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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Afghanistan’s ‘Misinformation Surge’

An avalanche of misinformation has followed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Some of it is sloppiness: people sharing information and not knowing it’s wrong. But intentional efforts appear to be at play, seeking to shape the images of the Taliban, the resistance, U.S. officials, and the Pakistani military. The identities and motivations of those sharing this misinformation are often not clear, but they could be part of organized propaganda campaigns.

Misinformation about Afghanistan has been posted in many languages, including Urdu, Hindi, English, and Korean. The Poynter Institute, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse have compiled many examples, including a Twitter thread from AFP fact-checker Uzair Rizvi.

U.S. actions in Afghanistan have so far been a frequent target of misinformation. Some social media posts include photoshopped images of Afghan evacuees bearing heavy weaponry, suggesting Washington has helped terrorists leave Afghanistan; these were posted by Russian media outlets. Others falsely accuse U.S. President Joe Biden of gifting $80 billion in arms to the Taliban and abandoning U.S. military dogs.

Additionally, much of the misinformation spreading in Afghanistan relates to Taliban brutalities and is easily debunked. An image of the Taliban purportedly auctioning off women actually depicts a protest against the Islamic State in London in 2016, and a photo of a man leading women in chains is digitally edited from an image taken in Iraq in 2003, for example. Other posts mention a nonexistent Al Jazeera investigation on women abducted by the Taliban and their nonexistent plans to execute Christian missionaries.

The battles between the Taliban and resistance fighters in Panjshir—the only province not seized by the group last month—have become a bonanza for fake news. The lack of credible on-the-ground reporting in the province has led to an information shortage that could be easily exploited. Photos of supposed Taliban fighters in Panjshir actually depicted French soldiers. Several Indian TV channels broadcast video purporting to show Pakistani aircraft attacking Panjshir. (In reality, the video was depicting American jets flying in Wales.)

What explains this surge in misinformation? The sudden attention rush of a major news story, the power of social media, and information shortages all play a role. Moreover, actors with axes to grind use misinformation as ammunition. Fake news about Biden’s policies in Afghanistan has been propagated by his rivals, from the U.S. Republican Party to Russian state media. Nationalist Indian outlets seek to paint Pakistan as an aggressor.

The information vacuum is critical. In recent years, Afghan and U.S. officials stopped providing information about military casualties and the amount of territory under Taliban control. As the security situation worsened in the last few years, media coverage outside of Kabul became more difficult. It’s now hard to know what’s happening in far-flung areas. In Panjshir, for example, the lack of on-the-ground reporting results in competing narratives, fueling rumors and propaganda wars.

The spread of misinformation in Afghanistan has troubling implications. For one, fake stories about the Taliban could change the group’s image among those outside of Afghanistan. While its brutality is apparent from its actions in Kabul, where citizen journalists recently filmed the Taliban beating female protesters, it’s harder to see this elsewhere. Without independent reporting, accounts of beatings, arrests, and intimidation outside the capital can’t be confirmed—giving the group space to project itself as softer and more moderate.

Furthermore, with so much fake news, true accounts run the risk of being dismissed as false. Social media posts have already suggested the images of U.S. aircraft taking off with Afghans clinging on that began circulating on Aug. 16 are fake. And with foreign bureaus evacuating their Afghan employees and local journalists facing Taliban threats, information shortages are only likely to worsen.

Unfortunately, the spread of misinformation all works to the Taliban’s advantage. It could prompt the militants to ramp up repressive activities in areas with little media presence, knowing that many of them will go unreported or unconfirmed.

Misinformation About the End of the War in Afghanistan, Debunked

These claims were among the recurring themes of misinformation that we fact-checked as the two-decade war came to a chaotic close.

— By: Samantha Putterman

— September 7, 2021 | Poynter.Org

President Joe Biden speaks about the end of the war in Afghanistan from the State Dining Room of the White House, Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

As President Joe Biden stuck to a deadline for pulling U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, he was criticized for leaving some Americans and thousands of Afghan allies behind and for not responding fast enough to the Taliban’s takeover.

Biden was also lashed over several things he didn’t do or that just didn’t happen.

Influential GOP senators and Fox News promoted false and misleading claims about the scale of U.S. weaponry now in the Taliban’s hands, the abandonment of military K-9s, and Biden’s treatment of the families of 13 U.S. soldiers who died in the Aug. 26 Kabul airport attack, which killed more than 200 people.

These claims were among the recurring themes of misinformation that we fact-checked as the two-decade war came to a chaotic close.

Claim: The Biden administration gifted the Taliban with an $80 billion “arsenal.”

Claims about the U.S. giving Taliban weapons surfaced following reports about Taliban fighters seizing some U.S. attack planes, Black Hawk helicopters and other vehicles and equipment. But trending posts about the Taliban’s new “arsenal” relied on outdated spending and purported to cite precise accounting where there is none yet.

Early on, widely shared Facebook posts inaccurately stated that the Biden administration gifted the Taliban with “$80+ billion” in military weapons.

That estimate is False. The U.S. spent about $88.6 billion on security in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, but just a fraction of it went toward military hardware. Defense expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told us that aircraft and other military equipment remaining are likely worth less than $10 billion.

Another misleading post about weapons in the Taliban’s hands listed 19 categories of military equipment, including 358,530 assault rifles, 22,174 Humvees and 33 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

This is also exaggerated. There has been no accounting of how much military equipment was left in Afghanistan. The figures cited are inflated and outdated, with most of the equipment being provided over many years to the Afghan forces.

The “358,530 assault rifles” figure, for example, appears to be from a 2017 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that counted the number of rifles, including AK-47s and sniper rifles, provided from 2004 to 2016.

And none of the figures show how many items remained in Afghanistan and were usable when the Taliban took control in mid-August.

Overall, most of the weaponry and equipment were provided over many years to the Afghan forces that opposed the Taliban, while some remained in control of the U.S. military.

Claim: Biden didn’t attend the ceremony for the 13 U.S. service members killed in Kabul.

We rated this Pants on Fire.

The baseless allegation was made by various conservatives — notably Republican political adviser Blair Brandt, and Buzz Patterson, a GOP candidate for Congress in California. They said in now-deleted tweets that Biden skipped the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for the remains of the 13 U.S. military service members who died in the Aug. 26 attack.

But the plane carrying the remains of the service members hadn’t yet arrived at the base when the tweets were posted. The ceremony took place the next day, on Aug. 29. Biden attended. He and first lady Jill Biden met with the families of the service members at Dover’s Center for Families of the Fallen.

Claim: The U.S. military left its working dogs in Afghanistan.

A viral photo of dog crates in front of a battered and empty U.S. helicopter sparked outrage among fans of dogs and the military. Prominent Republicans like Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said that they were military dogs abandoned at the Kabul airport during the U.S. evacuation.

But that isn’t right. The federal government said the dogs pictured do not work for the military and that its working dogs were evacuated from the country in mid-August.

“The U.S. military did not leave any dogs in cages at Hamid Karzai International Airport, including the reported military working dogs,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted on Aug. 31. “Photos circulating online were animals under the care of the Kabul Small Animal Rescue, not dogs under our care.”

Some of the animals in the images likely belonged to independent defense contractors and could be characterized as “contract working dogs.”

Some animal welfare groups like American Humane dismissed any distinction between the dogs’ contract or military status and called on Congress to start classifying contract dogs the same way it does military dogs.

Multiple groups involved in evacuating the dogs cited a series of setbacks, including chartered flights falling through, unrest at the airport and stringent U.S. safety regulations. Advocates said the dogs are safe, but what happens to them now is uncertain.

Claim: Video shows the Taliban executed someone by hanging them from a helicopter.

Conservative bloggers, pundits and politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared a short, blurry video of a helicopter flying with a person dangling from a rope.

“This horrifying image encapsulates Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe: The Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter,” Cruz tweeted.

That explanation is False. Various other images and videos reviewed by PolitiFact show that the person dangling from the chopper was alive, moving and waving his arms. The person was suspended by a harness that wrapped under his arms, not a noose around the neck.

Several news outlets and fact-checkers reached the same conclusion, determining that the video did not depict an execution, and that the person had been tasked with trying to fix a flag on a public building.

Aśvaka News Agency, an Afghan news outlet, later confirmed to PolitiFact that the person was controlled and was hanging from the helicopter to fix the flag at the governor’s building in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city.

Cruz later acknowledged that his tweet “may be inaccurate” and deleted it. But others, like Fox News host Sean Hannity, continued to give the false story air after it was widely debunked.

NOT REAL NEWS: A Look at What Didn’t Happen this Week

— By The Associated Press | August 20, 2021

— Tom Kertscher, Gabrielle Settles and Bill McCarthy contributed reporting.

This February 2003 photo provided by photographer Murat Düzyol shows three women walking behind a man in Erbil, Iraq. A version of this original image was manipulated to digitally add chains on the women's ankles, with a caption erroneously claiming it was made in Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of the country in August 2021. (Murat Düzyol via AP)

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

Photo from Iraq altered to create fake image of chained Afghan women

CLAIM: A photo shows three Afghan women chained to one another, walking behind a man who holds the end of the chain.

THE FACTS: The photo is fake. It was based on an old photo, and the chains were digitally added. Photographer Murat Düzyol told The Associated Press he took the original photo in Erbil, Iraq, in February 2003. Tweets sharing the altered photo were among several misleading social media posts that began to emerge after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on Sunday. Twitter users posted the manipulated photo and suggested that it showed women in Afghanistan walking behind a man. In the edited photo, chains were digitally added onto the ankles of the women, with the man holding the chain. There was no chain in the original photo. Also, it was taken in Iraq, not Afghanistan. “#AfghanWomen. God protect women and children because an institution like the United Nations has become impotent,” said a Twitter user who tweeted the altered photo. Over the years, the photo has been misrepresented and posted multiple times. One blog falsely stated the photo was taken in Afghanistan and said it showed an example of women walking about five paces behind their husbands. Düzyol, who lives in Istanbul, told AP he took the photo in 2003. Around that time, he often visited Iraq and took photos. The day the photo was taken, there was a ceremony commemorating Iraqi civilians who were killed in the city of Erbil, he said. “As people were returning to their homes after the ceremony, such a composition randomly appeared on the street. It’s a completely instant snapshot and completely natural,” Düzyol explained in an email. “The women obviously knew each other, but I’m not sure they knew the man.” Many fear the Taliban will reimpose a strict interpretation of Islamic law that was practiced when they ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time, women were barred from attending school and having jobs outside the home. They had to wear burqas and be accompanied by a male relative when they were in public. After taking over, the Taliban said they promise to honor women’s rights within the norms of Islamic law, but many Afghans are skeptical. — Associated Press writer Arijeta Lajka in New York contributed this report.

Afghan citizens pack inside a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, as they are transported from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. On Friday, Aug. 20, 2021, The Associated Press reported on stories circulating online incorrectly claiming another photo showed a plane full of Afghan refugees being evacuated from the country this week, with not a single woman or child among them. In fact, that photo, which appeared online as early as 2018, shows Afghan refugees being sent back to their country from Turkey, according to a story at the time from Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency. Photos captured this week show that hundreds of Afghan men, women and children have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. (Capt. Chris Herbert/U.S. Air Force via AP)

Photo of Afghan men on plane is from 2018

CLAIM: A photo shows a plane full of Afghan refugees being evacuated from the country this week, with not a single woman or child among them.

THE FACTS: In fact, this photo appeared online as early as 2018. It shows Afghan refugees being sent back to their country from Turkey, according to a story at the time from Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency. The photo looks down the aisle of an airplane filled with men, some of them waving at the camera. Social media users are sharing it as new this week with claims it shows only men, with no women and children, being evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. “And not a single woman or child among them!” one Facebook user wrote alongside the picture. “As if the invasion of our southern border weren’t enough of a challenge. Now the biden Administration is flying in hardened, fighting-aged men from Afghanistan.” Another Facebook user wrote, “Another wave of ‘refugees’ is already heading to Europe, this time from Afghanistan.” But a reverse-image search reveals the picture does not show recent evacuation efforts from Afghanistan. The photo showed some 324 Afghan refugees who had entered Turkish territory illegally and were detained and sent back to Afghanistan in April 2018, according to an article on the Spanish-language version of the Anadolu Agency’s website. Photos captured this week show that hundreds of Afghan men, women and children have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. — Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.

FILE - The Afghan flag flies atop the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. On Friday, Aug. 20, 2021, The Associated Press reported on a photo circulating online that was digitally altered to make it appear that the Taliban flag was flying on the tower of the palace in Kabul on Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

Photo digitally altered to show Taliban flag on Afghan presidential palace

CLAIM: A photo shows the Taliban flag flying on the tower of the Afghanistan presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday night.

THE FACTS: The photo is fake — an old photo was digitally altered to make it appear that the Taliban flag was flying above the palace. On Sunday, Taliban forces seized the presidential palace. The Associated Press took photos and video Tuesday showing that the Afghan flag was still flying from the building. The photo that was manipulated was first shared in 2020 and originally showed the palace adorned with Afghan flags. In the manipulated version, the Taliban flag replaces the Afghan flag. It looks clearly altered -- the flag appears too rectilinear and the script too flat to be on a moving flag. The edited photo was shared across social media and by some media outlets, with captions saying it showed the fall of Afghanistan. The Taliban took over Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was supposed to fully withdraw its troops from the country. President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. AP photos showed the Taliban inside the presidential palace on Sunday.

Video claiming to show Taliban fighters on trampoline is more than a year old

CLAIM: A video shows Taliban fighters jumping on a trampoline this week as they celebrate their return to power in Afghanistan.

