Politician first, general second, Army chief of staff General Casey with weak knees propagandizing about the bad religion of Slam

The link: Army Chief Concerned for Muslim Troops

A quote:

Asked whether he thought the Army “dropped the ball” in not responding to warning signs that the major was increasingly radical, General Casey replied that he was encouraging soldiers to provide information to criminal investigators. But he added that the Army needs to be careful not to jump to conclusions based on early tidbits of information.

“The speculation could heighten the backlash,” he said on “This Week.” “What happened at Fort Hood is a tragedy and I believe it would be a greater tragedy if diversity became a casualty here.”

I do think that the supreme leader of the military should make sure that Muslim citizens under his watch aren’t physically harmed or harassed.

But advocating mindless diversity is pure propaganda and brainwashing. Now, as far as how a leader should protect Muslim citizens, but not make Slam out to be harmless and good, that’s his problem. I’m not a government official, so I don’t have the problem of being tempted to cower down in fear of losing my powerful government position. I only have the problem of  being tempted to cower down in fear of losing my lowly position in life or of not being able to gain some other lowly position.

The fact is, bad religion should be opposed. It’s no fun opposing it, and opposing bad religion has the potential of putting you in uncomfortable situations with people, or worse if you’re in the minority, but it’s downright crazy to wimp out and make Slam out as benign.

I’m not currently working with any Muslims that I know of, but working with a Muslim wouldn’t be a problem with me. I hired a Pakistani engineering student using odesk.com to help me get disciplined and get up in the morning, and I assume he’s Muslim; I’ve never asked him whether he is or isn’t. As it turned out, he wasn’t disciplined either, but he’s still in my Skype contacts, and occasionally he’ll instant message me, or me him.

Society doesn’t have a problem with people not tolerating the KKK any more, but according to politicians such as General Casey, Slam is a good thing.

It’s not, though, and I know it’s not because I understand that the Koran is bad religion, and I can look around the world and see that Muslims take the Koran serious. They act on it. In particular, they act on the parts that tell them to subdue the unbeliever, and that’s why Slam is a such a threat. It’s not a threat because every Muslim acts on those parts of the Koran. It’s a threat because enough of them do. It’s no coincidence that Islamic republics like Pakistan and Iran are 99% Muslim.

Technically speaking, I consider all religions but one bad religion, but from a global perspective, you’re not going to hear me complaining like this about any other religion but Slam. That’s because there’s bad religion, and then there’s bad kill-you-dead religion.

I can coexist peacefully with adherents of a religion whose book doesn’t tell them to kill me. I can coexist peacefully with a small minority whose book tells them to kill me for blaspheming their god, but to facilitate the growth of that minority into a majority, that’s just crazy, especially when I can look around the world and see what happens when they’re something other than a very small minority of the population.

Slam is a global threat comparable to communism of old. But when communism was in full bloom, it wasn’t any different. There were a whole lot of people saying, “Who are we to condemn what they choose?”

Tom Cruise, he loves all the Scientology suckers of the world

The St. Petersburg Times does a big expose on Scientology here.

People have been chipping away for years at Scientology, and it’s finally getting to the point where Scientology can’t go after their critics as effectively as they could in years past.

Their cash cow, the exclusive access to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, are threatened now by the Internet (breitbart.com):

Others think the Church of Scientology is in trouble. Along with the defections and French court setback, Scientology has been unable to stop Internet leaks of confidential material that members must pay a premium for, said Hugh Urban, a professor in the department of comparative studies at Ohio State University.

I don’t see Tom Cruise falling away. Some people like a servile attitude in other people, and all those Suckers for Scientology who work in poverty for Scientology, including those who serve celebrities at the Scientology celebrity center, those kind of people are flattery heaven for people like Tom.

The Afghan war, and when Afghans have a will of their own

The link: U.S. official resigns over Afghan war (washingtonpost.com)

A quote:

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

“That’s really what kind of shook me,” he said. “I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism.”

…

With “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,” he wrote, the insurgency “is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.”

