Here's some quickies: The increasingly bizarre Florida primary gets the backgrounder treatment from the WP's new "Talking Points" column ... Also at the Post, Bill Arkin gives some inside baseball onthe current MC 02 wargame: is it centered on Iraq or Iran? ,,, MEMRI has an article from Al-Hayat on yet another round of Iraqi brutality, this time being Saddam's orders to mutilate anyone who avoided military service ... The left-leaning lefty-leftish Guardian casts Iraq as a poor little matchgirl trying to keep world peace in an article that might as well be entitled "Bully for Baghdad!" Richard Dawkins, the biologist who has no known expertise in international relations, chimes in on American-British diplomacy, saying "It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv."

 
More proof that your host needs a hobby can be found at Eugene Volokh's blog. Perhaps now would be a good time to take up skateboarding, or billiards, or recreational corporate auditing. Nonetheless, let's toss another scientific encomium in the mix, to go with the one below.

I've got a soft spot in my heart for the rather obscure Buys-Ballot. Certainly he would be better known if he hadn't been on the losing side of two major scientific arguments of the day: the kinetic theory of gases, and the existence of the Doppler Effect. In both cases, he came up with ingenious objections to the theories; in the latter case, he also devised a charmingly ingenuous method of testing the effect using a railway car and a brass section; and, upon receipt of the evidence, he honorably accepted the falsity of his original convictions. Indeed, the law named after him -- more of an observation, as an American meteorologist devised a complete model and theory during the same period, triggering a brief spat over authorship -- makes no sense unless one believes in the molecular and kinetic theories of gases.

Thus, an obscure scientist whose name is linked with two erroneous theories and an argument over primacy is in fact a model of scientific acumen: a man who critically examined every hypothesis handed him, who exposed flaws with a brilliant and subtle eye, yet who was in no way averse to discarding wrong beliefs, no matter how dear to him, in pursuit of the truth.

 
Pioneering computer scientist, compiler developer, and former NSA civilian consultant Frances E. Allen retired from IBM's TJ Watson facility last week. One of the generally untold stories of technology is the number of women in, and the level of their contributions to, the history of computing. The late Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, for example, basically created high-level computing languages; Adele Mildred Koss, who worked for RADM Hopper, was co-developer of the first compiler; Dorothy Denning has been a major and innovative figure in cryptography and cryptology; Betty Holberton was one of the first programmers ever, beginning with ENIAC itself; Lady Ada Lovelace seems to have been the first mathematician to describe a general-purpose computer; and the history of my own beloved Unix is replete with women, including the pioneering systems administrators Evi Nemeth and AEleen Frisch, whose writings saved my bacon numerous times as a novice sysadmin, and, more amusingly, programmer Heidi Stettner, owner of the eponymous Biff (if you're a Unix geek, you'll remember biff(1) ). Cheers to all, the first round's on me.

 
Speaking of federal crimes (below), James Traficant arrived at his new home today: the Allenwood Correctional Institution. Chalk one up for the good guys.

And, no, he's not allowed to wear his toupee in prison.

Erratum: Thanks to the readers (and The Rittenhouse Review) for pointing out that Allenwood is in Pennsylvania, not Traficant's home state of Ohio, as I erroneously reported. Mea culpa.

 
Statutory scope creep: The 2nd Circuit continued to reinterpret and refine the Supreme Court's opinion in Lopez by ruling that the Hobbs Act (18 USC § 1951) was properly used in the conviction of a man who robbed a private citizen. (United States v. Jamison)

The Hobbs Act -- part of the mid-century anti-racketeering statutes designed to stop corrupt unions from exercising malign influence -- has been applied to a wide variety of crimes one might think best left to local authorities, including a robbery of a fast food restaurant in which $34 was taken (United States v. Harrington -- and the court was the D.C. Circuit, so the ruling isn't quite as strange as it might seem at first blush). The courts have upheld an expansive interpretation of the Act, so that any crime that could potentially affect in any way interstate commerce -- such as a robbery limiting the ability of a Roy Rogers to purchase potatoes from Idaho -- falls under federal jurisdiction.