THE FACTS: This video is not current and has circulated online for more than a year. In the days since the Taliban seized power across Afghanistan, capturing all major cities in less than a week, social media users have shared videos of the insurgents allegedly celebrating their victory in gyms, amusement parks and presidential suites. One such video, which social media users claim shows Taliban fighters rejoicing on a trampoline, has circulated since at least March 2020. The video of four men jumping on an expansive trampoline and one standing to the side was shared with captions like “Taliban’s terrorists right now” and “Taliban fighters celebrating their takeover of Kabul by Jumping on a Trampoline.” But it appeared on Facebook as early as March 31, 2020. It was also shared on YouTube on Aug. 28, 2020, with the caption, “Taliban first time trampoline.” It wasn’t clear who captured the original video or who was featured in it. — Ali Swenson

Video showing shaking house is from Alaska, not Haiti

CLAIM: Video from a camera inside a home shows the house shaking from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Saturday.

THE FACTS: The video being shared online shows an earthquake that struck nearly three years ago in Alaska, not Haiti. As images and videos emerged from Haiti following Saturday’s earthquake, social media users began misrepresenting the Alaska video from 2018 to suggest it showed the earthquake rumbling through a home in Haiti. More than 2,000 people have been reported dead in Haiti following the earthquake that struck the southwestern part of the Island. In 2010, an earthquake of similar magnitude left more than 300,000 dead in the country. Posts online Saturday shared the video showing the Alaska earthquake, with wording that suggested it showed the power of the earthquake in Haiti. The posts sharing the video said to pray for Haiti. The original video was shared to Twitter by James Easton on Nov. 30, 2018, when Alaska was hit with a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. At the time, The Associated Press reported that the earthquake left thousands without power and buckled roadways in some places. Easton told the AP via email that the video showed his home in Alaska. Easton tweeted the video, saying that he was “just a little bit shaken” by the earthquake. The video showed the house violently shaking and the camera footage soon being cut off by the quake. “It’s amusing to see the video pop up every so often, but the focus should really be on the actual damage in Haiti,” he said. — Associated Press writer Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed this report.

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emospritelet · 6 years ago

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Honourable Members - 3/3

Yay, I finished something! And yes, I know the spoilers for Cobra have the PM on the opposite political side to the one I picked for him. I don’t care, I still got them laid, and that’s what counts. Here there be smut.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [AO3 link]

Sutherland was pacing his office.

It was an excellent room for pacing, he had discovered. The rug was thick enough to cushion his steps to silence, but not so thick that his shoes caught on the pile when he turned. Pacing was a habit of his, usually when he was irritated or had something that required a lot of thinking time. Right now, however, his brain was concentrating on very little other than burning off the nervous energy that had been produced by a long night and too much coffee.

The prospective administrator of Wolsingham plc had finally backed out, restructuring talks had broken down, and the Government’s largest private contractor was being put into liquidation by its creditors, of which the biggest by far was the Government itself. It meant that infrastructure projects would be on hold unless a new contractor could be found to take them over, and there would inevitably be widespread job losses, for which his administration would be blamed. However misplaced that blame might be.

Since receiving the late-night call from the Minister of the Department of Innovation and Industry, a call which he had dreaded but which wasn’t wholly unexpected, he had been up and working. He had approved the statement regarding the Wolsingham fiasco and sent it out to all MPs around half an hour before it was released to the press, at around seven o’clock that morning. The Minister had appeared on Today to explain the Government’s position, but given what was already leaking out from the company itself following the announcement, it was more a case of damage control than reassurance. Inside sources at the company, mouths firmly shut throughout its trading, were now telling anyone who would listen lurid tales about the rampant misconduct in the higher levels of the firm, and each new revelation made Sutherland want to wring the neck of each and every board member.

It was now almost midday, Parliament was in session and he was due to attend in an hour to give a statement. Passing his desk, he snatched up the remote control for the wall-mounted television and switched it on. The familiar green benches of the Commons flashed into view, already half-full of MPs gathered for the day’s business. The Speaker called on Belle French, who stood up and raised her chin, and Sutherland’s eyes narrowed at the determined look on her face. Here we go.

“Mr Speaker, having received notification of the impending liquidation of Wolsingham plc this morning, I was appalled to discover the level of mismanagement and corruption that appears to have been going on!” she began.

“You didn’t bloody discover it,” muttered Sutherland. “Somebody with a bloody axe to grind released the information.”

“I have received intelligence from credible internal sources at the company providing evidence of the most shocking misuse of public funds! Evidence that the Government appears not to have acted upon!”

“Well, we’ve only just received it ourselves, give us a bloody chance.”

“Undercutting, loss-leading, deliberately pitching bids at levels they knew could not be delivered, then leaving the taxpayer to foot the increased costs when those projects foundered!”

“None of which you would know about if we hadn’t appointed a provisional liquidator!” said Sutherland, more loudly, as though she could hear him.

“Not to mention, Mr Speaker, the atrocious way in which this company has treated the weakest in our society.” Miss French was on a roll. “Thousands of jobs at risk, hundreds of small businesses going without payment! This is blatant incompetence on a national scale, and the Government needs to be held accountable!”

“Oh, right, and the fact that we were tied into those fucking contracts by the last administration for the next five fucking years is lost on you, is it?”

Miss French stared out across the Commons, eyes flashing blue fire, perfect lips slightly parted as her hands gripped the notes in front of her.

“Moreover, Mr Speaker,” she added. “Is this latest debacle not indicative of this Government’s utter contempt for the people it serves? The failure to take seriously the mounting complaints about the small businesses and employees, suffering under the yoke of Wolsingham for years! The slew of queries from local people that I and other Honourable Members have received and have raised with Government Ministers, only to be brushed off and sacrificed on the altar of progress! A form of progress, Mr Speaker, that appears to be for a select few on the boards of these firms, and their shareholders!”

“Right, well, we’ll just nationalise everything, shall we? Should be the work of moments...”

“This country needs fresh ideas and a fresh perspective,” she went on. “The Democratic Socialists are the party of the twentieth century: a tired, worn out relic of the past run by tired, worn out men.”

“Bloody cheek!”

“It’s little wonder the Prime Minister spends so much time hidden away in Downing Street,” she said, seemingly uplifted by the chorus of jeers around her. “I’d be ashamed to face the nation if I were him! Presiding over those who have shown such blatant disregard for the people they were put in power to serve!”

“Can you believe this shite?” Sutherland demanded of no one in particular, gesturing at the television.

There was a rattle behind him, and he glanced around, to see Alice carrying in a tea tray. He quickly cleared some papers on his desk so she could put it down, and turned back to the television, folding his arms. Miss French stared out at him, proud and fierce as a warrior, her jaw set and her head high.

“Mr Speaker,” she said. “The House demands that an urgent inquiry be held into the collapse of this firm and all who were involved in this alleged malpractice! In the meantime, I call upon the Minister for Industry and Innovation and the Prime Minister himself to immediately make themselves available to this House for questioning on this most heinous of matters!”

“I’m attending in an hour for that purpose, and you fucking know it!”

He glared at the screen, but Miss French had sat down to a mingled chorus of cheers and heckling, and the Speaker called on another Member. Sutherland turned off the television in disgust.

“What the hell do they bloody expect when we got the information only a few hours before them?” he demanded. “I swear they want me to perform fucking miracles and then act all disillusioned when I don’t!”

“Seems to me like she’s already fighting the next election a year in advance,” remarked Alice, with a twinkle in her eye. “Try not to take it personally, sir. Coffee?”

He grumbled at that, but accepted a cup of coffee from her.

“Anything I need to hear about before I go over there?”

“The Press Office sent through a list of potential TV and radio programmes that have requested an interview,” she said. “Carrie’s handling it, she says she’ll catch you up after you’ve been to the House.”

“Fine.” He slumped into the chair and let his head roll back with a sigh. “God, I’m tired. If I have much more caffeine my head’ll explode.”

“I could make you some decaf if you want.”

“No,” he grumbled. “If I tried to drink decaf I think my nervous system would be in open rebellion.”

“Have a biscuit instead, then,” she suggested. “Chocolate Hobnobs. I picked them out specially.”

“Sometimes I think you and Arthur are the only ones that care about me.”

“You know perfectly well that Arthur’s a greedy attention-whore and doesn’t give a shit about anyone as long as he gets fed and snuggled,” she said, with a grin. “Mine is the only true loyalty around here.”

He chuckled, and sat forward, reaching for a biscuit. Alice dropped a folder of documents on top of the pile already on his desk, and he ignored it in favour of dipping his biscuit in the coffee before sucking off the melted chocolate.

“Can you tell Carrie to come in here when she’s ready?” he said. “I want to look over the briefing papers again and I could use her input.”

“Sir.”

She went out, and Sutherland ran a hand through his hair, pulling the papers towards himself and trying to take in what was printed there. He ate the last of the biscuit, hesitated, and then took another, telling himself he could use the energy after pulling an all-nighter. Tired and worn out my arse! We’ll see who’s bloody worn out by the end of this!

The House of Commons was almost full, MPs clustered together on the benches, staring at him and muttering as he delivered his statement, the odd heckle or roar of approval cutting across the ever-present background noise. Sutherland ignored them, speaking in clipped tones, laying out the facts and avoiding anything extraneous. He glanced around the chamber as he did so, briefly catching the eye of Belle French, who was staring at him with her mouth twisted and one eyebrow raised, as though she didn’t believe a word he was saying. It was a little off-putting, and so he looked away again.

“The Minister for Industry and Innovation is in talks with other members of the cabinet and with major stakeholders at this moment,” he said, drawing to a close. “I’m expecting an update from him in the next few hours, and this Government will keep Honourable Members briefed accordingly. I have every confidence that the Civil Service will act with its usual expertise and professionalism to make the process as painless as possible for all those affected.”

He sat down, mentally readying himself for a grilling, and the Speaker shouted to be heard above the din.

“Order!” he bellowed. “There’s a little time remaining for questions, but if you all get over-excited and shout over one another, it’s going to prove difficult for the Prime Minister to answer! Mr Baron Samdi!”

“Thank you, Mr Speaker.” Samdi stood, suave and immaculate, straightening the cuffs of his shirt as he caught Sutherland’s eye. “What reassurances can the Prime Minister give those of us with constituencies for which Wolsingham is a major employer that there will not be large-scale job losses?”

Precious little, at the moment. Sutherland stood up again.

“The viability of the company’s ongoing contracts and the potential for TUPE to apply to firms willing to take them on is under discussion and will form part of the Minister’s initial report,” he said, and sat down abruptly.

“Miss Belle French!”

For fuck’s sake, she gets to ask a question again? Wouldn’t be surprised if he bloody fancies her, the old bastard! Sutherland scowled to himself, but tried to smooth his expression as Miss French stood.

“Thank you, Mr Speaker,” she said. “There have been rumours circulating about the directors of this firm and potential misconduct in the handling of the firm’s finances and in the running of its business. Misconduct, Mr Speaker, that touches the lives of millions of taxpayers and service users. Misconduct that can only be described as contemptible—”

“Order!” shouted the Speaker, as the usual low grumbling increased in volume. “Perhaps, given the early stage of this affair, the Honourable lady could limit herself to a question to the Prime Minister, rather than a damning indictment?”

Sutherland smirked.

“Thank you, Mr Speaker,” said Miss French, in a flat tone. “Given the rumours of misconduct, rumours which I attempted very recently to bring to the Prime Minister’s attention, what steps is the Government taking to ensure that the directors are held to account for their actions?”

Sutherland wanted to grind his teeth. He stood up, gripping the edge of the despatch box to stop his fingers from drumming on it in irritation, and fixed Miss French with a glare which she returned with interest.

“I admire the Honourable lady’s tenacity,” he said dryly. “I’d like her to rest assured that the Government is not currently in need of her guidance in this matter. Investigations will be carried out as deemed appropriate by the relevant authorities, misconduct will be reported and acted upon where they see fit, and the Government will act in accordance with any advice received. If the Honourable lady could remind herself that the company has only just entered liquidation and it’s possibly a little too early to be erecting the scaffold, I’d be eternally grateful.”

A chorus of laughter rolled around the chamber, but he distinctly heard Miss French say “well, that’s bloody deflection, if ever I heard it.”

Her words needled him, but he stepped back from the despatch box, gathering his papers, a strange ringing in his ears that he recognised as growing frustration and anger. The questions continued, but fortunately the Speaker only allowed another five minutes, so he didn’t have long to suffer. He could feel Miss French’s eyes on him, and when he happened to glance her way she was glowering. The questions over, MPs began leaving for lunch, the next debate scheduled for an hour’s time, and he allowed the room to empty a little before marching from the chamber. Carrie fell into step beside him in the lobby, taking the papers from his hands and tossing her hair.

“Not a disaster, on the whole,” she said. “I’ve arranged a press conference outside Number 10. The Minister’s provided a brief update which we can go over in the car.”

“Fine.”

“Prime Minister!”

Sutherland let his head roll back with a rumbling groan at the sound of a familiar voice.

“Just keep fucking walking,” he muttered, and Carrie looked as though she wanted to burst into laughter.

“Prime Minister!” Tap-tap-tap-tap went her heels as she trotted after him. “If you have a moment?”

He caught a flash of chestnut hair and a whiff of her perfume as she drew up alongside. Sutherland sighed.

“Whatever it is, Miss French, you have precisely ten seconds to spit it out,” he said curtly. “I’m a little busy right now.”

