The Consortium News has the article, How Fake 2nd Amendment History Kills.

The whole idea of the Constitution – with its mix of voting, elected representatives and checks and balances – was to create a political structure that made violence unnecessary. As the Preamble states, two key goals were to “promote the general Welfare” and to “insure domestic Tranquility.”

So, the Framers weren’t encouraging violent uprisings against the republic that they were founding. To the contrary, they characterized violence against the constitutional system as “treason” in Article III, Section 3. They also committed the federal government to protect each state from “domestic Violence,” in Article IV, Section 4.

And one of the first uses of the new state militias formed under the Second Amendment and the Militia Acts was for President Washington to lead a federalized force of militiamen against the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt, in western Pennsylvania in 1794.

Though it’s true that many Americans owned a musket or rifle in those early years especially on the frontier, regulations on munitions were still common in cities where storing of gunpowder, for instance, represented a threat to the public safety. As the nation spread westward, so did common-sense restrictions on gun violence. Sheriffs in some of the wildest of Wild West towns enforced gun bans that today would prompt a recall election financed by the National Rifle Association.

This history was well understood both by citizens and courts. For generations, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment as a collective right, allowing Americans to participate in a “well-regulated Militia,” not as an individual right to buy the latest weaponry at a gun show or stockpile a military-style arsenal in the basement.

The article addresses the issue that many gun rights activists claim is the reason why the Second Amendment is important.  They feel the need to be armed in case they must rise up against a tyranical government that takes over this country.

They claim that if we want to change what the Second Amendment says, we ought to pass a Constitutional Amendment.

The above article says

In the late Eighteenth Century, the meaning of “bearing” arms also referred to a citizen being part of a militia or army

That is the reason we must argue over history.  If the Second Amendment only recognizes the bearing of arms in a “well regulated militia”, then it is up to the gun rights advocates to pass a Constitutional Amendment to change what the Constitution says about this issue.

Of course there is always the problem of our side finding rights implied by the Constitution that were never intended.  Although there is a difference between a  right that was never explicitly considered, right to privacy and therefore abortion, versus a right that was considered and rejected under the meaning that existed of words when the words were written..

The White House web site has this easy to understand video about What Obamacare Means for You.

The Affordable Care Act – also known as Obamacare – means better coverage for those who already have health insurance, and more options for those who don’t, including a new way to shop for affordable, high-quality coverage.

For all of us who want to see Obamacare have a chance to prove itself, one way or another, we ought to get behind the effort to publicize it. So pass this video on to your contacts.

If the Republicans turn out to be right that these additions to our traditional medical care system in this country cannot work, then at least we will be able to say we gave it a fair chance. If we stop it before we even give it a try, then we will have missed a golden opportunity to find out if there is another way to make health care available to all of our citizens.

I know what the Republicans seem to be afraid of, but here is our chance to see if they are right or not. Have they so little faith in our system of government that they are afraid to even try something different? What about the rest of us and our faith in our ability to govern ourselves through a democratic form of government?

If you believe our democratic system of self government might work, are you willing to give Obamacare a fair test to see if this new idea is better than the old ones?

If you believe that we are unable to have workable solutions selected in a democratic way, then this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Consider this a test of the American way.

In reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, I have come to realize how the subject of economic efficiency should be discussed.

The Republicans’ sell their idea on how to run an economy on the idea of economic efficiency.  Who could possibly be against economic efficiency and in favor of “waste and fat” in an enterprise or in the government?

Well there is a reason to be hesitant about anything that is ultra-efficient.  Something that is ultra-efficient produces the most output from the least amount of resources as long as everything is running according to its design.  The problem is that such a system is extremely fragile.  The more efficient the system, the less it takes to knock it off kilter.  When the fragile system does get knocked off kilter, the disaster is much larger than anything that would have happened in a robust system.

Vulture capitalists, like Mitt Romney, come along and see an enterprise that they consider to be “inefficient and full of waste”.  They buy the enterprise so that they can siphon off all the “waste and fat” into their own pockets.  As soon as the event comes along that pulverizes the now fragile system, they abandon it to the public and walk away with all the wealth they siphoned off.

The next time a demagogue comes along to sell you on increased efficiency that will occur if we privatize a robust government function, remember to ask, “But will it make the function so fragile that it is bound to fail?”

Remember, economics (real life) is not binary – it’s not “all this or all that”.  We must deal in a spectrum of real numbers rather than 1’s and 0’s.  We don’t want to over engineer a system to make it so robust, that the added safety margins are truly unnecessary.  However, we  don’t want to cut away the safety margin so much that the system is too fragile.

If you rigidly apply a single dogmatic position (called Conservative or Liberal), you will either get ultra-efficient but fragile systems or you will get systems that are so robust that they are throwing away the chance to use some resources for other useful purposes.  We need to work more wisely, not more dogmatically.

