Politico Looks For Causes

A headkine on Politico yesterday: Why Schumer picked a filibuster fight he couldn't win.

Chuck Schumer doesn’t typically lead his caucus into losing votes that divide Democrats. He made an exception for election reform.

The Senate majority leader has run a 50-50 Senate for a year now, longer than anyone else. The whole time, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have consistently communicated to Schumer that he wouldn’t get their votes to weaken the filibuster, no matter the underlying issue. But his decision to force the vote on the caucus anyway — and get 48 Democrats on the record for a unilateral rules change dubbed "the nuclear option" — will go down as one of Schumer’s riskiest moves as leader.

Politico does all it can to spin it as a some sort of secretlly brilliant move for Schumer, but it keeps trying to answer that pesky question -- why.

Schumer usually touts his caucus' unity, declining to engage in extended debates over issues that divide his 50 members. This time, Democrats were fine with isolating the holdouts.

. . . Republicans view the real leftward pressure on Schumer as coming from outside the chamber.

“He’s feeling incredible pressure from his progressive base. And also, his own political future may depend on his performance, too, to avoid a difficult primary,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a frequent sparring partner of Schumer’s.

But having asked the question, however indirectly, Politico never quite comes up with a satisfactory answer.

Some Democrats suggested that Schumer's move on Wednesday was only the start of a long campaign to peel off Manchin and Sinema. Another unilateral rules change vote this year isn't off the table for the party.

But as the midterms approach, now only ten months away, time for that "long campaign" is growing short, while at least for now, the prospects for success after November seem unpropitious. And in that case, is there a Plan B? This is the problem I keep seeing. Faced with the collapse of Plan A, President Biden and Leader Schumer keep insisting they can get Plan A done anyhow. John Fund in the UK Daily Mail circles a little closer to the real issue:

For Washington insiders, the decision to keep his current team into his second year as president is inexplicable.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican not known for his partisanship, called on Biden to fire his chief of staff, Ron Klain, for pushing a 'guaranteed-to-fail vote' on killing the Senate filibuster that he argued was a political ploy.

'It's CYA (cover your ass) week in Washington,' Sasse told Fox News. He said the vote was held in part 'so that Ron Klain can throw some chum at the Democratic Party's progressive base.'

. . . Sasse focused on Klain, because it's common knowledge that the 60-year-old backroom operator has unusual power in the Biden White House.

Klain first worked with Biden in 1987, when he was counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee while Biden was chair and assisted Biden during his ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign. That campaign ended after Biden was caught plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, head of Britain's Labour Party.

Klain later served as Biden's chief of staff when he was Barack Obama's vice president.

As President Biden's chief of staff he has been dubbed 'the most influential chief of staff of recent vintage' in an admiring New York Times profile and The Master of Disaster by his critics.

But neither account -- Politico's theory that the failed filibuster vote was actually evidence of Schumer's unacknowledged brilliance, nor Fund's theory that it all goes back to Ron Klain and Biden's unwavering faith in him -- explains the why in any satisfactory way. Schumer can be brilliant only if he pulls the rabbit out of the hat before November, which is not a realistic prospect. Klain is nothing but a chief of staff, whom presidents routinely fire no matter how much they like them.

It's hard to avoid the choice Politico wants to avoid, that the pressure for the failed filibuster vote came from outside the senate with the cooperation of Klain. My sense of things continues to be, though, that it's related to the putative deal that was made for Sanders to drop out of the 2020 Democrat nomination race in favor of Biden, in exchange for Biden's support for the Plan A agenda. The problem continues to be that there's no Plan B.

What You See Is What You Get

I dipped in and out of Biden's press conference yesterday. As of this morning, there are many takes on it, but what struck me in particular was this sequence, in response to a question from (I think) Peter Doocy:

Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m not. I don’t know what you consider to be too far to the left if, in fact, we’re talking about making sure that we had the money for COVID, making sure we had the money to put together the Bipartisan Infrastructure, and making sure we were able to provide for those things that, in fact, would significantly reduce the burden on the working-class people but make them — they have to continue to work hard. I don’t know how that is pointed to the left.

If you may recall, I — you guys have been trying to convince me that I am Bernie Sanders. I’m not. I like him, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist. I’m a mainstream Democrat, and I have been. And mainstream Democrats have overwhelmingly — if you notice, the 48 of the 50 Republi- — Democrats supported me in the Senate on virtually everything I’ve asked.

