Monday, October 4, 1926. Cristero War in Guanajuato, Phar Lap, Radio recipes.

Gen. Rodolfo Gallegos led an uprising in Guanajuato, Mexico, bringing the region into the Cristero War.

Islamic courts were closed in Turkey, Turkey having completely supplanted Islamic Law with secular civil law.

Great New Zealand born racehorse Phar Lap was foaled.

Like Seabiscuit, he provided much needed hope during the Great Depression.

The horse died at age 5 in California under still debated circumstances.

Housekeepers' Chat, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and featuring the fictional "Aunt Sammy", wife of "Uncle Sam" debuted.  

Running in its original version until 1934, the show was influential. For instance, it helped improve Chinese American food by expounding on traditional Chinese cooking methods.

Last edition:

Sunday, October 3, 1926. First postseason no hitter.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 1926 Colored World Series, 1926 World Series, 1960s, 1967, baseball, Catholic, Michigan (Detroit), Personalities, Radio, religion, Sports

Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Al Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers and Washington D.C. and where we are today.

 

Today will be widely marked as the 25th Anniversary of Al Queda's attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and attempted attack on the White House and Pentagon.

This blog existed at the time, but it was very inactive.  Indeed, most of the posts that are found in the 2001 section of this blog were posted, actually, in 2026 and then moved back to that date as they track historical events in sequence.  At that time my computer time was devoted to a forum on cavalry topics.

I'm not going to go into huge depth on the topic.  It's 25 years ago but seems like yesterday in a lot of ways to me, but at the same time it must be noted how much time has passed. The country really rose to the occasion, and then starting in the 2010s betrayed itself massively, showing that history isn't written at the onset, but the conclusion.  I've written a prior partial introspection on the event here:

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

Al-Qaeda is of course the entity that made the assault.  It was, and remains, a radical Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization who seek to restore an Islamic Caliphate.  Various caliphates have existed since Muhammed, but the last anyone could claim that one existed was in 1924. That year the Ottoman Empire dissolved and the caliphate that was claimed by the Ottomans dissolved with it.  Like all such larger empires, it'd had grown fairly icky, and nobody would want to restore an empire of that type.  Al-Qaeda has more of a hardcore Sunni empire in mind.

The organization was founded in 1988 with that goal in mind and the intent to use violence to bring it about.  Contrary to what some people like to claim, forcing a goal such as this is common in Islam.  Islam itself was forced upon the Middle East by violent expansion. At the time of Muhammed, the Middle East was well in the process of becoming an entirely Catholic region of the globe, although large populations of pagans and Jews lived throughout the region.  The extent to which Muhammed founded a religion that would mirror Islam today is quite debated, and frankly there are quite strong reasons to believe his original religious views were significantly different from modern Islam's.  It seems fairly evident that Muhammed was influenced by his first wife, Khadija, who was either Catholic or Coptic.  While Muslims hate the idea, and therefore reject it, his much older wife (she was 40, he was 25, when they married) had one daughter who clearly was Catholic and was married to a Catholic..  Muhammed also was influenced by an uncle of hers who seems to have been a Nestorian priest as well as Catholic monks.

Like a lot of would be religious reformers, he seems to have started off pretty conventional, to the extent we can tell, and then basically justified his own vices through his claim to be a prophet.  He'd adopt polygamy and clearly had an eye for women.  This extended right down to minors as the youngest female he married, Aisha, was only six years old at the time and was nine when he first had sex with her.  Fully sanctioning armed expansion of his faith by that time, he seems to have justified taking sex slaves in order to satiate the lust of his troops who were complaining about being away from their wives.

All this sounds gross, and it is, but it's not really unique.  Other would be Christian leaders have gone off the rails along these lines as well, sort of, with Joseph Smith perhaps being the best example of a conventional American lay preacher who founded his own religion.

Anyhow, in Islam there's no separation really between the faith and government. There's also no one real head, and the divisions within the faith are gigantic.  It's never been the case that all Muslims have accepted one religious or secular ruler, but Al Qaeda would force that, which is why, in spite of American confusion on the issue, Al Qaeda has no support in Shi'a cultures, including the one we're presenting loosing a war to.

