Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader owns a number of books that used to reside in various public schools throughout the great Commonwealth of Virginia. These books were either purchased by your Maximum Leader (or his friend Smallholder) when the books were going to be purged from the school library. Although some of the titles he’s purchased have turned out to be lamentable works of scholarship; all in all your Maximum Leader (and Smallholder) have felt that it was better that the books live out our natural lives on a shelf in a home rather than being reduced to pulp or landfill fodder.

When these purged books wind up on his shelf your Maximum Leader has felt he’s done a good thing. High school libraries are not places of scholarship. Libaries in high schools are for reference. The old and out dated should be moved to make room for the new. It seems to be in the natural order of things.

But your Maximum Leader feels very differently about college/university libraries. Collectively, colleges and universities libraries are the storehouse of the accumulated knowlege of humanity. Every college, big and small, plays a role in preserving the history of humanity. The good. The bad. The lamentable. The very poorly written. The classic. The obscure. All works have a place in the libraries of the world.

Your Maximum Leader loves the very smell of “the stacks” of a college library. The older the better. (NB: The book preservationist would likely say that the smell your Maximum Leader likes is decaying paper. Sad thought…)

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t think that a book that finds its way into a college library should ever be purged.

Sadly… That is not the case as Professor Mondo details in a recent post. Here is the hardest part to read:

Finally, there was the sense that I was engaged in a kind of intellectual Black Mass, inverting the sacrament that I was meant to perform. I love my students, but I also love the worlds of literature and ideas; indeed, I show my love to my students by offering them these other things I value so much. These books, these ideas in them, matter so much to me that I’m devoting my life to the business of letting those stories and ideas survive another generation. But instead, I spent today making it that much less likely that a Mondovillian might encounter someone’s story or idea, even through a confluence of idleness and serendipity. Education is meant to help the mind grow, and I see libraries as symbols of the growth that has gone before us. Instead, I spent today making our symbol shrink. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the opposite of what I do.

Go thee and read the good Prof’s piece.

After reading the piece it makes me want to call my alma mater and make a donation and specify it goes to the library fund…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is going to have to “drop out of character” for this post. (He thought it “sounded” weird doing it in his normal third person style…)

So, I’ve got a dog. She is a mutt. Part Whippet and part Lab. We got her at the pound. She was six months old, had a bad rash that made some of her fur fall out, and was pretty pathetic overall.

Did I mention that she was also named “Tequila” at the time?

We took her home and changed her name and proceeded to love on her. That was 2001.

She has been one of the best dogs ever. She is smart enough to learn and obey a number of commands. She is dumb enough to remain cute and never give you pause to think that she’s trying to outsmart you in anything. She has survived three kids who have tried to ride her, pull her tail and otherwise molest her. Her temperament is everything one could ever want from a dog.

Two years ago she was running through the woods and got a cut on her right hind leg. We treated it topically and wrapped it up. It seemed to heal pretty well.

Then she started to lick her healing wound.

Before too long it became a large, swollen, infected mess. We took her to the Vet. She got a steroid shot and some antibiotics. Everything cleared up. But after a few months she started licking again and got the leg into a swollen, infected mess. So it was back to the Vet. More steroids. More drugs. Recovery! Then the licking started again… Eventually in addition to drugs and steroids she got “doggie downers.” This cocktail of drugs worked for a while. Eight months or so. But it hasn’t stopped…

Basically… My dog is OCD and licks herself to infection and great pain.

We keep treating her, but my wife and I lament that she is just dumb to keep hurting herself like this. Then again… She’s a dog.

The other day I was sitting in my chair reading and rubbing the dog with my feet. I stopped reading and thought about karma. I am not a Buddhist, or Hindu, or new-agey person so I don’t “believe” (in a religious sense) in karma. Sometimes “believing” in karma makes me feel better about myself or things happening in the outside world.

But I was thinking about my dog’s karma. I thought that if you consider karma and reincarnation together what would explain my dog? If she was a person in a past life, what could she have done wrong to deserve to come back as a dog? Then again, life with my family is a pretty good gig for a dog. She is fed, groomed, loved on and well-treated. That is a pretty good life all in all. Then I considered the leg. Was she being karmically punished for a past life? Had the wheel of fate placed her (even as a dog) in too good a position in life and was karma “fixing” the problem by making her OCD and inflicting suffering on herself where none had to exist?

Then I considered something else. Perhaps it was my karma to inflict suffering in her. Perhaps I am the problem in this equation.

Then I figured that considering this was too much for someone who doesn’t really believe in karma anyway.

So I got up and poured myself a Makers and ginger ale and went back to my book.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is sitting in the Villainschloss right now in the middle of a domestic crisis. Apparently the Doctor Who marathon on BBC America is not “family friendly” viewing. (So says Mrs Villain.) Additionally, your Maximum Leader has learned that Mrs Villain has no interest in any of the college football on TV right now. So your Maximum Leader has done the wise thing and vacated the TV viewing area for the solitude of his study. (He will likely move back in and watch something a little later this evening.)

Your Maxmium Leader is really looking forward to dinner tonight. Delmonico’s raised on Smallholder’s farm. Matched with baked potatoes and some sparkling wines from around the world.

Your Maximum Leader’s offspring are taking a pool to see which of them will fall asleep first. Your Maximum Leader bet all of them that he will be the only one up at midnight and that he’ll have to wake them all for the change to the new year. Indeed, your Maximum Leader raised the possibilty that he might turn in early and let them all fend for themselves.

