On retirement

Alert readers may have noticed that my brief biography at the top left has changed slightly to acknowledge the fact that I retired from the university. My last day was December 31st. I have had a long and varied career at many institutions before I spent the last 27 years at Case Western Reserve University and they were wonderful ones. The students we get here are just wonderful and teaching them was a joy and I have fond memories of many of them.
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Review: Sherlock (no spoilers)

Last night I watched the first episode of season 4 of the Sherlock series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. It seems to me that as the series progresses, the writers are becoming too clever by half, to the point where one can imagine them chuckling as they add one more improbable twist to the plot, saying gleefully, “This will blow people’s minds!”
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Bye bye, Ben?

Yesterday’s news was full of stories about the abrupt resignation of two top staffers from Ben Carson’s presidential campaign that resulted in 20 other members following them out the door. There had been rumblings for a while about dissention within the camp and Carson himself had at one point said that he was considering a shakeup in his team, which seems to have made things worse.
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Here’s hoping for a better 2016

happy-new-year-images-2016

I’d like extend best wishes for 2016 to all this blog’s readers.

Last year was a disturbing one in terms of American politics. We saw the unleashing of openly xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, militaristic, and anti-poor appeals to the public, and sufficient numbers of them were attracted to those calls that, although they are not the majority, they have created sufficient noise to have significantly influenced that direction of the Republican party primary race.
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Obama and Seinfeld go for coffee

Jerry Seinfeld has president Obama as his guest on his show Comedians in Cars getting Coffee. He usually picks his guests up in a vintage sports car and they go to a restaurant. In this episode, the first part went fine with Seinfeld driving a 1963 Corvette to the White House but the second part was thwarted because the security detail would not let them leave the grounds.
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Great moments in evangelism

Two evangelical preachers Kenneth Copeland and Jesse Duplantis explain that they had to ask their congregations to donate money so that they could fly in private luxury because it was not good for them to be cooped up in a ‘long tube’ surrounded by ‘dope-filled demons’. Besides, their god told them that they must have more than one of them in order for their faith to grow and who are they to defy god?
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Republicans begin to form circular firing squads

As the first actual selection of delegates for the party nominations gets near with the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9, the various candidates are moving their campaigns into top gear. On the Republican side, what seems to be shaping up are contests within two main subgroups, one claiming the outsider or insurgent mantle and the other the establishment mantle, though given the angry mood of the Republican electorate, even the establishment candidate has to wear at least a partial outsider veneer, to claim that they are not of the establishment even if they come from it.
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