HITCHENS FOR KERRY: Christopher Hitchens, along with most of the staff at Slate, endorsed John Kerry for president. That’s odd. Just last week in The Nation he said he was (slightly) in favor of George W. Bush.

He is not at all happy with either Kerry or the Democratic Party right now, and his “support” is the kind I am entirely sympathetic with. He breaks it down into two parts.

Objectively, his election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq.

And:

I do think that Bush deserves praise for his implacability, and that Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.

I made similar points in a Tech Central Station column last month, so I know where Hitchens is coming from. I tried to talk myself and other hawks into voting for Kerry. The problem is I couldn’t convince even myself. I doubt Hitchens really convinced himself either. And I doubt Kerry could find a colder endorsement from anyone.

THE GENETIC BASIS OF RACE: Are there genetic differences between the races? As you’d expect of any subgroup breeding mostly within the group, the answer is of course there is. Scientists seem to be converging on the view that there is more genetic basis than one side of the argument had hoped, although less than the other side had averred. But the really good news is that as we get better data, it won’t really matter:

“We don’t have to use race as a surrogate for the biology when we can identify the underlying biology,” said Dr. Georgia M. Dunston, founding director of the Howard genome center. “By removing the barriers implied by the racial classifications we can more effectively study population differences in disease distribution.”

In the short term, though, race may make a good proxy for analysing things like disease distribution until genomic sequencing becomes widespread, as I think it eventually will.

A CLOSER LOOK AT CULPABILITY: The New York Sun reports that the US asked the IAEA to destroy the looted explosives in 1995

Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq’s interim government said this month was looted due to poor security.

The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing.

Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced the presence of the HMX, RDX, and PETN explosives was directly related to Saddam Hussein’s programs to amass weapons of mass destruction.

Instead of accepting recommendations to destroy the stocks, Mr. Duelfer said, the atomic-energy agency opted to continue to monitor them.

By e-mail, Mr. Duelfer wrote the Sun, “The policy was if acquired for the WMD program and used for it, it should be subject for destruction. The HMX was just that. Nevertheless the IAEA decided to let Iraq keep the stuff, like they needed more explosives.”

UPDATE: Roger Simon has more.

HOW TO CAMPAIGN IN WISCONSIN — EXPLOIT SCHOOLKIDS? Slate takes a close look at campaigning in Wisconsin — especially the way the Republican Party is organized throughout the rural counties and the way the get-out-the-vote effort for Kerry is dominated by independent groups. Don’t I know! Every day I get at least one phone call trying not just to get me to vote but also to get me to join the get-out-the-vote effort. This morning I heard a story on Wisconsin Public Radio about how schoolkids in Milwaukee have been assigned get-out-the-vote work. (The story isn’t up on the WPR website yet, but it will at some point be here.) The Milwaukee Journal is also covering the story. Here’s an excerpt:

Hundreds of public schoolchildren, some as young as 11, are taking time out of regular classes to canvass neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Madison and Racine in a get-out-the-vote effort organized by Wisconsin Citizen Action Fund – a group whose umbrella organization has endorsed John Kerry for president.

The coalition says the effort is non-partisan, but because the group is targeting minority neighborhoods and those with historically low voter turnout – overwhelmingly Democratic areas – Republican operatives are crying foul amid the highly charged political atmosphere in the state.

Kerry and George Bush are virtually tied in recent polls; in 2000, the state’s 10 electoral votes went to the Democrats by 5,708 votes – a margin of two-tenths of one percent of all votes cast.

“They are exploiting schoolchildren on the taxpayers’ dime to conduct what is clearly a Democratic, partisan get-out-the-vote effort,” said Chris Lato, communications director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin. “To spend this time on a clearly partisan effort when these kids should be in school learning is shocking. It’s a disgraceful use of taxpayer money.”

MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said the school administration approves of the program as long as children or teachers are not conducting partisan politics on school time and that the curriculum meets the state standards for teaching. The program involves 33 schools in Milwaukee, three high schools in Madison and one high school in Racine.

I firmly believe that once the state compels young people to attend school, deprives them of their freedom, it owes the highest duty to them to use their time only in ways that benefit them. To see them as a source of free labor or to exploit them for any purpose that is not itself a good reason for depriving the young of their freedom is a great wrong.

