Gra made his decision to sign the excommunication

The Gra made his decision to sign the excommunication. No compromises. I have already shown many times the problems that the Gra must have seen and I can not believe that people do not still see these same things. You do not need to look into history to see what that Gra felt was wrong. You can see it today.
It is strange they everyone thinks they are smarter than the Gra. Compromise with evil can not result in anything good.
The main trouble seems to be idol worship of their leaders. But the basic belief structure comes from the Shatz which also is a problem. But what ever the reason once you accept that the Gra had the halachic authority to make an excommunication then it in itself has halachic validity no matter if you agree with the reasons or not.

The trouble is there is no spark. No one seems outraged at the constant incessant trail of abuses. They figure as long at it does not hurt them directly, "Why get involved?" And when the abuse finally gets around to them then no one else wants to listen to their tale of woes.


And the further trouble is few people really can uphold the path of the Gra and Rav Shach and Reb Israel Salanter including me. For I have my own set of obligations including honor of my parents which mean I can not stand for the Torah alone approach. [My parents were clear about Torah with a Vocation.]

[Or perhaps it could be said that Rav Zilverman in the old city of Jerusalem in what could be called a yeshiva based on the path of the Gra is following that path faithfully. Also the Lithuanian Musar yeshivas to some degree seem to be adhering somewhat closely to the authentic path of Torah though they do ignore the signature of the Gra on that excommunication. This means the exact problems the Gra meant to avoid entered into the Litvak yeshiva world. The effects of ignoring the Gra are apparent.


For some reason in Israel in fact by a lot of Litvaks it seems to me that this subject of the cherem is taken more seriously than in the USA. I noted this a few time by Rav Shlanger the Mashgiach of Porat Yoseph in talking with his older married sons. [That is the father in law of Eliyahu Zilverman.]

And I have heard that a good number of places have spouted up based on the Gra's approach. [So when you see someone walking around with tefilin on that does not mean they are a part of Rav Zilverman's yeshiva. There are from what I have heard many other places that started up in the meantime that also take the Gra seriously.]

The major reason I think the Gra signed the Cherem was that he considered the whole business to be a scam of the Sitra Achra. --a way to penetrate the world of Torah.

The after blessing

בורא נפשות רבות וחסרונן על כל מה שברא להחיות בהן נפש כל חי ברוך אתה השם חי העולמים

חי is with a Tzerei 
נפש is feminine. Therefore the endings have to fit. Not "בהם"  and not "וחסרונם."

And there is no such thing as a bracha that simply ends baruch etc without a name of Hashem as the Gra noted. Then the end has to be like the Yerushalmi. 

Computer models

Avraham: Computer models are only as good as the assumptions they are built on which are often wrong, and often leave out external factors which are more important, and they depend on expansions which miss infinities.
For example see this lecture by Arthur Mattuck concerning y'=y^2. What ever the computer does it will not find the singularity.
{I should mention that all I really know about computer modeling is based on a few books, one was Numerical analysis that dealt in detail with the Runge Kutta method  that I read through about four times I think.But the books that deal with how to program computers do not usually deal with the above mentioned problem by Arthur  Mattuck that the computer can be mislead when trying to graph a ODE.]
In fact come to think of it, I do not think I ever saw any book on computer modeling that mentions this problem.

Reference Frame:

But they are also often - and maybe predominantly - demonstrably right, accurate, if not downright ingenious, and - especially - more accurate than predictions made without any models. This is an essential point that you, like O'Neill, try to obscure.
I didn't understand what this topic has to do with "infinities".

Avraham:
I meant the Taylor expansions or Numerical method. The computer will miss infinities as you go from point to close point unless by accident the computer happens to land on the infinity itself. So all I am saying is that when the computer shows a nice smooth line the reality might be that between those two points the graph goes to infinity. That is is all I meant.

In relation to this I think Catastrophe theory might be able to dig up those infinities, but I am not sure about that.
_______________________________________________________________________________


Computer models are used everywhere and are used to defend crazy stuff. Sometimes 9/11 conspiracies sometimes global warming the list is unlimited. Here is another comment I wrote:The Reference Frame mentioned this and also Steven Dutch. My own feeling about this I wrote in a comment on the Reference Frame. My comment was to the effect that after the first few floors of a building people depend on Finite Element Theory which is great approximation but not exact. To really understand what is going on after the first few floors you need Catastrophe Theory.