I think Hoh is forgetting why we went to war in Afghanistan to begin with. The original motive to attack them didn’t come from a desire to help them out and free them from the Taliban; it came because Osama bin Laden had been using Afghanistan as an operating base to attack us.

But we can go back to George W. Bush and his positive think and positive speak, how he was going to take democracy to the world, and defeat the enemy completely.

If you understand that some people in the world don’t want to or aren’t willing to live like us, and if some of those people become our enemy, and if the people in their region, many of them their friends or family, don’t want to or don’t have the will to ally themselves with us to defeat our enemies, then you understand that it’s best not to build up unrealistic expectations. If you confess up to reality, then you might be able to come up with a realistic solution.

Positive think and positive speak are important and good if you’re building on reality. Otherwise, they’re no good.

And here is John McCain talking about winning: McCain: Why we can — and must — win the war in Afghanistan (cnn.com)

McCain says,

Success in Afghanistan will emerge, as it did in Iraq, when local leaders and citizens are more and more able to take responsibility for governing and securing their own sovereign country without substantial international assistance.

Of course, I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Afghanistan and Iraq are not good comparisons, since Afghanistan is much more rural and mountainous.

And I think McCain is overstating “success” in Iraq. The whole reason the U.S. had to have a surge is because it lost control after initially having Iraq under complete control. The loss of control was due to Bush and Rumsfield’s refusal to take heed of military advisers who told them that they needed about 300,000 ground troops after the invasion, so I read.

Only God knows the future, but it seems to me that McCain is being very presumptuous in not allowing for the possibility that 28,000,000 people don’t want or aren’t willing to comply with what he thinks is best. Or that 100,000 foreigners can succeed in imposing liberty on 28,000,000 people who haven’t been willing to fight for freedom or live free in the past, to be willing to break the yoke of bad religion, to fight their own tyrants much.

Observationally-sacrificed science by consensus, Peter Woit and Sean Carroll as archetypes, those willing to operate past some observationless threshold, which is why resistance from Woit-types can do no more than lead a horse to a different watering hole

In Nielsen-Ninomiya and the arXiv, archetype Peter Woit is waging war against all those crackpots. Well, not quite. He always shows respect for Sean Carroll.

Not that I’m calling Sean a crackpot. I don’t call anyone a crackpot. I’m thinking about Woit’s inconsistencies. With Woit, with the right credentials and right status, typically of more combined weight than his, you’re safe from the crackpot label. Woit writes,

Because of the New York Times article discussed here, four recent papers by Nielsen and Ninomiya have been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Pretty much all of it has been unremittingly hostile, when not convinced that these papers must be some sort of joke (except for this from Sean Carroll).

I assume Peter plays it safe with labeling people because he places great value on his outsider-insider status. He’s not willing to risk being excommunicated by all the other prophets of the past, thus becoming an outsider-outsider.

To attack the root of the problem, Woit would have to start making the argument that non-speculative science requires a fairly strict form of observation. But that would be arguing that evolution (the unobserved type, as opposed to the fruit-fly-to-fruit-fly type) would have to be relegated to speculative science, the big bang also. I can’t see that Columbia would want him around if he did that, even in the math department. Most mathematicians of the assertive and vocal type are just as fanatical about evolution as establishment scientists.

Actually, I’m probably giving Peter too much credit. As a prophet of the past, it’ probably not that he’s afraid to lose his status and position, even if he’s financially secure enough to do so, and he has said that he’s financially secure, it’s probably that he’s more like them than not like them.

And that’s why Woit types will never win. All they can to is shift the problem. Types like him seem to have succeeded in damaging the status of string theory, but I would guess the result is that instead of graduate students becoming string theorists, many of them become, say, cosmologists. The fatal flaw with string theory is that there’s the expectation of present or future experiment to verify claims. [If there's any substance to string theory, it's only fatal for a person who wants the fame and glory now.] If your claims deal with the past, there are no such expectations. Logic is sufficient, because obviously, events in the long past cannot be observed.

