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Almost two-thirds of 1.6 million civilian full-time federal employees received merit bonuses or special time-off awards in fiscal 2002, according to an examination of federal records obtained by the Washington Post.

I’m sure this profligate system of rewards is encouraging these employees to subscribe to a philosophy of smaller government. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there are both pragmatic and philosophical reasons to object to the renewed Republican embrace of stronger and larger central government.

All names, places, titles, and work related information have been changed for the sake of security and privacy. The following article is NOT a textbook for stealing/shoplifting. The following article IS a resource for all security personnel to use as a means of training and defense against social engineering. I decided to work a short day today so I only had time to make my attempts on two stores. I met the District Loss Prevention Supervisor (Charles) at 7a.m. in Middleville and asked him a few questions before I got started. He told me that he and a few of his plain clothed security guys had done this in the past and one of them held the record in the district for getting out the door without getting stopped with a $400 DVD player. I assumed that it must have been a while since that happened if the price was that high. What I said to him next really peaked his interest. “Man, I’m about to walk out that door with $4000 worth of merchandise and I’ll stop and talk to a cashier on the way out.”

Of course, if this guy was really sharp, he would have first negotiated a deal that would allow him to keep whatever he managed to successfully get out of the store. I was shocked that he didn’t.

Franger writes: Vox your article makes the simple and flawed assumption that since you are a ‘christian’ libertarian, the left does not share your views, and neither does GWB, therefore GWB is left and it is stupid of the left not to realise this. But GWB’s governance is not of the left, it is crony capitalism. As a left/liberal I can realise that GWB doesn’t conform to the ideals of many of his own supporters, but that doesn’t put him in my camp.

I’m glad to hear that the American Left no longer supports a vast increase in federal spending and central government power. It’s wonderful that they are not interested in establishing new federal entitlements. I’m pleased to hear that they abjure the handing over of national sovereignty inherent in LOST. I think it’s great that they are no longer interested in having the US act as the military arm of the pretenders to global governance known as the United Nations. Oh, wait, they do support all that, don’t they….

Granted, the tax cuts aren’t a left/liberal’s cup of tea, but even the secular socialist saint John Maynard believed that taxes should be cut as spending is ramped up in times of economic slowdown. Personally, I suspect that if George Delano would declare that he doesn’t really believe in all that Jesus nonsense and start making overtures to the baby-killing crowd, the left would warm to him in a heartbeat. The far-left only doesn’t like the Iraqi occupation because it is the US who is nominally doing the occupying. Once Iraq gets turned over to the global centralists, they’ll argue that we should be funding it down to our last tax dollar.

And left-liberals are warming to George Bush. They call themselves 9/11 Democrats. They support big government AND war. Gee, that’s a new political paradigm.

Had a good time conversing with the NA crew. I’m a little surprised that there is still such a strong bent in favor of nation-building among the conservative crowd, especially considering that very few conservatives supported the concept in Bosnia when Clinton was leading the charge. I’m not opposed to the goal of expanding freedom and liberty around the world, I’m just extremely pessimistic about the likelihood of success as well as the opportunity cost. This is one of those areas where the Law of Unintended Consequences is almost guaranteed to bite you in the posterior in some manner you’d never considered.

We were more in accord on the women in the military issue, although I’m not sure that some of the guys had really thought about it all that much. Three callers this time, two opposing my view on nation-building and a Navy Persian Gulf vet offering anecdotal support for my contention that women don’t belong in the military.

I’m looking forward to the next time.

One season, 38 games, no defeats. Incredible. And I’m pleased to no end that my favorite player, Dennis Bergkamp, should turn out to be the hero of the final game. Sure, it’s not the Treble, but being the first team to go undefeated in the Premiership since 1889 is an astounding feat of sporting prowess.

2004 Arsenal

26 wins

12 draws

00 losses

73 goals for

26 goals against

From The Nation: Interviews with an array of conservative thinkers and policy-makers reveal a rising disquiet on these matters among people who have spent most of their lives proudly identifying with the Republican Party and the philosophy for which they’ve long assumed it stood. At the root of their discomfort is a feeling not that the Bush Administration is too conservative but that it has forsaken the guiding principles of conservatism–prudence, caution, restraint–to pursue an agenda that is messianic and radical. To these dissenters, it is an agenda that seems less a fulfillment of classic conservative principles than an exercise in hubris reminiscent of the ideological excesses of another era, the 1960s, only with the shoe on the other party’s foot.