This is remarkably disingenuous. He cites primarily the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill. but he omits Build Back Better, which was his 2020 campaign theme, and on which he was at length defeated in the senate. Build Back Better was so important to the House Progressive Caucus that they held the bipartisan bill hostage to it, insisting they be passed together. Speaker Pelosi did all she could to enable this, and Biden certainly appears to have been on board as well. Eventually, neither the Squad nor Speaker Pelosi nor Biden could prevent the two bills being separated and BBB's eventual defeat.

He then says he isn't Bernie Sanders, but in saying that, I think he unintentionally reveals the basic deal that got him the 2020 nomination: although early in the primary contest, it seemed like Sanders would get the nomination, the lizard people decided he couldn't beat Trump, but Biden could. However, at the core of the deal I'm pretty sure was an agreement that in return for the nomination and the support of the party left, Biden would support an essentially Sanders style platform, and that's what he's done over the past year. His real agenda was set by Speaker Pelosi, Sen Sanders, and the Squad.

The analysis I've seen this morning basically mentions nothing new -- the press conference was full of the usual stumbles, misspeaks, gaffes, insults, and outbursts. The conclusion was essentially unanimous, pro or con, Biden will make no course corrections. This isn't reassuring. Bill Clinton, faced with losses in the 1994 midterms, recalibrated and changed course in 1995 and pivoted off the Oklahoma City bombing to become a triangulator. He was able to use charm and flexibility to stay in office, first against Dole in 1996, and then against impeachment in 1998.

Biden clearly has neither charm nor flexibility. I still think he's not impaired or mentally unfit, at least insofar as he is thought to have a medical problem related to dementia. His ability, systematically if unconvincingly, to deny and deflect even the mildest criticisms of his performance yesterday reflects this. He is, though, shallow and obtuse.

Insofar as he has a plan, it sounds like he'll attack the anticipated results of the November midterms by calling them illegitimate. I'm not sure if it was wise for him to telegraph this now, as it gives the Republicans time to plan a counter strategy and work on other issues like Hunter's business deals and whether Joe profited from them, as he certainly must have done.

Biden's basic problem is that the Götterdämmerung strategy, the overall Democrat plan to implement a great reset by 2022 and not worry about the post-midterm consequences, has failed. The main takeaway from yesterday's press conference is that there's no Plan B, while Speaker Pelosi, the main architect of Plan A, is heading toward political limbo. Biden himself, while not senile, doesn't have the capacity to come up with a viable new plan himself.

The Real Political Alignment

Few photos from the past weekend's news illustrate more clearly the current real US political alignment. With even legacy media beginning to ask whether President Brandon needs to change direction following a disastrous first year, let's parse out the current situation. My first observation is that the current Democrat coalition is anything but Marxist, pace Mark Levin. My second is that President Brandon has no choice but to do everything he can to appease that coalition as it exists.

The contradiction in the news photos of the looted container trains in Los Angeles over the weekend is the distant view of the alabaster city framed by stately palms contrasted with the third-world conditions on the rail right of way in the foreground. This is one key nexus of the current coalition, which the rail shippers fully recognize:

Photos and videos showing piles of empty boxes littered alongside rail tracks in Los Angeles County, California have gone viral as shipping companies say they've seen a dramatic spike in railroad theft. Some of the boxes are packages from companies like UPS, Amazon and FedEx.

Union Pacific, one of the country's largest railroad companies, says it may avoid operating in Los Angeles County following the spike in thefts, which it blames on lax prosecution of crimes. The containers and trains are locked, but can be broken into.

This reflects the alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's criminal class, which is fostered by a new crop of prosecutors who won't prosecute violent crime, as well as bail reformers who oppose cash bail. On one hand, to Marx, the Lumpenproletariat are not reliable allies for the working class. On the other, petty criminals in the ghetto and barrio prey almost entirely on their own communities with drugs, shootings, robbery, and prostitution.

The most recent tendency for organized smash-and-grab retail theft and more wholesale looting of trains victimizes the poor and working class, where the retail stores close in their neighborhoods due to such losses, while the supply chain for consumer goods is interrupted, prices rise to compensate for the looting, and jobs disappear in the stores and shipping hubs. But so far, the demagogic politicians -- the Squad and others -- who claim to be acting on behalf of their consituents prevent attempts to remedy the problem and insist on defunding law enforcement. Regarding the lootings,

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has not appeared to take any action or issue a formal reaction to reports of looting from cargo trains near Los Angeles, even though he has taken credit for incremental progress on the supply chain crisis.

President Brandon and his allies in the Democrat establishment can't afford to alienate the Squad, and in any case, Secretary Buttigieg is not there to fix any real transportation issues. Meanwhile, the jobs of the elites don't depend on local retail and distribution, while they're protected from porch pirates in security buildings, well-policed enclaves, and gated communities.

