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December 13, 2024
Shaken baby syndrome: Settled science?I was introduced to shaken baby syndrome over a decade ago as an attorney for a local father in a family court case. He was accused of seriously injuring his child by violent shaking. I doubted the theory then, ...
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June 11, 2023
A feminist regretsA recent letter to advice columnist Dear Abby from a 32-year-old single woman caught my attention. Her 20s were spent in a serious long-term relationship. When that ended, she took a couple of years to "sow her wild oats" and ...
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March 9, 2022
Washington, leave us aloneIn anticipation of the importance of President Biden's March 1 State of the Union address in light of Biden's abysmally low (40%) approval ratings, Wall Street Journal contributor Andy Kessler in his February 28 column proffered sug...
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August 13, 2021
The woke never sleepThe preternaturally offended are ever on the alert to find reasons to be offended, even within a benign, politically unaffiliated organization like Alcoholics Anonymous. In April, the 71st General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonym...
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January 26, 2021
Sudden death on a street cornerMilan Loncar, 25, died suddenly Wednesday evening January 13 in Philadelphia’s Brewerytown section. That name will not be familiar to most readers beyond the immediate Philadelphia area. I’m writing to acquaint a wider audience with Mr. L...
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November 13, 2020
Voter suppression: In the eye of the beholderThe convenient thing about being a proponent of "systemic racism" in America is having the preternatural ability to ferret out systemic racism without the bother of presenting any purported evidence. Incontrovertible evidenc...
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November 7, 2019
Newcomers to the shining cityThere were more than a few teary eyes among the 53 new citizens, their families and friends, and assorted dignitaries at last Friday’s Naturalization Ceremony in Courtroom One of the Historic Chester County Courthouse. Sponsored by the Count...
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July 18, 2019
The tragedy of returning to where I grew upTry as I might, I can't get the mass shooting on Fathers' Day in Southwest Philadelphia's West African community out of my mind. The party at Finnegan Playground, 68th and Grovers Ave., was to celebrate recent graduates of area high sc...
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May 26, 2019
Bringing sanity to psychiatryPaul McHugh, 87, is a psychiatrist and professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. McHugh is best known as psychiatry’s most outspoken critic and skeptic of the “crazes” that periodically overtake h...
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November 17, 2018
Blue-State RefugeesThe day before Maine’s November 6 gubernatorial election, Governor Paul LePage announced that if Democratic nominee Janet Mills won, he planned to move to Florida. In fact, he was moving regardless who won. The Sunsh...
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October 28, 2018
This sexual abuse hysteria can't last much longerIn Pennsylvania, a person commits sexual assault, a second-degree felony, when "that person engages in sexual intercourse or deviate sexual intercourse with a complainant without the complainant's consent." In laymen's te...
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September 7, 2018
Opioid user hoped to sacrifice her free will to state Supreme CourtIn Commonwealth v. Eldred (Comm. v. Eldred), an underreported July 16 case with nationwide implications, where addiction was an underlying issue in a criminal case, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that it is not c...
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August 18, 2018
To share a culture, first share a jokeFreedom of speech is first among our constitutionally protected rights for good reason. A democratic people must be free to speak among its own members. More importantly, people must be free to laugh at themselves. It...
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May 26, 2018
Identity politics to Balkanization to tribalism: A slippery slopeFrom Purdue University president Mitch Daniels's May 12 commencement address (Wall Street Journal, Notable and Quotable, May 19): The last few Mays, I've found myself issuing the same caution to each departing class. I...
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May 11, 2018
Bill Cosby postmortemAt the end of comedian Bill Cosby's criminal trial last month, my fearless Facebook prediction was that the prosecution failed to prove Cosby guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The result would either be a not guilty verdict or, like his first ...
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March 24, 2018
Lamenting the decline of manly pleasures"A simple manly pleasure, now gone," a newspaperman once lamented about the demise of the old-fashioned men's haircut, tendered by a man – always a man, expert not only with scissors and shears, but with intangible tools of the tr...
