Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader must thank the many readers who commented on the Vermont Secession posts. Your Maximum Leader had no idea that there were so many hotbeds of secession around the nation. Although, to be honest, most of these movements are people wanting to create their own new state out of a portion of their old state (the Ole West Virginia/Virginia situation). Very few, including some secessionists in Texas and the aforementioned Vermont, actually seem to want out of the United States.

Well… Your Maximum Leader, as he’s stated before, will not let Vermont go peacefully. He’ll fight to keep Vermont in the Union. He’ll fight to maintain the Northeast Dairy Compact. Heck, we might need those Vermont dairy farmers to help keep the price of milk down (provided we could let market forces work outside of the Northeast Dairy Compact). Have you noticed food prices recently? Your Maximum Leader has. He spend $1.99 on a gallon of milk about three months ago. Today, he had to buy a gallon of milk (1% in case you care) and it was $2.95. Insanity!

The people at the Christian Science Monitor (and Yahoo News) have also noticed this price spike in food. In case you are too lazy to clicky on the linky:

The reason people are smarting: Inflation in grocery aisles is up by more in the first six months of 2007 than in all of 2006. That means food costs are on track for the biggest annual percentage hike since 1980, according to the Labor Department. The anticipated 7.5 percent increase would readily outflank the 2.6 percent core inflation rate to date, which excludes food and energy. It’s across every grocery aisle, too, from burgers to bagels, from duck to dumpling.

Added to sticker shock at the gas pump, high food prices, especially for meat, are forcing consumers to scrimp, coupon-clip, and ponder the possibilities of a deep freeze to take advantage of discounts, says Boyd Brady, an extension agent at Auburn University in Alabama.

“There’s a … combination of higher demand, natural disasters, higher energy prices – just a myriad of factors driving what price increases we’re seeing across the food sector,” says Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development in Ames, Iowa.

The chief culprit is corn, namely No. 2 feed corn, the staple of the breadbasket. In answer to President Bush’s call for greater oil independence, the amount of feed corn distilled into ethanol is expected to double in the next five to six years. Distillation is already sucking up 18 percent of the total crop. The ethanol gambit, in turn, is sending corn prices to historic levels – topping $4 per bushel earlier this year, and remaining high. All of this trickles down to the boards at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, affecting the price of everything from sirloin to eggs (which are up, by the way, 18.6 percent across the nation).

In a welcome response, US farmers told the government in April they plan a record-breaking 93-million-acre corn crop, though its true size won’t be known until the end of June. But corn alone does not explain the number of products that have become more expensive of late.

Facing higher costs at the farm and shareholder pressure to maintain profits, companies such as Tyson Chicken and Coca-Cola are raising prices. The fact that fuel prices remain relatively high hasn’t helped either, allowing no break in the cost of transporting perishable goods.

For fruit and vegetable growers, labor shortages are also a factor. A $2 cantaloupe sold for $3 at the South Carolina Farmer’s Market in Greenville recently, largely because of labor woes, says Thompson Smith of the South Carolina Farm Bureau. Winter cold snaps and hard freezes in California and the Southeast have made peaches, apples, and oranges pricier.

In the heartland, low yields on winter wheat mean cookies and baguettes are more expensive. Meat costs are up by 15 percent in some regions, in part because of drought that, as in Alabama, caused a cattle sell-off. Milk prices are up in part because of a global shortage, with milk exporters such as New Zealand unable to add capacity and Australia enduring a debilitating drought, even as demand rises in Europe, China, and India.

Damn those people in Europe and China and India. Drinkin’ our friggin milk! Don’t they have clean drinking water over there? Oh… Yeah…

Anyho…

Although your Maximum Leader isn’t sure how a $2 cantaloupe is actually a $3 dollar cantaloupe (did some important information get edited out of that line?), he does see the price increases with frightening regularity. One wonders if we are going to see record price increases on victuals this year does that mean that farm subsidies will be lower? After all, some of these record prices must get to a farmer’s pocketbook…

Your Maximum Leader was joking there… He knows that subsidies aren’t changing… (Thanks Congress!)

Anyho… Moving back to the first point of this post… With record dairy prices coming and demand growing, we must keep Vermont in the Union. Damn those Vermalcontents, Your Maximum Leader will go up there and secure those dairy farms and keep the milk and cheese flowing. He’ll make sure that those cows are fed and milked at gunpoint if need be.

