Catch-Up Week, Day 4: False Prophets of Various Stripes

It's the fourth installment of Catch-Up Week, and this will be a long, long post. First, the news; then, catch-up items; finally more quotes from Augustine. Father Time, I'm sure you'll be primarily interested with the passage from Augustine, but you might also take some interest in the catch-up section. Anyway, on with the news...

Afghanistan

U.K. Set to Add 500 More Troops in Afghanistan (AP, CNN, BBC, Guardian); Guardian: Extra 13,000 US troops to Afghanistan

Times: General: we could buy our way to Afghan victory - It could be part of the solution, but there's no way to just buy our way out of this war. We need to win it.

Times: US says al-Qaeda in 'poor financial state'

AFP: US military says Afghan force numbers no secret

Michael Yon: Market Garden, Afghan Lunacy

New York Times slideshow: With the US Marines in Afghanistan

Everything Else

Armenian leader in Turkey for 'soccer diplomacy' (CNN, BBC, Times) - This is probably a good sign - soccer is kind of a joke, but it's huge throughout the rest of the world, and I'm glad that the Armenian and Turkish diplomats involved took the opportunity to do this.

BBC: A photo a day for 64 weeks

BBC: Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes - Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, apologizes for the dual slashes that are included in all website addresses.

Guardian: White House says Fox is 'rightwing propaganda', not news - President Obama really, really doesn't like criticism or challenges to his authority. As far as I'm concerned, his fear of any and all criticism serves as an indicator of just how insecure he is. I, on the other hand, look forward to frequent, cordial, and substantive challenges from Father Time. It's just one more reason why I'm more qualified to be President of the United States than President Obama is... You know, in addition to having served at least a single day in uniform, and having ever held a real job.

Guardian: The decommissioning of [IRA] Marxism - What a lot of people forget is that the Irish Republican Army (and various splinter Republican groups) are and were motivated in large part by Marxism. Apparently, the claim is that Marxist ideology in Ulster has fallen apart as a result of the decline in violence in Northern Ireland over the last decade. As far as I'm concerned, less violence and less Marxism are both good things.

Guardian photo: Indian subway tunnel

Times: First new picture of Jaycee Lee Dugard since she was freed

UPI: New players reported in Yemen war

AFP: With economy down, US military recruitment is up

The Onion: Report: Al-Qaeda Allegedly Engaging In Telemarketing

BBC: Biases, U-turns, and the BBC's climate coverage - The BBC doesn't have a fantastic record of unbiased and iron-spined reporting on the climate debate. That having been said, I think the BBC deserves some credit. Even if the reporting has a consistent tendency to have a leftist, enviro-whacko bias, the BBC does make an effort to give voice to a number of different climate change skeptics. Like I said, their record isn't fantastic - observe...



... Yeah, yeah, I know, Glenn Beck, boo, hiss. The point, though, is that the BBC reporter changed the article under pressure from a "climate change activist". But, like I said, the BBC has made a point of interviewing folks from both sides of the spectrum, as I've cited before - the interviews are just poor quality, like pretty much everything that the BBC does. So... Yeah. Brilliant.

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Back in July the Wired.com blog, which is literary tripe, did a slideshow on the history of the AK-47 assault rifle. A few of the items struck me as odd, but I wasn't paying close attention to the narrative. I went back and looked for it again, and found that I wasn't the only one who'd seen a few issues with it. The write-up was most obviously done by some anti-gun twerp who has no clue about the subject he's covering. Here are just a few samples.

Original: Early in the Iran-Iraq War, an AK-47-toting Iranian soldier watches smoke rising from burning oil refineries near the Iranian city of Abadan. The Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, armed and supported by the United States, used mostly M16s.
Eventually corrected by Wired: Early in the Iran-Iraq War, an AK-47-toting Iranian soldier watches smoke rising from burning oil refineries near the Iranian city of Abadan. The Iraqis included AK-47s in their arsenal as well, although the Soviet Union imposed an arms embargo on Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. Iraq’s new partner, the United States, was able to provide Saddam’s troops with the spare parts necessary to keep their Russian-made weapons functional.
The Truth: Iraq was a Soviet client state, and both sides were using AK-47s. The author obviously has absolutely no concept of the history of the Iran-Iraq War, or the various nations that were arming both Iran and Iraq. Iran Contra and the Israeli connection come to mind as far as Iran goes. This claim that Iraq received substantial support from the United States during the 1980's is just bizarre - American support for Iraq prior to the ouster of Saddam Hussein was superficial, at best.

Original (and uncorrected): A Taliban militiaman checks his AK-47 while cleaning it between skirmishes in the mountains of Afghanistan. The ammunition clip has been removed, which, considering the way he’s holding it, shows good sense.
The Truth: The magazine is removed, not the "clip" - the author obviously has no knowledge of the meaning behind gun terms. Oh, yeah, and the entire upper receiver of the weapon has been removed for cleaning, so the claim of "good sense, considering the way he's holding it" is pure ignorance on the part of the writer.

Original (and uncorrected):Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) holds an AK-47 with a modified shoulder stock and ammunition drum during a 1999 news conference in Washington D.C. Feinstein was seeking a federal ban on high-capacity ammunition clips. She didn’t get it.
The Truth: Again with the "clip" versus "magazine" mistake, not to mention one reader's comment: "The photo of Feinsein is a true classic. A U.S. Senator committing assault with a deadly weapon!! Bolt closed, magazine inserted, finger on trigger. Anyone with any sense would have hit the deck the instant they saw that."

The Murdoc Online comments are well-informed; the Wired.com users who left comments really pulled no punches, and rightly so. Two of the reasons why I've grown to loathe the "journalists" who write on military topics, particularly for Wired, is that most of them can't proofread, and they don't appear to have any real clue what they're writing about, even the higher-ranking ones. This kind of ignorance when writing on a topic that people actually know about, and that's important for informing the public about critical national security issues, particularly when average readers can post fact-checks in the comments section, is both comedic and inexcusable.

Speaking of comedic and inexcusable, through some of my experience with conservative media outlets, I came to know bits and pieces about an author named Douglas Farah. Wikipedia describes him as an "investigative consultant and freelance writer on finance and national security issues". He's apparently the son of missionary parents, and spent much of his upbringing in Bolivia and elsewhere in Central and South America. He worked as a correspondent for United Press International, and as a bureau chief for the Washington Post, and, oh yeah, he has absolutely no concept of reality.

How do I know? Well, let's look at two articles he's written in the last couple of years. The first, titled IEDs and the Failure to Adapt, deals with the DoD's provision for counter-IED warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Farah, the American military's reliance on technology has failed to translate into a reduction in IED attacks or IED deaths. He basically implies in his article that the DoD was sluggish and ineffectual in dealing with the IED threat.

He goes on, but that's sort of the gist of the article. Let's think about this for a second. In July of 2000, shortly before I was formally inducted into the United States Navy Reserve, I had a conversation with a recently-commissioned ensign, with whom I discussed the Joint Strike Fighter. For those who aren't familiar with the F-35 Lightning II, it's a massive program to develop a multi-service, multi-nation attack/fighter aircraft. In July of 2000, I heard it mentioned for the first time. More than nine years later, they're still in the testing phases, and the first F-35 aircraft isn't expected to be fielded for another three to five years. This sort of development and implementation timeline is common for military systems, as has been noted in recent months with respect to a variety of systems across all four branches of the United States military as the new administration has sought to slash wasteful DoD spending.

