Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was perusing the Politburo Diktat today and found this nifty listing of blogs. The Commissar has, in the past, put out some other neat blog maps. With this shameless trackback, your Maximum Leader hopes to get Nakedvillainy listed as a group blog. Ministers! Get to writing!

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is ruminating over some comments inspired by his Minister of Propaganda’s last post. Your Maximum Leader agrees with some of the M of P’s major points as they speak to our elected officials at large. Not only our current administration.

Speaking of the Minister of Propaganda, your Maximum Leader saw this article over on the Washington Post website and thought of him.

Carry on.

Whether or not you are for the war or against the war, for or against Bush, here is an excellent analysis of Bush’s strategic failure in conducting the war in Iraq. To quote from the middle, “[the Bush administration] has adopted a two-tier policy: a complex and nearly hidden strategic plan and a superficial public presentation.”

Personally, I think this administration’s efforts to insulate their internal processes — not just with Iraq but in practically every aspect of government policy — demonstrates a harmful and dangerous style of leadership that is contrary to the best democratic traditions of this country. Even if you agree with his policies on this issue (the analysis I posted above supports the war in Iraq), aren’t any of you concerned about what this administration will privately decide next? Or worse yet, what’s ALREADY been decided without even a semblance of open, public debate?

The strength of democracy, in the liberal tradition anyway, is the public competition of ideas. This is the basic principle behind the First Amendment. This administration, and (dare I speak as a partisan for a moment) increasingly the Republican party itself, has adopted an overall political strategy where public scrutiny of internal strategis (Cheney’s energy council meetings, the Medicare boondoggle, Ashcroft’s wars on just about everything) is intentionally blurred by a two-prong strategy: first, the delivering of misleading or outright dishonest public statements (Bush, etc al) and second, vicious attacks on your opponents. Both efforts serve only to distract from any debate of substance. Whatever your political stripes, we should all be concerned about an administration which, in a GENERAL election, strategically moves to the FAR RIGHT on social issues. It’s a devisive strategy that chokes real debate on any issue, and it’s contrary to the founding principles of this nation.

In any practical analysis, the disconnect between private strategy and public presentation is unstable and should eventually tear this administration apart. My fear is that Bush (and Cheney and Rumsfield and Ashcroft) will do irreparable damage to our country before it does. Anybody-but-Bush this November.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, as a sometimes kilt-wearer himself, thought he would pass along this item off the AP news wire. Kilt-Wearing Marine Plays Bagpipes in Iraq. And he’s not Scottish…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minons. Your Maximum Leader wanted to point out that there is a sale going on at Your Maximum Leader’s Villainous Commerce Store. Ladies! Get your Nakedvillainy t-shirts for the perfectly reasonable price of $13 (US - no Loonies!).

Of course ladies, if you are in the mood you could pick up a Nakedvillainy Thong.

Guys. You can’t help but look studly, super-intelligent, and hung like a horse while wearing a Naked Villainy t-shirt. Chicks dig the nifty image of your Maximum Leader on your Schwarzenegger-esque pectorals. (Did your Maximum Leader mention that wearing his t-shirt will actually cause your pectorals to bulge?)

Loyal minions, indulge yourselves…

Commerce break is now concluded.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was over at National Review Online today and stumbled upon this article: Michael Smerconish on John Lehman & Airlines. Your Maximum Leader does wonders why this was not reported on in more detail by other news outlets? Here is an unspoken question, Did the 9/11 terrorists know about this policy? Your Maximum Leader doubts if we will ever be able to discover the answer to that.

Your Maximum Leader understands why racial profiling is contraversial. And to an extent your Maximum Leader acknowledges that profiling can be abused by certain officials. But, wouldn’t it make sense to follow a profile if it reasonably fits?

