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NOTES from the UNDERGROUND… No. 147 | July 27, 2008
"Getting It Out There"
Norbert Blei
MEDITATIONS ON A SMALL LAKE, Requiem for a Diminishing Landscape by Norbert Blei. Published by Ellis Press, David Pichaske, editor. 2008, $15, PO Box 6, Granite Falls, MN 56241Meditations on a Small Lake copyright 2008 by Norbert Blei. Originally published in 1987 by Ellis Press, Peoria, Illinois. Front Cover and page 71 art by Charles Peterson, Ephraim, Wisconsin. Back/inside covers, text page drawings by Emmett Johns, Fish Creek, Wisconson. ISBN: 978-0-944024-45-4
The easy part is writing a book. The hard parts include: finding a publisher; finding a newspaper, magazine, editor/reviewer/critic, somebody in the media to take note of your book; and (over the long haul) developing an audience of readers who will buy your book and look forward to purchasing your next one. They may not like everything you publish, but if you have touched them in any way with your words, if you have gotten hold of anything (in story, essay, poem) the way others see it, or may want to see it—you are on your way to establishing an audience.
The problem remains: the chasm between writer and reader. How do you find each other? Touch him/her? Cultivate them?
There's always an outside chance every dream about your book comes true: agent, publisher, contract, advanced money, publication …book tours, bestseller list/sizzle, speaking engagements, movie options, prizes, university invitations/appointments, enough money to get you out of hock and almost make you comfortable for years to come. It happens.
But don't count on it. There are some dreams that are best small…or forgotten. Most serious writers learn to live with these.
Let's say the easy part is done. You have a first book (or another new one). And let's say you're holding the first copy in your hands .Finally. Now comes that hard part: getting it out there. PR, marketing, advertising, mail orders, readings, book signings, word-of-mouth… None of this a given by any publisher, large or small. None of it easy.
Friends and family can buy only so many books. The aura and excitement of publication fades quickly. Here's your book. Here you are now, a published "author"… But nothing's happening. Your parents smile and wish you had a real job. Your friends say, "Hey, nice! Congratulations," may or may not buy copy—they have their own bills and busted dreams to deal with. Your spouse is thinking So what now? It's still not bringing food to the table…contemplating greener pastures. Your Significant Other is feeling Insignificant. The attention you think your book deserves… that circle is smaller than you ever imagined…and grows smaller. You're entering (or re-entering) the danger zone of no-man's-land.
How to reach out? For writers who become disillusioned by the whole process, the question is not how? But why?
I would hate to estimate how many potential and practicing writers walk partway down "the road not taken"—turn back and take the other one which is more crowded and less unpredictable. How many of them give up, fail to develop, lose faith, see nothing but futility in attempting to live by one's words alone. Years ago a friend of mine created this timetable: "If I don't publish a book in the next few years…first I'm going to sell insurance. Then I'm going to shoot myself." (He's still alive. With a shelf of books to his credit.)
Shall we do the dance of promotion? Most writers and artists are notoriously bad at it. And even for those who are reasonably good at doing the hustle, find it more difficult these days as newspapers grow thinner, book sections disappear, advertisements are ineffective, and nobody knows your name. Everybody has more important things to do than pick up a book, and what readership remains often dwindles to "books-everybody-else-is-reading"—those books and non-books usually featured on major network-TV talk shows, often owned or in bed with the larger publishers whose books are being flogged…often by authors who lost their soul to the very nature of the corporate process of manufacturing books that sell. Not always true of course. But true enough.
Now I'm into ethics. This is all too large a problem to consider in so small a space.
Does the internet sell books? Well, yes. And no. Amazon.com sure does. But that's another dance. So too bookstore signings, readings from every venue imaginable—living room book clubs, cofeeshops, bars, libraries, various speaking engagements–townhalls, beaches, parks, street corners… Most "underground writers," have done them all, or will. And continue to do the dance to the end. Or walk off the floor.
Can you survive as a writer in America? Well, not really. Not anymore—if ever. It's always THIS, and 'that'—whatever else a writer has to do to make his life work. Too often 'that' destroys him. It all goes back to selling insurance and self-destruction. Or to mix some more metaphors, it's a high-wire act. It was high-wire walker Karl Wallenda who said, "To be on the wire is life; all the rest is waiting," shortly before he fell to his death.
But to return to the dance. In THE SECOND NOVEL (Becoming a Writer), December Press, 1978, (o.p.), I quoted Henry Miller for my forward:
You want to communicate. All right, communicate! Use any and every means…
At a certain point in my life I decided that henceforth I would write about myself, my friends, my experiences, what I knew and what I had seen with my own eyes. Anything else, in my opinion, is literature, and I am not interested in literature. I realized also that I should have to learn to content myself with what was within my grasp, my scope, my personal ken. I learned not to be ashamed of myself, to talk freely about myself, to advertise myself, to elbow my way in here and there when necessary…
You will have to do it yourself, dear man. Or do it as Homer did: travel the highways and byways with a white cane, singing your songs as you go. You may have to pay people to listen to you, but that isn't an insuperable feat either. Carry a little "tea" with you and you'll soon have an audience. —Henry Miller
To repeat: Can you survive as a writer in America? I can give you some references off the top of my head, writers of considerable record, history, persistency: Ask Todd Moore (New Mexico); John Bennett (Washington state); Ron Baatz (New York state); A.D. Winans (California); Grace Butcher (Ohio/Alaska); t.k. splake (upper Michigan); Dave Etter (Illinois); Ron Whitehead (Kentucky); Alan Caitlin (New York); Jack Saunders (Florida); Bob Arnold (Vermont); Larry Smith (Ohio); Tom Montag (Wisconsin); David Kherdian (California/New York); Bill Kloefkorn (Nebraska); Eric Chaet (Wisconsin); Ron Offen (Illinois); Gerald Locklin (California); Leo Dangel (South Dakota); Antler (Wisconsin); Lyn Lifshin (New York/Virginia); John Brandi (New Mexico); Kenneth Gangemi (New York); Don Skiles, (California); David Clewell (Missouri): …for openers, I could easily add a hundred more, not to mention the ghosts of Frances May, Cid Corman, and Curt Johnson…reading their works, knowing their lives, how and in what shape they made it to the finish line.
You can persist—though that doesn't guarantee survival unless you define survival on your own terms. Some years ago in Bisbee, Arizona, I walked past what looked like a deserted storefront window, but seated only a short distance behind the window at a table was a writer with a stack of books. BUY MY BOOK his sign said. Which was unbelievable, funny, desperate, and almost scary. I've never forgotten that. Nor the fact I never went into the abandoned store to engage him in conversation. I was married at the time, living in a desperate emptiness of my own. I feared that's what could become of me if I continued to believe I could write and survive.
If somebody, anybody, gives you the smallest break by way of encouragement or exposure…you gotta give thanks. Which was my intention when I began writing this—only to see the piece swerve into whatever the hell I have here so far. You have to thank anyone who in any way responds to your work, even negatively. Any attention at all is important to a writer's survival., from a professional critic, to a writer whose work and judgment you value highly, to a friend who speaks from both heart and mind, to a stranger you meet on the street who simply tells you: "I really like your book."
"Thank you."
All of this by way of acknowledging Joe Knappen of the Door County Advocate, and Doug Moe of The Wisconsin State Journal for their reviews of MEDITATIONS ON A SMALL LAKE. Hopefully other reviews will follow, though I wouldn't bet on it, given the writer's situation discussed so far. Trust me, these two reviews alone are more than many serious writers in the Midwest (especially with smaller, regional presses) could ever hope for.
In addition to the newspaper reviews, I've decided to include/print the "unsolicited testimonials" I have received thus far. (Forgive me, I didn't ask anyone's permission and only used his or her initial and will gladly remove it if your are uncomfortable seeing your words in print.) What my friends, readers, fellow writers say and think, matters too–and plays a huge part in my own history of survival.
by Joe Knappen
Door County Advocate,
May 24, 2008
Readers who know only the bluster of Norbert Blei might have missed the point.
To get a better grip on the writer and his favorite theme, readers might want to treat themselves to the re-release of "Meditations on a Small Lake," an expanded version and third edition of his 1987 best selling book.
"Meditations" is a far from the powerful invective of Blei's "Chronicles of a Rural Journalist in America"—compendium of columns published in the Door Reminder —or his sesquicentennial blistering of aspects of Peninsula life.
"Meditations" is more in keeping with Blei's signature work, "Door Way, Door Steps and Door to Door."
The three works went a long way to define and/or explain Door County, its characters and its special nature.
Indeed, "Meditations" is , all the word implies: Quiet, reverential, a devotional to the start beauty of his adopted landscape, a love letter to the fragile Peninsula.
In the 40 years since Blei escaped Chicago to settle into an old farmhouse in northern Door County, he has done nothing but write and help other writers write.
In that time, Blei has built a considerable body of work: stories, poems, public and commercial radio commentaries, public television programs, newspaper columns, magazine articles, online writing and books. Nearly all focus on Door County
The loss of the rural character and community of Door County continue to be recurrent themes in Blei's print work and online writing (www.blei doorcountytimes.com) and books.
In April, Blei released the third reprinting of the 1987 book, and the "Meditations" continue to be a testament to changing times.
He remains staunch in his defense of preservation of the natural landscape — in Door County or any rural landscape threatened by over-development and crass commercialism.
Blei muses to pin down and define the quintessential elements that make Door County the place it is and explain why its people are the way they are.
The new edition contains three new essays, and the whole takes on a more mellow aspect, like exchanging an electric hard body for a mellow acoustic guitar.
Reenforcing the natural mode is the substitution of the original photographs of the first two editions with drawings by artist Emmett Johns.
The quiet cover drawn by Charles Peterson of Ephraim continues to retain its force in drawing the reader into the book.
Emmett Johns' portrait of the author on the back cover is real enough to convince the readers they can hear the howl of the Coyote.
"Meditations on a Small Lake," 122 pages in the il¬lustrated 2008 edition, can be obtained from Ellis Press, P.O. Box 6, Granite Falls, Minn., 56241 for $15 plus $2 for shipping and handling. The book can be | obtained from the author) at Norbert Blei, PO. Box 33, Ellison Bay, Wis. 54210.
[Joe Knaapen is the assistant editor of the Door County Advocate. Contact him at joeATdoorcountyadvocateDOTcom or at (920) 743-3321]
Emment Johns Illustration taken from Meditations on a small lake by Norbert Blei
by Doug Moe
Wisconsin State Journal
June 6, 2008
Norbert Blei doesn't get angry so much anymore but when he does, he knows what to do. As one of Wisconsin's foremost men of letters, Blei recalls Mark Twain, who said, "When angry, count four; when very angry, swear."
In other words, we all must suffer fools and foolishness in this world, but there comes a time when enough is enough.
Now, thanks to Blei and Minnesota's Ellis Press, discerning readers angered by the noise and mushrooming commercialism in everyday life have an option apart from swearing a blue streak in a primal scream room.
They might instead get themselves a copy of Blei's "Meditations on a Small Lake," a cult classic when first issued in 1987 and now reprinted in a fine new edition that includes three new essays and beautiful illustrations, including one of the author, by the artist Emmett Johns.
"It's a hodgepodge of a book," Blei said Wednesday, when I tracked him down at home in Door County. "But sometimes that can click."
This one clicks. Blei offers a mix of his essays — alternately evocative and angry — on his beloved Door County with a selection of magazine and newspaper interviews in which Blei is the subject. Inevitably, the changing face of Door, where Blei moved from Chicago four decades ago, is the subject, too.
Madison-area readers will smile to see included in "Meditations" a piece on Blei written by the late Madison author and radio raconteur George Vukelich. Twin sons of different mothers, those two, sharing a love of literature, the land, and a bedrock belief that humor trumps pomposity every time.
In his piece, originally published in Milwaukee Magazine, Vukelich notes that a mutual acquaintance had warned him about Blei: "He's different. It's like a mixture of Studs Terkel and Henry David Thoreau."
Vukelich could relate because George, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1995, was himself a man of many parts, a political activist, environmentalist, writer and broadcaster. I remember him captaining a stool at the old Fess bar, telling stories. Norb Blei heard many of those same stories when Vukelich took his WIBA radio program "Pages from North Country Notebook" to a statewide audience on Wisconsin Public Radio.
"I miss him so much on the Wisconsin scene," Blei said of Vukelich.
Vukelich's use of the description of Blei as part Terkel, part Thoreau was particularly apt because Blei's life and writing has frequently shifted between Chicago and Door County.
I met Blei for the first time in 2003 when he was in Madison to read at Canterbury from "Chi Town," his collection of pieces on his native Chicago that remains my favorite of all his works. It had just been reissued by the Northwestern University Press so a new generation of readers could get Norb's inimitable take on Chicago institutions like Nelson Algren, Mike Royko and the hot dog.
Blei's favorite Madison place is Nick's on State Street, but that first time we met at the Laurel Tavern on Monroe, because Norb had been meeting down the street with the University of Wisconsin Press about the possibility of their reissuing his Door County trilogy that began with "Door Way." (That collaboration, alas, failed to come to pass.)
He drank Scotch at the Laurel and proved as provocative in person as he is on the page. He signed my copy of "Chi Town." He promised to stay in touch, and he has.
This week, Blei said he is happy to see "Meditations" back in print. It has given him a chance to re-examine his complicated relationship with Door County, which he loves for its beauty and quiet spaces and hates because that same allure may be responsible for its ruin in the form of condos and commercial development. In the book, Blei notes ruefully that a condo developer once called to cheerfully tell the author he'd put a copy of one of Blei's books in all his condos.
Still, there remain places in Door where Blei can find the quiet he seeks. He quotes Melville: "Silence is the only voice of our God." He told me that a former Door resident, returning from Maine for the first time in two decades, recently offered this assessment: "It's not that bad."
The first reading for the new edition of "Meditations on a Small Lake" came about when Blei was talking with a friend of his who is minister of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Juddville, in Door County.
"The proper place to launch this book is a church," Blei said.
"Use mine," the minister said.
The reading is Monday evening. "It's perfect," said Blei, Wisconsin's amiable contrarian. "Nobody knows where Juddville is."
[Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoeATmadisondotcom.]
Charles Peterson Illustration taken from Meditations on a small lake by Norbert Blei
Just wanted to say what a GEM the revised edition of "Meditations" is! Pure Zen–in the feel of it in your hand; the black and white, spare drawings of Emmett's; and, of course, in the words. The prologue and epilogue nearly made me cry, and the new color is perfect–the blue of the ever present, surrounding waters.
Comforting, but disturbing, to know that, though I've been coming here for 25 years now, you've been here over 40, and still don't know what it is about this place…but maybe it's that Ultimate Question–we finally have to accept that we don't KNOW the answer, never will and that is the peace and purpose of all…
I have read the prologue, the foreword, the epilogue. You know I don't always agree with what you say, I don't think you can "keep time in a bottle", I think we are destined to evolve, to always be seeking and finding more. I wouldn't want to live in Buckingham palace but I'm glad it exists. But even if I don't always agree with what you say I always, always am awestruck and overcome with the way you say it. It is incredible how deeply you can embody each moment, feel every nuance, and then put it on paper in a way that enables, even forces, less perceptive people to enlarge their senses and experience it too. The epilogue especially. Oh, my God–catching a slap of wind in his eyes–hands curled warmly in black mittens—the wind in the tips of pine trees, –opens his mouth childlike, in communion, tasting the sacred quiet.
Maybe you do put time in a bottle. Charlie and Chester [from DOOR WAY] are caught in agate for the rest of us to see and remember the quiet beauty of their lives, for people long after we have "walked into our own shadows" as you put it. Maybe the exact circumstances will never be the same again, but you have caught them for others to remember and revere. probably for generations.
There is one place where you say it is not just the light, or the water or the light combining with the water that creates the mystique of Door county, that you are still searching for it and it is something spiritual, and that is so beautiful and so right. Everyone feels it. And that is what you are trying to save, to preserve. I understand that feeling and share it, and share wanting it to be saved. It is both tangible and intangible, and I think in a greater sense it is something within your own self Norbert, something that can't be destroyed.
I think if you had never come to Door you would have found it in a Cathedral in the city when all the votive lights were lit, or in the glow of a woman's cigarette beckoning from a dark door, or from the wild luridly colored lights on a wet city pavement. This "holy" thing is everywhere and everything. It is the presence of God, and you found it as much in Nik Klein who made rocking horses and the newsie and the hot dog seller as you did in James Farrell, or Charlie and Chester. And that is your great gift to witness and see it.
You are as the Gypsy said, "A seer." and beyond that "a feeler." You are able to see deeper and feel more and then give that gift to others, to open eyes and hearts.
Emmett Johns Illustration taken from Meditations on a small lake by Norbert Blei
It is truly wonderful, lyrical, poetic, you at your writerly best. We never had a copy, for some reason, maybe just didn't run across it when we came here in 1989.
I don't know if I've ever told you but it was "Meditations" (I picked it up at Passtimes Books, I think in 1994 or 95) that moved me to write to you about your other books and whether you did workshops. And I never never write those kinds of fan letters. You responded very graciously with plenty of info and a Clearing brochure. It took me another two years to get to the Clearing… When I got home…that year…after years of
floundering…I was committed and reaffirmed as a poet. It was at that point that I decided to make something out of my art.
So the long and short of it is that I can say absolutely that where I am as a poet today is a direct effect of having read "Meditations" back in 1994.
Part Terkel, part Thoreau, huh? And the soul and conscience of Door County, as well. I am glad you are reissuing "Meditations . . ." It really is time to reissue the trilogy too, isn't it? Thanks,
Something in the Bible says a man cannot be a hero in his home town. You may be such in Door County and Chicago, but the commies in Mad-Town seem to appreciate your jaded view…
read it. great job. i am in fact reading the first edition. it's great.
……as you know still my favorite [book] and I think one of Emmett's best sketch's……..you look like a "Goat" I have named "Hairy" that is too stubborn to go up on the roof!!
congrats…that's a really good review–hope you sell a ton of copies.
If you ever want to come read at the coffeehouse I have a couple months open for the 08-09 season, including Dec 20 (reconnect w/yr Chicago-area friends/students and sell books for folks to give as xmas presents)
Emmett Johns Illustration taken from Meditations on a small lake by Norbert Blei
Thanks for sending the new edition of Meditations… It is vastly improved in visual appeal and readability. The livelier blue cover with white title and illustration, the great Emmett Johns sketches (including portrait of NB), and the improved type font of the text — all make for a sweet little volume! And the added essays are great! Especially liked the quote from Everyday Suchness…
I realized as you read tonight…You articulated my feeling about the spirit of the county and that led me to become involved… Great to see you and I thank you for responding to my letters—nearly fifteen years ago. It meant and means much to me. (gotta see if they're worth anything on e-bay ..)
your book of lake meditations is keeping me company late at night. it has a warmth, beauty and wisdom that is downright soulful.
Charles Peterson's cover drawing of a lone man in a boat captures the essence of everything in the book. I can't keep my eyes off it. I can't keep from opening the book again to any page, entering the beauty and silence you capture in words.
The epilogue to the new edition of MEDITATIONS is so beautiful…
I wanted to write you a note and tell you how much I have enjoyed Meditations on a Small Lake…
It was wonderful!!!!!! I find it hard to believe that I had never read it before…
As I was reading it I was thinking…YES YES….as I feel many of the things you describe…so beautifully ("it's the light … Moisture and light etc etc….)…….but could never express as you do…I enjoyed the story In defense of Abandoned Farms as I have always wondered about these places when walking or riding past them…
Emmett Johns drawings are so beautiful and such a gift to have in your book ~to think a person can create such lovely drawings with just pencil and paper…
I really thank you for making this lovely book is available again to us all….


