WORKING BORDER COLLIE SHEEP DOGS
25-April-2025
Three (unexpected) 4-week-old spring puppies from Gail and Max are starting to explore the outdoors: James, Anne, Belle. I turn them out the kennel door and let them have it, leaving it to the adult dogs to look after them while I get things done inside. That’s part of the adult dogs’ job description: look after the young ones. All three are ISDS registered with the ‘Strafford’ prefix.
21-April-2025, Patriot’s Day
This is from Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and expert in fascism. [Warning and Spoiler Alert] The answer to the question she poses is frightening.
“When do we know we’ve become an authoritarian state? What is the tipping point when we must say: we are no longer a democracy?” These are among the most common questions I receive from the public and members of the Lucid community. It is part of human nature to want to make sense of what we are living through by giving it a name. And when what we are living through is the destruction of our democracy, the naming is also empowering, because we can take inspiration from others who have been in our situation, and apply their hard-earned wisdom to our own place and time.
“Democratic backsliding” and “authoritarian capture” (two terms now in circulation) refer not to states but to processes. In truth, short of a coup or a declaration of dictatorship that is followed up with prompt and wide-ranging action, it can be harder to point to one precise point or policy as proof that democracy has been vanquished.
It can also be harder to recognize autocracy if we hear the word and think of one-party dictatorships on the Fascist model. These are less common now (although Communism has kept its tradition going in countries such as China and North Korea).
Electoral Autocracy: What Authoritarianism Often Looks Like Today
Today, we have a proliferation of electoral autocracies, or countries with strongman leaders who keep a semblance of democracy going —emphasis on semblance— by allowing opposition parties and media to exist, and holding elections. “Here we have a ballot box…the democracy gets its power from the people. It’s what we call national will,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed to CNN in 2018, denying he was a dictator.
Elections are often the last democratic institution standing in a country where the judiciary, bureaucracy, and security forces have been captured and made tools of the executive. But those elections have a different function when strongmen “game” the system so elections tend to produce the results necessary to maintain the strongman and his allies in office. For example, they shut down opposition media and domesticate what is left, so the opposition’s message does not reach voters during election seasons. GOP muse Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, has done that.
Turkey is an example of how strongmen can propel their countries into full autocracy if they are haunted by a charismatic rival who would likely win the vote if free and fair elections were held. The stuff of Erdogan’s nightmares is former Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. In 2019 Erdogan tried some electoral tricks to keep Imamoglu out of that office, but ultimately relented.
Yet as Turkey’s economy has worsened and the president has become less popular, Imamoglu has emerged as an obvious choice for Turkish head of state. And so Erdogan has made sure that electoral contest will not happen, at least while he is in power. In advance of the 2023 presidential race, Erdogan sentenced Imamoglu to several years in jail. Then, in March 2025, when Imamoglu was about to be nominated by his CHP party as the 2028 candidate, Erdogan actually arrested him, along with 100 other opposition party notables, including other mayors and local authorities, and stripped him of his mayoral office.
This has led to a huge and still-ongoing crisis, with record numbers of Turks protesting in the streets. No one would believe Erdogan today if he called Turkey a democracy. His actions were a tipping point that moved Turkey from an electoral autocracy to a de facto authoritarian regime.
The Fascist Road to Autocracy: Two Years vs. Two Months
I cite this Turkish story because it unfolded over years. And that is how things usually go when autocrats come to power legally (via elections or appointment). Benito Mussolini’s Jan. 1925 declaration of dictatorship led to immediate roundups of some anti-Fascists and closure of some opposition media and party offices, but it was only later in 1925 and throughout 1926 that “Laws for the Defense of the State” created a secret police (OVRA) and formally banned strikes, political parties, and more. Antonio Gramsci, the Communist politician and theoretician, was not arrested until November 1926.
Adolf Hitler’s speedy moves to transform Germany into a dictatorship stand out as unusual, and in fact they went against advice Mussolini gave to Hitler in Jan. 1933 through his Berlin liaison, Italian military official Giuseppe Renzetti: “make your moves carefully, and don’t rush.”
The February Reichstag fire allowed Hitler to take a different path. The building still smoked when an emergency decree ended freedoms of press, assembly, and more. Thousands of leftists were detained in prisons and warehouses while Dachau, the Reich’s first concentration camp, was being converted from an arms factory. In March, 52 days after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, came the Enabling Act, which allowed him to rule without consulting the Reichstag or the President. Germany was now an autocracy.
So Where and What Is America in April 2025?
