Revolution was wonderful in its way, but it wasn’t sustainable, and many of the agricultural practices and plants introduced as parts of that program have been abandoned in the last forty years. Intensive farming is not sustainable, and soil is deteriorating around the world; we have been eating that soil. The sustainable level of population probably is in the range of one to two billion. Returning population to that level quickly will be impossible, unless we do have a great pandemic, something on the scale of the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century worldwide. There isn’t a high probability of such an event, but it may happen. In the absence of such an event, or a major war, limiting the extent of medical activity would slowly reduce the population to a sustainable level.
The climate change alarmists worry about changes that may take place, but the problems that already exist are just as bad, and they are real, not theoretical. Thomas Malthus has consistently been shown wrong since he first came up with his theory (1798), and humanity may dodge the bullet again, and it is conceivable that something unexpected will come along, but animal populations are well known to crash when population density reaches a level that is unsustainable, and the crashes take a variety of forms from pandemics to mass migrations to the occasional mass insanity. We do not have the necessary perspective to be able to see whether there are effects at present that may be viewed as part of a population crash in several hundred years, after population has stabilized at one and a half billion.
Careful consideration as to what medical procedures ought to be used to keep who alive will almost certainly take place over the next few hundred years. We can expect that reasonable and valid decisions will eventually be made, and it is possible that repairing genes that produce disorders may become routine, not may but almost certainly will become routine, but until then we will be retaining genetic code that leads to the devolution of the human species, unless we make some hard and cruel decisions soon. If we don’t make those decisions, then there may not be people who will be capable in the future.
While I do favor limiting the use of medical procedures, I have a distinct feeling that this post will look completely silly in a couple hundred years, or sooner, because we will have simple and easy genetic repair, interstellar travel, and a few other of those things that futurists have predicted, but the “Singularity” will never happen. I am working on another post regarding probability; that doesn’t apply well to pure speculation, but it suggests that past records are the only standard that we can quantify with much confidence. And that suggests that humanity will continue to make Thomas Malthus wrong.
Links
Why Chimps Eat Dead Wood and Other Plants
http://news.discovery.com/animals/wh...ith-111129.htm
Other animals taking natural medicines
http://www.cracked.com/article_19686...-medicine.html
List of Genetic disorders
http://www.genome.gov/10001204
More common disorders
22q11.2 deletion syndrome
Angelman syndrome
Canavan disease
Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease
Color blindness
Cri du chat
Cystic fibrosis
Down syndrome
Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Haemochromatosis
Haemophilia
Klinefelter syndrome
Neurofibromatosis
Phenylketonuria
Polycystic kidney disease
Prader–Willi syndrome
Sickle-cell disease
Tay–Sachs disease
Turner syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders
The End of Evolution
http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/13
More specifically, some people, who could not have survived because of genetically caused medical problems, are now living to become adults and sometimes passing on their genes that cause their disease. In addition to those conditions in the list below and on the linked list, many cancers are caused by genetic disorders that are triggered by other stimuli. By keeping alive people who would not be viable without major ongoing (or even constant) medical intervention and allowing some of those people to reproduce some of the results of millions of years of evolutionary improvement is being reversed.
It has been said that evolution ended when people started heating their places of habitation, but that was insignificant and other animals heat or at least insulate their places of residence. Many of the things that humans use are simply outgrowths of their evolutionary development, and the invented devices simply became additional tools for evolution. For example, humans invented cooking a long time ago. Initially cooking probably was a method for making carrion a little less likely to cause sickness, but cooking also led to the reduction in tooth size and made it more nutritious.
Cooking, building houses, mechanical transportation, and so on became tools for evolution and instruments for humans to do what they would have done anyway but a little more easily. Over the last couple million years humans have been slowly developing their tools and improving their methods for building houses. These things did not impede the biological systems, genes, etc. that are essential to evolution; they have been methods for evolution to operate or were until rather recently.
Humans had been altering their environment since the genus split from the other great apes, and humans are not the only species that alters its environment, so I don’t regard those changes as significant. Not even all medical practices do damage to the course of evolution. Chimps have been seen giving themselves medical treatments (see link below), and a variety of other animals eat foods that have specific medical benefits, but the extent of such treatments is rather limited (antibiotics and deworming mostly). Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to accept the medical industry as a natural outgrowth of the development of the human species, but I doubt the evolutionary value of treatments for various inherited genetic disorders that would cause death at an early age, if they were not treated. The outcome of such treatment is to help to perpetuate genetic characteristics that would not normally be passed on, because persons with those genes would not normally survive to reproduce. I am not suggesting eugenics, but I think that there has been too much medical care given to people who were not long for the world regardless of what might have been done for them. In addition, modern medicine has led to overpopulation.
