The Computer Simulation That Almost Started World War III

Remember the 1983 movie WarGames? The film is about a computer "game" with the potential to start thermonuclear war. But strangely this scenario is more truth than fiction. Because in 1979 programmers at NORAD almost started World War III when they accidentally ran a computer simulation of a Soviet attack.

In the early morning hours of November 9, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter, was awakened by a horrifying phone call. According to NORAD, the Soviet Union had just launched 250 missiles headed straight for American soil. Brzenzinski received another call not long after the first, and NORAD was reporting that it was now 2,200 missiles. This was the moment that every American living through the Cold War had feared. And U.S. officials had no plans to notify the public.

Brzenzinski didn't even bother waking up his wife. He assumed that he and everyone he knew would soon be dead, so there was no sense in troubling her. One can only imagine the dismal post-apocalyptic world flashing before his mind's eye as he thought about his next steps.

"I knew that if it were true, then within about half an hour I, and my loved ones, and Washington, and the majority of America would cease to exist. I wanted to be sure that we'd have company," Brzenzinski told a biographer in 2011.

What Brzenzinski meant was that he wanted to make sure if the attack was real that the Soviet Union would be little more than a giant hole in the ground. If we were going down, our Commie adversaries were going down with us.  READ MORE

A New York church is challenging Walmart's sale of high-capacity gun magazines

New York City's Trinity Church, one of the wealthiest churches in the world with over $2 billion in real estate holdings, is taking on Walmart by using their status as a shareholder:

The church’s rector, Rev. Dr. James Cooper, says he isn’t seeking a ban on the sale of assault weapons at Walmart. Rather, he’s fighting to force the world’s largest retailer to include a shareholder proposal in this April’s proxy materials, to be voted on at this summer’s annual meeting. Trinity’s proposal would require Walmart’s board to oversee the sale of “products that especially endanger public safety and well-being, risk impairing the company’s reputation, or offend the family and community values integral to the company’s brand,” as the document first filed with the Security and Exchange Commission last year reads.

The action to move Walmart to more oversight was taken after parishioners expressed outrage in the wake of recent mass shootings. Rev. Cooper began doing research:

Davis was keen to learn how the retailer decides, for instance, that it won’t sell CDs with Parental Advisory warning labels, but will sell assault rifles with the capacity for 30 rounds of ammunition. “If it were a video with somebody shooting up a school, or a rap song with somebody talking about shooting up a school, they wouldn’t sell it,” he said. “So why sell the gun? It doesn’t make sense.”

Seems simple enough. But, Walmart intends to continue fighting to keep the proposal out of shareholder material:  READ MORE

Thomas Jefferson, hypocrite. Robert 'Councillor' Carter, emancipator.

Robert Carter III of Nomini Hall, Virginia

Every time I have to hear yet another paean to the Founding Fathers, or see George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as graven images on Mount Rushmore, I think of the blood, backs, and bones of those enslaved black people they built their wealth on—some of whom were my ancestors—and I want to puke. I've grown weary of hearing Jefferson lauded for hypocritically stating that "all men are created equal" out of one side of his mouth, while buying, owning, selling humans, and siring children on his wife's enslaved half-sister.

I've already discussed my perspective on George Washington, the slaveholder, in George Washington is not my 'Great White Father.' I hold Jefferson in even lower esteem. If this country needs to applaud and honor any of the early slave-owning historical figures from the days of the founding, my choice would be the man who was the contemporary of and antithesis to Jefferson—Robert Carter III, known also as "Councillor" Carter. His story is told by Andrew Levy in The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves:

READ MORE

Top 10 reasons to vote Republican

Why would anyone vote Republican? Well, here are 10 reasons.

1. You are a bigot

It's true that not all Republicans are bigots. But if you ARE a bigot, the Republican party will be much more your group than the Democratic party. Remember that there are lots of ways to be a bigot: You could be a racist, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, or lots of other things.

