The Housewife Cheats

Professor J,

Okay, I know right now it's supposed to be all politics all the time as we head into the final stretch of election season. But a vacation and various other factors have conspired against me getting in a very thoughtful post this week. My solution is to offer up a distraction. "Look over there! Forget I haven't written a relevant post this week! And that I'm late! Would you believe the dog ate it?"  :)

So Dear Reader in case you never wander over to our personal blogs, here's what you are missing this week: On mine,                  The Danger of a Bucket List

When the movie came out the term "Bucket List" immediately made it's way into the American lexicon. Suddenly everyone has a list of things they want to accomplish and mark off before they kick the bucket. I actually had such a list written out about 15 years before the movie was released, but I think most everyone has a list of this sort, at least floating around in the back of their mind.

Here's the problem: Life isn't about scratching something off a list. In fact, the danger in seeing it that way is that the place, event, or activity may not be experienced to the fullest. Several years ago I took a trip and when I returned a friend asked it I had seen a couple of particular things. I hadn't, but I'd had a wonderful time and seen interesting different things that were enjoyable to me. Life is full of side streets and unexpected joys. It's best to stay open to those while you are on your quest. It's also full of detours and places you have arrived while the doors are locked. That's okay. Life may have unexpected treasures for you, you know nothing of.

Make sure your bucket has a hole in it. We want life to be full of exciting things. We want to sail around the world or write the great American novel. We see movies and read books about what other people are doing and we get a skewed view of our own lives. The better bucket list may include things like making little kids laugh, or volunteering at a local charity, or tutoring a struggling student. Sharing your experience and knowledge is a practical and rewarding thing to put on your list. Standing water stagnates. Keep what is in the bucket flowing in and out.

Today may have some things worth putting in the bucket. Life isn't actually made up of big moments. It mainly consists of millions of small ordinary moments, thousands of days, strung together to make a life. You don't want to spend so much time making, or dreaming about your list that you miss the simple joy of today.  When was the last time you visited a museum and sat in front of a work of art for half an hour contemplating it? You may want to add something like "See as many sunrises as possible." to your list. Too many people miss today searching for life's few big moments.

Keep filling the bucket. The thing about lists is, that we are eager to get to the end of them and feel a sense of accomplishment. As you learn and grow, the list will both shrink and expand. You may mark things off the list, not because you do them, but because you no longer need to do them. You may need to replace them with other more important or interesting things. Some of them may be released. Some of them may die. It's okay. Keep adding the new things you'd like to accomplish. Life, above everything else is a process.

Put "Keep moving forward." at the top of the list.  Here are some things that are on friends' lists: Travel to Italy, get a Ph.D., run a marathon, repair a broken relationship, write a book that will challenge status quo thinking. All of those goals have something in common. They cannot be accomplished standing still. Being a life long learner, getting and staying fit, and working on improving relationships are worthy of a spot on your list. The more you focus on forward momentum, the more you can tweak that list into something more meaningful than just a list of places to see and things to do.

A lot of things show up on these lists because of what everyone else thinks we should want to do. Your list will be unique and personal to you. It doesn't have to include skydiving or visiting the Taj Mahal. Think about what you really want to accomplish in life and let your list reflect that. Work toward making those things happen, but leave yourself lots of freedom to explore, wander, and dump out the bucket and start over. Just don't let it get rusty. You are only going this way once.

On The Professor's: Doubling Down on a Dose of Double Bull

“Double taxation” is mostly a straw-man argument.  Lots of people and situations are double or triple taxed:  Income taxes, payroll taxes, and sales taxes.  Every time you pay your repairman, or well, practically ANYBODY, you do so with money you have already paid taxes on.  And that repairman will pay taxes on the money you give him or her, and so on.

So capital gains and corporate taxes are not the big deal of disparate treatment they’re made out to be by the right-wing, although the flow of capital and investment PERHAPS needs consideration. 

Lower capital gains don’t create jobs here either.  We’ve had them for many years and few livable wage jobs have been created by it.  They mostly just enrich the rich further, while the secretaries who serve the rich pay a higher rate on an incredibly smaller income.

We have to quit being manipulated by these deflective, deceptive lines of bull.  History is going to record us as self-destructants willingly conned into acting against our interests and for the interests of those doing the conning.  The people of the future will say those words: “How could they let that happen to themselves?”

