Joseph Cirincione in Foreign Policy on rising tensions with Iran.

Does this story line sound familiar? The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops. The intelligence agencies say the nuclear threat from this nation is 10 years away, but the director of intelligence paints a more ominous picture. A new U.S. national security strategy trumpets preemptive attacks and highlights the country as a major threat. And neoconservatives beat the war drums, as the cable media banner their stories with words like “countdown” and “showdown.”

The nation making headlines today, of course, is Iran, not Iraq. But the parallels are striking. Three years after senior administration officials systematically misled the nation into a disastrous war, they could well be trying to do it again.

Nothing is clear, yet. For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

Meanwhile, Philip Anderson (Physics Nobel Laureate), Michael Fisher (Wolf Laureate), David Gross (Nobel Laureate), Jorge Hirsch (Professor of Physics), Leo Kadanoff (National Medal of Science), Joel Lebowitz (Boltzmann Medalist), Anthony Leggett (Nobel Laureate), Eugen Merzbacher (President, American Physical Society, 1990), Douglas Osheroff (Nobel Laureate), Andrew Sessler (President, American Physical Society, 1998), George Trilling (President, American Physical Society, 2001), Frank Wilczek (Nobel Laureate), and Edward Witten (Fields Medalist) have sent a letter to President Bush. (Via Cosmic Variance.)

Dear Mr. President:

Recent articles in the New Yorker and Washington Post report that the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran is being actively considered by Pentagon planners and by the White House. As members of the profession that brought nuclear weapons into existence, we urge you to refrain from such an action that would have grave consequences for America and for the world.

1800 of our fellow physicists have joined in a petition opposing new US nuclear weapons policies that open the door to the use of nuclear weapons in situations such as Iran’s. These policies represent a “radical departure from the past”, in the words of Linton Brooks, National Nuclear Security Administration director. Indeed, since the end of World War II, US policy has considered nuclear weapons “weapons of last resort”, to be used only when the very survival of the nation or of an allied nation was at stake, or at most in cases of extreme military necessity.

Conservative American columnist Daniel Pipes concludes a recent article for the New York Sun on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the following words: “The most dangerous leaders in modern history are those… equipped with… a mystical belief in their own mission. That, combined with his expected nuclear arsenal, makes him an adversary who must be stopped, and urgently.” As evidence of Ahmadinejad’s mysticism Pipes cites the fact that he believes in Mahdaviat, the ‘second coming’ of the ‘Mahdi’, an Islamic version of the Messiah. Such radical religious beliefs, held by the leader of a powerful nuclear state, Pipes argues, will have ominous consequences. No doubt he is right. But if Pipes is concerned about the rise of powerful nuclear-armed men who believe in the second coming, he might have looked a little closer to home. Forget Iran. The mainstay of religious radicalism and mainstream occultism, is the United States, and America already has the bomb. More than one.

Consider these statistics: 95 per cent of Americans believe in God; 86 per cent believe in Heaven; 78 per cent believe in life after death; 72 per cent believe in angels; 71 per cent believe in Hell; 65 per cent believe in the Devil; 34 per cent believe that the Bible is inerrant. But then again only 40 per cent believe they have actually had contact with the dead (source Kosmin and Lachman and The Economist).

more from The New Humanist here.

Consider that, in December 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” On the other hand, if Israel responded with its own nuclear weapons, it “will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Rafsanjani thus spelled out a macabre cost-benefit analysis. It might not be possible to destroy Israel without suffering retaliation. But, for Islam, the level of damage Israel could inflict is bearable–only 100,000 or so additional martyrs for Islam.

And Rafsanjani is a member of the moderate, pragmatic wing of the Iranian Revolution; he believes that any conflict ought to have a “worthwhile” outcome. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is predisposed toward apocalyptic thinking. In one of his first TV interviews after being elected president, he enthused: “Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr’s death?” In September 2005, he concluded his first speech before the United Nations by imploring God to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam. He finances a research institute in Tehran whose sole purpose is to study, and, if possible, accelerate the coming of the imam. And, at a theology conference in November 2005, he stressed, “The most important task of our Revolution is to prepare the way for the return of the Twelfth Imam.”

more from TNR here.

This week in Slate.com, Tyler Cowen, from Marginal Revolution, has a few reports on his visit to New Orleans.

