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UPS announced it is cutting 12,000 jobs (out of about 530,000 person workforce) this year and is requiring all workers to return to the office 5 days a week.

So much for the great economy narrative

Elephant in the room is outsourcing and importation of foreign cheap labor instead of using citizens

James Carville ?

UPS announced it is cutting 12,000 jobs (out of about 530,000 person workforce) this year and is requiring all workers to return to the office 5 days a week.

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James Carville ?

Stunning to think that he is less crazy than 90% of the media AND democratic staffers/appointees today.

Elephant in the room is outsourcing and importation of foreign cheap labor instead of using citizens

Thanks to a newly-enacted law last year, Florida’s public universities are slowly healing themselves of their racist Distractions, Errors, and Incompetence (DEI) departments. The latest this week was announced by Miami’s Florida International University which, Javier Milei-like, eliminated its DEI department:




I guess it’s spreading.

The WSJ reported last year that DEI discussions on corporate investor calls have become increasingly rare.

My oldest, best friend runs a large, contrarian investment fund. One of his favorite techniques to identify his short-sale targets (i.e., betting the stock price will fall) is counting up the minutes of investor calls devoted to DEI. He swears there is an inverse relationship between the proportion of DEI chatter and future stock performance.

In other words, the more corporate officials talk about their awesome DEI programs, the more it seems like they’re trying to distract investors from problems with their fundamentals. I would add that the more time and attention top management devotes to DEI, the less time and attention it has to give its real mission, which should be delivering a superior product or service.

Let’s test the theory. Victoria’s Secret, Moderna, and ConocoPhillips all significantly expanded their DEI teams last year. But even though the market as a whole is up, the jab company and the now body-positive lingerie firm are down year-over-year. Only the oil and gas company is up, and only about +1%. So.

Meanwhile, The Home Depot cut its DEI department by over 50% last year. Its stock is way up...

So. Maybe my friend’s rule works in reverse, too. Maybe there’s a positive relationship between deep cuts to DEI and an increased stock price. Somebody should look into that (because the media won’t, that’s for sure).

DEI is not just getting punched in the face by for-profit corporations. Last week, Florida’s largest public university axed its entire DEI department. According to the WaPo article, in just the last year state legislators have introduced at least sixty-five anti-DEI bills. Last year, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, and the decision loaded ammunition into legal challenges against private employers’ hiring practices. Conservative groups have been suing prominent mid-size corporations over their psychotic, anti-white, discriminatory hiring practices.

Local Austin ABC affiliate KVUE ran a terrific story yesterday headlined, “Dozens of UT Austin employees in DEI-related roles to be laid off.” Well, to be honest, KVUE was not super excited about the news. The story’s first quote was Aaliyah Barlow, president of UT’s Black Student Alliance, who reportedly sobbed “honestly, I cried and I was angry.”

Thanks democrats! Welcome to 2024. This is what things have come to. Adults crying over politics. Forget about policy or even reason. It’s all emotion now: mainly grief and rage. I’m not exaggerating. KVUE’s next ‘DEI policy analyst’ quote was from UT junior Chrisdianna Mcafee, who said, "A lot of people are upset; all of my group chats are raging. All of the GroupMe’s, all of the Slacks – everybody is raging.”

Goodness. Her inability to enunciate a rational objection makes one wonder what Ms. Mcafee’s student loan balance has climbed up to. The University of Texas might be wildly succeeding in its ‘emo’ studies, but it is clearly failing students elsewhere. Is that really value for money?

The news devastating UT’s far-left students was the announcement by the school’s president that, following passage of a new Texas law, the school’s DEI department would be rolled up, its diverse faculty employees reassigned, its funding equitably redeployed, and around 60 highly-inclusive “support staff” would be ashcanned. The president explained:

Funding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17's effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.

This is more excellent progress. And the blue-state / red-state divide grows ever wider.

Dozens of Secret Service Agents Ask Congress to Investigate Whether DEI Puts America at Risk

Thirty-nine Secret Service agents have signed a petition calling on Congress to investigate whether Marxist “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies are putting America at risk.

The petition followed a bizarre incident involving a Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Tampa Free Press reported. ...

“There’s a petition circulating inside the US Secret Service that flags concerns about ‘a number of recent Secret Service incidents indicative of inadequate training,’ a double standard in disciplinary actions, and a vulnerability ‘to potential insider threats’ that could pose a risk to US nat sec,” she wrote.

“Aim is to call for a congressional investigation, petition says,” she later added. ...

A news release from the U.S. Secret Service on April 22 said that an agent assigned to Harris “began displaying behavior their colleagues found distressing” before coming to blows with a supervising agent, CBS News reported.

“The agent was removed from her assignment while medical personnel were summoned,” the statement added.

Other sources present said the agent was muttering incoherently before engaging in a physical fight with a superior at the Joint Base Andrews.

The agent who was the aggressor was immediately subdued and detained by fellow agents, as Slay News reported.

RealClearPolitics identified the agent as Michelle Herczeg, a female agent on Harris’s security detail.

An ambulance took Herczeg to an area hospital where the agent was admitted. ...

The incident led to claims that Herczeg’s mental state may have been overlooked in order to comply with DEI hiring practices.

RealClearPolitics reporter Susan Crabtree revealed on social media that sources within the Secret Service questioned whether the agent in question was still on duty as a consequence of DEI policies.

Crabtree offered some other details in a post on X.

“Sources within the Secret Service community tell me the agent assigned to VP Kamala Harris was armed during the fight – that the gun was secured in the agent’s holster until other agents physically restrained the agent and took the gun from the agent’s possession,” she posted.

Crabtree said there are internal concerns over the incident.

“I’m also told there are DEI concerns among the USSS community about the hiring of this agent.

