Author: Eric Scheie

Am I alone in finding it extremely annoying to still be forced to use fax technology in this day and age? I have found that often when I have to have dealings with entrenched bureaucracies (typically government or academia), they will absolutely NOT accept emailed documents. Even simple letters; if it contains anything that has…

I enjoyed reading this complaint from a gay man who is sick of being bitch-slapped by gay activists: The rush to embrace and console every gay man who comes out is infantilizing and condescending—but it’s a script written and promoted by GLAAD and reinforced by a sanctimonious establishment of gay men that rewards those who play…

Using the procedures discussed here and here (which I skeptically suspected might be Internet disinformation), I just used a welder to zap the “dead” (meaning no longer chargeable with the charging unit) battery packs for my rechargeable cordless drill by injecting direct current at high amperage. To my utter amazement, this immediately brought a battery…

Failing to translate from English to Spanish is being called discrimination in a lawsuit. Ribota said she was injured at work because she couldn’t read a warning sign that was in English. “If I could speak English I wouldn’t have the problems that exist,” said Ribota. Last week 12 custodians from the Auraria Campus filed…

Right now I am on the road in Illinois, so I won’t have much time for posting. But earlier (as I tried to enjoy a cup of coffee at a local motel), my relative tranquility was suddenly interrupted by a man who walked into the hotel’s free continental breakfast area in the middle of highly…

I was intrigued to read (in Reason) about “The GOP Civil War Over Libertarianism” “This battle for the soul of the Republican Party [is] between people who are actually interested in cutting the size of government and…an establishment that is more scared,” says Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch. “I think, right now, this is…

As if more evidence were needed that the public school system is dysfunctional beyond belief, I read that two school boys were suspended for pretending pencils were guns: Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with…

Reading this gave me a wry chuckle: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is. What about the Fourth Amendment, you ask? That’s long…

Made a 12 inch long steel airplane from rough plans, to which I added a scaled, nine cylinder rotary engine I designed from tiny hardware parts. Behind the engine is a clock mechanism. (As you can see, the photo was taken at a little after 9:30.) The second hand is the propeller.  The landing gear…

Headline in the British press. Obama blames American guns for Mexican deaths Sheer demagoguery of the rankest order. We have a president with absolutely no shame.  

There are some interesting developments in the California child-snatching case I posted about the other day. Not only are a lot of people outraged by the tyrannical and unaccountable behavior of CPS, but a California state legislator who is trying to look into the matter has discovered that the agency believes that it has an…

There’s some really annoying and tasteless tagging that’s been going on in Ann Arbor, and it doesn’t even have the excuse that some graffiti has of being artistic. One clown likes to write the word “mole” and the other writes “SAES” all over buildings and other things. I have seen it, and it is not…

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. I’m often glad I never had children in this once free country. Reading about a California couple whose baby was snatched by armed police who illegally entered the hous with hands on their guns — because the parents sought a second medical opinion — served…

It seems that the Tsarnaev brothers’ mom is just your typical normal American mom who learned all about 9/11 on the Internet: Kilzer wrote that Tsarnaeva was a loving and supportive mother, and she felt sympathy for her plight after the April 15 bombings. But she stopped visiting the family’s home for spa treatments in…

While art is often defined as an imitation of nature, nature is often an improvement on art. Check out these grains of sand: Or this view of the microstructure of austenitic steel. If the above had been painted by a Cubist in the teens or twenties, it would probably be hanging in a museum. Instead,…

I often wonder whether Onion-style satire is infiltrating reality when I read about incidents like the one Bill Quick SteveF Steve  linked earlier. At the University of Connecticut, a team logo featuring a Husky dog is being seriously criticized on the ground that it promotes “rape culture”: In an open letter to UC President Susan Herbst, self-described feminist student…

Drudge links a headline about Iter Fusion’s apparent breakthrough: If Iter demonstrates that it is possible to build commercially-viable fusion reactors then it could become the experiment that saved the world in a century threatened by climate change and an expected three-fold increase in global energy demand. While I would of course defer to M.…

There is something about Ben Affleck that I have found annoying, and I really hadn’t stopped to think about it until his recent public vow of temporary poverty: The Oscar-winning director recently signed on to participate in the Global Poverty Project’s Live Below the Line, a campaign that challenges average (and above-average) people to live…

For some time now, I have complained about Drudge’s habit of regularly linking notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Infowars-dot-com. I don’t know whether it is a good sign or not, but today I see that Drudge has linked a story which expresses some skepticism about Jones. Jones — whose site has peddled conspiracy theories…

M. Simon forwarded me an email containing the following remarks from Richard Feldman, President of the Independent Firearm Owners Association (IFoA): “We know that 35% to 45% or more of gun-violence is directly related to the black market in drug trafficking. Now is the time to open an adult discussion on this vital and inextricably…