Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on December 18, 2010, 05:39:49 PM
-
Captain Beefheart at 69 years of age of MS. :cry:
-
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/09/mother-youngest-shooting-victim-describes-girl-bright-vivacious/
(http://a57.foxnews.com/static/managed/img/Scitech/397/224/ChristinaGreen.jpg)
-
A baseball player of my youth that I liked, Duke Snider, RIP.
-
LA Times
Nearly everyone familiar with the history of the 1960s has heard of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, the pranksters who spread the gospel of psychedelics to the countercultural generation. But far fewer remember Owsley Stanley.
Stanley, who died Saturday at age 76, was arguably as pivotal as Leary and Kesey for altering minds in the turbulent '60s. Among a legion of youthful seekers, his name was synonymous with the ultimate high as a copious producer of what Rolling Stone once called "the best LSD in the world … the genuine Owsley." He reputedly made more than a million doses of the drug, much of which fueled Kesey's notorious Acid Tests — rollicking parties featuring all manner of psychedelic substances, strobe lights and music. Tom Wolfe immortalized Stanley as the "Acid King" in the counterculture classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968).
The music that rocked Kesey's events was made by the Grateful Dead, the iconic rock band of the era that also bears Stanley's imprint. His chief effect on the band stemmed not merely from supplying its musicians with top-grade LSD but from his technical genius: As the Dead's early sound engineer, Stanley, nicknamed "Bear," developed a radical system he called the "wall of sound," essentially a massive public address system that reduced distortion and enabled the musicians to mix from the stage and monitor their playing.
"Owsley was truly important in setting the example of someone who would go to almost any length, beyond what anyone would think reasonable, to pursue the goal of perfection … sonic perfection, the finest planet Earth ever saw," Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally said Monday. "They never would have done that without Bear. Furthermore, the greater San Francisco scene never would have been what it was without the opportunity for thousands of people to experience psychedelics, which would not have happened without Bear."
Stanley, who moved to Australia more than 30 years ago, was driving his car in a storm near the town of Mareeba in Queensland when he lost control and crashed, said Sam Cutler, a longtime friend and former Grateful Dead tour manager. He died at the scene. His wife, Sheilah, sustained minor injuries.
Described by Cutler as a man who held "very firm beliefs about potential disasters," Stanley relocated to Australia because he believed it was the safest place to avoid a new ice age. He was a fanatical carnivore who once said that eating broccoli may have contributed to a heart attack several years ago. In his later years he was mainly a sculptor and jeweler, and his works were sought by many in the music industry, including the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, Cutler said.
"He was a very sophisticated man," Cutler said, "an amalgam of scientist and engineer, chemist and artist."
With artist Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the Dead's distinctive logo: a skull emblazoned with a lightning bolt. He also recorded about 100 of the band's performances, many of which later were released as albums. He once said that he considered preserving the live concerts one of his most important accomplishments.
Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky on Jan. 19, 1935, he was the grandson of a Kentucky governor and son of a naval commander. His nickname, Bear, reputedly was inspired by the profuse chest hair he sprouted in adolescence.
He studied engineering briefly at the University of Virginia before dropping out and joining the Air Force, where he trained as a radio operator. After completing his military service in 1958, he moved to California and worked at a variety of jobs, including a stint at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. He also studied ballet, Russian and French.
He enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1963 as the Free Speech Movement was erupting and drugs such as LSD began flowing. He got his first taste of LSD in April 1964. "I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside," he told Rolling Stone in 2007, "and the cars were kissing the parking meters."
That experience convinced him that he needed a steady and trustworthy supply. He found a recipe at the campus library. Then, with a chemistry major named Melissa Cargill, he started a lab and began manufacturing a very pure form of the drug.
His lab was raided twice; Stanley spent two years in prison. According to "A Long Strange Trip," McNally's history of the Grateful Dead, Stanley estimated that he had produced enough LSD to provide about 1.25 million doses between 1965 and 1967.
After his release from prison in 1972, he returned to the Dead and began working on a new sound system, a monolithic collection of speakers and microphones that channeled the music through a single cluster of equipment. The band introduced it in 1974 at San Francisco's Cow Palace, but it was too expensive to sustain and Stanley later gave most of it away. But his ideas were later adopted by concert equipment makers.
Not everyone was a fan of the system. "It was always malfunctioning," Country Joe McDonald, of the '60s psychedelic band Country Joe & the Fish, said in an interview Monday. "The Grateful Dead and their extended family were like a unit, a nine-headed hydra. They did things their own way. People loved it. It was part of their mystique." Stanley, whom McDonald knew slightly and remembered as "kind of an obnoxious" person, "fit in really well."
For a brief time Stanley was the Grateful Dead's main financial backer and put them up in a pink stucco house in Watts, where he had moved his LSD lab. A 1966 Los Angeles Times profile described Stanley roaring up to a Sunset Boulevard bank on a motorcycle with wads of money crammed in his helmet, pockets and boots. The Times' and other accounts described him as an LSD millionaire, a status Stanley denied. But it inspired a Dead song, "Alice D. Millionaire." He also was immortalized in a Steely Dan composition, "Kid Charlemagne," and in a Jimi Hendrix recording of the Beatles' "Day Tripper," in which Hendrix can be heard calling out "Owsley, can you hear me now?"
Stanley downplayed his influence on the psychedelic explosion, explaining that he began producing LSD only to ensure the quality of what he ingested.
"I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus," he told Rolling Stone. "I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places."
In addition to his wife, he is survived by sons Pete and Starfinder; daughters Nina and Redbird; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
-
"He was a fanatical carnivore who once said that eating broccoli may have contributed to a heart attack several years ago."
LOL -
I remember reading the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in the seventies. Then seeing the movie One Flew Over the Coockoos Nest. Tom Wolfe came to our college to speak.
I guess a movie on 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' is coming out this year?
I was never a big Dead fan though.
***The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the "nonfiction novel" tells the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. The book follows the Pranksters across the country driving in a psychedelic painted school bus dubbed "Furthur," reaching what they considered to be personal and collective revelations through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. The novel also describes the Acid Tests, early performances by The Grateful Dead, and Kesey's exile to Mexico.
In 1968, Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test "not simply the best book on hippies… [but also] the essential book."[1]
Film adaptation
A film adaptation of the book is in development for a 2011 release. It will be directed by Gus Van Sant.[2]
-
PS,
I remember travelling to Lehigh to see Timothy Leary give a lecture in the mid 70's.
My impression was he was brain damaged due to too much LSD. He was somewhat incoherent, rambling, almost "Sheen-like" saying something about space colonies. That is all I remember. My friend was also as less than impressed.
OTOH, maybe it wasn't the acid but was Harvard that did that to him.
-
The late Terrence McKenna (see e.g. "Nector of the Gods") was also from the same Harvard clique as Leary IIRC.
-
I would recommend reading the "Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test" and Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" together at some point. Kesey and the HA were parts of a social circle and the differences of perspective on interactions is interesting (as are the interactions, all by themselves!).
-
Haven't read EAKAT, but did enjoy HT's HAs many years ago.
Also part of that crew was Ram Dass. Is he still alive?
-
Haven't read EAKAT, but did enjoy HT's HAs many years ago.
Also part of that crew was Ram Dass. Is he still alive?
http://www.ramdass.org/biography
-
NOW that the 1960s are commodified forever as “The Sixties,” it is apparently compulsory that their legacy be rendered as purple-hazy hagiography. But that ignores an inconvenient counterintuitive truth: Relatively clear-thinking entrepreneurs created some of the most enduring tropes of the era — not out of whole paisley cloth but from their astute feel for the culture and the marketplace. And no one was better at it than Augustus Owsley Stanley III.
Entrepreneur? Mr. Stanley, who was killed in a car accident last Sunday in Australia at the age of 76, is remembered chiefly as a world-class eccentric — his C.V. lists Air Force electronics specialist and ballet dancer — who after ingesting his first dose of LSD in Berkeley in 1964 taught himself how to make his own. In short order, “Owsley acid” became the gold standard of psychedelics.
But Mr. Stanley didn’t stop there. He started cranking out his superlative LSD at a rate that by 1967 topped one million doses. By mass-manufacturing a hallucinogen that the authorities hadn’t gotten around to criminalizing, Mr. Stanley singlehandedly created a market where none had existed, and with it a large part of what would become the “counterculture.”
At the time Madison Avenue was at sea about how to reach the so-called youth market. “House hippies” were deputized as cultural ambassadors but didn’t prevent travesties like Columbia Records’ infamously clueless “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” ad campaign. Which made Mr. Stanley’s effortless grasp of his peer group and its appetites — he was, after all, an enthusiastic consumer of his own product — seem all the more prescient. When his lab in Orinda, Calif., was raided in 1967 — thanks to him, LSD had been declared illegal the year before — the headline in The San Francisco Chronicle anointed him the “LSD Millionaire.”
Mr. Stanley shared several qualities with another entrepreneur who, a decade later, would imbue his company with a hand-sewn ‘60s ethic that persists today. To compare Mr. Stanley to Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, purely on the basis of their operating philosophies is not as big a leap as it might seem.
Like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Stanley was fanatical about quality control. He refused to put his LSD on pieces of paper — so-called blotter acid — because, Mr. Stanley maintained, it degraded the potency. “I abhor the practice,” he declared.
Whereas the formulation and provenance of most street drugs was unknowable, Owsley LSD was curated like a varietal wine and branded as evocatively as an iPod — “Monterey Purple” for a batch made expressly for the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, which may have factored into Jimi Hendrix’s chaotic, guitar-burning finale. (Relentlessly protective of his brand, Mr. Stanley seemed insulted that many believed the Hendrix song “Purple Haze” was about the Monterey LSD — far from inducing haze, he sniffed, the quality of his acid would confer upon the user preternatural clarity.)
And like Mr. Jobs’s mandate for creating products he deems “insanely great,” Mr. Stanley’s perfectionism had the effect of raising standards across an industry — or in this case, a culture. He became a patron of the Grateful Dead and helped transform them from inchoate noodlers into the house band for a generation. Noting the dreadful acoustics at their performances, Mr. Stanley drew on his electronics background and designed one of the first dedicated rock sound reinforcement systems, thus making plausible that highly lucrative staple of the 1960s and beyond, the rock concert. (Ever the perfectionist, he later designed an upgraded version, the legendary Wall of Sound, that towered over the band like a monolith and prefigured the immense sound systems at stadium shows today.)
It is said we are living through times not unlike the 1960s, the catalyst being not rock ‘n’ roll and its accompaniments, sex and drugs, but the communications and information revolution made possible by the Web. Among the movement’s many avenging nerds, Mr. Jobs alone epitomizes Mr. Stanley’s unhinged originality and anarchical spirit — before founding Apple, Mr. Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, sold illegal “blue boxes” that allowed free long-distance calls and later proselytized so persuasively about the latest Apple gizmo that he was said to project a “reality distortion field.”
Augustus Owsley Stanley III knew a thing or two about that.
Michael Walker is the author of “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”
-
I wonder how many people were destroyed by his "product".
-
Woof,
Probably not as many as one might think, especially when compared to tobacco and alcohol and prescription pills. I survived the 60's and 70's and er.. part of the 50's as well, I'm telling my age now, but I personally saw only one incidence where LSD led to someone becoming mentally disturbed afterward and he was already at the edge of that, maybe over. The fact is substance abuse is more about the abuser than the substance itself. But I agree with your sentiment that cranking out the best acid on the scene shouldn't be a badge of honor either.
I do recall hazily, another incidence where a underage, long hair, very handsome and bright kid, sneaked into to a new movie called the Exorcist and in the throes of the part where the possessed girl turns her head all the way around on her shoulders, shouted at the top of his lungs, "Far out man!!!!!!". The packed theater exploded in laughter, with comments of "I want whatever that guy's on." :-D
Peace out man, P.C. :mrgreen:
-
Ya figure the NYT will do any similar obits for midwestern meth cooks?
-
Woof,
Thirty years from now? The NYT? If they're still around I'll be doing meth myself. :-P
P.C.
-
It'll be a line of custom placemats for the Waffle House and similar greasy spoon diners by then. Actual reporting was never their strong suit anyway.
-
Woof GM,
Ya think?
P.C. :-D
-
As a lover of animals:
BERLIN (AP) -- Veterinary experts performed a necropsy Monday on Berlin zoo's celebrity polar bear Knut to try to determine why he died suddenly over the weekend.
The four-year-old polar bear died Saturday afternoon in front of visitors, turning around several times and then dropping to the ground, and falling into the water in his enclosure.
Polar bears usually live 15 to 20 years in the wild, and even longer in captivity, and the zoo is hoping the investigation may help clarify what happened.
Results were expected later Monday or on Tuesday, the zoo said.
In the meantime, people continued to flock to the zoo to sign their name in a condolence book in tribute to Knut.
"Every visit to the Zoo brought happiness, because he was such a warmhearted animal and he brought us all so much fun," visitor Eveline Plat told AP Television News.
Knut was rejected by his mother at birth, along with his twin brother, who only survived a couple of days. He attracted attention when his main caregiver, Thomas Doerflein, camped out at the zoo to give the button-eyed cub his bottle every two hours. The bear went on to appear on magazine covers, in a film and on mountains of merchandise.
Doerflein, the zookeeper who raised him, died in 2008 of a heart attack.
Soon after Knut and Doerflein's first public appearance in early 2007, fan clubs sprang up across the globe. "Knutmania" led to a 2007 Vanity Fair cover with actor Leonardo DiCaprio shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz, a film and plush Knut toys.
Zoo spokeswoman Claudia Beinek said that they had to set up another condolence book online to accommodate the outpouring of sympathy from around the world for the polar bear.
In addition, the zoo said it was starting a special account to accept donations on Knut's behalf, which will be used for polar bear research and the preservation of their habitat.
"He has brought joy to us, the Berliners and many others around the world," the zoo said in a statement. "Knut also was an icon for the endangerment of his species and natural habitats of all wild animals."
-
http://books.google.com/books?id=3uSbqUm8hSAC&pg=PA435&lpg=PA435&dq=bill+james+on+harmon+killebrew&source=bl&ots=1lk6na7Dxf&sig=ue-_isECEfNP0J4AogKaFUfqgl0&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
-
Thank you CCP! Harmon Killebrew was my childhood hero. Class act! It took very little charting to figure where to sit in left field and be guaranteed Killebrew home run baseball. Mostly from pre-game batting practice but I think I got one every time I went to the ballpark. Pretty amazing for a little kid, to sit some 400 feet away and have your favorite player hit it right into your glove.
-
"Pretty amazing for a little kid, to sit some 400 feet away and have your favorite player hit it right into your glove."
Wow. The closest I ever got to getting a ball was at Yankee stadium when after a foul ball was hit and fell somewhere well behind me I looked down at the ground in front of my chair only to see the ball roll right between my feet and down the rows of seats in front of me. Probaly twenty people didn't realize it was rolling down to the front row between their legs.
-
A sad passing...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUMvjw9RlA&feature=related[/youtube]
-
I had not heard. Details?
-
According to news outlets, he died in a hospital in New York. No cause was annonced, although he was HIV positive and drug addicted.
-
I saw a report that said he was 62, which is odd because he was a year behind me (and I am 58) when I attended Fieldston HS (until I was thrown out for political activism, but that's another story) Fieldston was a private school that was about 90% Jewish with substantial diversity scholarships. One of Gil's friends told me that Gil was stirring up a lot of trouble until finally his mom was called in. In a big meeting the various teachers told her of their problems with Gil. She looked back at them and said "When I have problems with Gil at home, do I call you?"
-
Crafty, you may have saw this since you are in LA, but if not....
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gil-scott-heron-20110529,0,6942275.story
-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110529/ap_on_re_us/us_memorial_day_cia_casualties
-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110529/ap_on_re_us/us_memorial_day_cia_casualties
Lots of those heroes that died doing things still classified.
-
WSJ
Let it be said that Anna Schwartz led a model professional life. In our mercurial times, that is no small thing.
Most often, Anna Schwartz, who died Thursday at age 96, was included in sentences as co-author with Milton Friedman of the magisterial economic study "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960." That would suffice for the epitaph of nearly any economist. It does not for Anna Schwartz.
The daughter of a manager in the kosher meat department of Swift & Co., she graduated from Barnard College at age 18 and quickly earned a doctorate in economics. In 1941 she went to work for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the premier U.S. institution of economic studies, and never left.
Across six decades, she contributed strong work and commentary on economics, notably the financial system. In all her efforts to understand and explain financial behavior, Anna Schwartz focused on the system's primary need: stability.
Which brings us to the present economic instability, on which Schwarz had opinions that deserve to be heard again. Statements she made to this newspaper in a Weekend Interview three and a half years ago, in her early 90s, ring with clarity and relevance to current difficulties: "The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible."
And pointedly: "Firms that made wrong decisions should fail. You shouldn't rescue them. And once that's established as a principle, I think the market recognizes that it makes sense. Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich." But, she added, "That's not the way the world has been going in recent years." She liked understatement.
Anna Schwartz performed at the most austere level of her profession and gave the world the sensible, helpful results of that extraordinary achievement. We suspect she'd say there's still time to get it right.
-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238577/Maria-Santos-Gorrostieta-executed-surviving-assassination-attempts.html?ICO=most_read_module
It seems to me that she lived her life according to a creed that would make all members of the Pack and Tribe proud.
From the article:
Maria Santos Gorrostieta, who had already survived two assassination attempts, was driving the child to school at around 8.30am when she was ambushed by a car in the city of Morelia.
The 36-year-old was hauled from her vehicle and physically assaulted as horrified witnesses watched, according to newspaper El Universal.
They described how she begged for her child to be left alone and then appeared to get into her abductors’ car willingly.
-
Too bad she wasn't properly armed and trained.
-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/14/ronald-dworkin
A fine obit.
-
http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/richie-havens/concerts/bottom-line-february-16-1978.html?utm_source=CVNL&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=130423
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/world/europe/shalom-yoran-jewish-resistance-fighter-dies-at-88.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130918
Shalom Yoran, Jewish Resistance Fighter, Dies at 88
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: September 16, 2013
For three years, Shalom Yoran survived the German occupation of Poland even as he saw his fellow Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. When he and his family inevitably became targets themselves, his mother knew she would not escape.
Mr. Yoran’s memoir, “The Defiant,” describes how he and his brother escaped to become resistance fighters.
“Go, my beloved children,” she told Mr. Yoran and his brother, Musio, as they fled into a field to escape German gunfire. “Try to save yourselves and take vengeance for us.”
That was in September 1942. The brothers disappeared into the woods and went on to spend the rest of World War II fighting the elements, injury, illness and the Nazis.
After enduring the winter in an underground shelter that they had built, they shifted from trying to survive to striking back. They became Jewish partisans, joining many others in fighting an insurgent war against the occupying Germans in Poland and elsewhere.
By the spring of 1943, they had conducted their first mission: burning a factory that made rifle butts for German weapons. Mr. Yoran began to feel that he was fulfilling his mother’s wish.
“For me, this was the turning point in the war,” he wrote in a 1996 memoir, “The Defiant: A True Story of Jewish Vengeance and Survival.”
He continued: “Instead of constantly being on the run, or hiding underground trying to survive, I had actually participated in an attack on the German war machine. This was the beginning of my revenge.”
Mr. Yoran, who died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan at 88, was 14 when German forces invaded his hometown, Raciaz, and 17 the last time he saw his parents. His mother, Hannah, and his father, Shmuel, were killed within days of his escape into the woods with his brother, who was four years older. The Nazis eventually killed 1,040 Jews in Raciaz, virtually its entire Jewish population.
Mr. Yoran and his brother became full-time fighters, killing German soldiers on patrols or at their camps, planting mines, destroying roads and bridges — all while scrounging and stealing food and clothing. They soon made their way through northeast Poland, to the forests near Lake Naroch in what is now Belarus, to join a group of Jewish partisans who were coordinating their missions with Soviet forces.
Yet even there, fighting alongside non-Jewish Russians and Poles, they encountered anti-Semitism.
“So here we were, fighting against a common enemy — the Germans, whose aim it was to totally annihilate the Jewish people and to take over the Soviet Union — side by side with fellow fighters whose own hatred of Jews was notorious,” Mr. Yoran wrote.
“In this demoralizing situation I told myself again and again that I was fighting as a Jew — with them, but not as one of them. I dreamed of having my own country, of fighting for it, and even dying for it. That was what kept up my morale.”
He and his brother joined the Polish Army, advancing into Germany in 1945 as Allied forces closed in on Berlin.
Mr. Yoran was born Selim Sznycer on June 29, 1925, in Warsaw, the son of a lumberyard owner. He had only limited schooling before his family fled the Nazis.
After the war he worked for a group that helped smuggle Jewish refugees into British-controlled Palestine, resisting British efforts to prevent them from entering.
He assumed many identities on his own journey there, including that of a British soldier. Finally, to convince the authorities that he was not a refugee but a lifelong resident of Palestine, he assumed the name of a dead cousin, Shalom Yoran, in 1946.
“When I finally became a ‘legal’ citizen of Palestine,” Mr. Yoran wrote, “I bore my mother’s maiden name and my cousin’s date of birth.”
With the founding of Israel, and after receiving his high school equivalency diploma, Mr. Yoran joined the Israeli Air Force, learning aircraft maintenance. While in the Air Force he met Varda Granevsky. They married in 1954.
He later became an executive with Israel Aircraft Industries, which helped supply the Israeli government. It is now called Israel Aerospace Industries. He moved to the United States in the late 1970s to run an American office of an aircraft trading and manufacturing company.
It was after he had arrived in Palestine that Mr. Yoran began writing about his life, recording his memories in notebooks and on loose sheafs of paper while recovering from abdominal surgery in a hospital.
Decades later, while he and his wife were clearing out their apartment near Tel Aviv, he found the papers in a suitcase. The couple spent years translating the notes from Polish into English, often first into Hebrew. The fruit of their work was “The Defiant.”
Mr. Yoran died after a long illness, said his wife, a sculptor. He is also survived by two daughters, Dafna and Yaelle, and two grandsons.
His brother, who became known as Maurice Sznycer, moved to Paris after the war and became a professor of antiquities and West Semitic languages at the Sorbonne. He died in 2010.
Mr. Yoran helped found the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Near the end of his life, when he had dementia and other illnesses, his family established the Rose Art Foundation, which donates mobile reclining chairs to patients in need.
After “The Defiant” was published, Mr. Yoran frequently spoke publicly about his experience as a partisan.
“If there is a lesson to be gleaned, it is that no person should succumb to brutality without putting up a resistance,” he wrote in his book. “Individually it can save one’s life; en masse it can change the course of history.”
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQx4--L0TdY&feature=youtu.be
-
Another hero who fought for us has died of what sounds like war related problems. From meds used for chronic pain?
He was only 28. I was in my medical training at that age. So he urinated on dead bodies. Certainly distasteful but not a crime when your in a war zone fighting and enemy that would happily cut off your head.
****Marine who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan dies
.
Associated Press
By MARTHA WAGGONER 17 hours ago
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A decorated retired Marine whose career as a sniper was derailed by a video that showed him urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters has died, his attorney said Friday.
Cpl. Robert Richards, 28, was found dead Wednesday by his wife at their Jacksonville home, Attorney Guy Womack said. Neither foul play nor suicide is suspected.
The death was most likely from Richards changing medications he took because of injuries he suffered in a roadside bomb during one of his three tours in Afghanistan, Womack said.
Richards was demoted from sergeant after a video showed four Camp Lejeune Marines — in full body armor — urinating on three Afghans in 2011. One Marine looks down at the bodies and jokes, "Have a good day, buddy."
The video was posted on YouTube in early 2012. It was condemned internationally and caused outrage in the Middle East.
It was "a temporary lapse of discipline, and it should in no way define the service and honor of the snipers," Womack said.
Richards' sniper unit killed 12 Taliban fighters, some of whom the Marines knew were part of a cell making roadside bombs and training others, Womack said. About a month earlier, the Taliban cell had planted a bomb that blew the legs off a Marine.
One of the Marines in the video testified that their operation was designed to pursue bomb-making experts believed responsible for killing a corporal whose leg was later found hanging from a tree. The Marines were reacting to those events when they urinated on the bodies, Womack said.
"He never said it was OK," Womack said. "Marines shouldn't do that. At the same time, it really wasn't the crime of the century. "
Richards almost died when a roadside bomb exploded near him during his second tour, Womack said. Shrapnel went through his throat and an emergency tracheotomy on the battlefield saved his life, the attorney said. He also almost lost a foot and suffered back injuries. He was awarded a Purple Heart.
Richards was supposed to get 18 months off from active duty, but he returned early when a platoon commander asked him to join a new sniper unit that had no combat veteran snipers.
"He called it a personal obligation and said he would feel guilty if any of them were to die from their inexperience," Womack said.
Richards will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
___
Follow Martha Waggoner at http://twitter.com/mjwaggonernc
-
Funny and talented. Never afraid to say something controversial.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj3_EHjee5I
-
I met her in the LA airport this past year. She was relaxed and easy to talk to. "I saw you on the Ed Sullivan Show" I said. The ES Show was a REALLY big deal in the 60s and she was one of the very first female comics to get a big break like that and become a regular. There was a moment of eye contact and she laughed and said "That was a long time ago". I moved on, leaving her to a couple of women chattering excitedly. She was relaxed and gracious with them.
Cindy tells me she was working one hour shows with vigor up to the end and that her will specifies one raucous funeral.
-
Joan Rivers: The Entertainer
by Peggy Noonan
There was nobody like her. Some people are knockoffs or imitations of other, stronger, more vivid figures, but there was never another Joan Rivers before her or while she lived. She was a seriously wonderful, self-invented woman.
She was completely open and immediately accessible. She had the warmth of a person who found others keenly and genuinely interesting. It was also the warmth of a person with no boundaries: She wanted to know everything about you and would tell you a great deal about herself, right away. She had no edit function, which in part allowed her gift. She would tell you what she thought. She loved to shock, not only an audience but a friend. I think from the beginning life startled her, and she enjoyed startling you. You only asked her advice or opinion if you wanted an honest reply.
Her intelligence was penetrating and original, her tastes refined. Her duplex apartment on the east side of Manhattan was full of books in beautiful bindings, of elegant gold things on the table, lacquered boxes, antique furniture. She liked everything just so. She read a lot. She was a doctor’s daughter.
We met and became friends in 1992, but the story I always remember when I think of her took place in June 2004. Ronald Reagan had just died, and his remains were being flown from California to Washington, where he would lay in state at the U.S. Capitol. A group of his friends were invited to the Capitol to take part in the formal receiving of his remains, and to say goodbye. Joan was there, as a great friend and supporter of the Reagans.
That afternoon, as we waited for the plane to land, while we were standing and talking in a ceremonial room on the Senate side, there was, suddenly, an alarm. Secret Service men and Capitol police burst into the room and instructed us to leave, quickly and immediately. An incoming plane headed for the Capitol was expected to hit within minutes. “Run for your lives,” they commanded, and they meant it. Everyone in the Capitol ran toward the exits and down the great stairs. Joan was ahead of me, along with the television producer Tommy Corcoran, her best friend and boon companion of many years.