Unless we start questioning more and accepting less.

A Word On Three Programs

Yes, Madame, yes!  We HAVE mentioned those before.  We’ll keep it up though.  Sometimes things have to be mentioned a lot and be around for quite a while before they stick.

I know I’m probably supposed to mention something about last Thursday’s VP debate.  Ok.  Both men performed adequately for what their “side” sent them up to do: Biden to be the more assertive/aggressive, and Ryan to be foreign policy savvy and “vice-presidential” in his first big debate.  Both men along the way threw out deflections, “screens,” and a lot of other manipulative debating/politicking points.  Mostly so we wouldn’t know the R/R ticket largely doesn’t have realistic plans and specifics and the O/B ticket doesn’t want to take a black eye over an obvious bad show (death of ambassador Stevens) before the election.

Turning to JC’s comments of September 8^th (here: http://www.facebook.com/ProfessorandHousewife?sk=notes):

I’m an Independent.  I don’t drink anyone’s Kool-Aid.  I don’t like or put much faith in Democrats, but their “opposites,” the Republicans, have largely abandoned rationality and reasonable cooperation in favor of the most petty and often bizarre obstructionist stances.  I actually respect and heed thoughtful Republicans like David Stockman, Mike Lofgren, or Olympia Snowe.

While I have disagreements with Paul Krugman’s stands at times, I don’t categorically dismiss him or disparage his credentials.  Labeling him a “socialist/economist” is painting a picture that plays well to American rabid politics, but is not very meaningful.  He might be considered a fan of the socialist/capitalist hybrid on the Scandinavian model, but that doesn’t make him a socialist.  And your use of the word indicates a bias that can cloud appraisal.  You’ll also have to be more specific about such blanket ideological assertions that Dr. Krugman is not competent in macro-economics.  You may disagree with his positions and conclusions, but the analytical tools he uses are classic in nature, and just as macro as other economists.

And now to the first of the specific points, the assertion that the prime reason for the problems of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is that those who never paid into these “accounts” took money from them.  First, there are no “accounts”; that is a common misconception that plays into the hands of those who want to privatize these programs.  They are just that: programs.  They are all three, in effect, insurance, from those presently working, supplied to the elderly who have ceased work (for Medicare and Social Security), to those who have become disabled (Social Security), and to those who are too poor to afford care or who are on the verge of extreme poverty (Medicaid and Supplemental Social Security).

Social Security is funded by workers and employers.  Those are inadequate to continue benefits as at present, although even if there were no “trust funds” and taxes were never raised, the system could go on in perpetuity if it only paid out 70-80% of the stated benefits.   Social Security, at least, is not “going broke.”  Its problems are very addressable.

Medicare is funded from three sources (workers, employers, and premiums on recipients).  All three of those sources are inadequate.   Medicare has severe funding problems, and with the rise of both medical costs and numbers of elderly, it is a train wreck in the making unless something is done (refer to my previous post as to why the “Ryan Plan” is not that something).

Medicaid is not separately funded at all, and comes from general federal and state revenues.  It too has seen its costs rise, as more people slip into poverty, and more people attempt to get it.  It is one of the drivers of state budgets becoming hard to manage.

Illegal aliens are not entitled to any of these benefits, although fraudulent obtaining does occur.  It’s just unknown what the rate of that fraudulent obtaining is. 

The first point needs to be worded more carefully.  Saying “People drawing from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security who have never put anything into these accounts” implies use of the actual programs by freeloaders.  This can easily be used as deceptive, manipulative language.  Words matter. 

It is also largely incorrect even in the subsequent explanation.  Yes, the yearly surpluses in Social Security and Medicare were foolishly and selfishly squandered by a people and their politicians who irresponsibly delayed hard decisions or even emplaced selfish ones.  That part is true.  But the yearly surpluses in those programs, surpluses used to mask the true size of the deficits, were not spent on non-taxpayers—unless your professor means the foreign beneficiaries of our military’s posture and actions.  No, the diverted yearly “surpluses” were spent on  a mixture of misplaced allocation on contractors, on subsidies and corporate welfare, on defense, intelligence, security, etc. and also, in one form or another, directly or indirectly, on the citizens who were largely already paying the Social Security and Medicare taxes.   Was that spending often misplaced allocation of resources?  Yes.  And it helped us cover our underfunding of the government to go along with our overspending on the above.  Was it largely spending on the non-working?  Yes and no, often no.