The rise of Al Qaeda in general reflects an odd event that the end of the Cold War helped bring about.  In 1992 Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History arguing that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

He was way off the mark.

Indeed, what Fukuyama, and darned near everyone else, failed to realize that that the Cold War had resulted in the suppression, some voluntary, some not, of hardcore, non liberal, conservatism, everywhere.  In the Middle East much of the regions underground, and above ground, political forces had been completely secular.  Communist parties and movements were strong. The Baath Party was a fascist party.  There wasn't a single country in the Middle East that took the took the thought of an Islamic state seriously until the Islamic Revolution installed a theocracy, to everyone's surprise, in Iran in 1979, which was thought to be a freakish exception attributable to Shia, which is a minority millennialism branch of the faith.

But the end of the Cold Wat took the lid off of such forces everywhere. They were there all along, but with the threat of Communism gone, and the support of the USSR ended, very conservative religious forces emerged and began to threaten the stability of Islamic states, and for that matter non Islamic ones.  Indeed, the US is going through such a struggle right now with millennialist Evangelical conservatism.

Al Qaeda's complaint with the United States is and has always been significantly different than Iran's.  What Al Qaeda objected to was the presence of U.S. military forces in the region, which it regarded as intolerable and a sort of religious defilement.  

On February 26, 1993 Islamic terrorists, some with connections to Al Qaeda, attempted to blow down the World Trade Center, something that seems to now be completely forgotten.  In October 2000 Al Qaeda itself attacked the USS Cole. After that action, it was ready to try something more bold.

By that time the organization was hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan, having effectively been driven out of Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was ruled then, as it once again is due to Trump's surrender, by the Sunni Taliban, which was at that time engaged in a civil war against more moderate forces.

The concept, which was inept, was that attacking the towers (again) would destroy the U.S. economy and attacking the Pentagon and the White House would decapitate the U.S. government.

Of course, that didn't occur.

We could play out the conventional history from there, but we'll large omit it.  The US and its Allies went to war in Afghanistan, and mistakenly in Iraq.  The Baath government was defeated in Iraq, which now has a shaky democracy.  A long war in Afghanistan more or less defeated Al Qaeda there, but the American people grew tired of the long protracted was there and betrayed the Afghanis, with Donald Trump surrendering to the Taliban.

A budding civil war is developing there.  As we've often stated here, wars change everything, and the wars this sparked are no exception.  

The US overreacted to what was effectively a criminal assault on the US by converting it into sort of a global war.  Domestically the US government consolidated agencies into the Naziesque named Department of Homeland Defense, creating a sort of permanent war time footing where it did not need to exist.  It acclimated itself to the use of the military, and intelligence organizations, in extra legal operations.  "First Responders", in the form of firemen and policemen, were regarded as heros, legitimately, with their occupations, along with that of veterans, to go on and receive hagiographic treatment, which is not good at all.

An entire generation of Americans have grown up thinking this is normal.  First 

And the structure and atmosphere that created set up a condition in which a rogue President could use that force in a way that no Cold War era President ever could.

After World War One strong empires ruled by hereditary families supported by ultra conservative forces fell.  In some countries, the war brought about more liberal governments, which an expansion of democracy.  In others, it brought about radical right and left wing governments.  

Al Qaeda did not bring about a caliphate as a result of September 11, 2001.  It did succeed, however, in making the world worse.  The US can pull out of its own descent into fundamentalism, but the question is whether it will or not.

Sunday Morning Scene. Dominionism and the Department of Defense.

The following was posted by Assistant Secretary of Defense, Sean Parnell:

Sean Parnell

@SeanParnellASW

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. SEND ME!’” — Isaiah 6:8

Frankly, this is a shocking association of the US military with religion.
I've warned here that the US is in the thick of an Administration that features individuals in it who who hold minoritarian Evangelical views well outside the mainstream of Christianity, and further that were introduced rather late in Christian history.  Unfortunately, the United States, which is a Protestant country, is basically the epicenter of such views and many Protestants don't realize their views are not held by most of the globes Christians, most of whom are Apostolic Christians.

