The 2026 Election, 24th Edition. Voting for Gray and Hageman is morally unconscionable. So what to do?

 

Kristallnacht in 1938.  A lot of people who had voted for the Nazis had been stampeded there by the assertion that it was the Nazis or the Communists, both of which were populist parties.  The smiling couple probably wasn't smiling by 1945, assuming that they were both alive.

The first rule of logic:  Chesterton's Fence:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

Chesterton, The Thing. 

The second rule of logic:  Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

It's tempting to say that this will be an election like no other, and indeed, I think it is in many ways.  In terms of American elections, it's the most important election, even though it's a midterm election, since the the Election of 1860.  It's the election that will determine if Trump continues to rule as an insane dictator, or if the nation can begin to turn the path towards constitutional democracy.¹

Things like this make this a critical election:

On the Cornell rapes:

Letitia James is a corrupt person…And I feel badly for whoever she's looking at because they won’t get a fair shake.

He later called James a "dog".

I'm an actual conservative.  I am not a populist.  Conservatives believe that man if flawed and that we should be careful to conserve things that have worked or are part of culture until we know what the reason for casting it aside would really be.

The sixth rule of logic: Yeoman's Gate:

Before you go through a gate to get to the other side of a fence, completely figure out, to the extent you can, where the path goes.

Conservatives believe that man is fallen and that our natures and the nature of the world, in its pure form, is dictated by an outside existential, that being God to most conservatives, and nature to some.  We don't cast away easily, and we believe the Natural Law ultimately controls most things.

Conservatism has been killed by Donald Trump.

The most significant force around Trump is that of populism.  Populism believes that the "will of the people" is endowed with some sort of magic virtue. The question is, who are the people?  It's never all the people.  Populists always regard themselves as "the people" and other people as the enemy of the people.  They're easily lead by demagogues  At one time they followed Bernie Sanders around like puppies, now they follow Donald Trump.  The besotted populists believe that the will of the people is magically transmitted to Trump who is always right.  

Trump is a dangerously sick man.

Trump has never been an admirable one.  We could go into it, but people who claim he's "Godly" are rank idiots.  Indeed, a significant portion of Trump supporters at this point are the absolute bottom of the bell curve.  He's deeply immoral and is committing the United States to deeply immoral acts. Fortunately, the bloom is off the rose at this point, and it appears highly likely that the GOP, which has fallen down on its duties in Congress, will be tossed out.  Due to weirdness of Trump's cabinet, we'll have to endure Trump for two more years, probably.

The problem for real conservatives, however, and particularly for Catholics, or indeed for Catholics whether they are conservative or not, is how to vote.

In the Catholic Tradition, responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation.

Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, No. 13.

In Wyoming, some of the choices will be easy.  Eric Barlow, the Republican, is the easy choice over Democrat Ken Casner or Dixiecrat Rebecca Bextel.  It's not even close.  Effectively, the races for Governor, Secretary of State, and Superintendent of Public Education are over, and will all go to good Republican candidates.

But the candidates for the House and Senate are a nightmare.

Chuck Gray is a co-religious about whom the public knows nothing.  A far right right winger born with a silver spoon in his mouth he washed up in Wyoming as his daddy, who doesn't live here, has a radio station here.  He barely won the primary for Secretary of State, after having been an abrasive personality in the legislature, by running on lies.  Since the moment of his taking office in that position, he's been running for something else, and the House of Representatives fell to him when Harriet Hageman decided to run for retiring Cynthia Lummis' position.  

Gray has been a horrible Secretary of State and he'll be a horrible Congressman.  His campaign was basically that he loves Trump more than Trump loves Trump.  Trump is a horror.  This is a good reason not to vote for Gray, as if any additional reasons were needed.  If he wins, and he's likely to, he'll be worthless as a junior member a minority party who knows nothing about the state he's supposed to represent.

The Democrat is Lisa Kinney.  I just heard her speak, and she speaks very well.  She didn't have the chance to get into specifics, but they can be guessed at.  I'd be surprised at best if she wasn't "pro Choice", which is pro infanticide.

The Libertarian is Shaun Johnson.  I heard him speak too but he also didn't really have the chance to get into specifics.  The one interesting thing I heard him say is that he wouldn't caucus with the Republicans or the Democrats.

I don't think that Johnson has any chance.  I think Kinney has an off chance.

I suspect that if Kinney wins, Christensen will run against her in 2028 and likely take the seat.  I think he's planning on running.

