Author: Eric Scheie

Thanks to Sarah Hoyt, I found this monstrosity: Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison. That’s just one example from a piece on overcriminalization. We are, literally, screwed. In…

Via Glenn Reynolds’ link to Roger L. Simon, I just learned something interesting: In the new world of the NSA, the only secret left is Barack Obama’s college grades. Which comes on the heels of another NSA story: The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency…

The other day I read that Exodus International — a religious group claiming to cure homosexuality through prayer — is shutting down its operations. That’s right. They will no longer “treat” gays, and they have  even apologized! This startling and unexpected development has been called “huge news” and has had a lot of people shaking their…

After discussing the insider financial shenanigans of successful crooks like Al Gore, NRO’s Jim Geraghty has an interesting observation: It is no wonder that more and more Americans believe the game is rigged. It is no wonder that they buy houses they cannot afford and then walk away from the mortgage when they can no…

A WSJ article on teen peer pressure fascinated me because I can remember what it was like, and I was reminded that the whole deal is a two-edged sword: New studies on peer pressure suggest that teens—who often seem to follow each other like lemmings—may do so because their brains derive more pleasure from social…

The anti-plastic bag hysteria is spreading, with the self-important Los Angeles City Council now voting 11-1 to ban them. Under the ban, stores that sell perishable foods will be prohibited from handing out plastic grocery bags. “We’ve seen plastic bags clogging our gutters, polluting our rivers and piling up on our beaches,” Councilmember José Huizar…

Hard to believe that is an actual photograph I took, but it is.

I loved reading about what I hope is a growing trend — an apparently easy and relatively painless way to work around Obamacare: WICHITA, Kan., June 14 (UPI) — A Kansas physician says he makes the same income and offers better quality care to his patients after he dumped all health insurance companies. Thirty-two-year old…

A member of a left wing activist group called Clowns Not Bombs (apparently facing deportation) went completely bonkers in a San Francisco BART station and a video of his antics has gone viral. Yeiner Perez, 24, was arrested May 10 at the 16th Street Mission station after a incident in which he did handstands, flips and…

A comment to a Youtube video of Groucho Marx on “What’s My Line?” You know the world is kinda messed up when you find peace of mind in comedy shows from 1950 and they are infinite times better than anything you can find either on tv or anywhere else today. :/ I’m 26 and it’s…

Via Glenn Reynolds‘ link to a link well worth rescuing, I learned that David Brooks — a man who claims to be a great arbiter of civil society if not civilization itself — is upset by what he calls “unmediated” people. I read what Brooks said twice and I don’t think he meant “unmedicated” but missed…

Despite all the hoopla about pretending to help the economy, an item in today’s Wall Street Journal reveals that Obama administration couldn’t possibly be more viciously and stridently anti-business. The federal government — in the form of the EEOC — is applying the  “disproportionate impact” rule to go after employers who run criminal background checks…

They know you rang a sex line at 2 am, but they don’t know what your talking about? You ring a suicide prevention hotline from the golden gate bridge, but don’t know what you talked about? They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance, but they don’t…

This Facebook image reminded me of the famous Mae West line: Ironically, students today would be suspended for repeating the Mae West joke, and not because it is sexual — but because of the mere mention of the word “gun.” Considering today’s world of multitasking everything, if they let kids pretend bananas are penises, I…

A couple of days ago, I entertained myself for about two minutes by playing the Fox News / CNN switcheroo game. Between the IRS scandal and the Big Brother database revelations, it seemed to me that the country was in the middle of a major political storm, so I figured both networks would at least…

Jay Leno said something reassuring about President Obama. At least he is listening: Well, this has become a huge controversy after it was revealed that the National Security Agency seized millions of Verizon phone records, and of course this has caused a panic among civil libertarians, constitutional scholars and cheating husbands everywhere. Oh my God.…

I realize the above title is nowhere near as all-encompassing as the famous pangram, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” But it packs in a lot of suspicious words that we are being warned not to use because the idiots geniuses at the DHS are on the lookout for them. The Department of…

While I thought the schools couldn’t possibly get any crazier, today I read about a kid who got suspended from school merely for talking about guns: OWINGS, MD — The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the…

Via Glenn Reynolds, I learned about a secret apartment which was built in a shopping mall. “Installation art,” the artists called it. The man built the apartment with the help of seven other artists, and various people have lived in it over the past few years for up to three weeks at a time. The…

Just as “money laundering” is being used as the cutting edge to destroy the last vestiges of financial privacy, so “kiddie porn” is being used to destroy the last vestiges of online privacy. This is not to say that there aren’t such things as money laundering or kiddie porn, but how does the existence of…