The various people who promoted and approved of the idea are going with the theory that it is a great “civics lesson.” Well, maybe part of that civics lesson will be kids talking to each other about why the teachers are making them do this, why it’s supposed to be more important than those classroom exercises that the teachers normally think are so worthwhile, whether they are being exploited, and whether the effort is really partisan politics. And why shouldn’t they think such things? They are teenagers, primed to question and rebel against authority. I hope it is a valuable civics lesson that takes on a life of its own in the students’ minds. (Maybe some of them will email me — use my last name followed by @wisc.edu — and give me some inside information.)

UPDATE: An emailer notes the resonance between the program described above and Kerry’s own plan “requiring mandatory [community] service for high school students.” The link is to the Official Kerry-Edwards Blog, which has two links that purport to take you to more information but are, in fact, dead ends. (I note, schoolmarmishly, that “requiring mandatory” is a redundancy. Stay in school and learn some grammar, kids!) Isn’t it interesting that Kerry is the one who tries to scare young people into voting for him by falsely asserting that Bush is inclined to bring back the draft, when he is the one who with a plan — “part of his 100 day plan to change America” — to compel young people into service? Well, I guess if you’re old enough to vote, you’re old enough to escape the compulsion.

UPDATED to correct the name of the newspaper. It’s the Milwaukee Journal, not the Milwaukee State Journal. Milwaukee, I note, is not a state.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Swimming Through the Spin, which blogged the service proposal a few weeks ago, notes that the material the Kerry site seems to have pulled is preserved here:

High School Service Requirement

As President, John Kerry will ensure that every high school student in America performs community service as a requirement for graduation. This service will be a rite of passage for our nation’s youth and will help foster a lifetime of service. States would design service programs that meet their community and educational needs.

The regular Kerry site now has its service proposal here, but it no longer includes mandatory service for high schoolers.

Let me add a lawproffy note: an attempt by the federal government to force states to design and impose these service programs would violate the federalism principle announced by the Supreme Court in Printz v. United States. But maybe Kerry can restock the Supreme Court with new Justices who will do away with all those terrible federalism cases.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends this link to Little Green Footballs.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs agrees with me that the students are being misused.

THE FUTURE OF BLOGS: Glenn Reynolds’ second installment on the future of blogs and the blogosphere is up at Tech Central Station.

AL QA QAA THOROUGHLY SEARCHED: On April 4, 2003, CBS (of all places) reported that the al Qa Qaa industrial site was thoroughly searched by the 3rd Infantry Division. Suspicious material was found. (Hat tip: Captains Quarters.)

The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.

“Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we’re still going through the place,” the official said.

Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

Captain Ed notes:

From this description, it sounds as if the material left at Al Qaqaa would have only been samples or starter materials, as storing 380 tons of powdered explosive in vials would have taken most of Baghdad to store…The idea that various Army units showed up at the weapons facility and strolled around a few minutes before moving up the road to Baghdad, leaving the lights on and the front door unlocked, looks more and more ridiculous. The Army knew very well what it had found, and it searched the bunkers carefully looking for the most dangerous and high-priority items.

Indeed.

The CBS piece continues:

The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.

There is no mention of 380 tons of HDX and RDX that disappeared at some point. It appears increasingly likely that it went missing not only before the 101st Airborne arrived on April 10, but also before the 3rd ID showed up on April 3.

UPDATE: The Belmont Club makes an excellent point.

The contemporaneous CBS report, written before anyone knew al Qa Qaa would be a big deal, establishes two important things. The first is that 3ID knew it was looking through an IAEA inspection site. The second was that the site had shown unmistakable signs of tampering before the arrival of US troops. “Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.” Now presumably those thousands of boxes were not all packaged and labeled with chemical warfare instructions under IAEA supervision, so the inescapable conclusion is that a fairly large and organized type of activity had been under way in Al Qa Qaa for some time.

Read the whole thing.

COPYCAT: A number of people have emailed this New York Sun story alleging that Kerry committed plagiarism in his books. Oddly enough, I’m reading Past Perfect right now, a book about the recent plagiarism adn fraud scandals among American historians. As I read the section on Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I thought that their plagiarism was a rather abstruse crime, the kind that gets professionals outraged but leaves laymen cold, the way journalists get about source confidentiality. I suspect they’ll feel the same way about Kerry’s crime, assuming this story pans out.

