Author: Eric Scheie

One of the fringe benefits of having a dog like Coco is never having to worry about terrifying incidents like this: STRONGSVILLE ANIMAL COMPLAINT, DRAKE ROAD: Residents called police because they were trapped in their home by a temperamental squirrel. The squirrel was desperate to get in the house, according to the residents. The squirrel…

Roger L. Simon has a very thoughtful piece about Laura Bush’s support for gay marriage. Yes, that Laura Bush. The former first lady. Barack Obama is now to the right of her on this issue. She proclaimed that support in her characteristic well-mannered, low-keyed fashion on Larry King Live. (Okay, nobody’s perfect.) I even had…

That’s what I wondered when I read about a disgusting children’s event in Berkeley, in an article titled “Middle School Brainwashing: Would MLK Approve of Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism?” The event features a notoriously anti-Semitic rapper named Lowkey, and one of the most viciously anti-Israel activists in the world — a man named Norman Finkelstein…

A horrible carjacking in Detroit resulted in the tragic death of an innocent grandmother, but the headline and the focus of the front page story in today’s Detroit Free Press is on a bullet. They really make it stand out too. Geraldine Jackson was happy her granddaughter was back from the South. To welcome her…

Zombie has a great PJM post about the fatwa head-butting attack on Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, and I share his indignation, not only over the attack, but over the fact that people in the room cheered. People who believe in killing people for expressing ideas of which they disapprove are enemies of civilization itself. The…

Amidst the hubbub over Elena Kagan’s sexuality (or lack thereof), there’s a question which isn’t being asked by anyone, which I would call the question about the question. What is gay? Think it’s easy to define? I’d be willing to bet that if you polled most people, their answers would vary. Even the readers here…

Anyone remember the rumors about Condoleezza Rice? While I thought they were silly at the time, I can’t stop my thoughts from wandering back to not that long ago: The Enquirer described its article as “the ultimate guessing game among Hollywood fans – trying to figure out which big-name stars are gay”. The report went…

I can’t make the celebration at the Dal&iacute Museum in St. Petersburg, but Salvador Dal&iacute would be 106 today. In his honor, I thought I’d scan in a couple of images which don’t seem to be on the Internet anywhere. This one is from 1974 and is titled “Transformation.” Unfortunately, the entire image is a…

Not that the world was wondering, but I don’t give a damn about Supreme Court pick Elena Kagan’s sexuality. And while I don’t like her liberal, anti-military philosophy, that would typify anyone of her background, many of whom would be worse. So I haven’t felt especially compelled to write about her. Until today, that is.…

Last night I stumbled onto a problem which provided a perfect illustration of how computers are challenging traditional notions of property — of what is and what is not yours. What happened was that I tried to pay a simple YouTube video in Slackware, and the Firefox web browser would not play it unless I…

I realize that this is not the forum for bragging about silly accomplishments, but after spending nearly two insanely difficult days of trying this and trying that, I was finally able to get my Broadcom 4318 wireless card (the BCM43xx chipset is notoriously difficult, and that’s in the “easy” Linux distros) to work in Slackware…

From Scott Ott comes a good rhetorical question about a New York Times editorial: Does the New York Times really crave a society in which the federal government can restrict the constitutional rights of citizens who have committed no crimes? To which I would add another rhetorical question: “Is the Pope Catholic?” For some time,…

After some seemingly intractable hard drive partitioning problem (occasioned by the stubborn refusal of the GRUB-2 loader to accept partition changes), I finally managed to install and configure Slackware linux on this older Dell laptop. That’s in addition to Ubuntu — so now that I have straightened out the GRUB loader (with which Slackware has…

As I have pointed out in a number of posts, what I most like about the Tea Party movement is that it consists of largely of people who want the government to leave them alone. That’s a new phenomenon in American politics, because traditionally, political activists tend to be people who want to tell others…

Last night I attended a remarkable production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”. Written at the peak of the 1930s (before World War II had started to seep in and draw that period to a close), it’s a classic portrayal of small town life which poses profound questions about life, death and eternity. The minimalist scenery…

Roger L. Simon looks at the “mystery” (yes, they’re actually calling it that) of the man (Faisal Shahzad) who traveled to Pakistan and “learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp.” Once there, according to investigators, he traveled to the lawless Waziristan region and learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp. In court papers,…

Much as I love thoughtful comments (even by those who disagree with me), one of the problems that plagues me is when commenters jump on me by playing GOTCHA games, misreading what I said, putting words in my mouth, or even attributing to me positions I never took or beliefs I do not hold. This…

In an earlier post which I wrote after seeing Barack Obama’s commencement address (in which he advocated civility), I worried about the president’s failure to condemn the relentless campaign to falsely smear dissenters as racist, and concluded with a rhetorical question: …while I am glad the president said that “we can’t expect to solve our…

Anyone remember when being against Bush was the litmus test for liberalism? These days, it often seems as if being against Bush has become a litmus test for conservatism. The old rule used to be that “the Right is looking for converts and the Left is looking for heretics.” Now it seems to be the…

What do you do if you hate socialism but don’t like conservatism? Unfortunately for me, I have found myself in that predicament ever since the election of Barack Obama. Oddly enough, no one seemed to care when Bush was president, because in those days people who disliked socialism more than they disliked conservatism were considered…