Woit will never win against operators like Sean Carrol. For one thing, given that all scientists can use a standard set of assumptions that have never been observed to have happened, Sean’s argument is superior to Woit’s. In the article linked to above, Sean writes,

[There's no] real justification [by Nielsen and Ninomiya for pulling an absolutely speculative idea out of their hats] — or if there is, it’s sufficiently lost in the mists that I can’t discern it from the recent papers. That’s okay; it’s just the traditional hypothesis-testing that has served science well for a few centuries now. Propose an idea, see where it leads, toss it out if it conflicts with the data, build on it if it seems promising. We don’t know all the laws of physics, so there’s no reason to stand pat.

Once you compromise on a foundational idea, it’s a slippery slope.

…the specific choice of action contemplated by NN seems rather contrived. But I’m happy to argue that it’s the good kind of crazy. The authors start with a speculative but well-defined idea, and carry it through to its logical conclusions. That’s what scientists are supposed to do.

And because the observational requirement of Galileo-type science was compromised, compromised  to allow prophets of the past to make their prophecies, and to present those prophecies as science to be able to “explain everything by natural means,” it’s a slippery slope.

Sean writes,

There is another reasonable question, which is whether an essay (not a news story, note) like this in a major media outlet contributes to the erosion of trust in scientists on the part of the general public. …It’s always important to distinguish as clearly as possible between what is crazy-sounding but well-established as true — quantum mechanics, relativity, natural selection — and what is crazy-sounding and speculative, even if it’s respectable speculation — inflation, string theory, exobiology. But if that distinction is made…

The distinction is supposedly made, and among those claims distinguished  as non-speculative science are those that are only logically true, logically based on a hypothesis that certain rates are “well-established” for all time; the theory of relativity confirmed in the present is given no more status than detailed descriptions of the physics driving the cosmos (supposed but not observed) billions of light years away from the Earth, detailed descriptions assuming  a particular rate for all time, and assuming light has always only had one way to get from point A to point B.

But if that distinction is made, I’ve always found it pretty paternalistic and condescending to claim that we should shield the public from speculative science until it’s been established one way or the other.

Sean’s logic is solid, and that’s why the Sean types will succeed as long everyone  is allowed to use an unobserved set of assumptions.

[I'm talking about Sean's overall logic of people being justified in throwing out science claims, and then letting the claims be vetted by everyone else. Really, on saying that Sean's logic is solid about this, I've decided I might be guilty of  "assert yourself like a true blowhard whether you know for sure that you're right." But the standard is not very high these days for claims to earn the label of science, not when "in principle" experiment takes the place of experiment. Getting respect for a claim is more of a process, where the most assertive and aggressive people win respect for their theories. That's the way I see it. ]

If the leading scientists have given us permission to treat certain logic claims as science, it only makes sense that when consensus permits, more will be periodically added to the set. In the current setting, science isn’t clearly delineated knowledge,  it’s a continuum from the first time that a speculative claim is made to when the claim is completely accepted, acceptance not necessarily a result of people having observed what is claimed to be true.

Certain assumptions result in specific logical consequences. If the criteria for distinction between speculative science and science is not near-present experimental observation, always, then logic trumps experiment when actual experiment is impossible or impractical.

Because the observational requirement for science has been compromised, it only makes sense that debate rather than experiment has become a primary means by which people establish their ideas as science.

Any fool can debate. However, it takes combined billions of dollars (euros) from multiple nations to do advanced experiment.

The payback in war of setting false expectations

The link: American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains (timesonline.co.uk).

A quote:

Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: “If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don’t.”

In Proverbs, it’s written, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

As long as military and political leaders refuse to publicly confess that the Afghans must be the ones who decide whether our enemies in Afghanistan can be  overwhelmingly defeated, then we can’t deal with reality.

Where do we think the Taliban came from? From another world? Some country far, far away? They were produced by the families of Afghanistan, and because the Taliban are driven by certain Islamic beliefs, then it must mean that, in general, other non-combatant Afghans share those beliefs, or at least Afghans who are more willing to assert themselves.

