I tried to defend the point of view of the Rambam concerning Aristotle.

 I had a conversation [with Sarah Chaya] in which I tried to defend the point of  view of the Rambam concerning Aristotle. My point was that even though the Rambam is  Neo Platonic [Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle} there is a reason to look for modifications of that based on Kant and Fries. Mainly my point was that this the real world, the world of ideas  [not this world of shadows] is where real knowledge is. But to Kant that is where we have knowledge only within the conditions of possible experience. It is the idea of Fries that there is access even beyond that realm by means of immediate non intuitive knowledge. So we can have a relationship with God, but not by reason by by a different kind of knowledge not of reason, nor of feeling. A third kind. (The point is this is knowledge of God but not through reason nor any kind of sense perception or feelings.])

Of course we know that the Guide for the Perplexed was a scandal. No one liked the attitude of the Rambam towards a pagan philosopher. But the Ramban/Nahmanidess wrote an impassioned letter to the Baalai HaTosphot in France and Germany saying to leave the Rambam alone--even though the Ramban did not in fact agree with the Rambam about this issue. 

 No one I have ever tried to explain this to paid the slightest attention--but here I go again. The idea at the end of Laws of Shemita that, "when one who accepts on himself the yoke of Torah, the yoke of work is taken from him. " does not mean to make money by means of using Torah. It means that in some way God will provide. It is not a "heter" [license] to make Torah into a business.

There must become an iron wall between Torah and money.

Let's say that Rav Nahman was right that there is such a thing as תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים Torah scholars that are demons. They are especially set up to trick people into doing evil by means of supposedly teaching Torah. Then how does one guard oneself from them and also be sure not to become one himself? 

Obviously learning Torah is not an answer to this problem since that is the whole problem in the first place. And in the writings of Rav Nahman himself I do not recall any suggestion about this except for the only one in the LeM vol I perek 12.  There he explains the difference between a true Torah scholar and one who is from the Dark Side as being the difference of one who learns Torah for its own sake as opposed to those who learn for money and power. 

Now I know it is the custom to ignore the problem of using Torah to gain power and money , but I think the reason people minimize the problem is they do not realize the repercussions that are suggested y Rav Nahman. So as difficult of a solution it may be I think the only way to solve this problem is by ceasing to use Torah to make money. To simply stop the connection that exists that people that learn Torah think they will get support for doing so from the State or individual donors. There must become an iron wall between Torah and money. In this way the only people that will learn Torah will learn Torah for its own sake.

 When I first got to Shar Yashuv [a very important Litvak Yeshiva] I had seen a small booklet that was based on the Conversations of Rav Nahman perek 76 about learning fast. [It was emphasizing going through many pages of Gemara every day--But not just that bit having a few sessions also in the Midrashim, and the Yerushalmi and Rif and Rosh etc.] But when I mentioned this to Motti Friefeld, he was emphatic about depth learning with lots of review. Especially the idea of ten times  review of everything one learns. [That idea he got from his father the Rosh Yeshiva Rav Freifeld. ]And I am beginning to see the wisdom in that idea of review.

 If you are doing a few Tosphot or a long piece in Rav Haim of Brisk or Rav Shach, I have found that reading through them straight and then again the next day and so on and so forth for about a month is a good idea. But When it comes to Gemara, there I found just plowing through the whole tractate with Rashi Tosphot and Maharsha seems best for me. As for the natural sciences, ten times review seems to work best, but only after I have gone though the whole textbook first just saying the words and then going in until the end.  Then going back and doing review

 Sleep walking into WWIII. This is similar to how the world got into WWI. No one considered the damage. troops from the USA, the UK, and Germany are now involved. Everyone is thinking in terms of small moves. They imagine that their small moves will not be considered to be large threatening moves by the other side.    They are turning a local war into a World War.

So the US has cut off Russian oil. So where will they get it? Already the Arab countries have not even bothered to answer the phone when the president calls to ask for a deal with their oil.

The USA is walking into the worst possible nightmare.

It is like the talk representatives of the USA to invite Ukraine to join NATO just a few weeks ago. Did they not think putting nuclear missiles on the doorstep of Russia would provoke a reaction?

Or sending fighter planes to Ukraine? That makes the USA at war with Russia.

The situation in most Ukrainian cities was such that after the USSR, and you asked people when was better, they almost always said things were better in the time of the USSR. But like the time of the civil war of the Whites against the Reds, neighbors would kill each other when they thought their neighbor was on the other side. {I knew the people this happened to.} So even if people would prefer to be back to the way things were during the USSR, they dare not say so openly. –Except to someone like me that they knew would not tell their neighbors about their feelings. There however were exceptions–people that told me if Russia would show up there, they would take a rifle and shoot them.
So what you have is a sort of Hidden Civil War–hidden because it is unknown and hidden from public view. And the Russians were well aware of this from at least back to around 2012.

There were somethings that were odd in Ukraine.  Nazi battalions  at the public level. There was a lot more than that under the surface. But I do not want to be critical since I knew people there that were angels. So the best thing I think is to lay off and not let a local war become a world war.

