Author Archives: Countrylawyer

Dept. of Sic Transit

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Today I got to experience two completely unrelated things, both of which served to remind me of the passage of time.

Today for lunch my father and I ate at a local chain restaurant.  We had the lunch buffet.  He paid, as he always insists on doing.  He’s also in his . . . ummmmm . . . later 70s.  I am not.  After some few minutes puttin’ down the chow, I noticed the cash register receipt.  It reflected a charge for “2 Sr Buffet”.  Now, perhaps they determine eligibility for a senior discount based on the age of the payor, and not the age of the eater.  But that scarcely makes good business sense, does it?  Granddaddy hauls in his three strapping grandsons, each one between 18 and 25 and each one a (as Mark Twain would describe them) “famine breeder,” and they’re going to let all four eat at the price of some octogenarian with poor digestion who can’t sleep at night if he eats a big lunch?  But I am holding out for the restaurant making a foolish business decision, because the alternative is that the cashier (female and somewhere in that 24 — 40 range where you really can’t tell) thought me self-evidently old enough to qualify for the senior discount.

The other thing to happen was in the quarter that formed part of the tip.  It was nice and shiny, and so I looked at it to see what state quarter it was.  It was a 2012 Hawaii quarter.  I picked it up, and in an instant I was back in 1982 East Berlin.  I still recall the feeling of incredulity, the ludicrousness, of communist currency.  You quite literally could cut through one of their 1 Mark pieces with tin snips or light-duty wire cutters.  Seriously; I tried it one one when I got back; it went easily.  Their “money” was exactly that transparently worthless.  When you went to visit the capital and showpiece of the worker’s and peasant’s paradise, they forced you to convert at least 25 good, solid Deutschmarks, for exactly 25 marks of funny money.  On neither occasion (I visited East Berlin then and then once more, in early 1986) could I manage to find anything — anything at all — that I could both spend 25 marks on and that I wanted enough to tote it home through the check-points.  That obviously fraudulent money was the symptom and symbol of the train wreck that finally ran out of steam less than a decade later.

We appear to be now just about at that point here in the U.S.  That 2012 Hawaii quarter was noticeably lighter than its mates only a year or two older.  How long before you can take a pair of wire cutters and snip a Unites States coin, sovereign currency of the mightiest power in world history, clean in two?

Another Rube Self-Identifies™

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This time it’s Susan Estrich.  She voted for Dear Leader.  She voted for Him for many reasons, mostly involving his promises to provide free stuff to people.  She voted for Him because of her concerns for things she likes, like “ObamaCare,” which she doesn’t want to see repealed; like environmental suffocation of American businesses regulation, which she doesn’t want to see rolled back; like contraception (which she conflates with Roe v. Wade, which of course dealt with abortion, not contraception), which she doesn’t want to see at “risk”; like local schools being held in thrall by centralized bureaucrats more generously funded by a munificent Uncle SugarDaddy; like the federal assistance to New Jersey and New York in cleaning up after Tropical Storm Sandy, which she didn’t want to see diminished (although the Staten and Coney Islanders might politely inquire just how the level of federal assistance they’re getting could be diminished); like ending the war in Iraq, which He ended, and the war in Afghanistan, which He is committed to ending.

She didn’t, she wants us to know, vote for Him because she thinks she doesn’t pay enough in taxes.

That’s a comfort (I’m chewing on my index fingers, trying not to append h***y to the end of that).  I’m so glad that you voted for an ethnic separatist mountebank of a class warrior not understanding that he remains, as he has always been, dead set on increasing taxes on “the rich.”  I do have just one teensy li’l ol’ question for you:  How in the Sam Hill do you propose to pay for all that stuff you did vote for, all of which involves the spending of money (except arguably the war stuff, but then all that means is that in 20 years when we have to go back in and do it all over it will cost that much more, so I’m not willing to concede that point to you, at least not 100%)?

Estrich’s plight is in fact lamentable.  She qualifies as “rich” by Dear Leader’s standards, which means that her neck is on the block.  But unlike all them other rich people who don’t have to work, or “work all the jobs” she has to (and whose existence angers her), she actually “earns” almost every penny she makes.  (a)  Well done, Mme. Estrich.  You caught the car; you’re living the American Dream.  You’re part of the 1%.  I congratulate you; I really, honestly do.  And know what?  Your being in the 1% does not impoverish me to the extent of a single dime.  So enjoy the fruits of your labors.  Enjoy them now if you please, and live up to your income.  Or live well below your income and put some by, so that one day you, too, can “not have to work,” which brings up (b) Where do you imagine the wealth of the “truly rich” came from?  Someone busted his ass to make that money, to put the family just over that hump where what they’ve not lived on, what they’ve put by, begins to generate a significant amount of income, which (because by hypothesis these folks are actually living on less than they earn) those who have gone without can now put out to additional productive uses, all the while they continue to live below their “earned” incomes.  And at some point the calculus shifts; at some point paying full-time attention to what you have managed to save up makes more economic sense than going to the office each morning to try and figure out how to make payroll next week.  You can make more money selecting other people to worry about how to make payroll than by worrying yourself.  And by hiring that person you give him (or her) the chance one day to reach the position where you now are.  You call this “not having to work”; in the world of Paying Your Own Way it’s called minding the store.  At some point your particular “store” no longer has a bricks-and-mortar front, but rather consists of all the fruits of enjoyment deferred, of piano recitals missed, of little league games arrived at late in the 3rd quarter, of young children for whom daddy (or mommy, nowadays) is a tired voice at the end of a telephone line.  That’s the price, Mme. Estrich, of “not having to work.”

What Mme. Estrich is noticing is that when the government simply decides that you’ve made as much money as it’s willing to let you make, and decides to confiscate the balance so that it — not you — can decide how to spend it, what’s it’s really doing is artificially forcing you to live up to your income.  That amount that you were doing without, so that one day you might “not have to work,” or so that, in the event of some untoward event like, oh . . . say, the bursting of a governmentally-inflated housing bubble tanks the economy and we have 44-plus months of 8% unemployment, you and your family have something to live off of, so that your children don’t lose the only house they’ve ever called home, so that you don’t have to explain to your children why there’s no money for them to go and visit their only set of cousins next summer, so that you don’t have to choose between a pair of shoes for you to replace the worn-out ones you have, or a brake job on the car that’s got “only” 230,000-plus miles, so that the one you drive, which has 248,000 miles, might last a little longer, so . . . oh hell, Mme. Estrich, if I have to explain it to you, then you really never will understand.