I realize that there are people who think that the Earth could support even thirty billion people. But present evidence shows that it is difficult to have seven billion humans alive at once. The ability to produce adequate food for that many people is marginal at best, and, if the people who worry about climate change are right, then the resources to feed even the present population will not be available in the near future. A guess of how many humans the Earth could support effectively and with a safety cushion would be no more than two billion, roughly the Earth’s population in 1875. Although there were famines from time to time; there was adequate food production nearly all of the time. The places where there were famines had been developed and civilized for a long time and usually had local populations that pushed the local economy to its limit and any significant problem in food production resulted in a famine of some severity. Or famines were created by outside interference, as was the case in Ireland in the 1840’s. Famines were also created by invasions, and there have been periods of climate change in the past that led to crop failures; this happened during the period when the Little Ice Age was starting, resulting in cooler, wetter weather in some places, such as France where it cause crop failures. During the same era the American Southwest became dryer, and that led to the abandonment of the Anasazi cities.
During the period from 1725 (pop. 1 billion) to the present (pop. 7 billion) medicine has gone from unsanitary bleeding and other non-productive activities to being pretty darned advanced and effective, and I would contend that the improvements in medicine have been the principal cause for the increase in population. Infant and childhood mortality has gone from almost fifty percent to about ten percent, and people die in great numbers at ages greater than sixty now.
The term “sustainability” has become popular in the last few years, and I am proposing a way to make human life on Earth sustainable. The Green Revolution was wonderful in its way, but it wasn’t sustainable, and many of the agricultural practices and plants introduced as parts of that program have been abandoned in the last forty years. Intensive farming is not sustainable, and soil is deteriorating around the world; we have been eating that soil. The sustainable level of population probably is in the range of one to two billion. Returning population to that level quickly will be impossible, unless we do have a great pandemic, something on the scale of the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century worldwide. There isn’t a high probability of such an event, but it may happen. In the absence of such an event, or a major war, limiting the extent of medical activity would slowly reduce the population to a sustainable level.
The climate change alarmists worry about changes that may take place, but the problems that already exist are just as bad, and they are real, not theoretical. Thomas Malthus has consistently been shown wrong since he first came up with his theory (1798), and humanity may dodge the bullet again, and it is conceivable that something unexpected will come along, but animal populations are well known to crash when population density reaches a level that is unsustainable, and the crashes take a variety of forms from pandemics to mass migrations to the occasional mass insanity. We do not have the necessary perspective to be able to see whether there are effects at present that may be viewed as part of a population crash in several hundred years, after population has stabilized at one and a half billion.
Careful consideration as to what medical procedures ought to be used to keep who alive will almost certainly take place over the next few hundred years. We can expect that reasonable and valid decisions will eventually be made, and it is possible that repairing genes that produce disorders may become routine, not may but almost certainly will become routine, but until then we will be retaining genetic code that leads to the devolution of the human species, unless we make some hard and cruel decisions soon. If we don’t make those decisions, then there may not be people who will be capable in the future.
While I do favor limiting the use of medical procedures, I have a distinct feeling that this post will look completely silly in a couple hundred years, or sooner, because we will have simple and easy genetic repair, interstellar travel, and a few other of those things that futurists have predicted, but the “Singularity” will never happen. I am working on another post regarding probability; that doesn’t apply well to pure speculation, but it suggests that past records are the only standard that we can quantify with much confidence. And that suggests that humanity will continue to make Thomas Malthus wrong.
Links
Why Chimps Eat Dead Wood and Other Plants
http://news.discovery.com/animals/wh...ith-111129.htm
Other animals taking natural medicines
http://www.cracked.com/article_19686...-medicine.html
List of Genetic disorders
http://www.genome.gov/10001204
More common disorders
22q11.2 deletion syndrome
Angelman syndrome
Canavan disease
Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease
Color blindness
Cri du chat
Cystic fibrosis
Down syndrome
Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Haemochromatosis
Haemophilia
Klinefelter syndrome
Neurofibromatosis
Phenylketonuria
Polycystic kidney disease
Prader–Willi syndrome
Sickle-cell disease
Tay–Sachs disease
Turner syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders
The End of Evolution
http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/13
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