#but then the first journal publisher rejected us (fine it happens whatever)

[merlinity]

.

[sturchling]

Peaks out of a bush holding a sign asking for forgiveness.

Not in no hurry just add it to the list. Can I get a maribat. With Alya salt where she applys to a contest to win an interview with Lois Lane or Clark Kent. She doesn't tell anyone as she doesn't want to use Lila connections.

Use whatever lie you want to.

Meanwhile Marinette enters a contest sponsed by Daina prince Aka wonder woman.

Alya is told the reason she doesn't win and is disclfied is cause she not only did fact check a lot of what she put is can and will get her sued.

Alya was practically buzzing with excitement. She had entered a journalism contest and the prize was incredible. The first place winner would have their article published in the Daily Planet and win an interview with Clark Kent and Lois Lane, two of the top reporters in the world. Said two reporters were going to judge the entries and would also notify the contestants if they won or lost. Alya was sure she would win. She had submitted a new article, all about Lila's adventures in Gotham, how she was very close with the Wayne family, had helped with several major Wayne Enterprises projects, and how she had even helped Batman and the rest of the Batfam several times. At first, she had wanted to ask Lila for help, to make sure that she got everything right. But she didn't want to bother her friend, and she also didn't want Lila to use her connections to help Alya win. After all, Lila was very close with both Clark Kent and Lois Lane, and was going to help Alya get an internship with them at the Daily Planet. She couldn't ask Lila for more help. Alya was very proud of her work, and was positive that she would receive good news soon.

Meanwhile, Marinette had entered a contest of her own. Themyscira Industries, the public face of Wonder Woman that handles all her merchandising, had announced a contest. Wonder Woman was going to change her super suit design, and had decided that she wanted the public's input. Obviously her suit wouldn't be an exact copy of the design, they would change what they had to for practical reasons. Superhero suits have to be functional as well as fashionable after all. The winner of the contest would not only have their design as Wonder Woman's new suit, but would also get a private meeting with the Amazon herself.

Marinette jumped right in when she heard about the contest, thinking it would a fun chance to be creative and design something she wouldn't normally. And, if she won the meeting with Wonder Woman, she could get help with defeating Hawkmoth. The Parisian government had kept the whole situation a secret as best they could, so as not to effect tourism. This means, no one outside of Paris, including the Justice League, knew what was happening. If she got the meeting, she would reveal her identity to Wonder Woman. She was sure it would be fine, since Wonder Woman's mother Hippolyta was a Ladybug as well. Then with identities revealed, she would ask Wonder Woman for help tracking down Hawkmoth. It wasn't the greatest plan, but it was all she had.

With that in mind, Marinette quickly got to work. She took inspiration from suits Wonder Woman had worn over the years, and made sure that her design was also protective. Her time as Ladybug had made her appreciate a protective suit. When she finished her design, she submitted her entry and anxiously waited for the results.

Weeks went by, and both Alya and Marinette got the results of the contest. But only one girl was happy. Marinette received an email saying that she had won the contest and that her design would be made into Wonder Woman's new suit. Wonder Woman herself had even left praise for Marinette in the email. She had said she loved the design and was thrilled to see some protective elements already included in the design, which most of the other entries hadn't considered. Marinette was practically glowing, ecstatic with how the contest turned out. Not only did she get some good experience with this design, and get her name out there more in the fashion world, she had also got the meeting with Wonder Woman. She planned her trip to meet Wonder Woman

Meanwhile, Alya was upset and furious. Not only had she not won the contest, she had been disqualified. She couldn't believe it! She put everything into that article. At the bottom of the email that brought the bad news was a phone number for Clark Kent, who had sent the rejection email. Alya immediately grabbed her phone and called the number, determined to know what had happened and why she had been disqualified. As soon as Clark answered the phone, Alya started yelling, forgetting who she was talking to. She demanded to know why she was disqualified and what was wrong with her article. "Miss Cesaire, while you are very talented with writing, there is a major problem with your article. You did not fact check a single thing in that article, which was made up of entirely false statements. There is no record of this Lila Rossi being involved with the Wayne Family, Wayne Enterprises, or Batman. If we had published your article in our paper, not only would you have been sued, but we could have been as well. If you want to be a reporter as a career, I highly suggest you start fact checking all of your stories from now on. This kind of writing will absolutely get you sued and no one will want to hire a reporter with a history of publishing lies and getting sued. I wish you all the best with your future, and hope you can learn from this. Have a good day."

Alya was stunned. How could that be what got her disqualified? She had her source. How much better could you get than a first person account of what happened? Sure, she could have included some extra sources to prove everything, but primary sources are always best! Alya was determined to prove them wrong and show that her article was correct. Maybe if she got enough sources to prove her article, they would reconsider the contest. Maybe she could still win this. With that, Alya took to the internet, using all her sources and researching skills. But the more she dug into Lila's story, the more confused she became. She couldn't find any other sources that even mentioned Lila being in Gotham, let alone doing all the incredible things she had claimed to do there. On a hunch, she looked into Lila's other stories. Her stories about Jagged, Clara, Prince Ali, and many other celebrities. Alya couldn't find any proof. As far as she could tell, Lila had been lying this entire time. Alya was furious all over again, but this time at both Lila and herself. Obviously she was furious at Lila for lying to her. But, she was also angry at herself, for believing in her lies. So, Alya sat at her computer one more time tonight, and got ready to write another article.

Alya spent all night working on her new article. This one revealed everything Lila had ever lied about. All the disabilities, all the celebrity connections, and even where she had really been when she was 'on a charity trip to Achu', which she learned about when she called Mrs. Rossi to tell her what her daughter had been doing. And this time, she made sure gather all her sources and fact check everything. When she was sure about everything she had written, she published the story to the Ladyblog, with an apology for every post she had made about Lila's lies. She also took down all the articles about Lila's lies. She ended up emailing a link to her new article to Clark Kent, with an apology for her behavior when she called. Obviously, this didn't do anything in terms of the contest, but it made Alya feel better that one of her favorite reporters had seen a better article of hers.

While she didn't win the contest, when she got another email from Clark Kent saying that this article was much better, she was over the moon. He even told her about a new internship program that was starting that summer, and if she worked hard until then and kept writing and fact checking like this, he would seriously consider her for an intern position. Alya may have made a major mistake with the article she submitted to the contest, but Clark understood it was a mistake and she was trying to learn from it. Everyone deserves a second chance. Alya was thrilled and determined to work hard for that internship.

On Monday, Alya made sure to apologize to Marinette for not believing her about Lila. The two made up and started to patch up their friendship. Lila's kingdom of lies had been completely destroyed during all of this. The whole class knew she was a liar. The school knew about the lies too and expelled her for the truancy and fake disabilities. And her mother was furious when she found out and shipped Lila back to Italy, to live with her grand parents who could keep a close eye on her until Mrs. Rossi could be transferred back to Italy.

Now, Alya was sitting at her computer, getting ready to submit her application to the internship program that Clark Kent had told her about. While that contest all those months ago hadn't gone as planned, Alya was happy with what happened. If she hadn't submitted that article and got disqualified, she may never have looked into Lila's stories until it was too late. She could have ended up being sued or never made it as a reporter. And she might never have made up with Marinette. Now Marinette and her were friends again, and she had an amazing opportunity with this internship program, and it was because of her hard work.

[vminity21]

+1 | kth

Pairing: HighschoolCrush!Taehyung X StillProcessingIt!Reader

Word Count: 4.3k

Genre: angst/fluff/smut

Warning(s): slight language use, angst (if you read b/w the lines), pretty much smutty kissing, hand groping, mention of alcohol, breast worship, nipple play; Rated: 18+

Summary: When a crush you had in high school unexpectedly returns to your life six years later, this is the experience you have with him when you collected the courage to invite him over to hangout.

Credit to: @suhdays​ for the amazing cover!

Inspiration comes in the form of little expectancy especially when life seems to throw a curveball you never dreamed would be a potential possibility; but, here you are, tapping upon the keyboard of your five-year-old laptop decorated in stickers of celebs you've admired over the years mingled with relevant quotes that have bustled yet again- inspiration that motivates you day by day to continue to be the human being that you are. Inspiration though can appear in lyrical melodies broadcasted globally for millions to pine over; or, published in numerous pages creating imaginary worlds where ones can escape to; or, sketched in a meticulous design to build whatever idea had been desired to come to life; or, filmed in scenes of an edited story by talented persons determined to enter the spotlight in any way they can; or, painted along a canvas in colors of calculated detail bringing forth the picture of accomplishment. Inspiration derives from a mere moment- one that sparks the instinct to gather the materials needed to pour out your heart in ways that may bring a sense of peace.

For you, it used to be in the lines of a song penciled into a crinkled notebook from your backpack hidden away for no one to discover; it used to be countless childhood journals where you expressed your inward battles in order to find enough solace to sleep at night. You've lost your touch over the years because life changes in the blink of an eye, as you grow older, and work can distract from the time taken to focus on yourself; thankfully graduating college to gain the degree you now behold landed you a job, one you hope lasts for many years, and you are currently living in a two-bedroom apartment with your best friend, Monica, who's presently slumbering as you brush some loose strands of hair from your vision.

Your dog is curled at the end of your bed as you write, which is something that you haven't done in what feels like forever, but the reasoning behind this sporadic urge ignited when the familiar pair of brown eyes from six years prior, re-entered your world without your preparation and his presence from a recent night shared seems to echo in every space of your brain to where you've finally had enough. It's about time to reach out, the devil on your shoulder whispers, but the angel sitting on the opposite begs to differ. Shaking your head, you pause momentarily, cracking your knuckles before resting your forehead on the desk, exhaling slowly while the memory of his touch seems to haunt your skin.

He was someone you once admired in high school- roaming the hallways where girls giggled giddily each time he'd pass by; star of the basketball team, rising popularity to the point everyone knew his name, collecting homework answers from budding friendships, and it all began once he started his junior year at a new school- the school where you attended. But the difference that set him apart from the typical cliché's of the prevalent students you never seemed to relate to, was that he talked to absolutely everybody and anybody- no judgment on what group the person took part in, his kindness won the hearts of many other than the evident attraction of his physical features. He didn't care who you were or what you were into, he would be your friend, and that, considering he was viewed on a higher level, made him even more special.

Despite never admitting it then, you had a crush on him. He was more of an acquaintance, but you enjoyed his company when he came around, and when a past friend, who is now married with a few kids, used to have a crush on the same person, your heart sank, because with every guy thinking she was hot, you felt as though you would never stand a chance. Especially not with this guy who made your hands jittery and the beat in your chest skip- the guy who is none other than Kim Taehyung.

Taehyung would frequent the chorus room at times when you and your past friend would practice music pieces and he always was fond of your singing voice- something he praised you for often, while his attention was received from his talent regarding sports. Something he was so good at that it was spread that he may have gained quite the scholarship for college if he decided to go. There were memories of bravery where you seized the day just to steal a conversation and a hug; at one time, scribbling the words 'hot af' with an arrow pointing where he signed your friend, Min Yoongi's, yearbook; Yoongi playing it off as though he had no idea who the culprit was when Taehyung asked who wrote it. Utter surprise can't even fathom when you along with Taehyung were voted 'Most Likely to be Famous' by your graduating class when senior year was conquered. The inside joke was for you to hold the basketball while he placed his hands upon the keys of a piano, the picture you still couldn't process happened, but always remained grateful for.

Six years flew by and the conversation never necessarily held, but there were the rare messages from social media where he'd reach out hoping all had been well with you. Interestingly enough, a cover you posted harmonizing with a fellow singer happened to be his absolute favorite, one of the few Instagram posts he'd commented on, and one of the few singing videos he continuously would listen to repeatedly without your knowledge until a few weeks ago when he revealed that to you. A cover that is now near to be a four-year-old video that he still finds uplifting when he hears you and the way your voice blended so well with the other female. Your mind is reeling because after all this time, and even now, there are remains of the aftershock, trying to forget the feel of him, when there's no way you can, not with everything so fresh on your mind. So fresh on your heart.

It all occurred when Yoongi, who kept in touch with you occasionally after graduation brought you up to Taehyung who happened to think of you earlier when listening to his favorite cover of yours, and he agreed he'd like to hang out. He asked if his friend, Hoseok could join you, Monica, and Yoongi which of course you said yes to learn how sweet you found it, that he had traveled within the span of a day after visiting his grandparents, because he is a man of his word, planned to come see you even though the drive was five hours out of his way. The night was filled with so much laughter mixed with serious conversations to the point the card game that was supposed to be played was never finished, and it sprung the desire of wanting to see Taehyung again, and you couldn't come to terms with never knowing so after some encouragement from Monnie and Yoongi, you messaged T to hang out a few days later, but never opened his reply until you were safely home from work.

Taehyung: Gotcha! Hmmm, I haven't decided on what I intend on doing. Either being with family or hanging out with friends. If I don't hang out with family, you could be my plus 1 or bring whomever or vice versa

[Y/N]: Sorry I just got home from work! I'll definitely be your plus 1 if hanging with family doesn't work out! Sounds like a plan!

He asked if you wanted anything from the store when it was confirmed he was on his way which you responded with your typical answer of no, and with music playing from your Bluetooth speaker, you were highly humiliated when you lost track of four minutes of time, opening a message from him to see that he had been there, at your door. Heart racing you rushed to unlock it, head spinning when you saw he leaned against the stair railing with a plastic bag of two Arbor Mist wine bottles dangling from his hand, him promising everything was fine despite your profuse apologies- him slipping his phone in his back pocket while he followed you into your home.

