There is some connection between trust in God with no effort and accepting the yoke of learning Torah.

There is some connection between trust in God with no effort and accepting the yoke of learning Torah. Both of these things are accepted parts of the Litvak yeshiva world but no connection between them is ever spelled out exactly.

The way both are connected are in the sense that it is understood that: if one accepts the yoke of learning Torah, then the troubles and difficulties of making a living will be removed from him. But in fact both ideals on the surface to be totally independent.  What exactly is the connection?
I am not really sure about this even though there is  statement from the Gra about the right path of trust in God is specifically without effort on one's own part. It is not as if the Gra accepts the חובות לבבות opinion about trust in God with effort on your own part. See Proverbs 3:25 the commentary of the Gra there.

For writing on the computer on Shabat I depend on the Rema in the Shulchan Aruch that the prohibition of writing is Ashurit [and I would imagine also the ancient Hebrew letters called "Ketav Evri."]  along with the idea of the idea brought down on buildig that the form needs to be preserved for twenty four hours -not stored in megabytes.
But I admit there are perhaps many other areas in which I am too lenient. The truth is it is hard to get exactly how to keep the holy Torah. There are inherent ambiguities like honor of one's parents. It is hard to tell how far to take that.
 It is not just when one mitzvah seems to interfere with another. It is that sometimes the actual fulfillment is unclear.
I have written about the problems involved in keeping Torah quite a lot but not in a unified format. Mainly the problems come from the Sitra Achra {the Dark Side}which pretends to keep Torah in external form but internally is demonic. That makes trusting anything that the religious world says about Torah almost certainly wrong.

Some of the basic difficulties and ambiguities  are:
(1) The attitudes towards Reb Nachman, who was certainly a great tzadik, but when people get involved in Breslov they definitely get caught up into the Sitra Achra
(2) The ignoring of the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication. This is not simply ignored but outright declared wrong. To me it is clear that the Gra was 100% correct. [But that it would not apply to Reb Nachman for reasons that are easy to see if you read the actual letter itself.]
(3) The attitude towards the State of Israel. I would rather not go into this right now but service in the IDF and general support of Israel I consider very important.
(4) Attitudes towards what are called secular studies. To the Rambam there is no such thing as secular studies. Physics [in his terminology means also Chemistry] and Metaphysics are holy studies that are part of the Oral Law. Other things that are considered secular are simply treif, nevela, in the opinion of the Rambam.
(5) Attitudes towards kollel. This really is not that ambiguous in practice because you can pretty much tell whether people in any institution are using Torah to make money or if they are accepting money in order to learn Torah. If the later, then  clearly it is  great thing what they are doing.

(6)My own mistakes seem to be in the area of the Mir Yeshiva in NY. On one hand you might say it was important to get to Israel but that seems to have caused a lot of bitul Torah and getting involved in pretty dumb sitra achra stuff. What perhaps I might have done would have been to find  a Litvak kollel in Israel. But even that is hard to say could have made up for the loss of not learning in the Mir.

There was on America's Most Wanted a story about a father and son Taylor and Taylor that had been kidnapped for the apparent reason that they had found some means of commutation or communication with distant regions of space.

There was on America's Most Wanted a story about a father and son Taylor and Taylor that had been kidnapped for the apparent reason that they had found some means of commutation  or communication with distant regions of space. I can not imagine what it was, but I assume that there in fact might be something like that. If forced to I could think of a few things. If some small particles are black holes, they might have thought to combine enough together to make a worm hole.Also since their experience was in electrical engineering maybe they had thought of some aspect of electricity which always  involves imaginary time. Another suggestion would be that if one takes the paper of Feynman about two arrows of time and puts it together with two more arrows of entropy he gets results that are remarkable and suggestive of some deeper structure. 

Overall, the current findings provide evidence that interracial couples elicit disgust

Humans Naturally Dislike Mixing of Race.

See this link

Study 1   demonstrates that bias against interracial romance is correlated with disgust. Study 2 provides evidence that images of interracial couples evoke a neural disgust response among observers – as indicated by increased insula activation relative to images of same-race couples. Consistent with psychological theory indicating that disgust leads to dehumanization, Study 3 demonstrates that manipulating disgust leads to implicit dehumanization of interracial couples. Overall, the current findings provide evidence that interracial couples elicit disgust and are dehumanized relative to same-race couples.

