Where deceit, ideological fanaticism and bad policy interesect.

I am probably undercounting the number of ways in which these forces interact. But from my personal observations as a rigorous follower of events across the globe, I have become increasingly convinced that many of these seemingly separate streams are flowing into the same river. If they are not counteracted, we are likely to see an increasingly fractured society in which political identity takes precedence over individual liberty, disagreement is treated as evidence of moral deficiency, institutions become politicized, and the rule of law becomes increasingly conditional.

One of the most visible developments is the proliferation of cultures of victimhood. Increasingly, political movements derive legitimacy not from what they propose to build, but from the grievances they claim to represent. Victimhood becomes a political currency, with the magnitude of the alleged injury conferring greater moral authority upon those speaking on behalf of the aggrieved.

Closely associated with this is the growing demand to restrict freedom of speech and stifle debate through the language of being offended, harmed, or triggered. We are increasingly told that certain words are dangerous, that certain ideas are harmful, and that people must be protected from opinions

A free society was never designed to protect people from intellectual discomfort. Quite the opposite. Freedom of speech exists precisely because some ideas will be unpopular, offensive, disturbing, or wrong.

The proper response to bad ideas is better ideas. The proper response to falsehood is argument and evidence. Once we empower institutions to decide which opinions are sufficiently offensive to be suppressed, however, we have handed those institutions a weapon that will eventually be used by whoever controls them.

From there, we arrive at blacklisting and boycotting. Increasingly, people are punished not for breaking laws, but for holding the wrong opinions, associating with the wrong people, supporting the wrong causes, or simply refusing to adopt the prevailing ideological position. Careers can be threatened, businesses targeted, speakers cancelled, and institutions pressured to sever relationships.

This is not the behavior of a confident society. A confident society argues while an  insecure society tries to silence.

Echoing the Kremlin

The story of Western commentary sympathetic to Russia's interpretation of the Ukraine war have common unmistakable themes. The central thread of such rhetoric  is  a tendency to place primary explanatory responsibility on the United States and NATO, while giving substantially greater weight to Russian security claims than to Ukrainian sovereignty aspirations.

Among these commentators John Mearsheimer supplies the most influential intellectual framework.Mearsheimer's argument predates the 2022 invasion. His realist theory argues that NATO expansion after the Cold War—particularly the possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO member—created a fundamental security problem for Moscow.

Mearsheimer's formulation provides a sophisticated vocabulary for an argument that otherwise could sound like a defense of Russian aggression: Russia  should be condemned for invading Ukraine but the United States through NATO is  the principal cause of the conflict. 

The war as Mearsheimer  sees it could have been avoided if the West had accepted Russian demands concerning Ukraine's strategic orientation.Critics, including historian Stephen Kotkin, have challenged this interpretation and argue that it gives insufficient weight to Putin's own worldview, Russian historical ambitions, and Ukrainian agency. 

Tucker Carlson has taken some of these  arguments and translated them into a much more accessible political language.Carlson repeatedly asks why Americans should regard Russia's conflict with Ukraine as an American priority. The underlying question was not simply whether Russia was justified, but whether Washington had recklessly created a confrontation with a nuclear-armed power over a country that was not itself a member of NATO.

Carlson's framing repeatedly juxtaposes Russian security concerns with American hypothetical security concerns. The argument parallels the line that Washington would object violently if a hostile military power established itself immediately adjacent to the United States, and therefore Russia's objections to NATO's presence near its borders should be understood similarly. 

Douglas Macgregor brings a  military dimension to this narrative. Macgregor presents himself as a military expert assessing the balance of forces. His early arguments centered on the proposition that Washington had fundamentally misunderstood Russia's military capabilities and the strategic significance of the Ukraine to Moscow. . His commentary centers the conflict as one in which the Ukraine is  caught between a much larger Russia and an American foreign-policy establishment determined to bate Moscow.

After the invasion began Macgregor repeatedly forecast rapid Ukrainian military collapse and argued that continued Western assistance would merely extend a war Ukraine could not win.The problem with this strand is that it did not match the reality on the ground. Russia's initial campaign failed to achieve its apparent objective of quickly forcing Ukraine into submission. By July 2022, Russia had shifted toward a much more attritional campaign in the Donbas. Claims that Ukrainian resistance was collapsing were repeatedly presented as likelihoods  even when events poured cold water on these predictions.

Glenn Greenwald’s stance is  rooted less in sympathy for Russia than in a longstanding hostility toward American interventionism, the  political establishments, and mainstream media narratives. However he does seem to parrot  Mearsheimer's on several points. For one he has emphasized NATO's confrontational expansion, criticized American military assistance, questioned Western media coverage, and argued that diplomatic alternatives were not adequately  pursued.  In Greenwald’s view America's foreign-policy establishment is unreliable and mainstream media narratives cannot be trusted.  Washington has been responsible for an unnecessary war and the cost is staggering,

Former Russia Today journalist Abby Martin's trajectory is rooted in an explicitly anti-imperialist critique of U.S. foreign policy.  Martin has emphasized NATO expansion, the post-Soviet geopolitical order, U.S. interventionism, and the history surrounding the 2014 political upheaval in Ukraine. 

