Number Applying to Law School to Hit 30-year Low (Applicants Starting to Realize There Are Already Too Many Lawyers?)

I saw this when a classmate (a friend who graduated with me from law school and is now a manual laborer in the oilfields of North Dakota) posted it on Facebook:

“Law School Applications Crater”, Above the Law

So far, applications are down 20 percent from where they were in 2012. Law school applications are down 38 percent from where they were in 2010.

Huh?

Let me get this straight:  Law-abiding Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have “military-style” weapons that liberals think look scary (a. k. a. “assault weapons”), which are used in about 1% of gun crime (rifles of any kind are used in less than 3% of murders), but the government is giving free tanks and fighter jets to the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt who thinks the people of Israel are “bloodsuckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs” for whom Egyptian children should be “breastfed hatred”?

No, go ahead, keep voting Democrat, I’m sure you have your reasons…

Things You Hear on NPR: Laymen ‘Civilians’

On NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday:  The host, NPR’s Neal Conan, interviewed Father Jeff Kirby, a Catholic priest, about the scandals that broke ten years ago.  Conan:

Is it simply the question of how could their fellow priests or their future fellow priests do such a thing, how could the church protect them, but also—how they might come to be regarded, uh, by, uh—(pause)—I guess you’ll excuse the expression, civilians?

Things You Hear on NPR: Conservatism Is Racist

Last fall, partly as a show of good faith, I promised to listen to NPR every other day (on odd-numbered days).  (Of course I think you should make sure to get a balanced diet including at least some conservative media as well, lest you unwittingly allow yourself to sit in a self-reinforcing bubble of liberal prejudices.)

I have done so.  I don’t have much time to listen to NPR (any more than I do to listen to conservative and Christian talk radio), but I now get a significant part of my news from NPR (and the BBC, and Public Radio International, and American Public Media, and whatever else comes across the local NPR station), as I did in high school.

40 Years of Roe vs. Wade

On January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe vs. Wade (full text, Wikipedia), inventing a constitutional “right” to abortion and overturning democratically enacted laws to the contrary in something like 46 out of 50 states.  According to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, by 2008 “nearly 50 million” abortions had been performed.  (Pro-life groups estimate that the total is now more than 55 million.)

Well-spent Journey links to ten articles about the logic of the pro-life position.  It seems as good a way as any to observe this grisly anniversary.

Peer-reviewed Academic Studies: More Taxes, Less Prosperity

Via International Liberty:  Studies indicate that higher taxes lead to less economic growth.  As Dan Mitchell puts it, the Tax Foundation

reviews the academic research on taxes and growth and doesn’t find a single study supporting the notion that higher tax rates are good for prosperity.

. . .

Twenty-three studies found a negative relationship between taxes and growth, by contrast, while three studies didn’t find any relationship.

For those keeping score at home, that’s a score of 0-23-3 . . . .

Christianity Effectively a Criminal Offense in Egypt

Did you know that in Egypt, people can be sentenced to years in prison for converting to Christianity?

A mother and her seven children have been jailed for 15 years for converting back to Christianity from Islam in Egypt.

It’s not clear to me whether the fact that they were once Muslim is supposed to have made a difference.  (It’s outrageous either way.)

NRA Video: More on the Ruling Class’s Double Standard on Guns

Yesterday’s Project Veritas video included a theme of elitism, a ruling class that thinks it can live by one set of rules while imposing other rules on the rest of us—“Guns for Me but Not for Thee”, as the title of John Fund’s column put it.

Apparently the NRA also released an ad yesterday on the same theme:

Project Veritas, John Fund, Others: ‘Guns for Me but Not for Thee’

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has a new video out:

Project Veritas explains that idea was to show the irony (not to say hypocrisy) of anti-gun journalists and politicians who bully ordinary citizens and want to make it more difficult for us to arm ourselves and defend ourselves against criminals, while those same journalists and politicians rely heavily on guns to protect themselves.

Band Name

I think Germans with Colds would be a good name for a band.

Learned Ability

Overheard among some college students:

So I’m prepared—for drinking.  It’s about all I’m prepared for.

Christians a Plurality Worldwide, about One Third of All People

Christianity is the largest religion in the world (by a significant margin), comprising almost a third of the world’s population (about 2.2 billion).

All the Numbers You Always Wanted on Government Spending (But Were Afraid to Ask)

(Come for the pretty graphs; stay for the mounting sense of terror!)

I thought it would be useful to have all these data together in one place for easy reference, illustrated with easy-to-understand graphs, with links to solid sources.  I’ve even added a convenient hyperlinked table of contents:

• Government Keeps Growing

• Forced Redistribution Is Now the Main Thing the Federal Government Does

• “Fair Share”

• Federal Government Borrows More than a Third of Every Dollar It Spends

• “But I Heard Obama Has Been Really Responsible!”

In U. S., 22% of Pregnancies Aborted, 1.2 Million Abortions a Year

Just for everyone’s reference, according to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, more than one in every five pregnancies in America today is terminated by induced abortion, adding up to more than a million abortions a year.

Nineteenth-century Americans Knew the Fetus Was a Person

National Review Online has an interesting piece about the legal history of abortion in America.  Apparently there’s a certain liberal narrative that “the true purpose of 19th-century abortion laws was to protect women, not unborn children,” and that there was a “right” to abortion in Anglo-American common law “from 1607 to 1830.”

Apparently this narrative is far from historically accurate, and the liberal lawyers who crafted it were sometimes surprisingly explicit (among themselves) about what they were doing: