Tuesday: Hili dialogue

December 3, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day : Tuesday, December 3, 2024 and National Apple Pie Day, supposedly the culinary distillation of America (“as American as apple pie”).  But many countries have their own version of the pie, the best being the French tarte Tatin, best served with crème fraîche (not in the version below):

tarte tatin. Wmeinhart, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Green Bean Casserole Day, National Peppermint Latte Day, (part of the ongoing drive to convert all adult beverages and snacks, viz., seltzer and granola bars, into confections), Let’s Hug Day, Giving Tuesday, and World Trick Shot Day. 

Here are some trick shots in pool:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT explains why President Biden, who swore he’d never pardon his son Hunter over convictions on federal gun-possession and tax charges, changed his mind, (The article is archived here.)

Support for pardoning Hunter Biden had been building for months within the family, but external forces had more recently weighed on Mr. Biden, who watched warily as President-elect Donald J. Trump picked loyalists for his administration who promised to bring political and legal retribution to Mr. Trump’s enemies.

Mr. Biden had even invited Mr. Trump to the White House, listening without responding as the president-elect aired familiar grievances about the Justice Department — then surprised his host by sympathizing with the Biden family’s own troubles with the department, according to three people briefed on the conversation.

But it was Hunter Biden’s looming sentencings on federal gun and tax charges, scheduled for later this month, that gave Mr. Biden the final push. A pardon was one thing he could do for a troubled son, a recovering addict who he felt had been subjected to years of public pain.

When the president returned to Washington late Saturday evening, he convened a call with several senior aides to tell them about his decision.

“Time to end all of this,” Mr. Biden said, according to a person briefed on the call.

Apparently Hunter had been angling for a pardon for a long time, and his father felt that impending jail time would produce a drug relapse in his son, though he’d have trouble getting drugs in a federal prison. The upshot was that the pardon was written and drafted by Joe Biden after family consultation:

The endgame was, for the most part, a family matter. The final discussions about pardons excluded senior White House staff, including only the Bidens and defense lawyers. After the decision was made, aides were told to execute their orders, according to a person familiar with the situation.

I detect the influence of Jill Biden here, who apparently also pressured Joe to stay in office beyond the time he should have resigned.  The article supports this:

Behind closed doors, Mr. Biden was said to be influenced by members of his family for months as his thinking on the matter changed, several people around him said. The first lady had been at Hunter Biden’s side as he stood trial in a Delaware court over the summer. She was supportive of the decision to pardon the man she had raised since childhood and whose addiction had challenged and then damaged their family.

“Of course I support the pardon of my son,” she told reporters on Monday as she unveiled holiday decorations at the White House.

After the pardon, Biden disguised his anguish over Hunter’s going to jail by using others to couch Hunter’s convictions as politically motivated:

The statement that followed from Mr. Biden on Sunday offered a window into the mind-set of an aggrieved president who, in the end, could not separate his duty as a father from his half century of principled promises as a politician.

. . .The president’s decision also left current White House officials, some of whom had publicly said Mr. Biden would not issue a pardon for Hunter Biden, scrambling to explain the reversal.

“The president took an action because of how politically infected these cases were and what the political opponents, what his political opponents, were trying to do,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Angola, where Mr. Biden is making a diplomatic trip this week.

In the end, Biden seems to have simply cracked when he thought of his beloved son going to jail, and his paternal instincts took over. I believe Joe could have commuted Hunter’s sentence, though I’m not sure, which would give him some jail time, but only a limited amount, and would still look bad. But not as bad as the full pardon. In the end, Biden lied to the American public, giving us all a pretty correct notion that some people are above justice—if they’re relatives of those in power. He pretended that the convictions were politically motivated, but they weren’t, and the no-jail plea deal fell apart not because of Republican pressure, but because of a judge’s decision.

I deeply sympathize with Biden’s agony over his son’s convictions and impending jail time, but he gave up a principle for nepotism, and history will not judge his kindly. Nor will it judge him as a particularly good President.