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Mortuary Science Accelerated
Carl Sandburg College offers both a traditional and an accelerated associate degree program for students interested in a career in mortuary science.
Mortuary Science Program Aims and Objectives – prepares students to serve within the funeral service profession, adheres to the institutional commitment to student success in both human development and achievement of educational goals. This challenge is met by educating students in all phases of funeral service, with special attention being given to the high ethical standards within the funeral service profession. These goals are accomplished through a wide variety of educational experiences aimed at developing the many skills needed in order to successfully serve within the funeral service profession. This curriculum is based upon the American Board of Funeral Service Education curriculum outlines. Several of the mortuary science classes require some outside work as well as research about various aspects of the funeral service profession. Upon completion of the mortuary science program, each graduate will have attained those skills necessary to uphold and foster the dignity of the funeral service profession.
Nature of the Work
Funeral directors arrange the details and handle the logistics of funerals. They interview the family to learn what they desire with regard to the nature of the funeral, the clergy members or other persons who will officiate and the final disposition of the remains. Sometimes the deceased leave detailed instructions for their own funerals. Together with family members, funeral directors establish the location, dates and times of wakes, memorial services and burials. Funeral directors also prepare obituary notices and have them placed in newspapers, arrange for pallbearers and clergy, schedule the opening and closing of a grave with the cemetery, decorate and prepare the sites of all services and provide transportation for the remains, mourners and flowers between sites. Most funeral directors are also trained and licensed embalmers. Embalming is the cosmetic and preservative process through which the body is prepared for interment.
Employment Opportunities
Opportunities are excellent with many openings in the funeral service profession. These include, but are not limited to; funeral directors, embalmers, grief facilitators, and pre-need sales. Most funeral homes are family run businesses, and the funeral directors either are owner operators or employees of the operation.
Admission Requirements
The Mortuary Science program has specific admission requirements and a separate application process. Students must apply and be accepted into the program in order to enroll. Completed applications may be submitted beginning Oct. 1 every year for classes that start the next academic year. Admission to the program is on a rolling basis, but new students are only admitted for the fall semester each year. Mortuary science admission requirements are:
- Meet admission requirements of Sandburg
- Complete all general education courses
- Complete an application for the mortuary science program
- Submit all transcripts (High School, College or GED) to Sandburg
- Submit proof of interview with a licensed funeral director
- Hepatitis B Vaccination is required prior to admissions
Enrollment in the program is limited to a specific number of students due to accreditation requirements. Students who enroll in the program must earn a minimum grade of "C" (2.0 on a 4.0 scale) in all courses required in the mortuary science program. Failure to attain these grade requirements will result in dismissal from the program with an option to reapply to the program only available on a onetime basis.
Additional Requirements
Students are expected to purchase required clothing or protective equipment used in the program. Additional living and incidental expenses should be expected by the student.
Accreditation /Licensure
National Board Examination rates, graduation rates, and employment rates for this and other ABFSE-accredited programs are available at www.abfse.org. To request a printed copy of this program's pass rates and employment rates, contact Tim Krause, Coordinator of the mortuary science program at 2400 Tom L. Wilson Blvd., Galesburg, IL 61401 or email at email@example.com, or by telephone 309-345-8501.
Sigma Phi Sigma
The purpose and mission of Sigma Phi Sigma
Advisor: Tim Krause 309.345.8501 or email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


