Nancy Pelosi Doesn't Drink

What struck me about her husband Paul's DUI arrest over the weekend was the episode in the 2020 election campaign where pro-Trump pranksters put up a slowed version of one of her appearances that made her sound drunk. The response of the fact checkers was to say the speaker doesn't drink:

We requested an interview with Pelosi for this story. Her office declined, but spokesman Drew Hammill told us in an email that the speaker doesn’t drink. (Pelosi’s office told us she doesn’t drink for a similar fact-check in 2010.)

That lines up with what others have said about Pelosi over the years. After a manipulated video of the speaker slurring her words went viral on social media in May 2019, her daughter, Christine Pelosi, tweeted a rebuttal.

“Republicans and their conservative allies have been pumping this despicable fake meme for years! Now they are caught,” she said. “#FactCheck: Madam Speaker doesn’t even drink alcohol!”

At the time, my reaction was, "The Pelosis own a winery, and she doesn't drink?" But I set that aside. In preparing this post, I did a web search for images of the speaker drinking wine, or at least what appeared to be wine, and they weren't hard to find. In the photo at left, the others are holding smallish champagne flutes for a toast, but the speaker is holding a big wine glass, and it's pretty darn full, just like the one at the top of the post. A couple of full glasses that size, and my wife and I would be on the floor.

As I say, it sure looks like wine to me, although it could certainly be non-alcoholic, but I don't see that as part of the speaker's style.

The UK Daily Mail reported,

One vineyard owner who lives nearby told DailyMail.com the couple often block the road with their convoy of blacked-out SUVs when they come to town, but that they didn't seen [sic] anything this weekend.

. . . 'I wouldn't be going to the kinds of fundraisers and parties they go to.

'I don't like them very much or find them very interesting,' the vineyard owner said.

Big parties and fundraisers at their vineyard, and maybe she drinks non-alcoholic wine. That's hard for me to believe. Another interesting question is the timeline of the arrest:

For some reason that hasn’t been fully explained yet, it took law enforcement officers more than four hours to book him after he was arrested. He wasn’t booked until 4:13 a.m. Was he resisting a breathalyzer? Causing a problem? Were they debating whether or not to charge him? It’s not clear. And if he was still blowing more than 0.08 after that time, what was he like at the time of the crash? He was released about three hours after he was booked on $5000 bail.

For those who used to watch Live PD, DUI arrests were a common subject, and they were pretty straightforward: the subject is asked to take a field sobriety test, which he either fails or he refuses to take. He is then arrested, placed in the back seat of a police unit, and taken to the station, where he's booked within a fairly short time. (DUI attorneys advise people in that situation to demand a blood test at the station rather than a breath test in the field, simply because this will take more time and allow the body to lower the BAC, but of course, there are limits to how much help this can provide.)

I assume there is both body and dash cam footage of this incident. I would also guess that the officers immediately were asked, "Do you know who I am?" and much of the four-hour interval between the arrest and booking was taken up with calls among Pelosi fixers and authorities at the county, state, and federal level, but I would also guess that whatever Mr Pelosi blew, it was so outrageously high that there was no covering it up.

As at least one commentator suggested, for the guy to be doing this at age 82 suggests he'd been drinking at this level all his life. As Glenn Reynolds put it, "In Paul’s defense, if I were married to Nancy I’d drink heavily too."

I'm inclined to say stay tuned. It shouldn't be that hard to get the body and dash cam footage.

Meanwhile, remember that the speaker does not drink alcohol.

I'm Still Working Through This Puzzle

I've mentioned here already that by far the best coverage of the Russo-Ukraine war is at the leftist Daily Kos, and that's a puzzle, because the left as we used to understand it, even well after the death of Stalin, was always inclined to idealize the Soviet Union. Go no farther than the leftist Sen Sanders, about whom there is dispute whether a 1988 trip there with his new wife following their wedding was a honeymoon, though the trip definitely did occur.

A little over a generation later, it seems like the left is taking the lead in opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, even at the price of endorsing Reagan-era neoconservative policy, and in fact neoconservatives like Eliot Cohen and Frederick Kagan are being rehabilitated. For now, I just don't have an explanation, except to note that this is taking place. But let's look at the analysis in today's update from the Daily Kos:

The U.S. is sending its heavy vehicles by ship. There’s 200 of these on the way, plus hundreds of more Humvees, so this is likely more efficient than trying to fly them in. Also, it seems that things like artillery cannons and ammunition are higher priority for limited air transport space. I looked up shipping times from Georgia to France (no idea what port they’re going to), and it’s 24 days. Then they have to be unloaded and rail-shipped to Poland, and then transported across the border however that’s done (no one is talking about it for obvious reasons). So optimistically, all this armor won’t be in Ukraine’s hands for at least another 6-8 weeks.

Ukraine needs to buy time, and it seems that keeping Severodonetsk in Ukrainian hands for the next few weeks is part of that strategy.

Furthermore, there is suspicion in Ukraine that Russia is convincing its western allies to trade Ukrainian territory for a cease-fire. France and Germany certainly seem squishy, and Ukrainian media wasn’t happy when the United States and Russia re-established their military deescalation hotline. We might think, “good! Less chance of a misunderstanding escalating to nuclear war!” But Ukraine is convinced that Russia is in a full-court diplomatic press to freeze the conflict at its current status quo, averting a prolonged war (and its effects on the global economy and food supply), all for the low-low price of just the Donbas and Kherson.

Whatever Ukraine’s motivations, all indications are that the situation in the Donbas is desperate.

. . . Finally, let’s remember the full scale and context of the current battle zone:

Everything that is happening now is the culmination of incredibly shrinking Russian ambitions. Ukraine holds around 5,000 square miles of Donbas territory. That Lysychansk/Severodonetsk pocket would get Russia 5-10% of that territory. They've got a long way to go.

In contrast, today's update from the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War is flaccid and obtuse:

Russian forces have made steady, incremental gains in heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine in the past several days, though Ukrainian defenses remain effective overall. Deputy Ukrainian Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that the fighting is currently at its "maximum intensity” compared to previous Russian assaults and will likely continue to escalate. Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry Oleksandr Motuzyanyk characterized Russian gains as “temporary success” and stated that Ukrainian forces are using a maneuver defense to put pressure on Russian advances in key areas. Russian forces have now taken control of over 95% of Luhansk Oblast and will likely continue efforts to complete the capture of Severodonetsk in the coming days.

Their discussion of what's happening is vague and uninformative, and any attempt to explain why is completely absent.

The Daily Kos analysis also puts in context the recent statement by Henry Kissinger at the World Economic Forum:

Kissinger, who turns 99 years old on May 27, has generated even more controversy for himself. Speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum this week, the former statesman had a piece of advice for the Ukrainian government: it's time to think about a diplomatic settlement to end the war, and that settlement will have to include territorial concessions to Russia. "Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante," Kissinger surmised, referring to the pre-war lines in which Russia controlled the Crimean Peninsula and approximately a third of territory in the Donbas. "Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself."

However, Secretary Blinken so far has insisted that any decision to cede territory is up to Ukraine, which appears to be a change in policy from what had been articulated prior to the invasion. As of December 9, 2021,

President Joe Biden's administration is reportedly going to urge Ukraine's government to cede territory to Russia-backed groups in an attempt to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Associated Press reports American officials plan on pushing Ukraine to grant autonomy to eastern regions of the country which are currently under the control of Russia-backed separatists who revolted in 2014.

