Author: Eric Scheie

It has been a long day and I just got home, only to realize that I never wrote a frigging blog post! It is my DUTY to do so, even when it is the last thing on earth I feel like doing, and even when I have nothing whatsoever to say. Sarah’s earlier post, however,…

Fool that I am, I forgot to do my usual April Fools blog fakery yesterday. What a pity. However, I was at least foolish enough to attend Ann Arbor’s Festifools event. Here  a few pictures. Why this man is riding a tiger, I do not know:   Perhaps he thought it would turn this blue…

While the USA TODAY headline reads “Swing States Poll: A shift by women puts Obama in lead,” if the poll is accurate, there is in fact a major political split between men and women, and it isn’t explained away by the latest, ridiculous, “Republican war on women” meme. It may come down to a basic,…

While the First Amendment protects free speech in all of its various forms, recent trends worry me. One is the attempt to create an exception for “bullying” speech — something impossible to define, which lends itself to arbitrary double standards.  The other is an attempt to unconstitutionally criminalize electronic speech which offends anyone. Eugene Volokh…

As a believer in the First Amendment, I’m very suspicious of the anti-bullying movement, and I have criticized it repeatedly. There are already plenty of laws covering physical violence, but I think the old expression “sticks and stones” still holds true. Plus, it is good life advice. What worries me about anti-bullying campaigns is that they…

Might Barack Obama want Obamacare tossed out by the Supremes? My paranoid side was wondering earlier about the rank incompetence displayed by Obamacare’s official defender Donald Virelli. There is a remarkable consensus on both sides that he is doing an amazingly poor job, so I naturally have been wondering what’s up with that? I found a…

Life is full of deadly risks, but most of us don’t think that sitting at your table and eating toast at home is one of them. Tell that to Fred Skinner: Fred Skinner was eating a piece of toast when police from three different agencies burst through his front door with guns drawn, put the…

Years ago I had dinner with a family of six. The family consisted of a husband, a wife, and four kids. At the time I was visiting my folks in Philadelphia, but had been living in Berkeley for years and I had seen so many “dysfunctional” families and ill-behaved brats that I assumed dysfunctionality was…

It’s an old topic here: What worries me about feral children (not a new topic here) is society’s refusal to recognize their existence and deal with them honestly. This denial often takes the form of a bizarre belief that being of a certain age conveys “innocence,” even though anyone with an ounce of common sense…

I don’t normally read Paul Krugman, although every once in a while I check out his column to see what sort of brilliant insights I am missing. This morning was just such an occasion. The following uh, “legal analysis” (misstating Florida law, then blaming big corporations for it) served as a reminder of why I…

Unfortunately, I’m still sick of the Culture War. Fortunately, others are too. In explaining why,Radley Balko hits the nail on the head: The primary reason the culture wars keep raging on is that neither side really wants them to end. Neither side is content with merely winning the freedom to do its own thing. Real…

In a piece titled “Nature Has No ‘Balance’ for Us to Keep,” Matt Ridley touches on one of my pet peeves — the irrational human penchant for waging war against the “unnatural”: In her remarkable new book “The Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the…

Death sucks, and I know what it is like to lose people I love. However, I am getting a more than a little tired of angry grieving mothers who blame other people for the regrettable, stupid, and even fatal actions of their kids. The latest example is a mother whose son smoked synthetic marijuana, then…

Some drivers on the road are making it very difficult for other drivers, and an incident yesterday made me feel as if I was being turned against my will into a raging bigot. I don’t want to hate people, mind you. But there was this Prius driver who was in front of me on a…

I got nothing to say and no time to say it. However, a photo I saw on Facebook made me very happy, so I thought, why not share it? Dogs actually do smile. As most dog owners will cheerfully acknowledge. Ask Coco. She has a long history of smiling: That was when  she was still…

Culture wars are getting out of hand. Especially the rhetoric. It used to be that the phrase was “the culture war.” Lately it has been so expanded that there is no longer any “it” to it. I mean, it used to be that the “war” (itself an overused word meaning almost anything these days) involved…

I think the above is a true enough statement for those who are introverted. However, there is a dispute over who said it, and this blog has drawn angry misplaced comments — not for quoting it directly, but for quoting it within a quote from Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 article on introversion. Rauch attributed the quote…

Yesterday was Saint Patrick’s Day. And I wore orange. Not because orange is my color or I’m into the Orange Order or anything like that, but too many people were wearing green, and I’m not a greenie weenie type. Plus I don’t like the fact that Saint Patrick is said to have thrown the snakes…

I got so excited by Rick Santorum’s war on my erototoxins that I got all distracted from what I really ought to be thinking about. It’s not as bad as when I was a kid, though. In those days, my mind wandered terribly, and the teachers had to use discipline. Now they use drugs on…

While I don’t want to devote too much time to something that both Dave and M. Simon have already had fun with, what annoys me even more than Rick Santorum’s call for a crackdown on pornography is the crackpot thinking behind the idea. From the Santorum website: America is suffering a pandemic of harm from…