Her framework consequently resembles the Mearsheimer argument at several important junctions, but arrives there through a different ideological route. Mearsheimer begins with great-power realism; Martin starts with an opposition to American imperial power. 

She believes that Western audiences should scrutinize Washington's role in the conflict at least as closely as they do that of  Moscow's. Like Mearsheimer she treats the Ukraine less as an independent agent  and more as territory over which Russia and the United States are competing.

Kim Iversen's commentary furthers the  anti-establishment rhetoric.  Her Ukrain-Russian analysis emphasizes American responsibility and military-industrial interests, taking an emotionally sensitive angle where ordinary Ukrainians are paying the price for a conflict shaped by Washington.

The late Gonzalo Lira represents the most striking culmination of the same general pattern of interpretation. Unlike Mearsheimer, whose argument remained rooted in international-relations theory, Lira became increasingly explicit in adopting narratives favorable to Russia and hostile toward the Ukrainian government. According to Ukrainian authorities, Lira disseminated claims including that the Bucha massacre was fabricated and that Ukraine's government was a "Neo-Nazi" regime. Ukrainian authorities subsequently arrested and prosecuted him under legislation prohibiting justification of Russia's invasion. His imprisonment and unfortunate death also became part of the information conflict itself, with Carlson and others drawing attention to his case.

In totality all these voices echo a similar line of thought. NATO expanded after the Cold War; Russia opposed further expansion; the Ukraine became increasingly aligned with Western institutions. The existence of NATO and Western involvement emereges as less of the background condition and more of the leading explanation for the eventual war.

Ukraine increasingly appears as a naive party trapped within a battlefield or proxy  war.. Russian military failures, Ukrainian successes, Russian atrocities, or Ukrainian battlefield claims are treated with skepticism, while countervailing Russian claims receive less critivism. Russian escalation can be presented as unavoidable rather than an a planned political decision. Western military support is characterized as futile, escalatory, or immoral because as it likely prolongs a war that Ukraine cannot ultimately win.

However the truth is that the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022 remains an independent fact that cannot simply be absorbed into the category of "Western provocation." Contemporary accounts also document the failure of Russia's initial attempt to rapidly capture Kyiv and the subsequent Ukrainian resistance.

The invasion has not gone to plan. Russian casuaslties could be as high as one milion by some accounts and her forces have been shown wanting on several fronts with the Ukrainians optimizing the mechanics of drone warfare. The use of foreign troops (particularly North Korean) illustrate a desperate contingencies as the prospect of Ukramian collapse seem to be more remote than any of these commentators anticipated. In short the house of plywood that Putin attempted to kick in appears to have been built of a sterner fibre.

Now there is a legitimate historical debate over NATO expansion, U.S. policy toward Ukraine, the Minsk Manifesto and whether alternative security arrangements might have reduced the probability of war. However this is all lost within the context the common algorithm of cause and effect advanced by these commentators. One should indeed question establishment positions  however this should not come at the expense of ignoring empirical evidence that does not substantiate one’s alternative line of reasoning.This is the difference between informed commentary and ideological capture masquerading as open minded inquiry.

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A Quick Recap of Irish History

Irish history is a long tale of migration, invasion, religious conflict, famine, emigration, independence, and ultimately profound economic transformation. The story begins with the Gaels, a Celtic-speaking people who established themselves in Ireland during the first millennium BC. 

Over time, Ireland developed into a society of numerous small kingdoms, or tuatha, ruled by competing kings and clans. There was no single unified Irish state, although cultural, linguistic, religious, and political institutions connected much of the island.

By the eighth and ninth centuries, Vikings began raiding Ireland. They would eventually establish permanent settlements and trading towns, including Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork, and Limerick. This was a pivotal time when Ireland became interconnected to European trading networks.

From the medieval period onward, English involvement in Ireland gradually developed from limited territorial control into a much broader attempt to establish political authority. The Norman invasion of 1169–71 furthered the English presence that would eventually expand considerably, although English control remained incomplete for centuries.

During the Tudor period, the English Crown began pursuing more systematic control. The plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced English and Scottish settlers onto confiscated Irish land. The policy altered patterns of landownership and settlement and contributed to the growing religious and political divide between predominantly Catholic native Irish communities and Protestant majority settlers.

The Flight of the Earls in 1607 was an important event in Irish history. Several Gaelic leaders left Ireland, weakening the traditional Gaelic political order thereby producing the conditions for the Plantation of Ulster. English and Scottish settlers subsequently acquired large areas of land, particularly in the north.

The conflicts of the seventeenth century deepened these divisions. Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s led to an extensive confiscation of land dispossession, violence and forced transportation. Large amounts of Irish people were transported to the Caribbean as indentured labourers. The settlement and landownership patterns created during this period would influence Irish politics for generations.

After the Williamite wars, the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 was followed by the development of the Penal Laws, which imposed significant restrictions on Catholics and other non-established religious groups. These laws impacted property ownership, education, political participation, and the holding of public office. Over time, many of these restrictions were relaxed or removed, eventually leading to Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

Ireland was economically and politically subordinate to Britain. The 1798 rebellion, inspired in part by the American and French Revolutions, was led by the United Irishmen, who sought to unite Catholics and Protestants in an independent Irish republic. The rebellion was suppressed and the subsequent Act of Union of 1800 abolished the Irish Parliament incorporating Ireland directly into the United Kingdom.