Point two is simply incorrect (see here: http://www.factcheck.org/2009/03/social-security-for-illegal-immigrants/).  It has never been legal to pay Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare to illegal aliens.  Has fraud sometimes occurred?  Yes, and so has a lot of Medicare and Medicaid fraud unrelated to illegal aliens.  Has all that been enough to be a root cause, let alone THE root cause, of our fiscal problems?  No.  Calculations of pay ins and pay outs in the 3 mentioned programs generally run along actuarial expectations, with the margin of error in calculation generally no more than 7% or so.  Is 7% too much?  Yes.  But that’s the high end of the estimate.  And it’s not determinative exactly WHAT is causing that variance.

Even children born here of illegal immigrants, children who eventually receive “benefits,” usually enter the work force and begin paying, yes, payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare.  Even many illegals pay these taxes—even though they may never qualify for them.

Do we have a problem with the poor from elsewhere wanting to get the “good life” in America?  Yes, another problem that comes with marked disparity—and desperation—between next door neighbors (if Mexico became more prosperous like Canada, much of the illegal immigrant difficulty would go away—we don’t have an illegal Canadian immigration problem).  Does this problem manifest with some illegally or loophole obtaining of benefits?  Yes.  Once again, it’s not the driver.  More likely a kid in the back seat.

Social Security and Medicare should not be compared to IRAs or 401ks.  First because those programs are primarily insurance, not investments, and function largely as transfer payments between generations.  Second, because those investment vehicles you name have been abused by Wall Street to deceive Americans that those Americans could “control” their “own” money rather than having it “locked away” with “no control” in a pension plan.  When, in reality, those average investors were at the mercy of traders and funds managers, while pension trustees usually got better deals and better results because of their greater collective leverage.  So this idea of “accounts” is more privatization code-talk by those beholden to a greedy Wall Street.  A Wall Street that salivates at the prospect of more large amounts of money they can make big profits on and leave the ill-informed and near-powerless small investor depleted and whipsawed.  You can almost see the subliminal “sucker” message.

As for whether those who paid into Social Security and Medicare may not get what they paid for, because much of the money was diverted:  There’s a great amount of truth to that.  But once again, the people—a largely apathetic people, a people with poor knowledge about, or valuing of, civics, politics, or history—let it happen.  While their politicians did do them a leaderless disservice, it is just as much true, in a way, that the people largely only have their own willful ignorance, uncaring attitudes, and selfishness to blame.  They devote most of their energies to things other than how their government and their society functions (or doesn’t).

Debate Rumblings

Professor J,

There was a lot of debate about the debate. Last week's first debate between the candidates (well the two we are allowed to hear from) pulled in a little over 62 million viewers. With 131 million voters in the 2008 election, we could say nearly half of voters (assuming that most who were watching could vote) watched the debate. I'm guessing if we take into account the high turnout in '08 due to people's excitement about being able to vote for the first African American to run for president, we might expect this year's turnout to return to the 2004 number of roughly 122 million, so we could say very nearly half of voters watched.

I'm slightly encouraged by the fact that half of voters would take time to inform themselves by watching. But the point of a debate is to make your points, provide evidence as to why you are right and your opponent is wrong (or at least not as right), and to change people's minds if they weren't going to vote for you. I'm not sure how successful either candidate was on that third one. The comments I've seen and heard are along the lines of "Our guy won," or "I didn't really want to vote for Romney but I feel better about it now," or "Their guy just showed how (pick one) sleazy, arrogant, uninformed, he is."  I haven't heard anyone say "I wasn't going to vote for him, but he made a really good point," or "I hadn't thought about it that way before."

We have lost our ability to listen. Hey, haven't we mentioned that before?

Having watched that debate I was pretty excited about another debate that just took place: The Rumble in the Air Conditioned Auditorium between Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart. The country needs a good laugh about now and those two provided it. It wasn't all fun and games. They covered some serious topics in a passionate debate while keeping a sense of humor, being good sports, and maintaining a relationship in the process. They made a great case not only for their respective ideas for but for the importance of civil discourse, and how the country suffers because of our lack of it.

Hey, haven't we mentioned that before?

