Robert E Lee.

State rights makes a lot of sense to me. I could never figure out what the war was about. The Constitution was a contract. The South felt the North had violated the terms of the contact by interfering with local laws.{And the Sumpreme Court agreed. That should have been the end of the diagreement. } So they thought they were justified because of breach of contract.
I think we ought to celebrate the birthday of Robert E Lee. January 19. It should be a national holiday not just for the South but the North also because it means the great importance of the  Constitution of the U.S.A..

[Dred Scott was decided in 1857. And after all, that is the job of that court to decided what is constitional. The North decided to ignore the Constitution.]

The theory of the Background.

The way that Torah is interpreted in the religious world is that the foremost obligation is to be part of the religious world. But that seems to me to be highly inaccurate. But I can not disprove it except because of my own background. My feeling based on my own experience is that joining the religious world is the worst possible thing to do in terms of actually keeping the holy Torah.
The closest I could see to a sincere effort to actually learn and keep Torah according to its own background and core assumptions was in the two Litvak yeshivas that I was in in New York, Shar Yashuv and the Mir. But outside of the yeshiva world based on the Oral and Written Law of Moses, I found the religious world to be a hot bed of קטנות המוחין triviality and backbiting and a kind of living nightmare while awake.

The only way I could understand this was by means of Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle which he bases on Hobbes. The idea of the super-organism as being Lucifer.
Though he does not look at it in the same way the fact that he uses the term Lucifer to me implies a lot. That is by joining a larger community one gets to be sacrificed to Lucifer.










[The theory of the Background

John Searle: "What philosophers like Quine and Wittgeinstein got right, however, is the fact that verbal expressions underdetermine meaning, i.e. the number of ways that a given sentence could be misinterpreted is so great that, in their view, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning is something that doesn't even happen, because meaning in the traditional sense doesn't exist."


Sentences express abstract features, but these are always in a context of other abstract features (what Searle calls the "Network") 


The theory of the Background of Searle


"The thesis of the Background is simply this: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional."]

Lawsuits and Affirmative Action.

Companies are generally trying to avoid lawsuits. If they  are openly not hiring incompetent people, then they are guaranteed to get lawsuits piled onto them. So they have to make  a show of being interested in hiring  people that got their degree because of Affirmative Action. 
But then they need to have competent people to do the actual work, so they have to hire only whites or Asians.

t6 b flat major

t6 midi t6 nwc

Old Testament

My feeling is if the Old Testament occupies a central place in national life, then God, home, school and government are kept together, everything else good and right will happen. Remove the Bible, and civilization topples and crumbles into dust.

Brett Stevens: The question then becomes whether the Bible is the cause of that unity, or merely a common conduit that unites the other necessary parts.

Avraham Rosenblum says:

1. I would have to go with the former option based on the little I know about European and Roman History. I know this can be argued both ways, but it is simply my impression. Personally, I just can not see Western Civilization without the Bible [and Plato and Aristotle] as the foundation stone.

Early America felt also the Bible to be the main thing.  Americans up until 1920 saw the USA as Bible territory and wanted to defend it in that way. 

The trouble is with people that want to wipe out God and the Bible from the Earth.

[Just for the record, I am not against the New Testament. I think rather that Christians have misinterpreted Jesus. That is they go with Paul instead of with Peter and James as you can see in the Recognitions of Clement, the first pope of Rome. Furthermore, I see Jesus in a positive sense. This positive sense is not hard to define for myself because I learned the books of Reb Nachman from Uman, so I have a idea of what a "tzadik" (Jewish saint) means. But that concept can be hard to explain without that background.  In short, let me try to explain. It means a person that is in connection with some Divine trait in the world of Emanation. Thus, that person brings a certain kind of light or revelation into the world. Thus, I see Jesus as being a kind of Jewish Tzadik along the lines of Shimon Ben Yochai, Chanina Ben Dosa, or the Gra.

This idea I base mainly on a mystic Avraham Abulafia. [The favorite subject of Professor Moshe Idel at Hebrew University.] It has been awhile since around 1992 the first night of Hanuka that I was going through the micro films that had the writings of Avraham  Abulafia, and I came across this opinion of Rav Abulafia. I was so shocked that I could not move out of my seat, even though I had to go and light the Hanuka lights. [I was aware that Rav Abulafia himself was subject to debate. Still the opinion of Reb Chaim Vital (who quotes the books of Rav Abulafia at length) weighs a lot with me. And besides all that,-- I was aware of the opinion of Rav Yaakov Emden in his famous essay on this subject. Another important consideration is: acta non verba, deeds not words count. That is to say,-- that if I had not gone through a whole set of difficulties before that time, I would probably not have been open to the ideas of Rav Abulafia. I had to have seen where  deeds  did not correspond to words, and then seen where deeds corresponded to words. After seeing that clearly on a statistical significant basis, not a random basis, then I was much more open to accepting the words of Rav Avraham Abulafia.


Appendix: (1) I am aware that the Recognitions of Clement has a good deal of debate on it. But I am basing my opinions about this on much more. In my opinion you can see this in the NT itself.

(2) You can nowadays check up the opinion of Rav Abulafia since in the meantime someone made a printed edition of all of his works. You could also simply get the first book of Professor Moshe Idel at Hebrew University which  was in fact his Ph.D thesis. 

(3) The literal meaning of verses of the Old Testament is important. אין מקרא יוצא ידי פשוטו. Still sometimes its meaning is not literal. Like when Kind David said in Psalms "I am a worm and not a man."

(4) For what I mean by Emanation: the idea is based on the Ari Isaac Luria, but it is rather simple. It means a higher world (or pipeline) of God's holiness. One should not worship any tzadik, however belief in a tzadik brings a kind of blessing or flux into oneself. It is the same kind of thing that we believe in the prophecy of Moses or Samuel, but we do not worship them.

Some people are not very happy about Jesus because of the massacres of Jews during the Middle Ages,[e.g. 1240-1246 in Germany until stopped by Innocent IV on July 5, 1247 by letters he wrote to all German and French bishops demanding a stop to the persecution and redress of the wrongs..] There were a lot and they were horrific. Still abusus non tollit usum. If not then little could be justified.

The approach of the Rambam (Maimonides)

The approach of the Rambam (Maimonides) is pretty clear. The Oral Law, the Written Law, Physics and Metaphysics. I mean that it is easy to miss this message if one learns only the commentary on the Mishna and the Mishne Torah יד החזקה. But you can not miss this message in the Guide for the Perplexed. (It is in the Mishne Torah also but you have to know where to look.) The thing that makes this hard for people is they think if they do not understand every word they can not go further. Or they think it is only for smart people.
But as the Rambam makes clear, the mitzvah of learning Torah is for everyone young and old smart or dumb. The only way I can see however that this is possible for myself is by the method of learning brought in the Gemara Shabat,, to say the words and go on and not even care of you understand on the first reading. For you will understand after reading the material a second and third time etc.

[What I do with some texts is to get to some point in the middle an then do the chapters in reverse order as a kind of review. That is let' say the book has 600  pages. What I do with some books is to get to page 100 and then do the section in reverse order but still in the way of just saying the words and going on. For example lets say the last chapter I did was chapter 10 with ten sections. What I dd is 10.10. Then 10.9; then 10.8, etc. This I found best for texts in Math and Physics and I also did this for the writings of Isaac Luria.

T3 E flat major  [T3 in midi]