FROM A TRUE BELIEVER RAISED IN AN ORGONE FAMILY TO A RUTHLESS CRITIC OF REICH

A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of WILHELM REICH

By Roger M. Wilcox
Jump to the Introduction

Completed critiques:

Orgastic Potency as the criterion for emotional health
Others' personal experiences with Orgone Therapy
The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety
Bions
The problems with Reich's use of the microscope
PA Bions
T-Bacilli
SAPA Bions
Orgone Radiation
The Orgonoscope
The Orgone Energy Hypotheses
The Orgone Field Meter
The Reich Blood Test(s)
Experiment XX
The problems with Reich's use of the Geiger-Müller counter
Vacuum Orgone (VACOR) Tubes
Orgone Motors
The Oranur Experiment
Melanor, Orite, Brownite, and Orene
Cosmic Superimposition

Articles written by others but hosted here

Breaking the Silence: Secrets of the Reichian Cult (.pdf file) by Marjorie Bayes

Critiques still under construction:

Character Analysis
Sex Economy
Vegetative Currents (Orgonotic Streamings)
The Tension-Charge (Orgasm) Formula
The Cancer Biopathy
Psychiatric Orgone Therapy (character-analytic vegetotherapy)
My personal experiences with Orgone Therapy
Orgone Accumulators (ORACs)
Orgonomic Functionalism
The DOR Hypothesis
Cloudbusters
Medical DOR Busters
The Emotional Plague
Energy alphas
The FDA Injunction against Reich
The book burning

Critiques yet to be written:

The Orgasm Reflex
Reich's conviction and imprisonment

Introduction

Wilhelm Reich (1898-1957) is one of the most colorful characters ever to tackle the mysteries of the universe.  He was charismatic, strong-willed, well-read, imaginative, and unflinchingly devoted to his ideals.  And he was also, beyond doubt, a crackpot.
Reich's initial work was in the area of psychoanalysis.  In fact, he was a protege of Sigmund Freud.  His technique of Character Analysis expanded on Freud's psychoanalysis and was well-received.  Some at the time even considered Reich to be Freud's successor.  However, his involvement with the early Communist Party in Europe eventually got him kicked out of the psychiatric community — and ironically, his involvement with the psychiatric community got him kicked out of the Communist Party at around the same time.  His relentless insistence that sexuality was central to emotional health earned him more critics than supporters, as well.  Reich eventually fled Germany for Norway in 1933 for fear of the rising power of the Nazis, who showed a great deal of enmity toward members of the Communist Party (even former members).
From there on, though, Reich began to delve into areas of research for which his medical and psychiatric training left him ill-equipped.  He performed bioelectrical experiments on subjects in various states of sexual arousal, somewhat reminiscent of the experiments Masters and Johnson would perform two decades later.  He claimed to see microscopic bions develop from lifeless matter and organize themselves into living cells.  And he eventually came to believe he had discovered a primordial energy essential for life, which he called orgone energy, and which he was obsessed with for the rest of his life.  Along the way of making these various "discoveries," his works were either ignored or heavily criticized by the mainstream scientific community.  Reich seemed to take every criticism of his work as a personal attack.  He was convinced he had made the greatest discoveries in the history of humanity, next to which the discovery of electricity or the law of gravity or the wheel or fire were insignificant.  He felt that mainstream scientists only attacked his work because his discoveries were too emotionally disturbing for them to tolerate.  (Why was such obstinant resistance to Reich's "obvious truths" so prevalent?  Why, because of the emotional plague, of course.)  And Reich surrounded himself with people who agreed with his assessments of his discoveries' greatness, people who all lacked any formal training in the natural sciences — training which, if it had been present, might have helped Reich see the real, concrete reasons why his work was criticized.
Thus far, hardly any skeptics have seen Reich to be worth the time and energy necessary to debunk all of his claims in detail.  Almost all skeptical treaments of his works focus on the more outrageous claims he made about orgone energy, or simply poo-poo his research and theories out-of-hand.  This, unfortunately, lends a false air of legitimacy to the various Orgonomy groups that promulgate Reich's ideas.  Modern orgonomists come across like poor, downtrodden underdogs, attacked without reason by those few obviously orgastically impotent skeptics and mainstream scientists out there who still take potshots at Orgonomy.  Since the skeptics and scientists never seem to show why the Orgonomists are wrong — at least not to the satisfaction of the Orgonomist groups, who always seem to have a rebuttal up their sleeve — the Orgonomists must therefore be right, of course.
This situation might be improved if the criticisms levelled against Reich by his contemporaries were easily accessible in English today.  But sadly, most of them, such as Kreyberg's criticism of bions in the 1930s, are practically lost to history.  Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science contains one of the few critical treatments of Reich that has survived to this day, but even this is lacking in sufficient details to answer the rebuttals of the modern orgonomists.
My personal experiences with Orgonomy go way back.  Some people are raised in a Catholic family.  Some people are raised in a Jewish family.  I was raised in an Orgonomy family.  And despite Reich's insistence to the contrary, Orgonomy is a religion, filled with sacred truths which can never be experimentally verified, a single central theme which tries to explain everything in the universe, a Fall from Grace in the mythical past, and even a Christ figure in Reich himself.  I was forced to endure years of orgone therapy the way many other children are forced to go to church.  I became a "convert" to Reich's works in late puberty thanks primarily to his pro-sex attitude.  I was a "true believer" until the late 1990s, when my skeptical instincts finally caught up with me, and I at last acknowledged the similarities between the writings of Reich and the ravings of various other cantankerous crackpots who were trying to hawk their own all-encompassing theories.
This collection of articles, then, is the culmination of my skepticism toward the works and theories of Wilhelm Reich.  Reich's work encompassed many, many areas, not all of which he documented in the detail necessary to critique them properly.  So, yes, some of my critiques involve my personal, educated guesses as to what Reich might "really" have been seeing or measuring.  But enough of Reich's writings do give sufficient detail that Reich's own shortcomings as a self-proclaimed scientific researcher come through plainly.  For unlike Sir Isaac Newton, Reich was not willing to stand upon the shoulders of giants.  He stood only as high as his own experiences would allow, and from this low perch imagined himself to be a lone eagle soaring higher than any other man had ever reached.

This Freud Disciple Tried To Harness The Power Of Orgasms To Cure Illnesses

By Gina Dimuro

Published June 12, 2018

Wilhelm Reich believed he could absorb the energy of an orgasm, and use it as an all-purpose cure for all of mankind's ailments.



Wikimedia CommonsA female patient in one of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulators.

