The RIP Famous Person Thread

[S Landreth]

Trump steals classified documents: lock him up

Ellsberg steals classified documents: American hero

Much deeper

Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon Papers, dies at 92

Daniel Ellsberg, the history-making whistleblower who by leaking the Pentagon Papers revealed longtime government doubts and deceit about the Vietnam War and inspired acts of retaliation by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation, has died. He was 92.

Ellsberg, whose actions led to a landmark First Amendment ruling by the Supreme Court, had disclosed in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. His family announced his death Friday morning in a letter released by a spokeswoman, Julia Pacetti.

“He was not in pain, and was surrounded by loving family,” the letter reads in part. “Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes to Dan in the previous months. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”

Until the early 1970s, when he disclosed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite. He was a Harvard graduate and self-defined “cold warrior” who served as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances and came to be trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.

He was especially valued, he would later note, for his “talent for discretion.”

But like millions of other Americans, in and out of government, he had turned against the yearslong war in Vietnam, the government’s claims that the battle was winnable and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the U.S.-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region. Unlike so many other war opponents, he was in a special position to make a difference.

“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” “By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war.”

The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the U.S. and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after. The papers covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the U.S., including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.

As much as anyone, Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience — who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. David Halberstam, the late author and Vietnam War correspondent who had known Ellsberg since both were posted overseas, would describe him as no ordinary convert. He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious and profoundly sensitive, a born proselytizer who “saw political events in terms of moral absolutes” and demanded consequences for abuses of power.

As much as anyone, Ellsberg also embodied the fall of American idealism in foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the upending of the post-World War II consensus that Communism, real or suspected, should be opposed worldwide.

The Pentagon Papers were first published in The New York Times in June 1971, with The Washington Post, The Associated Press and more than a dozen others following. They documented that the U.S. had defied a 1954 settlement barring a foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries and had plotted to send American soldiers even as Johnson vowed he wouldn’t.

The Johnson administration had dramatically and covertly escalated the war despite the “judgment of the Government’s intelligence community that the measures would not” weaken the North Vietnamese, wrote the Times’ Neil Sheehan, a former Vietnam correspondent who later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on the war, “A Bright Shining Lie.”

The leaker’s identity became a national guessing game and Ellsberg proved an obvious suspect, because of his access to the papers and his public condemnation of the war over the previous two years. With the FBI in pursuit, Ellsberg turned himself in to authorities in Boston, became a hero to the antiwar movement and a traitor to the war’s supporters, labeled the “most dangerous man in America” by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, with whom Ellsberg had once been friendly.

The papers themselves were seen by many as an indictment not just of a given president or party, but of a generation of political leadership. The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt would note that growing mistrust of the government during the Vietnam era, “the credibility gap,” had “opened into an abyss.”

“The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy,” she wrote.

The Nixon administration quickly tried to block further publication on the grounds that the papers would compromise national security, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the newspapers on June 30, 1971, a major First Amendment ruling rejecting prior restraint. Nixon himself, initially unconcerned because the papers predated his time in office, was determined to punish Ellsberg and formed a renegade team of White House “plumbers,” endowed with a stash of White House “hush money” and the mission of preventing future leaks.

“You can’t drop it,” Nixon fumed privately to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

Ellsberg faced trials in Boston and Los Angeles on federal charges for espionage and theft, with a possible sentence of more than 100 years. He had expected to go to jail, but was spared, in part, by Nixon’s rage and the excesses of those around him. The Boston case ended in a mistrial because the government wiretapped conversations between a defense witness and his attorney. Charges in the Los Angeles trial were dismissed after Judge Matthew Byrne learned that White House “plumbers” G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, California.

Byrne ruled that “the bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”

Meanwhile, the “plumbers” continued their crime wave, notably the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters, at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The Watergate scandal didn’t prevent Nixon from a landslide reelection in 1972, but would expand rapidly during his second term and culminate in his resignation in August 1974. U.S. combat troops had already left Vietnam and the North Vietnamese captured the Southern capital, Saigon, in April 1975.