This whole question causes us to examine a difficult issue in our society. At what point to we sacrafice privacy for “security.” It also causes us to examine items such as race, sex, and religious affiliation which are hot button items. As a matter of course, we as Americans want to be tolerant of other people. People of all religions, sexes, and races deserve basic civil respect. So profiling according to these characteristics alone strikes many Americans as intolerant and even bigoted.

But at what point to we come to realize that in some cases (and so far not a demonstrable majority of cases) these characteristics may in fact be useful tools for raising suspicions? As has been said many times before, the 9/11 terrorists were all youngish, male, arab, muslims. From what we can gather, many of those who seek to do great harm to our nation fit that basic profile. Thus, those characteristics, added with others (like one-way tickets paid in cash on short notice), seem to be part of the basis of a sensible profile to use as a guide to segregate (used the word deliberately) some people from others in sensative areas for screening by legitimate authorities.

Ultimately, it seems to be a reasonable trade-off. Some people are, genuinely, disadvantaged by application of a profiling policy. But the application of the policy provides some reasonable measure of security to many others. Profiling, at least in airports and train stations (marine terminals?), is a sensible policy.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was looking over his site statistics. And found this: Yahoo! Search Results for anticpatory guidelines for pregnancy

Does it seem as though your Maximum Leader has been obsessing over his site statistics of late? He thinks it is nothing more than just liking to look at pretty colour graphs and such… (That is how the statistics are displayed on Superb.net.) He’ll be quiet about it now…

Carry on.

I have been called to task for ‚ÄövÑv dissociation‚ÄövÑvp on the Analphilosopher site by a reader:

Donovan and Smallholder’s posts read so much like Psychology 101 illustrations of Denial (animals don’t suffer, Donovan), Justification (it’s acceptable to eat meat because other animals do it, Donovan, or because the “meat” was raised “humanely,” Smallholder) and Dissociation (meat comes from “humanely raised meat” not from individual animals, Smallholder), that they are almost comedic. Thank you, I enjoyed reading them.

Joanna

I will send what follows to the Analphilosopher in his mailbag. He may or may not use it, as is his prerogative; I do not know his policy on reader-to-reader discussions.

Dear Joanna,

I‚ÄövÑv¥m always happy to bring happiness, humor, and joy to others. You should see me dance. Unfortunately, your amusement at my failure to recognize that meat comes from ‚ÄövÑv individuals‚ÄövÑvp arises only because she does not do her part to keep the Maximum Leader happy with his site meter statistics. If she would only click on the link to the Nakedvillainy blog, she would discover that I do not deny the individuality of the animals I eat. In fact, my blogosphere handle, ‚ÄövÑv Smallholder‚ÄövÑvp is taken from the English term that not only denotes someone who farms a small patch of land, but also lives in close harmony with his animals. I know each individual animal intimately, spending one or two hours in direct, hands-on contact with my boys every day.

If you were to drive up the hill at Sweet Seasons Farm at 5:00 AM on any day of the week, you would find the barn light on and yours truly inside, feeding the boys with hand-mixed milk replacer. As they drink, I rub their sides, talk to them, scratch their ears, and lift their tails to make sure they don‚ÄövÑv¥t have runny manure. They particularly like chin rubs. As I clean out the night‚ÄövÑv¥s manure, the only real difficulty I have is the lads throwing me off balance as they seek even more attention. The same process gets repeated each evening as well. In fact, one of the little scamps was too affectionate last night ‚ÄövÑv¨ I had forgotten the egg basket and carefully placed several eggs in my front pants pocket. One of my twins didn‚ÄövÑv¥t think he had gotten enough love and butted my hip ‚ÄövÑv¨ breaking four of the eggs.

