An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where

 https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-informer-told-fbi-what-docs-trump-was-hiding-where-1732283

Both senior government officials say the raid was scheduled with no political motive, the FBI solely intent on recovering highly classified documents that were illegally removed from the White House. Preparations to conduct such an operation began weeks ago, but in planning the date and time, the FBI Miami Field Office and Washington headquarters were focused on the former president's scheduled return to Florida from his residences in New York and New Jersey.

"They were seeking to avoid any media circus," says the second source, a senior intelligence official who was briefed on the investigation and the operation. "So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout."

‘Trump Knows What The FBI Found’ In Search Of FL Home

Why Hasn’t Trump Released The Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant?

Team Trump says it’ll keep Mar-a-Lago search warrant under wraps

 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/team-trump-says-ll-keep-mar-lago-search-warrant-wraps-rcna42418

Remember, Republicans have spent the last couple of days working from a certain assumption: Federal law enforcement, they’ve claimed, “raided” the home of a former president as part of an outrageous abuse of power. Team Trump could theoretically bolster those assumptions by releasing the search warrant that was executed, shedding light on the investigation and its direction.

If the basis for the warrant were flimsy, disclosing it would prove Republicans right. If the rationale for the search lacked merit, releasing the warrant would help on this front, too.

It was against this backdrop that observers from the left and the right encouraged Team Trump to simply make the voluntary disclosure, bringing key facts into the light.

All of which led to, “No, we’re not releasing a copy of the warrant.”

It’s the sort of thing that should, at least in theory, give Republicans scrambling to defend the former president pause.

The Justice Department is in a no win situation as Trump's fury rages

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/11/politics/justice-department-trump-fury-analysis/index.html

And Trump, after all, could publish the search warrant himself if he wanted. The fact that he has failed to do so and the increasingly unhinged tone of his attacks on the Justice Department are only deepening the impression he has something to hide. As is the fact that he, and not the FBI or Justice Department, broke news of the search in a transparent attempt to set a media narrative that he had been unfairly treated.

Sefer Shaarei Aryeh

 

Determinism and Free Will - nonsense

 https://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughtstoponder/determinism-and-free-will-ttp-258/

Those who study these narratives very carefully will realize, however, that the midrash was not obliged to give this interpretation. It could have allowed for an explanation which would be much more in line with the idea of free will and would be easier on God. But it did not. It took the difficult road, to emphasize the paradox of free will versus determinism, and it dared to accuse God of a deliberate and false accusation against man.

B. F. Skinner - Behavior Control, Freedom, and Morality (1972)

Freewill vs Determinism

 https://www.simplypsychology.org/freewill-determinism.html

Hard determinism sees free will as an illusion and believes that every event and action has a cause.

Behaviorists are strong believers in hard determinism. Their most forthright and articulate spokesman has been B. F. Skinner. Concepts like “free will” and “motivation” are dismissed as illusions that disguise the real causes of human behavior.

In Skinner’s scheme of things the person who commits a crime has no real choice. (S)he is propelled in this direction by environmental circumstances and a personal history, which makes breaking the law natural and inevitable.

Rav Wolbe: Religion has replaced sex as taboo

This is my translation of an excerpt (pp 72-73) from Rav Wolbe's essay on Religion and Psychiatry that I recently posted 

