I think that the idea of a "herem" [excommunication] is more of a serious  issue than most people are aware of. I was looking at the first chapter of Nedarim and I noticed there where the subject is brought.

The short and sweet of the subject is this. One under a  Nidui can learn Torah. But one under a "herem" can not learn nor teach. [That actual law is from Moed Katan]. So even if one would think the herem was based on a mistake it would not matter in terms of its validity.

So I try to avoid the religious world which seem to ignore the herem. And I can not figure out why the signature of the Gra seems to count for nothing for most people. [He who ignores a herem is under the same herem.]

Rondo for violin and winds

D Major Rondo  w14 file name mp3.  w14 in midi format  w14 in nwc format

Hegel thought somewhat as Dr Huemer said that just knowing what people thought [history of Philosophy courses] is not worth anything. But Hegel also thought that philosophy makes progress. This he thought happens by a "give and take" kind of conversation along the lines you would see Socrates do. Except Hegel expanded Socrates to say that that same process happens even after Socrates.

The fact is it is hard to get a good idea of the world view of the Torah even if one would know the whole Gemara. The reason is there was an aspect of things that the Rishonim [mediaeval people] were good at and that is to get at what the actual world view of Torah is in a general sense and then also to work out the details so that you iron out any seeming contradictions.
So to get an idea of the working world view of Torah--what it actually holds is right and wrong you really need the Musar Movement of Rav Israel Salanter who emphasized that aspect of the Rishonim.

There is no crisis in Physics.

There is no crisis in Physics. Physics is doing well, thank you. The crisis is in the minds some people who do not get the idea. The reason for this is that it has gotten hard and takes longer to get the idea.
QM works as well as when it was started. So does Relativity. There were problems with QM in terms of interactions so Q field theory was worked out by Feynman and Schwinger. There were strange kinds of relations between mass and spin so strings were suggested. [Spin seems to increase with mass squared. Regge trajectories.] Gravity was  a problem and it turned out that strings have answer to the problem of gravity.

The thing is to know Physics today takes a lot of time and effort. Lots of "Girsa" [saying the words and going on] and lots of Iyun (Review of one section many many times.]

Just for the sake of information, there is in Vayikra [Leviticus] a death penalty for sex between two males. It does not matter if one of the males cuts off his penis and makes a hole. He is still a male.

I recall this from a few places which I have not been able to review for years. [Of course I still hope to do review God willing].

One place is the subject of the person born with two sex organs. This is in the Mishna itself, not just the Gemara.
And that Mishna is brought in plenty of places that I ran into when in Shar Yashuv and also in the Mir in NY. And just take a look and you will see that cutting off the male organ would not make the person into a female even with a natural vagina. He is still half male.[So even way back in the time of the Gemara it was crystal clear to people that the difference between male and female is in every single cell of the body.]
[I ran into this when I was doing Hulin about the subject of a "Kvi" an animal that is between two species. I also recall this in Yevamot. But Sanhedrin where the main subject of the death penalty for sex between males comes up I simply did not learn in those few years I was in NY. Sanhedrin is a not a "yeshivishe tracate"]

Germany tends towards to extremes.

Germany tends towards to extremes. This is different from the way the USA used to be in that people tended towards to Middle. The differences between the political parties was usually confined to a ten yard line somewhere in the middle. Not the extreme Left or Right.
The fact that Germany tends toward extremes is on one hand the secret of their excellence. They take a axiom or build a car or a rocket and take the idea or build the car to the ultimate degree. In that they can find what is wrong with an axiom or find the weakness in the car and fix them.

But going towards the extremes has a defect also in that the truth never is in the extreme but somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps the best idea is to be extreme about being in the middle and having balance.

I am referring here to two reports from Germany. One about "sex" between two males is thought to be "natural". My answer to that on a Catholic blog was this: "The natural world includes not only green grass, bright flowers, and blue sky, but also fleas, lice, cholera, malaria, diphtheria, yellow fever, typhoid and smallpox." [Steven Dutch.] They are all a "normal" part of nature.

The other was on Reference frame about "climate science".