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  • Military Golf

    While trolling for new material for companion site vulcanhammer.net, I ran across the military document UFC 4-750-01NF, Golf Clubhouses.  The U.S. Military doesn’t leave anything to chance, and this includes the design of the clubhouses for the golf facilities it operates.  Below are a few photographs of these structures, taken directly from the document.

    Vandenberg AFB – California

    McChord AFB – Washington

    Luke AFB – Arizona

    Robins AFB – Georgia

    McChord AFB – Washington

    Ramstein AB – Germany

    Hickam AFB – Hawaii

    Vandenberg AFB – California

  • The Anglican Calendar Script and Feast Days

    Recently I received the following email from one of our visitors:

    I am writing about the Anglican Calendar php program on this website. Firstly, thank you so much for creating it and sharing it! It is fantastic!

    I am developing a website for my 1928 bcp church, and wanted something to put a bit of info about the current day. Your program works perfectly. However, I noticed at least one thing that I had a question about.

    In checking for feast days, your program simply looks at the day of the month. But I know that sometimes the feast days are moved if they overlap with other holidays. For example, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary normally occurs on March 25th. But in 2007, March 25th is Palm Sunday, and in 2008, March 25th is the 1st Sunday after Easter.

    The calendar at commonprayer.org moves the Annunciation for both those years.

    So here is my question: do you know how to tell when overlapping holidays need to be separated, how to know which takes precedence, and how far you need to push the lesser holiday (and in which direction!)?

    It would be awesome if you updated your code, but if you have access to the info, I will use it to update the code myself, since the website will be going up soon.

    Again, thanks for all the resources on your site, keep it up!

    My response was on this wise:

    As you may have noted, the calendar as it exists attempts to cover both the 1662 and 1928 BCP.  As a consequence, I had to generalise the output, and that’s why it puts out the Sundays and feasts simultaneously.

    As far as the precedence issue you mentioned, I think part of the problem is that a lot of what’s actually done isn’t strictly speaking "by the book."  Part of the problem is with the book itself.

    Let’s consider the example you gave, the Annunciation.  I’m looking at my 1928 BCP.  Page l of course lists the Annunciation as a feast.  But on the following page it tells us that all of the Sundays in Lent (and that includes Palm Sunday) take precedence over "any other Sunday or Holy Day," but that doesn’t apply to the First Sunday after Easter (Low Sunday.)  And it doesn’t give moving the feast as an option.

    It also lists Holy Days "which have precedence of days" over certain Sundays (such as those in Lent,) but the Annunciation isn’t one of them.

    Faced with this situation, I "punted" and simply had the days come up as they appeared on the calendar.

    The source code of the script can be modified, as is the case with the Catholic Calendar Script. But that doesn’t solve the problem of precedence.  I’m open to comments and suggestions as to the proper method of dealing with this problem.

  • A Saudi Solution to a Saudi Problem

    About three weeks ago, I posted The Saudis and Their Dangerous Game, where I discussed the whole business of a nation that, while propagating very tough Wahhabbi-Salafi Islam, they were then forced to deal with those who took is more seriously than they did.  This piece had enough merit to be cited in Slate.

    Part of the Saudis’ response to this dilemma is documented at Saudis nip extremism in the bud.  Although many readers will recognise the nature of this kind of re-education campaign, it is geared to the specific situation that Saudi Arabia–and Islam–find themselves in today.

    First, some terms: most people accurately describe Saudi Islam as Wahhabbi because its original teacher was Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab.  In 1734 he entered into a compact with the House of Saud (which included intermarriage.)  Thus his kind of Islam became the family religion, and the "national" (if that can be applied to a state like Saudi Arabia) religion of the country when it emerged after World War I.

    Adherents of this kind of Islam usually prefer the more general term Salafi.  Salafi Islam is literally the Islam of Muhammad and his companions.  It represents an attempt to get back to Islam as originally practiced.  The advantage of this term is that it broadens the application of this type of Islam beyond Saudi Arabia.

    As previously discussed, the problem for the Saudis now is that some Saudi Muslims don’t find Wahhabbi/Salafi Islam "fundamental" enough for their liking, and want to take things a step further.  Their idea is that there is no real Islamic state on the earth, including Saudi Arabia, so all true Muslims must fight to establish same wherever they are.