The choice this year, therefore, is between Kinney and Gray.  Voting for Kinney is saying no to Trump insanity. Voting for Gray is saying yes to Trump insanity.  That's about it.

At the Senate level the Democrats have a really good candidate, James Byrd.  The Republicans have a really horrible candidate, Harriet Hageman, who stabbed Liz Cheney, a former friend of hers, in the back so that she could crawl over her dead political body to go to Washington, where reportedly she already owned a house.  If she was voted out, she'd never come back.  She's shown contempt for her own state on public lands while there, making her potentially an even worse candidate than Gray.  

She received a lot of votes in the primary, in spite of being such a horrible candidate.  It'll take a lot for Byrd to overcome it.

So here's where we are at.  We cannot vote for Gray or Hageman.  Voting for them is voting for the insanity of Donald Trump and the ongoing destruction of the American democracy.  Can we morally vote for Kinney and Byrd, or do we not vote at all on those races.  Not voting on them may very well be like voting for Gray and Hageman. It's an interesting, and paramount, moral question.

Footnotes

1. And save the "we're a republic not a democracy" crap. That's brainless twaddle.  Our Constitution creates a democratic republic and people who say that should have their right to vote, drive a car, or speak a sentence revoked.

Last edition:

The 2026 Election, 23rd Edition. Stein's Law meets the GOP. The hints of a mutiny edition.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, Ashley Hinson, Chris Christie, Constitution Party, Donald Trump, inflation, Iowa, John Barrasso, Populism, Rebecca Bextel, Republican Party, Stein Law, Texas, Weird, Yeoman's Tenth Rule of Logic

Sunday Morning Scene. Back to the Coliseum.

 

I've been expecting it all along.  It just came in a surprising fashion.

Deep hatred of Catholics is the last acceptable form of outright bigotry in the United States, although there's been a general rise of bigotry and racism during the illegitimate Trump interregnum.  Trump's a populist, and populist tends to boost ignorance, with bigotry feeding on that.  Most of the major populist movements a person can recall, the Nazis, the Communists, the Know Nothings, featured a lot of really ignorant people who were willing to be lead around by a others, sometimes a charismatic, to them, other.¹ MAGA is a populist movement, masquerading as a conservative one, as Nazism was a populist movement that claimed conservatives within it.  It's not too surprising, therefore, that we're seeing more of this sort of thing than we have at any point since the 1960s.

Quite a few of the more ignorant members of MAGA claim they support Trump as he's Godly, which is patently absurd, but there's no denying that far right wing Evangelicalism is a major component of MAGA.  The Press, which isn't very well educated on religion anymore, just keeps calling them "Christians",  which is really misleading.  Some, but not all, far right Evangelicals supporting Trump hold religious beliefs that are very recent and very novel and well outside the mainstream of Apostolic Christianity and also out of the mainstream of most Protestant beliefs.  Almost all MAGA Evangelicals fit into the ignorant of theology and Church history camp that's strong in the United States of being "Bible Believing Christians" who are pretty ignorant of a rule on the history of the books of the Bible.

Around the periphery of MAGA, however, there's been some Apostolic Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, who have been, if not fully in the Trump camp, at least allowed to pitch a tent on its edges.  Some of this is just flat out opportunistic on their part, and it looked like it would have a major impact on the Trump administration due to Trump's flat out ignorance and laziness.  Inside the administration you have the example of J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, and outside of it you have people like Kevin Roberts.  You even have Peter Thiel, who claims not to be a Catholic but who keeps popping up in certain Catholic circles, as does Jordan Peterson and the Orthodox pundit Rod Dreher.²  National Conservatism has a strong right wing Catholic element to it, which is interesting in that it's sort of the intellectual heir of Fr. Charles Coughlin whose movement was shut down and who remains not widely admired in mainstream Catholic circles.

Most CAtholics that have supported Trump, however, have done so for one of two other reasons.  The thinking ones have done so as it seemed like he was probably the only candidate who would address long held Catholic concerns, like abortion.  People know that Trump himself was a louse, but they were willing to "hold their nose and vote".  Others were Protestantized Catholics, of which there are a lot in the United States in the Boomer and Gen. Jones generations.   These people are victims of the bad Catechization of the 1970s and as the US is a Protestant country, they've picked up a lot of Protestant beliefs.

Throughout Trump's second claim to power I've worried that the "Christian", i.e., far right Evangelical support of Trump would result in two things for Catholics.  The first, which we will not address here, is that the association of "Christian" with Trump would result in Christianity taking a major hit.  Evangelicalism definitely will. The second is that getting on the bus with Evangelicals would result in them beating us up as soon as we weren't of use to them.

