You can wonder about mixing belief systems. When the Rambam combined Aristotle with Torah, that must have seemed at the time like mixing apples and oranges. However you would not ask that if one would apply that principle to Torah and Medicine. It seems like they deal with two different areas. But Aristotle's Metaphysics must have seemed to some people as not really a different area than Torah but rather a conflicting area.
It is hard to come up with a good rule of thumb about this.

"מחאה" (to object to wrong doing)

It was pointed out to me once by Leibel [the son of the Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir Rav Shmuel Berenbaum] that there is an obligation of "מחאה" (to object to wrong doing--even when it seems you will not be listened to.]
In fact you see that in the Gemara in the events about Kamza and Bar Kamza. There was some wrong act that was done. But that act was not the cause of the fate of the Temple to be destroyed. Rather the fact that the sages of the time did not object to that act.
You see this also in the Old Testament with the tribe of Benjamin that did not object to the treatment of the concubine at Giva. And in that case God himself revealed to Israel to continue wiping out that tribe because of the fact that they did not object to wrong doing.

Similarly you can see why the Gra would have signed the letter of excommunication. Same reason. To object to evil--even if you know you will not be listened to.

two great Litvak yeshivas

There was a certain degree of grace that I merited to go to two great Litvak yeshivas. Shar Yashuv and the Mir in NY. Only later did I come to Israel to learn in kollel. But the kollel thing in Israel seemed to be structured in a way that I though was not really proper and so I dropped out of it and learned Torah on my own and said to my wife that we would trust in God to help with making a living.

[That is the short and sweet of my yeshiva career. The beginning of it was a meeting with Shmuel Glazer who was going to a different Litvak yeshiva in Baltimore (I think of Rav Rudderman).

I was in Asbury Park at the time, and met him through an old man at a hotel that my family was running. [The Hamilton Hotel]. 

What is great about Litvak yeshivas is basically the fact that they learn Torah in the straight and narrow path. They do not add nor subtract. What is Torah is Torah,- and what is not is not.
So in the few years I spent there I got a basic idea of what Torah is all about. That is on one hand the most obvious advantage of the Litvak yeshiva world. Another hidden advantage is that if you get into it, you can really get touched with "the spirit of Torah", but that is a little harder to put my finger on.

But it is not as if they are going with the path of the Gra exactly. Rather that they get about as close to the real thing as possible. But it would be nice if they would stick with the Gra more than they do.  The way I see it is that if they would take the Gra and Rav Shach a bit more seriously, that would help to bring clarity to what really is Torah and help people avoid the Dark Side and pseudo Torah.
 [Just for clarity let me just mention that basic set of the great Litvak yeshivas is Mir, Chaim Berlin, Torah VeDaat in NY and Ponovitch, and Brisk in Israel. [But Ponovitch has branches and also non-official branches of people that learned at Ponovitch and started yeshivas along the lines of Ponovitch. Shar Yashuv is known as a beginner's kind of place --which is true for the first year. But my impression was that after the first year they get rapidly into deep Torah waters in a way that falls nowhere behind the other great Litvak yeshivas.

[I did not learn Musar in Shar Yashuv because that is a Litvak yeshiva, but not a Musar Yeshiva. The idea really comes from Rav Haim of Brisk that Musar can be and often is a distraction. So Shar Yashuv was based on that model. They want the time in yeshiva to be for getting to the "real thing" as deep and fast as possible. Yet later at the Mir I did learn Musar. And I still am not sure which model of  Litvak yeshiva is better. With or without Musar.] 

Is China behind it? To me it seems unclear. I was convinced for years that the KGB at least had a hand in the riots of the 1960's. And later that became clear with the defection of Bezmenov [See Bezmenov utube]

I can imagine China is doing the same thing about trying to bring down the USA. But I highly doubt if they are doing it in the same ways.
[If Russia has to get a sample of sand from an American beach they would send in a commando Spetsnaz unit by submarine and commandeer the beach while gathering some sand. The China would send in a thousand tourists and each one would pick up one grain of sand and bring it back to China. That is probably how China is now dealing with the USA. But just like a friend of mine who was a KGB agent told me, (according to him at any rate) the KGB simply did not have the resources that would have been needed to subvert the entire USA in the 1960's/ It had to be Americans doing it to Americans. It seems the same nowadays. People have been so indoctrinated in Communists values in American public schools and colleges that they are simply taking the next logical step.

What Americans do right now I think has a lot to do with how the future will look. For one thing American might stand up to the mob. They might get armed and packing. They might refuse the Tyranny of Antifa. Or they might go down as sheep. Wear the masks. Obey the tyranny. I think a lot will depend if Americans are willing to accept tyranny.

You can't say, "I can't breath" without breathing. Just try it. It is a physical impossibility. Air must be going through the vocal chords for them to work.

Floyd  did not suffocate, he was talking (you can't say "I can't breath" without breathing) up until the moment his damaged heart, further impacted by massive doses of meth and fentanyl, gave out from stress, likely the stress of his resisting arrest.

The Middle Ages had one main problem to solve. The relation between faith and reason. And a sub area was free will. [There also was the issue of the relation between religion and government.]
The free will issue comes up in the Rambam and Raavad in Laws of Repentance.

Though Kant, Hegel and Leonard Nelson do not deal with this directly, their insights can shed light on the issue of free will.

One thing that I noted is that knowledge does not cause events. Rather knowledge is a result of something. [At least in my naive way of looking at things.] I see a blue desk so then I know there is a blue desk. [Someone must have painted it blue.] So the fact that God knows if one will be righteous or not does not cause the person to be righteous. Knowledge is different than being. It is a result of being. But with God, with "logos" the order is different. His knowledge comes first and then being. But still that knowledge --in order to be knowledge, in any sense of the word, can not force a thing to be so. It has to be a result of the thing being so.

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