Elena Kagan, Out And Proud Neo-Liberal

Update (May 18): As solicitor general, she intervened on behalf of Monsanto’s right to contaminate non-genetically modified food with GM food, in Monsanto vs. Geertson Seed.

Update: Just to clarify the reference to neo-liberal, Elena Kagan has extensive ties to Goldman Sachs, D.E Shaw, and to Larry Summers on her resume. In other words, her so-called progressive positions are in the service of the kleptocracy.

Update (May 15 PM):

The Boston Phoenix has this, substantiating the main point of the Cockburn piece I’ve posted below it:

“On matters of executive authority — where the judicial branch has been a vital bulwark against post-9/11 “war on terror” civil-liberties violations — Kagan’s record indicates an ideological departure from Justice Stevens, who authored watershed detainee-rights opinions and organized the five-justice majorities that struck down other Bush administration power grabs. Continue reading

Sibel Edmonds On Traitors In High Places

“Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us,”

by Brad Friedman, Hustler Magazine, March 2010

“Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

More at Antiwar by Philip Giraldi, on Edmond’s credibility.

Here is an op-ed written by Sibel Edmonds about the role of foreign agents in “hijacking” the country.

I should note that Edmonds herself has been seen by some as playing a sophisticated role of disinformation by overemphasizing Arab involvement in 9-11.

Frankly, I don’t know enough about her to argue if that’s plausible or not. In any case, even if her revelations serve an ulterior purpose, they are bad enough as they stand….

Reiki Therapy at Maryland Trauma Center

Alternative medicine gets some recognition at the University of Maryland:

“At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.

They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.

“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”

More in this AP report.

The Mind-Control Weapon In Your Living Room

One of Britain’s leading authority’s on children’s speech development, she completed a ten year study which showed that the background noise in the average two year olds day can delay his or her acquisition of a language by up to a year. Almost invariably the background noise came from television.
Amongst other things she found that:
· Children learn to speak from their parents and parents don’t play or talk enough with their children when the TV is on.

· Background noise from TV or radio, confuses infants. In response they learn to ignore all noise and then they ignore speech.

· Children of two years or older should not be exposed to more than two hours of TV a day.

· Children of one year old or younger should not be exposed to television at all.
Sally Ward is currently preparing to focus on television and the way it affects our attention. In particular she will be looking at Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “. . . a lot of people think it’s chemical,” she says, but in her view . . . “it’s very peculiar that at the onset of children’s television it got a lot more prevalent, and at the onset of children’s video’s it got a lot more prevalent.”
Her concern is being reiterated in America where child psychologist John Rosemond has stirred some controversy by suggesting that ADHD is environmentally created; a suggestion that is completely at odds with the pharmaceutical industry, which maintains that the disorder is genetically inherited and makes considerable profit as a result.
“Ritalin may work, temporarily,” says Rosemond, “But pharmaceutical intervention won’t change behavioural and motivational problems.” And these he blames on television – “the endlessly changing images, flickering like the attention spans of ADHD children.”

“Television: The Hidden Picture” – Rixon Stewart, via Handmaiden’s Kitchen

Mind power: ramping up

From the thinking trader, Justice Litle at Consilient Investor:

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Expanding on the drawing from an earlier blog post (All About the Tails), I realized that the traditional bell curve shape isn’t quite right.

rampcurveTo demonstrate the power of the tails in terms of effort and result, it’s perhaps more useful to think of a runway (1), leading up to a complexity ramp (2), followed by natural acceleration beyond the high point of difficulty (3).

In trying to solve complex problems, or learn a complex skill set, the natural human tendency is to start at point (2), the base of the complexity ramp.

But when you begin there, odds of success are low. The task appears daunting, if not impossible; the ramp looks intimidating, staring you in the face as it does; and logistically, there’s no real way to handle the job from a standing start.

Making full use of the runway, in contrast, can provide the momentum you need to get up and over the ramp. (Length is not fully represented in the drawing; it should probably be longer.)…..

More here at “Complexity Ramps, Quail Runs and Rough Drafts.”

My Comment:

Talking about politics is often done as though everything is determined by structures and forces outside us, which move inexorably like glaciers…the best we can do is hop aside. This seems to me to be a hopelessly inadequate way of thinking.

The individual mind is a quantity we need to pay much more attention to. How it works, acts, is acted on, surpasses itself, solves problems, or sets them — thinking on those lines may get us to a better place than the usual moldy stalemate between ideologies — which for want of better thinking, we consider politics…

Techniques to improve our thinking and actualize the potential power of our minds are a powerful antidote to the idea that we are helpless in the face of structures. There is nothing obscurantist about this. Peak performance theories, among others, can tell you ways to resist the mass thinking that’s the real reason we turn to the state for everything….