Last month I spent a week in Louisiana studying economic development, or in this case redevelopment. The institutional roots of cultural success—whether it be Mozart, Michelangelo, or Louis Armstrong—are a long-standing research interest of mine, and I wanted to see how New Orleans might lay the groundwork for economic recovery and future cultural innovation. But in Louisiana I found that the various factions arguing about how to rebuild are too focused on finding “the right” master plan. A better approach is to support good institutions and freedom of contract so that many private plans can come to fruition.

Many economists have suggested it is not worth rebuilding New Orleans at all. But they belie their own discipline by not asking, “At what price?” Hurricanes or no hurricanes, the devastated areas in New Orleans remain more valuable than most parts of the world, if only because they lie in a famous U.S. city. At some price, people will want to work and live there. City planners simply need to acknowledge that this price is lower than it used to be.

Philip Roth is the great recorder of Darwinian Man – “unaccommodated man”, who is no more than “a poor, bare, forked animal”, as old King Lear observed. Roth has understood what it means to be a conscious creature, driven by sexual desire towards the death of the body, nothing more. He called an earlier novel The Dying Animal, taking his title from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, in which the poet describes his soul as “sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal . . .”

Roth’s characters inhabit a truly post-religious world, in which we do not have immortal souls, only sick, lively desire, and the dying of the animal. The title of this new, bleak tale is taken from a mediaeval morality play in which Everyman, the human soul, is called by Death to appear before God’s judgement seat. He is deserted by his strength, discretion, beauty, knowledge and five wits, leaving only his Good Works to speak for him at the end. Hugo von Hofmannsthal reworked the play in 1911 for the Salzburg Festival, where it is still performed. Timor Mortis conturbat me is an ancient cry, but it sounds different in a world where the Four Last Things – death, judgement, heaven and hell – have been reduced to one, or maybe one and a half.

more from The New Statesman here.

Editing and rearranging the large mass of his early prose, Yeats tried to bring into coherence a diffuse body of writing. The pieces which were first collected in The Celtic Twilight were largely concerned with Irish folklore. These detailed, and occasionally meandering, reports from what Yeats considered the front line of racial memory and pagan religious instinct were deliberately distinct both in tone and procedure from the already established methods of the folklorist. The young Yeats’s prose is highly wrought, and yet this style is at the service of no real argument. It is important to the effect of The Celtic Twilight that its first-person voice should be identified as that of a young modern poet, importing much un-Victorian primitivism and mystery into contemporary writing; beyond that, larger patterns of coherence (and even smaller ones) are neglected. Ghosts abound, but not as the agents of philosophical instruction or religious apocalypse. “Drumcliff and Rosses”, Yeats writes of his own home ground, “are choke-full of ghosts”, adding a catalogue which seems to tire of its own effects: “By bog, road, rath, hillside, sea-border they gather in all shapes: headless women, men in armour, shadow hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so on”. Just in case his readers might baulk at the last item (having taken the others in their stride), Yeats tops this off with “A whistling seal sank a ship the other day”. The supernatural is everywhere, but its meaning and intentions (if any) are generally inscrutable. One anecdote tells of how the Devil approaches two women as a lover: he offers a lift to one; she refuses, and he vanishes.

more from the TLS here.

“One might speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote. “That predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and also a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.” Frydlender (like Benjamin) is a secular Jew, and his vision is quite reasonably a dark one, yet there is also in his pictures a faint yearning for redemption, as if by knitting together moments otherwise lost to history he might help make a broken world whole again.

His second New York show includes pictures taken in various Israeli venues–a makeshift nightclub, for example, with Elvis enshrined on the wall, where a middle-aged crooner serenades a room half filled with Tel Avivan slackers. The spliced images make the club’s floor curve like a boat’s hull–a Noah’s ark or ship of fools, carrying the tattered remnants of a counterculture.

more from the Village Voice here.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky on language.

You can watch it here. (Hat tip: Linta Varghese.)

From Powell’s Books:

In the past, Stephen King has scared us with dead cats and rabid dogs, killer clowns and killer flus, sinister government agents, homicidal Plymouths and otherworldly Buicks, schoolyard bullies and strange men in yellow raincoats. And now, with Cell, the zombie has shambled to the front of the queue, as might have been expected. What no one could have anticipated, however, was that the zombie would be clutching a cell phone.

King’s new novel opens with a young comic book artist named Clay Riddell strolling happily down Boylston Street in Boston, swinging his portfolio in one hand. Clay has just sold his graphic novel “Dark Wanderer” to Dark Horse Comics, and he is pretty pleased about it. He stops at a Mister Softee truck to treat himself to an ice cream in celebration, lining up behind a pair of teenage girls and a woman with a poodle. The girls are sharing a cell phone as they wait, and the woman with the poodle is talking on her own. Clay does not own a cell phone. That’s what saves him when “the pulse” comes crackling through the cell towers.