Nevertheless, even then, US policy would have been to arm Ukraine and eastern NATO countries in the event of an actual invasion:

In a two-hour call with Putin, Biden warned if Russia invades Ukraine, the United States will take action.

“There was a lot of give and take. There was no finger-wagging,” says White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan who also says if Russian troops move in, America would support its allies. “We would provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians above and beyond that which we are already providing and we would fortify our NATO allies on the Eastern Flank with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation.”

However, the question once the invasion took place was what kind of weapons to send, and how many. Every indication is that the administration's policy did change over a period of weeks following the invasion, and the Daily Kos story indicates that it's changing even as of today:

The United States’s decision on whether to send MLRS/HIMARS rocket artillery to Ukraine has been painfully long and torturous, but they’re reportedly on the verge of making it happen. According to CNN’s sources, the problem is fear “Ukraine could use the systems to carry out offensive attacks inside Russia … The MLRS and its lighter-weight version, the HIMARS, can launch as far as 300km, or 186 miles.”

Nobody else, as far as I can see, is reporting on this policy change and what is driving it, either short term or over past generations. Kissinger, who according to the link above is almost 100 years old, was the architect of detante, the pre-Reagan lowering of tensions with the Soviet Union. But as even Barack Obama unintentionally pointed out in 2012, the '80s called, and they want their foreign policy back. Why is the left now the group that's most on top of this?

The Speaker And The Bishops

I can't avoid thinking that perhaps over the past year, the US Bishops came proactively to an agreement-to-disagree on how to handle the issue of barring Catholic politicians from communion if they advocate abortion -- I can't help but wonder if Abp Cordileone was implicitly referring to such a thing in this passage from his interview with America magazine:

I suppose there will be a variety of opinions, but I think as bishops, we respect each other’s decisions and matters like this. Each bishop has to decide in accordance with his conscience in these and other types of situations as well. And they’re usually very complex. There are a number of different values and priorities to weigh in taking an action or not taking an action. What good will it do? What evil will it avoid? What might be the side effects? All these things have to be weighed, and we can come to different prudential judgments, using our conscience.

I note that while a number of conservative bishops have supported Abp Cordileone's action, liberals like Cardinal Cupich have remained silent, while Cardinal Gregory of Washington, who permits Pelosi to receive communion there, has said nothing publicly, and the archdiocese has so far not answered inquries from the press. As a result, there have been no public squabbles, which I think is a positive development. On the other hand, Speaker Pelosi on Tuesday did make public statements about Abp Cordileone's action:

“This is not just about terminating a pregnancy,” Pelosi said. “These same people are against contraception, family planning, in vitro-fertilization. It’s a blanket thing. They use abortion as the front man for it while they try to undo so much. That’s what they tried to do in the Affordable Care Act, which didn’t have anything about terminating an abortion — a pregnancy.”

. . . “Now, our archbishop has been vehemently against LGBTQ rights, too, in fact, he led the way in some of the initiatives on — an initiative on the ballot in California. So this decision, taking us to privacy and precedent, is very dangerous in the lives of so many of the American people.”

The first part of the statement is misleading in several ways. The Catholic Church is not against family planning; it's against artificial birth control but not against natural methods. In vitro fertilization at minimum involves discarding in vitro fertilized embryos, but it may also involve aborting multiple pregnancies in the mother as a result of the procedure. These aren't small issues.

In effect, Pelosi's statements imply that she's continuing to hold what Abp Cordileone in the interview calls her "more and more extreme and more and more aggressive" views on reproduction and sexuality, attacking the Church's views on matters beyond abortion, bringing in by implication the issue of same-sex marriage and using the political shorthand LGBTQ. Abp Cordileone says, "I know I’m going to be accused of being punitive, of being political," but the problem for the bishops and indeed Pope Francis is that Speaker Pelosi is a politician, a very senior and influential one, and she herself is addressing the problem on a political level.

This brings me to Bp Barron's op-ed in the New York Post almost a year ago (I don't believe he's made any public statement on Abp Cordileone's specific action over Pelosi):

The Catholic bishops of the United States are facing a great deal of political pressure these days. We are told that we must pursue dialogue with those who disagree with the divine and natural law on the issue of abortion — or who agree privately as Catholic believers but decline to govern according to this moral teaching.

So he's acknowledging it's a political issue, and the bishops are more or less forced to be involved with it.

I’m the son of a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Catholic Democrat. My father, whose family was very involved in city politics, would sooner have become a Lutheran than vote Republican. But my trouble with modern Democrats, I explained, has to do with abortion policy, where the party has lately staked out an especially extreme position.

My interlocutors insisted upon the necessity of an ongoing dialogue between pro-choice politicians and the Roman church. I replied, “OK, I’m with you. In fact, the Catholic Church, though it opposes all abortions, would be willing to support legislation that sets at least some limits to the procedure. If you’ll give even a little bit, we’re happy to talk.”

The problem is that Democrats have been locked into what Bp Barron calls an extreme and intransigent position, to the point that they won't even support protection for infants who survive abortion and are born alive. And while he doesn't go this far in the op-ed, nevertheless, over the past year, Democrat politicians have become more extreme over other areas of sexuality, advocating "gender affirming" surgery for pre-teens and insisting that transgendered men should compete in women's sports.

Abp Cordileone echoes Bp Barron in saying of the speaker, "her advocacy for codifying the Roe decision into federal law [is] becoming more and more extreme and more and more aggressive". And insofar as it's a legislative effort, it's political, and it's hard for Catholics, especially bishops, not to get involved in it. The positive side, though, is that Pelosi's position is looking more and more like a political loser, and it's a major reason why she'll likely lose the speakership in November.

Novertheless, the silence of both the liberal US bishops and the vague signal from Pope Francis that issues of life and death can't be defined down to matters of "choice" suggest that the balance is shifting even there.

Why Is John Kirby Really Going To The White House?

According to Politico,

Not even a week into press secretary KARINE JEAN-PIERRE’s time at the lectern, the White House brought in her Pentagon counterpart JOHN KIRBY, a runner-up for the podium, for a communications role.

. . . For about 24 hours, no one at the White House could answer whether Kirby would be working at the National Security Council or the press office and how often he would be appearing at the podium, if at all.

Several White House officials and insiders told West Wing Playbook that they felt the move put a damper on Jean-Pierre’s first week, and undercut her credibility at a moment when conservative media has targeted her.

Indeed, according to Red State,

Suddenly, we started hearing reports about a new shake-up in the Communications department at the White House — that John Kirby, the Pentagon spox, who had been considered for the Press Secretary job was going to be brought in, in a communications role, and saying that he would be doing some briefings.

. . . Not good, when it looks like you’re bringing in the white guy because you think he’ll help the situation. But as we saw during the Afghanistan debacle, Kirby was a horror. He and the Biden Administration still haven’t been held to account for lying about the number of Americans that they left behind in Afghanistan.

Regarding Afghanistan, I got the impression that Kirby, a retired admiral, understood the chain of command and was saying precisely what he'd been told to say. Indeed, the position of the Pentagon from Secretary Austin on down was that in Afghanistan, they were doing what they'd been ordered to do. This in fact seems to have been the subtext of President Biden's own remarks. Kirby was doing the absolute best he could with the cards he'd been dealt, and I can't really fault him for that.

I would say this has been Kirby on Ukraine as well. Among other thngs, he appears to have been acutely aware of the need to minimize any implication in his public remarks that the US has been sharing intelligence with Ukraine, though it's hard to avoid concluding this has been the case in situations like targeting Russian generals or sinking the Moskva. The advantage to the Pentagon is that, as someone who's previously been an admiral, nobody has to bring him up to speed on how the whole system operates. They trust the guy.