“Fine, then I’ll keep it brief,” she said bluntly. “I want in on the Wolsingham Committee.”

“The—” Sutherland stared at her. “There isn’t a bloody Wolsingham Committee!”

“Oh, so you’re telling me there’s gonna be no public enquiry coming out of this?” she said flatly. “No House Select Committee, no Government scrutiny whatsoever? Pull the other one, it’s got bloody bells on!”

Sutherland was in parts outraged and impressed by her bravery.

“Miss French, I thought we already discussed your prior dealings with this company and decided that those disqualified you from having any part in Government consideration of its actions.”

“Well, I’d suggest to you that things have changed since the firm went down the toilet and took a bunch of innocent people with it, wouldn’t you agree?” she said tartly. “At least put me forward for consideration and let someone else who isn’t blinded by prejudice decide whether I’m capable of acting impartially.”

Sutherland stopped abruptly, Miss French taking another step before turning to face him with fire in her eyes. Carrie had stepped back from them, clutching his briefcase to her chest, her eyes flicking between them avidly. He felt his jaw clench in outrage at Miss French’s thinly-veiled accusation.

“Are you saying I’m prejudiced?” he demanded. “Based on what? My reluctance to be accused of a rigged fucking system?”

“Right…” she drawled, nodding. “Because it’s not like that exists in public office. Perish the thought. Thank goodness the Government is here to preserve public trust...”

“I don’t like your tone, Miss French,” he growled.

“I speak as I find,” she said coldly. “You know as well as I do that this is an unmitigated disaster and it’s only gonna get worse! But maybe you don’t care about the little people who get hurt, hmm? I imagine being Prime Minister, stuck down here at Number 10, it’s easy to get out of touch.”

Sutherland prided himself in his self-control, something he had fought against his naturally volatile nature to address and improve over the years. It was a mark of how far he had come that he hadn’t cursed anyone out on the floor of the House, in his opinion, but he was tired, and stressed, and so he did something that, looking back later that day, he would not be proud of. He lost his temper.

“Don’t you dare tell me I’m out of fucking touch and don’t fucking care!” he spat, taking a step forward and wagging an admonitory finger at her. “When I was working my arse off campaigning for equal pay you were probably at fucking pony club!”

“And what if I was?” she demanded, hands on hips. “Just because my parents had money, it doesn’t invalidate what I want to do as a public servant! And - and it doesn’t mean I can’t recognise injustice when it happens to others!”

He growled under his breath, turning away and heading for the entrance, but she followed him relentlessly, getting in front of him again and glaring at him.

“Okay, so I don’t have as many years of service under my belt as you,” she said. “But then I am somewhat younger than you sir, and I’ve spent most of my life in school and in university! During which time I also volunteered for Citizens Advice and a local women’s refuge! Is that enough for you? Have I earned whatever credentials you think I’m missing? Or is it the fact that I’m challenging you that you don’t like?”

“Oh, so I’m a fucking misogynist again, am I?” he snapped, drawing to a halt again. “Take a look at my staff, Miss French! Take a look at all the women in senior positions in this Government and in Number 10 and tell me I’m a sexist pig, I fucking dare you!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t think you have a problem with women, sir, I think you have a problem with me specifically.”

Sutherland tried to keep his rage internal, swallowing down the waspish retort that had risen in his throat like bile. He even managed a tiny, bitter smile.

“If you have some sort of complaint about my behaviour, you know the proper channels to go through,” he said, as pleasantly as he could. “As regards your request about involvement in future committees, put it in writing and my PPS will look it over. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I actually have to go and do some fucking work. Perhaps you’d be good enough to do the same.”

He stepped past her, quickening his pace, and Carrie trotted at his side, shooting him an amused look as they made their way out into the sunshine. He could still feel Miss French’s eyes on his back, as though he had a target painted there. It made his shoulder blades itch. He was inwardly seething as he walked to the car, and Carrie seemed to sense it, calmly drawing his attention to the briefing paper she had mentioned. It was a useful distraction, and by the time he reached the podium that had been placed outside Number 10, he was as cool and collected as he could be. The press conference went well, and when the door of Number 10 was closed on the world, he heaved a sigh, handing his coat and jacket to Alice, who winked at him and promised to bring him some tea.

Sutherland stomped into his office, followed by Carrie, who was smirking slightly, as though she was thinking of a joke she wasn’t about to share. Slumping into his chair, he snatched up a folder of papers that Alice had left on the desk. Reports with one-page briefings attached made up the bulk of it, and he growled under his breath as he saw what he suspected would be the first of many letters from the Honourable Member for Avonleigh, her complaints about the alleged mismanagement of Wolsingham there in black and white. Snatching up the letter, he shook it at Carrie, who slouched in the chair opposite with a grin still on her face.

“And now I can’t escape the woman even here!” he complained, waving the letter. “Look! She’s gonna drive me up the bloody wall!”

“Well, if you let her set the tone of your encounters, that’s certainly true.”

“I don’t understand why we manage to push each other’s buttons so bloody much,” he added. “I never had this problem with her predecessor.”

“That’s because he was hopeless,” she reminded him. “Spent most of PMQs snoring on the benches, as I recall.”

That was true, but he grumbled under his breath anyway.

“You think she gets off on making me look an idiot?”

“I think you’re capable of doing that all by yourself,” she said, and he sent her a flat look, which made her sigh and roll her eyes.

“I think she gets off on the challenge,” she said. “I’d say that you’re fairly evenly matched, on the whole. Both very intelligent, both very passionate, just with slightly different ways of getting your point across.”

“As in I sound as though I’m shouting outside the factory gates and she sounds like a bloody orator?” he muttered. “I’m well aware.”

“Well, you never know.” She winked at him. “Maybe she likes a bit of rough.”

“I’ll give her a bit of bloody rough,” he growled.

“I expect that’s what she’s hoping,” she said absently, flipping through her papers. “We won’t say which bit, of course.”

“Remind me why I haven’t fired you?” he demanded, slapping the letter down, and she arched a brow at him.

“Because you think it’s important that people be able to speak truth to power, and you know I’ll always tell you the truth,” she said airily. “Even if I take the piss while doing it.”

He grumbled at that. It was accurate, of course.

“What am I gonna do about her?” he asked, and there was a hint of pleading in his voice. Carrie pursed her lips, a thoughtful look on her face.

“Well,” she said. “You could try sleeping with her.”

“Carrie!”

“I’m serious!” she protested. “It’s obvious that you want to. It’s even more obvious that she wants to. Why am I the only one saying it? You know, apart from the rest of the Cabinet, most of the Commons, Special Branch, the tabloid press...”

“That would be a total abuse of power and you know it!”

“Oh, please!” She sniffed in derision. “She’s not some gullible young intern gawping at you in awe. She’s a very intelligent, very competent adult. And she’s more than capable of handing your delightful arse to you.”

“She’s half my bloody age!” he said, ignoring the comment about his arse.

“Right, because that’s a total barrier to mutual lust…”

��For fuck’s sake...”

“You know I’m right.”

“I know we can barely stay civil when we have a conversation,” he said. “That’s what I know.”

“Yes, you’re both brimming over with passion,” she said absently. “Go burn some of it off would you? Preferably together. Preferably naked.”

“No, I’ve got a better idea.”

“I very much doubt it,” she remarked, and then sighed again as she looked up. “Very well. What’s your brilliant plan?”

“Easy,” he said. “I’m gonna give her something to do.”

Sutherland took a sip of whisky, scribbling a note on the report in front of him. The clock on the wall ticked its slow rhythm; it was approaching nine o’clock and most of the staff had left for the day. Even Arthur had wandered out of the room and left him alone. He was still expecting a visitor, though. The business of Government continued.

He finished reading the report, added a final comment, and set it aside just as the clock chimed nine. Sitting back, he took another sip of whisky, hearing voices outside the door. He took another sip, draining the glass. It appeared his visitor had arrived. A swift knock, and the door opened, Carrie peering around it.

“Miss French to see you, sir,” she said, in a perfectly appropriate tone, which she spoiled entirely by winking at him. “I was about to get off, but if you want me to stay…”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, in a very even tone. “I daresay Miss French won’t be here long. Thank you, Carrie.”

She nodded, disappearing, and Miss French took her place, black skirt and white shirt beneath a neat black jacket, her feet in some of those impossibly high shoes. She nodded to him cautiously.

“Prime Minister.”

“Well, come in and sit down,” he said impatiently.

She closed the door behind her, crossing to the chair in front of his desk and taking a seat. He sat back a little, tapping his pen against the papers in front of him as he looked at her, and Miss French pursed her lips.

“Am I to be reprimanded?” she asked lightly, and he raised a brow.

“For what?”

“For chewing you out in the corridors of power,” she said dryly. “For not knowing my place, whatever.”

He rolled the pen between thumb and forefinger, raising a brow.

“You think I brought you here to chastise you, is that it?”

A slight blush bloomed in her cheeks, and he wondered what she was thinking.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Although I guess if you were going to do something, it would have been earlier, right?”

He allowed himself a tiny smile.

“Miss French, if you think that was the worst thing that’s ever been said to me in the Houses of Parliament, you’re very much mistaken.”

“Guess I’ll need to try harder.”

She smiled a little, to take the edge off, and he grinned, jerking his head towards the cabinet.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Are we celebrating something?”

“No,” he said tersely. “But I’m gonna pour myself one, and I’m being fucking polite. D’you want one or not?”

She eyed him, lips pursed.

“Okay.”

He got up, taking his empty glass to the cabinet and taking out another.

“Whisky?”

“Thank you.”

He poured two glasses, turning with them in his hands. Miss French had stood up, and perched herself on the edge of his desk again, knees crossed, one foot bouncing a little as she watched him. The light gleamed on her curls, shining waves of mahogany resting on her shoulders. He wondered if it was as soft as it looked.

“No Arthur this evening?” she asked. He handed her a drink, trying not to glance at her perfect legs.

“He wandered off an hour ago. I should think he’s already gone to curl up on the bed.”

“Hmm.” She took a sip, still watching him. “Lucky Arthur.”

Her eyes held his, and he licked his lips, his throat suddenly dry. He wanted to say something, but the words seemed to catch in his throat. He took a sip of his drink as he tried to collect his thoughts, and Miss French came to his rescue by speaking first.

“Do you always work so late?”

“Not always,” he said, and shrugged. “Sometimes later.”

She smiled a little.

“Long days, then,” she said. “Longer nights, perhaps.”

She took another sip, eyes fixed on his, and he licked his lips again. He was nervous, he realised, and it was an unfamiliar feeling, if not entirely unpleasant.

“Country doesn’t run itself, unfortunately,” he added. “There’s a reason every Prime Minister rapidly goes grey.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” she said. “You look very distinguished.”

“That’s a kind way of saying knackered.”

She grinned at that.

“Well, you know what they say about all work and no play...”

“I know,” he sighed. “Ridiculously long work days and no personal life to speak of. I’m sure I must seem very boring to you.”

“Quite the contrary.” She tilted her head a little, looking him over. “I’m sure you can be very interesting indeed when it suits you.”

Her gaze was weighing, measuring, as though she was peeling off his clothing layer by layer to reveal the true man beneath. It was a little unnerving.

“I hope you find time for - leisure,” he said awkwardly, and her lips pursed, her eyes sparkling.

“I can keep myself amused.”

Her gaze was making his skin tingle, and he began pacing, head turned away from her a little. The silence between them stretched and grew, making his heart thump and his breath quicken. He heard her shift a little on the desk, the soft swish of smooth skin against skin as she uncrossed her legs. The sound made his breath catch, and he took a sip of whisky to cover it.

“Why am I here, sir?” she asked.

Her voice was calm, her tone mellow. He could feel her eyes on him, tracing a line of heat down his spine and making him shudder. Turning to face her, he took a deep breath, raising his glass.

“I thought perhaps we could clear the air,” he said.

Miss French sucked her teeth, looking thoughtful, and nodded as she crossed her legs again.

“Alright,” she said. “That seems like something two mature adults would do, doesn’t it?”

“I was thinking we might have a calm and rational discussion,” he added. “No one raising their voice, yelling or swearing.”

“By no one, I take it you mean you.”

Sutherland grimaced.

“I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you earlier,” he admitted. “I’m not proud of it, and I’d like to think it won’t happen again.”

“Oh, I should think it’s almost inevitable,” she said. “But is that a bad thing? To give one’s passion free rein?”

She had raised her chin a little, one dark brow arching, lips a little pursed, and for a brief, distracting moment he wondered what other passions she had. How else she might give in to them. He shook his head, dispelling the images just starting to form, and stepped back on one foot, taking his weight on his heel as he looked her over.

“You and I appear to have an - antagonistic - relationship,” he remarked.

“Yes,” she said. “I get on your tits, to use the vernacular. You already told me that.”

She took a sip of her drink, eyes fixed on his, crossed leg swinging at the foot a little. He could feel his breath quicken a little as she raised her head.

“If it makes you feel any better, you get on mine,” she added.

He was aware that his eyes had automatically dropped to her chest, where high, firm breasts pushed against her white shirt. A brief image flashed into his mind, her shirt open, breasts bare as his hands gripped and squeezed, as his mouth and tongue sought hard pink nipples. Swallowing hard and trying to ignore the sudden swelling of his cock in his pants, he dragged his eyes back up to meet hers. Miss French smiled a little, a slow curve of her berry-stained lips and a knowing glint in her eyes as her foot bounced a little quicker.

“Well, be that as it may,” he managed. “I’m sure we can work together to get past it.”