You won’t often hear me praising The Nation, but this article by Eyel Press, entitled “Even Conservatives Are Wondering: Is Bush One of Us?” is one well worth reading. I tend to be an early bird and left the GOP years ago, and I fully expect many, many Republicans to join me in exiting the party as it transforms itself into a ruling strong government institution.

It is not uncommon that one’s opponents have a clearer view of one than one does oneself. This article should seriously trouble anyone who still clings to the hope that the president is a conservative. The problem isn’t just that the administration’s agenda is messianic and radical, but that it is a left-leaning messianic and radical agenda. The fact that much of the left doesn’t recognize this only demonstrates how deeply stupid most of it is.

DS writes of Wednesday: What’s your opinion? Today looked like a close well below 10,000 and the 200 day MA. Then off like a rocket. Hadn’t seen that pattern for a while. Perfect straight line. Almost like a computer was doing the buying.

Ah yes, one powerful sign that the rally has lost its steam is that the Plunge Protection Team begins to poke its nose into the markets. While their actions last summer were successful in prolonging new life into the rally – in coordination with the newly low rates – any activity on their part tends to be a nice set up for shorts as we saw on Thursday afternoon and Friday. There is no PPT, officially, but there is certainly a Working Group on Financial Markets. I don’t think they have any hope of staving off a decline, not now, but they can hope to let the air out in an orderly manner.

Mike Hartman of Financial Sense Online wrote: The Working Group on Financial Markets was created for a reason, and I believe we saw one of them yesterday. The Dow looked like it was headed for a 300-point meltdown day, but that couldn’t be allowed to happen for a few reasons. For one, it could have jeopardized our already fragile economic recovery. Second, we are in an election year and third, the U.S. Treasury was right in the middle of their three-day auction to get some badly needed cash to pay back old debt and to finance the growing federal deficit.

Just in case you’ve been wondering what he’s been up to, this recent press release makes it pretty clear that he’s been busy playing video games on this thing.Vector processing and massively parallel processing capabilities in a single architecture – Combat Mission would absolutely fly on that thing!

Which reminds me, I’m going to need to fire up Wing Commander – the first one – once I get that Mitsubishi projector I’m thinking about. It’s amazing how there haven’t been many great games in the lasat few years considering how much better the graphics have gotten.

From the Onion:Your choice of reading material for the bus is very important. Displaying Harry Potter books could get you mugged, but no one f—- with a guy reading “Surviving The Imminent Nuclear Holocaust.”

Not that I’m a survivalist or anything, but this does remind me of a conversation with Big Chilly one afternoon many moons ago in the Digital Ghetto. Now, keep in mind that while we did have some storage space in the house, it was entirely occupied by the Mad Scientist’s extensive botany project. Big Chilly came into my room – which was essentially lined with bookshelves packed double and triple deep – and asked if I still had that old .38 revolver that my Dad had given me when I was a kid.

I was sitting on my bed, so I said yeah, reached over to my left, tipped three paperbacks forward, unloaded the cylinder and handed it to him. He looked at me a little strangely, then asked if I kept my Glock handy too. I reached over to my right, tipped two hardcovers forward and pulled out the Glock. At that point, he glanced up at the ceiling fan and asked suspiciously: “If I put my hand up there, what will I find? And where’s the SKS and the AR-15, anyway? You can’t tell me you’ve got them in a bookcase.”

“Dude, look under the bed.”

Iraq’s feared Abu Ghraib jail was one big sex romp – sometimes by candlelight with an audience watching, U.S. troops said yesterday. Sex and alcohol were commonplace, and soldiers frequently set up candlelit rooms for voyeuristic sex shows, said a soldier who served at the notorious prison. “There were lots of affairs. There was all kinds of adultery and alcoholism and all kinds of crap going on,” said Dave Bischel, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police unit, who returned home from Abu Ghraib last month.

It will be interesting to see if the mainstream media will run with this aspect of the story. Possibly not, since the only conclusion is that women have no place in the military. I don’t think that they’ll be able to avoid it, though, anymore than the Pentagon could sweep the abuse pictures under the rug.