By the way… For those of you wondering what your Maximum Leader’s Colonel-in-Chief outfits might look like… We have a few styles to choose from… Here we go:

Your Maximum Leader in the style of the Virginia Militia (Colonial Era):

Your Maximum Leader in the style of British Colonial officer:

And your Maximum Leader in the style of a 1930s dictator (a la Ian McKellan’s Richard III):

You can take your choice as to which one you like best… Your Maximum Leader will make sure to take them all with him on campaign…

Watch out Vermoonbats! Your Maximum Leader’s got your number!

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is sure that some of you out there are wondering “Hey! When will my Maximum Leader post something?” Well, all your dreams are coming true right now… New content on Naked Villainy…

Your Maximum Leader had lots of stuff he was going to try and post last night, but he did not blog because of a powerful thunderstorm. Call him crazy, but after losing a TV to a lightining-related power surge (through a surge protector by the way) he doesn’t turn on the computer during bad thunderstorms. (In fact, he unplugs TVs and computers from the wall… Interesting tidbit there…)

Anyho…

Your Maximum Leader does appreciate what the good people at UVA are doing to help our understanding of what ancient Rome looked like. Perhaps you saw the piece which went in part:

“Rome Reborn” was unveiled on Monday in a first release showing the city at its peak in 320 AD, under the Emperor Constantine when it had grown to a million inhabitants.

Brainchild of the University of Virginia’s Bernard Frischer, Rome Reborn (www.romereborn.virginia.edu) will eventually show its evolution from Bronze Age hut settlements to the Sack of Rome in the 5th century AD and the devastating Gothic Wars.

Reproduced for tourists on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre to be opened near the Colosseum, Frischer says his model “will prepare them for their visit to the Colosseum, the Forum, the imperial palaces on the Palatine, so that they can understand the ruins a lot better.”

“We can take people under the Colosseum and show them how the elevators worked to bring the animals up from underground chambers for the animal hunts they held,” he said, referring to the great Roman amphitheatre inaugurated by Titus in 80 AD.

Your Maximum Leader has looked over some of the images. Very cool. The navigation interface on the website could use a little work, but all in all it is very interesting.

Now if only they could add a “sounds and smells” track to the virtural tour to give people a real flavor of what ancient Rome was like…

Carry on.

Joe was tired of losing money to the stranger. The stranger seemed clever. Too clever by half.

“Listen feller,” Joe stated, “I’m of a mind to think you’re cheatin’.”

The stranger smiled wide. “My dear boy, I’m not cheating. I am using both of my brains to figure you out.”

“Both yer brains?”

“Yes, the one I was born with, and the other I stole from an itinerant I killed back in ‘68. My two brains are quite superior to your one.”

Joe thought about it. Yup. Two brains would ’splain everything.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has not been himself for the past few days. He has been rather weary and sometimes short tempered with people. He thinks he lost it a little bit last night.

EDITIED OUT BY YOUR MAXIMUM LEADER

Well, loyal readers… Your Maximum Leader wrote a rather lengthy post describing how and why he “lost it” last night. But after hitting the publish button, he decided he didn’t want to be that candid. So he is editing himself.

Let it suffice to say that your Maximum Leader’s not in a great mood. He’ll probably just take the weekend off from thoughts of posting.

Have a good one…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader loves japanese cuisine. He wishes there was a good japanese place here in his area. Alas, the best one is a long way away…

Anyhow… A long time ago your Maximum Leader lived in a place with one good japanese restaurant. And that place would do Bento Boxes for lunch for $10.99. He would treat himself from time to time…

If you are interested in bento boxes, you should check out this piece in the Washington Post today about the healthy lunchtime alternative a Bento Box represents…

All this talk of Bento Boxes makes your Maximum Leader hungry… He will get some lunch now…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader must admit that he doesn’t read Michael Yon as much as he would like. It is hard to keep up with all the things out there that one might want to read. Information overload is really a problem of the “information age” afterall…

Anyhoo…

If you haven’t read Michael Yon’s latest about his travels with the Queen’s Royal Lancers in Iraq, you ought to. It is excellent. Indeed, the link above takes you to the first published part of his work. This is part 1 of 4.

Excerpt:

The Queen’s Royal Lancers have been living out in the desert for about six months, like nomads moving from place to place, sleeping under the stars, getting much of their resupply of food and water by nighttime parachute drop as they patrol the Iran-Iraq border. They were living out there, as some officers had told me, in true Lawrence of Arabia style, wearing shamals, sometimes taking camel rides when Bedouins would wonder through their camps with great herds of camels. Some soldiers would go for weeks without bathing, while others would wash-down with a bottle or two of water. Water is strictly rationed.