“I’m sure we can,” she said. “Is this an offer of peace, then?”

“It’s an offer of work.”

Her smile grew.

“That’s a start, I suppose.”

“I’ve had some preliminary reports out of Arendelle Town Council,” he began, desperately hoping his rising arousal would dissipate. “Perhaps you’ve heard the stories circulating in the press?”

She looked curious.

“I’ve heard as much as everyone else, I suspect.”

“Turns out there’s truth in them.”

“How much truth?” she asked.

“That’s what we need to find out,” he said, pacing again. “I’m convening a committee to investigate potential large-scale negligence on the part of social services and the police. I understand that you have a particular interest in women’s safety and child protection, so I’d like you to be part of it.”

A smile was already spreading across her face, her eyes widening.

“It’ll mean spending a lot of time in the constituency itself,” he added. “I’m afraid that will mean reduced time in your own constituency, and in Parliament, but I want first-hand accounts from those involved before any hearings are chaired.”

“An unusual job for an MP,” she observed.

“Well, I want someone I can trust to oversee the investigations,” he said. “Should be a good opportunity for you, and I have every confidence that you’ll do a first-rate job.”

“Thank you for your support, Prime Minister.” Her tone was dry, and he turned to face her again, a frown already drawing his brows down.

“Is there something wrong with my offer?” he asked.

“Not at all,” she said blandly. “I’m sure this long-distance placement absolutely needs my feet on the ground in Arendelle and couldn’t possibly be done remotely.”

“I realise it’s a little unorthodox,” he said. “But I feel it’s the right choice.”

“Is it?” She pursed her lips. “Because it seems like a good way to keep me out of your sight for a considerable time. Getting me off your tits, as it were.”

“It’s a job that needs doing!” he insisted. “I thought you’d welcome it! I never thought that by offering it up I’d be accused of - of - what is it I’m being accused of, anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, looking irritated. “I think we could work well together, but I get the impression you don’t like me too much.”

“Really?” He chuckled hollowly, taking a sip of his drink. “And here you’ve gone out of your way to endear yourself to me. Can you imagine…”

“Oh, I’m well aware I can be a pushy pain in the arse,” she said impatiently. “That’s how I got here. That’s how all of us got here, isn’t it?”

He supposed that was true.

“It’s just that you seem to have some difficulty being around me at times, like - like you find me repulsive or something,” she went on. “Am I repulsive?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” he snapped. “You’re bloody gorgeous, and—”

He clamped his mouth shut, swallowing what he had been about to say, but Miss French smiled, looking deeply satisfied.

“Well,” she said. “So it isn’t that. How interesting.”

She picked up her drink, still smirking, and took a sip. Silence had fallen, a strange, heavy atmosphere making his skin tingle. He took a drink to give himself something to do, his mind working overdrive as he tried to think of a way to take back what he had said without looking like a total idiot, or worse, a total creep. Miss French was watching him over the rim of her glass, eyes dark beneath thick lashes, and she lowered the glass, the tip of her tongue sweeping across her lips. She set down her drink on the desk, bracing herself on the palms of her hands as she raised her chin.

“I’m sorry,” he said, having regained the power of speech. “That was inappropriate. I never meant to make you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t,” she said abruptly. “It’s actually quite reassuring.”

“Reassuring?”

“Well, you’ve admitted you find me attractive,” she said. “I was beginning to think all the hints I dropped were a waste of time.”

Sutherland blinked.

“Hints?”

Miss French tossed her dark curls, licking her lips as she uncrossed her legs.

“Perhaps I was being too subtle,” she said.

Her voice had lowered a little, grown smoky, sultry. It made desire tug at him, a low-down pull in his groin as his cock twitched. He took a drink to cover it, his eyes not leaving hers.

“Miss French—”

“You can call me Belle,” she interrupted.

He spoke her name in a whisper, the word ghosting over his lips, flowing from his mouth into the air, as though he were casting a spell, and her smile flickered into life again.

“We’re two adults,” she said. “Two adults who had the ambition to get where we are and who know their own worth. I think we can be honest with one another, don’t you?”

“I would hope so.”

“Good.” She reached out, taking the glass from his hand and setting it next to hers. Her eyes met his again, her lips moist from the touch of her tongue. “So. I find you attractive, you find me attractive. It’s out in the open, no more awkwardness required. Are you going to kiss me?”

He was beginning to think this was all a strange and vivid dream, and bit the inside of his cheek to prove otherwise.

“Do you want me to?”

Belle rolled her eyes.

“Definitely too subtle,” she sighed. “Yes, I want you to. But perhaps you should make sure we’re not disturbed first.”

His breath had quickened, his heart thumping and a high ringing in his ears as the clock on the wall ticked away, and he walked over to the door in a trance. Opening it up, he glanced outside, and caught the eye of the nearest Special Branch officer.

“Absolutely no visitors for the next half hour,” he said. “Unless someone starts a fucking war, I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“Understood, sir,” said the man, his face perfectly clear of any expression.

Sutherland nodded.

“And - and even if someone does start a fucking war,” he added, “knock first, got it?”

“Understood, sir.”

Sutherland grimaced as he shut the door. He hadn’t been kidding when he said they knew how to keep their mouths shut. Bloody good job. He turned around, heart still thudding in his chest as he walked back to the desk.

“They won’t let anyone in,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in his ears.

“Good.”

Belle raised her chin a little, shaking back dark, shining curls as he stepped closer, and he reached out to put his hands on her knees. Her skin was cool and smooth as silk, and his hands spread out and slowly pushed upwards, the fine wool of her skirt bunching and rising, exposing long, pale thighs. Fingers slipped down between her legs, slowly pulling them apart, and he stepped closer, in between her knees. Belle’s breath was coming faster, her chest heaving, and he raised his eyes to hers as he shifted closer, their noses almost touching. He could feel her cool breath against his lips, and for a moment he paused, gazing into wide blue eyes as his desire flared upwards, raging through him like fire ready to burst from his mouth, until he bent his head and captured her lips with his.

She opened for him, her tongue slipping into his mouth as she inhaled sharply, fingers sliding in through the short strands of his hair and making him shudder with pleasure. Belle let out a tiny moan as his tongue stroked hers, and he answered her with a deep, rumbling groan at the sweet taste of her. His fingers flicked open the button of her jacket, hands dropping to cup her breasts and squeeze before sliding down and around to grasp her rear and tug her towards him. Her knees rose up, legs wrapping around him, thighs gripping his hips as he pressed up against her, his cock already hard.

Her hands slid from his hair, over his shoulders, raking his back through the jacket, and he deepened the kiss, his hands squeezing her as he ground against her. The feel of it sent bursts of pleasure through him, desire that had lain dormant for what seemed like years surging through his body. He wanted to feel every bit of her, to slide a hand between her legs and push his fingers deep inside her, to tug aside her underwear and bury his cock in her and fuck her hard. The kiss grew rough and messy, and he pulled back a little, breathing hard, catching her gaze for the briefest of moments before he lifted his hands to sink into her hair and kissed her again.

Her arms had disappeared from around him, and she shrugged off the jacket, letting it drop onto his desk. Desperate fingers clawed at the knot of his tie, working it open and dragging it from his throat, then dropped to his shirt, tugging at buttons and flicking them open. He worked on her own shirt, breaking the kiss to press his forehead to hers so that he could see what his shaking hands were doing. Buttons sprung open, revealing the pale mounds of her breasts cupped by white lace. She shrugged out of the shirt, sending it to join her jacket, and he slipped his thumbs beneath the straps of her bra, tugging it down her arms, the cups falling down to reveal firm breasts with taut pink nipples. She was beautiful. She was perfect. And she was half-naked on his desk.

He bent his head to her, sucking a nipple in between his lips, and Belle arched her back with a moan, fingernails scoring his scalp and making him growl. Her skin tasted very faintly of vanilla lotion and salt, and he sucked at her, tongue scraping over the peak of her nipple. He wanted to taste all of her, to spread her out on his bed and take his time uncovering every inch of that milky skin, to slip his tongue into the heat and wetness between her legs and lick her to a screaming climax and suck the cum from her. But he was hard and desperate and it had been too bloody long for niceties. Perhaps she’d come up with him. After.

His hands shifted, pushing beneath her skirt again, bunching it up around her waist as his fingers sought the waistband of her underwear. He tugged it down, Belle shifting to help him get it off, and he let her breast slip from his mouth, stepping back from her and drawing the little thong down her thighs to fall off at her feet. Belle kicked off her shoes, leaning back on the desk a little, her chest heaving as her eyes met his, heat in her gaze.

“Touch me!” she whispered.

He kissed her again, one arm going around her waist and tugging her closer as he reached between her legs, touching hot, wet flesh. She was soft as silk, slippery with her juices, and he groaned into her mouth as his fingers rubbed over her, feeling the tiny bud of her clit. Belle moaned, fingers clutching at his shoulders, and he stroked her slowly, teasing her entrance with a finger before pushing inside. She pulled her mouth from his with a whining gasp, head rolling back, and he kissed down her neck, sucking at her skin as his finger pushed deep. His thumb rubbed over her clit as he thrust, and Belle arched her back, hands stroking through his hair and sending shivers through him as she opened her legs a little wider.

“God, that’s good!” she breathed. “So good!”

He bit down into her neck, making her let out a tiny cry, and added a second finger, thrusting in and out of her, his palm wet from her arousal. His mouth found her ear, and he felt her shudder, a ripple of pleasure running through her. He could hear her ragged breathing, could feel her hips rocking as he pushed and slid and rubbed, the pad of his thumb flickering over slippery flesh. Belle’s fingers had twisted in the short strands of his hair, her nose grazing his jawline as she put her mouth to his throat, and he let out a groan, feeling her soft, wet tongue stroke up his neck. She nipped at him, leaning back a little to gaze at him with a dark hunger before she lunged to kiss him again.

He inhaled deeply as his tongue pushed into her mouth, wrapping around hers, his fingers buried in her to the knuckles. She kissed him hungrily, nails scraping his scalp, her thighs gripping his sides. A long, low moan made her break the kiss, taking panting breaths as she pressed her brow to his. His cock was hard and straining in his pants, and he yearned to free it, to slide deep inside her and feel her all around him. Belle was letting out tiny moans, still rocking her hips in a steady rhythm, and he timed his thrusts to match, fingers rigid, thumb loose. He could feel her body growing taut, her moans increasing in volume, and she let out a loud cry as she came.

He thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, her back arching and head rolling back, her dark curls shaking out behind her, gleaming in the light. She let her hands drop from his hair, bracing on the desk beside her as she tried to catch her breath. Her chest was heaving, perfect breasts bouncing, her nipples dark from the pressure of his mouth and her pale skin marked with tiny pink patches. He could feel her gripping him, slick with her cum, and her eyes flickered open as he slowly drew out his fingers. Her scent was everywhere, sweet musk that made him want to lie her down and devour her. He sucked her juices from his fingers, salt on his tongue, his own breathing ragged.

Belle opened heavy-lidded eyes, a slow smile curving her mouth. Her lips were full and dark, glistening with saliva, and he watched as the tip of her tongue swept across them. He dropped his hands to her hips, leaning in to press his brow against hers, to find a moment of stillness as they each let their breathing steady. Belle let out a sigh, a shuddering, contented sound, breath cool against his lips, and reached up to stroke her fingers through his hair. Her nose brushed against his, and he felt the urge to kiss her again, to explore her sweet mouth with his tongue.

He cupped a breast, squeezing gently as he nudged at her nose with his, moving her head a little so that his lips could meet hers. Belle moaned, opening her mouth, her tongue stroking, the kiss growing messy. His hands slipped down to her rear, tugging her against him, and he let out a rumbling groan as he rubbed against her, inwardly cursing the barrier of his suit pants between them. Belle undulated, breasts pushing against his chest, thighs gripping him tightly, and his tongue swept across hers, his cock hard, his balls aching.

She pulled back with a wet, sucking sound as their lips parted, her chest heaving and her eyes dark with desire as her hands braced on the desk.

“Fuck me!” she whispered, and launched herself at him, slipping from the desk and pushing him down on the carpet.

He hit the floor with a grunt, a rush of air leaving his lungs and his head thumping against the thick carpet pile as Belle landed on his chest. She pushed open his shirt and began kissing her way down, sucking at his nipples and making him groan with pleasure as jolts of sensation went through him. It had been so long he had almost forgotten how good it could feel to have someone, to be with someone. Too long.

He reached up to stroke his fingers through her soft curls, enjoying the feel of her lips against his skin, and Belle let her tongue trail in circles as she made her way down over his belly. Sutherland closed his eyes, hearing the thud of his pulse in his ears and the clink of his belt as she tugged at it. He smiled a little, feeling her hands get his pants open, and lifted his hips so that she could pull them down along with his underwear. Belle let out a hum of appreciation, and he opened one eye a crack to see her looking him over. And then she bent her head to draw her tongue up the length of his cock, and he lost the last shreds of anything that might have been called reason.

Belle took him in hand, lifting him up and taking him in between her lips before sucking him in deep, and he arched upwards with a long, low groan at the feel of her. She sucked hard, moving with a slow rhythm, lips sliding up and down his length and making stars dance behind his eyes.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he gasped.

He felt her smile as her tongue stroked over the head, sending pulses of pleasure rippling through his body. Over and over it circled, the sensations building, making his body grow taut, his muscles straining.

“Belle!” he groaned. “Oh God, please!”