Included in that set of views, for some, is the concept that Christians can help bring about the Second Coming and, in some quarters, that the United States is a nation directly charged with a Devine Mission.

The military is definitely suffering right now, with some elements of the Navy having morale problems and a war going on which the administration repeatedly claims we've won, but which drags on.  The current hope is that economic sanctions will bring Iran to its knees but none of the predictions about the war have proven correct so far.  

Not one.

One way to definitely end the war would be to commit ground troops.  It'd also be a bloody mess.

These recruiting blurbs do not indicate a commitment to inserting ground troops, but they do demonstrate a frightening mix of religion with foreign policy.  We are not Crusaders and frankly Crusaders would have regarded American Evangelicals as weird heretics.  The fact that the government sends out a message like this should be alarming, and it should be offensive to Christians, Muslims and Jews, all of whom regard Isaiah as a prophet.

Indeed, when Isaiah spoke those words, he wasn't asking to be sent into combat.  He was being sent as a prophet.

The military should never be committed to an immoral cause, but we should not imagine that every time it has been committed the commitment met Christian standards.  None of the military actions taken during the Second Trump Administration do.  They most particularly do not under the reconsideration of the Just War Theory made by Pope Leo.

What Parnell did here is wrong on so many levels.  Christians should be horrified.

Friday, June 18, 1926. Egyptian troops at Mecca.

Egyptian soldiers fired into a crowed of Muslims Najadis, killing 25 of them, following a protest that began when the Egyptians were playing music while carrying the Mahmal through the holy city of Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage, to which the Najadis took offense.

It's often forgotten in the West that Islam is far more internally divided than Christianity, a fact that's aided by the fact that there is no central head of Islam.

The Fédération Internationale de Philatélie was formed for stamp collecting and other branches of philately in at Castagnola in Switzerland.

It's the oldest such organization in the world.

Princess Olga Constantinovna of Russia, 74, former Queen Consort of Greece from 1867 to 1913 as the wife of King Geórgios I, and briefly regent for one month in 1920, died in exile in Rome.

Congress was getting ready to go home.

Congress of that era, and all the way up into at least the 90s, really did work harder than it currently does.  I've heard an interview of a member of Congress who was out of office for a decade or more and who was shocked when he went back about how much real work had decreased.  It's not hard to see that the current Congress is a model of being ineffective.

I wonder, in part, if modern transportation contributes to that.  And the net definitely does.

You could get really fresh butter in Casper.

I knew that you could get locally produced butter in the 20s (and 30s, and 40s, and at least the early 50s), but I didn't really give that all that much thought.

Weirdest coffee ad ever.

And Out Our Way explored a misunderstanding.

Last edition:

Monday, June 14, 1926. The Calles Law.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, Brazil, Catholic, Christianity, Cristero War, Emiliano Zapata, It was because of the Mexican Revolution, League of Nations, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Plutarco Elías Calles, Porfirio Díaz, religion

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military. Paring the list, much ado about nothing?

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military.: The Department of Defense scaled back its list of recognized religions.   There were 211, now there are 31.  Here is the full list: Agnostic...

The big flap over the Pentagon's new list of religions, mostly focused on the LDS insisting it be recognized as a Christian religions which at least conventional Christianity holds that it is not, is obscuring the fact that frankly the list may not matter all that much.

All the list does is to provide some guidelines on anticipating the patrol needs of troops.   T/he prior list was so large there was no way that it was useful.  The original list, Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew, was probably too narrow, in the modern world, to be useful.

Arguably the current list is too big.  It'd make more sense, actually, to have Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Judaism, Islam and Other.  Every one of those categories, it might be noted, has various groups within it.  Probably only Catholic expresses a singular religious group, but even there, there are a lot of Catholic rites.  The Orthodox are a collection of Orthodox churches and have a major division between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox.  

Anyhow, that's probably more useful.

Of note, listing religions isn't an endorsement of them.  

About 70% of all service members are some sort of Protestant.  20% are Catholic.  I've given the figures already, but the number of LDS troops is very small, although in National Guard units from Utah the opposite would be true.  At least one religion on the list discourages its members from joining the military and last had any presence in the military when there was conscription in place.  

Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military.

The Department of Defense scaled back its list of recognized religions.   There were 211, now there are 31.  Here is the full list:

Agnostic (AN)

Baha'i faith (BH)

Buddhism (BU)

Christian - Assemblies of God (AG)

Christian - Baptist (BA)

Christian - Brethren (BR)

Christian - Catholic (CA)

Christian - Church of Christ (CC)

Christian - Church of God (CG)

Christian - Church of the Nazarene (CN)

Christian - Episcopal/Anglican (EA)

Christian - Evangelical (EV)

Christian - Jehovah's Witnesses (JW)

Christian - Lutheran (LU)

Christian - Methodist (ME)

Christian - Non Denominational (ND)

Christian - Orthodox (OX)

Christian - Other (CO)

Christian - Pentecostal (PE)

Christian - Presbyterian (PR)

Christian - Quaker (QU)

Christian - Reformed (RE)

Christian - Scientist (SC)

Christian - Seventh Day Adventist (SA)

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (CJ)

Hindu (HI)

Islam (Muslim) (IS)

Judaism (Jewish) (JU)

No Religion (NR)

Other Religions (OR)

Sikh (SI)

One of the things that I find discouraging to do is to give any credit to Hegseth's Department of Defense, but every now and then he's right.  Frankly, his view that too much social experimentation, or "woke" policies as the far right would have it, had been going on inside the military was correct.  Transgenderism and the the like had no place in the military.

Acting Chief Army Chaplain Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., who is serving until his successor is appointed.  He's a Baptist minister.  When I was a National Guardsmen, the 115th FA Bde., the Chaplain was a Baptist minister from Utah.  He was a nice guy, but the troops had little interaction with him.

And frankly the huge number of religions that the DoD recognized was a problem.

The Air Force's Chaplain Corps also serves the Space Force.

One thing I'd thought that Hegseth would do, and which I wish he would do, is to remove women from combat roles.  To some degree it looks like he's creeping up on that, but if that's the case, he ought to realize that after January 2027 he's going to be much less capable of doing anything.

The problem Hegseth interjects, however, is that like the Trumpian far right in general is that he combines some concerns over legitimate problems, including legitimate social problems, with wackiness, which makes it really hard to give him credit on anything.  In terms of religions, Hegseth is festooned with Crusader related tattoos which would be an insult to Crusaders, given his own beliefs, and fits into the theologically unsupportable hardcore millenialist Calvinist camp.

Maj. Gen. Trent C. Davis, Chief Chaplain of the U.S. Air Force.  He is also a Baptist.

Anyhow, this probably made sense, in the abstract.

And this is a far more complicated story than people might imagine.

The U.S. Army has had chaplains since July 29, 1775, sort of, as there were religious that served on a regimental level at that time.  Religious diversity existed in the colonies that early, but nowhere near to the extent it does not.  An official Army chaplain did not exist until  Reverend John Hurt of Virginia (who had served as Chaplain of the 6th Virginia Regiment during the American Revolution) was appointed to the position of Chaplain of the Continental Army on 4 March 1791, which even for the Revolution is sort of late in the day.

It wasn't until the Mexican War that there were Catholic Chaplains in the Army, the influx of German and Irish immigrants, and the bigoted attitudes of the Southern officer class making it a necessity.  The Mexican War remains the most unpopular war that Americans ever fought, something even some professional soldiers acknowledged, and the desertion rate in general was huge.  The desertion rate of Catholic Irish and German troops was particularly problematic.  So, during that war, Catholic Chaplains came into the service in response to the government recognizing the problem.  It's sometimes noted that the Mexican War served as a training ground for the Civil War, and in that context it certainly did, as  huge numbers of Catholic troops served in the Civil War, with most of them serving the Union.  Some senior officers by that time, such as Sheridan and McClellan, were Catholic.

