Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads on the news wires that the Social Democrats of Germany are looking to strip (posthumously to be sure) Adolf Hitler of his German Citizenship.

According to the piece the leadership of the SDP in Brunswick is looking to undo that which was done in 1932. According to the piece:

The Austrian-born Hitler gave up his Austrian citizenship in 1925 and only obtained German nationality when Nazi officials in Braunschweig (Brunswick) secured a position for him as a civil servant in the local administration in late February 1932.

As a civil servant, Hitler was automatically granted German citizenship, which allowed him to stand for election as president of the German Reich the following month.

You know, your Maximum Leader seems to remember reading this in Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler. (That book is, by the way, a fine biography of Hitler if you are looking for one. In all honesty however, it is the only biography your Maximum Leader has ever read about Hitler.)

Apprently the people of Brunswick are stigmatized by their actions, and feel this is an important step towards eliminating this stigma. Your Maximum Leader says if it makes the people of Brunswick feel better, well then by all means go ahead and strip Hitler of his German citizenship. Your Maximum Leader is sure that in the deepest, darkest pits of hell Satan will deliver the message to the evil man himself.

Frankly… Your Maximum Leader has never been sure why these sorts of moves are required. It is not like there is anyone who was involved in the decision to make Hitler a civil servant is alive today. Those people, it could be argued, might be reasonably asked for an apology. But in this case it is sort of like asking for an apology for something you didn’t do… Like asking your state legislature to apologize for slavery. Although no person alive in your state was a slave or slave owner. One shouldn’t feel guilt for something one didn’t do.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader knows that there are a good number of his readers out there who are excellent cooks. That being said, this will be a wonderful opportunity to test out the comments…

Your Maximum Leader just bought his esteemed mother-in-law some Marmite. At first your Maximum Leader didn’t ask questions. But eventually he just had to know, why did she want Marmite?

Your Maximum Leader was told that it was an ingredient in an “English gravy.” Now, your Maximum Leader will likely find out tomorrow or Thursday what the exact ingredient list is for this “English gravy.” But, right now he is in the dark. He’s searched a few cookbooks he owns, and even checked a cooking web site or two looking for a Marmite gravy recipe. No luck.

Now he asks his loyal readers… Have any of you heard of a gravy made using Marmite in any quantity? Feel free to comment.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is always out there looking for the interesting news story to share with you all. In the category of “man bites dog” there is this headline from the Reuters news wire: Whale kills would be rescuer.

Apparently a “stray” Sperm Whale capsized a small fishing boat and one of the fishermen was drowned. Two other fishermen were rescued.

Now, your Maximum Leader doesn’t want to make fun of a poor fisherman’s death. Indeed, he has great respect for those who make their living on the sea. But really, wasn’t Moby Dick a Sperm Whale? Don’t we know by now that Sperm Whales have a taste for human blood? Aren’t old japanese fishermen really just sushi for Sperm Whales?

Lesson to you all. Don’t try to “guide” a “stray” Sperm Whale to safety. Kill it. Kill it before it kills you, or explodes.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader thought he took this quiz before. Now that his archives are back on-line he should try and search for this quiz… But your Maximum Leader is lazy and not going to do that.

Here is the quiz…

Many thanks to GeekLethal for the link.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is just playing around with his new Wordpress installation. Sexy Sadie and Phin are the greatest for doing all the work they have behind the scenes to keep making Naked Villainy work. Your Maximum Leader really appreciates everything they are doing to help him. He knows it has been a longer and more difficult process than either anticipated. In part the difficulty has been caused by your Maximum Leader sticking with his existing hosting company. He must extend some special thanks to Sadie. She did so much work on the site. Some of it quite frustrating. (At one point your Maximum Leader wondered if she would ever want to speak to him again…) Many thanks Sadie. I appreciate your help very much.

Carry on.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader should know that if you start to comment on the American Civil War, you will elicit passionate responses from somebody. Since comments on this blog are still defunct, one must leave it to your blog-friends to comment on their blogs.

Your Maximum Leader’s post on George Henry Thomas (Old Slow Trot), elicited a very thoughtful response from our good friend Buckethead. Go now and read his post. More importantly… Read some of the comments as well. It looks as though it is your Maximum Leader and GeekLethal on one side, and Buckethead and the esteemed Steven Den Beste on the other.