The situation in the nineteenth century worsened consideraably. The Great Potato Famine of the 1840s resulted in approximately one million deaths and the emigration of more than one million people. The catastrophe permanently altered Irish society. Large numbers of people emigrated to Britain, North America, Australia, and elsewhere, creating Ian Irish diaspora that would profoundly influence the politics and culture of countries including the United States and Canada.

The land question became central to Irish politics after the Famine. Many Irish farmers were tenants rather than owners and were susceptible to eviction or insecurity of tenure. Movements such as the Tenant Right League and later the Land League demanded fair rents, security of tenure, and the right to purchase land. The campaigns eventually contributed to major land reforms that transferred much agricultural land from landlords to tenant farmers.

Religion and political identity remained equally important. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 ended its privileged status as the established church. At the same time, Irish nationalism became increasingly organised with demands for Home Rule coming to the fore.

Home Rule did not initially mean complete independence. Its central aim was the establishment of an Irish parliament responsible for domestic affairs while Ireland remained within the United Kingdom. Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party became the principal political force behind the campaign. Parnell's strategy was largely constitutional: use parliamentary power at Westminster to pressure Britain into granting Irish self-government.

Three Home Rule Bills were introduced in the British Parliament. The first was defeated in 1886, the second was rejected by the House of Lords in 1893, and the third, introduced in 1912, eventually passed into law in 1914. However, implementation was suspended because of the outbreak of the First World War.

The Home Rule debate showed that Ireland was not politically united. Nationalists generally supported some form of Irish self-government, while many unionists—particularly in Ulster—wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom. The issue was not simply political but involved religion, economic interests and fears especially amongst the Unionists of becoming a minority within a predominantly Catholic Ireland.

The Ulster crisis therefore became increasingly serious. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in opposition to Home Rule, while Irish nationalists established the Irish Volunteers. Ireland was effectively fissioning into two armed camps around the constitutional question just as Europe was moving toward war.

The First World War was a game changer. In April 1916, a group of Irish republicans launched the Easter Rising in Dublin. The rebellion was militarily unsuccessful and was suppressed within days. The British authorities subsequently executed many of its leaders, including Patrick Pearse and James Connolly.

The executions dramatically changed public opinion. Men who had initially been viewed by many people as extremists increasingly came to be regarded as martyrs. The Rising therefore became a turning point in the development of Irish republicanism.

The political movement that emerged from this transformation was associated with Sinn Féin, although the organisation itself had not planned the Rising. In the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin won a large majority of Irish seats outside Ulster but refused to take its seats at Westminster. Instead, its elected representatives established the Dáil Éireann in Dublin and declared an independent Irish state.

The resulting War of Independence, fought from 1919 to 1921, pitted the Irish Republican Army against British forces and produced a mixture of guerrilla warfare, reprisals, political negotiations, and civilian suffering.

Two of the central figures of this period were Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins, whose political visions overlapped but were not identical.

De Valera became president of the revolutionary government and was deeply committed to the republican ideal. Collins, meanwhile, became one of the principal organisers of the IRA and the revolutionary administration's intelligence and financial networks. He was also central to the negotiations that eventually produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

The Treaty established the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire and required members of the new parliament to swear an oath to the Crown. It also allowed Northern Ireland to opt out of the Free State, which it duly did.

However it also created a profound division within Irish nationalism. Those who supported it, including Collins, argued that it provided substantial independence and created a foundation from which further sovereignty could eventually be achieved. Those who opposed it, including de Valera and many republicans, argued that it fell short of the independent republic for which they had fought.

The disagreement led to the Irish Civil War of 1922–23. Collins,who by then was head of the Provisional Government, was killed in an ambush in August 1922. De Valera ultimately emerged as the dominant figure among the anti-Treaty republican political tradition.

The Free State gradually developed greater independence. De Valera returned to constitutional politics, founded Fianna Fáil, and became Taoiseach in 1932. His government progressively dismantled many of the remaining constitutional links with Britain. The 1937 Constitution established the state now known as Ireland, or Éire, and in 1949 Ireland became a republic and left the British Commonwealth.

Independence, left questions unresolved. Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, creating a political division that would eventually contribute to the conflict known as the Troubles. From the late 1960s through the 1990s, nationalist, unionist, republican, and British security forces became involved in a prolonged period of political violence.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 established a new political framework based on power-sharing in Northern Ireland and recognised that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could change if a majority of its people voted for that outcome. It also formalised important principles concerning identity, citizenship, and relations between Ireland and Britain.

As for the Republic of Ireland it entered a period of transformation. For much of the twentieth century, Ireland remained relatively poor, with high emigration and a largely agricultural economy. From the 1980s onward, however, economic policy increasingly emphasised education, foreign investment, European integration, industrial development, and an export-oriented economy.

The result was the extraordinary economic expansion associated with the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s and early 2000s. Ireland attracted major multinational companies, particularly in technology, pharmaceuticals, finance, and other high-value industries. Membership of the European Economic Community, later the European Union, gave Ireland access to the European single market and significant structural funding.