An Austrian psychoanalyst born in 1897, Wilhelm Reich had been a student of none other than Sigmund Freud himself. Freud believed that sexual repression was inherent to human nature, but his pupil took that radical idea even further.
Wilhelm Reich’s New Point Of View

The basis of Wilhelm Reich’s belief system was that the energy produced by orgasms was an all purpose cure for mankind’s ills, whether physical, mental, or societal. Perhaps if Hitler and his cronies joined in the “sexual revolution” Reich envisioned sweeping through the continent (an unpleasant image to be sure), even the war that was brewing in Europe could be prevented. Naturally, the Nazis did not take kindly to this theory (they dubbed it a “Jewish conspiracy”) and Reich was forced to flee to Denmark as his books were burned in Austria and Germany.

The zany psychoanalyst eventually found refuge in the United States during the late 1930s. It was there Reich decided to reach out to fellow refugee Albert Einstein, whom he wrote the first time in 1940 “to discuss a difficult and urgent scientific matter.”


Public DomainKurt Cobain waves from inside William S. Burroughs’s personal accumulator on a visit.

The urgent matter Reich was so eager to discuss with Einstein was an elaborate invention he had come up with, the so-called “Orgone Energy Accumulator.” The accumulator was actually nothing more than an enormous wooden box lined with metal and steel wool, but Reich believed what he had created had the power to harness “orgone energy” from the atmosphere and rid patients of all their physical and mental woes.

Einstein politely ignored Reich’s letters, but the persistent psychoanalyst kept up a deluge of correspondence until Einstein wearily agreed to meet him in Princeton. Reich considered the meeting a smashing success, noting in his journal that his earth-shattering discovery rendered Einstein’s comparatively modest work obsolete, noting “[Einstein] is simple and clear. I sensed his weaknesses . . . and was aware when his opinions were incorrect but felt not a trace of gloating.”

The renowned physicist clearly took a different view of the meeting, as Reich also noted (without irony),”When I told him, in concluding, that people considered me mad, his reply was ‘I can believe that.'” Reich kept sending absurd letters, but Einstein went back to simply ignoring them.
Not Giving Up Hope

Despite having been dismissed by one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the century, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator gained popularity amongst America’s avant-garde set in the 1940s and 1950s. JD Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, and Jack Kerouac all enthusiastically embraced Reich’s invention: it even made an appearance in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

Kerouac was introduced to the accumulator after William S. Burroughs wrote to him claiming “After reading [Reich’s] book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.”


Wikimedia CommonsReich and one of his cloudbuster machines.

Unfortunately, the popularity of his machine would actually bring about Reich’s downfall: the accumulator came to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration in the late 1940s. Its inventor then ran afoul of the government when he refused to have it tested to corroborate the results he claimed it provided.

Reich had been on the federal radar since his arrival in the states back before the start of World War II. The FBI had a file on him that was over 700 pages long and had put him under secret surveillance due to his membership in the Communist Party (which, funnily enough, had booted him because of his ideas about sexual liberation back in the early 1930s).

By the time the FDA began to crack down on Reich, his ideas had become even more outlandish. In the 1950s, Reich turned his attention from the human body to the skies, creating a “cloudbuster” (a bundle of giant tubes that shot water in the sky) that the believed could conduct orgones and use their power to control the weather. He was also convinced that UFOs were poisoning humans with radiation, which could only be combated by harnessing the power of orgones.

By this time, the FSA had had enough and a court had ordered Wilhelm Reich to stop selling his machines. Reich ignored the order and was sentenced to two years for continuing to sell accumulators in 1957. He died in prison eight months into his sentence in November of that year.

Next, read about some of the weirdest inventions created by the Nazis. Then, check out Ahnenerbe, Heinrich Himmler’s plan to prove the Aryan race was descended from Nordic gods.



Gina Dimuro
Gina Dimuro is a New York-based writer and translator.
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MIXED MEDIA ART INSTALLATIONS CLOUDBUSTER PROJECTS

CLOUDBUSTER PROJECT Christoph Keller NY 2003

The reenactments of Cloudbuster experiments took place on the roof of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City and on the top of the Clock Tower in lower Manhattan, New York. These actions were based on the invention of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian born psychologist and early scholar of Freud who developed a political theory of sexuality in the 1920s. Reich began initial experimentation with making changes to the atmosphere in 1952, shortly after the ORANURexperiments, which focus on the reaction of Orgone with nuclear energy. The reenactments had the aim of making rain over New York in the spring and summer of 2003. Out of the roof of the Clock Tower, the empty space of the missing World Trade Center Towers makes a distinct visual gap. The vacancy of these buildings dominated the general atmosphere in New York and had some influence on the Cloudbuster reenactments as well. It rained through the entire period of Cloudbuster operations in New York. The Cloudbuster has an uncomplicated mechanical structure, consisting of few rows of conductive metal pipes that are connected with hoses to a source of flowing water. A spacer made of organic material insulates each one of these metal conductors. According to Orgone theory, flowing water has a positive Orgone charge that can be channeled with the Cloudbuster into the sky. With activation, the apparatus attracts the Orgone present in the atmosphere, from zones of higher or lower Orgone potential. The pipes then function in channeling the relatively small attracting force of the water streaming through the base of the Cloudbuster, and direct it to a small area in the sky where it can be effective in initiating rain by conflating the unstable Orgone-potentials of negative or positive Orgone charge.

WILHELM REICH-WHAT IS CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Weather Service confirms five tornadoes hit D.C. area Friday morning

Weather Service confirms five tornadoes hit D.C. area Friday morning, biggest winter event on record

a tree in front of a house: Storm damage Friday along 

West Main Street in Westminster, Md

3/3 SLIDES © Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post

Storm damage Friday along West Main Street in Westminster, Md.

The National Weather Service (NWS) confirmed Friday evening that at least six tornadoes touched down during this morning’s historic winter thunderstorm event in Maryland and Virginia. Five were in the local Washington area.


Previously, the Washington region had seen a maximum of just one tornado in any winter severe thunderstorm event. The five occurring in a single morning represents, by far, the biggest winter tornado event on record for this area.

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The confirmed tornadoes join at least 225 reports of wind damage logged by the National Weather Service in the Mid-Atlantic, stretching from southeast Virginia through northern New Jersey. It is the most reports on record in the Mid-Atlantic from a severe thunderstorm outbreak during the winter months.

The first of the tornadoes happened near Leesburg in Loudoun County, with two additional touchdowns in Montgomery County, another in central Carroll County in northern Maryland, and yet one more in eastern Frederick County. The sixth was in far northeast Maryland.
Leesburg tornado

Although the Leesburg tornado was relatively weak, rated EF0 on a 0 to 5 scale, maximum wind speeds of 85 mph caused some significant damage. The twister touched down at 7:20 a.m. and had an intermittent path of 3.3 miles, with a maximum width of 250 yards.