2. You like eating, drinking and breathing poison.

Many Republicans are calling for or voting for shrinking or eliminating agencies that protect us against poison. They seem to think that the corporations will do the right thing, without any pressure from the government. Uh huh. Read The Jungle.  Look at the way Monsanto is hiding facts about Round Up. Look at food safety and outbreaks of E. Coli.
Corporations exist to make money. They will do so any way they can. The government needs to stop them from doing so in ways that hurt people.

3. You think the rich don't have enough money

The idea that giving more money to rich people (via tax breaks) will help poor people is nonsensical and has been shown wrong time and again in history. Huge tax breaks for the rich (a la George Bush) don't work.

4. You don't support our veterans

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran's Association (IAVA) rates every member of congress on how well they support our veterans.  In the Senate, 9 people got A or A+: All were Democrats. 30 got D or F: 29 Republicans and one Democrat.  More on this 

READ MORE

In one Oklahoma town, 5% of the population was arrested in a sweeping drug bust

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has been very busy in one particular area of Oklahoma:

In December of 2013, OBN and local authorities began investigating a large drug distribution ring in Pushmataha County." OBN Spokesman Mark Woodward said. "This group of defendants would sell significant quantities of crystal methamphetamine or ‘ICE', as well as prescription drugs in or around the town of Clayton, Oklahoma.”   Several of the 43 suspects lived in rural areas of Pushmataha, Latimer and LeFlore County.

Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Chief Darrell Walker:  READ MORE

Why Al Franken Is Worried About Smart TVs

As smart TVs become more ubiquitous in homes around the country, the technology behind what makes them “smart” is coming under greater scrutiny because of privacy concerns.

Recent reports that Samsung Smart TVs collect information from their voice-recognition software and pass that information along to third parties has led to an investigation of Samsung and LG by Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.). Early in February, Franken sent letters to the CEO of Samsung North America and the President of LG asking if the information being collected is necessary for the operation of the voice-recognition features.

“If such communications are unnecessarily captured along with voice commands, is it possible to extract that data before transmission to a third party?” Franken wrote.

Although Franken easily won his re-election bid in November, the Senator is still pushing forward on the issues that are important to him. He is a memeber of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s privacy, technology and the law subcommittee and has been a crusader for consumer privacy rights in electronic media for some time.  READ MORE

Eureka! My earthshaking new study reveals the root cause of the profoundly stupid

Polio Vaccinations

Can a vaccine be responsible for the profoundly stupid?

It is a question I have been pondering for the past week or two. Could a vaccine, specifically, the polio vaccine, have caused us to become profoundly stupid? Looking for evidence, like so many troubled young parents of today faced with a vaccination schedule, I turned to Google to find out. What I discovered was deeply disturbing.

The United States experienced an epidemic of polio in 1952, with 21,000, of the reported 57,628 cases, resulting in paralysis. Clearly, a vaccine was needed. Fortunately, work was already underway.

In 1953, Jonas Salk published the successful results of his early inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) tests. Those results were so promising that ...

A nationwide testing of the vaccine was launched in April 1954 with the mass inoculation of school children. The results were amazing -- 60-70 percent prevention -- and Salk was praised to the skies. But suddenly, some 200 cases of the disease were caused by the vaccine and 11 people died. All testing was halted. It seemed that people's hopes were dashed until investigators found that the disease-causing vaccine all came from one poorly made batch at one drug company. Higher production standards were adopted and vaccinations resumed, with over 4 million given by August 1955. The impact was dramatic: In 1955 there were 28,985 cases of polio; in 1956, 14,647; in 1957, 5,894. By 1959, 90 other countries used Salk's vaccine.  READ MORE

BREAKING: Obama Is NOT The Antichrist

Well, the best that can be said is that this is a letter to the editor, and not an editorial. Thank goodness for small favors.
Join me over the Chee-to for more:

You all really should read the letter. It's priceless.  Some highlights:
From the "mind" of Boyd Thomas:

Editor: God states that seven kings must come before the rise of the Antichrist. Revelations [sic] 17:10 says the seventh king will reign for a short amount of time. Is Barack Obama the seventh king?

So...if Obama is the Seventh King, does that make Hillary the Antichrist?