Your Maximum Leader got some nice comments to his post on spinning the Civil War. Your Maximum Leader thought the post would elicit some sort of response from the whole “slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War crowd.” Sadly, those idiots must know that this is not the place for them.

The interesting comments were about your Maximum Leader’s speculation that Mitt Romney will get the Republican nod in 2012. From Professor Mondo: “Meanwhile, Mitt Romney remains a charisma-free zone. I’m just afraid that the folks down here in Mondoville will go for the Huckster, who is just another statist. At this point, I’m kind of pulling for Mitch Daniels.” Our friend Polymath wrote: “My Lovecraft fantasy has me wishing for a re-animated Reagan.” And our very own farmer, the Smallholder, wrote:

Republicans give their nomination to the last cycle’s runner-up.

But Romney may be the exception that proves the rule. Since Republicans are on a jihad against Obamacare, the fact that Obamacare is essentially Romneycare does not bode well for Romney. It will be difficult for him to squirm away from his record during the primaries, particularly given his preexistent reputation for flip-floppigng. Gingrich advocated a version of health care very similar to Obamacare in ‘94, but he may be able to sidle away because it never went anywhere - Romney actually got it passed.

Mondo, I kind of like Mitch Daniels too. But he’s a bit too centrist to survive the primaries. He would make a good VEEP to appeal to the middle.

Polymath, I doubt Reagan could actually get tea-party votes today. He was too much of a pragmatist, rasied taxes to balance the budget, was in favor of arms control, and advocated tax rates higher than Obama’s. Folks are in love with an idealized person who never existed.

First off, your Maximum Leader must put an end to all this re-animated Reagan stuff. WE CAN’T GO ELECTING ZOMBIES TO OFFICE. Any office, not just President of the United States. Every person with an iota of sense knows that a re-animated corpse is a zombie and zombies aren’t cool. Zombies just want to eat our brains. Your Maximum Leader fears that a re-animated Reagan would not be a strong leader because he could always be sidetracked by a plate of warm steaming brains.

(NB: could one distract zombies by throwing them turrines of sweatbreads?)

Anyway… Even if you were able to safely reanimate Reagan (which your Maximum Leader doubts by the way) the 22nd Amendment still applies and he wouldn’t be eligible. Your Maximum Leader fears that a re-animated Harry Truman is our only option for zombie chief executive.

Your Maximum Leader will stand by the charisma-less, former Massachusetts Governor as the leader for the Republican nod right now. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t really think he knows enough about Mitch Daniels to get worked up one way or the other about him. Smallholder’s comment about Daniels being too moderate for the primaries seems to ring a little false as John McCain (no raging social conservative) didn’t have much of a problem navigating the primaries in 2008. Of course one can argue that the results (and “rage” as the media likes to call it) of the 2010 elections might have changed that. Frankly, your Maximum Leader doesn’t think so. The primaries are the primaries and any Republican who wants a crack at the top job will cater to the base to win the nomination. We speculate about how this year it will be different from past years; but it rarely is that different one cycle to the next.

The whole Obamacare/Romneycare bit isn’t too much of a reach. One can spin it as a question of scale and affordability. Use the Constitution, Obamacare is massive federal overreach; but what Romney did in Mass. is not the same type of deal. States can implement broad social programs within the state if they want. Since the state has to pay for the program it isn’t an unfunded mandate to all or a major source of future debt. It is a subtle argument to be sure; but it might have legs. (Also, Romney can claim that the program has been mismanaged in the years since he left the Governor’s mansion.)

It was Professor Mondo’s comment that Mike Huckabee seems to be enjoying wide support down his way that caused a little distress to your Maximum Leader. Mike Huckabee is one of those potential candidates that really does upset your Maximum Leader. Perhaps your Maximum Leader has a latent prejudice against social conservatives who might actually rise up the the highest office in the land. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t think that he is prejudiced against prominent social conservatives. He thinks his problem is when the conservative in question has ONLY social conservative credentials.

Winston Churchill once said that a fanatic was a person who wouldn’t change their mind and wouldn’t change the subject. Your Maximum Leader thinks that his major objection with many social conservatives is that everything boils down to abortion, prayer and whether or not the US is a Christian nation. Don’t get your Maximum Leader wrong, he is a pretty socially conservative fellow; but he is often looking for policy discussions on a whole host of subjects from his candidates, not just an exposition on religion and politics.

So back to Huckabee… He has executive experience (from a state that has already given us one chief executive). He also seems so authentic and natural as to be everybody’s friend. It is when he starts going on about his young Earth beliefs that he loses your Maximum Leader. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t begrudge anyone their own beliefs concerning the creation and age of the universe; but he finds that there is a strong correlation between those who believe that the universe was created exactly per the Book of Genesis and a lack of curiosity to the natural world. Curiosity in the natural world may not seem like a big prerequisite to higher office, but in your Maximum Leader’s mind it is. That type of curiosity should lead to an appreication for (if not an aptitude for) observation, recording of facts and formulation of hypotheses. Understanding and applying the scientific method (as it were) is a useful tool for developing mental acuity. Mental acuity is a trait of which your Maximum Leader is fond in political leaders.

