Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mirk is sire of a litter out of Sue, a big powerful female, who is Clwyd Bob x McCloskey’s Nel. Litter due 9-Jul-2025.

Today, I was forced to pay an illegal tariff on two imported pups!

Unilateral executive powers for tariff are for matters of ‘national security’. Otherwise, tariffs require Congressional action.

Importing border collies because we have such horrible breeding stock in the USA has NOTHING to do with national security. Federal courts have said it is an illegal use of executive authority. However, as is his way, Trump and his gang, will appeal and appeal, exploiting and manipulating the justice process, dipping and diving and abusing the court system due process.

The Trump Party in Congress that could do something is servile and submissive. Trump has them enthralled or in fear.

Everything about Trump is WRONG.

In the past, we relied upon enough people bucking party and personal interest and fear to stand up for what is right. Tragically, for America and the world, that is no longer the case.

Trump has filed for bankruptcy 6 times according to Politifact. How do we square that with business and executive acumen? In each case, the business kept going but the creditors were stiffed. Notorious for not paying or honoring deals and bullying his way out of it using the legal system, Trump is adopting the very same approach to governance. He dips, dives, evades and deceives …calling it business talent. Meanwhile, he ruins American advantage and undermines America’s future.

Trump is the ugly face of capitalism with no soul or conscience.

His tariffs, which I paid today on dogs that enhance the USA breeding stock, are a farce, illegal economic buffoonery by an elected and tolerated autocrat.

Democracy functions when have a shared spirit and reverence for the constitution, laws, institutions and norms. For 70 years, those in opposition to the spirit of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal have been working to undermine it. Their extraction, grown to nearly half the population, filled with resentment, greed, ignorance and deceits found fascination, shared grievance and form in Trump. For the life of me, I cannot understand how it could be so …except on some intellectual level.

Someday, ‘the chickens will come home to roost’, as they say. The consequences of Trump and his Trumped-Up MAGA will be present, and they will not be shaken off with a new election.

When it comes time to taking responsibility for Trump, MAGAts, MAGA voters and enablers will -out of ignorance (often willful), greed, and guilt- say something akin to what the residents of Bergen and Belsen did when the Allies discovered the horrors of the concentration camp, “But vee didn’t noh!” …if they say anything at all. Lies and bullshit. We ALL knew what Trump was about. He had history, he had a first term. He told us.

10 month old Clare is a striking pup out of James McCloskey’s Nel and Rob Ellis’ Welsh Champion, Bran. With her long strides with natural flanks, she shows lots of potential. I was going to sell her …but I think I am going to hang onto her and see how she develops.

8-June-2025

The 5 pups from Meg’s surprise litter look healthy and content at one week old, maybe a little smaller than usual, because I didn’t know Meg was pregnant until the last week. They should catch up. Meg is probably my best mothering female. She looks after her pups dutifully until they are nearly 8 weeks old.

Puppies are completely uninteresting for the first 2 weeks when they are blind and deaf. That time is really just a group extension of the uterus. They just nurse and sleep. Once they open their eyes and they can hear (2 weeks), when they can walk not paddle (3 weeks), they are discovering their world and become adorable.

All the pups have classic black and white markings like their parents, Meg & Pete. Two of the males look quite large and bully-built –like Meg!

10 month old Tynygraig Meg arrived from Wales on 10-June. She is the daughter of Aran Fly and Llanfarian Mirk. Here she is showing me she’s off to a good start before she leaves Wales.

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Arriving with Meg, 11-month old female Brynoer Lass. She is by Dewi’s Clwyd Bob, the #1 sheep dog stud in the world, the same sire as my #1 dog, Peter.

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1-Jun-2025

8 days ago, I looked at Meg and noticed enlarged teats …and girth. “OMG!”, I thought to myself, “You’re pregnant, Meg.”

I am not sure how it happened or which male was responsible. I thought I was being very careful.

Today, Meg delivered 5 healthy pups. The markings are indefinite. I will do a DNA paternity test to confirm before I register them.

No one I like to be with more at the end the day than ‘Perfect Peter‘.