But you will understand the tingle of the cold steel on the back of your neck, won’t you?

Respectfully, Mme. Estrich, I don’t think you have thought through your political preferences very carefully.

In addition to her economic remedial education, I also submit that Mme. Estrich has a little additional soul-searching to do.  Remember her mentioning her “anger” at those who “don’t have to work,” or work as hard as she does?  A scant few lines later she rolls this one out onto the table: 

One of the amazing things about this country is that the middle class doesn’t hate the rich. We are not a society divided by economic castes. Yes, there are real issues as the gap between the top and the middle, between CEOs and those in good but not great jobs, grows. But beginning a new term with what will look to many like a class war is not the way to fulfill the real mandate of this election, which is to bring us together, not turn us against each other.

I guess it’s OK to get all angry about all them folks who don’t have to work, as long as you don’t “hate” them.  And truly, was she not paying attention to the actual campaign that Dear Leader ran?  Did she really think that the election was fought on the one side by people who were actually proposing to undo Roe v. Wade, and on the other by people who weren’t stoking a class and race conflict?  What color is the sun on your planet, Mme. Estrich?  I don’t even own a television and I picked up that much about the campaign.

In short, you got exactly what you voted for.  You just got rooked into thinking you were voting for all the other stuff.

Rube.

™”Another Rube Self-Identifies” is used without permission of, but with extreme gratitude towards, Instapundit.

Well Now; Here’s Another Coincidence

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On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln got at least one prediction flat wrong:  “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here . . . .”  That’s not quite how the thing worked out.  My mother has a 1953 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which I have made her swear a solemn oath to “heir” to me (out in these parts, “heir” is a verb).  Part of why I like it is that, being from when it is, it lacks all the bilge-water tripe uttered by the sundry darlings of the lefties over the next 50-plus years; the reader is spared all the claptrap about how awful Europeans are, and how the world would be much more swell a place if only someone would put the U.S. in its place &c. &c. &c.  We’re also spared excerpts from what some speech writer put into some hack politician’s mouth, as well as similar offerings from the ghost-written memoirs of people like Dear Leader.  When you read a quotation in there from, for example, Clemenceau, you can be pretty sure that those were actually Clemenceau’s words.  And at the risk of hazarding a prediction, in 100 years Dear Leader’s legacy will still be able to stand beside the Lion’s all day and not cast a shadow.

In any event, what has always struck me about that particular book is that, by a wide margin, the longest single quotation is the Gettysburg Address, in full (it’s also unusual in that respect, although that is most likely a result of its brevity).  In terms of political thought, it’s a rather extraordinary speech.  It was of course delivered in the midst of what Lincoln described as “a great civil war” which had begun, as Lincoln himself had pointed out to I believe it was Horace Greeley, who had demanded he take positive action to end slavery, as a war specifically to save the Union, and only to save the Union.  Lincoln said as much: he would save the Union whether it meant freeing all, some, or none of the slaves.

And what Union was it Lincoln set out to save?  The Union of the Constitution.  That Union was about many things.  It was about creating a defensible polity (and people today forget just how fragile the U.S. was when the guns finally fell silent in 1783).  It was about transforming a gaggle of ex-colonies, no small number of which viewed each other with only slightly less suspicion as they did Britain, into a single polity, and making that place a single economic space.  It was about spanning the horns of simultaneously creating sufficient central power that the country could endure and not fall play-thing to predatory or just cynical European powers, and yet also so arranging the attributes of that power that its citizens could never say of it, as the motion was made (and carried, too, if I recall correctly) that the power of the crown “had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished.”  It was about trying so to create commonalities of interest that the bane of republics historically — faction — would not form, grow, and eventually swallow the nation (we haven’t falsified that proposition yet, I’d observe, and based upon the gloating about the particulars of Dear Leader’s recent electoral triumph we may not pull it off).

What that Union was not about was “equality” in any greater than an abstract sense, if that.  The three-fifths clause is only the most widely-cited example.  But the original document made no effort to guarantee any degree of uniformity of political or civil rights, beyond to say that Congress (and here I must observe how comically incorrect the judiciary has been in this respect) may not do certain things.  The original Constitution (and I do include the Bill of Rights, as it was presented for ratification so immediately) does stipulate that certain rights shall not be abridged (notice it does not say by whom), such as speech, assembly, petition, and the keeping and bearing of arms.  It also provides that right of “the people” (the same “people” as mentioned in the Second Amendment, by the way) to be secure in their persons and property from unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be diminished.  [N.b. I’ve always wanted to hear how it was that the exact same draftsmen who spoke of “the people” in the Fourth Amendment and by it meant individuals somehow used precisely the same words two amendments previously, yet really meant to say “the states, as states,” when, just a few amendments later, they demonstrate explicitly that they understood both concepts of “people”=individuals and “states”=the different political entities of the Union, and drew a plain distinction between them, when they provided that the powers not granted by the constitution to the federal government, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the people or to the states respectively.  Maybe I’m just dumb.]  There’s also no equal protection clause in the original Constitution.

So much for the Union Lincoln had said he was going to war to preserve.  He gets to Gettysburg, and in that speech holds aloft in blazing rhetoric not the dry structures of the Constitution, with its “shall be vested” and so forth, but the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . .”  You won’t find that in the Constitution.  According to Lincoln now, the nation’s very foundation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  This was something new indeed.  It was something sufficiently novel to his fellow citizens, then and for generations later, that it took the Civil Rights Movement to actualize what Lincoln spoke, 149 years ago today, over a newly laid-out cemetery.

In 1887 there died a young American woman, a poet.  She was Jewish; her family had been in North America since colonial days.  This is important in light of the words for which she will forever remain known.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

As mentioned, what is unusual about Emma Lazarus is that, while Jewish, her family did not come to America as part of the tired, poor, huddled masses that flooded in between the end of the Civil War and World War I, and particularly not among the hosts of Eastern European Jewry fleeing the Tsar’s pogroms and the resentments of their fellow citizens (although they weren’t fully citizens, most places) as the disruptions of industrialization turned on its ear a world that had grown stable, and brutal, and poor over centuries.

