Brains are different today:Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

NYTimes

 On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework. [...]

Government legalizes molesting - for sake of security

NYTimes

n the three weeks since the Transportation Security Administration began more aggressive pat-downs of passengers at airport security checkpoints, traveler complaints have poured in.

Some offer graphic accounts of genital contact, others tell of agents gawking or making inappropriate comments, and many express a general sense of powerlessness and humiliation. In general passengers are saying they are surprised by the intimacy of a physical search usually reserved for police encounters. [...]

Rubashkin Affair:The Wheels of Justice

Five Towns Jewish Times Rabbi Yair Hoffman

Ahmed Ghailani, transferred from Guantanamo Bay, was convicted this week of conspiracy to blow up government buildings in the al-Qaida attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998.  He was acquitted on more than 280 other charges, primarily because much of the available evidence was not allowed to be presented. He will receive a sentence of 20 years in jail.

Sholom Rubashkin is now serving a 27 year sentence given to him by Judge Linda Reade for crimes associated with his running a kosher meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa.

There is such a thing as justice and there is such a thing as law.  At times the two concepts meet.  At times they do not. [...]

Dr. Asher Lipner in Child & Domestic Abuse Volume I

page 143

Importance of disclosing abuse

While there are understandable reasons for the withholding of disclosure of abuse, it usually exacerbates the difficulty of the trauma both because silence can allow the abuse to occur repeatedly, and because it does not allow for the emotional wounds to heal.  

Loneliness, abandonment and neglect are feelings that a victim of abuse often has about others in his or her environment who did not intervene to rescue them from their abuse.  Children are often more angry at the non offending parent for not protecting them then at the one who actually perpetrated the abuse.  Partially, this is because they expect more from the “healthier parent” and partially because it feels and sometimes is safer for them to focus their angry and hurt feelings at the parent who is more likely to care and to react positively and not punish them.  Victims of rabbinic abuse or abuse by a teacher, often have more anger at the organization for protecting and enabling their molester and abandoning the protection of the students.

This reaction is not uncommon in other survivors of interpersonal violence as well.  An off duty policeman who was savagely assaulted by a gang on a subway and suffered permanent neurological damage, told me that in his nightmares and flashbacks the only thing he remembers seeing at the time of the attack are the twenty or so people who were watching and did not come to his assistance.  Many Holocaust survivors report feeling more distressed by the apparent lack of concern about them by the whole world than by almost any other aspect of their trauma.  This is why in clinical work it is important to view all sexual abuse as involving three parties: the abuser, the abused and the bystander.    Trauma in general has come to be viewed by psychologists as a phenomenon that cannot be fully described and understood in and of itself, but needs to be seen as an experience that takes place in a social context that both creates the environment in which it occurs as well as the environment in which the survivor continues to live. [...]

Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle: Food as medicine

NYTimes

Once every three or four months my son, Sam, grabs a cookie or a piece of candy and, wide-eyed, holds it inches from his mouth, ready to devour it. He knows he's not allowed to eat these things, but like any 9-year-old, he hopes that somehow, this once, my wife, Evelyn, or I will make an exception.

We never make exceptions when it comes to Sam and food, though, which means that when temptation takes hold of Sam and he is denied, things can get pretty hairy. Confronted with a gingerbread house at a friend's party last December, he went scorched earth, grabbing parts of the structure and smashing it to bits. Reason rarely works. Usually one of us has to pry the food out of his hands. Sometimes he ends up in tears. [...]

Dispute Over Dead Sea Scrolls Leads to a Jail Sentence

NYTimes

A man convicted of impersonating a New York University scholar in a debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls was sentenced on Thursday to six months in jail and five years’ probation.

The man, Raphael Haim Golb, was taken from a courtroom in State Supreme Court in Manhattan in handcuffs, after which one of his lawyers headed to the appellate division to ask that he be allowed to remain free pending appeal.[...]

One who makes a sincere mistaken interpretations of Torah - is not a heretic

Radvaz (4:187): A reason for not punishing preachers who distort the meaning of verses or medrashim is that their mistaken interpretations are the result of their faulty study of the texts. They are no worse than those who err concerning one of the fundamental principles of faith because of their misunderstanding of texts and yet are not considered heretics. For example, we find that the great man Hillel II erred in one of the principles of faith when he said Moshiach was not coming because of the events in the time of Chezkiyahu. Nevertheless, this error did not make him a heretic — G﷓d forbid. If he had been a heretic, how could the Talmud quote him? It is clear that since his improper statement was the result of sincere study, it was considered as inadvertent and thus he was not a heretic.