Litvak Yeshiva World follows the Gra to some degree

 My recommendation in terms of the Gra are to follow his approach in several areas 1. Learning bekiut (saying the words in order ) of all the books of the Written and Oral Torah (the two Talmuds and all the Midrashim) and iyun of the Achronim from Reb Chaim of Brisk until Rav Shach.  2. The famous herem (excommunication) 3. The study of the seven wisdoms. 4. Trust in God for all things spiritual and physical.  Trust without effort for parnasa [money]. 5.Coming to the Land of Israel. 6. Make sure before you get married that you will learn TORAH at all cost lishma (i.e., for no money), and will never compromise on this for any reason what-so-ever. If she wants to leave because of that, then good riddance.

Even though the Litvak (Lithuanian) Yeshiva World follows the Gra to some degree, but not to depend on that for any kind of example. After all, if Torah is the standard, then volunteering for IDF on the first day of the war ought to have happened without any prompting, [not to fight the draft at all cost]. 

Also I should mention that I think some of the Seven Wisdoms that the Gra mentioned have made advances since the time of the Ancient Greeks.   Thus one  should not be restricted to Aristotle in these subjects.

Why Kant is important is that the approach of the Torah is Faith with Reason; and the sort of synthesis of the Rambam is based on Aristotle, and that approach has some major flaws

 There is a kind of problem in Kant which I think is best answered by Jacob Fries. THIS problem is really many aspects of the same problem. how do we know the dinge an sich exists? How can the a priori categories tell us anything about reality since they are all in mind? Is not is or is not a a priori category? With Fries the role of reason or knowledge is expanded into immediate non intuitive knowledge. Normally we would think that there is a kind of immediate knowledge that comes along with perception. That is the second half of the B deduction. But  Fries postulates that there is a kind of immediate knowledge that precedes the senses that knows the categories but also the level of knowledge of the One or the Good in Plato and Plotinus..

That should not be taken to dismiss Hegel who I think deals with a lower level of Logos [of Plotinus]. To me that seems clearly what Hegel meant by the Geist.

The next level is the foundationalists, Huemer, Prichard, G. E. Moore. There you are dealing with a level of cognition after we already can perceive universals.

the best approach to fries is leonard nelson and kelley ross--and even there the best i kelley ross because there are things that fries gets wrong and nelson corrects. and other areas the opposite. to get a full and consistent picture the best is kelley ross.

Why Kant is important is that the approach of the Torah is Faith with Reason; and the sort of synthesis of the Rambam is based on Aristotle, and that approach has some major flaws--as pointed out by Berkley and Thomas Reid. 

The trouble with Communism

 The trouble with Communism is the short memory of people. Every day  about 15,000 people from East Berlin used to escape into West Berlin until the wall was put up in 1961. They were not escaping from the worker's paradise promised by Communism but from worker's hell. After the wall was up, the escape attempts were almost every day, and many of these attempts were reported in the USA where I was aware of this phenomenon. The East German guards had orders to shot to kill, and succeeded in doing so many times. So when in  English Literature Departments in universities  advocate for communism, why don't they mention this? 

global warming

 I might mention that plants need CO2 for it is their way of surviving, and they produce O2 which we need. But we can not breathe CO2. But the real reason for the global warming scare is the newspapers can not be sold unless they are predicting some dire catastrophe.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere during the Jurassic era was 1800 parts per million; and at the start was 2100. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere now 419.39 ppm. That is the amount now is about a fourth of what it was when the dinosaurs were around. 

Ii would like to add here that papers about the subject tend to rely on computer modeling. But there are plenty of equations that go to infinity, but a computer will miss completely unless you enter the exact amount. See the lectures of Dr Strang at MIT where he mentions this. Besides the computer depends on input data. so it all depends on what you put in.  

combining faith with reason that was universal with Muslims, Christians and Jews.

 My son, Izhak, was aware of the importance of the teachings of Rav Nahman of Breslov, But at the same time was aware of the pitfalls of Breslov.  The tendency in Breslov is to go off on tangents that have nothing to do with Torah. One gets excited about Rav Nahman, and then learning Gemara goes out the window. +in the middle ages there was a general approach of combining faith with reason that was universal with Muslims, Christians and Jews. But how this worked was not unanimous. The Rambam wrote the Guide For The Perplexed in order to answer this question, and he has some good points. However, I think Rav Nahman does a much better job. That is not to say that this was his only intension, however in the way that Rav Nahman answers this question, I think he does a better job. Of course, he had the help of Rav Izhak Luria in order to do so. Without the insights of the Ari, clearly Rav Nahman would not have been able on his own to show the reasons and reasonableness of the commandments.

Even though I am not really sure why the Guide seems not very great, still Rav Avraham Abulafia, the great mediaeval mystic, saw in the first 40 chapters the redemption of Israel. [My suspicion is that the translation might not present an accurate picture of what the Rambam was saying. The original was in Arabic.   ]

 In some subjects I find that getting through the whole book straight, and then doing that again four times helps to gain understanding more that doing lots of review on one single chapter. Ii think I see this effect in some subjects like Shas, or mathematics. In other subjects like Rav Shach' Avi Ezri or Reb Chaim of Brisk's Chidushei haRambam, i find staying on one chapter  with lots of review is more beneficial. 

And i might mention that this learning is of benefit to all Israel, as you can see in the Nefeh Hachaim of Reb Chaim of Voloshin the disciple of the Gra.

 It has been noted that the USA is a great help for Israel, but that does not mean that Israel has to carry out its demands. I  think Israel ought to finish up in Gaza and not make artificial distinctions between Hamas and the civilians. Like  General Sherman said  War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.