BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Taylor Caldwell was always one of my favorite authors - through high school and beyond. From 6th grade to 12th grade I developed a serious handicap - TELLING THE TRUTH. Caldwell's writing was descriptive and honest, and I appreciated it deeply. My Nana, of blessed memory, always told me - "Barbara, no one likes a truth teller. Just remember that." It was not an admonition to lie but to be aware of the consequences. My father, of blessed memory, told me the same - "Sweetie, you have my disease - that telling the truth disease." In fact, my father who had been in sales and on the road for many years, stopped and joined the State Troopers around 1971-72 because he got sick of "twisting the facts", as he put it. He even said 'it was wearing him down.' Unfortunately, in my 53 years on the planet I have been villanized, lied to and about , called crazy, psycho, obsessed, insane and a variety of other mean-spirited labels by people who have bl...

From this great site: The not-so-bitter truth “You’re just bitter.” This is a phrase commonly used to silence women . Another variation says, “You are so unforgiving.” The bitterness accusation is used to bully a woman and tell her how she “should” feel instead of asking her how she does feel. Someone who uses this label expects her to pretend there has been no harm, no foul. She is expected to pretend the one who hurt her is a great person, even if she knows he is a terrible person. If she does not pretend, it is because she is “bitter and unforgiving.” Abusers nearly always sling this accusation at their victims. She may have accepted him back with open arms after a dozen violent episodes, but the first time she hesitates to “forgive and forget,” he will tell her she is a bitter and unforgiving person. If only it stopped there. The world does not want to hear the voice of the abused, either. Let her speak of abuse in the divorce hearing, and the judge may roll h...

Para-moralisms: The conviction that moral values exist and that some actions violate moral rules is so common and ancient a phenomenon that it seems to have some substratum at man's instinctive endowment level (although it is certainly not totally adequate for moral truth), and that it does not only represent centuries' worth of experience, culture, religion, and socialization. ...Any act can thus be proved to be immoral or morally proper by means of such para-moralisms through active suggestion, and people whose minds will succumb to such reasoning can always be found. In searching for an example of an evil act whose negative value would not elicit doubt in any social situation, ethics scholars frequently mention child abuse. However, psychologists often meet with para-moral affirmations of such behavior in their practice, such as in a family with the prefrontal field damage in the eldest sister. Her younger brothers emphatically insisted that their sister's sadistic tre...

by Kathy Krajco [L]ike little children, narcissists view truth as a relative quantity, not an absolute. People whose thinking is thus screwed up go around talking about "your truth" and "my truth," "your reality" and "my reality." They have conveniently slipped from acknowledging that people have different points of view (and therefore different perspectives) into the logical error that they actually view different objects or events. I mentioned that such people think to determine THE truth by making their version bigger than yours. This is why people whose thinking is thus screwed up go around talking as though truth is determined by popular opinion. For example, here's the typical anti-American's favorite club: The whole world hates you Americans, so you're hateful. (Sorry, Charlie, the people full of hate are the hateful ones.) Anti-Americanism is collective narcissism, and we see the same behavior pattern in individu...

I was raised by my father, of blessed memory - to be truthful. Being scrupulously truthful has caused me a lot of problems. People either don't want to hear it or are frightened by it coming out (and often attack you for telling it.) But I am raising my own children to cling to truth. It will set you free. By Berel Wein The Torah extols the value of truth as an absolute virtue. It teaches us to stand firmly away from falsehood. Even though the technical application of this value in Halacha is apparently limited to legal and evidentiary matters, the value of truth in Judaism as a general axiom is unquestioned. Yet the Torah itself allows for the situations when ultimate truth can be harmful and counterproductive to family harmony and social amity. The Lord Himself, so to speak, does not tell Abraham the entire statement of disbelief of his wife Sarah when the angel informs her of the coming birth of her son Isaac. She wonders aloud how she will become youthfully rejuvenate...

From my friend, Anna at Narcissists Suck : The NPD illusion of superiority is a facet of a generalized disdain for reality. These individuals feel unconstrained by rules, customs, limits, and discipline. Their world is filled with self-fiction in which conflicts are dismissed, failures redeemed, and self-pride is effortlessly maintained. They easily devise plausible reasons to justify self-centered and inconsiderate behavior. Their memories of past relationships are often illusory and changing. If rationalizations and self-deception fail, individuals with NPD are vulnerable to dejection, shame, and a sense of emptiness. Then they have little recourse other than fantasy. They have an uninhibited imagination and engage in self-glorifying fantasies. What is unmanageable through fantasy is repressed and kept from awareness. As they consistently devalue others, they do not question the correctness of their own beliefs; they assume that others are wrong. The characteristic difficulties of in...

(Can I be sick now? - Barbara) In today's society lying is no longer an option, it is a skill that is absolutely necessary for survival . I’m not here to discuss the ethics of lying (that’s what philosophy websites are for), nor am I here to tell you to always be “good” (the world isn’t black and white by the way). Nope, I’m here to tell you how to lie and lie so well that no one (not even your own mother) will know. But this is only fair. The world can be a downright evil place and it’s totally reasonable that you have the tools to fight back. With that said I’m going to treat everyone like an adult, and ask that you use these abilities for good… mmmkay? A Sharp Double-Edged Sword Knowing when you should lie is a tricky skill all by itself. So before lying you should first evaluate both the potential benefits of a successful lie against the consequences of getting caught. If the benefits clearly outweigh the risks, then you are probably good to go. But remember that you may be ris...

"This is the punishment of a liar: he is not believed, even when he speaks the truth." - The Talmud PLEASE CLICK HERE TO JBLOG ME

The Mobosphere Unveiled Ever since Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act giving immunity to interactive service providers for publishing the defamation of others, a wide range of characters has arisen and infiltrated the mainstream blogosphere. Instead of becoming a source for obtaining reliable information, the blogosphere, and user generated content, is at risk of becoming a less credible information source. Dozier Internet Law defamation lawyers are constantly battling these “black hat” forces and over the past several years we have acquired quite an insight into this underworld; an anonymous and covert society bent on terrorizing businesses. These are our internal thoughts on the matter, and not scientific analyses. We are not psychiatrists; just defamation lawyers and trial lawyers trained for almost fifty years to figure out the human nature of clients, witnesses, and juries. All too often blog attacks are simply protection rackets and extortion schemes i...

by GARY L. KRUPP A recent papal decree moved Pope Pius XII, among others, closer to sainthood -- returning to the forefront the controversy over his role in World War II and the Holocaust. Growing up Jewish in Queens, I never dreamt I would be defending the man I once believed to be a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. But my work since 2002 with my wife, Meredith, and the Pave the Way Foundation has led me to this point. We founded Pave the Way to identify and eliminate nontheological obstacles between religions. Thus, despite our early prejudices, we decided to investigate the papacy of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), one of today's greatest sources of hurt between Jews and Catholics. After years of research in documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony, what we found shocked us. We found nothing but praise and positive news articles concerning Pius' actions from every Jewish, Israeli and political leader of the era who lived through the war. A few articles in the postwar er...