Concern-trolling at the Small Engine Shop

I take down and section enough trees that I have an opinion on chainsaw blades, and that opinion is that you definitely do NOT get what you pay for when you purchase chains in a local shop or specialty store.

My last experience was in the shop that sold me my chainsaw.  

That shop sells $18” chains for about $28 — the same price they sell them for at Lowes.  

When I mentioned I was buying chains for $4.75 apiece, the salesman said he had “concerns” about these cheaper Chinese-made trains.  They “stretch” he said. 

I looked at him weird.

“All chains loosen,” I replied.  “It’s why the saw comes with a wrench, and why there’s a bar chain adjuster.”

Apparently his normal clientele did not use their chainsaws enough to know how to actually put on and tighten a chain.  

It’s actually a common problem, but it’s not one at this house.

“Concern trolling” is a core competency in the world of sales. 

The most common manifestation is the phrase “you get what you pay for.”  

That might be true in some cases, but more often than not, it’s bullshit — the catch-phrase of the up-selling salesman.

What’s this have to do with dogs?  Quite a bit.

Dog breeders are big on the idea that the more you pay for a dog, the better it’s likely to be.  

That’s mostly bullshit

It’s also bullshit that the more expensive the dog food, the better it’s likely to be.  

Provably not true.

Then, there’s veterinary care, where a large part of the job of most “vet techs” is to upsell and tack on every nonsense service, test, and procedure they can think up.

Concern trolling is the most lucrative part of nearly every veterinary practice.

It's concern trolling that gets customers to:

* Vaccinate their adult dogs for diseases they will not get because that first-year round of distemper and parvo vaccines are actually good for life;

* Put their dogs on heartworm medication all year long, even when it's snowing outside;

* Buy their flea and tick medications from their vet rather than order online for half the price;

* Run tests for parasites (worms) and diseases (Lyme) rather than simply treat for less.

* Come in every year for a "teeth cleaning" (complete with anesthesia) and a "well dog checkup."

The concern trolling vet tech will say they are “concerned" your dog is not "up to date" with yearly vaccines.  

He or she is "concerned" about your dog's weight -- and has special food to sell you. 

"It's standard practice," they will tell you, to have your dog's teeth "professionally cleaned" every year and for it to come in for a well dog “checkup" because “that's what you do for yourself,” right?

Can you feel the concern?

If you are a dog owner, the proper response to being concern-trolled is to push back with your own concerns. 

A vet pushing annual or every three-year parvo and distemper boosters should be asked if he or she has been keeping up with any of the literature of the last 30 years. Surely he or she has read Ron Schultz, the leading expert on vaccines? Surely they know that parvo and distempter vaccines are  good for life?

You have concerns!

Annual teeth cleaning? No, actually you do not get anesthetized every year to have your teeth cleaned, and you also do not have a full  blood workup to boot. That does not happen. And no, it's not going to happen to your dog either. Anesthesia is dangerous, dental cleaning and scaling for humans has not been show to be effective, and dogs are dead at age 15, not age 80 like people. Surely the veterinarian knows all this? And what dental school did he or she go to again?

You have concerns!

And why would you test an asymptomatic dog for Lyme? If a dog is asymptomatic, the dog is fine. Leave it alone.  Surely they know this is the correct protocol?

No? You have concerns!

And why would you run a fecal worm test that, with the vet bill for it, is far more expensive than simply dosing the dog for worms with an over-the-counter wormer?  Surely the vet knows this too, right?  Right??

You have concerns!

A heartworm test on a dog younger than 6 months? Surely the vet knows that dogs cannot get heart worm if they are that young? 

You have concerns!

And surely they KNOW that heartworm cannot be transmitted if the temperature at night has ever fallen below 56 degrees any time in the last 30 days? No?  Then maybe the vet needs to read up on heartworm before prescribing anything?  Concern troll right back!

Of course, if you are too timid to push back, are a people-pleaser that avoids all confrontation, or are the kind of person that folds to any and all claims of authority (see the Milgram Experiment), you are free to carry on by flushing your money down the drain.

As always, do what you want.  It’s a free country, even if the upselling is all very expensive.

Practicing “Place”

Practicing “place” on rocks and downed trees.

Franken-Fido

Frankenstein is a story of unintended consequences.

Dr. Frankenstein was not a bad man. He was simply trying to push death beyond the horizon by returning life to the recently deceased. 

He did not set out to make a monster. 