If you’re not sure whether you can do more than merely contain and subdue the enemy, because of factors beyond your control, then you shouldn’t act if there’s some guarantee that you can, that it’s just a matter of fighting the good fight, otherwise you’re building up expectations in people that may not be fulfilled.

But in Afghanistan, if we want to maintain a presence in the country, then that implies we may never be more than an occupying force. That’s a big problem for multiple reasons. But by refusing to acknowledge it, it makes it appear that there’s only two options, total victory or total defeat, and it results in propaganda because politicians and leaders make it appear that there are only two options.

With the right mindset, you can endure adversity for the long term. If someone tells you success is going to be easy, and then it’s hard, and hard for a long time, you get discouraged and disillusioned.

Useful math as a foundation which prevents the corruption of math

(Below, I refine what the commenter had to say with this comment.)

You cannot corrupt math, although it’s not because there aren’t mathematicians who wouldn’t corrupt it if it could be corrupted. Once mathematicians stray from math, their ability to be logical and unbiased is nothing but average. What can be corrupted is the application of math, and many people confuse the application of math with math.

Because the most useful of math is tied into an algebraic structure, such as the real numbers, then how could any corruption of note not be logically tracked down? And concerning the motive to corrupt math, isn’t useful math useless without the tools of quantity or distance, counting or measure? There’s true and false, but even the use of logic symbols requires counting. Interfere with quantity or measure, and you’re shaking the foundations of math based on quantity or measure, which is essentially all of mathematics. I use “essentially” only because using “all” is hazardous.

The foundation of the real numbers, and other algebraic structures, is standard set theory, standard logic, and the natural numbers. A corrupt mathematical construct would likely be at a higher level than the real numbers, and anything at a lower level, what would be the purpose of that? Very few people have a problem with the way we count or with the law of the excluded middle; it might be better to say that few people desire the awareness to be aware of such things.

You don’t have to corrupt math to corrupt an experimental-based application of math. You only have to find a set of unproved assumptions and a mathematical model that will take your assumptions where you want those assumptions to go.

The logic underpinning the mathematics will be rock solid, even if the math is wrong. One description of math would be “logical statements which do not require experiment to determine the logical validity of the statements.” The absence of experiment is important because the biggest problem with corrupt knowledge is not that false statements can be made, but that false statements can be made which definitively cannot be determined to be false.

In useful math, all statements are considered to be either true or false, a consequence which prevents any assumption from corrupting math. With math, no assumption in any hypothesis requires justification; any assumption will merely result in logical consequences.

Math is not an experimental science, and a person can get as creative with definitions, undefined terms, and axioms as desired. If the creative result conflicts with the logic of useful math long established, the result will be ignored or abandoned by others.

To corrupt experimental-based applications of math, there is no need to corrupt math, you merely need a set of unproved assumptions and a mathematical model that will take your assumptions where you want those assumptions to go. And in fact, given your unproved assumptions, why shouldn’t you be able to get the desired conclusion? At most, you might merely need some additional unproved assumptions. At most, you would merely need to practice the freedom of logic practiced in mathematics, and with the right credentials, you’d be good to go.

(With the above in mind, it should be apparent that talking about math and religion in the same sentence, conversation, or discussion is no threat to math. Math can be used to make religiously motivated, false statements about the world we live in, but that’s an application of math.)

McChrystal, an aggressive man who knows when he has the advantage

The link: Barack Obama angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan (telegraph.co.uk)

A quote:

An adviser to the administration said: “People aren’t sure whether McChrystal is being naïve or an upstart. To my mind he doesn’t seem ready for this Washington hard-ball and is just speaking his mind too plainly.”

and

Some commentators regarded the general’s London comments as verging on insubordination.

Bruce Ackerman, an expert on constitutional law at Yale University, said in the Washington Post: “As commanding general, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements.”

It appears that McChrystal talks about winning in some grand sense, which I think borders on propaganda, but obviously, he’s also not willing to toe the party line.

Maybe there are more things important to him than climbing the ladder a little higher, like self-respect.

What’s gonna happen to him for playing the way he’s playing? A courtmartial? I don’t think so. He’s a general, and he at least has 20 years in. He’s probably close to the 30 year mark, and most military people retire at least at 30 years.

