Jeff:

You need a humor transplant. Either that, or your sense of humor is more seared than arid.

Two resistors in parallel deliver resistance less than either. Last I looked, resistors 'produce' little - other than perhaps a bit of inductance if a wire-wound device. Given the level of education with the OP, that is as close to negative resistance as he will be likely to achieve or understand.

Animal Cruelty Acts. Yes, certainly. The circus, along with dwarf-throwing, bear baiting, dove-shoots, buffalo hunts and much, much more represent cruel times in American History. However, today that cruelty has been largely been confined to human-on-human, and most of us are dead quiet about all that. Cute, fuzzy little animals, noble lions, tigers, elephants and whales are very safe causes with few objecting to them - but for certain "japs" and other "slopes", or little brown "gooks" somewhere or other. But not our neighbors, friends and allies. Gotta look at them with half-closed eyes (Duterte, Putin, Li, Salman), but that's all right. As long as the goods, oil, cheap wood and other 'stuff' keeps coming.

But we all sit back and cry crocodile tears about very real and very preventable human tragedies and do nothing or much worse. All for the sake of comfort. As a country and a culture, we are going through troubled times. We are about to lose, if it is not lost already, our primacy as a moral compass for the world, and we are about to cede that position to China of all possibilities. Does that not scare the living **** out of you?

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA