Boulder, Colorado, is the land where Democrats have ruled supreme since the dawn of time. Or at least since the 1960′s, which pretty much coincides with the dawn of time for me.

Boulder is also the county seat of Boulder County, and the city contains the headquarters of the Boulder Valley School District, which serves schools throughout the county and beyond.

The Boulder Valley School District contains a number of much-less-liberal areas. Cities like Lafayette and Broomfield (and others) operate as feeders to the city of Boulder proper, so that the citizens of Boulder itself can be served by people who could never hope to live in the city. It’s a bit like Aspen or Telluride that way.

So much is history. But it makes for some unintentional humor at times, and a new article today was wonderful.

The Denver Post reported today that the school district has been working to make lunches healthier, but that something odd happened. It seems that unexpected problems have arisen. The money quote is as follows:

But the program, which was billed initially as revenue neutral, lost almost $700,000 in its first year despite a 25-cent increase in lunch prices — mostly because fewer kids signed up to eat than were expected.

The school district, with about 25,000 students, anticipated a 10 percent surge in participation with the new meals above the 26 percent participation but got only a 2 percent district-wide increase.

Or, in other words, when they raised the price and at the same time marketed the change as an improvement, many people decided not to participate!

Which came as a tremendous surprise, I’m sure. Who would have thought demand could be elastic?

(And for those of you keeping score at home, please note that the financial geniuses who did this based the plan on a higher-cost change covered by both higher prices and higher demand. Which to an economist is a rather extraordinary outcome, but this is Boulder.)

Apparently, though, there was a split in the returns:

… schools in Boulder and Louisville sold about 80,000 more meals during the year after they were made healthier, but students in Lafayette and Broomfield schools bought about 53,000 fewer.

Again astonishing. Students who live in families where the median incomes are much higher bought more of the expensive lunches, while students whose families are not so well-off bought fewer. Simple economics might explain this, but cultural differences might too: students from lower-income families are less likely to have been indoctrinated in the innate “goodness” of organic food, less likely to come from a background embracing the religious mythology about “healthy” eating, and probably less likely to appreciate having their chocolate milk taken away.

No good story out of Boulder is complete without a passing patronizing slam at the hoi polloi of the County, however:

“If you lost a job or spouse, you may pack lunches instead of buying them,” said Bill Sutter, interim chief financial officer for the school district.

Which is to say, if you’re one of those poor people. Boulder itself, of course, would never have unstable marriages or problems with unemployment. And even if they did, making sure their children get proper organic salad bars would no doubt be critical enough to avoid (gasp) packing a lunch.

Which leads to what is actually the only really irritating thing about an otherwise entertaining experiment in sloppy thinking by people who have never in their lives had to be accountable for their opinions or actions.

The school district is responding to the lunch crisis by increasing their marketing efforts. New slogans, new pressure on parents, sports celebrities stopping by, and so on. All of which will cost money, which will only reduce the (already negative) return on investment. The costs, of course, are picked up by the taxpayers of the State of Colorado and the Boulder Valley School District. That near-million dollars they’re going to spend every year trying to foist a mistaken mythology onto their students is coming from people who are already struggling. The spending competes for priority with real needs: books, teachers, and repairs. It’s a fancy luxury and a pointless expense at a bad time.

But this is Boulder, and reality has never had too strong a grip in Boulder. They’re not going to suddenly get smart, and the problem is small enough that it’s not going to kill them. So for those of us who have seen it over and over, it’s just another delightful unintended lesson in Natural Consequences 101.

The small-business aid bill is fully paid for. So our exalted President says.

The state-and-local bailout bill was fully paid for. Nancy Pelosi said so, although Polifact thinks she lied.

A border security bill was fully paid for, at least according to Chuck Schumer.

What do all of these have in common? They’re all contemptible lies. As is the case every time those ugly words are uttered. “Fully paid for” in the current lexicon means this: the Congress, in its infinite wisdom and surpassing mercy, has found a group of people less politically connected, and they’re going to take more money from that group to give to people they like better.

That’s it. It’s not about the deficit. Do you really think that the “teacher bailout” is deficit-neutral? That the massive increases in taxes on corporations will magically have no effect on the economic activity of those corporations? That weakening our military at this time by cutting routine appropriations won’t cause a sudden need to escalate later? Or that state and local governments won’t be back for more when this runs out?