“The first damage was reported in the Greenway Farm and Linden Hill subdivision in southwest Leesburg,” according to the survey. A number of trees were uprooted at that location, in addition to numerous limbs down. In this area, damage was estimated to be caused by 65 mph winds.

After briefly lifting and sparing the historic downtown, the tornado touched back down and became stronger. In northeast Leesburg, several locations of significant damage occurred.

The survey notes that “a townhome on Ginger Square NE had its siding and underlayment completely peeled off, exposing [its] roof trusses.” A number of other houses had roof damage, as well as trees downed.

The NWS found another zone with major damage north of Battlefield Parkway NE.

“Here, fifteen to twenty 1.5-2.0 foot diameter pines were uprooted,” it wrote. The NWS continued, “Of special note was a line of 5 large pine trees in the easternmost portion of the apartment complex which were uprooted and which fell onto two unoccupied vehicles.”
Dickerson (Montgomery County) tornado

An EF1 tornado was also confirmed near Dickerson, Md., in western Montgomery County. It touched down at 7:28 a.m., with a path length of a mile and maximum wind speeds of 95 mph.

The survey indicates that damage was seen in trees near Martinsburg Road near the Potomac River. “A large barn used to house horses lost all of its roof while an adjacent open-air pole barn was flattened,” the NWS wrote. Additionally, “several small outbuildings were destroyed.”
Boyds (Montgomery County) tornado

At roughly the same time, an EF0 tornado was occurring near Boyds in Montgomery County. Maximum sustained winds of 80 mph were estimated along its 2.3-mile path.

Several trees were topped and downed power lines on Darnestown Road in Boyds. The tornado went on to destroy an outbuilding and damage several structures. “A 10 foot 2x4 impaled the side of one of the office trailers while another 2x4 impaled the roof of the second office trailer,” the NWS wrote.
Westminster (Carroll County) tornado

Later, an EF1 touched down in Carroll County to the southwest of Westminster. It had an intermittent path length of 10.3 miles and a maximum wind of 90 mph.

The tornado passed largely over rural areas, snapping and uprooted numerous trees. Some fell onto cars and homes. A military trailer and recruiting office of the National Guard were damaged as well.
Monrovia (Frederick County) tornado

The Weather Service confirmed an EF1 tornado carved a six-mile path through eastern Frederick County, with winds to 105 mph. This twister, on the ground from 7:44 to 7:50 a.m., was up to 150 yards wide as it passed in the vicinity of New Market and Monrovia.

Traveling mostly over open country, the Weather Service wrote that tree damage was “extensive.” The twister damaged several structures on a farm, “where a machine shed and barn were flattened,” as well as a silo.

These are the first tornadoes on record during meteorological winter, or December-February, in each of the counties they occurred locally. That also means they’re the earliest tornado in a calendar year on record. For instance, the touchdown in Loudoun County bests prior earliest touchdowns on April 16 in 1993 and 2011.

Another tornado was confirmed by the NWS Philadelphia/Mt. Holly office near Barksdale, Md., bringing the total in the broader region to at least six.

While the Mid-Atlantic averages about one tornado per meteorological winter, the ferocity of the broader event was unusual. It was driven by a very powerful storm system plowing northeast up the Appalachians while strengthening rapidly. It goes down as one of the largest winter tornado events on record in the Mid-Atlantic, in addition to the largest locally.

Information in this report should be considered preliminary, and additional tornado confirmations are possible.

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THE WRATH OF TRUMP HIS EMOTIONAL TIRADE AND FIRINGS OVER IMPEACHMENT LED TO THIS DISRUPTION IN THE D.C. BIONSPHERE RELEASING NEGATIVE ORGONE ENERGY OF HIS PSYCHIC RAGE AS THE UBERMENSCH OF REICH'S LITTLE MAN

PROPERTIES OF ORGONE ENERGY DEDUCED BY WILHELM REICH

1. It is mass free
2. It is omnipresent. Orgone energy fills all space in differing degrees of concentrations.
3. It is the medium for electromagnetic and gravitational phenomena.
4. It is in constant motion.
5. It “contradicts” the law of entropy. It is attracted to itself.
6. It forms units that are the foci of creative activity such as bions, clouds and galaxies.
7. Matter arises from mass-free orgone energy.
8. It is responsible for the phenomena of life and spontaneous generation of living organisms out of non-living matter.
9. Superimposition Function: separate streams of orgone energy may be attracted to each other and converge in a spiral form.  This convergence of energy may be viewed in cyclonic storms and is the principle expression of mating in living nature.
10.It can be manipulated and controlled by orgone energy devices.

see_wilhelm_reich_s_orgasm_powered_cloudbuster_at_his_orgonon_estate_in

 

Bald eagle numbers soar to new heights in this state

The bald eagle population in Wisconsin has made a huge comeback in the last 45 years.

© STOCK PHOTO/Getty Images A bald eagle sits in a nest in this stock photo.

According to new data released by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the state has shown a dramatic increase in the total number of active bald eagle nests since 1974.MORE: Researchers ask public to help find bald eagle nests in Ohio

"The success of bald eagles in Wisconsin is a comeback story fueled by the national ban on the pesticide DDT, added protections under state and federal endangered species laws, river cleanups under the Clean Water Act and public support of nest monitoring and protection efforts," the WDNR wrote on Facebook.MORE: 3 adult bald eagles watch over 3 eaglets in nest along Mississippi River

"Part of that public support includes donations to the Endangered Resources Fund via Wisconsin state income tax forms, purchases of an Endangered Resources license plate and citizen reports of bald eagle nests or nest-building activity."

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After Disasters, Puerto Ricans Are Left With $1.6 Billion in Unpaid Insurance Claims

When the ground shakes in Puerto Rico and it is time to head for higher ground, the people in the northwestern coastal city of Aguadilla find out the old way: the shrill of whistles.

© Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times A tsunami siren in Aguadilla, P.R., that broke during Hurricane Maria has yet to be repaired.

Aguadilla is one of two dozen cities on the island that do not have emergency alert sirens, even as hundreds of earthquakes have rattled Puerto Rico for weeks. The sirens were destroyed during Hurricane Maria in 2017, and insurers still have not paid long-pending claims that would allow the cities to install new warning equipment.

“I’ve seen people in town with a whistle hanging around their necks,” said Carlos Méndez Martínez, who retired as mayor last month after almost 25 years of running the city.

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More than two years after Hurricane Maria descended, destroying power poles, public buildings, homes, roads and other infrastructure from one end of the island to the other, an estimated $1.6 billion in insurance claims — particularly high-dollar claims filed by cities and condominium associations — remain unresolved.





