VideoGames & Computer Entertainment (February 1991)

VideoGames & Computer Entertainment (February 1991)

U.S. Senate and Biden Administration Shamefully Renew and Expand FISA Section 702, Ushering in a Two Year Expansion of Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance

One week after it was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate has passed what Senator Ron Wyden has called, “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” President Biden then rushed to sign it into law.  

The perhaps ironically named “Reforming Intelligence and Security America Act (RISAA)” does everything BUT reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). RISAA not only reauthorizes this mass surveillance program, it greatly expands the government’s authority by allowing it to compel a much larger group of people and providers into assisting with this surveillance. The bill’s only significant “compromise” is a limited, two-year extension of this mass surveillance. But overall, RISAA is a travesty for Americans who deserve basic constitutional rights and privacy whether they are communicating with people and services inside or outside of the US.

Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance of foreigners abroad from inside the United States. It operates, in part, through the cooperation of large telecommunications service providers: massive amounts of traffic on the Internet backbone are accessed and those communications on the government’s secret list are copied. And that’s just one part of the massive, expensive program. 

While Section 702 prohibits the NSA and FBI from intentionally targeting Americans with this mass surveillance, these agencies routinely acquire a huge amount of innocent Americans’ communications “incidentally.” The government can then conduct backdoor, warrantless searches of these “incidentally collected” communications.

The government cannot even follow the very lenient rules about what it does with the massive amount of information it gathers under Section 702, repeatedly abusing this authority by searching its databases for Americans’ communications. In 2021 alone, the FBI reported conducting up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data using Americans’ identifiers. Given this history of abuse, it is difficult to understand how Congress could decide to expand the government’s power under Section 702 rather than rein it in.

One of RISAA’s most egregious expansions is its large but ill-defined increase of the range of entities that have to turn over information to the NSA and FBI. This provision allegedly “responds” to a 2023 decision by the FISC Court of Review, which rejected the government’s argument that an unknown company was subject to Section 702 for some circumstances. While the New York Times reports that the unknown company from this FISC opinion was a data center, this new provision is written so expansively that it potentially reaches any person or company with “access” to “equipment” on which electronic communications travel or are stored, regardless of whether they are a direct provider. This could potentially include landlords, maintenance people, and many others who routinely have access to your communications on the interconnected internet.

This is to say nothing of RISAA’s other substantial expansions. RISAA changes FISA’s definition of “foreign intelligence” to include “counternarcotics”: this will allow the government to use FISA to collect information relating to not only the “international production, distribution, or financing of illicit synthetic drugs, opioids, cocaine, or other drugs driving overdose deaths,” but also to any of their precursors. While surveillance under FISA has (contrary to what most Americans believe) never been limited exclusively to terrorism and counterespionage, RISAA’s expansion of FISA to ordinary crime is unacceptable.

RISAA also allows the government to use Section 702 to vet immigrants and those seeking asylum. According to a FISC opinion released in 2023, the FISC repeatedly denied government attempts to obtain some version of this authority, before finally approving it for the first time in 2023. By formally lowering Section 702’s protections for immigrants and asylum seekers, RISAA exacerbates the risk that government officials could discriminate against members of these populations on the basis of their sexuality, gender identity, religion, or political beliefs.

Faced with massive pushback from EFF and other civil liberties advocates, some members of Congress, like Senator Ron Wyden, raised the alarm. We were able to squeeze out a couple of small concessions. One was a shorter reauthorization period for Section 702, meaning that the law will be up for review in just two more years. Also, in a letter to Congress, the Department of Justice claimed it would only interpret the new provision to apply to the type of unidentified businesses at issue in the 2023 FISC opinion. But a pinky promise from the current Department of Justice is not enforceable and easily disregarded by a future administration. There is some possible hope here, because Senator Mark Warner promised to return to the provision in a later defense authorization bill, but this whole debacle just demonstrates how Congress gives the NSA and FBI nearly free rein when it comes to protecting Americans – any limitation that actually protects us (and here the FISA Court actually did some protecting) is just swept away.