We don’t have a major federal deficit simply because Congress chose to increase spending and The One signed the increases. The deficit has two components: the revenues available, and the spending. And the revenues have plummeted with the undead recession. Every tax hike, every new government regulation, and every new uncertainty introduced in a law passed before it can be written just makes it that much harder to increase economic activity. When a fifth of your labor force is out of work, done trying, or working for minimum wage when they used to have a career, you have a problem you can’t solve with “pay-go”. And if your corporations are drowning in red tape, cut off from capital, and forced to spin off their foreign operations, you can increase tax rates all you want, but your revenues are going to continue free-falling.

So when I hear that Congress has found another group of victims to pay for their latest harebrained scheme, I don’t relax and think “wow, the deficit at least won’t increase.” I think about the unintended consequences of legislation. I think about the unabashedly hostile attitude of some members of Congress toward economic success. I think about the profoundly limited intellectual capacity of others (has Guam capsized yet?). And I hope in my heart of hearts that November will come soon and that we can be done with this insanity.

Hey, everyone under the bus – move over! It’s time to make room for the Minerals Management Service.

Dear Leader just discovered that government regulators and the oil company have been getting along well. He’s upset. He’s angry. He’s downright furious. He’s slamming those nasty corrupt government officials in every public forum. He’s as mad at them as he is at those evil corporate leeches.

And why not? Who could have anticipated that a major oil spill might involve political factors and government involvement? It’s certainly not his problem that this happened. But from the heat and anger, you’d almost think that he was in some way responsible.

Actually, of course, he is. Those “cozy regulators”? They work for Mr. Obama. That Secretary of the Interior? He works for Mr. Obama. For the past year and a half, pretty much the whole regulatory shooting match has belonged to him.

What do you say if your employees mail it in in a serious way and it causes a catastrophe? If you’re an auto manufacturer slow to respond to a safety issue, you have your CEO apologize and you pay the penalty. If you’re a drug manufacturer whose employees failed to control contamination in a major product, you apologize and you make it good. But if you’re the president of the only superpower left in the world and somebody in the rank and file seems to have created the appearance of impropriety combined with a really substantial technical foulup, it’s apparently time for tantrums, not-my-fault, and how-could-I-have-known. Or at least a really big blast of righteous anger, eagerly lapped up by the media, who without a trace of investigatory irony somehow have failed to notice who’s in charge of the whole rickety apparatus.

Hey, buddy. Yeah, you, Big Guy. You with the big white house and the cool personal jumbo jet.

They work for you. They’ve been your problem since you moved in. Kinda late in the game to pretend otherwise, isn’t it?

Well, maybe not your questions, but they didn’t exactly say.

Tomorrow evening at 7:30 EDT, the federal government is sponsoring an “online chat” at healthreform.gov to answer “questions” about that monstrosity they just passed, signed, and will someday hire someone else to read.

I know this because I’m signed up for emails from this lovely site. This is the taxpayer-funded “.gov” official site featuring a full-out marketing campaign for so-called Health Care Reform. They’ve been baying in full voice for the past year on the subject. Yes, your dollars helped fund the echo chamber that pushed this dead, rotting horse over the line. See? You knew you were paying your taxes for a reason.

I looked on the site this morning (I do NOT recommend doing that before the first cup of coffee, by the way) and it seems curiously unwilling to advertise tomorrow’s event. I think they’re probably just shy.

So if you’d like to ask questions, like “what in the name of all that is holy do you honestly hope to gain through this lump of legislative toxic waste?”, you may have the opportunity.

Nobody says, of course, that they’ll actually take your questions or that they’ll answer them honestly. I fully expect they’ll be screening heavily. But it doesn’t mean we can’t ask…

Last week, I woke up disabled. Not “differently abled” or some such nonsense, but with something important that out of the blue didn’t work any more. This is the penalty you pay for living, sometimes, and I’m lucky in that it’s likely that I’ll have a pretty good return of function (although any time me or one of my colleagues tells you that “you may have some permanent residual disability”, we’re not just hedging our bets). It’s going to be a while, though, and it’s going to involve some work and pain on my part, and I may have to learn to do some things differently. Through the week, I alternated between depression and determination, as I came to terms with what was ahead of me.