The fact is that everyone knows that if you are mixing races, you have turned your back on your heritage. This puts you in the camp with traitors, cowards and profiteers.

Next, they realize that you are an unfortunate person. Other than for novelty points at the bar, you will never have a real identity. Instead, you will always be flogging your “uniqueness” while neither of your constituent groups accepts you.

Finally, looking into miscegenation shows us the inner workings of life. We do not like to think about it, but we are biological beings with our personalities arising from genetics. Miscegenation breaks apart the visions of people that we process socially, and shows us that beneath the level on which socialization operates, we are animals and can be bred as such.

As the age of ideology ends, tribe becomes more important. The result of this is that people are struggling to find their identities and live within them, lest them become people without a nation or origin, which in a time where identity is more important than elective categories like political alignment or religion, makes them the loneliest people in the world.

Now contrast this with research that shows racial identity outlasts diversity:

What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That’s an error rate of 0.14 percent.

Neil Risch, PhD, a UC-San Francisco professor who led the study while he was professor of genetics at Stanford, said that the findings are particularly surprising given that people in both African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups often have a mixed background. “We might expect these individuals to cross several different genetic clusters,” he noted. That’s not what the study found. Instead, each self-identified racial/ethnic group clumped into the same genetic cluster.

Over the long term, people resist miscegenation because it destroys who they are, which they innately know is tied to genetics and history even if these concepts offend their notions of “free will” and individuality. In other words, having an identity that gives the individual a starting point in their narrative of self — origins, purpose, rank — is more important than joining the generic, mixed-race social group.

For this reason, they also dislike and instinctively are disgusted by miscegenation. The mixing of racial groups constitutes the destruction of those groups over time, so in the practice of miscegenation, people see the erasure of their identity. As a result their is a natural revulsion to loss of identity, which is in part a destruction of the self.

Highlights

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Bias against interracial romance is correlated with self-reported feelings of disgust.

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Interracial couples elicit a neural disgust response among observers – as indicated by increased insula activation.

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Manipulating state disgust leads to implicit dehumanization of interracial couples.

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Findings suggest that meaningful social units (e.g., couples) influence person perception.

.So if one is in a place of authentic Torah like the Mir yeshiva in NY there are always little whisperers telling him "Perhaps someplace else is better."

Every area of value seems to have an equal and opposite area of value that is indiscernible from the real thing. The reason seems to be what you have in the Armed Forces "the need to know."
Merit does not seem to depend on finding the right path, but rather in every path there is good and evil. Merit depends of some ability to discern evil on one's path and avoid it.  Not on finding some  abstract right path.

To be a little more explicit:
 Value starts with things like Formal Logic  in which the sentences are empty and can stand for anything but the rules are formal. If A implies B and B implies C and A is true, then C is true.
Up the scale you get Mathematics which has more content but can not be reduced to formal logic as Godel showed. Value gets greater as content increases  and form gets less. E.g. Music.
But every area of value-whether is has much or little content has an equal and opposite area of value which in externals looks exactly the same. That is so that there should be free will.

[I have mentioned this a few times. But the new idea I wanted to bring out is that this ignorance is the realm of the Dinge An Sich--Kant's Thing in Itself--is intentional. To choose good otherwise would be simply a mater of finding the right path and following it. Certainly some people assume that is the case. But then there would be no room for free will. The way the world was made it self there is room left for anyone to choose good or evil on what ever path they were born into. Most people think since they were born into some path which to them seems good, they can basically do what they like.

In this I am building on Dr Kelly Ross (Kant-Friesian School) and the Rambam.

Dr Kelly Ross taught in a CA Community College. I think the whole system has gotten so messed up that you can find idiots that teach at Harvard and geniuses that teach in a community college.
Recently Dr Ross taught at an ivy league school on the East Coast (Rutgers). It is nice that someone finally recognized him for the genius  he is.
That being said I thing the curriculum is too much. If possible I would reduce the requirements to the Natural Sciences, Music. No "Humanities" or "social studies"  which nowadays are just propaganda.

