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.