RISAA’s passage is a shocking reversal—EFF and our allies had worked hard to put together a coalition aimed at enacting a warrant requirement for Americans and some other critical reforms, but the NSA, FBI and their apologists just rolled Congress with scary-sounding (and incorrect) stories that a lapse in the spying was imminent. It was a clear dereliction of Congress’s duty to oversee the intelligence community in order to protect all of the rest of us from its long history of abuse.

After over 20 years of doing it, we know that rolling back any surveillance authority, especially one as deeply entrenched as Section 702, is an uphill fight. But we aren’t going anywhere. We had more Congressional support this time than we’ve had in the past, and we’ll be working to build that over the next two years.

Too many members of Congress (and the Administrations of both parties) don’t see any downside to violating your privacy and your constitutional rights in the name of national security. That needs to change.

U.S. Senate and Biden Administration Shamefully Renew and Expand FISA Section 702, Ushering in a Two Year Expansion of Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1297-1300)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The first photo in this set shows a middle aged couple out by a lake on a fall day. It is unlabeled and undated but is probably from the 1950s or early 1960s. The next photo shows a gentleman in a suit, also likely from the same time period. The third photo is a cat pic from November 1951. The final photo also features a cat (named Teddy in this case) but this one is under a Christmas tree sitting on the types of things cats sit on...anything. It was taken in December 1952.

November 1951

Teddy - December 1952

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

Maximum PC (March 2004)

Maximum PC (March 2004)

Why Toronto Cops Are Advising Homeowners: Just Give Criminals Your Car Keys

One of my favorite movies growing up was RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 dystopian classic.

The movie, which was probably way too violent for a 10-year-old, depicts a fictional future in which Detroit is ravaged by violent crime and on the verge of social collapse. The police are virtually powerless against the criminals, who are too numerous and better armed. Led by a particularly nasty crime lord named Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), the crooks prey on helpless citizens.

In one memorable scene, a member of Boddicker’s gang rolls up to a Shell station where a bespectacled clerk is doing geometry.

“Give me all your money, bookworm, before I blow your brains out,” the gang member says, tapping his automatic weapon against the plexiglass.

The clerk quickly puts down his compass and turns over the cash. Moments later, after filling up his motorcycle, the crook again approaches the clerk and appears poised to shoot. That’s when RoboCop shows up. 

“Drop it,” he orders, raising his three-round burst pistol. “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

The scene has always stuck with me for some reason. Maybe it was the cruelty of the sawed-off gang member (“You a college boy or something?”). Maybe it was the patheticness of the mute clerk, who seemed so weak and helpless. But mostly, I think, it was the feeling of utter lawlessness the scene evoked.

Lawlessness is an overarching theme in RoboCop. The city is out of control. Citizens can’t protect themselves, and the police aren’t much help. We see this early on when Murphy, the hero of the movie, tries to stop Boddicker’s gang and is blown to pieces (literally). What remains of Murphy’s body is reconstructed into a law-enforcing cyborg — RoboCop, half machine, half man — who is going to take on not just Boddicker and his gang but Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), the corporate villain who heads up OCP, the corporation that created him.

RoboCop is a good enough flick for a kid, but the older I got, the more absurd the film felt. The villains are cartoonish, and the idea of a society imperiled by helpless citizens and weak police forces always seemed detached from reality. 

At least it did.

Toronto, Police, and Rotten Incentives

A couple weeks ago news broke that Toronto police, facing a crime wave, have offered new instructions to citizens: leave your keys at the front door for criminals.

“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your [key] fobs at your front door,” Const. Marco Ricciardi is heard telling citizens and reporters at a recent community meeting.

When I first saw these claims on social media, I thought it must be fake news. But Toronto police confirmed it in a statement.

“Police are concerned about an escalation in violence, where all sorts of weapons and firearms are being used to steal vehicles, and that includes during home invasions,” the statement reads.