The Politico link above is intriguing farher down:

In theory, the move was meant to add a strong foreign policy voice at a moment when crises abroad occupy a huge portion of the president’s time. Kirby’s experience in the Pentagon, and the State Department, and his strong relationships with many reporters and broadcast network higher-ups serve as useful tools for a White House fielding numerous thorny foreign policy questions every day[.]

. . . In addition, there was confusion over what exactly Kirby would do in the White House.

. . . There were also discussions about whether he would have the responsibilities and receive the same title held by BEN RHODES, former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting.

. . . “The thing about describing models like that — the Ben Rhodes model — they tend to be unique to an individual,” JAKE SULLIVAN told reporters on Air Force One Sunday. “John Kirby will have the John Kirby model of the role of coordinator for strategic communications at the NSC.”

I think it's safe to say that Kirby is absolutely trusted by Secretaries Austin and Blinken, including on the basis of his down-the-line performance on the Afghan withdrawal. At the same time, I have the impression that Austin and Blinken have managed to carve out a field of policy discretion for themselves over Ukraine. Observers like retired Gen Jack Keane have made the point that after the first weeks of the Ukraine invasion, the administration made a 180 degree policy turn, moving to full support of Zelensky, shippinig him heavy weapons and allowing the transfer of old Warsaw Pact aircraft from NATO countries.

I've got to assume this was at the initiative of Austin and Blinken, while I've also got to note that this is just about the only policy Biden hasn't [messed] up. I've also got to assume Austin and Blinken recognize that Biden is the creature of his handlers, and they need to have a credible figure on site at the White House to further their interests and act as a Biden handler on the specific issue of Ukraine. Otherwise, the risks of Biden himself trying to take control (as he did with Afghanistan) or some other unqualified handler getting involved are too great.

Kirby is the utterly trusted catspaw for Austin and Blinken to carry out the Pentagon's day-to-day interests in the White House. They couldn't care less about Karine Jean-Pierre; that problem will deal with itself soon enough.

The Pelosi Fallout Is Predictable

Other than rants from figures like AOC and Whoopi Goldberg, reaction to Abp Cordileone's banning of Speaker Pelosi from communion has been largely muted and predictable. As of yesterday, "Pelosi's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request to comment."

However, according to the Red State agggregator-blog,

The California Democrat attended mass on Sunday at Holy Trinity in Georgetown where she received Holy Communion, Politico Playbook reported. Pool reports show that President Joe Biden often attends evening masses at the parish as well.

It also cited this tweet, apparently sent to the press in error:

WOW. Washington Archdiocese accidentally sent this email to @dcexaminer admitting that it is ignoring press inquiries about whether @WashArchbishop will "bring down the hammer on Pelosi." pic.twitter.com/KPtY6gpZzu

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 23, 2022

Basically, nothing has changed. Catholic politicians like Sen Durbin and President Biden have been able to avoid prohibitions from their home bishops by receiving the sacrament in Washington or, in the case of Biden, simply relying on Cardinal Gregory's continuing willingness to allow it. Pope Francis seems unwilling to step in directly:

Pope Francis today: "Sadly, there has been a change in the common mentality, and we are more led to think that life is a good at our complete disposal, that we can choose to give birth or to take a life as we please, as if it were the exclusive consequence of individual choice" pic.twitter.com/zxUUJOmdcw

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) May 22, 2022

In LA, there's been no direct comment from Abp Gómez, who is President of the USCCB and has been generally aligned with Abp Cordileone on state issues like Catholic school legislation and COVID lockdowns. However, our local pastor's homily this past Sunday referred to the need to "walk the talk" in claiming to be Catholic, but he made no reference to Abp Cordileone or Speaker Pelosi. This seems to be the Church's overall approach for now, not to stoke direct controversy but as applicable to use it as a teachable moment.

It seems to me that Pelosi can finesse the issue as long as she continues to spend most of her time in Washington, and so far, she seems to show no willingness to retire, although she's 82 and likely to lose the speakership after the November election. It's hard not to conclude that she's been used to getting her own way all her life -- she is the daughter of Maryland political boss Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., who was a US representative from Maryland and mayor of Baltimore.

I suspect this will simply be another incentive for her to remain in Washington and not to retire. If she can control people like the US president, it won't be much of a stretch for her to control the Almighty as well.

Poland Wastes No Time

The map above shows the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth as of 1619, overlaid on present European borders. It covered much of Ukraine, as well as the Baltics and Belarus. Two weeks ago, I posted on the likely outcome for Poland under conditions resulting from a militarily weakened Russia in the region and suggested Poland might be aiming for some type of return to the Commonwealth.

Deveopments since then make this seem more and more likely. Yesterday, Polish President Andrzej Duda addressed the Ukrainian parliament, and he and President Zelensky appeared ready to establish closer ties between the countries:

"We have agreed to implement this in the near future in a respective bilateral agreement. First [the agreement] on joint border and customs control, and later [the agreement] on a single conditional border - when Ukraine becomes a member of the European Union," Zelensky said.

He expressed confidence that all the necessary decisions will be made first for Ukraine's candidate status and then for full membership, including thanks to Poland's many years of protection of Ukrainian interests on the European continent.

"And I am grateful for your willingness, Andrzej, to pay a visit to European capitals together with Slovakia's President Zuzana Caputova in order to lobby for Ukraine's membership in the European Union in "sceptical" countries. "In fact, they are not skeptics, but future optimists. That is how I see our common task in this area," Zelensky said.

In my previous post, I noted that Poland and Ukraine had already concluded a defense agreement that links their interests irrespective of the outcome of NATO's decision on admitting Poland, and what we're seeing now is an economic pact that claims to anticipate Poland's admission to the EU but nevertheless will establish an EU-like environment between the countries regardless of that outcome.

Yesterday, Zelensky also announced a draft law that would reciprocate the special legal status Poland has granted Ukrainian refugees in that country.

“We have to look into the Polish law about the people temporarily displaced to Ukraine that, in fact makes Ukrainian citizens equal to the Polish citizens, except for the voting right. On the president’s initiative, a similar bill (concerning the Polish citizens) will now be adopted in Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy’s press secretary Sergey Nikiforov, as reported by the Polish PAP agency after UNIAN.

. . . Appreciating “the respect and support that we receive from the Polish people and the Polish government,” Zelenskyy said that under the new law, Poles on Ukrainian territory would be granted “the same rights that Ukrainians received in Poland.”

Since 24 February, around 3.53 million Ukrainian refugees have crossed the Polish border, tweeted the border guard. In March, the Polish embassy in Kyiv roughly estimated the number of Poles living in Ukraine at “several hundred, probably nearly a thousand.”

The Russo-Ukraine war has clearly brought back the uncertain conditions that resulted from the formation of the Soviet Union after World War I and anticipated realignments before World War II. For instance, according to Wikipedia,

The Polish–Lithuanian War was a conflict between the newly independent Lithuania and Poland in the aftermath of World War I.

. . . Due to Polish-Lithuanian tensions, the allied powers withheld diplomatic recognition of Lithuania until 1922. Poland did not recognize independence of Lithuania as Polish leader Józef Piłsudski hoped to revive the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (see the Międzymorze federation) and campaigned for some kind of Polish–Lithuanian union in the Paris Peace Conference. Poland also did not intend to make any territorial concessions, justifying its actions not only as part of a military campaign against the Soviets but also as the right of self-determination of local Poles.

