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Excerpted from “The Real Rationale for the 2nd Amendment, That Right-Wingers Are Totally Ignorant About”, on AlterNet.org, 12/21/2012 found at www.sshsny.org.

Right-wing resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false notion that America’s Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this absurd, anti-historical narrative.

The reality was that the Framers wrote the Constitution and added the Second Amendment with the goal of creating a strong central government with a citizens-based military force capable of putting down insurrections, not to enable or encourage uprisings. The key Framers, after all, were mostly men of means with a huge stake in an orderly society, the likes of George Washington and James Madison.

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 weren’t precursors to France’s Robespierre or Russia’s Leon Trotsky, believers in perpetual revolutions. In fact, their work on the Constitution was influenced by the experience of Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786, a populist uprising that the weak federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, lacked an army to defeat. …

The rebellion alarmed retired Gen. George Washington, who received reports on the developments from old Revolutionary War associates in Massachusetts, such as Gen. Henry Knox and Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. Washington was particularly concerned that the disorder might serve the interests of the British, who had only recently accepted the existence of the United States. …

“If three years ago [at the end of the American Revolution] any person had told me that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite – a fit subject for a mad house,” Washington wrote to Knox on Feb. 3, 1787, adding that if the government “shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail.” …

Washington’s alarm about Shays’ Rebellion was a key factor in his decision to take part in – and preside over – the Constitutional Convention, which was supposed to offer revisions to the Articles of Confederation but instead threw out the old structure entirely and replaced it with the U.S. Constitution, which shifted national sovereignty from the 13 states to “We the People” and dramatically enhanced the power of the central government.

The drastic changes prompted strong opposition from some Revolutionary War figures, such as Virginia’s Patrick Henry, who denounced the federal power grab and rallied a movement known as the Anti-Federalists. Prospects for the Constitution’s ratification were in such doubt that its principal architect, James Madison, joined in a sales campaign known as the Federalist Papers in which he tried to play down how radical his changes actually were.

To win over other skeptics, Madison agreed to support a Bill of Rights, which would be proposed as the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Madison’s political maneuvering succeeded as the Constitution narrowly won approval in key states, such as Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts. The First Congress then approved the Bill of Rights, which were ratified in 1791. …

The Second Amendment dealt with concerns about “security” and the need for trained militias to ensure what the Constitution called “domestic Tranquility”. There was also hesitancy among many Framers about the costs and risks from a large standing army, thus making militias composed of citizens an attractive alternative.

So, the Second Amendment read: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Contrary to some current right-wing fantasies about the Framers wanting to encourage popular uprisings over grievances, the language of the amendment is clearly aimed at maintaining order within the country.

That point was driven home by the actions of the Second Congress amid another uprising which erupted in 1791 in western Pennsylvania. This anti-tax revolt, known as the Whiskey Rebellion, prompted Congress in 1792 to expand on the idea of “a well-regulated militia” by passing the Militia Acts which required all military-age white males to obtain their own muskets and equipment for service in militias.

In 1794, President Washington, who was determined to demonstrate the young government’s resolve, led a combined force of state militias against the Whiskey rebels. Their revolt soon collapsed and order was restored, demonstrating how the Second Amendment helped serve the government in maintaining “security”, as the Amend-ment says.

Beyond this clear historical record – that the framers’ intent was to create security for the new Republic, not promote armed rebellions – there is also the simple logic that the Framers represented the young nation’s aristocracy. Many, like Washington, owned vast tracts of land. They recognized that a strong central government and domestic tranquility were in their economic interests.

So, it would be counterintuitive – as well as anti-historical – to believe that Madison and Washington wanted to arm the population so the discontented could resist the constitutionally elected government. In reality, the Framers wanted to arm the people – at least the white males – so uprisings, whether economic clashes like Shays’ Rebellion, anti-tax protests like the Whiskey Rebellion, attacks by Native Americans, or slave revolts, could be repulsed.

However, the Right has invested heavily during the last several decades in fabricating a different national narrative, one that ignores both logic and the historical record. In this right-wing fantasy, the Framers wanted everyone to have a gun so they could violently resist their own government.

This bogus “history” has then been amplified through the Right’s powerful propaganda apparatus – Fox News, talk radio, the Internet and ideological publications – to persuade millions of Americans that their possession of semi-automatic assault rifles and other powerful firearms is what the Framers intended, that today’s gun-owners are fulfilling some centuries-old American duty. …

Today’s American Right is drunk on some very bad history, which is as dangerous as it is false.

 

From the New Yorker, Feb. 4 2013, a Profile of Dr. Mehmet Oz (of Oprah fame):

Want to know how many orgasms you will require each year to prolong your life?  Oz says two hundred — give or take.

What a relief to find out that figure is 200 per year!  All this time I’ve been going for per month.

No wonder I’ve been so tired.

Well, better news for me: not a slipped disk.  Instead, a badly sprained lower back muscle is inflamed, and expanded to the point of pinching the sciatica nerve.  Still excruciating pain; but with a chance of making that muscle relax and stop pinching the nerve.