The interesting thing about Emma Lazarus’s death on November 19, 1887, and the Gettysburg Address 24 years before, on the same date, is that it was precisely the propositions enunciated in the Declaration, and which Lincoln had elevated to the very organizing principle of the U.S., that brought the tired, poor, huddled masses.  Immigration to the U.S. had always been popular, and the recent immigrants had always written back home in lyrical praise of their new country and its fecundity.  Immigrants had fled disaster before, from the general grinding poverty of the Scots-Irish to the acute catastrophe of the potato famine.  They’d come seeking religious freedom, freedom from the press-gang into the maw of the new mass armies Napoleon had bequeathed to the continent.  Many, if not most, came just to be able to own some land.  But it seems to me, from what I’ve read, that the promise of Equality, the Land of Unlimited Possibilities, as a beacon to immigrants is peculiarly a post-Civil War phenomenon.  America as the New Holy Land appears (and again, I am comfortable that there are sufficient counter-examples as to keep this well within the bounds of over-generalization) to have arisen in the minds of the common man, from the shtetl to the tenement to the peasant piling his dung heap as a consequence precisely of the Declaration’s statement of principle being placed firmly front and center in America’s self-understanding.  Is it unreasonable to wonder whether, had Lincoln not been martyred, had his every pronouncement not been elevated nearly to holy writ, that the reinterpretation of the country’s foundation which he offered 149 years ago today would have taken, and stuck?  That America’s self-understanding as a nation of poor, tired, huddled masses would have become so central to what we are about?

Looks Like the SPLC Has Some Competition

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Let’s see, a committed socialist who has announced an intention to pursue gun control “under the radar” is elected.  People across the entire country go on a guns-and-ammo-buying splurge, before the feds start regulating the civilian firearms industry into oblivion.  No, wait, this ain’t got nuthin’ to do with people justly fearing that someone who’s announced an intention to subvert their Second Amendment rights intends to . . . subvert their Second Amendment rights.  What this is about is a bunch of bitter clingers gettin’ ready to have them a race war against . . . Mexicans!

Full disclosure:  I own several firearms.  I haven’t shot any of them in probably five or more years.  They’re all mostly muzzle loaders, and not those egregious modern plastic-stock-and-camouflage-patterns-everywhere, with center-fire percussion (o! the horror!).  No thankee; I have a .50 cal. Hawken, a .45 cal. Kentucky rifle, a .44 cal. 1847 model Walker cap-and-ball revolver, and a .44 cal. 1851 Navy revolver.  An honest man’s muzzle loader, they all are.  If I had the money I’d buy a Model 1911 .45 cal., for home and personal defense.

I’ve never sensed in myself the slightest inclination to go shoot a Mexican.  I’ve never heard any of my acquaintances express such a desire.  I’ve never even overheard a stranger express such a desire.  Around here at least until recently, the overwhelming proportion of Mexican immigrants were some of the workingest guys you ever saw in your life.  And they did excellent work, too.  And at least out here in the sticks you hardly ever saw one in jail.  Too busy working.  So with all possible respect for Ms. Alcoff, she’s as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

Here’s the money quotation from the article (no pun intended):  “While the Associated Press reported last month that rising firearm sales resulted from a fear of increased gun laws, Alcoff said this is instead evidence of the Latino community being targeted.  ‘These groups are not harmless,’ Alcoff said. ‘The principle target here…is not an unspecified or abstract immigrant population, but generally Latino immigrants from Mexico or Central America.’  In fact, Alcoff is currently lobbying for more recognition of specific instances of Latino racism as hate crimes. Her talk was hosted by The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and previewed her forthcoming paper about racism.”

[Side note:  The author of the article is a graduate stoodint at the Kolumbia Skool o’ Journalism and Activism, or something like that.  The spell-checker didn’t catch “principle” instead of “principal.”]

We are not vouchsafed a definition of what is a “radical” group.  For that matter we’re not told what constitutes a “group” or how one distinguishes between on the one hand people who happen to agree on a range of particular matters and publicly express that agreement, and on the other people who actually sit down and organize themselves into a group which coordinates the actions of its members in respect to those matters.  What we do have to guide our thoughts on where Ms. Alcoff is headed with this is the semantic practices of folks like Morris Dees over at the Southern Poverty Law Center.  To ol’ Morris, anyone who disagrees with the left-most wing of the Democratic Party is by definition a “hate group.”   Morris has earned himself a very handsome living raising money to combat “hate groups,” although it’s not clear that he’s ever managed to reduce any ambient level of hate against anyone, anywhere.  That dear Ms. Alcoff is trying to poach on his turf is given away by the next-to-last sentence of the quotation:  She’s lobbying to have a legal category of offense recognized.  That’s Step 1; the next steps will then involve her establishing one or more “foundations” the mission statement of which is tracking “Latino hate crimes,” and combatting “hate groups” which target not some “unspecified or abstract immigrant population, but generally Latino immigrants from Mexico or Central America” and assisting alleged victims of same by filing lawsuits, preferably against defendants who have a reputation to lose and the ability to pay to protect it (this is, by the way, the “Rev.” Jackson’s preferred tactic with his operation).  Anyone want to bet whom Alcoff envisions as the executive director of this newly-created Latino-hate-crimes industry?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Anyone?

The grievance trade is an industry, and a very handsomely lucrative one for its insiders.  The “Southern Poverty Law Center,” run by one Morris Dees, has (at least according to its 2010 Internal Revenue Form 990) no offices or branches other than its main office in Montgomery, Alabama.  So far as I am aware it has never lifted the general economic condition of any portion of the South (or any other part of the country, either), through legal measures or otherwise.  Its statement of “What We Do,” from its website, allows that, “The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and exposes their activities to law enforcement agencies, the media and the public. We publish our investigative findings online, on our Hatewatch blog, and in the Intelligence Report, our award-winning quarterly journal. We’ve crippled some of the country’s most notorious hate groups by suing them for murders and other violent acts committed by their members.”

Monitoring and exposing is a fantastically remunerative activity.  For 2010, the Center reported $36,125,562 in contributions and grants and $2,297,571 in investment income.  It also reported (Pt. V line 4a) having overseas financial accounts in the Caymans and in Bermuda (this would explain why you saw Morris Dees so vociferously defending Mitt Romney’s overseas financial interests . . . oh, right, never mind).  As of the end of 2010 it reported net assets of $238,134,564; that’s right, almost a quarter-billion dollars.  Just its cash holdings were $7,649,689.