Torres del Parque Condominium in Bayamón, P.R., is still waiting for repairs.Next Slide
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1/4 SLIDES © Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

Torres del Parque Condominium in Bayamón, P.R., is still waiting for repairs.

Emergency facilities, hospitals, stadiums, basketball courts, convention centers and other government properties around the island are still in shambles, waiting for repair because private insurers have not paid claims.


Hurricane Maria exposed an important deficiency in the process of Puerto Rico’s disaster recovery: underfunded private insurers, who are subject to few regulations.

While blame has been directed at the federal government for not providing timely disaster relief, less attention has been paid to the private companies that had a contractual responsibility to help clients who had paid premiums, many of them for years. Two insurers went out of business after Maria, and many of those that did not collapse offered pennies on the dollar. In many cases, insurers nearly doubled premiums after the hurricane while continuing to fight what the companies described as exorbitant and fraudulent claims.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed.

Aguadilla was left with no compensation for more than the tsunami sirens. The city sued its insurer, MAPFRE Insurance, after the Spanish company paid out $2 million for a destroyed coliseum that experts said would cost up to $20 million to replace, the former mayor said. Also left unusable were a water park, an ice-skating arena and an oceanfront boardwalk.

“Obviously the only way to attack this is with lawyers — without that, they don’t pay,” said José Alfredo Londoño, president of the Astralis condominium association, a 210-unit complex in the Isla Verde neighborhood near San Juan. “They are not going to pay.”

His complex’s damages totaled more than $13 million, he said, but MAPFRE offered $1 million.

“Ridiculous,” Mr. Londoño said.

Out of an estimated $8.5 billion in insurance claims filed since Hurricane Maria, $6.9 billion have been paid, said Javier Rivera Ríos, who was Puerto Rico’s insurance commissioner throughout the wake of the storm. The remaining $1.6 billion, he said, were more complex cases that were taking longer to resolve.

The insurance battles on the island put a spotlight on the work of public adjusters, often hired by clients who suffer damages to help make their case to insurance companies. The nature of their job is to carefully read policies to determine everything a business, homeowner or municipality is owed. But in Puerto Rico, some of the insurance companies have accused public adjuster firms of pumping up claims in a quest for higher recoveries.

Alexis Sánchez Geigel, president of MAPFRE Puerto Rico, now the largest insurer on the island, said the company had paid more than $1 billion in claims. He said that nine of the 22 municipalities it covers have not been fully paid, and that seven of those use public adjusters.

“We have settled 99 percent of our claims,” he said, adding that company policy does not allow him to discuss pending claims. “Some of the allegations we have made are public.”

MAPFRE took an unusual and aggressive stance by suing two of its clients. The company took the cities of Cabo Rojo and Barceloneta to court, accusing them of submitting grossly inflated and fraudulent insurance claims.

MAPFRE offered Cabo Rojo $611,648 for its damages, while the city’s Mississippi-based public adjuster firm submitted a claim that surpassed $62 million, according to the lawsuit. In one multistory building, the adjuster said that every sink, toilet, urinal, soap dispenser and garbage can needed to be replaced, even though all of them, according to MAPFRE’s lawsuit, were in “perfect condition” and undamaged by the storm.

This was just one example of the kinds of inflated claims that insurers have been dealing with, Mr. Sánchez said. “Time will tell who did the right thing and if it was done properly or not.”

Cabo Rojo’s mayor, Roberto Ramírez Kurtz, said that he had not seen the claims before the public adjuster, Scott M. Favre, submitted them, and that was disturbed to learn the city’s claim was so high.

“I was bothered by that, and canceled the contract with the public adjuster,” Mr. Ramírez said. “It’s been a year with a new adjuster and we haven’t moved one inch forward. We have always acted in good faith. MAPFRE has not acted in good faith with us, and instead are punishing the people.”

Pedro Ortiz Álvarez, a lawyer who represents Barceloneta and several other cities, said insurance companies were using complaints about public adjusters as a red herring to distract from their own failure to make good on policies they wrote.

“They have used the subject of the public adjusters as an excuse,” he said.

The adjusters’ claims are often accompanied by matching estimates prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said.

Mr. Favre, the public adjuster accused in MAPFRE’s lawsuit of inflating claims, said the insurance companies that have contested his claims cannot explain why so many experts agree with his damage estimates.

“When the estimate is greater than theirs, the insurance company calls that fraud,” Mr. Favre said. “But the disparity is often 1,000 percent.”

One municipal building he handled had panels blown off the roof, was flooded and lost all its windows.

“The carrier came up with $131,000,” he said. “And then let’s say I go out there and go with experts and came up with $3.8 million, FEMA says $4.9 million and then another contractor says $4 million. The carrier says, ‘You must be committing fraud.’”

Mr. Favre’s company came under fire when it was revealed that the firm, which has secured at least 40 government contracts, used consultants closely linked to the ruling New Progressive Party.

Six complaints have been filed against Mr. Favre by both clients and insurance companies, the insurance commissioner’s office said.

Mr. Rivera, the former insurance commissioner, said in an interview before his resignation last month that the protracted claims process showed the need to reform existing insurance laws. Puerto Rico has recently adopted some measures to help consumers through the claims process, including mandatory arbitration to settle disputes.

“I think that I have to recognize it could have been a better response, and for that we have new regulations,” Mr. Rivera said. “Consumers learned a lot: They have to purchase insurance seriously and understand what they are buying. There is a mix of high expectations and bad insurance.”

But Mr. Rivera will not be overseeing any additional reforms; after a series of accusations of conflict of interest involving personal loans and other matters, he stepped down from his post last month.

In the interview, Mr. Rivera said that, on average, customers received about 60 percent of the amounts they submitted on their claims, and that the majority were settled within 10 months. Some who got nothing from their insurance had to settle for payouts from a government catastrophe fund, while others are waiting for assets of the failed insurance companies to be distributed. Every insurance company on the island was fined for some deficiency or another, Mr. Rivera said.

He said his office sued several insurers for delaying claims until after the statute of limitations for a customer to file a lawsuit, an issue that was addressed with the new legislation. Puerto Rico’s nonvoting representative in Congress, Jenniffer González-Colón, said the continuing problems and series of new disasters highlighted the need for better federal oversight over insurers.

Iraelia Pernas, executive director of the Puerto Rico Insurance Companies Association, said that some customers were not sufficiently insured, and that the companies also saw a lot of fraud, such as pictures of the same broken window that were submitted for all the units in a building.

“Condominiums have similar windows; we can compromise on that,” she said. “But it is not possible that every apartment had the same air-conditioner, the same things on the table.”

A few public adjusters were asking for more than the policy limits, and some overestimated prices, claiming that a sink cost $600, she said.

“It’s a public restroom,” she said. “We are not talking about marble.”

While the cases wind through the courts, people like Luis M. Rodríguez Rivera, a 54-year-old disabled diabetic, are left in the lurch. Hurricane Maria soaked Mr. Rodríguez’s home in Guayama, cracking the floor and leaving it covered in mold.

“It’s as if it sprouted cracks and is exploding,” he said.

Mr. Rodríguez, a former school technology specialist, now alternates between staying with his mother or — when he does not want her to see him weeping — in his car. The law firm he hired estimated that his house needed $92,000 in repairs; MAPFRE gave him an $8,000 check his lawyers told him not to cash.

“It’s like I’ve fallen into a trap,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “You don’t know when you’re going to get what is owed to you to fix your house and live with dignity.”

Edmy Ayala contributed reporting from San Juan, P.R.

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Bumblebees are going extinct in a time of ‘climate chaos’

Bumblebees, among the most important pollinators, are in trouble. Fuzzy and buzzy, they excel at spreading pollen and fertilizing many types of wild flora, as well as crucial agricultural crops like tomatoes, blueberries, and squash.

© Photograph by Clay Bolt, Minden Pictures
Bumblebees like this species (Bombus impatiens) are vital for their role as pollinators, but many species are imperiled by extreme heat and other factors.

But their numbers are dropping. New research using a massive dataset found that the insects are far less common than they used to be; in North America, you are nearly 50 percent less likely to see a bumblebee in any given area than you were prior to 1974.© Photograph by Antoine Morin

Bumblebees pollinate many wild plants, as well as important crops like tomatoes, squash, and many types of berries.

Moreover, several once-common species have disappeared from many areas they were once found, becoming locally extinct in those places. For example, the rusty patched bumblebee, which used to flourish in Ontario, is no longer found in all of Canada—in the U.S., it’s endangered.

In a new paper published this week in the journal Science, researchers used a complex modeling process to suggest that their decline is driven in large part by climate change.

Specifically, the scientists found that in areas that have become hotter in the last generation, or have experienced more extreme temperature swings, bumblebees are less abundant. In Europe, they are 17 percent less plentiful than they were in the early 20th century. The scientists examined the abundance of 66 species across the two continents.

The approach suggests “climate chaos” is a primary driver of the drop in bumblebees, says study leader Peter Soroye, a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa.








Slide 1 of 7: This male Andrena perplexa was caught in Maryland on May 16.Next Slide
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1/7 SLIDES © Photograph by Sam Droege, USGS

THIS MALE ANDRENA PERPLEXA WAS CAUGHT IN MARYLAND ON MAY 16.


“These declines are linked to species being pushed beyond temperatures they haven’t previously had to tolerate,” Soroye says. Their disappearance from a region means that they’ve either moved elsewhere or died.

Cool specialists

It has long been known that bumblebees are more suited to cold weather, with their fuzzy bodies and ability to generate heat while flying, which often allows them to be the first bees out in the spring. Exactly how vulnerable they are to heat waves and weather fluctuations still isn’t clear for most species, though this study suggests there’s a limit to their adaptability.

And it is indeed warming up. The last five years were the hottest ever recorded in the 139 years that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked global heat.

There are several mechanisms at play, says study co-author Jeremy Kerr. The insects can simply overheat, as lab experiments have shown, but there may also be indirect impacts on vegetation and flowers that could lead to the bees starving, he adds.

Bumblebees only live one year at most, and queens often spend the winter in leaf litter or in the ground. Here, they are still vulnerable to shifts in temperature, and things like unusually early ice melts and fre-freezes, Kerr says.

The decline is dangerous for the environment since bumblebees’ pollination services are necessary for many flowering plants to reproduce, says Matthew Austin, a Ph.D. student and researcher at the University of Missouri in St. Louis who wasn't involved in the paper.

“As these plants are then used by myriad other organisms, the decline of bumblebees can have cascading ecological [effects] that may collectively cause biodiversity loss.”

There could also be economic costs. By one measure, bees contribute more than $15 billion to the U.S. economy by pollinating crops.
Other drivers of decline

Climate change is not the only factor behind the insects’ decline. They are also threatened by pesticides like neonicotinoids—which are extremely toxic to all bees—destruction of habitat by development and conversion of wildlands into agriculture, the spread of pathogens, and the release or non-native bees for commercial pollination.

“This study will be impactful in drawing scientists’ attention more to the role climate may play in the declines of these bees,” say Heather Hines, a researcher at Penn State University who wasn’t involved in the research. “That said, their data shows that while climate can explain declines to a large degree, it is not the only factor involved in explaining the overall decline in species richness observed over time.”

The authors agree, and note that the paper shows habitat loss was also a driver of local extinction. Kerr stresses that “we’re not arguing against the role of habitat loss and pesticide misuse as [drivers] of decline... we think the case for those things is strong, but just different.”

“What we’re pointing out is that there’s a strong climate change signal,” he adds. “If you ignore the climate change signal, you can’t understand extinction risk clearly.”

“While bees might be able to cope with one stressor alone, the combination of several stressors may bring a population over the tipping point,” says Matthias Becher, an ecologist with Exeter University in the U.K.

Some researchers went further. Jamie Strange, chair of the entomology department at Ohio State University, says that focusing on climate change could be problematic, because it ignores the many other causes of decline.

“My concern is not that their science is wrong, but that this work will draw the focus from some of the issues that desperately need to be addressed to save bee populations,” Strange says, which “are all equally or more pressing than climate change to impacting bee populations worldwide.”
How to help

There is good news, however, Soroye adds.

Since the paper suggests that extreme temperatures can impact the bumblebees, creating more parks or planting trees and shrubs in urban environments—which are often cooler than surrounding built spaces—could give them places to shelter from the heat, he says.

There are also other things people can do to help the bees.

Among the easiest are bee-friendly yard practices like planting native flowers that bumblebees can feed on, and avoiding the use of pesticides like neonicotinoids. Creating flower beds that are continuously in bloom can also help, Austin says, as well as waiting until spring to remove leaf litter, a prime denning spot for the insects.

RELATED VIDEO: Saving bumblebees became this photographer's mission

Acronym, the dark money group behind the Iowa caucuses app meltdown, explained

This isn’t how Acronym wanted to rocket onto the national stage.

Emily Stewart 7/2.2020

 

© Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images A staffer stands in the shadow ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ caucus night celebration in Iowa.

The Iowa caucuses debacle drew a lot of attention to a new app made by a company called Shadow that was at the center of many technical failures of the evening. And it’s also putting scrutiny on Acronym — the Democratic group that backed Shadow — which has sought the spotlight in recent months, though probably didn’t hope for this situation.


