Eliezer Berland was convicted of sexual assault and prosecutors have decided not to appeal a decision granting him early release after five months.
haaretz
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Trying the Feldenkrais Method for Chronic Pain
ny times
After two hourlong sessions focused first on body awareness and then on movement retraining at the Feldenkrais Institute of New York, I understood what it meant to experience an incredible lightness of being. Having, temporarily at least, released the muscle tension that aggravates my back and hip pain, I felt like I was walking on air.
I had long refrained from writing about this method of countering pain because I thought it was some sort of New Age gobbledygook with no scientific basis. Boy, was I wrong!
Seven Bizarre Notions Trump and His Team Have About America
ny times
President Trump, his motley crew of White House and cabinet ideologues, and many other Republicans claim to have a better understanding of American values, traditions and history than the rest of us. They are the “real Americans,” as the historically illiterate Sarah Palin loved to say many times a day.
But a great many of their notions about America are deeply puzzling at best and, at worst, truly scary ideas infused with racism and intolerance of dissent.
The list defies comprehensive accounting. (Time magazine has to keep updating a handy guide to the world according to Trump that it started after his first 100 days in office.) But here are some of my favorites.
The Civil War: Back in August, after racists marched in Charlottesville to defend monuments to those who fought to preserve slavery, Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, forwarded around an email saying that there was “literally no difference” between George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
More recently, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that the “lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
Continue reading the main story
Andrew Rosenthal
Politics, technology, national security, popular culture and whatever else seems interesting, important or just funny.
The F.B.I.’s Black Phantom Menace
OCT 19
Trump’s Self-Absorption on War Deaths
OCT 17
Trump’s Latest Outrage Against Puerto Rico
OCT 12
The N.F.L.’s Workplace Dodge
OCT 11
The Debate That Goes Nowhere
OCT 4
See More »
RECENT COMMENTS
Patricia G 2 hours ago
There's much commentary here about the big compromises in our history and whether the Civil War was about secession or slavery. But,...
DebbieR 3 hours ago
Mr. Rosenthal, it doesn't matter what you, or other elites think about what Trump says, because he is speaking to his base, and only his...
Charles 3 hours ago
Trump is not a political discussion, it's a discussion about psychology. Reporters were taken off guard because they were ready to write...
SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT
What possible compromise could there have been over slavery? But it’s also false history. There were plenty of “compromises.” All of them enshrined the evil institution of slavery and made the civil war more likely, not less.
It might be tempting to write Kelly’s remarks off as the ravings of a man whose boss must drive him crazy on a daily basis and who had earlier talked of a mythical time when women in America were held “sacred” (by blocking their career aspirations and paying them less than men, denying them birth control and access to abortions, and refusing them the right to vote for more than a half-century after the Civil War).
But Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, picked up Kelly’s false history the next day. There was, she said, “pretty strong consensus” among people from “the left, the right, the North and the South” that a failure to compromise caused the war.
Questioning the military: Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, lied on Oct. 19 about a speech given by Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida when he was making his defense of Trump’s conversation with the widow of an American soldier.
Asked about that later, Sanders said, “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you, but I think if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s something highly inappropriate.”
President Trump, his motley crew of White House and cabinet ideologues, and many other Republicans claim to have a better understanding of American values, traditions and history than the rest of us. They are the “real Americans,” as the historically illiterate Sarah Palin loved to say many times a day.
But a great many of their notions about America are deeply puzzling at best and, at worst, truly scary ideas infused with racism and intolerance of dissent.
The list defies comprehensive accounting. (Time magazine has to keep updating a handy guide to the world according to Trump that it started after his first 100 days in office.) But here are some of my favorites.
The Civil War: Back in August, after racists marched in Charlottesville to defend monuments to those who fought to preserve slavery, Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, forwarded around an email saying that there was “literally no difference” between George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
More recently, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that the “lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
Continue reading the main story
Andrew Rosenthal
Politics, technology, national security, popular culture and whatever else seems interesting, important or just funny.
The F.B.I.’s Black Phantom Menace
OCT 19
Trump’s Self-Absorption on War Deaths
OCT 17
Trump’s Latest Outrage Against Puerto Rico
OCT 12
The N.F.L.’s Workplace Dodge
OCT 11
The Debate That Goes Nowhere
OCT 4
See More »
RECENT COMMENTS
Patricia G 2 hours ago
There's much commentary here about the big compromises in our history and whether the Civil War was about secession or slavery. But,...
DebbieR 3 hours ago
Mr. Rosenthal, it doesn't matter what you, or other elites think about what Trump says, because he is speaking to his base, and only his...