And that's starting to happen.

The reason it started is because Pete Hegseth, who is festooned with Crusader themed tattoos announced that the U.S. Army is going to livestream the execution of former US Army Major Nidal Hasan who killed thirteen unarmed U.S. soldiers in 2009. ^3 4

The Catholic Church is opposed to killing people.  It's opposed to killing people in pretty absolutist terms and always has been, claims of Catholic haters aside.  It's always been opposed to infanticide, including abortion.  Early on in Church history there were serious debates if Christians, which were all Catholic, were required to be pacifists, and there are some saints who were.  St. Martin of Tours, who had been a Roman soldier, famously told his commander "I am a soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight."  Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer, went to his death in Nazi Germany rather than fight for the Nazi state.  Ben Salmon, an American Catholic layman who has not been beatified went to prison as a conscientious objector during World War One as he held the view that all war was immoral. ⁵   And starting with Pope John Paul II, the Church has opposed the death penalty.

Catholic Bishops immediately responded to Hegseth's live stream the killing announcement by condemning it.  Quiet a few individual priests with  a net presence did as well.  And then almost immediately after that Pope Leo XIV did, stating:

This caused an immediate reaction by some Evangelical Christians on the far right, and it did from a few very far right Catholics who are probably in the Rad Trad camp.  Predictably, a notable number of the Evangelicals threw of pretending they approved of Catholics in any fashion.  Laughable comments that the Pope doesn't know theology were out there, but more radical ones by the Invincibly Ignorant immediately arose as well.

Los of hte comments immediately cited the Old Testament, which is a bit ironic as frankly the CAtholic Church uses the Old Testament much more than any Protestant group does.  There's a number of quotes from the Old Testament that address the death penalty, for example:

Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.

Genesis 9:6 

Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death.

Exodus 21:12

So there you go. . .but wait:

Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.

 Exodus 21:15 & 21:17

Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.

Exodus 21:15 & 21:17

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.

Exodus 21:16

If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death."

Leviticus 20:10 (Adultery)

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

Leviticus 20:13

Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them."

Leviticus 24:16

Okay then, if we apply to the Old Testament, we need to be killing anyone cursing their parents, kidnappers, adulterers and adulteresses, homosexuals and blasphemeres.

Indeed, if this was fully applied, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Paula White, and Scott Bessant wouldn't be in Washington D.C. as they're either adulturers or, in Bessant's case, a homosexual.  Shoot, probably about 1/3d of the congregation of Protestant congregation would have to be offed, based on my observation that they don't take divorce or pre marital sex as a sin.

Well, what the heck?  Why aren't we imposing the death penalty with sweeping abandon?

Well, that's because the Apostolic Churches and the Mainline Protestant Churches hold the view that Christ fulfilled the law and the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians.  There are a pile of laws in the Mosaic Law that nobody seeks to apply to Christians due to the Catholic Church having alway taken this view.  That's why Christians can eat shellfish and pork.  Protestants who are running around declaring that the death penalty is Biblically mandated are apparently ignorant of the Bible and is laws, or they'd be killing adulterers, blasphemers, parent disrespecters, homosexuals and not eating shrimp.

Indeed, this was the case from day one.  One of the very first debates in the Church was whether converts had to be circumcised.  Nope,  no longer applied.  The dietary laws no longer did either.

It's also odd to see how all of these people aren't citing the New Testament.  While the law was fulfilled by Christ, Christ did set down some pretty strict behavioral requirements.  We are, for example supposed to love our enemies. That's a tough one.  

Some have tried to drag out Church history, of which they're largely ignorant.  "Well, the Church has always killed people. . ."

Nope.  Indeed, from antiquity it's tried to stop it.

As Christ led you from death to life, so you should try to save not only the innocent, but also the guilty from death.

Pope St Nicholas the Great.

Now, I suppose you could argue that Pope St. Nicholas was talking about eternal life, but you sure are't going to save a guy by killing him.

And of course, there's the customary ignorant citation to the Black Legends were demonstrably untrue, but which lots of people still believe.

The Church as been against killing of all types right from the onset.  But people, deep in their hearts, like killing.  Lots of people make compromises with their Faith to justify their own acts and desires.  Today, for example, is the anniversary of the murder of Hymie Weiss, the gangster who sanctioned hits, but who also carried a rosary in his pocket.  As noted, plenty of very conservative Catholics have tried to say "well, I know that the Popes have said no death penalty, but it's still okay . . "⁶

It isn't.