*The WSJ news column describes how Biden’s legacy will be tarnished. (Article archived here):

Joe Biden made the central purpose of his presidency clear in his Inauguration Day address: “We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile,” he said at the U.S. Capitol, where a violent mob had tried that month to overturn his 2020 election victory. Biden’s aim would be to unify the nation and shore up its democratic institutions.

That is one reason why the president’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, on Sunday may further damage his already tarnished legacy: The reprieve he ordered threatens to undercut one of the main propositions he offered for his election.

Biden’s political brand as a presidential candidate—his value proposition as a leader—was largely a promise to restore democratic norms and to fight the cynicism that had helped Donald Trump build his MAGA movement on claims that self-dealing leaders had corrupted the government. Biden had repeatedly promised to respect the independence of the justice system and avoid interfering with the prosecution of his son, including by issuing a pardon.

. . .His reversal “is not fully consonant with what he ran on,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. While Kessler said he empathized with Biden’s impulses to protect his son, the pardon comes as Trump will soon retake office on promises to overhaul a criminal justice system that he says unfairly targeted him and his followers. To lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Trump has nominated Kash Patel, a loyalist who has said he would fire its senior leaders and prosecute agents he thinks abused their authority.

Trump has pledged to pardon people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and seek “retribution’’ against his political opponents, which Democrats say threatens the independent disposition of justice. The Hunter Biden pardon “clouds the message” that Democrats will employ to protest those moves, Kessler said.

And that is perhaps the worst part of the whole Hunter Biden pardon. It gives Trump the excuse to pardon the insurrections of January 6 by saying, “Well, Biden did it, too. The rioters were only angry at what happened to me.” Trump would have done it even without Biden’s pardon, but, along with Biden’s refusal to resign well before the election, this casts a deep shadow over Biden’s presidency.

*An excellent article in The Critic describes the debate at the Oxford Union over the proposition, “This House Believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”. As you may recall, the debate, heavily attended by pro-Palestinian activists (Jewish people were said to be too scared to show up), voted overwhelmingly to affirm the proposition.

The most infamous debate in history of the Oxford Union is, by common acclaim, the endorsement in 1933 of the proposition that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country”. “Abject, squalid, shameless …disquieting and disgusting” was Winston Churchill’s verdict, while The Times dismissed the affair as “children’s hour”. Now, after more than ninety years, that debate has competition in the annals of infamy.

On 28 November, the Union debated the proposition that “This House Believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”. That the students in attendance supported this modern blood libel was not unexpected, though the lopsided result — 278 to 59 — was surprising. But that was not the main source of shame. It is what was said, by the speakers and more importantly by the members in the chamber, that will haunt us for far longer than the 1933 debate.

. . . The atmosphere both inside and outside the Union was febrile. The crowd chanting genocidal slogans was audible in the chamber where the debate was, if it is possible, even more unhinged. The first problem was the motion itself. The proposition levelled the most damning charge imaginable and dared those opposing it to defend the indefensible. The opposition was set up as genocide deniers, to the obvious delight of the raucous crowd.

The second problem was the choice of speakers. It seems clear that the Union wasn’t interested in a real debate. Only two of the eight invited speakers, both opposing the proposition, were interested in an evidence-based exchange on the specific terms of the debate. The rest were polemicists and provocateurs. Two speakers, one from each side, left the debate early: one after storming out, the other after being forcibly removed.

Only the distinguished barrister Natasha Hausdorff and journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti even attempted to debate, as that art has traditionally been practiced in the Union. Had all of the participants been so committed, the night would likely still have been a debacle — that is what the crowd around the antisemitic bear pit obviously wanted — but it might not have been the disgrace that it was.

And the worst bit:

. . . The most chilling message, however, came not from any of the speakers or from a heckler but from something the crowd as a whole didn’t say. During his remarks, Mosab Hassan Yousef, who spoke against the proposition, asked for a show of hands of those in the room who, if they had had advance knowledge of the 7 October attacks, would have warned Israel. Not even a quarter of the crowd raised their hands.

The silent expanse of unraised hands spoke louder than the final vote. The vote, after all, merely endorsed an abstract and laughably counterfactual verdict against Israel. The sparse show of hands went much further. It said that a large majority of students believed that, for their country’s alleged sins, Israeli citizens deserved to be raped, murdered, kidnapped, and tortured, pitilessly and indiscriminately.