The great DEI drainout continues. Last week, North Carolina’s Daily Tar Heel ran a story headlined, “UNC System announces multi-million dollar cuts for DEI positions and programs.”

It was a DEI St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Last week, the state’s Board of Governors made sweeping cuts across the entire North Carolina public university system, slashing up to sixty positions and reallocating tens of millions of dollars in budgets for diversity and inclusion programs.

The Board equitably reassigned even more positions and, very diversely, dissolved entire DEI departments.

The move followed a new policy the Board approved back in May. UNC’s system approved a policy banning all DEI offices and titles, and required its universities to report on staff and funding reductions for these programs by September 1st.

Progress! As red state educational systems recapture money wasted on DEI departments, they will gain competitive advantages over blue state schools, since they can better fund other programs that add value, like STEM degrees. Blue state schools will, eventually, be forced to come around.

It’s slow, but it’s happening. Nobody’s setting up new DEI departments, and red states are, one by one, defenestrating them. As Charles MacKay famously wrote, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

In a world that seems constantly crazy, we need to focus on what’s happening at ground level in boardrooms and conferences. The world is not going as crazy as the headlines suggest. Hang in there!

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a long-form, magazine-style report, explicitly labeled as “investigative,” headlined “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” ...

Apart from Matt Walsh’s movie (“Am I Racist?”), nothing this year has more evidenced the promising advances in the conservative counter-revolution than this article springing from one of the wellsprings of DEI, which, as it turns out, is not, after all, Ponce De Leon’s fountain of eternal academic youth.

DEI is prematurely aging. It isn’t aging well.

The article described how no university in America embraced DEI as tightly and passionately as did the University of Michigan. In 2016, after Trump’s election, every single MichU department, hundreds and hundreds of them, were ordered to develop and staff comprehensive DEI radicalization plans.

Even the university’s plant nursery (the “Arboretum”) delivered a 37-page buzzword-packed diversity plan, born out of wedlock, which vowed to adopt “a polycentric paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”

They are deadly serious, but that right there is a joke. I defy you to explain what that means in simple English. (Two-Eyed Seeing? Apart from BB gun accident victims and the mythical Cyclops, is there any other kind of seeing?) I also defy you to justify how a plant nursery could be so racist it had to be “fixed” in the first place.

The Times’ investigative journalist interviewed numberless faculty members, mostly unlucky teachers who the institutional DEI machine had masticated at one point or another. A common theme developed. The original architects and power brokers of MichU’s DEI industry refused to talk to the Times’ reporter. They sensed it was too dangerous.

A second theme bubbled up: white women were the worst. A “cartoon professor” was investigated by the University’s DEI police after students reported her for showing them a ‘racist’ cartoon (a 1960s political cartoon about Maoist repression). She told the Times she’d been reported by a group of female white students. “They want to do something — be a part of the cause,” the professor explained.

Another professor remarked that creating the DEI tipline and policing process was like handing tasers to a gang of six-year-old children. At times, the article swerved — almost certainly intentionally — toward Matt Walsh-levels of self-parody. For example:

"Last spring, I met with Princess-'Maria Mboup, then the B.S.U.'s
vice speaker, and Brooklyn Blevins, its speaker at the time.
Michigan couldn't create a more welcoming environment for Black
students because it didn't enroll enough of them, Blevins told me; it
couldn't enroll more of them because the environment wasn't
welcoming."

... In sum, the Times’ story — again, well worth reading — conveyed a pervasive sense of dilapidation, as though the entire edifice of DEI is rotting from the inside, paint peeling off the walls, doors hanging from the hinges. Let us never forget that DEI was still under construction until the pandemic exposed the reprehensible ideology to appalled parents.

Would it help to point out shoveling money to people because they are of a specific race is illegal? No, it would not. Because the law is what the law does, so suck it up, white men. And because “Beginning in 2021, the White House and NSF created scientific integrity policies to require that agencies “[i]ncorporate [Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility] considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.”

About a third of the DIE grants went to women because they were women. The Committee didn’t say what these women’s feelings were about this, but it’s a good bet the papers they write funded by this largess will fill us in in great detail.

The other grants went to the categories of Social Justice, a.k.a. Grievance Hustling, Race, and Environmental Justice, which surprisingly (to me, anyway) only scooped up 362 grants. Could interest in “climate change” for persons of color be waning?

It’s worse than the raw numbers say, because the amounts going to DIE are increasing year by year, with most of it coming in 2023, and 2024 looking like it will be a banner year. A full 16.5\% of all NSF grants in 2022 were for DIEing, almost 19\% in 2023, and it’s projected to be about 27\% this year.

Over a quarter of “hard” science money is now going to DIE. It turns out to be more than enough.

More evidence comes from this post (and subscribe!) by our friend John Carter, the very Martian Warlord himself: “Academia is women’s work“. All that money spent to DIE has its effect. Women now dominate almost all university departments, with the exceptions, so far, of Engineering and Computer Science. For the obvious reasons. But, as Carter says, these fields cannot remain untouched:

"Sadly for the prospects of academia, there is almost no prospect of universities letting well enough be. The persistence of a few small pockets of patriarchy in the midst of the gynocratic hegemony is an affront to everything the longhouse stands for. We endlessly hear about the crisis of female underrepresentation in those departments that have not yet been conquered, principally STEM. There are special recruitment programs for women, special scholarships for women, special mentoring programs for women. STEM departments are under constant internal and external pressure to bring in more women. This has led to a culture inside STEM departments that shows immense favouritism to women…

University faculties and administrations are packed full of activist girlbosses for whom admitting, mentoring, hiring, and promoting other activist girlbosses is their entire animating purpose in life."

She told the Times she’d been reported by a group of female white students. “They want to do something — be a part of the cause,” the professor explained.