And the real surprise to those not paying attention will be how prolife Catholics really are.  Indeed, I've seen surprising statements in support of the Pope from completely secular sources.

And there's utterly no support for making this execution a public spectacle.  We really are in the last days of the Roman Empire if we've reached that state.  "War, inflation, . . . don't worry, look at my shiny baubles, come watch somebody die."  Panem et circenses.

A danger of politics is that, for people who have a religion, even slightly, that it becomes easy to confuse your politics or your personal beliefs with your religion. The various flavors of the American Civil Religion are packed with that.  Divorce is okay, and even extramarital sex, unless it's homosexual. . . Trump must be a Godly man as he's doing what I want him to, even if he's a liar and a serial polygamist.

There was always going to be a day when the Evangelical far right discovered that the Catholic Church is the Universal Church, it's everywhere, and that local politics are secondary to it.  We're not right, not left, we're Catholic, the original Christians.

Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to.  Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’

But he will answer, "I don’t know you or where you come from."

Luke 13:22-30.

This warning applies to us as well.  "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."  Luke 12:48.  We really can't ignore the barbarism of the Trump administration any more.  We've invaded a foreign nation without cause, we're killing Iranians in an undeclared war, and we're murdering people on the high seas.  The Nuremberg Defense or just ignoring it all doesn't work.

Well, we were always going to be hated.  Frankly, as Catholics, when everything is going well for us, it's not going well.

Footnotes:

1.  Hitler was reportedly very charismatic, although watching him from the outside, it's hard to see why.  To his followers, Trump is charismatic, while to most other people he certainly is not.

2.  I'm not claiming that Peterson is influential in the administration, but rather he's in the Catholic end of the National Conservatives even though he is not Catholic.  His wife is.  Dreher was Catholic at one time and converted to Orthodoxy, where he remains with one foot in the Catholic door and nearly, for that matter, in the back pews. Dreher is partially responsible for the intellectual atmosphere that made Trump possible even though he now outright holds Trump in contempt.

3.  Hegseth is some sort of Evangelical on the far right.  Actual Crusaders would have regarded him as a weird heretic.  

4.  The fact that the killings occurred in 2009 is a really good argument against the death penalty in and of itself as it takes so long and is so expensive that the punishment aspect of it is nearly lost by the time the sentence is carried out.

5. St. Augustine famously developed the Just War Theory, which people sort of naively regard as a Catholic free pass to war.  It isn't.  The theory has always been fairly restrictive and even though Catholics have waged and been in a lot of wars, a lot of wars don't fit the category of being "just".  

Even when they are, finding a war that's justly waged is difficult. World War Two probably stands out as a war which, for the Allies, was just, but the Allies clearly took deeply immoral actions in it, the nighttime bombing raids of the RAF, and the USAF nuclear bombings, being the two primary examples for the Western Allies.

Recently Pope Leo has further clarified the doctrine and while I do not think that his statements actually develop it in any fashion, they caused shock waves and they probably should as Catholics really need to consider if they can morally serve in the U.S. military at this point.

6.  No Pope has declared the death penalty invalid ex cathedra, so a slim ability to argue it's still okay exists.  But it's very slim.

Suit Weights (and modesty), a history.

Really interesting thread on men's suit weights, sans photographs, from "Derek Guy", who frequently comments under that pseudonym on fashion.

derek guy @dieworkwear

Oct 6

Men's dress shirts used to be considered underwear, not to be seen except for the collar and cuffs. In "respectable" company, a man wore a waistcoat over his dress shirt, and then a tailored jacket over that. The jacket also had layers: haircloth, canvas, felt, and lining.

It's important to note that these were very heavy fabrics. Harrison's of Edinburgh, my favorite fabric merchant, once made custom fabrics for Andrew Carnegie. In their archives, you can find materials they made for Carnegie's summer wardrobe. The weight? 510 grams per sq. meter

To give you context, 510 gram wool today is typically reserved for a topcoat or heavy winter suit (like the brown coat you see below). This is what men wore in the *summer* back in the day. Average ready-to-wear suit today is maybe 255 gram cloth — half the weight.

Here's a gray Donegal tweed suit designed for winter. I think the weight is around 450 grams. This is lighter than what Carnegie would have worn in the summer. He would have also been shocked by the lack of a waistcoat. It would be like walking around with your pant fly open.