Charles 3 hours ago
Trump is not a political discussion, it's a discussion about psychology. Reporters were taken off guard because they were ready to write...
SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT
What possible compromise could there have been over slavery? But it’s also false history. There were plenty of “compromises.” All of them enshrined the evil institution of slavery and made the civil war more likely, not less.
It might be tempting to write Kelly’s remarks off as the ravings of a man whose boss must drive him crazy on a daily basis and who had earlier talked of a mythical time when women in America were held “sacred” (by blocking their career aspirations and paying them less than men, denying them birth control and access to abortions, and refusing them the right to vote for more than a half-century after the Civil War).
But Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, picked up Kelly’s false history the next day. There was, she said, “pretty strong consensus” among people from “the left, the right, the North and the South” that a failure to compromise caused the war.
Questioning the military: Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, lied on Oct. 19 about a speech given by Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida when he was making his defense of Trump’s conversation with the widow of an American soldier.
Asked about that later, Sanders said, “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you, but I think if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that’s something highly inappropriate.”
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Mindfulness Training for Teens Fails Important Test
scientific amrican
x
Mindfulness involves a conscious focus on and awareness of your present state of mind and surroundings, without judgment or reaction. Mindfulness is rooted in Buddhism and was developed in the 1970’s as a therapeutic intervention for stress in adults by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Over the past several decades, the practice of mindfulness has evolved into a booming billion dollar industry, with growing claims that mindfulness is a panacea for host of maladies including stress, depression, failures of attention, eating disorders, substance abuse, weight gain, and pain.
Not all of these claims, however, are likely to be true. A recent critical evaluation of the adult literature on mindfulness identifies a number of weaknesses in the extant research, including a lack of randomized control groups, small sample sizes, large attrition rates, and inconsistent definitions of mindfulness. Moreover, a systematic review of intervention studies found insufficient evidence for a benefit of mindfulness on attention, mood, sleep, weight control, or substance abuse.
That said, there is empirical evidence that mindfulness offers a moderate benefit for anxiety, depression, and pain, at least in adults. Can mindfulness also be used as an effective tool for mitigating depression and anxiety in teens? Some research suggests it can, but the research is plagued by the same shortcomings identified in the adult literature (e.g., lack of a randomized control group, small sample sizes). In an effort to address these limitations, Catherine Johnson, Christine Burke, Sally Brickman, and Tracey Wade conducted a large-scale study including a randomized control group to assess the benefits of mindfulness training in teens.
They evaluated the efficacy of mindfulness training in 308 middle and high school students (average age 13.6 yrs) from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The students were enrolled in 17 different classes across 5 different schools. Students opted in to the study, and were randomly assigned to the control group or the mindfulness training group. Students in the control group received no mindfulness training but instead participated in community projects or received lessons in pastoral care. Students in the mindfulness group completed 8 weeks of training in the .b (“Dot be”) Mindfulness in Schools curriculum, which is based on the “gold standard” Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention for adults. The training sessions varied in length from 35 to 60 min and were administered once a week. All mindfulness training was conducted by the same certified instructor. Beyond the weekly training sessions, teens in the mindfulness group were encouraged to practice mindfulness techniques at home and were given manuals to assist in this practice.
x
Martin Luther: Definitely Not a Jew
In Wittenberg, Germany, right now, walking around without a city map in one hand and camera in the other makes you stand out. The Protestant Reformation began, one could argue, 500 years ago this month, and tourists have been coming in droves to its birthplace. Martin Luther did not begin the Reformation but gave it a major kick in the pants here, and just about everything here is named after him, including the city’s official name, which in 1938 became Lutherstadt Wittenberg.
Outside the central train station, a billboard advertises the Luther-Hotel’s “Luther Burger and Käthe Nuggets”—Käthe for Katharina von Bora, Luther’s wife. Shops lining old town Wittenberg’s cobblestone streets sell cookie cutters shaped like Luther’s head and Playmobil’s special-edition Luther figurine. The city’s free public Wi-Fi network pays tribute, too: +LutherWLAN.
Monday, October 30, 2017
He was a rising Nazi leader — until a shocking secret did him in
http://nypost.com/2017/10/28/he-was-a-rising-nazi-leader-until-a-shocking-secret-did-him-in/
By Jerry Oppenheimer October 28, 2017 | 6:09pm | Updated
By Jerry Oppenheimer October 28, 2017 | 6:09pm | Updated
Fifty-two years ago this Halloween, a 28-year-old Queens native by the name of Danny Burros killed himself, firing .32-caliber bullets into his chest and head.