. . . At that moment, the debate ceased to be an abstract proposition. A room full of future journalists, professors, public servants, judges, and MPs openly and unashamedly endorsed the inhuman logic of a pogrom.

We’re getting used to this kind of vicious antisemitism in the West, but we shouldn’t; we should be calling it out and fighting it as hard as we can. Although the Jews are the first victims, the tenets of Western culture and democracy are the next targets.

*In a similar vein, and according to Commentary, UCLA has engaged in blatant antisemitic hiring practices, which imply that they’re about to be hit by a huge lawsuit.

The latest and most illuminating example comes from UCLA, where a newly filed complaint alleges that the college Cultural Affairs Commission has in place a policy of anti-Jewish bias in its hiring process. Bella Brannon, editor of the Jewish student newspaper Ha’am, filed the petition with the Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC) Judicial Board earlier this week.

The crux of the allegation is that Alicia Verdugo, head of the Cultural Affairs Commission, told staffers not to hire Jewish applicants. Specifically, she told subordinates, “please do your research when you look at applicants” because “lots of zionists (sic) are applying.” However, the directive was not Israel-specific; applicants were being rejected after having identified themselves as Jews unrelated to anything regarding Israel or the war in Gaza. Finally, staffers were told that at an upcoming retreat a “no hire list”—that is, an anti-Jewish blacklist—would be shared.

According to Ha’am, “every student who indicated their Jewish identity in their applications for Cultural Affairs Commissioner (CAC) staff was rejected.” One rejected applicant, for example, answered a question on the application about an issue of importance by noting that “as a Jewish student at UCLA, it is imperative that I have the right to express my identity.” Another rejected applicant had mentioned Judaism when asked about attendance at the staff retreat, explaining that they are Sabbath observant.

A CAC hiring document obtained by Ha’am allegedly says: “We reserve the right to remove any staff member who dispels [they mean “espouses”] antiBlackness, colorism, racism, white supremacy, zionism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and any/all other hateful/bigoted ideologies.”

. . . Everyone knows what these activists mean when they say “Zionist.” Shops with signs that say “Zionists not welcome” are actually displaying signs that say “Jews not welcome”—and no one, but no one, is foolish enough to believe otherwise, no matter what they say.

Remarkably, college students and administrators are starting to give up on even trying to gaslight the public. If someone says “don’t hire this person because they keep Shabbat and therefore are a Zionist,” they are not making a political argument; they are explicitly expressing an anti-Semitic hiring policy.

If by now you don’t hear “antisemitic” when you read “anti-Zionist,” then you haven’t been paying attention.

*Finally, I suppose it’s appropriate that the Oxford Dictionaries (publisher of my favorite lexicon, the OED), have declared “brain rot” to be the word of the year (but it’s actually two words!):

Many of us have felt it, and now it’s official: “Brain rot” is the Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year.

Oxford University Press said Monday that the evocative phrase “gained new prominence in 2024,” with its frequency of use increasing 230% from the year before.

Oxford defines brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is daring Andrzej to give her orders. She’s a cat, after all.

A: Hili, When we are eating , cats must not sit on the table.
Hili: Say it again.
Ja: Hili, przy naszym jedzeniu kotom nie wolno siedzieć na stole.
Hili: Powiedz to jeszcze raz.

******************

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Cat Memes:

From Science Humor:

From Masih; another Iranian woman arrested for showing her hair not only continues to show it, but displays her midriff as well:

From Luana: Einat Wilf is an eloquent defender of Israel, but I don’t know what Trump can do that the IDF can’t!

Emma invents a new dish:

From my feed: a border collie herds the wrong animals. What if the ducklings don’t want to go in the puddle? And where is their mother?

From Malcolm; cats having a problem with water. They can almost get out without getting wet!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A Dutch girl murdered with cyanide gas upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T08:25:35.784Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a 350-year-old skull showing what smoking a clay pipe can do to your dentition:

Male skull showing wear pattern to teeth resulting from long-term pipe smoking, c.1660. As he clenched the pipe, the abrasive clay wore facets in the enamel of the teeth. Eventually these facets left holes in the bite. This skull was excavated from the Patuxent Point site, Calvert County, MD.

