Hebrew calendar i

The way I see it the first night of Hanuka ought to be Thursday night [the first day should be December 7]. This would be based on the idea that the actual beginning of the Jewish month should be at the time of the molad [when the path of the moon and sun are on the same longitude.]. It is not that I am trying to disagree with the Rambam that says the present day Hebrew calendar is from Mount Sinai. It is just that his position seems to me to be untenable. I have no fun out of disagreeing with the Rambam, but in this case I have to. The present day calendar was the calendar that was accepted in ancient Athens and instituted by Meton. It is not mentioned in the Talmud anywhere. The idea that Hillel the second sanctified it is also simply nonsense. If he had done so it would have been mentioned in the Talmud.
Lacking a specific calendar, we have to fall back on the simple  idea of the Torah itself and the Talmud in Sanhedrin that the time of the beginning of the month is the conjugation. [See the opinion of Rava and Rav Ashi in Sanhedrin page 10 side b as Rashi explains them there.]

Welfare checks for not working were non-existent. If you did not work you went to a nice comfy Soviet Prison. I am just letting the people in the USA know what they are getting themselves into with their African President

 The blacks in the USA are activity trying to create a welfare  state in which the white people will work and the blacks will enjoy their welfare checks and get university degrees by means of Affirmative Action [every university must have the same percentage of blacks that there are in the general population outside the University. also every business. Otherwise the university is sued for racial discrimination] instead of the traditional way by study).
This is hiden in the USA by Hollywood always portraying blacks as saints and by the fact that there are outstanding black people like Est and the supremo court Justice Sowell.  But these few black people do not change the general animosity of blacks towards everything that America represents. and their attempt to turn it into a  African Socialist state.

White people are forgetting an important fact about welfare states-people work. In USSR there was no welfare. Thought it is true that bread was 22 kopecks [less than five cents] and doctors were free, still people had to work. A person that did not work was sent to prison for an average of three years. If after that he still did not work he was sent to Siberia. Ar,y service was an obligation. And after that you got three month vacation. But right after two weeks someone from the government would come and find out if you already had work lined up. It had to be written on your work card. Welfare checks for not working were non-existent. If you did not work you went to a nice comfy Soviet Prison. I am just letting the people in the USA know what they are getting themselves into with their African President

The basic freedoms that American took for granted a generation ago are gone

I think a lot of the problem in America is a lack of Judeo-Christian values. The types of values you were taught at home and in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts: honor, loyalty, trust in God.
Now America  is a society that is constantly on the lookout for new values. And when Americans arrives at some new value, they hold from it as if it was given at Mount Sinai, (Instead of the actual Torah which was given at Mount Sinai.)  It was inevitable that as the media keep on portraying black people as great saints, (and the bad guys in movies are always  businessman) that eventually they would get a black president who is sucking the life blood out of America.  But you can't call him evil. Nor a sinner. Nor a racist against white people. That would be a sin.
  The only hope I see at this point for America is a return to the Constitution of the USA. But I don't see that this could ever happen. The basic freedoms that American took for granted a generation ago are gone. In it place is a a society of vampires.

Hard exercise lifts testosterone levels.
[I used to jog but it was too public. Now I exercise at home. In the USSR they had a 10 minute radio program every day at 7:00 AM. This encouraged people to exercise for ten minutes in the morning. I think this is an amazing and great idea.

Alcohol diminishes testosterone.
Sex once a week lifts levels of testosterone
Bad for testosterone: cell phones and wifi  waves.

No hormones. Stop sugar.  Plastics demolish testosterone levels.





I am not in favor of testosterone therapy. I don't think it does anything. It is like vitamins. The body needs it -but it needs it in a natural way.

I know many Christians have a negative idea towards sex. This seems to me to be a good approach to some degree because when guys chase after girls the girls tend to run away. It seems a basically retrained approach is best. However just for the record let me say that I think the Christian attitude is highly based on Paul and not very much on the Torah. [In the book of Tecla, Paul basically says that anyone who has sex will not get into the kingdom of heaven]. In the Torah itself we find a different approach. Calev Ben Yefuna had two girlfriends, and he was "totally with God. " וימלא אחרי השם
Not only do we not find criticism for his several wives and two girls friends, but he is the only person in the entire  Bible that it says about him this unique phrase. On some people it says they were righteous, others it say walked with God. Other walked before God. But to be totally with God? That unique phrase is only used on Calev who was definitely having sex outside of marriage. [That is what a פילגש is. I looked up the place in the Shulchan Aruch which brings this argument between the Rambam and the Raavad and I looked at the Gra and he brings this proof to the Raavad from Calev Ben Yefuna.]

I should mention that health has been a major concern of my learning partner for some time. So before and after we learn our session of Talmud he fills me in with the latest insights.
I have not mentioned them collectively but a few  times. Let me say he got me started on beets a few years ago. I was over weight and he said to me something about vegetable juice. He had a vegetable mixer and that was his thing in those days.

Now you have to understand that he takes more care of his diet than he would normally have to do because he is in a situation  where he can't jog or take long strenuous walks. But recently I found myself in a similar kind of situation so I also am taking more of a look at diet.

At any rate, in those days the vegetable mixer was not working for me either, so I just started having a raw beet with black bread in the morning. I would do a short math session. Then I would jog. Well you can guess the weight just came off like that. Bamm!

Any questions about diet I ask my learning partner who spends a good amount of time studying this subject. But I also learned from him the idea of egg yokes. I found this surprising because in fact Ashkenazic Jews have used egg yokes as coffee creamer for about 200  years. Not just as nourishment but also that it makes one not want bad food.

When he mentioned this to me about egg yokes I told him about Arnold Schwarzenegger in some movie that puts raw eggs in a mixer when he got up in the morning. His comment was why do you think he looks like that? If you are in the USA however you want to make sure there are not anti antibiotics in the chickens from where the eggs come from. Even in areas where people grow their own food like the Ukraine  or Russia there is still a difference between eggs. Brown ones are more likely to be antibiotic free.

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