But this wasn’t just another tragic suicide. To those who knew of Burros’ hate-filled life — and the shocking secret that haunted him — his suicide was viewed as justice served.
In the 1960s, New York City had far more dangerous white-nationalist fanatics than those who marched in the deadly Charlottesville, Va., protests in August. These were extremists who had sworn to exterminate Jews, blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Danny Burros was one of them.
At one point, the printer by trade was one of the leaders of a band of American-born and -bred Hitlerites who were members of the racist and anti-Semitic National Renaissance Party. It was headquartered in a four-story apartment building at 10 W. 90th St.
To prove his anti-Semitic bona fides, Burros proudly carried a small bar of soap wrapped in paper printed with the German words, “Made from the finest Jewish fat,” and he had a portrait painted of himself in full Nazi regalia, with the smokestacks of Auschwitz in the background.
He often bragged about a torture machine he had concocted in his twisted mind: a piano with electrified wires that would deliver shocks to Jewish prisoners, causing them to jump and twitch as the instrument was played.
In Nazi get-up, he and his self-styled storm troopers picketed New York-area movie theaters where the film “Exodus” was showing. They marched in front of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on West 47th Street to protest a play about the Holocaust.
Burros and his fellow extremists were watched closely by the NYPD’s antisubversive squad, which was on alert for terrorism and hate crimes in that 1960s era of the civil-rights movement.
“We have to watch they don’t go out and kill people,” a squad member said at the time.
Before he joined the NRP, Burros was a leader of his mentor George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, headquartered in Arlington, Va.
Burros proudly held the title “extermination planner.”
He often picketed outside John F. Kennedy’s White House in full Nazi regalia, carrying signs demanding “Free Speech for Nazis,” denouncing “Jews and N- - - -rs,” and distributing pamphlets that declared, “Gas Communist Traitors.”
Obsessed with Nazi spectacle, he proposed to Rockwell parachuting over New Jersey with his fellow storm troopers, waving Nazi flags. Even Rockwell thought the idea was too off the wall.
Still, for years, Burros had one dream and one dream only for his future: He wanted to be America’s fuhrer.
But Burros also had a frightening secret, one he found so humiliating he would eventually kill himself over its disclosure.
The fanatical extremist who idolized Adolf Hitler and wanted to see all Jews exterminated was, in fact, Jewish himself.
Burros was the only child of lower middle-class religious Jews with Russian roots. His father, George, was a factory worker, his mother, Esther, a department-store clerk.
About a year after his parents married, Dan was born on March 5, 1937, the same day headlines blared that the Nazis in Berlin had called New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia a “lout and scoundrel” after he proposed building a “Hall of Horrors” at the city’s planned 1939 World’s Fair featuring der Fuhrer as a “brown-shirted fanatic.”
After Danny’s birth, the Burros family moved from a simple apartment in The Bronx to one in Richmond Hill, Queens, and were living what they considered the American dream near the end of the Great Depression — just as Hitler was beginning “The Final Solution,” the eradication of Jews.
Years later, when asked why he was so determined to see all the Jews murdered, Burros curiously replied, “We must make the world safe for blond-haired, blue-eyed children [from] the taint of nonwhite blood.”
A chubby, blond-haired, blue-eyed, bespectacled boy, Danny was extraordinarily bright with an IQ of over 150, remembered for earning A’s for his good conduct at PS 12 in Richmond Hill.
Dan avidly attended Hebrew school, was considered a star pupil, and at age 13, at the Orthodox Congregation Talmud Torah of Richmond Hill, had his bar mitzvah. The rabbis believed he would be a rabbi one day.
Under Jewish law, his bar mitzvah meant he had become a man accountable for his actions.
But Dan Burros’ actions would be motivated by pure hate. As he reached his later teens, Burros’ bedroom in his family’s small apartment was covered with pictures of German generals. By then, he was a student at John Adams HS in Ozone Park, Queens, home to such alumni as journalist Jimmy Breslin, and actors Jackie Gleason and Jack Lord.
Burros would later say that as a boy he was “disgusted” by his liberal New York Jewish classmates. A conservative high-school history teacher, he would claim, “crystalized” his extreme beliefs.
Today, hate groups recruit on the Internet. In the 1950s, there was the postal system, and the teen Burros began corresponding with German right-wingers and studying the extremist material sent to him by “unreconstructed Nazis.”
At John Adams, Burros studied German, winning a proficiency pin. He was at the top of his class but was kicked out of an honor society because he attacked a student he felt was “inferior.”
