Teasing a dog

Food for thought:

http://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/is-it-ever-ok-to-tease-a-dog

I have a Veterinerian question.

My pup needs an operation for a torn ACL. In making arrangements with the Vet's staff today, they told me that the pup will have to stay overnight, but they also told me that there won't be any staff there overnight. They said that the pup will be pretty drugged up and that they had never had any problems with this. Is this normal? I'm worried. Should I be?

I wonder if people who don't believe in God are more likely to

be afraid of dying than people who do. Thoughts?

Grendel's Den and Texas Abortion Law

Old Massachusetts case may hold the key:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09/07/opinion/how-massachusetts-case-could-end-texas-abortion-law/

The next step: They will begin questioning Texas women in airports and bus terminals.

Where are you going? Why? Who are you visiting? And on and on.

I was thinking this morning that we could set up an "adopt a Texan" movement where, if a woman needed to leave Texas in order to obtain an abortion, she could be sponsored by a person or family in the other state. Then, I started thinking about what Texas might do to stop that. Nothing would surprise me. This country has been on a slippery slope and it's picking up speed and heading for the bottom.

Now I'll sit back and wait for someone to tell me how negative I am.

Would the men of the US be willing to fight and die for the rights of women and girls of the US?

I'm not sure if the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

Unspoken truth.

They are culling the herd. Make no mistake about it, this is not a story of dumb, feckless, incompetent individuals. This is a plan that was conceived of and put in place by dark powers that have been right under our noses for a long time. Dispense with the old, the weak and the noisy ones and they rid themselves of all the social security nets leaving more for themselves. They have a vision of a new society and it doesn't include us.

Again, we need to call this what it is. Trump and Abbott and DeSantis are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing but, more than that, they are in the employ of others. In my mind, after all the talk, the pleading and the dying, there is just no other explanation.

Tell me I'm wrong and, more than that, tell me why.

One small step for the 1%, nothing for mankind. n/t

Sound familiar?

Below is a passage from the Wikipedia summary of the life of Frederick Douglass. I realized recently that I knew very little about Douglass because it was not taught in school when I grew up. I often use Wikipedia as an introduction to a subject and for its footnotes. The passage below is part of a description of the Reconstruction Era.

"After the Civil War, Douglass continued to work for equality for African-Americans and women. Due to his prominence and activism during the war, Douglass received several political appointments. He served as president of the Reconstruction-era Freedman's Savings Bank.[122]

Meanwhile, white insurgents had quickly arisen in the South after the war, organizing first as secret vigilante groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. Armed insurgency took different forms. Powerful paramilitary groups included the White League and the Red Shirts, both active during the 1870s in the Deep South. They operated as "the military arm of the Democratic Party", turning out Republican officeholders and disrupting elections.[123] Starting 10 years after the war, Democrats regained political power in every state of the former Confederacy and began to reassert white supremacy. They enforced this by a combination of violence, late 19th-century laws imposing segregation and a concerted effort to disfranchise African Americans. New labor and criminal laws also limited their freedom.[124]"

Speaking of troubled buildings...Citicorp Center, NYC

From Wikipedia

Due to material changes during construction, the building as initially completed was structurally unsound. LeMessurier's original design for the chevron load braces used welded joints. To save money, Bethlehem Steel changed the plans in 1974 to use bolted joints, which was accepted by LeMessurier's office but not known to the engineer himself.[22] Furthermore, according to The New Yorker, LeMessurier originally only needed to calculate wind loads from perpendicular winds under the building code; in typical buildings, loads from quartering winds at the corners would be less.[22][159] In June 1978, after an inquiry from Princeton University engineering student Diane Hartley, LeMessurier recalculated the wind loads on the building with quartering winds.[159][f] He found that, for four of the eight tiers of chevrons, such winds would create a 40 percent increase in wind loads and a 160 percent increase in load at the bolted joints.[22]

Citicorp Center's use of bolted joints and the increased loads from quartering winds would not have caused concern if these issues had been isolated from each other. However, the combination of the two findings prompted LeMessurier to run tests on the structural safety.[103] The original welded-joint design could withstand the load from straight-on and quartering winds, but a 75-mile-per-hour (121 km/h) hurricane force quartering wind would exceed the strength of the bolted-joint chevrons.[99] With the tuned mass damper active, LeMessurier estimated that a wind capable of toppling the building would occur on average once every 55 years.[162][161] If the tuned mass damper could not function due to a power outage, a wind strong enough to cause the building's collapse would occur once every 16 years on average.[162] LeMessurier also discovered that his firm had used New York City's truss safety factor of 1:1 instead of the column safety factor of 1:2.[99]

LeMessurier debated how to address the issue before ultimately contacting Stubbins's lawyer. LeMessurier then contacted Citicorp's lawyers, the latter of which hired Leslie E. Robertson as an expert adviser.[163] Citicorp accepted LeMessurier's proposal to weld steel plates over the bolted joints, and Karl Koch Erecting was hired for the welding process.[104] Very few people were made aware of the issue, besides Citicorp leadership, mayor Ed Koch, acting buildings commissioner Irving E. Minkin, and the head of the welder's union.[99][104] Starting in August 1978, construction crews installed the welded panels at night. Officials made no public mention of any possible structural issues, and the city's three major newspapers had gone on strike.[88][104] The work continued despite the threat of Hurricane Ella several weeks after the repairs started.[99][164] Repairs were completed in October 1978, before the media resumed publishing. LeMessurier claimed a wind strong enough to topple the building would only occur once every 700 years.[88][165] Stubbins and LeMessurier covered all of the repair costs, which were estimated to be several million dollars.[165] Since no structural failure occurred, the work was only publicized in a lengthy article in The New Yorker in 1995