In terms of what it spent, the Center reported spending $10,984,964 on “providing legal services to victims of civil rights injustice and hate crimes,” and $12,480,500 on “educating” sundry audiences.  That’s from Pt. III of the 990, where they are to list their three largest program services by expense.  Those are the only two entries.  It appears that the $10,984,964 for “providing legal services” also includes $1,390,052 of “case cost expense” (Pt. IX (Expenses) line 24). 

For grants made by them they report $0.  Nothing.  Those whom they “educate” are all people who one would think ought to recognize a crime when they see one: local law enforcement officials and the like.  The Center makes no mention of educating any poor people of any color or ethnicity at all, to provide them the skills that they will need not to remain poor across generation after generation after generation (from acquaintances I’ve known over the years who work in the government hand-out industry it’s not too unusual for their case loads to include families in which it’s been three or more generations since anyone in the extended family held a job, any job), like how to avoid rip-off scams, or how to do family budgeting, or how to search for a job, or where to look for money to fund a trade or vocational school program.  In short, the SPLC evidences no interest, at all, in actually alleviating the condition of their target constituencies.

Back to their program expenses.  I mean, wow.  Not quite eleven million dollars on litigation.  I’m sure they must really have left a crater on the landscape of hate and bigotry, right?  Well, in Pt. VIII (Revenue) they report $165,405 in “court awards,” which sounds like awards of attorney’s fees, and they report holding in their IOLTA trust account $504,252 for distribution to their clients.  Now, that latter number is not a correct indicator of what judgments they in fact have obtained and collected for their clients during the year.  They do mention that since 2004 they’ve distributed nearly $2 million to sundry immigrants they claim to have helped.  Their hate crime litigation page lists a good number of lawsuits in which they’ve won significant verdicts for victims of what appear to be racially-motivated criminal acts.  Most of the cases listed are several years in the past, some over ten years old.  Is it unreasonable to ponder what they’ve done for actual victims lately with that $11 million annual litigation budget?  I got to see, recently and from a fairly close if second-hand remove, the dynamics of a very large, very well-funded litigation by grievance industry outsiders against local entities, in which a good deal of the accusation was that a decision taken decades ago, before its physical and physiological implications could even have been known (I mean, literally, the science just wasn’t there at the time), was somehow motivated by racial animus.  The eventual resolution of the suit provided a pittance to the supposed victims . . . and an enormous fund-raising banner for the outside litigation sponsor, which waved it prominently at every opportunity.

In other words, there’s a jolly good reason to harbor suspicion that what the SPLC does is litigation-as-fundraiser.  “See how we’re really goin’ after them meanies!  Your pre-addressed envelope for your contribution to fighting hate is enclosed herewith.”  In Pt. IX, line 24, other expenses they show $4,248,454 for “educational publication”; $2,716,159 for “postage and shipping”; $2,356,843 for “printing and lettershop”; and $1,654,728 for “other development cost.”  That comes to $10,976184, or 99.92% of their total program outlays on “providing legal services.”  The Center spent $1,926,027 on their five largest independent contractors (Pt. VII Sec. 5), of which the top two (accounting for nearly a million of that) appear to be database-related services, and the next three are described as telemarketers.  Now folks, you’re simply not going to convince me that there are so many millions upon millions upon millions of hate-mongers in the U.S., spread among their claimed 2,292 hate and “patriot” groups that they can’t hire some college kid to design and run their database to track them all.  They need to pay almost a million bucks to outside contractors so they can keep up with the bad guys?  No, what they’re spending nearly a million dollars on is managing and massaging their donor base.

There is, however, one small set of locations in which the SPLC has in fact alleviated poverty.  In Pt. VII, director and executive compensation, they identify their most highly compensated key employees.  All of them are stated as working 40.00 hours per week for the organization, which I neither understand nor quite believe.  In a Form 990 one of the things you’re concerned with is demonstrating to the IRS that your organization is not serving as a tax-exempt vehicle to line the pockets of the insiders beyond a reasonable compensation for services actually rendered to the organization for purposes associated with its tax-exempt functions.  So that would give you a built-in incentive to err on the side of overstating the hours those insiders spend working, right?  Maybe I’m wrong and they just shoved down the 40.00 hour figure for all of them just as a matter of choice.  Whatever; I’m not sure it makes a difference.  But here we go:  Morris Dees, identified as “chief trial counsel,” comes in with $343,676 compensation package; Richard Cohen, as president, runs $339,764; Teenie Hutchison, the sec’y/treasurer, is running $159,752, and Joseph J. Levin, Jr., “general counsel,” is a bargain at $184,411.  That’s $1,027,603, or 7.31% of the $14,066,129 total salaries and wages they report.  In truth its doesn’t seem as though the senior staff is receiving a disproportionate share of the total compensation the Center pays out.  But over $340,000 to one lawyer?  At a non-profit?

This is where I’m coming from in excoriating Morris Dees and his quarter-billion dollar nest-egg:  For about twelve years I was on the board of directors of our local humane society.  For roughly nine of those years I was its president.  The facility consisted of a beat-up old single-wide trailer to which had been tacked a jack-leg built concrete block facility.  The roofs leaked, everywhere.  The heater broke multiple times per winter.  In summer there was one air conditioner in the whole place.  The shelter was utterly dependent on donations for food, cleaning supplies, toys for the animals, everything just about.  It could afford to pay minimum wage to two or three part-time employees, and a miserly salary to a shelter manager.  The entire operation was seldom more than two weeks away from having to shut its doors completely.  Our county is about 40 miles from a larger metropolitan area.  That city’s humane society handled about four times the numbers of animals that our little society handled each year.  Its budget was roughly twenty-five times ours.  The population base from which it could draw support was roughly 19 times our size.  My mother for several years was a priest at a tiny congregation out in the country.  The church finally got plumbing and electricity in the late 1980s.  Most of her congregation would qualify as “poor as Job’s turkey” by any reasonable standard.  These were folks for whom a $10 per month pledge made a noticeable dent in the family finances.  Recently when the local humane society was again within days of shutting up shop, the question was posed to these people whether to pitch in.  Someone said, “Let’s give them $500.”  Done.  Three minutes.

So I’m familiar with how genuine non-profits work, non-profits that actually benefit the communities in which they work.  I therefore bristle when I see the likes of Morris Dees sitting on a quarter-billion dollars and accomplishing damned near nothing that can be measured, other than raking in that $36,125,562 in grants and donations the SPLC reported for 2010.