The woman closes her phone and tries to climb through the window of the Mister Softee truck to tear out the ice cream vendor’s throat. When she fails, one of the girls rips out her throat instead, while the other backs away, half-mad and muttering. The poodle is run over by a careening limo, and down the block a businessman bites the ear off a Labrador. Clay doesn’t understand what is happening, though he knows it is nothing good. We’re a little ahead of him. We know that all the cell phone users in Boston, and maybe the world, have suddenly been transformed into crazed, carnivorous zombies.

More here.

From Science:

Written words have only been around for about 6000 years, but that hasn’t kept some scientists from believing that there’s a specific part of our brain devoted to reading. The existence of a brain region dedicated to reading was first proposed by neurologist Jules Déjerine in the late 19^th century. Brain scans appear to support the hypothesis: The region–called the visual word form area (VWFA) and located in the rear of the brain’s left hemisphere–lights up when individuals read words.

A chance opportunity allowed neuroscientists led by Laurent Cohen of INSERM, the Université Paris and the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in France to put the theory to the test. The team became aware of a man who was about to have brain surgery to treat epilepsy. The surgery was to remove a small area next to the VWFA, so Cohen’s team carried out a set of experiments. Prior to the surgery, the man took 600 milliseconds to read common words of three to nine letters. After the surgery, the patient could still quickly identify objects, but his reading went downhill. On average, it took him over 1000 milliseconds to read a three-letter word, and for every additional letter, the time went up about 300 milliseconds.

More here.

In Nature (also in the BBC), researchers find that pretty women distract heterosexual men.

It seems that the more macho a man is — at least according to his hormones — the more the sight of an attractive woman will affect his judgement.

Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium asked men to play an ultimatum game, in which they split a certain amount of money between them. High-testosterone men drove the hardest bargain — unless they had previously viewed pictures of bikini-clad models, in which case they were more likely to accept a poorer deal.

The sight of flesh had less effect on the bargaining tactics of low-testosterone men.

The testosterone dose that interested the researchers was that encountered by their participants when developing in the womb. This can be measured by comparing the lengths of the index and ring fingers — a relatively long ring finger is a sign of a high-testosterone man.

In the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten on cartography and the digital revolution, that is, on MapQuest, googlemaps and the like.

It can be amusing to see what MapQuest an its ilk come up with. They don’t always work For example, I recently looked to see ho MapQuest would get me from East Ninety-sixth Street in Manhattan to the North Shore o Long Island, an hour-long trip that I an countless other drivers have honed (wit variations for personal preference, traffi avoidance, and monotony-breakage) over th years. Triborough Bridge to the Grand Centra Parkway to the Whitestone Expressway to th Cross Island Parkway to the Long Islan Expressway. Bing-bang-boom. MapQuest ha an unprecedented suggestion: take th Triborough Bridge to the Bruckner Expresswa and then to the Throgs Neck Bridge. From th Upper West Side, a few traffic lights west MapQuest, snickering, guides you to the Cros Bronx Expressway and then to the Throg Neck. The Cross Bronx? It would seem that the algorithms are new to the area. These directions involve a disconcerting degree of noncontiguousness. Why cross a body of water at its widest possible point? Why even mess with the Bronx? You may as well stick a sandwich in your ear before putting it into your mouth.

Generally, MapQuest and OnStar choose a road based on their calculations of which will get you there fastest. The criterion is time, a function both of speed and of distance. They do not, as some people suspect, simply pick the shortest route; otherwise, you might spend all your time on side streets, stuck at traffic lights or goat crossings. The algorithms consider the length of a road segment and the expected speed of the road and calculate the time it will take you to pass along it. Every road segment has a “costing,” a sum of the features that can slow a driver down. Turns, merges, exits, toll plazas, stoplights, speed zones: they all carry a cost. (Navteq has five “functional classes” of road, ranked according to connectivity and speed. An interstate highway is a one; a local street is a five.) These systems do not yet take into consideration traffic, construction, weather, time of day, or one’s tendency, on certain roads, to go faster than the speed limit.