Acronym is a relatively new Democratic group that launched in 2017 and got active around the 2018 midterms in digital organizing. Its structure is, in a word, complex. Acronym is a nonprofit, but it also has a political action committee — under its nonprofit are for-profit entities that its nonprofit sometimes pays into. It is brazen and ambitious, which is not unique for a political strategy group, but it’s also somewhat shadowy and secretive. And it’s been trying to distance itself from the Iowa debacle, even though it’s really at the center of the storm.
Acronym is a lot of things all at once

If you pay attention to political media, you’ve probably noticed stories about Acronym popping up here and there in recent months.

In November, the New York Times covered its plan to launch a $75 million digital advertising campaign to counter President Donald Trump in 2020, and the Wall Street Journal profiled a former Facebook employee who was embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016 and has since joined Acronym’s ranks. Bloomberg wrote about the Courier Newsroom, a for-profit media company under Acronym’s umbrella that runs multiplelocal sites that deliver left-slanted news, countering a tactic often employed by the right. Acronym’s CEO, Tara McGowan, has quickly become a high-profile figure in Democratic politics and digital strategy.

Acronym talks a big game when it comes to its political strategy prowess — though it’s new enough and opaque enough that it’s not entirely clear what the organization is actually delivering. Now that Shadow, one of the companies affiliated with Acronym, is under the microscope, Acronym is too.

Related video: 48 hours later and Iowa caucuses winner still undetermined (provided by ABC News)
Click to expand

In the wake of the Iowa caucus debacle, Acronym has tried to distance itself from Shadow. In a statement, spokesperson Kyle Tharp said that Acronym just happens to be an investor in the firm, along with others. “Acronym is a nonprofit organization and not a technology company,” Tharp said.

Except it’s more complicated than that. Shadow is a tech company, and both Acronym and Shadow have described their relationship as an acquisition, not an investment, in the past and on multiple occasions. Acronym and McGowan in the past have touted their work with Shadow — McGowan has often touted it on Twitter and talked about it on a podcast as recently as last month. But now, Acronym has scrubbed its website of mentions of launching Shadow and says it’s just one of multiple investors along for the ride. Acronym’s decision to distance itself from Shadow — or perhaps lying about it altogether — is making the situation worse, not better.

© Alex Wong/Getty Images A precinct chair shows the smartphone app made by Shadow that was at the center of the confusion in the Iowa caucuses.

“I don’t think they’re evil, but in their thirst to take over the world using a bunch of short-term donor money, they leveraged their political connections to get contracts that they didn’t have the expertise to fulfill,” one Democratic strategist told me.
“There’s this whole group of organizations that are feeding each other, and they’re ultimately all controlled by the same group of people”

But there’s a lot more to Acronym than Shadow. Under its nonprofit umbrella are multiple for-profit operations beyond Shadow, including the digital media operation Courier Newsroom and Lockwood Strategy, a digital strategy firm that McGowan runs. Acronym also operates a political action committee called Pacronym and publishes a podcast hosted by McGowan as well as a weekly newsletter.

“There’s this whole group of organizations that are feeding each other, and they’re ultimately all controlled by the same group of people,” another strategist said.

Acronym has for months been building itself up as one of the loudest players in the room in Democratic strategy. Now, people are starting to look under the hood.

Acronym did not return requests for comment for this story. On Wednesday evening, McGowan published a lengthy post on Medium as well as a series of tweets attempting to clarify the situation. She sought to cast Acronym as an investor in many of its projects, though she did acknowledge some “warts” in Shadow’s operations and wrote that “progress requires taking calculated risks and doing things differently.” McGowan also appeared to distance herself and Acronym from Shadow. She did not acknowledge Acronym’s attempts to downplay its relationship with Shadow, including altering its website.
Acronym has been around since 2017 — and its reputation has skyrocketed in recent months

McGowan, 34, has deep ties to the Democratic Party and has worked in Democratic circles for years. She started her career as a journalist and according to her LinkedIn profile got into politics when she worked as press secretary for Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island in 2010. Then in 2011, she went over to the Obama White House where she worked as a digital producer, after which she had stints at Tom Steyer’s NextGen America and consultancy Purpose. She later headed digital strategy at Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action. In early 2017, McGowan founded Lockwood Strategy, a digital strategy firm she still runs. A month later, she launched Acronym.

On its website, Acronym describes itself as a “values-driven organization focused on advancing progressive causes through innovative communications, advertising, and organizing programs.” The organization claims that its affiliated PAC helped get 65 progressive candidates elected in 2018 with “new tech and digital-first strategies to register and turn out voters.”

A handful of traits have marked Acronym’s development in recent years: its intertwining with Facebook, its ability to get good press, and, in turn, its growing popularity with donors.

In September 2019, Ozy profiled McGowan as the Democrats’ “most dangerous digital strategist.” In November 2019, the New York Times ran a splashy story about Acronym’s plan to raise $75 million to push back against President Donald Trump on Facebook. The organization had raised only about 40 percent of that amount at the time.

Trump’s reelection campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has cultivated a public reputation for himself as a political digital guru — which, depending on who you ask, is or is not an accurate portrayal — and Acronym plans to answer that. And it has some big names in tow, the most prominent being former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who told the Times that the idea behind the effort was to have a Facebook ads mechanism in place before the Democratic Party’s nominee has been picked.

“Our nominee is going to be broke, tired, have to pull together the party and turn around on a dime and run a race for a completely different audience,” he said.

Weeks later, the Wall Street Journal published a profile of James Barnes, a former Facebook employee who had been embedded with the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential race. The 2,500-word story cast Barnes as a figure who had seen the light and come over to the Democrats’ side with Acronym to try to undo what he’d done in the last election. Barnes isn’t the only former Facebooker in Acronym’s ranks; earlier in the day on Monday, hours ahead of the caucuses, a former Facebook data scientist announced he was joining the organization.

McGowan herself has become an increasingly common fixture in media stories, often commenting on the issues of the day. (Acronym has spoken with and sent statements to Vox about digital political strategy in the past.) When Google announced it would limit microtargeting around political ads, igniting speculation Facebook might follow suit, McGowan slammed the decision and said it wouldn’t curb disinformation but would instead “hinder campaigns and others who are already working against the tide of bad actors to reach voters with facts.” She said the decision affects Google’s ad inventory as well as inventory across the internet. “They are essentially using their market power to limit how campaigns can speak to voters where they get their information,” she said.