Obama's lifted sanctions off Iran with promises that a peace treaty will be made but does nothing to inspect Iran as they continue to make nuclear weapons. Does Obama already know Iran's actions and is helping Iran? God says Israel must be attacked by Iran to start a war between all nations before the Antichrist can rise to create a peace treaty between these nations.

Wait...Are you saying that God is a Neo-Con? READ MORE

Stop AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from blocking fast and affordable Internet access.

Join CREDO and Daily Kos in telling the FCC to protect our access to fast and affordable Internet service.

ALEC is pressuring state legislatures around the country to ban cities from offering broadband Internet access. Nearly 20 states already have laws on the books stopping cities from providing fast, publicly-owned Internet access – and other states could soon follow suit.

President Obama just urged the FCC to make it illegal for states to block cities from providing affordable and fast Internet access–and the FCC is expected to make a decision very soon.

Many perennial funders and members of ALEC, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner, stand to gain financially from these state laws because they eliminate the possibility of competition from city-run broadband services.READ MORE,  SIGN THE PETITION

As Houston Islamic Center Burns, Firefighter Posts, "Let it burn...block the fire hydrant."

Quba Islamic Institute in Houston

On Friday morning, part of the Quba Islamic Institute in Houston went up in flames, and local firefighters spent over an hour battling the blaze before extinguishing it, saving the institute's school and mosque. The building set ablaze, which stored religious books, was completely destroyed, and came after the center's staff chased off a masked man from the premises earlier this week. Houston officials believe the fire was set intentionally, and many are calling for this to be investigated as a hate crime. Unfortunately, the hate which likely ignited this fire wasn't just contained to the blaze, for as news of the fire spread, a retired Houston-area firefighter who still (update: no longer) volunteers for Crystal Beach Fire & Rescue posted the following: READ MORE

SOME CARTOONS MAKING THE ROUNDS

Visit the site,  the comments are interesting and telling.

Cartoon: Brian Williams in 'American Liar'

 

Cartoon: NBC Nightly News with George W. Bush

 

UPDATE: Fox Station That Used Pic of Obama as Rape Suspect IS REFUSING Acknowledge "Error"

NO CHARGES FILED

As reported in this diary, San Diego Fox News 5 used a picture of President Obama with the caption reading NO CHARGES while head anchorwoman Kathleen Bade  was discussing a rape suspect.
Although it was up there the entire time during her lead-in,  assignment editor Mike Wille said it was just a mistake. Since they knew it was a mistake, (and left it up there the whole time), why didn't they at least offer a correction or apologize?
Good question:

Asked why there was no on-air acknowledgment or apology for the error, Wille said: “They really don’t do that when it’s a small thing like that.”

Nice.  Putting up a photo of a different person while talking about a rape suspect is no big deal. But then again, this is not surprising when you have leading stories like THIS ONE at that station.
Here's a partial transcript.  It focused on a rally with ten people in attendance:  READ MORE

'No Go' Zones Were First Made In America

Projection, I have observed more than once, is more than a mere trait of the American right wing, it's a conscious strategy designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.

One of the more revealing instances of this projection is the sudden rise of claims from various right-wing elements that radical Muslim immigrants in both Europe and the United State have created "no go zones" where "Sharia Law" is enforced and where white non-Muslims are unwelcome and unsafe. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has made something of a national ass of himself touting these claims, which of course originate deep in the fetid cesspools of the far right.

And it is telling that all this talk about "no go zones" is arising even as anti-Muslim hate crimes are spiking (with the help of the gung-ho war film American Sniper). The even broader context is that this talk is occurring even as more people are opening discussions about the ongoing influence of white privilege in both our discourse and our polity, spurring angry denials from the right that such privilege even exists.   READ MORE

Did Sarah Palin Quit Her Internet Subscription Site?