A second factor emerged in the weekend's news, the reemergence of Islamist terrorism in the US, which had been largely inactive since the San Bernardino shootings of December 2015 and the Orlando nightclub attack of June 2016. It's especially significant that the FBI, a Democrat deep state ally, was forced to backtrack on its initial statement that the Coffeyville, TX synagogue hostage crisis was not "specifically related to the Jewish community." Clearly this is a sensitive issue to the Democrat coalition.

Antisemitism and the larger, related issue of "decolonization" are also a key issue for the Squad and its allies in the coalition. Again, the current extremely narrow majorities the Democrats hold in congress mean President Brandon can't afford to alienate even the most extreme adherents of these views. "Decolonization", the view that reason, responsive government, meritocracy, and economic choice are oppressive measures of European domination over people of color, has an associated anti-Christian component, as we saw in the post yesterday in which advocates attempted to restore the Aztec religion to remedy such grievances.

It's worth pointing out that Marxism is philosophically atheist and materialist, although Marx himself was of Jewish ancestry, and the early generations of Soviet and international communists were also of heavily Jewish ancestry. It would never have been part of Marxist doctrine to advocate revival of Islam or Aztec religion, and Marxism was far less specifically antisemitic than National Socialism, which which early Islamism was closely allied,.

Another part of the coalition is, broadly speaking, pansexualists, now including transgenderists. The goal here is increasingly strange, with the most prominent current public figure now Lia Thomas, an Ivy League biological male who competes as a female swimmer. Of all things, the Ivy League as a body has endorsed this:

The Ivy League is, and always has been, of, by, and for the wealthy established elites. It has consistently followed, and continues to follow, discriminatory admissions policies. Just as it endorses transgender athletes, it also now moots dropping standardized admissions tests, once thought to be a meritocratic innovation. Marx never had anything to say about gender dysphoria, although in his personal life he appears to have been well beyond a mere traditionalist in his view of the dominant male role. These people are not Marxists by any stretch.

The public is incresingly aware of the current alignment and is making decisions accordingly. Gallup has found "a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter." Although Gallup themselves mention that the opinion shift is a remarkable reversal of the polls immediately following the 2020 election, they don't mention an inevitable takeaway from this, that the electorate is collectively reviewing that election and determining that it made a mistake.

The Democrat problem is that it can't change course in any meaningful way, since its current legislative majority is so thin that it can't afford to offend any of its allies.

In additioni, COVID and the associated moral panic were a major factor in the 2020 outcome. We're still coming to terms with what happened.

Fun With The Establishment Clause

The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." I ran into an interesting recent case that illustrates yet again how useful it is.

The state of California has agreed to remove an “Aztec chant” from its ethnic studies curriculum following a legal settlement with several plaintiffs

The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec.

Part of the chant read “Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.”

The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin, had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions” as Christians had committed “theocide” to “oppress marginalized groups.”

It occurred to me that pretty much the whole theme of Judeo-Christian scripture, as well as the history of the Church, is theocide, whereby false gods are often quite ruthlessly exterminated. It's just as well the state isn't involved in choosing sides, because at this point, it's almost guaranteed to come down on the wrong side. The story continues,

The Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit in September challenging the chants on behalf of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and three parents. Special Counsel Paul Jonna said “The Aztecs regularly performed gruesome and horrific acts for the sole purpose of pacifying and appeasing the very beings that the prayers from the curriculum invoke.”

The Thomas More Society site explains further:

“The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” added Frank Xu, President of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. “This public endorsement of the Aztec religion fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment.”

The complaint submitted to the court details the California State Board of Education’s approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which includes a section of “Affirmation, Chants, and Energizers.” Among these is the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which invokes five Aztec deities. Although labeled as an “affirmation,” it addresses the deities both by name and by their traditional titles, recognizes them as sources of power and knowledge, invokes their assistance, and gives thanks to them. In short, states the complaint, it is a prayer.

. . . Attorneys sent a demand letter to Tony Thurmond, the California Department of Education’s State Superintendent and former California State Assemblyman, on August 26, 2021, asking for removal of the Aztec prayer from the curriculum. A response was requested by September 2, 2021. When none was received, the lawsuit was filed.

The Thomas More Society was among the public interest law firms that were instrumental in securing a ruling from the US Supreme Court that prevented health departments from declaring religious services non-essential.

Hillary 2024?

I think we can safely say that Hillary Clinton is eyeing a run for the presidency in 2024. Dick Morris, a sometime Clinton intimate, is making the case:

Morris said Sunday that if Democrats lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be toast — paving the way for a second Hillary bid, with husband Bill playing an architect to her strategy.