I likewise bristle when I read of people like the Alcoff woman, who to all appearances wants to leverage her fellow-citizens’ very well-founded fears of the federal government’s designs on their individual freedoms into a job for herself, along the template of the “Rev.” Jackson and Morris Dees.

Heightening my sense of a snake oil salesman when I read of the Alcoff woman is my awareness of things like this.  According to the folks at the Pew Foundation, net immigration from Mexico has stopped, and may have even reversed.  While the current awful state of the U.S. economy has doubtless contributed to that, of greater long-term importance is the falling Mexican birth rate, cited in the article.  The long and short is that Mexican women are just barely replacing their population now.  Mexico is not going to have large surplus population to send abroad.  So the prediction that the massive numbers of “Latinos” in the U.S. by 2050 sparking a race war as all them Awful Anglo-Saxons decide to fight to preserve their hegemonic place in the society are rather over-blown.  What’s going to happen to those here now is that over the next few generations (and we’re still 38 years from 2050, by the way) they’ll intermarry, move around, settle in, put their feet up, and the next thing you know they’ll view Cinco de Mayo as maybe another excuse to crack open a beer or twelve.  Sort of like the Irish and St. Patrick’s Day.  By the way, another interesting factoid the Pew report mentions is that measured as total percentages of all immigrants, both the Germans and the Irish were bigger immigrant waves than the Mexicans.  Yeah, you can travel around parts of the Midwest and see lots of black-red-gold decorations, lots of eagles spangled onto things, but really:  Who really cares that one’s ancestors came here from Mecklenburg in the 1890s?  Or Donegal in the 1850s?  Ms. Alcoff, being largely innocent of history it seems, does not appear to notice that all immigrant groups across all U.S. history have “threatened” the status quo, and there’s never been a race war to show for it.  Poor Ms. Alcoff; if she wants to make a living as a grievance monger she’s going to have to lobby the government to create the market for her services . . . which it just so happens she’s in fact doing.

This isn’t about hate, or oppression, or challenging cultural hegemony.  It’s about the Benjamins.  Just like it always is.  Ask Morris Dees.

Update (20 Nov 12):  And right on cue, Bloomberg offers this op-ed on making sure that “non-profits” aren’t really about, you know, making profits.

 

 

Have to Wonder How This Made it Past the Dissenting Opinion Suppression Committee; or, Tom Friedman Call Your Office

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At the New York Times, yet even.  They actually mention what happened under their socio-economic darlings’ responsibility.  Twice in the same op-ed:  The piece is of course about the dozens of millions starved to death in the Great Leap Forward (I suppose we ought to be thankful that Dear Leader didn’t adopt that as his campaign slogan this time around), which lasted four years, but it also gives a nod to the Holodomor, in which Stalin bagged as many Ukrainians in a year and a half as Hitler picked up Jews over twelve years.  [I have to wonder if anyone in the editorial department made any observation about the NYT‘s own Walter Duranty, Stalin’s mouthpiece and white-washer, who as a NYT reporter won a never-repudiated Pulitzer for his intentional misrepresentations about Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.]

The bunch who brought you the Great Leap Forward is the same ruling clique which Tom Friedman, also of the NYT, laments isn’t in charge here in the U.S.  Well, perhaps not them exactly, but he’s on multiple occasions bemoaned that the U.S., with all that messy checks-and-balances thingy, just can’t quite respond as rapidly and effectively to circumstances as specifically Red China.  He’s all for a little single-party dictatorship around the edges, if it means we can be more “efficient,” presumably in having the government take over everything it feels like. 

OK, one more time, for even the slowest-witted NYT pundits (or subscribers):  The Great Leap Forward is precisely the reason that we have checks and balances; it is Exhibit A in the seminar on why you want government policy to move slowly, and with multiple chances to be derailed.  It was, as the linked article explains, a bunch of party insiders who understood zero about the actual processes of growing things and making things who simply declared that Output Will Be Raised to X.  Their underlings then hopped to it to report that output in fact had been raised to X, which of course suggested to the insiders that they hadn’t been sufficiently ambitious, and so then they decreed 4X.  Meanwhile, back in the provinces, the regional and local apparatchiki decided that if they ever wanted to become insiders, they’d better just go ahead and make it 7X because the guys in the next province over had only gone to 6X.  And so they did, thereby prompting the insiders to move the goalposts again. 

And on the ground, there was no food.  Entire villages died out.  There’s a good story of the carnage in Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts:  Mao’s Secret Famine.  As with so many other instances in which it comes time to count communism’s dead bodies, it’s hard to get a handle on how many were done to death; the 36 million figure is probably conservative.  When the Soviet Union had a census after the Holodomor, Stalin didn’t like it that the head-count was several million shy.  So he had the census bureau shot, and sent out a new team with instructions to go count again.  Got a much more acceptable result, he did.  The system Tom Friedman wishes upon us makes a state secret of the basic census numbers.

The Great Leap Forward, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and similar but not-quite-as-deadly interludes are what happens when government works efficiently.  It very efficiently plows millions of its citizens under the turf.  The reason that government “efficiency” necessarily does this is that the very fact of “efficiency” destroys the feedback loops which serve to inform and therefore restrain private conduct.  If Ford builds a crappy car, it won’t sell.  Ford will know that it’s not selling within weeks of its launch.  It will be on the horn with every regional sales management team in the country to find out why it’s not selling.  If it can’t be made to sell, Ford will jerk it back off the market within a matter of months, and either re-design it or quietly shoot it in the head and hope no one noticed.  It will do this because if it does not, the consequences of Ford’s lousy decision-making will come back to roost with Ford.  When you have a coercive power on one side of the equation, and on the other people whose incentive structure is to mollify, not modify that coercive power, then you get bogus feedbacks.  You get the regional party chairman earnestly reporting to Peking that Whatever-the-Hell Province has increased production to 60,000 metric tons per acre of grain, which prompts Peking to figure that he’s got to be slacking off at least a little, and so we’ll just go ahead and set the “norm” at 78,000 metric tons and see how he does with that. 

