How many legs would a calf have?  This was a rhetorical question put to his cabinet by Abraham Lincoln during a discussion that seemed to be running in circles.  They all answered, “Five,” at which point Lincoln corrected them.  Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Nor can you credibly claim that fossil fuels are being “subsidized” by re-defining “subsidy” into meaninglessness, as a several authors affiliated with the International Monetary Fund seems to have done.  According to those sages, world-wide energy costs — by which they overwhelmingly mean fossil fuel energy costs — are being “subsidized” to the tune of $5.3 trillion annually.  The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has the article.  Here’s the blog post.  The blog post relies heavily on an IMF working paper, “How Large are Global Energy Subsidies?,” available in .pdf here. The reader doesn’t get past the headline without tripping across the writers’ leftist bias splashed across the screen:  “Act Local, Solve Global: The $5.3 Trillion Energy Subsidy Problem”.  Isn’t $5.3 trillion a rather large number?  How did they get there?  Did they add up governmental hand-outs, direct or indirect, to energy producers or consumers?  Well no, no they didn’t.  What they did was define a calf’s tail so that now it’s a leg:

“We define energy subsidies as the difference between what consumers pay for energy and its ‘true costs,’ plus a country’s normal value added or sales  tax rate. These ‘true costs’ of energy consumption include its supply costs and the damage that energy consumption inflicts on people and the environment. These damages, in turn, come from carbon emissions and hence global warming; the health effects of air pollution; and the effects on traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and road damage. Most of these externalities are borne by local populations, with the global warming component of energy subsidies  only a fourth of the total.”

“Externalities.”  “True costs.”  And of course, “global warming.” The latter of which hasn’t been occurring for the past 15-plus years, and the extent to which it is anthropogenic is the subject of massive debate, despite what the acolytes of The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the television talking heads, and the rest of the left-extremist media repeatedly assure us is “consensus” scientific opinion.  Even on the assumption that, long-term, the earth overall is in fact warming up, as of right now there is little robust (in other words, non-manipulated) data to indicate that human activity is the dominant cause of it.  Looked at slightly differently, for the past 15 years, during which time everyone now agrees there has been a “hiatus” in warming, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily climbing.  By every one of the climate alarmists’ models the world should be cooking.  But it’s not.  Why not?  Well, there are a bunch of theories out there, all of which — hardly surprisingly — rely on naturally-occurring phenomena to explain “where the heat is being hidden.”  But what does that tell us?  What it tells us is that naturally-occurring phenomena can very easily overwhelm the anthropogenic component of warming trends, and that assumes that the computer models which are the source of our estimates of the magnitude of that component are accurate in the first place.  Which may or may not be the case.

These IMF writers are perfectly comfortable not only assuming that the world is warming and will continue to warm, but that it’s human carbon emissions that are the cause of it.  And then they pull a number out of thin air to slap a price tag on it, and call it an “externality” which must be accounted for in calculating the “true” cost of energy.

The health effects of air pollution are a genuine external cost of the use of fossil fuels.  And it’s not hard to put some pretty robust numbers on that cost.  Most countries keep pretty good track of mortality and morbidity, and the range of illnesses and diseases reliably connected to ambient air pollution is pretty well-settled.  So when they authors write, “In China alone, the World Health Organization estimates there are over one million premature deaths per year due to outdoor air pollution, caused by the burning of polluting fuels, particularly coal, and other sources,” that’s a number I can take at close to face value (ignoring the extent to which international NGOs have joyfully prostituted themselves to various left-extremist causes).

That million-premature-deaths-per-year data point really doesn’t take full account to the full consequences of China’s fuel consumption, does it?  Let’s look back a few decades to see what life in Red China was like before its economy took off.  China was a land of — in many provinces still is — dirt-poor peasants, without clean drinking water, transportation to keep the villages fed, reliable modern or semi-modern healthcare, or most of the other advantages of modern economies.  They died like flies.  What has happened to overall life expectancy in China as a result of its economic modernization?  Here are the charts: overall life expectancy went from 68.31 years in 1985 to 73.27 years in 2010.  These IMF folks are counting only one side of the equation.  If I increase life expectancy across several hundred million people by five years through generalized, wide-spread economic development — a development which would be utterly impossible without cheap, for which read “fossil” energy — but out of those hundreds of millions, 1 million annually die prematurely, then I’m not only still to the good, I’m massively to the good.  In India, one of the other major “sinners” in fossil fuel consumption, the increase is even more stark.  We see life expectancy going from 62.5 to 67.14 years between 2000 and 2012, five years’ increase over just twelve years.

By the way, despite the obviously Marxist leanings of these IMF wonks, general economic development and prosperity inures to everyone’s advantage.  Everyone’s.  If air pollution is an external cost, then general economic advancement is an external benefit, and it’s asinine — and dishonest — to include the one without accounting for the other.

“The effects on traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and road damage”:  These are likewise “external costs” that amount to “subsidies” of energy.    I’d love to see someone demonstrate that “too-cheap” energy prices result in traffic congestion and accidents.  What produces traffic congestion and road accidents are too many people trying to fit their vehicles onto a given surface of road at the same time.  And what produces that is geographically concentrated economic opportunity that grows faster than government’s ability to respond to it.  Unemployed people don’t drive to work, to put it bluntly.  Businesses that go out of business don’t run their trucks.  So if we just tamped down productive economic activity our roads would be safer and less congested.  Which appears to be the objective of these authors.