Monnie happened to be staying the night with her family, so it would be just the two of you tonight, besides your dog who bounced at his legs while he reached down to pet her fluffy head. Taking in the sight of him, now that was something you found hard to believe. Just a simple pair of jeans, a gray t-shirt with a black jacket complementing the dark tendrils of hair spread across his forehead leading to the carefully sculpted lining of his jaw nearly brought you to your knees, but you held it together long enough to settle across from him at your dining room table. He had taken off his shoes at the door remembering upon a few days prior, and he set out the wine while you jumped to retrieve wine glasses (Yoongi happened to purchase for you) while banter still related to greetings.

One thing that truly intrigued you when first seeing Taehyung after six years were words, he had said that touched your heart more than you'd like to profess. "That's why I try to enjoy every moment with people because you never know what day will be your last," and you knew right then, that if there was anyone you wanted to share a moment with, it was him, and there he was, right before you, smiling about something you said while the sound of the fruity liquid-filled each glass.

"I really truly do not understand what you are so afraid of. What do you even have to lose?" Monnie tinkered with the lens to her camera while she sauntered through the living room. Exasperated from anxiety, you sucked in your lips before teasingly throwing her the side-eye.

"My dignity,"

"Oh c'mon," she paused, lifting a brow. You had been talking nonstop on how bad you wanted to invite Taehyung over, but fear of rejection including the fear of humiliation seemed to overwhelm you, although deep down you knew your best friend in the entire world was correct. You did not nor do you have anything to lose.

"Well!" You squawked, raising your palms dramatically in the air before slapping them to the sides of your thighs, "Why the hell would Kim Taehyung ever want to hang out with me anyway? Do you not see how farfetched this all is?"

"Bold of you to assume that my life isn't already farfetched enough as it is-"

"Not! The point!"

Monnie sighed, and when she saw the way your shoulders slumped in disappointment that shouldn't have been an issue, to begin with, she stepped closer, placing her hand on your shoulder, "First off, you are overthinking this, and you shouldn't. Besides, I think after hanging out as a group, he only sees you as a friend, meaning no expectations. So, go into it with that mindset okay? I'm sure he'd love to hang out with you. Secondly," she smiled, her serene expression filled with promises she always kept, "You've waited six years for this. I think you should ask him to hang out."

"You really think so?" Your grin reached your hopeful eyes, and the feeling in your chest seemed to react more positively despite your earlier turmoil.

"Yeah. The dude owes us a chair anyways,"

"Ah!" You cackled, back pressed against the dining room table as you remembered literally a few days ago when Taehyung accidentally broke a spindle of the chair in half with his foot when Yoongi scared him just by suddenly walking down the hallway. "I don't think I've ever seen a man so embarrassed."

"I'm not saying to hold it over his head, but," Monnie held up her index finger, "I think that gives him enough reason to come back," she giggled, setting her camera on the dining room table before waltzing into the kitchen.

You shrugged, "At least we can still sit on it."

"Look at it, it's staring at me," Taehyung pointed swiftly at where the vacant spindle would have been, your laughter reverberated throughout the space.

"T, really, you do not owe us new chairs. I promise, it's fine," you reassured him, realizing your cheeks were sore from how much you'd been smiling since he entered your 'realm of refuge' as you liked to describe your apartment. He snapped a picture of it, probably with the intention of getting a new chair for you and Monica regardless, and you found that appreciative although you would be happy if he didn't.

Shit. You pause from the computer screen, leaning back into your chair before folding your arms tight across your chest. Eyeballing the cursor, your vision narrows as it blinks, waiting for you to add more words to the memory that seems to spin in a cycle with the subtle goal of not stopping. Or, so you figure. If recalling every little detail isn't already hard enough, reliving the reminiscence of his fingers twirling in your hair, his sweet laugh when he looked at you, or the way he held you so tight-

But, everything in between, leading up to those mesmerizing flashes are just as important to you as what it led to. Maybe it was the conversation- the three hours of conversation before the move to the sofa which it was hard to fully focus on what else was being said because how could you properly concentrate when the one person, you'd been so worried about spending time with was seriously conversing with you like the pair of you had been friends your whole lives?

Miraculously, you were able to gather the stories of past vacations that resulted in mild disappointment revolving around the complaints of people surrounding him, or the goal of visiting as many places as possible leading Taehyung to scribble down a list of where he'd been to reveal you both have equally been to the same amount of places. Of course, the thrill of going on a mini adventure with him brought an excitement you haven't felt in a while; even the story of why he was transferred to your high school years ago due to a misunderstanding, and when the pair of you made your way to the couch, he nestled into one corner while you gladly took the other, wishing you could snuggle closer but fear prevented you from doing so.

It seemed as though that he didn't want to watch the movie anyhow, because he talked to you as though he never wanted to stop, and eventually it led to you asking one too many times if he was okay with spending the rest of the night with you. "It's up to you, I'll stay if you want me too," he promised, the way your heart fluttered when you replied, "Yes, can you please stay? I don't want you to go."

"Alright, alright! I'll stay," he smiled widely, both of his large hands reaching out, and there was not one ounce of hesitation from you- your hands grasped his before your dog jumped to beg for attention, trying to lick at his face causing your hands to undo. Laughter was contagious with Taehyung, and still cuddled into the corner of the couch, you were so elated that he was going to stay, you reached to hug him, his arms wrapping around you, the feel of your bodies aligning putting the biggest smile on your face. It was crazy how everything was seeming to fall into place- the stars aligning as though it was all magic; and, you couldn't get past how right everything felt. How right he felt. Pulling away, his smile never left him, "Are you shy?" His arm remained draped around your shoulders, and timidly you peer at his surprised gape, his black hair almost covered his crescent eyes.

"I mean... Yeah, I can be," you murmured, reaching to hug him again, but something washed over you this time, a thought that had crossed your mind repeatedly that you just couldn't take it anymore. The side of his face was blurred, placing your palm upon his cheek, and without even a moment of doubt, you kissed him. A sudden decision, but one of the best ones you could have made.

His lips were so soft, the way his mouth just seemed to mold with yours for only a few mere seconds, and the shock on his face when you pulled away, paired with the realization that his hands were held in the air, you hadn't expected his reaction. Shit! You cursed inwardly, immediately jumping back to persistently make sure he was okay; even when he moved to cuddle with you, him claiming everything was fine, but that he couldn't believe you kissed him being the both of you never once saw this coming especially six years ago during the high school days. His hand was fidgety as he swiftly rubbed your shoulder, your head buried on his chest while your mind spun in a continuous loop of how you could not believe that you kissed Taehyung. The Kim Taehyung.

He became quiet- too quiet, concern etched in your expression, maneuvering yourself back to the opposite corner of the couch, so you could face him. "T, are you sure you're okay? Did I freak you out?"

"No, no, I just can't believe you kissed me," he was in awe, eyes dazed as he ran his slim fingers through his hair, "Like, really I never saw this coming,"

"I mean, have you looked in the mirror?" You teased, knowing damn well he'd been aware of you finding him attractive, and he shook his head in dismissal of your compliment as he chuckled; it took you a whole sixty seconds to realize you were holding his hand, fingers linked, and him asking if you were nervous due to your clammy palm, though you tried to swear up and down you were not, the next round of words he said nearly brought you to tears when he finally spoke.

"You shouldn't sell yourself short," he looked you in the eyes without any faltering, although you tilted your head in mild confusion as to why he was saying this, to begin with, "I don't think you realize how much of an impact you've made on others, especially guys," ah, he was letting you down easy, and you knew it, but you're too stunned to speak as you listened, "I don't think you give yourself enough credit either. You're a great singer, you're pretty much a musician, you love animals, you have a job, you live on your own. Really, you shouldn't sell yourself short-"

"T," you breathed, pleading almost, but trying not to make it obvious, but he never broke eye contact, "We don't have to date or anything, I just- I just wanted a moment with you." You mentioned what inspired you to spend time with him- exposing how a few nights ago when he said he wanted to enjoy every moment with people- you knew you wanted to have a moment with him, too. Memories from high school were spoken momentarily, thirty minutes passing by which included a made-up handshake as well as the subtle twirl of his fingers in your hair- him complimenting how good your hair looked which made you blush even more.

Just when you thought he wasn't already smooth enough, you noticed Taehyung started teasing your dog, her pouncing at his chest before he'd lean in closer to you. Eyebrows scrunching, it took you a hot second to realize what he was doing. Each time Taehyung would scoot closer to you, he'd kiss you, sending the pair of you in boisterous laughter when your dog would try to break the kisses by jumping in between your faces. The more your lips would touch, it'd last a bit longer and longer, your hand clinging to the side of his jacket to pull him closer when things really started moving fast, eventually your dog left the room with the hint that attention was no longer available for her.

Still lip-locked, Taheyung's hands gripped your hips while you willingly moved to straddle him, arms resting on the top of the couch on either side of his head, the tip of your tongue glided along his, while he fanned his hands along your ass. You refrained from moaning into his kiss despite how bad you wanted to, yet you held yourself together, involuntarily grinding your clothed heat where his erection was felt. T smacked your ass before slithering the tips of his fingers to your shirt, slowly unbuttoning one by one.... One by one. His eyes were hazed from how much he was craving your mouth, and with a seductive nod in his direction, he continued until he made it to the final goal, your kisses never planning to stop, the sides of your shirt being brushed away for him to take in the sight of you.

"Ooh my God," his eyes darkened in evident lust when he saw the way your black bra cupped your breasts, "Oh my God," his voice deepened, him hardly knowing what to do with himself while your smirk remained subtlety on your mouth. Though you hadn't needed him to ask, he politely waited for your permission to touch your chest, a quick pang of frilly nerves ghosted your stomach.

"Yeah," you breathed seductively, gradually moving to capture his lips, trying to hold back a giggle when he gently moved his hands to your back, "You're not going to find it there," you mused, referring to the clip. He paused as if panicked, "It's in the front," you finally admitted, but failing miserably, Taehyung let you take initiative, you unclipped your bra uncovering what is now widening his brown eyes. "Oh my God!" His reaction made you want to cum right then and there, especially when his fingers made their way to squeeze your nipples when his mouth returned to yours. Taehyung worshiped your breasts, and for some odd, yet arousing reason, you lived for it.

You're uncertain of when the tv was switched off, and even now, as your hands continue to fly across the keyboard, one thing you do recall, one of the lingering memories of the evening was your shirt being off, thrown onto the floor mingled with your bra, and without any warning, Taehyung hoisted you in the air, your legs instinctively wrapped around his torso while he tightened his hold around your body. His steps were painfully careful, kissing you roughly while your arms kept their place behind his neck, and the direction was being taken to your bedroom where your heart pounded so anxiously to be. His jacket was shed before the bold act, and all that was left was his gray t-shirt and jeans. Laying you down with a bounce from your mattress, he remained above you, and your eyes refused to stray especially when he reached to remove his shirt- his smooth skin greeting yours sending waves of goosebumps spreading among your limbs.

There was no one like him in your eyes, and there never would be. Not in your heart. And with how perfect everything was going; you were not prepared for how hard it was going to be to stop before things went too far. Because what if he doesn't exactly feel the same? He was letting you down easy not even an hour ago, and here you were, hopes so high, you weren't sure how you were going to erase them back down. He kissed you until you couldn't breathe, your fingers dug into your comforter, while his palms glided all over your frame for however long you let him, but when he went to remove your leggings, you halted him.

Now, this is where your heart aches when you relive this part, because a conversation was held, one where you mentioned what if someone catches feelings if the both of you decided to solely be just friends with benefits? Taehyung said all you had to do was communicate with him because he was easy to get along with, and you've known this about him for six years. He was always someone easy to talk to, and you knew he would never treat you poorly over a situation like this. And, he hadn't. You made the executive decision to not sleep with him for you wanted him to remember you as the woman you are, and the woman, you've always been, and with the fear of going all the way being something that could change his image of you, you were satisfied to hear the loud echoes of his snoring after you changed into pajamas, gazing at his sleeping demeanor before you drifted into slumber as well.

When the morning came, you were not ready for him to leave, but he asked if you would walk him out, him throwing on his shirt and jacket while you rushed to brush your teeth. T asked if you had any other plans for the rest of the day which you proceeded to answer honestly with a no, as he mentioned that he was going to get breakfast.

"Let me know when you make it home," you said tenderly, "I want to know you're safe,"

"I will," he promised before you embraced him, turning just enough to place a peck to his cheek. It was his smile that decided to enter your recollection- the boxy smile that would plague you until the day you accept that you will never forget it.

And when you opened the door to the apartment where he gracefully waltzed through, you merely caught a glimpse of him leaving, ahead of you quietly shutting the door to whatever could have been.

Or, what could have started a beautiful story that has yet to unfold.