Ireland shifted from a predominantly agricultural economy with high population outflow into one of a more globally integrated economies. Both employment and living standards increased as did immigration. However there was a downside with economic growth becoming increasingly dependent on property, construction, credit, and international investment. The financial crisis of 2008 exposed this vulnerability as it did elsewhere in the European Union.

The Special case of Gerhard von Mende.

Gerhard von Mende was a Baltic German scholar who specialized in the peoples and languages of the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, he became an official in Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete).

Von Mende was deeply committed to the Nazi racial and political worldview. He became particularly interested in exploiting the ethnic and religious divisions within the Soviet Union and advocated using Muslim and Turkic minorities as political and military assets against Stalin.

His position within the Ostministerium placed him in charge of matters concerning several Muslim and Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union. He worked on recruiting and organizing anti-Soviet émigrés and prisoners of war and supported the creation of political and military organizations that could be used against the Soviet state.

This was not simply an exercise in German military pragmatism. Von Mende was himself an antisemite and an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi racial ideology. He worked under Alfred Rosenberg, one of the regime's principal ideological figures and the head of the Ostministerium.

The Nazi relationship with Soviet Muslims was nevertheless complicated.They viewed  many of these populations through the lens of racial hierarchy, but they were also willing to exploit anti-Soviet sentiment when it served German interests. Muslim and Turkic groups were therefore simultaneously subjected to Nazi racial thinking and courted as potential allies against the Soviet Union.

Von Mende survived the war and, unlike many senior Nazi officials, avoided prosecution.This is where his story becomes particularly interesting.

During the early Cold War, his knowledge of Soviet Muslim and Turkic communities made him useful to Western intelligence services. He maintained contacts with émigré communities and former collaborators who were opposed to Soviet rule.West Germany also became an important center for these networks.

Von Mende's experience and connections therefore survived the collapse of Nazi Germany and were repurposed in the emerging struggle against the Soviet Union. This was part of a much broader phenomenon in the early Cold War, when Western intelligence agencies sometimes recruited former members of Nazi Germany's political, military and intelligence apparatus because of their anti-Communist credentials and specialized knowledge.

His  career illustrates one of the uncomfortable realities of the early Cold War: some individuals who had served the Nazi regime were subsequently considered useful by the very Western powers that had fought against Hitler.

Von Mende’s  activities also intersected with the complicated history of Muslim anti-Communist political networks in postwar Europe.

Among the people associated with these networks were former anti-Soviet activists and collaborators from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Some maintained connections with the Munich Muslim community, which became an important center for Muslim political activity in postwar West Germany.

The Munich Mosque and its associated institutions later became connected with figures such as Said Ramadan, an influential Egyptian Islamist and son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna.

It is important, however, not to suggest that the Munich Mosque was simply a Nazi creation or that von Mende controlled it throughout this period. The history is more convoluted than that and involves Muslim émigrés, former anti-Soviet activists, German authorities and, eventually, competing Islamist and anti-Communist networks.

Von Mende's influence declined as these networks evolved. His past also became increasingly problematic as details of his Nazi activities and ideological commitments became better known. He died in Düsseldorf in 1963 after suffering a heart attack.

As a character Von Mende is therefore a fascinating example of a lesser-known figure whose career crossed three very different historical periods: Nazi Germany, the immediate postwar struggle over former collaborators, and the emerging Cold War. His story is particularly disturbing because it demonstrates how ideological enemies could become temporary partners when political circumstances changed.

A man who had once worked for the Nazi regime in its struggle against the Soviet Union could later find himself useful to Western interests for precisely the same reason: his expertise in anti-Soviet political networks.

It is a reminder that the end of the Second World War did not produce a clean separation between good and evil. The Cold War inherited many of the unresolved personnel, networks and political problems of the Second World War—and Gerhard von Mende was one of the more obscure figures who survived that transition.

The West Coast War

 The Japanese did indeed attack the West Coast of the United States during World War Two. The most notable of these incidents was the naval bombardment of Ellwood, near Santa Barbara, California, which targeted the Ellwood Oil Field and caused minor damage to the facility. This occurred on February 23, 1942.

The military installation at Fort Stevens in Oregon was also shelled by the Japanese submarine I-25 on June 21, 1942, although the bombardment caused only minimal damage. In addition, Japanese forces occupied two of the Aleutian Islands, Kiska and Attu, in June 1942, shortly after the Battle of Midway. The occupation was intended in part to protect Japan’s northern flank and extend its defensive perimeter. The Japanese landing on Attu marked the first time that U.S. territory had been occupied by a foreign power since the War of 1812.

So why did the Japanese not go any further?

The defeat of the Japanese carrier force at Midway severely curtailed further Japanese expansion in the Pacific and shifted the strategic initiative toward the United States. However, let us play devil’s advocate for a moment and assume that the Imperial Japanese Navy had emerged victorious at Midway, defeating Admirals Nimitz, Spruance, and Fletcher.