Down the long marble halls, down the long steps . . . At the bottom of the steps, in a grassy patch to the left, I saw Joan on the ground, breathless. Her high heel had broken, the wind knocked out of her. I’m not going any further, she said to Tommy. Keep going, she said. I should note that everyone really thought the Capitol was about to be attacked.
I stopped to ask if I could help, heard what Joan had said to Tommy and then heard Tommy’s reply: “I’m staying with you.”
“Run!” said Joan. She told him to save himself.
“No,” said Tommy. “It wouldn’t be as much fun without you.” He said if anything happened they’d go together. And he sat down next to her and held her hand and they waited for the plane to hit.
Needless to say it didn’t; some idiot flying an oblivious governor had drifted into restricted airspace. I don’t know if they ever had any idea how close they’d come to being shot down.
But that was a very Joan moment, her caring about her friend and him saying life would be lesser without her.
* * *
I was lucky to have known her. I owe it to Steve Forbes, the publisher and former presidential hopeful who, with his family, owned a chateau in France near the Normandy coast. It was the family’s custom once a year to invite friends and associates for a long weekend, and in the summer of 1992 I went, and met Joan. Talk about a life force.
We all stayed in beautiful rooms. Joan amused herself making believe she was stealing the furniture. It rained through the weekend, which Joan feared would make Steve and Sabina Forbes blue, so she organized a group of us to go into town to a costume-rental place so we could put on a show. All they had was French Revolution outfits, so we took them, got back to our rooms, and Joan and I wrote a play on what we announced were French revolutionary themes. Walter Cronkite, another guest, was chosen by Joan as narrator. I think the play consisted mostly of members of Louis XIV’s court doing Catskills stand-up. It was quite awful and a big success.
The highlight of the weekend was a balloon lift, a Forbes tradition—scores of huge balloons in brilliant colors and patterns would lift from the grounds of the chateau after dawn and travel over the countryside. It was so beautiful. I stood and watched, not meaning to participate, and was half pushed into a gondola. By luck Joan was there, full of good humor and information on what we were seeing below.
We held on hard as we experienced a hard and unplanned landing on a French farm. We were spilled out onto a field. As we scrambled and stood, an old farmer came out, spoke to us for a moment, ran into his farmhouse and came back with an old bottle of calvados. He then told us he hadn’t seen Americans since D-Day, and toasted us for what America had done for his country. No one was more moved than Joan, who never forgot it.
* * *
I last saw her in July. A friend and I met her for lunch at a restaurant she’d chosen in Los Angeles. It was full of tourists. Everyone at the tables recognized her and called out. She felt she owed her fans everything and never ignored or patronized an admirer. She smiled through every picture with every stranger. She was nice—she asked about their families, where they were from, how they liked it here. They absolutely knew she would treat them well and she absolutely did.
The only people who didn’t recognize Joan were the people who ran the restaurant, who said they didn’t have her reservation and asked us to wait in the bar, where waiters bumped into us as they bustled by. Joan didn’t like that, gave them 10 minutes to get their act together, and when they didn’t she left. But she didn’t just leave. She stood outside on the sidewalk, and as cars full of people went by with people calling out, “Joan! We love you!” she would yell back, “Thank you but don’t go to this restaurant, they’re rude! Boycott this restaurant!” My friend said, “Joan, stop it, you’re going to wind up on TMZ.”
“I don’t care,” she said. She felt she was doing a public service.
We went to a restaurant down the street, where when she walked in they almost bowed.
She wouldn’t let a friend pay a bill, ever. She tipped like a woman who used to live on tips. She was hilarious that day on the subject of Barack and Michelle Obama, whom she did not like. (I almost didn’t write that but decided if Joan were here she’d say, “Say I didn’t like Obama!”)
She was a Republican, always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was one because, as she would tell you, she worked hard, made her money with great effort, and didn’t feel her profits should be unduly taxed. She once said in an interview that if you have 19 children she will pay for the first four but no more. Mostly she just couldn’t tolerate cant and didn’t respond well to political manipulation. She believed in a strong defense because she was a grown-up and understood the world to be a tough house. She loved Margaret Thatcher, who said what Joan believed: The facts of life are conservative. She didn’t do a lot of politics in her shows—politics divides an audience—but she thought a lot about it and talked about it. She was socially liberal in the sense she wanted everyone to find as many available paths to happiness as possible.
* * *
I am not sure she ever felt accepted by the showbiz elite, or any elite. She was too raw, didn’t respect certain conventions, wasn’t careful, didn’t pretend to a false dignity. She took the celebrated and powerful down a peg. Her wit was broad and spoofing—she would play the fool—but it was also subversive and transgressive. People who weren’t powerful or well-known saw and understood what she was doing.
She thought a lot about how things work and what they mean.
She once told me she figured a career was like a shark, either it is going forward or it is dying and sinking to the ocean floor. She worked like someone who believed that, doing shows in houses big and small all over the country, hundreds a year, along with her cable programs, interviews, and books. She supported a lot of people. Many members of her staff stayed for decades and were like family. Because of that, when I visited the hospital last week, I got to witness a show-business moment Joan would have liked. A relative was scrolling down on her iPhone. “Listen to this,” she said, and read aloud something a young showbiz figure who had been lampooned by Joan had just tweeted. She said it was an honor to be made fun of by such a great lady. “Joan will be furious when she sees this,” said the relative, shaking her head. “She won’t be able to make fun of her in the act anymore.”
It was Joan who explained to me 15 or 20 years ago a new dimension in modern fame—that it isn’t like the old days when you’d down a city street and people would recognize you. Fame had suddenly and in some new way gone universal. Joan and a friend had just come back from a safari in Africa. One day they were walking along a path when they saw some local tribesmen. As the two groups passed, a tribesman exclaimed, “Joan Rivers, what are you doing here?!”
She couldn’t believe it. This is Africa, she thought. And then she thought no, this is a world full of media that show the world American culture. We talked about it, and I asked, beyond the idea of what might be called Western cultural imperialism, what else does the story mean to you? “It means there’s no place to hide,” she said. They can know you anywhere. At the time, the Internet age was just beginning.
Her eye was original. Twenty years ago, when everyone was talking about how wonderful it was that Vegas had been cleaned up and the mob had been thrown out, Joan said no, no, no, they are ruining the mystique. First of all, she said, those mobsters knew how to care for a lady, those guys with bent noses were respectful and gentlemen, except when they were killing you. Second, she said, organized crime is better than disorganized crime, which will replace it. Third, the mobsters had a patina of class, they dressed well and saw that everyone else did, so Vegas wasn’t a slobocracy, which is what it is becoming with men in shorts playing the slots in the lobby of the hotel. The old Vegas had dignity. She hated the bluenoses who’d clean up what wasn’t mean to be clean. No one wanted Sin City cleaned up, she said, they wanted to go there and visit sin and then go home.
* * *
Joan now is being celebrated, rightly and beautifully, by those who knew and loved her. They are defining her contributions (pioneer, unacknowledged feminist hero, gutsy broad) and lauding the quality of her craft.
But it is a great unkindness of life that no one says these things until you’re gone.
-
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152263577037689&fref=nf
-
Joan Rivers’ Doctor Snapped Selfie During Throat Procedure (Report)
Joan Rivers‘ personal ear, nose, and throat doctor allegedly snapped a selfie with the comedienne while she was under general anesthesia for her throat procedure.
Also read: Joan Rivers’ Endoscopy Clinic Denies Performing Dangerous Throat Biopsy
According to CNN, a Yorkville Endoscopy staff member told investigators the photograph was taken while Rivers was in the procedure room.
The 81-year-old entertainer went to the clinic to undergo a scheduled endoscopy by gastroenterologist and the clinic's medical director Dr. Lawrence Cohen, according to reports. After that procedure, CNN reports Rivers also underwent an unauthorized vocal cord biopsy performed by a physician, who hasn't been identified.
While she was under!
On Friday Yorkville Endoscopy announced Dr. Cohen was no longer medical director of the clinic, located in Manhattan. Reports are conflicting as to whether he voluntarily stepped down or was fired.
“Dr. Cohen is not currently performing procedures at Yorkville Endoscopy, nor is he currently serving as medical director,” a spokesperson from the clinic said in a statement obtained by TheWrap.
Also read: Joan Rivers Funeral: Howard Stern Delivers Eulogy at Star-Studded Service
On Sept. 5 the New York Medical Examiner's Office told TheWrap that the autopsy on Rivers’ body did not yield a firm cause or manner of death, and that further studies would be conducted to determine exactly how she died following the Aug. 28 procedure.
Rivers was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital, but did not recover. She was placed in a medically-induced coma and had been on life support when she died on Sept. 4.
-
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/joan-rivers-biopsy-doctor-id-nyc-physician-report-article-1.1943127
-
http://time.com/3472131/paul-revere-raiders/
-
I saw him at the Fillmore East and some other places too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xJWxPE8G2c
-
Remembering Senator Fred Thompson
Originally published at the Washington Times
Callista and I are deeply saddened by the passing of Senator Fred Thompson. Our hearts go out to his wife Jeri and their family.
Fred was much more than a United States Senator.
He was a big man. At six feet, six inches tall, he towered over the room and had a powerful, deep voice to match his physical stature.
My favorite memory of Fred was his role as the Admiral Josh Painter in the Hunt for Red October. I was deeply impressed by the way he said: “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.” He made it sound authoritative and definitive and he looked the part perfectly.
I once asked Fred if he was channeling some famous admiral when he played that role. “Nah,” he said. “I was thinking of my grandfather and how he talked. Now HE was an authority figure.”
Fred had a remarkable career as a citizen. He was the first member of his family to go to college and did well enough as a student to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School. When he passed the bar, he shortened his name from Freddie to Fred.
As a young lawyer, he worked as a deputy U.S. Attorney locking up bank robbers and other criminals.
After three years, Fred left the practice of law to run Howard Baker's reelection campaign in 1972. That step would change his life.
A year later, Baker asked Thompson to become the top Republican counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. It was actually Fred who asked Alexander Butterfield the key question about the taping system. With that one question, President Richard Nixon's future was sealed and his resignation was only a matter of time.
After Watergate, Fred went back to the practice of law. In 1977 he accepted a case involving massive corruption in the Tennessee governor's office. That case changed Thompson's future decisively. Hollywood decided the governor's corruption would make a good movie. As the film’s producers were looking for someone to play the crusading lawyer, they decided Thompson was the best person to play himself.
Having successfully acted that part in the 1985 movie Marie, Thompson then went on to play the CIA director in Kevin Costner's No Way Out, the airport manager in Bruce Willis’s Die Hard 2, and the admiral I mentioned in Sean Connery's The Hunt For Red October. In total, Fred played roles in 40 films as well as enjoying a long run as a district attorney in Law and Order.
Fred was drawn back into politics when Al Gore left the Senate to become vice president in 1993. Fred won his U.S. Senate seat in 1994 riding around the state in a red pickup truck. Imagine this Vanderbilt lawyer, Watergate counsel, successful attorney, and Hollywood actor riding around in a red pick up truck and you have some idea of the power of his personality.
Thompson was a good senator, a credible presidential candidate in 2008, a real asset to the American Enterprise Institute as a scholar, and a deeply committed husband, father and grandfather.
Fred represented the best in the American tradition. He was a citizen before he was a politician. He cared about his country and voted the way he believed. Because he was not a career politician, he could vote and speak as his conscience. Fred was impossible to intimidate because he knew he could earn a living without a vote and he knew there were a lot of things in life more important than being a senator.
In a very real sense, Fred was the classic American whose independence was grounded in a willingness to work and take risks. He called them as he saw them.
We didn't always agree but we always respected the integrity and independence within which each of us operated.
When Fred endorsed my presidential campaign in 2012, it was a high honor and one which Callista and I will always cherish.
Fred Thompson was an American original. He will be deeply missed.
Our prayers go out to his family.
Your Friend,
Newt
-
Nice eulogy from Newt.
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/us/gen-h-norman-schwarzkopf-us-commander-in-gulf-war-dies-at-78.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
-
http://nypost.com/2016/03/17/joran-van-der-sloot-appears-to-confess-to-holloway-murder/
There is some justice in this case. At least he is in jail in Peru, but another young lady died first.
One last footnote. There is no limit to the sickness of women who go for such monsters:
'In a prison ceremony on 4 July 2014, Van der Sloot was married to Leidy (alt. Leydi) Figueroa, a Peruvian woman whom he met while she was selling goods inside the prison. She was 7 months pregnant with his child at the time.[177] On 28 September 2014 L. Figueroa gave birth to an 8 lb baby girl in Peru '
(Wikipedia)
-
His body wrapped in a *35* state flag as he was lifted naked from his deathbed and placed into the hastily made custom large pine coffin:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/15/the-dark-bloody-morning-lincoln-died.html
-
As a dog lover myself I can appreciate this:
https://www.hotgas.net/2016/06/memoriumpierre-pu-may-29-2004-jun-14-2016/
:cry:
-
One of my few, until today, living heroes . I had the privilege of seeing him speak in the 1990s when I was in Florida.
Reading his wikipedia page I notice there is a "controversy" section. From the liberal Jews of course even giving him a hard time over Israel:
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel
-
Now in judging the full measure of a man who would you rate as the better human being? E Weisel or Sid Blumenthal and the chip off his father's old block?