. . . In April 1920 Poland launched the large-scale Kiev Offensive in hopes to capture Ukraine. Initially successful, the Polish Army started retreating after Russian counterattacks in early June 1920. Soon the Soviet forces began to threaten Poland's independence as they reached and crossed the Polish borders.

Clearly the relations among Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania become extremely complex whenever Russia is weakened in the region, and Poland is attempting to create conditions where it can reassert itself regardless of the EU or NATO, and for now, Ukraine seems willing to cooperate with Poland. However, this thread at Reddit suggests it may not presage the dawning of the Age of Aquarius:

• Just restore commonwealth and be done with it. Always used it to kick muscowy in Europa universalis IV
• No. The commonwealth was a slave state that only pretended to not be primarily a Polish state. In a lot of ways it was the same as Russia, and when Poland regained independence it basically tried to restore the old dynamic.

  Separate and equal partners and allies is an important stepbforward from the past.

It looks like this won't be simple, and the situation after World War I went through the Versailles Conference and the League of Nations before World War II made it moot. I would guess there will have to be a conference similar to Yalta or Versailles that regularizes this and other situations.

More On The Republican Division Over Ukraine

I'm heading this post with another fanciful end-state map for a theoretical partition of Russia, this one after a putative 2037 Treaty of Delhi that ended World War III. This was imagined well before Putin's current invasion of Ukraine, but I think it's pertinent because it represents what antiwar Republicans are refusing to recognize: the Ukraine conflict is likely to force a similar resolution, but at a much lower cost than anyone could have predicted.

As Allahpundit put it at Hot Air more than a week ago,

I’m showing my cards here: I don’t believe that much of the MAGA or MAGA-adjacent caterwauling about the cost of the Ukraine aid bill is on the level. Nationalists have never been sticklers about federal spending, after all. I posted these Mark Levin tweets earlier but let me post them again here.

. . . The populist right and left resent that Ukraine is demonstrating the strength of the prevailing western liberal order on the battlefield at the expense of one of the great enemies of that order. After all, the more effective the American establishment and the EU look in backing the Ukrainians, the less interest American and European voters will have in replacing either with populist regimes of the right or left.

The aid bill has become a cause for populist grumbling because it channels that dubious ambivalence or even hostility towards a Ukrainian victory into a more politically congenial grievance, exorbitant federal spending and the government’s misplaced priorities[.]

. . . [Rand Paul] can’t resist lapsing into libertarian boilerplate about America not being the world’s policeman even though no American “police” are in the field in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are policing their own territory. All we’re doing is helping them defend themselves, a concept that libertarians normally support ardently in the context of the Second Amendment and gun rights.

Once more for emphasis: This bill will pass. [It did.] And because it will, Paul knows that holding it up won’t achieve any of his stated goals but might hurt the Ukrainians at the margins. The fact that he chose to hold it up anyway speaks volumes about his intentions. I hope McConnell exacts some revenge the next time Paul needs something from him.

And McConnell is playing to his advantage now. Allahpundit quotes an interview in the New York Times behind a paywall:

Why did you decide to make the trip to Europe last weekend?

One was to try to convey to the Europeans that skepticism about NATO itself, expressed by the previous president, was not the view of Republicans in the Senate. And I also was trying to minimize the vote against the package in my own party.

We have sort of an isolationist wing, and I think some of the Trump supporters are sort of linked up with the isolationists — a lot of talk out in the primaries about this sort of thing. And I felt this would help diminish the number of votes against the package. I think that worked out well.

The current strategic situation in Ukraine represents a resurgence for Reaganite and neoconservative foreign policy, to the point that even Mitt Romney is regaining credibility:

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney suggested in a New York Times essay that "NATO could engage" in Ukraine, "potentially obliterating Russia's struggling military" as an option against Russian President Vladimir Putin were he to deploy nuclear weapons.

. . . "Russia's use of a nuclear weapon would unarguably be a redefining, reorienting geopolitical event," Romney continued. "Any nation that chose to retain ties with Russia after such an outrage would itself also become a global pariah."

Romney warned that a "cornered and delusional" Putin could use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine, citing warnings from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Russian ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov, and CIA Director William Burns.

I think the problem for populist opponents of Ukraine aid is that the war is already a "redefining, reorienting geopolitical event" -- consider only that Sweden and Finland have applied to join NATO, and irrespective of NATO's specific composition, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and some NATO countries are already concluding side security guaranatees against Russia, while even Austria and Switzerland are beginning to reconsider their prior neutrality.

If Putin were to use nukes, it would only hasten the eventual outcome, which is going to wind up looking something like the map above no matter what. And an attempt to delay the inevitable outcome by forcing a smaller withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine than Ukraine wants will only result in renewed conflict later and continuing war at higher cost.

Neoconservative policy foundered on Iraq and Afghanistan, advocating disastrously costly and inefficient endless wars -- it bothered me from the start that the US was using multimillion-dollar helicopters on missions that alone cost six-figure amounts in fuel, ammunition, and personnel to shoot at insurgents riding motor scooters. This had to end somehow; Biden ended it clumsily. Ukraine reverses the cost-benefit ratio; it's Ukraine that's the low-cost combatant fighting the wasteful Russians.

And the benefit nobody has so far mentioned is that somehow Biden has gained nothing in the polls for his support of Ukraine.

Abp Cordileone Bars Speaker Pelosi From Communion

The odd thing is how little intelligent coverage this development has had on the right-wing aggregators. As of this morning, it's well below the fold on the Red State blog, although there's an unusually thorough story on Breitbart.

However, the interviewer above from the Jesuit AMERICA magazine draws Abp Cordileone out in some detail on the precise implications of his action. It is not, in his view, excommunication, which he believes would be more severe. Instead, she may attend mass, but she may not present herself for the sacrament, and he has instructed his priests not to admit her to the sacrament if she presents herself for it.

However, Hot Air reports that "Pelosi has a second home in Santa Rosa, and the bishop there plans to honor Cordileone’s declaration." The story quotes The Pillar:

After Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s archbishop said Friday she is barred from receiving the Eucharist, the bishop of the California diocese where Pelosi has a vacation home says he will uphold the prohibition when Pelosi attends Mass in his diocese.

Bishop Robert Vasa of the Diocese of Santa Rosa told The Pillar May 20 he has instructed priests to observe the decision of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone when Pelosi attends Mass at the parish nearby her Napa Valley vacation home and vineyard.

“I have visited with the pastor at [Pelosi’s parish] and informed him that if the Archbishop prohibited someone from receiving Holy Communion then that restriction followed the person and that the pastor was not free to ignore it,” Vasa said in a statement provided to The Pillar by the Santa Rosa diocese.

Washington’s Cardinal Wilton Gregory has not responded to questions from The Pillar about whether Pelosi can continue to receive the Eucharist when she attends Mass in Washington D.C., where Pelosi and her husband Paul live while Congress is in session.

In the past, Gregory has expressed opposition to prohibiting Catholic politicians from the Eucharist because of the political positions, even on abortion.

In the interview above, Cordileone says the US bishops may differ on individual cases based on their prudential judgment, but they generally respect each other. He notes that the US bishops have discussed the issue extensively behind the scenes, and in particular, he's had discussions with Cardinal Gregory of Washington. So far, there's been no public disagreement with Cordileone's move from other bishops, but the story is still new. At the same time, there's so far been no public reaction from Pelosi.