The kind of economic advancement which produces crowded (and dangerous) traffic condition arises from, and only from, relatively inexpensive transportation, and that requires relatively inexpensive energy.  By “relatively,” I mean, incidentally, relative to other mechanized and non-mechanized forms of transportation.  When you had to own and maintain a horse and wagon in order to “drive” anywhere, that was both highly inefficient and very restrictive.  As Paul Johnson describes travel in pre-railroad England in The Birth of the Modern, the vast majority of people walked wherever they went, because they couldn’t afford to ride, not because they wanted to stop and smell the flowers.  That’s still true elsewhere in the world.  Despite all the picturesque photographs in The National Geographic of swarms of passengers so covering rail cars that you can’t see the rail car beneath them, most people in the less developed world walk, and not from choice.

Non-mechanized travel is slow, it’s inefficient (how many horse-drawn wagons would it take to deliver the lumber and brick to build a single house? how many guys driving flat-bed trucks?), and it is, relative to fossil-fueled mechanized travel, horribly, horribly expensive.  Among forms of mechanized transportation, railroads are phenomenally inefficient in any sense of how much energy it takes to move X people or weight of objects Y distance, from any given Point A to Point B.  Those who extol the virtues of rail conveniently pay attention to the first component X over Y, forgetting that niggling little issue of where it’s being transported from and to: which Point A to which Point B.  There is not money enough in all the world to build and run railroads to everywhere that needs cheap transportation.  If I’m 30 miles from the nearest railroad point of embarkation (and many, many places, even in the Easter U.S., are), then it doesn’t really do me much good to ponder how much weight a train can pull per unit of energy, does it?

Once more, the “too-cheap energy” hand-wringers need to answer the question of precisely how they account for the overall benefit, in length and quality of life, provided by modern capitalistic economies operating through the inter-connectedness of inter-continental markets for everyday goods (and even services, although to a lesser extent).  These authors’ outlook assumes a pre-lapsarian paradise where an increasing population somehow has jobs that somehow enable its individuals to pay the bills and somehow live long, relatively-healthy lives, without a relatively inexpensive way to move people and goods, to heat, cool, and light houses and businesses, and to operate the machines which make the physical objects that make it all possible.

How do our authors propose to impose on consumers the “true cost” of energy?  Why, through taxation, of course.

“The fiscal gains from subsidy reform are sizeable and could be a game changer for fiscal policy in many countries.  This would give room, for example, for governments to reduce some types of taxes (such as those imposed on labor) that weigh down growth;  raise growth-enhancing public expenditure (e.g. for infrastructure, health  and education); and finance targeted cash transfers for the poor.  Furthermore, there would be appropriate incentives for investment in green technology because dirty energy would no longer be artificially cheap.”

In the working paper linked above you get a better idea of just how purely theoretical all these wonderful “savings” actually are.  Reducing a tax on labor sounds nice, but it really doesn’t answer the question where you are going to replace the money from all the income tax revenue lost from jobs destroyed or more importantly jobs never created.  Moreover, if you just read the above paragraph you’ll notice a curious contradiction:  Increasing energy costs will reduce energy consumption, and we’re going to use all that money flowing in to . . . build and repair more roads and bridges for all the cars and trucks that aren’t being driven any more.  It also assumes an infinitely linear relationship between economic growth and government expenditure on “education” (no such relationship has ever been shown above a certain level; if that were the case the United States would be a nation of Einsteins) or “health” (ditto).  And finally we get to the nub:  more money to hand out to our pet constituencies and “green energy” cronies.

On a more practical level, when has there even been a sustained pattern of government taking one tax revenue source and using it to reduce another?  That is a supposition that defies uniform experience of government since the days of the pharaohs.  For that matter, it seems to me that if most of the externalities of energy consumption are experienced locally, then paying a whacking great chunk of money to a centralized bureaucracy to siphon 40-80% of it off the top in “administration” costs and then dole the balance out to its favored constituents is precisely the wrong way to match externalities with those who must experience them in the actual lives.  I’ll give you a hint:  There aren’t a whole lot of “green energy” mooches in Atlanta, and yet there’s a boat-load of externalities to experience there (as anyone who’s tried to drive further than three blocks around there can tell you).  So the solution is to impose a tax on all those who live and work in Atlanta, so some firm in Silicon Valley can be handed $535 million in taxpayers’ money to get behind the major-political-donors’ equity position when the firm, which was already irretrievably broke when the money was paid, files its bankruptcy petition?  Color me uninterested.

Finally, other than using less energy, what do the authors’ suggested uses of this tax revenue actually do to reduce the externalities of energy consumption?  China could burn 17% less coal and it would still have lousy air quality in its large cities.  New Yorkers could burn 17% less automotive fuels and mid-town would still be a parking lot for most of the day.  Where the change would occur would be at the margin and in truth would largely occur in the form of lack of economic activity.  In any single year that might not be a terribly large number, but once you slice 0.5% off your annual rate of growth over several decades because energy is now so damned expensive, and suddenly the difference in overall societal condition is the difference between the American Midwest and rural India.