For the record, Author Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein story has roots in reality.  

Its core premise was rooted in a scandal of her time — body snatching done by, and for, doctors who were studying human anatomy in order to teach medicine and make medical advances to save lives.

Anatomy beyond the skin is learned through dissection, and it was through dissection that Herophilus, Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and even Benjamin Franklin learned about bones, heart, lungs, kidneys, muscles, and the human circulatory system. 

Up to the start of the 20th Century, most medicine was built on the dissected bodies of dead men and women.  By studying the dead, the health problems of the living could be understood and perhaps even reduced.

The first bodies used for anatomy were those of criminals who came fresh from the gallows, and their use by medical science for this purpose was legal. 

But as the pursuit of medicine and science exploded, and capital punishment became rarer, the demand for bodies outpaced the supply.  

In order to bridge the gap, doctors and universities began to pay grave robbers to find a supply of fresh bodies by any means necessary.

This was the era before embalming, and bodies turned bad quickly, especially in warm weather.

A man might die on a Friday evening, be buried Saturday afternoon, and the body dug up and disappeared by Sunday morning.

The problem was severe enough that in New York City in 1788, there was a small riot by the poor against doctors who were employing grave robbers (called "resurrectionists") to provide corpses.

This was the background against which 20-year old Mary Shelly wrote her novel, Frankenstein, a cautionary tale about scientists playing God and acting in isolation on the ragged edge of permitted thought and action.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein sought to banish death to a distant shore by discovering the spark of life that, when extinguished, resulted in grief for living friends and relatives. 

Surely, that spark could be reignited?

After all, electricity made dead limbs jerk and still hearts pump again. This was a mechanical problem -- a simple question of wiring and chemistry -- was it not?

And so Victor Frankenstein set out to make a new Adam and, by doing, rid the world of sorrow.  

He set out to do good, not evil.

But that's not how it worked out, was it?

Instead, Victor Frankenstein created a monster. 

Instead of banishing death, he created a thing that brought fear, death, and destruction with it.

Here was a tale of unintended consequences; of good intentions gone to very bad results.

Frankenstein was first printed in 1823.

At the time, grave robbing was so common that massive stones and even ironwork cages were being put over graves to thwart the activity. 

Relatives and hired men watched over graves for a week or more after burial to thwart those looking for fresh corpses.

And yet, the demand for fresh corpses for anatomy students continued unabated.

Capitalism being what it is, incentives were paid for grave robbers to move fast and find a "fresh one."

Apparently the incentives were enough to spark murder.

In 1828, some five years after the first publication of Frankenstein, William Burke and William Hare along with their wives, began murdering in order to provide fresh corpses for their patron, Dr. Robert Knox of Edinburgh, Scotland. 

Many of the murders were travelers lodging at Hare's house. 

All in all, Hare and Burke killed at least 16 people before they were finally caught and put on trial. 

Dr. Knox received no charges at all even though, at some point, he clearly knew that the men he was paying were in fact murdering the poor and sick for quick cash.

William Hare avoided the gallows by implicating Burke and Burke's wife, Helen McDougal.

Burke was found guilty of murder on Christmas Day 1828 and, in a twist of irony, the court ruled that: "Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomized. And I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes."

Burke's body was, in fact, dissected at the local medical school.  His skin was turned into a book cover.  His bones are still on display at the Edinburgh Medical School.

What’s all this have to do with dogs?

A bit.

You see, the eugenic ideas of Francis Galton, upon which the Kennel Clubs are built, were hammered up with good intentions.

Galton’s cousin, Charles Darwin, had postulated that the invisible hands of Mother Nature and Father Time had come together to forge the fires of Natural Selection.

But natural selection was so slow!

Surely, things could be speeded up by the hands of man, as stock man Robert Bakewell had already done with cattle and sheep?

And so “unnatural selection” at the hand of man was created.  The idea here was simple:  select a few dozen of the best of a form or type, and then breed best to best, ad infinitum, until perfection was achieved.  What could go wrong?  Nothing!

But while cattle, sheep, and chicken breeders had a steak-and-eggs axis against which to judge their efforts, dog breeders did not.

The result was increased selection for exaggeration, leading to serious deformity and dysfunction. 

In addition, small closed gene pools meant that invisible recessive genes (an idea not yet fully understood) were often doubled up on, resulting in a rise in disease.