[memnonofarcadia]

Remembering Joey Bruno

Originally published in the Sacramento Jazz & Blues Quarterly Bedtime is sometime around dawn. Dinner is usually whatever you want it to be. Shall we go to Iceland? Festivals, fliers, wristbands, Sharpies on skin, smoke, grass, hash, molasses, sky, blue, crisp, clear sky. And yet I’m still writing all this within a grey airport terminal, locked into some kind of strange Druid-esque ritual with pen and paper. Deadline is tomorrow, where were you when you were supposed to be working? Don’t have any answers for now, just that I need to write and get it out to my boss within the next day. Or two. It wouldn’t have been the first deadline blown. But think, distract myself with the McDonald’s coffee and keep putting down adjectives and phrases from places I’ve been, things I’d seen, dreams I’d never have again with people I’ve never met and music I had. 40 minutes till boarding starts, I’ll be last, of course. It pays enough to fly but not enough to enjoy it. Been getting harder and harder to deal with the travel, at any rate. Starting to notice the spell everyone is under, the sleepwalking nature of the corporate employee. It had only been noticeable after it had been broken, which I had no problem doing, ever. When your home is a hotel you take your shots however you can get them, besides it wasn’t like you have to live in any particular town past a few days at most. Half-heartedly started keeping a list of rejections and their professions, making sure to note that there was only one waitress on the list, most were from bookstores or places where there was an escape for all parties. Don’t need to make it more awkward than it has to be. Sorry, I didn’t mean, then the words fade off into the ocean. On the edge of nowhere, like a little seaside town. Maybe that’s where I’d like to end up, like a lifeguard in the post-apocalypse, no responsibilities, just looking cool for the seagulls. How many life guards had I asked out? Not many, either way. Concerts didn’t go well with water, not in my experience. Can’t seem to find a way to write about anything other than something on the present times, life and times. I struggle, already flipped through the notebooks to jog the memory with some tit and tat that had to be discarded for the sake of length from another article. Or two. Or four. Or 12. Throwing yourself to the wolves, towards and into the meat grinder that one might just pay the bills with the right amount of ink in the right places on a blank piece of paper. Who cares about music festivals and pop culture when there’s McDonald’s coffee and the cold inside of an airplane to look forward to? Four times I’d attempted to ask about an airline attendant’s relationship status, thrice I’d been rejected. Once she’d pretended not to hear me and instead moved to the opposite end of the plane for the remainder or the flight. Understandable, no harm done. No harm done. By anyone, right? Who said this was ever going to be a love story, you and I?

College had been a breeze, not that I’m bragging. State schools were like that, at least then, and Californ-I-A’s were no different. No doubt now there’s better options available for where I was at when I had to decide where to go to school, but there you are. A degree in journalism is a degree in journalism, and I had little else to go on other than my love of music, substances, travel, female company, and a shocking talent at being able to string together sentences. In a way it’s always given me a bit of a guilty feeling. I never sat down and really worked at learning or improving with regards to writing, I just sort of could do it. That’s the short version of how I found my niche of a career, one I thought I could exploit anyway. Turns out I was right, and in a way it was everything I could (and did!) hope for. Except everybody’s got to grow up sometimes, and I did, regrettably. There’s only so many hungover mornings a human being can take before they’re permanently reduced to a shambling, sickly mess of what used to be a humanoid organism, and I had certainly put myself on that path. Got off of it, thanks to the countless AA meetings I made myself go to, but I digress. That had been the first mark on the wall of things that I could no longer enjoy about the gig, the fact that now I had to do the whole thing sober. The hardest substance I have confidence I can enjoy responsibly now is coffee, and even then the ugly demon of acid reflux put me back in my place before too long. Suddenly all the kids were much more annoying than usual, the travel a hassle, the food revolting, and the music itself just kind of bad, which was the real heartbreaker. Some days before it had been all to keep me going, minus the women, which were always a constant. “Festival sluts” is the term you’ll want to Google (or DuckDuckGo) if you’re curious about what I mean, also colloquially known as upper middle class girls whose parents were too busy working to devote anything past a friendly “hullo” to their children, and thus succeeded in raising a bunch of hedonistic, attention-desperate, and morally naïve young people with excess income and too much time to spend it all in. Nasty ain’t it? But it kept me coming back for more, like the good-natured animal that I am. We all are. That’s the secret that I learned more than anything from the beat, we are all more simple and pleasure driven than we could ever articulate or realize. It’s what keeps the lights on at home, for everything and anything. Probably. Or maybe I’m just bitter. Most of the friends I made during college or were colleagues in my escapades writing about indie rock et al. around the globe are gone now. Burnt out, some burnt up, most just couldn’t hack it anymore and left to go get real jobs at real newspapers. The circus, or pirate ship, as is probably more accurate a nomer, is not for everyone, and rarely does it last forever. Bet you’re wondering where that leaves me. Still bitter, but still coming back for more, just like I was always going to. Always. So why don’t I quit? You tell me. Because I know why.

The finest writer I ever met was a journalist by the name of Joey Bruno, a guy I came across one of the many late nights I spent at the pathetic office of my college’s newspaper. I was editing a freshman’s piece about how the White Album was actually really bad, sighing uncontrollably the whole time, when Mr. Bruno walked in and struck up a conversation with yours truly. I happily engaged, as any activity that didn’t involve that stupid piece of writing was fine by me. He explained that he was friends with the real Editor , who was at his parents’ in Wisconsin for the weekend, and would drop by periodically when he got off work to help out where he could. “Why spend your time working on bad writing by dumb college kids?” I’d asked him. “Free beer, plus it can be fun sometimes. There’s been plenty of stuff come through here that I rewrote beyond all recognition just for fun, and nine times out of ten the original author doesn’t even notice. Good times.” Maybe so, I’d thought. In any case every other Friday or thereabouts I’d get a late night revising buddy to help cull the newspaper’s intimidating stack of submissions. It was in those early morning hours that I came to the conclusion that I wanted to become a music journalist, mostly from talking to Mr. Bruno about his own adventures. But I don’t think I listened, not really. Maybe if I had I’d be off this conveyor belt by now, but then again maybe not. Maybe I’d never have started. One night in particular while we were enjoying our cigarettes, coffee, and beer (all courtesy of the newspaper of course), he retailed me with a story of his long lost love, a girl he’d known briefly in the California punk scene of the late 80s. I was instantly entranced. “It was a magical time,” he’d said to me while stroking his magnificent beard. “But I’m glad it’s over now. It was getting messy there at the end,” I brought up how those little parts of the world, at that time were being romanticized an awful lot in contemporary media then. “And for good reason, too.” He’d responded wistfully. “A lot of great things happened for a lot of good people. It was about as close to the 60s as anyone came since then, I think. That much hope,” And this is where he began to tell his story, the story of “the rebel known as ‘Justine,’” as he’d put it. However it had happened, the two had come into contact through the various zines they’d each produced and sent out to the other punks in town. The closest thing to an internet forum for back then was to just be louder than everyone else, apparently. That was the only real way to get heard, to start a dialogue of some kind. That or take your chances at the shows, which they did anyway, but there wasn’t much talking going on there. Joey had written to Justine complimenting her on “Pop!,” which was her way of pushing her radical politics and militant-feminist views out on to the unsuspecting public behind the thin-façade of a bubblegum periodical. The art had been good, and the writing made everyone Joe showed it to laugh out loud, so he made a point to let the author know, whoever they were. There was an address included in the back for people to write in, so he did just that. He also included a copy of his own creation, the somewhat popular (in those circles anyway) “Buzz ‘n’ Stuff.” “What was it about?” I asked as my friend rolled himself another cigarette. “Nothing really, I just sort of made stuff about interesting things I found at the library then slapped it together in that. It seemed to work. I remember the one I sent her had something about how to get popped bubblegum out of your hair without cutting it all off, so I think that’s what got her interested. There wasn’t anything of value or substance in there, let’s be real,” Joey took another swig of his beer and reached into the cooler below his desk for another, being sure to throw me one too like a sport. “Thanks, boss. But continue, you got me interested now,” So he did. It had started slowly, really, with the trading of zines and letters, the occasional patch or pin by mail too. Eventually after a lengthy correspondence they made a plan to meet up at a concert, The Vandals to be precise. Joey had taken painstaking measures to show up in the most hip clothing of the day, studded leather jacket, combat boots, the whole nine yards. “I looked like a freak,” he told me with a chuckle. “But then I saw her,” Justine had arrived looking like everything and nothing Joey had expected her to. She had the familiar punk gear, Doc Martins and an army jacket covered in patches and safety pins, but the rest of what she had on departed from the norm drastically. It had been some bizarre cross between a punk, hippy, and cult leader all in one, macabre golden jewelry offsetting the “meat is murder” t shirt underneath. “It was great,” said Joey. “People were afraid of her at that show. She looked really scary,” They hit it off and had a jolly old time watching The Vandals play, and later they found themselves alone on a hill overlooking the suburbs, talking about the issues and passing a joint back and forth. It was all music to my ears, as it would be for most any young person, I suspect. “Tell me more,” I’d implored. These were fantasies that I needed fulfilled. Joey paused and rocked back and forth in his chair contently for a few seconds before he complied. My heart sank before he spoke. “We were inseparable after that first time. It really was something. We could go anywhere, do anything, and we would always end up on the same page somehow. It was easily the deepest spiritual, emotional, whatever you want to call it connection I’ve ever had with another human being, let alone girlfriend. But then a year or two later her Mom moved her and her brother up to Connecticut to be closer to the rest of their family. Last I heard she went to school in Maine, but that was it as far as we were concerned. Finito,” He smiled through all this as though recalling some rosy-cheeked memory but I was aghast. “What do you mean that’s it? You didn’t try to follow her or anything?” Joey just laughed. “Yeah, that was really an option at 17 without a car or money. It was just something that happened when we were kids, nothing really. I’m glad it happened at all, now.” Well then. What do you make of that? The conversation drifted pretty heavily after that point, as it always did when Joey and I got to jabbering and drinking, and as usual it was stories of the times he’d been on tour years later with Ozzy Osbourne or The Stooges or someone, then got to interview them endlessly and write about it. The usual vices were there as well in his stories, the drugs, the travel, the women, the glamor, the romance. But it all left pretty quickly once the novelty wore off, hence why Joey had quit after a few years and moved back home to Sacramento. When I knew him at the college newspaper he was a jazz correspondent, if you can wrap your head around that, for several of the snootier publications in the area. “I skipped to the fun part,” he told me. “The shows never get old, now. Plus jazz cats have the best shit,” he said with a wink. I probably just laughed, I don’t know, maybe downed the rest of my beer. I’ll be bound to have another once I get on the plane, off to Finland this time. Apparently it’s festival season in Scandinavia and its surrounding territories. Guess I’ll be writing about that all then though, from a different airport terminal that looks just like this one, with coffee and food and cigarettes and beer that shortens the life as much as the ones that came before. I could go on, but I won’t, for both our sake. There’s no moral to be gleaned from all this just a simple explanation of the reality, and how I’m passing the time in the airport by writing this, because I said I would. I promised. It’s my group now, and I have to go.

[michaelkeenan]

tl;dr: this latest academic journal hoax is over-hyped and the reporting on it is terrible A trio of academics submitted 20 ridiculous papers to various feminist/gender/related-studies journals in an effort to show the journals to be ridiculous. 7 papers were accepted. The coverage has been gloating and the Twitter response has been gleeful. But the more I look into it, the less there is to it. This is troubling, because smart people like Paul Graham and Patrick Collison have retweeted about it. WSJ article

The Chronicle of Higher Education article

Google Drive link with all the papers and the review comments

Here's the trio's essay on it. At times, I think they're deliberately vague about which ridiculous papers were accepted and which weren't. Here's a paragraph of theirs:

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it.

The parallel structure of the paragraph, with 'The answer to that question also turns out to be "yes"' elides the very different fates of the two papers. Hypatia didn't publish the Progressive Stack paper, and in fact they rejected it three times. But phrasing it this way, you can describe it in the same paragraph as an accepted paper, and many people won't remember the difference. (Here's a Harvard lecturer's thread, with 10,000 Twitter Likes, describing the Progressive Stack paper as accepted.)

The coverage has been even worse. Here's a Quillette piece on it, with a part that a Facebook friend quoted:

[Hypatia] invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment.

This isn't just wrong; if anything, the reviewers opposed the shaming technique. Here are the full review comments for all three rejections of the paper. I don't see any concern for an overly compassionate stance, or any recommendation of harsher treatment. When a reviewer does mention it, their concern is that it might be ineffective, and they're uncomfortable with it. Here’s a quote from the second rejection:

What are experiential reparations? Say more about this. Also, some of your suggestions strike me as "shaming." I’ve never had much success with shaming pedagogies, they seem to foment more resistance by members of dominant groups.

And from the same reviewer in the third rejection:

Find a place for the experiential reparations. This still makes me feel uncomfortable, because it’s shame-y and I’m not sure that student can see it otherwise.

After reading the reviewer comments, I'm very sympathetic to the reviewers, and I update toward thinking that their field is not a made-up illegible jargon-fest. They say things like:

"There are dozens of claims that are asserted and never argued for."

"The author promises to explore key terms and explain why they are applicable to the classroom. They introduce: epistemic violence, epistemic oppression, epistemic violence, testimonial smothering, privilege-evasive epistemic pushback, epistemic exploitation, testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, willful ignorance, virtuous listening, and strategic ignorance. This is too much ground to cover!!"

"The scholarship is not as sound as it could be; that is, the basic structure of the argument is plausible and interesting, but the submission has far too many issues that get in the way of a clear and sound presentation of the author’s argument."

"I think these are basically good insights, they need to be argued for more clearly and not just asserted as true. They are interesting claims, say more, say how, say why, and don't just assert...Explain."

These aren’t possible comments from a field full of fashionable nonsense that doesn’t mean anything. I'm sad to contemplate the reviewers trying to help someone fix the mistakes in their paper, while the authors' intention is to slip through as many mistakes as possible. As the editor wrote in an encouraging cover letter:

At the same time ref #1 is encouraging about your revisions. You'll note that ref #1 says, for example, that it's your earlier improvements that have generated some of the new problems that need attention!

See also this Twitter thread by one of the reviewers for the Masturbation is Rape paper (which was rejected). It's sad - he rejected the paper, but wrote some encouraging things, and the hoaxers quoted the positive parts in their essay.