The service did not start issuing "dog tags" until 1906, and that was due to the concern of Army Chaplain Charles C. Pierce, who who was in charge of the Army Morgue and Office of Identification in the Philippines.  To put this in context 40% of the Union dead from the Civil War remained unidentified after the war.  Their bodies were never identified.   The early dog tags did not identify religion, but late Great War ones did, with that being indicated by a single initial, P, C, or H, for Protestant, Catholic, and Hebrew, the latter being the term used to identify Jewish soldiers.  After the war, with a return to a small military, the practice was discontinued, but it was revived in 1941.

By the Vietnam War the practice had changed to allow troops to choose what would be stamped on their dog tags.  This is the type we had in the 1980s, and in my case it was stamped "Catholic".  Apparently this is the system that's still used.  

Of course dog tags are one thing and ministering to troops another.  I honestly have no idea how the protestant chaplains minister to protestant troops  There are so many varieties of Protestantism it must be difficult.  The task faced by Catholic, Jewish and Muslim must accordingly be easier in that regard.

Anyhow, with the current diversity of the US, this must be a huge task.  Cutting the categories down to sizes makes sense, but its also guaranteed to upset people.

The Navy's Chaplain Corps also served the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard.

One group it's upset is the Latter Day Saints, as they aren't listed as Christians, which they aren't.  Jehovah's Witnesses, however, are listed as Christians on this list, and they are not either.  Both religions recognize that Christ existed, but their theologies are radically different from Christians.  Mormon theology is really had to nail down, and it moves, but generally the LDS do not believe Jesus is the co-eternal God of the Holy Trinity, but rather view Him as an exalted, separate being who is the literal spirit brother of all humanity and Satan.  Jehovah Witnesses believe that Jesus is the most exalted of God's created beings.  Neither religion, therefore, hold what Christians do, as defined by the Nicene Creed:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the Only Begotten Son of God,

born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation

he came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and became man.

In other words, they don't believe in one eternal God with three personalities, which have always existed.

At least traditionally they haven't believed that.  As noted, Mormon theology moves and frankly isn't well defined.

Nonetheless, this has upset the LDS, which regards itself as Christian.  It may regard itself as such, and surely does given its name, but it isn't.

That it upsets them and is a big deal to them makes sense, however, as its a direct rejection of their religious claims.  So in essence the Pentagon has made a statement rejecting their theology, and it pretty much had to, which shows the danger of recognizing even 31 faiths.  But you also have to recognize some distinctions as well.  Protestants and Catholics are different.  The LDS is extremely different.  

Rear Adm. Gregory N. Todd, Chief Navy Chaplain.  He is a Missouri Synod Lutheran.

A peculiarity of this we'd note is that this would only matter in practical terms if you have troops fitting these categories.  Jehovah's Witnesses are precluded from serving under their religion, so not only is the identification of them as Christians incorrect, but even having that category for the service may be fairly pointless.  

There are about 36,000 Mormons in the military, which is surprisingly slightly lower than the number of Orthodox, which is about 39,000.  There are only 15,000 active duty members of the service who are Jewish.

Cpt. Jennifer Bowden, USN, Chief Chaplain for the Coast Guard.  She's an Elder in the United Methodist Church.

So, I guess, is there a point to this discussion?

I suppose, with part of it just being to note what the overall story is.  The US is very diverse and that reflects in the military, but not to the extent that a person might think.  20% of servicemembers are Catholic which mirrors our percentage of the American population.  In Korea, to attend Easter Mass, a colleague of mine and I went to an on base chapel, but the Priest was Australian and not in the Army.  Probably a fairly typical scenario.  In contrast, my father was pretty good friends with a Catholic Chaplain in the Air Force when he was stationed overseas.  

70% of servicemembers overall are Protestant, but of course, as noted Protestantism is very diverse.  That makes the 20% of the service that's Catholic a pretty big block.

The other part of this story is, I guess, that you are going to upset people with a list like this.  The service can't possibly list every single Protestant faith and Protestants themselves notoriously disregard their own denominations.  Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims, don't.  That's a real reason some discretion is needed.  A Catholic needing last rights needs it from a Catholic or Orthodox Priest, who are the only ones who can deliver that.  The LDS are their own thing as well, and frankly, except they obviously feel uncomfortable that, they ought to accept it.

But is there more to this?

(To Be Continued).