The Grifter from Wasilla hasn't posted anything new to the Sarah Palin Channel for over ten days now? What are her subscribers getting for their money? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Palin set a pretty low bar for success when she launched the channel in the first place, but her traffic is still tanking pretty badly and even her supporters may be wondering where she's at these days.
Here's more from News Corpse: Shill Baby Shill: Did Sarah Palin Quit Her Internet Subscription Site?:

In recent days there has been a flurry of activity (mostly concentrated within the Republican National Committee and Fox News) asking in faux-worried tones where Hillary Clinton is hiding. Of course, Clinton is neither a public official nor a candidate for office, so her whereabouts are strictly her own business. Nevertheless, the “Hillary Hiding” campaign was created by the RNC and Fox picked it up verbatim to enhance their already festering anti-Clinton programming. And as usual, they have a severely myopic view of the world and are oblivious to the missing persons among their own ranks. READ MORE

Israel Prepares Illegal Settlement Expansions in Four Locations

The West Bank settlement of Kedumim, 2013. (photo: Tali Mayer/Haaretz)

By Chaim Levinson, Haaretz

09 February 15

 
n the instructions of the Netanyahu government, the Civil Administration last year prepared major expansions of the settlements of Kedumim, Vered Yericho, Neveh Tzuf and Emanuel.

Some 3,740 dunams in the areas of the settlements were marked as state lands. More than 99 percent of state lands are allocated to settlements.

Preparations for submitting construction plans were carried out on 18 projects encompassing 12,840 dunams. This marked a significant decline from 2013 when preparations were made on 26,548 dunams. An examination of the work done in these areas demonstrates the government’s intentions to expand settlements. READ MORE

Brazil's Cities Cancel Carnival Because of Drought

Brazil's samba filled streets during Carnival usually
attract millions of visitors. (photo: Reuters)

By teleSUR

09 February 15

 

Brazil's worsening drought has been linked to both climate change and deforestation which have limited rainfall, say experts.

everal cities in the southeast of Brazil have called off Carnival this year due to a serious drought that has plagued the region for months and shows no signs of abating.

Brazil is famous for its Carnival, a week-long street festival where people party day and night, bringing Samba music and elaborate colorful costumes to the street, to mark the beginning to Lent. This year's Good Friday, which marks the beginning of Carnival, lands on Friday, Feb. 13. 

However, at least 15 cities and towns in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais and San Paolo have already called off all or parts of their Carnival festivities because of the region's water crisis. Both states have been suffering from drought for more than a year, with the water situation worsening. This has been the regions' worst drought in at least eight years. READ MORE

Biggest Leak in Banking History Exposes Massive Tax Evasion

HSBC's private bank in Geneva. (photo: Fabrice
Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

By Paul Lewis, The Guardian UK

09 February 15

 
he US government will come under intense pressure this week to explain what action it took after receiving a massive cache of leaked data that revealed how the Swiss banking arm of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank, helped wealthy customers conceal billions of dollars of assets.

The leaked files, which reveal how HSBC advised some clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, were obtained through an international collaboration of news outlets, including the Guardian, the French daily Le Monde, CBS 60 Minutes and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The files reveal how HSBC’s Swiss private bank colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from domestic tax authorities across the world and provided services to international criminals and other high-risk individuals.

The disclosure amounts to one of the biggest banking leaks in history shedding light on some 30,000 accounts holding almost $120bn (£78bn) of assets. Of those, around 2,900 clients were connected to the US, providing the IRS with a trail of evidence of potential American taxpayers who may have been hiding assets in Geneva.

A trail of evidence READ MORE

The Netanyahu Visit Goes From Bad to Hilarious

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. (photo: Reuters)

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

09 February 15

 
mong the many things that John Boehner is not, prominent among them is, "a competent ratfker." I'm sure that Boehner and his colleagues in the monkeyhouse leadership thought inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to come over here and submarine the president and the administration on the negotiations with Iran was a brilliant idea when they thought it up. Once Operation Suckup went into effect, however, almost nothing went right and now, of course, everybody's blaming everybody else.
READ MORE 

Burying Vietnam, Launching Perpetual War

How thanking the veteran meant ignoring what happened.

The 1960s -- that extraordinary decade -- is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965!  How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe?  After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives.  More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We’ve been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say:  “Let’s honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice.”

For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we’re now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt.  For today’s typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history.  Most of their parents weren’t even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.