I haven't looked at all the papers in detail; this isn’t a thorough investigation of all of it. Maybe I happened across the least-bad papers and the most-misleading coverage first. I think the "fat bodybuilding" paper is just as bad as it sounds: "fat bodybuilding" would be unhealthy, unpopular, and no sport has ever been started by someone proposing it in a paper to an obscure journal.

But other accepted papers, I think, use a trick: invent some fake data of interest to the journal, and include a discussion section with some silly digressions. The journal accepts the paper because the core is the interesting data, and then the hoax coverage says that the paper is about the silly digressions. For example, the core of the dog park paper is a fake observational study showing that humans, especially males, are faster to stop male-on-male dog sexual encounters than male-on-female sexual encounters. I think that's fine; it is actually indicative of heteronormativity or homophobia or whatever. The paper also has an angle about canine rape culture, and that is indeed silly, but the paper is not best described, as The Chronicle of Higher Education did, as being "about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland".

There are things to learn from this whole thing. I have a lower opinion of fat studies than I did before. But I have a higher opinion of the various fields that correctly objected to ideology-pleasing buzzword-filled digressions, and I wish the coverage noted that in equal measure. I get the impression you have to fake some interesting data to get much Sokal-style fashionable nonsense through, and even then, they'll catch most of it.

(Maybe I’m minimizing the ridiculousness of what did get past the reviewers. I think a younger, more idealistic version of me would have been more shocked by it, like the commenters at Hacker News who think that peer review should be able to detect fabricated data. My mild reaction is partly due to not expecting Idealized Science-level rigor of these fields to start with.)

And no-one should be saying anything about the rejected papers, except for praising the journals for rejecting them. If you ask someone out, and they say they're flattered but they only like you as a friend, don't gloat that they said that they like you. It's a rejection.

[mechatherium]

What the heck is a Tully Monster, anyway?

Not to be confused with Telly Monster.

An older reconstruction of T. gregarium by Stanton F. Fink. (source)

Last month I wrote a post on Illinois’ State Fossil, the enigmatic Tullimonstrum gregarium. I promised a future post where I planned to explain how an international team of scientists from Texas and the UK finally figured out what branch on the Tree of Life the infamous “Tully Monster” belongs on.

Alas, such is not the case. Let me explain.

Ever since Francis Tully brought the first specimen in to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, paleontologists have tried to discover what sort of animal T. gregarium was. It’s not for lack of material; unlike most fossil organisms, thousands of Tully monsters have been recovered from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek formation in Illinois.

And these creatures are preserved in exquisite detail; Mazon Creek is what is called a Lagerstätte: a rare fossil bed where organisms are so well preserved in fine detail that traces of soft parts are visible. (Other examples include the famous Cambrian-age Burgess Shale in Canada described in loving detail in Steven J. Gould’s Wonderful Life and the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone in Germany that yielded the stem bird Archaeopteryx lithographica.) Good thing, too, as as Tully monsters have no hard parts—no bones, no shell, no exoskeleton.

Even with this wealth of well-preserved material, paleontologists have had a devil of a time trying to classify tullies as a particular kind of animal; the animal was so specialized in its construction it lacks any obvious features that clearly link it a known animal group. As a result over the years tullies have been classified as chordates (animals with notochords—our group), mollusks, annelids (segmented worms, including earthworms), conodonts (another once-enigmatic fossil group, later identified as chordates), and even a descendant of the stem-arthropod Opabinia.

In what I thought was the final answer to “what the heck are these things?” earlier this decade, two different teams of scientists led by Thomas Clements and Victoria McCoy from the University of Leicester in England made comprehensive studies of Tullimonstrum fossils with the latest tools, including scanning electron microscopes and high-powered particle accelerators.

Clements studied the structure of the tully eye, specifically the structure and arrangement of protective pigment structures called melanosomes in the cells of its retina that preserve very well in Lagerstätte fossils; McCoy took thousands of tully fossils to Argonne National Laboratory to use their  particle accelerators like super-powered CAT scanners, trying to image the animals’ internal structures.

In 2016 they released their results, declaring Tully monsters not just chordates, but vertebrates, jawless fish related to living lampreys.

I thought that would be the end of it. Frank Tully’s mystery solved at last. Alas, science often doesn’t work like that.

Humans, you see, are really good at convincing ourselves of things. We build models in our minds to try to understand how the universe works. The problem comes when those models don’t accurately reflect how the universe actually works. Worse, our minds are wired with a tendency to automatically reject evidence that our models don’t reflect reality.

The beauty of science is it’s a constant testing and re-testing of our models against reality, not just by one lone genius but by many people, many groups—the more, the better. The more and harder our ideas of how the Universe works are tested, the more certain we can be the models that survive are an accurate description of how the world actually works.

When I went to refresh myself on my sources Saturday night I ran across an article that led me to this piece in The Conversation published November 11, 2019: “The mysterious ‘Tully Monster’ fossil just got more mysterious.” Trying to find a link to the scientific paper, I ran across an earlier article in phys.org, “‘Tully monster’ mystery is far from solved, group argues,” published in 2017.

The 2017 article describes a paper in the journal Paleontology (not linked, but here’s a UPenn press release) where a team led by assistant professor Lauran Sallan went through the Clements and McCoy papers and found major flaws in their reasoning.

First, Sallan and her team point out that the Mazon Creek formation was a marine environment, an ancient sea bed. Lagerstätte or no, that has major effects on fossil preservation. “In the marine rocks you just see soft tissues,” she says in the press release, “you don’t see much internal structure preserved.”

Next, they point out there were lampreys living with Tully monsters in that same ecosystem; their fossils are found with the tullies, in the same rock layers. And, according to Sallan, et. al, their fossils don’t look a thing like the tullies’.

Then they point out vertebrates were hardly the only animal group to evolve eyes. Eyes, of whatever level of complexity, are found in about every major animal group. And, according to Sallan, tully eyes weren’t that complex; Sallan’s group asserts Tullimonstrum had a simpler form of eye called a cup eye, like those found in many mollusks, nautiluses, some worms—and some primitive chordates.

If tullies had cup eyes, they could not have been vertebrates, however primitive. All known vertebrates, living and fossil, have complex eyes with lenses; there are some groups that lost their eyes secondarily, like some cave fish, but none have ever simplified the design.

Finally, Sallan points out that if tullies had been vertebrates, McCoy should have found two specific structures found in aquatic vertebrates—and only in vertebrates. The first are otic capsules, structures in the inner ear that provide the sense of balance (we have them; we call them the semicircular canals). The other is a lateral line; a sensory structure found in all fish and many amphibians but lost in land vertebrates. Lampreys have both otic capsules and lateral lines; if Tully monsters were really lamprey relatives, as McCoy asserts, her team should have found them in the thousands of fossils they examined.

The 2019 conversation article was written by paleobiologist Chris Rogers from the University College Cork in Ireland. In it, he describes his own work on comparing the structure and chemistry of tully eyes to those of other animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates. Specifically, he focused on their melanosomes, like Thomas Clements did.

Clements claimed the structure and arrangement of melanosomes in tully eyes was the same as in vertebrates, leading him to put Tullimonstrum among the chordates. Rogers tested that claim with a two-pronged approach. First, he studied and compared melanosome structure and arrangement in living and fossil invertebrates with large, complex eyes, finding that some invertebrates, like cephalopods, had similar melanosome arrangements, and that these can be found in fossils as well.

Rogers concluded the arrangement of melanosomes in Tullimonstrum eyes isn’t enough to prove it was a chordate.

Next, he took a page from McCoy’s book, using high-powered X-ray beams generated by particle accelerators at the California’s Stamford University to analyze the chemical makeup of traces of melanin left in fossil tully eyes.

Rogers’ team analyzed melanin in living animals, finding a slight but consistent chemical difference between vertebrates and invertebrates; we vertebrates have a higher ration of zinc to copper in our melanin than invertebrates do. When they used Stamford’s accelerator to analyze melanin traces in fossils of known vertebrates and invertebrates found at Mazon Creek they found the same difference. When Tullimonstrum fossils were finally put under the X-rays Rogers and his team found the traces of melanin left in their fossils’ eyes was more like that of invertebrates.

Rogers is careful to say that this does not prove the Tully monster was not a vertebrate, merely that Clements’ and McCoy’s analyses aren’t the “smoking gun” the popular science press of the time thought they were.

So the mystery remains, the debates continue, and that’s okay. Because that how science happens. Now Clements and McCoy may go over the data they collected some more and answer the concerns raised by Sallan and Rogers. Maybe Clements can show that tully eyes were built just like those of fish, as opposed to the superficially similar eyes of say, cephalopods. Maybe McCoy will go over the thousands of tully fossil X-rays and find otic capsules and lateral lines—or show that contemporaneous vertebrate fossils don’t preserve those either. Perhaps someone will point out flaws in Sallan and Rogers’ work, I don’t know.

Hopefully, what will happen is as these and other scientists look more and more closely at Tully monster fossils, sooner or later they will find some feature—some anatomical or biochemical clue that will point us toward tully origins, and maybe perhaps some living relatives.

Sorry about the wall of text. I’ll try to make my next posting a bit shorter.

References:

Clements, T., Dolocan, A., Martin, P. et al. The eyes of Tullimonstrum reveal a vertebrate affinity. Nature 532, 500–503 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17647

McCoy, V., Saupe, E., Lamsdell, J. et al. The ‘Tully monster’ is a vertebrate. Nature 532, 496–499 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16992

Baillie, Katherine Unger. “'Tully Monster' Mystery Is Far From Solved, Penn-Led Group Argues.” Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania, 20 Feb. 2017, https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/tully-monster-mystery-far-solved-penn-led-group-argues.

Rogers, Chris. “The Mysterious 'Tully Monster' Fossil Just Got More Mysterious.” The Conversation, 11 Nov. 2019, https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-tully-monster-fossil-just-got-more-mysterious-126531.

[payment-providers]

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Why Libraries Are Giving Up On Late Fees

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It has happened to all but the most organized among us. We’re minding our own business, cleaning out a closet or reorganizing the bookshelf, when it suddenly thrusts itself upon us.

That lost library book we had almost managed to convince ourselves no longer existed. The book that became the second reason we’ve avoided going to the library since the waning days of the second Bush administration. (The first being Amazon, of course.)

At this moment, every library delinquent faces the same dilemma: return the erstwhile book, or put it back in whatever box it came from and pretend this whole unpleasant incident never happened. Weird questions start running through one’s mind: “Does the library stop trying to collect the fines at any point? Does compounding interest accrue? Can they charge a fine that exceeds the book’s replacement value? Can I be arrested for holding onto a library book for over a decade? Do I need a lawyer?”

As it turns out, library fines, generally speaking, don’t become a major financial hurdle. According to recent reports in The Wall Street Journal, the average fine is about 17 cents per day that a book is late – and are capped at $5, $10 or the cost of the books borrowed. But, as St. Paul Public Library Director Catherine Penkert told the publication, it’s not just about the money.

It’s the shame of having to face a librarian and sheepishly have to pull out a dollar bill and admit you are not able to handle the simplest possible adult responsibility.

“I didn’t even want to tell you, ‘I have fines,’” Penkert told the Journal of what she normally hears at work while collecting library fines from friends and family in the community, who usually wear a rather pained hangdog expression.

But perhaps the scourge of library fines is migrating to the past. This week, Chicago became the largest metro area to officially say no to library fines – joining St. Paul, Minnesota; Dallas, Texas; and Oakland, California – in what has become known of late as the library fee amnesty movement that has been quietly (they are libraries after, all) picking up steam in 2019.

Because libraries need customers to keep coming in – and they have been finding out in recent years that a late fee and a disapproving librarian create a very bad customer experience … but one that is pretty easily rectified.

Why Libraries Are Killing the Fines Nationwide 

In a digital world – where most of the classics can be downloaded for free, reference books are rapidly becoming a tool of antiquity and digital streaming has largely eliminated the need for a physical hub for free access to entertainment media – libraries are struggling to bring users in the door. One apparent solution, according to Curtis Rogers, a spokesman for Urban Libraries Council, is to get rid of the things that are actively driving people away.

“We’d rather have you come to the library and engage in our services,” Rogers noted.

Catherine Penkert concurred, noting that in a world where consumers have a lot of choices when it comes to reading materials – many of them free – making the library an unpleasant place to be is far from an optimal strategy.

“All the rules that we have, and the fines and the fees, they’re making libraries really hard to deal with,” she said. “Putting everybody in this spot where they’re going to be fined to death is not helpful.”

Moreover, libraries can’t back up their fines with much in the way of force. In the not-too-distant past, they have been known to play hardball – they would hand unpaid fines off to specialty collection agencies that dealt purely with library fines. Customers who didn’t cough up the money owed could actually see their credit score take a hit, and find themselves locked out of things like car loans or even mortgages, simply because an overdue book situation got way out of hand. These days, however, that is a much, much less likely occurrence, and the credit bureaus do not use library data or parking tickets to generate consumers’ scores.

Incidentally, most people don’t actually know this, according to Equifax – which means they get a lot of questions from panicked library delinquents worried they are about to be booted from mainstream credit markets.

“The topic has come up so frequently that we decided to include it among our credit myths,” said Nancy E. Bistritz-Balkan, spokeswoman for Equifax.

The specialty credit collectors for library fees still exist – but in 45 states, they are unable to put the fine data onto a credit report. And even in the states where they are allowed to do so, they usually don’t.

Unique Library, based in Indiana, is one such specialty credit firm. As a rule, they do not try to wreck library patrons’ credit – instead, they employ what they call a “gentle nudge” policy, aimed at inspiring people to either return their books and pay the fine, or just buy the book. They claim to have collected more than a billion dollars in fines and late fees for overdue materials on behalf of nearly 2,000 libraries in five countries.

