Rav Maasud Abuchazeira and his son Rav David.

You can see the fact that honor of one's parents is more severe than is commonly known from the rebellious son.
It is a lot easier to incur the death penalty for disobeying one's parents than people are aware of. It does not need a lot of conditions. That is you need the rebellious son to take something of his father's without permission. [That is stealing]. And then you need him to buy wine and meat. [To go shopping with the money]. Then the parents bring him to a small court of three judges and they give the son lashes. If the son does it again, they take him to the larger city court of 23 judges and they give the death penalty to the son. [Every city had a court of 23].

You can see the severity of this also in the events in the life of Rav Maasud Abuchazeira and his son David. Rav David was in fact a very great tzadik. But one day his father said something that sounded like a complaint to Rav David. Rav David asked, "Why does my father complain?" Rav Maasud, Looked at him and said "I had a great diamond, and now I have lost it." [Meaning that David had lost his great spiritual level]. Then David realized what he had done and went into exile. Then after some time he returned home and when he got to the edge of the city he began cawing on his knees until he got to his father and begged forgiveness.

However parents that are wicked are an exception. Even in the strict legal sense. Rav Shach has a section about this issue in his Avi Ezri. 

This is the Age of Disappointment. People get involved in some political or spiritual group with the best of intentions. Then discover the group is based of fraud or some kind of scam.
The good people will leave the group and spend the rest of their lives wondering what went wrong.
   Some might spend their time fighting the group after realizing it was based on lies. Other might just try to pick up the pieces of their broken lives and get on with things.

  This is different than previous generations when there were plenty of all kinds of groups with all types of strange ideas,-but (and this is a big "but") they did not lie about their basic beliefs in order to entice people.

It seems more noble to warn others and to remove the evil. But not everyone is up to that.

[I am thinking about the warning of the Gra. That is the signature on the letter of excommunication. The fact is that was ignored. But now that it is clear that he was 100% right, people ought to themselves repent, and heed his warning and even warn others.]

I am wondering during the Black Plague  in the Middle Ages, did people need to get tested to see if they had it? How can something be a deadly virus, if one needs to be tested to even see if he has it?

the values that the USA was founded on --the Bible and the Enlightenment can and will survive.

So when people go insane what does that mean? I think that it is two things. One is Hegel's dialectics. where God [Absolute Spirit] is working in the world by a kind of thesis anti thesis synthesis process. And combine that with Heidegger that Being is coming into the clearing.

"racism" and categories of sins

I have never been very impressed with the "racism" charge. I have not seen anywhere in the Bible that that is considered a sin.
If it means feeling superior to others because you belong to some racial group or some other group , well why not? Let's say one is an American, and feels superior to others because of the great things America has accomplished. And then someone insults him, "You are an American" or, "You are a patriot," as a slur. Well so what?
Besides that there is no such sin. There are lots of categories of sins. The Gates of Repentance goes into them in detail. [By R Yona of Gerondi]. But racism is not there. Besides that, people ought to welcome it. It is a compliment to feel that your group has accomplished great things.
So if you are a Wasp, White Anglo Saxon Protestant, then feel racist, and proud of your race. When other races have invented anything even a trillion light years away from this then they will also have reason to feel proud of their race. 

People do not usually put the Gra and Rav Shach in the same category as Rav Nahman of Breslov. But to me that seems like a mistaken approach. True the Gra did sign the letter of excommunication the herem which certainly has halachic validity and ought to be heeded to at all cost. Still Rav Nahman certainly was not in the category of the herem.

The Gra and Rav Nahman have different areas of emphasis. Rav Nahman with prayer, and the Gra with Torah. Happy is one that can combine both.

I have thought about an idea of Rav Nahman [of Uman and Breslov] that there is always some piece of advice for any problem. He never says this in so many words but it is implicit in all of his writings.
Not just the Sefer HaMidot where in fact you have about a thousand individual bits of advice for a whole assortment of problems. But you can see in events reported about him that he was always looking for some kind of advice that would help people in some way or another.
It usually has mostly to do with some positive commandment. So in terms of "sweetening of judgements" [that is for cases where a person feels everything is going wrong with his life]]

But most of these pieces of advice I think have to be done over a period of forty days in a row or more.
Still the idea seems powerful to me and it has stuck with me for a few years.

Now I think there is one major piece of advice I believe has saved me from countless problems and enemies. To speak the truth always at all cost.
But there are other bits of advice I have not seen so much in Rav Nahman but more in the Gra that struck me at also being extremely powerful. Learning Torah along with trust in God.
This I saw in practice while at the Mir in NY. people would learn Torah and put their trust in God to help with making a living and somehow that always worked out. No one ever starved. They all got married and had good children --all the while doing nothing but learning Torah and as for making a living the attitude was "God will help"
I feel this is true and great. But I would like to say that I think Physics and Mathematics are part of learning Torah in terms of this advice. That is also to learn Physics and no worry if you will understand or not or if will help in terms of making a living. Just for its own sake,

I would like to also mention  coming to Israel can be a great help based on a few statements of Rav Nahman about Israel being the place of miracles. And start a Beit Midrash HaGra and Rav Shach. --so that people learn authentic legitimate Torah.[There is no patent on teh name of the Gra and Rav Shach.\]