Is mooching immoral? (or, What Aristotle has to say about your roommate who can’t make rent)

We all know a mooch: the coworker who borrows a dollar and never pays it back, the friend who invites you to a bar and can’t pay their own tab, the first date who orders the lobster-stuffed, caviar-encrusted filet mignon and doesn’t even offer a lil’ la chatte in return. Anyway, I was recently fuming over a […]

Dumb movie reviews

During the pandemic of 2020, working mostly from home, I quickly discovered that I enjoyed working on my laptop, a cup of coffee beside me, with something playing on the TV. But it had to be the right something. A well-plotted movie or engaging TV show would be too distracting. I needed entertainment that was […]

My family feels like a cult

My family feels like a cult.
When I visit, I feel like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, entering a building whose inhabitants are all members of the same cult just watching and waiting for her to join them. Seriously: When I walk in, conversations stop, everyone just turns and stairs. The stairs are followed by forced smiles and forced conversation, fake laughter, exaggerated hospitality.

Did Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams predict Donald Trump would be president?

Scott Adams, cartoonist, entrepreneur and author behind the Dilbert cartoon and a host of books, likes to make predictions on his blog and Periscope. Scott often brags that he predicted the Trump presidency back in 2015 when few people took the billionaire TV-personality’s candidacy seriously. A 2018 Forbes article on Scott even linked the success of […]

5 times Ted Cruz made us laugh

Ted Cruz: To know him is to love him. That glorious dad bod. The greasy side part. His steadfast support of a president who mercilessly mocked him before millions during televised presidential debates. That grating Warren T. Rat voice. But, most of all, we love Ted because he makes us laugh. Over the years, Ted’s […]

Sexist creation, feminist salvation

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the denial of women as equal members of the religious body, as well as of their very humanity, is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the first book of the Bible. Genesis 2:21-23: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took […]

Did federal minimum wage laws kill American Samoa?

I regularly tune in to Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams’ political rants on Periscope. During a recent philippic, he mentioned in passing that federal minimum wage laws recently devastated American Samoa’s once-booming economy. He basically painted a picture of a paradise-turned-ghetto with equality-of-outcome economic policies to blame. I, of course, had to look into this claim. […]