Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader passes along a link to a site which will allow you to waste piles of time…

Throw Paper

Your Maximum Leader’s record is 13.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees on the news wires that Oakland, California, has a goose problem. Well… According to the article the geese wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t poop so much. The people living around this large lake in Oakland are overrun with Canada Geese. Thousands of them. And each bird makes a pound of poop a day. They have tons of poop every day going into their lake, their lawns, their water. Poop is everywhere.

And this concerns the good residents of Oakland. They want to be good neighbours to the geese. But they can’t. Too much poop. They hire dogs to chase the birds away. But they come back. They don’t want to run afoul of international treaties that protect migratory birds. Such action might result in retaliatory airstrikes from the Bush Administration. So what are the poor people of Oakland to do?

Well… They need to get the Governator on the line and ask him to got to Washington and get the White House and Congress moving on some needed reform of the Migratory Bird Treaties. We need to stop protecting the Canada Goose. They are all over the place. Once we allow more hunting of Canada Geese, we do some serious cooking of goose. Have you ever had a cooked goose? Damn they are tasty. Your Maximum Leader commends to you this recipe for roast goose. This is close to one your Maximum Leader has used in the past. And remember to save the fat your goose gives off in cooking. That stuff can be used to cook and flavour all sorts of other tasties.

All this talk of roast goose is making your Maximum Leader quite hungry…

Carry on.

Greeting, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is changing out his bejeweled floppy hat today. He is going to be wearing a coonskin cap today in honor of the 300th anniversary of the birth of founding father, Ben Franklin. You know, of all the founders Ben Franklin always seems to be the most fun. Naturally inqusitive. Funny. Prankster. Ladies Man. Philosophical thinker. Pillar of his community. All those things and so many more were Ben Franklin.

If you would like to learn more about Ben Franklin, your Maximum Leader will commend his Autobiography to you. It is a very good read. Of course, you may also be able to find Walter Isaacson’s recent bio of Franklin at your local bookstore.

If you are living in the Philadelphia area, your Maximum Leader suggests you get yourself on over to the Franklin Institute. While the Institute is closed today (to celebrate the founder’s birthday no doubt - there is a little delicious irony there) it will reopen tomorrow. Get down there and see it. Very cool.

Carry on.

I believe the Norweigan bull semen I ordered for Bonnie (the house cow) was mishandled during shipping.

That is all.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader hopes that the subject line of this post is not off-putting to many of you. There will be no NSFW stuff in this post. Just some links.

Did you know that consuming caffeine might boost a woman’s sex drive? Well… At the least female rats who had more caffeine were also found to want some luvin’ more often than those rats who didn’t get hopped up on caffeine. So, ladies be sure to have some coffee and a few cokes before coming to visit your Maximum Leader. He’ll provide chocolate if that floats your boat.

Guess what else? Having a TV in the bedroom reduces the amount of sex a couple has. Call your Maximum Leader crazy, but that little bit of information seems self-evident. From personal experience your Maximum Leader can verify that when Mrs. Villain watches tv in the bedroom the shows she chooses cause your Maximum Leader to fall asleep. The reverse also appears to be true.

Excursus: For those of you wondering how control of the bedroom remote is determined… It is a first come first serve basis.

According to Barbara Ellen, “no-strings attached” sex is popular again in Britain. Riddle your Maximum Leader this… From a man’s perspective has “no-strings attached” sex ever been unpopular?

Anyhow… There it is… A little sex post. Hope you enjoyed it.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees (thanks to Dr. Rusty Shackelford) that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent the afternoon assuring Muslims in America that we love them and will not discriminate against them in a mosque who’s Imam spends his free time denying the Holocaust. Sheik Fadhel al Sahlani says that reports of 6,000,000 dead jews are “exaggerated.”

Isn’t this a fine how-do-you-do? One wonders who did Mayor Bloomberg’s advance work on this. One hopes that the Mayor will soon have himself a new advance team. Indeed, your Maximum Leader knows some people who might be able to help him… Mr. Mayor, give your Maximum Leader a call. He’ll give you some advice. (Psst- That advice is “More vetting.”)

