Author: Eric Scheie

  • Careful what you pray for…

    M. Simon’s post reminded me of today’s Sunday “prayer.”     I get a lot of annoying email from people calling themselves “patriots,” but if they’re not careful they’ll lose control of the word. (As well as their prayers, regardless of what the pope actually says…) I often think we’re living in ridiculous times. Yet,…

  • Happy Memorial Day! Remember and honor those who died!

    This famous poem is now over 100 years old: Flanders Field today: And a painting of the soldier poet’s subject: So please remember. Don’t let their sacrifices be in vain. We will always be in their debt.

  • “What A Great Job You Are Doing”

    Great. Just great. Last month critics of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous anti-drug crusade were dismayed by the official White House summary of a “very friendly” telephone conversation in which Donald Trump praised the bloodthirsty authoritarian for “fighting very hard to rid [his] country of drugs.” A newly revealed transcript of the April 29 call,…

  • The constantly-evolving, living, breathing definition of fascism

    Even though my posts have slowed to barely a trickle, as most readers know, I’m no fan of Trump. Nor is Reason‘s Nick Gillespie, whose latest piece totally cracked me up: Donald Trump, the most-unlikely and least-liked president in the history of the United States, had barely celebrated his first 100 days when calls for his…

  • What happened is less important than what people want to have happened!

    I don’t blog much, but occasionally I get really pissed off with nowhere else to go, and this is such an occasion. I am almost beside myself over something, and I don’t know what to do about it. For years now (and especially for the past few months) I keep hearing people say that Hitler…

  • Massive surveillance by nameless apparatchiks, and the buck stops nowhere!

    While these days I generally avoid politics like the plague, I have become more than a little annoyed by the uproar over Trump’s complaint — in a misspelled tweet, mind you — that he was wiretapped. Wiretapped? Of course he was! As anyone who has been following the news in the past decade knows, we have…

  • Illiterate Marxists arise! You have nothing to lose but your plague!

    Yesterday morning I ate at a local Berkeley breakfast diner. The table tops are covered with copper, and someone went to a lot of trouble using a chemical (probably some sort of mild copper solvent, maybe even lemon juice) to put graffiti on a number of them which would be very difficult to remove, as you’d…

  • “the right-wing movement that is affiliated with Breitbart News”

    As a witness to the recent rioting in Berkeley (and as someone who has known the Berkeley left for years) I was dumbfounded by Robert Reich’s bizarre theory that the rioters in fact may have been secret right wingers affiliated with Breitbart: “There’s rumors that they actually were right-wingers. They were a part of a kind…

  • Why pretend?

    Probably because it’s human nature…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovY1MMQhMsQ    

  • The Bible is hate speech, as is the Quran, and so what?

    I’m getting more than tired of arguments over whether the Bible (in this case the Leviticus condemnation of “lying with man as woman”) is hate speech. Let’s assume that this woman — and all people who raise religious objections to homosexuality — are religious bigots. So what? Religious bigotry is nothing new. (Just ask the Islamists.)…

  • So much for states rights! (Campaign promises be damned!)

    I was just greeted by a wonderful headline: “White House sees greater enforcement on recreational marijuana“: WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) – The administration of President Donald Trump expects to see greater federal enforcement of laws against the use of marijuana for recreational purposes, a White House spokesman said on Thursday. Asked if the government would…

  • It’s only censorship if they’re censoring something I agree with!

    I was outraged over the cancellation of Milo’s speech by the University of California Berkeley recently. So were a lot of people — many of whom are on the right. You know, the people who call themselves conservatives? And now that a major conservative organization has also canceled his speech, we’re told (by the same people…

  • Internationalism, 1972

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Uu57h7H18

  • “Populism is a libertarian tragedy”

    So argues P.J. O’Rourke in a piece that nearly made me weep. The election of 2016 was terrible because it wasn’t an election, it was a rebellion. America is having a civil war, or, to be more accurate, a War of Incivility. The war is not between Republicans and Democrats or between conservatives and progressives. The…

  • Free speech?

    For the past few hours, I’ve been hearing loud explosions, lots of sirens, and helicopters in the air. It’s because Milo was supposed to be speaking here tonight. Canceling the event seems to have only emboldened the demonstrators. Things are pretty ugly around here.   (Actually, I would have said that before today’s events….) MORE: Local news:…

  • Cheer up! Things will get better, or worse, or stay the same.

    Forgive me for not having much reaction to the inauguration of Donald Trump. When I watched the election returns back in November, it actually did occur to me that the man would be inaugurated, which he was yesterday. Yawn. Anyway, I’m not jumping up and down with glee. Nor am I reveling in the idea…

  • Old love

  • If you don’t know that “private email” is an oxymoron, then stay off the Internet!

    Email is not a secure means of communication. This simple fact has been known since there was email. This is so obvious that there really should be no need for me to say it, and it ought not require serious commentary. Here’s why: Email could be intercepted and accessed by an unauthorized party Email could be…

  • Why not Walter White?

    SNL can laugh all they want, but the DEA is a deeply corrupt organization that should be abolished, which makes this video more on point than they realize. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KAATMlalC4 Anyway, the EPA deserves to be cut down to size, and as I said before, I support that. So what makes the DEA so damned sacred?

  • Racist food guilt

    I have long balked at paying exorbitant prices for high-priced “gourmet” hamburgers and “gourmet” pizza. I have similar feelings about high-priced tacos, but never considered that the latter feelings are grounded in racism: Urbanites may have the advantage of living in places where regional cuisines from far-flung countries are readily available, but we need to collectively…