Author: Eric Scheie

Today’s irritating Drudge headline was this: USA DOWNGRADED: FIRST CREDIT RATING CUT IN NATION’S HISTORY… DETAILS [.PDF FILE]… And here’s Megan McArdle’s reaction to the downgrade: Americans are not going to be happy about this downgrade. They will blame the GOP.  And the GOP is not going to find it easy to defend themselves. If…

It can happen.

Like most people, I get all caught up in petty day-to-day issues. Even when discussing politics, I tend to rant and rave about the many petty tyrannies of the nanny state. A report that Glenn linked recently reminded me of how petty tyrants love to dismiss objections to their petty tyrannies. Look how petty Republicans…

Not content merely to demand animal rights, PETA continues to push their moral equivalency campaign. The latest is an exhibit on the National Mall: A new exhibit on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is raising eyebrows for its contrast of slavery, genocide and animal cruelty. The display, placed by activist group People for the…

Animal Rights activist and longtime PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich now runs a group called “Farm Sanctuary” He is also a regular columnist at the Huffington Post, where today he  has a post in which he lobbies for a federal bill which he says would be, “the first federal law relating to the treatment of chickens…

Accustomed as I am to getting fraudulent email purporting to be from Nigerian barristers holding millions of dollars on my behalf, earlier I was surprised to receive an email purporting to come from an actual friend in real life, originating from a known and trusted email account. It was a tale of woe about stolen…

I can’t get over the idea some people have that the recognition of financial reality constitutes “terrorism,” but it isn’t just limited to angry leftist writers. The latest is Joe Biden. Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over…

What’s more deadly to established order than “Cultural Marxism”? Why, Cultural Capitalism, of course. More than anything else, it was Western decadence that brought down the Soviet Union. Those who worry about “Cultural Marxism” (said to have been sponsored by the KGB to weaken America’s will) would do well to consider John Stossel’s recent column.…

PJM founder Roger L. Simon has weighed in on CPAC’s decision to kick out gay conservatives, and Andrew Breitbart’s decision to support them: …I had to speak out personally in immediate support of my friend Andrew Breitbart regarding GOProud. I too will not be attending CPAC next year unless the ban of this organization is…

One of the things I noticed driving in Ohio yesterday was that gasoline prices were substantially lower than they are in Michigan. ($3.85 in Ann Arbor versus an average of $3.60 in northern Ohio.) As to why this is, I don’t know. Ann Arbor is known for high gas prices, so it isn’t representative of…

While I always stay in dog-friendly Motel 6 motels when I’m on the road, today I saw something a bit different. A Motel 7. Never knew there was such a thing, but there seem to be others. Whether it’s part of a chain, I don’t know. Darn. I never asked whether they allow dogs! Instead…

Earlier I read that the TSA is readying a “new behavior detection plan for airport checkpoints“: The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday. TSA already has “behavior detection officers” at 161 airports nationwide looking for…

Ann Althouse’s post about problems posed by dry cleaning alerted me to a problem I didn’t know existed. The most widely used dry cleaning chemical is doomed: It’s really quite awful. Your clothes are dumped — along with everyone else’s dirty things — into a giant machine full of perchloroethylene, which should be banned and will…

People love fantastic stories, and this misleading headline would seem to supply them with something to cluck about: “New Zealand goldfish survive 134 days without food“ Sounds incredible, right? The problem with the story is that if you bother to read it, the fish had food. They were in a 26 gallon tank filled with…

A man who tried to remove his stomach hernia with a butter knife has succeed in earning his 15 minutes of fame, plus a trip to the loony bin: A 63-year-old Glendale man was in stable condition after he attempted surgery on himself with a six-inch butter knife to remove a protruding hernia from his…

Apologists for murder — especially mass murder — annoy the hell out of me. Unfortunately (and unbelievably), a couple of recent commenters have been apologizing for the evil actions of Anders Breivik. I do not delete such comments; as long as I pay my monthly bandwidth charges, they remain forever. Anyway, a commenter calling himself…

While I guess it should come as no surprise, I just learned that the longest prison sentence Anders Breivik can receive is 21 years: The fact that Norway’s maximum penalty for any crime is 21 years in prison is facing rising criticism in the wake of the twin attacks that killed 93 people, with many…

One of the many people quoted in Anders Breivik’s manifesto was Bruce Bawer, a gay American writer living in Norway. In a recent PJM column which Glenn linked, Bawer (who is understandably very upset) discusses what Breivik said about him in web site comments.  Among other things Breivik had called Bawer “a liberal anti-jihadist and…

I’m continuing to slog through Anders Breivik’s 1500 page “A European Declaration of Independence” (easy to read Word doc file here), and I think the following speaks for itself in terms of both the motive for the crime and the willingness of the author to kill large numbers of people: 3.44 Traitor – classification system…

I’ve been slogging through “A European Declaration of Independence” (said to be confirmed as having been written by Anders Breivik, aka Andrew Berwick) and while I am not about to attempt to dissect it point by point, several things stand out. Whoever the “author” (editor, really) may be, he is completely fluent in writing English,…