Such a victory would have significantly altered the balance of power in the Pacific in Japan’s favor. It could have delayed or seriously complicated the American counteroffensive, while a weakened U.S. Pacific Fleet would have made the defense of Hawaii considerably more difficult. With a stronger position in the Central Pacific, Japan might have been able to launch additional attacks against the American West Coast and, more importantly, impose a greater naval threat against the United States while the American fleet was rebuilding.

Even in this alternative scenario, however, it is very unlikely that the United States would have sued for peace. The American industrial base and population remained intact, and the continental United States was never seriously threatened with invasion. Japan might have gained time and territory, but defeating the United States outright would have been an entirely different matter.

As for a full-scale frontal attack on the West Coast, that possibility was exceedingly improbable. The planning, shipping, manpower, and logistical requirements would have been enormous—on a scale that would have dwarfed even the Allied preparations for D-Day. The Pacific Ocean presented a formidable geographic barrier, and Japan simply lacked the manpower and industrial capacity necessary for such an undertaking.

Japan's military commitments elsewhere made the prospect even less realistic. Its forces were already heavily engaged in China and across the enormous territories it had conquered in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Its defeat by Soviet and Mongolian forces at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 had also demonstrated the difficulties of conducting a major land campaign against the Soviet Union. These considerations contributed to Japan's decision to pursue a southern strategy rather than open a second major front against the Soviet Union—much to Adolf Hitler's frustration.

Invading the American mainland would have been an even more daunting proposition. This was fundamentally different from attacking and occupying American positions in the Philippines, where Japan could operate from bases relatively close to its existing sphere of control.

By 1942, Japan was already heavily committed across a vast area, having expanded its control over the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, French Indochina, Burma, and numerous Pacific islands. Its more realistic objective after a hypothetical victory at Midway would therefore have been to consolidate its gains, suppress Allied resistance, and establish a defensive perimeter strong enough to contain or delay an eventual American counteroffensive.

Additional raids against the American West Coast were conceivable. A sustained campaign aimed at invading and conquering the continental United States was not.

Japan's best hope was therefore not to conquer America, but to make the cost of defeating Japan sufficiently high that Washington might eventually reconsider its objectives. In reality, however, Japan's strategic position deteriorated rapidly after Midway, and the United States was able to bring its enormous industrial capacity to bear. Any Japanese strategy based on permanently holding off the United States was ultimately doomed.

My Personal Understanding of the Ein Sof

 I have always considered myself, by nature, a scientific rationalist. I seek evidence for what I believe and, as much as possible, try to avoid leaps of faith. At the same time, I recognize that science is fundamentally a method for understanding the material world. Its extraordinary power is also its boundary: science can tell us much about matter, energy, causation, and the observable universe, but it may not be equipped to answer every question about existence itself.

I have dedicated much of my life to science, and I do not intend to abandon that commitment. Quite the opposite. I believe I owe it to myself to exhaust scientific explanations before turning to anything beyond the material. When confronted with a phenomenon, my first instinct is to search for a natural explanation. I am skeptical, but I am not a logical positivist. I do not believe that only propositions empirically verifiable by science are meaningful. Rather, I see myself as a realist armed with Occam's Razor: I prefer the simplest adequate explanation, but I remain open to the possibility that reality extends beyond what science can presently measure.

This tension has accompanied me throughout my life. I personally believe that there is an essence that extends beyond the physicality of the matter-energy universe. Perhaps that inclination is itself a consequence of my individuality—of my genetics, my experiences, and the particular environmental history that shaped me. I have repeatedly tried to dismiss this intuition and surrender myself completely to scientific materialism. Yet I cannot. Something in me continues to resist the conclusion that physical reality constitutes the entirety of existence.

The concept that has given the greatest intellectual expression to this intuition is the Kabbalistic idea of Ein Sof, literally, "without end." I find something profoundly compelling in the notion that to define the ultimate essence of reality completely is, in a sense, to limit it. If we could fully describe or conceptualize the ultimate, then by definition we would have placed boundaries around it.

I therefore think of Ein Sof as the ultimate ground of existence: omnipotent, inexhaustible, and ultimately beyond complete human articulation. It cannot be reduced to a particular image or proposition, yet its presence is, in some sense, ubiquitous. I envision Ein Sof as multifaceted, and this follows naturally from the idea of omnipotence. An infinite reality may be perceived through many levels of experience without those perceptions constituting separate realities.

For me, the transcendent God—the "Spirit God"—is the transcendence from which our souls originate. The personal God is the one with whom I communicate through prayer and contemplation. I do not see these as competing conceptions. They are intrinsically connected: different ways of approaching the same ultimate reality.

I understand individual souls as somehow derived from Ein Sof. Our emergence from the Infinite does not diminish the Infinite, because Ein Sof transcends the material universe. The laws of physics do not constrain Ein Sof; rather, those laws and the physical reality in which they operate are themselves ultimately products of that greater reality. In this sense, Ein Sof provides an answer to the most fundamental question of existence: why is there something rather than nothing?

If our souls are derived from Ein Sof, then perhaps the way we interact with that Infinite reality is through the way we live. We approach it through goodness—not through the accumulation of dogmas, but through the extension of our sense of self, the cultivation of our own being, and the deliberate assistance of others.