She let him slip from her mouth, sliding up his body with a triumphant grin on her face, and he gasped for breath as she straddled him, hands bracing on his belly, his cock pressed against her wet heat. Her skirt was still pushed up around her waist, the bra bunched around the waistband, and he watched as she unhooked it and tossed it aside. She was pressed against him, every movement a delicious agony, and he yearned to get inside her, to sink deep into her. Belle took a deep breath, fixing her eyes on his, and smiled softly.

“Ready?” she asked, and he nodded.

He reached between them, taking himself in hand, using his other to stroke through her wet flesh, teasing, probing. Belle moaned, shaking back her hair as his fingers found her entrance, and he slipped two inside her, pushing in up to the knuckles, making her moans grow louder. She was hot and slippery-wet, soaking his fingers, so he drew them out, lining them up so that she could lift her hips a little and sink down onto him. He let out a low groan as she took him deep, scalding wet flesh closing up around him, a velvet glove surrounding him.

Belle stilled for a moment, breathing hard, hands splayed on his belly, and her eyes found his, her gaze intense. She began to move, hips rocking gently, letting him slip out a little way before taking him back inside, and he pushed up into a sitting position, one arm snaking around her waist to hold her tight against him as he kissed her. She clutched at his shoulders, her movements increasing, and he moved in time with her, thrusting upwards, pushing deep. The friction was incredible, the tug and pull of her flesh against his, and he reached up to cup her face, lips pushing hers open, tongue stroking inside. Belle moaned into his mouth, the sound a frantic whimper, and he quickened the pace of his thrusts, hips bucking, their bodies rubbing together. Her nails dug into his shoulders, her body stiffening, and she pulled her mouth from his with a cry as she came, clenching around him, heat and wetness flooding over him.

He fell backwards with a gasp, back arching as he thrust up inside her, the sensations building inside him, a rising wave of bliss. Belle was still moaning and jerking, and he slid his hands up her thighs to grasp her hips, holding her close against him as he thrust. The wave surged, crashing through him, and he let out a loud groan of pleasure as he came, bright lights bursting behind his eyes, electricity coursing through his body as his cock spurted deep inside her. It felt so good he wanted to burst out laughing, and he slumped against the carpet, every inch of his skin tingling.

For a moment there was no sound but for their own heavy breathing and Belle’s contented little moans, and he took several deep breaths to steady himself. His heart was thudding hard in his chest, sweat beading on his upper lip, and he raised a shaking hand to run a palm over his face, inhaling the scent of Belle’s pleasure as he did so. Belle let out a low giggle, leaning forwards a little as he opened his eyes.

“You see?” she murmured. “We work very well together.”

He chuckled at that, reaching up to kiss her before letting his head thump onto the carpet with a satisfied groan. Belle leaned forward, folding her arms across his chest and resting her chin on them as she eyed the door.

“You realise Special Branch probably heard everything,” she said.

“Undoubtedly.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Probably less than it bothers them.”

She giggled, eyes sparkling, and pushed up on her hands a little, looking him over.

“Well, I think it’s safe to say our professional relationship is ruined,” she remarked.

“Given the dreadful state it was in, that can only be a good thing.”

She giggled again, and he reached up to push a stray curl of hair behind her ear. A feeling of contentment was stealing over him, the heat and bliss of his orgasm mellowed into something pleasantly lazy.

“Do you want to come upstairs?” he asked, and she raised her head, pursing her lips.

“Upstairs?”

“The private apartments are very nice,” he said. “And very private.”

“Hmm.” She pursed her lips. “Is that where Arthur’s curled up on the bed?”

“Well, I was thinking we could politely ask him to leave.”

She giggled.

“For awhile, at least,” she said. “I don’t mind cats being on the bed.”

“Nor do I, as a rule,” he said. “As long as there’s no other company, of course.”

“Are you asking me to stay the night?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”

“I’d have to leave first thing,” she said. “Need to get home to feed my own cats.”

“I’ll have a car take you,” he offered.

“A very early start, then.”

“Not too early,” he said. “We’ll have breakfast first.”

“Most important meal of the day.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he growled. “I can think of a few other things I’d like to eat.”

Belle giggled again, fingers tracing patterns on his skin.

“And you’re hungry, are you?”

“Starving.”

She leaned in to kiss him again, lips pulling at his before she sat back.

“Harder to sneak me past the press pack in the daylight,” she observed.

“I don’t give a flying fuck,” he said. “Will you stay?”

She eyed him for a moment, then smiled, a wide, beautiful smile that made his heart clench.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I’ll stay as long as you like.”

She pushed up, mouth finding his, and he let his hands sink into her hair as he rolled her onto her back. As long as I like? That could be a very long time.

#fic: honourable members #sutherelle fic #rumbelle fic #my fic #sutherelle #rumbelle #rather large estate #lemons #rumbelle smut

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medicswiththeo · 3 years ago

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All Eyes on Pharma Reps: The Myths, The Pressure, The Rewards

“At the end of the day, when I think that somewhere in my territory there is a patient whose life has been improved because of a product I promote, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling and a deep sense of personal satisfaction.”

— Corey Nahman, CEO, I

Pharmaceutical companies impact just about every American’s life. Our country is home to approximately 67,000 pharmacies, and according to a Mayo Clinic study, seven out of ten people in the United States take at least one prescription drug. From testing to production to selling to prescription, a medical product’s journey is complex and involves countless professionals.

The most significant of these professionals? For drug companies that want to stay in business, the answer is easy: sales reps. A pharma rep’s job is demanding, intricate, and at times exhausting. It requires specialized training in pharmacology as well as comprehensive knowledge of subject matters as diverse as biology and sales techniques. Succeeding as a pharma rep also takes a great deal of perseverance – not only to get the job done, but also to withstand misconceptions and misguided stereotyping.

Challenges and myths

If you’ve ever seen a pharma company hosting a banquet-room lunch for doctors and formed the assumption that pharma sales can be bought, think again. The complex relationship between reps and doctors is often incorrectly regarded as a quid-pro-quo system that starts with drug companies providing free meals and paid speaking engagements to doctors in exchange for those doctors prescribing their products. While it’s true that a strategy’s at work here, it’s not designed to woo. It’s about time – which, as we know all too well, doctors have very little of.

Often, coffee or a meal is the only avenue for pharma reps to get in front of a doctor. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of doctors won’t promote a drug they don’t like or believe in. So what’s actually happening at these lunches? The real answer is that salespeople and doctors are coming together to build a partnership focused on determining the best therapy options for patients.

That may sound like a lofty goal for a salesperson, and it is. That’s due not only to the stress of the sales process itself, but also because attaining and retaining a position is no walk in the park.

Many pharma reps come to the job with a background in chemistry, biology, or premed. According to the Princeton Review, pharma companies commonly demand that their sales employees have an advanced degree in the medical field. During their initial years in the industry, they often take advanced courses in pharmacology to deepen their knowledge of their company’s product line. Doing so helps them convey complex scientific and medical concepts in accessible language.

Reps may also have to learn how to interpret data and statistics so as to gain an understanding of both public and private health issues. As a primary source of information for doctors, they have to be prepared to discuss various diseases and new clinical studies, stay up to date with the competition, and thoroughly explain the qualities that make their product better than the competition.

In short, every last one of them has to become a trusted member of the local medical community.

The intensity, the intellectual challenge, and the satisfaction of helping patients may be just what draws people to this career. “You cannot get discouraged doing a job like this,” says James Bowden, a pharmaceutical sales specialist. “After all, by filling the shoes of a pharmaceutical representative, you bring a great added value to a physician and his or her patients through the drug products that you promote. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. That is why I’m doing what I love the most, and that is helping people live longer, healthier, and an overall better quality of life.”

In the best of all worlds, pharma reps are driven by an innate passion for the profession, and they find jobs with companies that value their unique skills and ability to build long-lasting relationships with doctors. But we don’t live in an ideal world, which means that reps’ financial satisfaction is a vital consideration.

A pharma rep’s earnings are 20-30% commission-based – a far higher rate than you’ll find in other industries. But the market is highly competitive – so much so that a “pay for performance” cult has developed and begun to take hold across other sales verticals. Recent HBR research shows that the number of companies offering bonuses or other forms of pay based on performance increased by 6% between 2014 and 2016 alone.

That sounds like great news for pharma reps, right? All they need to do in order to earn financial rewards is hit quota on a regular basis.

Of course, that isn’t as easy as it sounds. With quotas often set at unachievable heights, pharma reps are flying on a wing and prayer. Less than half will succeed – which means the majority will fail.

As you might imagine, failure is not a great bedfellow for reps, who tend to thrive on success; failure leads to frustration and loss of interest in selling your product. If you’re in a leadership position, you can avert such a scenario by instituting business processes that ensure goals are challenging but achievable – present and future – even during periods of enormous change.

How? With the right technology, for one. Advanced technology enables accurate quota management, balanced territory design, and – most importantly – forward-thinking comp plans that tap into your people’s inner motivations.

Gamification, for instance, appeals to salespeople’s competitive spirit. Visibility into individual and team performance will also light a fire beneath them; it’s empowering for reps to have access to sales and call-planning insights that indicate which doctors or institutions are likely to be most receptive to their overtures. Proper visibility also helps reps decide which doctors and institutions would benefit from more visits – and which would not. Add on a bonus calculator, which should be included with any truly robust technology solution, and reps can capitalize on these insights by projecting how much they can increase their earnings. When reps feel inspired to maximize their compensation, the company is simultaneously rewarded with better bottom-line performance.

But technology is only as good as the people who implement and use it. That means it’s vital to bring in expert staff who know their way around the tech and can help you utilize it to its full potential. These experts can conduct ongoing analyses of processes, continually gain and share insight, and cement improvement and revenue growth as an integral part of your company culture.

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chiseler · 4 years ago

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Aliens Are Invading Ecuador!

Leonardo Paéz

It’s fair to say that if you had listened attentively to Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds from beginning to end on the night of October 30th, 1938, there is very little chance you would have been fooled into believing a Martian invasion was underway. As it did every week, the broadcast opened with the usual Mercury Theater on the Air theme music and a clear announcement that week’s show would be an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds. This was followed by Orson Welles’ introduction (also standard), setting the tone for that evening’s entertainment. Once the show got underway, Welles himself quite unmistakably played several characters in the drama. There was a commercial break in the middle with more announcements reassuring listeners that went they were hearing was a dramatization of the classic science fiction story. And the second half of the show was of a completely different nature than the first (though the ending is undeniably creepy).

Most listeners, however, did not listen attentively from beginning to end. Welles’ genius in designing the show the way he did was his deep understanding not only of human psychology (he was tapping into the anxieties haunting a population preoccupied with the inevitability of the coming war), but his understanding of listener behavior as well. In most households the radio was on in the background as listeners talked to one another, washed the dinner dishes, took care of the kids and generally went about their business, listening with half an ear at best. Moreover, a lot of people tended to spin through the dial during commercial breaks, just to see what else was on. Most important of all from Welles’ vantage point, in that more innocent time people believed what radio newscasters told them, because they’d never been given reason to doubt it.

At the time, the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy show was the most popular program on the air, drawing a much larger audience share than Mercury Theater. Welles knew exactly what time the Bergen show took its first commercial break every week, so chose that precise moment for the Martians to land in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. All those Charlie McCarthy fans missed all that introductory clarification, and while spinning the dial were dropped right into the middle of a tense news bulletin about an alien invasion. Then all hell broke loose.

Or something approximating “hell,” anyway. To be honest, the nationwide panic that’s become the stuff of legend wasn’t nearly so widespread and wild-eyed as we’ve been led to believe. Yes, an alcoholic in New York was poised to kill himself and his family before the cops assured him it was just a silly show, an already unbalanced woman in Indiana was prevented from swallowing poison rather than die in a cloud of poison Martian gas, a farmer in Jersey shot up a neighbor’s water tower after mistaking it for a Martian machine, and tens of thousands of people across the country called their local radio affiliates and police precincts to find out just what the hell was going on, but that was about it, really.

True to form, the extent of the panic would be exaggerated by not only the media, but Welles himself in the days and years to come.

It was a different story eleven years later when another radio adaptation of Wells novel, following the Mercury Theater model, was broadcast in Ecuador on February 12th, 1949,.

Let me back up for just a moment. In 1944, William Steele, one of the principal writers on the popular radio series The Shadow (also starring Welles), translated the Mercury Theater War of the Worlds script into Spanish and sold it to a Chilean radio station. When the show was broadcast later that year it had much the same effect on listeners as the original, even being blamed for the death of an electrician, who reportedly died of a fear-induced heart attack.

Four years later in late 1948, Eduardo Alcaraz, the dramatic director at Radio Quito, one of the largest radio stations in Ecuador’s capital city, took the Chilean script and adapted it further, changing names and locales to make them more Ecuador-Specific. He then bounced it off the station’s art director Leonardo Paéz.

Now, Paéz, in his early thirties at the time, was already a national celebrity. Along with being a radio producer, reporter, actor and general on-air personality, he was also a noted poet, playwright, novelist and singer/songwriter. He was well familiar with the effect the broadcast had in the US and Chile, and took it as clear evidence of the power the medium held over people. It was their primary information source, and so they believed what they heard. It seemed fertile ground for a harmless little prank. Yes, he was definitely on board for this, and thought they could even top what Welles had done. The pair then set about scheming to scare the pants off the people of Ecuador, all in good fun.