“Without Nixon’s obsession with me, he would have stayed in office,” Ellsberg told The Associated Press in 1999. “And had he not been removed from office, he would have continued the bombing (in Vietnam).”

Ellsberg’s story was depicted in the 2009 documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” The movie had its West Coast premiere only a few blocks from the Rand Corp. headquarters in Santa Monica, Ellsberg former workplace. He sent college students with fliers to urge old colleagues to attend the screening, but none attended.

Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931, to Jewish parents who converted to Christian Science. His father was an unemployed engineer in the early years of the Great Depression and the family later moved to suburban Detroit, where his father worked in a plant making B-24 bombers. Daniel held vivid memories of learning that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, and of reports of the Nazis bombing London and the U.S. bombing Germany and Japan.

In his teens, Ellsberg found himself in agreement with Harry Truman and other “Cold War liberals,” believing in civil rights and economic justice at home, and containing the Soviet Union overseas. He was also shaped profoundly by personal tragedy. During a car trip in 1946, his father nodded off at the wheel and crashed into a sidewall, killing Ellsberg’s mother and younger sister. Ellsberg would look back with a sense of loss and mistrust — his father, the authority figure, had failed to keep his family safe.

With thoughts of becoming a labor organizer, Ellsberg won a scholarship to Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude. He served in the Marines as an act of defiance against his Ivy League background, but eventually returned to Harvard and earned a doctorate in economics. In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the Rand Corp., a global policy think tank based in Santa Monica, California, and consulted for the Defense Department and the White House on nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans and crisis decision-making. Ellsberg spent two years in the mid-1960s with the State Department in Vietnam, where he learned first-hand how casually military and political officials lied and became convinced the conflict was unwinnable, in part through the firefights with the North Vietnamese that he survived.

Encouraged by a close friend from Rand, researcher Anthony J. Russo, Ellsberg had decided by the fall of 1969 that the Nixon administration would continue the policies of other presidents and that the McNamara study needed to be seen. His life would soon resemble an espionage thriller.

Ellsberg removed some of the bound, classified volumes from his safe in the Rand offices, placed them in his briefcase and walked past security guards and a sign reading “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” With Russo’s girlfriend owning an advertising agency, Ellsberg spent months copying the documents on an office Xerox machine, sometimes helped by his teenage son Robert. On occasion, the office alarm would mistakenly ring, police would show up, and leave soon after. Ellsberg became so worried that he began slicing off the “Top Secret” markings from the papers, in case authorities wanted to inspect more closely.

Leaking to the Times was not his first choice. He had hoped that government officials, including Kissinger, would read the study and realize the war was hopeless. Legislators turning him down included Sen. William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, the longtime chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, who in 1972 would run for president as an antiwar candidate.

A final plot twist was unknown to Ellsberg until decades later. He had showed some of the report to Marcus Raskin and Ralph Stavins of the liberal think tank the Institute for Policy Studies before approaching Sheehan. Only in the early 2000s did he learn that Raskin and Stavins, who had recommended that he speak with Sheehan, had already given some of the papers to the Times reporter. Sheehan, who died in 2021, also defied Ellsberg’s request not to make duplicate copies and did not give him advance notice before the first Times report ran.

“It was just luck that he didn’t get the whistle blown on the whole damn thing,” Sheehan later said of Ellsberg, whom he regarded as “out of control.”

In his later years, a spry, silver-haired Ellsberg became a prominent free speech and anti-Iraq war activist, drawing parallels between U.S. involvement in Iraq and Vietnam, and called for impeachment of President George W. Bush. He expressed similar fears about Afghanistan during the Obama administration, saying it had the potential to become “Vietnamistan” if the U.S. increased troops there.

He was active in campaigns to prevent nuclear arms proliferation and drew upon his history in government for the 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” in which he included a once-top secret document showing that the U.S. had considered launching nuclear attacks on the Chinese in 1958. He also defended other leakers and whistleblowers, among them WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed details of secret U.S. surveillance programs and is now living in Russia.

“Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut,” Ellsberg told The New York Times in 2023.

On Friday, Snowden tweeted that he had spoken with Ellsberg last month and found him more concerned about the world’s fate than about his own.

“He assessed the risk of a nuclear exchange to be escalating beyond 10%,” Snowden wrote. “He had hoped to dedicate his final hours to reducing it, for all those he would leave behind. A hero to the end.”

Ellsberg is survived by his second wife, the journalist Patricia Marx, and three children, two from his first marriage. He and Marx wedded in 1970, the year before the Pentagon Papers were made public. In a New York Times wedding announcement, he was identified as a “senior research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, where he was writing a critical study of United States involvement in Vietnam.”

[Shutree]

I am sure it was common in 1960s Ireland and London, I never heard it in USA in 70s or much since

What is the origin of the word shaver?

My father grew up in East London, I always assumed it was local slang along with some of the rhyming slang he occasionally used - much to my mother's wannabe-middle-class disgust. I don't recall my uncles or anyone else using it. Maybe I'll adopt it for a revival. Not many opportunities for it on TD though.

[S Landreth]

Carol Higgins Clark Dead: Actress and Best-Selling Author Was 66

Carol Higgins Clark, an actress in several television movies and best-selling author of the Regan Reilly series, died on June 12. She was 66.

Her family told The New York Times that she died in Los Angeles following a battle with appendix cancer.

Clark, the daughter of best-selling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark, who died in 2020 at the age of 92, was born on July 28, 1956, in New York City. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 1978, she went on to study acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

It was later that she found her way to becoming an author. Some of her most successful novels were centered around private investigator Regan Reilly, including Decked, which was nominated for the Agatha Award in 1992 and the Anthony Award for best first novel. Several of the books in the series were also made into TV movies, which she appeared in.

She also co-wrote several Christmas-themed novels with her late mother. When she wasn’t writing, Clark took on roles in some television movies based on her mother’s books, including The Cradle Will Fall, While My Pretty One Sleeps and A Cry in the Night. She also appeared in Deck the Halls, The Mystery Cruise and My Gal Sunday.

Then in 2016, Clark was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Her mother, who had been previously inducted in 2011, introduced her at the ceremony.

She is survived by her siblings, Marilyn, Warren and David Clark. Another sister, Patricia, died before her.

According to her obituary shared online, a wake is scheduled for Monday from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York City. A Funeral Mass will then be held the following day at 10:30 a.m. at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer.

[david44]

My father grew up in East London, I always assumed it was local slang along with some of the rhyming slang he occasionally used - much to my mother's wannabe-middle-class disgust. I don't recall my uncles or anyone else using it. Maybe I'll adopt it for a revival. Not many opportunities for it on TD though.

Many tongues and accents I heard as a kid on the move, age 14 I was working in E London near the Old Jago so it might have been there and not at home or school I picked it up.


Plenty of examples from Arthur Daley to Dickens and Swift

“Clad in shoes, one young shaver after another bit himself sore on the Krakatuk’s teeth and jowls without helping the princess in the least. Dentists had been summoned, and when an unfortunate suitor was being carried away half unconscious, he would sigh: “That was a hard nut to crack!”

― E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker


Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: Chapter 5


The Literature Pagehttp://www.literaturepage.com › read › greatexpectatio...




"Excuse me, ladies and gentleman," said the sergeant, "but as I have mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver

Note expected regarding birth, about heart of young shaver ...


Wordplays.comhttps://www.wordplays.com › crossword-solver

The Crossword Solver found 30 answers to "Note expected regarding birth, about heart of young shaver, ultimately (7)", 7 letters crossword clue.

[helge]

age 14 I was working in E London near the Old Jago

Where the fuck haven't you been ?

Are you Kilroy ?