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Answer Me Jesus™ finally answers the question "What Would Jesus Do?" Like a magic 8 ball but infinitely more wise, Answer Me Jesus™ delivers the answers you seek. Hold the wisdom of the Lord in the palm of your hand and let Jesus shepherd you through the quandaries of life. Hallelujah!
intended for use by the closed minded.
Answer Me Jesus™


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Coca-Cola Columbia recently set out to promote their new online radio station Coke FM. So Coca-Cola took a popular local band and hosted a live convert on a stage that was suspended over 50m from the ground. To get the band down to ground level, the crowd had to download songs from the band's latest album on the Coke FM mobile site. By downloading the songs on their mobile phones the audience helped to lower the band to the full stage.
And with over 50,000 downloads through Coke FM in just one hour, I'd say this is a pretty successful way to promote a digital radio station! What do you guys think of this one?


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Home » Handprints Wentworth Point » Pictures » IMG_20180608_134854
Date: August 9, 2018
Author: hpelc
Main office:
102 Warrimoo Ave St Ives, 1 Ridgeland Ave Killara, Shop 14 Pierside 1 Burroway Road Wentworth Point
St Ives: 91882068, Killara: 94992560, Wentworth Point: 93020206
email@example.com email@example.com email@example.com
The Handprints Blog is an opportunity for our educators to write and explore the concepts of early education they believe in while also seeking feedback from others in the profession. Enjoy!
© Copyright © 2017 Handprints ELC. All Rights Reserved.


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Pymble Ladies' College
The dog has long been a symbol of fidelity and guardianship. But take away the carefully constructed layers of meaning and what remains is a spirit that cannot be defined nor inhibited. My work asks 'What is the dog?' and aims to break the tradition of representing this age-old species symbolically. The audience can take each panel at face value. Here, the dog is a dog: in control of its own space. Surrounded by an ambiguous atmosphere of unrepeatable marks, it displays the instincts that drive it to be nothing more than canis familiaris.
Influencing artists: Deborah Williams, William Kentridge, Helen Fay, Bridget Farmer


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Date: Sunday, May 15th, 1:00-2:30pm
Location: Arden Courts Memory Care, 45 South Rd, Farmington, CT. A little over an hour from the Norwalk area.
The CT FTD Foundation has a support group meeting for all caregiver's and families/friends who have a loved one diagnosed with Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD).
The support group meetings are a chance for everyone to share their experiences and express concerns. It also gives a chance to share ideas that have worked for other caregivers going through the same experience. Meetings are informal.
You are welcome to bring your loved one with FTD, Arden Courts will provide respite care in a separate room. Please just let us know in advance if your loved one will attend.
Meetings are the third Sunday of every month at Arden Courts Memory Care, 45 South Rd, Farmington, CT. Time: 1:00pm – 2:30pm. Hosted by the CT FTD Foundation, meetings are free. For more information contact firstname.lastname@example.com.


