Author: Eric Scheie

Sarah told me about an outfit called “US Uncut.” Sounds funny in a sexy way, right? It sounded funny to me too, but Sarah warned that it is “not nearly as much fun as the name makes it sound…” Wow, was Sarah ever right! If the people quoted here are any indication of the mentality…

Today is one of those days when I just don’t feel like writing about anything, and when that happens, ordinary news and opinions fail to trigger my urge to blog. And even though I am always on the lookout for annoyances,they have to be especially annoying and touch on a pet peeve to interest me.…

One of the signs of success is when you drive your enemies batshit crazy. And one of the signs that leftists are being driven crazy is when they let down their guard and reveal themselves to be the very sort of bigots that they condemn. In John Hawkins’ interview with Andrew Breitbart, I found a…

Does anyone still remember the Fourth Amendment? Here’s the outmoded, out-of-style text written by dead white men who owned slaves: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by…

While I don’t have much time for blogging today, as it’s tax time I wanted to make a brief observation about our president’s remark about the nature of government: Republicans plans to shrink the reach of government is “not a vision  that’s impelled by the numbers” but a “choice” to give a trillion  dollars in…

If you will forgive the Socratic dialogue and the cheapshot classical allusion, I’ll give a hint. The answer is not Socrates! (You will just have to read on.) I live in a college town, and I have lived in one college town or another for most of my life. I don’t know how related it…

Reading that the woman who sent Rep. Peter King a pig’s foot (apparently as some sort of protest) was a Muslim fascinated me. So did an earlier incident in which she sent Georgia State Senator Greg Ball a “Curious George monkey with a label saying it was bound for Auschwitz” “I knew the Jews were…

“Perhaps we need to build nuclear power plants to keep the potheads happy.” Sounds like the sort of thing I might say if I wanted to give M. Simon a chuckle, but Clayton Cramer said it. Potheads (more accurately, marijuana growers) are apparently using more than their fair share of electricity to grow the stuff,…

In the interests of preserving what is left of my mental health, I need to find some way to avoid the temptation to click on links to things that irritate me. Sure, it’s a minor irritation to see these Drudge headlines: UPDATE: PARENTS FURIOUS AFTER TSA FRISKS 6-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER… ‘Such pretty hair, you have’… VIDEO……

I’m back from Radley Balko’s tour-de-force presentation about brutal SWAT Team raids (yes, they are inherently brutal), and the systematized militarization of police in America. This was a large crowd of twenty-somethingish law students, and Balko began with this horrific video showing the police shooting a dog whose only crime was being owned by a…

If you’re in Michigan, don’t miss this event. Especially if you’re an Ann Arbor Reasonoid like me. This Wednesday, April 13th, at 12:15 pm, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko will speak about police militarization at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. The speech will be at  625 S. State St. in room…

Earlier Drudge linked this story about feral hogs invading a Texas suburb.The citizens are apparently helpless, because they are not allowed to shoot the hogs, and the beasts have an uncanny ability to avoid traps and snares. Feral hogs are on a rampage in a Fort Worth neighborhood, leaving a path of destruction behind. Merely…

This sort of thing is getting as outrageous as it is predictable.  At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to…

During one of his discussions of Chernobyl (the truths of which seem very much unsettled), M. Simon cited a source familiar to anyone old enough to remember the good old days of Cold War moral clarity. PRAVDA. While it still bears the commie logo, the editorial bias has changed. Anyway, in response to M. Simon’s…

In a piece Glenn linked titled “Big government on the brink,” Robert Samuelson points out that Americans are more dependent on the government than they realize: Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal…

One of the many annoyances these days consists of spam text messages on cell phones. The worst is so called bulk SMS “short code” spamming, because many of these orginate from crooked providers from all over the world who, because of inherent flaws in the system (as well as lawsuits based on “free speech”) are…

I am in a hurry today, so I have no time for a long and thoughtful post. However Sarah emailed me a link to a humorous article which is simply not, um, “family friendly” enough to be quoted at length in this blog. I didn’t know what to do with it, until I saw this…

As I spent the last two hours unable to log into this site to write a blog post, I thought I would break with the usual pattern of looking for something interesting to write about and lay the blog problem out for the world to see. Without naming names of any of the parties who…

Some goofball teacher on an anti-Christian crusade in Seattle has made herself look more moronic than she realizes. A student wanted to bring Easter Eggs to class, but the teacher would not allow them to be called Easter Eggs: A sophomore at a local private high school thinks an effort to make Easter politically correct…

As most readers know, I take a broad, lliteral view of the First Amendment. I think freedom of speech means the state cannot stop anyone from saying anything (no matter how offensive), and free expression allows things like flag burning, Nazis marching in Skokie, flying Confederate flags (or I suppose, even Ku Klux Klan demonstrations…