Here was Franken-fido come to life; German Shepherds unable to stand unaided, Bulldogs that could not breed or whelp on their own, and Dogue du Bourdeaux that routinely expired at age five or six.

No one started the Kennel Club intending any of this to happen, anymore than Dr. Victor Frankenstein intended to unleash a monster on the world.

But there it was; unintended consequences. 

Now the question was “What are we going to do about it?”

And the answer, so far, has been to fumble the ball for a hundred years.

Blue Heron on Yesterday’s Bike Ride

Recapitulating Scotland’s Mistake

 The older I get, the more I see patterns, and so often those patterns are repeated mistakes.

It’s often racism, war-mongering, and capitalism run amok, but sometimes it’s slower, less dramatic, and every bit as brutal.

This video is about how an ancient mountain range was divided by the Atlantic Ocean, and then the Scottish side was denuded of its forests, losing its soil, exposing its rock which was used to create stone walls to pen sheep, which kept the forest from growing back until the sheep economy began to collapse.

This  video is also about how immigrants from Scotland and other parts of the UK and “Old England” came to New England to do the same thing.

Watch the whole thing.  Long, but worth it.

For those wondering how this relates to terrier work, see >>   https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-glory-of-british-dogs.html?

52 Years Ago Today

Found a Third Box Turtle in the Yard

This one was floating in a tiny 50-gallon deer watering “pond” next to where I set out corn for deer.  This Box Turtle was fine (they can float), but he’s not a water turtle, and I fished him out and put in a escape ramp to avoid future water problems

Today’s Box Turtle is picture #1.  The other pictures are of the other two Box Turtles found earlier.  They can live 50 years, and lay only 4-5 eggs a year.

Now We Re-Elect the Crooks

Woodward and Bernstein watching Nixon’s resignation announcement, 52 years ago this evening. Where were you? I was in a camp ground, bicycling between Bangor, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts.

A Very Handsome Grandson

Eastern Cicada Killer Wasp

Eastern Cicada Killer Wasps are giant wasps that paralyze cicadas and then pick them up and fly them to burrows.  The cicadas are still alive when the wasp lays there eggs in them.

The Cicada Killer wasps are pretty harmless, but their presence attracts another wasp.  

This other wasp is a wingless reddish wasp, sometimes called a “Velvet Ant,” but more accurately called a “Cow Killer” wasp. The sting of Velvet Ants is extremely painful.

Drone, Drone on the Range

  Back in 2012, I wondered:

“How hard would it be to put a small gun on a drone and fly it into forest or field... or through a window for assassination purposes? Not hard, I can assure you. Sure it would probably be a one-shot deal (blow back and all), but you can bet that little problem will be fixed soon enough. 

“Imagine a world with everyone flying cheap drones with guns on them. The possibilities for extortion, murder, and mayhem are legion, and so too will be the desire and rationalizations of the police, and others, who are likely to use them to invade privacy and snoop in all kinds of ways now unimaginable.”

The 2012 post >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2012/09/photo-source-wired-add-caption-back-in.html? .

Go Ahead and Look Up (But it won’t matter)

Splitting Two Coreopsis

My goal was to get six new plants out of two big Coreopsis.  I got 23 new plants out of them.  They got planted out yesterday, along with 25 more Rudbeckia.

The Struggle Was Real

Eastern Jack-o'lantern mushrooms (Omphalotus illudens) are growing on an oak tree stump in the yard.

The Yard Work List Grows

TOMORROW’s AGENDA is to plant 25 more Black-eyed Susans, and split and plant two large Coreopsis four-ways, as well as three Catmints two-ways.  I also have about 6 daylilies to set out. 

The mulch work might start Friday or Saturday.  No rush.  

Lots of other stuff to do: mowing, chainsaw work, string trimming, fern planting, etc.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Apocalypse stories are about the end of man, which is often described as a beneficence to nature.

Ray Bradbury’s story, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” is read here by Leonard Nimoy.  It begins in August 4, 2026, and yes there is a dog. 

Is the AKC Running Out of Gas?

Ted Phillips, the Chief Financial Officer of the American Kennel Club, delivered the June 9, 2026  First Quarter Financial Report, which shows a continued decline across nearly every category.  

▪️Annual AKC registrations seem to have slipped south of 500,000. In 1992, they were 1.53 million. 

▪️AKC registration decline continues despite the fact that, on a per capita basis, Americans own more dogs than ever before *and* the population of the US continues to grow.  