(when you claimed to have slept in Mendip's cabin on the survey boat, I swore to myself not to believe another word from you)

But do carry on

[david44]

(when you claimed to have slept in Mendip's cabin on the survey boat, I swore to myself not to believe another word from you)

Of course knot it was similar twin bunk cabin as common on ships over the world.

I would imagine millions live in London as did I and many members have been there

I have scant knowledge of most of the planet 2/3 is the sea! only having visited about 90 countries ( They do keep changing , I visited 2 Germany's and Vietnams but no they are single states, barely a half of the total.


I know no N Korea , no N Jutland nor the North Pole, despite many letters to Father Xmas when a young slaver but have often been to Norreport .Norra Fogdlyckegatan Karlshamn and Nørre Søgade, København, Denmark,

I shall be delighted to share sherbert thereabouts in August and can debrief as to Kilroy , Kilfoyle and Rob Roy over a Gamle Dansk, the watering holes of Sydhavn are of course more authentic Ol kros if cruising for a bruising, I will be in top form if mein sox chnage op come orf.
I trust being snubbed won't make you a grate deign to conquer?

You are absolutely correct to believe nothing on this forum bar St Willy and of course knob twiddler Pope Edmond the Indelible or was Unfellatable?

[helge]

´So if I decide to climb K2, there won't be written in handshaking urin: "Rubba was here...--...---...."
(the dots is cause I can imagine that you elder statesmen piss like that.)

[david44]

So if I decide to climb K2, there won't be written in handshaking urin: "Rubba was here.

Pwo Bobly Knot, but as a recognised sceptic the only way you can be sure is to become a social climber , as to taking the piss I need no help , mine goes straight down a pipe and ultimately to Davey Jones' Locker to blend with the lost aircraft subs, plankton and Wales sperm.
If Maitre Rudi is still in The Bus Stop Bar, Amager Bvd he'll assure RJ was there. Skol

[helge]

Skol

Skål .

[david44]

Skål .

'es knot wong

åouch I have been smote by a theta lover!

Torden scolded even, Too late to raise a glass but will raise a good night miturtion to our Fyn boys

PS how long's the Ferry to Bornholm on calm August evening?

[S Landreth]

• Butthole Surfers Drummer Teresa Taylor Dead at 60

Teresa Taylor, Longtime Drummer for Butthole Surfers, Dead at 60

Teresa Taylor, a longtime drummer for the punk-rock band Butthole Surfers, has died. She was 60.

The death of Taylor, who was also known as Teresa Nervosa, was announced on social media Monday by her former bandmates.

"Teresa Taylor passed away peacefully this weekend after a long battle with lung disease. She will live in our hearts forever. RIP, dear friend," the band wrote in a statement.

Her partner Cheryl Curtice also shared the news on Facebook, writing that Taylor "passed away clean and sober, peacefully in her sleep."

"She was so brave, even in the face of her horrible disease," Curtice wrote. "We were all fortunate to have her beautiful, strong spirit in our lives. She will be forever missed... I love you, beloved Teresa."

Taylor announced in November 2021 that she'd been diagnosed with end-stage lung disease, but was staying upbeat.

"My situation is perfect, really. I live alone in my little apartment. It's easy to stay clean and organized. My son, Snoopy the Cat is a constant companion," she wrote. "I don't have cancer or any harsh treatments. I know I smoked like a chimney and this is to be expected. My spirits are up. I broke my arm when I fell and wish I had something for the pain, but otherwise I'm pretty comfortable."

A native of Arlington, Texas, Taylor joined Butthole Surfers in 1983 after a jam session with singer Gibby Haynes. She said the two were "bonding" when Haynes asked if she wanted to join the band and play drums alongside King Coffey.

"I was like, 'Gibby, can you, in my lifetime, can you get me to Paris?' And he said, 'Yes, I can,'" Taylor recalled. "So I called my mom and I said, 'Mom, my ship's come in!'"

In 2014, on the 30th anniversary of Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, band member Paul Leary opened up about why they band decided to have two percussionists.