But there are indicators that things within Acronym are not as seamless as they would appear from the outside. One Acronym staffer told the Outline it is “far and away the most disorganized place I’ve ever been a part of.” According to the staffer, leadership says it’s just the “startup environment” of a new company, but it’s unclear how many people work at Acronym, or who they work for. There are a lot of blurred lines between the various Acronym outfits — for example, job links on the Courier News website redirect to Lockwood Strategy.
Acronym has gained popularity with big donors, while some onlookers have expressed skepticism

Acronym is a dark money group. That means donations to its 501(c)(4) nonprofit don’t have to be reported, and we don’t entirely know who their money is coming from — or how much they have.

But Federal Election Commission filings show Acronym’s PAC, Pacronym, is doing pretty well. Billionaire hedge funder Seth Klarman gave $1.5 million to the PAC in the fourth quarter of last year, venture capitalist Michael Moritz $1 million, and director Steven Spielberg $500,000, among others. As Recode’s Teddy Schleifer pointed out this week, the donation was Moritz’s first since 2011, and his largest disclosed political contribution ever.
  

© Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Michael Moritz speaks at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on October 19, 2016.

To raise that much money and obtain such a high profile, an organization like Acronym has to talk a big game. That’s what some of the four Democratic strategists I spoke with — all on the condition of anonymity so they could speak freely on the matter — see as part of the problem. Acronym knows how to get eager donors, especially those who are eager to get in on the next big thing, to buy into what it’s selling.

“Their pitch is that everyone is doing it wrong, and they’re here to disrupt and innovate,” one Democratic strategist told me. “And they don’t always follow through with that in a successful way.”

“On paper it sounds great,” another strategist said. “Investors want to invest in shiny, new, cutting-edge things, but there’s not a ton of actual evidence there.”

Part of the issue is that Acronym’s structure is complex, unusual, and opaque. Its major plank may be a nonprofit, but the entities under it are not. McGowan runs Lockwood Strategy and is, presumably, paying herself a salary out of the companies coffers, which is not illegal. Shadow and the Courier Newsroom are also private companies. So sometimes, when Acronym makes public pronouncements about what it’s going to do and spend on, it’s not clear where the money is coming from — or where it’s ending up. For example, in October, Acronym said it would spend $1 million on digital impeachment ads in swing states. And its FEC filings show that many independent expenditures for digital ad buys against Trump were filtered through Lockwood Strategies, which McGowan runs. That’s all really hard to track.

“With public pronouncements about things they’re doing that don’t happen, there’s less transparency about why,” one strategist said.

Some observers have also raised questions about the Courier Newsroom, which runs hypertargeted local news with a lean to the left. Last year, McGowan told Bloomberg that Courier Newsroom planned to focus on six swing states — Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — and “fill the news deserts, deliver the facts favorable to Democrats that [McGowan thinks] voters are missing, and counter right-wing spin.”

While politically unbiased news is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics — look at Fox News and the myriad of right-leaning outlets, for example — the Courier Newsroom launch did raise some eyebrows. If this were a Republican operative declaring its strategy like this, a lot of Democrats probably would have criticized it. So the reaction from the left has been a bit awkward.

Lachlan Markay at the Daily Beast drilled down on what’s so odd about Acronym’s approach:


But in trying to take on such a wide swath of digital political roles, ACRONYM has also been drawn into roles that appear to be in conflict: not just political vendor and vote tabulator, but also ostensibly-independent media mogul and Democratic activist.

Such conflicts have been apparent in ACRONYM’s backing of a handful of state-specific media organs billed as editorially-independent journalistic outfits. Through investment in an entity called Courier Newsroom, McGowan’s group has seeded such outlets in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Virginia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. The left-leaning consulting firm Lockwood Strategy, in turn, has helped staff up the outlets, and in at least one case, Lockwood was on the payroll of the Virginia Democratic Party as an ACRONYM-backed outlet favorably covered the party’s 2019 statehouse candidates.

In other words, one McGowan company was drawing a paycheck from the party as another pumped out news content boosting its election prospects.

Acronym’s founders made a bet that donors are often willing to throw money at vague digital projects, especially amid anxieties about the 2020 elections and concerns Democrats are lagging behind in terms of online and data strategy. And so they’ve built out a complex organization that lets them raise money and spend money — including on themselves — with their actual impact remaining unclear. At least until Iowa.
Acronym’s founders made a bet that donors are often willing to throw money at vague digital projects
Acronym changed its story after the Iowa caucuses screw-up

Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, technologies fail. And when they do, many would argue that the best path forward is for whoever built the tech to own up to the problem and quickly try to fix it. But that has not happened in Iowa.

This is not to say that Acronym is to blame for the meltdown in the Iowa caucuses. However, it’s become increasingly clear that the organization hurried to distance itself from the situation.

After it came out that the Shadow-built app, which according to Vice was called the IowaReporterApp, was at the center of the Iowa caucuses delays, Acronym came out with a statement saying it was just an investor in the tech company. It read, in part:


Acronym is a nonprofit organization and not a technology company. As such, we have not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party, Presidential campaigns, or the Democratic National Committee.

Acronym is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors. One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow, Inc, which also has other private investors.

But the tenuous relationship described in the statement above doesn’t appear to accurate. Or at the very least, both Acronym and Shadow have described their relationship differently in the past.

Shadow was initially a tech firm named Groundbase, founded by Hillary Clinton campaign veterans Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis and funded by progressive nonprofit Higher Ground Labs. The company was struggling after its campaign texting platform failed to take off, and Acronym stepped in to inject some cash and keep it from going bankrupt. They launched Shadow from there and new products, including an email app that was supposed to help the Democratic Party centralize its data. In a 2019 article, Shadow described its flagship product as a “universal adapter for political data and technology.” In practice, what that means is pretty indecipherable.

Acronym distancing itself from Shadow is a new development. In 2019, McGowan celebrated acquiring Groundbase and marketed the company openly on Twitter. Acronym put it on its website as well. While Acronym has since clarified it doesn’t own Shadow entirely, the organization has previously said it is “launching” Shadow and described the deal as an acquisition. On LinkedIn, Niemira lists himself as a former Acronym employee.

The problem is, Acronym left a lot of evidence that suggests it used to have a much closer relationship with Shadow than it’s now admitting to. According to the Intercept, for instance, Acronym and Shadow share an office space in Denver, Colorado, and as recently as last month, McGowan said Acronym was the “sole investor” in Shadow.



If you look at Acronym's "About" page today it says "we invested in Shadow" but if you look at the Wayback Machine from last month it's "we launched Shadow" pic.twitter.com/FM5XVddclh— Kate Knibbs ‍♀️ (@Knibbs) February 4, 2020

The, well, shadow around Shadow has been part of what’s so weird about the Iowa debacle. Prior to Monday, Shadow’s involvement in the Iowa caucuses had been kept secret. The Iowa Democrats said they were using a new app, but they wouldn’t name it, arguing that it was a security precaution to keep it from being hacked. Had they not been secretive about it, maybe someone would have noticed the problems with it prior to caucus day. Multiple sources told the Times that the app was under-tested and that caucus volunteers were poorly trained on how to use it.