So back to Huckabee… Your Maximum Leader just can’t imagine him as having the mental acuity needed to be president. This is based solely on Huckabee’s religious beliefs. This type of assessment (a prejudice if you will) is based solely on observations and experience your Maximum Leader has made of others. It may be that Mike Huckabee is a brilliant man with wisdom and understanding beyond what your Maximum Leader has observed. But given what your Maximum Leader has observed, Huckabee is sorta scary as a potential nominee.

Well… Your Maximum Leader believes that he’s run this train of thought off the rails and has no more to say (for the moment) on this subject. He’ll now open the first bottle of bubbly for the evening and see when he might get those steaks.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was, until about 14 minutes ago, blissfully unaware of the conspiracy that exists in this nation to exterminate a certain minority group. This conspiracy is based in the public schools, churches, Planned Parenthood, the pyschiatric profession and organizations of “European” manufacture.

To elaborate on this conspiracy further your Maximum Leader presents this video (about 14 minutes in length):

Your Maximum Leader is stupified. Just when he starts to forget how insane some people are a video like this one serves to remind him of what craziness people are willing to believe.

Oh yes, one more thing… Your Maximum Leader is glad that Mr. Johnson doesn’t feel the need to subject himself to the oppression of conventional spelling or grammar in the graphics of this video.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has written in this space before that he’s not much of a “Tea Party” type of person. He considers himself a conservative. He further considers that he is likely in agreement (in broadest principles) with many of the overarching ideas espoused by the Tea Party movement.

But honestly, he thinks that the movement is going a bit far.

The requirement to which your Maximum Leader objects the most is the one calling for ideologocial purity. Purity in a political movement is counter-productive in this and most times throughout US history. (This is made worse by the fact that in many cases the ideology espoused by many in the Tea Party movement just isn’t consistent in the best case, and just completely ignorant in the worst case.) Your Maximum Leader also isn’t thrilled with many candidates running under the banner of the Tea Party.

So let us get a few things out of the way… Your Maximum Leader hasn’t directly supported any Tea Party candidate. Frankly he has no reason to. He is represented in Congress by Rob Wittman. Congressman Whittman is a great guy personally and is perfectly conservative enough for your Maximum Leader. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t spend a lot of time going around actively supporting candidates who have no connection directly to him. (Although he is still very interested in politics in the aggregate.)

To your Maximum Leader the Tea Party movement has been something from which he has felt detached and more than a little bit disturbed by. He is generally suspicious of any populist movement of any ideological stripe. Anger is not his favorite emotion in politics. Certainly anger and fear are the most powerful of political motivators in our country. That said your Maximum Leader isn’t all that comfortable with emotion being the major motivator in politics. (NB: This is not to say that your Maximum Leader doesn’t like intrigue, backbiting and grudges. He does. But he doesn’t want voters to be overly emotional that just makes them more crazy than normal. Emotional voters - bad. Politicians being politicians - normal and sometimes good and fun.)

So… What about the Tea Party victory of the moment? Let your Maximum Leader discourse for a moment on Christine O’Donnell. Let him start with the good stuff. Speaking as an objectifying man, she is cute. She’s a hell of a lot better looking than Mike Castle that’s for sure. (NB: Your Maximum Leader has met Mike Castle in the distant past. At the time Castle was Governor of Delaware. And he should also add that he seems to remember then-Gov Castle having a rather hot girlfriend. Your Maximum Leader only mentions this because apparently some people were rumoring recently that Castle was gay. Take that for what it is worth.) And being cute certainly must count for something. Insofar as her politics go, your Maximum Leader can’t say anything good or bad about her. Other than knowing that she was supported by the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin there doesn’t seem to be much written about her politics.

Except the stuff about abortion (she’s against it - so is your Maximum Leader by the way), masturbation (she’s against it - your Maximum Leader doesn’t know why masturbation might be a political issue - but insomuch as it is political he’s for it) and calling President Obama anti-American your Maximum Leader doesn’t know much about her politics. Again, like with the Tea Party at large, he suspects that he would likely agree with lots of her politics if he knew what they were. (Then again, like the Tea Party at large, the devil is in the details.)

She was nominated as the Republican candidate for Senate twice before. So apparently much opposition to her is recent. It is fine for her to be a sacraficial lamb before the campaigning of (now Vice-President) Joe Biden but it is too much for her to compete for a seat that is now open.

She won the primary fair and square. She won it in the only way she could. She tapped into voter anger and pushed the buttons that needed to be pushed. She’s played by the rules and won according to how the rules are played.

But there is the question of should she have run against Castle in the first place. This is the heart of what your Maximum Leader has to say on this.

Okay… Is Mike Castle a RINO? Is he a dreaded Republican in name only? No. He is a Republican. Is Mike Castle a conservative? No he is not. Your Maximum Leader realizes that Republicans tend to be more conservative than Democrats. But since we only have two political parties in this country they both need to be pretty big tents (to use a cliche). If one attempts to purify one of the parties you are left with a small rump party that ceases to be viable long-term.

Let us go back to the situation in Delaware. Is Delaware a particularly conservative leaning state? No. If it was would they have elected Joe Biden for all those years? Why has Mike Castle been so successful in Delaware? He’s been successful because he is in touch with the people he has represented for so many years. Mike Castle was the Republican that was able to appeal to the people of Delaware. Could conservatives count on the Mike Castle vote 100% of the time? No they could not. Could conservatives count on Mike Castle’s vote 50% of the time. Sure they could. Could conservatives count on Joe Biden’s vote 50% of the time? Nope. Could conservatives count on Joe Biden’s vote 10% of the time? Probably not.