This practice changed over 100 years from mid-18th to mid-19th century. This transformation happened as buildings adopted central heating and society became less uptight/ more liberal. Still, when you watch old films, such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or The Apartment you still see men mostly keep their jackets on while indoors. Again, remember these are not like your trucker or field jackets — they have multiple layers inside them for structure (haircloth, canvas, felt) and were made from heavier materials than what's typically worn today

This is why I thought it was interesting to see Dale Partridge harp about modesty while wearing a t-shirt. This would have been unthinkable to a man in the early 20th century.

A friend of mine who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, x.com/dalepartridge/…

A friend of mine who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, which often become hot topics on Twitter. 

Let's first visit the excerpts. Adapted from a series of BBC radio talks he delivered during the last few years of the Second World War, CS Lewis's Mere Christianity touches on some big topics — the meaning of the universe, Christians beliefs, and what is considered proper Christian behavior. Regarding behavior, there's a chapter on sexual morality that begins with one of the least popular Christian virtues: modesty. Here's what CS Lewis had to say:

Lewis points out something interesting here: modesty has to be understood within the matter of context. A woman in the Pacific Islands, he notes, can be modest while wearing barely any clothes, while a Victorian woman will have different standards for the same idea. 

In my original reply to Dale, I noted that he was wearing a thin jersey t-shirt, which revealed the outline of his nipple (a well-known erogenous zone, even for men). The t-shirt, of course, was once considered underwear. In the 19th century, a proper gentleman would have worn a coat and waistcoat — the shirt was hardly ever seen except for the collar and cuffs. In the 20th century, the waistcoat was eventually dropped, but the button-up shirt remained. It wasn't until about the 1940s and 50s that it became increasingly common to see men wearing t-shirts in public. The style ascended partly because it was sexually suggestive (think of Marlon Brando in The Wild One). 

Of course, no one thinks t-shirts are underwear anymore, and it's no longer considered improper to wear one in public. The same is true of leggings. Most people would be shocked if a woman appeared in public in her actual underwear (by today's definition). Unless they were being performative, no one would act that way when they see a woman dressed like that on the right. Thus, modesty has to be contextual. 

Let's move on with the rest of the passage. 

Lewis recognizes that modesty raises thorny issues, but he sweeps them aside to focus on the more important spirit. I want to bring your attention to the last sentence: "A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems." 

This reminds me of Cardinal John Henry Newman's book Definition of a Gentleman (which, like CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, is adapted from a series of lectures). I often cite Newman's book because it's so instructive. The term gentleman is so overwrought and frequently abused, but to the degree it means anything at all, I think Newman captures it here:

On Twitter, there are often debates about how to dress respectably (and the importance of doing so). These discussions usually get uncomfortable because they touch on class and race. Just this morning, I saw someone say they are glad young black men are "wearing quarter zips" and putting away "Jordans," which they say are associated with "ratchet behavior." 

On matters of respectable dress, it's helpful to separate two distinct acts. The first is how you decide to dress; the second is how you judge others by their dress. It's true that the world judges us based on appearance. And if you wish to show respect in certain contexts — such as attending a wedding or funeral — it's worth considering what your attire is communicating. This is why I think people should shop for a suit well in advance of when they need one. You don't want to be the guy wearing a weird outfit during those important occasions, as they can send the wrong message (e.g., "I don't care about you"). 

But then there's the second decision: how you judge others based on their dress. If being gentlemanly means anything at all, it should mean what Newman outlines above. Or what Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: "A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems." There are two acts here: how you decide to dress (e.g., making others feel comfortable) and how you treat others (e.g., "desire to believe all the good you can of others"). 

My friend and fellow menswear writer Bruce Boyer is fond of saying that clothes are more important than most people think, but less important than fashion people think. I'm of the same mind. I think it's perfectly fine to use the language of clothing. But on issues such as respectability and morality, I think you should judge people by their deeper, more important actions. That doesn't mean how they dress, but rather how they treat others on a more meaningful level. 

Anyway, I will probably reference CS Lewis's book in the future. Thanks to M for the reference.

To be clear, I don't care what people wear and I don't believe in dress respectability. We're also on a global platform, so ppl here live in different countries. But for much of the 20th cent., it was not unusual for a man to wear a jacket indoors, whether tailored or casualwear

I should have added, since I know people will jump to "global warming." While I acknowledge that global warming exists, the average temp has increased about 3 Fahrenheit degrees from early 20th cent to now. While this has meaningful impact on glaciers, it makes little difference on whether someone can wear a jacket (excluding, of course, the days with extreme swings). 