In the post-Vietnam decades, our culture has buried so much of the history once considered essential to any debate about that most controversial of all American wars that little of substance remains.  Still, oddly enough, most of the 180 students who take my Vietnam War class each year arrive deeply curious.  They seem to sense that the subject is like a dark family secret that might finally be exposed.  All that most of them know is that the Sixties, the war years, were a “time of turmoil.”  As for Vietnam, they have few cultural markers or landmarks, which shouldn’t be surprising.  Even Hollywood -- that powerful shaper of historical memory -- stopped making Vietnam movies long ago.  Some of my students have stumbled across old films likeApocalypse Now and Platoon, but it’s rare for even one of them to have seen either of the most searing documentaries made during that war, In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds.  Such relics of profound antiwar fervor simply disappeared from popular memory along with the antiwar movement itself. READ MORE

Everything We Know About the Drug War and Addiction Is Wrong, Says Author

Johann Hari talks about some of his findings for his latest book about the war on drugs.

As President Obama seeks $27.6 billion for federal drug control programs in his new budget, we talk to British journalist Johann Hari about the century-old failed drug war and how much of what we know about addiction is wrong. Over the past four years Hari has traveled to the United States, Mexico, Canada, Uruguay and Portugal to research his new book, "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War of Drugs." His findings may surprise you — from the U.S. government’s persecution of Billie Holiday, to Vancouver’s success in addressing its heroin epidemic, to Portugal’s experiment with full decriminalization of all drugs.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One part of President Obama’s new budget that has received little attention is the war on drugs. The White House is seeking $27.6 billion for federal drug control programs, nearly $1 billion more than last year. More than half the money will be allocated for drug law enforcement by the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the drug czar’s office. Hundreds of millions of dollars have also been requested to be spent fighting the war on drugs in Colombia, Mexico and Central America. The budget also includes a line item that would clear the path for allowing legal sales of marijuana in Washington, D.C. READ MORE

Below is an interview with Hari, followed by a transcript:
 

In Defense of Divorce

Pols on both sides of the aisle obsess over the importance of "family structure." Here's why they miss the point.

One of the most common memes in today’s intellectual center, agreed upon by both liberals and conservatives, is that family structure is a major factor behind rising inequality in the United States. Family structure, by which most commentators mean “single mothers,” is also used to explain black poverty and stagnant upward mobility. Marriage thereby becomes the solution to a host of social ills — which benefits the wealthy, because the less we discuss financialization, globalization, de-unionization andthe shift in tax burdens, the better.

But the focus on marriage is deleterious for two reasons. First, by obscuring the true causes of inequality, it leads to an endless cycle of blaming the victims of economic change for their plight. Second, nearly all of the proposals that pro-marriage proponents advocate will end up harming women by trapping them in bad marriages.

While it is often stated as a universally acknowledged fact that family structure is an important driver of inequality and mobility, there are reasons to believe the causal link is reversed. Molly Martin, for example, finds that, “family formation probably reacts to prevailing economic conditions.” As her chart (below) shows, changes within family structure have been a bigger driver of inequality than those between family structures. That is, the primary change in inequality has not been between two-parent households and single-parent households, but rather some two-parent households taking more and more money, and others being left behind. (Her data only covers the bottom 96-to-98 percent of the income distribution, which means family structure can tell us even less about the rise of the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent.)  READ MORE

Think Islamists Are the Only Religious Terrorists? Meet Some Famous Killers for Christ

In 1997, Christian terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph planted
and detonated a homemade bomb at the Atlanta
LGBT bar the Otherside Lounge.

The next time someone tries to tell you that Islam produces the only violent religious extremists of the world, show them these examples.

By David Ferguson / Raw Story 

President Barack Obama raised hackles on the Christian right this week during his address to the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast.

In the wake of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris by Islamic extremists and the atrocities committed on video by ISIS, Obama urged Christians not to get too complacent in their view of Islam as a violent religion and Christianity as a peaceful one.

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” said the president. “Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Conservatives greeted this assertion with their usual unflappable calm and equanimity, which is to say, of course, that they pretty much all started screaming and soiling themselves at once.