So let us see where we are now. Christine O’Donnell might well win the race in November. Who knows. She won a primary “against the odds.” So if she can pull out one more win this year that would be great. If she wins in November your Maximum Leader will eat his words and state that nominating her wasn’t a mistake.

But let us say that history has not changed and Delaware is still what it has been for decades, a pretty safely Democratic state, and that Christine O’Donnell is beaten by a relative nobody on the Democratic side. Then what? What if Delaware was the difference between Republicans running the Senate or Democrats retaining control? In that situation would it not have been better to have Mike Castle there than in enforced retirement? As far as your Maximum Leader is concerned, the answer to that question is yes. Better to have Castle than nothing.

But for many Tea Party advocates it is better to have nothing than something. That is very disturbing.

Many years ago your Maximum Leader was an intern on Capitol Hill. And in his lowly position he had occasion to run into Lee Atwater and Mary Matalin and a host of other late 1980s early 1990s political guru types. At one point Lee Atwater said to a bunch of us interns that generally speaking 40% of Americans were always going to vote Democrat and 40% were always going to vote Republican. Both parties were fighting over about 11% of the electorate. Now Atwater was speaking about national races and speaking in the aggregate. But there is a basic truth here that many in the Tea Party movement don’t seem to get…

Let us say that those evenly split 80% of Americans were not just Democrats and Republicans. Let us instead think of them as Liberals and Conservatives. Those numbers are pretty hard and fast. Your just not going to change the mind of anyone in that 80%. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to. And in your Maximum Leader’s opinion that is just what the Tea Party movement activists are trying to do. It isn’t that the Tea Partiers are fighting in a meaningful way to win over the minds of the middle 20%. They are trying to make sure that the only people on their side are the ones that completely agree with them.

Your Maximum Leader thinks that it is unlikely that O’Donnell will win in November. She might, but it is unlikely. With Delaware remaining safely in Democratic hands it becomes less likely that Republicans (conservative ones as well as not so conservative ones) will take control of the Senate. If the Senate stays Democratically controlled it is much less likely that the Tea Partiers will get their (purported) wish, namely the opportunity to stop President Obama’s agenda.

So the question seems to be are the Tea Partiers looking to win, or just to make sure only the kids they want to play get to play? At this point your Maximum Leader thinks that the primary objective of Tea Party activists is to take control of the Republican party where ever they are able, regardless of being able to actually beat the man who they believe is ruining the country.

Sure some Tea Party supported candidates are going to win this fall (your Maximum Leader thinks Rand “Aqua Buddha” Paul will likely win in KY and it seems that Sharon Angle might actually beat Harry Reid in NV). It will be interesting to see how the Tea Party candidates will actually govern. Your Maximum Leader suspects that they will be a pain in the arse to everyone of all political stripes. We’ll see on that.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t have many people he’d consider his personal heros. There are a few however. At the top of that list is Winston Churchill. (Also on that list are George Washington and Elvis. You can see others over on the right side nav bar under the “Pantheon” heading.

So… Your Maximum Leader likes Churchill…

Imagine his surprise when he saw a headline on his Yahoo homepage this morning about a Churchill UFO cover up. Wha? Well here is the juicy part of the peice (which can be found in its entirety here: Did Churchill order a UFO cover up?):

It’s a conspiracy theory worthy of the “X-Files,” and it goes like this: Churchill, then the prime minister, apparently ordered a cover-up of an encounter between a Royal Air Force bomber and an unidentified flying object during World War II. The reason: Churchill feared that news of the incident would create public panic and a loss of faith in religion.

The Daily Telegraph explains that Churchill is reported to “have made the orders during a secret war meeting with U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.” He ordered that the information remain secret for a period of 50 years.
[…]
Apparently, Churchill’s order was overheard by one of his bodyguards. The man, also a member of the Royal Air Force, kept the secret to himself for years, but told his daughter at some point, and told his wife on his deathbed in 1973. The man’s daughter later told her son (the bodyguard’s grandson, for those of you keeping score), and he inquired about the incident with the Ministry of Defense in 1999. That inquiry made it into the files that were made public on Thursday.

According to the report, the crew of the plane did manage to take photographs of the UFO, which “hovered noiselessly” near their plane before zooming away. Alas, the photos, if they do indeed exist, were not released.

So there it is. In case you are wondering about it, here is the link to the article in the Telegraph that is the basis of the article on Yahoo.

Now let your Maximum Leader say that he thinks that the odds of there being extraterrestrial life (in some form) somewhere out in the universe somewhere are statistically rather high. He also thinks that the odds of that life being able to travel the vast distances across space (and time) to come to Earth and stop by without saying hi are pretty much zero. So he doesn’t believe in UFOs - to be clear.

So your Maximum Leader doesn’t know what that RAF bomber crew might have seen, or what story might have made its way to Churchill… But in time all UFO stories have been debunked by careful examination. To much time may have passed for this UFO story to be debunked as well. But if we were able to get the all the facts your Maximum Leader is sure that we could sensibly explain whatever it was that those RAF flyers saw.