I find an extraordinary parallel in the Hindu Upanishadic conception of Brahman. One formulation describes the supreme Brahman as infinite and the conditioned Brahman as infinite: the infinite proceeds from the infinite, and even when the infinite is subtracted from the infinite, the infinite remains. I find this remarkably close to the way I understand Ein Sof.

I am particularly drawn to the Hindu conception of the Atman, the individual soul, as being in its essence a derivative or expression of Brahman. It resonates with my own intuition that individual consciousness somehow participates in an underlying infinite reality. In both traditions, I see a path toward that reality through meaningful action and goodness.

Yet religious insight can easily become obscured by what I think of as cultural noise. Human beings have built enormous structures around their attempts to understand transcendence—institutions, doctrines, rituals, political identities, arguments, and competing claims to authority. Some of these are valuable; others can become distractions from the very reality they were originally intended to illuminate.

Meaningful belief, in my view, has to extend beyond this noise. It must recover the underlying connection with Ein Sof. When it does, it can produce something that is difficult to articulate but easy to recognize: a profound sense of joy and meaning.

The direct approach toward goodness begins, I believe, with perspective. Perspective determines how we prioritize our goals, interpret daily events, and understand our difficulties. In this sense, perspective is a form of triage for the mind. It places our problems into context so that temporary suffering, disappointment, or anxiety does not overwhelm our awareness of the larger goodness that surrounds existence.

Meaningful acts are ultimately acts of kindness—an extension of the self to include another person. Martin Buber's conception of the relationship between "I" and "Thou" speaks deeply to this idea. When we encounter another person not as an object but as a being worthy of recognition, we transcend the narrow boundaries of the isolated self. Such encounters, I believe, bring us closer to Ein Sof and allow us to appreciate something of its magnificence.

Life must also be lived with purpose. In purposeful living, we discover what I think of as the "spark" of Ein Sof: those moments when existence feels connected to something larger than ourselves. We must also cultivate gratitude. I think of gratitude as a consolidation of reality—a conscious recognition of what we actually possess rather than an endless fixation on what we lack. Once that foundation is established, the mind becomes more naturally oriented toward goodness, and that orientation becomes a catalyst for action.

Every morning, for as long as we are fortunate enough to wake up, we are given another opportunity—at least for the most part—to test ourselves, improve ourselves, and contribute something to the lives of others. The simple fact that we are alive is itself worthy of appreciation. We should recognize that gift and use our lives to help other people.

My relationship with Judaism is complicated but deeply important to me. I consider myself Jewish in the cultural, ethnic, and historical sense, and I celebrate many Jewish traditions. I understand Jewishness in much the way Mordecai Kaplan described it—as belonging to a civilization. Religion is one component of that civilization, but it does not encompass the entirety of Jewish existence.

I have never been able to take the revealed-nature argument for religion completely seriously. It does not, in my view, withstand rational scrutiny. Yet this does not diminish the extraordinary intellectual and ethical richness of the Jewish tradition. The biblical tradition, the Tanakh, the Talmud, and the centuries of Jewish argumentation contain profound insights into human nature, ethics, justice, responsibility, and community.

What I find particularly compelling about Judaism is its willingness to wrestle with God. Judaism does not necessarily demand that one approach the divine with passive certainty. There is room for argument, questioning, doubt, interpretation, and even struggle. That aspect of Judaism is deeply compatible with my temperament.

I was born Jewish and remain proud of my Jewish identity. I celebrate many aspects of the culture and take enormous pleasure in studying its history. Throughout my life, I have struggled to understand what exactly I believe religiously. At various times I have flirted with benign forms of atheism and with French Deism, but neither has held me for very long. The intellectual and existential pull of Ein Sof has always drawn me back.

At the same time, I cannot accept every traditional religious claim simply because it has been transmitted through generations. In particular, I have difficulty giving credence to ancient miracles that appear to contradict the well-established laws of nature. I understand the arguments offered in their defense, including the idea that we once lived in an "Age of Miracles," but that reasoning strikes me as carrying a quality of magic and superstition that is difficult to reconcile with post-Enlightenment rationality.

This tension was ultimately one of the reasons I rejected elements of Orthodox Judaism, even while retaining respect for some of its institutions and traditions.

I do not believe that belief in Ein Sof requires miracles. There is, to my mind, enough philosophical and existential reason to believe in an ultimate transcendent reality without suspending the laws of nature. Indeed, I would argue that if Ein Sof is responsible for the structure of physical reality, then miracles are unnecessary. The universe itself is already extraordinary.

Prayer, for me, must come from the heart. I prefer to formulate my own words because prayer is ultimately a personal conversation. Others may find greater meaning in established liturgy and inherited prayers, and I respect that choice. For me, however, spontaneous prayer creates a more direct connection between the person I am and the transcendence I am attempting to address.

Prayer opens a necessary channel of communication with transcendence. It enriches belief by transforming an abstract proposition into a relationship. On a communal level, prayer also creates solidarity among people who share a religious or spiritual framework. Psychologically, it can serve another important purpose: it can clarify thought, organize emotion, and help us see our lives with greater perspective.