Also noteworthy is the authors’ pointing out that the “externalities” of “too-cheap” energy are very predominantly local.  Even assuming all the climate alarmist chatter to be true in every detail [It’s not; all these models and projections trace themselves to data held by the University of East Anglia, data so thoroughly corrupted by manipulation that the man they hired to recreate their original measurements gave up after about three years of trying; the source data has been so monkeyed with that it is unusable for any other than propaganda purposes . . . which coincidentally is what it’s being used for; useful entry points to understand what’s been going on here, here, and especially here.], something like half the total is accounted for by local air pollution.  Local.  All of which is to say that there are enormous swathes of every country on the face of the earth where the air simply isn’t all that bad.  Yet the taxes proposed will hit everyone in the country.  Seems like what they’re proposing is to shift the externalities from one subset of people (residents of dense urban pockets) to another subset (everyone else).  I’d also note that non-residents of dense urban areas tend to use — at least in their personal existence — more energy for things like transportation than their urban cousins.  Ditto businesses.  If you live or work out in the sticks, you’ve got further to move yourself and your stuff than if your customer base all lives within 25 miles of you or your business.

In fairness to the authors of the linked paper, they do come right out and admit that their conclusions rely on enormous assumptions that may or may not be true, especially on the benefit end of things.  This is significant, because we do know a great deal about the cost of suppressing growth.  Take a look at the life expectancies as of 1960 in — China: 43.47 years; India:  41.38 years; Brazil: 54.69 years.  Those truncated lives are the “externality” of allowing a bunch of coastal elites to feel good about themselves by taxing the rest of us into oblivion so they can have more of our money to play with.

I humbly suggest that willfully knocking the creation and aggregation of wealth back to an era when we didn’t have a million Chinese dying “prematurely” each year, but rather hundreds of millions of Chinese with over 20 years’ less life expectancy at birth, all based on pie-in-the-sky assumptions about all this magical government revenue that will roll in from a shrunken economy, is a suggestion that does not deserve to be taken seriously.

And those assumptions sure as hell are no basis to claim that energy is being sold at $5.3 trillion below its “true cost” annually.

Instapundit I think it was who formulated a very helpful rule:  In trying to make sense of what gets or doesn’t get reported in the U.S. mainstream media, and how is reported what does see the light of day, if you simply proceed from the notion that the reporter and the organization are Democrat Party operatives then you won’t go far wrong.

Notwithstanding we see the wisdom of that rule confirmed time and again, we are forever assured that there is no lamestream media bias in favor of the left.  Oh noes!  You can, of course, regularly and with depressing uniformity of result play “Name that Party,” in which reports of egregious wrong-doing by prominent Democrats either never mention party affiliation, or bury it in the third-from-last paragraph of a 25-paragraph story, over on page B-15 of the Saturday morning paper, while Republicans will have their affiliation mentioned in the lead sentence of the first paragraph, if not the headline as well.  You can read the whole sordid history of Journolist, the conspiracy hatched and run from The Washington Post’s offices by Ezra Klein during the 2008 presidential campaign, and the intent and effect of which was to coordinate among roughly 400 reporters and Democrat operatives what and how they were going to report in connection with that campaign.  You can go back and watch Candy Crowley (I think it was) jump into Mitt Romney’s shellacking of Dear Leader during their debate, to buttress a fraudulent claim by Dear Leader that he had correctly identified the Benghazi attacks as being of terroristic origin, when in fact he did no such thing for weeks afterward.  And so forth and so on.

Or you can follow the story of George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton operative who now masquerades as a “journalist” on ABC, and who interviewed the author who has described in detail the patterns of cash flowing from various unsavory foreign governments and operations to the Clinton family’s slush fund, while Hillary Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State, and which — coincidentally, we’re assured — achieved favorable results in the discussions they just happened to be having with the U.S. government and its agencies at the time.  Ol’ Georgie-boy kept asserting during his interview that the author had “no evidence” of any quid pro quo arrangements.  No “smoking gun.”  No evidence.  No evidence.  No evidence.  Well, of course not:  Hillary destroyed any evidence that might have existed after cherry-picking what e-mails to surrender to the U.S. government.  [N.b.  When the images of her private server’s hard drive are finally leaked, however, then we’ll see the evidence.  I am perfectly comfortable that those images exist in the hands of multiple parties hostile to the U.S. . . . and that their existence has been made known to Hillary, very quietly of course.]

The problem for George is that at no time before or after that interview did Stephanopoulos disclose that over three years — 2012, 2013, and 2014 — he had made annual $25,000 contributions to the Clinton Foundation or that he was an active participant in several of its functions.  When confronted, he first dismissed annually giving over half the annual median income of a household of four as chump change, and nothing we ought to worry about.  Moreover, it was just part of his larger charitable giving program, dontcha know, and he’s just such charitable guy and all that stuff.

There’s only one problem:  At the end of 2010, the Clinton Foundation spun off the vast bulk of its charitable activities and since then has concentrated on activities more properly characterized as Clinton campaign networking.  By 2013 the foundation spent less than 15% of its revenue on charitable grants; in contrast, over 60% of its expenses are characterized as just “other.”  So whatever else George Stephanopoulos’s $75,000 in chump change was paying for, it sure as hell wasn’t much charity at all.

ABC has already doubled down, vigorously defending their standard-bearer and declining to do anything more than promise he won’t “moderate” a GOP presidential debate.

If the GOP has a lick of sense about it, they’ll categorically refuse to permit this hack to come anywhere near a 2016 presidential debate.  Which means he’ll do ’em all, of course.