The more interesting question to this story that doesn’t seem to be asked is what exactly Churchill’s advisors might have thought the UFO was and what theories they presented to WSC to make him classify the incident.

Where are Agents Muller and Scully when you need them?

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader skipped out to the beach for a few days and while there had a brainstorm for a short story. So that explains his (now usual) lack of posting…

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t normally blog about his dreams. This is mainly because dreams (Inception aside) are just subconscious ramblings of you mind trying to unwind. Last night your Maximum Leader had a dream that was positively frightening. It did, in fact, wake him from his slumber. In the dream your Maximum Leader’s legs were encrusted with some material like peat moss. The moss was infested with flesh-eating ants that were trying to make a colony in his legs. In the dream after a bit of panic your Maximum Leader took a long knife and cut off the infested moss. He then swam in a very cold river. Apparently at this point he woke up.

This was the first time a dream has caused your Maximum Leader to wake up from a deep sleep in longer than he can remember.

Oddly… Shortly after waking up a loud thunderstorm blew in. It was comforting and put your Maximum Leader right back to sleep, happy in the knowledge that we were getting much needed rain.

If any of you out there care to play Joseph to your Maximum Leader’s Pharaoh and try some dream interpretation feel free to go for it. (NB to all minions: your Maximum Leader thinks dream interpretation is bunk by the way - but have at it anyway.)

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader attended a memorial service over the weekend for a friend of our family. Our friend was 90 and lived a great long life.

During the reception after the service there was a slide show playing on a video monitor. The majority of the photos were of our friend in the majority of his life before we knew him. It was interesting to see him as a younger man in the 1950s and early 60s. He had a flat top hair cut, crisp suit and narrow tie.

At one point your Maximum Leader looked around the room and realized something interesting. There were three other men in the room who still wore flat top hair cuts. Who still wore crisp navy suits. Who still wore narrow ties. The three men were likely all in their 80s.

Your Maximum Leader worked the room a little and found out about these other men, or directly struck up conversation with them. They were a former airline pilot, a former civil engineer and a former chemical engineer. They spoke of knowing our friend at various stages of his life. We shared our thoughts and memories and then went our own ways.

On the drive back to your Maximum Leader’s in-law’s house it occurred to your Maximum Leader that these men are directly responsible for so much that is America today. These men built the modern United States. They came home from a war where they had saved the world and proceeded to change their nation and the world.

Your Maximum Leader couldn’t help but wonder how their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are squandering their work. He lamented to himself the decline of American manufacturing. He was saddened by the coarseness of our popular culture. He was absolutely crushed by the whining that punctuates any discourse about affairs of the day.

This is not to say that your Maximum Leader wants to return to a 1950s that was all Ward Cleaver-esque. He doesn’t. And please don’t think that your Maximum Leader is unaware of the idealized 1950’s and early 1960’s. He holds no illusions about that period - for good and ill.

What he is saying is that the spirit of doing, and making, and building and progressing is lost in our time. We don’t build things. Sure we innovate and invent, but we rely on others to do the actual producing (and in many situations that is fine - but shouldn’t we have some domestic industrial capacity?). We hardly seem capable of maintaining a national infrastructure that was largely the vision and work of those men with flat top haircuts. We don’t seem willing to work for much when we can coast on reputation and good fortune.

Sadly, reputation changes and good fortune changes to bad suddenly.

Your Maximum Leader was struck by a deep pathos on a holiday weekend that is his favorite of the year. If a pollster had contacted him and asked the most inane of inane (yet frequently repeated) pollster questions he would have said that our nation is “on the wrong track.” Sadly the right track doesn’t seem like a possible path for us.

Say we were able to take some of the flat top haircut Americans we have and put them to the task of energy independence, what would result? Probably little. You see, in order to get from here to there we would need to transition. This transition period (one that might require more domestic oil production, and more coal and more natural gas to get us “over the hump”) is so objectionable to so many people that it hardly seems possible that we will be able to move forward. Frankly this is the stage at which we’ve been stuck for 30 years. Myopia is the problem we have in our nation, and it is the bane of the flat top American. When so many can’t see more that what is right in front of them you can’t really have a vision of the future. What is worse, when myopic leaders (who are legion and of all persuasions) articulate a “vision” it is nothing more than a series of short term (myopic) goals strung together; because these people can’t think in other terms.

Your Maximum Leader wants his children to grow up and be the descendants (spiritually, as well as literally - we have quite a number of family photos blessed with many flat top haircuts) of those Americans who changed the world seventy years ago. He hope that they can accomplish great things. He hopes they will not have to be he suspects that they will be the ones that will have to save this nation, if it is to be saved. He also hopes that if they do turn out to be the flat top Americans of the future that their spirits will not be crushed by short-sighted idiots who don’t have the ability to conceive of that it was the work of American with flat top haircuts that made it possible for them to become short-sighted idiots in the first place.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t have a subject or theme to this post. So you’ll just have to bear with him.

Last night your Maximum Leader dreamnt that he (and Mrs Villain) were going to a party at the Hearst Castle. We were the guests of George Hamilton. Hamilton was taking us all around and introducing us to everyone. Somehow your Maximum Leader ended up in a huge Gothic library, in a smoking jacket, smoking cigars with George Hamilton, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and Eddie Izzard (who was not wearing a smoking jacket, but instead a sequined evening gown). Conversation revolved around making a film version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The “gimmick” of the film would be having it set in late 20th Century America and Caesar has overthrown the government. (Caesar would be killed on the floor of the old Senate Chamber in the Capitol.)

