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.

Poland Will Come Out The Winner

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 which a resuscitated Poland will inevitably expand. Note that prior to the partitions, Polish-Lithuanian territory extended well into Ukraine, and it's clear that Polish leadership is already planning for new circumstances:

"There will be almost no more borders between our countries–🇵🇱and🇺🇦,"🇵🇱President Duda said in his speech to🇵🇱ppl:

"We shall live together on this earth, building&rebuilding our common happiness and strength, which will repel any danger or possible threat" https://t.co/2tY4Q85rq9

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) May 5, 2022

Ukraine’s PM Denys Shmyhal confirms that Ukraine has just signed an important defense deal with Poland.

“I can’t reveal its content, but it’s an important step towards providing Ukraine with special technology and special support in the field of security and defense.”

🇵🇱🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/r35L26hziN

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 6, 2022

Poland has also been making its own statements of policy objectives for the resolution of the current war, including that it will not support a settlement that does not restore Ukraine's existing territorial boundaries.

It had begun to occur to me, partly from listening to the YouTube presentations of Ukraine historian Rabbi Henry Abramson, that Poland (as well as Lithuania) had historical ties to much of Ukraine prior to the Russian annexation. According to Britannica,

Direct Polish rule in Ukraine in the 1340s and for two centuries thereafter was limited to Galicia. There, changes in such areas as administration, law, and land tenure proceeded more rapidly than in Ukrainian territories under Lithuania. However, Lithuania itself was soon drawn into the orbit of Poland following the dynastic linkage of the two states in 1385/86 and the baptism of the Lithuanians into the Latin (Roman Catholic) church. The spread of Catholicism among the Lithuanians and the attendant diffusion of the Polish language, culture, and notions of political and social order among the Lithuanian nobility eroded the position of the Orthodox Ruthenians, as had happened earlier in Galicia. In 1569, by the Union of Lublin, the dynastic link between Poland and Lithuania was transformed into a constitutional union of the two states as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At the same time, the greater part of the Ukrainian territories was detached from Lithuania and annexed directly to Poland. This act hastened the differentiation of Ukrainians and Belarusians (the latter of whom remained within the grand duchy) and, by eliminating the political frontier between them, promoted the closer integration of Galicia and the eastern Ukrainian lands. For the next century, virtually all ethnically Ukrainian lands experienced in common the direct impact of Polish political and cultural predominance.

If nothing else, a weakened Russia means a strengthened Poland in Ukraine. For now, based on the tweet above, it also appears that there now is a more or less secret military alliance between Ukraine and Poland, irrespetive of NATO or the EU. But this will probably make Ukraine's NATO membership inevitable, especially as the course of the war is leading to Ukraine's transition from old stocks of Warsaw Pact weaponry, either its own or supplied by Poland and other countries, to NATO weaponry.

A close military alliance with Poland would also make Ukraine a de facto member no matter what. Indeed, Ukraine's experience in successfully fighting Russia will make it an extremely valuable partner. Thus a trend in which Poland becomes a major shaper of NATO policy will likely continue. I'll have more to say on Poland's likely role in a postwar division of Russian territory in a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukraine alignment as well.

I'm intrigued by another potential footnote, the issue of the Russian railroad gauge. At the start of rail construction in Russia, it purposely adopted a railroad gauge, five feet between the rails, that was incompatible with the standard European gauge of 56-1/2 inches between the rails. Thus it would be impossible for either Germany or Austria-Hungary to invade Russia directly using rail transport. This proved only a mild impediment to Germany in Operation Barbarossa, but it's been an increasing obstacle to trade, especially after former Warsaw Pact countries joined the EU.

Indeed, the peacetime break of gauge at the Russian border has been a long-standing impediment to freer trade. Technological workarounds have never been more than uneconomic halfway measures. At some point, especially with Chinese efforts to complete a rail connection to Europe north of the Himalayas with their own rail network, also of the European standard gauge, will also inevitably isolate the Russian broad guage.

Like Ukraine, the Baltic countries adopted the five-foot gauge with Russia. But after the demise of the Soviet Union, the Baltic countries have been in the process of converting to the European gauge.

A close trade agreement with Poland, as well as closer cooperation with Romania as a result of the current war, suggests the same type of conversion will inevitably take place in Ukraine, probably in combination with the postwar rebuilding of Ukraine's rail infrastruture damaged in the war.

I think this will also reinforce a historic realignment. For historical context, it's worth noting that a delayed outcome of the US Civil War was a change in the southern railroad gauge to conform to the northern standard, which effectively finalized the absorption of the south into the northern industrialized economy.