Now, take the IED threat. Without going into excessive detail, I'll cite systems like the Warlock electronic countermeasure system, which was a Desert Storm-era system that was originally designed to prevent the explosion of certain types of mortar and artillery rounds, that was re-tasked and re-packaged for counter-IED warfare. Or how about MRAP vehicles, like the Cougar and the Buffalo? Or, semi-related, what about the C-RAM system, which countered a growing threat from indirect fire attacks? These systems didn't exist in the American arsenal prior to the invasion of Iraq, and by the time Farah wrote his article on the topic in October of 2007, robust initiatives throughout DoD had provided these systems to American personnel to counter threats that had emerged after the outbreak of the Iraq War. Sure, the DoD took longer that was optimal to get on the ball with respect to IED warfare, and lives were lost in the interim; but once the severity of the problem was realized, the DoD acted with much greater flexibility and ingenuity than normal to begin countering the threat.

And it's not as if he wrote this piece in '05 or '06, during the height of the IED threat - he wrote it in late 2007, when these systems were already being fielded in Iraq, far quicker than the typical testing and acquisition curve for military procurement. Was Farah lying? Probably not - he was probably just completely ignorant of the topic he was addressing. For a so-called "investigative journalist", writing on a topic despite this profound level of ignorance is just inexcusable.

I mentioned within the last few weeks that I recentely reread one of my favorite books, An Unorthodox Soldier by Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, OBE. Because of this and other reasons, I've recently been doing some casual Internet research about LtCol Spicer and his current company, Aegis Defence Services. What would I run across but another poorly researched article by Douglas Farah? Here are a few of the highlights - I can't speak to the entire article, but he seems to botch a number of the items to which I can speak specifically. First and foremost, he couldn't even be bothered to proofread his own headline. From there...

Well, it looks like Aegis, the company run by British mercenary and profiteer Tim Spicer...

"Profiteer" is a bit strong, particularly since Spicer's first company, Sandline International, isn't actually accused of having accepted payment in commodities. In both Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone, the two locations to which Farah is referring when he says that Spicer "has a long history of involvement with rogue armed groups", Spicer and his company were paid in cash, in exchange for logistical, training, and operational support provided to legitimate military forces in vetted and legitimate conflicts.

One of Spicer's main business partners in the 1990s was Anthony Buckingham, and oil entrepreur with interests in Africa. Together they founded Executive Outcomes, a forerunner of Sandline (see above).

The part about Tony Buckingham is true, and Buckingham was tied to both Executive Outcomes and Sandline International; but Executive Outcomes was founded by South African businessmen and a former South African lieutenant colonel named Eeben Barlow in 1989, when Spicer was still a fairly junior officer in the Scots Guards regiment of the British Army. Sandline wasn't founded until around 1996, after Spicer had retired from the British Army as a senior lieutenant colonel. The history of Sandline's founding and its timeline are well documented in Spicer's book, and while I can accept that the book almost certainly contains some spin, I don't think that the chronology of Spicer's military career, or his involvement with Sandline International (vice Executive Outcomes), or the timelines for the founding of either company are at issue. Farah just plain gets it blatantly wrong.

Spicer formed Aegis to operate in Iraq.

Aegis was formed in 2002, prior to the outbreak of the Iraq War (which commenced in March of 2003). At the time of the invasion, Aegis was doing security consultation work for the Disney Cruise Line. Again, Farah's narrative is at odds with fairly well established chronologies.

Somehow, despite his open affiliation with ... various mercenary operations in Africa that offered military services in exchange for the right to diamond fields...

Again, I don't think this particular item is actually in evidence. In Spicer's book, he notes that the company prefers payment in cash, but that he is not inherently opposed to taking payment in commodities. Trying to tie Spicer's work to conflict diamonds, no matter how controversial it may have been, is pretty questionable.

His reviews have not been good. The GAO has consistently found his company to be doing a poor job, but that appears not to matter. It was renewed recently for another year.

This is literally the only time I've ever read or heard this. My understanding, having read articles about Aegis and LtCol Spicer in Vanity Fair and the Times of London, is that Aegis has not only done good work in Iraq (to include designing and operating a system for tracking all private contractors in Iraq in the same way that military personnel are tracked), but has essentially avoided the scandals that have dogged companies like Blackwater/Xe in Iraq, and ArmorGroup in Afghanistan.

