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22.7.17

For writing on the computer on Shabat I depend on the Rema in the Shulchan Aruch that the prohibition of writing is Ashurit [and I would imagine also the ancient Hebrew letters called "Ketav Evri."]  along with the idea of the idea brought down on buildig that the form needs to be preserved for twenty four hours -not stored in megabytes.
But I admit there are perhaps many other areas in which I am too lenient. The truth is it is hard to get exactly how to keep the holy Torah. There are inherent ambiguities like honor of one's parents. It is hard to tell how far to take that.
 It is not just when one mitzvah seems to interfere with another. It is that sometimes the actual fulfillment is unclear.
I have written about the problems involved in keeping Torah quite a lot but not in a unified format. Mainly the problems come from the Sitra Achra {the Dark Side}which pretends to keep Torah in external form but internally is demonic. That makes trusting anything that the religious world says about Torah almost certainly wrong.

Some of the basic difficulties and ambiguities  are:
(1) The attitudes towards Reb Nachman, who was certainly a great tzadik, but when people get involved in Breslov they definitely get caught up into the Sitra Achra
(2) The ignoring of the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication. This is not simply ignored but outright declared wrong. To me it is clear that the Gra was 100% correct. [But that it would not apply to Reb Nachman for reasons that are easy to see if you read the actual letter itself.]
(3) The attitude towards the State of Israel. I would rather not go into this right now but service in the IDF and general support of Israel I consider very important.
(4) Attitudes towards what are called secular studies. To the Rambam there is no such thing as secular studies. Physics [in his terminology means also Chemistry] and Metaphysics are holy studies that are part of the Oral Law. Other things that are considered secular are simply treif, nevela, in the opinion of the Rambam.
(5) Attitudes towards kollel. This really is not that ambiguous in practice because you can pretty much tell whether people in any institution are using Torah to make money or if they are accepting money in order to learn Torah. If the later, then  clearly it is  great thing what they are doing.

(6)My own mistakes seem to be in the area of the Mir Yeshiva in NY. On one hand you might say it was important to get to Israel but that seems to have caused a lot of bitul Torah and getting involved in pretty dumb sitra achra stuff. What perhaps I might have done would have been to find  a Litvak kollel in Israel. But even that is hard to say could have made up for the loss of not learning in the Mir.










There was on America's Most Wanted a story about a father and son Taylor and Taylor that had been kidnapped for the apparent reason that they had found some means of commutation or communication with distant regions of space.

There was on America's Most Wanted a story about a father and son Taylor and Taylor that had been kidnapped for the apparent reason that they had found some means of commutation  or communication with distant regions of space. I can not imagine what it was, but I assume that there in fact might be something like that. If forced to I could think of a few things. If some small particles are black holes, they might have thought to combine enough together to make a worm hole.Also since their experience was in electrical engineering maybe they had thought of some aspect of electricity which always  involves imaginary time. Another suggestion would be that if one takes the paper of Feynman about two arrows of time and puts it together with two more arrows of entropy he gets results that are remarkable and suggestive of some deeper structure. 

Overall, the current findings provide evidence that interracial couples elicit disgust

Humans Naturally Dislike Mixing of Race.

Study 1   demonstrates that bias against interracial romance is correlated with disgust. Study 2 provides evidence that images of interracial couples evoke a neural disgust response among observers – as indicated by increased insula activation relative to images of same-race couples. Consistent with psychological theory indicating that disgust leads to dehumanization, Study 3 demonstrates that manipulating disgust leads to implicit dehumanization of interracial couples. Overall, the current findings provide evidence that interracial couples elicit disgust and are dehumanized relative to same-race couples.

The fact is that everyone knows that if you are mixing races, you have turned your back on your heritage. This puts you in the camp with traitors, cowards and profiteers.
Next, they realize that you are an unfortunate person. Other than for novelty points at the bar, you will never have a real identity. Instead, you will always be flogging your “uniqueness” while neither of your constituent groups accepts you.
Finally, looking into miscegenation shows us the inner workings of life. We do not like to think about it, but we are biological beings with our personalities arising from genetics. Miscegenation breaks apart the visions of people that we process socially, and shows us that beneath the level on which socialization operates, we are animals and can be bred as such.
As the age of ideology ends, tribe becomes more important. The result of this is that people are struggling to find their identities and live within them, lest them become people without a nation or origin, which in a time where identity is more important than elective categories like political alignment or religion, makes them the loneliest people in the world.
What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That’s an error rate of 0.14 percent.
Neil Risch, PhD, a UC-San Francisco professor who led the study while he was professor of genetics at Stanford, said that the findings are particularly surprising given that people in both African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups often have a mixed background. “We might expect these individuals to cross several different genetic clusters,” he noted. That’s not what the study found. Instead, each self-identified racial/ethnic group clumped into the same genetic cluster.
Over the long term, people resist miscegenation because it destroys who they are, which they innately know is tied to genetics and history even if these concepts offend their notions of “free will” and individuality. In other words, having an identity that gives the individual a starting point in their narrative of self — origins, purpose, rank — is more important than joining the generic, mixed-race social group.
For this reason, they also dislike and instinctively are disgusted by miscegenation. The mixing of racial groups constitutes the destruction of those groups over time, so in the practice of miscegenation, people see the erasure of their identity. As a result their is a natural revulsion to loss of identity, which is in part a destruction of the self.