I cannot say that a day goes by without my contemplating my relationship with Ein Sof. This contemplation reaches into the very core of who I am. Without that personal dialogue, I would certainly be poorer.

And yet my faith does not come easily.

In some ways, I envy those who possess an uncomplicated certainty about their faith. They seem to have attained a form of contentment that has largely escaped me. My own faith is more like a tug-of-war. It is complicated by the countless rivulets of thought that have shaped my understanding of the world. I constantly interrogate what I believe. Throughout my life, I have moved from one place of intellectual and spiritual comfort to another.

That struggle is itself part of the relationship.

I do not think that wrestling with God or Ein Sof represents a failure of faith. For me, it is faith. The questions are not evidence that the relationship has failed; they are evidence that the relationship remains alive.

Buddhism is appealing. At first glance, there is an extraordinarily soothing quality to its philosophy. It often presents itself in a gentler and more welcoming form than some interpretations of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

One particularly interesting distinction concerns the replacement of an all-powerful judging God with the concept of karma—the idea that actions have consequences. Yet when I examine the two systems closely, I find an unexpected similarity. Both ultimately provide a framework intended to guide human behavior toward what is good.

In the Buddhist conception, harmful actions generate harmful consequences and ultimately suffering. In Western theological traditions, harmful actions may be understood as invoking divine judgment and suffering. The explanations differ, but the ethical objective can be remarkably similar.

I sometimes wonder whether karma could itself be understood as a description of how God or Ein Sof distributes consequences rather than as an entirely separate metaphysical mechanism.

My difficulty with karma as a self-contained explanation is that it can seem too convenient and too mechanistic. It risks turning human existence into an equation in which B can reliably be deduced from A. In that sense, karma can resemble a theological version of classical physics: deterministic, predictable, and ultimately too simple for the complexity of human existence.

I believe the consequences of our actions are murkier. The ultimate decider of our fate is Ein Sof, and I do not believe Ein Sof's logic is simplistic.

There are questions that remain profoundly beyond our comprehension. Why, for example, does an infant die at a very young age? We cannot provide an intellectually satisfying explanation. If Ein Sof exists, then perhaps the explanation exists at a level of reality inaccessible to us.

There is an interesting parallel here with the development of modern physics. For centuries, people believed that mathematics and classical mechanics could ultimately allow us to predict the future state of the universe with complete certainty. Quantum mechanics challenged that assumption. The uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and the strange probabilistic nature of quantum reality revealed a universe far more intricate and unpredictable than classical intuition had suggested.

There is logic in the universe, but that logic may be concealed behind a complexity that human beings will never fully penetrate. I suspect the same may be true of the consequences of our actions. There is an underlying order, but it may be vastly more complicated than any simple system of reward and punishment.

I also believe that atheists can develop a genuine spiritual dimension.Buddhism and Taoism, for example, demonstrate that spirituality does not necessarily require devotion to a personal deity. More broadly, a person can encounter a sense of transcendence through their own understanding of reality without identifying that transcendence as God.

A scientist who stands in awe of the structure of the cosmos, the complexity of life, or the elegance of natural law may be engaging in a form of spiritual contemplation. One need not attach a particular theological vocabulary to that experience for it to be meaningful.

For me, however, the concept of Ein Sof provides a language for that sense of transcendence. Another person may find that an alternative  language may be more appropriate. The  Infinite is sufficiently infinite to accommodate different ways of approaching it. This also shapes how I think about monotheism.

God is extraordinarily difficult—perhaps impossible—to define completely. Human beings therefore rely on names, metaphors, symbols, and conceptual constructs to describe divine action. Angels, for example, can be understood as ways of articulating aspects of divine agency rather than as independent pieces of God.

As long as these metaphors do not actually divide the ultimate reality into separate entities, I do not see them as necessarily violating monotheism. They are tools through which finite minds attempt to approach the infinite.

Finally, I believe that free will is essential because it gives us genuine choice. We are not merely automatons moving through a predetermined sequence of events. Free will necessarily carries a difficult consequence: we can choose badly.

Those choices can produce pain and suffering—for ourselves and for others. Yet free will can also lead to lives of extraordinary harmony, generosity, creativity, and love. Both possibilities have to exist. Without the possibility of a bad choice, the good choice loses much of its meaning.

This is where I find some common ground with existentialism, although our metaphysical starting points differ. Existentialism argues that even in a universe without inherent meaning, human beings possess the freedom to choose and must live with the consequences of those choices. I would frame the issue differently. I believe that reality ultimately possesses a transcendent foundation in Ein Sof, but within that reality we have been given enough freedom to make meaningful choices.

We therefore occupy a peculiar position. We are finite beings attempting to understand the Infinite. We are products of the material universe while sensing that there may be something beyond it. We are rational creatures who nevertheless experience wonder, meaning, beauty, love, and transcendence.

I do not claim to have resolved this tension. Perhaps it cannot be resolved.

My intellectual instinct is to question. My scientific training demands evidence. My skepticism warns me against superstition and easy answers. My Jewish identity connects me to a civilization built around argument, memory, ethics, and the persistent struggle with God. And yet beneath all of this is an intuition I have never been able to extinguish: that existence is grounded in something greater than the physical universe.