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The Conservative New Deal
--- A Question of Numbers
by ROGER LOWENSTEIN
Published: January 16, 2005, NY Times
In 1938, the Social Security Act was only three years old, but its future was already very much in doubt. Conservatives claimed it would bankrupt the nation, and independent critics argued that the way it was financed amounted to ''financial hocus-pocus,'' as one editorial in The New York Times put it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defended the program, said by a cabinet member to be his favorite, with some of his trademark oratory. ''Because it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to build their own security,'' the president told a national radio audience, ''government must now step in and help them lay the foundation stones.''
Social Security did become the cornerstone -- not only the biggest government entitlement plan but also the most universal, the most popular and the most enduring. But the debate over Social Security never ended. Barry Goldwater wanted to repeal it; Milton Friedman wrote in 1962 that it was an unjustifiable incursion on personal liberty; and David Stockman, the budget director who personified Ronald Reagan's efforts to shrink the federal government, tried to take a hatchet to Social Security, which he called a ''monster.''
But in this 70-year struggle, no other conservative has ever come as close to transforming the program as George W. Bush. He is making Social Security reform, including a partial privatization, a centerpiece of his second term. If the most ardent ideologues have their way, such a reform would be a first step toward a wholly new approach to retirement security -- one that would set aside the notion of collective insurance and guaranteed minimums for that of personal investing and responsibility.
This could do more to reverse the New Deal, and even the Great Society, than Goldwater, Stockman and Reagan ever dreamed of. ''We call it a conservative New Deal,'' says Stephen Moore, author of ''Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger.'' In Moore's words, it will be a fundamental shift ''from an entitlement society to an ownership society.'' The key to this transformation, according to a generation of conservative thinkers and crusaders, is reducing the size and changing the nature of Social Security, which now pays benefits of half a trillion a year, and which will only grow bigger as America grows older.
The campaign to privatize has not only been about ideology; it has also focused on Social Security's supposed insolvency. Moore's book calls Social Security a ''Titanic . . . headed toward the iceberg'' and a program ''on the verge of collapse.'' A stream of other conservatives have bombarded the public, over years and decades, with prophecies of trillion-dollar liabilities and with metaphors intended to frighten -- ''train wreck,'' ''bankruptcy,'' ''cancer'' and so forth. Recently, a White House political deputy wrote a strategy note in which he said that Social Security is ''on an unsustainable course. That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness.''
The campaign is potentially self-fulfilling: persuade enough people that Social Security is going bankrupt, and it will lose public support. Then Congress will be forced to act. And thanks to such unceasing alarums, many, and perhaps most, people today think the program is in serious financial trouble.
But is it? After Bush's re-election, I carefully read the 225-page annual report of the Social Security trustees. I also talked to actuaries and economists, inside and outside the agency, who are expert in the peculiar science of long-term Social Security forecasting. The actuarial view is that the system is probably in need of a small adjustment of the sort that Congress has approved in the past. But there is a strong argument, which the agency acknowledges as a possibility, that the system is solvent as is.
Although prudence argues for making a fix sooner rather than later, the program is not in crisis, nor is its potential shortfall irresolvable. Ideology aside, the scale of the fixes would not require Social Security to abandon the role that was conceived for it in 1935, and that it still performs today -- as an insurance fail-safe for the aged and others and as a complement to people's private market savings.
About 47 million people -- retirees and their dependents, under-age survivors of deceased workers and the disabled -- receive a check from Social Security every month. The money for this colossal endeavor comes from a payroll tax on current workers and on their employers. The program is a model of efficiency; expenses are low, as pension plans go, and participation is near universal. Benefits rise with the level of earnings, but they are tilted toward progressivity, so that those at the bottom get more in proportion to their earnings and those at the top get less. Social Security also delivers a considerable nonmonetary benefit: people who have contributed throughout their working lives know that, regardless of the ebb and flow of their careers and, indeed, of the stock market, a guaranteed pension awaits them.
Currently, Social Security is running a hefty surplus; the payroll tax brings in more dollars than what goes out in benefits. By law, Social Security invests that surplus in Treasury securities, which it deposits into a reserve known as a trust fund, which now holds more than one and a half trillion dollars. But by 2018, as baby boomers retire en masse, the system will go into deficit. At that point, in order to pay benefits, it will begin to draw on the assets in the trust fund.
The debate over Social Security's solvency is really two debates. The first is over how long the trust fund will last. The law requires the Social Security Administration to estimate its financial condition for 75 years into the future, and the agency's conclusions depend on the assumptions it makes about what America will look like decades hence -- how much people will earn, how large their families will be, how long they will live.
Politicians and other commentators tend to speak about these long-range trends, or at least about Social Security's finances, with an air of precision. This is almost amusing, since few economists can predict the swings in the federal budget even a year in advance. Joshua Bolten, head of Bush's Office of Management and Budget, said of Social Security last month, ''The one thing I can say for sure is that if left unattended, the system will be unable to make good on its promises.'' But the Social Security Administration itself pretends to no such certainty. Its actuaries (about 40 are on staff) frankly admit that the level of, say, immigration in 2020, or of wages in 2040, is impossible to forecast. ''The only thing we are sure of is that it won't happen precisely as we project,'' says Stephen Goss, the chief actuary at the agency. And the trustees' annual report, which is based on the actuaries' analysis, takes pains to say that it is not making a prediction. It makes a projection -- three different ones, actually -- that amount to informed but very rough guesses. The agency's best guess, labeled its ''intermediate'' case, is that the system will exhaust its reserves in 2042. At that point, as payroll taxes continue to roll in, it would be able to pay just over 70 percent of scheduled benefits. That would leave a substantial deficit, but one that Congress could easily avert if it were to act now when the projected problem is more than a generation away.
What's more, there is a strong case to be made that the agency is erring on the side of being overly pessimistic. If its more optimistic projection turns out to be correct, then there will be no need for any benefit cuts or payroll-tax increases over the full 75 years.
No one can definitively predict that outcome, either, of course, but David Langer, an independent actuary who made a study of Social Security's previous projections compared with the actual results in 2003, thinks the ''optimistic'' case is its most accurate. Over a recent 10-year span, the trustees' intermediate guesses turned out to be quite pessimistic. Its optimistic guesses were dead on, and its pessimistic case -- sort of a doomsday situation -- was wildly inaccurate.
And, contrary to widespread belief, recent demographic trends have been modestly better (from an actuary's gloomy standpoint) than anticipated. For instance, longevity hasn't increased as much as expected. Partly as a result, since 1997 the agency has pushed back, by 13 years, the date at which it projects its reserves will be exhausted. In other words, as the cries of impending doom started to crescendo, the guardians of the system have grown more optimistic.
The second debate concerning solvency is over whether the securities in the trust fund will be honored or whether, in Moore's pointed imagery, the fund will resemble a bank ''after it's been robbed by Bonnie and Clyde.'' This seems an odd preoccupation. Social Security does not own junk bonds or third-world debt; it invests in U.S. Treasuries, considered the safest investment on the planet. Since 1970 there have been 11 years in which Social Security has operated at a deficit; each time, it redeemed bonds from the trust fund without a fuss. Goss, the agency's actuary, says he has no doubt it will be able to do so again. ''Absolutely,'' he said when asked if the trust-fund bonds are sound.
This isn't what some conservatives have said. Paul O'Neill, the former treasury secretary, went so far as to say that Social Security has no assets. In anti-Social Security literature, the ''no assets'' contention isn't even debated; it's treated as gospel. According to Michael Tanner, head of the Cato Institute Project on Social Security Choice, the agency's pauperism has turned America's seniors into ''supplicants'': after working and paying taxes their entire lives, ''they earn the privilege of going hat in hand to the government and hoping that politicians decide to give them some money for retirement.'' The implication is that the money isn't there: graybeards will have to beg for it.
Cato, a libertarian policy center founded in the late 1970's, has been arguing for 25 years that Social Security is on the verge of crisis. In a recent position paper, Tanner wrote that Social Security faces a horrendous unfinanced liability of $26 trillion over 75 years. In a footnote, he cited the 2003 trustees' annual report. Actually, the trustees' intermediate projection is for a deficit, over 75 years, of $3.7 trillion. Though that is a lot of money, it could be covered by an immediate surcharge to the payroll tax of less than two percentage points, or by various combinations of tax hikes and benefit cuts, each of them quite manageable. But $26 trillion is too big a hole to fix. When I asked Tanner about the footnote, he admitted that the trustees didn't actually say $26 trillion; Tanner derived the figure by counting the cash-flow deficits that the trustees project from 2019 on out. In other words, he ignores the next 15 years or so, during which time Social Security will be running a surplus. And he assumes that the assets in the trust fund, which should be accruing interest into the 2040's, won't exist, either. Tanner counts only the bad years and only the bad numbers. Another doomsayer, former Republican Representative John Kasich, pegged the Social Security deficit at $120 trillion in a recent op-ed -- some 32 times the agency's figure. (Kasich toted up annual deficits in nominal -- not inflation-adjusted -- dollars for every year through 2080, by which time a hamburger could cost $40.)
Such hyperbolic claims aside, there is a serious issue at the heart of what worries critics. It isn't that the trust fund is broken; it's that the existence of the fund is seducing the government to spend more than it otherwise would, thus brooking larger deficits in the future. Since Social Security lends its surplus to the Treasury (that's what it means to be investing in Treasuries), it is parking its surplus cash with the government. And just as lending money to a child outside a candy store may impose an impossible temptation, so the government may feel tempted while it holds onto Social Security's purse.
Ideally, Congress would recognize that the surplus is only temporary and would, therefore, take pains that the money lent to it is properly saved -- that is, that it run a surplus. But the government is operating at a deficit. So you must conclude that rather than saving Social Security's surplus, the government has been spending it -- on the military, education, tax cuts. In only 15 years, the government will have to start repaying its debt to Social Security. It will be able to do so. If need be, it will borrow, as it has borrowed for many purposes since 1776. The amount of borrowing, which could very gradually scale up to 1 or 2 percent of the country's gross domestic product, will be far smaller than the present federal deficit, which is just under 4 percent of G.D.P. But to avoid layering one deficit atop another, the government needs to exercise discipline -- to not overindulge in candy -- in the years when Social Security is running a surplus.
The fear that the trust fund would represent a ''perpetual invitation'' to Congress has bedeviled Social Security since its inception. Economists of the 1930's knew that every pension plan starts with more workers contributing into the system than there are retirees. But down the road, as those workers retire, obligations mount. Therefore, they recognized, any system that builds an adequate reserve for the future must collect more than it needs in the early years. And though social scientists of the 30's could not anticipate the war or the baby boom that would follow it, they knew that America's population was going to age.
In 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt formed the Committee on Economic Security to design what was in effect the first federal safety net, the committee hired three actuaries to stargaze into the future. The actuaries predicted that the proportion of Americans over 65 -- then only 5.4 percent -- would rise to 12.65 percent in 1990, meaning that retiree costs would soar. They were just a tad high; the actual figure would be 12.49 percent.
The committee was sharply divided on how to prepare for this demographic onslaught. Harry Hopkins, who oversaw the New Deal's relief program, thought the U.S. should simply pay retirement benefits from general funds; the more fiscally minded Henry Morgenthau Jr., the treasury secretary, wanted a self-financed system. F.D.R. sided with Morgenthau; above all, he said the system should be simple -''nothing elaborate or alarming about it.''
But alarm was very much the order of the day. When Roosevelt was swept into office in 1933, he had been preoccupied with the emergency of the Depression -- 10 million unemployed, 18 million on relief, the country's business output cut by a quarter and its morale shattered. He responded with a whirlwind of legislation and with rhetoric that, for a while, truly inspired. By 1934, the energy of the New Deal's first days had begun to subside, and yet the Depression had not abated. Meanwhile, the administration was being outflanked by political zealots, utopians and snake-oil salesmen, who increasingly appealed to desperate Americans. In California, the novelist Upton Sinclair was running for governor on a radical platform to ''end poverty.'' In Louisiana, Huey Long was leveraging his ''share the wealth'' movement into a national campaign. The Rev. Charles Coughlin, a demagogic and incendiary radio orator, was attracting millions of listeners with his attacks on bankers, Bolsheviks and assorted other villains.
By far the oddest of these ducks was an elderly doctor in Long Beach, Calif., Francis Townsend, who had lost his county medical job to the Depression. Dr. Townsend, a onetime ranch hand and mining speculator, wrote to the local newspaper suggesting a fantastic retirement scheme: the government should distribute $200 a month to each American over 60 and pay for it with a sales tax. When recycled through the economy, he augured, these lavish pensions would ''abolish unemployment'' forever. His proposed stipend was well above the average American's monthly wage, and his plan was demonstrably unworkable. But in rural America, it had the lure of an elixir. ''Townsend Clubs'' popped up across the country. Millions of members were recruited, a weekly newspaper was printed and dozens of U.S. representatives dutifully lined up in support.
''The Congress can't stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system, nor can I face the country without'' one, Roosevelt told his labor secretary, Frances Perkins. Each had been thinking of social insurance since well before the emergence of Townsend -- as governor of New York, Roosevelt dispatched Perkins to England to study the British state insurance system. But characteristically, F.D.R. had let the idea simmer until the moment was ripe. The domestic agitation was his opportunity.
In January 1935, the Economic Security committee delivered a sweeping proposal for ''cradle to grave'' insurance. Much of the bill merely authorized the federal government to distribute aid to the states, but two aspects of it were revolutionary: a plan for unemployment insurance and one for retirement. F.D.R., however, was greatly troubled by a detail in the latter. Though the payroll tax was scheduled to rise, in staircase fashion, within two generations it would be insufficient to cover benefits. Perkins explained that as the number of retirees rose, funds from the Treasury would have to cover the shortfall.
''Ah, but this is the same old dole under another name,'' F.D.R. said. F.D.R. had hoped that handouts would no longer be necessary as the economy recovered, and he shrewdly anticipated that in future generations, welfare-type programs would be vulnerable to political attack. He wanted Social Security to be different -- universal and enduring. Therefore, he insisted, it had to be self-supporting. Thus was conceived the (soon-controversial) trust fund. To build a future reserve, the New Dealers doubled the initial level of the payroll tax to 2 percent, applied up to a cap that was initially set at $3,000 of income. This added a regressive aspect to the plan, shielding the highest income brackets. Nonetheless, in August 1935, legislation was enacted that, in F.D.R.'s words, would ''give some measure of protection to the average citizen.''
The public strongly supported the new program, but conservatives attacked it as a socialistic scourge. Playing on the fact that each worker was to receive a government number, the Hearst papers published front-page illustrations of a man wearing a chain with a dog tag. Henry Ford said Social Security could cost Americans their basic freedoms, like the right to change jobs or to move from one town to another. A shareholder in a utility filed suit, claiming that the payroll tax was unconstitutional. The case went to the Supreme Court, where, in 1937, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, as if to resolve the historic debate over federalism, ruled, ''The conception of the spending power advocated by Hamilton . . . has prevailed over that of Madison.'' The new agency's organizational elan won over some critics. W. Albert Linton, a skeptical insurance executive, visited the Social Security headquarters in Baltimore and was amazed when the staff plucked his name and address from among the 26 million records. ''I think it is amazing,'' he said, ''the way they have solved the technical aspect.''
But the opposition wouldn't die. The issue that sparked the loudest protest was one that still burns today: the trust fund. Deductions from pay envelopes began in 1937, but benefits weren't scheduled to start until 1942, and there was a great deal of mistrust about where the money was going. Government actuaries sheepishly explained that Social Security was building a reserve eventually expected to reach $47 billion. This was an awesome sum -- eight times the total then in circulation. Alfred Landon, the Republican who ran against Roosevelt in 1936, called it ''a cruel hoax'' on the American people. His platform, sounding uncannily that like that of Republicans today, stated, ''The so-called reserve fund . . . is no reserve at all, because the fund will contain nothing but the government's promise to pay.'' Arthur Altmeyer, head of the Social Security board, came under heavy fire at a Congressional hearing. Looking for a way to safeguard the reserve, he made an intriguing suggestion: why not let the government invest in sound private securities, and thus insulate the surplus from Congress's eager hands? As Altmeyer recounted in his memoir, Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan, threw up his hands and snickered, ''That would be socialism!''
To quell the furor, Roosevelt turned to that standby device for embattled politicians -- an advisory council. The council arrived at an expedient solution, though one with troubling longer-term implications. It suggested increasing benefits for the first generation of retirees, even though that group had paid little in payroll taxes. An amendment in 1939 raised their benefits and also created new classes of beneficiaries -- wives, widows and survivors. This was a departure from the principle that all workers would be treated equally (couples would get more than single workers) and added an element of ''need'' -- a point that would rankle conservatives and later fuel the privatization movement. But in the political climate of 1939, it had the advantage of soaking up surplus taxes and greatly reducing the rate at which reserves would accumulate in the trust fund. F.D.R., anxious to have the controversy settled, went along, even though the changes paved the way for the eventual deficits he had feared.
The crunch came, as actuaries had predicted, in the late 1970's. Part of the problem they had not foreseen; Social Security benefits were skyrocketing because of inflation. In the 70's, Congress decided to index retirees' benefits to the cost of living. The timing was awful. Not only did inflation soar, but incomes -- the basis of payroll contributions -- stagnated. Critics like those at the newly formed Cato Institute warned of disaster. A former Nixon cabinet member, Peter Peterson, began to attract attention by arguing that any pay-as-you-go system (in which one generation supports another, as today) was inherently unstable, and advocated deep cuts in the rate at which benefits increased. The criticism had an ideological as well as an economic edge. In a pre-financed system -- in which, for instance, each worker invests for his own later retirement -- society never faces a liability. But individuals may come up short (if their investments fare badly) and live out poorer retirements. President Carter, responding to the darkening outlook, became, in 1977, the first president to legislate a belt-tightening.
Carter's efforts, however, didn't suffice. The trouble was that Social Security's actuaries had been way too optimistic. The actuaries had assumed that from 1978 to 1982 inflation would total 28 percent; the actual figure would be 60 percent. And they had predicted that wages would grow by 13 percent after inflation, whereas, in fact, real wages didn't rise at all; they declined. Social Security's experts were hardly the only people surprised by the dreadful economy, which was buffeted by skyrocketing oil prices, Middle East turmoil and a slumping stock market. Regardless, in 1981, Social Security experts announced that the trust fund would run dry in a year or two. That left the problem up to a new president, Ronald Reagan.
As a candidate for president, Reagan had proclaimed that he was ''pledged to a Social Security program that will reassure these senior citizens of ours they're going to continue to get their money.'' By then, Social Security had become a program that politicians couldn't afford to oppose and, indeed, that most Americans supported. President Eisenhower, a Republican, had proved this in 1956 when -- to the great disappointment of conservatives -- he supported a significant expansion of Social Security to include the disabled. But among adamant free marketers, the dream of upending Social Security lived on. One of the more prominent postwar opponents, in fact, was Reagan, a disarming actor then transitioning to political life.
