There used to be a lot of really good songs being sung on Shabat in Brooklyn, New York. I fear they are mostly being forgotten. I remember my friend at the Mir , Shelomo Berger, who had in his family tradition and really nice Yah Ribon Olam. It was almost like a small symphony. I also remember when I was at the school of Shelomo Friefeld the Yom Kipper  and Rosh HaShanah service like like a  great Beethoven Symphony. It was not that the songs [nigunim ] were more accurate, but that the songs were connected and related in the way that Mozart or Beethoven would weave a strong rigorous framework with a few basic themes. My sadness about all this being forgotten is not just one sided. It applies also to the spirit of Torah that existed then.  It was a vast enterprise to build up a moral and just society according to the Divine law.

The social "meme" was Torah. People acted by their own free will according to the dictates of God's Law. Thus you had a moral decent society as long as that lasted. What went wrong is a mystery to me. At some point the social structure which was in place to protect from dangers of the secular world became worse than the secular world.  I think a lot of its attraction was based on the idea that it gave immunity from the evils of secular society. But this protection became instead a kind of trap.

So in simple terms what was right was a joint community effort to keep the Law of God. תורת משה. What went wrong is that this ceased to be the major motivation. People began to use Torah as a means to make money and status. 

An argument by Ruth Marcus helps the Godel's proof of the existence of God.

An argument by Ruth Marcus helps the Godel's  proof of the existence of God. One critique is that there seems to be a contradiction in different perfections.
The argument of Marcus about moral perfections seems to overcome this objection.

Marcus defines a consistent set of moral principles as one in which there is some "possible world " in which they are all obeyable. That they may conflict in the actual world is not a mark of inconsistency. As in the case of necessity of identity, there was a resistance to this interpretation of moral conflict. Her argument counts against a widely received view that systems of moral rules are inevitably inconsistent.[3]

I have modified version of Ayn Rand's idea

I have modified version of Ayn Rand's idea that a society follows it philosophers. I think a society also follows its religion. If the society is unjust, then you do not need to bother examining the religion.

People also have two modes of operation. Inherent character and world view. And these are warring. Sometimes bad character warps a good world view. Sometimes a bad world view warps good character. And sometimes the opposite. The Geon from Vilna has a similar idea and you certainly see this in Isaac Luria's writings in Shar Hagilgulim.

In any case Ayn Rand has a wealth of great ideas

Once blacks became lawyers, they made it their business to check that every corporation had an exact amount of blacks working for it, and every bank was giving loans to an exact amount of blacks.

  For people that are unaware of the problem, the failure of the banks,  was because they were forced to make toxic loans to blacks. Once blacks became lawyers, they made it their business to check that every corporation had an exact amount of blacks working for it, and every bank was giving loans to an exact amount of blacks. [Less than this exact amount would bring a law suit of discrimination and the owner would lose his business and be put into jail.] Normally, a bank manager can tell when a loan is a bad idea. He sees an unemployed black walking into his bank asking for a home loan. Normally, he would show him the door.
But because of the fear of lawsuits, he would have to give him the loan.

Normally, an employer can tell when a black person is not able to do a certain job. In such a case, he would not hire him. But then there is the real possibility of being sued for discrimination and losing his entire company. So he hires the black, and puts him in some position in which he hopes the black will not do too much damage to his firm.
You multiply the effect of this several million times, and you get  the story of the failure of the American economy.
It makes me wonder about the wisdom of the Civil War. After all the American Constitution is in its essence a contract that the Northern States were unilaterally trying to change. This is in general not how contracts work. The normal way a contract works is that after you sign on the dotted line you can't change the terms without the consent of the other party. This is clearly what the North was doing and so by definition of contract it justified the secession of the southern states.

A second application of the compactness theorem shows that any theory that has arbitrarily large finite models, or a single infinite model, has models of arbitrary large cardinality (this is the Upward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem).


Two years later I don't know why I wrote the above note but I think it was because I wanted to prove the consistency of the  idea of Godel that a being can have an infinity of positive traits. He uses this idea in his proof of the existence of God. And it has been criticized. I thought to answer that criticism with the Lowenheim Skolem theorem. [Say the ''s'' in Skolem as in English-- not ''sh''.][This is similar to why C^n is not used instead of C^infinity, which is the it makes no difference which manifold you use. So C^infinity is always used.]

The actual idea of Gödel's proof of the existence of God came from Anselm. People argued whether it was rigorous or not. Leibniz showed that it is. Godel put it into logical notation and thus it is easily shown by on proof checking software program computer that is is a rigorous proof. No one dares to suggest that the proof is not rigorous. Rather the critics focus on the axioms.

[Hegel held that it is a valid proof and in fact the entire system oif Hegel is all about how to get to God--the absolute- as he makes clear.]

I learned Books of Ethics (Musar) along with the Talmud.  This set of books  set of books were written in the middle ages and are meant to distill the basic ethics of the Talmud.

I once heard say that whenever one is asked for charity, he should always give and mot ask about who is asking. This is derived from a law in the Shulchan Aruch about Purim. It so happened that I was in a certain city playing the violin on the street. In this city there were anti Semites.
Eventually other beggars stated asking me for money as I was playing the violin. There was one German fellow who also used to ask me for money. He thought that since I was playing Mozart that I must like Germans. In fact he is wrong. I just happen to like Mozart. However since he is poor and he he was asking for money so according to this idea of always giving to a poor person I had to oblige. Once he heard his friends in the center of town scheming to rob and kill me, and warned me and  introduced me to the head of the Mafia in that area and told him to keep watch out for me. It so happened that the head of this Mafia was also of German extraction [though he spoke  only Russian].
That was the end of that problem.

After this I thought to myself of the verse cast your bread on the face of the waters and in the space of many days you will find it again.

Eli: Spodek: Really relationships are reflections of world powers.

 Eli: Spodek: Really relationships are reflections of world powers.


Sarah Adelle Spodek:|or world powers are reflections of relationships!"


Me:   However Hegel (and people that borrowed his ideas like the feminists and communists and nazis and psycho therapists) reduce all relationships to power struggles. I tend to think that this is not true and that in fact the idea of borrowing from Hegel is not a smart idea.
However the point of Sara is true that international relationships are highly based on personal motives and the actual people involved more that the interest of each nation.