I'm not going to bother looking up the GAO report - Farah could be accurate on that, but as far as I'm concerned, the outright lies and/or ignorance that are easily fisked out of this article with only moderately detailed level of knowledge on the subject are enough to prevent me from bothering to verify any of his other claims. Add to that the previous article about Iraq, in which Farah has no knowledge of rapid fielding initiatives which saved lives by streamlining the acquisition process, and Farah loses any trace of journalistic or investigative credibility.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who takes issue with Douglas Farah's reporting. His Wikipedia page links to an article about him at a site called Loonwatch, in which the writer attempts to make a case for Farah being an delusional anti-Muslim fanatic. I didn't read the whole article, but what I did read would seem to indicate that Farah tends to make outlandish inferences based on very tangental connections and limited evidence. I'm sure that Farah's own beliefs on a number of subjects overlap with my own, but I'd rather not have someone like this making my political or philosophical cases for me. Whether you're liberal or conservative, people like Douglas Farah give journalists of every feather a bad name - and that jackass from Wired.com who doesn't know anything about guns isn't much better.

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Today's passage from Augustine, which I read Monday morning, discusses a couple of issues that I've studied extensively, both from academic and religious perspectives: the interrelationship between legitimate science and legitimate religious faith, and the disconnect that many heretical religious groups have with reality. I've done a bit of abridgement, as Augustine had a tendency to rattle from a relevant discussion of his experiences right into verbose praise of God. I'm all for verbose praise of God, but I think it detracts a bit from Augustine's narrative. So, read on.

And as I had already read and stored up in memory many of the injunctions of the philosophers, I began to compare some of their doctrines with the tedious fables of the Manicheans; and it struck me that the probability was on the side of the philosophers, whose power reached far enough to enable them to form a fair judgment of the world, even though they had not discovered the sovereign Lord of it all... They have discovered much; and have foretold, many years in advance, the day, the hour, and the extent of the eclipses of those luminaries, the sun and the moon. Their calculations did not fail, and it came to pass as they predicted. And they wrote down the rules they had discovered, so that to this day they may be read and from them may be calculated in what year and month and day and hour of the day, and at what quarter of its light, either the moon or the sun will be eclipsed, and it will come to pass just as predicted. And men who are ignorant in these matters marvel and are amazed; and those who understand them exult and are exalted. Both, by an impious pride, withdraw from thee and forsake thy light. They foretell an eclipse of the sun before it happens, but they do not see their own eclipse which is even now occurring. For they do not ask, as religious men should, what is the source of the intelligence by which they investigate these matters. Moreover, when they discover that thou didst make them, they do not give themselves up to thee that thou mightest preserve what thou hast made... They do not know the way which is thy word, by which thou didst create all the things that are and also the men who measure them, and the senses by which they perceive what they measure, and the intelligence whereby they discern the patterns of measure. Thus they know not that thy wisdom is not a matter of measure.

[...]

Yet I remembered many a true saying of the philosophers about the creation, and I saw the confirmation of their calculations in the orderly sequence of seasons and in the visible evidence of the stars. And I compared this with the doctrines of Mani, who in his voluminous folly wrote many books on these subjects. But I could not discover there any account, of either the solstices or the equinoxes, or the eclipses of the sun and moon, or anything of the sort that I had learned in the books of secular philosophy. But still I was ordered to believe, even where the ideas did not correspond with--even when they contradicted--the rational theories established by mathematics and my own eyes, but were very different.

[...]