Here are some quotes from the debate:

In reference to Romney's 47% O'Reilly said:  “About 20 percent of us are slackers, and it’s a growing industry.”

O'Reilly: “The mind-set is, if I can gin the system, I’ll do it because it’s easy.”

Stewart:  “If you take advantage of a tax break, you’re a smart businessman. If you take advantage of something you need to not be hungry, you’re a moocher.”

 O'Reilly: “It doesn’t matter what [President] Bush did. The job of the president now is to get the deficit under control, and you got to cut stuff.”

 While discussing cutting funding for PBS, Stewart said: "Give me back the $800 billion for the Iraq war and children's television is on the house."

O'Reilly: “You gotta let the free market run away a little bit. You gotta unleash the machine.”

A funny quip by Stewart (We can only hope that a somewhat less than civically-informed populace got the joke): "The first sentence of the Constitution mentions unions and welfare. I don't know what to tell ya."

There was one thing that both debates had in common. The speakers ran over the moderator. Though viewers would have much preferred looking at E.D. Hill compared to Jim Lehrer, at one point after a lengthy exchange, O'Reilly turned to Hill as she attempted to ask a question and said "Are you still here?"

It was refreshing to see a debate that was fun, and where every answer hadn't been focus grouped to death and polished beyond any substantive meaning. A friendly yet fiery argument that didn't leave frost hanging in the air. In his closing remarks Stewart referenced the other candidates we aren't allowed access to, specifically naming Gary Johnson.

Hey, haven't we...

Oh, never mind.

De-Brief

For those surfers who have come to this site by mistake thinking it is some Lady Chatterley’s Lover type collection, I’m afraid this title too will disappoint, despite its promise, for it’s not about either Madame or I shedding our undergarments, it’s about my short dissection of the first presidential debate of 2012.

That it has consumed the chattering communication channels says a lot about us.

First, it seems to confirm, in waves, Hedges’ contention that we are a spectacle culture, more about form and show than substance. 

It also says much, at least about many males, that we place so much emphasis on “scoring,” “slamming,” “beating,” etc., and little about issues, other than our surface knowledge which politicians use to manipulate us.  It is also why falsehoods and half-lies and deceptions and deflections can be tossed out by our politicians with no lasting consequences for them from us. 

We have a traditional/corporate media that needed a shake-up of this race, an imperative to make it tighter regardless of whether it really was or is, because that increases interest, and interest equates to money.  Social media, which emphasizes money matters far less, was much more in the middle on assessments of the debate.

Yes, the debaters were overbearing (the reader can decide which, if any, was more so), yes the moderator was not as assertive as maybe could have been the case (but an argument could also be made that letting the men talk revealed more than cutting them off), yes the questions were maybe too softball or general.

Yes, one candidate with low expectations turned in a “stronger” performance than expected, and that helped that candidate.  Yes, the other, with high expectations, turned in an acceptable performance, but because it was below expectations, it was termed “soft,” “meek,” or “off.”  Yes, we Americans love a contest between two contenders.

It’s one debate.  And it only occurred between the two establishment candidates.  The other two or three real candidates, who would have provided true breadth and perspective, were nowhere to be seen.  And most Americans neither know nor care.  And that makes our democracy feebler, for our discussions and considerations have resulting gaping holes in them.

One debate.  In a month it could be forgotten.  This American obsession with the NOW can be quite a weakness, and works to the detriment of our perspective.  We never seem to remember how our obsession with, well, most everything, turned out in hindsight to be excessive.

A Little Bird Told Me

Professor J, 

Our readers are probably still studying your last post. So as not to overwhelm them, and because I'm really tired, tonight's post is just for fun. My brilliant plan to do tweet live during tonight's debate was derailed. Twitter however, is my favorite part of live television and tonight's tweets did not disappoint. I'll leave the in depth analysis to you (our readers know how you love that). Here were my favorite moments:

Dan Savage ‏@fakedansavage

Domestic issues? Mitt is prepared to discuss maids, drivers, and gardeners.

Kevin Gosztola ‏@kgosztola

RT @chrislhayes: Glad they're going w/ red and blue ties that correspond with our now well-established chromatic partisan coding.

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed

Did...is Mitt FLIRTING with Obama?

 Peter Z. Scheer ‏@peesch

Obama only wants to hire math and science teachers in a country where no one knows ANY history.