I hope these foreign examples from past and present give some context for the American situation. I want to emphasize that there is no 21st century parallel, where the head of state came into a highly developed democracy via an election, for the pace of what is now happening in America: the speed-of-light purges, dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, abandonment of allies and partnering with autocracies, and wrecking of government entities concerned with humanitarian assistance, compliance, checks on power, oversight, and accountability.
Even where there was no such tradition of democracy, as in Russia, Vladimir Putin, in his first months, did not fundamentally recast government and foreign alliances at the pace the Trump-Musk administration has moved.
There is also almost no parallel in a highly developed democracy for a leader to try and overthrow the government in a “self-coup” and, rather than end up banned from politics, or stand trial, is elected to a second term, with a major political party as his personal tool, and legal, business, media, and other elites capitulating to him as though that coup attempt and insurrection had never happened.
Now we are 100 days into the second Trump administration. Whether it is public health policy, economic policy, national security, foreign policy, media-government relations on the democratic model, or the everyday business of governance, America is becoming unrecognizable to allies abroad and to many Americans.
When U.S. legal residents are rounded up and deported to a foreign gulag without the semblance of due process; when U.S. citizens with no criminal record receive letters from the government telling them “It’s time for you to leave the United States”; when the executive power makes clear it no longer believes that court decisions should constrain its actions; when the leader has a personality cult that resembles those of autocracies: these are all signs that a shift away from democracy has taken place in government that is affecting everyday Americans.
This accelerated transformation from democracy into autocracy has been possible due to an innovation of the authoritarian playbook which I described as a “new kind of coup” less than two weeks after the inauguration. Instead of one strongman at the helm of government, we have two.
One of the parties in this power-sharing agreement has taken a more traditional approach to the dismantling of authoritarian governance: purges of the bureaucracy, the appointment of fanatics to Cabinet positions, attacks on the independent judiciary and security forces and military, and so on.
The other, a private citizen, has been given license to unleash digital shock troops to re-engineer government to benefit himself and his private companies, and wreck America understood as a democratic power. This new kind of coup can also be described as a hostile takeover of government via DOGE, which was created as an instrument for Musk to infiltrate and control a sovereign power.
History serves as a guide to discern what is new and what is an application of classic tactics of autocratic consolidation. So, where is America in April 2025? When “democratic backsliding” is producing demonstrably autocratic outcomes, we are in authoritarian territory.
19-April-2025
A group of 4 dogs and I attended the “No Kings” protest in Lebanon, NH today. A moderate sized crowd without the enthusiasm of 2 weeks ago at the “Hands Off” protests. Part of it due to the Easter holiday weekend. And the location was the town square in Lebanon rather than the busy route between the twin states. A few sprinkles but otherwise warm.
My companions today were: Peter, Sue, Becca and Lotti. All were impeccably behaved. Staying right with me off leash …okay Becca did make the occasional visits to make new friends, but the crowd seemed okay with that. Tons of compliments on my Dogs for Democracy!
The MAGAts should have read this 2018 book by a fellow Republican before they voted for Trump a second time and screwed us all …except most of them don’t read, and if they do, they don’t comprehend and/or they don’t believe. They also have a very poor sense / knowledge of 20th century history.
Burning it all down because you don’t like certain pronouns or gender explorations or because congresses –yes, Republican congresses!– and presidents (of both parties) didn’t deal with immigration, is brainless and irrational. Watching Fox and the like is like drinking wood alcohol or smoking opium. Feels good in the moment …it destroys your brain. Voting for Trump and his party and continuing to support them while they smash government and trash the economy, is self-injury and mass destruction.
Was stopping the excesses of DEI really worth it?? Congress had a bi-partisan plan to fix immigration that Trump nixed so he could have a campaign issue …did you know that??
People who voted for Trump chose a man who declared bankruptcy 6 times and left everyone else to take their losses and clean up afterwards just as he is doing with the US economy and government. Trump isn’t a successful businessman. He is a fraud, huckster, bully, liar and cheat, with no empathy or conscience, who as Rick Wilson recounts …destroys everything he touches.
Americans who voted for and support Trump and his party …you have been had! You screwed yourselves …and the rest of us in the process. America is what Trump is destroying now, only to walk away from it, as he did his entertainment and property debts.
Trump doesn’t have ‘policies’ (with the possible exception of his nutty tariffs). He has ‘whims’ and grievances; he has tantrums and fits …when he tosses the toys from the pram and screams and threatens. That is the MAGAt president! Everything he touches breaks or dies.