Twenty-odd years ago someone came up with the assertion that it was impossible for someone from a “minority” to be racist, because racism is by definition an aspect of a unidirectional power relationship, and not a mind-set, a frame of reference, or even a visceral animosity.  If I can exercise no power over you, then necessarily I am incapable of racism towards you.  “You,” by the way, is defined by group affiliation (an affiliation which I claim the right to assign, incidentally).  It thus follows that even though I can treat the guy bringing me my lunch at the restaurant like shit, if he’s a member of a group over which I deny the ability to exercise “power” (or “privilege,” the new and ill-defined term used in its place), then I can lord it over you to my heart’s content based on your skin color and all with a clean conscience.

I cannot recall if it was Leonard Jeffries, enjoying his taxpayer-funded gig at CUNY, who came up with that precise formulation of the idea, but if he didn’t he should have.  He peddles, among other notions, that of whites as “ice people,” who are genetically violent and oppressive, and blacks as “sun people” who are genetically peaceful and compassionate.  This is  one excrescence of something going by the name “melanin theory.”  Wikipedia describes it as a “pseudo-science,” and it gets the “pseudo-” part only because there is one tiny little grain of truth in it:  “white,” by which is meant “Caucasian” hued skin is in fact the result of a genetic mutation which seems, as I understand, to have occurred after the first humans left Africa.  All humans once had skin much closer in color to today’s sub-Saharan Africans.  And then at some point in the DNA history up cropped the “white” mutation.  Since having very dark skin was not a particularly helpful trait for those humans living outside of sub-Saharan Africa (and let’s recall for a moment that humans didn’t evolve all over Africa, but rather in that part of it comparatively near the equator, where the sun is at its most intense), the mutant strain didn’t select out of the population.  By the way, humans aren’t the only ones to evidence the dropping of a gene that is no longer of assistance; there is (I read this years ago in The Economist) a species of wild dog on New Guinea which used to be domesticated.  The gene for tail-wagging has sifted out of that species after it went wild again, and so they, like other wild canids, do not wag their tails as does your labradoodle.

I have to wonder how Jeffries accounts for, say, the Japanese, or the Amish . . . or the Hutu and Tutsi.  Imagine that:  In 1994 over the course of 100 days or so an entire genetically peaceful and compassionate ethnic group so revolted against its genetic coding as to slaughter 900,000 of its neighbors, whose skin is nearly precisely the same color as theirs.

Suffice it to say that Jeffries is enjoying his taxpayer-funded (and that’s New York City, state, and federal funds, since CUNY receives funding from all three sources and one dollar is fungible with all others) position to put out a load of “Afrocentric” clap-trap that is doing no one any favors but himself.

Demonstrating that one of the hallmarks of idiocy and fraud is recrudescence, we now have a point-blank statement of the principle from Great Britain.  Some weeks ago the student union at Goldsmiths University in London sponsored a function.  The university’s “diversity officer” (alas, that title is genuine; there really does appear to be such a person), perhaps not understanding the word “diversity,” posted on the union’s Facebook page a curious appendix to the event announcement:  If you’re male, or white, do not come to this event.  This is for “BME” (whatever the hell that means) and “non-binary” people (what-really-ever the hell that means) only.  Because diversity, you know.  Notice, by the way, that white women are also specifically uninvited; that’s important to recall in light of the quotation I’m about to share with you.

As anyone with enough to sense to make anything of his/her life other than become a “diversity officer” could have foreseen, the rational world exploded at this — well, frankly racist exclusion based upon skin color, and sexist exclusion based upon genitals.  Even the WaPo picked the story up.  The diversity officer in question then proceeds to dig her hole even deeper:

“I want to explain why this [people pointing out that her actions betray both racism and sexism] is false. I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describes structures of privilege based on race and gender.  And therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist because we do not stand to benefit from such a system.”

She really said that.  She really used the expression “minority genders.”  Presumably she wasn’t talking about females, since they’re not quite 51% of the gross human population.  And we know that she’s not talking about males, since she hates them based upon their genitals.  Presumably there are multiple genders out there which are “minority”.  Now, she identifies as an “ethnic minority woman,” and based on that she’s on the wrong end of at least one “structure[] of privilege based on . . . gender.”  Of course, white women are also on the wrong end of any such “structures of privilege based on . . . gender,” but she specifically disinvited them as well.  On what could that disinvitation be based if not racism?  Oh, but they’re white, and so they cannot be victims of “structures of privilege based on race.”  I guess white women are to be left to sort things out for themselves in respect of the structures of privilege based on gender.  Notice that she only claims that she cannot be racist or sexist towards white men; do I sense an admission that she can be racist towards white women?

Oh dear, how does a human mind get so confused?  We cannot say for sure, but whatever the cause if you try to wade through her self-description you realize the rot has gone deep:  “I am particularly interested in looking at the gendered body in Japanese pornographic anime and horror through a Foucauldian framework in order to analyse the West’s gaze upon a world it attempts to categorize.  My politics are intersectional, queer, feminist, anti-racist . . . I am a working class, Turkish Cypriot, queer, disabled woman and activist.”  If by “disabled” she means “gibbering lunatic,” then I suppose that may explain some of it.