In the NYRB, Bill McKibben reviews Jerome Armstrong and Markos (“kos”) Moulitsas Zúniga’s Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics:

When we consider Kos’s own Web site and its numerous links to other blogs, we see something like an expanding hive of communication, a collective intelligence. And the results can be impressive. A writer with the pen name (mouse name) Jerome à Paris, for instance, organized dozens of other Kossacks interested in energy policy to write an energy plan that I find far more comprehensive and thoughtful than anything the think tanks have produced. It’s been read and reshaped by thousands of readers; it will serve as a useful model should the Democrats retake Congress and have the ability to move legislation. The blogs began as purely reactive and bloggers still spend much of their energy responding to the “mainstream media.” But a kind of proto-journalism is emerging, and becoming steadily more sophisticated. If you want to understand (albeit with plenty of spin) the ins and outs of Scooter Libby’s defense in the Plamegate trial, for instance, the place to go is Firedoglake.

Some of the discourse is less edifying, of course. There is much familiar and ofte tiresome ranting at the Bush administration, at intelligent design advocates, at Fo News. But much of that disappears when there are specific factual issues to b addressed. For instance, the site’s commentators have become experts at monitorin the regular press and television for signs of rightward bias, and they respond en masse When The Washington Postkept repeating the GOP’s charge that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats as well as to Republicans, on-line activists assembled data and organized an overwhelming response, showing that Abramoff mainly worked with Republicans. This finding was soon picked up by the press and television and much less was heard about Abramoff’s evenhandedness. Reporters long cowed by conservative charges of bias (as Michael Massing demonstrated in his recent essays on press coverage of Iraq[2] ) now find that they are getting closer scrutiny on the Internet. Since the liberals of the blogosphere are better organized, this is starting to have a balancing effect. Kos says he gets fifty times the number of visits received by the entire right-wing “blogosphere,” where his biggest competitor is probably a site called Instapundit.com.

Andrew Gelman summarizes some current research by Larry Bartels on income, economic growth and voting.

Larry Bartels spoke in our seminar the other day and talked about this paper on Democrats, Republicans, and the economy. It started with this graph, which showed that incomes have grown faster under Democratic presidents, especially on the low end of the scale:

He looked at it in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern.

But then, he asked, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning.

Brain Hayes explores the meaning of one of most famous stories in mathematics.

Let me tell you a story, although it’s such a well-worn nugget of mathematical lore that you’ve probably heard it already:

In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher’s aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + … + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever. Gauss was not a calculating prodigy who added up all those numbers in his head. He had a deeper insight: If you “fold” the series of numbers in the middle and add them in pairs—1 + 100, 2 + 99, 3 + 98, and so on—all the pairs sum to 101. There are 50 such pairs, and so the grand total is simply 50×101. The more general formula, for a list of consecutive numbers from 1 through n, is n(n + 1)/2.

The paragraph above is my own rendition of this anecdote, written a few months ago for another project. I say it’s my own, and yet I make no claim of originality. The same tale has been told in much the same way by hundreds of others before me. I’ve been hearing about Gauss’s schoolboy triumph since I was a schoolboy myself.

The story was familiar, but until I wrote it out in my own words, I had never thought carefully about the events in that long-ago classroom. Now doubts and questions began to nag at me. For example: How did the teacher verify that Gauss’s answer was correct? If the schoolmaster already knew the formula for summing an arithmetic series, that would somewhat diminish the drama of the moment. If the teacher didn’t know, wouldn’t he be spending his interlude of peace and quiet doing the same mindless exercise as his pupils?

(Hat tip: Dan Balis)

Over at TPM Cafe, Ivo Daalder offers some reasons why war with Iran is not inevitable.

Politically, too, the context for war is very different today than it was in 2002-03. Then, the president was still riding high in the polls, and the American people looked to him as a trusted, competent, and strong leader. Now, Bush’s approval ratings have collapsed and Americans have lost faith in his honesty, competence, and leadership. In one recent poll, fully 54 percent of Americans said they did not trust Bush to make the right decision on attacking Iran. And given the trends in public opinion, these numbers are bound to get worse over time. Equally important, there wasn’t much political debate about the wisdom of war three years ago. Most Senate and many House Democrats joined Republicans in giving Bush the blankest of blank checks — and a significant majority of Americans supported going to war. Today, the possibility of attacking Iran is hotly — and rightly — debated, and it would be inconceivable for Bush to gain congressional backing for such a move absent a far more dire and imminent threat from Iran.

And then there is the international context. While back then doubts about the direction of American foreign policy had already begun to set in, and opposition to going to war against Iraq was mounting, Bush could still count on getting the backing of many important players. In 2002, that included getting a unanimous vote on a UN Security Council resolution declaring Baghdad in breach of past UN resolutions and warning of serious consequences in case Iraq failed to come into full compliance. In 2003, it meant getting significant military backing from Britain, Australia, and some other key allies — and the political backing of still more countries. Today, even Tony Blair has made clear that Bush would be on his own if he attacked Iran.