Your Maximum Leader played with an iPad yesterday for about an hour. We wants one now. We wants one…

Your Maximum Leader thought of Robbo when he learned that Brooks Brothers is running a seersucker suit sale. Go for it Robbo!

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t have too much planned for the weekend. If the weather holds he’ll take the family out for a little hike in the George Washington National Forest. We may see a waterfall if we are lucky.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has a few mental sidenotes he’ll go ahead and immoratalize in the ether of the interwebs now…

Earlier today he opened a can of Spagetti-Os. That is not noteworthy in itself. The noteworthy piece is that he opened it with the can opener tool on a Swiss Army knife. It took about 40 seconds. It has likely been 15 or more years since he’s opened a can this way.

After reading Robbo’s latest he mused that there are some names he likes a lot and (half-heartedly) tried to apply to his daughters. Mrs Villain vetoed them immediately in fact. They are: Livia, Helen, Irene, Agrippina, Julia and finally Andromache. Theodora has a nice ring to it, but the historical connection is a little too slutty. (NB: Your Maximum Leader never learned why Helen and Julia were problematic to Mrs Villain.)

Your Maximum Leader has always thought (and perhaps has mentioned before) that he’s always found this song lyric particularly lovely and poignant: “Two are born to cross/their lives/their souls/their heart/if by chance one turns away/are they forever lost?”

Your Maximum Leader has about 8 hours of Dollhouse on the DVR to watch. He’s been meaning to see how Joss Whedon wrapped up the series. But since the Olympics are on, he’s not been watching the DVR…

Your Maximum Leader has often wondered how the course of Western Civilization would have been changed if the Emperors of the Byzantine Empire had been a little less concerned with iconoclasm and more concerned with Islam. Today, he found himself imagining what the world would be like if Constantinople was still the seat of an Orthodox Empire in the East.

Your Maximum Leader gets annoyed with people who spell it “ikon” and not “icon.” He notices that he only sees “ikon” in the context of a religious image.

Who is cuter? Mila Kunis or Kristen Bell? Your Maximum Leader normally would say Mila Kunis, but her connection to McCauley Caulkin makes her slightly less attractive. Repeated viewings of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” keep adding props to Kristen Bell.

Your Maximum Leader wonders about the great and terrible Velociman. He hopes all is well with him.

You know, your Maximum Leader has crossed paths many times with the police chief in this photo. (The photo is on the main page of Velociworld now, that prompted this thought.) He always seemed like a nice fellow who had the terrible burden of this photo being the only thing that people knew him for.

Your Maximum Leader’s kids keep singing this song.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has in the past expounded on the architectural/sculputral style he likes to call “Totalitarian Gothic.” He first introduced this term to you all in this post in Sept 2006. For those of you who have visited Washington DC, you will see quite a bit of “Totalitarian Gothic” sculpture and building. Afterall, the Federal City as we know it was built in large part in the 1930s, when Totalitarian Gothic was pretty chic.

Now, you may have gathered that your Maximum Leader is a fan of Totalitarian Gothic. Well… He is and he isn’t. In some circumstances it is fine. But in others it is not.

Which brings him to the object of this post…

The impending memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. on the Mall in Washington. Not exactly on the Mall but pretty close, near the Tidal Basin across from the Jefferson Memorial actually…

According to the Washington Post, the monument to MKL is ready for pickup in China.

If you have no idea what this monument looks like you can see a graphic by clicking here.

Now… Before anyone goes berserk over these comments… Your Maximum Leader is not a racist bastard who doesn’t think Martin Luther King Jr. should have a monument on the Mall in Washington. A monument or other memorial is just fine. Your Maximum Leader just really doesn’t like this one.

So… Where to begin… Let us start back in the 1980s when the Congress of the United States decided to put a statue of MLK up in the Capitol Building along with other great Americans . The bust that was put in the Capitol is here. Now let us look at some of MLK’s company in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Here are: Jackson (in bronze), Garfield (in marble), Reagan (in bronze), and Washington (a bronze replica of the much greater marble which resides in the Virginia State Capitol and which the Federal Government has tried to appropriate from time to time with no success). At the time your Maximum Leader thought that the MLK bust in the Capitol was ugly and not in keeping with the style of monumental statuary in the Capitol building. Now he finds himself harping on the exact same issue, only this time the problem is writ large.

Writ 30 feet large to be exact.

The MLK monument near the tidal basin has a lot of problems in your Maximum Leader’s opinion. The first one is scale. If you clicked onto that graphic you would see that the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial is 19 feet tall. The MLK monument is 30 feet tall. That is just too big for a statue on the mall. Way too big.

Now you may be saying, “Hold on there, the Lincoln Memorial building is much taller than 30 feet. Shouldn’t you compare apples to apples?” Fair point. If you want to consider the whole MLK monument as a you would a building, then you are faced with a classical temple versus a large rock with a man coming out of it.