"It was definitely fun to behold," Leary said at the time. "When King first joined our band, he didn't have much in the way of a drum kit. He had a snare, a couple of toms, and a cymbal. Having the second drummer really took that concept to the next level."
Though Taylor left the group in 1989, she joined them again for touring in the mid-2000s.

“I only found out much later when I got into therapy, but it’s not necessarily a natural state for five or six people to eat every meal together, live together, have one person carry the money and dole it out," she told Spin in 1996 of her departure.

She also told the Austin Chronicle in 2008 that she left the band due to various health concerns.

"I didn't want to leave the band, but I really wasn't well. I was flipping out, drinking too much and all that," she said. "I had developed a really big fear of flying. I always thought the plane was going to crash. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I started taking Prozac and trying to get better, trying to find someone who could help me."

After leaving the band, Taylor was diagnosed with an aneurysm and underwent brain surgery. She later developed strobe light-induced seizures.

She also had a small but memorable role in the 1990 Richard Linklater film Slacker as a woman trying to sell Madonna's pap smear.

Haynes paid tribute to Taylor on Instagram, writing: "In days of old when nights were bold….see you when I see you sweetheart”

[DrWilly]

You are absolutely correct to believe nothing on this forum bar St Willy and of course knob twiddler Pope Edmond the Indelible or was Unfellatable?

Oi, leave me out of your half addled musings.

[misskit]

Pathum Thani Governor Narongsak Osottanakorn, who was hailed for his role in coordinating the “Wild Boars” rescue operation in Chiang Rai over four years ago, has died after unsuccessful treatment for cancer, according to a senior official of the Interior Ministry.


He said Narongsak, 58, passed away peacefully at Siriraj Hospital at around 6pm on Wednesday.


“As his superintendent and colleague, I want to convey my deepest condolences to the family of Khun Narongsak,” said Interior Permanent Secretary Suthipong Chulcharoen.


As governor of Chiang Rai in 2018, Narongsak played a crucial role in coordinating the much-publicised and successful operation to rescue 13 young footballers and their coach from a flooded cave.


Narongsak was later transferred to serve as governor of Phayao before moving to Pathum Thani. He turned down an approach by the Palang Pracharath Party to run in the Bangkok gubernatorial election last year before informing the public that he had been diagnosed with cancer.

Governor Narongsak dies of cancer at 58 | Thai PBS World : The latest Thai news in English, News Headlines, World News and News Broadcasts in both Thai and English. We bring Thailand to the world

[harrybarracuda]

Actor Julian Sands.

Julian Sands obituary | Film | The Guardian

[S Landreth]

John Goodenough: World's oldest Nobel Prize winner dies at 100

John Goodenough, the world's oldest Nobel Prize winner who played a crucial role in developing the lithium-ion battery, has died at the age of 100.

He passed away on Sunday, according to the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked as an engineering professor.

"John's legacy as a brilliant scientist is immeasurable," said University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell.

Lithium-ion batteries power millions of electric vehicles around the globe.

The University of Texas described him as a "dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor".

Dr Goodenough was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2019 at the age of 97 for his work on batteries, including the development of the lithium-ion battery.

The lightweight, powerful battery sparked a revolution in technology, paving the way for modern portable electronics such as laptops and mobile phones.

Born in Germany in 1922 to American parents, Dr Goodenough grew up in the north-eastern US and served in the US army as a meteorologist during World War II. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University, as well as a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago.

He was married to Irene Wiseman, who passed away in 2016.

His discoveries "improved the lives of billions of people around the world", Mr Hartzell said. "He was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career, and he never ceased searching for innovative energy-storage solutions."

Dr Goodenough started his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked for 24 years and helped develop random-access memory for the computer.

There, he became one of the founders of the modern theory of magnetism, which has played a pivotal role in the field of telecommunications.

Asked by the BBC's John Humphrys in 2016 what it was like to know that his discoveries had changed the way humans live, Dr Goodenough said he did not "think about it too much".

"I'm very gratified that I've provided something for the people of this world," he said. He joked at the time that he himself did not have a mobile phone because he did not like to be "bothered".

