In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 cr...

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 messag...

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 spontan...

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 reestabl...

I don't think it's a coincidence that Poland has beccome the second-largest supplier of weapons and other aid to Ukraine, behind only the US. (Canada, however, may have moved into second in recent days.) I'm starting to think their opportunity is historic. According to Wikipedia, The Partitions of Poland were three partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that took place toward the end of the 18th century and ended the existence of the state, resulting in the elimination of sovereign Poland and Lithuania for 123 years. The partitions were conducted by the Habsburg monarchy, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, which divided up the Commonwealth lands among themselves progressively in the process of territorial seizures and annexations. The wars of the 20th century severely weakened the successor states to Prussia and Habsburg Austria, while the collapse of the Soviet Union and the likely outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war have left a vacuum into whic...

Since the Russo-Ukraine War started, I've been puzzling over why certain groups have been at best squishy over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is apparently something of a schism among Russian Orthodox, the largest Orthodox denomination, since Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has been staunch in his endorsement of the invasion. On the other hand, there's been little intelligent reporting on this, especially on how Russian Orthodox outside Russia have reacted. In fact, the general tendency in religious reporting has been to elide Orthodox and Evangelicals into a single group along with elements of the US fringe and not-so-fringe Right. Here's a typical take: While many Russian Orthodox Church priests have condemned Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, the head of the church, Patriarch Kirill, a man who once called Putin “a miracle of God,” is firmly in the Russian president’s corner. Kirill is particularly concerned about gay pride parades in Ukraine’s Donbas region. ...

As I've already said here, my take on Elon Musk is related to what I've gleaned about earlier American industrialists like Rockefeller Sr, Edward Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould. They didn't get that rich without knowing something, and that included knowing how to make a buck. I'm starting with the assumption that Musk knows more than most people about how to make a buck, and making a buck is his main interest. It's worth noting that his best-known early investment was with the predecessor to PayPal, which revolutionized checking by eliminating the float, the extra balance everyone could carry by waiting days for checks to clear the bank. Musk knew something and figured out how to make a buck from it. And oh by the way, along with the web, it transformed mail order. As a result, his takeover bid for Twitter must not be just a quixotic gadfly gesture. He was able to get financing for his bid, which he wouldn't be ab...