In addition, as of this morning, I find that an attempt to visit the Archdiocese of San Francisco's website results in a 403 Forbidden message, which I assume is the result of a hacker. I'm sure there will be further developments.

UPDATE: It looks like this was a denial of service attack, and it seems to have been alleviated. The text of Abp Cordileone's letter to the faithful is here.

More Division Over Ukraine On The US Right

The amount of grandstanding on the US Right against aid to Ukraine is disturbing -- I've got to hope it's cynical, because if people like Rand Paul actually believe what they're saying, it's even worse. The good news, though, is that even combined with the tankies on the Left, they're a minority. Here's a piece at the pro-Trump, anti-Ukraine Breitbart News:

The Senate on Thursday passed legislation to give $40 billion to Ukraine in economic and military aid, while Americans suffer from food shortages and inflation.

The Senate voted on H.R. 7691, the Ukraine Supplemental Aid Package, which passed 86-11. The vote featured strong Republican and Democrat support for the bill; however, some populist Senate Republicans opposed the legislation, believing that America should focus its efforts on domestic crises such as 40-year-high inflation and baby formula shortages.

. . . Senate Republican populists could not stop the overwhelming Senate support to stop the legislation, even though it required 60 votes, but Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) managed to delay the passage of the bill until Thursday.

Paul told Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow that the United States would have to borrow the $40 billion to send the tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. The Senate did not vote on Paul’s proposed amendment to have an inspector general ensure the billions were spent wisely.

. . . Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also became a sharp detractor of the Ukraine aid bill, contending that it is not in America’s interests.

“Spending $40 billion on Ukraine aid – more than three times what all of Europe has spent combined – is not in America’s interests. It neglects priorities at home (the border), allows Europe to freeload, short changes critical interests abroad and comes w/ no meaningful oversight,” Hawley wrote.

In contrast, the Never Trump Hot Air reported,

A surprising meeting of the minds amid a storm of bad-faith populism.

Why are we spending $40 billion on Ukraine instead of on baby formula? the MAGA nationalists demand to know. Well, (a) the baby-formula shortage is a regulatory problem, not a funding problem. And (b) as all but the most pathetic anti-anti-Putinites understand, it’s in America’s own long-term interest to have a highly motivated foreign military smash Putin’s army on a rock for us.

Frankly, the question should be turned around. When was the last time we got as much bang for our buck on defense spending as we’re going to get from this $40 billion outlay on Ukraine? We spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan over 20 years and our reward was watching the country fall back into Taliban hands. For a little less than two percent of that amount, we’re helping the Ukrainians destroy fascist Russia’s major-power status on a global stage and set the Russian military back God knows how many years.

. . . Another populist argument against aid to Ukraine is that it’s dangerous to keep this war going given the risks of escalation. I’m sympathetic to that one; there’s no higher-stakes bet than gambling that a humiliated Putin won’t go nuclear. But yanking aid to Ukraine for fear of what Putin might do would be appeasement in its rawest form. It would incentivize him to engage in nuclear brinksmanship in all of his future foreign adventures, expecting that the quivering west will back down. “Provocative weakness” is a thing, especially to a character who obsesses over strength.

My sympathies are populist, but Rand Paul for one is not a populist -- he's a doctrinaire libertarian. Beyond that, the main issue he cites, along with Donald Trump of all people, is that we're sending $40 billion to Ukraine while there's a baby formula shortage at home. The contrast is incredible; Ukraine is dealing with ethnic cleansing on a scale approachling genocide and discovering new mass graves daily. The US has a baby formula shortage.

The Hot Air piece goes on to speculate on why Ted Cruz voted in favor of the package:

He’s a populist, and not just any populist but one who’s hoping to inherit Donald Trump’s voters once Trump retires. He tends to keep pace with Josh Hawley in the Senate, knowing that Hawley covets the same niche. Hawley voted against the Ukraine aid bill, however, while Cruz voted for it. How come?

Maybe he’s enough of a hawk by instinct that his desire to see Putin defeated trumps his electoral instincts to pander to populists. But I doubt it. Cruz always has a plan when it comes to the next presidential primary, and in this case he’s probably expecting that Republican voters will remain hawkish towards Russia through 2024. Further to that point, a new YouGov poll finds GOPers support sending financial aid to Ukrainians by a 58/23 spread and sending weapons by a 65/17 margin. If the Ukrainians win the war, those numbers will balloon after the fact; everyone wants to be on the winning side, after all. If so, it’ll be easy for Cruz to explain why he supported the bill in hindsight. It’ll be hard for Hawley to explain why he didn’t.

On Ukraine, Trump is turning out to be amazingly tone deaf.

"Tankies" And Changing Political Alignments

One bit of information I've been chewing on recently is that by far the best reporting on the Russo-Ukraine war is at the uber-left Daily Kos. Up at that site yestesrday was Ukraine update: The tankies think everything—even the Ukraine invasion—is America's fault. "Tankie" was a new word for me. According to Wikipedia, "Tankie is a pejorative reference to hard-line, pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party of Great Britain." Kos goes on at the link,

The pejorative term “tankie” comes from American leftists who defended the violent Soviet crackdown of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an uprising crushed by tanks. They were our allies during the Iraq War, so it may come as a shock seeing them become pathetic apologists for Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to reconstitute the Soviet empire.

In their telling, the Ukraine invasion is the United State’s fault because it “expanded” NATO too aggressively, threatening poor Russia. How would we like it if Mexico joined a military alliance with Russia? We didn’t like it when the Soviet Union tried to place nuclear bombs on Cuba!

In the tankie worldview, no one has agency except the United States. Poland and Slovakia and Romania and Bulgaria didn’t have the ability or right to choose to join NATO. Neither do Finland and Sweden. These are all imperialist provocations and machinations by the American empire. What other option did Russia have but to defend its borders by, uh, explicitly advocating for its own empire?

Well, I turned 21 in 1968, and although as a student I was generally sympathetic to the so-called New Left of the time, by the early 1970s it was increasingly plain that many prominent New Leftists had actually been "red diaper babies", which again according to Wikipedia were "child[ren] of parents who were members of the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) or were close to the party or sympathetic to its aims", which is to say Stalinists. The New Left was simply a rebranding of the Old Left.

Oddly, Kos is calling out the remnants of those bad old days. The piece links this tweet from Glenn Greenwald:

Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it.

"His name is Donald J. Trump," Chomsky says.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/z3Cug8kFHS

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022

The piece concludes:

The tankies like to pretend that President Joe Biden and nearly all European heads of state begged Russia to hold off any invasion, or maybe think it was some dastardly effective reverse psychology ploy. They point to increased defense spending and new riches enjoyed by the military industrial complex and say “aha! It’s all going according to their plan!” as if this unfortunate new round of defense spending hasn’t been foisted by Putin’s actions.

But nothing galls more than their utter disregard for the choices of free nations to decide their own destiny. They have been so impacted by America’s real foreign policy sins that they have lost the ability to understand that the world is a complex place, and sometimes, other people get a say in their own affairs. And sometimes, America is on the right side.

So all of a sudden the Daily Kos is endorsing a Reaganite, essentially neoconservative foreign policy in all but name, indeed going so far as to draw a distinction between seeing the Ukraine conflict as a "proxy war" in which Ukraine is simply carrying out US imperialist designs, versus a view that regards eastern European countries as following a freely chosen course intended to forestall Stalinist revanchism. But I think Kos is also repudiating the New/Old Left of C Wright Mills, Staughton Lynd, Bettina Aptheker, Abbie Hoffman, and others, which became increasingly Stalinist in its outlook and would seemingly never have agreed to a foreign policy of Soviet containment, much less rollback.