Police have a point about surging crime. Car thefts are up 25 percent over the last year in Toronto, news agencies report, and many of the crimes involve crooks breaking into homes and snagging car keys.

When you watch the footage of masked attackers kicking in doors — many of whom are armed, according to police — one can see a certain logic to the guidelines. If the invaders find the keys quickly, it reduces the likelihood of an encounter between a homeowner and a potentially armed group of criminals.

Still, there are obvious problems. Put aside for now that your car (and everything in it) is being stolen. There’s also the problem of incentives.

We talk a lot about incentives (and disincentives) in economics. They are the drivers of human action. We make countless decisions every day, consciously and unconsciously, based on incentive structures around us. You needn’t be an economist to appreciate their power.

“Incentive structures work, so you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do,” Steve Jobs told author Brent Schendler many years ago, “because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate.”

The late Charlie Munger once said that if you showed him the incentive, he’d show you the result. And though incentives can get rather complicated, at their most basic level they are rather simple. A good incentive structure rewards good behavior and punishes bad.

Anyone who has trained a dog or raised a child understands this. You don’t give a dog a treat after he poops on your carpet; you give him a treat after he sits (or does whatever task you want him to do). You might reward a child with ice cream for getting a good grade on a spelling test, but not for throwing a tantrum at the grocery store.

Which brings me back to Toronto. By telling residents to leave their key fobs at the front door for criminals, police are essentially incentivizing burglary and theft. They are making it easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.

One needn’t have a Ph.D in economics to understand this is likely to have an obvious adverse effect: an increase in car theft and home invasions in the city.

‘The Inviolable Domicile’

All of this is eerily reminiscent of RoboCop.

When you watch the Toronto police video footage of criminals kicking down doors of homeowners, and you combine that with police officers telling homeowners simply to give their keys to car-jackers, I’m reminded of the lawlessness of RoboCop and the mute gas station attendant who was helpless against it.

There’s something dystopian in normalizing this kind of violence, and in some ways it is darker and more depressing than RoboCop.

The police in Verhoeven’s film may have been ineffective, but at least they were trying to fight back. This is in contrast to the Toronto Police Service, whose lengthy list of home invasion tips was conspicuously absent an obvious response: homeowners exercising their right of self-defense.

This is strange, because the inviolability of the home is a legal concept that stretches back to before the birth of Christ.

“What is there more holy,” asked Cicero, “than the house of each individual citizen? Here is his altar, here is his hearth, here are his household gods; here all his sacred rights, all his religious ceremonies, are preserved.”

What we sometimes today refer to as the “castle doctrine” existed in the days of the Roman Republic.

“The domicile was seen as inviolable,” the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges wrote in his celebrated history The Ancient City. “According to a Roman tradition, the domestic god repulsed the robber, and kept off the enemy.”

The Not-So-Inviolable Domicile

The legal right to protect one’s home, with defensive violence if necessary, is a concept more than 2,000 years old in the Western tradition. And it’s a legal precept you’ll find not just in the US but in Canadian legal charters.

“A person’s home is inviolable,” Sec. 7 of Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms explicitly states.

Apparently, not everyone sees the home as inviolable, even against violent intruders.

“You can’t use a gun for self-protection in Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flatly stated in 2022. “It’s not a right that you have.”

This isn’t true, however. The Canadian government might not allow you to cite self-defense as a reason to obtain a firearm, but Canadians do have the right to defend themselves and their property, so long as the actions are deemed “defensive” and “reasonable.”

This right was recently tested when a 22-year-old Ontario man, Ali Mian, opened fire on a group of men who broke into his home and attacked his mother. One intruder was killed, and Mian was charged with second-degree murder. The charge was later withdrawn, however, apparently after prosecutors realized the shooting was a textbook case of self-defense.

Canada’s demonstrated legal protections for self-defense only make Trudeau’s callous dismissal of them all the more peculiar.