— Dr Lindsey Fitzharris (@drlindseyfitz.bsky.social) 2024-12-02T14:47:46.961Z

From Larry, the First Cat, with two following posts:

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me, a partridge in a pear tree.Ate it.

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T08:58:36.901Z

Larry its advent not Christmas.

— Bronwen (@bronwengrey.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T09:08:42.267Z

We had this discussion last year and being a cat Larry completely ignored everyone.

— Kim Marshall 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇪🇺 🇪🇸 (@kimmarshall.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T12:21:57.418Z

31 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The positioning of the coupons on the boxes of “Pick Me Ups” was absolutely 100% deliberate.

  2. We’re getting used to this kind of vicious antisemitism in the West, …

    Let’s be clear why this is happening in the UK. It is because the UK is undergoing mass immigration from Muslim countries at levels of many hundreds of thousands of people a year. The UK is now 8% Muslim and this number is rising rapidly. Most of this is from dysfunctional countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. The rate of migration is such that immigrants then mostly live in enclaves and retain most of the attitudes and culture of their dysfunctional former countries.

    According to UK government figures, this migration is a net drain on the UK economy. That is, while the average migrant from a European or other Western country pays more in tax than they receive in government spending, the average migrant from MENA countries (Middle East, North Africa) will cost the state far more over their lifetime than they pay in taxes.

    Most of this migration is legal (illegal migration in small boats across the channel is significant, but not nearly as high as legal migration), and it is deliberate government policy (not just under Labour, but also the deliberate policy of recent Conservative governments under Johnson and Sunak).

    With all the extra people (a million a year in recent years) median house prices are now 8.5 times median earnings (in the 1960s it was 4 times). In the South East it is now above 10 times. Young people literally cannot afford a house.

    The really baffling thing is why the government is doing this. The only answer given is that it “boosts the economy”. But while it does boost GDP (more people, more money changing hands => higher GDP), it does not increase GDP per capita, which is surely the more important metric. Instead, it reduces GDP/capita. And, if you need to spend twice as much on your house, you’re then vastly poorer in disposable income and standard of living, whatever the figure for headline GDP.

    As you might guess, you won’t find any discussion along these lines on the BBC or in most of the mainstream media. That discussion doesn’t get beyond “it boosts the economy!”.

    1. Here on Turtle Island we’re also experiencing the same effects of mass immigration (higher housing costs, lower GDP). Government decided to act – fewer legal immigrants or international students in 2025 – because the problems have become a federal election issue. Lots of knock-on effects: tens of thousands of international students are making asylum claims to stay in Canada when their study permits expire, because for many of them it was never about education & training and it was always about just staying in Canada (and who wouldn’t want to stay?). And fewer study permits will leave another $20M hole in my university’s budget in 2025. That’s smaller than last year’s $50M gap, but we’ve already let go a lot of employees (to find the $50M) so not clear who will be let go next (to find another $20M). Leadership does not have a plan to wean ourselves off our dependence on international student fees.

    2. A political party in Canada that is usually smeared as “far-right” correctly diagnosed this problem at least three elections ago. As in the UK, mass immigration has enjoyed support from both parties that have formed Governments here with little public comment until recently. The usual rationale is that since native-born Canadians, including children born here to immigrants!, aren’t having enough children to provide workers to look after the retired, therefore every year we have to import enough people of working age to keep the treadmill going. But those immigrants age into dependency themselves, and bring their aged parents over, too. So every year we need more immigrants than the year before. This has the features of exponential growth, where the rate of rise of the immigrant population is proportional to the existing population. Which is why the problem in the public consciousness was gradual, then sudden. And it’s not going to stop.

      Our immigrants are selected for their likely success, as judged by bureaucrats, in finding jobs, any jobs. They aren’t on average particularly well-qualified, and the ones that are leak into the U.S. (Professions certified in other countries can’t work in Canada. There are even provincial turf barriers to migration.). This drags down per capita GDP, even if, on the whole, our immigrant class works, behaves itself, and Muslims & Khalistan zealots excepted, is not executively radicalized. It is scary the legions of brown people (not just Arabs) who turn out for pro-Hamas demonstrations, though, shouting in unaccented English.

      Canada seems to be accepting a lower per-capita GDP — it will finance expensive public service demands with deficit spending, not taxes — as the cost of having enough people of working age to provide the physical services old people will need. Since children of immigrants don’t want to do immigrant labour, again you need a steady supply of unskilled workers coming in to do it.

      The political party that first called attention to this is so far outside the Overton Window here that it has never elected an MP to Parliament, not even its leader. (Even the Greens have managed to get their leader elected on occasion.) But whatever their other faults (exaggerated out of context by the media) might be, they nailed it. Too late, they are seen to be correct.

      1. The situation is terrible in Victoria, BC. Not only are housing prices unaffordable many young people can’t even afford rent and are forced to stay with parents.

        I don’t think Trudeau anticipated this (not too bright). Now he’s detested.

      2. I’m just getting caught up and reading this on Wednesday (12/04). I wasn’t aware of the Khalistani issue in Canada. I missed that whole saga. One more damn problem amongst many.

  3. I heard there was a dart board with a bunch of years on it, and Biden’s best two out of three was 2013 but they rounded up for good measure.

  4. Biden may still be filled with spite over how he was pushed aside by Democratic leadership. His behavior lately screams “screw you…I’m going to look after myself and my own…”

  5. Pingback: Toasty Tuesday – Disaffected Musings – Refpropos.

    1. Agree completely. The media pearl-clutching over Biden’s pardon is too much for me. Meanwhile, Trump is openly planning to fire the current FBI director and install his own minion promising to turn it into a gestapo and the media yawns. I have grown extremely tired of Democrats being held to a different standard than Republicans over and over and over again. Maybe I’ll begin to worry about Biden’s legacy when he refuses to accept his loss and steals boxes of classified documents on the way out.

      1. I cannot understand this argument.
        First off, President Biden repeated, as did his press secretary, that he would not pardon Hunter. It has come out that he’s been planning to do this for several months at least, so he and KJP have been blatantly lying. But we already knew that he was a serial liar, so no real surprise there.
        However, what is wrong with being held to a higher standard? I voted for Biden over Trump specifically because I expected the Democrats to hold themselves to a higher standard than Trump. By this logic, the Republicans should now eliminate the filibuster and stack the Supreme Court with friendlies because the Democrats proposed to do it, so why should they be held to a higher standard? If ethics don’t matter, then the whole argument that Trump is fascist is both moot and also it’s no problem if the next D president decides to enact authoritarian policies, because why should they be held to a higher standard?

        Regarding your last point, Biden did have boxes of classified documents at his home. According to the special counsel’s report, “There were documents marked classified regarding military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s entries about national security and foreign policy matters “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-special-counsel-report-handling-classified-documents/

      2. Good Morning,

        Would you mind sending links to articles, etc. from credible, unbiased sources regarding the promise to turn the FBI into the Gestapo?

        Thanks.

          1. Thanks for the quote and the link; that said, IF the election was rigged (and I have NO reason to believe that), I think that the State would be well within its right to vigorously pursue the guilty, regardless of whether Red or Blue.

            BTW, I responded to the original comment as it has lately been en vouge to compare those on the Right in the U.S. to various persons (e.g., Hitler) and aspects (e.g., the Gestapo) of Nazi Germany which, well, I find absurd.

            That’s all I will say today about this topic.

      3. What does it mean when someone says “[Insert outrageous event] was too much for me.”? Did it mean he died or was stricken into silence? (Obviously not, here.) Did it precipitate some catastrophic failure like a typhoon’s waves breaking a ship’s bow off, or homicide? Is so, the reference tells us only about the speaker’s own (inadequate) resilience, and not much about the event itself.

        I could ask the same of what it means to be “so tired” of something. Sounds like everyone needs to just buck up a bit. Do calisthenics in the morning or something. Not everything needs to be described in terms of how it affects oneself. It’s not healthy.