Liberal Jews are not Jews. They are Democrats.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/07/02/elie-wiesel-perfect-tribute-hate-tweet-clinton-associate/
-
Was Elie Wiesel Happy?
Yosef Abramowitz - The Jerusalem Post
“You came for me?” asked a bewildered Mikhail Gorbachev.
“As a Jew, I owe you that much,” responded Elie Wiesel.
French president Mitterand sent Wiesel aboard a government plane to Moscow, where he met Gorbachev immediately after the 1991 coup failure, several months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
“When Gorbachev saw me he was moved. I asked myself, why was he moved, with tears in his eyes? Because he had just realized that his friends were not his friends. Every single one had betrayed him. Those whom he had elevated, abandoned him. I have rarely seen a man as lonely as he was. And here comes a young Jew, and says I’m here to help you, to give you support. I was thinking: I’m a yeshiva bucher from Sighet, and all of a sudden I’m involved with presidents, bringing personal messages, and traveling in government planes. I was surprised.”
Wiesel’s life-long self-image as “a yeshiva bucher from Sighet” provided important hints not only into his pre-Holocaust life, but also insights as to how the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate viewed himself. Wiesel has been described as a modem prophet, a moving writer, a brilliant teacher and even a Jewish superstar. He is best known, however, as a survivor of Nazi horrors. Yet to keep describing Wiesel in all the obituaries as a survivor does an injustice to the totality of his life and accomplishments. Elie Wiesel did not merely survive, he triumphed. And if he would have paused long enough to consider it toward the end of his remarkable life, he might even have said he was happy.
Passing away at 87, Wiesel marked nearly 60 years since the publication of the best-selling Night and almost three decades since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “I can’t believe it,” he said in a conversation with this writer, smiling and shaking his head at the incredible path his life had taken.
x
Books were everywhere at Wiesel’s home on the 26th floor of a nondescript Upper East Side Manhattan apartment building. A visitor is first confronted by thousands of books in Hebrew, Yiddish, French, and English that cover nearly every inch of space between the floor and ceiling of the L-shaped living room. One upper shelf in a corner is devoted to the more than 30 titles bearing Wiesel’s name. People are not aware that when he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, he was also being seriously considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Two framed pictures are the lone exceptions to the otherwise book-lined walls. When Wiesel sat at his large desk, he faced on the far wall a sketch of Jerusalem. When he turned around to use the computer, he looked right into a dark black-and-white photograph of the house in Sighet where he grew up, which is featured in his memoirs along with 16 pages of family photos.
“Since I began writing, I always face that house,” he said in a television interview. “I must know where I come from.”
Eliezer Wiesel was born in the picturesque town of Sighet, below the Carpathian mountains that were once home to the Ba’al Shem Tov, the father of Chasidism. Tantalized by Chasidic tales his grandfather told, Wiesel’s happiest childhood memories were punctuated with singing Shabbat songs, eating chocolates and studying a page of Talmud under a tree while the other youngsters played ball.
“He was a little sickly and certainly what we call bookish,” recalled Professor David Weiss Halivni, who studied in cheder with Wiesel in Sighet. Halivni, a former professor of religion at Columbia University and one of Wiesel’s closest friends, said that even as a child, Wiesel was “artistically more sensitive” to the mystical teachings of their teacher. Halivni believed Wiesel's sense of humor was conditioned as a child. “Maybe he had a premonition,” he said.
“We were in the ghetto together. He was on the last transport. I was on the first. I left on Monday, he left Thursday,” recalled Halivni. “So we came to Auschwitz at different times.”
“We met in Auschwitz,” said Rabbi Menashe Klein. Wearing a black Chasidic robe, tzitzit, white beard and sidelocks, Klein strikes one as Wiesel’s Old World alter ego. This is perhaps how Wiesel himself might have looked had his life, his studies, and his preoccupation with mysticism not been interrupted by history. “Somehow we got to Buchenwald and were liberated there together,” he said. “We went to France then, and Professor Wiesel attended the Sorbonne. I, on the other hand, kept dwelling in our Torah.”
Rabbi Klein, whose study in Brooklyn was also crowded with religious books, explained that Wiesel took a different path after the war as a result of the shock of his experiences during the Holocaust.
After the war, Wiesel studied in Paris, where he earned money directing a choir. Later he became the Paris correspondent for the Israel daily, Yediot Aharonot, earning $30 a month. His big break came when he moved to New York to work with the Yiddish Forward, earning $175 a month as a copy editor; writer and translator. “I remember when he lived on 103rd Street,” says Halivni. “He had only a small room, narrow, dark—you could see the poverty. I remember him sitting on the floor surrounded by records of Bach. At that time he was practically starving.”
In 1956, Wiesel stepped off a curb in Times Square and was struck by a speeding taxi. Following the accident, which left him hospitalized for seven months, Wiesel desperately needed money and tried covering the United Nations on crutches for Yediot. Golda Meir, then foreign minister, took pity on the young journalist and would invite him back to her hotel suite, where she would prepare omelets and tea and brief him on the day’s events. In 1967, his books, which had been commercial failures, began to sell, and Wiesel was able to leave daily journalism to concentrate on book writing.
So powerfully embedded in the popular psyche is Wiesel’s association with the Holocaust that many would find it surprising that the topic rarely came up in his classes or in his writings.
“When people didn’t talk about the Shoah, I felt I had to. So many people are doing it now, I don’t need to any more,” he explained. In fact, he always thought twice about raising the issue. “I’m afraid of making it into a routine. I want it that whenever I mention the word Shoah, I should stop for a second and my voice should tremble, my whole being should tremble before pronouncing that word.”
Halivni left public speaking about the Holocaust to Wiesel. “But when he comes to see me,” he said, “He listens and I shout.”
While the Holocaust rarely figures prominently in Wiesel’s public life in the later years of his life, his sensitivity as a survivor gave him an appreciation for every moment, and for life’s fragility. He and his wife, Marion, used to travel on separate flights. “Just in case,” he said, like a quick prayer, eyes flashing toward Heaven.
It also drove him to work hard.
“There are people who want to do more than they can. Wiesel is one of them,” said Rabbi Klein, who, like Wiesel, went to sleep late and woke up early to study and write. “For Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize is no more than a ladder, a step, toward fulfilling a goal for which he remained alive: to do for the Jewish people.”
“A person cannot live with the feeling that they have achieved the highest,” said Halivni, who claimed that the Nobel Prize had been a mixed blessing for Wiesel.
“The Nobel Prize did not become an end, rather a new beginning. He realizes that the Nobel Prize was given to him as ‘Mr. Jew,’ and therefore he owes it to the Jewish people. In a sense it entails a greater responsibility. It has imposed a burden on him; the possibility of extending help, because of his connections, is much bigger. There is nothing more frightening for a sensitive person than having power.”
While New York is far from Sighet, Elie Wiesel was never far from the forces that molded his childhood: chasidism and the Holocaust. And the struggle of these two forces to coexist in one soul is what shaped Elie Wiesel until his last day, providing the creative tension for his achievements and writings. Deep within him lay a young yeshiva bucher from Sighet; deep within he believed he survived the Nazi horrors for a purpose.
* * *
Clad in a well-tailored gray suit and hugging a velvet blue Torah scroll, Elie Wiesel danced in a tight circle with his friends and sang songs of praise to the God he had so often challenged. Wiesel was glowing; gone was the trademark somber look that is naturally chiseled in his sullen, handsome face. It was Simchat Torah for the Jewish people. Yet for Wiesel it was more; it was also his birthday.
“We never celebrated birthdays at home,” Wiesel said of his childhood. He rarely celebrated the occasion because “to me every minute is a victory.”
Wiesel credited his sanity to his family and friends. “I read, I listen to music, I speak with friends. My life is full. The main thing is not to waste time.” But then he added, “Sometimes I think that I too am insane. I was always in the minority, like the madman. When I began to talk about trying to teach the Shoah, how many others were there? When I began for Russian Jewry, how many others were there then?” “What keeps Wiesel sane?” pondered Rabbi Menashe Klein. “We sing together, eat together, daven together, walk together. He comes here before every holiday. Mostly we meet, we talk.” Klein says that Wiesel, who sang in a choir as a child, still loved to sing Chasidic melodies. “He would begin singing Friday night at 5:30 p.m. and wouldn’t stop until after 2 a.m.”
Wiesel said that his daily study of Jewish texts was essential for him. “I love to study. It gives you a good sense of proportion. After all, what Rambam says maybe is more important than the article I wrote for The New York Times.”
Wiesel's preoccupation with books began early. When others were hording food and valuables, the young Wiesel brought books to study onto the cramped cattle car to Auschwitz.
Dr. David Weiss Halivni and Wiesel expressed their friendship by always speaking Hebrew to each other. Halivni was one of the few who could really make Wiesel laugh. “The lightest moments we have are when we bring up characters from Sighet,” he said.
What kind of characters? There was the shadchan (matchmaker), Ziegenfeld, who always walked with an umbrella. And then there was the tall shochet (ritual slaughterer) and his short wife. And many others. “Hardly a conversation passes when we don’t talk about Sighet,” Halivni said. “When describing these things, recapturing the comical aspects of Sighet, then I see him having a hearty laugh.”
Was Wiesel happy? To his friends, the question seemed irrelevant. “We never think in those terms,” said Halivni. He explained that Chasidic spirituality gave Wiesel freedom—a second liberation—and that Wiesel “needs the joy of Chasidut because he cannot always live in the shadow of the Holocaust.”
Wiesel, hesitant to allow an affirmative answer, gave a traditional response. “We don’t speak about happiness in our faith, we speak about simcha vesasson (joy and gladness). What do we ask for? Shalom, yes. We mainly ask for Yirat shamayim (fear of heaven), for study, for chaim shel Torah (life of Torah). What is Torah? Meaning. My life has been the pursuit of meaning, not joy.”
For Wiesel, without a Jewish context there was no enjoyment. When asked. about simcha vesasson in his own life, he paused briefly, and then his words flowed in his soft French accent. “Nineteen forty-eight, when Israel was born. I remember that Shabbat in Paris. I felt joy that came from history. Then the ‘67 war. Shichrur Yerushalayim (the liberation of Jerusalem), something that remains with me. And Simchat Torah in Moscow with young people.”
Yet “there is something missing, and when something is missing, happiness can’t be present because happiness means nothing is missing. What is missing?” The Boston University professor paused and then answered the question. “Certainty. You have the haunting feeling that history is trying to purge itself of its demons, of its nightmares with the pursuit of violence of bloodshed, of hatred.
“In this generation, the pursuit of pleasure is at the expense of happiness. Pleasure is instant pleasure. Everything we are obtaining is instant. Instant meaning, instant love, instant philosophy, instant truth.
“The Gaon of Vilna said that the hardest mitzvah to accomplish is ‘v’samachta bechagecha' (rejoice in your holidays). ‘Do not steal,’ ‘do not kill,’ everything is easy. ‘Vesamachta bechagecha!’ To make sure that you rejoice,” Wiesel said energetically.
Wiesel’s voice then became barely audible, his downward gaze was steady. His consciousness seemed to have been transported to another time. “Another kind of joy, even deeper than that, and more personal, was the birth of my son... even more, the brit of my son. To me in my life, it has the importance of the birth of Israel, the reunification of Jerusalem. I felt it in my body, in every cell of my body....”
The phone broke his trance, and Wiesel walked over to his executive-size mahogany desk to answer it. On it sit two photographs: One of him with his wife and their son Shlomo-Elisha, and one a close-up of their son, both taken at least 35 years ago. Wiesel named his son after his father, who was in the camps with him and died only weeks before Wiesel’s liberation. “I was 16 years old when my father died,” writes Wiesel in his memoirs.
“My father was dead and the pain was gone. I no longer felt anything. Someone had died inside me, and that someone was me.”
“My father had no official position in the community, he was a kind of intercessor in the community, he was a grocery store owner,” Wiesel said in a tone of great respect. “Somehow, I don’t know how, he always defended the Jews with the authorities. Therefore, when something would happen, they would come to my father.” At times his father was so busy with Jewish communal business that the young Wiesel would only see him at home on the Sabbath.
Wiesel himself had no official position in the Jewish community, yet he has served as an intercessor with heads of state, including President Reagan prior to his trip to Bitburg and President Clinton, to ask him to do more to help the Bosnians. As Prime Ministers, both Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu tried convincing Wiesel to accept the position of President of the State of Israel. “The need to help Jews, I think I am following in my father’s footsteps and I think he would have wanted it that way,” said Wiesel. Wiesel said that he has only recently realized the similarities between himself and his father, and explains that it took a long time to come to this conclusion “because of kibbud av (respect of one’s father), I didn’t dare compare myself with him. He saved Jewish lives; I didn’t. I try to teach, but he saved Jewish lives. He was arrested, he was tortured. I was not. So how can I compare myself to him?” Just as Wiesel struggled with being a son, he also wrestled with being a father. “The hardest is to be a good father, always” confessed Wiesel. Halivni says that it is not easy being the son of a great man. Shlomo-Elisha, a Yale graduate who now works in finance, had been heard to say, half-jokingly: “It’s hard growing up in a house where your dad is the arbiter of morality in the 20th century.”
Wiesel believed that “the father-son relationship is a test, both for the father and for the son. When the son leaves home, it is harder for the father than for the son,” he said, hoping not to betray the privacy of his family life while trying to convey the love and understanding he had for his son. “The son has to free himself on the one hand, and at the same time be loyal,” he said, speaking perhaps about both his relationship with his father and his son’s with him. “The hardest things are the most rewarding.”
