yom kippur.

 Yom Kippur. For those people who find fasting impossible, I should mention that half amounts are better than full amounts.  What is a half?  For food it is anything less than a volume of an olive [within a dividing interval of about 4 minutes]. For drink it is less than the amount one can hold in one cheek. [the interval between sips is much less to the Raavad. It is about 10 seconds.]

Since the main idea of Yom Kippur is repentance I think that one ought to make a commitment to learn Musar [i.e., works on ethics from the Middle Ages] 

[There are four major works, but about thirty of the less well studied. Then also there are the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter .] [''Musar'' became synonymous with religious fanaticism after the first generation--but religious fanaticism is a mistake..]

  Most Rishonim and Rav Hai Geon hold the night begins after 72 minutes.  [18 is 3/4 of a mil if you hold a mil is 24 minutes. It also might make sense from the ''three stars''.] [The Gra says the night starts at 3/4 of a mil which is either 13 minutes or 18 minutes. But that is the opinion of a minority of rishonim]

There is no question that Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory and that he has already declared the three eastern provinces as Russian territory. So what makes the most sense is to knock down the tension a few notches.  

what is a woman?

 what is a woman? I never bothered to as or answer this since it is an open mishna. Anyone who wants to now can simply look it up. Androginus has two sex organs so he or she is  a doubt. Other than that there is no doubt.. . But if this is unclear then, the fact that male or female is in every cell. XX female. XY Male.

And if that is still unclear then I suppose there is no point arguing. If one denies the difference between men and women, then there is nothing more obvious to appeal to. And you are dealing with the most disingenuous and insincere of all.  

If Russia sees this is where the west is going, no wonder they want no part of it. Nor do they want a border state  with these insanities anywhere near it. 

Bava Metzia page 35.

Introduction. A person that rents a cow, and the cow dies naturally, takes an oath that it died naturally and does not have to pay for it because it was not his fault. But a person that borrows a cow and it dies naturally has to pay. In the language of the Gemara this is שומר חינם נשבע על הכל. שואל משלם על הכל. שומר שכר נשבע על אונסים גדולים כמו לסטיים  מזויימים ומשלם על אונסים קטנים כמו גניבה ואבידה and we are saying a renter is like a paid guard. 

 I am sorry not to have written anything about the Gemara for a long time but my head has been in mathematics for a while. but today I just wanted to share one thought about Adi bar Abin's statement and Abyee's answer in Bava Metzia page 35. There the Sages say if you have a renter who rents a cow and loans it to a borrower. Then the cow died naturally. The Sages said the renter takes an oath and the borrower pays him [not the owner]. Adi bar Abin objected to this '' let the owner tell him 'I do not need you nor your oath'. Abyee answered '' the sages are saying that the renter gets possession not at the time of the oath but the time of the death of the cow.

It occurred to me to wonder about what abyee means. I thought perhaps he means like  the opinion in the Gemara that a guard of an object has a sort of possession in the object, but then i thought that can't be what Abyee means since then he would have said the possession starts right when it is given over to guard. So I think you have to say like Reb Aaron Kotler that he means the prior assumption is with the renter even before he takes the oath. it is after all natural for a cow to die. the only reason for the oath is to appease the owner. but even without that the assumption is that he should not have to pay. 

 Though i am not looking for agreement, it is encouraging when i find it. i was at the local breslov [na nach ] place yesterday and a person was saying a drasha [speech] and mentioned in it how the entire religious world is pure idolatry, [since they all worship some tzaddik (someone who is supposedly righteous)]. And the unusual thing about this is that that person is totally traditional Sephardi. From what i gathered he is an av beit din in some city and in his drasha he was quoting traditional Sephardi sources like Rav Yaakov Abuchatzaira.

 Ukraine was apart of Russia since the time of Alexsei Romanov.. The long and short of it is the whole area up until western Europe was under the domain of the Mongols. Then in one decisive battle the yoke of the    Mongols was thrown off by a Russian. So Russia became independent while the Ukraine was still part of Poland. Then the Cossacks of Ukraine rebelled from Poland and sought alliance with the Turks and then Russia i.e. Alexsei Romanov thus became ruler of Ukraine in the 1600's. It remained a part of Russia until the start of the USSR. Then it was still part of what in the west was still called russia even though the ussr was not strictly Russia but it still was more or less the exact same thing as the empire ruled by the czars.

 The transcendental deduction of Kant is on shaky ground. He himself rewrote it in the second edition. The idea is to show that after he has first given proof that reason and empirical knowledge have two different sources, then he wants to show that in spite of that, they work together to give true knowledge. I am thinking that the Friesian idea of a deeper source of knowledge [immediate non-intuitive knowledge] gives a answer that is almost implicit in Kant himself. For even in the second edition of the Critique,  he only shows that pure reason and knowledge based on the senses must work together, but not how.