Will Getting Rid of Overdue Fines Save the Library?

It is probably a lot to expect that removing overdue book fees – and the anxiety surrounding them – will utterly solve for the library’s problems in the modern world. There are plenty of people who fail to visit the library every week not because they owe money, but purely due to lack of interest and an abundance of other options.

But as avid payments peeps, we can’t help but observe that dropping the fees is often an effective method of boosting consumers’ enthusiasm, which is why it’s a method that is popping up more and more often.

Over the summer, Discover captured a lot of headlines and attention with the announcement that it was dropping the fees on all of its deposit accounts – including fees for insufficient funds and excessive withdrawals, as well as penalties for falling below minimum balances and making stop-payment requests. The elimination also extends to charges for monthly maintenance, checkbook orders or replacement debit cards.

“Helping our customers lead better financial lives is at the heart of everything we do, whether that’s removing fees, offering industry-leading rewards or consistently delivering distinctive customer experiences,” said Arijit Roy, vice president of deposits at Discover, in the release. “Removing all deposit account fees was an easy decision for us based on our commitment to offer the most rewarding banking products in the industry.”

Affirm’s Chief Product Officer Jack Chou told Karen Webster in a conversation last year that in attempting to build an honest and transparent financial company, fees were the first thing on the chopping block, because at the end of the day, they just lead to consumer confusion and anxiety. When there are hidden and built-in fees, Chou noted, the customer never really knows what they are going to pay, and thus is always just a little uncomfortable.

“The one thing we kept hearing from customers over and over again,” Chou said, “was that their trust in our brand went beyond that loan they got that one time.”

And, while the issues of a library are in many ways different from those of a POS lender or bank, one can see how the issue of trust is a common thread. The customer who doesn’t trust herself to return a library book – or the process of being fined for it – will start avoiding the library. The Wall Street Journal had story after story about people who checked out a book in their youth, got hit with a fine along with library failure shame, and then never went back to the library.

The customer who goes in and believes there is no way going to a library will end in anything but a peaceful afternoon of reading, on the other hand? They might actually make the journey – or at least not reject the possibility out of fear that they won’t be able to make eye contact with the librarian.

And at least the early data on the subject bears that out: Since St. Paul, Minnesota killed overdue fines, some branches have seen a double-digit percentage increase in circulation. Citywide, circulation is up nearly 2 percent – which may not sound like much, but it is the first increase the city has seen in 10 years.

And, it seems, patrons are not failing to return the books – or at least no more so than they were before.

——————————–

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Meet The Most Powerful Political Organization In Washington

This article was originally published in the journal Democracy. Subscribe to it here, because why not?

WASHINGTON — Coverage of the influence of money in politics tends to suffer from the same weakness that all horse-race politics writing does: it almost never connects day-to-day movements to any broader reality or purpose. We learn about the size of ad buys or overall spending plans, but there’s no so what? Following the 2012 presidential election, the political press decided, rather unanimously, that all the talk about the Citizens United decision had been overblown because, after all, Democrats more or less matched Republicans on the spending front, a Democrat was reelected to the White House, and the party even hung on to the Senate, so no rich conservative was able to buy the election. Sure, Republicans later took over the upper chamber in 2014, but plenty of Democrats still managed to win.

This focus on campaigns and elections tends to exclude coverage of the political agenda itself. In other words, what is it that Congress and the regulatory agencies are thinking about and, just as importantly, not thinking about? And so this focus has missed one of the most fundamental transformations within our political system: the way in which corporate interests have moved the playing field away from party politics and into the bowels of agencies, courts, and Congress. The media have yet to figure out how to keep score. Author and journalist Alyssa Katz, in her new book The Influence Machine, charts the history and measures the power of one of the leading drivers of this shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which she calls the “single most influential organization in American politics” (as would anybody else writing a book on it).

The Chamber, unique in American politics, is the only organization that simultaneously spends big money on elections, lobbies Congress heavily, drills into the regulatory process and, if all else fails, drags the government to court. As Katz keenly observes, the Chamber routinely promises to spend eye-popping sums of money on federal elections, but then in its tax documents several months later reports spending far less. Its critics suggest the Chamber does spend the money and somehow hides it from the IRS, but more likely the organization is following in the footsteps of Mark Hanna, the 19th century Roveian consultant who helped get William McKinley elected in 1896. Before the campaign was over, he returned a sizable contribution, telling the donor they had more than enough money to win. The goal of business in politics is not to win elections or run up the partisan score; the goal, rather, is to make money. If that goal can be accomplished for less, all the better.

Katz doesn’t deliver many groundbreaking revelations; close Chamber watchers won’t learn much new. But hers is the first book-length exposé of a phenomenon that is generally known only deep inside Washington: namely, that the Chamber is not what it appears. The nonprofit Chamber’s official mission is “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” Beyond that, it is thought to be a coalition of business groups that collectively push for a free-market agenda aimed at improving the climate for business broadly. It is also often assumed to be a partisan operation aimed simply at electing Republicans. But, in fact, it’s neither of those things. Rather, it is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.

The Chamber is a gun for hire, a faade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand.

In 2005, the Federal Election Commission cast a 4-2 vote finding “preliminary evidence that  . . . [Chamber head Tom] Donohue had violated federal law by steering corporate campaign contributions directly to a federal campaign committee in order to influence an election,” Katz reports. Similar movements of money had destroyed the career of Tom DeLay, but the Chamber came out just fine. After the commission settled the case, three commissioners voted in 2008 to reject the settlement, deadlocking the panel. It has been so since. “Again and again, in state elections and in federal ones, including presidential races, the U.S. Chamber and its affiliated organizations were operating as political organizations and effective ones at that. But as far as the IRS was concerned, they remained educational groups, free to do what they would with their funds,” she writes.

The Chamber stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying.

Thinking of the Chamber as an organization at all winds up missing the point. Yes, it has a headquarters — a hulking one that stares down the White House from across Lafayette Square — an HR department, water coolers, and so on. But knowing what can legally be known about the Chamber gets you almost nowhere. The Chamber, instead, stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying. It has become an essential cloak for corporate special interests looking to get in and out of Washington without anybody seeing.

For decades, the Chamber tried to be what it seemed to be: a respectable coalition of businesses. But it found itself neutered by its need for consensus—companies are all in competition, after all—and easily outmatched by the combined might of labor and consumer advocates throughout the 1970s. It also was distracted by the anti-communist paranoia that consumed much of the politically active business community after World War II.

The new model was launched secretly, first uncovered on a day where the news wound up being utterly ignored. Jim VandeHei, then a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, broke it on September 11, 2001: The Chamber was selling its advocacy services to specific industries and companies at quite specific price levels. Drug makers paid for cover in a fight over pharmaceutical prices, Ford wanted to beat back legislation sparked by the deadly tire failures on its Ford Explorers, and so on. (For businesses without any particular interest at the moment, the dues paid to the Chamber are better thought of as protection money: Nice company you have there — would be a shame if a little congressional curiosity should happen to it.)

Today’s Chamber addresses a central problem for businesses in Washington: While business and business owners in general might be broadly popular — the business of America is business, after all — the particular things that individual businesses want tend to be extremely unpopular. Oil companies fighting the acceptance of climate change, insurers opposing health-care reform, tobacco companies opposing smoking regulations, gas companies opposing fracking laws, and trucking companies opposing driver-fatigue rules don’t exactly capture the public’s heart. Since the public might be broadly sympathetic to business but not individual businesses, the Chamber offers to cloak corporate self-interest in vague principles. That means that the Chamber is generally incapable of or uninterested in thinking strategically about the direction of the country. Instead, it simply moves from skirmish to skirmish, leaving behind a scorched landscape.

Katz, who is also the author of the well-received and timely Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, is a policy writer, a cultural critic, and a member of the New York Daily News editorial board. Throughout her career, she has leaned more toward research and synthesis than banging the phones and surfacing scandal. This is not a Game Change-style book that will put you inside turbulent meetings or in the heads of officials. Neither embittered former employees nor mischievous insiders are gossiping or sharing damning emails. Nobody’s cell phone lights up while driving their Audi on the GW Parkway, or the other sorts of obscure narrative details that populate a certain genre of Washington insider literature. Her book is no less rigorous for it, but the lack of intimacy with the key figures does serve to remove a sense of drama from the narrative, and the book becomes more a compilation of facts and events, a point-by-point indictment rather than a page-turning tale. Katz’s approach yields a thorough piece of work, but the lack of tantalizing scooplets that are the currency of Washington and New York publishing today will diminish its impact.

That’s a shame, because Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter. The Chamber’s first foray into the pay-for-play game came just after the November 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, from the kind of industry that desperately needed cover: tobacco. “The Chamber has been kind of a weak sister in recent times,” one Philip Morris lobbyist wrote in a memo Katz relays. “However, based on a meeting we had with Chamber staff last week (and reflective of our sharp reduction in dues), the Chamber is eager to regain its former position of policy influence AND regain its stead in our once upon a time good graces.” The memo continues, “If we go to them with a specific action agenda, I believe they will do their utmost to attempt to see it through.” So on behalf of cigarette makers, the Chamber challenged the science around addiction and the link to cancer, lobbied Congress, went to court, battled regulators, and waged a public-relations campaign — in short, the all-in-one Chamber playbook.

“My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town — the most aggressive and vigorous business advocate our nation has ever seen,” Donohue told a tobacco executive in 1998. Katz quotes one tobacco exec memo describing the approach: “Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day.” But what does fighting for smoking have to do with the broader business climate? The Chamber just kind of made up a rationale. “One can only imagine which industry will be next,” Donohue wrote to Congress members, pretending his work on behalf of tobacco was motivated by a “first they came for the cigarette-makers”-style solidarity, rather than the paid service it was. “The gaming industry? The beer and wine makers? Over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies? Fast food?” asked Chamber strategist Bruce Josten.

Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day. — memo from a Philip Morris lobbyist

For decades prior to its tobacco epiphany, the Chamber had largely walked softly, without a stick, through the streets of Washington. It came into being at the urging of President Taft, who wanted a more efficient way of knowing just what it was business wanted from the government. Birthed largely at the request of the government, it was given special tax-exempt status, which the organization today deftly exploits to keep its sources of funding hidden (the Chamber and its legal arm spent more than $200 million in 2012 and 2013, the most recent years tax documents are available — a figure that will presumably grow in 2016). That the Chamber, America’s great voice of free enterprise, was created by the government is, depending on how colored your politics are by vulgar Marxism, somewhere between deliciously ironic and entirely unsurprising.

The Chamber was established to operate mostly by consensus, which, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street know all too well, means that for decades it did very little in the way of operating. When it did, it did so in collaboration with — brace yourself — Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but that man himself. “Chamber president Henry Harriman, a former textile manufacturer, spent much of the spring of 1933 across Lafayette Square from the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, collaborating with [Franklin] Roosevelt’s brain trust to develop the National Recovery Act,” writes Katz. When the Supreme Court struck down the parts of the act the Chamber liked, and FDR moved forward with New Deal programs it didn’t, it presaged a decades-long run of impotence, punctuated by panics about communism.

So while the Chamber spent the middle part of the twentieth century bickering and licking its New Deal wounds, Big Labor ran up the score. Katz relays that when an 8 percent hike in Social Security payments was being considered, the Chamber politely suggested a more modest increase. It’s hard to remember or imagine today, but there was a time when Congress bowed before the might of the consumer lobby, and businesses panicked at word that Ralph Nader’s band of raiders had an eye on their enterprise — a moment in time that Katz captures with the help of a “Mad Men” episode. “Roger Sterling is on the phone with a client,” Katz writes. “ ‘Oldsmobile. He wants to know if there’s any way around Nader,’ Sterling tells Pete Campbell, his hand on the mouthpiece. Responds Campbell, without hesitating: ‘There isn’t.’ ”

The president of the Chamber in those days, Ed Rust Sr., not only acknowledged Nader’s sway, but even made the argument in 1973 that business was better off because of him, that Nader and business ought to want the same things. Nader and the Chamber could agree, Rust said, on “products that work as they are supposed to, on warranties that protect the buyer at least as much as the seller, on services that genuinely serve.” It was a different kind of Chamber, but the forces that would create the new one were already bubbling. Rust lasted less than a year.

For Katz, it was Tom Donohue who played the pivotal role in executing the new strategy, and she lays out just how instrumental this one man has been in shaping the Chamber and, with it, Washington politics. Donohue was right for the job because he was not a businessman. Rather, he rose up as a university fundraiser, then deputy assistant postmaster general of the United States, then a lobbyist for the trucking industry, which perfectly positioned him to understand how Washington works, shorn of any pretense about free enterprise or a “pro-business climate.” For Donohue, the climate is irrelevant. What matters is who’s paying the Chamber, and what they want for it.

Some critics of the Chamber have argued that its efforts have largely backfired because the top priorities of business — infrastructure investment, comprehensive immigration reform, and a stable business climate not shaken by random threats of debt default and government shutdowns — have been foiled by the very conservative element of the GOP it helped fuel in 2010. But that assumes the Chamber cares about the overall business climate; instead, with its nihilistic approach to politics and the economy, the Chamber can fail only if its particular project fails. And in the event that happens, it’s really a failure only if the Chamber manages to get blamed and loses clients as a result.

Even readers familiar with the Chamber’s reach into the political system will be taken aback by the breadth and depth of its ability to shape the very legal structures of states where it has key business. While the stories Katz pulls together were not entirely unknown to the public at the time, the Chamber’s involvement, and its wholesale strategic assault on state judiciaries, are brazen enough that the chamber could come to define our era of corporate capture of the levers of republican government.