If only EVERY dog could be like Peter.

Pete is better than his sire, Clwyd Bob. On par with his grandsire, International Champion Jock …but smarter. Without reservation, the best dog I have ever bred or owned, more perfect than I could have imagined possible.

Peter is available at stud in Vermont. Frozen semen ( in 150+ million post-thaw motile sperm doses ) is available as well.

Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy quoted in Thomas Edsall’s 22-April-2025 column in The NY Times, Trump Is Insatiable (free link), tells us “there is good reason to be worried.” Not only has the Republican majority in Congress “exhibited little interest in monitoring, much less checking, the president,” but “the ultimate guardrail against tyranny, the electorate,” cannot be relied on:

A decisive chunk of the American electorate elevated Trump to the presidency after he had shown his authoritarian proclivities. And even now after Trump has menaced the civil service, unions, universities, news media and professions in a reckless, dangerous, dictatorial fashion, the number of Americans vocally upset is disturbingly small.

Edsall notes, “a crucial tactic adopted by Trump in his second term is to isolate a target. Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, elaborated on that point”:

In each case, the president isolates key targets and threatens them, and seemingly them only, if they don’t bend to his will. And for each target, the calculation is simple: Resisting entails concentrated costs to their organization and diffuse public benefits to American democracy, whereas capitulating transfers diffuse costs to American democracy and concentrated benefits to their organization.

Edsall warns us:

What appears to be happening is that recognition of the fact that making even small concessions will only encourage the administration to keep asking for more is spreading.

Why? Because Trump is insatiable.

Sound (too) familiar ???

In all respects: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes:

Republicans in Congress have done nothing. They are fully beholden to Trump and will do nothing to resist his authoritarian inclinations. It is one of the most shameless capitulations in American history.

It is hard to believe these people genuinely love their country. They have confirmed cabinet nominees who are the most unqualified in history. And they have raised not a finger to resist DOGE’s assault on Congress’s constitutional powers to appropriate funds and create federal offices.

Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email to Edsall that by acting with such speed that his adversaries have been caught by surprise, Trump has been unexpectedly successful in the opening months of his second term:

The entire society has been taken aback by the suddenness and violence of Trump’s first 100 days. He has worked astonishing innovations in the exercise of executive power. Much of what he has done is obviously lawless.

Trump has seized the high ground in the belief that possession is nine-tenths of the law. He has dared the courts to defy him. And the courts are on this point cautious, because, as has been true for hundreds of years, their authority depends upon the force of their reason.

Many of Trump’s executive orders suggest that he cares little about legal reason. To speak figuratively, Trump cares only how many divisions the courts can mobilize. In such circumstances, the force of judicial reason depends upon public opinion, and Trump is presently still on a honeymoon with the sectors of the public that elected him.

Trump’s strategy is to divide his adversaries, Post wrote:

Unbound by law, immune to shame, the Trump administration has unleashed the full force of the executive branch on institutions of civil society like universities and law firms.

Civil society is splintering under the assault. Harvard resists; Columbia bends the knee. Paul, Weiss bows in obeisance, Perkins Coie sues. Resistance is genuinely difficult, because the main institutions have left themselves exposed to blackmail from the federal government that has determined to trash all previous norms of behavior.

For those who think things will just bounce back, Edsall’s panel has some bad news, Jack Balkin, at Yale Law School, said in an email that the wreckage will be hard to repair: “A great danger of the Trump revolution is that it may be very hard to reconstruct the public and private institutions that he has damaged. Even when Trump leaves office, he will have created a playbook for future administrations to follow.”

Enormous amounts of expertise and institutional memory have departed from the U.S. government in multiple areas. The purges have badly compromised the professional culture of government institutions. That culture was premised on people making long-term career commitments to gaining expertise and working in the public interest.

And finally, Edsall refers us to an essay, Universities in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Thought Giving In to Government Demands Would Save Their Independence,” by Iveta Silova, the associate dean of global engagement and a professor at Arizona State University, in which she reminds us “after Hitler took office in 1933, his regime moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents.”