▪️When you factor in the 34 percent US population growth between 1992 and 2024 (257 million to 346 million), we find the relative decline in AKC registrations in the last 30 years is about 78 percent. To put it another way, if AKC registrations had simply kept pace with US population growth since 1992, they would be well over 2 million a year, not under 450,000.

▪️Total AKC operating revenue was $21.9 million, or 6 percent lower than the same quarter in 2025.

▪️Total operating expense was $22.7 million, or 7 percent lower than the same quarter in 2025.

▪️Registration and event fees totaled $14.7 million in the first quarter of 2026, which is 4 percent, or $595,000 lower than the previous first quarter period.

▪️Advertising, sponsorship, and royalties totaled $3.8 million were down about 16 percent,or $713,000. 

▪️Products and service sales totaled $3.5 million, down about 6 percent, or $203,000. 

▪️Dog registration totaled $5.3 million, which is a decline of 7 percent, or $378,000, and litter registration totaled $2.6 million, which is a decline of 12 percent,or $360,000. 

▪️Litter registrations and dog registrations equally declined by 11 percent in their respective categories, with litters landing at 49,697 and dog registrations at 111,864. 

▪️Conformation revenue increased by 19 percent to $1.5 million; Companion events increased by 8 percent to $1.9 million, and Performance events increased by 19 percent to $813,000. The only underperformer in this area was the Family Dog program, which was lowered by 11 percent at $846,000, as compared to $946,000 in the prior year's period. 

▪️Event entries are down 3 percent to 783,000. The number of events, however, has increased to a little over 6,000.

 ▪️Sponsorship revenue totaled $2.5 million and is down by about 11 percent from the prior year.

▪️Advertising revenue totaled $763,000, which is 

31 percent lower. 

▪️Royalties were down by 11 percent, as compared to the prior year.

Source >> https://www.akc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Minutes-June-2026-Delegate-Meeting-FINAL.pdf

Larry Adler and Yitzhak Pearlman :: Summertime

Incentivized Doom Notices

The Medicare Board of Trustees has a long track record of being wrong.

In 1995, Medicare Trustees said Medicare would be broke by 2002.

In 2016, Medicare Trustees said Medicare would will be insolvent by 2028.

Earlier this year, the Medicare Board of Trustees said its projected Medicare would become insolvent in 2033.

Yes, being conservative in solvency projections is good, BUT let’s not forget that the media and the privatizers are incentivized to bang the drum of doom.

A Good News Story

The US has the same beaver recovery trajectory over the same period. The lesson: If we take our boot off Mother Nature’s neck, she’ll generally bounce up and dance a jig.

Who’s Your Daddy?

I have a suspicion…..

The Cursed

To be incurious and willfully ignorant is to be cursed. 

It is to be blind in a field of flowers, to be thirsty surrounded by water, and to be without hands as you slip off the abyss.

Who would willfully do this to themselves?

More Daylilies Going In

 

Seventy-two mixed daylilies from Gilbert H. Wild and Sons in Missouri.  I have ordered hostas and daylilies from them in the past, and they came up like gangbusters.

These new arrivals will fill in around the very large clumps of Stella D’Oro daylilies going into the orchard area. More dirt to move, and then wood chips to top all. Months of work ahead, but it should look good in two years when fruit are on the trees and the flower beds fill in.

The Sum Total of All Knowledge

I simply do not understand the incurious. 

The sum total of all knowledge is in your pocket, and it’s free, and you still have no questions for which you are eager to find answers?

The Gospel According to Trump

A lady I know told me she was re-reading and studying the Bible.

I laughed.  “You don’t believe the Bible,” I said.

She puffed herself up.  “I certainly do.”

“No you don’t,” I replied.  “You told me yourself you were a racist.”

“I am not a racist,” she said firmly.

“Oh, OK,” I said lightly,  “Maybe I misunderstood.”

But I did not misunderstand.  

One of our first conversations was her asking me:  “You’re not prejudiced at all, are you?”

“Not a bit,” I said.  “Not racist, not homophobic, none of it.  Not perfect, but not that.”

She mewed she was “a bit racist” which, considering the question that she had broached, and my emphatic response, meant she was almost certainly a very solid racist.

It was a weird beginning, and one of our first conversations. 

I had never been asked a question like that — as if it was something odd to **not** be a racist or homophobe — like being a Zoroastrian or a pygmy.  

Nor had anyone ever described themselves to me as she did.

I assure you, it was quite a memorable conversation.

She probably raised the question because she’d seen several non-white people coming in and out of my house over many months — Hispanic, Black, Asian, Arab, many of them workers when I first bought the house, or repairman over the course of the 42 months since then.

That a few of these non-white people might be my children was an idea outside her imagination. 

Even now, three and a half years later, she did not know or understand that “the little guy” (her words) moving dirt with me the day before was not some hired help, but my son, who runs 20 miles at a crack at least once a week, and who has shoulders like a tree trunk.

My neighbor says she supports Trump for his “policies,” but when I once asked her which of those policies Jesus might have endorsed, she pivoted. Suddenly she didn’t want to talk politics.  

Which is fine. I don’t bring up politics or religion with my neighbors. In fact, I have told them explicitly, let’s **not** do that; let’s be neighbors instead.  

My other neighbor gets it, but this one forgets, and she likes to talk. If we talk too long, it seems these topics bubble up out of her like oil out of an Ozark seep.

On this day, I try to move the discussion to other subjects and I succeed — the vandalism to her mailbox last year, the financial help we extend to our kids, who she might recommend for small engine repair, the Back-eyed Susans and daylilies now going into my orchard area.

But the unresolved issue is there, and as I try to pry myself away towards the end, she circles back to it.

“I’m not a racist,” she says, bringing the subject up again, and clearly upset I had seen her in a light in which she did not want to be seen.

I realized this was actually a good sign. 

She *knows* being a racist is a bad thing.

And yet, she is also a Trump voter who is attracted to Trump *because* of his cruelty and racism.  

She will not admit this, of course, but if you press her she says she “likes Trump’s immigration policies”. 

But which ones? The ones that admit and pardon foreign pedophiles like Ghislaine Maxwell and the Tate brothers, or the ones that separate small children from their parents? 

The ones where employers who profit from hiring illegal immigrants are lauded or ignored, or the ones where  ICE agents shoot non-criminal people with misdemeanors  dead, and without benefit of trial?

And then there is the little matter that she had told me herself, in one of our very first conversations; that she is a racist.

But who wants to fight with a neighbor?  

Not me. 

And so, once again, I try to open up space for redemption and change.

“OK,” I said. “I must have misunderstood.” 

There it was again:  space where, through her own voice and action, she could definitely prove me wrong, over time.

But then she said it. 

She could not help herself.

“I used to work with a lot of black people,” she says. “I’ll accept them if they accept me. But, you know, a lot of them are racist against white people.”

“Uh huh,” I say.  I hear you,” and I walked away to signal that the conversation was over. 

“I hear you,” is simply a statement of fact, but it’s ambiguous, and non-combative. 

I hear you.  

I was not trying to fight.

I hear you.  

And yes, I did.  

Loud and clear.

Maya Angelou said “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

I did, but I also try to allow space for change and redemption.

She said she was reading or re-reading the Bible. That was hopeful.

But was she **really** reading the Bible?

I had my doubts.

The Gospels are neither long nor complex.  

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell the same story four times. 

Matthew 5: 3–10 is the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus lists specific virtues and actions (the Beatitudes) that lead to divine grace and true happiness. 

Surely she had read them? 

Further on in the same Gospel (Matthew 25: 34-46), Jesus has a colloquy with his disciples in which he outlines the roads to Heaven and Hell;

“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came unto me.

“Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when were you hungry, and we fed thee? Or thirsty, and we gave thee drink? When did we see thee a stranger, and take you in? Or naked, and clothed you? Or when did we see you sick, or in prison, and came unto you?

“And the King shall answer and say unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’

“Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:  For I was hungry, and you gave me no meat: I was thirsty and you gave me no drink: I was a stranger and you took me not in: I was naked and you clothed me not: I was sick and in prison and you visited me not.’

“Then shall they also answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when were you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and we did not minister unto thee?’

“Then shall he answer them, saying, ‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’

“And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”

Right.

That seems clear and unambiguous

What policies and actions lead to “everlasting punishment”?

What policies and actions lead to “life eternal”?

But now we circle back to it; how can you say you believe in Christ *and* that you voted for Trump both the first and the second time?

Have you read the Gospels?

To be clear, I am not a member of this Book Club, and I did not choose this book.

But have I actually read it?

I have.

And did I need to re-read it, again and again, to understand the message?

I did not.

———————————

▪️Related Link:  Epstein 3:16