Reagan began speaking out against Social Security in the late 50's. At the time, Democrats were trying to extend Social Security to health care -- to what would eventually become Medicare -- and Reagan worked with the American Medical Association to try to stop them. The A.M.A. conducted a stealth campaign (unearthed in 1999 by the political scientist Max Skidmore) known as Operation Coffee Cup, in which doctors' wives would urge women in their communities to oppose the plan in letters to Congress. Reagan produced a record album for that campaign in which he criticized Social Security for ''supplanting'' private savings and warned that subsidized medicine would curtail Americans' freedom. Warm and folksy even as he envisioned a bleak Orwellian future, Reagan said that Big Brother could start with health care, ''and pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him.''
Reagan gave slightly altered versions of this speech in personal appearances around the country, attacking Social Security as a ''sure loser'' of a program, and one that would worsen, not alleviate, the hazards of age. In the 70's, Reagan continued to sermonize against Social Security, often suggesting that it be made voluntary or more voluntary. At first blush, this sounded reasonable. As most people don't save enough for their retirement, however, under a voluntary system many who opted out would wind up destitute. Higher-earning workers (who get a lower proportional return on their payroll taxes) would opt out for certain. This problem is known as adverse selection. Wealthier people contributing higher taxes exit the system, leaving less revenue and a higher burden for the poorer people who remain. In effect, it would become an unpopular welfare program.
Once Reagan was in the Oval Office, he allowed his budget director, David Stockman, to handle the crisis. Stockman, who was waging a war on government spending, tried to exploit the moment to curtail Social Security sharply. It was Stockman's idea to cut benefits to early retirees by one-third. Without those cuts, he warned, the U.S. could suffer ''the most devastating bankruptcy in history.'' There were two weaknesses in the Stockman approach. First, he exaggerated. The deficit looming in 1983 was only temporary. (Since the birthrate dropped during the Depression, the number of seniors coming of age in the 1990's would decline, providing the agency with a respite.) Second, Stockman was politically naive. By proposing cuts for people on the verge of retirement, he triggered vehement protests. Members of the Republican-controlled Senate showed their instinct for self-preservation by voting 96-0 for a resolution intended to distance themselves from Stockman. James Baker, Reagan's chief of staff, urged the White House to do likewise. So Reagan, like F.D.R., bounced the problem to a commission, this time led by a well-known economic consultant, Alan Greenspan.
The 15-member commission got nowhere until December 1982. Then, with default only months away, an unofficial subgroup began to meet in secret. Robert Ball, a former Social Security commissioner, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan negotiated for the Democrats opposite Baker for the White House.
In the end, they compromised on a combination of benefit cuts and tax hikes. The payroll tax, then 10.16 percent, was already scheduled to rise, but the negotiators sped up the implementation of the increase. (Today the rate is 12.4 percent.) Moreover, Congress agreed to hike the retirement age from 65 to 67. This change, which is being phased in very slowly (the retirement age is now 65 and 6 months) had the same effect as cutting benefits. Greenspan and company now calculated that Social Security would build a giant reserve, sufficient to see it through the middle decades of the 21st century. This was the original F.D.R. approach -- build a trust fund. President Reagan said the package ''assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half-century ago.''
Social Security's next few annual reports made best-guess (intermediate) projections of solvency for 75 years, meaning it expected the system to remain solvent until 2060 and beyond. So the question that should arise now, but that has been oddly ignored is, What happened?
Nothing did. Or in the words of Robert Ball, the nonagenarian former commissioner, ''nothing in the real world.'' But perceptions changed, and the balance of opinion began to shift in favor of reform. To some extent, that shift was bipartisan. In the mid-1980's and early 90's, Democrats discovered they didn't love deficits after all. When it began to appear that Congress was incapable of keeping its hands off Social Security's surplus, fiscally prudent Democrats like Moynihan and Bob Kerrey came out in favor of individual accounts. President Clinton famously campaigned to ''save Social Security first'' -- meaning that Congress should balance the budget. Meanwhile, the popular impression that any fool could make money in the stock market (for a while, any fool did) made private accounts seem like a natural. In the 1996 campaign, even among Republican contenders, only Steve Forbes favored privatization; by 2000 it was party doctrine.
Social Security's actuaries also began to make more pessimistic assumptions about the future. To quote the report of yet another Social Security advisory panel, this one from the mid 90's, ''It is pointed out that while today there are 3.3 workers paying into the system for every beneficiary drawing benefits, over time this ratio will change to two workers per beneficiary. . . . However, this has almost nothing to do with why there is a . . . deficit.'' The report continued, ''The ratio was fully taken into account in the 1983 financing provisions.'' So why did Social Security begin to forecast a more rapid exhaustion of the trust fund? Social Security was burned in the 70's and early 80's by being too optimistic. Now the actuaries are leaning the other way. ''It's a less optimistic estimate today,'' says Harry Ballantyne, who was chief actuary until 2001.
Social Security's key long-range projection is that, over 75 years, it will come up short by an average of 1.89 percent of payroll. Though deficits would still loom beyond 2080, the problem could be fixed until then by an immediate tax increase of 1.89 percent, or a benefit cut of roughly 13 percent. (Democrats tend to favor a combination.) But this all assumes that the middle projection is right. And several underlying assumptions of that middle projection tend to exaggerate the potential deficit. The first concerns longevity. A 65-year-old man today can expect to live to nearly 82. According to the most likely projection, in 2080 he should expect to live to 86. Goss says that the agency is assuming that medical technology will deliver more ''miracles.'' Most demographers agree with him, and some even think the agency is not being optimistic enough. The only trouble is, as Goss notes, that over the past 20 years ''they have been wrong at every turn. There has been less improvement than we were expecting.'' Indeed, the improvement in mortality has slowed significantly. And no one is sure why it has slowed. Nonetheless, the agency expects a sharp rebound over ensuing decades. Its fiscal gloominess thus depends on a speculative uptick in medical miracles.
Immigration is another contentious point. Immigration is good for the system because immigrants are earners and taxpayers. Though immigration has been rising, Social Security projects that it will taper off sharply, from 1.2 million a year to 900,000 in 20 years. This forecast is curious, because if the birthrate in America declines as anticipated, the country will need more foreign workers.
Rising wages are also a boon to Social Security's finances. Forecasting wages is difficult, as the trustees' report frankly admits, but it seems undeniable that as society ages, businesses will be harder pressed to find workers, and that should push wages higher. The trustees, however, project that real wages will grow at only 1.1 percent a year -- roughly equal to the level of the last 40 years.
The basic point here is that tiny swings in any of these or other factors could improve -- or worsen -- the program's balances. If a few of them lean in the direction of the optimistic forecast, the trust fund will cover benefits through 2080, or close to it. Would such a program, which appears to be solvent or near solvent until the limit of what is humanly forecastable, be improved upon by the various schemes for privatization?
Social Security does not provide, and was not meant to provide, a satisfactory retirement on its own. The average stipend for a 65-year-old retiring today is $1,184 a month, or about $14,000 a year. About half of Americans also have private pension plans, but for two-thirds of the elderly, Social Security supplies the majority of day-to-day income. For the poorest 20 percent, about seven million, Social Security is all they have. Even those figures understate the program's importance. According to an agency publication, ''Income of the Population 55 or Older: 2000,'' 8 percent of elderly beneficiaries were poor, but a startling 48 percent would have been below the poverty line had they not been receiving Social Security. Charles Blahous, the White House point man on Social Security, publicly criticized this calculation as ''mindless,'' and the Social Security agency no longer computes the figure.
Conservative economists say the figure is irrelevant: if Social Security didn't exist, people would save more. This may be true of economists, but what about the rest of us? The argument illustrates the ideological agenda of those who favor privatization: they want to change people's behavior. But how will the proposals to privatize, several of which are before Congress, actually work? Basically, younger workers would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into individual accounts. Upon retirement, these workers would get lower Social Security benefits supplemented by whatever had accumulated in their portfolios.
But since the diverted money would not be available to pay benefits to current retirees, the government would have to undertake significant borrowing to pay people now in their middle and older decades. Eventually, the system might transition to one in which most people mostly relied on their personal accounts. But this transition would take many decades.
The president is expected to back a plan similar to one recommended by the advisory council he appointed, in 2001. That plan opts for a slow transition, keeping entitlement-type minimums in place. The amount of money to be diverted into personal accounts -- and therefore, the potential gains -- is relatively small. Some free-market purists are unhappy about this. But Bush's economists, whatever else is said of them, are determined not to re-enact the Stockman debacle by moving too quickly and enacting immediate cuts. They have read their history.
The White House asked the Congressional Budget Office to analyze one advisory council plan. That plan would allow workers born after a certain date (perhaps 1950) to siphon about a third of the payroll tax into individual accounts, up to $1,000 a year. The money could be invested in any of three choices (other plans provide for wider menus) and would be converted into an annuity upon retirement.
The C.B.O. assumes that the typical worker would invest half of his allocation in stocks and the rest in bonds. The C.B.O. projects the average return, after inflation and expenses, at 4.9 percent. This compares with the 6 percent rate (about 3.5 percent after inflation) that the trust fund is earning now.
Proponents hail the plan for forcing savings on the government. But the diversion of money into individual accounts would save the government nothing, since it would have to borrow to offset the loss of the diverted dollars. The individual accounts represent a transfer, not a savings.
The second feature of the plan would link future benefit increases to inflation rather than to wages. Because wages typically grow faster, this would mean a rather substantial benefit cut. That cut would mean a savings for the government. This is a political choice; we can always save money by reducing benefits. But it's important to stress that the savings result from cuts, not from the decision to privatize.
Overall, the plan is gentler toward lower-income seniors than wealthier ones, but all seniors would be poorer than under present law. In other words, absent a sustained roaring bull market, the private accounts would not fully make up for the benefit cuts. According to the C.B.O.'s analysis, which, like all projections of this sort should be regarded as a best guess, a low-income retiree in 2035 would receive annual benefits (including the annuity from his private account) of $9,100, down from the $9,500 forecast under the present program. A median retiree would be cut severely, from $17,700 to $13,600. On the plus side, budget deficits would be lower in the future. But, because of the lengthy transition, that ''future'' is exceedingly remote -some 50 years down the road. In the interim, deficits would rise by up to 1.5 percent of the country's G.D.P.
One rationale for privatization is that workers would get a better return on their money in Wall Street securities than with Social Security's dowdy old Treasuries. This notion, which has Wall Street investment banks salivating, was especially in vogue during the 90's, when the stock market was soaring. When the bubble burst, advocates reined in their sales pitch, but they still are unrealistically sanguine. Last year, Tanner of the Cato Institute wrote that ''over the worst 20-year period of market performance in U.S. history . . . the stock market produced a positive real return of more than 3 percent.'' Actually, the market has done worse than 3 percent per annum in nine different 20-year periods.
In any case, Social Security could capture the return on stocks, without putting individuals at risk, by investing in equities directly. This would also achieve another frequently stated objective: keeping the government's hands off the Social Security trust fund. That option would be far more efficient, in economic terms, than separating the money into 150 million disparate accounts. Costs are much lower for one big investor. And more important, in a system of individual accounts, benefits will vary with individual choices, and some people will make poor ones. In Sweden, where the retirement system has included private accounts since 2000, the majority of Swedes made excessively risky investment choices by putting money into stocks at the market top, according to Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago behavioral economist. Finally, pooling the investment pools the risk, and thus reduces the danger of retiring at the wrong time. In a system of personal accounts, someone who retired after a market crash would be out of luck.
So it is notable that all the current proposals to privatize involve the economically inferior option of individual accounts. But privatization advocates aren't motivated solely, and perhaps not even primarily, by economics. Glenn Hubbard, Bush's former top economic adviser, wrote in Newsweek that an ''obvious objective'' of privatization is ''to advance the president's ownership society agenda.'' Such pro-free-market sentiment has a long lineage. Remember Senator Vandenberg, who fretted in the 30's that public ownership of private securities would amount to socialism? Even though state pension funds and some U.S. agencies, including the Federal Reserve, put some pension money in stock-index funds, conservatives still react as if such a solution for Social Security were akin to turning it over to the Kremlin. Peter Ferrara, a former White House staff member under Reagan and now senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation, who has been proposing Social Security privatization plans since the late 1970's, told me that economics ''was not my primary motivation. It was ideological. We don't want the government controlling that much investment.''
There is a policy choice that unites Social Security's critics -- from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush -- which is that the program should be balanced by shaving benefits rather than by raising taxes. They favor smaller government, so shrinking Social Security (rather than increasing its financing) serves their broader aim. Indeed, though the public continues to oppose cutting benefits, Bush has ruled out any solution that involves a tax hike.
Reagan said the program had morphed from the humble insurance plan formulated by F.D.R. (for whom he voted four times) into a swollen caricature of government excess. The first Social Security recipient, a legal secretary in Vermont named Ida Fuller, started with a benefit of $22.54 a month. Today's retirees obviously do better (even after adjusting for inflation). Nonetheless, according to Lawrence Thompson, who was the Social Security acting commissioner in the 90's, the retiree program is not really more ''generous'' now than it was in the past. Like other pension systems, Social Security was designed to replace a fixed portion of a retiree's previous earnings. For a single person with average earnings, initial benefits were intended to replace about 40 percent of income. They are still pegged to 40 percent of income.
Since wages generally rise faster than inflation, retirees in each generation get more in real dollars than those in previous ones. Contemporary critics, like Kasich and the Bush council, would slow the rate of future increases by linking benefits only to inflation. Though this would save a lot of money, its effect on retirees should be understood.
Seniors now get an initial benefit that is tied to a fixed portion of their pre-retirement wages. If the index was changed, their pensions would be pegged to a fixed portion of a previous generation's income. If this standard had been in force since the beginning, retirees today would be living like those in the 1940's -- like Ida Fuller, which would mean $300 a month in today's dollars, as opposed to roughly $1,200 a month.
One way or another, societies with more old people have to devote more resources to them. Right now, benefits amount to 4.3 percent of G.D.P. The trustees' most likely projection assumes that over the next 75 years that figure will rise to 6.6 percent. In the more optimistic case, benefits will rise to 5.2 percent. Given the substantial increase in the elderly population, neither of these figures seems rash or out of proportion. The increased cost would be on a par with that of making Bush's first-term tax cuts permanent, which is projected to be about 2 percent of G.D.P.
And though future generations of workers will have to support more retirees, they will also be having fewer children. In fact, according to the Social Security actuaries, the total ''dependency'' burden (that is, the number of nonworking seniors and kids that each working-age adult will have to support) will remain lower than at its baby-boom peak. ''In a grand social sense,'' says Thompson, the former Social Security commissioner, ''we can support more seniors where there are fewer people in day care.''
Ultimately, every 75-year forecast is just a guess, and therefore every approach must accommodate a range of possible outcomes. Plans that link worker benefits to the stock market automatically adjust -- if the economy underperforms, then workers get lower benefits. This enhances, rather than mitigates, whatever is the trend in people's private savings. As Thompson says, ''The default adjustment is you eat less.'' This could be brutal and also unfair, especially to the post-1983 generation of workers that, on the say-so of Greenspan and Reagan that the trust fund would be honored, has paid a sacrifice in both reduced benefits and higher taxes.
What other solution is there? Ball, who joined the system in 1939 as a $1,620-a-year district officer in Newark, has thought of one. He starts from two premises: it would be reckless not to make some adjustments now, but foolish to make too much of 75-year prophecies. ''In 1928, there was no way to forecast the Depression, World War II, the birth-control pill. We have to stop acting as if 75-year estimates were absolute,'' he told me.
Nonetheless, Ball would tweak the system in several modest ways to reduce the projected deficit. For instance, he would very gradually raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax, now at $90,000. This would reverse a recent regressive trend. Income distribution in America has become more skewed, thus upper-income folks have earned more money that has escaped the tax. Ball would also add three other, smaller fixes to further tighten benefits and raise taxes. (There are many variations of these fixes floating around the Beltway.) After Ball's prescription, how much of a deficit would then remain? Possibly a fraction of a percent of the payroll, possibly zero. The answer would depend on the net effects of future birth rates, wars, diseases, inventions and so forth. Enter now Ball's little accommodation to uncertainty. It is that Congress simply resolve now to impose, 50 years hence, a payroll tax increase sufficient to close whatever gap exists over the ensuing quarter-century. This could not be enforced now, of course, but that is Ball's point. He wants to free the Congress, and the rest of us, from the annual game of insisting on an exact and illusory far-off balance; to diminish the perception that we must urgently adjust to economic and demographic developments too distant to be forecast.
The 2004 ''Economic Report of the President'' takes dead aim at such an approach. It reckons that all pay-as-you-go systems will eventually be doomed by demographics, and that solutions like Ball's will only push back the date that the trust fund runs out of money by a few years. The White House worries that any fix that covers 75 years of benefits could still bequeath a deficit in the 76th year. ''The nation must act to avert a long-foreseen future crisis in the financing of its old-age entitlement programs,'' the report states. Its assumptions may be true, or they may not be, but the conclusion suggests a misplaced allegiance: We have an obligation to the distant future, but don't we owe a greater debt to the current generation and to those that immediately follow?
Prudence dictates taking steps now to minimize the possible shortfall. This could include raising the cap, some modest cuts and tax increases and a gradual redeployment of the trust fund into assets that may not be tapped, willy-nilly, for whatever legislative purpose. But only a real crisis would dictate undoing an institution that has provided a safety net for retirees, that has helped to preserve in the social fabric some minimum of shared responsibility and that has been supported by workers in good faith. And, in looking at Social Security today, the crisis is yet to be found.
-- Roger Lowenstein is a contributing writer and the author of ''Origins of the Crash.'' His last article for the magazine was about presidents and job creation.
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The F-916.083 model 'Crusher' Cybernetic Arm, in the red brass of gunmetal, is the latest in naturalistic technologies that aim to enhance the human experience rather than cause - or worsen - a disconnect from reality. As such, its components have been carefully designed to ensure they operate at a level of efficiency that is pleasing and empowering to the human mind, while not going too far beyond that level.
The purpose of its shoulder pad, for instance, is not just to absorb any number of shocks that a capsuleer might suffer inside and out of the capsule, but also function as a clamp - because this model, quite honestly, is so strong that if its internal push/pull sensors were to malfunction and it were to grip something with the full extent of its capabilities, it might very well tear the wearer's entire shoulder out of its socket.
Likewise, scanners in the fingers can detect details unavailable to normal humans - particulars in heat, texture and light reflection - but are set on a timer whereby they limit the details after a while, because even a capsuleer's mind, which can multitask at near-superhuman levels, is not set up to handle a constant influx of unnecessary data.
Finally, the upper arms have exposed and slanted machinery that resembles the striations of raw muscle. It could of course have been covered over, but was kept open to indicate the unfettered strength of the capsuleer in all that he does.