That is a fair amount of firepower on the other side… But you know, your Maximum Leader is… well… a Maximum Leader. So, taking Buckethead’s advice, one doesn’t think we’ll leave it up to the statisticans and odds-makers, but might debate this one out.

More to come as your Maximum Leader has time to write a cogent response…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was wasting time on You Tube and found this…

Okay… Perhaps the title of “Weaponizing a Big-Arsed Bunny” was the best part. But it did make your Maximum Leader laugh.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just loves seeing things flying through the air. Especially if those things flying through the air are on fire.

In this vein, your Maximum Leader presents: Rich English Guy and his Trebuchet.

Your Maximum Leader wonders if the gun he used to “make a cable hole” in the car was a Purdey. He wouldn’t be surprised if it were.

Damn… Your Maximum Leader would love to have a Purdey side by side. Failing to get one of those, a Holland and Holland would do.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was looking through some books that he has on the shelf. While standing regarding the volumes, he recalled a small picture book that his friend, the Air Marshal’s father, owns. It is called Ustinov’s Diplomats. It is a small paperback containing a single photo on each page. Each photo is of Peter Ustinov doing an imitation of a particular UN Diplomat. There are no costumes. It is just Ustinov doing a different facial expression. Just thinking about it makes your Maximum Leader smile.

Thinking on that, he thought he’d share these little You Tube pieces with you.

First, from the Muppet Show:

And another clip:

Your Maximum Leader always liked Ustinov.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader must thank Misspent for turning him on to this movie. When it comes out your Maximum Leader will definately go and see it…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will make a confession. In front of you all he will admit that he hasn’t read his loyal minion Bill’s web site in about a week. He could make all sorts of excuses for this, but there aren’t any really. Normally he reads the blogs of all his “Loyal Minions” daily… Sorry Bill…

That apology said, your Maximum Leader did want to nitpick on something Bill wrote just recently. Bill wrote a thoughtful and lengthly exposition on suicide recently. There is a lot there to comment upon. Especially since your Maximum Leader disagrees with a number of Bill’s conclusions. But your Maximum Leader will focus on one part of Bill’s essay in this post.

Bill writes:

The logic is “Thou shalt not kill” and if one kills oneself, it is sinful. But this is a very absolute proscription. It requires that a person in agony beyond any normal comprehension [it does exist, I’ve been there, bk] with no hope of alleviation must continue to suffer until they die without outside intervention. To take this position and blame God for it is to make God a partner to torture. This is totally incompatible with a benevolent God. However, if God cannot or will not violate the laws of nature to relieve this suffering which must grate against the omnibenevolent side of His nature, then He becomes by default a party to torture. In such a conflict, brought on by the very nature of the omnipotent God, the choice to end one’s life voluntarily seems hardly to be a sin, but rather the resolution of a difficult problem. By my reasoning, suicide under such circumstances is not a sin.

Your Maximum Leader will disagree with this particular passage - but perhaps not for the reason one mght think.

Why do we believe in an omnibenevolent God? Bill’s point above only holds true if one accepts that God is omnibenevolent. Why do we suppose that He is?

Excursus: It is funny that your Maximum Leader should focus on this point. He has an ongoing discussion with a particularly devout friend of his that always boils down to this point. If that friend is reading this (which is doubtful) take heed… All the stuff that follows is old-hat to you.

Your Maximum Leader for many years was caught up in the problem of evil. He looked at, accepted, then rejected, many answers to the problem of theodicy. Eventually he came to think that evil exists because God Himself allows it to exist. There is suffering, intractable pain, disasters, and all other ills because God allows them to exist.

One can try to construct the various arguments to try and preserve the concept of an omnibenevolent God; but at some point - as Bill points out - you always make God complicit in some “unsavory” proposistions. Most devout people have issues with making God complicit in suffering. But where do we stand if we accept God’s acceptance of evil and suffering?

Sometime it may be much easier to accept that God is beyond our poor human ability to define. Our attempts to define Him are nothing but limitations on God’s nature, limitations we impose on Him in an attempt to understand Him. But God is ultimately beyond our understanding. His purpose in setting about creating everything is beyond our understanding. Perhaps the existance of evil and suffering is also beyond our understanding.

To get this back to Bill’s points on suicide… As harsh as it is to say, perhaps God has a purpose to our suffering. A purpose which is not for us to understand.

Just something to think on.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, while normally loathe to criticize the work of juries in criminal cases, feels that the jury in the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial has really screwed the proverbial pooch by handing down guilty verdicts against Libby.