LTC Nixon-Eckersall would say that their job was to melt away into the desert, providing the eyes and ears that monitor the border. They’d apparently done their job well. I had been on many patrols with American forces along the Iranian border, but had no idea that Brits were out on desert safari. Although there had been some fighting, the Queen’s Royal Lancers had not lost a single soldier to combat during this tour.

Read the rest.

And one more thing… God bless the all the soliders in Iraq.

Carry on.

The Maximum Leader scoffs at the 13% of Vermonters who wish to secede.

I think they could do it (provided they can grow the 13% to 51% and win control of the state legislature).

First of all, there wouldn’t be a war. Nasty lawsuits maybe, but no one is going to volunteer to bayonet the Vermontians (Vermonters? Vermontites? Vermin?). The Civil War was fueled by a moral, religious, passionate issue. Folks like my ancestors were willing to march through Georgia to end slavery.

Other than the Maximum Leader, who among our readers is going to kill to keep Vermont part of the Northeast Dairy Pact?

Secondly, Vermont can assure that the rest of the states let them go peacefully. They can simply ramp up the gay marriage and then threaten to sue any state that denies the validity of Vermont marriage under the “Full Faith and Credit” portion of the Constitution. Rather than waiting for an aggrieved couple with standing to work the non-recognition of their marriage through the appeals process, Vermont could sue another state - say, Virginia - for impeding contracts made in Vermont. A state vs. state suit would go directly to the Supreme Court. And win.

So Vermont can simply argue: Let us go our way OR we force gay marriage down everyone’s throats. The Republican party would shower them with nice parting gifts.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader hasn’t visited Vermont in years. It is probably a decade or more in fact. The last time he went to Vermont it was, explicitly, to go to the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream factory and gorge himself. (That mission was accomplished, by the way.)

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t pay too close attention to what is going on in Vermont, to be honest. So imagine his surprise when he reads that 13% of Vermonters (Vermonsters?) are in favor of seceding from the Union. Really now… Your Maximum Leader had no idea that 13% of Vermonters are certifiably insane. He knows that Vermont is the home of some people that he might charitably describe as “liberal wackos” (a term your Maximum Leader employs only sparingly); but frankly what state doesn’t have its share of wackos (liberal or otherwise).

Of all the questions posed throughout history, or at least the history of our great republic, your Maximum Leader would have thought that the question of secession was about as moot as you could get. There was a war faught (and in the minds of some still being faught) on the whole secession issue. As your Maximum Leader recalls, it didn’t turn out too well for those who thought that the United States of America was a voluntary association.

So… It seems as though the Vermont secession movement is organized and has manifestos… According to the article:

Supporters have published a “Green Mountain Manifesto” subtitled “Why and How Tiny Vermont Might Help Save America From Itself by Seceding from the Union.”

In 2005, about 300 people turned out for a secession convention in the Statehouse, and plans for a second one are in the works. A poll this year by the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies found that 13 percent of those surveyed support secession, up from 8 percent a year before.

“The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable — it’s too big, it’s too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens,” said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.

“We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war,” Williams said. “If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what’s left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire.”

If you were sitting near your Maximum Leader now you would hear him crying out “cukkoo!” Sweet mother! What the hell is going on up in the Green Mountain State? Honestly now, are the people favoring secession going to reconstitute the Green Mountain Boys (and Gyrlz) and take up arms to defend themeselves against the fraud-loving, corporately-corrupt, militarists who until recently were their countrymen? Your Maximum Leader would like to see that. Hell, your Maximum Leader would raise a group of Virginia Volunteers (he would be Colonel-in-Chief) and march on up and retake Vermont on behalf of the United States. He would be happy to liberate the Ben and Jerry’s plant…

If he couldn’t liberate the Ben and Jerry’s plant, he would be happy to secure the grave of Calvin Coolidge for the US… Sherman had his march to the sea. Your Maximum Leader would have his march to Plymouth, Vermont. Be warned! It would be just as bloody…

Watch out Vermont… We’re not gonna let you go peacefully.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader knows a few techie types who will be rushing out on June 29th to get themselves a new iPhone.

Your Maximum Leader will not be one of them.