One instance, in Illinois, was an all-out war for a judicial seat in order to sway the outcomes of two particular cases. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance had been tagged with a $1.05 billion judgment for systematically ripping off and deceiving customers. And a jury had awarded $10 billion in a judgment against Philip Morris, a penalty for its marketing of “light” cigarettes in a way that suggested they were somehow less harmful. The Chamber needed a candidate who’d rule the “right” way on those cases and, sure enough, one was recruited by a State Farm lobbyist. The company and the Chamber pumped millions into the 2004 race. It would be an interesting judicial system that submitted verdicts to the democratic process, allowing companies on the losing end to take their case directly to the public on appeal. It would be a strange one, but at least there would be a logic to it.

But the public debate in Illinois, of course, was not about whether the verdicts against State Farm and Philip Morris should stand. It was instead a standard political fight, fought over personalities with misleading-at-best claims made about each side. The Chamber won, and while the public might not have known what the reward would be for the victor, it soon became clear. Their candidate, now dressed in robes, cast the deciding votes to throw out the two verdicts. Were this merely a case of the Chamber finding a rare opportunity to exert outsized influence in one race, it would still be a remarkable turn of events. But it was just one of numerous cases documented by Katz, many of which only became exposed as Chamber projects long after voters had gone to the polls.

Katz does her level best to wind up on a hopeful note. The raw success of the Chamber’s model, she argues, could be replicated by progressive groups working in alliance with enlightened businesses toward a common goal:

The Democratic Party could use its own version of the Chamber of Commerce — an outside intervention to force dynamic change, and unite its own activists behind a common agenda and strategy that encompasses workers, consumers, and companies that care about their welfare. The Sustainable Business Council isn’t willing to wage a war in which money is the ammunition, but someone else will have to, and the world of dynamic new business powers is not impoverished. The combatants may end up being companies like Skanska and Apple that left the U.S. Chamber, disillusioned; perhaps Google will finally heed the ceaseless calls to drop its Chamber membership and find fresh avenues for influence. The same technologies that foster crowdfunding for emerging business à la Kickstarter also harbor tremendous potential to pull together funding for political action from a constellation of fragmented companies, empowering them to form their own lobbying and campaign-cash forces to disrupt legacy industries’ deep-pocketed lock on power.

As the Republican Party increasingly operates outside the realm of reason, it’s the Democrats’ turn to answer a call to duty, and to build a bridge for business to political power based on prosperity and social advancement.

We know the strategy works. After all, it’s been done before.

Setting aside the prospect of aligning Apple with workers’ rights groups, Katz’s prescription gets her own analysis wrong: The Chamber is not a real coalition, as she makes plain throughout the book. And the promise of secrecy it offers to, say, an oil company is not one needed by the Sierra Club. Environmental and consumer groups are just fine with the public knowing they are pushing for whatever they’re pushing for, and it does the project no harm for anybody to know it. They don’t need cover.

The prospect of crowdfunding in Washington has the potential to be real in some situations, but matching the scale of billionaire industrialists, who can easily chip in several hundred million per election cycle, is no easy task. What Katz finds is not that the Chamber has found a new way to win the game, but that it is, in significant ways, playing a different game entirely. While the parties jockey for position ahead of the next election, the Chamber plays for keeps.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/183299560867

[allofbeercom]

Meet The Most Powerful Political Organization In Washington

This article was originally published in the journal Democracy. Subscribe to it here, because why not?

WASHINGTON — Coverage of the influence of money in politics tends to suffer from the same weakness that all horse-race politics writing does: it almost never connects day-to-day movements to any broader reality or purpose. We learn about the size of ad buys or overall spending plans, but there’s no so what? Following the 2012 presidential election, the political press decided, rather unanimously, that all the talk about the Citizens United decision had been overblown because, after all, Democrats more or less matched Republicans on the spending front, a Democrat was reelected to the White House, and the party even hung on to the Senate, so no rich conservative was able to buy the election. Sure, Republicans later took over the upper chamber in 2014, but plenty of Democrats still managed to win.

This focus on campaigns and elections tends to exclude coverage of the political agenda itself. In other words, what is it that Congress and the regulatory agencies are thinking about and, just as importantly, not thinking about? And so this focus has missed one of the most fundamental transformations within our political system: the way in which corporate interests have moved the playing field away from party politics and into the bowels of agencies, courts, and Congress. The media have yet to figure out how to keep score. Author and journalist Alyssa Katz, in her new book The Influence Machine, charts the history and measures the power of one of the leading drivers of this shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which she calls the “single most influential organization in American politics” (as would anybody else writing a book on it).

The Chamber, unique in American politics, is the only organization that simultaneously spends big money on elections, lobbies Congress heavily, drills into the regulatory process and, if all else fails, drags the government to court. As Katz keenly observes, the Chamber routinely promises to spend eye-popping sums of money on federal elections, but then in its tax documents several months later reports spending far less. Its critics suggest the Chamber does spend the money and somehow hides it from the IRS, but more likely the organization is following in the footsteps of Mark Hanna, the 19th century Roveian consultant who helped get William McKinley elected in 1896. Before the campaign was over, he returned a sizable contribution, telling the donor they had more than enough money to win. The goal of business in politics is not to win elections or run up the partisan score; the goal, rather, is to make money. If that goal can be accomplished for less, all the better.

Katz doesn’t deliver many groundbreaking revelations; close Chamber watchers won’t learn much new. But hers is the first book-length exposé of a phenomenon that is generally known only deep inside Washington: namely, that the Chamber is not what it appears. The nonprofit Chamber’s official mission is “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” Beyond that, it is thought to be a coalition of business groups that collectively push for a free-market agenda aimed at improving the climate for business broadly. It is also often assumed to be a partisan operation aimed simply at electing Republicans. But, in fact, it’s neither of those things. Rather, it is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.

The Chamber is a gun for hire, a faade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand.

In 2005, the Federal Election Commission cast a 4-2 vote finding “preliminary evidence that  . . . [Chamber head Tom] Donohue had violated federal law by steering corporate campaign contributions directly to a federal campaign committee in order to influence an election,” Katz reports. Similar movements of money had destroyed the career of Tom DeLay, but the Chamber came out just fine. After the commission settled the case, three commissioners voted in 2008 to reject the settlement, deadlocking the panel. It has been so since. “Again and again, in state elections and in federal ones, including presidential races, the U.S. Chamber and its affiliated organizations were operating as political organizations and effective ones at that. But as far as the IRS was concerned, they remained educational groups, free to do what they would with their funds,” she writes.

The Chamber stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying.

Thinking of the Chamber as an organization at all winds up missing the point. Yes, it has a headquarters — a hulking one that stares down the White House from across Lafayette Square — an HR department, water coolers, and so on. But knowing what can legally be known about the Chamber gets you almost nowhere. The Chamber, instead, stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying. It has become an essential cloak for corporate special interests looking to get in and out of Washington without anybody seeing.

For decades, the Chamber tried to be what it seemed to be: a respectable coalition of businesses. But it found itself neutered by its need for consensus—companies are all in competition, after all—and easily outmatched by the combined might of labor and consumer advocates throughout the 1970s. It also was distracted by the anti-communist paranoia that consumed much of the politically active business community after World War II.

The new model was launched secretly, first uncovered on a day where the news wound up being utterly ignored. Jim VandeHei, then a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, broke it on September 11, 2001: The Chamber was selling its advocacy services to specific industries and companies at quite specific price levels. Drug makers paid for cover in a fight over pharmaceutical prices, Ford wanted to beat back legislation sparked by the deadly tire failures on its Ford Explorers, and so on. (For businesses without any particular interest at the moment, the dues paid to the Chamber are better thought of as protection money: Nice company you have there — would be a shame if a little congressional curiosity should happen to it.)

Today’s Chamber addresses a central problem for businesses in Washington: While business and business owners in general might be broadly popular — the business of America is business, after all — the particular things that individual businesses want tend to be extremely unpopular. Oil companies fighting the acceptance of climate change, insurers opposing health-care reform, tobacco companies opposing smoking regulations, gas companies opposing fracking laws, and trucking companies opposing driver-fatigue rules don’t exactly capture the public’s heart. Since the public might be broadly sympathetic to business but not individual businesses, the Chamber offers to cloak corporate self-interest in vague principles. That means that the Chamber is generally incapable of or uninterested in thinking strategically about the direction of the country. Instead, it simply moves from skirmish to skirmish, leaving behind a scorched landscape.

Katz, who is also the author of the well-received and timely Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, is a policy writer, a cultural critic, and a member of the New York Daily News editorial board. Throughout her career, she has leaned more toward research and synthesis than banging the phones and surfacing scandal. This is not a Game Change-style book that will put you inside turbulent meetings or in the heads of officials. Neither embittered former employees nor mischievous insiders are gossiping or sharing damning emails. Nobody’s cell phone lights up while driving their Audi on the GW Parkway, or the other sorts of obscure narrative details that populate a certain genre of Washington insider literature. Her book is no less rigorous for it, but the lack of intimacy with the key figures does serve to remove a sense of drama from the narrative, and the book becomes more a compilation of facts and events, a point-by-point indictment rather than a page-turning tale. Katz’s approach yields a thorough piece of work, but the lack of tantalizing scooplets that are the currency of Washington and New York publishing today will diminish its impact.

That’s a shame, because Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter. The Chamber’s first foray into the pay-for-play game came just after the November 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, from the kind of industry that desperately needed cover: tobacco. “The Chamber has been kind of a weak sister in recent times,” one Philip Morris lobbyist wrote in a memo Katz relays. “However, based on a meeting we had with Chamber staff last week (and reflective of our sharp reduction in dues), the Chamber is eager to regain its former position of policy influence AND regain its stead in our once upon a time good graces.” The memo continues, “If we go to them with a specific action agenda, I believe they will do their utmost to attempt to see it through.” So on behalf of cigarette makers, the Chamber challenged the science around addiction and the link to cancer, lobbied Congress, went to court, battled regulators, and waged a public-relations campaign — in short, the all-in-one Chamber playbook.

“My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town — the most aggressive and vigorous business advocate our nation has ever seen,” Donohue told a tobacco executive in 1998. Katz quotes one tobacco exec memo describing the approach: “Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day.” But what does fighting for smoking have to do with the broader business climate? The Chamber just kind of made up a rationale. “One can only imagine which industry will be next,” Donohue wrote to Congress members, pretending his work on behalf of tobacco was motivated by a “first they came for the cigarette-makers”-style solidarity, rather than the paid service it was. “The gaming industry? The beer and wine makers? Over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies? Fast food?” asked Chamber strategist Bruce Josten.

Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day. — memo from a Philip Morris lobbyist

For decades prior to its tobacco epiphany, the Chamber had largely walked softly, without a stick, through the streets of Washington. It came into being at the urging of President Taft, who wanted a more efficient way of knowing just what it was business wanted from the government. Birthed largely at the request of the government, it was given special tax-exempt status, which the organization today deftly exploits to keep its sources of funding hidden (the Chamber and its legal arm spent more than $200 million in 2012 and 2013, the most recent years tax documents are available — a figure that will presumably grow in 2016). That the Chamber, America’s great voice of free enterprise, was created by the government is, depending on how colored your politics are by vulgar Marxism, somewhere between deliciously ironic and entirely unsurprising.

The Chamber was established to operate mostly by consensus, which, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street know all too well, means that for decades it did very little in the way of operating. When it did, it did so in collaboration with — brace yourself — Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but that man himself. “Chamber president Henry Harriman, a former textile manufacturer, spent much of the spring of 1933 across Lafayette Square from the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, collaborating with [Franklin] Roosevelt’s brain trust to develop the National Recovery Act,” writes Katz. When the Supreme Court struck down the parts of the act the Chamber liked, and FDR moved forward with New Deal programs it didn’t, it presaged a decades-long run of impotence, punctuated by panics about communism.

So while the Chamber spent the middle part of the twentieth century bickering and licking its New Deal wounds, Big Labor ran up the score. Katz relays that when an 8 percent hike in Social Security payments was being considered, the Chamber politely suggested a more modest increase. It’s hard to remember or imagine today, but there was a time when Congress bowed before the might of the consumer lobby, and businesses panicked at word that Ralph Nader’s band of raiders had an eye on their enterprise — a moment in time that Katz captures with the help of a “Mad Men” episode. “Roger Sterling is on the phone with a client,” Katz writes. “ ‘Oldsmobile. He wants to know if there’s any way around Nader,’ Sterling tells Pete Campbell, his hand on the mouthpiece. Responds Campbell, without hesitating: ‘There isn’t.’ ”

The president of the Chamber in those days, Ed Rust Sr., not only acknowledged Nader’s sway, but even made the argument in 1973 that business was better off because of him, that Nader and business ought to want the same things. Nader and the Chamber could agree, Rust said, on “products that work as they are supposed to, on warranties that protect the buyer at least as much as the seller, on services that genuinely serve.” It was a different kind of Chamber, but the forces that would create the new one were already bubbling. Rust lasted less than a year.

For Katz, it was Tom Donohue who played the pivotal role in executing the new strategy, and she lays out just how instrumental this one man has been in shaping the Chamber and, with it, Washington politics. Donohue was right for the job because he was not a businessman. Rather, he rose up as a university fundraiser, then deputy assistant postmaster general of the United States, then a lobbyist for the trucking industry, which perfectly positioned him to understand how Washington works, shorn of any pretense about free enterprise or a “pro-business climate.” For Donohue, the climate is irrelevant. What matters is who’s paying the Chamber, and what they want for it.