In fact, the close association with the individuals can get even more intense. Last year, a snowstorm coupled with freakish wind swirling through the hills pushed snow through the barn‚ÄövÑv¥s second story, around the hayloft, and into the pen. I went out at eleven in the evening to check to see if my boys were snuggly warm in the midst of the blizzard and found them standing forlornly with a quarter inch of snow on their backs. Intellectually I understand that cattle are built to survive this sort of thing ‚ÄövÑv¨ I have seen my neighbor‚ÄövÑv¥s cattle with an inch of encrusted ice all over their hides ‚ÄövÑv¨ but I didn‚ÄövÑv¥t want my lads to be cold. I Jerry-rigged (look at me ethnically slandering myself) a tarp over the calf pen, rubbed them all over with a blanket, changed the straw bedding, and then proceeded to sleep in the barn to add my body heat to their pen. It was cold, nasty work. But I kind of enjoyed waking up at three in the morning with calves snuggled up to me on each side, their heads tucked between my shoulders and face.

This year I had an outbreak of pneumonia. I had one calf that I tube-fed three times a day for a week, cradling it in my arms and massaging its ribs to aid digestion.

I could provide many, many, more examples.

I‚ÄövÑv¥m sure Joann will object that it can‚ÄövÑv¥t be humane because the guys must be terrified at the end of their lives. I‚ÄövÑv¥m sure the slaughtering process is hard on 99.9% of the steers destined for hamburger, but the kindness I have shown the boys and the mutual affection we have also help their ends come cleanly. They follow me right up to the truck and I drive over to a Mennonite Farmer who slaughters on the side. He takes the animals in the order that they arrive, so I shoot to get to his place at 4:00 AM so I am first in line. They calmly walk down the ramp and into the facility. He was shocked that they would just follow me like little lambs ‚ÄövÑv¨ normally unloading and moving is accompanied by a fair amount of yelling and shoving. He hits them with a 22 to the brain and they are down ‚ÄövÑv¨ no muss, no fuss.

Ah, many animal rights advocates might contend, there is still cruelty because they die in the end. While I am in agreement with animal rights activists in their critiques of unnecessary (mental and physical) cruelty, they typically lose me when they make that judgment. If the goal of animal rights activists is to eliminate as much animal suffering as possible, attacking humane farming conducive to their end. My animals lead TREMENDOUSLY better lives on my farm then they would in nature.

The PETA crowd seems to misunderstand that ‚ÄövÑv Mother Nature‚ÄövÑvp is, as Gene Logsdon puts it, often ‚ÄövÑv Old Bitch Nature.‚ÄövÑvp Animals aren‚ÄövÑv¥t living out in a state of Disney Technicolor utopia. Animals in the wild are perpetually fearful, subject to predation, parasite-ridden, frequently sick, and constantly hungry. Most die young and their deaths are ugly, traumatic affairs.

Professor Burgess-Jackson has stated that the art of persuasion is based on making people realizes that their basic beliefs are in conflict. I have a challenge for his readers.

If my beliefs are:
A) Suffering should be minimized.
B) Animals in my care, provided with meals, shelter, health care, and protection from predation, suffer much less than they would in the state of nature.

Show me where these beliefs are in conflict. Please do so without using the ‚ÄövÑv don‚ÄövÑv¥t use others as an end‚ÄövÑvp arguments. I‚ÄövÑv¥d buy that in person-to-person relationships, but don‚ÄövÑv¥t accord full moral (human) weight to animals.

Smallholder

Greetings, loyal minons. Your Maximum Leader has been thinking about a more substantive Iraq post of late. But he has been trying to figure out what may be some of the other causes behind the current uprising. Here is one from the New York Post. Thanks to Kate and The Glittering Eye for starting your Maximum Leader down this path. Will investigate more.

Carry on.

I see the Maximum Leader is still proselytizing about the wonders of pigdom.

I too appreciate the animal known to many American homesteaders as the ‚ÄövÑv Mortgage-lifter‚ÄövÑvp because of its economic utility, but I had to decline Mike‚ÄövÑv¥s request to raise a pig to go along with the beef I am raising for the Villainous household.

