Iran and the Bomb

Yesterday's New York Times published an Op-Ed entitled "There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran" by a foreign policy analyst specializing in nuclear proliferation, Alan J. Kuperman. Unlike most people I've read who urge action against Iran, he put forward a very reasonable and convincing analysis.

Kuperman begins by outlining the evidence that Iran is quickly headed, politically and logistically, towards a nuclear weapon. I believe the facts are very much on his side here. Even a writer at the leftist New York Review of Books estimates that Iran could have a bomb in as soon as 6 months.

Kuperman then argues that the best way to prevent an Iranian bomb is through an airstrike, as opposed to the full-scale invasion desired by some neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz. I'm in full agreement that an invasion is a bad idea. If Iraq has shown us anything, it's that you can't invade a Middle Eastern country thinking you can create stability and peace, let alone a liberal democracy.

This all begs the question, though, of whether an Iranian bomb is truly a threat to Israel and Middle East peace at-large. Critics of intervention against Iran argue that it would be completely crazy of Iran to ever use a nuke, because of the massive retaliation that would ensue against it. I emailed Kuperman for his thoughts on this argument, and he told me:

I think there are powerful elements in Iran who would do so, especially if they thought it could not be traced back to Iran. Given Iran's opaque, unstable, and non-unitary political apparatus, it cannot be ruled out that such elements would some day be in a position to do so.

No one can say precisely what are the odds that a nuclear weapon would be transferred, but to me they seem non-trivial.

Again, Kuperman seems to be staking out pretty solid ground. If you want to tell me that concern over Iran is alarmism, you also have to show me that there is no reasonably possible scenario where an Iranian bomb would be used against Israel.

Gender identity: nature and nurture, but mainly nature

Reiner & Gearhart's NEJM Study on Cloacal Exstrophy - Review by Vernon Rosario, M.D., Ph.D.:

Of their 16 affected subjects, 14 had been reassigned female at birth. At follow-up, between ages 5 to 12, 8 of those reassigned female now identified as boys. The children and their parents completed a battery of questionnaires assessing psychosexual development, sexual identity, and gendered behavior. Follow-up assessments were done at least annually ranging from 34 to 98 months follow-up. All of the subject had moderate-to-marked male-typical attitudes and interests. The two children reared as males continued to identify as males. Of the 14 reassigned female at birth, five still persistently identified as girls, four spontaneously declared a male identity, and four chose to identify as boys after told that they were born male.

While nature can explain why most of them later identified as male, the 5 who didn't suggest a significant role for the environment in the development of gender identity.

American Bureaucrats and Explorers

I was recently visiting a small, boring Midwestern college. While touring the campus, I ran into a middle-aged man with dozens of small bags of popcorn and a dull expression on his face. I was pretty bored, so I decided to try my luck at hustling a bag of popcorn from him.

In the most jovial way possible, I say "Hi there. I'm visiting your excellent town, and really enjoying this great university, and it strikes me that the only way I could really improve my experience would be to try some of your excellent local popcorn."

The guy tells me that the popcorn is a reward for people who watch some student's film that the university is featuring. Apparently the film is so boring that they need to bribe people to stay the whole way through.

Unmoved (and, more accurately, annoyed) by my friendly attempts at popcorn acquisition, the guy tells me that I should wait until after the people watching the flick are done.

So, I go and do some other stuff, and come back a while later as people are leaving the theater. No one is interested in the popcorn. The guy has to start marketing it to people. "Try some popcorn!".. He's interrupting conversations. When he finally starts getting takers, he tells people to "take two!". There are literally dozens of popcorn bags there, and he still hasn't offered me one.

It's at this point when I realize that he's actually trying to prevent me from getting any. This guy is experiencing something I can only call "authoritarian spite". He has his worthless little job (probably titled Assistant Events Director or what have you) and he's enjoying the small sense of bureaucratic power/responsibility he gets from denying a person something that they kind of want.

The sad thing is that there are millions of people like this throughout America. They're in a pointless bureaucratic position, and they're unmoved by any appeal to them as an individual.. In fact, they savor the chance to reject individual warmth and decency in favor of their place as a cog in the bureaucracy. The Bureaucrat is an American archetype.

However, America provides another archetype which is a foil to the Bureaucrat. I'm talking about the Explorer. The Explorer is a person who lives by their own rules, seeking out new territory and challenges. An Explorer is a misfit in traditional society, forced either by temperament or circumstance to "build cities on the slopes of Vesuvius."

The Reconstruction Era was the heyday of the Explorer, with folks like Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane out winning the West. American Explorers have left their mark at every point throughout history, though. In the 1930's you could find them among the Okies and Arkies in California. The Explorers in Easy Rider hit the open road in search of the frontier spirit that America had forgotten. Today the American Explorer can be found making millions with an innovative idea, or living life on edge, one adventure to the next. That same spirit, that same drive to explore uncharted frontiers has never left us.

Everyone worth knowing in America is somewhat of an Explorer; everyone worth knowing in America has something of the original pioneer spirit.