This learned after a visit to the local Med360 center, which is just around the corner from my house.  No calling up to make an appointment, no waiting around at all: diagnosis while-you-wait; no blood tests, no xrays, no referrals to osteopaths or surgeons who just want to put you under the knife.  Inflamation-reducing drug administered at once, and prescription for analgysic (hydrocontone) faxed to the Walgreens I always go to, also just around the corner.  Then to the other side of the center, to the physical therapist, to begin therapy the same day.

Bad news: been reading up on lower back pain, and it seems in general to take a very long time to get the healing done.  Like at least a month.  A month of pain.  Something to look forward to.

Intense pain.  Inflammation.  Muscle stress.  Hmm…now what one thing would help to alleviate–or at least palliate, these systems?

Answer:  medical cannabis.  Yes, marijuana would be just the thing for this set of symptoms.

A reasonable solution? Yes.  An available solution?  No way…at least, not in the great state of South Carolina.

I’ve often seen pictures of old men, their backs bent, leaning forward with one hand on a hip, what you’d call stooped.  I always thought it was just because that was how their bones became deformed.

Not.  It’s because their in great pain, and this is the most comfortable standing position.  Like them, I find myself comfortable only standing and leaning forward and down.  The problem is a ruptured disk.  “Slipped disk” in the familiar parlance, though disks are fixed in position, and cannot ‘slip’. Instead, it’s a hernia, a protuberance of the  disk that pinches the sciatic nerve.

Painful?  YOU BET painful!  The sciatic nerve become pinched, causing pain to the whole hip, as well as the rest of the leg; “like there’s a hot poker in your leg,” Avis described it, and that’s a pretty good way to put it.  If I stand up for any length of time, upright that is, the pain gets greater and greater, until I just want to scream.

If I’ve been walking for a while — say, 10 minutes — the pain is so excruciating I want to cry; it is a pain as great as passing a stone–which itself is said to be the closest a male can get to the experience of pain in childbirth.

The other day I was asked (well, not me particularly; it was a rhetorical question, made to the group, but still), “Why is God always ‘He’?  Why does god have to be masculine?”

Good question, and one with an answer.  Or many answers.

The sun was no doubt the first thing to be worshipped.  And rightly so, as we depend so much upon the sun: for heat, for light, to make our food grow, to power our solar cells… And the sun has always been represented  as masculine.  In Taoism, the sun is yang, the moon is yin; brightness versus dimness, hot versus cold.  In languages where nouns have gender, the sun is masculine: il sole, el sol, le soleil.  Even in English until about the seventeenth century, the sun was masculine.  Shakespeare, “the sun his glory, the moon her circl’d orb.”  The moon is Diana, the sun Ra, Helios, Apollo.

Watching the presidential balls, when the president is dancing with Michelle, the foreground is just a sea of smartphones taking movies.

From Wapo:

The progressive project of building a decent welfare state is giving way to the more technocratic work of financing and managing it. How government is run, more than what exactly it does, seems set to be the main battleground of American politics in coming years.

Unfortunaely, a certain element of the Republican Pary doesn’t agree: they want to dismantle the social welfare safetynet.

I like my Kindle.  I read stuff on it all the time.

Problem is, you can store tons of books on the thing, but no one will know!  No one can look at your Kindle and say, “Wow, Tom, you’re a really erudite person.”  No one can be impressed that you’ve got a library on an arcane subject.

Just as we walk upright and wear 501’s for genital display, so too we display books on our bookshelves to impress and intimidate others.

Kindle just fails at that.

Headline in WaPo Wonkblog:

Top Bush administration economists: Don’t default. Do use the debt limit negotiations to rein in deficits.

Why should there be any ‘negotiation’ at all?  What’s to negotiate?  Raising the debt limit is not about spending more money; it’s about paying for what’s been spent, paying the bills.  Negotiation is when there’s a question of how much should be spent; but the debt is money we owe.  We can negotiate about how much should be spent in the future: that’s called the ‘budget negotiations,’ and that’s sure to be a doozy of a session.  We can also argue about how much to restore of the funds in the ‘sequester’.  But the debt ceiling?  Not open to discussion.

Well, we can use the Bayes Probability Theorem to figure out how likely is is that fracking will pollute our water supply.

Suppose the probability of fracking polluting the water supply in any one spot–say, within 500 yards of the fracking site–is originally estimated, before any evidence of pollution has been found, to be only 0.5%.

Now an event happens, such as the real event: water coming from a tap in a house, which draws its water from a well, starts to ignite when an open flame is brought near it.

What are the chances that the fracking caused the pollution?  We can estimate that there is about a 40% chance that fracking is the cause.  We can also posit that, without the fracking, natural causes might cause the water to become polluted; but it’s very rarely that a water supply spontaneously becomes flammable, so let’s put that possibility at 0.05%.

Plugging these values in to the Bayesean Theorem; x=.5, y=50%, z=0.05%

Bayesean Theorem:  P = xy / xy + z(1-x)

Solving for P :  There is a 83% chance that fracking will pollute the water supply.

That is not a trivial possibility.

You can play with these figures, using my Bayesean Calculator, at www.tbentley.com/bayes.php .  In any case, you will not find the possibility of pollution from fracking to be anything but frightening.

Hey, nothing wrong with that, right?