To make this seem less abstract: Let's say you are on a Torah path. In itself that is great. The trouble is the Sitra Achra that comes to greet anyone that starts out on that path.So if one is in a place of authentic Torah like the Mir yeshiva in NY there are always little whisperers telling him "Perhaps someplace else is better."

In summery, there are any areas of value-but whatever area you go into it is important to choose the authentic thing.

to learn fast--(just to say the words in order and go on) t

Even though most of the time I try to learn fast--(just to say the words in order and go on) that is whether it is Gemara or Physics, etc, still there are times that I revert to an idea of saying the words forwards and backwards that seems to help in understanding complicated issues.
This idea of saying the words forwards and backwards you can even find in the sidur itself and it is brought by Rav Isaac Luria. Still I never heard of anyone applying it to math which is where I found it the most useful. [Forwards and backwards is how I manage to get through my Physics and Chemistry  courses at Polytechnic Institute of NYU. But it is only for a very concentrated type of learning. Most of the time I think it is best to do בקיאות fast learning.]

For example in learning Gemara or Reb Chaim Solveitchik, I have found it is best just to plow through a whole section or a whole page and then the next day to just repeat that same section. [and do this for many days in a row]

the belief system of the Torah is Monotheism

"And though all the forces of the sphere pervade all the existents..."
chapter II, 10 of the Guide
The Rambam far from having a mechanistic view of the universe, actually sees the cosmos as a single organism. A sort of "Gaia hypothesis" stretched to include the heavens!
But that Gaia spirit of the higher spheres is not the same thing as God. Worship of the spirit that permeates everything is to the Rambam idolatry.

The Rambam and all rishonim understand the Monotheism of the Torah to mean God made the world, and he is not the world.
The fact that the belief system of the Torah is Monotheism is so trivial that it really should not have to be brought up except for people that claim it holds differently. That is the almost universal belief of the Jewish religious world, and they definitely worship the spirit that pervades everything. That is pure idolatry to the opinion of the Rambam 

DNA does seem to determine a lot.

It is a good point that England was a caste society and reached its peak and greatness when that system was in operation. And in fact DNA does seem to determine a lot. I see this all the time. There are people who seem predisposed towards theft, others seem predisposed towards robbery with violence, others towards other bad traits. According to Sapolsky {Stanford} genes do determine a lot.
To me it seems certain belief systems help people to restrain bad traits and come to good traits. Other belief systems seem to aggravate already existing bad traits. But little comes close to the power that DNA has on people.
Reb Israel Salanter already noted the difficulty in one's correcting his own bad traits.
It seems pretty clear to me that when people think they are repenting, they are as a rule just reinforcing in themselves their own messed up ideas.It is clear like Rav Salanter said:One can have good traits without Musar. But one can not go from bad traits to good traits without Musar.

[Musar [ethical works from the Middle Ages] has a limited definition. Not everything people claim is Musar is actually Musar.
There are also however specific lessons  to accept from certain tzadikim. The Gra revealed the importance of learning Torah. The aspect of learning in depth however really is  a Litvak thing.

In any case if one would thing about the caste system idea the most likely place to look would be the descendants of Rav Yaakov Abuchatzaira. That is not from DNA, but rather some kind of אור מקיף divine light that seems to surround that family. Not that it is same thing as it used to be; still there is some aspect of the whole Bava Sali thing that I think is still there.

The descendants of Rav Abuchatzeira are mostly located in Israel.

T81 C major

natural law and Divine Law to the Rambam.

I am beginning to wonder if there is any real difference between natural law and Divine Law to the Rambam. The reasons for the laws we know were implicitly understood by the Chazal (Sages) except for the Red Heifer. But only later the Rambam spelled out the reasons.

But there does not seem to be any definite account of what Avraham Avinu's natural law approach might have been in the Guide. (That is Abraham the Patriarch). It is almost as if the Rambam is saying in order to get to natural law you have to keep the Torah. He certainly does not think of the legal structures of Ancient Greece as fulfilling the requirement of natural Law.
He puts the nomoi (laws) of the Greeks into the same area of the ravings of the Sabians in the Guide.
In the Guide, the Rambam makes clear most of the laws of the Torah are to bring to things that he considered natural law.