    The Saudis’ counter to this–and what their re-education program attempts to convince its "pupils" of–is that Saudi Arabia is in fact a duly constituted Islamic state, doing what Islam is supposed to be doing, and that they as good Muslims don’t have any business trying to overthrow it.  They educate and counsel with the help of imams.

    Will this work?  With some people, yes.  But there are the hard core on both sides.  About 1,400 jihadis have refused to enter the program.  Others in Saudi Arabia would like to skip the re-education and, neo-con style, perform a few well-placed executions to send a message to everyone.  But in a religion where vengeance is not just the province of Allah, and where you’re dealing with potential suicide warriors, this may not be as effective as one would like.

    But ultimately their approach is only effective in Saudi Arabia itself and other countries where shar’ia is in force.  Without the force of law and the close relationship of mosque and state, the imams and other teachers in this program would have limited, if any, credibility.  Certainly no Western country could make this stick.  We may think jihadis are crazy, but how much credibility would an imam hired by the U.S. government have in a country where you can’t even pray in school?

    A better solution would be prevention.  People in the West pine for "moderate Islam," but as long as religion and politics are a unity, the desire to implement Islam as a political system will remain.  And as long as Saudi Arabia holds itself out as a model Islamic state, conflict is inevitable.

  • With Bankruptcy Law, Timing is Everything

    It’s probably worth reminding everyone that, in advance of the current credit meltdown, the U.S. tightened its bankruptcy laws, as noted in the 2005 posting A recipe for social unrest.

  • Yahweh in the Morning: Spirit

    This week’s podcast continues Emmanuel’s music with Spirit (appropriate enough for a Charismatic prayer group.)

    Click here for more information on Yahweh in the Morning.

  • Peace, Justice and Catholic Education

    Back in the early 1980’s, I was involved in a Catholic Charismatic prayer group.  We were under a great deal of pressure, some of which was of our own making and some of which came from a Church which didn’t really care much for what we were doing.  It was also the days of "if you want peace, work for justice," the nuclear freeze, and other left-wing emphases which tended to deflect hierarchy and faithful alike from their relationship with God.

    A major turning point for me took place on day when, while discussing things with one of our prayer group leaders, she mentioned that, because of the high tuition, she could not afford to send her eight children to Catholic school.  So they went to public school.

    That revelation was the beginning of the end of me as a Roman Catholic.  I concluded that any church that was too bourgeois and self-satisfied not to subsidise its own needful children to attend the schools it wanted them to attend was too bourgeois to be an advocate for social justice.  So I took my leave on a course that’s best encapsulated in The Preferential Option of the Poor.

    Now, a quarter of a century later, the Aussies are starting to realise that this is a problem in Australian Catholic schools: a preferential option for the wealthy?

    The only hitch is that they’re looking at government funding for the schools.  And government funding brings government control, which will in the long run forces the schools to teach things the Church cannot support.  But at least the problem is recognised.

    Hopefully someone on this side of the Pacific will tackle this problem as well.

  • Emigration: Not So Extreme After All

    Some may have thought the posting Maybe It’s Time to Emigrate (concerning Lydia Playfoot and the chastity ring case) was a little extreme.  But then again consider the Daily Express informing us that 4,000 people a week trying to leave UK.

    BRITAIN is facing a mass exodus of people looking to escape the crime and grime of modern living.

    The country’s biggest foreign visa consultancy firm has revealed that applications have soared in the last seven months by 80 per cent to almost 4,000 a week. Ten years ago the figure was just 300 a week.

    It really isn’t just the chastity business.  There are a lot of good reasons to look elsewhere.  It’s interesting to note that most of the emigration is to the Commonwealth (read: old British Empire) which is, as noted earlier, still an improvement over the mother country.

    And that longing may spread to other places as well.

  • Spengler’s West Coast Competition

    Those of you who follow "Spengler" on Asia Times Online are familiar with his argument coupling the birthrate with religious belief and the survival of a society.  (An interesting correlation of this from an Episcopalian standpoint can be found here.) 

