s70 G major  [s70 in midi]

To marry a virgin

The world has changed. It used to be known that being a virgin was very important. The Ketubah [marriage contract] is 100 (zuz) for a girl that is not a virgin, and 200 for a virgin. Also If he was tricked into thinking she is a virgin the marriage is null to some opinions. And at least she loses her Ketubah. [Either the whole thing or just 100. That is also an object of debate. See Ketubot pages 9 and 13.] From the first act of sex there is always something left inside according to the Ari [Isaac Luria]. However I heard that the Ben Ish Hai said that is only when the first act is after marriage. [That is not from the actual book the Ben Ish Hai, but from some other book that he wrote on the Ari. I assume he must have some source for that opinion. Maybe he saw it somewhere in Reb Hayim Vital?]
I forgot all the details. But, at any rate, this is a very big deal.

"Western Civilization."

"Christendom" used to be the term for it. Now it is called "Western Civilization." The problem is the weight of intellectual evidence weighed on the side of Christianity during the Middle Ages with heavy hitters like Aquinas et al.
The after that period the weight of Reason and Evidence did not go in that direction. This was not the fault of the Enlightenment philosophers. It was just the way things were. You certainty can not accuse John Locke of having a bad heart or evil intentions.  There was and still is a crisis of faith that no one has been able to mend.

To a great degree this had a parallel in the Jewish world also. And the advice there by Israel Salanter was to learn the books of Mediaeval Ethics. This to me seems highly applicable to the Christian world. That is to learn the books of classical Christianity, Augustine, Anslem etc. The reason is because everything starts in the mind. All deeds and all words and all attitudes start there. If you cultivate a good mind then you cultivate good deeds and good words. So learning the right kinds of things is the beginning of the correction.
Neo Reaction from Amerika: “They’ve essentially thrown out centuries of Christian tradition, practice, and scholarship in order to assert that here in the 21st Century, we’ve finally discovered the true doctrine, and it just so happens to be the one pushed by Christianity’s ideological enemies.”

Though not Christian myself, I have long thought that Christians have ignored Aquinas, Anselm, and Augustine at great loss to themselves and to everyone else. [I do not mean they ought to be Catholic.]

introspection can be bad for the health:

The trouble with psychology is that it makes people insane. 

"Indeed, introspection can be bad for the health: it is a road to “mental illness” (‘Illuminism and Terrorism’, 1798, [Immanuel Kant]

That means that talking about your problems with a psychologist or anyone in the related professions is the best way to go insane. Kant goes into great detail why this is the case.


People like to talk about their problems and about sex and all one needed to do to make money from this was to create the impression that doing this is good for them and then set yourself up  as one  whom to talk to. The terrible thing about this is that the real effect is just the opposite.

commitments

The reason I think making commitments to change one's deeds is a good things is this. It is based on something I learning with my telescope looking at the stars. I noticed that if u look directly that it gets out of focus. But if you look slightly to the side then the star is clear. Thus I see the idea of making commitments as a way of solving personal problems. That is: I see there are lots of problems in my life that I cannot solve. And I also see if I take the direct approach that usually backfires, or at least does nothing to solve the problem. Therefore I say like Rabbainu Yona in the Musar Book Shaari Teshuva that אין יסורים בלי עוון "there are no problems without sin." So it must be that the problems are coming from something that I am doing that I ought not to do, or from lack of doing something that I ought to do.

The study of Musar {Mediaeval Ethics} has helped me understand certain areas of improvement that I have needed to face. But as a general rule it is certain that Reb Israel Salanter would have said that if you are going to make any commitment to do anything it should be to learn Musar every day  for a certain length of time.
I have a lot of faith in this idea of Reb Israel Salanter and my older brother agreed with me when I mentioned it to him. Still I do not want to put too much into it. We do not want a scenario in which people are learning Musar and acting badly --  which would discredit the whole idea. Rather Musar is a simply a way of recognizing your own personal faults and working on them if you want to. It is no guarantee to have or to acquire  good character.  


It is a map but it is not the destination.

In any case commitments can not be things you pick out of a hat. They have to be things you anyway believe to your best knowledge that these are God's Will for you, but you just have not had the will power to do them. 

Leftism

I am no expert but a great deal of Leftism was attractive to people because they thought that it made sense. They had a few minor philosophers to go with and then some heavy hitters like Hegel. The only reason I am not a leftist myself is because of my own intellectual background which is more along the lines of the Talmud, Maimonides, Aristotle and then of utmost importance--Kant.  That is to say place Hegel on a lower level than Kant and also take the general approach of the people that developed Kant in a certain direction. That is not Hegel and not the Neo Kantians who took Kant in what I think is  a wrong direction. In any case in the long run I am saying Hegel did not prove his point and Leftism is based very much on Hegel. See for example the writings of Lenin on Hegel and also see Marx's Capital which is very much based on the labor theory of value -that something's value depends on how much work went into it.
In any case the Left used to have a case. But the judge of time and experience and Reason has thrown their case out of court.

Family history in California

The idea of my Dad in moving to California was to work for a company called Ford Aerospace. He had gotten there after work in NJ at an US Army base in Monmouth NJ where he was the head of the team that made the first Infra Red Camera. That got him into Life Magazine. Then McCarthy came there and started his anti communistic thing right there at that base  on Friday. The next Monday My Dad came in with Bernard Marcus and they were the only two people left on the team. Everyone else had been fired. That was about fifty engineers who were all Jewish plus one German fellow whose wife was Jewish. 

They were all rehired after the heat was off. But my Dad and Marcus were put off by the whole thing, and so accepted a job offer in CA. 

At that time he also worked on the U-2 camera.

  

After three years he invented in the garage a kind of copy machine that was super sharp based on x-rays and marketed it. After some time he sold the company and moved to Beverly Hills and worked on Laser Satellite Communication for Star Wars [SDI] at TRW.
That was the same time the KGB had a mole there. My Dad left that after about 5 years and right after that the mole was discovered and the company went under, and a major motion picture was made about the incident. [''The Falcon and the Snowman'' named after the two criminals that stole and old man Dad's inventions and other technology at TRW to the KGB.]

[After that I went to two great Litvak yeshivot in NY, Shar Yashuv and the Mir.--Both great but their approach to learning differed. shar Yashuv was more into in depth understanding of Tosphot and the depths on the page--like you can see in the Pnei Yehoshua. The Mir was definitely along the lines of Rav Chaim of Brisk--global issues like between Tosphot, Rambam and how the subject on the page relates to related issues throughout the Talmud.