Rabbis use torture to convince men to give divorce!

The two rabbis offered an unusual service to Jewish women who could not get their husbands to agree to a divorce, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For a fee, they would convene a rabbinical court and authorize the use of violence to get a recalcitrant husband to agree to a divorce, the F.B.I. said.

But that was not all, according to court papers unsealed Thursday morning. They were also willing to employ hired muscle, two men known as Ariel and Yaakov, to actually kidnap the man and torture him, until he pledged to divorce his wife, according a criminal complaint in Federal District Court in Newark.

Two men whom the authorities describe as rabbis – Martin Wolmark and Mendel Epstein – as well as a third man, Ariel Potash, have been charged in a kidnapping conspiracy according to court papers. In connection to the case, F.B.I. agents carried out raids in South Brooklyn and Monsey, N.Y., in Rockland County on Wednesday evening.

In some Orthodox Jewish communities, a divorce is granted only once a husband provides his wife with a document known as a get. And stories of the frustrations and obstacles that women face in their quest to obtain a get are commonplace. While a woman can sue in rabbinical court to try to secure a get, some husbands do not comply with the court’s edict.

That, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is where the rabbis came in. “You need special rabbis who are going to take this thing and see it through to the end,” Rabbi Wolmark said in a recorded telephone conversation with an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a woman whose husband would not grant her a get.

During the telephone conversation, on Aug. 7, Rabbi Wolmark referred the undercover agent to Rabbi Epstein, whom he described as “a hired hand” who could help. The fee was high, according to the court papers: $10,000 to pay the rabbinical court to approve the kidnapping and an additional $50,000 or more to actually carry out the kidnapping.

In a subsequent meeting at Rabbi Epstein’s home in Ocean County, New Jersey, Rabbi Epstein explained what he planned to do. “Basically what we are going to be doing is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him and then getting him to give the get,” according to a recorded conversation that is described in the criminal complaint. Rabbi Epstein, according to the court papers, mentioned that his “tough guys” utilized cattle prods and other torture techniques that were not likely to leave a mark.

Should the husband go to the police, Rabbi Epstein said, it was important that there were no obvious signs of injury. Without such physical evidence, Rabbi Epstein said, the police were unlikely to probe too deeply into the affairs of the Orthodox Jewish community, which can appear impenetrable to outsiders.

“Basically the reaction of the police is, if the guy does not have a mark on him then, uh, is there some Jewish crazy affair here, they don’t want to get involved,” Rabbi Epstein explained, according to the criminal complaint.

The court papers, which outline the undercover F.B.I. sting operation, do not describe instances in which the defendants actually carried out such kidnappings. But the authorities said that the evidence in the case includes a recorded conversation in which Rabbi Epstein “claimed that his organization kidnapped one recalcitrant husband approximately every year and a half.”

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Roaches as a family pet!

Controlling Cockroaches

Responses to RoboRoach, a behavior-controlling cockroach backpack, vary from enthusiasm to ethical concerns.

By Abby Olena | October 8, 2013

FLICKRWhen RoboRoach appeared as a Kickstarter project in June, the project to control a living cockroach’s movements using a smartphone, generated buzz and was successfully funded. Now the project is poised for a large-scale launch in November, but some dissidents have raised ethics concerns about the way it frames animal experimentation.

Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, who are both trained neuroscientists and engineers, cofounded Backyard Brains, the company behind RoboRoach. According to the Kickstarter page, RoboRoach is a backpack that the roach wears that “communicates directly to the neurons via small electrical pulses.” By trimming the roach’s antenna to insert wires that could be attached to the Bluetooth backpack, aspiring neuroscientists can control the roach through a smartphone. Gage and Marzullo have billed the project as a way to spark an interest in neuroscience in students as young as 10 years old.

But some experts are concerned about the ethical implications of RoboRoach. “[The devices] encourage amateurs to operate invasively on living organisms” and “encourage thinking of complex living organisms as mere machines or tools,” Michael Allen Fox, a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Canada, told ScienceNOW. Animal behavior scientist Jonathan Balcombe of the Humane Society University in Washington, DC, added that the idea that animals are not harmed by the removal of body parts is “disingenuous.”

Backyard Brains responded to the criticisms of the project on the ethics section of the company’swebsite. “Our experiments are not philosophically perfect and without controversy; however, we believe the benefits outweigh the cost due to the inaccessibility of neuroscience in our current age,” they wrote. At Ted Global 2013 Gage added, “If we can get these tools into hands of kids, we can start the neuro-revolution.”

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Dogs are closer to humans than apes - in some ways

Catch My Drift?

Dogs are proving to be more in tune to human communication than any other animal, but how much they really understand about people’s intentions is up for debate.

By Jef Akst | October 1, 2013

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JINGZHI TANDogs have a unique sense of humans. They seem to understand people in a way no other animal does, accurately interpreting gestures, expressions, and even words. What’s more, they then use that knowledge to their advantage—like sneaking forbidden food when people in the room have theirbacks turned or eyes closed. But do dogs really get humans?