Yet what we're seeing in Ukraine and NATO, with a new policy of explicit military alliance intended to oppose and even reverse Stalinist revanchism driven by Poland and attracting Sweden and Finland, is something leftists of even my generation would never have countenanced.

On the other hand, the current US Right that once was fully on board with what had once been a bipartisan consensus for Soviet containment, now has at least prominent skeptics highy critical of US funding for Ukraine's war. These include Rand Paul and even Donald Trump, while Biden, whom everyone had assumed would look the other way for a Russian invasion, has come out fully in favor of an essentially Reaganite policy.

So I guess it's no coincidence that the single best source of daily updates and analysis on the war is at the Daily Kos. But I'm scratching my head.

Musk Takes The Red Pill?

The Musk Twitter takeover is devolving into delicious comedy:

The CEO of Tesla had roiled the markets on Friday when he placed his Twitter takeover deal on a “temporary hold” while citing the need to gauge the exact proportion of bots or fake accounts that populated Twitter’s 229 million monetizable daily users in Q1 2022.

Even though Musk had stated at the time that he was still “committed” to the deal, the CEO of Tesla recently revealed that he had received a call from Twitter’s legal team shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The call was prompted by a tweet from Musk where he revealed that Twitter’s in-house random sampling process used a sample size of 100. Bear in mind that Musk will have to pay $1 billion in breakup fees if the deal falls apart.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. We had noted on Friday that Musk’s suspension of the takeover deal might be a ploy to renegotiate a lower price for Twitter. Well, the latest tweet from Musk certainly adds confidence to this conjecture.

To wit, Musk has now speculated in a tweet that “over 90%” of Twitter’s daily active users might be bots or fake accounts.

There is some chance it might be over 90% of daily active users, which is the metric that matters to advertisers.

Very odd that the most popular tweets of all time were only liked by ~2% of daily active users.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 15, 2022

In the same news cycles, Musk has made it public that he now plans to vote Republican, despite his previous hiatory of voting Democrat.

Billionaire Elon Musk said he plans to vote Republican in the upcoming election cycle after voting "overwhelmingly" for Democrats in the past.

The Tesla CEO and founder made the remark on Monday while speaking via video link at a Miami tech conference, where he discussed his views on Twitter and free speech, among other topics.

One problem with trying to decode Musk is that his tongue never seems completely out of his cheek. On the other hand, as a few observers have pointed out, what Musk is implying in his tweets that Twitter's fake users number somewhere between 20% and 90% is that the company's business model is based on massive fraud. This goes beyond a simple attempt to talk the price down. That he would release the information that Twitter's sample size in claiming 5% bots was 100 -- an absurdly small number -- suggests he may well be on to something.

On the other hand, Alex Berenson, whose suit against Twitter for banning him survived Twitter's motion for summary dismissal, has this interpretation on his Substack:

Some of you have asked why I’m still chasing my lawsuit against Twitter, even after it accepted Elon Musk’s takeover offer.

Fair question. In fact, at the Berenson v. Twitter hearing on April 28, federal Judge William Alsup asked something similar. After all, if Musk is going to let Donald Trump back on, he’ll let me on too, right?

I have two answers, one practical and the other philosophical.

The practical one is that we don’t know whether the deal is going to happen - whether Musk will actually buy Twitter. This point may be the only one on which Twitter’s lawyers and I fully agree.

Musk highlighted the risks two days ago by tweeting (of course) that the deal was “on hold” because Twitter might have more fake accounts than it has admitted. Musk sent the message Friday morning, before the stock market opened, and it put Twitter shares into a tailspin. On a very positive day for stocks, the first in a while, Twitter was down about 10 percent.

Oh please. Like the man didn’t know Twitter had bots. Musk’s real concern is obvious: Technology stocks have cratered in the last month. If not for the deal, Twitter shares would probably be trading in the 20s. Thus $54.20 is a rich price (as Twitter’s board confirmed in its rush to take it).

At the same time, shares in Tesla, Musk’s car company, have plunged since he first made his offer for Twitter.

Musk has plenty on his plate. Tesla investors are clearly worried fixing Twitter will take more time and energy than he thinks and put an even bigger target on him. Electric cars are the reason Musk is the world’s richest person. He can’t like the way Tesla’s stock has performed since he started dancing with Twitter.

All in all, Musk may be suffering some buyer’s remorse. Offer to spend $44 billion in haste, repent at leisure! At the least, Musk might be hoping to jam Twitter’s board - which so far has shown all the spine one would expect from a company whose general counsel weeps in public - into accepting a lower price.

Twitter is now trading almost 25 percent below Musk’s offer, indicating investors think the odds are at least 1 in 3 the deal won’t go through.

Thus I cannot depend on Musk to let me back on, and the lawsuit must continue.

On this, I've got to side with Berenson -- he's coming off as a pretty shrewd guy, and he sees pretty clearly that he and Musk have completely different agendas. Nevertheless, I would bet that Musk has good reason for his suspicions about Twitter bots, and if so, we're venturing into Enron territory. At some point, Berenson may be left without anyone to sue.

I would also bet that Musk is too smart to take a pill from some old guy he just met on the web.

Congressional UFO Hearings!

I suppose that in a week where Amber Heard returns to the witness stand and the number of fake accounts on Twitter could be as high as 20%, there should be nothing unusual about congressional hearings on UFOs. But I was doing a web search on "UFO religion" and came up with an interesting piece on VOX -- interesting in how much it gets wrong:

It’s a great time to believe in aliens.

. . . According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the new book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion — and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think.

More than half of American adults and over 60 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident.

. . . On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.

According to Wikipedia, Diana Walsh Pasulka is a writer and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. But in the interview at the link above, her knowledge of religion is pretty one-dimensional:

Sean Illing

You describe belief in UFOs and aliens as the latest manifestation of a very old impulse: a religious impulse. What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people?

Diana Pasulka

One way we can make sense of this by using a very old but functional definition of religion as simply the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. There are many definitions of religion, but this one is pretty standard.

Which would presumably put Aquinas on the same level as Erich von Däniken -- the problem is that Jesus of Nazareth, as well as Moses and, heck, Mohammed and Buddha, are fully human, and none came from the sky. So this is your pretty standard liberal arts prof conjuring comfortable bromides from thin air. She goes on:

There is another distinction about belief in nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligence, or UFO inhabitants, that makes it distinct from the types of religions with which we are most familiar. I’m a historian of Catholicism, for instance, and what I find when I interact with people in Catholic communities is that they have faith that Jesus walked on water and that the Virgin Mary apparitions were true.

Prof Pasulka claims to be some sort of expert on Catholicism, but she misses an important distinction. According to this explanation:

Catholics are obligated in faith to accept all general or public revelation, but they are not guilty of sin if they decline to believe in particular private revelations, even if those private revelations really occurred. If you find the evidence for a particular apparition unconvincing, you’re free to disbelieve in it. In fact, you should disbelieve in it, because you’d do yourself a disservice if you believed in something you think didn’t occur.

Marian apparitions and apparitions of other saints are examples of what we call private revelations. They are given to individuals in private. General or public revelation is given to the whole Church, is enshrined in Scripture and sacred Tradition, and ended with the death of the last apostle. General revelation is binding on all Christians, but private revelations are binding only on their recipients.