But because we’re so nice here at the Raw Story Historic Corrections Desk, we thought we’d share some examples of Christian extremist violence for the edification of our right-leaning friends who seem to believe that it’s nothing but Christmas trees and Easter lilies on their side of the church as opposed to IEDs and lynching ropes.

Let’s begin, shall we?  READ MORE

5 Facts That Show Half of America Is Seriously Struggling

The media celebrates "economic growth," while new data shows most Americans are barely surviving.

By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet

 

Happy Monday! S&P 500 now up 10% for year --CNN Money
Third-quarter U.S. economic growth strongest in 11 years --Reuters
The U.S. economy is on a tear --Wall Street Journal 

Half of our nation, by all reasonable estimates of human need, is in poverty. The jubilant headlines above speak for people whose view is distorted by growing financial wealth. The argument for a barely surviving half of America has been made before, but important new data is available to strengthen the case.
READ MORE 

7 Fascist Regimes Enthusiastically Supported by America

The U.S. treated Cuba as an enemy while backing deeply oppressive Latin American regimes.

President Barack Obama inspired a great deal of debate when, in December, he asserted that it was time for the United States to begin to normalize relations with Cuba and start loosening the embargo that has been in effect since the early 1960s. And many hard-right Republicans and neocons, from Texas’ Ted Cruz and Florida’s Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate to House Speaker John Boehner, have been vehemently critical of Obama’s stand. Boehner has insisted that “relations with the Castro regime should not be revisited, let alone normalized, until the Cuban people enjoy freedom,” and Cruz has maintained that because Fidel and Raul Castro are “brutal dictators,” the embargo must remain. But given the United States’ long history of supporting one fascist dictatorship after another in Latin America, the embargo of Cuba has been the height of hypocrisy on the U.S.’ part. While it’s true that Amnesty International has often been critical of the Castro regime over the years, many of the other Latin American dictatorships that Amnesty International has criticized have been U.S. allies—and Cuba has hardly had the market cornered on human rights abuses in Latin America.
Below are seven of the worst fascist regimes in Latin America that the U.S. enthusiastically supported. READ MORE

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state.  The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?"  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.  READ MORE

\-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-\

So we learn that the 2nd was not,  as claimed,  a necessity for the defense of either nation or state,  but merely a "quid pro quo" to get the slave states to ratify the bill.

What this means is that,  quite contrary to what people today are saying about the 2nd, in reality it was only meant as a way to preserve and protect the rights of slave owners to keep and hold slaves.  The fact that today's debates of the 2nd have focused on national and private security issues,  does nothing to change the fact that this was a "right" created for the sole purpose of keeping slave ownership viable.  In other words,  had there been no slavery,  the 2nd wouldn't exist.  Since the gov't and the several states already had whatever powers they needed to preserve,  either state or national,  security using either police or military powers.

Thus the 2nd is really just an anachronism,  meant and designed to preserve a social condition that is now completely illegal.  Those facts cannot be either hidden, changed nor erased. The 2nd is simply a slave ownership artifact in the U.S. Constitution and has nothing to do with a "well ordered militia" being needed to do anything more than keep (the now illegal) slavery viable. 

The Founding Fathers were very smart men,  and they knew that to keep this slave ownership "right" in the bill,  without raising protests from the other side of the slavery issue,  it had to be couched in language that belied it's true cause,  just like the "We hold that all men are created equal",  was conveniently believed not to describe people being held in captivity.  But,  while they chose their words very carefully,  the back stories  they wrote in missives,  letters,  and displayed in debates,  makes their true intentions abundantly clear,  so the 2nd was simply a slave ownership protection,  nothing less or more.

Could it be that the 2nd Amendment proponents are, merely seeking to keep their weapons,  for a day when slavery might return?  Well,  that would be anyone's guess,  but the fact remains that the 2nd Adm., has no state or national security issues at it's root.  I'll leave it to future debate about whether it should be done away with or "modernized" and how that might be accomplished.  But,  suffice it to say that the 2nd,  does not say,  or represent,  what people today seem to think that it does.  This is due to the all but "forgotten" back story issues that gave birth to it.