Yet, since he did not know even these other things, and most impudently dared to teach them, it is clear that he had no knowledge of piety. For, even when we have a knowledge of this worldly lore, it is folly to make a profession of it, when piety comes from confession to thee. From piety, therefore, Mani had gone astray, and all his show of learning only enabled the truly learned to perceive, from his ignorance of what they knew, how little he was to be trusted to make plain these more really difficult matters. For he did not aim to be lightly esteemed, but went around trying to persuade men that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter and Enricher of thy faithful ones, was personally resident in him with full authority. And, therefore, when he was detected in manifest errors about the sky, the stars, the movements of the sun and moon, even though these things do not relate to religious doctrine, the impious presumption of the man became clearly evident; for he not only taught things about which he was ignorant but also perverted them, and this with pride so foolish and mad that he sought to claim that his own utterances were as if they had been those of a divine person.

When I hear of a Christian brother, ignorant of these things, or in error concerning them, I can tolerate his uninformed opinion; and I do not see that any lack of knowledge as to the form or nature of this material creation can do him much harm, as long as he does not hold a belief in anything which is unworthy of thee, O Lord, the Creator of all. But if he thinks that his secular knowledge pertains to the essence of the doctrine of piety, or ventures to assert dogmatic opinions in matters in which he is ignorant--there lies the injury. And yet even a weakness such as this, in the infancy of our faith, is tolerated by our Mother Charity until the new man can grow up “unto a perfect man,” and not be “carried away with every wind of doctrine.” But Mani had presumed to be at once the teacher, author, guide, and leader of all whom he could persuade to believe this, so that all who followed him believed that they were following not an ordinary man but thy Holy Spirit. And who would not judge that such great madness, when it once stood convicted of false teaching, should then be abhorred and utterly rejected? But I had not yet clearly decided whether the alternation of day and night, and of longer and shorter days and nights, and the eclipses of sun and moon, and whatever else I read about in other books could be explained consistently with his theories. If they could have been so explained, there would still have remained a doubt in my mind whether the theories were right or wrong. Yet I was prepared, on the strength of his reputed godliness, to rest my faith on his authority.

I used to see a conflict between science and religion, but after studying under Professor Augustus, I refined my beliefs and views on the subject. As far as the disconnect between science and religion, I think that there are two groups at fault. The first group is select scientists, who vocally and militantly turn science into a surrogate religion, losing any trace of actual objectivity. It's one thing if scientists are indifferent to religion; it's quite another if a scientist is openly hostile to religion, and attempts to use science to unequivocally denounce religious faith. This creates an inherent conflict of interest, and as far as I'm concerned, it's quite revealing of many so-called "scientists'" actual motives.

The second group, of course, is overly dogmatic Christians. Many people fail to realize that, following the age of Aristotle, nearly all scientific research in the Western world was conducted by Christians who were seeking to better understand God through the discovery of His creation in greater and greater detail. There's an inherent difficulty in dogmatically rejecting any scientific evidence that contradicts an entirely literal interpretation of the Bible, and it's also unnecessary - there are plenty of figurative and poetic passages in the Bible, and there's no reason to believe that various passages that discuss things like origins or other items that interact with science aren't included in that. Christians who are dogmatic about such items are really doing themselves, and centuries upon centuries of Christian scientists, a great disservice.

There's more that can be said about this, but for me, the bottom line on this topic is that science and religion are inherently linked, rather than being inherently contradictory. I may discuss this in greater detail at another time.

As far as heretical religious movements are concerned, Augustine's experiences with the teachings of Mani (the founder of the Manichean faith/philosophy) are highly demonstrative of modern heretical sects and cults, many of which can be carefully examined and subsequently dismissed as ignorant heresy based upon their rejection of obvious factual evidence. It's one thing to have faith in something that can never be proved or disproved; it's quite another for one to maintain faith in something that's easily disproved, or even disproved with some degree of expertise or difficulty. This reinforces my previous statement: there is no inherent conflict between legitimate science and legitimate religion - if you find an actual conflict between the two, the issue is either bogus science (which is out there), or in many cases, inherently bogus religious doctrine.

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That's a long post, but I'm glad that I got it all squared away - catching up is hard work, but ultimately satisfying. Have a fantastic Thursday, folks, and check back tomorrow for a few more items to complete Catch-Up Week.