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.
Tynygraig MegThere is joy in that face …happy to be in Vermont
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.
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.
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.
Gail’s 9-week-old pups exhausted themselves by mid-afternoon on Memorial Day. Shortly after 3 pm, I put them back to the kennel to dine on sautéed chicken hears and kibble. Litters of 3 tend to form a tightly bound unit of mutual aid, comfort and safety. They do everything together.
The 3 Gail x Max puppies turned 8 weeks over the weekend. They are out exploring their world together on fine spring days. THIS is why I keep my pups until at least 12 weeks. They need those extra weeks together, as a unit, for socialization and development.
There are no boundaries here, only the puppies’ good sense. I trust they will not go too far and they will look after one another. This is a particularly nice litter. A happy, “Babies! Bay-bees!!” brings them running. [The name ‘puppy’ is taken by one of the now-adults, so they are ‘babies’.] I will miss their joy when they leave.
An op-ed by my favorite NYT columnist, Thomas Edsall, captures the sadness I feel for the gross error Americans made 6 months ago. Some of his points:
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.
Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.
“The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”
I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied: “There is no precedent, not even close”
Wilentz continues: “Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.”
Edsall quotes Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee:
I previously felt that the predictions of authoritarian government in the United States were exaggerated. The pace and scope of actions in the early months of Trump 2 have changed my assessment.
The levels of open corruption, the direct challenges to the rule of law, the assaults on institutions have been larger and more consequential than I expected. We are in a period of grave political peril.
There is another op-ed in The NY Times this morning that confirms what I have been saying since Trump started on his path of destruction. Trump has irreversibly ceded American leadership and global advantage to China.
America, by contrast, may end up as a profoundly diminished nation. Sheltered behind tariff walls, its companies will sell almost exclusively to domestic consumers. The loss of international sales will degrade corporate earnings, leaving companies with less money to invest in their businesses. American consumers will be stuck with U.S.-made goods that are of middling quality but more expensive than global products, owing to higher U.S. manufacturing costs. Working families will face rising inflation and stagnant incomes. Traditional high-value industries such as car manufacturing and pharmaceuticals are already being lost to China; the important industries of the future will follow.
“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.” ~ Coco Chanel
Faces of hate are a common feature of MAGAt abusers who lack empathy and kindness. Pam Bondi, Kristie Noam, Kellyanne Conway, Laura Ingram, Marjorie Taylor Green, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller… There is a deeply unkind, hard MAGA look to them. Cruelty, whether by word or deed, settles into faces.
Compare those faces to the joy and tranquility in the face of performer Bruce Springsteen. [see earlier post] Coco Chanel, the doyenne of fashion, saw how truth finds its way to the face.