So she misses the distinction between the scriptural account of Christ walking on water, a general revelation, and Marian apparitions, which are private, and over which individual Catholics are entitled to differ, especially if they find the evidence unconvincing. But then she goes off in a truly weird direction:

But there’s something different about the UFO narrative. Here we have people who are actual scientists, like Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, who are willing to go on TV and basically make announcements like, “We are going to find extraterrestrial life.” Now, she’s not exactly talking about intelligent extraterrestrial life, but that’s not how many people interpret her.

She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.

But the belief that UFOs and aliens are potentially true, and can potentially be proven, makes this a uniquely powerful narrative for the people who believe in it.

Is it fair to call this a new form of religion? I think so.

The reasoning here seems to be that Ellen Stofan is an "actual scientist", so we must give her predictions special validity. Old time religion was "based on faith in things unseen and unprovable", but now we're in a realm where actual scientists are predicting that UFOs and aliens are "potentially true, and can potentially be proven". According to Wikipedia,

The Great Pumpkin is an unseen character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. According to Linus van Pelt, the Great Pumpkin is a supernatural figure who rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween evening, and flies around bringing toys to sincere and believing children. Linus continues to have faith in the Great Pumpkin, despite his friends' mockery and disbelief.

Well, I've been to academic presentations where the latest recipient of the Professor of the Year award goes on smoothly about Science or whatever, and he or she simply ignores basic objections in the question period, and I would guess Prof Pasulka would do the same if I were to raise that sort of question. But how does Ellen Stofan differ from Linus if neither the Great Pumpkin nor any superhuman space alien has provably appeared?

I think Prof Pasulka does provide an intriguing pathway to further inquiry if we identify a popularized conception of "science" as something that's arisen in the wake of Hume, Kant, and Darwin as what we might call a replacement for naive fideism, a belief that faith and reason are incompatible, while reason is an exclsively reliable guide to living. The problem is that "science" keeps needing to reach out to the unproven to justify itself.

News On The Space Alien Front

Via the New York Post,

NASA scientists plan to launch pictures of naked humans into space in the hope of luring aliens to us.

The depictions will also include an invitation to respond should an intelligent alien race find the space nudes.

Fortunately, the hypothetical aliens shouldn’t be too shocked by the unsolicited nudes.

The pictures aren’t graphic photographs of naked humans but a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a depiction of DNA.

The man and woman are waving in an attempt to look more inviting.

NASA scientists revealed the image in a study that’s part of a project called the “Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG).

The image looks like this:

But I have a bunch of questions, starting with whether this is redundant. It appears possible that the space aliens could be watching episodes of Naked and Afraid well before this transmission reaches them, after all. According to the BBC,

A television company has joined forces with a social networking site to send a message to the nearest theoretically inhabitable planet. But can our television and radio broadcasts already be picked up in space?

. . . Space scientist Dr Chris Davis, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, says it is possible that television and radio signals from Earth could be picked up on other planets, but it isn't easy.

. . . "Of course, no one more than about 50-70 light years away will have yet heard from us, but I figure that our earliest broadcasts are washing over about one new star system each day. So the potential audience is growing."

We're back to the remarkably blithe assumption that the space aliens can decode the binary transmission that contains this strangely puerile message. Well, yes, if they've invented the warp drive, of course they can do it, and a great deal else. But if that's the case, why haven't we heard from them already? But even if we accept the calculations that say there are n to the 25th planets with the conditions that allow life to develop, on how many of those does life evolve beyond pond scum?

I was banned from the comment section of an economics blog many years ago when the blogger posted a mathematical calculation, and I asked how math evolved from pond scum. But the problem is there: reason, with the ability to understand and manipulate the physical world, is necessary to invent warp drives or decrypt interplanetary messages in a bottle, but that's something entirely separate from the physical world itself and as far as I can see, does not necessarily come from it.

So this reflects a certain unintended Genesis bias in the transmission, which is no different from the Carl Sagan pictographs on the Voyager disks. And let's face it: the depiction of the naked earthlings on either the Voyager disk or the new transmission has nothing to do with how earthlings actually look outside of porn sites. People don't usually walk around that way. This is part of the oddly puerile vibe of the whole communication-with-aliens project, especially given the current emphasis on gender equity. Heck, why not show five earthlings in unisex space suits and leave the details for later?

The BITG project is entirely heteronormative and transphobic. I have no idea how NASA got away with this.

But the depiction in the transmission also reflects another Genesis bias, which is that the historic depictions of naked Adam and Eve represent earthlings in their prelapsarian state, at worst in the instants between the temptation of Eve and Adam's bite at the apple. The strange pixellated rendition is a peculiar parody -- earthings male and female aren't actually like that; the portrayal is so unrealistic as to be unscientific.

Real earthlings are flawed, they grow old and die, they don't look like porn stars.

Meanwhile, the never-Trump but right-wing Hot Air blog is reporting sympathetically on congress's impatience with the slow implementation of the AOIMSG (Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group), the next iteration of the Project Bluebook UFO hunt boondoggle. And indeed, Hot Air now reports with delight that the House is making progress:

I find it hard to believe that I’m actually typing this, but it’s true. After so many years of calls for more transparency from the government on the subject of UFOs (or unidentified aerial phenomena, as we’re supposed to call them now), a House subcommittee on intelligence will hold public hearings on the topic next week. This is the first time that such a hearing has taken place in more than half a century.

These people are as dumb as the goys who are sending fanciful pictures of porn stars into space. They're pleasing only themselves.

Fermi's Paradox And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

According to Wikipedia,

The second law may be formulated by the observation that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease, as they always arrive at a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where the entropy is highest at the given internal energy. An increase in the combined entropy of system and surroundings accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, often referred to in the concept of the arrow of time.

According to Wikipedia,

Entropy is a scientific concept as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty.

It's interesting that the definition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics above contains the word "evolution", since skeptics of neo-Darwinism often challenge the theory with reference to the Second Law. Somewhat restated, this will say that if you take a pot of water and cover it up, no matter how long you leave it, it won't spontaneously generate life. Even if you drop in some amino acids, if you just leave the pot alone, you won't get lfe, because that would assume the order in the pot would increase; i.e., the amino acids would somehow become more complex and regenerate themselves.

Instead, the Second Law would say that without any other input, the amino acids and any other minerals you found in the pot will instead deteriorate, to the point that even the pot itself will eventually fall apart and any remaining water would spill out, except it would have evaporated long before then.

The whole idea of life on other planets hinges on the possibility -- or indeed, the probability -- that given a certain set of preconditions on a planet, life will somehow emerge. A second question is if life emerges at all, presumably as some form of primitive pond algae, how it can become more complex or more ordered over time and "evolve" into an advanced civilization capable of telecommunications or space travel. After all, a planet or a solar system can be considered an isolated system, and the assumption is that all of its components will become more disordered over time.

This is certainly borne out when we look at Mars or Venus. We might assume that Mars at one time had a more complete atmosphere, or that at one time it had surface water, but following the Second Law, Mars has become more disordered over time. There's no evidence of life there now, at least so far, and the best we can do is speculate that at one point it could have emerged, but under the Second Law this is unlikely, and it must in any case have succumbed to the increasing disorder we would expect on the planet as an isolated system.

The idea that there is some high statistical probability of alien life, and indeed not just life, but intelligent alien civilizations, emerged in the late 1950s. Again according to Wikipedia,

In September 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in the journal Nature with the provocative title "Searching for Interstellar Communications". Cocconi and Morrison argued that radio telescopes had become sensitive enough to pick up transmissions that might be broadcast into space by civilizations orbiting other stars. Such messages, they suggested, might be transmitted at a wavelength of 21 cm (1,420.4 MHz). This is the wavelength of radio emission by neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, and they reasoned that other intelligences might see this as a logical landmark in the radio spectrum.