So he knows he has the advantage. The worst that could happen is an early retirement, and there’s a good chance that in his view there’s no “worst” in that. A hard charging, successful man like him would have lots of opportunities in life.

And who wants to go down in history as another in a long line of commanding generals who left Afghanistan or Iraq as someone who was outdone by the enemy.

There’s self-respect. And there might be a whole lot more than that, like simply wanting to do the right thing, and having the courage to stand up to the political machine.

But again, they got nothing on him. It’s him who got something on them. If they boot him out and then fail in Afghanistan, it’s all upside for him, because the likelihood of winning in the sense that the enemy will be completely defeated is pretty slim.

There’s no war magic for McChrystal

The link: Ten US soldiers killed in Afghanistan (timesonline.co.uk)

A quote:

The US has suffered some of its worst casualties in eastern Afghanistan, where its soldiers have sought to control the remote passes through which Taleban fighters infiltrate from Pakistan, but it had planned shortly to withdraw from the area as part of General McChrystal’s strategy to focus on protecting population centres.

If you do one thing, it means you can’t do another. You can’t do two things at the same time. It’s the economics of time, energy, and resources.

I was skeptical when the other general was relieved by McChrystal several months ago. The upbeat impression given at the time was that McChrystal had some fandangled,  amazing expertise in how to deal with counterinsurgency warfare.

From only about a week ago, this,  McChrystal: Conventional Strategy Won’t Win in Afghanistan (defencetalk.com):

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan ardently believes that conventional military thinking and actions won’t win the counterinsurgency war there.

“What I’m really telling people is; the greatest risk we can accept is to lose the support of the people here,” Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal told “60 Minutes” news program correspondent David Martin during a profile segment that aired tonight.

Additionally,

Protecting the Afghan population from a resurgent Taliban and thus gaining their support is the key tenet of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, McChrystal told Martin.

“If the people are against us, we cannot be successful,” McChrystal said. “If the people view us as occupiers and the enemy, we can’t be successful and our casualties will go up dramatically,”

It appears that casualties went up very soon after McChrystal began implementing his methods.

It’s a noble thing to die to protect another person, but positive-think is no substitute for simple manpower when manpower is what’s needed to do te job.

If the priority is protecting citizens, and it’s acknowledged that there’s a price for us to pay to do that, then maybe that’s what we should do. But without honesty, you can’t deal with reality.

The Republican propaganda that results from requiring that we always win, from not recognizing that the world is a big place, that 300 million people aren’t all powerful

The link: George Will’s Afghanistan Moment (theatlanticwire.com)

A quote:

America’s slipping fortunes in Afghanistan have caused conservatives to ally with Obama on staying the course, while liberal and moderate support for the President’s war efforts have been foundering, as the Wire has covered here and here. Today, George Will, the premier tory conservative columnist in the Washington Post, breaks ranks with Republicans in a bombshell column that joins war skeptics by calling for a withdrawal of American troops…

I linked to the above because there are lots of links to Republican-type-harletos who are propagandizing.

I’m not against warring if that’s what we should do. What I’m against is rah-rah propaganda to where we always have to win in some grand, dramatic, ultimate manner.

It’s a big world, and we should be realists. If we can’t nuke ‘em all, which we can’t, and don’t want to, then we should realistically decide what we can do, and then be honest about it.

Not everyone wants to live like we do. Not everyone has our values. Some people got bad ideas. Some people got bad religion. They don’t wanna change. So the best you can do sometimes, when those type of people are your enemy, is contain them, and keep them subdued. It’s not so romantic sounding as proclaiming how we’re gonna bring democracy to the world, but it’s reality.

Rick Perry, Republican whore politician whose motto is “never admit you’re wrong unless you have to,” a man who never opposed Big G George Whore Bush, yet acts like he’s some defender of limited government now that Obama’s in office

The links:

• Shakeup in Texas execution probe draws criticism, questions (cnn.com)
• Trial by Fire (newyorker.com)