He noted in his school yearbook, the Clipper, that he hoped to go to the US Military Academy. He was obsessed with military uniforms and insignia, which he often sketched, along with drawings of Nazi soldiers.
But instead of applying to West Point, he enlisted in the Army and became a gung-ho paratrooper in the crack 82nd Airborne, where he would claim he was radicalized.
Deployed to Little Rock, Ark., during the school-integration crises, he saw troopers with bayonets pointed at whites, and was sickened, believing America was “becoming a left-wing police state.”
Fellow soldiers dubbed him “Der Fuhrer.”
He was eventually discharged for his extremist pronouncements, his “instability,” and faking suicide by taking aspirins.
In the early 1960s, after working as an office-machine operator in the Queens Public Library, Burros moved to Arlington and joined Rockwell’s Nazis. He even lived with Rockwell in party headquarters, a storefront on a main street. Bizarrely, he would bring a Jewish treat — knishes — to party meetings. Despite this, no one ever suspected he was anything but a true Aryan.
Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, was born near the end of World War I, the son of vaudeville comics whose circle included such radio and TV icons as Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Benny Goodman and the New York gossip columnist Walter Winchell — all prominent Jews.
To support himself when he wasn’t goose-stepping and denouncing Jews and blacks, Burros worked a menial job at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. He was fired for “disciplinary infractions.” Furious, he picketed the government building with fellow Nazi party members.
He was often arrested and fined, and even jailed for a time. But his secret remained well hidden.
More extreme activity came when he pasted swastikas on the DC headquarters of B’nai B’rith, an Israel and human-rights advocacy group.
By then, Burros had risen to national secretary of the American Nazi Party, second in command to Rockwell. But he and the commander feuded. Burros grew “tired of being little more than assistant fuhrer,” said an official of the Anti-Nazi League.
Back in New York, he joined the National Renaissance Party.
In July 1964, he was sentenced to two years in prison for violence during an NRP protest against members of the Congress of Racial Equality who were demonstrating outside a Bronx White Castle restaurant. After his release — he was only in for a few days — he published a hate sheet, “The Battle Organ of Racial Fascism.”
But Burros was about to be toppled from his fascist pedestal.
On Oct. 20, 1965, the House Committee on Un-American Activities named him as a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who recently had been appointed chief organizer for the hate group’s New York branch.
A government agent aware of his Jewish birth leaked the explosive intelligence to The New York Times, and on Halloween 1965, the paper published a front-page exposé: “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.”
The day the story hit newsstands, Burros was staying in the Reading, Pa., apartment of Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., the 25-year-old grand dragon of the Pennsylvania Klan. Also there were Frankhouser’s girlfriend and another Klansman, Frank W. Rotella, Jr., the king kleagle of the New Jersey KKK, police said.
Rotella told police that Burros went out to get the paper and returned to the apartment agitated. “This will destroy me!” Burros yelled, then ran upstairs and shot himself.
Frankhouser said, “If Burros was really Jewish, it was the best-kept secret since the atom bomb.”
Burros’ elderly Jewish parents identified his body and had it cremated.
His saddened mother, Esther, who knew little about his extremist life, told a reporter, “He was such a good boy.”
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
A Long-Delayed Reckoning of the Cost of Silence on Abuse
NY TIMES
Bill O’Reilly and Harvey Weinstein may have come from different ends of the political spectrum, but it turns out they have a lot in common.
They rose to positions of power around the same time and used their big, bullying voices to secure for themselves leading roles in American culture. Both men worked in industries that put up with gross behavior from male executives for decades, and both now stand accused of lording their status over women who have stepped forward to say that the men sexually harassed or otherwise abused them.
Mr. O’Reilly, late of Fox News, and Mr. Weinstein, late of the Weinstein Company, share something else. They kept their alleged misconduct under wraps with the help of the nondisclosure agreements included as part of the numerous out-of-court settlements that allowed them to admit to no wrongdoing.
The sums they paid their accusers bought them silence. A full, public airing did not come to be until those meddling reporters came along.
The report in The New York Times this weekend that Mr. O’Reilly paid $32 million in a single settlement with the former Fox News analyst Lis Wiehl in
Bill O’Reilly and Harvey Weinstein may have come from different ends of the political spectrum, but it turns out they have a lot in common.
They rose to positions of power around the same time and used their big, bullying voices to secure for themselves leading roles in American culture. Both men worked in industries that put up with gross behavior from male executives for decades, and both now stand accused of lording their status over women who have stepped forward to say that the men sexually harassed or otherwise abused them.