SIX OF ONE, HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER: Will Wilkinson points out that allowing people to vote illegally is effectively the exact same thing as suppressing legal votes:

The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.

If somebody’s dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here’s another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they’re both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy’s votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.

Republican vigilance about keeping illegal voters from voting is democratically equivalent to Democratic vigilance against Republican attempts to suppress the legal vote. Republican vigilance has the semi-intended side-effect of suppressing likely Democratic votes. And huge Democratic registration and GOTV drives have the semi-intended side-effect of canceling out a large number of Republican votes with illegal ballots. I bet I can tell from your party affiliation which you think is worse.

Need I say it? Read the whole thing.

DIALOGUE ABOUT “GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS,” between me and my 21-year old son, Chris:

“The new ‘Grand Theft Auto’ came out.”

“It’s about stealing cars!”

“That’s like saying ‘Super Mario Brothers’ is about collecting coins.”

I’m told to check out Metacritic’s reviews of the game, currently rating the game at 98 out of 100. Too few reviews to make a final call about whether it’s the best rated game ever, but proceed with caution: I’m told the game is “controversial, very violent.”

UPDATE: One of our law students writes:

I have been playing the GTA series since the late 90s, before it went 3-D and became the empire that it is today. I played the last installment, the ultra-violent Vice City, right up until the day I bought San Andreas.

I played San Andreas for about three hours yesterday and I was amazed at how rough it is. Within ten minutes of beginnng the story, I was being assaulted with coarse language, the likes of which are seen only in R-rated films. Shortly there after, I was instructed to kill a crack dealer who was bringing the neighborhood down. I didn’t have a firearm yet, so I beat him to death with a shovel I found behind my house. But the real triumph was when my three buddies and I did a drive-by in rival gang territory. I was the wheelman, and when we got close enough to our target, my buddies leaned out of the car, black bandanas over their faces, and opened fire. The game really captures the gritty life of early-90s Los Angeles (or at least the life that gangsta rap told us existed).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the game. But even I was surprised at how violent it is. I expect there to be a lot of controversy over this game, even more so than when Vice City came out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The student emails that he wouldn’t mind being named. It’s Zachary Wyatt.

I’VE NEVER READ A CODE OF JOURNALISTIC ETHICS, but it seems to me that this much is clear: it is absolutely intolerable for a news organization to hold onto a story for the purpose of breaking it so close to an election as to prevent a fair investigation and response. This story in the L.A. Times indicates that both the New York Times and CBS News/”60 Minutes” learned of the missing explosives story last Wednesday, and each competed against the other to break the story first. This competition is a safeguard that might work better than ethics to protect us from outrageous withholding of stories for the purpose of helping a favored candidate. I hope the L.A. Times story is correct.

Now, I’m watching “Special Report With Brit Hume,” which presents a lengthy report, indicating that the explosives, in all likelihood, went missing before the invasion of Iraq. Hume then sums up: “So, what has recently been learned by the IAEA, which is that these weapons are missing, was something that U.S. weapons inspectors detected in … May of last year.” It seems to me — correct me if I’m wrong — that the Times and “60 Minutes” aren’t to blame for pro-Kerry complicity here. Both tried to break the story quickly once they got the news. It could have been old news, if only the government had released information to this effect earlier. A choice seems to have been made to keep the information under wraps. Now that it has come out and become another basis for saying the aftermath of the war was handled badly there’s a motivation to release the information that the loss of the explosives pre-dates the war. By sitting on the evidence — assuming it is true that the loss precedes the war — the Bush administration took the risk that the story would come out before the election (and close to the election) and that it would be hard to establish the facts about when the explosives disappeared.

Nevertheless, if becomes clear that the loss pre-dated the war, Kerry ought to drop it from his argument that Bush handled the aftermath of the war badly. Or if he doesn’t, assuming it’s true that the loss pre-dates the invasion, Bush ought to fight back and accuse Kerry of relying on bad information. Yet the fact that we aren’t seeing Bush lash back with an accusation like this makes me suspect that the loss either did not pre-date the war or that it isn’t clear whether it did or not. This is a pesky issue to be dealing with so late in the game, but for those already convinced the war was woefully mismanaged, it may not matter that much. Indeed, those who accept the raggedness of the post-war effort and stand by Bush may also not care that much.