In a coercive system, as all government is, you also have the decision maker insulated from the consequences of his decision.  Dear Leader’s EPA will suffer not a whit if huge areas of the U.S. power grid, dependent on coal-fired electricity generation, have to ratchet rates through the roof as the generators have to shut their turbines down because they can’t comply with ever-heightened emissions requirements.  The EPA jobs will never go away; their offices will never go dark.  If the electric-operated foundries now find their products no longer competitive, even behind tariff walls, they will shut down.  That feedback will not register in those locations where the decisions are made.

It is therefore important to realize that calls for government “efficiency” are actually calls to hand the power over and bugger the consequences.  Hayek pointed out decades ago that the essential function of the free market is to communicate information rapidly and accurately to widely dispersed decision-makers, none of whom have the capacity to know all the inputs into anyone else’s decision matrix.  Government fiat does not, cannot match either the speed of communication or the reliability.  In fact, since government regulation assumes something that cannot exist, viz. concentration at a single decisional locus of all pertinent information, you will inevitably get measurably incorrect decisions because you’re basing them on bad information.

Given the NYT‘s predilection for totalitarian systems, it’s nothing short of amazing that they printed this op-ed.  Wonder how long before it gets disappeared down some memory hole.

So Swords Come With Two Edges, Do They?

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The good news:  By 2020 the U.S. will be the world’s largest (non-renewable) energy producer, and its dependence on imports from blood-soaked theocratic lunatic asylums will end.  In fact, the Green River Formation is considered to contain, in terms just of recoverable oil, not only more than the proven reserves of all of OPEC, but three times as much as all humans have used in all recorded history.  Ever.  That includes all the oil burned, or just burned up or spilled into the ocean, fighting World War II, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars as well. 

The bad news:  The U.S.’s place as chief customer for those asylums will be taken by China.  So a report from the International Energy Agency.  Of course, the Chinese will also be a larger customer of Canada, which is going to build the Keystone XL pipeline whether Dear Leader wants them to or not.  They’ll just build it east-west instead of north-south.  And all those tons of carbon will be released into the atmosphere from all the clean-burning Chinese power and transportation sectors.  Isn’t that comforting?

As the National Post observes, reducing America’s interest in a peaceful, stable, democratic Middle East is a mixed blessing indeed.  The U.S. may reduce its dependency on the Middle East, but that will emphatically not be the case for Europe.  They will still be faced with shipping their money by the container ship-load to the theocratic lunatics or to Putinesque Russia.  Will they step up and shoulder the burden that the U.S. has carried in the Middle East since the 1950s?  Let us not hold our breaths.  Will they unite to contain Russia?  I don’t see how that’s possible either.  The result is that Europe’s prosperity will continue to be exposed to wild swings in the political situation in an area of the world in which the U.S. will have a much diminished material interest in pouring out its own blood and treasure to enforce some reasonable level of stability.

In point of fact, as the NP points out, with China remaining America’s largest creditor for the foreseeable future, and with at least another four years of out-of-control spending just contracted for, what’s really going to be happening is that we’ll still be underwriting the theocratic thugs.  We’ll just be filtering our money through Red China as the middleman in the picture, instead of having our pockets hoovered directly.

When you add it up, the figures at the bottom of the seem to spell out:  (i) The U.S. will continue to be the economic engine behind the theo-kleptocrats; (ii) Without direct purchases from the, the U.S.’s direct economic interest and thus influence will diminish; (iii) If the U.S. is not to watch China re-make the region in its own image, it will still have to pour out its resources in a place where it no longer has a direct material interest and under circumstances in which we do not have available the same economic carrot/stick arrangement we’ve had for the past 50 or more years; and (iv) Europe will continue to free-ride on the American economy, while lecturing us about how we need to keep electing redistributionist socialists.

The good news from Dear Leader’s perspective is that with all that fossil fuel in the ground, it will require even greater subsidies — the IEA report cites the figure of $4.8 trillion — which means ever more Solyndras.  Ever more “green businesses” to shake down for campaign cash.

What’s not to love?

And Speaking of Cognitive Dissonance

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We go to our street reporters, on the beat in New York City, to bring you the latest update in on-going, massive, carefully coordinated relief efforts for the most vulnerable of Tropical Storm Sandy’s victims.

[sound of needle screeching across vinyl record]

Actually, let’s see what’s happening in . . . say, Brooklyn.  Gee whiz, where have we ever seen local authorities taking insufficient preparatory action, then getting smacked by natural catastrophe known to be a threat (exactly the Sandy scenario was presented in quite some detail several years ago on How the Earth was Made, the first season of which my mother gave my boys on DVD)?  Same local authorities then absolutely fall apart on the post-disaster relief efforts, all the way from misallocation of resources (think: all those supplies stockpiled in Central Park for the marathon, as well as the single help center trailer blocks from the people described in the Puffington Host article) to simply running out of real simple stuff like bottled water (FEMA), to the union line crews refusing to cooperate with the “scabs” from outside the area (a very close friend of mine has a brother-in-law who’s employed by a company that does exactly this, viz. large-scale utility disaster relief work, and he reports that the tales of union-vs-non-union labor are, unfortunately, entirely accurate).

It was the local and state authorities’ botched responses to Katrina in 2005 that were relentlessly presented as George Bush’s fault, and which were — artificially — kept in the spotlight all the way through the 2006 elections.  That attribution to a national political party of a corrupt local system’s failings (example: a seventh of the NOPD’s officers didn’t show up to police the area after the storm; why? because they didn’t exist, they were phantom employees whose paychecks had gone to sundry criminals and criminal organizations) was entirely successful, and we bought ourselves Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and Harry Reid as majority leader.  Wow.

My humble prediction for this fiasco, however, is that it will be either not reported at all outside the metropolitan NYC area, or only cursorily, and no questions will be asked about why all this mismanagement is occurring.  Not one bit of the failings will be attributed to anyone . . . except possibly to the House Republicans, or maybe them fat-cat Wall Street bankers.  No one will demand to know why the president did not personally take charge of relief efforts.  No one will demand the FEMA chief’s head on a platter, with watercress.  No one will investigate the unions’ conduct.  No one will demand statutory short-circuits to all the regulatory red-tape when it comes to re-building.  Davis-Bacon will be enforced to the letter.  All the enviros will litigate every reconstruction effort into oblivion, and no one will ask what, precisely, all this has actually helped.