  7. UCLA and some of the other universities should just hang a sign up on their doors to say “Restricted”.

  8. The noteworthy aspect of the Hunter Biden pardon was that he was pardoned and sheltered from federal criminal repercussion from any of his behaviors or actions from and after January 2014 up to today…a pardon more comprehensive than any other issued in our national history, with the sole exception of Ford’s pardon of Nixon. The date is relevant in that it was just before a crack-addled Hunter started raking in mega-dollars as a “director” of a Ukranian oil company….the Ukraine being within Vice-president Biden’s policy brief in the White House in those days. So the focus on Hunter’s impending sentencing seems almost a smoke screen…the real prize was insulating Hunter from investigation and charges for the tens of millions he and other Biden family members….possibly even Biden himself….raked in from China, Ukraine, and friends and enemies of the US. But the investigation will still ensue, now that Hunter has lost his privilege against self-incrimination. As an aside, I’d give even money that James Biden also gets pardoned.

    1. +1 re the almost unprecedented scope of the pardon; -0.5 re Burisma Holdings and other alleged financial improprieties.

  9. Hmmm. Biden’s pardon. I can certainly understand Biden’s anguish at the prospect of his son spending time in prison. On the other hand, he could have gotten his son off the hook much earlier if he had wanted. But doing so would have surrendered the high ground to the Republicans, in that pardoning Hunter Biden earlier would have allowed the Republicans to claim—with some validity—that Biden, too, was using the Justice Department for his own aims. The troubling implication, of course, is that Biden hung his own son out to twist in the wind until the very last moment when he issued the pardon.

    Regarding the Oxford “debate,” I have nothing to add other than it underscores the antisemitism that pervades even advanced nations.

    The UCLA hiring practices will end up in court and will cost the University a great deal of money. That’s really the only thing that will stop this kind of behavior. Appealing to what’s morally right is a waste of time.

    So sad to see the vital image of Rosalina Elisabeth Bloemist in her final hours. She would have been a 91-year-old great-grandmother today. Such a terrible loss. And the ideology that killed Bloemist seems to thrive still in Amsterdam.

  11. Presidential pardons. The most idiotic take I have heard from politicians and the media is that “Donald Trump pardoned the father of his son-in-law!!!” Um, yeah, years after the man had spent two years in prison for his crimes.

    On a slightly more serious note. RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard: refugees from the populist left. Elon Musk and others of the financial class: refugees from the center left. Joe Rogan and less prominent podcasters: refugees from the Bernie Sanders left. Millions of minority voters: refugees from the working-class left. Trump himself: cultural left. Many of the commenters here: still on the left but, perhaps, privately hopeful, and glad that some of the Democratic Party excess and insanity of the last several years might now end. It is unfortunate that Donald Trump is the man that he is. Were he less repulsive in some of his actions and demeanor, we might be celebrating this curious blend of former political adversaries, world views, class interests, and personalities.

    1. Great points Doug!
      I’m not a Trump fan but I’m not fearful or unhappy with the election results.

      Re: your last point, I think that no matter what he’d still be demonized by the Left. As examples, the demonization of the former left icons you mention. If they can’t tar them as Nazis, then they’re Russian Assets or dangerous in some other way.

      I do enjoy this site. I really hate it when people adopt a party line because of the opinion given to them by the media for that party, whether it’s Democrats proclaiming that men who dress in women’s clothes are truly women, or free-market Republicans saying that tariffs are actually a good thing.

    2. “…we might be celebrating this curious blend of former political adversaries, world views, class interests, and personalities”

      I couldn’t agree more and I am publicly hopeful.

  12. The sheep dog is not herding the ducks of his own volition. If you listen you can hear the whistles of the herder directing him/her. I just love watching muster dogs!

    1. My second dog was half border collie and he crouched down like that and appeared to be stalking anything we approached that he’d not seen before. I had no idea what he was doing at first. He did it to parked motorcycles, electric fans, all sorts of random objects. It was funny, except he sometimes did it to other dog walkers and it frightened them. He was very gentle, though—Not at all aggressive. He was the smartest and overall best dog I’ve ever had.

      1. I have seen weeks-old border collie and kelpie puppies do that. It’s in their genes! And yes, so intelligent. You were lucky to have one. Compliments of the season.

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