The professor was known for his quick wit and "infectious laugh", according to the University of Texas. "That laugh could be heard reverberating through UT engineering buildings," the University said.

Recently, Dr Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas had been researching new ways of storing energy, including via a battery made of glass.

[cyrille]

Wonder if they tried rolling him around in bed to get him going again.

[Ukan Kizmiaz]

Andy Rourke of the Smiths. Only 59

Andy Rourke, bassist for British rock group The Smiths, dies from cancer aged 59 - ABC News

I missed this - he could play the bass and was a key part of the smiths sound. Too young too.

[harrybarracuda]

Alan Arkin: Oscar-winning actor who starred in Little Miss Sunshine and Argo has died aged 89



Oscar-winning American actor Alan Arkin has died at the age of 89.

Arkin was named best supporting actor for his role in Little Miss Sunshine at the Academy Awards in 2007.

He was also nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actor category for Argo.

Arkin died on Friday at his home in Carlsbad, California, according to Variety.

His sons Adam, Matthew and Anthony said in a joint statement: "Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man.

"A loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather, he was adored and will be deeply missed."

Arkin appeared in more than 100 films and TV shows and was nominated for an Academy Award four times.

Arkin was initially turned down for his award-winning role in Little Miss Sunshine because the directors thought he looked too fit and healthy.

In the film, he played a foul-mouthed 80-year-old grandfather who was frail and shaky from years of drug abuse.

"It's the best rejection I ever got in my life - they thought I was too virile," Arkin told The New York Times in a 2007 interview - during which he jokingly flexed his biceps and struck a bodybuilder pose.

He landed his first Oscar nomination - for best actor - in his debut major film role in 1966, when he played a Soviet sailor in Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

Arkin was praised for his performance as a psychopathic killer in the 1967 film Wait Until Dark opposite Audrey Hepburn.

He later said the experience made him feel uncomfortable because he "didn't like being cruel to her".

Arkin's big screen appearances also included the 1970 film version of Catch-22, Edward Scissorhands in 1990 and Grosse Pointe Blank in 1997.

Most recently, he voiced the character of villain Wild Knuckles in last year's animated hit Minions: The Rise of Gru.

He earned Emmy nominations for the TV series The Kominsky Method, also starring Michael Douglas, which debuted in 2018.

Arkin was also a director, author and stage performer, winning a Tony Award in 1963 for his major role in Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing.

Alan Arkin: Oscar-winning actor who starred in Little Miss Sunshine and Argo has died aged 89 | Ents & Arts News | Sky News

[S Landreth]

Homer Hogues, One of the Last Tuskegee Airmen, Dead at 96

Homer Hogues, one of the last living Tuskegee Airmen, died this week, just two days after his wife, according to his obituary. He was 96.

Hogues, a Texas native who enlisted in the United States military and later achieved the rank of staff sergeant while working as an aircraft mechanic for one of the first units of Black military pilots, died on Tuesday.

His wife, Mattie Bell, died just days before on Sunday. The couple had been married for over 70 years.

According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Hogues joined the Army Air Corps in 1946 and flew with the 99th Pursuit Squadron and 332nd Fighter Group during World War II.

"Throughout his life, Hogues was an active representative of the Tuskegee Airmen, giving countless speeches and interviews about his military service," the museum said Thursday.

As Hogues told the Dallas Morning News in 2016, he struggled to find his dream job with an airline after leaving the military.

Instead, he worked on cars and eventually retired after 47 years of service as an electro-plater for Lane Plating Works, according to the report and obituary.

"They said the only thing I could do was gut the planes and sweep the floors and all that kind of stuff," he told the paper. "I thought that was a slap in the face."

However, recognition would eventually follow. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010, and he was invited to President Barack Obama's second inauguration two years later.

"Homer was soft spoken and kindhearted and loved by many," his obituary reads. "He spent a brief time in a nursing home but was blessed to return home with the assistance of various community and military groups."