You can’t prevent storms like Sandy.  They’ve happened before and they’ll happen again.  You can’t prevent massive damage, injury, and dislocation when a storm the size of Sandy hits a concentration of people the size of New York City.  That’s just part of having 13 million people crammed into a single urban area.  When you jam people together like that they perforce have to rely on other people and systems over which they have no influence to deliver them necessities of life.  Those systems, by the way, tend to be much more robust in a place like NYC than elsewhere.  But when those systems fail in a sufficiently massive disaster, there are no alternatives to them, as there are in other parts of the country not so densely populated.  When something like Sandy comes along that disables those systems, the failure is not incremental but catastrophic.  There’s very little distance between functional and chaos.

All you can do is prepare, and have in place practiced systems and protocols to deal with that catastrophic failure.  Which does not seem to have happened here, much, at all.  And that failure is very much the fault of those people and organizations who have been in control of New York City for several decades now.  New York City is experiencing the same degree of local failure for in large measure the same reasons that New Orleans did: prolonged single-party government and the toleration of a culture of active corruption, peculation, and graft which has to be fully investigated and examined to be believed.

And in 2014, my humble prediction is that the voters who are sitting in the dark, freezing their butts off, hungry, thirsty, and crapping in buckets, will loyally troop down to the polling place, and pull the lever for another straight party ticket.

Peering Over the Neighbors’ Fence

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. . . can be a useful exercise, especially in terms of deciding how you don’t want to keep your own backyard.

Wonderful France, which like the U.S. has recently elected a committed socialist to its presidency, seems to be — unexpectedly! as Instapundit would note — not doing too well when it comes either to creating or even keeping private sector employment.  In fact, during the third quarter 2012 the private sector in France lost 50,400 jobs; the total employment (again, private sector; the public sector is not factored into these numbers) is 67,000 less than in 3Q of 2011.  The French analogue of the BLS is reckoning with a private sector unemployment rate of 10.2% by year-end, which is 0.5% — unexpectedly! — higher than projected at summer’s end.  Only 16 million Frenchmen remain employed in the private sector.  As of end of 2011, the population of Metropolitan France was ciphered out at 63,136,180 (including Corsica, but not other overseas possessions), which means that roughly a quarter of the gross population is employed in the private sector.  By way of comparison, as of the end of October, the St. Louis Fed reports 111,744,000 people employed across all private industry in the U.S., from total population reckoned at 314,395,013 as of September, 2012.  As a proportion of population, France’s private-sector employment is thus 29.66% lower than America’s, or from the other direction, our private-sector employment is 42% higher than France’s.

So what’s a socialist to do, who has publicly committed to soaking the employers rich?

Right, you hold a two-and-a-half-hour press conference at which you solemnly intone that fighting unemployment will be the first priority of your administration.  Well, that and you blame the preceding administration (gee, where have we heard that refrain before?).  And how do you foster an anemic private sector?  Why, you subsidize public-sector employment, e.g. the national railway and local government.  Hollande promises 75% subsidies for up to 150,000 jobs for young people.  The program’s two-year cost is given (nudge, nudge) at five billion Euros, all paid for, we have to presume, by taxes on the same private sector employers who cannot afford to hire young Frenchmen in the first place.  It must be from taxes because Hollande has also promised to reduce from 4.5% to 3% of GDP — a 33.33% reduction in borrowing.  This reduction is to occur at a time when the economists (they don’t call it the dismal science for nothing) are poo-poohing his promise to reverse the unemployment trendline by end of 2013, because for the foreseeable future they anticipate net private sector job loss.  Higher taxes and lower borrowing in a shrinking economy; how’s that likely to work out?

The write-up doesn’t mention whether Hollande explained how private sector employment is supposed to compete with the public sector, when it can’t afford labor right now and when the 75% subsidy will do little more than cause public sector wages to increase even further.

I never cease to be amazed that a group of people — lefties here and abroad — have no problem grasping that something so seemingly simple as a farm pond is actually a complex system, and that when you start tinkering with any one part of it you end up mommocking up the whole pond, in ways that you can’t even really predict with any degree of certainty.  They understand this, and yet they imagine that they can fine-tune a national economy like a guitar, and they can pluck at any particular string, fretted in any location, and not set all the other strings to cacophonous jangling.  They imagine that if they make a pig’s breakfast of any particular portion of that economy, any industry, any segment of the labor force, they can wave their magic fairy wand and un-do it all.  It doesn’t seem to cross their minds that when you’ve destroyed a decades-old industry — say, the private health insurance industry, or the community banking industry (Dodd-Frank will be its death knell if not significantly altered) — you can’t just repeal or amend a statute and have it all come magically back to life.  Commerce is not a Broadway play.  Once you’ve fired the lead actors there are no understudies.  You can’t just hire a new cast, go play the sticks for a few months, and then re-open in the city with the same script and to the same reviews. 

You can’t tax people to death who have the choice to go elsewhere.  The same folks who willingly signed up for another round of Gov. Moonbeam back in 2010 have just proven themselves to be the biggest crew of shit-pokes in Western Civilization (the expression comes from someone so dim-wittedly gullible that he’ll poke his finger into every pile because hey! you never know there won’t be a diamond underneath it).  This is lauded as a visionary exercise of sovreignty.  Hollande in France seems to forget that  particular implication of the free movement of people and capital. 

I’m glad to see that we aren’t the only country whose president promises us fur-bearing, flying, egg-laying mammals, all paid for by someone else’s money which magically will appear.

Flash! Kaiser’s Troops Invade Belgium! (a series)

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Well, guess what?  The National Association of Women Lawyers has just discovered that the demands of child-bearing and holding a family together are (i) murderously difficult, (ii) incompatible with life in BigLaw (i.e. an AmLaw 200 firm), and (iii) especially hard on women who would like to have children before the odds of having a Down’s Syndrome child hit 50/50.  They’ve just released their seventh annual “Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms.”

A couple of observations: 

First:  Their sample was the AmLaw 200, the 200 largest law firms in the United States.  All of 56% of the firms surveyed responded, which works out to be something like 112 firms.  That’s like evaluating the federal employment experience by surveying the president and his cabinet members.  It’s the equivalent of Field Marshal Haig trying to run the Western Front while never actually visiting the trenches, or even sending his staff officers up very much.  Even if they’d surveyed the 750 largest firms in the country that would still capture only a tiny slice of the total population of lawyers in general or female lawyers in particular.  This survey, in other words, is fascinating for the sorts of people who join (a word at which I get the involuntary shivers) outfits like the National Association of Women Lawyers; for the rest of the universe of lawyers, women, and women lawyers, not so much. 