“There are folks that think that dogs understand the whole set of mental states,” said comparative developmental psychologist David Buttelmann of Universität Erfurt in Germany. “I myself belong to the group of people who think that all that dogs do is follow commands. Wolves were not domesticated in order to understand us—to understand our intentions and goals and think about what we are saying. They were just domesticated for following our commands, [and] the ones who did the best were the ones who were allowed to reproduce.”

The evidence can be alluring, though. It’s long been recognized that dogs understand pointing better than wolves or even chimpanzees: when a human points to an object—a cup of food or a hidden toy—dogs go to it. “Dogs use human gestures, like the pointing gesture, flexibly, and they do so better than any other species we’ve looked at; even six-week old puppies use human pointing,” said Juliane Kaminski, a comparative cognition researcher at the University of Portsmouth, UK. “With a dog, there seems to be a certain readiness to attend to these gestural cues and to read and use them.”

But does the fact that dogs respond in a sensible way to human gestures mean that they understand the intentions behind them? In 2011, Kaminski and her colleagues showed that when a person did not first make eye contact with them, dogs did not follow a human’s point, suggesting that dogs interpret the pointing gesture as a command. “When the pointing gesture is not directed at them but directed at another person, even though the gesture itself doesn’t change, then they tend to ignore it,” said Kaminski. Children, on the other hand, will still take note of gestural cues even when the signaler’s attention is focused elsewhere, suggesting they understand that the point still contains usable information.

In another study, dogs followed the experimenter’s point to an empty bowl, rather than going for another bowl filled with fragrant food. “This made me think [that] they just follow the point,” said Buttelmann—that the dogs were not interpreting her point as an informative cue to direct them to food. Other research has demonstrated that over repeated trials, dogs tend to improve in their use of human gestures. Some have argued that such learning suggests dogs do not comprehend the meaning behind such gestures.

But Brian Hare, director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University and coauthor of The Genius of Dogs, does not believe that these studies rule out dogs’ understanding of human intention. “If a child learns to do math, do you then conclude that it doesn’t understand math?” he asked. Hare suggests that dogs may resemble human babies in their abilities to interpret human gestures in a flexible way—something even highly intelligent great apes seem to struggle with.

“The flexibility we’ve seen [in dogs] is similar to the similar the flexibility we’ve seen in human infants, [and] human infants are imputed to have an understanding of intentionality,” Hare said. “So if you use the standard applied to human infants, well then it seems like what [dogs] are doing is really quite sophisticated.”

Beyond pointing, dogs also appear to use the direction of human gaze and the placement of physical markers to find hidden food and objects, tasks that apes also struggle with. And earlier this year, Buttelmann and his colleague Michael Tomasello from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that dogs seemed to interpret human emotional expressions. In their study, an experimenter would open two boxes, looking at the dog after each with one of three expressions: smiling broadly, neutral face, or making a face of disgust. Though the dogs seemed to have trouble distinguishing happy or disgust expressions from the neutral one, when one box brought the person happiness and the other disgust, the dogs preferred the happy box.

“I was surprised by our findings,” Buttelmann said. “I wouldn’t have expected [the dogs] to understand emotional expressions, because that’s not really a command you’re giving them.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t a simple explanation for dogs’ seemingly human-like ability to understand our communicative signals. “Maybe it just on the surface looks similar,” said Hare. “I think it’s entirely plausible that’s there’s a really simple set of mechanisms that explain what dogs are doing that doesn’t require them thinking about your intentions.” Buttelmann agreed: “It’s not clear yet what’s the right answer.”

Regardless of dogs’ understanding of the intentions behind human communications, their level of social cognition is undoubtedly among the most advanced ever studied. “Through domestication, somehow, it seems the cognitive abilities of dogs might have evolved in a close link to the cooperative nature of the interaction that dogs have with humans, which is rather different than any other animals,” said comparative cognition researcher Ljerka Ostoji? of the University of Cambridge. “They’re kind of unique in the nonhuman animal kingdom.”

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Paul Krugman - the NY Times

The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.

To see what I’m talking about, consider the report in Sunday’s Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects — the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others — plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.

This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. You’d have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. — as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn’t seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.

Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.

Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the political equivalent of the Keystone Kops — the Boehner Bunglers? Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.

Remember what happened in the 2012 election — not the fact that Mitt Romney lost, but the fact that all the political experts around him apparently had no inkling that he was likely to lose. Polls overwhelmingly pointed to an Obama victory, but Republican analysts denounced the polls as “skewed” and attacked the media outlets reporting those polls for their alleged liberal bias. These days Karl Rove is pleading with House Republicans to be reasonable and accept the results of the 2012 election. But on election night he tried to bully Fox News into retracting its correct call of Ohio — and hence, in effect, the election — for Mr. Obama.

Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.

Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.

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Plankton

Extremely worth your time!

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Ricken Patel - Avaaz.org" <avaaz@avaaz.org>
Date: October 3, 2013 at 10:42:21 PM EDT
To: "yes@therainbow.com" <yes@therainbow.com>
Subject: what happened after I signed the petition?