For me, that something is Ein Sof. I do not pretend to understand it. Indeed, the very nature of Ein Sof suggests that I cannot.

The Infinite cannot be contained by the finite mind. We can only approach it indirectly—through reason, through contemplation, through perspective, through gratitude, through kindness, and through the meaningful use of the brief period of existence that has been given to us.

And so my faith is not a conclusion that I reached once and then stopped questioning. It is an ongoing conversation between reason and intuition, science and transcendence, skepticism and belief.

Did Britain really lose the American Revolution?

The claim that Britain somehow never lost control of the United States after the American Revolution is an exaggerated interpretation of the very real historical, cultural, economic, and political ties that developed between the two countries. The United States unquestionably broke free from British political rule in the eighteenth century. What survived the Revolution, however, was a deep connection between the two societies that has endured—despite periods of intense rivalry and even war.

The War of 1812 demonstrated that the relationship was hardly always friendly. The United States and Britain fought a major war, and British forces famously captured and burned Washington, D.C., in 1814. During the American Civil War, Britain officially remained neutral, but British shipbuilders constructed Confederate commerce raiders, most notably the CSS Alabama, while British public opinion and commercial interests were divided over the conflict. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century the two countries were increasingly moving toward cooperation.

Economic ties became particularly important. Britain was for many years the largest foreign investor in the United States, helping finance American railroads, industry, and infrastructure. British capital played an enormous role in the economic development of the United States during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Today, the United States and United Kingdom remain major trading and investment partners, although the global investment landscape is far more diversified than it was during Britain's economic heyday.

The cultural and institutional relationship is even deeper. American law inherited many principles from the English common-law tradition, while the political institutions of the United States developed partly from British constitutional experience. The Founding Fathers were influenced by a range of political philosophers, including John Locke, whose ideas concerning natural rights, government by consent, and the right of resistance to tyranny had a significant influence on American political thought. Locke was English, although it would be misleading to attribute the intellectual origins of the American Revolution to him alone; the Founders also drew heavily upon classical republicanism, English constitutional traditions, Enlightenment thinkers, and their own colonial experience.

The demographic connection is similarly strong. A substantial proportion of Americans have ancestry originating in the British Isles, particularly England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. British ancestry was especially prominent among the colonial population and the political and economic elite of early America. This common heritage helped preserve cultural similarities even after political independence.

The relationship became particularly important during the two World Wars. In World War I, American financial institutions, particularly J. P. Morgan & Co., played an important role in arranging loans and purchases for Britain and France before the United States entered the war in 1917. American entry into the conflict then provided substantial military and economic assistance to the Allied cause.

The relationship was more complicated during the opening years of World War II. Before the United States entered the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration gradually expanded assistance to Britain through measures such as Cash and Carry, followed by Lend-Lease in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States directly into the war, Britain and the United States became the principal partners of the Western Allied war effort, cooperating closely in military planning, intelligence, industry, and diplomacy.

After 1945, the relationship became even more strategic. Britain and the United States were founding members of NATO, and the two countries became close allies throughout the Cold War. Britain subsequently supported the United States in major conflicts including the Gulf War of 1990–1991, the 2003 Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan. The United States supported Britain during the Falklands War of 1982, although the nature of that support requires some qualification: Britain was itself the combatant in that conflict against Argentina, while the United States attempted to mediate initially and ultimately provided important diplomatic and logistical assistance to Britain.

Few individuals embodied the Anglo-American connection more clearly than Winston Churchill. Churchill was British, but his mother, Jennie Jerome, was American. He became one of the strongest advocates of close Anglo-American cooperation during World War II and famously described the relationship between the two countries as a “special relationship.” Churchill understood that the combination of British diplomatic and military experience with American economic and industrial power could become one of the foundations of the postwar international order.

There is therefore a substantial historical basis for describing the United States and Britain as unusually close partners. They share language, legal traditions, cultural influences, extensive economic ties, intelligence cooperation, and a long history of military and diplomatic collaboration.

But none of this means that Britain secretly retained control over the United States. The American Revolution was a genuine revolution in sovereignty. The United States developed its own political institutions, economic interests, foreign policy, and strategic priorities, and it has frequently disagreed with or opposed British policy. The two countries fought each other in the War of 1812, and the United States ultimately emerged as the more powerful partner in the twentieth century.

The idea that the United States is merely a disguised British colony therefore confuses influence with control. British institutions and culture exerted—and continue to exert—considerable influence on American society, but influence is not sovereignty.

Claims that Britain secretly controls the United States belong more properly to the realm of conspiracy theories than serious historical analysis. Such arguments have appeared in various forms over the years, including in the writings of political movements and conspiracy theorists who portray the British monarchy or British financial interests as exercising hidden control over American affairs. Whatever one thinks of particular British policies or institutions, there is little historical evidence to support the proposition that American independence was merely an elaborate façade.

The more interesting historical question is not whether Britain secretly controls America, but why two countries that once fought a revolution and later fought a war against each other eventually developed one of the world's closest bilateral relationships. The answer lies in shared language and institutions, economic interdependence, common strategic interests, and—particularly after the two World Wars—the recognition that their interests were often better served through cooperation than rivalry.