Second:  In only one place does the survey mention the 600 pound gorilla in women’s lives, viz. the biological reality of child bearing, and then only in passing.  The study is full of data on women being “represented” in this, that, or the capacity within firm structures of sundry types.  [Why is it that a person, any person, who happens to have been born with a particular set of genitals is deemed to be able to “represent” everyone else also born with that same set?  I am not “represented” by any given redneck in whatever position you choose to name, nor by any left-handed person, nor by any person above a certain height, nor by any person with a particular educational background or holding a specific license.  Yet studies like this assume that anyone wearing a bra is somehow a proxy for everyone else wearing one.  I don’t understand.]  But there is zero examination or even mention of things which any wife or mother — lawyer or no — would find curious:  for each female lawyer in an “of counsel” position who is considered to be or not on the partnership track at her firm, how many children does she have? how old was she at the first birth? is she married to the father of her children? how old was she when she married the father? was this her first or a subsequent marriage? is her husband also a lawyer at a BigLaw firm? how old are her children? do any of those children have special needs?  Each and every one of those questions is going to have an enormous impact on how much of herself a woman can or is willing to give to a law firm.

Third:  The survey mentions “anecdotal” indication that women in “low status” positions like “staff attorney” (of which set women comprise 70%, the only category in which they are a majority) may enjoy lower stress, a better work-life balance, etc.  Really?  What sorts of follow-up questions would that sort of “anecdotal” evidence suggest to someone with the investigative smarts of, oh, say, a high school journalist?  Ummmmmm . . . did you choose to be a “staff attorney”?  For married lawyers, was this a choice which you made unilaterally, or did you and your husband “study on it” together and make the decision together?  Have you attempted to get out of the role of “staff attorney” at your current firm?  At another firm?  But this is what the survey contents itself with:  “Anecdotally, we understand some women staff attorneys are pleased with their situation: they work in a pleasant environment with intelligent colleagues, earn good wages, and can achieve the kind of work-life balance that simply isn’t possible for partner-track lawyers and partners in the large firm environment. Some even view their exclusion from a partnership track as beneficial, since they don’t face the same competitive stresses as associates and don’t have to concern themselves with firm ‘up or out’ policies.”  Well now.  No kidding?

Fourth:  The survey is full of calls for lawyering to become different, to be made more so that female lawyers can have it all.  The survey assumes without any showing that male lawyers can have it all.  This assumption is transparently bogus.  I still recall a classmate of mine who worked at one of the firms surveyed during a summer.  There were well over 150 partners at that office; not a one of them was married.  Not.  One.  Partner.  They were either divorced or had never married.  Since the assumption of this survey is that measurable outcomes ought to be indistinguishable among any sample of lawyers at BigLaw, irrespective of non-lawyer personal attributes, why is there no reporting of their “control group”?  It seems to me that anything which aspires to any sort of statistical validity ought to cite a control group.  What are the measurable outcomes for single males, for married males, for fathers?  What are the salary and bonus figures for male lawyers whose areas of practice, billing loads, pro bono activities, and family lives mimic their female colleagues’?  Anyone ask any of those fathers when the last time he saw his daughter’s softball team play?  When the last time he went camping with his boys?  Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

Statisticians refer to “levels of aggregation,” which is the technical expression for the analytical evaluations used to avoid the sort of meaningless results which you obtain when you lump dissimilar things together based on one or a few measurable attributes.  Income levels for all men and all women tell you nothing.  Even “all male college graduates” and “all female college graduates” tells you nothing because you’re comparing STEM fields, which are both self-selected and overwhelmingly male, with people who go through four years at the school of “education,” which is likewise self-selected and overwhelmingly female.  And so forth.  This survey has an enormous problem with levels of aggregation, a problem brought about in part through its minuscule sample size.

The survey assumes, in other words, that child bearing and family existence have indistinguishable effects on the workplace choices and outcomes of both males and females.  This is simply not the case and never has been, either in BigLaw, law in general, or any other occupation.  Whether you’re a farmer or a cabinet minister or a field geologist or a lawyer, someone has to take care of that baby.  Your average mother has been terrified now by years of horror stories of nannies, paedophiles, baby snatchers, and so forth.  She’s been guilted up for not breast-feeding.  She can’t stand in the line at a grocery store without having pictures of Hollywood trollops bragging about how they lost 45 pounds six weeks after giving birth to twins.  The simple truth is that for most families, under most circumstances, the voluntary choice of all parties is that the mother becomes the primary caregiver.  What this survey is complaining about is the workplace reflection of those voluntary choices made by extremely highly educated, accomplished, and well-paid (by any objective standard) women.  But those choices don’t match their political narrative, so they must be condemned.

Even moreso than the assumptions about family life and physiology, the biggest problem with the survey is once again an unspoken assumption.  It assumes that the AmLaw 200’s clients will permit those firms not to have a 24/7 approach to lawyering; that they will suddenly stop wanting everything by Monday 9:00 a.m. when they call at 2:15 p.m. Friday; that they will magically cease to have legal problems or opportunities which implicate sixteen distinct fields of law in 23 of the 50 states and four foreign countries; and, that those problems and opportunities can be made — from the law firm’s end of things — to have timelines and windows of opportunity that offer the kind of human existence which the vast majority of people, male and female, want for themselves.  Errrrmmmm, guys gals, I don’t know if anyone has explained this to you recently, but we’re a damned service industry.  Either we provide the service our customer wants or that customer is going down the street to find him someone who will.  You can lament the fact that 47% of law skool grads are women but only 45% of new associates are female all you want.  You can bemoan that only 30% of BigLaw considers its “of counsel” positions to be partnership-track eligible (even though female “of counsel” earn 95%+ of what their male counterparts do).  But you cannot change the world in which BigLaw has to keep the doors open.

The survey’s findings and exhortations assume, in other words, a universe of facts that does not exist and will never exist.  The survey concludes that female lawyers are exiting BigLaw in droves, and the higher up they go the more likely they are not to be there the next time you look.  The survey does not examine in any meaningful depth the simple question of why that should be so.  In short, this survey is a very nice illustration of the sort of irrelevance which results when you have a bunch of joiners artificially defined by a single attribute examine a tiny sample of women who have damned near nothing in common with 99% of other female lawyers except (i) a law license, and (ii) a vagina.