This morning, my medical profession and my nation are waking up disabled. No accident, this, but rather the designed and deliberate outcome of the work of people who wish us harm. Ignorant breakers, no more acquainted with the mysteries of medicine than they are with the intricacies of fair play or the strictures of ethical constraints. But just as with my own condition, this imposed disability does not change who we are. The idiots have spoken. They have elevated payment above practice, wheeled and dealed their way to a Devil’s bargain, and missed everything important about caring for the ill and the well in the process. So be it.

So tomorrow I begin my part of our national rehabilitation. Some things may be harder than before, because parts of the system – payment, reimbursement, rules, common sense – are now broken or gone. Some things I may have to do differently. Government panels, for example, do a terrible job of evaluating evidence and recommending practice. We are to be blessed with an abundance of poorly-informed government panels to supplement the ones we already endure. I will have to simultaneously fend off their advice while finding new and better ways to evaluate evidence on my own. Payment will be denied for services I find necessary. So I will have to find still more ways to serve without that payment. Political panels will want to tell me what to say to patients. I will have to tune that out and speak truth.

Most of what I deal with for the next several years will be colored and constrained by the damage done tonight, and it may be hard to stand up straight and practice. So I will learn to walk with a limp.

There is a limit, of course, to the amount of damage that a profession or a nation can withstand. It is possible that, armed with this latest weapon, the fools and demagogues who created this atrocity will use it to hack away at the principles of the profession until we achieve Soviet-level life span and health metrics. Part of the extra burden of our new disability is that we have to take the axe away from the madmen. Elections are coming, and we all have a job to do.

In the end, however, it is simply this: I didn’t get into this job because I cared all that much about reimbursement, insurance, lifestyle, or even common sense. I did it because I was called to do it, and because I have been lucky beyond belief. Much so have I been lucky beyond all reason to be born in this nation, and to have been placed where I can do some good in a hard time.

As the sun set both literally and figuratively last night, it was a time of crippling. In the morning, it is time to begin the work that will transcend it.

The science is settled.

Everyone knows it’s true.

You’ve read about it in the papers. You’ve heard it talked about on TV. Skeptics are hard to find, and they’re wrong. Obviously. You know it yourself.

Only now, the wheels are coming off the bus a little. Recent studies haven’t showed what was expected. And a few folks are starting to ask why.

Sound familiar? It’s not, exactly. I’m actually writing about cell phones.

It seems that a recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study failed to show any reduction in traffic accidents after enactment of laws banning various kinds of cell phone activities behind the wheel. The laws worked, clearly enough, to reduce the actions being targeted. The problem is that there was no reduction in traffic accidents. All the traffic enforcement, the advertising, the public service messages, and the money spent on headsets appears to have had no effect on the thing it was supposed to help.

Why? The IIHS is scratching its head. “We’re currently gathering data to figure out this mismatch” is the mantra.

The reason is obvious, and it serves as a great object lesson for those who bang the “Climate Change” drum, or a thousand other well-meaning interventions based on really bad science.

If you, in your heart of hearts, believe that cell phone users are death on the roads, please work with me for a moment. Suspend your disbelief – you can have it back if you need it – and let me make a contentious point or two.

Cell phones don’t cause traffic accidents. They can’t possibly have the kind of effect that’s been quoted. I’ve read that the risk of having an accident while you’re on the phone is the same as if you were drunk. In which case, we could trade the cell phone that’s active in the majority of cars on the road today for four stiff shots of vodka, and the results would be the same. It’s a silly analogy.

Nobody will say that talking on the phone makes you a better driver. But driving, as it turns out, is a very safe activity with an enormously high margin for error, stupidity, distraction, and lousy training. Back in the early ’90′s, there were essentially no telephones in cars. Through the 1990′s and the oughts, cell phone use increased to the point that most drivers have one, and nearly everyone has talked on them while driving. And yet, through that same period, the accident rate per passenger mile and the fatality rate per passenger mile decreased at a nearly constant rate. If cell phone use were a significant driver for accidents, we’d have seen it in the numbers. It never showed up.