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March 1, 2018
Nikolas Cruz: 'Troubled' or narcissist?I'm confused. When did concern about the mental health of cold-blooded murderers override time-honored concepts like good and evil, crime and punishment, free will, personal responsibility, and equal justice under the law in the crimin...
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November 13, 2017
Addiction: Brain disease or bad habit?That President Trump has declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency does not address the underlying question: Is drug addiction a mental health problem or a behavioral problem? The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will soon ...
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September 2, 2017
George Steinbrenner: The Donald Trump before Donald Trump?George Steinbrenner, Donald Trump: birds of a feather? Because the life trajectories of these two larger-than-life personalities are remarkably similar, revisiting the former may aid in deciphering the latter. Both men ...
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July 8, 2017
Just how offensive is 'white trash,' really?June Chu, a Yale University dean who was put on leave after being tied to a string of racially insensitive reviews on Yelp, has formally left the school. It's not known whether she jumped or was pushed. Chu was chided for a one-star revi...
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March 7, 2017
Channeling Freud: What do Trump haters want?It was to Marie Bonaparte that Sigmund Freud remarked, "What does a woman want?" Freud had no answer to the "great question … despite [his] thirty years of research into the feminine soul." I've asked...
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January 26, 2017
The Opioid Scourge and the Disease Metaphor for AddictionThe "opioid scourge" and government intervention: full of sound and fury (and sound bites, empty gestures, and taxpayer dollars) destined to accomplish nothing. The “opioid scourge” has become the disease du jour in the ...
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January 4, 2017
Let Democrats be DemocratsHistory teaches that all men have blind spots that are impervious to facts. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the aftermath of 2016’s presidential election. President-Elect Trump’s every utterance, acti...
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October 30, 2016
Class envy and entitlements: The story of the bakerI've never envied the rich or thought they owed me anything. In the short list of unalienable rights, nowhere is it written that I have a claim to property of another. My moral code resists that idea, and the criminal code prohibits it. ...
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January 10, 2016
Banning Criminal Background Checks and the Law of Unintended ConsequencesIt’s a truism that any law with more than 15 words contains at least one loophole. This is a lesson liberals seem incapable of learning. They doggedly pass laws intended to benefit favored constituencies but which in practice accomplish the pol...
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December 14, 2015
Neurosis or soul sickness?Mortality rates are rising among less educated, late-middle-aged white Americans. Drugs and alcohol and suicide are the leading causes of the spike. Coincidently, church attendance in America has been in decline for some time. Is the...
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November 13, 2015
Liberals, blacks, and Stockholm SyndromeRecently, the Hispanic-flavored sights and sounds of downtown Bridgeton, New Jersey triggered the recall of a conversation I once had with a black, twenty-something IT professional about race, politics, and racial politics. My friend is a minority...
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October 8, 2015
The drugged children of foster careA February, 2014 Wall Street Journal article, “Drugged as Children, Foster Care Alumni Speak Out,” examines the upsurge in strong antipsychotic drugs prescribed for children in Medicaid and foster care in the past decade and a half. ...
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September 23, 2015
Why aren't churches more like bars?David Vann was 13 when his father shot himself. The Wall Street Journal recently chose Vann’s Legend of a Suicide as one of its Five Best books about the death of a father. Mr. Vann writes, “[H]e had a terrific pain in his h...
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September 18, 2015
Liberalism and Munchausen Syndrome: The Perfect FitLiberalism often exhibits the classic symptoms of Munchausen Syndrome, a mental disorder whereby caretakers further enfeeble the chronically enfeebled as a means to power and privilege. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fi...
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September 10, 2015
Impaired Driving: Another LookOccam’s Razor is a problem-solving principle which holds that when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better. There are times, however, generally when the “simpler” theo...
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April 23, 2014
Government in Cahoots with its OwnTo paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation about the rich, "Even when (politicians) enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think they are better than we are." Sad to say, that may be true. S...
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January 7, 2012
Cheeta: In MemoriamA Florida animal sanctuary reports that Cheetah ( a/k/a Cheeta ), Johnny Weissmuller's chimpanzee sidekick in almost a dozen " Tarzan" films of the 1930s and 40s, died December 24 at age 80. Rumors that the departed was not the authentic Cheeta...