Here is a comment by Timmy on the blog of Michael Huemer:

his war actually began in 2014 when the US State department backed a coup d’etat in the Ukraine to overthrow the democratically elected pro Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych and installed a pro-west leader in his place. The new pro-west Ukrainian leadership immediately began shelling and killing ethnic Russian separatists in the eastern part of Ukraine. The US immediately began sending arms (6 billion worth) to the new pro-west Ukrainian leadership to help them with their bombing campaign against their fellow citizens. They used these US weapons to kill 14000 ethnic Russians over the course of the last 8 years. Oh yeah, they also used a literal Nazi militia called the Azov battalion and officially incorporated them into their military. The US has literally armed and trained this literal Nazi militia which literally killed thousands of ethnic Russians.This is all known verifiable true information that professor Huemer somehow thought irrelevant.

Even Henry Kissinger has long warned that these actions by the US would lead to a Russian invasion of the Ukraine. This was all predicted. So why did the US do the thing that everyone with a brain knew would lead to a Russian invasion of the Ukraine? Follow the money. War is a racket.

Those $6 billion worth of weapons shipped to the Ukraine during the last 8 years were paid for by you, the US tax payer, and that 6 billion of your money lined the pockets of the American oligarchs (military industrial complex) who profit from war. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, along with the banks and the energy companies.

The expansion of NATO is all about selling more arms. To join NATO, countries need to have a minimum level of military capability which none of the last 10 countries to join NATO had. They all had to buy the prerequisite NATO war equipment from the above mentioned war profiteers and the tax payers got the bill.

War is a racket. It is the quickest possible upward transfer of wealth known to man. This theory predicted this war and it also predicts how this will all play out and how it is already playing out. This war will be dragged on and on so as to expend the most possible war machine money. Western aligned countries will all buy arms from the private war profiteer companies using tax payer money and ship those arms to the “so brave” Ukrainian people to be used in a long drawn-out hopeless and un-winnable war.

This war could easily have been stopped before it started and it could easily be stopped now by diplomacy. Russia’s pre-war demands were extremely reasonable and easy to accommodate. The opposite happened because the military industrial complex wanted this war. This war is brought to you by capitalism. Don’t take my word for it. You can look all of this up for yourself. This is not some super secret hidden conspiracy theory. It’s all being done in broad daylight. Watch.

Rav Nahman did not hold from looking for extra restrictions. It is possible to serve God with everything.

 It is possible to serve God with everything. אפשר לעבוד השם יתברך בכל דבר This is an idea brought in the LeM of Rav Nahman in Vol II 44 (and circa 86). Rav Nahman did not hold from looking for extra restrictions.

There was in fact an incident in which Rav Natan [his disciple] was offered to be a rav in some city. He asked Rav Nahman about whether to accept the offer or not. 

Rav Nahman asked, "Why not?" 

Rav Natan said, "I am afraid of Hora הוראה." [Giving a legal decision.] 

Rav Nahman said "As long as there is a posek [authority] to depend on, you can depend on him."

I am not quoting this story exactly but this is the best that I can recall.]

[At that time the word "Posek" referred to Rishonim, However Rav Nahman used the same word to refer to the Shulchan Aruch of Yoseph Karo with its commentaries Shach, Taz, etc.

Even so, carrying in a public domain seems problematic. I know that Some Rishonim hold you need 600,000 to be a public domain, still this seems hard to swallow.  I should mention that the Eruv that people put up has nothing to do with a public domain. It helps only for a Carmalit.{ Carmalit is like a מקום פטור a space that is not a public domain nor a private domain.] But real public domain a string can not make into a private domain. The reason I say this is that in tractate Shabat you have lots of discussion about what constitutes carrying in a public domain and no where is it mentioned that the cities in Babylonia were small. The largest citiesz in the ancient world were like Rome with more than a million people. But Sura or Pumbdita or other cities where there were mostly Jews were not more than Athens at its peak of power and prosperity which was about 20,000 But the Gemara goes into the issues of a public domain without mentioning anywhere that that could not have applied to their very own cities. which were less than 600,000

[The issue here is much more important than meets the eye, for it goes to the very root of what is inane and insane about the religious world in their constant search for more and more things to forbid and then claim that it is all from the Torah.]

[This is the core of my critique about the religious world,--they make up restrictions that have no source in the gemara or poskim, and ignore real and actual prohibitions of the Torah or the words of the Scribes. and yet claim to be representing true Torah and want us shimazals to pay for their sitting around all day chatting  and claim to be learning Torah.]

a mystic tradition

 What is the status of the Ari [Rav Isaac Luria] or the Remak [Moshe Cordoba]-if we notice that the Zohar is not really from R. Shimon ben Yochai? (note 1) But there was a mystic tradition.

 I think the closer we get to  areas outside  of conditions of possibility of experience, the easier it is to get into worlds of delusions.   So while the Ari and Moshe Cordoba were great tzadikim, it is hard to distinguish. to get an idea of legitimate continuance of the Ari, it is too easy to get involved in pure delusion.  [The best that are okay, are the Reshash (Sharabi), Rav Yakov Abuchazeira, the Ramchal.]  

(note 1) the world "although" in the Zohar is always expressed as "with all of this" עם כל דא and that is the Aramaic translation of עם כל זה and that is an expression invented by the Ibn Tibon family of translators during the Middle Ages. Therefore it could not have been written by R. Shimon ben Yochai.