I will one day add at least a couple of pigs to the farm, but not until the Wee Smallholder is a bit older. I have a cousin whose ear is a bit jagged because he stepped to close to the boar pen when he was a toddler. Old Horace decided that the little lad would make a good snack, grabbed him by the ear and pulled him into the pen. If my uncle had not been nearby, he would have lost a kid.

So, until my dear little one is big enough to a) understand to stay away from the piggies and b) is too big to constitute a tasty porcine morsel, we will not have any pigs.

This brings to mind one of my favorite answers to vegetarians. When Gene Logsdon was asked how he could eat pigs that he had raised by hand, he responded: ‚ÄövÑv If I had a heart attack in the pen, the pigs would eat me. That‚ÄövÑv¥s fair.‚ÄövÑvp

Big Hominid has posted on the same two Analphilosopher posts that I discussed a little while ago. He does a better job then me.
Of course, he is an academic while I am only a poor son of the soil.

You should also check out his 20 questions with the Maximum Leader. Unbeknownst to Mike, however, question 17 is moot. I already have a spot reserved for him in the compost pile.

UPDATE FROM YOUR MAXIMUM LEADER: No need to be all clandestine about putting my corpse in the compost pile. It is a more utilitarian end to my body than embalming and burial. And anyway, why not have my body end up in a field (or as pig food) when your Maximum Leader is gone. It is better than being interred in a glorious tomb along a major thoroughfare and having thousands of loyal minions coming by to pay their respects to my perfectly preserved body; only to have the MWO crumble, the visitors stop, the tomb close, and have western businessmen offer to buy the corpse as a sideshow attraction in a new amusement park… - Max. Ldr.

Lest you think I‚ÄövÑv¥ve gone soft on the Analphilosopher:

My last post showed KBJ at his best: thought-provoking.

This one returns to my earlier critique of the blog as hack propaganda.

From yesterday:

Liberal Dishonesty

Please keep in mind that I was a liberal for a long time. I know the liberal mentality and tactics. Liberals have no shame. They’re unfulfilled totalitarians. Their only goal, despite their declared concern for the disadvantaged, is power. Think about it. If liberals truly cared about the disadvantaged, as they say they do, they’d dispose of their wealth. There are enough wealthy liberals in this country to feed, clothe, shelter, and medicate every poor person. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen. The Kennedys are still wealthy, aren’t they? John Kerry is more than happy to take advantage of the Heinz fortune. Liberals insist on forcing others to pay for their hare-brained social-engineering schemes. This suggests that they’re driven by envy and spite, not benevolence.

Read that again. I‚ÄövÑv¥ll wait.

Let‚ÄövÑv¥s see. Liberals are incapable of reasoned argument because they unsupportedly question the motivations of conservatives and call names. They all want power. They are shameless, totalitarian, wealthy, harebrained, envious, spiteful and malevolent.

Does Burgess-Jackson even see the humor in this post? Is he being intentionally ironic?

You might recall an earlier critique I made of KBJ, questioning whether his political ‚ÄövÑv analysis‚ÄövÑvp was in fact knee-jerk, hackneyed, elephant-echo-chamber propaganda. KBJ blogged in response that he was only analyzing the issues. I challenged him to provide ONE example in which the application of ‚ÄövÑv reason‚ÄövÑvp did not result in a whole-hearted embrace of the position taken by the Bush administration. KBJ did not respond, which I took to be an implied admission that he was indeed partisan rather than analytical. The post quoted above is an explicit admission of this fact, n‚ÄövÑv¥est ce pas?

Is it possible to eat meat in good conscience?

Good stuff from the Analphilosopher on meat-eating today. While I do not hold animals to have rights directly analogous to human rights, I believe that the suffering experienced by animals in factory farm conditions is abominable. Even if most people are not amenable to rational persuasion, the average American would be horrified if confronted by a typical day in the life of a factory pig. It seems that consumers willingly turn a blind eye towards how their meat is produced.

I‚ÄövÑv¥ll give you one example.