Yosef I. Abramowitz, Elie Wiesel’s student, serves as CEO of Energiya Global Capital and can be followed @KaptainSunshine
-
Well written :cry:
-
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/24/525443040/-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-author-robert-m-pirsig-dies-at-88?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170424
-
Gomer Pyle USMC was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid. He was a character player in his TV shows but he had real dramatic talent too in one movie I saw him in but it eludes me now.
One of the hardest belly laughs I ever had was watching that the episode where in a wrecking ball crashed and demolish Sargeant Carter's car while it was under Gomer's care:
A lifetime later I still remember that:
https://www.newsmax.com/thewire/jim-nabors-dies-fans-friends/2017/11/30/id/829139/
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/u-s-helicopter-crashes-western-iraq-rescue-underway-n857156
RIP to Katherine's cousin who passed away yesterday . He was 32 yo, just got engaged
and was a Georgetown law school graduate who followed his older brother into the Air Force and became a pilot like his brother .
He will get into heaven immediately :cry:
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/u-s-helicopter-crashes-western-iraq-rescue-underway-n857156
RIP to Katherine's cousin who passed away yesterday . He was 32 yo, just got engaged
and was a Georgetown law school graduate who followed his older brother into the Air Force and became a pilot like his brother .
He will get into heaven immediately :cry:
He died in this crash?! :-( Yes, I think heaven has a fast entry program for heroes.
-
yes .
-
The wood is consumed, but the fire burns on.
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/u-s-helicopter-crashes-western-iraq-rescue-underway-n857156
RIP to Katherine's cousin who passed away yesterday . He was 32 yo, just got engaged
and was a Georgetown law school graduate who followed his older brother into the Air Force and became a pilot like his brother .
He will get into heaven immediately :cry:
Very sorry for this loss.
-
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/obituaries/stan-lee-dead.html?fbclid=IwAR2m7s2b3hhqQyAKVYHw1fS_pPb-MWM8JLGuTA4w890Q8ZIWCRweBV3iG0U
-
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/obituaries/stan-lee-dead.html?fbclid=IwAR2m7s2b3hhqQyAKVYHw1fS_pPb-MWM8JLGuTA4w890Q8ZIWCRweBV3iG0U
He had quite the cultural impact.
-
Not wild about most of the Marvel movies-- even Spidermans were turned into a chick flicks, but as a boy and high schooler I loved Spiderman and as a young man and Dog Brother I loved the Conan comics-- Indeed I have about 2/3 of every one ever released.
-
When the Yankees couldn't buy a ticket out of the Bronx to get home.
Mel was one of the few bright lights during that time. Al Downing had a good year or two. Mantle was on his way out. I got to see him strike out and hit a weak grounder to short.
Waiting forever for Booby Murcer to bust out . Hit .330+ one yr and Phil Rizzuto thought he was the next coming of Mantle .
The original great Bloomberg from NY was one of the few semi stars - when he batted against lefties only I think. The Boomer !
Felipe Alou, Sandy Alomar, White in left. I remember Joe Pepitone swinging for the fences and whiffing - but it was still the biggest swing I ever saw and remember over 50 yrs later.
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/mel-stottlemyre-pitcher-legendary-yankees-mets-pitching-coach-dies-77-185543693.html
-
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ram-dass-dies/
-
don't know him personally
but I really believe he is one of the greatest movies actors to have ever lived
He shines in 'the Juggler'
and so many others
-
Spartacus!
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conrad
maybe not the good guy he was in TV shows
with DIU, fist fights , calling butcher Tony Spilotro his best friend, watching him in some celebrity sports competition in the 70s make a total fool of himself
but
I loved the Wild Wild West - my favorite show - with Dr Loveless etc.
I used to look forward to watching him kick ass every Friday night as a kid.
-
according to Mike:
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/02/08/actor-michael-douglas-former-mayor-gary-indiana-stump-bloomberg/4701357002/
MY question is get what done?
turn the country into a nanny redistribution state and sell out to globalization and open borders?
what exactly is he going to get done?
another for Republicans or conservatives - though he is safe with 60 bill
-
When I was 15-16 I would sneak out of the house and take the Lexington Ave subway down to Greenwich Village and walk over into the bowls of the Lower East Side to a tiny jazz club called Slug's (or was it Slugo's? Trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot there by a jealous woman if that helps your search) whenever McCoy was playing, often with Elvin Jones on drums and one time Jimmy Garrison too.
Very, very sad.
:cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:
-
https://christianmcbride.blog/2020/03/26/remembering-mccoy-tyner/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog
-
I remember McCoy Tyner
I think I even had an album of his
a friend of mine was into music of his
and Coryell guitar, Clarke bass, J. McLaughlin guitar
and others that elude me at the moment going back to the 70s and into early 80s
probably my favorite guitarist (blues I guess more than jazz) was Roy Buchanan who was never very popular and came to a sad end
-
John Lewis’s America
The arc of his life shows the racial progress the country has made.
By The WSJ Editorial Board
July 19, 2020 5:02 pm ET
Six leaders of the nation's largest black civil rights organizations pose at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, July 2, 1963. From left, are: John Lewis, chairman Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Whitney Young, national director, Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, president of the Negro American Labor Council; Martin Luther King Jr., president Southern Christian Leadership Conference; James Farmer, Congress of Racial Equality director; and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The tributes are rolling in far and wide for John Lewis, the civil-rights leader and Democratic Congressman who died Friday at age 80. His life is worth celebrating for its own sake, but it’s all the more valuable for what it says about the progress of his country.
Lewis was one of 10 children of a sharecropper in Alabama when state power enforced white supremacy in the American South. He dreamed of being a preacher, but he had a political awakening over civil rights while attending American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. He led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and in the early 1960s became the most prominent young leader of the civil-rights movement that broke Jim Crow.
White political supremacy at the time was enforced by state and local governments. Nonviolent protests built moral authority and widespread political support for the movement that triumphed in the mid-1960s with the help of federal law and enforcement authority. The fight took too long and required much sacrifice, including the cracked skull endured by Lewis as he marched across the Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965. But legal segregation and black political exclusion were defeated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The arc of Lewis’s life and career shows how much the South and America have changed. Born into a world of segregated schools and lunch counters, Lewis became a political activist and in 1986 won election to Congress from Georgia. He served there until his death, rising to the heights of power as so many black Americans have. Forty-five years after the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Lewis spoke, America elected a black President.
We had differences with Lewis on policy, not least his opposition to the 1996 welfare reform when he predicted a catastrophe for the poor. The reform, passed by a GOP Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, is the most successful bipartisan reform of the last 30 years.
But these differences are trivial compared to the significance of Lewis’s life and contribution to America. He famously forgave George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist Governor in the 1960s, in an example of reconciliation all of us should emulate. He never gave up his belief in nonviolence, despite the violence used against him. He never lost faith in the capacity of American democracy, despite its flaws, to strive for a more perfect union.
These days much of the left dismisses the racial progress America has made. They would rewrite history to say America was founded to maintain slavery and continues to enforce white supremacy. This ignores the central principle of the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—that inspired the slavery abolitionists and the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution.
The civil-rights movement that John Lewis helped to lead vindicated those principles, and his rightly celebrated life is a refutation of those who would now consign America to a future of continuing racial rancor and division.
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain
would a mask have made the difference
of course no one can say
but bottom line
wear the freaking masks and you too Trump
some of this is his fault.
-
The Tulsa rally was a mistake IMHO.
I liked Herman Cain and am sad at his apparently unnecessary passing.
-
The Tulsa rally was a mistake IMHO.
I liked Herman Cain and am sad at his apparently unnecessary passing.
https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/979733?section=newsfront&keywords=herman-cain-obituary&year=2020&month=07&date=30&id=979733&oref=pjmedia.com
Very sad. Great career. I wish he had been President.
https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/979733?section=newsfront&keywords=herman-cain-obituary&year=2020&month=07&date=30&id=979733&oref=pjmedia.com
https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/07/30/rip-herman-cain-passes-away-coronavirus-age-74/
-
My understanding was that he was given 3 months to live 8 months ago, terminal cancer.
Any evidence masks work to stop the spread of viruses?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain
would a mask have made the difference
of course no one can say
but bottom line
wear the freaking masks and you too Trump
some of this is his fault.
-
".My understanding was that he was given 3 months to live 8 months ago, terminal cancer.
Any evidence masks work to stop the spread of viruses?"
I. did not hear that tho I recently read he had advanced colon cancer in ~ 2006 which if true he lived a longer time then I ever heard of with stage 4 colon cancer.
--------
We have used masks forever to stop spread of respiratory virus spread
not new
my opinion is when infectious disease experts all come out and say - don't bother with masks (and now saint fauci - adding goggles)
it would be foolish to not wear them and recommend them. Trump was just being a hard ass.
if for no other reason he would have been smarter to simply say. we need to get the economy moving again but we need to do in safest manner possible - wear masks and keep distance - would that not have been politically far wiser than doing the opposite berating these potentially life saving measures ? As for me he looked like a dope for preaching against it, never setting an example by wearing a mask, and some governors going a long with this strategy and now seeing what we are seeing in those areas?
somehow this virus is spreading from person to person - no coincidence we see beaches full of people and the numbers going up.
until we better understand how this happens ( one person getting and spreading to family members , gastrointestinal spread?) just don't be reckless and carefree about it - isn't that what we all expect from a President?
he, and I, and other supporters of him are all paying the price now in his now reduced prospects
and for the course of this country .
-
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-netherlands/dutch-government-will-not-advise-public-to-wear-masks-minister-idUSKCN24U2UJ
".My understanding was that he was given 3 months to live 8 months ago, terminal cancer.
Any evidence masks work to stop the spread of viruses?"
I. did not hear that tho I recently read he had advanced colon cancer in ~ 2006 which if true he lived a longer time then I ever heard of with stage 4 colon cancer.
--------
We have used masks forever to stop spread of respiratory virus spread
not new
my opinion is when infectious disease experts all come out and say - don't bother with masks (and now saint fauci - adding goggles)
it would be foolish to not wear them and recommend them. Trump was just being a hard ass.
if for no other reason he would have been smarter to simply say. we need to get the economy moving again but we need to do in safest manner possible - wear masks and keep distance - would that not have been politically far wiser than doing the opposite berating these potentially life saving measures ? As for me he looked like a dope for preaching against it, never setting an example by wearing a mask, and some governors going a long with this strategy and now seeing what we are seeing in those areas?
somehow this virus is spreading from person to person - no coincidence we see beaches full of people and the numbers going up.
until we better understand how this happens ( one person getting and spreading to family members , gastrointestinal spread?) just don't be reckless and carefree about it - isn't that what we all expect from a President?
he, and I, and other supporters of him are all paying the price now in his now reduced prospects
and for the course of this country .
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Seaver
I was a Yankee fan but still remember this of course being from NYC metropolitan area:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bskqXjLwGTA
-
A great human being
just too bad she was on the wrong side of politics
https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-supreme-court-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-dies-from-cancer-complications
so what now? can McConnell pull if off?
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/iconic-rock-guitarist-eddie-van-halen-dies-at-65/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=21710873
-
https://bongino.com/economics-legend-walter-e-williams-dies-at-84/
-
https://bongino.com/economics-legend-walter-e-williams-dies-at-84/
So sad. Great, great, great man.
--------------
Walter Williams, R.I.P.
By VERONIQUE DE RUGY
December 2, 2020 11:01 AM
National Review
The great economist and freedom fighter Walter Williams has died. This is an incredibly sad news. Walter was a great communicator of ideas and a prolific, provocative and uncompromising writer. He was the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University. His voice, his happy-warrior demeanor, his cosmopolitan views, his endless fight on behalf of those with no political voices, and his generosity to all of us at Mason will be missed.
David Henderson writes about the news here.
Economic Policy Journal has this tribute. It includes this tidbit:
He was the author of over 150 publications which have appeared in scholarly journals such as Economic Inquiry, American Economic Review, Georgia Law Review, Journal of Labor Economics, Social Science Quarterly, and Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy and popular publications such as Newsweek, Ideas on Liberty, National Review, Reader’s Digest, Cato Journal, and Policy Review. He authored ten books: America: A Minority Viewpoint, The State Against Blacks, which was later made into the PBS documentary “Good Intentions,” All It Takes Is Guts, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism, which was later revised for South African publication, Do the Right Thing: The People’s Economist Speaks, More Liberty Means Less Government, Liberty vs. the Tyranny of Socialism, Up From The Projects: An Autobiography, Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed On Discrimination? and American Contempt for Liberty.
If possible, I will update this post with more tributes to Walter. Until then, here is one of Russ Roberts’ EconTalk podcasts with Walter Williams.
R.I.P., Walter.
-
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/future-prospects-for-economic-liberty/?utm_campaign=williams&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=101929147&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_0OBIk_wlKAidlkfDsa29tNO5Lo0I5bcQqp7JAVV4Fgc5n9KaX9r2AMW1VAIWbGjj0I9GRf0LhyLlvLM2aUlYsZtlpzA&utm_source=housefile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZGvQcxoAPg&feature=emb_logo
-
There aren’t many giants in American life, and on Monday we lost another. Chuck Yeager, the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound, died in his home at the age of 97.
In 1947, Yeager, a young Air Force pilot from the little town of Hamlin, W.Va., was chosen to fly a rocket-propelled plane, the Bell XS-1, on a supersonic flight over the Mojave Desert. On October 14 he flew the plane, which he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife, at a speed of Mach 1.06—700 miles per hour. The night before he had broken two ribs by falling off a horse, and he could barely reach up to seal the hatch, but only his wife and a close friend knew about it.
