You can read it in a number of ways, but my best interpretation is strangely almost as a (shudder) Ayn Rand-style response -- "Some of you don't like my work and are rude about it. So bite on this one."

There's nothing to add to your letter and response but I did want to comment about your opening complaint.

I think you're completely within your rights to complain about your very rude treatment. You clearly are ingenuous, care about your "clients", and try as hard as you can. It is inevitable that you'll fuck up some of the time on a daily column but then you have an uncensored letter column to fix that.

Your analysis is correct but there's another side that you might want to consider.

In the last year or two I've been trying to figure out how the United States got into this dire state, and it is my conclusion that a small but significant proportion of humans are literal, clinical psychopaths, that these individuals disproportionately get into positions of power, and worse, that the cult of Individual Power that is America strongly encourages these people at all levels more than other more socially-centered cultures where such individuals are more ostracized.

For example, see "The Sociopath Next Door" by Harv Med prof. Martha Stout, which I finished just this morning and agrees with me almost to the word (except it doesn't discuss politics directly).

There are people without any conscience nor any remorse -- often intelligent people too.

Dr. Stout says that 4% of the population are psychopaths and gives 6 journal reference to back her up. This means one person in 25 that you know is a psychopath.

You see them often in your column -- they're never writing in but they're very often the counterparties causing the letter to be written. I particularly remember the woman who worked in an office with a man whose past crimes she knew but was professionally bound not to reveal -- but not all psychopaths are so obviously evil.

You, Cary, as a sensitive person, are unable to understand viscerally I think that there are people aren't just "suppressing their emotions" with respect to sympathy and conscience -- they literally don't have them at all. These people are rare, but unfortunately the people, the victims in their lives are far, far more likely to write to you.

So your classic mistake when you write your column is to not recognize that your writer is encountering one of these people -- and this mistake is scary so a lot of people get upset.

And from the other side, you must remember that if 1 in 25 is a psychopath, then some of them are writing letters to your column with the sole purpose of getting some excitement by making you unhappy. Remember that you have disclosed your deepest vulnerabilities to the world so they know what will make you tick.

So I really think you should feel free to stop reading letters that aren't polite. And stop early! You don't have to think about every letter -- even if there is some truth in it. There really isn't ANYTHING wrong in mostly only reading the nice letters. Just glaze your eyes over and go to the next -- remembering that at least some of the time it's some nutcase deliberately trying to get a rise out of you for their own jollies.

This is a public medium -- we should expect and demand civilized discourse -- it's quite possible to disagree with everything someone says and still be supportive of the individual. There's no excuse for rudeness, you have no need to read such letters.

Congrats again on years of good work and this particularly fine column today.

The failure mode for batteries often involves outgassing. Better to let the gas out slowly than have it build up.

I wouldn't panic about it -- the ziplok seal would almost certainly give out before anything else happened -- but you might want to put a few pinholes in the bag, just in case.

Using only information from official US government web sites, he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the last election *was* stolen -- and not with jinxed machines either (not that that isn't a problem too) but simply by making sure that votes from probably Democratic voters aren't counted.

The book is a scary read. Did you know that if you're African-American, the chance of that a vote you make is not actually counted are over three times that of a white American? Or, if you're an indigenous (Native) American, the chances of your vote not being counted are over *thirty* times greater?

It's like a magician's misdirection -- you have to look at the other hand to see where the trick is.

I'd be very interested to see your response to this book, Farhad. It's a fast read and the voter suppression material is nearly all in the last couple of chapters...

I'd like to add two more little pieces.

First, if you go to the IRS and say that you "made a mistake" before they catch up with you, considering how small the stages are, there's no chance at all that they'll take legal action. If you wait until they notice, your chances become much dimmer. You don't have to pay them off immediately, just start talking to them as soon as possible.

Second, it sounds very much to me as if your husband is abusing stimulants, whether prescription or illegal. There are all the symptoms, the long work hours, the sudden outbreaks of violent temper, grandiose and unrealistic plans. This is very dangerous!

Be careful. We're rooting for you.