The scale of the large rock with a man coming out of it is just too great. It will dwarf many of the trees (cherry trees in many cases) in the area. Also, in terms of human scale it is not approachable. One of the many things that works with the Lincoln (or Jefferson) Memorial is that you are faced with an impressive ediface, but then the statue is scaled down proportionally and you can “feel” closer to it. The MLK carving is just huge. It will be five times taller than a tall man. Five times taller! Not only that, MLK will just be staring off into the distance above the visitor. The strength of the Lincoln statue is that he looks down to the visitor. Your Maximum Leader just can’t think of a way in which the MLK monument works on the National Mall. Not a one. It is too big, too impersonal, and too out-of-place.

When your Maximum Leader first saw the MLK monument the first thought that popped into his head was, “Dear God. It looks like something Kim Jong-il would have built in honor of his father, Kim Il-sung.” It does. The impersonal face. The crossed arms. The imperious look. It does seem like a monument more akin to a communist dictatorship than a democratic republic. (Indeed, in the MWO expect to see many similarly scaled monuments to your Maximum Leader. They will be omnipresent.)

Our National Mall is a communal space for the Nation. The monuments that adorn it should reflect, in scale, in material, and in composition our democratic ideals. The Lincoln Memorial harkens back to classical Athens. The Jefferson Memorial harkens back to Republican Rome. The WWII Memorial is a bit of a stretch with its monumental arches, but it fits closely enough to be passable. The Washington Monument is a bit out of place, but it is the distinctive mark (along with the Capitol Dome) on the city skyline. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t see how an artificial mountain with a man coming out of it will work in this communal space.

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t like it. No he doesn’t. Not one bit.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was just reading the lastest Badass of the Week entry. It is on the Kraken. Sadly, the Kraken didn’t quite do it for your Maximum Leader. But being in a badass frame of mind he provides you with this eternal question:

Ninjas vs Pirates? Which is more badass?

Well… Ben, the chronicler of all things badass, answers the question here.

Your Maximum Leader has pondered the question and agrees with Ben’s rationale.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader read an interesting opinion piece on the WaPo last week. It is Today’s Town Halls a Departure From de Tocqueville, Rockwell by Phillip Kennicott. In it Kennicott spends a whole opinion column without giving his opinion on the whole topic of “town hall meetings.” Your Maximum Leader will remedy this by giving you his opinion of “town hall meetings.”

Your Maximum Leader is a strong advocate of thoughtful debate. He enjoys going to listen to people (hopefully people with some measure of expertise) discuss issues of the day. He imagines that he would greatly enjoy participating in one of the (mythological) town hall meetings depicted by Norman Rockwell (and mentioned/debunked in Kennicott’s piece). Participatory democracy has its place in small homogeneous groups, like small close-knit rural communities or in Robert Nozick’s ideal minimal states. The keys to having such a town hall meeting work are listening and thoughtful response.

Alas, what passes for a “town hall meeting” today is not at all what your Maximum Leader wants to think about as a “town hall meeting” except in as much as the meeting might take place in a town hall or other public building. Let us first agree to call these meetings “Q&A sessions with ‘decision makers’” because that is what they really are supposed to be. You get a Congressman or Senator (or Administration Official - or President Obama) standing in front of a bunch of people answering questions that are asked. Nothing is actually to be decided at these meetings. No policy is actually going to be made. No amendments offered to legislation. No county codes adopted. These are glorified question and answer sessions.

Of course, when you add uncertainty, fear, arrogance, and single-mindedness to a question and answer period you get what we’ve been seeing around the country in the past few weeks. These aren’t really question and answer periods. They are open mic sessions at your local school where you can say whatever crosses your mind. This goes equally for the citizens and the “decision makers.” There are no subject matter experts (for the most part) at these meetings. The decision makers don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And the angry citizens don’t know much except that they are angry.

These meetings should be called “name-calling recrimination meetings.”

This is not to say that your Maximum Leader isn’t sympathetic to the average citizen who is afraid of what his government is contemplating doing to the nation’s health care system. In fact, your Maximum Leader is just as appalled as those people who seem to make the highlight reels on every newscast. If your Maximum Leader were to attend one of these shindigs he would not be inclinded to call people “nazis” (unless he were sure they actually were) or reference how they will surely meet with a dire heavenly judgement (like the President said once, that judgement is above his pay-grade). Your Maximum Leader would really have liked to ask the President at his “town hall” one question. That question would be “Mr. President, where exactly can I find the legislation that constitutes your health care plan? I’d like to read your plan and not one of the dozen proposals in front of Congress that is not your plan.” To your Maximum Leader’s knowledge President Obama references his plan a lot; but no one has read the legislative text of that plan. One could stop a lot of “misinformation” about death panels and such if you actually had a single presidential plan to which to refer…

Ah well… Your Maximum Leader has thought that in the mainstream public forum true political discourse is dead in America. You have to go to small blogs and niche publications to get real discourse and discussion. It is out there; but you will not find it at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN or Fox…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has not been asked to run the Islamic Republic of Iran; and frankly it has never been an aspiration of his. Your Maximum Leader is not a Muslim. Neither does he speak Persian. Those two issues alone would likely preclude his installation as Supreme (Maximum if you will) Leader fo the Islamic Republic.

Of course your Maximum Leader has read the inner monologue of current Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Until reading that your Maximum Leader has never really thought about being the unquestioned leader of a medieval theocracy on the verge of gettng nukes. It could be a real gas.

But then your Maximum Leader reads shit like this (from the Jerusalem Post via the Wall Street Journal) in which a member of the Basiji (a paramilitary militia in Iran loyal to the Supreme Leader) confesses to the following:

He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.”