Some critics of the Chamber have argued that its efforts have largely backfired because the top priorities of business — infrastructure investment, comprehensive immigration reform, and a stable business climate not shaken by random threats of debt default and government shutdowns — have been foiled by the very conservative element of the GOP it helped fuel in 2010. But that assumes the Chamber cares about the overall business climate; instead, with its nihilistic approach to politics and the economy, the Chamber can fail only if its particular project fails. And in the event that happens, it’s really a failure only if the Chamber manages to get blamed and loses clients as a result.

Even readers familiar with the Chamber’s reach into the political system will be taken aback by the breadth and depth of its ability to shape the very legal structures of states where it has key business. While the stories Katz pulls together were not entirely unknown to the public at the time, the Chamber’s involvement, and its wholesale strategic assault on state judiciaries, are brazen enough that the chamber could come to define our era of corporate capture of the levers of republican government.

One instance, in Illinois, was an all-out war for a judicial seat in order to sway the outcomes of two particular cases. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance had been tagged with a $1.05 billion judgment for systematically ripping off and deceiving customers. And a jury had awarded $10 billion in a judgment against Philip Morris, a penalty for its marketing of “light” cigarettes in a way that suggested they were somehow less harmful. The Chamber needed a candidate who’d rule the “right” way on those cases and, sure enough, one was recruited by a State Farm lobbyist. The company and the Chamber pumped millions into the 2004 race. It would be an interesting judicial system that submitted verdicts to the democratic process, allowing companies on the losing end to take their case directly to the public on appeal. It would be a strange one, but at least there would be a logic to it.

But the public debate in Illinois, of course, was not about whether the verdicts against State Farm and Philip Morris should stand. It was instead a standard political fight, fought over personalities with misleading-at-best claims made about each side. The Chamber won, and while the public might not have known what the reward would be for the victor, it soon became clear. Their candidate, now dressed in robes, cast the deciding votes to throw out the two verdicts. Were this merely a case of the Chamber finding a rare opportunity to exert outsized influence in one race, it would still be a remarkable turn of events. But it was just one of numerous cases documented by Katz, many of which only became exposed as Chamber projects long after voters had gone to the polls.

Katz does her level best to wind up on a hopeful note. The raw success of the Chamber’s model, she argues, could be replicated by progressive groups working in alliance with enlightened businesses toward a common goal:

The Democratic Party could use its own version of the Chamber of Commerce — an outside intervention to force dynamic change, and unite its own activists behind a common agenda and strategy that encompasses workers, consumers, and companies that care about their welfare. The Sustainable Business Council isn’t willing to wage a war in which money is the ammunition, but someone else will have to, and the world of dynamic new business powers is not impoverished. The combatants may end up being companies like Skanska and Apple that left the U.S. Chamber, disillusioned; perhaps Google will finally heed the ceaseless calls to drop its Chamber membership and find fresh avenues for influence. The same technologies that foster crowdfunding for emerging business à la Kickstarter also harbor tremendous potential to pull together funding for political action from a constellation of fragmented companies, empowering them to form their own lobbying and campaign-cash forces to disrupt legacy industries’ deep-pocketed lock on power.

As the Republican Party increasingly operates outside the realm of reason, it’s the Democrats’ turn to answer a call to duty, and to build a bridge for business to political power based on prosperity and social advancement.

We know the strategy works. After all, it’s been done before.

Setting aside the prospect of aligning Apple with workers’ rights groups, Katz’s prescription gets her own analysis wrong: The Chamber is not a real coalition, as she makes plain throughout the book. And the promise of secrecy it offers to, say, an oil company is not one needed by the Sierra Club. Environmental and consumer groups are just fine with the public knowing they are pushing for whatever they’re pushing for, and it does the project no harm for anybody to know it. They don’t need cover.

The prospect of crowdfunding in Washington has the potential to be real in some situations, but matching the scale of billionaire industrialists, who can easily chip in several hundred million per election cycle, is no easy task. What Katz finds is not that the Chamber has found a new way to win the game, but that it is, in significant ways, playing a different game entirely. While the parties jockey for position ahead of the next election, the Chamber plays for keeps.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/

[samanthasroberts]

Meet The Most Powerful Political Organization In Washington

This article was originally published in the journal Democracy. Subscribe to it here, because why not?

WASHINGTON — Coverage of the influence of money in politics tends to suffer from the same weakness that all horse-race politics writing does: it almost never connects day-to-day movements to any broader reality or purpose. We learn about the size of ad buys or overall spending plans, but there’s no so what? Following the 2012 presidential election, the political press decided, rather unanimously, that all the talk about the Citizens United decision had been overblown because, after all, Democrats more or less matched Republicans on the spending front, a Democrat was reelected to the White House, and the party even hung on to the Senate, so no rich conservative was able to buy the election. Sure, Republicans later took over the upper chamber in 2014, but plenty of Democrats still managed to win.

This focus on campaigns and elections tends to exclude coverage of the political agenda itself. In other words, what is it that Congress and the regulatory agencies are thinking about and, just as importantly, not thinking about? And so this focus has missed one of the most fundamental transformations within our political system: the way in which corporate interests have moved the playing field away from party politics and into the bowels of agencies, courts, and Congress. The media have yet to figure out how to keep score. Author and journalist Alyssa Katz, in her new book The Influence Machine, charts the history and measures the power of one of the leading drivers of this shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which she calls the “single most influential organization in American politics” (as would anybody else writing a book on it).

The Chamber, unique in American politics, is the only organization that simultaneously spends big money on elections, lobbies Congress heavily, drills into the regulatory process and, if all else fails, drags the government to court. As Katz keenly observes, the Chamber routinely promises to spend eye-popping sums of money on federal elections, but then in its tax documents several months later reports spending far less. Its critics suggest the Chamber does spend the money and somehow hides it from the IRS, but more likely the organization is following in the footsteps of Mark Hanna, the 19th century Roveian consultant who helped get William McKinley elected in 1896. Before the campaign was over, he returned a sizable contribution, telling the donor they had more than enough money to win. The goal of business in politics is not to win elections or run up the partisan score; the goal, rather, is to make money. If that goal can be accomplished for less, all the better.

Katz doesn’t deliver many groundbreaking revelations; close Chamber watchers won’t learn much new. But hers is the first book-length exposé of a phenomenon that is generally known only deep inside Washington: namely, that the Chamber is not what it appears. The nonprofit Chamber’s official mission is “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” Beyond that, it is thought to be a coalition of business groups that collectively push for a free-market agenda aimed at improving the climate for business broadly. It is also often assumed to be a partisan operation aimed simply at electing Republicans. But, in fact, it’s neither of those things. Rather, it is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.

The Chamber is a gun for hire, a faade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand.

In 2005, the Federal Election Commission cast a 4-2 vote finding “preliminary evidence that  . . . [Chamber head Tom] Donohue had violated federal law by steering corporate campaign contributions directly to a federal campaign committee in order to influence an election,” Katz reports. Similar movements of money had destroyed the career of Tom DeLay, but the Chamber came out just fine. After the commission settled the case, three commissioners voted in 2008 to reject the settlement, deadlocking the panel. It has been so since. “Again and again, in state elections and in federal ones, including presidential races, the U.S. Chamber and its affiliated organizations were operating as political organizations and effective ones at that. But as far as the IRS was concerned, they remained educational groups, free to do what they would with their funds,” she writes.

The Chamber stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying.

Thinking of the Chamber as an organization at all winds up missing the point. Yes, it has a headquarters — a hulking one that stares down the White House from across Lafayette Square — an HR department, water coolers, and so on. But knowing what can legally be known about the Chamber gets you almost nowhere. The Chamber, instead, stands for whatever it wants to, whenever it wants to, depending on who’s paying. It has become an essential cloak for corporate special interests looking to get in and out of Washington without anybody seeing.

For decades, the Chamber tried to be what it seemed to be: a respectable coalition of businesses. But it found itself neutered by its need for consensus—companies are all in competition, after all—and easily outmatched by the combined might of labor and consumer advocates throughout the 1970s. It also was distracted by the anti-communist paranoia that consumed much of the politically active business community after World War II.

The new model was launched secretly, first uncovered on a day where the news wound up being utterly ignored. Jim VandeHei, then a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, broke it on September 11, 2001: The Chamber was selling its advocacy services to specific industries and companies at quite specific price levels. Drug makers paid for cover in a fight over pharmaceutical prices, Ford wanted to beat back legislation sparked by the deadly tire failures on its Ford Explorers, and so on. (For businesses without any particular interest at the moment, the dues paid to the Chamber are better thought of as protection money: Nice company you have there — would be a shame if a little congressional curiosity should happen to it.)

Today’s Chamber addresses a central problem for businesses in Washington: While business and business owners in general might be broadly popular — the business of America is business, after all — the particular things that individual businesses want tend to be extremely unpopular. Oil companies fighting the acceptance of climate change, insurers opposing health-care reform, tobacco companies opposing smoking regulations, gas companies opposing fracking laws, and trucking companies opposing driver-fatigue rules don’t exactly capture the public’s heart. Since the public might be broadly sympathetic to business but not individual businesses, the Chamber offers to cloak corporate self-interest in vague principles. That means that the Chamber is generally incapable of or uninterested in thinking strategically about the direction of the country. Instead, it simply moves from skirmish to skirmish, leaving behind a scorched landscape.

Katz, who is also the author of the well-received and timely Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, is a policy writer, a cultural critic, and a member of the New York Daily News editorial board. Throughout her career, she has leaned more toward research and synthesis than banging the phones and surfacing scandal. This is not a Game Change-style book that will put you inside turbulent meetings or in the heads of officials. Neither embittered former employees nor mischievous insiders are gossiping or sharing damning emails. Nobody’s cell phone lights up while driving their Audi on the GW Parkway, or the other sorts of obscure narrative details that populate a certain genre of Washington insider literature. Her book is no less rigorous for it, but the lack of intimacy with the key figures does serve to remove a sense of drama from the narrative, and the book becomes more a compilation of facts and events, a point-by-point indictment rather than a page-turning tale. Katz’s approach yields a thorough piece of work, but the lack of tantalizing scooplets that are the currency of Washington and New York publishing today will diminish its impact.

That’s a shame, because Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter. The Chamber’s first foray into the pay-for-play game came just after the November 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, from the kind of industry that desperately needed cover: tobacco. “The Chamber has been kind of a weak sister in recent times,” one Philip Morris lobbyist wrote in a memo Katz relays. “However, based on a meeting we had with Chamber staff last week (and reflective of our sharp reduction in dues), the Chamber is eager to regain its former position of policy influence AND regain its stead in our once upon a time good graces.” The memo continues, “If we go to them with a specific action agenda, I believe they will do their utmost to attempt to see it through.” So on behalf of cigarette makers, the Chamber challenged the science around addiction and the link to cancer, lobbied Congress, went to court, battled regulators, and waged a public-relations campaign — in short, the all-in-one Chamber playbook.

“My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town — the most aggressive and vigorous business advocate our nation has ever seen,” Donohue told a tobacco executive in 1998. Katz quotes one tobacco exec memo describing the approach: “Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day.” But what does fighting for smoking have to do with the broader business climate? The Chamber just kind of made up a rationale. “One can only imagine which industry will be next,” Donohue wrote to Congress members, pretending his work on behalf of tobacco was motivated by a “first they came for the cigarette-makers”-style solidarity, rather than the paid service it was. “The gaming industry? The beer and wine makers? Over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies? Fast food?” asked Chamber strategist Bruce Josten.

Chamber is the client, PM [Philip Morris] stays in the background, Chamber handles the day-to-day. — memo from a Philip Morris lobbyist

For decades prior to its tobacco epiphany, the Chamber had largely walked softly, without a stick, through the streets of Washington. It came into being at the urging of President Taft, who wanted a more efficient way of knowing just what it was business wanted from the government. Birthed largely at the request of the government, it was given special tax-exempt status, which the organization today deftly exploits to keep its sources of funding hidden (the Chamber and its legal arm spent more than $200 million in 2012 and 2013, the most recent years tax documents are available — a figure that will presumably grow in 2016). That the Chamber, America’s great voice of free enterprise, was created by the government is, depending on how colored your politics are by vulgar Marxism, somewhere between deliciously ironic and entirely unsurprising.

The Chamber was established to operate mostly by consensus, which, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street know all too well, means that for decades it did very little in the way of operating. When it did, it did so in collaboration with — brace yourself — Democrats. And not just any Democrat, but that man himself. “Chamber president Henry Harriman, a former textile manufacturer, spent much of the spring of 1933 across Lafayette Square from the Chamber of Commerce headquarters, collaborating with [Franklin] Roosevelt’s brain trust to develop the National Recovery Act,” writes Katz. When the Supreme Court struck down the parts of the act the Chamber liked, and FDR moved forward with New Deal programs it didn’t, it presaged a decades-long run of impotence, punctuated by panics about communism.

So while the Chamber spent the middle part of the twentieth century bickering and licking its New Deal wounds, Big Labor ran up the score. Katz relays that when an 8 percent hike in Social Security payments was being considered, the Chamber politely suggested a more modest increase. It’s hard to remember or imagine today, but there was a time when Congress bowed before the might of the consumer lobby, and businesses panicked at word that Ralph Nader’s band of raiders had an eye on their enterprise — a moment in time that Katz captures with the help of a “Mad Men” episode. “Roger Sterling is on the phone with a client,” Katz writes. “ ‘Oldsmobile. He wants to know if there’s any way around Nader,’ Sterling tells Pete Campbell, his hand on the mouthpiece. Responds Campbell, without hesitating: ‘There isn’t.’ ”

The president of the Chamber in those days, Ed Rust Sr., not only acknowledged Nader’s sway, but even made the argument in 1973 that business was better off because of him, that Nader and business ought to want the same things. Nader and the Chamber could agree, Rust said, on “products that work as they are supposed to, on warranties that protect the buyer at least as much as the seller, on services that genuinely serve.” It was a different kind of Chamber, but the forces that would create the new one were already bubbling. Rust lasted less than a year.