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Kanger KR808D-1 USB Wall Adapter replacement for Kanger brand KR808D-1 batteries.
We guarantee all batteries, chargers, Revolution Bodies, and Indulgence V4 Power Switches to be free from defects in material and workmanship under normal use and service for 30 days from the date in which you received your order.
All Atomizers, Cartomizers, and Clearomizers have no warranty and are guaranteed to not be received as DOA (Dead on Arrival) ONLY!
Please note that before shipping, we test each Atomizer's resistance and check for continuity with a multimeter.
We do not check any Cartomizers or Clearomizers (except RiVa-T CE2 Clearomizers) so we suggest that you check for DOAs as soon as you receive your order.
All DOA claims and return requests must be made within 24 hours of receiving your order.
This warranty and Exchange Policy DOES NOT guarantee or replace any products with damage caused by normal/heavy wear and tear, modification of our products, improper setup, use of products bought outside our store/website which causes damage to our product/s, or unintentional/intentional misuse or abuse of our products.
This warranty DOES NOT cover any Cartridges or E-Liquid for safety and sanitary reasons.


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The Italian Legislative Decree no. 196 dated June 30, 2003, known as the Law on Privacy and Data Protection, requires that detailed information shall be supplied to all subjects whose data are processed by any company. Therefore, we hereby inform you that your personal data, as provided by compiling any form in the Polaroid Website, will be processed in accordance with the said legislation and with this Information Letter as required by article 13 of the Italian Legislative Decree no. 196/2003.
- 1. Personal data supplied by you by filling such forms shall be used mainly for information system purposes, as follows:
- a. to respond to your request, thus providing a possible proper service, and to send you our eventual newsletter and/or other documents in relation to our company, as applicable;
- b. to carry out internal market surveys within our group;
- c. to send commercial, advertising and promotional information, both for marketing purposes in general, and in order to investigate on the satisfaction of web site visitors;
- d. to comply with any legal obligations;
- The provision of personal data is voluntary, but will be essential in order for us to provide the possible service that you request. Therefore, we inform you that without the information indicated as "compulsory", we will not be able to respond to your request or provide the service.
- 2. Personal data as mentioned in paragraph 1 may be disclosed to companies in the Safilo Group and, moreover, to third parties on a domestic or international basis and as follows:
- a. to comply with any legal obligations, to respect any orders from public authorities that requires such disclosure, or if such disclosure is required in order to exercise a right before a court;
- b. to professionals or consultants in order to carry out market analysis requested by the group;
- c. to third party suppliers in order to provide our services.
- 3. All rights as provided by art. 7 of the above mentioned Legislative Decree are reserved to you, and therefore you are allowed to obtain a confirmation of the existence of your data in our records, which shall be made available to you in an intelligible way. In compliance with the law, it is your right to require any amendment, updating, correction, completion and full cancellation or blockage of the data, as the case may be.
- 4. The Data Controller of the processing rights is SafiloS.p.A., with registered office, for these purposes, in Settima Strada 15, 35129 Padova, Italy (telephone no. +39 049-698 5111+39 049-698 5111). A list of the staff responsible for the data is available, at your simple request, at the above mentioned address