Later, Alcaraz would insist he begged Paéz to follow the lead of both the American and Chilean broadcasts by clearly announcing beforehand the show was merely a dramatization of a classic story,. Paéz, he said, was having none of it, arguing the inclusion of disclaimers would ruin the prank. In fact Paéz took it one step further. The previous summer, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted a group of UFOs near Mt. Ranier, spawning a flying saucer craze that swept the US before quickly spreading worldwide. The radio station was housed in the same building as El Comercio, a daily newspaper, and in the weeks before the planned broadcast Paéz began priming the pump by planting fake news stories about local flying saucer sightings in the pages of the paper.

At nine p.m. on the night of Saturday, February 12th, 1949, a regularly-scheduled live music program was interrupted without warning by a special news bulletin announcing an alien spaceship had landed in Cotocollao, a small town about eighty miles to the north of Quito. With no disclaimers to assure them, and already a little jittery from all those recent UFO sightings in the news, people fled into the streets in a blind panic.

On the show, Paéz, playing himself, sped to Cotocollao to offer an on-the-spot report. Shortly after he arrived, he announced a long, green arm had emerged from the ship. A moment later one of Ecuador’s most popular celebrities was vaporized by an alien death ray live on the air. This didn’t help matters, as thousands of people tried to make desperate arrangements to escape the city. The streets became jammed with cars and hysterical, screaming people.

Meanwhile, the president of Ecuador was out of town at the time, so some unidentified government official ordered the police, the Red Cross, and fire brigades to converge on the town of Cotocollao to offer what help they could to those survivors of the alien attack.

As the show rolled on, actors playing real public officials (including the Archbishop of Ecuador!) offered terrified statements of moral support and announced still other alien ships had landed elsewhere in the country.

(As a quick sidenote, in 1938, a Mercury Theater actor who did a dead-on FDR impression was supposed to make an “official presidential statement” concerning the national emergency as part of the broadcast, but in reviewing the script beforehand, station management nixed the idea, saying there was no legal way you could get away with claiming the actor really was FDR. Obviously no such rules were in place in Ecuador.)

Back on the broadcast, the military, it was said, had engaged the alien invaders in Latacunga, some twenty miles to the south of the capital, but had been decimated when the aliens unleashed a deadly cloud of poison gas.

As the panic in the streets grew more violent, word of what was happening outside eventually filtered back to the radio station. The station managers, recognizing they were in trouble, cut the show short, going on the air to announce the whole thing had been a hoax.

Well, this didn’t help matters. Now instead of being terrified of invading aliens with death rays and poison gas, people were fucking pissed at having been played for suckers by a dumb radio show, and reacted in the natural human way.

Forming themselves into the traditional angry mob, they stormed to the El Comercio building and, after a bit of screaming and rock throwing, set the building ablaze with over a hundred people still inside. A handful, including Paéz, were able to sneak out the back door, but many were trapped on the top floors, a few leaping out windows to escape. Fire trucks arrived, but the growing mob wouldn’t allow them to get close enough to the building to douse the flames. At last the military was ordered in, using tear gas to disperse the angry mob so the firemen could get to work.

(There are also unsubstantiated claims the police were nowhere to be found either because they were just as pissed as everyone else and didn’t give a good goddamn what happened to those lying assholes at the radio station, or they were still up there in Cotocollao looking for aliens.)

Even now accounts differ. Some say six were killed, others ten, still others fifteen, with scores of others injured in the carnage. Whatever the specific number, several people were killed in the fire, including Paéz’ nephew and girlfriend.

Ten radio station employees were arrested that night, with a handful of others rounded up in the days that followed, charged with inciting a public panic. An official investigation was launched, and immediately the finger pointing began. The station managers insisted they had been kept in the dark about the whole thing. The involved actors insisted they were simply reading the scripts they’d been handed. Alcaraz insisted it was all Paéz’ doing. Sure, Alcaraz may have written the script, but if they’d done it the way he wanted with clear disclaimers, none of this ugliness would have transpired. And Paéz was nowhere to be found. Eventually all the charges were dropped.

Legend has it that Paéz himself, hiding in the back of a truck, escaped to Argentina that fateful night. He supposedly remained in hiding there for the next six years until he learned he’d been cleared, and he never again returned to Ecuador.

In a 2017 interview with journalist Jim Wyss, however, Paéz’s daughter Ximena says that’s not exactly true. She said Paéz went into hiding, yes, but never left Ecuador. He was exonerated in three months, not six years, and continued to work in Ecuador afterward, winning a number of theatrical awards. He did eventually move to Argentina in 1955, but then only because he wanted to send his kids to better schools. He died in 1991 at age eighty, and according to his daughter, to the very end he was mighty proud of the work he’d done on War of the Worlds.

by Jim Knipfel

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ericfruits · 7 years ago

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Google should not have given an outspoken engineer the sack

THE talk in Silicon Valley just now is as likely to be about sex as software. Women in tech firms feel badly treated. And they are right: they rarely get the top jobs, they are sometimes paid less than men and many suffer unwanted sexual advances. Most of their male colleagues sympathise; at the same time some feel they cannot express unorthodox opinions on gender. And they are right, too: they can easily fall foul of written and unwritten rules, and face drastic consequences.

The charged atmosphere helps explain why “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, a memo by a young software engineer, James Damore, has caused such a stir (see article). It says that the firm’s efforts to hire more women are biased. After circulating internally, it went viral. On August 7th Mr Damore was fired. To quote Sundar Pichai, Google’s boss, he advanced “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace”.

Mr Pichai had good reasons to sack Mr Damore. One is the content of the memo. It says many reasonable-sounding things: that “we all have biases” and that “honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots”. But these are just camouflage before a stonking rhetorical “but”: the argument that innate differences, rather than sexism and discrimination, explain why women fare worse in the technology industry than men. “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)”, Mr Damore writes, “may contribute…to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.”

Research has indeed shown some smallish group-level differences in personality and interests between the sexes. But drawing a line from this to women’s suitability for tech jobs is puerile. An unbiased eye would light on social factors rather than innate differences as the reason why only a fifth of computer engineers are women. Mr Damore claims women are “more interested in people than things” but, if this were true, they would in fact be better than men at the senior software-engineering jobs that involve managing teams. As for blind spots, although he repeatedly uses the words “discriminate” and “discrimination”, Mr Damore does so only to describe the unfairness to men of trying to hire more women.

Mr Pichai also has legal arguments on his side. The American constitution protects free speech in public, but within a company’s walls that right is limited by what bosses deem acceptable. After Mr Damore had suggested they are less qualified because of their sex, women at Google could have refused to work with him and taken legal action. Moreover, he may have known that his memo would be seized on in Alt-Right circles (it got top billing on Breitbart and far-right websites).

Still, there was a better response to Mr Damore than immediately giving him the sack. Other firms may limit their workers’ speech, but the largest search engine, with a mission to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible”, should hold itself to a higher standard. It should not be suspected of limiting the debate of thorny subjects.

Speak up

It would have been better for Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and the boss of Alphabet, its holding company, to write a ringing, detailed rebuttal of Mr Damore’s argument. Google could have stood up for its female employees while demonstrating the value of free speech. That might have led to the “honest discussion” Mr Damore claimed to want—and avoided the ersatz one about his firing. It would have shown that his arguments are not taboo, but mostly foolish and ill-informed. And it would have countered his more defensible claim: that Google, and the Valley, so welcoming of gender diversity, are narrower-minded about unorthodox opinions.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Not evil, just wrong"

http://ift.tt/2usWRwV

#IFTTT #Feedly

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marymosley · 4 years ago

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Mueller Aide Weissmann Calls On DOJ Attorneys Not To Help On Investigations

Andrew Weissman.

I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work.

I was among those who expressed concern when Mueller selected Weissmann due to his history of controversial prosecutorial decisions, including a pattern of prosecutorial overreach in the Enron litigation.

Weissmann’s recent statements (made before the release of his new book on the Russian investigation) have only served to reaffirm those concerns.

Recently, Weissmann wrote an extraordinary and disturbing New York Times op-ed (with former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman). In the column, he appeared to call on Justice Department lawyers to undermine the Durham investigation as well as the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Bash’s investigation into the “unmasking” requests by Obama administration officials. They wrote “Justice Department employees in meeting their ethical and legal obligations, should be well advised not to participate in any such effort.”

Consider that line for a moment. Weissmann is openly calling on attorneys to refuse to help on investigations that could raise questions about his own decisions. Durham is looking at a pattern errors, false statements, bias, and now criminal conduct in the Russian investigation. There is obviously overlap with the Mueller investigation which discussed many of the same underlying documents and relied on work by some of the same individuals. The failure to address misconduct, bias, or criminal conduct by such individuals would be embarrassing to both Weissmann and Mueller. Despite that obvious conflict of interest, Weissmann is calling on attorneys to stand down.

It is the same troubling position that was once taken by Sally Yates, who told an entire federal agency not to assist the President in his travel ban.

After Weissmann called on Justice Department attorneys not to assist investigations by the Justice Department, Durham disclosed that the first guilty plea would be entered by Clinesmith. That would ordinarily cause embarrassment for someone who was calling for DOJ lawyers to effectively hinder the investigation. Not Weissmann. He has now attacked the criminal plea.

Weissmann mocked Attorney General Bill Barr to explain the difference between the Flynn plea and the Clinesmith plea.

Weissmann tweeted:

“Question for Barr: how are Flynn’s confessed lies to the FBI (repeated to the VP) not a crime, but Clinesmith changing an email (the full version of which he also sent to DOJ) is?

Clinesmith is charged with adding the words ‘not a source’ to an email about Carter Page, but no where does the charge say that is false, i.e. that Page was a source for the CIA. Without that, how is the addition ‘materially’ false?”

Here is Durham theory: even though Clinesmith gave the complete and accurate email to DOJ to use in the Page FISA, when asked by an FBI agent if the CIA had represented IN WRITING that Page was not a source, Clinesmith said yes, when CIA had not said so explicitly in writing. no where is it alleged that Page was in fact a CIA source or, if so, that Clinesmith knew that. How is any of this false or material to the Page FISA, using Barr’s new Flynn materiality standard. It’s not. Two systems of justice at play.”

“Clear from Durham charge that the FBI supervisor wanted to know if CIA confirmed “in writing” that Page was not a source because of distrust of CIA — but whether in writing or not, no allegation that Clinesmith lied about the fact Page was not a source. That’s a federal crime?”

The tweets reveal more about Weissmann than Clinesmith or this guilty plea.

First, Weissmann is completely distorting both the law and the facts to disregard the significance of this guilty plea. The fact that Page was a source for the CIA is not disputed. The Horowitz investigation and various congressional investigations have confirmed that the CIA made clear to Clinesmith that Page was working for United States intelligence, a fact that critically undermined the basis for the original application for secret surveillance. The statement that “no where does the charge say that is false, i.e. that Page was a source for the CIA” is bizarre. The charge is that Clinesmith made this false statement to the court and there is a wealth of evidence to support that charge. It was clearly enough to prompt Clinesmith to take a plea and enter into what appears a cooperative agreement with prosecutors.

Second, the claim that “Clinesmith gave the complete and accurate email to DOJ” would not negate the charge. It was the false information that he gave to the court that mattered. Prosecutorial misconduct often involves telling courts something different from what is known or discussed by prosecutors. Moreover, the implications of such a contrast adds to the need for the investigation that Weissmann has sought to hinder. If other DOJ attorneys and investigators knew that the court was being given false material information, the concerns are magnified not reduced for the Durham investigation. Indeed, it means that this investigation dragged on for many months despite other attorneys knowing that the original claims of Page being a Russian assets were directly contradicted by American intelligence and never disclosed to the Court.

What is astonishing is that the FISA court itself as well as Horowitz have flagged this as a serious matter of false or misleading information. Weissmann however is actively seeking to convince Justice Department lawyers to refuse to help on the investigation.

Weissmann also misrepresents the law and the position of the Justice Department in Flynn. I have been one of the most vocal critics of the plea. It is true that Flynn gave false answers to the investigators. However, he fought the allegations until the Mueller team drained him of his savings and threatened to prosecute his son.

Keep in mind that Flynn was the incoming National Security Adviser and held entirely lawful discussions with Russian diplomats. Even James Comey told President Obama that the discussions were “legit.” Moreover, in December 2016, investigators had found no evidence of any crime by Flynn. They wanted to shut down the investigation; they were overruled by superiors, including FBI special agent Peter Strzok, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Director James Comey. Strzok told the investigators to keep the case alive, and McCabe is described as “cutting off” another high-ranking official who questioned the basis for continuing to investigate Flynn. All three officials were later fired, and all three were later found by career officials to have engaged in serious misconduct as part of the Russia investigation. Recently disclosed material indicate that Obama, Biden, and other discussed the use of the Logan Act as a pretense for a criminal charge. The Logan Act criminalizes private negotiations with foreign governments. The Logan Act is widely viewed as unconstitutional and has never been used successfully against any U.S. citizen since the earliest days of the Republic.

Then, in February 2017, Comey circumvented long-standing protocols and ordered an interview with Flynn. Comey later bragged that he “probably wouldn’t have … gotten away with it” in other administrations, but he sent “a couple guys over” to question Flynn, who was settling into his new office as national security adviser. Indeed, Yates recently agreed that Comey “went rogue” on the Flynn matter.

This history is what was detailed to the court in the Flynn motion to dismiss the charge. The materiality point reflected the governing law that indictments require more than mere “relevance” or relatedness but rather a statement that is “reasonably likely to influence the tribunal in making a determination required to be made.” United States v. Weinstock, 231 F.2d 699, 701 (D.C. Cir. 1956) (emphasis added). The distinction with Clinesmith is obvious. Clinesmith lied to the Court in an investigation to influence a “determination required to be made” by the court.

Imagine if this were not the rule. It would mean that any prosecutor could intentionally lie to a court to secure warrants or other actions without the risk of a criminal charge. Yet, Weissmann is mocking the very notion that Clinesmith could be charged while insisting that his office was correct in prosecuting Flynn despite the absence of an ongoing federal case and the fact that the agents themselves did not believe Flynn intentionally lied. There is no question the Clinesmith lied and that the lie was critical to the court’s consideration of the FISA application.

Weissmann’s public effort to derail the Durham investigation and his distortion of the Clinesmith guilty plea only reinforces the view of many of us that the Durham investigation must be completed and made public. Despite saying that I did not believe that Mueller would find crimes of collusion or conspiracy with the Russians, I supported the Special Counsel investigation. I also supported the Horowitz investigation and the Durham investigation. The reason is the same. I believe that the public needs to have a full and transparent account of what happened in the Russian investigation on both sides. Like many, Weissmann would like transparency on only one side and to shutdown the Durham investigation despite Horowitz referring matters for criminal investigation and finding a host of false statements, errs, and professional misconduct. Even the addition of a criminal plea has not stopped Weissmann from denouncing this investigation.

For years, I have criticized Weissmann’s record of dubious prosecutorial judgment, bias, and overreach. However, that case against Weissmann is not nearly as powerful as the case he is making against himself.

Mueller Aide Weissmann Calls On DOJ Attorneys Not To Help On Investigations published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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glenmenlow · 5 years ago

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Questioning The Business Case For Purpose

Corporate purpose is the buzzword of the day. Last August, the US Business Roundtable radically redefined its statement of the “purpose of a corporation” to include stakeholders, rather than just shareholders. Larry Fink, who leads the world’s largest asset management firm BlackRock, wrote in a 2018 letter to corporate CEOs: “Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential.”

But is there actually evidence to back up this claim? It’s been widely quoted to highlight the urgency of adopting a purpose – but the statement itself never cited any evidence, yet has been accepted uncritically. This is an example of confirmation bias – the temptation to accept evidence that it confirms what we want to be true, which I explored in a TED talk, What to Trust in a Post-Truth World. We’d love it to be the case that purposeful companies succeed, for at least two reasons. First, we’d like to live in a world in which companies that do good also do well, and selfish companies get their comeuppance. Second, the idea that purpose drives success is empowering, because any company can come up with a purpose. So it suggests that a leader merely needs to follow a three-point purpose plan and then she’s on the road to riches. Indeed, I’ve just written a book on purpose, entitled Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, on the importance of purpose, and so might have a vested interest in arguing that the business case for purpose is unambiguous.

But it’s not. Let’s take one of the most influential books on purpose, “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek. (I very much like Sinek’s TED talks and agree with the importance of purpose; these remarks are merely an assessment of the scientific evidence). He claims that purpose has driven Apple’s success, since Apple was founded on the “why” statement “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo.” Apple has indeed been extremely successful. But there could be a ton of reasons behind its success – perhaps Steve Jobs’ novel ideas or his network of relationships. However, the narrative that success was due to Apple’s “why” is particularly appealing as anyone can adopt a “why” – whereas not everyone can suddenly think of a novel idea or has a network of relationships. Moreover, Apple never actually said “everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo”, nor anything similar, but people took this for granted and indeed you can find 23,000 articles on Google quoting this phrase because they accepted it uncritically.

In addition, Apple is a single hand-picked example. You can almost always find an anecdote to support anything you’d like to support. To show that purpose drives success, we’d need to look at hundreds of “purposeful” companies and see whether they outperformed non-purposeful ones. Indeed a recent book does so, but as highlighted in an excellent Branding Strategy Insider article by Richard Shotton, the evidence is extremely weak. It shows that purposeful brands performed better, but the “purposeful brands” were selected as those that ended up being successful, so the argument is circular. Moreover, interpreting “successful companies have a purpose” as “purposeful companies are successful” is a major logical error – just as “all successful CEOs have two legs” doesn’t imply that “all CEOs with two legs are successful.” To make the claim that “purposeful companies are successful”, you’d have to look at all purposeful companies, not just those that ended up being successful, and compare them to non-purposeful ones.

The Evidence Behind The Concept Of Purpose

So how strong is the evidence for purpose, really? That’s what my book aims to gather. Rather than starting from a pre-conceived notion that purpose must matter and then hand-picking studies that support it, I aim to let the data speak and scrutinize the evidence critically. By doing so, any evidence that survives the scrutiny should speak not only to the converted – people who already believe in purpose – but also to hard-headed business leaders who previously thought that purpose is a luxury or an optional extra.

The first thing to acknowledge is that it’s almost impossible to measure “purpose”. We could indeed look at purpose statements, but companies can always come up with statements even if they don’t actually put them into practice. Moreover, the impossibility of measuring purpose gives researchers substantial freedom to cook the data. They can find companies that ended up being successful, and then categorize all these companies as “purposeful”. Since purpose can only be assessed subjectively, no-one can objectively falsify their definition. Indeed, luxury brands such as Moët & Chandon and Mercedes-Benz were classified as “purposeful” – but purpose involves serving wider society rather than just the 1%, so these classifications are dubious.

Rather than aiming to measure “purpose”, a more rigorous approach is to measure outcomes – whether a company actually delivers value to society. One of my own studies looks at the list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America”, which is a measure of employee well-being. It’s compiled independently by the Great Place to Work Institute, so I didn’t have the freedom to pick and choose which companies I counted as “employee-friendly.” This list is particularly thorough – it randomly selects 250 employees and surveys them on 57 questions of employee well-being spanning credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie. As a result, it’s widely respected and thus has been around since 1984 and since expanded to 45 countries.

But simply showing that the Best Companies outperform their peers isn’t enough. For example, Google is perennially on the list, and has performed well. That could be nothing to do with employee satisfaction. Perhaps it’s because Google is in the tech industry, and the tech industry happens to have performed well. So, to isolate the effect of employee satisfaction, I stripped out the impact of a company industry, and many other factors that could have driven returns such as its size and recent performance. And I addressed the problem that it could be firm performance that causes employee satisfaction, rather than the other way round. After all that blood, sweat, and tears, I found that the Best Companies outperformed their peers by 2.3-3.8% per year over a 28-year period, which is 89-184% compounded.

This study ended up being published in a top peer-reviewed academic journal, the Journal of Financial Economics. To do so, it has to be rigorously scrutinized by world-leading scholars, who tried to take apart my arguments. Does being on the Best Companies list causes socially responsible funds to buy these companies, and that’s what drives up the stock price? Are companies that treat their employees well also well-governed, and it’s good governance, rather than employee well-being, that cause the outperformance? Did the market think that employee-friendly companies were “tree-huggy” and thus priced them too cheaply, and that’s what caused them to do well going forwards? I needed to answer all of these questions to satisfy the peer reviewers and get the paper published. But many studies claiming that “purpose pays” are released without having to undergo such scrutiny.

What about other dimensions of stakeholder value beyond employees? A study published in The Accounting Review, a top accounting journal, uses MSCI ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) scores, which are again produced by a third-party (MSCI) rather than being subject to the researchers’ discretion. These scores cover a company’s performance on multiple societal dimensions, such as employees, customers, the environment, and communities. Contrary to common folklore, companies with high scores across the board do not beat the market. Instead, only companies that do well on the stakeholder dimensions material to their industry, and actually do badly on immaterial dimensions, beat the market. For a bank, this might mean focusing on fair marketing and data security rather than climate change, even though the latter might be the order of the day.

What this all means is that there is no evidence that a “purpose” that tries to be all things to all people will outperform. A purpose that aims “to serve customers, colleagues, suppliers, the environment, and communities while generating returns to investors” sounds inspiring. But it ignores the reality of trade-offs – for example, shutting down a coal-fired power station helps the environment but hurts workers. So while the above purpose statement sounds great, it can’t be put into practice, and offers no guidance on how to navigate trade-offs.

Purpose Defined

Indeed, the word “purpose” is often misunderstood. “Purposeful” is often seen as a synonym for “altruistic”, e.g. a “purposeful company” is an altruistic one. But, semantically, this isn’t what “purposeful” means – it means targeted and focused. A purposeful meeting is one that has a clear agenda; if I do something “on purpose”, I do it deliberately. A purposeful company recognizes that it needs to serve wider society – but also recognizes that it will need to take tough decisions when trade-offs arise. Purpose involves understanding who are the “first among equals” to guide such trade-offs – it’s about knowing what not to do as well as what to do. Purpose is the answer to the question “How is the world a better place by your company being here?” The response has to be focused, just as a citizen’s purpose would never to be a doctor, teacher, lawyer, and entrepreneur.

And this more nuanced view of purpose is actually freeing, rather than constraining. Some companies may think that being purposeful is a daunting task, since they need to “serve customers, colleagues, suppliers, the environment, and communities while generating returns to investors”. They may thus not even try, and instead default to maximizing short-term profit. As a result, sweeping claims on the criticality of purpose may hinder, rather than help, the move towards a more enlightened view of capitalism. Instead, the evidence on the importance of materiality gives leaders reassurance that they don’t need to be purposeful. By being grounded on evidence rather than wishful thinking, leaders can better put into practice what purpose actually means – and by doing so serve both shareholders and wider society.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School and author of Grow the Pie, How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit.

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joejstrickl · 5 years ago

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Questioning The Business Case For Purpose

The Evidence Behind The Concept Of Purpose

Purpose Defined

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School and author of Grow the Pie, How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit.

The Blake Project Can Help: Meet the new requirements of competitive advantage in the Branding 4.0 Business 4.0 Workshop NOW ONLINE

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

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jeenatomsonnn · 5 years ago

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revpauljbern · 6 years ago

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The Washington Shutdown, the Bible and Faithfulness

Unlike Trump and the Government, the One True God Never Shuts Down

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

For a website view, click here :-)

It has happened again. Usually when the federal government shuts down, it's because Congress and the president can't pass a federal budget on time. This time around the shutdown is all about money all right, but never before has there been a shutdown inside the Beltway over a single item within the overall federal budget like there has been over president Trump's border wall. I have seen photos of the 4 “sample walls” president Trump has had constructed along side one another in the southern Arizona desert. You can't even see through them! Some drug cartel could be building a ramp or a ladder on the other side, and the Border Patrol wouldn't be able to see that until people were already coming over the top. This is idiotic!

OK, so let's all visualize this for a minute. Two Border Patrol agents of the USDHS hypothetically spot several men climbing over the top of president Trump's 'wall'. But when they apprehend them, 25 or 50 more come over the top right behind them. The only sure way to stop all those people at once would be to shoot to wound a few, in the hopes of causing the rest to stop where they are out of pure fear of being shot themselves. Unfortunately for the Border Patrol, not to mention any Christian worth his or her salt, they're not allowed to do that unless they are fired on first by one of the migrants. As you may know, that rarely if ever happens.

Moreover, if I were a Border Patrol agent, I wouldn't be able to hold on to that job for very long, because I simply refuse to shoot anyone who presents no danger to myself, nor to anyone else. And I sure as hell couldn't shoot at children, nor could I allow a single one to die while in my custody like ICE and the Border Patrol have. And yet this is exactly what our government is doing. They're murdering children, and this has either got to stop or the American people will be forced to rise up against their own government. In that event, anyone who refuses to rise up against such evil make themselves complicit in these crimes against humanity.

The other aspect to Trump's government shutdown has been the 800,000 US government employees who have been left without a paycheck. Worse yet, some of them are compelled by law to work without pay in such circumstances as this. Imagine what this means to these federal workers! Employees are required by law to work without pay during a government shutdown. That means they can be arrested for not showing up to work unexcused, and the same goes for even trying to quit. So, it is quite evident based on these rather ugly facts that the federal government is not a very nice employer at all. On further thought, it makes me wonder why anyone else would want to work there in the first place. For the “benefits”? I find no 'benefit' whatsoever in being potentially complicit in the slaughter of innocent children who pose no threat to me.

What this means from the employees' point of view is their own government – their employer – can't be trusted to pay them on time because Uncle Sam can't keep his house in order. And, it's all because the government (allegedly) doesn't have enough money to go around. Maybe if the Pentagon wasn't spending all those trillions of dollars in all those clandestine wars being fought overseas, there would be money for a border wall. And even then, we don't want a wall, all we really need is a tall fence. We need border security, granted, but a $5 billion solid concrete wall really is way over the top. A fence made of aluminum bars 16 to 20 feet tall with razor wire at the top could be built for a fraction of the $5 billion president Trump is currently demanding, and I'm sure Trump knows that. He's holding out to see how much he can squeeze out of Congress, but I doubt that the Lord approves of the way the president is going about it.

By laying off 800,000 people, while causing another 400,000 to work uncompensated, Trump has essentially taken the country's workers and management hostage in an effort to gain a political advantage. To sum this up, then, president Trump is being unfaithful to those the government employs, and by extension to the rest of America. The Bible has a lot to say about unfaithfulness. Faithfulness is considered to be a virtue, as the prophet and Psalmist David wrote in Psalms 117:2 – “For great is his love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.” In comparison, president Trump's faithfulness to pay his workers on time is conditional to his political demands being met. Now that it's been established that Mexico isn't going to pay for the wall at America's southern border, Trump is trying to force his employees to cover the tab instead. This has got to be the ultimate in unfairness in the workplace. Don't get me wrong, president Trump, I admire and respect some of the things you've done or are doing, such as your recent decision to pull out of Syria. But engineering a mass layoff for political advantage really is way too much.

Contrast the government shutdown to what God has said through his prophet David regarding this matter: “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations. The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does.” (Psalm 145:13) Unlike president Trump, who has to run again in 2020 if he wants 4 more years – and if he wins at the ballot box – God never has to run for reelection. He has ruled and reigned for all eternity, and always will. Only once did 1/3 of the angels challenge his authority, everyone knows what happened to them. Moreover, God remains faithful to each one of us on a personal basis, as the apostle Paul wrote, “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” (1 Corinth. 10:13) The word 'you' in this context meant the entire church at Corinth, but it was also meant individually to each member as well.

Again it is written in 1st Thessalonians 5:23-24, “23) May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24) The one who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.” As of this writing, with the partial federal shutdown firmly in place, Donald Trump is the last man on the face of the earth who could be called blameless at this point. Not only is he being unfaithful to his employees first, and his constituency second, he has put the entirety of his trustworthiness as Chief Executive into question. What has the Bible said about this? The apostle Paul wrote, “Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.” (1 Cor. 4:2) In its original context, the apostle Paul was writing about those in charge of churches being trustworthy people of good repute. These words were intended for what Paul called “bishops and overseers”. Interestingly enough, the titles 'pope', 'father' and 'pastor' aren't in the Bible anywhere, but that's another topic for another time.

Although I would be quick to agree that running a country's government is nothing at all like running a nonprofit, the person in charge of that charity – be it a church, a battered women's shelter, or whatever needs to be a faithful and trustworthy individual. This clearly extends to governments, which are supposed to be nonprofit entities but obviously are not (such as $21 trillion missing from the Pentagon, etc). One of the things that define faithfulness is those in charge being faithful to the positions they have been entrusted with by the electorate. This means, among other things, paying your employees on time. So this part of my weekly message is primarily directed at president Trump, but the shutdown in Washington is not all Trump's fault. The rest of the blame lands squarely in the laps of Congress, who have yet to show any willingness whatsoever to negotiate with president Trump in good faith. As of this writing, no such thing has happened, and the government will probably remain shuttered until after the first of the year. While resolve abounds in Washington DC, faithfulness is sorely lacking. Let everyone involved from the president on down get this country running again ASAP, and let's put an end to all this pointless posturing – on both sides!

#Washington shutdown #president Trump #being trustworthy #faithfulness #the REAL bible #real Christianity #Congress

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brucebai · 7 years ago

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The Uber Dilemma

The Uber Dilemma http://ift.tt/2w6g9f3

By far the most well-known “game” in game theory is the Prisoners’ Dilemma. Albert Tucker, who formalized the game and gave it its name in 1950, described it as such:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

The dilemma is normally presented in a payoff matrix like the following:

What makes the Prisoners’ Dilemma so fascinating is that the result of both prisoners behaving rationally — that is betraying the other, which always leads to a better outcome for the individual — is a worse outcome overall: two years in prison instead of only one (had both prisoners behaved irrationally and stayed silent). To put it in more technical terms, mutual betrayal is the only Nash equilibrium: once both prisoners realize that betrayal is the optimal individual strategy, there is no gain to unilaterally changing it.

TIT FOR TAT

What, though, if you played the game multiple times in a row, with full memory of what had occurred previously (this is known as an iterated game)? To test what would happen, Robert Axelrod set up a tournament and invited fourteen game theorists to submit computer programs with the algorithm of their choice; Axelrod described the winner in The Evolution of Cooperation:

TIT FOR TAT, submitted by Professor Anatol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, won the tournament. This was the simplest of all submitted programs and it turned out to be the best! TIT FOR TAT, of course, starts with a cooperative choice, and thereafter does what the other player did on the previous move…

Analysis of the results showed that neither the discipline of the author, the brevity of the program—nor its length—accounts for a rule’s relative success…Surprisingly, there is a single property which distinguishes the relatively high-scoring entries from the relatively low-scoring entries. This is the property of being nice, which is to say never being the first to defect.

This is the exact opposite outcome of a single-shot Prisoners’ Dilemma, where the rational strategy is to be mean; when you’re playing for the long run it is better to be nice — you’ll make up any short-term losses with long-term gains.

Silicon Valley’s Iterated Game

What happens in Silicon Valley is far more complex than what can be described in a simple game of Prisoners’ Dilemma: instead of two actors, there are millions, and “games” are witnessed by even more. That, though, accentuates the degree to which Silicon Valley as a whole is an iterated game writ large: sure, short-term outcomes matter, but long-term outcomes matter most of all.

That, for example, is why few folks are willing to criticize their colleagues or former companies:1 today’s former co-worker or former manager is tomorrow’s angel investor or job reference, and memories are long and reputations longer.2 That holds particularly true for venture capitalists: as Marc Andreessen told Barry Ritholtz on a recent podcast, “We make our money on the [startups] that work and we make our reputation on the ones that don’t.”

Note the use of plurals: a venture capitalist will invest in tens if not hundreds of companies over their career, while most founders will only ever start one company; that means that for the venture capitalist investing is an iterated game. Sure, there may be short-term gain in screwing over a founder or bailing on a floundering company, but it simply is not worth it in the long-run: word will spread, and a venture capitalists’ deal flow is only as good as their reputation.

The most famous example of this is cemented in Valley lore. From The Facebook Effect:

Facebook’s success was beginning to make waves. And in Silicon Valley, success attracts money. More and more investors were calling. Zuckerberg was uninterested. One of the supplicants was Sequoia Capital. Among the bluest of blue chip VCs, Sequoia had funded a string of giants—Apple, Cisco, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Yahoo, and YouTube, among many others. The firm is known in the Valley for a certain humorlessness and a willingness to play hardball. Sequoia eminence grise and consummate power player Michael Moritz had been on Plaxo’s board and was well acquainted with Sean Parker. It was not a mutual admiration society. Parker saw Moritz as having contributed to his downfall. [Parker was fired from the company he founded by the board, including Moritz] “There was no way we were ever going to take money from Sequoia, given what they’d done to me,” says Parker.

Plaxo raised a total of $19.3 million in the rounds in which Sequoia participated; was whatever percentage of that $19.3 million Sequoia put in worth missing out on the chance to invest in one of the greatest grand slams in the history of venture investing?

The entire point of venture investing is to hit grand slams, and that calls for more swings of the bat. After all, the most a venture capitalist might lose on a deal — beyond time and opportunity cost, of course — is however much they invested; the downside is capped. Potential returns, though, can be many multiples of that investment. That is why, particularly as capital has flooded the Valley over the last decade, preserving the chance to make grand slam investments has been paramount. No venture capitalist wants to repeat Sequoia’s mistake: better to be “nice”, or, as they say in the Valley, “founder friendly.”

Benchmark Sues Kalanick

This is why what happened last week was so shocking: the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital filed suit against former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for fraud, break of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty. From Axios:

The suit revolves around the June 2016 decision to expand the size of Uber’s board of voting directors from eight to 11, with Kalanick having the sole right to designate those seats. Kalanick would later name himself to one of those seats following his resignation, since his prior board seat was reserved for the company’s CEO. The other two seats remain unfilled. Benchmark argues that it never would have granted Kalanick those three extra seats had it known about his “gross mismanagement and other misconduct at Uber” — which Benchmark claims included “pervasive gender discrimination and sexual harassment,” and the existence of confidential findings (a.k.a. The Stroz Report) that recently-acquired self-driving startup Otto had “allegedly harbored trade secrets stolen from a competitor.” Benchmark argues that this alleged nondisclosure of material information invalidates Benchmark’s vote to enlarge the board.

Moreover, Benchmark alleges that Kalanick pledged in writing — as part of his resignation agreement — that the two empty board seats would be independent and subject to approval by the entire board (something Benchmark says was the reason it didn’t sue for fraud at the time). But, according to the complaint, Kalanick has not been willing to codify those changes via an amended voting agreement.

Giving three extra seats on the board to the CEO was certainly founder friendly; that the expansion happened at the same time Uber accepted a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which came with a board seat, suggests Benchmark viewed the board expansion as a way to protect its own interests and influence as well. After all, longtime Benchmark general partner and Uber board member Bill Gurley had been pursuing ride-sharing years before Uber came along, and the investor had penned multiple essays on his widely-read blog defending and extolling Kalanick and company.

Then again, by June 2016, when the board was expanded and the Saudi investment was announced, Gurley’s posts had taken a much sterner tone: specifically, in February 2015 Gurley warned that late-stage financing was very different than an IPO, and that it had “perverse effects on a company’s operating discipline.” A year later, in April 2016, Gurley said that the “Unicorn financing market just became dangerous…for all involved”, and that included Benchmark:

For the most part, early investors in Unicorns are in the same position as founders and employees. This is because these companies have raised so much capital that the early investor is no longer a substantial portion of the voting rights or the liquidation preference stack. As a result, most of their interests are aligned with the common, and key decisions about return and liquidity are the same as for the founder. This investor will also be wary of the dirty term sheet which has the ability to wrestle away control of the entire company. This investor will also have sufficient angst about the difference between paper return and real return, and the lack of overall liquidity in the market. Or at least they should.

I suspect this, more than anything, explains this unprecedented lawsuit.

The Uber Outlier

Benchmark is one of those most successful venture firms ever. Founded in 1995 with a commitment to early stage funding, the firm has, going by this chart from CB Insights been an investor in 14 IPOs, 11 in the last five years (the chart shows 13 and 10; I added Snapchat, which IPO’d earlier this year).

The company’s investments include Twitter, Dropbox, Instagram, Zendesk, Hortonworks, New Relic, WeWork, Grubhub, OpenTable, and many more; according to CB Insight, since 2007, the companies Benchmark has invested in have exited (via IPO or acquisition) for a combined $75.96 billion.3

That, though, simply highlights what an outlier Uber is, at least on paper. Uber’s most recent valuation of $68.5 billion nearly matches the worth of every successful Benchmark-funded startup since 2007. Sure, it might make sense to treat company X and founder Y with deference; after all, there are other fish in the pond. Uber, though, is not another fish: it is the catch of a lifetime.

That almost assuredly changed Benchmark’s internal calculus when it came to filing this lawsuit. Does it give the firm a bad reputation, potentially keeping it out of the next Facebook? Unquestionably. The sheer size of Uber though, and the potential return it represents, means that Benchmark is no longer playing an iterated game. The point now is not to get access to the next Facebook: it is to ensure the firm captures its share of the current one.

This, I would note, is a lesson founders should learn: Kalanick was resolutely opposed to an IPO, claiming he would wait “as long as humanly possible”; his delay, though, completely flipped the incentives of Kalanick and his early investors. While in most companies the venture capitalists have to worry about their reputation along with their capital, in the case of Uber there is simply too much money at stake: transforming a $68 billion paper return to a real return (and guaranteeing a per partner return in the nine figures) is worth whatever reputational damage is incurred along the way.

In other words, an iterated game is good for founders: it ensures venture capitalists are nice. Single move games, though, which Uber has become, often end badly for everyone, particularly founders.

Diminished Uber

Understanding that Benchmark is focused on achieving liquidity on its all-time greatest investment suggests two potential outcomes:

The most straightforward is that Benchmark hopes to push Uber to an IPO sooner-rather-than-later; clearly Kalanick was an obstacle as CEO, and according to reports, has sought to reestablish control of the company via his control of the board, driving away Meg Whitman, who was reportedly Benchmark’s choice for CEO.4 This also explains the urgency of this suit: Benchmark is trying to prevent Kalanick from naming two more members to the board, further complicating the CEO selection process.

The other potential outcome is that Benchmark is looking for an exit. Softbank, which is looking to dominate car-sharing globally, has reportedly had discussions with Benchmark and other investors about buying their shares; reports have been mixed as to who wants to make a deal — Kalanick or Benchmark — but if it is the latter a lawsuit is an excellent way of getting the former to agree to a sale.

There is a third possibility: that Uber broadly and Kalanick specifically are in big trouble when it comes to Waymo’s lawsuit against the company, and that Benchmark is making clear that it is not culpable. A full six pages of Benchmark’s lawsuit were dedicated to describing Kalanick’s role in the Otto acquisition and Benchmark’s obliviousness to alleged wrongdoing; I noted when the lawsuit was filed that it, more than any of Uber’s scandals, had the potential to be Kalanick’s doom, and apparently Benchmark agrees (although, of course, one should question why Gurley, then an Uber board member, apparently declined to do more digging on a $680 million acquisition).

What is without question, though, is that whatever outcome results from this mess will be a suboptimal one; most Uber critics still fail to appreciate that the ride-sharing market is demand driven, which meant Uber really did have a chance to be the transportation behemoth of much of the world. Now the company is retreating throughout Asia, is on the regulatory run in Europe, and stuck in a fight it should have never drawn out with Lyft in the United States. Perhaps Benchmark will get its all-time great return, reputations be damned. It seems unlikely its return will be what it once might have been.

Above and beyond problematic arbitration agreements [↩]

This isn’t always a good thing: one reason serious issues like sexual harassment by venture capitalists go underreported is that the harassed worry about the long-term effect on their reputation — will future investors simply see them as trouble? [↩]

According to CB Insight, IPO valuation is based on first day closing price; acquisition valuation is based on public pronouncements or whisper valuations [↩]

Whitman is most famous for her stewardship of eBay, Benchmark’s first big breakthrough investment [↩]

BruceFav Bloggers via Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com August 14, 2017 at 10:38PM

#PersonalFav

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