Mr. O’Reilly, late of Fox News, and Mr. Weinstein, late of the Weinstein Company, share something else. They kept their alleged misconduct under wraps with the help of the nondisclosure agreements included as part of the numerous out-of-court settlements that allowed them to admit to no wrongdoing.
The sums they paid their accusers bought them silence. A full, public airing did not come to be until those meddling reporters came along.
The report in The New York Times this weekend that Mr. O’Reilly paid $32 million in a single settlement with the former Fox News analyst Lis Wiehl in
Far Rockaway, NY – NYC Rabbi Gets Prison For Misappropriating Funds
Far Rockaway, NY - A New York City rabbi has been sentenced to prison for misappropriating funds that were marked for disabled preschoolers. Hiller was assistant director of the now-defunct Island Child Development Center located in Far Rockaway on Cornaga Avenue. It provided services to Jewish communities in Far Rockaway, Queens, and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Borough [...]
Police: Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach behind anti-draft demonstrations
ARUTZ7
Police say leader of extreme Jerusalem Faction will be treated like any other citizen in response to illegal roadblocks in several cities.
The Doctrine of Trumpal InfallibilityGEDOLIM
NY TIMES
last week John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, tried to defend President Trump against charges that he was grossly insensitive to the widow of a U.S. soldier killed in action. In the process, Kelly accused Frederica Wilson, the member of Congress and friend of the soldier’s family who reported what Trump had said, of having behaved badly previously during the dedication of an F.B.I. building.
Video of the dedication shows, however, that Kelly’s claim was false, and that Representative Wilson’s remarks at the ceremony were entirely appropriate. So Kelly, a former general and a man of honor, admitted his error and apologized profusely.
See? I made a joke!
In reality, of course, Kelly has neither admitted error nor apologized. Instead, the White House declared that it’s unpatriotic to criticize generals — which, aside from being a deeply un-American position, is ludicrous given the many times Donald Trump has done just that.
But we are living in the age of Trumpal infallibility: We are ruled by men who never admit error, never apologize and, crucially, never learn from their mistakes. Needless to say, men who think admitting error makes you look weak just keep making bigger mistakes; delusions of infallibility eventually lead to disaster, and one can only hope that the disasters ahead don’t bring catastrophe for all of us.
Which brings me to the subject of the Federal Reserve. What?
T
last week John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, tried to defend President Trump against charges that he was grossly insensitive to the widow of a U.S. soldier killed in action. In the process, Kelly accused Frederica Wilson, the member of Congress and friend of the soldier’s family who reported what Trump had said, of having behaved badly previously during the dedication of an F.B.I. building.
Video of the dedication shows, however, that Kelly’s claim was false, and that Representative Wilson’s remarks at the ceremony were entirely appropriate. So Kelly, a former general and a man of honor, admitted his error and apologized profusely.
See? I made a joke!
In reality, of course, Kelly has neither admitted error nor apologized. Instead, the White House declared that it’s unpatriotic to criticize generals — which, aside from being a deeply un-American position, is ludicrous given the many times Donald Trump has done just that.
But we are living in the age of Trumpal infallibility: We are ruled by men who never admit error, never apologize and, crucially, never learn from their mistakes. Needless to say, men who think admitting error makes you look weak just keep making bigger mistakes; delusions of infallibility eventually lead to disaster, and one can only hope that the disasters ahead don’t bring catastrophe for all of us.
Which brings me to the subject of the Federal Reserve. What?
T
Monday, October 23, 2017
'Anti-draft protesters are reckless fools'
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky blasts Yerushalmi Faction over wave of anti-draft protests: 'They're empty, foolish people who insult great rabbis.'
One of the leading rabbinic authorities in the haredi community lambasted anti-draft demonstrators affiliated with the Yerushalmi Faction (Jerusalem Faction) movement, calling them “empty, foolish and reckless people” after a series of protests across the country following the arrest of two haredi draft dodgers.
After a series of smaller protests last week, the Yerushalmi Faction declared a “Day of Rage” last Thursday, leading hundreds of supporters to protest around the country.
Some 120 demonstrators were arrested for blocking roads and clashing with police officers.
Led by Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, the Yerushalmi Faction has rejected the mainstream haredi approach of relying upon deferments provided by the army for full-time yeshiva students to avoid be drafted.
Rabbi Auerbach has called upon supporters not to cooperate with the IDF in any capacity, even to secure a draft deferment, instead encouraging young haredi men to ignore the draft board and if necessary be arrested.
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