People simply have different standards for how comfortable they expect to be at all times. This, along with the adopting of central heating, is the bigger reason why men today mostly walk around in t-shirts.

I should note that I don't walk around in t-shirts.  I did when I was young but haven't for a long time.

I should also note that I failed to wear a tie for the first time in a long time at a deposition.  I just forgot the tie.  I almost felt naked really.

I'm curious on what others think of Guy's thesis here.

Thursday, October 7, 1926. Choral Evensong.

The fusionist religion Caodaism was established in Saigon by Ngo Van Chieu with the signing of the "Declaration of the Founding of the Cao Đài Religion".

The still running Choral Evensong was broadcast for the first time, on the BBC, featuring a 15-minute airing of the Evensong, the Anglican church afternoon prayer, at 3:00 pm. 

The Yankees beat the Cardinals 3 to 2 in Game 5 of the World Series, giving them a three to two edge.

Last edition:

Wednesday, October 6, 1926. World Series Record.

Labels: 1790s, 1794, 1920s, 1926, 1926 World Series, 1970s, 1977, 2010s, 2011, American Puritanism, baseball, Blue Laws, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania (Pittsburg), Protestant, Puritans, religion, Sports

Friday, October 4, 1946. Truman's announcement on the eve of Yom Kippur.

President Truman announced that he had telegraphed Prime Minister Clement Attlee to endorse the immigration of 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine.  Attlee was furious at the public disclosure which made an already difficult situation worse.

Speculation was that Truman may have done this to court Jewish votes in the election.

The Gnostic Nag Hammadi library, discovered in 1945, was accepted into the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Robert A. Taft publicly criticized the results of the Nuremberg trials as unjust, citing the impossibility of the victor trying the vanquished fairly.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 3, 1946. Game two of the 1946 National League Playoffs.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 World Series, Aircraft, baseball, Disaster, Labrador, Sports, Transportation

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 158th Edition. How the Internet Emphases the Absurd and Marginal and Make it seem Significant. Pastor Brian Sauvé

Holy Women at Christ's Tomb, Annibale Carracci.

One Brian Sauvé, senior pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, has been much on the net recently due to some comments he made on vlog or some sort of web based video show providing for all to see how the net has served to emphasize the absurd and marginal, serving to make it seem like a big deal.

Refuge Church is a "Reformed Protestant" Church and Sauvé  describes himself as "Reformed and Protestant, Paedobaptist, Postmillennial, and Patriarchal".  The church describes itself as basically a solo scriptura group holding to 66 books of the Bible, rather than 73, which means that the don't believe in the 66 books of the Bible as the New Testament itself describes how sola scriptura is invalid and the omitted books that a German monk, who should never have been that, took out were done so based on his prejudice and a misunderstanding on what books of the Old Testament the Apostles were referring to.

Patriarchal Sauvé certainly is.  And extremely so.

Sauvé in a September 18 podcast stated the following:

Women either shouldn't be on social media or any social media they have should be kind of a walled garden situation where some competent man is curating and blocking and directing and taking a look at what's going on.  I have access to my wife's social media accounts and I have blocked—this is not an exaggeration—thousands of accounts. Thousands of them. She generally has very little idea of what is going on in the real social media because I've created a walled garden of cute goat videos.

We have normalcy bias in a certain direction.  We consider normal what is actually insane. We consider normal women having unsupervised access to one another all the time. That's not normal.

We consider normal women having political rule. We consider normal women living unattached from a male—like a father, then a husband—for lengthy periods of time. You could fill in the blank with all of these modern feminist outworkings of the original feminist vision and what they've done is they've made women anxious, psychotic, depressed, miserable, and genocidally evil. And we just go, "Oh, that's normal.'"

People are going to hear me talking about, as my wife's head, monitoring her social media, and they're going to be like, "Brian is such a tyrant." You have normalcy bias for insane world. You're living in an insane asylum and you think it's the normal world and I'm saying, "No, we don't live in the insane asylum. We do what people did for thousands of years before today."

The interview went on and discussed how "crazy" it was to allow women to vote, something Hegseth fan boy has said of Doug Wilson in Idaho.

Unlike Wyoming, the least religious state in the country, Utah is the most religious state in the Union, and its religious landscape is dominated by the Latter Day Saints.  It's not as Mormon as it once was, however, with about 55% of the residents of the state being in that faith.  Culturally, however, they dominate it.  Catholics are about 5%.  About 25% claim no particular faith.The rest are mostly some sort of Protestant but there are, of course, Jews, Muslims, etc.