Curiously, David Plouffe was asked about Acronym and Shadow on MSNBC on Monday as the Iowa caucuses debacle unfolded. Plouffe, seemingly unfamiliar with the app, said he didn’t know about it and had spoken via text with the CEO — presumably McGowan — who confirmed that Acronym was an investor in the tech. “I have no knowledge of Shadow or what’s happening,” he said. It’s entirely possible that Plouffe hadn’t heard of Shadow, as a board member whose main role seems to be to boost the group’s profile and fundraising. The Acronym team seems to have decided to stick with that distancing of ties to the app.

Regardless of the level of Acronym’s involvement, it still remains unclear how Shadow managed to release such a problematic app for such an event as important as the Iowa caucuses. One strategist I spoke with speculated this may have simply been a case of an overly ambitious agreement between Shadow and the Iowa Democratic Party, which reportedly paid just $60,000 for the app. Perhaps there was just too much excitement over the new, shiny thing.

“This has all the markings of a pet project of someone who says, ‘Oh, we can do that,’” the strategist said. “You let a company that has no track record just build the most important thing you’ve probably done in the last decade, and yeah, it was going to fail.”
Was Iowa just a massive screw-up, or is there something more nefarious at foot?

At best, Acronym’s behavior around Shadow could be described as odd. That and the Iowa Democratic Party’s initial secrecy around its relationship with Shadow has led to a number of conspiracy theories around the app malfunction and results delay. Some Bernie Sanders supporters have suggested this is an effort to undermine the Vermont senator, who prior to the caucuses was leading the polls, and boost a more establishment-friendly candidate, namely, Pete Buttigieg. Some on Trump’s side have claimed this amounts to rigging the election as well. And after the Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll was pulled from being released over the weekend, suspicions and conspiracies had already been afoot.

Shadow is raising even more suspicion now that its work with Democratic candidates has also been revealed. Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and plenty of others have paid Shadow for services, and in the past, McGowan has expressed her support for Buttigieg. (McGowan’s husband is also a senior strategist for Buttigieg.) Some Acronym employees have previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and are well-connected among Democratic insiders.

Many on the left — especially Sanders supporters who believe the cards were stacked in favor of Clinton in the 2016 election — are highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the Democratic primary.

During the last election, the Democratic National Committee held few debates and at awkward times, which some alleged was an effort to keep Sanders from getting airtime, and undertook other efforts that appeared to favor Clinton. Superdelegates pledged to her early in the process, seemingly anointing her the nominee. Sanders’s backers believe the Democratic establishment doesn’t want him to win the nomination this time, either (and indeed, some don’t) and worry about what lengths they might go to in order to stop him. Iowa’s big app fail doesn’t appease those concerns, and Acronym’s lack of transparency around its ties doesn’t help.

That there is some bad blood regarding Acronym among Democratic politicos — which is natural in any competitive industry — has become clear in the wake of the Shadow debacle. One strategist told me that the scrutiny on the organization was natural — it’s very young, very hyped, and seems primed for a misstep. Another was more cutting in their assessment of the situation: “People have been waiting for this to blow up and did not foresee that this would blow up in quite a spectacular way.”

The Aflac duck is 20 years old: Here's how he's changed the insurance world


Paul R. La Monica

© Aflac/YouTube

Insurance is boring. You have it because you need it, not because you want it. So it's amazing to think that insurance ads are among the most amusing on TV. And the Aflac duck, who's been quacking the company's name for 20 years, is a big reason why.

The first Aflac duck commercial aired on January 1, 2000. Geico's gecko debuted a few months before the start of the Aflac ad campaign. The pair have since helped turn insurance commercials into 30-second comedic interludes.

If not for the duck and gecko, there may not be a Flo from Progressive, AllState's Mayhem guy, the Liberty Mutual emu and Doug, or Super Bowl winning quarterbacks Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes doing lighthearted ads for Nationwide and State Farm.

Aflac CEO Dan Amos, who's been the head of the company since 1990, told CNN Business he's pleasantly surprised by just how much the duck resonates with consumers. The brand awareness that the ad created is a big reason for the company's success today, he said.

"Within three years of the first ad, our sales in the US doubled and our name recognition went from under 10% to around 90%," Amos said. "We now get texts, emails and calls from people wanting to wear merchandise with the duck on it. We've arrived."

Aflac, which reported its fourth quarter and full year results after the closing bell Tuesday, posted annual revenue of more than $22 billion. The stock has soared 325% in the past 20 years, compared to a 124% gain for the S&P 500.

Amos said the duck was the brainchild of the old ad agency Kaplan Thaler, which is now owned by Publicis. (Aflac has since switched marketing firms.)

Using humor to cut through the clutter of boring insurance ads

At the time, the goal was to try and simply raise awareness of the Aflac name. Amos said many at the company were skeptical about the duck and using humor to sell insurance to cover accidents and illness. Most insurance ads were dead serious. Think about Prudential and its iconic Rock of Gibraltar commercials.

"We knew we were making fun of our name and we were not sure how that would turn out. Nobody was doing humor in financial services ads to a great degree," Amos said. "There was a dead look on everyone's faces when we first showed it. But everyone gets it now."

The duck is such a marketing icon now that it has endured even after Aflac decided to fire its celebrity voice, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, in 2011 after Gottfried wrote a series of insensitive tweets about the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed more than 15,000 people.

Aflac generates about three quarters of its revenue from Japan, and Amos said that after he first heard about Gottfried's tweets from a reporter, the decision to cut ties with Gottfried was made within minutes.

"We have vowed to never bring him back," Amos said.

Aflac then ran a nationwide search for a new voice, auditioning more than 12,000 people in six cities. The company ultimately decided to hire Minnesota radio station sales manager Daniel McKeague, and he's been quacking "Af-LAC!" ever since.

The duck has even gone high tech to help sick kids. Amos said that the company has already raised more than $145 million for pediatric cancer charities since the start of the ad campaign from the sale of stuffed plush Aflac ducks.

And it now has an interactive robot version of the toy duck that gets donated to children diagnosed with cancer. It's won best in show awards at both the influential Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as well as at South by Southwest.

Amos said he's proud of the recognition for the toy -- and he's thrilled that the duck continues to be a Madison Avenue marketing hit twenty years after its first TV spot. Amos added that there are no plans for the duck to retire anytime soon.

"We were a good company before, but the duck catapulted us into a different category. We have brand recognition like Coke and Nike," he said. "I never really dreamed I would bet my whole career on a duck, but that's the way it turned out."

 

© Mark Lennihan / AP