UPDATE: Many readers sent me this link to the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. While there is nothing specific it in it about attempting to sway elections, readers have suggested that the most relevant general provision is:

Act Independently

Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.

Frankly, I don’t think that’s good enough. “Obligation” to an “interest” is quite different from sharing someone else’s goals and wanting to help him achieve them.

I find this provision more relevant:

Seek Truth and Report It

Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information. …

Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.

I still found nothing about the specific strategy of withholding a story and timing its release to affect an election, but it is obviously unethical and implied by the generalities of this code.

MAYBE HILARY’S PROFICIENCY WITH CATTLE FUTURES WASN’T SO UNUSUAL: Professor Bainbridge has a nifty piece on the not very suprising fact that our Senators do amazingly well in the stock market, outperforming such investment luminaries as Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet. How do they do it? Innate brilliance or inside information? We report,you decide.

JUST HOW EXPLOSIVE ARE THEY? Much has been made of the fact, by opponents of the administration, that the missing explosives are so powerful that only a pound (or half a pound, depending on the source) was capable of taking down Pan Am Flight 103.

I’m under the impression, however, that an airplane requires very little explosive to take it down, because it’s just a thin aluminum skin covering a) a lot of very important wires and b) the open sky, so a little of it is likely to either damage the plane beyond operability, or catastrophically depressurize the plane. Can readers enlighten me?

Update Bill at INDC points to a Baltimore Sun piece which says that the missing explosives are only “slightly more powerful than TNT”. He also points out that it was neither HDX nor RDX, but the much more powerful Semtex (of which RDX is a component) that brought down Pan Am 103. The last points out that the explain did explode into multiple pieces when the bomb went off, so the explosion must have been very powerful.

Further Update Another reader writes

The bomb used in the downing of PA-103 was not very powerful, just powerful enough.

I’ve seen the wreckage of the plane as assembled at the UK’s equivalent of the NTSB. Most of that wreckage is in large pieces. What brought the plane down was that the integrity of the plane’s skin was broken. With even a square-foot’s worth of skin torn open into a 500+ mph wind stream, the plane had to come apart.

There’s a strip of aluminum skin, originating at the place where the explosion breached the hull that “unzipped” up and over the top of the plane, then down the other side, all the way to the bottom of the hull. The hole created by the explosion is no bigger than a softball. The strip of skin that “unzipped” ranges from six inches to 10 feet in width; the entire strip is over 60 feet long.

Once the integrity of the hull was breached, though, that wind simply tore the plane apart. The NTSB website also has good details on the physical aspects of the explosion.

EARLIER TODAY I posted a question, first asked by J. Trevino at Red State, about what might have happened after the 3rd ID arrived at the al Qa Qaa weapons site in Iraq and before the 101st Airborne showed up a week later. I still don’t what the 3rd ID found. But it seems unlikely the missing explosives were there at that time.

2Slick left the following in the comments section on my blog.

I understand your questions about the 3rd ID being there 1 week before us, but I think I should offer up a military perspective for you. I was with the 101st when we RIP’d (Relieved in Place) the 3rd ID in that region.

380 tons of explosives would require about 40 truckloads to haul it away. It would have taken more than 1 week (and an unbelievable amount of man-hours and heavy-moving equipment) simply to load the trucks. To imply that those trucks could have been loaded and then driven away unnoticed, under the watchful eye of the 3rd ID is absolutely ludicrous.

WHY NOT USE ‘EM? N.Z. Bear asks a good question about the supposedly missing explosives from al Qa Qaa. If they were looted by terrorists a year and a half ago, why have they never been used?

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES: Don’t miss the latest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted on Overtaken by Events.

THE NEW YORK TIMES WOULD BE FUN TO READ AGAIN. Thomas Maguire, guestblogging over at GlennReynolds.com, shows Bush supporters the upside of a Kerry victory.