After all, the right to self-defense has a broad popular appeal and a rich intellectual tradition. It is present in the Bible and defended by thinkers as diverse as Confucius, Mencius, and Malcom X, who bluntly stated, “I am not against using violence in self-defense.”

The philosopher John Locke carved out perhaps the most robust defense of the right of self-protection in his Second Treatise on Civil Government:

I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him.

Despite the rich tradition and popular appeal of the right of self-defense, Trudeau and many others remain hostile to it, which is no doubt why Toronto police declined to recommend defensive force as a deterrent to home intrusion.

This hostility likely stems from a number of sources, but in Trudeau’s case it is perhaps best explained by his disdain for individual rights, particularly property rights and the right to bear arms.

Critics of self-defense and gun rights have noted that for many, “the gun is the premier mark of individual sovereignty.” Yet many progressives see individual rights and individual sovereignty as a threat to the collective good; so the rights of individuals must be curbed and subordinated, as Trudeau has done with recent gun control legislation.

Unfortunately, placing the “collective good” above individual rights is a path toward dystopia and dysfunction. Individual rights — including the right to protect oneself and one’s home, and also to bear arms — are the wellspring of freedom. And freedom is the fountain of prosperity, civilization, and progress.

Departing from this tradition is how you end up with a society where individuals are unable to legally protect their own homes from violent criminals. Many will argue that this is why we have police, but the obvious problem is that police cannot protect everyone, certainly not with the immediacy that is needed in the midst of a burglary.

Unlike the citizens in RoboCop, Canadians can’t count on a cybernetic policeman to defend them from violent actors. 

Even worse, they’re being discouraged from protecting themselves and their homes by a government so hostile to individual rights and self-defense that it’s advising them simply to turn their property over to their attackers.

It’s not hard to see where this will go if Canada continues down this path.

This article originally appeared in AIER’s Daily Economy.

Source: Why Toronto Cops Are Advising Homeowners: Just Give Criminals Your Car Keys – FEE

Why Toronto Cops Are Advising Homeowners: Just Give Criminals Your Car Keys

Computer Shopper (December 2001)

Computer Shopper (December 2001)

ANALOG Computing (May 1985)

ANALOG Computing (May 1985)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1293-1296)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The first three photos in this set were processed in May 1966 and appear to have been taken at the same event. In the second photo a woman is cutting the cake so perhaps it is her birthday. The final photo isn't labeled but appears to be of a family (parents and two daughters) and was probably taken in the 1960s as well.

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

Rand Paul Exposes the ‘Great Covid Cover-up’

In an explosive new op-ed, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed that at least 15 separate federal agencies knew that attempts to create a COVID-19-like coronavirus were being undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as early as January 2018.

Yet, heads of these agencies did not reveal this information to the public; for years, they actively refused to release information on the project to lawmakers such as Paul, who were attempting to provide congressional oversight.

“For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of COVID-19 and the DEFUSE project,” wrote Paul, who in March revealed he was formally launching a bipartisan investigation into the virus’s origins with Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan.

The DEFUSE project refers to a proposal submitted by EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization headed by British zoologist Peter Daszak, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The purpose of the proposal was to “insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus.”

Paul also identified two additional parties who were part of the original plan to create chimeric coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the federal agency formerly headed up by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Dr. Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology and one of the authors of the now-disgraced “Proximal Origin” paper. The authors of the paper, which was published in Nature in March 2020, stated that evidence clearly indicated that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, even though privately, the authors expressed clear concerns that evidence suggested the virus was genetically designed.

Some scientists have already raised ethical concerns in response to the revelation.

“We now know Ian Lipkin was part of the initial DEFUSE proposal,” said Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, in response to the revelation. “Everything he has said about COVID origins and his role in the fraudulent ‘Proximal Origins’ paper must now be reconsidered in the wake of these new revelations.”

It’s not just Lipkin, of course.