Geek time. If you hypothesize, as many people including the IIHS have done, that cell phones are a major driver for accidents, and you want to reconcile this with the absolute lack of any visible effect on the incidence of accidents during the largest natural experiment possible, then you have to either reject your hypothesis outright, or you have to postulate an equal, opposite, and completely simultaneous factor that counteracted the influence of your primary driver. You have to assume that every time someone picked up their cell phone, something else intervened – divine Providence, perhaps – to prevent that driver from killing everyone. Anyone see anything on the horizon that looks like this? Except maybe that people are in general careful enough about when and how they call that they avoid accidents most of the time? Which, if true, is just a way of invalidating the hypothesis in the first place.

Okay, enough geek time. Back to basics.

Other than the fact that “everyone knows it”, and “I’ve seen it too many times”, and “I saw it on TV”, how do you know that cell phones cause accidents? Discounting the times you’ve heard about it on TV, read about it in an entertainment medium like the papers, or had someone tell you about it second-hand, how do you know it?

I’ve actually read the science. There isn’t any. The “four fold” number that refers to actual incidents tracks back to the dumbest paper I’ve ever read (and as a scientist and a physician I’ve read a bunch of them). I’ll spare you most of the details, but let’s just say that the paper, published in a prestigious medical journal and peer-reviewed, asked and answered one of the strangest questions I’ve ever seen. They proved, using a review of phone and accident records in a single major metropolitan area, that being in a non-fatal injury accident was linked with a four-fold increase in the likelihood that you would have made a call at around the time of the accident, compared to the same phone a day earlier. That’s it. No causality, no details about the accidents, nothing else. And from that, we get the Known Fact that you’re four times more likely to be in a crash.

There have been other studies. Some have been “how distracted are you by your phone” kinds of studies, where the Known Fact is bolstered by testing of subjects in artificial environments to prove that you can’t react as fast with a phone in your hand as you can with your hands empty. Which is true, but is apparently irrelevant to the question of whether you can mostly avoid getting in car wrecks. Various law enforcement agencies are also gathering information on whether a driver was calling at the time of the accident and whether that contributed, but other than pointing out that there are a lot of cell phones out there, the studies are uncontrolled and essentially useless to answer any meaningful question.

Okay, so now the skeptics can climb back off the bus – I’m done offending your opinions. Now I want to talk public policy.

So we have science that contradicts apparent reality driving public policy that caters to the opinions of the scientists, producing laws that don’t seem to have any effect but do cost plenty of money. Ring any bells for anyone?

Scientists make terrible legislators. Legislators make terrible social engineers. Combining the two to enact laws which protect us from things we want to do and that don’t seem to hurt anyone (like mowing the lawn with a gas mower, for example) is never a good idea. Remember that, the next time someone wants you to go along with banning cell phones, or small engines, or non-organic foods, or movie popcorn.

It’s no accident (pun intended maliciously) that most of the experiments that the IIHS is quoting – the laws that are failing – are in places that have ceded some or all of their traditions of liberty to the paternalistic protection of the state. California, New York, and recently Oregon and Washington come rapidly to mind. For the rest of the nation, it turns out that you were right. There are better things to do with our time, and better uses to which our money might be put.

And to the IIHS, I would simply say that a lot of the money that you’re wasting “gathering data to figure out this mismatch” might be profitably spent improving driver training, reducing recidivist drunk driving, improving signs and roads and cars, and all the other things that you and others have been doing that has produced the steady safety trend of the past 50 years. You’re wrong on cell phones, but I salute your efforts overall.

P.S. – For those of you who still think that cell phones cause carnage and have personal anecdotes to prove it, and who haven’t read about Confirmation Bias and that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, I have a true story. A friend of mine, long ago, had a used car that was about to turn 100,000 miles, in a time when a lot of cars didn’t get that far. The day arrived and, as he drove down the highway, he watched as the numbers flipped over. And as he did, he missed a curve, rolled the car (he walked away, fortunately), and totalled his ride with exactly 100,000 miles on the odometer. So did the odometer cause the accident, and should we ban them? Or is it possible that staring at something too long without paying attention to the road is a bad idea, and that we should teach people not to do that, but recognize that we can’t possibly ban everything that might interfere with a laser-like focus on the road? Just asking…

So with a little research courtesy of the CBO prompted by a front-page article, I am now truly astonished.

Everybody knows that the deficit is about $1.4 trillion. But did you know that total federal spending was only $3.5 trillion? Which means that we as a federal government borrowed or invented nearly 40% of the money we spent last year.