Socialist programs are not part of the constitution and not the Torah

Socialist programs are not part of the constitution and  not the Torah.  Dr Epstein (NYU) pointed out the general welfare clause is not a permission to benefit one part of the population at the expense of the other parts. It is almost always taken out of context.

I have long thought the voting for socialist programs which benefit the religious is against the Torah. Pretty soon after I got to Israel and realized the basic problems with the system- Torah for money, and  the religious voting for themselves other people's money, I dropped out of the system. I learned on my own at home or in the fields around Safed. That was not much learning, but at least it was for the sake of Torah, and not for money.

I have tried to keep down my critique on this because on rare occasions some good comes from it. But in general I think the Rambam was right that there should not be monetary payment for learning or teaching Torah.  When money gets involved with it, it ruins the holiness.

However there are great yeshivas where you can feel just when you walk in, that the Torah there is learned for its own sake and for those kinds of places I think it is  a great thing to support them.

Learning Torah for its own sake [not for money] constantly and with energy

Learning Torah for its own sake [not for money] constantly and with energy (with תמידות and מרץ) is an issue that comes up in Litvak yeshivas. Some people have found that making a yeshiva is  a good way to make money, so they pretend that this goal of learning constantly and with energy is, in fact, their goal. Others are straightforward enemies of this goal. They hate the idea of people learning Torah for its own sake. But if it is for money [like they do] -then it is OK.
This is not just an issue of a some intellectual puzzle, but for me was and still is a very personal issue.

The reason kollels were created [the original idea started with Reb Israel Salanter] was to remove one of the biggest obstacles of learning Torah--marriage.

That to some degree might seem to help, but to me it looks like it just contributes to the problems of people using Torah to make money.

The best idea to marry a "Bat Talmid Chacham" (the daughter of a authentic Torah scholar) [not the phony types].

The general answer to this problem is not known to me, except that people ought to be taught the importance of learning Torah for its own sake, and to do so on one's own, and to support the Litvak yeshivas which in fact do this.

I had a long history in this subject. To go into it in detail seems too much for me right now. but in short the issue can be divided into several time periods.
Time Period I: Yeshiva. That is where I first encountered the concept. Later reading the Nefesh Hachaim made it more clear. [The issue was not really dealt with in more general books of Musar]
Time Period II. Getting married. The girl I married was not exactly a Bat Talmid Chacham (the daughter of a authentic Torah scholar), but she certainly appreciated what I was doing in yeshiva.[Her father was a working guy.] Something about what I was doing seemed to affect her in some kind of deep way--enough to get her to run to NY and chase me for years, in spite of my constant refusals [and rude refusals.]. I guess you would have to say that something of the spirit of Authentic Torah must have touched her soul.

Time period III. Getting involved in Breslov. In some ways great. But as far as learning Torah goes, it caused me to lose interest. It is given lip service, but the actual essence is gone. Still that was a great period in many ways. It gave me interest in getting to Israel, and for the seven years I was there there was a kind of opening into a higher consciousness.

Time Period IV.  I found out how nasty the religious world really is.  A tremendous effort was spent after I returned to California  to separate me from my wife and children all because I was learning Torah.  That is learning the hard way to stay away from the religious world and the demonic "Torah teachers" that are obviously into Torah because that is where the money and power is.

Time Period V: trying to figure it all out. One good approach I discovered is Schopenhauer. He does deal with this question in a straightforward way. Human good is not something that interests the "Will."
That is however not very satisfying in my own case since it seems clear that in any case for the seven years in Safed I was not doing much learning Torah anyway. So it is kind of expected that when one has gone away from learning, and then tries to get back to it, that obstacles will be encountered.

In any case, I am no poster child for this particular position. If I got back into learning at all, it is a due to David Bronson with whom I learned Gemara with after all the above mentioned events.

The thing is the Greek States choose their form of government. And that is what made them free as opposed to Persian rule. But I see that any form of government can be corrupted. That is a good point. The Democrats definitely have shown that point all too well.