All of these parties failed to speak up when COVID-19, one of the deadliest viruses in a century, emerged from Wuhan, Paul says, and details of the DEFUSE project may not have come to light at all if not for a whistleblower (identified as Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy).

More details of what the Kentucky senator calls “the Great COVID Cover-up” are likely to materialize as Paul and Peters continue their investigation. But an abundance of evidence already shows it’s no exaggeration to use that word: cover-up.

Paul is hardly the first government official to use the term.

Nearly a year ago, David Asher, a bioweapons specialist who led the State Department’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19, sat down with New York magazine journalist David Zweig and explained why there has been so little progress made in discovering the origins of COVID: Those with institutional power don’t want answers.

“It’s a massive coverup spanning from China to DC,” Asher said. “Our own state department told us, ‘Don’t get near this thing, it’ll blow up in your face.’”

Other government whistleblowers have also attempted to expose the cover-up.

In August, the CIA confirmed that the agency was “looking into” allegations from a CIA whistleblower who claimed that analysts tasked with determining the origins of COVID were offered “significant” financial incentives to change their assessment that COVID likely emerged accidentally from the Wuhan lab. (It’s worth noting that Fauci allegedly was admitted to agency headquarters “without a record of entry” while the CIA was conducting its investigation into COVID’s origins.)

The reason the government would cover up DEFUSE becomes obvious when one analyzes the nature of the proposal, which British author Matt Ridley weeks ago noted included a great many “wacky” (and reckless) ideas such as spraying vaccines into bat caves to immunize them.

“In the end, what they were doing was making more dangerous viruses, with a view of understanding them,” Ridley said. “It looks very strongly as if in trying to prevent a pandemic they may have caused one.”

While we still do not know this for certain, it looks increasingly likely that COVID-19 was born of gain-of-function research that was partially funded by the U.S. government.

Though this result would be shocking to many, especially those who see the state as virtuous and infallible, it’s far less surprising to students of history and economics.

“The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments,” Ludwig von Mises explained in Omnipotent Government. “The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”

The reason for this is obvious. The more power is concentrated, the less accountable it becomes, and power without accountability is a recipe for disaster.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Source: Rand Paul Exposes the ‘Great Covid Cover-up’ – FEE

Rand Paul Exposes the ‘Great Covid Cover-up’

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1289-1292)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

All of the photos in this set were processed in May 1966. The first features a cat next to a vintage (vintage now anyway) Zenith TV. The next are of some elderly ladies, perhaps having tea or coffee. The last one looks like it was taken at a party or dinner for some event.

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

PC World (November 1994)

PC World (November 1994)

New Study Calls into Question Whether DEI Programs Really Boost Corporate Earnings

It’s safe to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion is one of the more controversial ideas of our time (and a multibillion-dollar industry).

Some such as Elon Musk argue that DEI — which definitionally speaking means addressing structural inequalities in society — constitutes blatant racism. Others contend that DEI is simply about creating more equitable and harmonious workplaces, and offers clear financial benefits to companies, as well. “Study after study has proved that diverse companies perform better than their more homogeneous counterparts,” Inc. reported in 2023. “Companies that don’t foster an inclusive environment or prioritize diversity initiatives do so at their own peril.”

“Proved” is a heavy (and inaccurate) word here, but Inc. isn’t wrong about the abundance of evidence showing that DEI initiatives make companies more profitable. From 2015–23, McKinsey & Company, a multinational strategy and management consulting firm, released four separate studies showing that DEI initiatives boost corporate earnings. Unfortunately for DEI advocates, the research appears to be bunk.

A new study published in Econ Journal Watch, a semiannual peer-reviewed academic journal, shows that researchers were unable to replicate the results of all four McKinsey studies.

“[O]ur results indicate that despite the imprimatur often given to McKinsey’s 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2023 studies, McKinsey’s studies neither conceptually … nor empirically … support the argument that large US public firms can expect on average to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives,” professors John R. M. Hand and Jeremiah Green found.