In Foreign Affairs, Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray present some of the key findings of a study of the Iraqi military based on interviews and internal documents:

Only slowly did Saddam and those around him finally seem to realize that they were suffering a catastrophic military defeat. In the regime’s final days, the only decisive actions those at the top seemed capable of were attempts to stem the flow of bad news. For instance, a Ministry of Defense memorandum dated April 6 told subordinate units, “We are doing great,” and reminded all staff officers to “avoid exaggerating the enemy’s abilities.” By that point, Iraq’s military forces had already collapsed or were collapsing. Coalition attacks had destroyed almost all of the corps and division headquarters, and the few that remained had been rendered ineffective by the furious pace of the U.S. advance. Although some isolated Iraqi units continued to fight, they were no longer connected to a coherent military organization.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Aziz, by then even Saddam had finally accepted that the end was near. On that day, he called a meeting of the Iraqi leadership at a house in central Baghdad. During the meeting, according to Aziz, Saddam’s tone was that of a man “who had lost his will to resist” and “knew the regime was coming to an end.” Later that day, Saddam traveled to another safe house a few miles away (he changed locations every three to six hours). There he met with his personal secretary, his two sons, the minister of defense, and the chiefs of staff of the al Quds Army, the Republican Guard, and the Saddam Fedayeen. It was almost midnight, and according to those present, the combination of some accurate battlefield reports and Western satellite news broadcasts had finally made it impossible to ignore their dire predicament.

Yet Saddam began giving orders to deploy and maneuver formations that had ceased to exist.

From The Village Voice:

Conceived in the shadow of no towers, the Tribeca Film Festival was the first 9-11 memorial, and surely the most upbeat. The fifth edition acknowledges its roots—opening with the movie everyone I know is afraid to see, the quasi-real-time United 93. At least two documentaries evoke that epoch-defining day, and there are many more on the Bush wars, not to mention the fictional disaster movie Poseidon and the presumably mega-violent secret-agent flick Mission: Impossible III.

What have Robert De Niro and his producer Jane Rosenthal wrought? From the perspective of its founders, Tribeca has been a mild boon to neighborhood restaurants and magnificent advertisement for American Express. The festival is a triumph of branding, but has it found its niche? Like the city it celebrates, Tribeca has proven resilient, but like New York, it’s far too sprawling and abrasive to ever attain the grooviness of SXSW or the exclusivity of Telluride. Marketing—yes. Market—we’ll see. Tribeca is very far from rivaling Sundance (or Toronto) as the place at which to sell or launch a movie. True, Oscar nominee Transamerica did have its premiere at the last festival—but only God and Harvey Weinstein know if the Weinstein brothers weren’t already planning to make that acquisition. (Other recent releases that found distributors at Tribeca include 4 and Ushpizin; The Power of Nightmares, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and Night Watch were local premieres.)

More here.

From Scientific American:

Spring is the season for flashy mates, at least for finches. It is only later in the year that the females choose based on genetic diversity, according to new research from two scientists at the University of Arizona. Their 10-year study of a colony of 12,000 finches in Montana has revealed the seasonal dynamics of finch attraction and thereby resolved an evolutionary conundrum. Previous research had shown that female birds go for the most resplendent mates; in the case of finches, this means the males with the reddest breast.

By analyzing genetic records collected over 10 years, researchers found that early in the mating season, females chose the male finch with the reddest breast. But as the season wore on–and new females entered the charm–they typically chose males with strong genetic differences from themselves. And those tempted to stray typically chose a mate more genetically different than their regular partner, according to the research presented in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

More here.

Daniel Dennett is the “good cop” among religion’s critics (Richard Dawkins is the bad cop), but he still makes people angry. Sholto Byrnes met him “That’s one of my favourite phrases in the book,” says Daniel Dennett, his huge bearded frame snapping out of postprandial languor at the thought of it: “If you have to hoodwink your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.” The 64-year-old Tufts University professor is amiable of aspect, but the reception he has had while in Britain promoting his new book, Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon, has not been uniformly friendly. His development of the theory that religion has developed as an evolutionary “meme”, a cultural replicator which may or may not have a benign effect on those who transmit it, has drawn attacks, not least in these pages, where John Gray accused him of “a relentless, simple-minded cleverness that precludes anything like profundity”.

more from the New Statesman here.