I guess it’s a good thing that no one outside the West — oh, say, for example, the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia or the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Hindu in India — attempt to “categorize” the “gendered body.”  No, in Saudi Arabia they just won’t let people wearing a vagina drive a car or hold a job.  In Afghanistan they’ll throw acid in the “gendered” face for the crime of exposing it to God’s sunshine and fresh air.  And in India entire gangs of men will enjoy themselves on some teenage “gendered body” before hanging her by the neck in a tree.  And in Southeast Asia they’ll sell pre-pubescent “gendered bodies” to brothels to be whored out to bus-loads of middle-aged Southeast Asian men (and Europeans and Americans who also travel to those places for precisely those purposes; at least in That Awful West we try to arrest them on their return if we can catch them at it).

Maybe Miss Mustafa can move to New York City and shack up with Leonard Jeffries.  They can “categorize” each other’s “gendered bodies” and condole each other that it’s all Whitey’s fault.

[Update 20 May 15]:  Apparently using Twitter hashtags like #killallwhitemen does not constitute racism, under Comrade Mustafa’s rules.  Problem for her is that the students at her university might not agree.  They’re gathering signatures for a vote of no confidence in her.

Don’t get me wrong.  Stacy Chou, featured in this article in the most recent edition of Wired, has not only an undergraduate degree but also a master’s in computer science, with a specialty in artificial intelligence.  Her day job is coding for Pinterest, and she interned at Google and Facebook before signing on as one of the first 15 employees at Pinterest.  She’s got chops, in other words.  I’m quite satisfied she’s brilliant in ways I don’t even suspect a human can be brilliant.

I’m just some ol’ redneck.

But Comrade Chou is also an “activist.”  And how, whom, or what does she activate?  Well, she’s trying to increase the number of women employed as engineers in Silicon Valley.  Among the 200-odd smaller tech firms who voluntarily responded to a survey she’s organized, she found — just to what extent can this have been news to her or anyone else? — that only a tiny number of the engineers were women.  Sound the diversity klaxon!

She’s also trying to recruit more women directly into her company.  This summer, 21 of 57 interns scheduled to work for Pinterest are women.  And she trots out:  “It’s still not enough.”  Enough?  For someone as hyper-intelligent as she is, she seems to understand very little about either basic human nature or the demographics of the world in which she works and moves.

For starts, specific humans are not random events.  Each of us in the product, to a greater or lesser extent, of everything that has happened to us, every decision we’ve made over the course of our entire lives up through today, starting with the family we were born into and continuing on until this morning.

Secondly, Pinterest and its peers aren’t just hiring people to work the loading dock.  Their hiring criteria are painfully exacting.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but there aren’t a whole lot of Stacy Chous out there to hire, of either sex, of any race, of any age, of any ethnic or national background.  Period.  With folks like Mlle Chou, you’re talking three standard deviations above the mean just in raw mental horsepower, and that’s before you even get to the questions of talent and inclination.  Yes, it’s possible today for people in that field to work closely together from all over the world (a cousin of mine works from home outside San Francisco and his immediate boss works in London; the rest of his team is similarly scattered about the globe), but you still have to find them first, and that takes proximity.  The world is a huge place and the gross number of humans with the requisite mental capacity is finite.  A half-percent of seven billion humans (gross population isn’t at that level yet), which is actually a bit more than the proportion of the gross population at 3+ standard deviations above mean IQ, is 35 million (that same proportion of the U.S. population shakes out to roughly 1.65 million), and those people are scattered everywhere from villages in sub-Saharan Africa to Central Asia to Polynesia to Scandanavia to Dothan, Alabama.  The likelihood of any single one of them finding his or her way to Silicon Valley and even scoring an interview at a top-level tech firm is dauntingly, vanishingly remote.

Thirdly, no one at Pinterest or anywhere else in Silicon Valley is going to hire someone to learn computer engineering on the job.  That’s called learning how to shave on someone else’s face and Silicon Valley has no more money for that sort of indulgence than any other industry.  Nor are they likely to hire someone who’s just a pretty skilled engineer.  They’re looking for the very top layer of the very upper-most crust of the most talented people in the industry.  They’re looking for people who can strap themselves in and immediately launch down the catapult.  Those people don’t just coalesce from thin air sometime during their senior year at college.  Those are the people who’ve already been doing this sort of stuff, not only at school but also as a hobby, in clubs, on their own, for years before they ever darken a door in Silicon Valley.  They’re the kind of people for whom computers and programming are not just a field, but a vocation.  I’d bet that if Mlle Chou polls this summer’s interns, she’ll not only find out that most if not all of those 57 have — just for giggles — written multiple apps of their own, but that a large portion of them wrote their first apps before their junior year in high school.  It takes a long, long time for the talents and drive Pinterest and its peers are looking for to grow within any person.

All of which is to say that the pool of eligible hires for any serious firm in Silicon Valley is not only going to be minuscule, but it will be, even more so than in any other industry, incredibly self-selected.

And here we get to ordinary human nature.  It is neither more nor less an undeniable fact that girls, beginning right at the point in life when that sort of fanatic devotion to an activity begins to manifest itself (my hobby — my consuming passion — from the time I was in 7th grade was designing ships; had I been able to do calculus I’d have majored in naval architecture and this blog wouldn’t exist), girls self-select out of the STEM fields.  They just do.  Sure, some of it’s cultural, but unless Mlle Chou’s got plans she’s not sharing with us, neither she nor anyone else in Silicon Valley is going to be able to change the cultural forces to which 6th grade girls are exposed, either here in the U.S. or in any other country.  Some of it’s not cultural; a few years ago Larry Summers posed the question why there are so many fewer women at the very top of the field of (I think it was) mathematics than there are men.  He posed the question of whether there might be a sex-correlated difference in talent at that level.  Notice he did not say, “women can’t do math” or anything of that nature.  He merely speculated that — at that very highest level of achievement — there may be some physiological sex-correlated achievement differential.  He was crucified for even asking the question; lost his job, if Gentle Reader will recall.  You don’t, however, have to do a whole lot of digging to find credible support for the notion that female and male brains are adapted to different modes of thought and reasoning, that these adaptations lend themselves at different levels to different fields of human endeavor, and that these adaptations express themselves in the differing frequency of the voluntary pursuits of women versus men.  It’s just that simple.