About 63% of the residents of Ogden are LDS.  Catholics make up almost 9% of the population there.  The rest would mostly be some sort of Protestant.

We'd note that Mormons, which Sauvé is not, are extremely socially conservative generally.  That's important to note as while, at least in my experience, Mormons and some conservative Protestant religions do not get along, the overall cultural conservatism of Mormonism heavily impacts the Jello Belt.  I'm not saying that to be mean or critical.  Utah has some of the most well kept towns, including small towns, in the country and as a rule Mormons don't go in for the weird cultural silliness that is part of the current zeitgeist.  Without condoning the tenants of their faith, their faith also causes them to have what some folks refer to as "nice families", as other conservative religious groups sometimes to.  You'd probably have to get into Traditional Catholics in order to find a similarly family oriented well kept group of people.

The Culture of a People reflects upon the place they live.  The views that Sauvé are not all that radical in the locality in which he is speaking them, as they reflect sort of broadly on the LDS, and specifically on some of the LDS, although most LDS would not hold them to the extreme that he does.

Now, as should be obvious, Pastor Sauvé is extremely socially conservative.  Why should we care?

We shouldn't.

The church is indicated as having a "mid sized" congregation.  His congregation ought to care what he thinks, and chances are they believe exactly what he does.  This sort of extreme patriarchal view is quite limited and goes way beyond what even very conservative members of various other Christian faiths typically believe.  It's also ironic in that women more than men were the foundation of the early Faith.  Women brought men to it. There's a reason that Mary Magdalene is the "Apostle to the Apostles".  And there's a reason that St. Brigid is so closely associated with St. Patrick.

But then, I'm an Apostolic Christian where strong women are the norm.  Protestants can keep John Calvin, we'll take Joan d'Arc.

And Protestants can keep telling us that we shouldn't ask Mary for help, we're going to keep doing so.

Virgin Mary at Zetum

Such a diminished view of women is odd, and sad.

It's also cultural and malformed.

But here's the thing.  It's the Internet that has given voice to stuff like this. But for that, Sauve would be an unknown Protestant Pastor in the Jello Belt.  Probably a lot of people in his own city wouldn't be able to tell you anything about him.  I couldn't tell you anything about the two large warehouse type churches' pastors here.  I'm sure that there are Protestants around here who hold the same beliefs.  I just don't know who they are, and there aren't many of them.

The Internet is really giving voice to a lot of things, ideas and people who shouldn't have one.  I don't know if Sauve was known before, but there's a whole host of like minded Protestants who show up on blogs all the time and spark Internet outrage. That outrage then circulates their message.

It's the same with people like Nick Fuentes, whose message is political and not religious, although there is some of that mixed in.  But for the Internet, he'd just be a barely employed oddball.  

It's one of the real challenges of our time.  We need to ignore these people.  They don't deserve a national audience.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 157th Edition. Press Revolt and other matters.

Labels: 1780s, 1789, 2020s, 2026, Abolitio nominis, Dancing, Donald Trump, Food, John Barrasso, Lies, Petroleum, The Press, The Second Trump Administration, Trump, Trump War Inflation, Washington DC Vandalization

Tuesday, September 19, 1876. The start of Ben Hur.

A nocturnal train ride with former Civil War subordinate Capt. Robert Ingersol caused Gen. Lew Wallace to begin his intense study for a book that would end up being Ben Hur, which in turn would make the Civil War general and New Mexico Territorial Governor a wealthy man.

Ingersol was an atheist and Wallace was more or less an indifferent agnostic at the time.  About the train ride, he's later state:

It is possible to fix the hour and place of the first thought of a book precisely enough; that was a night in 1876. I had been listening to discussion which involved such elemental points as God, heaven, life hereafter, Jesus Christ, and His divinity. Trudging on in the dark, alone except as one’s thoughts may be company, good or bad, a sense of the importance of the theme struck me for the first time with a force both singular and persistent. “My ignorance of it was painfully a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness. I was ashamed of myself, and make haste now to declare that the mortification of pride I then endured, or if it be preferred, the punishment of spirit, ended in a resolution to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.

Research for the book caused Wallace to deepen a Christian faith he'd been indifferent to, although he never joined any one Protestant sect.

Wallace is an interesting figure.  He first entered military service during the Mexican War.  He met and married his wife, the daughter of his Mexican War commander, shortly after the war.  Like Wallace, she was a writer and was published before he was.  Between the Mexican War and Civil War he practiced law.  He only briefly practiced law after the war.