If you earn $2100 after taxes every month and you spend $3500 and charge the difference on your credit cards, you have a heck of a problem really, really soon. Even if your credit cards have wonderful interest rates. And they won’t have those great rates for long, because your creditors will notice.

But wait – it gets better. For all those “fiscally responsible” Democrats (and not a few Republicans) who think we should tax our way out of this, you have the grim specter that you would have to more than double both individual and corporate income tax receipts in order to balance this budget. Every single person, and every single corporation, would have to pay twice as much money as they do right now. How many of us can even imagine what that would do to the economy as a whole?

And it’s the economy that matters, because it’s the economy that produces this problem. Even as federal spending rose massively last year, tax receipts dropped almost 17%. Corporate income taxes dropped more than 50%, and the Obama administration’s hostility to business makes one wonder if they noticed that business is hurting badly. Personal income taxes dropped more than 20%, and given that personal income taxes are the largest single segment of tracked revenue, this one hurts more than the corporate loss. And with record-setting unemployment projected (with a palpable sense of “who cares?”) by the Obama administration to continue at 10% stated (and more than 20% actual), this number isn’t moving any time soon.

New taxes to try to accomplish a $1.4 trillion revenue increase (that’s a 40% increase in total revenues, for those of you keeping track at home) would have the actual effect of destroying anything they touched. It’s simply too large of a load to place on an economy barely getting by, and trying to carry it would worsen the deficit and contract the economy further.

Spending cuts would be a lot more useful. Spinning off, privatizing, or shutting down large sections of wasteful and often counterproductive government bureaucracy would be a great thing. Simply stopping the madness with things like TARP and the “stimulus” would seem to make sense.

Which makes the current items of controversy – increasing tax rates through cap-and-trade and massively increasing spending through health insurance reform – seem utterly insane. Par for the current course, but insane.

Or is it just me?

I’m a doctor. Not the fancy kind you see on TV, or even the kind on one of those cool government commissions. Just a pediatrician, with a sideline in healthcare IT and maybe a little more knowledge about how the government works than the average doc.

But I know enough to make a simple request of those people in Washington earnestly working to “reform” health care. So, without further ado, my open plea to the Powers that Be:

Stop. Please. Give up, go away, and please stop trying to make my life worse. There is nothing that you’re talking about that is going to do anything good.

Oh, there are things that would help. If you really wanted to make health care cheaper for all Americans, you could start by funding Medicare and Medicaid at levels that didn’t require me to charge more to every other patient so that I can make ends meet for my government-funded ones. No, wait, that’s not on the agenda. Increasing the number of government-funded patients, yes. Making sure that I don’t take a loss on every one I see, not so much.

Or you could ease up a little on a regulation here or there. Medicine is, you know, the most heavily regulated profession in the country already. Maybe just charge me a little less for my DEA? It’s not terribly expensive, but every few hundred dollars is another expense that my patients get to pay. See, I don’t actually print my own money – the only money I get to spend is money from my patients, or their insurance companies. If you want to pay less for medical care, how about charging me less to provide it?

Actually, why do I need a DEA at all? Could you maybe just stop trying to regulate addicting drugs at a federal level? No, no, I’m not serious. I’m sure it does some good, somewhere. I’d just be interested in a sort of societal ROI on that one. ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it costs a heck of a lot more than it saves.

But back to reality. How about working to streamline the FDA some? The reason that things cost so astonishingly much in medicine is partly because of regulations. The cost of the saline in a pre-packaged IV flush is less than a penny. The cost of the sterile container and transport (not counting the regulations) is probably a few cents. The actual cost to the hospital is about $15.00 (per syringe), and nobody’s making a killing on it. MRI scans? A few cents for electricity, a couple hundred for the radiologist still paying off his student loans, and a couple thousand more because it’s medical, the machine costs a fortune, and you’ve got to make the capital expense work.

I’ve never actually heard about the FDA making a single thing easier or cheaper to do. I’ve actually done medical device development, as well as having a sister in Big Pharma, and neither of us can recall a single time when a regulation or process was challenged, made cheaper, or eliminated as not productive. Nobody is arguing that we don’t want oversight, and I guess the FDA is as good a way as many (although I can think of some private ways that would be better), but is it too much to ask, in 2009, that you stop spending health care dollars as if they were on fire? Or that you remember that every dang regulation you enact produces costs that trickle right back to the bedside?

