Trends in Wokeness

Don’t Believe What McKinsey Has Been Saying

It doesn’t take a master’s degree from Wharton to understand that DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), as a business agenda, makes zero sense.

It’s not because those values are ethically, philosophically, or even inherently misguided. (Although one can argue that they are). It’s because the DEI agenda has nothing to do with product innovation, sales and profit growth, or shareholder value.

And so I was surprised to learn recently that McKinsey & Company has been publishing papers for nearly 10 years (since 2015) claiming that there is a direct correlation between companies that embrace DEI practices and corporate success.

Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer summarizes his research into the methodologies, analysis, and resulting conclusions of those papers, and argues that they were intentionally structured to produce data that were not just statistically inaccurate, but that arrived at conclusions that were polar opposites of what correctly applied statistical analysis would have produced.

Racial, religious, or ethnic discrimination in hiring employees, contracting vendors, pricing products, and maintaining healthy profit margins are all damaging to all businesses, he asserts. And that’s why the most successful investment research companies – despite what some of them say publicly – are leery of investing in companies with a strong DEI culture.

Click here.

Election Watch

Targeting Trump 

In this essay, Taki (of Taki’s Magazine) argues that all but possibly one of the current legal charges against Trump are basically “bills of attainder,” which were expressly forbidden by the framers of the US Constitution.

The End of Western Culture 

Damn Dams!

In December 1997, Steven Tvedten, as a result of a complaint filed by his neighbor with the Department of Environment Quality, a regional government authority, received a letter from that agency giving him six weeks to remove two “unauthorized” and “hazardous” dams from a stream on his property or face prosecution.

Tvedten responded with a letter in which he makes a mockery of the complaint and refuses to comply on behalf of the beavers that had built the two dams. The case made the news and was quickly dropped.

You can read Tvedten’s brilliantly written letter here.

Health Watch 

There Are More Viruses Than Stars in the Sky

“Viruses are everywhere,” says Dr. Toby Rogers in a recent essay on the National Geographic website. “There are a quadrillion times a quadrillion individual viruses on Earth – 100 million times more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the sky.”

But, contrary to popular belief, viruses as a class are surprisingly bad at killing us. Of those quadrillion-times-a-quadrillion individual viruses on Earth, he points out, only about 200 of them contribute to disease in humans. The rest “function as a sort of divine scratch pad for working out new models of life.”