He just go himself a new Motorola Razr. He is replacing the first generation Razr he got when they first came out. Which brings him to a little rant…

Your Maximum Leader’s old Razr worked just fine. He got a software upgrade on it and everything just seemed to be peachy with it. Then it started getting to the point where his Razr’s battery wouldn’t hold a charge. He could hardly get 20 minutes of talk out of his cell phone on a full charge.

Now… Please know that your Maximum Leader fully understands how and why batteries (rechargeable batteries) wear out. He knows it happens. And he wasn’t surprised that his Razr’s battery started to give up the proverbial ghost after 2.5 years of heavy use.

The part that pisses off your Maximum Leader was that when he went to AT&T (or Cingular - or whatever synergistic name they happen to have now…) to buy a new battery he was informed that a replacement battery was $55. He was also informed that with a 2 year service commitment a brand new Razr (that would get some sort of TV streaming stuff) was only $50.

Talk about a waste. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t consider himself an “environmentalist” but he knows that making and disposing of batteries is about a dirty a business as you can have. So it seems particularly egreigous that the phone makers and resellers would price it out so that new phones are “more economical” than new batteries. It seems very wrong on one level.

At any rate… Your Maximum Leader will not be getting an iPhone… He’s going to be enjoying his Razr until the battery can’t hold a charge…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is not a fan of the Patriot Act as long-time readers know. His opposition to the Patriot Act is based largely in the fact that it was hardly debated and rushed through Congress to President Bush’s desk. While many provisions of the Patriot Act are fine, there are many others that just have not been well thought out.

As a matter of course, your Maximum Leader would prefer the status quo to change. (Isn’t that the heart of conservatism?) In the case of far reaching legislation, he feels that “rushing a deal through” means that the law will be a bad one.

And so he comes to the new Immigration Bill before the Congress…

Your Maximum Leader has tried to read the bill. (Which the Heritage Foundation has graciously posted.) He really has. He’s gotten pretty far along, but hasn’t finished the job. Allow him to say… The bill is a mess. One can tell that this is the worst kind of political compromise. He says the worst kind of political compromise because it seems just thrown together. It is like some of the negotiating entities (presumably various Senators and Administration officials) just started throwing things in that everyone seemed to agree on.

All in all this bill would need months of work and careful review to be made more thoughtful and workable. But, we live in an age where careful thought and consideration to the bill will not be given in the first place. And it now appears as though the Senate and the White House are hell-bent for leather to pass this bill in more or less its current form.

So, your Maximum Leader has to oppose its passage. He would prefer that no immigration “reform” bill be passed than to pass a bill that no one understands, or will have time to attempt to understand.

Your Maximum Leader sees that many of his own fellow-travelers are opposed to the bill for various reasons. They might oppose family reunification. They might oppose the proposed “point system” used in evaluating visa status. They might oppose that the border will not be fortified. These are all legitimate reasons to oppose the bill. On the other side, many liberals and Democrats are opposed to the bill because it does strengthen the border. They oppose the bill because it requires fines to be paid by illegals wanting to change their status. They oppose the bill because it doesn’t go “far enough” for them.

Whatever the reasons for opposition, they are all legitimate concerns. Your Maximum Leader will continue to make his standard points on this issue…

1) Until we can secure our borders (Canada included) none of this matters at all. And by securing our borders your Maximum Leader means that we have a comprehensive and workable strategy to detect and indentify people crossing into and out of the United States. He doesn’t anticipate that securing the borders will “get” everyone trying to enter the US. But it needs to get “most” of the people trying to enter the US. He isn’t sure what percentage constitutes “most” of the people. But he feels it ought to be a pretty high number.

Excursus - As we now know, thanks to lawyer with TB, our existing lax system doesn’t even work that well. Really now… If you are on a list to be detained and you reach the border and you are not detained… Due to human error or any other error… That is a big problem.

2) Once we secure our borders, then we can discuss what type of immigration reform we want. As your Maximum Leader has said before, after the borders are secured, he doesn’t care much what status we give to illegal immigrants. He imagines that if many of the current illegals were given some status where they could work in the US and travel to and fro to Mexico they might take that status.