Highlights

Bias against interracial romance is correlated with self-reported feelings of disgust.
Interracial couples elicit a neural disgust response among observers – as indicated by increased insula activation.
Manipulating state disgust leads to implicit dehumanization of interracial couples.
Findings suggest that meaningful social units (e.g., couples) influence person perception.

21.7.17

.So if one is in a place of authentic Torah like the Mir yeshiva in NY there are always little whisperers telling him "Perhaps someplace else is better."

Every area of value seems to have an equal and opposite area of value that is indiscernible from the real thing. The reason seems to be what you have in the Armed Forces "the need to know."
Merit does not seem to depend on finding the right path, but rather in every path there is good and evil. Merit depends of some ability to discern evil on one's path and avoid it.  Not on finding some  abstract right path.

To be a little more explicit:
 Value starts with things like Formal Logic  in which the sentences are empty and can stand for anything but the rules are formal. If A implies B and B implies C and A is true, then C is true.
Up the scale you get Mathematics which has more content but can not be reduced to formal logic as Godel showed. Value gets greater as content increases  and form gets less. E.g. Music.
But every area of value-whether is has much or little content has an equal and opposite area of value which in externals looks exactly the same. That is so that there should be free will.

[I have mentioned this a few times. But the new idea I wanted to bring out is that this ignorance is the realm of the Dinge An Sich--Kant's Thing in Itself--is intentional. To choose good otherwise would be simply a mater of finding the right path and following it. Certainly some people assume that is the case. But then there would be no room for free will. The way the world was made it self there is room left for anyone to choose good or evil on what ever path they were born into. Most people think since they were born into some path which to them seems good, they can basically do what they like.

In this I am building on Dr Kelly Ross (Kant-Friesian School) and the Rambam.

Dr Kelly Ross taught in a CA Community College. I think the whole system has gotten so messed up that you can find idiots that teach at Harvard and geniuses that teach in a community college.
Recently Dr Ross taught at an ivy league school on the East Coast (Rutgers). It is nice that someone finally recognized him for the genius  he is.
That being said I thing the curriculum is too much. If possible I would reduce the requirements to the Natural Sciences, Music. No "Humanities" or "social studies"  which nowadays are just propaganda.

To make this seem less abstract: Let's say you are on a Torah path. In itself that is great. The trouble is the Sitra Achra that comes to greet anyone that starts out on that path.So if one is in a place of authentic Torah like the Mir yeshiva in NY there are always little whisperers telling him "Perhaps someplace else is better."

In summery, there are any areas of value-but whatever area you go into it is important to choose the authentic thing.






20.7.17

to learn fast--(just to say the words in order and go on) t

Even though most of the time I try to learn fast--(just to say the words in order and go on) that is whether it is Gemara or Physics, etc, still there are times that I revert to an idea of saying the words forwards and backwards that seems to help in understanding complicated issues.
This idea of saying the words forwards and backwards you can even find in the sidur itself and it is brought by Rav Isaac Luria. Still I never heard of anyone applying it to math which is where I found it the most useful. [Forwards and backwards is how I manage to get through my Physics and Chemistry  courses at Polytechnic Institute of NYU. But it is only for a very concentrated type of learning. Most of the time I think it is best to do בקיאות fast learning.]

For example in learning Gemara or Reb Chaim Solveitchik, I have found it is best just to plow through a whole section or a whole page and then the next day to just repeat that same section. [and do this for many days in a row]


18.7.17

the belief system of the Torah is Monotheism

"And though all the forces of the sphere pervade all the existents..."
chapter II, 10 of the Guide
The Rambam far from having a mechanistic view of the universe, actually sees the cosmos as a single organism. A sort of "Gaia hypothesis" stretched to include the heavens!
But that Gaia spirit of the higher spheres is not the same thing as God. Worship of the spirit that permeates everything is to the Rambam idolatry.

The Rambam and all rishonim understand the Monotheism of the Torah to mean God made the world, and he is not the world.
The fact that the belief system of the Torah is Monotheism is so trivial that it really should not have to be brought up except for people that claim it holds differently. That is the almost universal belief of the Jewish religious world, and they definitely worship the spirit that pervades everything. That is pure idolatry to the opinion of the Rambam 

17.7.17

DNA does seem to determine a lot.

It is a good point that England was a caste society and reached its peak and greatness when that system was in operation. And in fact DNA does seem to determine a lot. I see this all the time. There are people who seem predisposed towards theft, others seem predisposed towards robbery with violence, others towards other bad traits. According to Sapolsky {Stanford} genes do determine a lot.
To me it seems certain belief systems help people to restrain bad traits and come to good traits. Other belief systems seem to aggravate already existing bad traits. But little comes close to the power that DNA has on people.
Reb Israel Salanter already noted the difficulty in one's correcting his own bad traits.
It seems pretty clear to me that when people think they are repenting, they are as a rule just reinforcing in themselves their own messed up ideas.It is clear like Rav Salanter said:One can have good traits without Musar. But one can not go from bad traits to good traits without Musar.

[Musar [ethical works from the Middle Ages] has a limited definition. Not everything people claim is Musar is actually Musar.
There are also however specific lessons  to accept from certain tzadikim. The Gra revealed the importance of learning Torah. The aspect of learning in depth however really is  a Litvak thing.

In any case if one would thing about the caste system idea the most likely place to look would be the descendants of Rav Yaakov Abuchatzaira. That is not from DNA, but rather some kind of אור מקיף divine light that seems to surround that family. Not that it is same thing as it used to be; still there is some aspect of the whole Bava Sali thing that I think is still there.

The descendants of Rav Abuchatzeira are mostly located in Israel.