I feel that after the 60's when academic standards and requirements were lowered because of affirmative action that the result was that a humanities degree and a social science degree are worthless.

I feel that after the 60's when academic standards and requirements were lowered because of affirmative action that the result was that a humanities degree and a social science degree are worthless. (I have to say there are Achronim that I respect like the Aruch Hashulchan and the actual commentaries on the page of Shuclan Aruch. Achronim (later authorities after Yoseph Karo) written on the Shas (Talmud) like the Maharsha are the exception here. They tend to be very good.)
(The scam of the insane religious world  is that it is built on the Achronim or later authorities that simply ignore anything in Talmud or first authorities that seems to them to be not strict or fanatic enough. This used to have the name of Maharil'ism but now you could call it Mishna Brura'ism.)

So the Gemara has great validity in the realm of value. But what value structure is implicit in the Gemara itself?


And this affects the very future of Democracy. For the modern world is a result of a small handful of thinkers starting with Machiavelli up until John Locke. Yet this Enlightenment project has come to a crisis of no content inside the human being.\
 Freud to saw all higher aspects of a human being as coming from his basement (Id).

My basic approach is to accept John Locke in the political sphere and inside of political society I put civil society. And civil society needs a spiritual backbone which I consider to be Torah and Talmud. But this would not give the Talmud authority in the political realm. For the realm of freedom is the thing in itself--the core of individual.
 
The result of the Enlightenment thinkers is that wonder of the world,-- the U.S.A. But this wonder of the ages has become under siege. It values are no longer treasured. Freedom is seen as sham. Human rights has become a mercenary tool to deprive others of their rights to their own property and freedoms.

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  Democracy is no longer in danger because of the Soviet Union. It is now in danger from within. The rot has spread so deeply that some leaders of the free world are conspiring to make it no longer free.

I say that only the Torah can't hold up democracy any more. But when Torah becomes a tool of oppression then where can we go for help?

  This is where Reb Nachman becomes essential. Reb Nachman is the only thinker that sees the source of value and authority in the individual. In fact the only path to God in the thought of Reb Nachman is by the aspect of "one was Abraham."
RN said: "Abraham served God only by this aspect that he thought in his own mind that he is alone in the world with God and he did not look on any obstacles from people discouraging him."
And this is where Reb Nachman adds the key words--"and similarly any person that wants to come to God can do so only in this manner --of thinking he is alone and not paying attention to those who try to prevent him."

Rosh Hashana in Uman

I want to suggest that Hobbes and John Locke were correct about human rights. This is an essential aspect of natural law (Avrahamic law in the conceptual scheme of the Rambam). But there are many problems in John Locke. The most obvious one is that there is no social contract!! (Kelley Ross used the word "implied" (i.e. implied social contract in order to answer this question.)
But the attack on the Enlightenment starting in Rousseau and reaching it intellectual low in Marx I disagree with.
I suggest the Rambam saw all of this before it happened. and suggested Divine law as a higher category than natural law--but that you need the natural law for it to be based on [otherwise what looks like Divine law maybe be the based on communion with the spirit that pervades the universe (chasidut)--not with communion with the Creator of the universe.]
And we find that even divine law depends on natural law dorshin taama dekra. (which in one place the Rambam says is the even for a Law of the written Torah (deurita din) if the reason does not apply then the law does not apply.)
This is to say in politics I agree with John Locke and I place the emphasis on freedom--not equality like the school of Marx and Rousseau. In fact I say that equality is not a ideal at all and contrary to reason. And this can be proved logically.
But I am seeing Democracy implode on itself just like Aristotle foresaw that it would. I think that Democracy can't be held up without The Torah to back in up in private life.

Rosh Hashanah in Uman

terrorism

September 11

September 11

What is lacking here is the recognition that faithful, religious, believing Muslims (not fanatics--rather simply believers in the simple meaning of the Koran) attacked the Jewish people and America and Western civilization. Moses already had an answer for that. "Call to them for peace; and if they don't accept people, then give it to them over the head." (or something like that)

After Pearl Harbour not only did we defeat Japan and Germany, with no quarter given, but went on to crush and obliterate the ideologies that drove them. The result is a decent and democratic Germany and Japan, never again to return to their self-destructive ideologies.

IN opposition to this, the actual response after 9/11 has been weak and self-defeating. The result is that Islam is empowered worldwide, and more so in America. What else can one expect when the immediate response of Pres Bush after 9/11 was to visit a mosque and proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace.

A way of seeing the hidden nature of reality.
This starts with Huygens principle (Huygens proposed that every point to which a luminous disturbance reaches becomes a source of a spherical wave) and a vector potential (that is something that you take its derivative and you get a vector field) called A which is the potential that you derive the Maxwell equations from.
The next step is to look at the scattering of a wave of an electron acts when it interacts with another electron. (This is by the Born approximation).
Then you have to see how this scattering is described by a Green's function.
(The Green's function is something you put into an integral--like a kernel to make the integral come out to be a solution of a non homogeneous differential equation.
It sounds mysterious but in fact most people are probably already familiar with in in the regular context of integral equations in which there is a function you put inside the integral to make the equation come out just right.


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So you see that when you are looking at an electron that is in close contact with another then you are really looking at a very small part of the actual infinite electron wave.
This was suggested by David Bohm to show how reality might have higher layers.
This seems to be born out by string theory. the only real rival to strings was the GUTs but the fact that the blue and red light from that super nova a few years ago arrived at the same time showed that all GUT s are wrong. This left String Theory the only person still standing in the ring. (Its projective aspect is a refinement of David Bohm idea of noticing how the Green's function takes a little piece of the infinite electron wave.)


I mean to say that the Mind body solution is very trivialized nowadays because people in general don't understand the problem and therefore think they have solutions when they in fact do not.
The mind body problem comes from five basic facts that are all very hard to deny and yet they contradict.
Personally i think the one fact that might be the weak link in the chain may be the fact that mental states do not seem derivable from physical states. Kindness, opinions, love do not seem to be properties of atoms.
I suggest that since the first one cell organism at some point seems to have swallowed a bacteria which became its nucleus that we can see a mental state coming from the characteristics of atoms. Ie the larger call wanted to eat the smaller bacteria and it could not because of the defenses of the bacteria and so the bacteria became a nucleus inside the cell.
This would push back the mind body problem to God the creator of the laws of physics and of matter and energy himself. i.e. it dissolves the mind body problem and simply says that mind states are derivable from physical states and the only mystery remains God himself.