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has never watched Firefly. So he doesn’t know if these results (from a quiz he saw over on Brian’s site) are any good.

You are Captain Malcolm Reynolds, aka. Mal or
Captain Tightpants. You saw most of your men
die in a war you lost and now you seek solitude
with a small crew that you are fiercely devoted
to. You have no problems being naked.

Which Firefly character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
While your Maximum Leader doesn’t frequently wear tight pants (to confining you know…) he generally is okay with being naked….

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is married to a teacher. His mother-in-law was a teacher. The Smallholder is a teacher. And out there in the great ether that is the internet is Minion Molly, who is also a teacher. Minion Molly is a teacher in the greater Houston, Texas metropolitan area. Now your Maximum Leader isn’t sure if Minion Molly is affected by the changes he’s reading about in teacher pay, but he figures he’ll point out and opine on this article.

Now let your Maximum Leader go on the record and say that he believes, as a general rule, that teaching as a profession is under-funded. This is to say that teaching fills such a vital role in our society that teachers ought to be paid more than they are. But this general rule is tempered by a number of other factors. Among these factors are that many people who go into the teaching profession are idiots. As your Maximum Leader said, he knows lots of teachers personally. Many of them are dim bulbs. He means this in a general sense. He’s been informed by Mrs. Villain that some of the teachers he’d categorize as dim bulbs are actually great subject matter experts and work with kids in their field of expertise quite well. Your Maximum Leader accepts that in many situations. But he also musts point out that Mrs Villain exercises a considerable amount of influence in assuring that the Villainettes get the “right” teachers. Generally the “right” teachers for the Villainettes are not the dim bulbs of whom your Maximum Leader was just speaking…

Another factor that tempers his rule concerning teacher pay is the fact that teaching is taxpayer funded. This big factor is an amalgomation of many sub-factors that all impact teacher pay. In being taxpayer funded the teaching profession is insulated from many market forces. While certain supply-demand market forces are at work on the teaching profession, many others are not. For example, pay for performance. (Which is the focus of the article about the Houston school district.) In the private sector it is generally demonstrable that workers who perform better than others will earn more money. It is also demonstrable that in the private sector incompetence or underachievement can cause one to lose one’s job. This is not often the case in teaching. Surely new teachers have a high “wash-out” rate, but if you can make it past the first few years you are a lifer.

It must be mentioned that as a taxpayer funded function teaching is subject to many outside pressures that other industries are not. Namely that taxpayers want to “have a say” in what teachers teach. This, in your Maximum Leader’s estimation, is not always a good thing. Alas, the voters that get most upset about what goes into the curriculum are also the very same voters that will be disfranchised and sterilized in the MWO.

Here in the great Commonwealth of Virginia, we used to have appointed School Boards. This meant that elected officials of both parties would sit down and appoint people to serve on local School Boards. Appointments were done on a “bipartisan” basis. Furthermore, appointees were almost always learned people who were genuinely interested in creating a good curriculum and doing well by their districts.

Unfortunately, we now have elected School Boards. Oftentimes your Maximum Leader finds that the people running for School Board (and their supporters) are the very same voters who, in the MWO, will be disfranchised and sterilized. When you have partisan races for School Board you have partisan outcomes in your curriculum. Excursus: Before any other citizens of Virginia start to write their Maximum Leader and say that School Board races are non-partisan as party affiliations are not listed allow him to advise you to stop sucking on the crack-pipe. School Board races are highly partisan and party affiliated - but the candidates just can’t tell you openly if they are Republican, Democrats, or other.

Now allow your Maximum Leader to engage in a little dichotomy here. While he dislikes the political process by which he gets to choose his School Board, he demands that the curriculum be accountable to political bodies. This is to say that if his tax money is going to support some function, then by gum he’s going to want to hold some elected person responsible for what goes on. That said, he prefer to hold someone a little higher-up the food chain of politics responsible and have an appointed School Board of “worthy” people. But as it stands he has to vote out idiots who actually run for the office.