So for Mlle Chou to say that X out of Y engineers’ being female is “not enough” is to assume any number of facts that not only aren’t in evidence, but rather are directly contradicted by some of the most basic facts which are.  Additionally, how the hell can you tell when the number of people exhibiting any arbitrarily selected characteristic is “enough,” when you’re talking about recruiting from a tiny talent pool for an incredibly demanding job?  You know when you have “enough” women, or “enough” blacks, or “enough” Jews, or “enough” left-handed people, or “enough” Pacific islanders?  You have “enough” when your team has sufficient talent to get the job done, right, on time, and within budget.  Then and only then can you say you’ve got “enough” of anyone.  If you can do all that, then, irrespective of what it is you’re looking for, you have enough of it; if you can’t do that, you need more talent and more dedication, not more women.

But then again if Comrade Chou had said that, she wouldn’t be featured in Wired, would she?

If Comrade Chou wants to recruit more women (or more of any arbitrary and largely irrelevant characteristic) into her job field, bully for her.  If her employer is OK with her doing that on the company’s dime, that’s fine too.  It’s their money to squander.  If I were the company’s general counsel I’d jolly well see to it that any such recruitment effort gets assayed over a Bunsen burner to make sure the company doesn’t get itself sued into oblivion by someone not wearing Mlle Chou’s favorite sort of genitals (this is California we’re talking about; if Comrade Chou fails to hire a man who’s had himself surgically mutilated into resembling a “woman” because he’s, you know, still a man, then God help her and her employer).  But to say that some X specimens of anything out of Y total employees is “enough” or “too many” or “woefully inadequate” is nothing more than silly.

Once again we see demonstrated that awe-inspiring levels of intelligence and garden-variety silliness are not mutually exclusive traits.

Back at the end of February I linked to an article in The Washington Post about the failure of the Clinton Foundation to disclose some pretty hefty contributions from foreign governments and other foreign affiliates to the Clinton family’s slush fund charitable foundation, all at a time when Hillary Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State and those foreign governments or nationals were actively engaged in discussions with the United States, through the latter’s Department of State, for various sorts of things, generally involving trade concessions, greasing the skids for foreign business interests to do business in the U.S. or with U.S. companies, and so forth.

In my post on that article I lamented that the sleuths had followed the money trail only part of the way.  Specifically I noted that asking where the money came from is only part of the question, and that equally important is the issue of where the money has gone, since “charitable foundations” so easily lend themselves to what ordinary speakers of English would describe as money-laundering.

Some of that sleuthing has now been done, as well as additional digging on the sources of funds.  At the risk of understatement, what has come to light thus far is several orders of magnitude worse than what I’d have imagined back in February.

For starts there’s the Canadian mega-donor, who was flying Bill Clinton around on his private McDonnell-Douglas MD-87.  Frank Giustra first met the former president in 2005 and they quickly became buddies.  Over the years Giustra’s committed in the neighborhood of $100 million to the foundation, placing him firmly among the largest individual donors.  Since 2005 the plane has been used 26 times for foundation business, frequently ferrying Clinton around the world.  None of those trips, each of which is a contribution by a foreign donor, has previously been reported, by the way.  The Washington Post has a nice write-up on the plane and the connections between the Clintons and Giustra.

It’s about well more than an airplane, however.  It seems that Comrade Giustra set up his own “charity” in Canada.  That “charity” has donated quite a bit of money to the Clintons’ slush fund charitable foundation.  There was a 2008 written agreement between Hillary Clinton, the Clintons’ foundation, and the incoming administration of Dear Leader, in which Hillary was to serve as secretary of state, to disclose all foreign donations to the Clintons’ foundation.  Well . . . its seems that while the donations from Giustra’s foundation are disclosed, the identities of over 1,100 foreign donors to Giustra’s foundation remain secret.  Which is to say that without popping open the lid on the Canadian’s foundation we have no way of knowing on which foreign governments’ or actors’ payroll our former U.S. Secretary of State is.

But it gets better.  Ol’ Comrade Giustra owned huge uranium mining interests, including mines in Kazakhstan he acquired in 2005 in a $500 million deal . . . a deal finalized within days after he personally visited with the Kazakh president . . . in the company of one Wm. Jeff’n Clinton, erstwhile U.S. President.  Now, let’s not overlook that in 2005 Clinton was just a former president and his wife a junior senator from New York.  On the other hand, everyone and his cousin knew Hillary was running in 2008 and already three years earlier had been anointed with the mantle of “inevitability” (Dear Leader, of course, hadn’t got that memo).  The Kazakh deal made Giustra a major world-wide player in the uranium mining industry.  The next year Giustra made a $32.7 million donation to the Clintons’ foundation.  But of course Giustra and Clinton both deny Bill had anything to do with getting the deal closed.