    It looks like he’s got some competition from the West Coast in the form of the Hoover Institute’s Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt in her recent article How the West Really Lost God.  She’s not quite as entertaining as he is, but her research is of greater depth.

    This line of thinking has some interesting implications for Evangelical churches, but some are putting it into practice.

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  • A Link From Indonesia

    In the course of all of the social, political and other rants that fill this blog, it’s easy to forget that a major source of visitors is our companion site vulcanhammer.net, the site for geotechnical and marine engineering downloads.  In the course of those links this site received one from the website The works of Wiryanto Dewobroto, civil engineering lecturer at the Universitas Pelita Harapan in Indonesia.  Professor Dewobroto is Roman Catholic, and that in the largest Muslim country on the planet.

    In the midst of the challenges that face Christians both here and in Indonesia, I especially like his vision statement:

    do not worry about your life, . . . your heavenly Father knows that you need . . . . . . seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

    His mission statement is as follows:

    You are the light of the world. . . . Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

    Both of these are from Mathew’s Gospel, and they bear repeating in the times we live in.

  • Evangelicals and Politics: Somebody Finally Gets It

    It is heartening when someone, somewhere–and especially an academic like Bradford Wilcox at a respected institution (in this case the University of Virginia)–finally grasps what liberals cannot in his article Preaching to the Choir, namely that much of evangelicals’ political involvement is defensive rather than offensive.  This is something I have been repeating since Public Education: A Christian Perspective, published back in 1990.

    Beyond that, the real eye-opener came when Wilcox presented this:

    But even after controlling for class, I find that nominal evangelicals do worse than other Americans. Why? I suspect that many nominal evangelicals are products of a Scotch-Irish “redneck” culture, still found in parts of Appalachia and the South, that Thomas Sowell and the late Southern historian Grady McWhiney argue has historically been marked by higher levels of promiscuity, violence and impulsive behavior. This cultural inheritance, and not their Protestantism, probably helps to account for the poor family performance of nominal evangelicals.

    McWhiney’s thesis was summarised in an article that appeared in the 4 March 1983 issue of the Miami Herald (an institution in a region that really dislikes “rednecks”):

    At the heart of their (McWhiney and his University of Alabama colleague Forrest McDonald) besieged thesis is a contention that cultural differences between Yankees and southerners in pre-Civil War times and, so some extent, today can be traced to differences between the Celts, of Scotch [sic] or Irish extraction, who settled much of the South and the English, or Anglo-Saxons, who settled much of the North.

    The Celts were a violent, rugged, rural, pastoral people who shunned other types of farming to raise hogs and potatoes, neither of which required much work.

    “The Celts thought people were crazy to work if they didn’t have to.  If one could get a cow or a hog to earn a living for him, who grow plants?  Digging in the ground is hard work,” said McWhiney…

    The two historians say their research shows antebellum southerners to be “more hospitable, generous, frank, courteous, spontaneous, militaristic, wasteful, lazy, lawless, impractical and reckless than northerners, who were in turn more reserved, shrewd, disciplined, enterprising, gauche, acquisitive, careful, frugal, ambitious, pacific and practical…”

    In fact, they say, traits of their Celtic ancestors can be seen to this day in the boys of Dixie.

    “God, yes.  The good ole boy is pretty much the incarnation of all these [Celtic] traits.  Look at his love of hunting and fishing, his attitude toward enjoying life and eating and drinking and his willingness to live a violent life if that’s what’s called for, his love of country music,” said McWhiney.

    “One of the nicest letters we got was from Harper Lee (the Alabama author who won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel To Kill a Mockingbird), who said we explained from a scholarly point of view what she had always believed but never could give any authenticity to…”

    One of the problems of some northern industries, McWhiney claims, is that they brought the myth of the southern work ethic and lured southerners northward to man factory assembly lines.

    “Somebody quoted me as saying that Detroit is the Confederacy’s revenge,” he said.  “Bringing people out of the Deep South and Appalachia to man assembly lines in Detroit was not bringing people with a work ethic to Detroit.  They just brought their old junk cars and country music and honky-tonks and a desire not to work,” said McWhiney, who thinks the rocking chair should be symbol of the South.

    Such was much of the inspiration of To Do The Work.

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