Author: Eric Scheie

While the subject is the same, I think this: leaves more to the imagination than this: It’s all a question of scale. Not as in balance, though. MORE: In other news of runny ruins, “Facebook draws 7,000 to anti-Muslim pork sausage party in Paris.” When I was a kid, rebellion took the form of long…

There’s a raging battle over what sort of ads should be allowed on Craigslist. The more Craigslist attempts to comply with the demands of prosecutors and various self-appointed monitoring groups and advocacy organizations, the louder their demands. First it was demanded that they monitor the “Erotic Services” section. Then they had to take it down.…

Sometimes I find the statements that come out of our leaders so mind boggling that I don’t know where to begin. Earlier I read that President Obama is complaining about a rise of “tribal attitude”. It’s one of my pet peeves too; I have written several posts about tribalism, which I think is indistinguishable from…

My earlier post about big government’s systematic elimination of large denomination currency — ostensibly to fight the war on drugs — made me wonder whether big government’s need for the war on drugs is based not so much on a realistic goal or genuine desire to eliminate illegal drugs so much as it is the…

Yes, today is M. Simon’s birthday, and I won’t say which one as it just sounds too spooky (especially being that his birthday always falls on October13th, which looks Halloweenishly inverted). And I don’t want to get into numerology here. One superstition at a time. For this this special occasion, I decided to do something…

Human behavior being what it is, if we consider the sheer number of people on the planet (or even limit our considerations to the 300 million or so Americans), it should not surprise anyone that each day, a number of incidents occur which are capable of generating outrage. It used to be that local news…

I don’t like being lied to, and while I have come expect it, what irritates me even more than being lied to is seeing other people being lied to. Especially in the name of “democracy.” A perfect example of the kind of stuff that just pisses me off is the way the Democrats have run…

An issue that has long fascinated me is high denomination currency. There used to be quite a bit of it in circulation, but it died out. In the late 1960s: The Federal Reserve began taking high-denomination bills out of circulation in 1969. As of May 30, 2009, there were only 336 known $10,000 bills in…

Happy Columbus Day! As Glenn Reynolds noted earlier, Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. Gee, ya think? How about “Christopher Columbus & His Crimes Against Humanity“? That seems as good a nomination as any for…

There are a lot of ways to drum up publicity for your own book, but I think throwing it at the president takes the cake. As I just told M. Simon in an email related to his post, it’s obvious that the authorities know the title, and equally obvious that they don’t want ordinary people…

Nolan Finley (editorial page editor of The Detroit News) is warning the Republican Party about the inherently fragile (and often seemingly fickle) nature of independent voters: The country is tilting more conservative, in reaction to the extreme liberalism in Washington, just as it leaned more liberal in 2008 in a rebuke of Bush. But there’s…

I didn’t know it before, but thanks to Glenn I realized that today is 10/10/10. And right now it’s 10:10 p.m. So I better get this post up quick before I turn into a pumpkin! AFTERTHOUGHT: It came and went pretty fast. I don’t think I’ll ever live to see another 1010101010. And I just…

That’s what one advocate says about an idea floated by Michael Savage (a man I can’t stand) to impose a 20% tariff on all Chinese goods: In his book that just came out today, “Trickle Up Poverty,” Conservative talk show host Michael Savage has proposed a tariff on Chinese goods in order to restore America’s…

On Friday, I flagged a quote on my daily calendar which illustrates the pitfalls of either/or thinking. It didn’t seem important enough to merit a post at the time, so I set it aside. But now that I’m ready to make a stab at the post, I found my mental processes interrupted by the usual…

A statistician I am not. Nor do I believe in predicting (much less judging) what individual will do based on which statistical group an individual is said to belong. One of the things I hate about the insurance industry is the way they translate statistical correlations into individual judgments, and a perfect example is the…

This morning Glenn Reynolds linked the Blog Prof’s discussion of the race between political titan John Dingell, Obamacare sponsor and lifetime advocate of socialized medicine, and Dr. Rob Steele, a cardiologist who has had enough of what’s happening and decided to run for Congress. OK, Dingell happens to be my congressman, and FWIW, I wrote…

I’m pretty sure it was Glenn Reynolds who linked this video of a woman having a fit and threatening a Human Events photographer, but WTH, I can’t find his link so maybe it was Memeorandum. I do try to be accurate in attributing links, but I also have to sleep. Nothing pretty about it unless…

I love the story of Charlie the Smoking Chimp, and I am sorry to read that he died, although I am delighted to see that by making it to 52, he outlived “normal” (which I assume means non-smoking) chimps by a decade. Charlie the chimp, known for his cigarette habit, has died at his home…

Damn it I hate definitions — especially when the definitions lurk within definitions. In yesterday’s post about the definitions of work and the work ethic” I fell into a trap of my own inadvertent creation by treating the word “society” as almost a synonym for government. the weaselly phrase “the work ethic” avoids taking sides…

According to A. O. Scott of the NYT, homophobia has a sneaky way of making itself acceptable by allowing its own ridicule: …lampooning homophobia has become an acceptable, almost unavoidable form of homophobic humor… Why those sneaky homophobes! I find this development deeply worrisome. That to ridicule something is to encourage it? Put aside homophobia…