He and his wife Susan only had one child, which was unusual for the time.

Last edition:

Monday, September 18, 1876. Frank and Jesse James escape Minnesota.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, Crime, Minnesota, Northfield Minnesota Raid, The James Gang, Weather

Thursday, September 16, 1976. Noche de los Lápices.

Teenage members of the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios were rounded up by masked agents of the Argentine government and would continue for the next several days.   The victims would be tortured, raped, and in most instances, murdered.

The victims were:

• María Claudia Falcone, age 16. She is missing and presumed murdered. According to her brother Jorge Falcone, she was a Montoneros militant.
• Claudio de Acha, age 17.  Missing and presumed murdered.
• Gustavo Calotti "Francés" age 18 He was a police cadet.  He survived.
• María Clara Ciocchini, age 18.  A Catholic school student, she was murdered.
• Pablo Díaz, age 18.  He survived.
• Francisco López Muntaner "Panchito", age 16.  Missing and presumed murdered.
• Patricia Miranda, age 17.  He did not belong to any militant organization and was ultimately released.
• Emilce Moler, age 17.  She survived.
• Daniel A. Racero, age 18.  Missing and presumed murdered.
• Horacio Ungaro, age 17 Missing and presumed murdered.

Quite frankly, with the US on the very eve of an upcoming attempt by populist extremist to steal the 2026 election, things like this are now quite imaginable here in the US.

The first angioplasty on a human being was performed by West German surgeon Andreas Gruentzig.

Mao's widow Jiang Qing altered the Chairman's final directive with the help of three others giving rise to the Gang of Four which would briefly rule Communist China.

The House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church of the United States voted to permit the ordination of women into the Episcopal priesthood. 

1976 was at the height of the first wave feminist movement and the Episcopal Church, traditionally the richest and most powerful Church in the United States, had taken a definitely liberal bent.  Nearly all American Christian churches were going through a left wing wave at the time.  In the case of the Episcopal Church, this was effectively the beginning of its downfall.

Last edition:

Tuesday, September 14, 1976. Last foreigners out of Vietnam.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, Australopithecus africanus, Federal Emergencies, Geology, Gerald Ford, It was because of the Vietnam War, law, Prehistory, Red Cross, Tanzania, The Fall of Saigon, Vietnam War

Wednesday, September 11, 1946. Longest scoreless tie.

The Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds played the longest scoreless tie in Major League Baseball history.  Nineteen innings in 4 hours, 40 minutes,

The game was called because of darkness.

The United States turned over $1,121,400,000 worth of surplus U.S. Army property to the Philippines.

Ida Stover Eisenhower, mother of Dwight Eisenhower, Milton S. Eisenhower, Edgar N. Eisenhower, Arthur Bradford Eisenhower, Paul Dawson Eisenhower, Roy Jacob Eisenhower, and Earl D. Eisenhower. died at age 84.

Dwight was, of course, Commander of SHAEF in World War Two, and later President of the United States.  The military had actually been a default career for him, and not his first intention.  Milton S. Eisenhower was an accomplished academic. Edgar was a lawyer. Earl an engineer and Kansas legislator.

Ida was a runaway.  Family deaths and circumstances had left her in the care of an aunt and uncle who did not believe in female education, so she took off in order to go to high school.  Her husband, David, was an engineer by training, but his personality left him impoverished and withdrawn.

She was a pacifist.

Blessed Francesco Giovanni Bonifacio was brutally murdered by Yugoslavian Popular Guards for being a Catholic Priest.

He was ethnically Italian, although the region of Italy he was born in was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire at the time of his birth.  The region he was killed in was part of Italy at the time, but became part of Yugoslavia, and is now part of Croatia.

Johnny Allen Hendrix was renamed by his father to James Marshall Hendrix.

Last edition:

Tuesday, September 10, 1946. The call within a call.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Albania, Catholic, Christianity, India, Personalities, religion, toys

Tuesday, September 10, 1946. The call within a call.

Albanian born Sister Agnes Teresa Bojaxhiu of the Loreto Sisters' Convent while riding on a train from Siliguri to Darjeeling heard the call of God that; "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.".

She is known to us today as Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

St. Mother Teresa with the Reagans.

Veteran fighter pilot from World War Two Fred Morrison sketched his concept for a toy plastic disc

It would become the Frisbee.

Last edition:

Monday, September 9, 1946. Truman writes Bess.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Harry S. Truman, The written word, White House