========================================

Frankel quotes the Yale University psychiatrist, F. C. Redlich, “Psychodynamic psychiatry threatens the strict religious dogmas. It seems to do this by its implicit values rather than by explicit statement.” Frankel added the following comment after attending a conference of psychiatrists in New York. “It is almost impossible to find in New York psycho-analysts who don’t have serious doubts about the mental health of their clients - if after completing their psychoanalytic treatment they are still actively religious.” If this observation is in fact accurate, perhaps it is truly time to acknowledge that there is absolutely no necessary contradiction between the Jewish conceptualization of man and that of psychiatry. Perhaps the two views even complement each other. I am going to allow myself to be sarcastic for a moment and to say, After seeing the elevated picture of man as the beloved friend – how can one be satisfied with the picture of man as an intelligent monkey with the addition of a subconscious mind and a bit of sublimation?” There is to this matter an additional aspect. Psycho-analysis made a major contribution by revealing the mechanism of repression i.e., repression of the libido. With the passage of the years the analytic concepts such as libido and repression have in my opinion – become very popular. While permissiveness is not implicit in psycho-analysis, nevertheless the popularization of psycho-analysis has caused it. That is because the masses have found justification in it for permissiveness. Perhaps they have even found guidance to behavior which is very free concerning sexual issues. Consequently – repression of the libido has become uncommon.  Today there is no repression of sex – but there is repression of religious feelings. That is what Frankel has written. He quotes Gordon Allport, “Perhaps there has been an exchange -  during the course of the last 50 years - between the nature of religion and sexuality: Today psychologists write without any inhibition-  such as Freud or Kinsey – regarding the passions of man. However they blush and keep quiet the moment the conversation comes to religious yearnings.

Psychiatry in Crisis! Mental Health Director Rejects Psychiatric “Bible” and Replaces With… Nothing

Scientific American   What is mental illness? Schizophrenia? Autism? Bipolar disorder? Depression? Since the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry has attempted to provide definitive answers to these questions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Often called The Bible of psychiatry, the DSM serves as the ultimate authority for diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage of mental illness.

Now, in a move sure to rock psychiatry, psychology and other fields that address mental illness, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health has announced that the federal agency–which provides grants for research on mental illness–will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Thomas Insel’s statement comes just weeks before the scheduled publication of the DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Insel writes:

“While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’–each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”[...]

Seridei Aish: Recommends psychology rather than force or prohibitions to deal with teenager who is obsessed with magic tricks

Rav Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg (Seridei Aish 3:95): Because of the principles of education, it is best to avoid using forceful means on a son who has deviated from the normal path. You correctly mention that it is prohibited to hit a grown child. You are also correct in saying that the prohibition is not limited to hitting a grown child but rather it is prohibited to use any type of force because it has the potential to bring about results that are the opposite of what was desired. The modern educational experts have proven that force or strong pressure arouses in a teenage youth extreme stubbornness and a tendency to rebel. The best advice is to find an alternative activity for this youth which he would enjoy. In other words the strategy should be to transfer his current obsession for magical tricks - without his awareness - to other activities. Fortunately in the present case the youth is committed to Torah and mitzvos. Perhaps it is a good idea to send him to Israel to learn in yeshiva there. The change of friends and the spiritual atmosphere will cause him to move away from the American lifestyle and immersion in the nonsense activities of American youth. It is also a good idea that that the trip to Israel should be presented as a reward for his good behavior. You can also promise him that his magic trick devices  that he is enamored with - will be stored away and protected until he returns from Israel. However it is quite likely that when he returns from Israel, he will no longer be interested in the nonsense of magical tricks.

Torah & psychology: Conflicts in values and goals I

The recent events with the Weberman case in Brooklyn and apparently a similar situation in London, calls for a serious discussion of the integration of secular psychology with Judaism. The  problems for treatment of the opposite gender, conflict in values and goals. And what happens when the therapist takes on the role of the rabbis in teaching values and roles in marriage versus the rabbi taking on the role of therapist. Tomorrow I will be posting an important article sent to me by Dr. Klafter on this topic. Today I want to pose a question which someone asked me that clearly indicates the problems. 

There is an organization which provides therapy to frum clients using trained psychologists and social workers. The organization has a posek who has answered their questions for years. Recently a question arose dealing with a wife who was severely abused in all possible ways. She has been destroyed psychologically without any self-esteem or ability to function as an independent entity. Therapy and the law requires that she be treated as a separate entity and be given the skills and confidence to decide whether she wants to get divorced. The Rav insists that the Torah requires that the husband be involved in her therapy and especially the issues of divorce. 

What would you advise?

First update - the other side of the story.

