McClatchy has the article AP freelancer says report of rebel chemical weapons use not hers.

Gavlak produced a series of emails detailing her unsuccessful attempt to have Mint News either clarify the article’s background or remove it from the site. The emails begin almost immediately after publication of the story on Aug. 29th and continued through the weekend until Sept. 2.

The initial email detailing the filing of the story – Gavlak admits to helping Ababneh convert his Arabic reporting into English – reads “Pls find the Syria story I mentioned uploaded on Google Docs. This should go under Yahya Ababneh’s byline. I helped him write up his story but he should get all the credit for this.”

After seeing the story published under her name and the amount of interest it was generating – in large part because of the credibility lent to it by her relationship with AP, which bills itself as the “world’s oldest and largest newsgathering organization” – Gavlak demanded her name be removed. Muhawesh refused.

You have to read the whole story to come away pretty confused about what is going on here.  Let me see if I can confuse you more by tacking on this other story that I just read from McClacthy, Russia says US is trying to derail Syria deal.

“Our U.S. partners are beginning to blackmail us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the First Channel, a state-owned television network. He said the U.S. was threatening to “fold up the work” toward securing the chemical weapons if Russia won’t back a United Nations Security Council resolution based on Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows the use of force against nations that threaten international peace.

Perhaps we just won’t take yes  for an answer to our desire to get international controls on Syria’s chemical weapons.

It seems like it just goes with the territory that when you are in a powerful position of authority, you cannot let everyday honesty be the rule.  The matters are such high stakes, that you may just need to twist the truth, if not outright lie, in order to keep the world or your country safe.  The trouble with this way of thinking is that when you need people to take your word for something, you have lost all credibility, and nobody is going to take anybody’s word as definitive proof of anything.

Perhaps I should relate my own experience with gratuitous inclusion of your name in a byline.

In 1983, a group of us at Digital Equipment Corp. decided to write some technical papers on some software that we had written the year before. Since I was visiting the Universtiy of California at Berkeley for a year, I was not in on all the decision making as to who would write which articles about the software. I had made an emailed suggestion that did not include my name on one of the articles. I guess as a favor to me, my name was included on the article, anyway.

The trouble was, that the article was accepted for presentation at a technical conference based on an outline. A description of the article was published in the program of the conference, but the person who was responsible for the article never wrote it, never informed the organizers of the conference that he was not going to write the article, and did not attend the conference.

Since I was well known by a number of the attendees and organizers of the conference, it fell upon me to explain why “my” article had never been submitted and that nobody was going to present the talk at the conference.

You can see what a favor my “coauthors” did for me by giving me credit that I did not want. They didn’t even get my name correct on the byline. They used my nickname instead of my full name.

I guess I am playing a role in the meta-analysis of other people’s analyses of the Larry Summers saga.

New Economics Perspectives has the post Galbraith’s Post-Mortem on the Summers Drama by Dan Kervick.

Is Summers history’s greatest monster? No. But he had his shot on the historical stage. He put his large, assertive stamp on an era of market fundamentalism and deregulation, and helped build a system that collapsed catastrophically in 2007 and 2008, and has left deep, damaging craters in the social landscape forged both before the collapse and in the aftermath. The philosophy of the Summers era has been revealed to be a key contributing cause of the many social and economic problems we now face. That’s why it was time for Summers and the other votaries of the neoliberal god that failed to move aside.

The article on which Dan Kervick is commenting is from The Los Angeles Times Obama’s Fed drama by James K. Galbraith.

In his book “The Escape Artists,” Noam Scheiber portrayed Summers as a force for restraint in the 2009 stimulus debates. That too cost him — unfairly — some liberal support. It now seems clear that he was a strong advocate of expansionist policies, though with tactical reservations that muddied the view from outside. On the other hand, there were esoteric matters relating to the bailouts — the Summers-Timothy Geithner toxic-assets plan for the big banks, for example — that might have brought deserved criticism had they been better understood.
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So the battle was symbolic, a fight of outsiders against insiders, of Wall Street allies against regulators, prosecutors, women and populists.

Neither Summers nor Yellen played any visible role in it; they appeared as observers, while the battle blew around them. For my part, not least since my views don’t matter, I ducked a few invitations to join in. This was partly personal: My rare exchanges with Summers have been cordial, and I owe him for acts of grace in 2006, at the end of his Harvard presidency, when my father died.

By the time I step in here I am commenting on Dan Kervick’s comments on James Galbraith’s comments on Noam Scheiber.  This might be a little like the telephone game (or gossip game), where you whisper something into the ear of one person in a long line, and that person whispers it to the next.  When the item gets told out loud by the last person in line, it has limited resemblance to what went it.

Do you want to join the line?

The Real News Network has the videos US & Iran Negotiations. This is in two parts.

Can you imagine why anybody would be against rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran?

Pt. 1 US & Iran Move Closer to Negotiations But Neo-Con Objectives Attempt to Pull Them Apart

Pt. 2 US & Iran Move Closer to Negotiations But Neo-Con Objectives Attempt to Pull Them Apart

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think that what you have is acolytes, disciples, if you will, of the extreme right wing in Israel, led by Netanyahu at the present time, working towards what has always been laughed at, really, by realists in the world and others, an ultimate strategy of the right wing in Israel to build a greater Israel. We’re not just talking about the West Bank and Jerusalem; we’re talking about eventually Jordan, much of Syria, the Sinai, and so forth being the greater Israel.

Edge Perspectives With John Hagel has the article Getting Stronger through Stress: Making Black Swans Work for You. In the article he has a very helpful explication of the meaning of Nassim Nicholas Taleb new book Antifragile.