Your Maximum Leader followed the case as closely as one could by reading the papers and news accounts. He doesn’t see, from what he knows, how one could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Libby should have been convicted of the 4 counts.

Being a reasonable man, your Maximum Leader is willing to concede a few points to those of you who might be on the other side of this issue. First off, he read the accounts and wasn’t in the courtroom. That is a big deal. As it the fact that your Maximum Leader wasn’t in a jury room and susceptible to the “group-think” that sometimes occurs in a jury room. It is possible that your Maximum Leader’s singular understanding of the case is somewhat different than that of the jurors.

Your Maximum Leader also feels as though the jury’s instructions from the judge may not have been all that good. The various questions that came up from the jurors at various times seemed to indicated that the instructions were not particularly good. Your Maximum Leader seems to remember reading something about the instructions somewhere. But he can’t find anything to link you to…

Your Maximum Leader caught a short bit of the one juror’s Q & A session with the press on the steps of the courthouse. (Excursus: A practice that your Maximum Leader feels should not be allowed. But… Most disagree on this point.) During what he saw there were more than a few times when the juror claimed that he and his fellow jurors wondered why they were seeing Libby and not someone else in front of them. That raised the hairs on the back of your Maximum Leader’s neck.

The reason that Libby was the only person brought to trial in the case was the fact that he was the only person the Special Prosecutor thought he could conict of anything.

With all of the resources (unlimited resources in fact) and time (unlimited time in fact) that Patrick Fitzgerald had at his disposal a person could expect to see more indictments and trials. Unless of course, no crimes were commited. Why was no one charged with the acutal “leaking” of Valerie Plame’s identity? Your Maximum Leader posits it is because there was no crime.

After a Special Prosecutor spends the people’s money on investigations and grand juries, the Special Prosecutor has to charge someone with something. But what if there is no crime? In that case, the Prosecutor reviews what he has and decides to find something that he can convict someone of doing. That way the money and time isn’t “wasted” on “nothing.” Supporters of Special Prosecutors can look back and say that someone was punished and we can all pretend to be happy for justice being done.

Only justice isn’t done and we shouldn’t be happy. People should be outraged that the Office of the Special Prosecutor exists. They should be outraged that they have little oversight and unlimited resources. They should be distressed when they learn that the only prosecutions will be for items tangentially related to the putative reasons behind the appointment of a Special Prosecutor in the first place. And people should lament when someone will be deprived of their liberty as a result of the whole process.

The jury in this case was right to wonder why they were in the deliberation room trying to determine if Lewis Libby conspired to obstruct justice or perjured himself and not trying to decide who leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the press. Perhaps what they should have thought - or at least one of them should have thought - was is Patrick Fitzgerald just trying to get a conviction so his investigation doesn’t seem like a waste. Then they should have moved to acquit.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been following the on-going postings about the Harper v Poway Unified School District case on the Volokh Conspiracy for a few days now.

Your Maximum Leader was going to blog a little on his opinions on the matters at hand. But then realized that most of what he would say had already been said (with much greater authority and expertise) by Eugene Volokh. Here is a page with all the related posts together on one page.

Allow your Maximum Leader to go on record and say that of the many dangerous situations we as Americans find ourselves concerning our liberties; the tiny encroachments of our freedom of speech are among the most dangerous. When the First Amendment ceases to be neutral we all have much to fear.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader still wants for good material. He had thought about writing about Ann Coulter, but she tires your Maximum Leader now. There was a time (around 2001) when your Maximum Leader found her amusing - and even somewhat sexy. But as time dragged on, Ann became more tiresome. He cannot now motivate himself to type more than a few sentences about her.

So… He has a few ideas for a post ruminating about in his wee little brain. We’ll see if he has the time and talent required to flesh out his ideas…

Speaking of fleshing out… Thanks to your Maximum Leader’s dear friend the Air Marshall, we have a great little You Tube find…

Loyal readers, your Maximum Leader presents to you, Sir Mix A Lot’s magnum opus “Baby Got Back” in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The lyrics are not exactly safe for work (depending on your workplace). So you may want to listen with headphones.

And, lest you forget, there is also a page with Sir Mix A Lot’s opus translated into Latin. For the real old-school amongst you all.

Your Maximum Leader continues to do what he can to expose his erudite and cultured readers to as much vile anti-culture as possible…

Carry on.