Jamison expands the 2nd Circuit's interpretation somewhat. The defendant bungled a robbery of a small business owner and, uh, pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Porter (nickname: "Boogaloo"), who kept cash at his home for both legal and illegal purchases:

At Jamison’s trial, to satisfy the jurisdictional element of the Hobbs Act, which requires proof of an effect on interstate commerce, the government relied on the effect the robbery would have had on Porter’s clothing and narcotics businesses. As noted, Porter, who commingled the funds of both businesses and his personal cash, had nearly $18,000 in cash located in a safe in his house, and $3,310 on his person. The government’s theory was that Jamison’s attempted robbery, if successful, would have depleted cash that Porter regularly used to purchase items in interstate commerce as inventory for his clothing and cocaine businesses.

The legal goods came from places as diverse as "Asia, Guatemala, California, Massachusetts, and Maine," whereas cocaine, of course, is not a staple crop anywhere in New York. The court upheld the convinction of Jamison, noting that the funds were intended primarily for business use, and thus fell under the Hobbs Act. Interestingly enough, the court seems to suggest that it doesn't favor the argument that "the robbery of an individual depleting the individual’s personal funds should be governed by a different test from a robbery that depletes the assets of a business," which leads me to wonder just how far the prosecutors in New York will attempt to take RICO and its cousins in the future.

This is no small matter; the history of federal criminal law has been a history of statutory scope creep, in which legislative intent has been stretched to cover all manner of crimes, allowing prosecutors to layer offense atop offense in criminal cases. This latest affirmation is yet another step to the tacit federalization of virtually all crime.

 
The new First Things is out, and so Richard Neuhaus continues to pontificate (ironic word, that) on the Catholic child-abuse scandals, now attacking the Church's Dallas conference, which he described as resembling "a self-criticism session in a Maoist reeducation camp," and the policies adopted there.

In particular, Neuhaus, like many Catholics, seems uncomfortable with the idea that any priest who sexually abuses a child should be removed for cause:

Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of Albany, New York, usually thought to be solidly in the liberal camp of the episcopal conference, spoke up against "zero tolerance." He pointed out that just last year the bishops issued a statement calling for the rehabilitation of prisoners and advocating "restorative justice." "Do we advocate this biblical concept for the community at large, but not for our own priests?" he asked.

Since I'm not a Catholic, I can be fairly accused of missing the point, but it seems to me that there is a confusion between society and a profession being made here. A man who is not fit to carry out a position of trust can, and should, be removed from that position; however, his place as a member of society is not altered by that removal, so there is no conflict of the sort that Hubbard discerns.

Neuhaus also comes out against the retroactive application of penalties, of "remov[ing] from ministry faithful priests who did one bad thing thirty years ago and have since had an impeccable record and are clearly no threat to anybody." I am amenable to at least discussing the possibility of restoring to service priests who have been punished, and subsequently apply for return with a penitential mind, but I think that Neuhaus seeks to apply a principle that exists beyond society to an organization that exists within society. If a priest commits a misdeed, and then hides, or he and his hierarchy hides, that misdeed, then there are two punishments wanting: one for the offense, and the other for the misprison. Removal and investigation, for the good of society and its trust in the Church, seems well-placed in such a situation ... as long as one doesn't accept the proposition that the Church exists beyond temporal laws and cares.

The spoils system returneth: Be sure to check out the interesting article on slavery reparations from the last FT issue, now online. The reparations call has kind of simmered along as an issue lately, submerged beneath the surface of popular politics. It hasn't gone away, however, and at some point it will need to be confronted and dealt with as a potentially divisive issue. While I disagree with some of Guelzo's foundational assumptions, it's an article well worth reading. (As well, if you've never read the roundtable discussion in Harper's that begat the current round of reparations-talk, it's also a crucial read.)

Radical feminism hooks up with radical terrorism in this Andrea Dworkin column, in which she claims that "female suicide bombers are idealists who crave committing a pure act, one that will wipe away the stigma of being female." Now, to be fair to Dworkin, she's not advocating terror attacks -- though she liberally spreads blame upon the Israelis and, disturbingly enough, holds up Algeria's vicious civil war as a model of feminist equality -- but she dismisses them as epiphenomena of "an anti-sisterhood camouflaged as nationalist liberation." It's almost as if she's saying that men killing men, that's one thing, but women killing women, well, that's just wrong.