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News Archives - 2008
Washington Center thanks Augsburg
Recognizing Augsburg's commitments to service learning and civic engagement, Eugene Alpert, senior vice president of The Washington Center, presented a gift to President Pribbenow after this morning's presidential seminar discussion in Hoversten Chapel. The plaque commemorates the partnership between Augsburg and The Washington Center, a partnership President Pribbenow said dates back several years and will continue in the future.
Accepting the plaque, Pribbenow said he was pleased with the College's role in the seminar because it has allowed Augsburg to express its commitments to service and engagement, as Alpert noted, and also to serve our neighbors through our hospitality.
In December 2007, Augsburg College was chosen by The Washington Center to host the 2008 Presidential Academic Seminar Series in conjunction with the Republican National Convention. More than 150 college students from across the country, faculty, and Washington Center staff are on Augsburg's campus through September 4 participating in seminars and internships related to the convention. Twenty-four Augsburg students are included in the seminar.
In addition to academic sessions and field placements, the seminar has featured daily forums including speakers such as columnist Arianna Huffington, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, and Secret Service Agent David O'Connor. On Thursday, September 4 at 10:30 a.m., Augsburg will welcome Nancy Theis, Special Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Correspondence, and Sergio Gor, former White House intern, for a joint presentation in Hoversten Chapel in Foss Center. Howard Dean, Chairman of the National Democratic Committee, will hold a rally at 12 noon on the Urness Hall lawn.