Oh, but it gets better.  Let’s follow the thread some more.  In 2007, Giustra merged his uranium mining company — UrAsia — with a company called Uranium One.  Uranium One also happens to control about 20% of America’s domestic production of uranium, a strategic mineral.  Uranium One was headed by a buddy of Giustra’s.  During Hillary’s tenure as U.S. Secretary, Uranium One decided to sell itself to the Russian government in a series of transactions running from 2009 to 2013.  The sale of a company that controlled that much of American uranium required the approval of the U.S. Department of State.  While this deal was being reviewed by State, the chairman of Uranium One donated some $2.35 million to the Clintons’ slush fund foundation, and one of the Russian bankers working that end of it engaged Bill Clinton to deliver a speech in Moscow.  For a nice $500,000 fee, among the largest he ever got.  The State Department approved the deal.  During the deal, Comrade Giustra — remember him? — arranged for senior officials from Kazatomprom (it was involved in the deal from the Kazakh end of things) to visit with the former president at his house in New York.  Confronted with questions about the visit, the Clinton Foundation reflexively lied and said the visit had never occurred . . . until the reporter from The New York Times observed there existed a photograph taken at the meeting, at which point the story changed.  Yes, the meeting had taken place.

That same NYT reporter is the author of a pretty damning report . . . in The Grey Lady, of all places.  “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal” is the headline, which pretty much sums it up.  Recall that this wasn’t a one-off thing.  It was sequence of transactions and during the entire period the cash kept flowing.  Moreover, the State Department was involved in substantially more than just signing off as Russia acquired control over 20% of U.S. production.  Remember those mines in Kazakhstan that Giustra had bought right after a visit from Bill Clinton to the Kazakh president?  Well, those mines were the crown jewels for Uranium One.  Rosatom (the Russian government’s entity) was only interested in the deal if it knew that it could get clear title to those mines.  There was only one problem, however:  In June, 2009, “Mr. Dzhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom, had just been arrested on charges that he illegally sold uranium deposits to foreign companies, including at least some of those won by Mr. Giustra’s UrAsia and now owned by Uranium One.”  Uranium One’s stock value dropped precipitously on the news.  Oopsies.  It turns out, by the way, as we now know from Wikileaks revelations, that the arrest was all part of a Russian move to force acquisition of those Kazakh assets.

So what do you do if you’re Uranium One?  Right:  You call up the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan and pressure it to get involved.  From the NYT:  “It was against this backdrop that the Vancouver-based Uranium One pressed the American Embassy in Kazakhstan, as well as Canadian diplomats, to take up its cause with Kazakh officials, according to the American cables.  ‘We want more than a statement to the press,’ Paul Clarke, a Uranium One executive vice president, told the embassy’s energy officer on June 10, the officer reported in a cable. ‘That is simply chitchat.’ What the company needed, Mr. Clarke said, was official written confirmation that the licenses were valid.”  Remind me again why the United States embassy to a foreign country is being asked to vouch for the validity of mineral concessions in that foreign country, granted by that country to a corporation that is from yet another foreign country.  On June 10 and 11, 2009, those U.S. embassy officials met with the Kazakh government, and three days later Rosatom closed its first acquisition, of a 17% interest.

And who was the U.S. Secretary of State during this period?  Oh, right:  Hillary Clinton.

Less than a year later, Rosatom made an offer that would give it a 51% stake in Uranium One.  That created some waves in Washington.  There is, it seems, an outfit called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.  This not some toothless haven for people to whom the president owes the odd political favor.  The members of this committee include the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Energy . . . and the Secretary of State.  And they certainly take their jobs seriously.  From that same NYT article:  “When a company controlled by the Chinese government sought a 51 percent stake in a tiny Nevada gold mining operation in 2009, it set off a secretive review process in Washington, where officials raised concerns primarily about the mine’s proximity to a military installation, but also about the potential for minerals at the site, including uranium, to come under Chinese control. The officials killed the deal.”

The Russian deal sailed through, at a time when the Clintons were raking in millions of dollars from people directly interested in the transactions.
“Amid this influx of Uranium One-connected money, Mr. Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.”  That would be the $500,000 speaking fee.  But not to worry:  From the NYT, we learn that, “In a statement, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, said no one ‘has ever produced a shred of evidence supporting the theory that Hillary Clinton ever took action as secretary of state to support the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation.’”  Well, that’s reassuring.  Notice, by the way, that he does not say it didn’t happen; he says no one has “produced a shred of evidence” that it happened.  You really do have to parse these people’s words carefully.

If we want to find out if there is any evidence of such goings-on, I guess all we need to do is examine in detail the written record of Hillary’s tenure at State, including specifically all of her e-mails (given the amount of time she spent on the road while in office, she must have spent a phenomenal amount of time communicating by e-mail), and then maybe we’ll get a better feel for whether or not basic human nature and simple calendar-reading is misleading us here.  Oh, I forgot:  Hillary has destroyed all original evidence of her electronic correspondence while Secretary of State.  It was stored on a private computer server in a closet in her personal residence.  She has now wiped the hard drive, after having her personal staff — not even representatives from State — determine what to turn over and what not to.  As someone recently observed, not even Nixon physically destroyed the tapes.