“There’s a good chance of it,” said Morris, referring to a Hillary-Trump rematch, to John Catsimatidis on the radio host’s WABC show.

“Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill.

. . . ​”She has set up a zero-sum game where the worse [Biden] does, the better she does, because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden. Not just to Biden, but to the extreme left in the Democratic Party,” Morris said.

I think Morris is in something of an alternate universe here. As far as anyone can tell, both the Clintons now appear to be old beyond their septuagenarian years, and they're both sick. What on earth did Bill do to contract sepsis from a urinary tract infection? My bet is that Bill was just being Bill and paid the price -- over my working life, I knew lots of guys who came back from Vegas with UTIs. And by 2024, on her current pace, Hillary will look like a cross between Angela Merkel and Golda Meir.

I've already speculated here that Hillary's best chance is to be the candidate to replace Kamala Harris as vice president under the 25th Amendment if Harris resigns. Then she can either step in for Biden before 2024 if Biden resigns or is incapacitated, or she can try for the nomination then if Biden is still in office.

The problem with that is that the Democrats have moved to the left even since 2016, but beyond that, Hillary isn't really credible as a moderate alternative to Biden or Trump. Biden, after all, was supposed to be the Clinton-style modrate himself, but the story of his presidency so far is that he's caved consistently to Pelosi and the Squad. How would Hillary be different? And to move in as vice president under the 25th Amendment, she would need a majority in both houses of congress.

Up to November of this year, this means she'd need the approval of the Squad. After November, it's likely one or both houses would be under Republican control, and Republican majorities likely wouldn't approve a candidate who'd use the post to campaign in 2024. They'd probably want a non-controversial figure, possibly even a moderate Republican, who wouldn't be a serious 2024 contender. A difficulty there is that many potential names, like Colin Powell, are no longer available.

A Trump-style Republican who runs in 2024, Trump himself or someone like DeSantis, would probably use a "fool us once" strategy against any Democrat who claims to be a moderate, which Hillary is not in any case. They'd simply say you voted for Biden thinking he wasn't what he turned out to be. How can you trust anyone else who needs the support of the far-left Democrat base?

I don't see it. Actually, I thought Dick Morris was smarter.

Trump Is Back

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign.

Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.

“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back."

. . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to allege that the close outcome was the result of left-wing chicanery, the result of ballot stuffing and interference by Venezuelans, among other false claims. State lawmakers who spent the past year reviewing the ballots ultimately found zero evidence of mischief. But that didn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. GOP politicians across Arizona adopted Trump’s lies anyway. Many of them were guests of honor tonight.

Now, I'm not quite sure what qualifies as a "lie" here. Let's take another well-known example:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he,
“I never died” says he.

Is this a lie? I would call it rhetorical hyperbole.

One Republican talking point, independent of Trump, has been that the circumstances of 2020 temporarily legalized ballot strategies that indeed favored Trump's opponent, and the For the People Act that died in the Senate last week was a failed attempt to make those temporary strategies permanent. There can be no disagreement that electoral reforms in states like Georgia, which President Biden has specifically and angrily denounced, were implemented to eliminate the advantage the 2020 temproary electoral changes gave Democrats.

Even if detailed reviews of ballots showed no irregularity under unique 2020 conditions, it doesn't mean that temporary loosening of ballot requirements didn't influence the election's outcome -- Biden's own objection to Georgia's electoral reforms in the wake of the election argue persuasively for that conclusion. If Trump says he "won twice", it seems to me that's allowable in this context.

In addition, Trump voters are overwhelmingly acting as though the election was legitimate, at least under the conditions at the time. There have been no armed insurrections contesting any local, state, or federal 2020 election. (Get serious, the Januatry 6 Capitol demonstration was not any such thing.) The Trump voters are beginning to organize to exercise legal and constitutionally protected redress in upcoming congressional elections. This alone is a recognition of the process's legitimacy.

The Atlantic article strikes me as disingenuous in its implication that a coup is somehow in the works:

Now that the midterm season is fully underway, Trump will be out and about more often, hosting rallies and stumping for the any Republicans desperate enough to lie about the election in exchange for his support. He will in some ways be reintroducing himself to the country: Here I am, America, back after a stolen election, ready to win by any means possible.

I asked a group of older attendees if they were excited to see Trump run again in 2024. They all were. Two of them argued about whether he could take office before 2025. "It's not possible," a retiree named Michael, who declined to give his last name, said. "I think it is!" a retiree named Susan Higgins said. "The military has to come in, and take [Biden] away."