So now lets return to teacher pay… As your Maximum Leader said, he thinks teachers are paid less than they ought to be. But he doesn’t like just giving teachers pay hikes without some sort of indicator that his tax dollars are being well spent. This is where “merit pay” comes into the picture. Your Maximum Leader would gladly pay higher local taxes to support schools that could supply evidence that they were doing a good job teaching kids. This means benchmarking and standardized testing. Now your Maximum Leader knows that there are all sorts of different kids in the world and some test well and some don’t. Further he knows that standardized tests - like the politized curriculum from whence they spawned - are in many ways deeply flawe. But in the end you have to establish some sort of global assessment standard by which you can determine if you are “making progress” towards better educating our kids.

So, we have standardized test and we have kids getting tested. Why shouldn’t we reward teachers and districts that do well? We should. But we should also be very critical of the tests, the curriculums that are formed around the tests, and the methods used to determine the benchmarks.

All that said your Maximum Leader would like to point out one more thing… The photo Houston area teacher Kim Hennis is unflattering. Yeah, yeah, your Maximum Leader knows she is reading a story (with emphasis and interpretation) to first graders. But the editors could have found some better photo.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, generally, does one obituary and moves on. But he felt that the puny obituary for Birgit Nilsson to which he linked yesterday was… Well… Puny… He much prefers the obit in today’s Washington Post by Tim Page.

He commends it to you for your own edification. And for all posterity, or as long as this blog is published, he’ll reprint it in full below the fold.

Carry on.
(more…)

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has yet another question to pose to his readers today.

Why are some people always convinced of a convicted killer’s pleas of innocence? Regardless of the killer being named Mumia, “Tookie,” or Coleman… Someone is always willing to believe the convict. Why is that? Your Maximum Leader is fine with believing someone’s word all through the accusation and trial. But after the trial ends in conviction your Maximum Leader starts on his “why should I believe the convict” mode. Mebbe that makes him a bad person. Mebbe his experience tells him that convicts - or should he say convicted felons to be more specific - have a general tendency to lie… Particularly where the question concerns their guilt or innocence.

In case you missed it, Roger Keith Coleman - who was executed in 1992 - did actually rape and murder his sister-in-law. The latest DNA tests confirm it. Of course, none of this evidence is new. An old DNA tests (you know the old completely unreliable ones that were used in the OJ trial) pointed the bloody finger of guilt at Roger Keith Coleman back in 1990.

This is a news story because for many years a number of groups have said that Coleman was innocent and executed. The current Governor of Virginia, and presidential hopeful, Mark Warner agreed to allow DNA laden samples from the crime scene and from Coleman’s person be tested to (he hoped) prove that Coleman was guilty. Tests in. Coleman guilty. Now perhaps we can all move on to some other case…

Carry on.

Alito’s “no recollection” response smells bad and disingenuous.

That said, what exactly is so bad about membership in CAP?

Now, I haven’t seen any reputable summary of the group’s principals, but from tidbits I’ve gathered from the Washington Post and NPR, I don’t think it is fair to call it anti-women and anti-minority.

As I understand it, and the MoP is encouraged to enlighten me based on his readings on the left of the blogsophere, the CAP started out protesting the expulsion of ROTC from campus. I think even our left-leaning MoP would agree that colleges ought to allow ROTC to be housed on campus, as he himself has suffered from this policy at Yale.

Opposing co-education is not the same as being anti-women. There is a place for private (as opposed to publicly-funded) schools that are single-sex. One wonders if women who opposed making Longwood College coeducational were anti-men or simply “keep the school we love the way we love it” types.

As I understand it, the anti-minority charge stems from CAP’s opposition to lowering admissions standards in order to artificially increase minority enrollment. This is silly. Saying that there ought to be academic standards is not the same as donning a klansman outfit. One can oppose affirmative action on the basis of justice, efficacy, or merit without being a racist.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but the CAP membership seems innocuous to me. If this manufactured issue is all the Dems have, I urge the Senate to confirm him forthwith. If I am missing something, point me to it in the comments.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader would like to post some more inappropriate questions for your reading enjoyment. These are questions pertaining to the Alito nomination that Democratic Staffers rejected passing along to their bosses…

1) Judge Alito, you seem to be a skinny guy. Do you eat right? Do you exercise? I ask because I was hoping that you would make a habit of eating fatty fried foods and drinking melted butter. We hoped this diet plan would get Clarence Thomas off the Court sooner. Even though it hasn’t worked so far we figure it is worth a second try.

2) Judge Alito, have you seen “Brokeback Mountain?” If you had to choose would you rather nail Heath Ledger or Jake Gyllenhaal? Could you make the one you chose squeal like a pig? You know like that scene in “Deliverance…”

3) Judge Alito, Senator Feinstein says that this is proper technique for fellatio. Is it your experience that this technique works?

4) Judge Alito, that chunky daughter of yours over there… Can she go on a date with Senator Kennedy?

5) Judge Alito, my colleagues on this committee have implied or actually called you a bigot, a homophobe, and an elitist over the past few days. I’ve seem to have misplaced my notes here, but could you also confirm for me that you are also a closed-minded, misogynistic, anti-semetic, greasy-haired dago-guinea-wop? I seem to remember reading talking points which indicated that you are…

6) Judge Alito, you’ve said many times in these hearings that the President is not above the law. If the President sent you a nice fruit basket and personally invited you for a weekend of “carousing” at his ranch in Crawford, would that change your mind? If yes, could we change it back by inviting you on our next “investigation” of how legalized prostitution in Nevada impacts the national economy? We promise that you and Senator Dick “Tiny” Durban wouldn’t have to sit next to each other on the plane ride out…

7) Judge Alito, what am I gonna have to say here to make your wife cry again?

After listening to a few hours of the interrogation, your Maximum Leader isn’t really sure that thse haven’t already been asked…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader would like to pose this question to his loyal minons.

If you are stampeded to death on your way to a symbolic stoning in Mecca during the Haj do you go right to heaven? If you are a man, and reach heaven, are you greeted by 72 doe-eyed (horny) virgins?

Your Maximum Leader is trying to find the up-side to this story.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was over on Jeff’s site amusing himself… ahem… Well, your Maximum Leader was over at Beautiful Atrocities when he clicked through onto a link to the Babalu blog. Then he read the article and clicked through again to the MSNBC site.

What could have merited all that clicking?

The mini-vaca. Yes boys, girls, and minions everywhere. The mini-cow. Go. Read. Return. Pretty cool huh?

Just remember, your Maximum Leader told you about it before the Smallholder brought it up… BTW, Smallholder is probably still sitting alone in his barn being shocked (shocked!) that Texas judges could be fooled into thinking that redistricting isn’t a political process and its outcome isn’t always aimed at minimizing the influence of the opposition and creating safe seats. Silly judges… Politics is for crooks and Trix are for kids.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is filled with sadness… Birgit Nilsson, one of your Maximum Leader’s favourite Wagnerian Sopranos, has died. She was 87. Your Maximum Leader has numerous recordings of Nilsson singing in various Wagner operas. Indeed, your Maximum Leader would have to say that one of his regrets is that he never saw her perform. She retired “in the 1980s” according to the article. Your Maximum Leader thinks that 1982 was her final US performance. Alas, he wasn’t going to many operas then. He does have some recollections of listening to some of her Met performances over the radio. (Both your Maximum Leader’s sainted mother and dearly departed grandmother were/are regular listeners to the opera broadcasts on WETA in Washington DC on Saturday afternoons.)

This afternoon he will have to transfer some of his Wagner to the iPod and listen to Birgit Nilsson sing.

Carry on.