In a 1985 memoir, Yeager famously expressed his sense of disappointment at crossing the threshold of sound and creating the world’s first sonic boom. “And that was it,” he wrote. “After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a let-down.”
But by then he had defied death more often than anybody knew. As a pilot in World War II, Yeager shot down at least 13 enemy fighters. He once downed five German aircraft in a single day. Yeager was shot down himself over France, but made it across the Pyrenees and into Spain, sometimes disguised as a peasant and carrying a wounded companion. When the war ended, Captain Yeager was 22.
He led missions in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, too, and spent a well-earned retirement giving speeches and conducting himself with decency and honor. Chuck Yeager was an American of an older, rarer kind: ready to take a risk for his country, courageous beyond measure, utterly without pretense.
-
Yeager
yes an unbelievable and courageous career for this historic patriot and hero
he must have had steel guts
read he flew over 200 different aircraft
one thing I was surprised to learn he did NOT fly the X 15
still the fastest aircraft produced at a (mere) 6.7 times speed of sound:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/x-15_2006_2.html
-
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/04/a-personal-note-on-walter-mondale.php
-
Nicely written.
-
https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/jackie-mason-dead-at-93/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jackie-mason-dies/2021/07/24/62717c86-ecea-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html
A very prominent Jewish Conservative and Patriot! Uncommon indeed.
Previously a Democrat (like most self righteous Jews ) he, like /Ronald Reagan , became a Republican and supported DJT.
He used the S word a few times
and of course was the victim of the political correct crowd
and I am certain many fellow "better than thou" liberal Jews:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Mason
RIP Mr. Mason
You bring back memories of good old Jewish humor prior to the age of "woke".
-
of course
woke gay controlled politically correct Variety:
headlines on Jackie "controversial and cranky"
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/jackie-mason-one-last-borscht-004940605.html
How do you say "African American" in Yiddish?
or binary? or "bi" etc.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNmEilgccUk
As a kid, this was my introduction to Jackie Mason (Although not actually his voice).
https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/jackie-mason-dead-at-93/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jackie-mason-dies/2021/07/24/62717c86-ecea-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html
A very prominent Jewish Conservative and Patriot! Uncommon indeed.
Previously a Democrat (like most self righteous Jews ) he, like /Ronald Reagan , became a Republican and supported DJT.
He used the S word a few times
and of course was the victim of the political correct crowd
and I am certain many fellow "better than thou" liberal Jews:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Mason
RIP Mr. Mason
You bring back memories of good old Jewish humor prior to the age of "woke".
-
Charlie Watts, Rolling Stones Drummer, Dies at Age 80
Watts is widely considered one of the most important drummers in the history of rock ’n’ roll
Charlie Watts, shown playing drums with the Rolling Stones in Denver in 2019, was the reliable backbone for the group.
PHOTO: JOE AMON/MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES
By Talal Ansari and Neil Shah
Updated Aug. 24, 2021 5:16 pm ET
Charlie Watts, the influential longtime drummer for the Rolling Stones, has died. He was 80 years old.
Mr. Watts died at a London hospital on Tuesday surrounded by his family, his spokesperson said in a statement.
“Charlie was a cherished husband, father and grandfather and also as a member of The Rolling Stones one of the greatest drummers of his generation,” the statement said.
Earlier this month, the band said Mr. Watts was unlikely to perform with his bandmates when they resumed their “No Filter” tour because he was recovering from an undisclosed medical issue.
Steve Jordan, a veteran drummer and music producer who has worked closely with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, was tapped to fill in.
“For once my timing has been a little off,” Mr. Watts said in a statement earlier this month. “I am working hard to get fully fit but I have today accepted on the advice of the experts that this will take a while.”
Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones in 2016.
PHOTO: EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Since joining the Stones in 1963, a year after the band was formed, Mr. Watts hadn’t missed a show, according to Rolling Stone magazine. He underwent treatment for throat cancer in 2004.
Mr. Watts is widely considered one of the most important drummers in the history of rock ’n’ roll.
“I don’t know a single drummer that hasn’t studied what Charlie does, and I haven’t heard of a single one who has been able to pull it off,” said Daniel J. Levitin, a professor emeritus of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University and author of “This Is Your Brain on Music.”
Deeply influenced by jazz, his inimitable drumming style helped define the sound of the Rolling Stones by giving it a sense of swing. On songs such as “Tumbling Dice” from the Rolling Stones’ 1972 masterpiece “Exile on Main St.,” for example, he played slightly behind the beat, giving the song a slinky, sexy groove as memorable as its lyrics and guitar riffs.
While most Stones songs are credited to singer Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards, Mr. Watts indirectly played a role in the band’s songwriting, too, by acting as a foil for Mr. Richards as he jammed and tinkered with anchoring riffs.
“To me what was amazing about the Stones was Charlie’s drumming—which always sounded to me like a train that was about to go off the rails but it never does,” said Mr. Levitin. “That makes it really exciting and scrappy. It avoided the kind of perfection sheen that characterized a lot of bands.”
Compared with his rowdier bandmates, who have been known for their drug-taking and jet-setting, Mr. Watts had the image of the mature Stone, providing a reliable backbone for the group, as symbolized by his sartorial flair—though he too struggled with substance-abuse issues in the 1980s.
Charles Robert Watts was born June 2, 1941, in London, and grew up in the northwest neighborhood of Wembley, where he would later perform sold-out stadium concerts. By the time he was 16, Mr. Watts was drumming in jazz groups and frequented London clubs, according to a biography provided by his spokesman.
He initially turned down an invitation to join the Rolling Stones, continuing to work as a graphic designer at an advertising agency. But six months later, in January 1963, Mr. Watts made his first appearance with the band at the Flamingo Club in London’s Soho. He finally gave up his graphic design job after the band was signed to Decca Records, and would remain behind his drum kit for more than 50 years.
Colleagues across the music industry paid tribute Tuesday to Mr. Watts on social media.
“Charlie Watts was the ultimate drummer,” Elton John posted on Twitter. “The most stylish of men, and such brilliant company.”
Paul McCartney, in a video posted online, called Mr. Watts steady as a rock. “Love you Charlie. I’ve always loved you,” he said.
Beatles drummer Ringo Starr posted a photo of the two legendary drummers together, writing, “#God bless Charlie Watts we’re going to miss you man.”
Write to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com
-
Keith Richards has become even more powerful.
“There can be only one!”
Charlie Watts, Rolling Stones Drummer, Dies at Age 80
Watts is widely considered one of the most important drummers in the history of rock ’n’ roll
Charlie Watts, shown playing drums with the Rolling Stones in Denver in 2019, was the reliable backbone for the group.
PHOTO: JOE AMON/MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES
By Talal Ansari and Neil Shah
Updated Aug. 24, 2021 5:16 pm ET
Charlie Watts, the influential longtime drummer for the Rolling Stones, has died. He was 80 years old.
Mr. Watts died at a London hospital on Tuesday surrounded by his family, his spokesperson said in a statement.
“Charlie was a cherished husband, father and grandfather and also as a member of The Rolling Stones one of the greatest drummers of his generation,” the statement said.
Earlier this month, the band said Mr. Watts was unlikely to perform with his bandmates when they resumed their “No Filter” tour because he was recovering from an undisclosed medical issue.
Steve Jordan, a veteran drummer and music producer who has worked closely with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, was tapped to fill in.
“For once my timing has been a little off,” Mr. Watts said in a statement earlier this month. “I am working hard to get fully fit but I have today accepted on the advice of the experts that this will take a while.”
Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones in 2016.
PHOTO: EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Since joining the Stones in 1963, a year after the band was formed, Mr. Watts hadn’t missed a show, according to Rolling Stone magazine. He underwent treatment for throat cancer in 2004.
Mr. Watts is widely considered one of the most important drummers in the history of rock ’n’ roll.
“I don’t know a single drummer that hasn’t studied what Charlie does, and I haven’t heard of a single one who has been able to pull it off,” said Daniel J. Levitin, a professor emeritus of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University and author of “This Is Your Brain on Music.”
Deeply influenced by jazz, his inimitable drumming style helped define the sound of the Rolling Stones by giving it a sense of swing. On songs such as “Tumbling Dice” from the Rolling Stones’ 1972 masterpiece “Exile on Main St.,” for example, he played slightly behind the beat, giving the song a slinky, sexy groove as memorable as its lyrics and guitar riffs.
While most Stones songs are credited to singer Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards, Mr. Watts indirectly played a role in the band’s songwriting, too, by acting as a foil for Mr. Richards as he jammed and tinkered with anchoring riffs.
“To me what was amazing about the Stones was Charlie’s drumming—which always sounded to me like a train that was about to go off the rails but it never does,” said Mr. Levitin. “That makes it really exciting and scrappy. It avoided the kind of perfection sheen that characterized a lot of bands.”
Compared with his rowdier bandmates, who have been known for their drug-taking and jet-setting, Mr. Watts had the image of the mature Stone, providing a reliable backbone for the group, as symbolized by his sartorial flair—though he too struggled with substance-abuse issues in the 1980s.
Charles Robert Watts was born June 2, 1941, in London, and grew up in the northwest neighborhood of Wembley, where he would later perform sold-out stadium concerts. By the time he was 16, Mr. Watts was drumming in jazz groups and frequented London clubs, according to a biography provided by his spokesman.
He initially turned down an invitation to join the Rolling Stones, continuing to work as a graphic designer at an advertising agency. But six months later, in January 1963, Mr. Watts made his first appearance with the band at the Flamingo Club in London’s Soho. He finally gave up his graphic design job after the band was signed to Decca Records, and would remain behind his drum kit for more than 50 years.
Colleagues across the music industry paid tribute Tuesday to Mr. Watts on social media.
“Charlie Watts was the ultimate drummer,” Elton John posted on Twitter. “The most stylish of men, and such brilliant company.”
Paul McCartney, in a video posted online, called Mr. Watts steady as a rock. “Love you Charlie. I’ve always loved you,” he said.
Beatles drummer Ringo Starr posted a photo of the two legendary drummers together, writing, “#God bless Charlie Watts we’re going to miss you man.”
Write to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com
-
https://www.navytimes.com/breaking-news/2021/12/26/richard-marcinko-first-commanding-officer-of-seal-team-six-dies/
-
https://www.c-span.org/video/?287712-1/bob-dole-words-2007
-
Don't speak ill of the dead - has become another one of those examples of two sets of rules and this one applies only to us. It should be waived when someone this low starts receiving big accolades.
1. Reid's signature accomplishment was killing what was to be George W Bush's signature accomplishment, the partial and voluntary privatization of your own social security funds.
This was too risky in 2005 with the Dow at 10,000. Looks clairvoyant today with the Dow at 36,000. We would have had millions more millionaires by now and people would have had a different relationship with their government, but NO, Harry Reid stopped it.
2. In 2012, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed he had seen Mitt Romney's tax returns for the last ten years and Romney had paid no taxes. It was one of the biggest lies in political history. instead of apologizing, the dirtball boasted, 'Well he didn't win, did he?'
3. This 'public servant' seemed to do quite well financially. Hmmm.
Crooked, corrupt, lacking any sense of moral character, not even a tangential relationship with the truth, and left the dirty world of divisive politics worse than he found it. I really can't follow that with rest in peace.
-
Utterly corrupt scumbag. The Las Vegas airport now bears his name.
:roll:
Don't speak ill of the dead - has become another one of those examples of two sets of rules and this one applies only to us. It should be waived when someone this low starts receiving big accolades.
1. Reid's signature accomplishment was killing what was to be George W Bush's signature accomplishment, the partial and voluntary privatization of your own social security funds.
This was too risky in 2005 with the Dow at 10,000. Looks clairvoyant today with the Dow at 36,000. We would have had millions more millionaires by now and people would have had a different relationship with their government, but NO, Harry Reid stopped it.
2. In 2012, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed he had seen Mitt Romney's tax returns for the last ten years and Romney had paid no taxes. It was one of the biggest lies in political history. instead of apologizing, the dirtball boasted, 'Well he didn't win, did he?'
3. This 'public servant' seemed to do quite well financially. Hmmm.
Crooked, corrupt, lacking any sense of moral character, not even a tangential relationship with the truth, and left the dirty world of divisive politics worse than he found it. I really can't follow that with rest in peace.
-
I think I will avoid that airport.
-
I think I will avoid that airport.
Well, there is good training to be had at Front Sight. Las Vegas is becoming Detroit with palm trees at this point. Best avoided.
-
Well, , , may he receive his just reward.
Bye.
-
and he always somehow eaked out election wins
always had his soldiers go out and get the union members to vote for him
just enough so he would have the numbers in the end so I read
not clear how many were illegals either
he would pull a Pelosi and buy land in a dead end then get Fed money to build a highway there
raising the land value multiple fold
is one scam he used to cash in
So I read.
Any one else hear any particular stories?
-
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2021/12/30/exclusive-peter-schweizer-harry-reid-enriched-himself-family-used-fear-control-persuade/
May as well name the airport Benjamin Siegal airport
in "honor " of another mobster not employed by taxpayers. :wink:
-
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/murray-haber-obituary?id=34012374
-
Squash champion, avid tennis player, golfer, expert heli skier, home in Beaver Creek, catamaran sailor, lived to 97... I would like to have hung out with your step father!
Marc, I'm sorry for your loss. Sounds like a great guy.
-
We had a wonderful goodbye visit about two weeks ago.
====================
-
my deepest condolences to you and your family
just had my last uncle pass about 2 mo ago
he was also 97
WW2 vet and was an engineer who was in France the second day after D day
cardiac amyloid - wow that is rare
-
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/murray-haber-obituary?id=34012374
My condolences.
-
Thank you gentlemen.
The Adventure continues!
-
Orrin Hatch, Towering GOP Senator, Dies at 88
Then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., July 11, 2018 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
By ARJUN SINGH
April 23, 2022 10:29 PM
Orrin Hatch, the towering Utah lawmaker who was the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, died on Saturday evening at 88.
First elected in 1977 when Jimmy Carter was president, he spent 42 years in the upper chamber, holding several influential committee chairmanships — including atop the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Finance Committee. He also served as the Senate’s president pro tempore, the chamber’s highest ceremonial role, and briefly sought his party’s presidential nomination in 2000.
Hatch’s death was announced by the Hatch Foundation, an organization he founded.
“Senator Orrin G. Hatch personified the American Dream,” the group’s executive director, Matt Sandgren, said in a statement. “Born the son of a carpenter and plaster lather, he overcame the poverty of his youth to become a United States Senator.”
Sandgren highlighted the senator’s work on issues ranging from “tax and trade to religious liberty and healthcare,” saying, “Senator Hatch touched the hearts of countless individuals, and I know I speak for all of them when I say he will be dearly missed.”
On the Finance Committee, Hatch played a key role shepherding the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — America’s last major tax reform — through the Senate and into law. Over 750 bills he sponsored or co-sponsored eventually became law, including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and State Children’s Health Insurance Program Act. He retired in 2018, and was succeeded by Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah).
The Hatch Foundation noted that when he retired, “Hatch held the distinction of having passed more legislation into law than any other Senator alive.”
He also played a leading role in the conservative movement as a co-founder of the Federalist Society in 1982, an organization created to spread conservative ideas in the legal community. It has since become among the most influential foundations in the United States, with scores of its members holding top roles in government and the federal judiciary, including six of the Supreme Court’s current nine members. By the time Hatch retired from politics, Washington Post Magazine noted it had reached an “unprecedented peak of power and influence.”
Hatch also was a musician, playing the piano, violin, and organ and recording several songs for the Latter-Day-Saints Church and popular labels. His song “Souls Along the Way” was featured in Ocean’s Twelve, while the song “Heal Our Land” was performed at George W. Bush’s second inauguration in 2005. Frank Zappa also recorded a song with Hatch named “Orrin Hatch on Skis.”
-
This nice obit on Jimi's drummer, Mitch Mitchell came across my desk:
Mitch Mitchell
He was the free-ranging and powerful drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience
Adam Sweeting
Thu 13 Nov 2008 19.01 EST
Though the Jimi Hendrix Experience released only three albums in its three-year existence, the trio's influence remains huge. Their drummer, Mitch Mitchell, who has died aged 61, apparently of natural causes, in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, cemented himself into rock'n'roll history with his free-ranging but powerful technique, partly influenced by John Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones.
Mitchell was recruited into the band in autumn 1966, after Hendrix had been brought over to England from New York by his new manager, Chas Chandler, previously the bassist with the Animals. Mitchell recalled that when Chandler offered him the job, he replied that he would "have a go for two weeks".
Advertisement
Born in Ealing, west London, Mitchell gained his first taste of show business as a child actor, appearing in BBC television's Jennings at School. But by the time Chandler came knocking, he had amassed a wealth of musical experience via stints with several early sixties bands including the Tornados, the Coronets and the Riot Squad. In 1964, Mitchell was among several drummers who auditioned for the Who, only to be trumped by Keith Moon, and in mid-1965 his profile received a hefty boost when he joined Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames. The band split on October 1 1966, and on October 6 he attended his first rehearsal with Hendrix's band. The trio was completed by another Englishman, Noel Redding, on bass.
In the US, the reaction to Hendrix's prodigious gifts was slow, but among the British rock elite it was immediate and unanimous. The likes of Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and John Lennon all turned out to see the Experience play in London, and Eric Clapton was so dumbfounded by Hendrix's guitar-playing that he confessed he felt (temporarily) like giving up the instrument. Hendrix's dexterity, imagination and technical innovations established him as a path-finder in rock music's most daring and creative phase.
Yet Hendrix was fortunate to have found two such sympathetic musicians as Mitchell and Redding, both of whom proved remarkably able to adapt to his improvisation and his quest for fresh studio sounds. The Experience's 1967 debut album Are You Experienced? was one of the seismic events of the period, bristling with such classic tracks as Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary, but while the bandleader hogged most of the plaudits, critics hailed Mitchell's achievement in transforming his drums into something beyond mere percussion. The group's dramatic appearance at the Monterey pop festival in June 1967 was pivotal in their rise to international prominence.
Advertisement
On their second album, Axis: Bold As Love, the trio continued to display prodigious growth. Along with the rock, soul and R&B influences, they ventured into experimental psychedelia such as If Six Was Nine. By the time they made the double album Electric Ladyland in 1968, Hendrix was testing the trio format to destruction, deploying a barrage of recording techniques to create a new medium beyond the physical limitations of three musicians on a stage.
A US tour in spring 1969 proved to be the Experience's last stand, and they played their final show in Denver that June. Mitchell also played with Hendrix at Woodstock in August 1969 in a temporary line-up called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. It later emerged that Hendrix's co-manager Mike Jeffery had cut Mitchell and Redding out of shares in future royalties.
By now Mitchell was admired and in demand. He had featured in the Rolling Stones' Rock'n'Roll Circus in 1968 as part of the Dirty Mac (alongside Lennon, Clapton and Keith Richards). In 1969 he appeared on the concept album Music from Free Creek, which involved various artists including Clapton and Beck, and on Martha Velez's Fiends & Angels. In 1970 he joined Jack Bruce and Friends, an under-appreciated jazz-rock outfit, then in April 1970 he temporarily rejoined Hendrix, with bassist Billy Cox, for the Cry of Love tour, five months before Hendrix's death. In 1971 he was back with Bruce, then deputised for a sick Cozy Powell in the Jeff Beck Group. In 1972 he featured on the solitary album by Ramatam, a band he formed with Mike Pinera and April Lawton.
Subsequently Mitchell's profile waned, though he cropped up in a band called Hinkley's Heroes in 1976, made an album with the Dave Morrison Band in 1982, and played on Bruce Cameron's Midnight Daydream in 1999. In 1992, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
At the time of his death, Mitchell had just completed an Experience Hendrix tribute tour, alongside Buddy Guy, the Doors' Robby Krieger and Pearl Jam's Mike McCready. He had worked on numerous projects with Experience Hendrix, a company started by Jimi's father, James "Al" Hendrix, to sustain his son's legacy. Mitchell is survived by his wife, Dee, and a daughter.
John "Mitch" Mitchell, drummer, born July 9 1947; died November 12 2008
This correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday November 20 2008. The tracks Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary were not on the Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 debut album when it was released in the UK, although they were added to the subsequent US version.
-
Or as the Left says, wrong Trump died.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVBLYmTrUZM
-
The most famous judges in American history are those who make it to the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean they are the most consequential. One of the latter is Judge Laurence Silberman, who died Sunday, a few days short of his 87th birthday.
Judge Silberman had one of the great careers in the law and public service. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, he spent some 36 years on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, hearing cases even after taking senior status and up to the time of his sudden illness.
His most consequential opinions include Parker v. D.C. (2007), which found that the Second Amendment was an individual right to bear arms and not merely for a militia. Silberman’s opinion examined the history of gun practices in common law and the American founding, which served as the basis for Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the landmark ruling in D.C. v. Heller (2008).
He was also ahead of his time in 1988 (In re Sealed Case), when he held that the independent counsel statute violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. The Supreme Court ruled the other way in the dreadful Morrison v. Olson decision. But Judge Silberman’s view was echoed in Scalia’s famous Morrison dissent that would surely prevail with today’s Justices if the counsel statute hadn’t lapsed after Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton.
Judge Silberman believed in judicial restraint, a philosophy he had absorbed at Harvard Law School in the 1950s when many Democrats and Republicans subscribed it. He lamented in recent years that every Democratic judge has abandoned that view in favor of activist judging, while some libertarian GOP judges have done the same.
An example of restraint that went against his policy preferences was the ObamaCare case in 2011. His appellate opinion found against the constitutional challenge to the law under the Commerce Clause, citing the Supreme Court precedent of Wickard v. Filburn (1942). He disliked ObamaCare as policy but felt obliged to follow precedent as a lower-court judge.
Silberman also wielded significant influence as a public official and legal mentor. His roles included Labor Department solicitor and deputy attorney general in the 1970s, ambassador to Yugoslavia, member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s review panel, and co-chair of the Robb-Silberman commission on intelligence leading to the Iraq war.
With former Senator Chuck Robb, the Robb-Silberman commission made a historic contribution by identifying major intelligence failures but putting to rest the partisan claims that intelligence had been deliberately skewed to support the 2003 invasion. The judge considered it his most important act of public service.
Congress asked him to testify as deputy AG on the confidential files of the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, which he was obliged to read. He wrote in our pages in 2005 that reading the files was the “single worst experience of my long governmental service.” He vowed to take the secrets he learned about political figures to his grave, and so he did.
Silberman’s influence is also felt far and wide in the vast network of clerks and associates who populate the federal judiciary and government. His former clerks include Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the leading appellate litigator Paul Clement, and countless others. His behind-the-scenes counsel will be missed, not least by some of the current Supreme Court Justices, but his legacy as a model judge and public servant will live on.
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries/judy-tenuta-love-goddess-comedian-known-brash-routines-dies-72-rcna51097?fbclid=IwAR0zsuYkgQDWCel3SmkbzbJPHN6KWT-JbjRK23_yKy3HmUrx_XyViLUnOOg
-
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries/judy-tenuta-love-goddess-comedian-known-brash-routines-dies-72-rcna51097?fbclid=IwAR0zsuYkgQDWCel3SmkbzbJPHN6KWT-JbjRK23_yKy3HmUrx_XyViLUnOOg
Ok, now I feel old.
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11617777/Diamond-Diamond-Silk-dies-51-home-North-Carolina.html
-
https://nypost.com/2023/02/15/raquel-welch-dead-fantastic-voyage-actress-and-sex-symbol-was-82/?fbclid=IwAR3EkH3hguE6qUdDtu7GsnTooFTQRlYU393-roSEeBdYq8g9Z8sbe3A4GJA
-
I remember seeing Fantastic Voyage age 9.
Good special effects for 1966.
-
She navigated the waters in which she swam with class and dignity.
-
Commentary Magazine
The monthly magazine of opinion.
MARCH 2023 BIOGRAPHY
Paul Johnson, 1928–2023
Paul Johnson, 1928–2023
How a serious man changed the world
by Andrew Roberts
When Paul Johnson was a schoolboy, he met Winston Churchill on the steps of the Clifton Arms public house in Lytham in Lancashire. The prime minister gave him one of the long matches that he used to light his cigars, emboldening young Paul to ask, “Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” The reply was instantaneous: “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down.”
Paul Johnson never seemed to conserve his energy, however. His prodigious output was unmatched by any other British writer of his generation. He published more than 50 books, became editor of the New Statesman magazine at the age of only 36 in 1965, debated regularly on Britain’s TV and radio shows, carved a reputation for himself as the best-known British historian in America—and, at a crucial moment in the history of his country, ignored the pleas of lifelong friends on the left and embraced the Thatcher revolution, which he recognized as the only way to save Britain from slipping down into the third tier of the world’s nations. He also wrote an outstanding history of the Jews, fired as he was by a lifelong loathing of anti-Semitism and all its metastasizing forms.
In the mid-1970s, Johnson bravely set his face against the trade-union militancy and Marxist activism that was wrecking the United Kingdom’s economy and democracy, and he denounced it in language of remarkable range and eloquence. “In the 1970s Britain was on its knees,” he later explained of this period in his life, “The Left had no answers. I became disgusted by the over-powerful trade unions which were destroying Britain.” Blessed with the remarkable capacity to type 1,000 words of searing, well-argued, factually supported polemic in only 15 minutes, Paul was a commanding presence in British journalism for half a century. He died at 94 on January 12, 2023.
Without his apostasy against the left in the period after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, it would have been possible for the Labour Party to paint her as an extremist reactionary bent on ending trade-union rights. Yet along with the Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, the newspaper columnist Bernard Levin, and the novelist Kingsley Amis—all of whom had been Labour supporters since 1945—Paul was able to persuade many lifelong Labour voters that the party, which by this point had come to support unilateral nuclear disarmament, was no longer the same organization that it had been under Clement Attlee and his immediate successors following the Second World War, and that Thatcher could be trusted to rein in anti-democratic trade-union ultra-left militancy.
Listen and Subscribe to the Commentary Podcast
The result was to be 11 and a half years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Although Paul never joined the Conservative Party, he advised her and was occasionally called upon to contribute to her speeches. Paul was offered a peerage by Thatcher, and later also by Tony Blair, but he honorably refused on both occasions because he did not believe that journalists should accept honours from politicians. Instead of retiring to the cozy anonymity of the House of Lords backbenches, he continued in the Daily Mail and many other newspapers to issue broadsides against the ills of modern society. His firm Catholic faith, socially conservative beliefs, contempt for Marxism and anti-Semitism, patriotic support for Britain’s active role in the world, love of Ronald Reagan’s vision of America, and superb sense of humor and delight in mischief-making meant that he became one of the most readable British journalists of the 20th century.