The Rambam does not put any form of government in the category of natural law. I assume he had read Aristotle's/ book on the constitutions of the Greek states.
He puts the nomoi of the Greeks and ravings of the Sabians all into one category. Clearly to him only the Torah itself can guarantee natural law.
This leaves one wondering nowadays when one finds religious neighbors to be particularly obnoxious, what could the Rambam have answered? That they are not keeping Torah well enough? Then what kind of state did he envision? One in which everyone is a tzadik?It is well known living under the rule of religious authorities is a Kafkaian nightmare.  

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t79 nwc format

laws of neighborhoods and my own problems with neighbors.

Little is known about the laws of neighborhoods and neighbors outside the Litvak yeshiva world where chapter two of Bava Batra is learned  once every seven years. The religious world focuses on religious rituals, and thus the aspects of Torah which deal with relationships between neighbors is ignored. This is just one example of what I have been saying for  along time. The Jewish religious world has nothing to do with Torah.

In any case, there are three basic opinions concerning things that cause damage to a neighbor's.  property. The Ri MiGash that to put things that would cause damage to a neighbor's wall if there was a wall are permitted to put there as long as there is no wall. If the neighbor puts up a wall then the things that cause damage must be removed. Another opinion is if the things were put there before the wall is built, they do not need to be removed. Another opinion is they can not be put there ever, because the neighbor might build a wall.

There seems to be a contradiction is the Beit Yoseph's Shulchan Aruch concerning this where he goes by the Ri MiGash.[I noted that Rav Shach goes into this in some detail.]

I noticed years ago that Reb Ahron Kotler had a big piece on this in his collected writings on Shas but never got a chance to learn it. My own study in Bava Batra was very limited to "Girsa" saying the words and going on along with the English Soncino. I never got much of a chance to do it in depth. [This was in spite of the fact that they had begun this in the Mir in NY when I was there, but by that time I was off into Seder Moad and also getting ready to come to Israel. Rav Ernster was given a Kirya in Safed by the Israel Government on condition that he fill it. Thus I was invited to Israel at that time. [I believe it was a Labor government at the time, since I am pretty sure the Likud never got into power until later.]
Hindsight suggests to me that being in Rav Ernter's kollel would not have been a bad option but at the time I though the taking tests to prove that you did the learning was along the lines of using Torah to make money. I still wonder about that. Some time later I saw that Shimon Buso was talking part in a program to learn and take tests  though clearly his intention was to  have an extra kind of motivation for the learning. If I had been smart I think I would have gone to Rav Fievelson's kollel in the old city of Safed--a litvak kollel. But in any case I was Moharosh's orbit {Rav Shick} at the time.  Still I was not into learning since after getting involved in Breslov my basic worldview had changed.

The Kirya of Rav Ernster was great for most of the time I was there. It got after some time people that were less than desirable neighbors. towards the end people took telling their children to stone my kids to indicate to me that I was not wanted there.

OPEN BORDERS

It was noted before that economists tend to look at things from the aspect of economy. The economic advisers to the White House during the Vietnam War looked at the war from the perspective of cost analysis to the North Vietcong. Their advice was based on the idea that if the war could be made non cost effective to the Vietcong, they would give up. It is hard to imagine worse advice.

If you would do that enough, all you will get is another Cambodia. Open Borders

Dr Caplan is the author of some really great essays. But it is true that on this  a few other issues he seems to be less that at his peak. This in fact is one of the reasons I stopped looking at that blog that he contributes to.
That author of the essay in "The Economist" writes
"Workers in rich countries earn more than those in poor countries partly because they are better educated but mostly because they live in societies that have, over many years, developed institutions that foster prosperity and peace. It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada. "

 If you would do that enough, all you will get is another Cambodia.

I was stolen from this morning as I went out to buy stuff for Shabat. Stealing is not uncommon in the Ukrainel.(It almost impossible to guard oneself from this.) But this event seems worse than usual, since it was my bank card along with money.
This probably means a lot of trouble for me to replace old documents. Mainly I consider things like this to be reminders to repent on my sins even though my repentance does not seem to ever last long.