Avaaz.org - The World in Action
Dear amazing community,

I often get asked by Avaazers, “what happens after I sign a petition?” And the truth is, a HECK of a lot! Every Avaaz campaign springs from a massive global mandate, and then zeroes in on the best way for our voices to win. Here’s just two of our victories from the last few weeks:

Remember when 2 million of us came together to stop the flogging of a 15-year old rape victim in the Maldives? Her sentence has been quashed! Here's what our team did to win:

Our ads threatened the profits of officials who owned parts of the tourism industry

Spoke for hours with the Maldivian Attorney-General and Ministers and emailed the President at his personal account.

Commissioned opinion polls showing massive support for reforms to protect girls. And wrote an Op-Ed in a major national paper.

Persuaded a top Islamic scholar to speak out against flogging.

Threatened to run an ad (right) in tourism publications, affecting the country's major industry.

Visited the Maldives and the location where the girl was held, pressing officials directly.

Ahmed Shaheed, former Foreign Minister of the Maldives said “The Avaaz contribution was the spearhead of the campaign to overturn the flogging sentence; a petition signed by millions, a country visit, a public opinion survey, and persistent follow-up all proved irresistible.”

Another example: Remember how almost 2 million of us rallied to stop the Maasai tribe in Tanzania from being kicked off their land for a hunting reserve? Last week, the Prime Minister announced they could stay! The petition provided a powerful basis for what the team did next:

Maasai women gather to protest the eviction. Photo by Jason Patinkin

Got CNN and the Guardian to visit the Maasai and break the wider story to the world.

Advised Maasai elders on their campaigning strategy.

Flooded Ministers and the President with messages -- forcing a debate in cabinet and Parliament.

Ran a hard hitting newspaper ad in an influential paper which publicly shamed the government.

Persuaded diplomats worldwide to raise the issue -- embarrassing the government.

Financially supported Maasai elders to travel to the capital where they gathered to 'occupy' land outside of the Prime Minister’s office for weeks, refusing to leave until he met them.

Gordon Brown said: "A million dollars has been raised via the brilliant Avaaz.org, in just a few days."

Key Brazilian Senator joins Avaaz "open vote" naked protest sending a clear message: "we have nothing to hide"

The victory belongs to the Maasai people, but our community helped them win by making this a global issue the government could no longer ignore. This hopefully ends a 20 year land battle!!

Of course, our community does a LOT more than petitions. Last week, we raised a $1 million challenge grant in a few days to donor governments to put Syrian refugee kids in school. At a UN meeting, I was able to put a cheque on the table and issue the challenge on behalf of over 40,000 Avaaz donors. UN Education Envoy Gordon Brown, who chaired the meeting, called our community's effort a "magnificent and impactful intervention" in getting other governments to give!

And often it's not the Avaaz team but our community that does the direct lobbying. For example in Brazil, we're inches away from winning a massive fight to end the shady practice of 'secret voting' in the Congress. Our huge push helped win the vote in the lower house and right now, Senators’ telephones are ringing off the hook as Avaaz members across Brazil use our online calling tool to directly tell them to stop this corruption -- experts say a win is likely in days!

It's this unique magic mix between a gigantic and spirited community of citizens able to speak out, donate, and lobby, and a small team of top notch advocates able to take smart, strategic actions at the highest level with democratic legitimacy, that makes our campaigns increasingly unstoppable.

If we keep believing in each other, and growing in size and in commitment, there's no limit to the good we can do in the world. Thank you so much for the honour and the joy to be part of and serve this community. It's something truly precious we have here -- let's keep building Avaaz.

With love and appreciation,

Ricken and the team

PS -- You might not know that Avaaz is different from just about every other global organization in that we are 100% funded and guided by our community. Every campaign we run is first polled and tested to a random sample (you might think of it as a jury) of our community, that tells us exactly how the whole the community will react. I may be the CEO, but you're my boss. If you don't like something (and I don't mean 51% like it, but 81% like it) then our team go back to the drawing board and come up with a better option for you. We have never, ever, broken this rule. So at the end of the day, it is your wisdom, the collective wisdom of our community, matched with the smartest suggestions the team hears from you and come up with ourselves and from our partners and experts, that determines what we do every single day.

When you add to that the fact that 100% of our funding comes from small online donations (we strictly refuse any donations from corporations, governments, foundations, and even individual donations over 5000 Euros), I think Avaaz may be one of the purest organisational expressions of people-powered change in the world today. Make that an organisation served by a beautiful team of wonderfully talented and deeply committed people that I wish I could introduce you all to, and we've got a kind of magic that can build the world we dream of.

PPS -- If you want to chip in to help keep it all going, click here: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/october_reportback_a/?bEQnhcb&v=29778

Avaaz.org is a 26-million-person global campaign network that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision-making. ("Avaaz" means "voice" or "song" in many languages.) Avaaz members live in every nation of the world; our team is spread across 18 countries on 6 continents and operates in 17 languages. Learn about some of Avaaz's biggest campaigns here, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

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