I too read Andrew Sullivan’s entirely unsurprising endorsement of Kerry, and while he advances an argument I’m sympathetic to–that while the decision to go to Iraq was right, the administration screwed up in major ways once it got there–he also advances some of the most oft-seen, and to my mind unconvincing, reasons to trust Kerry with national security:

Does Kerry believe in this war? Skeptics say he doesn’t. They don’t believe he has understood the significance of September 11. They rightly point to the antiwar and anti-Western attitudes of some in his base–the Michael Moores and Noam Chomskys who will celebrate a Kerry victory. I understand their worries. But they should listen to what Kerry has said. The convention was a remarkable event in that it pivoted the Democratic Party toward an uncomplicated embrace of the war on terror. Kerry has said again and again that he will not hesitate to defend this country and go on the offensive against Al Qaeda. I see no reason whatsoever why he shouldn’t. What is there to gain from failure in this task? He knows that if he lets his guard down and if terrorists strike or succeed anywhere, he runs the risk of discrediting the Democrats as a party of national security for a generation. He has said quite clearly that he will not “cut and run” in Iraq. And the truth is: He cannot. There is no alternative to seeing the war through in Iraq. And Kerry’s new mandate and fresh administration will increase the options available to us for winning. He has every incentive to be tough enough but far more leeway to be flexible than the incumbent.

Besides, the Democratic Party needs to be forced to take responsibility for the security of the country that is as much theirs as anyone’s. The greatest weakness of the war effort so far has been the way it has become a partisan affair. This is the fault of both sides: the Rove-like opportunists on the right and the Moore-like haters on the left. But in wartime, a president bears the greater responsibility for keeping the country united. And this president has fundamentally failed in this respect. I want this war to be as bipartisan as the cold war, to bring both parties to the supreme task in front of us, to offer differing tactics and arguments and personnel in pursuit of the same cause. This is not, should not be, and one day cannot be, Bush’s war. And the more it is, the more America loses, and our enemies gain.

The idea that we should trust Kerry, even if we think his previous foriegn policy instincts have all been bad, because he has nothing to gain from failing to pursue Al Qaeda, makes little sense. Surely George Bush had nothing to gain from failing to suppress the insurgency in Iraq, and yet his administration still hasn’t done so. This argument seems to fall into the partisan assumption that if Kerry fails it will be out of malice. But most people who think that Kerry isn’t the right man for the job think he will fail not because he wants to, but because he’s fundamentally wrong in some way in his national security strategy.

Similarly, it doesn’t strike me as very logical to imply that Democrats have abandoned national security issues, and then suggest electing them anyway as a way to force them to “take responsibility” for national security, any more than I would employ a drug addict in a pharmacy on the theory that this would force him to “take responsibility” for enforcing our nation’s drug laws.

One may believe, as many do, that Kerry will be better on national security for other reasons. Andrew Sullivan offers several of them in his peice. But neither of these two strikes me as very compelling.

PLEASE, GOD, LET THEM BE WRONG: 6 in 10 voters think it’s unlikely we’ll have a clear winner on November 3rd. If there’s one thing I most fervently hope for this election, it’s that whoever wins, wins big. I’m not sure the country can take another four years of “He stole it!” Although I confess that I would enjoy seeing John Kerry win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, if only so that I could measure how quickly & seamlessly partisans on both sides can switch positions on the “validity” of an electoral college victory, and the moral obligation it imposes on the candidate to govern as if he were a member of the other party.

ANDREW SULLIVAN HASN’T DECLARED HIS SUPPORT FOR KERRY YET? I asked with some surprise fifteen days ago. It sure seemed obvious already that he was for Kerry. Today, he’s made the official declaration. Of course, he’s for Kerry. His key question about Kerry, back when I expressed surprise that he was still claiming to be undecided was:

[C]an John Kerry be trusted to fight the war on terror? Worrying about this is what keeps me from making the jump to supporting him.

So how well does he answer his own question today?

[Kerry’s] record is undistinguished, and where it stands out, mainly regrettable. He intuitively believes that if a problem exists, it is the government’s job to fix it. He has far too much faith in international institutions, like the corrupt and feckless United Nations, in the tasks of global management. He got the Cold War wrong. He got the first Gulf War wrong. His campaign’s constant and excruciating repositioning on the war against Saddam have been disconcerting, to say the least. I completely understand those who look at this man’s record and deduce that he is simply unfit to fight a war for our survival.