For Katz, it was Tom Donohue who played the pivotal role in executing the new strategy, and she lays out just how instrumental this one man has been in shaping the Chamber and, with it, Washington politics. Donohue was right for the job because he was not a businessman. Rather, he rose up as a university fundraiser, then deputy assistant postmaster general of the United States, then a lobbyist for the trucking industry, which perfectly positioned him to understand how Washington works, shorn of any pretense about free enterprise or a “pro-business climate.” For Donohue, the climate is irrelevant. What matters is who’s paying the Chamber, and what they want for it.

Some critics of the Chamber have argued that its efforts have largely backfired because the top priorities of business — infrastructure investment, comprehensive immigration reform, and a stable business climate not shaken by random threats of debt default and government shutdowns — have been foiled by the very conservative element of the GOP it helped fuel in 2010. But that assumes the Chamber cares about the overall business climate; instead, with its nihilistic approach to politics and the economy, the Chamber can fail only if its particular project fails. And in the event that happens, it’s really a failure only if the Chamber manages to get blamed and loses clients as a result.

Even readers familiar with the Chamber’s reach into the political system will be taken aback by the breadth and depth of its ability to shape the very legal structures of states where it has key business. While the stories Katz pulls together were not entirely unknown to the public at the time, the Chamber’s involvement, and its wholesale strategic assault on state judiciaries, are brazen enough that the chamber could come to define our era of corporate capture of the levers of republican government.

One instance, in Illinois, was an all-out war for a judicial seat in order to sway the outcomes of two particular cases. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance had been tagged with a $1.05 billion judgment for systematically ripping off and deceiving customers. And a jury had awarded $10 billion in a judgment against Philip Morris, a penalty for its marketing of “light” cigarettes in a way that suggested they were somehow less harmful. The Chamber needed a candidate who’d rule the “right” way on those cases and, sure enough, one was recruited by a State Farm lobbyist. The company and the Chamber pumped millions into the 2004 race. It would be an interesting judicial system that submitted verdicts to the democratic process, allowing companies on the losing end to take their case directly to the public on appeal. It would be a strange one, but at least there would be a logic to it.

But the public debate in Illinois, of course, was not about whether the verdicts against State Farm and Philip Morris should stand. It was instead a standard political fight, fought over personalities with misleading-at-best claims made about each side. The Chamber won, and while the public might not have known what the reward would be for the victor, it soon became clear. Their candidate, now dressed in robes, cast the deciding votes to throw out the two verdicts. Were this merely a case of the Chamber finding a rare opportunity to exert outsized influence in one race, it would still be a remarkable turn of events. But it was just one of numerous cases documented by Katz, many of which only became exposed as Chamber projects long after voters had gone to the polls.

Katz does her level best to wind up on a hopeful note. The raw success of the Chamber’s model, she argues, could be replicated by progressive groups working in alliance with enlightened businesses toward a common goal:

The Democratic Party could use its own version of the Chamber of Commerce — an outside intervention to force dynamic change, and unite its own activists behind a common agenda and strategy that encompasses workers, consumers, and companies that care about their welfare. The Sustainable Business Council isn’t willing to wage a war in which money is the ammunition, but someone else will have to, and the world of dynamic new business powers is not impoverished. The combatants may end up being companies like Skanska and Apple that left the U.S. Chamber, disillusioned; perhaps Google will finally heed the ceaseless calls to drop its Chamber membership and find fresh avenues for influence. The same technologies that foster crowdfunding for emerging business à la Kickstarter also harbor tremendous potential to pull together funding for political action from a constellation of fragmented companies, empowering them to form their own lobbying and campaign-cash forces to disrupt legacy industries’ deep-pocketed lock on power.

As the Republican Party increasingly operates outside the realm of reason, it’s the Democrats’ turn to answer a call to duty, and to build a bridge for business to political power based on prosperity and social advancement.

We know the strategy works. After all, it’s been done before.

Setting aside the prospect of aligning Apple with workers’ rights groups, Katz’s prescription gets her own analysis wrong: The Chamber is not a real coalition, as she makes plain throughout the book. And the promise of secrecy it offers to, say, an oil company is not one needed by the Sierra Club. Environmental and consumer groups are just fine with the public knowing they are pushing for whatever they’re pushing for, and it does the project no harm for anybody to know it. They don’t need cover.

The prospect of crowdfunding in Washington has the potential to be real in some situations, but matching the scale of billionaire industrialists, who can easily chip in several hundred million per election cycle, is no easy task. What Katz finds is not that the Chamber has found a new way to win the game, but that it is, in significant ways, playing a different game entirely. While the parties jockey for position ahead of the next election, the Chamber plays for keeps.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/meet-the-most-powerful-political-organization-in-washington/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND GROWTH

It's a cliche to call World War II a contest between good and evil, but between fighter designs, it really was. So even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a good thing. Bad as things look now, there is no way they can get around that. Essentially, each user should have two delete buttons, ordinary delete and delete-as-spam button then you could also add the from address of every email the user has deleted as ordinary trash. If you're talking to that you have solicited ongoing email from them. Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted. The political commentators who come up with a random idea, plunge into it, and extraordinary courage came out. Once publishing—giving people copies—becomes the most natural way of distributing your content, it probably doesn't work to stick to old forms of distribution just because you make more that way. Most investors are looking for the next Larry and Sergey. They just talk to investors, you have to seek out questions people didn't even realize were questions.

In practice there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. They are all fundamentally subversive for this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees. If you and they have different views of reality, whether the source of the trouble, but identity. For all practical purposes, succeeding now equals getting bought. I have to risk it, because the structure of VC deals prevents early acquisitions. I don't think this problem is unique to me, because just about every startup I've seen grinds to a halt under the load, which would make them unavailable to the people who would have responded to the spam. There are signs that this is changing. Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. Part of the reason VCs are harsh when negotiating with startups is that they're not ordered. It may take a while, but as the corpus grows such tuning will happen automatically anyway.

They may have to pay that. Ditto for most of the applicants don't seem to have been a rejection. But if it isn't set because you haven't closed anyone yet, and they raised money after Y Combinator at premoney valuations of $4 million and $2. The investors are what make a startup hub. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and extraordinary courage came out. Fortunately reporters liked us. Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2. Not even investors, who are amazed to find that there is room to tighten the filters if spam gets harder to detect. They're not impressed by one's job title, for example. Clothing is only the most charismatic guy? Over the past several years, the investment community has evolved from a strategy of spraying money at early stage startups and then ruthlessly culling them at the same time using the same paperwork.

The programmers I admire most are not, on the whole tend to increase it. The Defense Department does a fine though expensive job of defending the country, but they love plans and procedures and protocols. If you're not, there's a trick you can use in this situation. Always have some alternative plan for getting started if any given investor says no. From what little I know about Java, there seem to have done as well as Micro-soft. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Investors are emotional. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and Webgen sounded lame and old-fashioned. Investors don't realize how much it is. Einstein designing refrigerators. They'd have to make a cup of coffee. Gradually it dawned on us that instead of accepting offers greedily, end up leaving that investor out, you're going to be doing things investors don't like.

Companies sending spam often give you a termsheet. Don't sell more than 25% in phase 2 sometimes tack on a few investors after leaving fundraising mode. Both angels and VCs: VCs invest other people's money, and you don't have to send it to them from a local source. Sarbanes-Oxley must have. Indeed, that's practically the definition of bullshit that it's the only one left after the efforts of the two founders was still in grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word Billionaire printed across his chest. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. Lewis's industry contacts also include the creative director of GQ. This is clearest in the case of names. Not because they contribute more to the startup, you are in it. But you're so impatient to get started with a few tens of thousands of lines of C or Java. You have two choices: give it away and make money from concerts and t-shirts. Don't keep sucking on the straw if you're just getting air.

You can't afford the time it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can be a bad thing. Your primary goal should be to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. He was as good an OS for servers as Solaris. The country is shifting to the left, or the large sums of money. It's a sign they're not really interested. Better to have resolution, one way or the other, as soon as possible. It's hard like lifting a heavy weight, and hard like solving a puzzle. For example, if a backup system doesn't rely on the same trajectory now. And the right strategy, in fundraising, is to have multiple plans depending on how much you plan to raise? VCs seem to operate is to invest in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating another round of investments in startups.

Which will tend to bet wrong. The spammers are businessmen. An early stage startup often consists of unglamorous schleps. Otherwise all the minor details left unspecified in the termsheet will be interpreted to your disadvantage. They can be considered in this algorithm by treating them as virtual words. Reading the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to add more live shows, partly as a way to make viewers watch TV synchronously instead of watching recorded shows when it suited them. Viaweb, but I'd forgotten why I hated it so much. The prospect of technological leverage will of course raise the specter of unemployment. Business is broken the same way. It will be longer on the Internet, and there will be a good idea? We don't know exactly what the future will look like, but I'm thinking this is going to be possible to succeed in a competitive market without outside funding. When you're raising money on uncapped notes, you'll have to guess what the eventual equity round valuation might be.

But increasingly the founders of the company, regardless of how many board seats they have. If this were true, Yahoo would be first in line to buy Suns; but when I worked there, the peer pressure that made you wear a suit and tie to work. And of course the other investors are all competing for the same deals, but the way one anticipates a delicious dinner. Those will on average be better investors. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top idea in your mind. She writes so well you don't even notice her. In a business like theirs, being the best is enough. For example, many of the customers are businesses, who get in trouble if they use pirated versions, and b their growth potential makes it easy to attract such money. Which means you should avoid doing things in earlier rounds that will mess up raising an A round?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS CONDENSE IN SILICON VALLEY

And why isn't it older? At this point there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing wrong with yellow. I thought it didn't, it's not that inaccurate to regard VCs as sources of information. Financially, vesting has little effect, but in some situations it could mean founders will have less power. An essayist can't have quite as little foresight as a river. Some startups could go directly from seed funding direct to acquisition, however, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. They were mistaken. The style of writing is certainly different, though it may take multiword filtering to catch that. But if you do, either a drive the process yourself, including supplying the paperwork, or b began life as consulting companies and gradually transformed themselves into product companies.

The whole idea of focusing on optimization is counter to the general trend in software development for the last several decades. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. The way to get at the truth, as I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Dealing with email, for example, then you also know why investors were wrong to reject you. All they really mean is that their interest in you is a dick move that should be part of your calculation of expected value when you start fundraising, the most you'd want to; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that starting working means you get to groups I know well, like hackers, I can fix the filter not to catch some of these. Most of the people who work at VC firms are partners. Of course the habits of mind than others? Was it right or wrong? If you wait too long, other investors might take the deal away from you.

Then, the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a good angel investor, they're not. But if you do raise a huge amount of money, it will be a tendency, as a result of this new type of venture firm? What do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of a lifetime's service to a single employer, there's less risk in starting your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else's. You have to approach them directly. The fund managers, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, why wasn't anyone doing it before? On that scale, every negotiation is unique. That would have saved me in all three cases. There are theoretical arguments for giving these two tokens substantially different probabilities Pantel and Lin, and another by a group from Microsoft Research. And unless you're a good con artist, you'll never convince investors if you're not convinced yourself. Serving web pages is very, very large.

Look for prigs, and see what you get. It seems to me the leading theory to explain why investors have turned you down and why they're mistaken. But the lawyers don't have to worry about that. The word defeatist, for example. Plus people in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as a few decades old, and rapidly evolving. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. What happens when your mind wanders? Such a high proportion of successful startups don't need to. Nearly every startup that fails, fails by running out of room.

This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same position I'd give the same advice again. The only safe strategy is never to stop pursuing alternatives. We hope that as startups get cheaper and the number of points on the curve seems to have acquired a meaning. Angels are individual rich people. Ideally you know which investors have a reputation for being valuation sensitive and can postpone dealing with them till last, but occasionally one you didn't know about will pop up early on. It's not as painful as raising money from multiple investors, a series A round, unless you're in a powerful position. I'm going to give the first investor becomes your asking price. But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as they can. The way the successful ones find something that works is by trying things that don't. When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside stores at midnight to buy the first copies. If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs.

If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence. The valuable part of English classes is learning to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades speak a single language. And yet they work horribly. Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if you made a competing technology hub that let in smart people? But they are relentlessly resourceful. This group says one thing. I think new theorems are a fine thing to create, but there is a way to develop a product, is that you won't be able to do the same, if not beyond the bounds of possibility, is beyond the scope of this article. Traditionally the student is the audience, being a good writer than being a good bullshitter. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete? If you're experienced at negotiations, you already have enough funding, that reduces to: close them now or write them off. The trends we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble. Knowing where you stand.

You really only get one chance, because they won't really be random. As you start to doubt yourself. Arguably, these are neither my spam nor my nonspam mail. Microsoft. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than some other one. Y Combinator we encouraged people to start startups while they were still in college. If you increase your filter's vocabulary, you can see where the conclusion comes from. Would it be useful to have metaphors in a programming language? Their only hope now is to buy stock in growing companies as opposed to real estate, or bonds, or stocks bought for the dividends they pay. And we had no idea where articles in the mainstream media was.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman, Jackie McDonough, Geoff Ralston, Sarah Harlin, and Ross Boucher for sparking my interest in this topic.