How can I put this? A lot of what goes on is dependent on computer modeling which is complete depends on the assumptions you start with which often is complete absurdity. So many papers start out with “We have found…” when in fact they found out nothing at all. They mean their computer model found ….

And even if their model somehow represents reality in some way which it usually does not anyway they always depends on expansions–which can miss infinities unless you expand at the exact point where the infinity is found.

Let me try to find the links I mentioned:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/911NutPhysics.HTM

http://motls.blogspot.com/2016/09/europhys-news-911-saw-controlled.html

Last thought. BYU is the same place that thought they came up with cold fusion with an amazingly sloppy chemistry set. I see no reason to pay attention to them.

knowing "how to learn"

It occurred to me that knowing "how to learn" is not complicated concept. It simply means "Don't skim." That is:- there is a time to skim, and that is the second seder, the afternoon session. But skimming is not knowing how to learn. Mainly knowing how to learn  means to learn Tosphot and to understand what he is saying.
It definitely does not mean to look up the Mahrasha or any rishonim or achronim or the Tur, Beit Joseph. Looking up these things is perhaps worthy and good,-- but it is not "knowing how to learn" which is to learn and understand the Gemara and Tosphot on the page.  For that reason it is the custom in any decent yeshiva to spend about a week or two on every page of Gemara because that is about how long it takes to get even the simple idea of what is going on on the page.

(Looking up achronim or rishonim is the equivalent of freshman learning.)

Knowing how to learn is what all rishonim [authorities of the Middle Ages] and achronim [authorities after and including Rav Yoseph Karo] thought people were already doing when they wrote their books. But now this essential thing is skipped and no one notices because people that teach Torah are mainly from the Sitra Achra and are not teaching Torah from the realm of holiness.

A few thoughts about STEM and the Chafetz Chaim

A few thoughts about STEM and the Chafetz Chaim

1) As far as STEM goes a computer major is probably well on  the way of taking care of the obligation to learn the "work of Creation"

 Rav Zilverman the Rosh Yeshiva of Aderet Eliyahu in the old city of Jerusalem told me once that learning engineering (electrical or other types) can be considered as a part of what the Rambam calls "the work of creation."

2) The Sefer the Chafetz Chaim is important to learn and to keep. I think I finished it at least once with the notes at the bottom of the page. -but probably not more than once.

At one point I believe I tried to get through every single book the Chafetz Chaim had written and probably got through a lot.

3)  I am in fact very impressed with Kant though I did not have a chance to learn him in high school when I was doing my philosophical research.  I have to mention that Kant was saying something stronger than the fact that human beings have a limit to their knowledge. He was saying pure reason –reason totally abstracted away from people also has a limit where it can not venture and if it does it comes up with self contradictions.

4) Simcha  Zissel of Kelm. one of the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.  held very strongly about this idea   to have sessions  in Torah that one does not deviate from at all.

diet and exercise.

My learning partner tends to focus on diet and he suggested a mixer and vegetables. He was not thrilled with fruit because of the Rambam ([Maimonides). [Maimonides thought only a small list of fruit is good like grapes and dates and a few others that I forgot. This makes sense because they are mainly sugar.]







It was not that he disagreed with exercise. Rather he was in a situation where it was not possible and so he focused on diet. He thinks every vegetable has some curative property. He might have mentioned beets to me, but if he did it was only in the general context of vegetables.

For me a mixer became impracticable. So I stick with a knife  and plain simple raw vegetables.
[A woman, (Natasha, in the Ukraine) mentioned beets with sour cream to me and I also found that beets with olive oil is good.]





He also mentioned many other things like  a raw egg. This was in fact how Jews used to have coffee or tea in Eastern Europe instead of cream. The raw egg tends to cancel out appetite for unhealthy food.

I might mention that I think people are too addicted to cooking. Not everything has to be cooked.
A girl, Barbara  from Germany mentioned to me a staple of her diet growing up was yogurt with raw oatmeal.

I should add that his basic approach comes down to what is known as the paleo diet,-but with an emphasis on green vegetables

Holocaust denial

There is a lot of Holocaust denial going around. I find this odd. My grandparents came over to the USA before World War II and so survived. But no one else in my family that was in Europe at the time did. My grandfather Yaakov had a brother Avraham with a wife and seven young children who were all murdered by the Nazis. That was not because of working too hard in  labor camp.