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Dilemma of the Cooperative Gene by J. D. Alt.

The first reality, then, which the cooperative gene must acknowledge is that it is never going to persuade the competitive gene to cooperate towards the equitable creation of collective goods. The only strategy available, it seems, is for the cooperative gene to persuade itself that money is neither a commodity, nor is it scarce—that the narrative hammered out by the competitive gene is, at its very roots, a false and self-serving belief system that puts collective society itself at risk.

If you don’t think the word “gene” is the most appropriate phrase to use, just substitute “a more appropriate phrase” every time you see the word “gene”.

The article may be completely logical and the best way to sell the idea, but I am coming to think that for the sake of reducing fragility, the problem is really that the government has given too much of the fiat currency to the wealthy who are squirreling it away rather than putting it to work in the economy.  It might be easier to kiss this money good-bye and just create more money to be put to better use.  However, the idle money cannot be ignored.  As long as it exists, there is the chance that it will be taken out from under the mattress and put to use just at the most inopportune time in the economic cycle.  This will cause inflation.

Better to cut the downside risk of inflation, something the Republicans claim to be worried about, by taxing back the idle “money” and putting it to the use it should have been put to in the first place.

The web site Popular Resistance has the article and video Video: The Anti-TPP Take Over Of The US Trade Representative Building.

Below is a video of activists working in the coalition FlushTheTPP.org dropping multiple banners from the US Trade Representatives Building in Washington, DC to protest the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The groups sought to expose the secret negotiations that have been ongoing throughout the five years of the Obama administration and mobilize people concerned about workers, the environment, banking, food, water, Internet freedom and other issues to take action to oppose the TPP. The TPP will give large transnational corporations absolute power over our lives and make them more powerful than governments.

The web site itself is trying to let people know that the Occupy movement is not as dead as the media would like you to believe.

Do you laugh while you cry or cry while you laugh?

The Real News Network has a multi-part series with Rania Masri.

The first part is Rania Masri on Reality Asserts Itself Pt.1.

I think the following excerpts capture her political philosophy.

MASRI: A Muslim or Jewish or Druze or whatever or atheist. It was irrelevant. I was raised that religion is the way that you treat people, and everything else is a personal decision between oneself and one’s God and however way ones choose to worship. So that was very, very intrinsic to our upbringing. That’s one caveat of, one basic tenet of the political party. The other tenet is that they believe in something called natural Syria or greater Syria, which is that Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq are actually one natural entity and they are one nation. And it goes on beyond there.
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And then the third tenet of the ideology is that economically they believe in something called profit-sharing. So the worker does not own the company, the factory, per se, but the worker gets a salary at a percentage of the profits.

I should caution your, though. If you believe that anyone who calls Israel the enemy is not worth listening to, then don’t waste your time here.

For those of you who are still with me, we come to the second part, Opposing Intervention in Syria Without Apologizing for a Dictatorship Pt.2.

I stand very much against acts of economic violence and acts of military violence, completely. So in this case, economic sanctions against Iraq were themselves truly a weapon of mass destruction, were themselves horrendous in their impact on people’s lives. And bombing campaigns are not an option. They’re not a peace mechanism. So in those aspects, yes, my loudest actions were in opposition of those.

Her views on non-violence are what is especially worth considering. It is not as if she claims her words are from a saintly human being. She recognizes inconsistencies in her views and other people’s views. She understands that life is complex. She understands that not everything is black and white. Nevertheless, I think her ideas about non-violence make a lot of sense.

2013/09/26

The third part of the interview is The Survival of the Palestinian People is Itself a Form of Resistance Pt.3.

And I believe over time that the Israelis will recognize what the white South Africans have recognized, that the only path to true peace is one of a full democracy and not a racist-based kind of state. Very much so I believe in that. I don’t subscribe to the idea that we should expel all Israelis into the sea or expel the Zionists into the sea. No, I don’t believe that ethically. I don’t believe that strategically. And there are Israelis that I consider to be comrades, namely, Ilan Pappé, for example, who is a marvelous historian and a marvelous individual. And I would consider him a comrade, yes. You know, even though he is an Israeli, I would consider him a comrade, as well as there are numerous Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis–I could go on and on and on–that I consider them to be strict opposition, both in terms of their political and their economic platforms.

I think the above quote is the best one that I could find to convey the essence of what Masri’s position is. It takes a while in the interview for Paul Jay to get over his sticking point and to let this idea come out.

The whites in South Africa kept pushing themselves into a corner by raising the level of mal-treatment of the native population to the point where they could not conceive of the possibility of avoiding massive retribution if they ever relented. Then, all of a sudden it seems, the whole system fell apart, and the worst-case scenario did not occur.

That gives me hope that such an outcome could happen in Israel.

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.