Because there is a cat I care about who is still homeless because of Dan.

Dan must be held accountable.

You do remember that you are supposed to be one of those people
who like cats, right?

You might also consider mastering your newseader.

It is indeed about that. It is also about conduct in a virtual community.

May I observe I said "flaming and confrontation"?  Flamed no, confronted
repeatedly.

And your actual experience should have demonstrated now, whatever the
facts of the matter, that Dan is not going to answer.

It's entirely probable he has killfiled you. He certainly has
demonstrated that he isn't going to answer you.

I have my own opinions, which I do not intend to share. Nevertheless, I
don't see your actions as tarnishing his reputation or not. Your points
have been made, and people will take them as they will.

Ever read the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?  Was there a benefit to the
mariner spending his life telling all he had shot the albatross?

From my perspective, there were allegations from both sides. I don't
know the truth of the matter, and I'm not going to go to California to
find out. I might be biased slightly, based on the history I've given,
to people who use their real names. In this case, however, I really
don't know the truth of the matter.

I'd really like to know if Secretary of War Stanton was part of a
conspiracy to kill Lincoln, but I accept I never will know. Even when
all the records are unsealed, we won't really know if Oswald acted
alone. I don't agonize over these things.

Perhaps more to the point, I've been in situations where I did all I
could to help the health of a two- or four-legged person, and I know I
did. Somewhere along the line, playing what-if is not a useful exercise.

Chatterley (RB) declined over a couple of years, probably from a
slow-growing brain tumor. She needed more and more nursing care,
grooming, etc., but I could clearly tell she was happy. One day, at
about 1PM, she collapsed. She couldn't walk, but she actually played a
bit and gobbled tuna until about 5 or 6 PM, when she started having
convulsions. They frightened her, and I could examine her well enough to
believe it was likely she was dying.  There was an intense ice storm
outside, and even if I could have gotten through it, she hated cars and
I wouldn't have wanted that to be her last memory. I did check through
the injectable drugs I had available, but there was nothing appropriate
for sedation or euthanasia.

She made it very clear that she wanted to be close to me, and I held her
and soothed her through the next three hours or so, as she pressed
against me.  One convulsion was especially strong, as she lay in my
arms, and she seemed to relax, then stopped breathing. The stethoscope
confirmed her heart had stopped.

Should I have euthanized her sometime earlier? I don't think so. She
could no longer use the litter box, but as long as I kept her clean, she
was happy and even playful. Yes, if I had an appropriate drug, I
probably would have given it to her in the last 3 or 4 hours.  Under the
circumstances, I did the best I could, and I think she died happy.

Less happy was my mother's final illness, when breast cancer
chemotherapy was rather new. For various odd reasons, I had wound up in
the not ideal position of giving her most medical news, and getting the
details first from the staff. She had called me saying the nurses were
annoying her, wanting to give her IVs "to build up her strength".  
Puzzled, I called several of the staff to find out what was going on,
and found that the IVs were intended to reverse a reaction she was
having to a new drug.  The doctors were mixed about whether they should
or not, because, if untreated, this reaction would cause her to go to
sleep and not wake up, within 48-72 hours.

The point was that she was still a conscious adult, and no one had been
willing to tell her the truth and let her make a decision. They wanted
me to make it for her, but I felt she was still alert enough to discuss
the situation. Complicating the situation was that there was one
remaining treatment, with about a 30% chance of helping her.

I told her that I would support any choice she made, but it needed to be
her choice. She chose to take the immediate treatment and then the one
last drug, which didn't work. She died very, very badly, having
transferred to a hospital that wouldn't respect a DNR or even do decent
terminal care (this was a veterans' hospital in 1975).

If I had been in her position, I probably would have elected the gentle
death of hypercalcemia, knowing that no cure was possible. Still, I
think I made the best choice among undesirable alternatives.

I suspect that different people here see different alternatives in
different ways.

Your welcome, Howard.

I am really not trying to pick a fight.  Sometimes,

I agree. But when you use terms like "Denial of Service" attacks,
among others you used, I must question your objectives.

We will then agree to disagree.