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I'm not a railway enthusiast at all, but back in the olden days (1960s) there was a British Rail research project to develop a train that could travel at high speed on Birtain's 19th Century railway lines. The project became the Advanced Passenger Train.

The APT employed a tilting mechanism to allow it to go around curves up to 40% faster than conventional trains. It could achieve speeds of 160mph, when not held up by slower traffic. There were even gas turbine-powered prototypes, however in 1981 three electrical trains were built.

Unfortunately, the journalists invited to experience the first Glasgow to London run were plied with drink and reported that the tilting mechanism made them feel sick. Mechanical problems followed, and the trains were withdrawn from service.

They were reintroduced in 1984 but were withdrawn in 1986 for good.

The technology was adopted by other companies in France and Italy, and now Virgin Trains uses the tilting Italian/French Pendolinos on the West Coast Main Line.

Lemmy died on 28th December at the age of 70. The Guardian has some of his best quotes (with swears etc.)

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal. In your forties, you just pray it doesn’t hurt too much, and by the time you reach my age, you become convinced that, well, it could be just around the corner. Do I think about death a lot? It’s difficult not to when you’re 65, son.

The BBC and the Guardian both recently reported that Pope Francis has officially recognised Mother Theresa' second miracle, and that her canonisation is expected to take place in Rome in September.

The BBC article states , "The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said."

The Guardian article, however, goes into more detail about the controversial nun and discussed the incident of another alleged miracle, as documented by Christopher Hitchens. "A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumour. Her physician, Dr Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumour in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine."

Mother Theresa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is said to have amassed vast wealth and enjoyed the best private health care money could buy, while the poor and sick in her missions in India endured illness without proper medication, pain relief and even had to use second-hand hypodermics, despite the huge sums of money donated to the "good cause."

All miracles are open to public scrutiny, so there should be no doubt!

Let us examine the evidence. Or not.

It took a few decades, but they came around to accepting a tenuous reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.

Rising up to the bait, I asked why and was pointed to three legal essays (labeled by authors Burton Newman, Anthony M. Sierzega (PDF of a project for undergraduate honors), and Saul Cornell). This rant is going to discuss the basic problems I noticed right away.

All these essays argue that the Second Amendment grants a collective right rather than an individual right, and that the "individual right" was a relatively new spin peddled in recent decades by the NRA and the libertarian movement.

The first thing I noticed was that two of the three essays ignored the actual writing of the Second Amendment.

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.

It seems kind of a huge oversight to ignore that the Amendment grants a right to "the people" (which has always been interpreted to mean anyone living in the US, not just US citizens) and then turn around and say that the right is clearly "collective". Is the previous amendment on free speech "collective" as well? For example, Newman writes:

In 1939 the Supreme Court issued the Miller decision. The justices ruled that "the Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective Militia." That was the state of Second Amendment law until the 2008 Heller decision. Prior to Heller, the Supreme Court never recognized that individuals had an individual right to keep and bear arms. It was the NRA propaganda, not the law of the land, that led the cry for unlimited gun ownership and protection of gun owner rights. The NRA myths allowed the cycle of expanded gun sales and NRA power to purchase political influence. Democrats and Republican alike announced their allegiance to the Second Amendment and the public grew to believe that the NRA view of the Second Amendment was consistent with constitutional law. The NRA controlled too many elected officials to allow for protection of our citizens from gun violence, gun deaths and unspeakable gun horrors in schools and public places.

Meanwhile Cornell writes:

The Second Amendment reads: "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." What do these words mean? Well, the answer to this question depends on who you ask. Supporters of the so-called collective rights interpretation believe that the Second Amendment only protects the right to bear arms within the context of well regulated militias. Supporters of the so-called "individual right" interpretation view the right to bear arms as a right vested in individuals, much like the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.

The fact that there are two such divergent interpretations is the result of significant changes in how Americans view the 2nd Amendment that occurred during the latter part of the twentieth century. For most of the last century, the meaning of the Second Amendment was not particularly controversial: the courts, legal scholars, politicians, and historians endorsed some version of the collective rights interpretation. As late as 1991, Chief Justice Warren Burger described the individual rights view as an intellectual fraud. Yet, the growth of a revisionist individual rights theory of the Second Amendment in the years since Burger made his comment has been nothing short of astonishing.

This view was originally propagated by gun rights activists such as Stephen Halbrook, Don Kates, and David Kopel whose research was funded by libertarian think tanks and the National Rifle Association (NRA).

It's only Sierzega's essay that observes (via discussion of a legal opinion written by current Justice Antonin Scalia) that "the people" elsewhere in the Constitution (including amendments) referred to individual rights.