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You can make fun of San Antonio's puffy tacos all you want, but don't even go there when it comes to disrespecting the River Walk.
According to television station KABB, Houston Mayor Annise Parker recently took a shot at one of Texas' top tourist attractions.
She was asked why Houston has not developed its bayous as a draw for tourists and responded, according to KABB:
"As I travel I am often asked by people why we don't turn Buffalo Bayou Park into a River Walk. The answer is that the River Walk is a cement ditch … there's no nice way to put it."
Parker, who made the comment Oct. 3 during a news conference about the American Planning Association naming Buffalo Bayou one of the nation's Top 10 public places, went on to say:
"Buffalo Bayou is a living, active water course, and it has to be kept in as natural state as it can be for flood control purposes to allow the fish, the birds, the turtles, the critters that live in there to get what they need from the bayou as well as the recreational opportunities for Houstonians."
She added that the Harris County Flood Control District is reshaping some of the bayou, "putting some of the natural bends and curves back into it," to help it hold water during rainstorms and to improve water clarity.
"We still think there will be opportunities for things like a café to stop and get a cup of coffee and enjoy some time along the bayou with your family as well as active rental opportunities that will be coming."
Her mayoral colleague, San Antonio's Julián Castro, said Houston covets what it doesn't have.
"Seems like Houstonians have a little river envy," Castro said. "Mayor Parker is a good mayor, we have a good relationship but it was clear from her comments that Houstonians are more than a little jealous of the River Walk."
Separately, San Antonio leaders are trying to develop more of the San Antonio River to draw even more visitors.
The Express-News reports that city leaders recently spotted a snowy egret during development of the spot where the river meets Mitchell Street. River improvement in the area is being paid for by a tax levied on visitors to the River Walk and other parts of San Antonio.
What do you think of the Houston mayor's comments?
— originally posted on chron.com


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I'm happy to introduce today's guest post from Keri Steckler, potty trainer extraordinaire!
I know you'll appreciate the mommy tips she shares here –
and the 20% discount for Mother's Circle readers.
*I have received no compensation for this post.
I'm a business owner with two young girls at home, and I've had my struggles with getting kids on board with change, behavior modification, or a new routine. I find I'll nag (and then we'll argue) I'll be inconsistent (allowance/chores one week, out the window the next) but when I think about what HAS worked for us, I've realized my girls make the biggest strides when they take ownership of their behavior.
Here are three ways to change behaviors that work for us:


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The extended power outages for Baltimore Gas and Electric customers are a symptom of the decline of this country. When I was growing up in the 1970s in Northern Virginia, we never lost power for a week. Not when we received two feet of snow. Not even during Tropical Storm Agnes. My neighborhood in Howard County has been without power for 13 days within the last year due to three separate storms. What's changed?
The change is that the focus of business has shifted. The only reason for BGE to exist now is to produce as much profit for it's parent corporation as possible. This profit is used to pay exorbitant salaries to the C level executives and large shareholders at the parent company, and to influence the government and the regulators to allow profits to be further maximized. It's a virtuous circle for the ruling class. Constellation had to pay Warren Buffet $1.3 billion to bail them out for energy market speculations. What in the world did that have to do with providing reliable power to my house? How many miles of power line could be buried with the money that instead was gifted to executives as part of the sale to Exelon?
The utility workers at BGE repairing the lines are working as hard as linemen did when I was young, but this emphasis on repair is focusing on the symptom instead of the cause. I would bet there was a higher ratio of linemen to miles of power lines at VEPCO decades ago than there is at BGE today. I bet there was more preventive maintenance and more capital investment, too. This isn't the case today. Constellation, now Exelon, needs to book every last cent of profit it can get. Otherwise, Mayo Shattuck and his ilk would have to get by on $2-$3 million a year instead of $10-$15 million.
This unrestrained greed is epidemic in industry after industry. It's capitalism at work, apologists exclaim. Well, I hope everyone affected, repeatedly, by these extended power outages enjoys the unregulated "capitalism" of the power industry. I hope you enjoy what the future holds for our children as 80 percent of the citizens of this country work harder, longer, for less money relative to inflation, year after year.
This country is slowly, but surely, turning into an oligarchy. It is sad to witness. It seems inevitable.


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Careers in Psychology
How Do I Prepare for the Careers of Tomorrow?
In today's high-technology society, careers and work change and evolve more rapidly than ever before. Just 20 years ago, who could have imagined the existence, let alone the popularity, of the following jobs?
- App Designer
- Corporate Social Media Manager
- Large Database Analyst
- Behavioral Healthcare Manager
- Institutional Director of Sustainability
How can you prepare for the jobs of tomorrow that don't even exist yet?
The best way is to prepare by learning the quantitative analysis skills, people skills and communication skills that will enable you to adapt and learn in a changing world. You can read about these skills and what employees are looking for in new hires HERE. One of the best undergraduate majors at WCSU that prepares you with these diverse skills is the
The Psychology program at WCSU has been recognized as one of the Signature Programs at the University, which contributes to WCSU being recognized as a College of Distinction.
Successful graduates of the WCSU Psychology program gain the following skills:
Big Data Analysis Skills
The Psychology research and statistics sequence is carefully crafted to give students the skills they need to understand Big Data and to ask meaningful questions by designing research or using existing large databases. All psychology majors take the following courses:
- Principles of Research in Psychology
- Psychological Statistics
- Experimental Psychology
- Advanced Seminar
In this course sequence, students gain familiarity with using statistics to answer critical research questions, and become familiar with statistical software used with large datasets (SPSS). Statistical skills gained include:
- t-tests
- Pearson correlations
- Chi-squared tests
People Skills in a Multicultural World
Psychology majors are well placed to succeed in a variety of corporate, organizational or government environments, with a well-developed understanding of human nature. Students take courses taught by expert faculty in important areas such as:
- Motivation
- Human development
- Decision making and cognitive processes
- Social influence and the study of groups, teams, society and the individual
- Counseling and psychotherapy (The course Community Psychology [PSY 439] includes internship experiences in mental health).
The WCSU Psychology Department recently added two new courses that give students who wish to pursue careers in mental health or applied psychology the opportunity to gain more applied experience during their undergraduate training. These are:
- Internship in Applied Psychology. Students collaborate with the course instructor in selecting their practicum site, and must obtain 120 hours of practicum experience in a semester. Settings include social service, mental health, medical, and educational agencies.
- Advanced Seminar in Applied Psychology. This capstone 400-level course can be taught in a variety of primary areas, according to the expertise of the instructor. Areas that can be offered include:
- Clinical and counseling psychology
- Health Psychology
- I/O Psychology (Industrial/Organizational)
- Applied Social Psychology (Psychology and Law, Forensic Psychology, etc.)
- School psychology
Communication Skills
The Psychology major is designed to develop writing, critical thinking, and in-person communication skills. Students are helped to develop clarity and organization in idea expression through multiple writing assignments across a broad range of courses, culminating in a senior capstone project that requires original research or analysis. Our goals in developing effective writing standards adhere to the published standards of the American Psychological Association (APA). Our students also gain experience in face-to-face presentations and group discussions, and are encouraged to give formal presentations at local psychology conferences, at CSU Psychology Day, and at WCSU Research Day (WRD). Our graduates have been successful in a variety of career fields in business and management, and in graduate programs in fields such as public health, social work, management, and education.
You can look at the Psychology program sheet to see all the major and general education requirements in Psychology. That page also provides you with a blank work sheet to fill out.


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DIALux Download
Traxon Technologies Product Selector 184.108.40.206 (Database 11/03/2014)
After installation of the Traxon plugin for DIALux start the plugin in standalone mode and click the Update command in the top navigation of the plugin. The plugin will then load the newest database content from the DIAL server. Make sure that no firewall blocks the communication to the DIAL server.
This is an international database. Some Traxon & e:cue products may not be available in your region. Please consider this when making your selection.
Prior to installing the Traxon Technologies Product Selector, please close any applications currently using the PPS and un-install the previous version: Start>Settings>Control>Panel>Add/Remove Software.
Download the new software version. Unzip the file, and run the setup file: setup.exe.file.
If you don't have the DIALux software installed on your PC, you can click here to be directed to DIALux download page.


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Penguins' Letang Suffering Concussion Symptoms
Kris Letang Leaves Game Against Dallas Stars In First Period
Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman Kris Letang is experiencing concussion symptoms after he was hit in the head area during Wednesday night's game against the Dallas Stars.
"Kris Letang did have some symptoms today and is going to get reevaluated back in Pittsburgh when we get back after this road trip," head coach Dan Bylsma said, according to Penguins.com.
The Penguins play in Colorado on Saturday night before returning for a four-game homestand beginning Monday.
Letang was down on the ice for several minutes midway through the first period Wednesday after a hard check along the end boards by Dallas' Eric Nystrom.
Letang, Pittsburgh's top-scoring defenseman with 31 points, skated shakily to the locker room while Nystrom went to the penalty box to serve a roughing minor.
The Penguins announced in the second period that Letang was done for the night.
Letang missed 21 games earlier this season because of a concussion he suffered in late November.
Letang was playing arguably the best hockey of his career before taking an elbow to the head in a 4-3 win over the Canadiens on Nov. 26. He returned to the game and scored the overtime winner but woke up the next morning with a headache.
He did not return to the lineup until Jan. 19 against the New York Rangers.
(Watch Video Nystrom's Hit On Letang)
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