Historian and Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University, Robert Paxton, specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era:
“[Fascism is] a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Even when Trump is gone (please let it be soon!), the American fascist movement lives on with JD Vance, Samuel Alito and the Project 2025 gang.
15-April-2025
If I got to St. Peter’s gates and he said to me, you can bring only one thing with your from your earthly life, the answer would come faster than I could take a breath …my Peter.
I keep banking frozen semen from Peter because he is likely the best I will ever breed and EVERYONE should want to breed with this dog. Every moment spent with Peter is sublime.
People come for stud services and invariably choose Max. I love Max, he is a very good dog …but Peter is two classes above ‘very good’. People think Peter is ‘too much dog‘. Any serious dog person should breed with Pete.
“Nate White, an eloquent and quick writer from England, wrote this magnificent response to ‘Why the British hate Trump‘. An excerpt:”
Trump lacks certain qualities that the British traditionally value highly.
For example, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no fineness, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honor, and no grace.
So to us, the stark contrast throws an awkwardly bright light on Trump’s restrictions. Besides, we like a good laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never said anything dry, witty or even remotely funny – not once, ever.
I don’t say it rhetorically, I mean it literally: not once, ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to British sensitivity – for us the lack of humour is almost inhumane.
But with Trump it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a coarse comment, an uneducated insult, a temporary cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and never laughs; he only triumphs or ridicules.
And frighteningly enough, he doesn’t just speak in gross, slow-thinking insults – he actually thinks of them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and reflective malice.
There is never any underlying layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all in the surface.
Some Americans may see this as refreshing right on. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain, we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are brave underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither brave nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich man or a greedy fat cat. He is more of a fat white snail. And worse, he is the most unforgivable of all for the British: a bully.
He hits down – which a gentleman would never, should or could do – and every punch he aims is below the belt. He especially enjoys kicking the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they’re lying down.
…
He turns artlessness into an art form; he is a Picasso in pettiness; a Shakespeare in shit. His flaws are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on infinitely. God knows that there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of mean people as well. But rarely has the stupidity been so evil, or the wickedness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look reliable and George W Bush look smart.
The fact is, if Frankenstein decided to create a monster made entirely of human flaws – he’d create a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would pull out large tassels of hair and scream in anxiety:
– Oh my God… what the… has… me… created?
Rick Wilson coined an encapsulating phrase back in 2018
12-April-2025
3 weeks is when puppies start to become cute and interesting. Eyes and ears open, legs fully functional: they are running around discovering their world including people. Fun to have a [blessedly small] batch of spring puppies –and quiet ones, only happy noises from this lot.
The head counselor at Sal’s summer camp had 12 puppies overnight. She’ll be rotating them around the teats, since there are more pups than teats. I’d be reaching for mind-numbing relief 🍺 🍺🍺🍺🍺. Reminds me why small litters are a blessing.
In a week, the pups will be able to regulate their temperatures and out they go to the puppy room in the barn.
10-April-2025
I had a ‘spring update’ from Jullian who took Venti from the summer 2023 Clwyd Bob x Nel litter. Not all pups by the redoubtable Clywd Bob and the TFB Nel turn out to working dogs. Venti had a different kind of life ahead of him.
Venti continues to bring so much joy to my life just by being his wonderful self. He lives a spoiled and fulfilling life in Boston.
He recently completed a dock diving class and loved it!! We are currently trying agility. It has been very fun trying out different activities with him. We are in no hurry to compete- Venti has already proven himself to be a skilled athlete, but he needs a bit more time to grow into himself.
We ran into a Welsh gentleman today who crossed the street to say hello to Venti, and said he reminded him of the Border Collies he sees back home. He was delighted when I mentioned that Venti takes sheep herding classes.
Most working collies would not thrive in an urban environment. Jullian makes it work for Venti. Kudos to Jullian! A very happy match!!
“Did you see that? He brought 75 countries to the negotiating table? You are seeing the ‘Art of the Deal’ in action.” He’s the world’s best negotiator, we are told by the MAGAt faithful –‘the best negotiator EVER!’ Of course ‘national security’ prevents him revealing who the alleged 75 countries are …because they don’t really exist. What is more likely to exist is insider trading. Welcome to tyranny, kleptocracy, authoritarianism, savage ineptitude …they all fit.
With no terminal condition, the bafoonery just repeats itself over and over again
Tending to democracy is like tending to a house or car or to life relationships. We can let it slide for a while, but only for a bit. If we don’t maintain it, it breaks down …sometimes beyond repair.
Our democratic rights, individual freedoms, global standing and vaunted institutions are not abstractions. Losing them will have real consequences.