Next, Scalia turns to the language of the Second Amendment, once again arguing along the same lines as the libertarian individualists. He begins his analysis by dividing the amendment into two clauses: the prefatory clause (“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”), and the operative clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”). Scalia believes the prefatory clause simply announces the purpose of the Amendment and does not limit the operative clause (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). He writes that while “this structure…is unique in our Constitution, other legal documents of the founding era, particularly individual-rights provisions of state constitutions, commonly included a prefatory statement of purpose” (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). For Scalia, the prefatory clause may offer clarification regarding the operative clause, but it in no way restricts its meaning. After defining several key phrases found in both clauses, Scalia offers a conclusion regarding the meaning of the structure of the amendment.

Scalia begins his analysis of the operative clause with an examination of the phrase “the right of the people.” The Bill of Rights uses the phrase three times: in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause, in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause, and in an analogous phrase in the Ninth Amendment (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 5). According to Scalia, each of these examples refers to the protection of an individual right, not a collective right. The use of the words “the people” by themselves is found three additional times in the Constitution, each regarding the reservation of power, not rights (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 6). The phrase “right of the people,” when used in its entirety, always refers to an individual right. “The people” used in these six examples has been read to describe the entire political community. Therefore, according to Scalia, the amendment does not just protect a subset of people, in this case the militia consisting of adult white males. Instead, it protects the rights of all Americans.

Seems strange to me that legal opinions would ignore an obvious interpretation of the amendment and instead go to great effort to portray the "individual right" interpretation as something novel.

There is also a remarkable glossing over of history. Once again, Sierzega is the only one to observe that the NRA's lobbying efforts started in 1934 not 1977 (when every one of the essays claims the NRA was taken over by "libertarians"). Further, he's the only one to observe that federal level gun control started in 1934 with the National Firearms Act as well with regulations presented by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) to restrict firearms which were commonly used by criminals of the day (such as bans on sawed off shotguns and silencers, and restrictions on machine guns). This law and similar ones of the day were, according to Sierzega, contributed to and supported by the NRA, whose leadership expressed support for the "collective right" model for the Second Amendment.

Even more surprisingly, the early NRA supported, and often helped write, many of the nation’s first federal gun control laws, including the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act (Rosenfield 2013). Testifying before Congress in 1938, NRA President Karl T. Frederick supported the National Firearms Act, stating that “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses” (Rosenfield 2013).

But on the other hand, it is quite clear that the NRA supported individual ownership of firearms and use of firearms for numerous purposes, particularly, hunting, self defense, and sporting/target practice. In other words, despite their public statements, they clearly have supported individual rights such as ownership and use of firearms since their very beginning in 1871 and immediately started to lobby to protect those rights from the moment that they were threatened at the federal level.

This leads to an issue of timing which was wholly ignored by these essays and Mr. AC, namely, that the distinction between individual and collective right was completely irrelevant to federal level gun control until 1934. So the alleged "revisionism" covers a bit over four decades before 1977 rather than almost two hundred years. It's been almost as long since 1977, the year that the NRA started explicitly supporting individual rights. The fact that US Congress didn't even see fit to regulate firearms till 1934 also indicates to me substantial implicit support for individual firearm rights.

The Supreme Court ruling which decreed a "individual right" was District of Columbia v. Heller. In 1976, Washington, DC in response to one of the worst crime rates in the US, passed a gun control law that severely impaired peoples' ability to protect themselves with firearms. Aside from firearms grandfathered in from before 1976, handguns were banned and all firearms had to be stored in a way that made them much harder to prepare for self defense on sudden notice. Newman's essay glosses over this harm and I doubt, for example, that the Supreme Court of the 19th century would backed such a law no matter how they choose to interpret it. The interpretation of an individual right is natural here because the situations of self defense are naturally individual. There is no collective right to self defense. And it was quite clear that the ability to not only bear firearms, but to be able to use those firearms instantly was crucial to a variety of self defense scenarios (such as a resident reacting to a nearby burglar).

Coincidentally, this law barely predates the alleged libertarian takeover of the NRA. It'll be interesting to see how much influence it had on the NRA power shift.

The last point I want to make here is that a collective right is rather dubious legal structure on moral and practical grounds. For example, the most common use of the expressly collective right was to give some classes of people advantages over other classes of people (eg, apartheid in South Africa). And it is dubious to claim you have a collective right without a corresponding individual right. For example, how could we have a collective right to free speech, if no individual also had that right? Eg, the US public could say whatever it wanted by say, a poll, but no one individually could? That would go wrong immediately.

Similarly, what is the point of a collective right to bear arms? As a counter to US military might, it's a joke. All of the states' National Guards forces are no match for the US military assuming they were even independent enough to fight the US military (say because the US military declines to provide them with weaponry and supplies). Nor does existence of the National Guard help the average citizen becoming a better soldier in an "effective Militia" (as described by the Supreme Court in the Miller decision above). OTOH, the individual right to own and use firearms does just that. It creates a huge group of people familiar with the care and use of firearms which would be necessary to any "effective militia" and it supports the above mentioned individual right to self defense.

And of course, all the essays had to mention former Chief Justice Warren Burger's opinion (here from Newman):

In a PBS News Hour interview in 1991, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger referred to the NRA Second Amendment myth as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

In sum, I find these peculiar essays (which may not reflect mainstream gun control advocacy) to have contained considerable hypocrisy with a bunch of revisionists complaining about other alleged revisionists and claiming "fraud" over an obvious interpretation of the Second Amendment and obvious historical support for it. Further, actual history shows no significant gun control regulation for 140 years after the US ratified the Bill of Rights with crudely two bouts of federal level gun regulation, the first in the 1930s and the second starting in the 1970s. Currently, we have what appears to me to be a near reversal of gun control regulation to the level prior to the 1970s with what appears to be a great deal of public support both for the reversal and for the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.

There is an article in the Guardian called Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here's why.

The premise seems to be that government running a budget surplus leads to contraction in the private sector i.e. recession. Therefore, austerity will continue to make things worse for us.

The reasoning is very simple, perhaps simplistic.

You may be objecting at this point: but why does anybody have to be in debt? Why can’t everybody just balance their budgets? Governments, households, corporations … Everyone lives within their means and nobody ends up owing anything. Why can’t we just do that? Well there’s an answer to that too: then there wouldn’t be any money. This is another thing everybody knows but no one really wants to talk about. Money is debt.

I understand that people may borrow money to invest in e.g. a business where they might need to buy machinery and to pay staff before the profits start to roll in, and that hopefully the profits will be large enough to pay back the load and to make a living, but that's where my small brain gives up.

What is the rest of the story?

Also, note the graph of house prices.

Update: here come the sub-prime mortgages again. Only this time we, the public, have to bail out the banks when it all goes horribly wrong. Remember how they changed the law after the last crisis, so that the same terrible fate would not befall the banks again.

Not sure, if this is interesting for SN, so I will post it in my little journal. If you landed here by accident, please click here

Last week in the Guardian:

Asterix and Obelix are back in a new edition of the famed comic book, this time fighting their Roman foes in a propaganda war alongside a character inspired by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Two years after Asterix and the Picts saw the duo head to ancient Scotland, the Gauls are back home for their latest adventure as a tribe resisting Roman occupation, the 36th book in the hugely popular series.
Asterix and the Missing Scroll is the second book by writer Jean-Yves Ferri and illustrator Didier Conrad, who took over from original co-creators Albert Uderzo and Rene Goscinny.

The UK's descent into fascism accelerated today when Home Secretary Theresa May introduced a McCarthyist witch-hunt against "extremists" of all kinds in the public sector.

In other news, David Cameron has positioned the UK as China's best friend in the West ahead of all other countries. He had to promise never to speak to the Dalai Lama ever again though, to be best friends with China

Amnesty International and other groups concerned with human rights issues in China are expected to protest in St James' Park on Tuesday and it is expected that there will also be a pro-China protest.

The Guardian and Channel 4 News each report about a young British mother who went to the "Islamic State" to join her jihadi husband (a former Guantánamo Bay detainee) but changed her mind, describing life there as, "not my cup of tea."

The gangster mentality that she encountered amongst other women and the squalid living conditions that the jihadi wives and children had to endure were not to her liking, so she and the children fled where they were held in Syria near the Turkish border by a gang of smugglers who needed strong convincing that she wasn't an ISIS supporter.

She claims she went there to try to talk some sense into her husband, to plead with him to come home. She wants to come back to the UK, but what fate awaits her?

Last year Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police and policing lead for the government's Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, warned that Britons returning from Syria would be stopped at the border and face arrest.

How could anyone be so naive, at the age of 33 and having had five children? And living in the UK where we still just about have free speech and the freedom of the press? How could you possibly not know what it would be really like? How could you voluntarily take five innocent, defenceless children willingly and knowingly into a war zone?

Female ex-Muslim anti-Islamist campaigner Maryam Namazie writes in the Guardian "Why I speak out against Islamism."

The article is superbly written and makes very clear points regarding the importance of the ability to criticise religion (of any kind) to facilitate social progress.

The complex situation regarding Islamism, Islam, Muslims, Muslim culture and "the Muslim Community" is outlined making clear distinctions between each, and in particular the range of opinions (and beliefs) within them. This contrasts with the (bigoted) simplistic views (pro- and anti-) presented in the Western media and which frequently leads to Islamophobic attacks against peaceful and innocent people.

What is particularly refreshing to see written in main-stream Western media is the following:

The labelling of much-needed criticism of Islamism as antisocial, even dangerous by left apologists sees dissent through the eyes of Islamists and not the many who refuse and resist. How else are we to show real solidarity with those who struggle against the theocracies we have fled from – if not through criticism? The fight against Islamism and the need for international solidarity apparently does not enter into their calculation.

In short: things will not improve unless we are free to talk.