Now if you REALLY wanted to help, you could maybe put a muzzle on the plaintiff’s bar. Not just the ones who sue doctors (although I do have sort of a grudge against them), but the bottom-feeders advertising for mesothelioma patients, the ones looking for people who have been harmed by various drugs, and so on. There’s a line between appropriate compensation for inflicted economic injury and reckless profiteering on the backs of patients and providers alike, and that line is way the heck back there someplace.

And patients (or insurance) pay for it all. Again, I don’t print money. So my malpractice premiums, those of my colleagues, and the liability insurance for the hospital all come out of the pockets of the people we treat. Actually, those liability costs are built into costs for labs, X-rays, drugs, and everything else in health care. Pretty much everybody gets sued, and in a closed lottery like this one, you can guess who pays. HINT: It’s not the trial lawyers. Now I really don’t expect you to do anything about that, because everybody in Washington, Democrat and Republican alike, has a soft spot for plaintiff’s attorneys, but it would actually help quite a lot. Just saying, is all…

See, we have the best health care system in the world right now. Sure, you can say how awful it is, but how many people really want to go anywhere else? The best physicians are here, the best emergency care (by far) is here, and the serious problems we have with health are all long-term issues caused more by lifestyle (we think) than by failures to take care of people. If you’re ill, the United States is the best place in the world to be. If you’re poor and ill, it’s one of a handful of nations rich enough that you’ve got a good chance to get care without having to pay for it. If you’re poor, ill, and homeless, the United States might be the only place on earth where you’re not going to die of the first major illness you contract. So is it too much to ask that you at least try to preserve that?

Yeah, it probably is. So I’m left hoping for sloth, political infighting, and distractions of a thousand other kinds to get in the way of doing anything. If you can avoid trying to help, we’ve got a chance to keep the system we’ve got, fix some of the things that are wrong with it, and keep improving. The more you “help”, the less bandwidth I and my colleagues have to actually take care of people.

Think I’m kidding? Think again – that lovely HITECH act that you passed as part of the Spendulus has created a land-office bonanza of consultants and vendors trying to sell things to “comply” with the requirements for “meaningful use” of “certified systems”. Only nobody actually defined those terms, so everybody’s guessing. Sometime later this year, we’re going to have a ruling from the Office of the National Coordinator who will put a stake in the shifting sands and say “this is meaningful use”, and then there’ll be about a hundred major fights, a few lawsuits, and a few thousand health systems trying to go after some of the money. But there isn’t that much money, and the result is that we’re already spending a lot of cash that (a) isn’t paying for care, (b) doesn’t have anything to do with doing anything better, (c) doesn’t specify or predict any particular date or time when results are going to improve, and (d) will never be paid back in anything like the quantity in which it’s being spent. The whole thing is a boondoggle, and my system (and a lot of others) are participating mostly because we figure that you are going to drop our (already below-cost) reimbursement to compensate for our “stimulus windfall”, so if we don’t play the game, we get put out of business. With help like this, who needs swine flu?

And that’s just the warm-up. Sometime in the next year, unless you lovely folks manage to find someone else’s house to burn down, you’re going to “reform” my profession and my life. I expect payment “reform” that will make it virtually impossible to stay in business, combined with regulations that will permanently fracture the industry. I expect punitive sanctions for random “crimes”, mostly having to do with “profiteering” and maybe with “inefficient” or “unsanctioned” care. I expect bureaucrats to decide everything from hospital staffing to health plan formularies, and I don’t imagine those individuals will have the knowledge or the direction to make those decisions to improve anything at all. I expect, to be perfectly blunt, that a batallion of chimpanzees with submachine guns will be put in charge of me, my patients, and my profession.

Oh, we’ll keep taking care of people (including you) as best we can. I didn’t get into this profession because I was going to make a fortune, and my early-’90′s Toyota gives a pretty accurate picture of how much of a fortune I didn’t make. I knew when I was getting in that I would have to work around people hostile to everything I do, and I have done so for years. So don’t worry, I’ll still see your kids if I’m reduced to accepting food stamps in the process, and I’ll play whatever games you make me play in the process, but I’d really rather not go there. So again, to all of you in Washington earnestly looking to camp on someone’s lawn and “make a difference”, could I ask once again that you do it somewhere else? I really don’t need the help.

Honest.