CLIMATE CHANGE IN Alaska.

THE ONLY REASON I link to this Slate piece on John Gotti is because of the following tale of his kids dining out:

The most shocking thing I ever learned about Junior concerned his dining habits. His sister once told me about a visit they made to Illinois to see their father in prison. They were on the road and hungry, and she suggested Italian, or a steakhouse. "But John says, Cracker Barrel," she told me. "I said, 'What's Cracker Barrel?' He said I'd love it. So we get there, and all the furniture and everything is wood. Then he said the chicken and biscuits are really good. Chicken and biscuits? I said I was hoping for a steak. He said they had a country-fried steak that was excellent. I said, 'Country-fried steak?' "

A roommate of mine once had a theory that dining choices could be found by looking for newspaper reports of gangland slayings at restaurants. "Mobsters don't know much, but they know good eating," the hypothesis went, more or less.

In any event: I once found myself working on a case in none other than Marion, Illinois, where the federal maximum-security prison that held Gotti was. And, for lack of alternatives, we ate at the local Cracker Barrel, perhaps the very same one that Junior and Victoria Gotti dined at. I might even have ordered the country-fried steak. I can't say that I'd go out of my way to eat there again.

And, finally, just to show the interconnectedness of all things, I'll note that on the plane ride back, the partner on the case borrowed my copy of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and never returned it.

ANDERSEN FOUND GUILTY.

Last night, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon issued a crucial ruling in the case, one that appeared to give the jury permission to convict the accounting firm on an obstruction of justice charge even though the individual jurors differed as to which Andersen employee broke the law.

Musil has covered the debate fairly well from a layperson's view of the defense standpoint. Judging by the press reports, the prosecution had the better of the argument on this one; no case was directly on point, but the precedents were closer to the prosecution's position and I wasn't persuaded by the press coverage of the defense arguments distinguishing those cases. (You'll note my qualifiers: as an ancient Confucian saying goes, lawyer who relies on press for coverage may be chilled by legal winds. Well, if Confucius didn't say it, he should have.) The issue will be taken up on appeal, and the judge preserved the issue for appeal in a way that she wouldn't have if she ruled in the defense favor and the jury acquitted. It's up to the Fifth Circuit now.

I have to disagree with Musil that the Andersen attorney should have anticipated this issue in the original jury instructions and caught the prosecution unaware. The fact that the precise legal situation is unprecedented is strong evidence that the instruction shouldn't have been anticipated, but, more importantly, the prosecution would not have been unaware of what Andersen was doing. Proposed jury instructions are typically submitted on individual sheets of paper -- the instruction on top, the supporting authority on the bottom. Any non-standard instruction (i.e., one outside the published "pattern" jury instruction books) would have needed supporting case law, and Andersen's problem pre-deliberation would have been as it was the same post-deliberation -- there would be no precedent on point, the prosecution would have discovered this and challenged the instruction, and the judge would not have given it.

I also have to disagree with Musil that Duncan's attorney's advice has been demonstrated to be facially bad. Duncan was faced with a classic prisoner's dilemma, and one with three co-defendants no less.

1971 SOVIET WEAPONIZED smallpox outbreak.

THE LEAD SPEAKER at the conference held by the anti-Semitic loonies at the Institute for Historical Review will be Joseph Sobran, speaking on the "Jewish question." I don't know if any newspapers still use Sobran as a columnist, but it's long past time to relegate him to David Duke territory. (Any fantasy about the IHR's true intentions can be dispelled by noting that their top four speakers are speaking about "the Jewish question," Croatian persecution of Germans, the Jewish role in the slave trade, and an "Arab mystery speaker" on the Middle East. That's a bit beyond the supposed scope of research into the Holocaust.)