Exactly. So how does Sullivan dig himself back out of that hole? His argument with regard to Iraq is mostly: “There is no alternative to seeing the war through in Iraq.” And he contends that the Democrats ought to have to take responsibility for national security. The notion is that it would be good for everyone if the Democrats had their President so that those who now sit on the sidelines and criticize would have a partisan motivation to support the war. That’s not enough to convince me to abandon my mistrust of Kerry’s commitment to national security. But give Sullivan his due and read the whole thing.

J. TREVINO AT RED STATE points out that NBC’s Milkaszewski story doesn’t quite debunk the New York Times article that says the Iraqi explosives at al Qa Qaa were lost under American watch. NBC reports that when the 101st Airborne arrived at the site the explosives were already gone. But the Third Infantry Division was there a week earlier.

There are still at least two things we don’t know.

Was the Third Infantry Division the first to arrive at the site? If so, what did they find?

Trevino issues an appeal, which I’m happy to post:

If you are military, or know how to navigate the maze of PAO personnel, lend a hand. The logical person to track down is COL John Peabody, cited as 3ID EN BDE CDR, and quoted in the relevant press reports. Any other avenues of inquiry that present themselves should be pursued — respectfully and professionally.

BLOOD FOR OIL: William F Buckley says it’s a fair trade

If you are willing to die in order to protect your local hospital, then you must be willing to die for oil, because without electricity, your hospital won’t take you beyond a surgeon’s scalpel, and a surgeon is helpless without illumination, which is provided (in many places) by oil.

To say that we must not fight for oil is utter cant. To fight for oil is to fight in order to maintain such sovereignty as we exercise over the natural world. Socialism plus electricity, Lenin said at the outset of the Soviet revolution, would usher in the ideal state. He was wrong about socialism but not about electricity. Electricity gives us whatever leverage we have over nature.

To flit on airily about an unwillingness to fight for oil suggests an indifference to the alleviation of poverty at the next level after bread and water. Throw in, perhaps, the wheel. That too is an indispensable scaffolding of human power over nature. But then comes all the power not generated by the muscles of human beings and beasts of burden.

Oddly, those who speak so lightly about oil are often the most reluctant to explore seriously alternatives to it. In the history of discovery, only one such has materialized, which is nuclear power. Although nuclear power proceeds inconspicuously to light most of the lamps in France and promises to do as much in China, a mix of superstition and Luddism stands in the way of developing the nuclear alternative here.

Meanwhile, we must get on with oil, and the reserves of it are diminishing, and such great storehouses of oil as exist are mostly in the Middle East. The idea that our effort in Iraq is motivated by lust for its oil fields is easily dispelled by asking who is today profiting from such oil as is being produced in Iraq? The answer is: the Iraqis. The great need now is for increased security forces deployed to protect the oil from the nihilists and from those who reduce any consideration of oil to politics. What is achieved, that any sober judgment will approve of, by the destruction of oil fields, the kind of thing that Saddam Hussein tried to do in Kuwait in 1991?

PILOT ERROR: The FAA says that the November 2001 airliner crash, which caused natural fears that it was another terrorist attack, was the result of pilot error.

Update A reader emails to say that since the story says the co-pilot did what his airline had trained him to do, it wasn’t pilot error. Let’s say that the pilot seems to have done the wrong thing, but where the culpability for his action lies is unclear.

Update IIAnother reader, a pilot, emails to say everything’s pilot error:

Nearly every thing is pilot error, at least anything the pilot could have prevented. It’s a broad category, but that’s what you get for being in charge! As my instructor told me once, if the steering doesn’t work when you take off it’s not the guy who switched cable’s fault, it’s the pilots for not making sure the ailerons moved in the right direction before he started going fast.

CARNIVAL OF THE LIBERATED: Dean’s World hosts the latest Carnival of the Liberated, the best of the Iraqi blogs.

IDEOLOGUE APPRECIATION FOR THE NON-IDEOLOGUE. Somehow I find myself heartily approving.

YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE: Drudge reports that 60 Minutes hoped to sit on the explosives story until the very last minute.

News of missing explosives in Iraq — first reported in April 2003 — was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crises mode.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that “our plan was to run the story on October 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold…”

It doesn’t hold, all right. It doesn’t hold water.

So they lost their story. And there was time enough to debunk it. That’s what they get for playing partisan games.