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her “husband.”

“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said.

Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?”

“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.”

Damn! Damn! Damn! DAMN! Gawd! Your Maximum Leader read that and wanted to go find Ali Khameni and sodomize him with a sun-dried and splintering axe handle. Sadly, that type of degredation would be too good for Khameni. Your Maximum Leader doubts that any techniques he could pick up from anyone short of the bastard love-child decendent of Stalin, Pol-Pot and the Marquis de Sade would do the trick. Your Maximum Leader thought, for a moment, that putting Khameni in a cell with a few of the mothers of daughters who suffered the brief “marriages” to their Basiji husbands might be suitable. Alas, it would surely be too quick. Any means of death that didn’t last at least 90 days would be to short.

Your Maximum Leader jokes from time to time about lining people up against the wall and them getting what they deserve. But unfortunately some people, and Ali Khameni might be one of them, don’t ever get what they deserve.

If your Maximum Leader were ever to find himself as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran there are many who would have to pray every second of their short lives that the worst thing that would befall them is that they would get dragged out and shot.

Just to go on the record, Ali Khameni wouldn’t even get the benefit of a show trial.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sometimes hears of, or reads a story, that simmers slowly in his consciousness for days or weeks. Then, after properly stewed and triggered by something, the rant comes… In this case the story has been stewing for a few weeks and the trigger was a piece on APM’s Marketplace today.

So it is that your Maximum Leader is going to rant for a moment about slavery guilt…

In late June your Maximum Leader first started to see the news articles. They were predominantly British articles. A number of scholars are beginning to go over the records kept by the British government concerning reparations paid out to compensate slave owners when Britain outlawed slavery in the whole British Empire (in 1833).

Your Maximum Leader remembers a Financial Times article detailing how two old-line British firms may have profited from slavery. The big firms were the Rothchild Bank and the law firm Freshfields. The Financial Times article opened:

Two of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies, documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking family’s 19th-century patriarch, and James William Freshfield, founder of Freshfields, the top City law firm, benefited financially from slavery, records from the National Archives show, even though both have often been portrayed as opponents of slavery.

If you go on to read the whole piece you would see that Freshfield and Rothchild were, in fact, abolitionists. In the case of Freshfield, his firm acted as trustee for Caribbean slave owners and set about getting reparation funds on behalf of the clients. In the case of Rothchild, the bank sought reparations for slaves that were collateral for broader transactions.

Now, one can certainly make a case that Freshfield and Rothchild could have instructed their firms not to deal at all with slave owners and not to agree to act as trustee for slave owning estates or use slaves as collateral for loans. So your Maximum Leader isn’t trying to put them completely off the hook here… But there is profiting from the slave trade and slavery, and then there is what Freshfield and Rothchild did. It may be a matter of degrees here, but perhaps these are important degrees to examine. If a lawyer is a trustee for an estate, he damned well had better do what he can to effectively and profitably manage the estate on behalf of its beneficiaries. And in the case of a bank, if you have chosen to accept slaves as collateral in a loan transaction, then when the government is removing the collateral’s value and offering reparations; the bank needs to take the money.

Your Maximum Leader is not sure how Freshfield and Rothchild are villains in this story. Especially given the large role the Rothchild Bank played in financing the reparations the British Government made…

But the part that sets your Maximum Leader off is the chorus of people who believe that the sins of the dead should be revisited on the unrelated living… This is especially true in how your Maximum Leader views the calls in the US for reparations for slavery. The Financial Times points out in their piece how JPMorgan has set up scholarship funds to “repay” the decendents of slaves in the US as a way of saying “We’re sorry” about the role some predecessor banks mortgaged slaves. The FT piece also mentions how Aetna and New York Life have apologized and paid for “educational efforts” to in essence make up for insurance policies they wrote on behalf of slave owners.

There is also the fact that the US Senate passed a resolution (which contained clauses saying that the resolution couldn’t be admitted into evidence in a court of law) apologizing for slavery.

If one views institutions like banks and insurance companies (and the US Senate) as continuing entities across time, then one might (just barely might) be somewhat justified in asking them to own up to a wrong they did in the past and say their sorry. Your Maximum Leader is not trying to let these companies off the hook for other transgressions they may have committed in the past; but he is willing to draw a line about slavery in America.

It would behoove people to remember that there was this thing called the American Civil War. That war was all about slavery. The war ended slavery in America. There was no reparation for freed slaves paid to rebellious slave owners. There was no compensation issued for destroyed farms and cities in states in rebellion. Northern bankers weren’t repaid for lost collateral and property they had claim to in the South. Insurance policies weren’t cashed out. The pro-slave and anti-slave forces pretty much took sides and decided the question on battlefields. Upwards of 650,000 men were killed or wounded fighting for the Union to decide the issue of slavery. Your Maximum Leader will suggest that those men paid in blood any reparations that might be owed slaves. He further suggests that it is wrong to extract monetary reparations from people who have never owned slaves or suffered as slaves.

It is not for your Maximum Leader to decide how the British should or shouldn’t settle the question of who might be owed what for profiting off slavery. But from what he’s read the case against Freshfield and Rothchild seems quite overblown. If he had to offer advice he’d recommend a heartfelt and tearful apology. Because this is more about how people feel things should be than actual wrongs. After an apology, move along…

Carry on.