By the end of the evening, Trump was having trouble pretending that he isn’t actively running for president. He previewed his lines of attack on Biden over Afghanistan, immigration, and inflation, recited a litany of policy changes a Republican-controlled Congress would be able to make, and promised that “in 2024, we are going to take back the White House.” Sam and Dave’s “Hold on I’m Coming,” played as he exited, and the song sounded like a promise.

Trump himself is not quoted as making any remark that implies he intends to do anything but support candidates in the midterm elections who in turn support his agenda, and it's generally recognized that he will be a kingmaker in the 2022 midterms. In 2016, his nomination came as enough of a surprise that there could be no organized effort to reform the rest of the Republican party along his lines, and that was a disadvantage that limited his effectiveness during that term.

At this point, his period out of office is beginning to look like an opportunity.

More Thoughts On Fermi's Paradox

This is a third in a series of posts on Fermi's Paradox, which started here. My thinking in recent years is driven by a remark from the then-vocation director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who posed this question to a discussion group of seminarians: If aliens arrive from outer space, should we offer them baptism?

I don't think he had a single right or wrong answer in mind, but I find the overall direction of his thinking compelling. It's actually in full conformity with the views of pop cosmologist Carl Sagan, the author of the Voyager Disk illustrated above, as well as the late 20th century science fiction universe exemplified by the Star Trek-Star Wars franchises -- except that I think it subverts them via a reductio ad absurdum.

Let's start with the assumption behind the Voyager Disk, which is clearly that it's intended to be found someday, even eons and light years distant, by an alien civilization that has the rational resources to decrypt it. It would pose no challenge for Hollywood to develop a script based on the idea that an alien civilization does in fact come upon the disk and then makes contact with the earthlings who produced it, via some combination of warp drive and time travel.

But the basic assumption behind the disk is that the aliens have the rational capacity to understand that the images are of a species with sexual dimorphism, situated on a planet with a particular location in the universe, with a particular rationalistic understanding of physics and chemistry. Heck, I could write a subplot in that Hollywood script that would involve Dr Asdf Qwerty, a young assistant professor in the Cosmology Department at the University of Glubdwtfug, who comes upon the disk in a discarded pile of cosmic trash, and his subsequent struggle to prove its authenticity. Key to his eventual triumph would be his ability to reverse engineer the LP phonograph technology that plays the sounds on it.

The utter complacency of Sagan's idea is in effect that the mere power of random evolutionary forces will produce alien species elsewhere in the universe with rationalistic cultures that are near-duplicates of our own Ivy League dominated human establishment, such that, once the Sagan disk is discovered, it will be a relatively trivial task to translate a rationalistic message on a piece of metal and act on it in some consequential way -- if in no other way than to place it in the Glubdwtfug Institute of Cosmology's museum. (It would not, however, be consistent with this theory to have an alien microbe species come upon the disk and simply eat it.)

This is puzzling. Before the Star Trek-Star Wars model of the universe, there was the HG Wells model in War of the Worlds, whereby the space aliens are not benign and do not have the interests of earthlings in mind. In fact, even among the earthling cosmological establishment, there have been objections to the Sagan Voyager Disk-SETI model, suggesting we may not be doing ourselves a favor by broadcasting to the universe that we're around.

But looking at Sagan's biography and list of awards on Wikipedia -- which include Ivy League advanced degrees, as well as the Klumpke-Roberts Award; NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal; Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction; Oersted Medal; Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science; and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal -- it's plain that the Sagan view of alien beings has formed the contemporary popular understanding of how the universe is populated.

Thus, space aliens, even if there are superficial differences with earthlings, are able to undersand each other via a mutually translatable set of languages, and indeed, can communicate and persuade via classical rhetoric. It's implied that they are able to understand and manipulate the universe's elements and properties via mutually recognized rationalistic techniques. I think this is in fact an understanding of how we view space aliens that underlies Fr Sam's question to the seminarians.

If or when we encounter space aliens, it's clearly understood in this view that the aliens will not simply want to eat us. Nor will they simply want to exterminate us to steal the planet's water. The basic assumption is that the universe is benign. In fact, it's complacent enough to encompass the idea that there are probably Ivy Leaguers on other planets who are fully simpatico with those on this one.

So there are two basic assumptions here. The first is the Judeo-Christian view, expressed in the Genesis creation story, that the universe is benign. "He saw that it was good." The second is that rationalistic creatures are in effect created in God's image. Thus if there are intelligent space aliens, which of course is a big if, they are created in God's image.

In that case, I have a hard time getting around Fr Sam's question: should we offer them baptism? Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.