We all reap tremendous benefits (and do pay significant costs) from the work of illegal immigrants. The US is a nation of opportunity. We can’t and shouldn’t bolt the doors and refuse to let more people in. Your Maximum Leader believes that we ought to raise our current levels of legal immigration. He remembers reading that there are only 18,000 H1B visas issued now. These visas are for highly trained and educated people who have tremendous skills (generally engineers, doctors, scientists). He was shocked to learn the number was that low. He would raise it to 100,000 a year. We need these people to build our economy and future. But we also need the low skill workers. Your Maximum Leader would like to see a floating number of temporary worker visas available. The number would be based on the number of jobs we project to be available. These people would be allowed to come to the US and work and then free to leave, and come back.

We need to give some serious thought as to how we want the path to citizenship to look. We also need to give serious thought to what it means to be a citizen of our nation. Just as we aren’t thinking about a true immigration reform package, we aren’t thinking about any of this right now…

Your Maximum Leader believes that the current immigration bill will likely pass the Congress and be signed by the President in more or less its current form. And that is a bad thing… Your Maximum Leader will write his two Senators and ask them to vote against the bill - or at least demand that more time is given to debate the bill. There is no reason to rush this.

Do you know who has some interesting thoughts on the immigration bill and how the President is acting… Peggy Noonan… You ought to read her piece on Opinion Journal about how George W. Bush is destroying the Republican base. She makes a very interesting observation:

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he’d been elected to Reagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Very interesting indeed.

Oppose the immigration bill… No bill is better than a bad bill…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was afraid that he wasn’t going to have time to write this post bringing to your attention the anniversary of the Battle of Jutland during the Great War.

The Battle of Jutland was fought on May 31-June 1, 1916. It was the largest battle between fleets of modern battleships in the history of the world. It pitted the German High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet against each other.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly good article on the Battle. Here is another site (and okay site overall) about the battle.

Your Maximum Leader’s own opinion of the battle has slowly evolved over the years. For many years he spouted the standard British Admiralty line which was “Brits won.” Now he has a more nuanced view. He believes that the German High Seas Fleet scored a tactical victory. Even though the High Seas Fleet fled the battlefield (so to speak), they had drawn more blood and by that standard they won. If one wanted to evaluate the performance of the two fleets, the Germans again would have the advantage in terms of gunnery accuracy, manoeverablility, and night fighting.

That said, the British won the strategic victory. The High Seas Fleet fled the battle. The High Seas Fleet never again ventured far out of port for the remainder of the war. And the British were left controlling the seas. But that standard the greater victory was won by John Jellicoe (the British Admiral). Your Maxmium Leader agrees (as he often does) with Winston Churchill who declared that Jellicoe was the only man on either side in the war who could lose the war in an afternoon. The destruction of the Grand Fleet would have dramatically changed the course of the war. Lucky for all of us he did not.

Carry on.

This stuff is great!

The Maximum Leader recently explained why he is opposed to “pix” on the web.

I wish he had posted that before I posted my picture.

Ladies, please. Please. Please stop with the love letters, okay? I’m happily married.

There are two stories in today’s Washington Post about some Individual Ready Reserve Marines who are in trouble for taking part in anti-war protests while wearing a uniform.

For the non-vets out there, IRR is a status where you can be recalled to service, but do not have to do anything other than call personnel command if you move and keep your uniform in the closet.

The reservists argue that being in IRR means they are civilians and the military may not censor their speech or political activity.

Setting aside the political activity they are engaged in, I find this argument disingenuous.  The military has very clear rules about not wearing the uniform to political events.   A fully discharged veteran can wear his uniform - the UCMJ no longer has any jursidiction.  But being in the IRR means you are not yet fully a civilian.

That said,  I’m not sure if it is in the military’s interest to go after these guys.  The normal response would be to tell them to stop it and it would end there.  One wonders if in Kokesh’s case the military is holding a hearing because he was rude to an officer via e-mail.  Kokesh may be dishonorably discharged from the IRR, which would mean that he would have to repay $10,800 in G.I. Bill benefits.   While this punishment will have a punitive impact on Kokesh, it will draw additional media attention and simply serve to call attention to the fact that there are veterans out there who say the war is wrong.   How can that help the military?

 I’m interested to hear what other folks think, especially fellow graduates of IRR, the Director and Polymath.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader’s dear friend (and overall spelling/grammar resource) the Big Hominid notes that in the previous post the word “capitol” was used when the correct word ought to have been “capital.”

You know, your Maximum Leader knew the difference, but like a lemming following his bretheren off a cliff; your Maximum Leader saw the incorrect spelling on the quiz and just continued to use it. He now wonders just how much (or little as the case may be) smarter than the average American he might be.

Ugh.

Carry on.