_____________
It was probably Paul’s upbringing in the 1930s in the Potteries region of Staffordshire in the West Midlands, an area known for its no-nonsense plain speaking, that gave him the brutal honesty he unleashed in his 1988 book Intellectuals, one of his finest, in which he flays a series of famous thinkers for their abominable personal hypocrisy. “Didn’t think much of his opinions,” he once said of Jean-Paul Sartre, “and he was a very ugly little man.” Similarly, it might well have been the influence of Paul’s father, who was the headmaster of the Burslem School of Art, that encouraged Paul in his profound knowledge and love of traditional representation and left him despising much of the modernist art school, as expressed in his bestselling, countercultural work of 2003, Art: A New History. (Paul himself painted watercolors, giving them to friends.)
Nor did Paul reserve his commentary solely to the written word and his regular TV and radio appearances. When the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was invited to say a few words at a London Library party in the early 1990s, Paul kept up a hilarious, low-level barracking of the Stalin apologist that had those around him laughing uncontrollably. His use of ridicule to puncture the pomposity and illuminate the fatuous inconsistency of leftist intellectuals was a constant joy to his many friends.
Paul was always helpful to young journalists and would-be authors, giving them extensive free interviews, often in his drawing room in his well-appointed house in Bayswater. In almost all cases they treated him with the respect his age and eminence warranted. On one occasion, however, an interviewer arrived to attack him with rude questions criticizing Paul’s admiration for Ronald Reagan. After answering a few of them perfectly politely, Paul got irritated and bored by the left-wing termagant. So he simply stood up and, without a word of explanation, went upstairs for a nap. The journalist, nonplussed and with his tape recorder still running, called upstairs several times and waited until it became clear that Paul was not returning, and then let himself out. It might have been uncharacteristically discourteous of Paul, but who among us hasn’t wanted to do the same thing?
Paul’s charming memoir, The Vanished Landscape (2003), was a funny and evocative paean to his early years, from his birth in 1928 to the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. It provides several glimpses into how and why he turned into the Promethean figure he became. His remarkable memory for facts derived from his mother, Anne, who, he writes, “came from a time when memory training was instilled and vast quantities of knowledge were stored in the spacious chambers of the mind.” Anne Johnson could recite all the rivers and bays of Europe, the kings and queens of England with reigning dates, the prime ministers from Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s dominions and colonies in order of acquisition, the decisive battles of world history, and so on. She had many thousands of lines of poetry by heart, including Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Southey, and Browning. When in later life Paul wrote his thousand-word pieces for the Daily Mail and other publications, he rarely had to consult the reference books in his library, thanks to his mother’s training. “She was an enchantress,” he wrote, “and the countless hours I spent listening to her are rich treasures I shall carry with me to my grave.”
Paul’s Roman Catholicism derived from Father Ryan, to whom he had to make confession from the age of six. “I doubt if he heard a word of my mumble,” Paul wrote of one of these early encounters, “but he pronounced absolution and said, ‘Tell the next [child] to make it snappy.’” Later on that day, Paul’s schoolmate Rena Milton asked him how many sins he had confessed, and when he replied three, “she positively smirked, and putting her hand on her hip and twirling, said, ‘I had nine!’”
Like Commentary to see more of our articles on your Facebook feed
Paul was educated at the Jesuit public school Stonyhurst from 13; his profound Catholicism was an integral part of his personality. His powerfully expressed belief that homosexuality was sinful produced a good deal of outraged criticism from his detractors, but although he had several gay friends, it was not a stance from which he ever resiled. From Stonyhurst, Paul won an exhibition to Magdalen College, Oxford, where from 1946 to 1949 he read modern history.
Paul considered himself a historian as much as journalist. His greatest bestseller, A History of the Modern World—published in the United States as Modern Times in 1983—provides a master class in how history ought to be written, blending narrative with insightful commentary. The extraordinary commercial successes of Paul’s books—it was said that his History of the Jews was given as a present at half the bar mitzvahs in America—meant that Paul never accepted advances from publishers, so he started receiving royalties from the moment the first copy of each book was sold. It is an almost unheard-of practice, but it gave him the satisfaction of knowing that he never needed to earn back advances, which of course made him popular with publishers, as did his practice of always indexing his books himself. His close and long friendship with the maestro publisher George Weidenfeld, who published much of Paul’s vast output, gave both men enormous pleasure.
Paul had an innate gift for friendship. Among his other close friends was Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of COMMENTARY and father of its present editor. Paul and Norman were contemporaries; both edited magazines of the left, then moved to the right, enduring ferocious criticism in the process. Among his younger American friends, the historian Amity Shlaes got to know him well in later years, around the time he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in December 2006. “Our country honors Paul Johnson,” Bush said at the investiture ceremony, “and proudly calls him a friend.” Richard Nixon became a fan after leaving office. He would not have been a fan when in office, however, as Johnson attended anti–Vietnam War demonstrations outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London.
In 1957 Paul married Marigold Hunt, the daughter of Dr. Thomas Hunt, physician to Prime Ministers Churchill, Attlee, and Anthony Eden. She is a sparky, delightful, and engaged woman whom Paul adored for the next two-thirds of a century. Her attractive personality deflected some of the more bitter criticism that would otherwise have been directed at her occasionally rebarbative husband. “Paul is offense,” their son Daniel has said, “and Marigold is defense.”
Marigold was educated at Oxford and later campaigned against poverty with prison reformer Lord Longford, the father of her great friend, the historian Antonia Fraser. In 1974, she stood as a Labour candidate in the safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield and never joined her husband in his admiration of Margaret Thatcher’s politics. On meeting Thatcher at a reception once, Marigold tried to make small talk, later recalling, “I was standing with a glass of Champagne and I said nervously: ‘Isn’t it lovely to be here, a real treat.’ And Margaret looked at me with such contempt and said, ‘I don’t get up in the morning and think about treats. I think about what work there is to do that day.’” In fact, of course, Marigold’s life extended to much more than treats, and she was awarded the Order of the British Empire for her work on the Northern Ireland peace process. She and Paul had four children, among them the aforementioned Daniel (a Commentary contributor, as was Paul) and the successful businessman Luke Johnson.
_____________
Paul Johnson was a rain-making journalist; what he wrote changed people’s minds and ultimately their votes, too. It is unlikely that the British people would have voted to reclaim their sovereign independence from the European Union in the Brexit referendum if it had not been for the decades-long work that public commentators—Paul at the forefront among them—had done pointing out the constitutional implications of Britain’s membership. His eloquence and vigor changed Britain, and probably far more than if he had followed his youthful idea of entering politics.
Of course the profound effect that Paul had on British politics and society made him widely loathed on the left after his mid-1970s apostasy, especially once he became one of the leading standard-bearers for the causes of Thatcherism, Zionism, and pro-Americanism. Far from disconcerting him, however, the abuse he received only ever confirmed him in his certainty that he was on the correct side. He had firm convictions and great moral courage, as well as a superb sense of fun. I knew him well for 30 years, and almost all my many memories of him involve laughter.
All writers worry occasionally that they are preaching into a void, that their work has little or no effect. Paul Johnson knew that he was making a difference. He knew it from his huge book sales, bursting mailbags, praise from friends, and—equally enjoyably—the howls of fury from his enemies. The phrase “Great Man” is bandied about far too promiscuously in an age when any sports personality, celebrity, or tycoon seems awarded the distinction by an undiscriminating media. Paul Johnson, however, was indeed a Great Man.
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
-
https://twitter.com/TBroomey/status/1636805561118228492
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbRoQ1cZDXo
I recall reading a book in the 60's written by some NYGiant lineman whose name eludes me now.
Whenever a game came up against the Browns the coach would simply and succinctly say to the team, "watch out for Jimmy Brown".
PERIOD!
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbRoQ1cZDXo
-
RIP Sandra Day O'Connor
She broke new ground for women.
Without going negative, I think she would describe herself as a moderate in support of the constitution.
From my point of view, a wasted pick by Pres Reagan when at that point in history the strongest constitutional conservative possible. It was (reportedly) the one real decision where Nancy Reagan used her unelected influence.
RIP Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. A life well lived.
-
ustice O’Connor Knew the Limits of Judging—and Government
A rugged individualist, she approached cases with care, humility and a regard for the facts above all else.
By Viet D. Dinh
Dec. 1, 2023 5:52 pm ET
31
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(5 min)
image
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor holds up a copy of the Constitution at a hearing in Gilbert, Ariz., Sept. 17, 2005. PHOTO: MASTT YORK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sandra Day O’Connor shattered expectations and made history as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. She was often the pivotal vote, and her jurisprudence leaves a lasting mark on American law, from national security and education to federalism and beyond.
As important, she was a model of judgment and civility. After retiring from the bench to take care of her beloved husband, John, she dedicated herself to reviving the nation’s civic culture. With faith in our established structures at an all-time low, O’Connor’s second act, as a champion for American institutions and good citizenship, provides a timely reminder of this country’s enduring promise.
Born to an Arizona ranching family in 1930, O’Connor knew about rugged individualism and what government—the federal government in particular—could, couldn’t and shouldn’t do. Her public life started in state politics: She served as an assistant attorney general, state senator, the first female majority leader of any state legislative chamber and a state appellate judge. So when President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the court in 1981, she brought a deep respect for small government.
She breathed new life into federalism, placing guardrails on federal power. She wrote the court’s opinion in New York v. U.S. (1992), which reinvigorated the 10th Amendment and restrained Congress’s previously unlimited Commerce Clause authority. She dissented vigorously in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), which allowed Congress to override state drug laws within state borders under its authority to regulate interstate commerce.
She was my mentor and champion, and a great teacher in the craft of law. Her approach was simple: Consider the question presented, assess the facts, apply the law and make a decision. She didn’t play philosopher-king but decided the cases before her. She was, plain and simple, a good judge.
Consider her careful approach to what was then one of the most pressing questions of constitutional law, the military detention of enemy combatants during the war on terror. At one pole was Justice Clarence Thomas’s near-total deference to the executive’s war-making power. At the other, Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens would insist on affording full constitutional rights to criminal defendants.
Justice O’Connor’s controlling opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) was sensitive to executive prerogatives but simultaneously alert to the requirements of due process. She respected order and liberty and understood that the president had broad authority but held that the Constitution required an opportunity for combatants to challenge their detention. She gave the necessary breathing room for the branches of government to act while deciding the case before her and articulating the boundaries of law.
So too with the use of race in university admissions. In Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), O’Connor joined conservative colleagues to reject a rigid, points-based system of affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s undergraduate application process. But in Grutter v. Bollinger, decided the same day, she wrote a majority opinion upholding the Michigan law school’s ability to factor in race to promote a diverse student population.
Critics might see inconsistency. But O’Connor was evaluating fact-specific remedies on the record. And when a very different record was at issue in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the court built on O’Connor’s jurisprudence to invalidate that system of impermissible racial preferences. Far from repudiating her approach, subsequent justices grappled and dealt with her rationales, just as she did with her predecessors’.
The use of traditional tools to reach the right legal conclusion was hardly revolutionary. And that was the point. She rejected the notion of a grand unified theory of constitutional law and instead practiced a kind of judicial humility that respected the institutions of government.
That is why she became a video-game mogul after retiring from the court. Sensing a decline in civic literacy as school curriculums abandoned the topic, she dedicated herself to reinvigorating knowledge of constitutional structure and to sharing her love of American government with students. The result was iCivics, a digital platform providing interactive games and lesson plans designed to promote civic education and active citizenship to students and educators alike.
Though hardly tech-savvy, O’Connor understood earlier than most that technology would come to dominate all aspects of life, including how young people learned. Since its founding, iCivics has reached more than five million students with tens of million interactions. It was a joy for O’Connor to share her love of America and its cherished institutions. Until the end, she was a tireless advocate for rule of law and civic virtue.
Sandra Day O’Connor wasn’t a crusader or a philosopher. She aspired to be a good judge and a loyal citizen. In succeeding, she has become a pioneer and a national treasure.
Mr. Dinh is chief legal and policy officer for Fox Corp. He served as a clerk for Justice O’Connor, 1994-95.
-
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/joe-lieberman-former-connecticut-senator-2000-vice-presidential-nominee-dead-82.amp
The 2000 vp debate was the last (or only?) gentlemanly debate we've had in this country.
Biden Palin, Biden Ryan, Biden Trump, these were all horrible. Joe was a gentleman, got along with both sides. Always tried to be reasonable, and that's pretty good in politics.
He has my respect. Rest in peace Joe.
To everyone else, these falls as we age, it's a thing. Let's take some precautions.
-
yes falls in elderly can be devastating
my mother in law just tripped in our kitchen 3 days ago and broke her hip.
he must have hit his head and had a subdural bleed presuming the fall was simply losing his balance vs.
he passed out etc as reason for fall and secondary to another event such as stroke, heart attack etc.
I was literally awed at seeing/hearing him even come onto right wing talk shows and discuss any topics brought up. Never mad, never unreasonable, never illogical, always earnest and sincere, never appeared to lie was a remarkable breath of fresh air from a Democrat later Independent
I was surprised and saddened when he passed on.
Also was his commitment to Israel and defense of her even going against the antisemite and suck egg phony DEmocrat Jews who are more interested in their party power than anything else.
RIP :cry:
Agree with Doug.
-
A truly fine American and man.
RESPECT!!!
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B_5p_FiANQ
At 6'8" and 500 pounds rivaling Andre the giant he is larger then a silver back gorilla (though probably not stronger)
I have become a big fan of Sumo since it is on cable at times.
The only wrestler to beat him in the video was able to manuveur around him .
I don't see how any of the shorter much smaller wrestlers think they must charge into him can win that way.
Although maybe they are supposed to do this because of rules.
-
80 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUvxRjYqjEQ&t=2s
-
80 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUvxRjYqjEQ&t=2s
A legend. RIP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ5V6hdoPpA