{"id":178584,"date":"2018-10-22T17:54:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T22:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/10\/22\/lies-damned-lies-and-mckinsey-co\/"},"modified":"2018-10-22T17:54:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T22:54:00","slug":"lies-damned-lies-and-mckinsey-co","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/10\/22\/lies-damned-lies-and-mckinsey-co\/","title":{"rendered":"Lies. Damned Lies, and McKinsey &#038; Co."},"content":{"rendered":"<div>It seems not that the Crown Prince has ordered a rich journalist murdered and dismembered, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2018-10-21\/mckinsey-horrified-saudi-arabia-report-may-have-been-misused\">McKinsey &amp; Co is &#8220;Horrified&#8221; that their work for the House of Saud might have been used in abusive ways<\/a>.<\/div>\n<p>We know what the House of Saud is, and we know what they do: They are incompetent and corrupt royals who make the Hapsburgs look like Little Orphan Annie.<\/p>\n<p>Your hand wringing after the fact will disabuse no one of your complicity in their regime:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">McKinsey &amp; Co. said it\u2019s \u201chorrified\u201d that a report it prepared to measure public perception of Saudi Arabia\u2019s policies may have been used by the kingdom to silence dissidents.<\/p>\n<p>The consulting firm responded on Twitter to a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/terminal\/PGXSVB3H0JK6\">New York Times article<\/a> that detailed a report in which it identified several people driving conversations on Twitter. Those people were later arrested or had their social-media accounts shut down.<\/p>\n<p>In a nine-page report, the consulting firm said responses to the country\u2019s economic policies received twice as much coverage on Twitter than in the country\u2019s traditional news media, and that negative sentiment was more common than positive statements on social media. The document was a brief overview of social-media usage and meant for internal use, McKinsey said. <\/p>\n<p>The New York-based firm said it wasn\u2019t working in tandem with the Saudi government, and that when it does work with governments, the company \u201chas not and never would engage in any work that seeks to target individuals based on their views,\u201d according to a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/mckinsey\/status\/1053838356826808320?s=21\">statement released on Saturday night<\/a>. \u201cWe are horrified by the possibility, however remote, that it could have been misused in any way,\u201d the statement said. \u201cAt this point, we have seen no evidence to suggest that it was misused, but we are urgently investigating how and with whom the document was shared.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, and Dick Cheney is looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>Please, don&#8217;t treat us as idiots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems not that the Crown Prince has ordered a rich journalist murdered and dismembered, McKinsey &amp; Co is &#8220;Horrified&#8221; that their work for the House of Saud might have been used in abusive ways. We know what the House of Saud is, and we know what they do: They are incompetent and corrupt royals &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,413,368,364,509,378],"class_list":["post-178584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-civil-rights","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-house-of-saud","tag-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}