The real opportunity, in Taleb’s view, is to learn and grow from volatility and unexpected events – not to return to where you were, but to become even better as a result of the exposure and experience.  This is the essence of antifragility, a term that Taleb feels he has to coin because the English language doesn’t have a word that adequately captures this property of systems. While they may not be perfect synonyms, Taleb is seeking to describe the properties of adaptive or evolutionary systems that become better and reach even higher levels of performance as a consequence of encountering and overcoming challenges.  They are dynamic rather than static. They thrive and grow in new directions rather than simply sustain themselves. They actually need random events to strengthen and grow and they become brittle and atrophy in the absence of these random events.

I think it will be very helpful to have some idea of where Taleb is going as you start to read his new book. Sometimes, I  find a lot of promise in a Taleb book about what he is going to tell you, but I walk away feeling that the promise has not been fulfilled to my satisfaction.  I do learn a lot, but not as much as I had hoped.  I know Taleb is trying to tell me something profound, but I never quite get a firm handle on the actionable part of what he is trying to tell me. Perhaps the new book with the help of the introduction of the above article will be even more fulfilling than his previous books.

The way I came to find the article may be an antifragile example in itself. By looking at the statistics of where the traffic to this blog is coming from, I found that an author on Scoop.it had referred to my post about Taleb.  The Scoop.it “magazine” was Generative Systems Design by Anne Caspari.  Her site pointed to the article Antifragile system design principles in Wired.com.  The Wired.com article pointed to the article that is the subject of this blog post.  Each layer along the way added to what was in the layer below.

The Republicans are pushing the video below.

The Republicans ask the question,

Why is the Obama administration willing to negotiate with Putin on Syria, but not with Congress to address the Washignton’s spending problem?

1. The Washington spending problem is not spending enough to stimulate the economy. The Republicans want to spend less. What’s to negotiate?
2. Negotiation with Putin breaks the deadlock on an insoluble problem and brings about an almost perfect solution.  (Bombing Syria would might have let loose the chemical weapons into terrorist’s hands.  Syria’s turning these weapons over to international control for eventual destruction accomplishes exactly what we said we want to accomplish.)
3. It is more likely that Putin will stick to his negotiated promise than it is that Boner will stick to his.

It is a sad day when we find that the Russian leader is more amenable to reason and negotiation than is the Republican party. It’s odd that the Republicans would want to focus our attention on this fact. Maybe they really do have a death wish.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show does a good job of pointing out the inconsistencies in people’s positions on two Constitutional Amendments in The Bill of Rights.

The hard part to understand is that neither side of the debate on one of the amendments is consistent with that side’s position on the other amendment.

As described in the book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, now that each side has decided how they feel about the two amendments, they need to figure out why they made the decision they made. The decision is based on your gut feeling, and then you make up rationalizations to explain it. So let’s hear the rationalization for how you decide one way one one amendment, but decide the opposite way on the other amendment. I want to hear this so I can figure out why I take the positions I do on these amendments. I at least recognize my cognitive dissonance even if I don’t know what to do with it.

This is a great outreach program of the NRA to make sure we all have equal rights, especially second amendment rights.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Larry Summers Got a Bad Rap on Stimulus: Obama is the Problem by William K. Black. The article begins as follows:

I am a strong supporter of Janet Yellen and believe her support for the fiscal and monetary policies best designed to produce a stronger, prompter recovery from the Great Recession makes her the superior replacement for Ben Bernanke.  The criticism of Larry Summers’ position on fiscal stimulus, however, was generally inaccurate.  Within the Obama/Biden administration, the best known economists (Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein) proved dramatically better economists than did the non-economists who eventually came to dominate Obama’s economic policies (Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, and William Daley).  Summers, Romer, and Bernstein were strong voices in favor of fiscal stimulus.  Summers deserves some additional praise because he had to break from his mentor’s (Bob Rubin’s) pro-austerity dogmas to reach his anti-austerian position.

I wasn’t sure if it were Summers or someone else that was giving bad advice to President Obama on the stimulus.  If William Black wants to defend Summers on this aspect of his economics advice, then I am willing to listen.  There are some links that I am going to have to follow to see if there is an explanation of just where Summers stood compared to Romer.  He might have stood correctly in opposition to Geithner, Lew, and Daley, but still be more tepid about stimulus than Romer.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page has a link to the video Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL.

I always find it easy to understand the concept and the value of what he is promoting. I also have a devil of a time figuring out how to achieve the concept and its value.

This talk is no exception. However, there is a hint that the how to is discussed more in his new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, than in his previous books.

Even understanding the difference between anti-fragile and robust took a fair amount of perseverance as I watched the video. In the end, I am very glad that I did not quit. Had I seen the full title of the book beforehand, it might have helped a little.

Talking Points Memo has the story Obama Blasts GOP ‘Extortion’ And Threat Of ‘Apocalypse’ Over Debt Limit.

Obama is determined not to repeat the mistake he made by letting Republicans use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip. He likened the GOP’s position to a hypothetical Democratic Congress demanding that a Republican president agree to tax hikes in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit. Earlier this year, when the debt limit deadline was coming up, Obama refused to negotiate, and as a result, Republicans caved and raised it.

The point is that refusing to negotiate with the House Republicans is the correct strategy.  It worked before, and it will work again.  If the Republicans were to carry out their threat, the impact would be that enough voters would vote to turn the House back to a Democratic majority.  Its a heads Obama wins, tails the Republicans lose situation.