Orthodox, Evangelicals, The US Right, and Putin

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. He claims that the war is “far more important than politics,” adding that “if humanity accepts that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity accepts that sin is a variation of human behavior, then human civilization will end there.” Writing at The Bulwark, Cato Institute fellow Cathy Young noted that the patriarch mentioned “the evil of gay parades” multiple times in last weekend’s Forgiveness Sunday sermon but “did not say a word about fellow Christians under fire in Ukraine. . . .”

Christian nationalism is partly driving Putin’s holy war in Ukraine, much like Christian nationalism is at the heart of the Christian Right’s holy war in the United States. The only significant difference between these two religious wars is that one is a shooting war and one is not.

In opposition to the official atheism that defined the Soviet Union of his youth, Putin now believes that Russia is a historic Christian nation that is in danger of eroding into immorality and debauchery. He wants to prevent what he sees as the decadence of the West, a culture informed by autonomous individualism and sexual promiscuity, from influencing eastern Europe.

While I might stipulate that there's some group of people who are "Christian nationalists" in the US, if this means they somehow want to establish some flavor of Christian as the national religion, they have a tough row to hoe against the First Amendment, which specifically prohibits it. And it's worth pointing out that the US Catholic bishops have been taking collections to aid Ukraine in the conflict, Pope Francis has been clear that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a bad thing, and he has specifically engaged Patriarch Kirill in the matter of his endorsement of it. Yet Catholics are the largest Christian denomination in the US. Certainly the US bishops have no problem with the First Amendment.

The next problem goes beyond the war and into the question of how the media understands and defines "Evangelicals", which is a vague term covering everyone from main line Baptists to people who assert simply that they've been "born again" or "have a personal relationship with Jesus", but don't attend church services at all. This is an almost meaningless designation, and it certainly doesn't imply that any in this vague group automatically support Putin or are some sort of Christian nationalists.

Here's another, similar take:

[C]onservatives [have] been developing a political and emotional alliance with Russia for almost 20 years. Those American believers, including prominent figures such as [Franklin] Graham and Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice see Russia, Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church as protectors of the faith, standing against attacks on “traditional” and “family” values. At the center is Russia’s spate of anti-LGBTQ laws, which have become a model for some anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the U.S.

Now, with Russia bombing churches and destroying cities in Ukraine, the most Protestant of the former Soviet Republics, American evangelical communities are divided. Most oppose Russia’s actions, especially because there is a strong evangelical church in Ukraine that is receiving attention and prayers from a range of evangelical leaders.

Er, what "anti-LGBTQ laws" that are "a model for some anti-trans and anti-gay legislation in the U.S."? The only ones I'm aware of in the US are meant to prevent sexual grooming of pre-teens in the classroom but have no bearing on private conduct outside of it. And this reporter seems not to know what most writers quickly learn: Google is your friend:

[T]he majority of Ukrainians (74%) identify themselves as Orthodox, 8% as the Greco-Roman Catholicism, 1% – as Roman Catholicism and Protestant and Evangelical churches. Just Christians consider themselves almost 9% of respondents, don’t identify themselves with any religious denominations 6%.

Regionally, in all areas of the most common is Orthodoxy, except Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv region, where more than half respondents profess Greek-Catholicism. Also, the Greek Catholics consider themselves almost 20% of the population of Transcarpathia. Roman Catholicism is more common than in other areas in the Carpathian region (7%).

Among those who consider themselves as Orthodox, the relative majority (38%) identified themselves as Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, 20% – to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1% – to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, 39% – consider themselves as just Orthodox.

As far as I can tell from Facebook, Protestant denominations across the board, as well as Jewish charities, have been making humanitarian appeals to support displaced Ukrainians. I've seen no equivalent appeals for Russia. And as I've said, US Catholic parishes have been taking up second collections at mass for Ukraine and including Ukraine in prayers. As the link indicates, there are far more Catholics than Protestants of any type in Ukraine. (As a more or less conservative diocesan Catholic, I have a small Ukrainian flag sticker on my car, and one of our friends at mass recently implored my wife and me to pray for Ukraine.)

As a result, I suspect Christian support for Russia from any direction in the US is overstated in the media.

What about conservatives who are less clearly religious? Tucker Carlson is the most prominent among these, but those with similar views quickly reach the fringe, like Reps Greene and Cawthorn -- joined at the other end of the spectrum by members of the leftist Squad. On the other hand, other conservatives like Rep Dan Crenshaw have a saner perspective:

Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea. You should feel the same.

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 11, 2022

Some remarks I've seen suggest that the fringe US Right feels the ruling class is in some sort of mutual deal with Zelensky to cement its control using Ukraine's current prestige as a cats paw, but it isn't clear exactly how this operates. The ruling class, in the form of President Biden, clearly dragged its feet over supporting Ukraine in the first weeks of the war, and commentators like retired Gen Jack Keane have made the point that the administration has completely reversed its earlier position since then. So precisely what position has the ruling class taken?

My own view is that Zelensky is a Jew and a Ukrainian who sees a strong religious identity, both Jewish and Gentile, as part of an emerging Ukraine. At this point, he's an independent force to be reckoned with.

What Is Musk Actually Up To With Twitter?

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 able to do if Wall Street thought he was just playing games. He thinks he can make a buck out of Twitter, and not just a couple of token percentage points, either. As with making electric cars a high-end consumer good, he's going to transform an industry, or maybe even create a new one from scratch.

My own view from a career in tech is that every tech business or IT department is hugely inefficient. Tech has prospered mostly because it's less inefficient than what it replaced, i.e. paper processing, manual calculation, and multiple procedural steps to get things done. On the other hand, its innovation has reached a plateau. Tech organizations have an interest in maintaining or increasing their levels of inefficiency. This is the first insight Musk has expressed, warning Twitter of new expectations:

Elon Musk has warned Twitter staff they face 'extreme' workloads when he takes over - but insists he'll still graft even harder than them to make the firm a success.

The tycoon replied to an earlier tweet he shared about his plans for the social media network Saturday, and wrote: 'Also, work ethic expectations would be extreme, but much less than I demand of myself.'

His original tweet had outlined Musk's tech-focused approach to running the firm, and said: 'If Twitter acquisition completes, company will be super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware.'

A week ago, I noted his telegraphed intent to fire the company's chief censor and general counsel. My guess is that he wants to get Twitter entirely out of the censorship business, and I would say this is less because he supports free speech than that he can't see why Twitter is giving a valuable product away for free. But if Twitter drops its for-free censorship model, it will force Google, YouTube, and other platforms to review their own losing business models and transform an industry just like PayPal transformed mail order.

Consider the immediate move of the Biden administration to create a "Disinformation Governance Board" following Twitter's acceptance of Musk's takeover offer. In other words, the Biden administration, which we may presume is aligned with the deep state, sees "disinformation governance", i.e. censorship, to be a highly valuable service, one that Twitter had been performing up to now for free, and for which the deep state is clearly now willing to budget serious money if Twitter will no longer provide it.

Musk, as an entrepreneur at the Rockefeller-Harriman level, could even suggest he could provide a for-profit censorship service at a reconstituted Twitter for less than the government would spend itself and still make a buck -- and we can't completely rule that out as a future move. But there can be no question that Twitter's current censorship operation is running at a loss, because the company isn't billing anyone for it now, and the whole project may just not be an efficient use of tech anyhow.

But beyond that, Musk not only tweeted that there would be greater expectations of work ethic and that the company would be "super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware". If you think about it, that would put it much more on a traditional Silicon Valley path like Hewlett-Packard or even the traditional IBM, which in its days of greatness offered a full hardware-software architecture, as well as pioneering information security. This is beyond Microsoft, which is software only, or Apple, which offers a limited spectrum of product focused on the consumer and entertainment.

I spent the first part of my tech career working with "IBM classic", the comprehensive "360" architecture when the business rule of thumb was that you couldn't be criticized for going with an IBM product. But as a contrarian, I always resisted that mindset (and was sometimes written up for it). Once PC desktop architecture, Unix, and networking gained ground, IBM stumbled and stagnated. To my mind, though, in its day, it made a lot of money with that formula, and if Musk can come up with a new 360-type architecture that covers the field, more power to him.

If he was behind PayPal, I wouldn't put it past him, but he's clearly transforming the space industry with Space X, turning the stodgy and underperforming NASA on its head, but expanding into communications as well. Not for nothing does Russia see him as a threat:

The head of Russia’s space agency is threatening Elon Musk with consequences for supplying satellite internet to Ukraine with SpaceX’s Starlink system.

On Saturday, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, posted a message to his Telegram channel, condemning Musk for expanding Starlink’s service to Ukraine, which is facing an ongoing invasion from Russia.

In the message, Rogozin accused Musk of supplying the Starlink dishes to the Ukrainian military, which he described as “Nazis.”

Ukraine, or at least Space X's involvement there, is the least of it. Russia has been forced to scale down its own involvement in space, creating a vacuum Musk will fill. Remarkable and highly underrated guy, an Edison more than a Jobs.