As many readers of this blog know, I am a small-scale farmer. I have an orchard and a vineyard, both of which are very attractive to deer. After spending over a thousand dollars in passive exclusion methods (Ask the Maximum Leader and his long-suffering wife how much fun it was to construct a slant fence), I had to be more pro-active in my defense of my family‚ÄövÑv¥s livelihood. When a deer figures out how to get into the orchard through the truck gate, I have no real option but to shoot the darn thing. I don‚ÄövÑv¥t enjoy it, but it needs to be done.

Having sacrificed the deer, I don‚ÄövÑv¥t want the meat to go to waste. I have filled the freezers of family members, friends, and a local food bank. However, the guy who cleans the deer for the local food bank is tired of dealing with the animals. If there is a deer in the garden prior to school, I don‚ÄövÑv¥t have time to deal with processing the carcass. So I sent an e-mail to my colleagues at work:

I have a kill permit to protect my vineyard and orchard from deer damage. I have been donating the deer to the local food bank, but the guy who cleans them is feeling a bit overworked, so I switched to another hunters for the hungry drop off, but they don’t open until 7, so it makes it very tight for me to get to work.

Mark

One of the women I worked with became very angry at me. She thought the e-mail posted above was really disgusting and berated me, out in the halls in front of passing students, for ‚ÄövÑv grossing her out.‚ÄövÑvp She was genuinely, shakingly, angry.
Now, I tend to react to this sort of thing by becoming calm and trying to ascertain what the real issue. So I quietly apologized, explaining that I had not meant to insult her dietary beliefs, but that I was just trying to avoid having the meat go to waste. Her response? ‚ÄövÑv I‚ÄövÑv¥m not a vegetarian. I love meat. I just like to pretend that it comes from the store in little plastic packages.‚ÄövÑvp

She was so appalled at the humane killing of an animal that has lived its life in nature that she was willing to make an ass of herself in front of God and all his disciples, but she was cheerfully willing to consume feedlot beef? Her real issue is that I had pulled aside the curtain on her carefully constructed Oz of self-delusion.

Read the Analphilosopher‚ÄövÑv¥s post. My critique of his position is that the suffering issue isn‚ÄövÑv¥t either-or. Meat can be raised humanely ‚ÄövÑv¨ I do it. But most Americans don‚ÄövÑv¥t even think about that. I would guess almost 100% of meat in grocery stores is of factory farm origin.

UPDATE: After typing this, I saw that one of KBJ‚ÄövÑv¥s readers had sent in an asinine comment:

Why cant i deny that pain and suffering is bad for animals? For me its as simple as the food chain and im at the top of it. I love meat and have no quibbles about doing whatever is required to put it on my families dinner table. The super market just makes it easy. Got to love the division of labor!

Sorry i just dont put animals on the same playing field as humans.
Donovan

Here is the reply I sent to KBJ:

Dear Donovan,

Smallholder

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader instructs you to read 20 Questions with the Maximum Leader over on the Poet Laureate’s site. Your Maximum Leader took the time to answer… You take the time to read.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has a little confession to make. He is a train nut. He loves trains. He loves pictures of trains. He can spend hours and hours building railroads with the help of his trusty “Railroad Tycoon” game. So, it disturbs him that the development of an O. Winston Link museum passed beneath his radar. And he had to read about it on Virginia Postrel’s blog to find out about it.

Of all the railroads in the country, your Maximum Leader has always loved the old Norfolk & Western. (The Norfolk & Western is now a component of the much larger Norfolk Southern Corporation.) It always made money. It built its own locomotives. And it ran on coal until the mid-1960s. And in the late 50’s the N&W let a commercial photographer named O. Winston Link travel the road and capture the passing age of steam. Your Maximum Leader has two books of Winston Link’s photos of the N&W. He also as a beautiful framed photo by Link in his office. Now, He will have to travel to Roanoke, VA to visit the museum.

Carry on.