This is not the only research that shows DEI initiatives are not the panacea for corporate earnings supporters claim them to be. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Robin J. Ely, a professor of business administration at Harvard, and David A. Thomas, the president of Morehouse College, point out that “the rallying cries for more diversity in companies” are not supported “by robust research findings.” Ely and Thomas add, “We say this as scholars who were among the first to demonstrate the potential benefits of more race and gender heterogeneity in organizations.”

The idea that all these studies showing clear financial benefits to DEI are rubbish might be shocking to some readers, but it’s a familiar academic pattern. For well over a decade, scholars and media have publicly worried about the “replication crisis” in science. It turns out that an astonishing number of findings in various fields — from psychology and economics to sociology, medicine, and beyond — fail to hold up when other researchers attempt to replicate the findings, as Vox has explained.

None of this is to say that diversity and inclusion are inherently bad, of course.

I value diversity and am an inclusive person, and I encourage others to be the same. It’s the means we choose to achieve diversity and inclusion that are the problem, as well as that word wedged in between them: equity. To many, advancing social equity is a paramount value. Because of this, many support illiberal means (in the classical sense) to achieve this end—including supporting policies that actively discriminate on the basis of race.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The End of Race Politics, recently appeared on The View and offered a better approach. “My argument is that we should try our very best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and our public policy,” Hughes told the hosts (who accused him of being “co-opted” by the Right). Hughes is right to say that this is the North Star we should be aiming for: the equal treatment of all people regardless of race or class.

The great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass saw that such a view is the true path to progress. “In a composite nation like ours, as before the law, there should be no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights, and a common destiny,” Douglass noted in a speech in 1867.

The ethos of DEI runs counter to this, which is precisely why both the concept and industry should be scrapped. A good place to start would be to dispense with the fiction that DEI programs are a rainbow leading to a pot of gold in corporate profits.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Source: New Study Calls into Question Whether DEI Programs Really Boost Corporate Earnings – FEE

New Study Calls into Question Whether DEI Programs Really Boost Corporate Earnings

ANALOG Computing (November 1984)

ANALOG Computing (November 1984)

ANALOG Computing was probably the most popular Atari 8-bit computer magazine published in the U.S. It covered all of Atari's 8-bit computers through its life including the Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 1200XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE and more. It also occasionally had Atari ST coverage though it was always primarily an 8-bit magazine. The November 1984 issue includes:

Features

• AtariCon Report - A report on the first international Atari users convention which was held August 24th and August 25th 1984 in Southfield, Michigan.


• Bopotron! - A type-in platform game in which you must control a robot running around a spaceship trying to keep all of the power packs charged.


• Circuit Database - A type-in program designed to store and organize circuit diagrams.


• XL-DOS - A type-in modification of Atari's DOS 2.0S for XL computers to make it faster and more efficient.


• Cassette Compressor - A type-in program for compressing programs on cassette and making them load faster.

_{Table of Contents from the November 1984 issue of ANALOG Computing}

Reviews

• A Software Cornucopia - Reviews of Pengo (Atari), Infidel (Infocom), Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory (Datamost), Flak (Funsoft), and Questron (Strategic Simulations, Inc.).


• Archon II: Adept - An in-depth review of Archon II: Adept, from Electronic Arts.

Columns

• Rader Comment - Letters from readers about the Ape-Face printer interface, Micro-Puzzler, plotting 3D images, and more.


• Griffin's Lair - Reviews of educational programs including Seastalker from Infocom, Dragon's Keep: Troll's Tale from Sierra On-Line, and Tonk in the Land of Buddy-Bots from Mindscape.


• New Products - A brief look at new Atari related products including the Hush 80S printer, Gumball from Broderbund, Getting Started with the Atari 600XL (book), the Anchor Signalman Mark XII 1200bps modem ($399), Pitfall II and H.E.R.O. from Activision, Quest of the Space Beagle from Avalon Hill, and more.

_{Back cover of the November 1984 issue of ANALOG Computing}

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