Peter Z. Scheer ‏@peesch

Hi class. I'm professor Obama. Here's my syllabus.

 big_bird ‏@big_bird

shivering 

llisonkilkenny ‏@allisonkilkenny

I'm glad they shut third party candidates out of this thing to preserve its painfully boring atmosphere 

Melissa McEwan ‏@Shakestweetz

"You can't have people opening banks in their garage." LOL! What about in their CAR ELEVATORS?

jeremy scahill ‏@jeremyscahill

Any pundits who try to say someone won this debate was (incredibly) paying less attention than Jim Lehrer.

M. ‏@TrancewithMe

How can we make Jon Stewart hosting the debates happen? #debates

 Fire Tom Friedman ‏@firetomfriedman

Candidates seem tired. Y'all seem tired. I'm tired. How about we all get some sleep and try this again some other time? 

What an excellent idea...

Some Answers Here; Correctness A Matter Of Opinion!

Readers:

I turn now to addressing reader JC’s questions, going back a few weeks.  JC has more questions and comments and we will get to them all.  These first:

1.     How big should government be?  That’s a big question, lol.  Depends on what kind of a society you want to have, or what that society wants.  If it wants things done collectively for a lot of things, while still having individual freedom and basic capitalism (the situation in Scandinavia, for example), the expenditures will be a good deal larger.  If it wants the society to do little collectively, expenditures can be a good deal smaller, although I believe total government expenditures of a modern, complex, democratic-capitalism nation should be no lower than 30% of GDP or it will find itself failing to meet the needs a modern society requires. Those expenditures should also probably be no higher than 60%, or the “sweet spot” will have been exceeded, and overall productivity will lag.  Once you set that general guideline, then you have to decide how much of that should be national government, how much state/provincial, and how much local.

2.     Do we need more taxes to support big government? A question that is too narrow and too assumptive.  America’s taxation falls disproportionally on those in the middle, and, to an extent, in the lower classes, when one considers all the kinds of taxes (property, sales, payroll, state, etc., not just income tax).  History is full of failed societies that overburdened those who are the social foundation and basis of productivity.  America also has a tax code that favors the exploitative over the productive.  Those who make their money on dividends, interest, and “capital gains,” for example, pay a lower rate than most working people, and furthermore, get extraordinary tax breaks and loopholes.  For instance, when you as an average person sell your home, car, or other personal asset, you can’t deduct the loss.  Those who the rules-rigged system deem “professionals” can not only pay a lower tax rate on any profit they make, can not only deduct  a loss on the “investments” they sell, but can carry forward that loss to offset it in future years against income.  If it’s a corporation, the deal is even sweeter, allowing one to amend past year returns if desired to offset the loss.  Toss in liberal depreciation, depletion, and other rules, and the deals just get sickeningly sweet.  In effect, the US taxpayer subsidizes any risk or downside of corporations and “investors,” but most of those taxpayers don’t get those benefits themselves.  As an important aside, now the reader can get a glimpse about why corporations often pay little or no taxes, and why high income individuals pay a smaller tax rate than what is supposed to be the smallest tax rate.  They certainly, as Warren Buffet says, often pay a smaller tax rate than the secretaries/administrative assistants who work for them.

a.     Now let’s look at when America has been most prosperous.  It has NOT been most prosperous when robber barons paid little, and is obviously not all that prosperous now, when taxation on the highest incomes has been the sustained lowest in well over 70 years. When has it been most prosperous?  When middle and lower classes made livable wages AND paid tolerable taxes WHILE progressive taxation (as high as 91%) ensured that capital stayed in productive circulation and the drive for wealth did not become the number one priority.   Does this mean flat rates can’t work?  Flat rates CAN possibly work, but not until much else is changed around that rate (those sweet deals I talked about). 

b.     America’s government is underfunded and misallocated.  That is, the wealthy have escaped much taxation that they did not escape in the more prosperous past, AND the government has made expenditure choices that not only put us in debt and weaken us, but siphon away economic productivity, a negative synergism with cumulatively bad effects.  For instance, military, defense, security, etc. spending are at extraordinarily high sustained historical levels, and those things are generally far less economically productive (and are often counterproductive) than direct economic—preferably non-governmental—activity.  As a related matter, things certainly began to deteriorate when the unsustainable combination started happening (ever lowering rates, ever more loopholes, combined with increased government spending—Defense, Medicare, etc.).

