In responding to the biting criticisms by Yale University academic Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of her tenure as CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina’s campaign hit back at him by charging that Sonnenfeld was fired from Emory University for vandalizing school property, though why that invalidated his criticisms was not made clear.
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The Values Voters Summit is an annual event that gathers together all the religious right wing crazies, and politicians go and pander to them by throwing out red meat rhetoric on their favorite issues for them to devour. For these people, establishment Republican leaders are wimps who won’t really fight for conservative causes by threatening to bring government to a halt unless they get their way.
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You may be familiar with the neologism ‘gaydar’. The idea is that people who supposedly have this quality can intuit accurately a person’s sexual orientation simply by observing them. I had heard about this and naturally was curious to see if I had this ability. But a few casual attempts on my part to do so had such variable results that I concluded that even if there were such a thing as gaydar, I certainly did not have it.
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The ignominious early departure of someone as unlikable as Scott Walker was bound to create a great deal of schadenfreude, especially given the risible way he tried to describe his defeat as somehow a call by god for him to exercise a novel form leadership. Stephen Colbert decides to give Walker a farewell too, likening the elimination process in the Republican primary race to what happens in The Hunger Games. Not having read the books or seen the films, some of the allusions are lost on me.
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While the UN does a lot of good work, one of its biggest problems is that many of the roles on its committees are either arrived at by rotation or by some Byzantine process that can result in what to outsiders seems like utterly ridiculous outcomes. In this category is the news that Faisal bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the UN in Geneva, has been appointed chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council, even as that nation is about to behead a young man Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr “accused of a variety of crimes against the state, all stemming from protests he took part in against the Saudi government” and who was just 17 years old at the time of his arrest.
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A five-year-old girl broke through the security barrier along pope Francis’s motorcade to try and reach him. Fortunately for her in this day and age, she was not immediately shot and while she was being escorted away by security, the pope noticed her and asked her to be brought to him and she managed to give him a hand-drawn picture and a letter.
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Here in one sweeping article is ammunition for anyone wanting to expose the lies and distortions that Carly Fiorina peddles about her record. It is by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean of Leadership Studies and Lester Crown Professor of Practice Management at the Yale School of Management, whom both Donald Trump and Fiorina mentioned in the last debate.
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Since there are so many Republican candidates, sometime ago (before Perry and Walker dropped out of the race), I started grouping the Magnificent Seventeen into categories to see if that made predicting the eventual winner any easier. There were three natural groups:
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The theremin is perhaps the first truly electronic instrument. It is played without actually being touched. Instead, by moving one’s hands near the instrument, one changes the inductance of the circuitry and thus the resonant frequency, and so can control the pitch and the volume. It is not an easy instrument to master.
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