After some investigation, I found out the rav's point of view. He had been informed by a number of people who had worked with the couple previously for shalom bayis that the woman's account of abuse are questionable and might possibly indicate delusions and psychosis. The rav said that the reality of the woman's story needs to be verified with others before giving her treatment as an abused person who probably should get divorced. The wife refuses for the therapist to speak to her husband and the therapist believes she is telling the truth. Legally and ethically a therapist can not go behind a clients back to solicit information when the client objects. Thus the rav is not asserting that the husband has to be involved because he is a husband but because of the need to clarify the truth of her claims. Thus there is a clear conflict between the values of secular therapy and secular law and the Torah position 

 Second update: Thursday Nov 29
Another case. A troubled marriage of a couple who are at the highest levels of Torah society. If they get divorced it will destroy their children's chance of happiness in shidduchim. Therapist insists that the marriage is unhealthy and supports wife call for a divorce. Their rebbe tells the therapist to provide wife with sedatives so she can survive the marriage until the kids are married off. This is a question of values - not reality or professional judgment. Does the therapist have to listen to the rav or does his Ph.D. exempt him from Torah obligations as seen by the rav


Third update - another  case
I remember, as a bachor in yeshiva, speaking to the psychologist of one of my fellow students who became psychotic. The therapist told me, "the basic problem is you people don't touch girls until you are married. My client would be way better off psychologically if he got a girl friend." When I objected that this was against our religious laws, he snickered and said, "It is my professional view that this is necessary for my client's well being." Would you require that a prostitute be hired until he got a girl friend because a licensed expert in the field of pscyhology said it was necessary? 

Fourth update - December 1 2012 What does it mean when a rav issues a psak in medical issues -  

See Rav Sternbuch paskens that alternative medicine can't be used instead of conventional medicine in pikuach nefesh cases 

Rav Dessler: Modern Psychology's mistaken view of man

Michtav M’Eliyahu (3:360-361 written 1949): Education of children regarding corporal punishment. Question: You have written that the lastest scientific research has a fundamental problem with the use of corporal punishment. They say that it is natural that children imitate what their parents do. Consequently if they are given corporal punishment then they will learn the improper lesson that they should hit those who act against their wishes... Answer: The secular researchers are mistaken because of two fallacies in their reasoning which cause them to misunderstand the true nature of the matter. 1) The first mistake is that they think  that man is born without any characteristics at all [tabula rasa] and therefore a person’s nature is totally determined by what he learns from his environment. In other words they mistakenly believe that a man acquires his personality entirely from his surroundings. This is not true. The Torah says “At the door sin crouches”. That means that even before a child is born that there is an instinctive attraction to evil. Our Sages note that when Rivkah was pregant with Yaakov and Esav  - when when she passed the temples of idolatry that Esav pushed to be born. See what the Maharal writes on this. That means that there is an aspect of instinct without conscious awareness or thought at all which are part of a person’s nature that he is born with which he has to fight against. It is obvious of course that the social environment can strengthen characteristics and that he can in fact learn from others. However the primary characteristics do not have to be learned from others because they are innate. 2) The second mistake is that they think that it is necessary to develop independence in children. This is an incredible error. In fact not only do they no need to learn independence but they need to learn submission and humility. They will in fact learn by themselves pride and murder. But to teach them “there is no one like me” (Yeshaya 47:10) is the approach of Edom< Examine well the letter of the Gra where he writes, “There are those who try to plant seed on a stone. But the heart of stone does not allow anything to enter. Therefore it is necessary to hit the stone and shatter it. Therefore I wrote to you that you should hit our children if they don’t listen to you... " We see from this comment of the Gra a totally different aspect of hitting. He says that hitting makes the child’s heart broken and subdued [so that he is capable of listening and understanding properly what is said to him - not just to punish him]. Study well Derech Etz Chaim of the Ramchal... It is difficult to quote all the relevant parts because there is so much material. Nevertheless he has profound comments and a totally different way of looking at it. He is saying that hitting one’s children is comparable to removing the impure blockage from the heart and the purification of the grave. [...] click here for 2nd half

http://daattorah.blogspot.co.il/2010/02/corporal-punishment-psychology-from-non.html