Two months later, Harvard University astronomy professor Harlow Shapley speculated on the number of inhabited planets in the universe, saying "The universe has 10 million, million, million suns (10 followed by 18 zeros) similar to our own. One in a million has planets around it. Only one in a million million has the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it. This calculation arrives at the estimated figure of 100 million worlds where life has been forged by evolution."

There have been numerous attempts to detect alien transmissions following the criteria set by Cocconi and Morrison, but in the 60-odd years since, no such signals have been detected. One basic problem is the Second Law: even if you have a planet with "the right combination of chemicals, temperature, water, days and nights to support planetary life as we know it", things on that planet as an isolated system can only get more disordered over time; over billions of years, that planet, like Mars, can lose its atmosphere, lose its surface water, lose its chemicals, or whatever else even before lfe has a chance to develop, much less evolve into a civilization capable of radio transmissions.

What's The End State?

I was watching a Ukrainian's comment about the war on YouTube, and he made a key point: various political leaders have worried about "starting World War III", but it's important to be realistic: we're already in World War III. Right now, there's a massive tacit allied effort to wage a new war against Soviet revanchism, with Ukraine as the proxy, but the tacit alliance recognizes to one extent or another that the fate of Europe hinges on its outcome. The only remotely clear policy statement on allied war aims so far has come from Secretary Austin, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

That should be at least relatively uncontroversial -- as Jennifer Rubin says in the link, "In reality, Austin simply stated the obvious." But what does this mean in context? I've already said here that the end of this war, even if its immediate cease-fire result is just a reestablishment of Ukraine's existing borders, will nevertheless mean some additional set of measures that will weaken Russia enough to keep it from re-invading Ukraine. That's the closest thing to an allied territorial war aim that we have for now.

This leaves aside the question of how Russians can be tried and punished for war crimes, which is also an expressed aim of many allied leaders. But an international authority with the effective power of the Nuremberg tribunal will be needed within Russia, able to override former national police power to the degree that suspects can be effectively located, arrested, brought to trial and subject to punsihment. This would place the existing Russian state or its successor under some type of superseding international control. This in turn suggests that a full achievement of allied war aims would involve a reconstitution of the Russian state similar to what happend in Germany and Japan after 1945, and proposals for a postwar Russia that fall short of that are unrealistic.

Allied discussion before the end of World War II addressed these same problems. France and Poland were liberated, but what would protect them from re-invasion if Germany were able to rebuild as it had been and reassert itself? After all, the evidence was clear that the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty had failed to accomplish the same objectives a generation earlier. The practical solution was the occupation of Germany, reduction of German territory, its partition into four temporary occuparion zones and two eventual successor states, and the political reorganization of those states under great-power supervision. These principles were agreed prior to and during the Yalta Conference.

It seems reasonable to expect that some type of international agreement similar in extent to Versailles or Yalta will need to establish conditions following the conclusion of the Russo-Ukraine war. On that basis, it's hard to assert that "World War III" hasn't already been started, and its resolution will lead to territorial relignment, as well as a new Russian constitution.

Unanticipated consequences following Yalta, however, were reification of postwar Poland under revised borders that awarded the eastern part of the country to the Soviet Union, which kept what Stalin had gained in the 1939 partition pact with Hitler, and which in turn transferred East Prussia and Silesia back to Poland from Germany. This will have serious implications that will now play themselves out in a new settlement with post-Ukraine Russia. Will eastern Poland remain Russian? What about Kaliningrad?

In thinking about a post-Ukraine War settlement, I discovered there are already numerous maps on the web from well before this year depicting potential partitions of Russia following a theoretical World War III. One goes so far as to represent itself as the outcome of the "2037 Treaty of Delhi". The one above is similar, though all these are fanciful and likely not predictive -- but they do reflect a consensus even before the current war that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union would not be the end of the story, and a realistic assumption that World War III in whatever form would reflect a major revision to Russian territory.

One factor that I've already discussed has been the rise of Poland, which has been taking a leadership role in supporting Ukraine in this war, transferring its own tanks and other arms, as well as being a key transport corridor for other countries' contributions. In yesterday's post I discussed this issue at greater length.

But there are other territorial disputes that have been on the back burner since at least 1945 but would become pressing with a weakened Russia -- and again, a "weakened Russia" is now an implicit war aim for the US and other allies. Japan would almost certainly regain control of the disputed Kuril Islands and possibly Sakhalin. Stalin seized Karelia, several areas along the Finnish border, after the Russo-Finish war. Although Finland's policy has not been to claim these territories are disputed to avoid antagonizing Russia, its attitude appears to be changing, and a weakened Russia would be in less of a position to object to their return.

China and Russia have had a series of relatively minor border disputes, which have been at least theoretically resolved as of 2008. However, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, begun in 2013, envisions a series of possible rail connections between the Chinese rail network and Europe that could be economically threatening to Russia, especially considering the proposed route between China and Turkey running south of both the Caspian and the Black Seas. Both the Chinese and European rail networks, of which Turkey is a part, use the same rail gauge, which is not compatible with the Russian network. An international commission settling the Russo-Ukraine War could conceivably allocate Russian territory to China or other countries to allow completion of this standard gauge rail link, which would stimulate Eurasian trade while excluding Russia.

Other divisions of Russian territory, like those illustrated in the map above, more fancifully allocate wider swaths to China and even the US. At this point, they seem unlikely, put we simply don't know how the war will turn out, and we don't know what a post-Putin Russia will look like after a major military defeat. If, as in the map above, eastern Siberia is annexed by the US, this would make a Bering Sea rail tunnel a practical possibility, something that's been mooted since before World War I. Ths would, among other things, allow a standard gauge rail connection from North America to China, since both also use the standard European track gauge.

In addition, a weakened Russia and now a schism within Orthodoxy, along with a strengthened Catholic Poland, also means a renewed Catholicism in Ukraine. I don't think it's a coincidence at all that Pope Francis is increasingly involved in trying to settle the war.

Pope Francis said he has asked for a meeting in Moscow to help bring about an end to the war and warned that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a key backer of President Vladimir Putin's fight against Ukraine, should not become Putin's "altar boy."

The pope's remarks came in an interview published on May 3 in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

In it, the pope revealed that 20 days after the war began, he asked the Vatican's top diplomat, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to communicate with Russia that Francis was ready to travel there in an effort to bring about an end to the conflict, which he likened to what took place in Rwanda 25 years ago. Although the pope did not use the word, the Vatican has recognized the 1994 violence by the Hutus against the Tutsis, which left more than 800,000 people dead, as a genocide.

"We have not yet had an answer and we are still insisting," the pope said of his request to meet with the Russian leader.

Francis has spoken with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky twice since the outbreak of the war and, in a break with diplomatic protocol, left the Vatican on Feb. 25, the day after the war began, to travel to Russia's embassy to the Holy See to register his concerns against the conflict.

. . . The pope also offered further details on his March 16 video conference with the Russian patriarch, saying that during their 40 minute discussion, "I told him: we are not state clerics."

Consider that Pope St John Paul had a major role in supporting Polish resistance to Soviet domination, the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Warsaw Pact. This in turn set Poland on its current course to become a regional power comparable to its position before the Partitions . I would guess that Francis sees a reason to continue the Church's role in the region.