3.     What is the size of US government expenditures and liability? A good question, and one that gets into accounting.  Because we have been deluding ourselves for a long period of time, what SHOULD be included often isn’t, and we have an extraordinary amount of things “offline” which affect both budget and liability.  Government accounting—incredibly—has actually improved in the last few years, and accounts for more of these previously offline things now.  The federal budget is complex, and includes law-mandated spending and yearly appropriation spending.  It is under $4T total, but creeping toward there.  It is under 25% of GDP, but getting toward there.  As for liabilities, that’s another tricky accounting thing.  Probable total liabilities and future promises, including the national debt, are just shy of $90T.   Of course, we need to look at more than just federal government expenditures and liabilities.  If all government liabilities in the country, as well as private liabilities, obligations, and “promises” that could become government liabilities were added into the mix, we probably have upwards of $180T in liabilities, probable liabilities, and potential liabilities, and maybe as high as $250T or more.  That’s more than 10-18 times GDP.  It’s a colossal problem, one related to our collective delusions and to plutocrats transferring their risk onto the taxpayers.

4.     How can we pay off the 16 trillion dollars in US federal debt in the future? If we had stayed on track in 2001, we’d be well on our way to paying the debt down by now.  We still have the means to pay the debt, but it’s becoming more and more difficult by the day.  In the simplest terms, first thing is to 1) correct the economy, 2) then, after the economy is corrected, stop the deficit spending and start an ever increasing surplus to pay down the debt, and 3) quit abusing Keynesian economics, and if you’re going to use it, use it like it was designed (borrow only in a recession or war; pay it back when those end).

5.       Are we close to the troubles of Greece? We are not close to the troubles of Greece, but remember, Greece’s problems are partially its own fault and partially the fault of the international system that whipsawed it.  Still, we are not FAR from the troubles of Greece, although our position as world economic center gives us some more distance than perhaps is commonly thought.  It is not a magical protection though, and people should remember that.  All credible organizations say we are on an unsustainable path.  We must summon the will to address that, and get on a sustainable path.  If you mean, does what happens in Greece and to Greece affect us, the answer is yes.  The interconnection of our globalized world, and especially global economics, ensures that.

.

Holding Pattern

Professor J,

We'll bring them all in for a landing...eventually.

In my effort to simplify and clarify I have confused and complicated (perhaps I missed my calling as a politician). LOL Busy making lists of future discussions, are you? Don't make it so hard on yourself. We'll bring them all in for a landing in good time.  Probably when some event or politician's speech brings about the need for further discussion. 

To me, the theme of Sowell's article was that financial aid fosters dependency and that the Democratic Party is fine with that, in fact he gives them credit for instituting policy with the end of dependence in mind.  Since you had been so thorough I didn't feel the NEED to address each point in turn. I merely wanted to point out that it's easy to see how at attitude of dependence can come to be, even if it ISN'T the intent. So yes, you chose wisely; your assumption was correct.

As for the abortion issue, which we can tackle in depth at some later date, I was trying to boil something thorny with more gray areas than most people are willing to think about, down into something with a reasonable answer for you so we could move on. You don't like shortcuts do you? I think for a lot of people, it is hard to understand guaranteeing citizens of a country all the resplendent benefits of citizenship without making provision for protecting them when they are the most vulnerable. This topic however has layers and layers that need peeling back. The primacy of one party or the other is just the tip of the iceberg. But again, a discussion for another time...No chance this one will run out of fuel before we get around to it.

When asked how he defines Libertarianism, Penn Jillette says  "Take a left on sex and a right on money."  Well, that clears it up! LOL The problem with defining it too precisely is that the people who consider themselves libertarians refuse to be neatly placed in any other category. I suspect the moment there is a hard and fast definition, they'll flee and create the Contrarian Party.  A party that, while attempting to nail down a platform, would use the planks to beat each other to death. It could be the first Pay Per View convention.

Please notice my obvious effort to put our editorial train back on the track after so masterfully derailing it last time! :) Trying not to introduce anything new into the dialogue this week so that you have time to give our new friend, JC, the answers he has requested.

Note to the reader: You can read JC's most recent comments and his questions for the Prof. here: