Mediaeval Ethics, Musar, Pirkei Avot and learning Gemara in depth.

 The year before I went to the yeshiva called Shar Yashuv in Far Rockaway I spent a lot of time on Pirkei Avot with Shimshon Refael Hirsches' Commentary. In Far Rockaway the attitude was to plunge the students into hard core lumdut [deep learning of Talmud] as soon as possible on the theory that if one does not get it then and there, one will never get it. And I have seen this theory is substantiated in fact.

Learning Pirkei Avot today I would recommend with Avot DeRabbi Natan, the Gra the Rambam and Shimshon Refael Hirsch also.

But that is for Musar.[Learning Ethics= "Musar"] 

As for Gemara, I would in fact recommend going as deeply as possible as soon as possible-because otherwise people never get it at all. I would prioritize going deep into the Gemara with the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach.[Rav Elazar Menachem Shach from the Ponovitch Yeshiva in Bnei Brak]. [Why is learning in depth important? According the Hegel once  a  people stops questioning its institutions and beliefs, then Spirit  dies and cannot 
further develop.]

What happens when people do not learn Gemara in depth at the very beginning of their yeshiva years is a kind of self delusion. They think they understand that which they do not understand. This is different than you find in other fields in which there are experts that know the different between real expertise and phony. In yeshivas nowadays the phonies are the majority. To find the real thing you have to dig deep or go to authentic yeshiva like Ponovitch or the Mir in NY. 

In other words the problem of phonies  is unique in the Torah world, and does not have an equivalent or parallel in the academic world.



[You could take instead of Rav Shach's book the book of Reb Chaim Soloveitchik or his disciples Reb Baruch Ber or Shimon Shkop. But  Rav Shach is  easier to understand.]

In short what I recommend is medieval ethics plus the oral law.

Blacks as group behavior

I think Blacks are more interested in taking down the USA than in who will pay for things after whites are gone. [That is Blacks as group behavior and attitude. Individuals can and sometimes are completely different than the bell curve of their group. That is because people have free will. But that does not change the fact that there is such a thing as group behavior. And in particular group behaviors as directed towards a certain goal. For example Muslim behaviors to destroy Christianity and Israel.

Once you've allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again is an ally.

Once you've allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again is an ally. We can worry about what the city should look like once we've put out the fires and have stopped the barbarians from actively setting more of them.

Vox Populi

Belief in God. I few ideas i wrote on Roosh V

Belief in God is rational. Everything has a cause. So unless there is a first cause, then you would have an infinite regress. And then nothing could exist. Therefore there must be a first cause. Therefore God, the first cause, exists. QED. (You could prove the first step a priori that everything has a cause by noting that nothing can come from nothing. This makes it a priori, not just an empirical observation).

The idea here is to limit the number of causes. I am not saying everything needs a cause. I am saying just the opposite. That there must be a limit or else nothing could exist.

The idea is similar to what you have in logic concerning the infinite regress.

The quantum mechanics that I am aware of does not say something can come out of nothing. Rather before something it measured it is just a probability.

For those it might be helpful here to look at this from the standpoint of Kant. Unconditioned realities exist but their character is part dependent on the subject and part on the object.

I am not trying to go further than the First Cause.

A priori , not based on observation, is how we know cause and effect. The question of Induction is not my intention here.

I would have mentioned Godel's adaption of Anselm's proof but that seems like too much to discuss here

The Musar Movement of Reb Israel Salanter I think can be divided into different areas of emphasis: Fear of God, Trust in God, good character traits e.g  speaking the truth.
Each disciple came away from Reb Israel with something different.

But I think the track and idea of trying to find a limited numbers of things to emphasize is a better that just "keep Torah" since people have only a limited number of rules they keep in mind on a daily basis. So that set of rules has to be the set that contains the whole Torah in potential.

Cults are the greater danger than  physical means of destroying people's lives. By enslaving a person's mind, you enslave the whole person.
Sadly not enough research has been done in this area. It is hard fir me to believe that there is a single family that has not been touched and ruined by some cult. And yet this problem scarcely gets public mention. I have no idea why something that obviously is very destructive and effects everyone is barely worth public mention? You would think it was just a few odd balls here and there that fall for the shenanigans.

I have from some kind of odd sort of curiosity done much reading on cults. Both their own sets of religious books and also other sources. It is hard to come to any conclusion about any group because they have the power to convince.

Jogging is something that President Kennedy introduced on a large scale in the USA. Very few people engaged in it until he made a very public matter out of it.



He certainly deserves the credit for making jogging popular world wide. I wish I would do more of it.

But I also would like to recommend sit ups. There is something about sit-ups which I find amazing. It is like I get up re- energized in a way I do not see with jogging.

In terms of fat, I recommend putting in a raw egg in your coffee instead of cream. This takes away the desire to eat unhealthy foods the whole day. [This I heard from my learning partner.]