Incidentally, the speaker on the Jewish role in the slave trade is Wellesley's Tony Martin, whose official Wellesley biography brags that his latest book is called "The Jewish Onslaught." (That last page, to no one's surprise, is a Nation of Islam web site.) I'm curious if Wellesley would tolerate a Jewish professor speaking of blacks in the same way at a anti-black conference, but I guess we all know the answer to that. Wellesley does claim to "thoroughly investigate all reports of...hate speech directed towards...Jews," though it's not clear from their web site whether they're a free speech campus or a campus that selectively enforces hate speech rules.

A READER CHALLENGES ME:

[Evolutionists] are constantly appealing to hypothetical, unobservable processes like prehistoric co-optation (e.g., saying that various components of the flagellum might have evolved for some other purpose, and then later were co-opted into the flagellum).

(The flagellum, of course, is one of Michael Behe's bogus examples of "irreduceable complexity.")

This is putting the cart before the horse. No one claims that evolution is a fact because there's a theory of how the flagellum evolved. We know evolution is a fact because of the billions of pieces of other evidence supporting evolution, from which we can make inferences about possible routes by which the flagellum evolved that are consistent with what we know about evolution. The fact that we can theorize evolutionary pathways for flagella demonstrates that the existence of flagella does not falsify evolution. To my knowledge, no one has claimed that any of these theories is the one true theory of how flagella developed. What we do know is that it is virtually certain that flagella evolved, because we can safely infer this from the fact of the common ancestor and the fact that every other observable life form evolves. (I'm not a flagella expert, so I may be understating the degree of evidence of flagella evolution.)

EUGENE VOLOKH has a good post on how the Miranda perhaps constrains civil authority from questioning terrorists in a way that it doesn't for military authority. It's not clear that this is entirely true; to the extent the United States is applying the Geneva Convention to detainees, the Convention prohibits the use of coercion to obtain other than identifying information of prisoners of war. (Of course, the Geneva Convention only applies to prisoners of war, and al-Qaeda doesn't fit in that category, as they neither carry arms openly nor conduct operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.)

Going unstated is the interesting unintended consequence of the Miranda rule: if applying civil authority to someone creates undesirable results because of the application of Miranda, it creates attempts to avoid the application of civil authority and the expansion of military authority. Miranda may turn out in the long run to endanger civil liberties more than its absence did.

As Professor Volokh has noted elsewhere, this has been an unfortunate consequence of the exclusionary rule:

When judges know that finding a search to be unconstitutional may well let a criminal go free, they err on the side of not finding such unconstitutionality. But if the case isn't about exclusion of reliable evidence, but about making the police pay damages, the incentive to find the search constitutional is smaller.

ALSO VIA Johnson: the latest batch of Saudi satellite television to be broadcast throughout the Middle East. Highlight: a three-year-old celebrated on a talk show "Muslim Woman Magazine" for her "true Muslim" education, as exhibited entirely by her rants about the need to kill Jews. But I thought "Islam" meant "peace"?

Jews are systematically excluded, or have been on occasion systematically excluded by the U.S. government, from working in Saudi Arabia. I have a long quote from a former service officer about how this is done. A 'J' is put in front of certain people's names not to go to Saudi Arabia.

There's the case of a contractor for the Defense Department that explicitly said that no Jews or Jewish-named personnel would be sent as part of a team to Saudi Arabia. The U.S. government-the Defense Department was breaking U.S. government laws in not sending Jews to Saudi Arabia. There are many other such cases.

-- Daniel Pipes' Congressional testimony.

(via Welch and Johnson)

But wait, there's more:

One finds over and over again that Americans in position of authority are acquiescing or even preemptively acquiescing to what they imagine the Saudis would like. An answer to why this is happening can be found in a statement by the current Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

He said the following, and this was quoted in the Washington Post of the 11th of February, 2002. He boasts of his success cultivating powerful Americans who deal with Saudi Arabia. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office."

The heart of the problem is a very human one. Americans in position of authority bend the rules and break with standard practice out of personal greed.

SOMETIMES Ted Rall is accidentally funny.