[As an aside:  This computer server in the closet of one of the Clintons’ unused bedrooms (or wherever it was) was most emphatically not secured to the level required for cabinet-level correspondence.  As a practical matter what this means is that there are, in places like Russia, China, very likely India, and elsewhere complete images of that entire drive in the hands of people who are no friends to the United States.  Were — God forbid — Hillary to be elected president as she believes herself entitled, we would have the U.S. President subject to blackmail by any of several implacably hostile foreign countries (and that ignores the near-certainty that it’s not just those governments who have possession of the incriminating evidence, but also private criminal organizations).]

And the above is just one of the stories of where the money has come from.  Where is it going?

Well, damn little of it is going to charitable grants (“programmatic grants” in the language of the foundation’s Internal Revenue Form 990s) to third parties.  To be precise, from 2008 to 2012 inclusive, the foundation’s own disclosure show $500 million raised (and remember that number is dishonestly low, because they didn’t disclose many millions of dollars from foreign governments and others with business before Hillary’s State Department), and of that a whacking $75 million, or 15%, going to charitable grants.  Some $290 million, or roughly 60%, isn’t even categorized on the returns, it seems; it’s just listed as “other expenses.”  Really?  You have a charitable foundation that wants to toot its own horn for doing good — and they all do that, every last stinkin’ one of them — and yet it modestly declines to describe the charitable operations or purposes for 60% of its gross expenditures over a five-year period?  Please do not insult my intelligence.  Right at $110 million went to employee salary and benefits.  Color me skeptical, but I have a hard time accepting as reasonable that 20+% in wages, salaries, and benefits for an organization that does not produce or market anything of its own.

Well, don’t they do a huge amount in-house?  Must a charity implement its charitable purposes by giving money to other organizations?  Cannot it get down in the bilges and (in the words of the late Fleet Admiral Fisher) “stoop to oil their hands”?  Let’s take a look.  From the same author as the above-linked article in The Federalist, we have this article as well.  By the numbers:

“While some may claim that the Clinton Foundation does its charity by itself, rather than outsourcing to other organizations in the form of grants, there appears to be little evidence of that activity in 2013. In 2008, for example, the Clinton Foundation spent nearly $100 million purchasing and distributing medicine and working with its care partners. In 2009, the organization spent $126 million on pharmaceutical and care partner expenses. By 2011, those activities were virtually non-existent. The group spent nothing on pharmaceutical expenses and only $1.2 million on care partner expenses. In 2012 and 2013, the Clinton Foundation spent $0. In just a few short years, the Clinton’s primary philanthropic project transitioned from a massive player in global pharmaceutical distribution to a bloated travel agency and conference organizing business that just happened to be tax-exempt.”

Now, there was some reorganization behind the changes in those numbers.  In 2010, the Global Health Access Initiative, which had previously been within the umbrella of the Clinton Foundation and which had been the vehicle through which most of that pharmaceutical and care partner expenses were run, was spun off into its own entity.  The above numbers, showing those expenses going from $126 million in 2009 to $1.2 million in 2011, reflect that.

What was left?  Well, the Clinton Global Initiative, most of whose expenses are planning and staging the annual do of the . . . Clinton Global Initiative.  Then there is the Clinton Presidential Center, which is mostly the presidential library in Little Rock.  The other main programmatic expense is the Clinton Climate Initiative.  And what is its charitable function?  Well, the problem is that according to its CEO, Ira Magaziner (we first heard his name back in the early 1990s as one of the architects of Hillarycare), it’s not charitable at all.  Do what, you say?  Let’s let Ira tell it for himself.  From an article in The Atlantic in October, 2007:

“The climate initiative, in typical Magaziner style, has many moving parts, including technical assistance to cities, networks for sharing best practices, software to measure progress, financial support, and a full-time foundation staff member assigned to each city. But the make-or-break component is a plan to re-equilibrate the market for energy conservation. ‘What we’re doing is jump-starting— accelerating—market forces,’ Magaziner told me.

<snip>

That would be step one. Step two, in Magaziner’s vision, is to channel a Niagara of private capital into the effort. Energy-saving technologies typically cost more up front but less over time. ‘So what we’re going to be doing is setting up a financing mechanism,’ he told me. The foundation would help cities borrow in the securities markets against future energy savings. ‘The whole thing is bankable,’ Magaziner said. ‘It’s a commercial proposition. This is not charity. The whole concept of this is that the market itself over some period of time is going to deploy all these energy-saving things. The problem is it will happen slowly and gradually.’ The foundation hopes to reduce decades to years, and years to months.”

OK then.  Can anyone say, “unrelated business taxable income”?  Now, with the Clintons, as with all politicians, you have to ask yourself who is to benefit from the deal.  The Clintons are accepting all kinds of money from all manner of unsavory foreign donors.  They are turning it around and pumping it into — what? — his presidential library, an annual piss-up and meet-up, and some spectrum of “green technology” firms about which we know really nothing.  Where does it go from there?  Well, we have some idea of what may well be happening.  Our template is the Solyndra fiasco.  That was the one where the U.S. government subordinated $535 million in “loans” to the equity position of major donors to Dear Leader’s campaign and related supports.  Solyndra was a “green technology” start-up.  Or little Bobby Kennedy’s outfit (the name escapes me at the moment), the public filings of which indicate that its entire business plan is to live off government grants.

How much money goes to which firms, upon what terms, and what are the political donation patterns of the principals and senior management of these operations?  That will need to be the next step, drilling down to find out how much of this cash gets recycled back to the Clintons, either in “speaking fees” for Bill, or contributions to Hillary’s presidential bid.