Hogues is survived by his three daughters, 10 grandchildren and more than a dozen great-grandchildren, along with "a host of nieces, nephews, adopted children, and friends," his obituary states.

[helge]

^

famous definition: 1. known and recognized by many people

I'll have to look up the definition for 'many'

[harrybarracuda]

^


I'll have to look up the definition for 'many'

He follows me around like an obsessive little puppy. He's my bitch.

[S Landreth]

• Harry Markowitz, Nobel laureate, UC San Diego professor who revolutionized investing, dies at 95

Harry Markowitz, the renowned scholar who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for research that helped to revolutionize investing and who went on to become one of UC San Diego’s most revered faculty members, has died. He was 95.

Markowitz died on June 22 of pneumonia and sepsis at a San Diego hospital, Mary McDonald, a longtime assistant to Markowitz told The New York Times.

He was best known as the father of modern portfolio theory, which revolutionized the management of financial portfolios. Markowitz made it clear through empirical research why investors should diversify investments in the stock market using combinations of assets instead of individual securities.

The framework he helped pioneer showed the correlation between low-risk investments and low returns, and high-risk investments and higher returns. This innovative theory earned him the 1990 Nobel Prize in economics alongside William Sharpe and Merton Miller.

He moved to San Diego in 1993 and never left.

“I was trained at the University of Chicago; I taught full-time, part-time and lectured all over the world; but the Rady School and UC San Diego are my home,” Markowitz said in 2017 when he made a $4 million donation to the school.

Until Markowitz came along, the investment world assumed that the best stock market strategy was simply to choose the shares of a group of companies that were thought to have the best prospects.

But in 1952, he published his dissertation, “Portfolio Selection,” which overturned this traditional approach with what became known as modern portfolio theory.

Sharpe, 89, who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize with Markowitz, said the origins of today’s financial management and investing sector can be traced back to Markowitz. Sharpe, who is a professor of finance, emeritus at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, recalls seeing Markowitz a few times a year at investing conferences and sitting in the back rows chatting about finance.

“The whole field of finance that’s taught in business school it all has some of Harry’s ideas and some of my ideas and some of the ideas of a zillion people who built on those ideas,” Sharpe said in a phone interview. “So he was a giant.”

Beyond his revolutionary contributions to the fields of finance and business, Markowitz was known in the San Diego community for his generosity and kind nature.

John Freeman, a retired San Diego investment manager, said that Markowitz was “a brilliant guy in a bunch of different areas,” but above all else, he was interesting because he was interested in other people.

“For all of his brilliance, he was a wondrous soul, a true unicorn in that realm of self-interest,” said Freeman, who noted that Markowitz “was proud of his intellect” but “never employed his status.”

During Freeman’s finance career, he worked more closely with Sharpe, but he would see Markowitz a few times a year at conferences. He remarked that both men “had that magic of incredible intellect and tremendous human spirit” and were just “joyous to be around.”

He noted that the contributions of the Nobel Prize-winning research continue to touch the lives of everyday people — without it, index funds and 401(k) investing as we know it wouldn’t exist.

“On a macro-level … they helped millions through their improvement in the world of investment management and understanding diversification and the relationship between risk and return,” he said. “They’ve helped hundreds or thousands on a more personal basis by being supportive or critiquing stuff, or just being encouraging.”

Tom Anichini, chief investment strategist at San Diego-based GuidedChoice, a retirement planning firm that Markowitz co-founded, worked with him for nearly a decade. He was hired by Markowitz to work at the firm and he describes the many Thursday afternoon meetings that Markowitz joined in the office as some of the greatest memories of his career.

He described Markowitz as “a sociable guy” who despite his numerous accolades “treated everyone like a potential friend.”

“You knew when Harry had arrived at the office, because the typical client office noise would suddenly be broken up by sporadic bouts of laughter as he would make his way through the office, greeting different people,” he recalled.

Anichini said Markowitz was much more than an economist or an academic — he loved his family and making people laugh. He remembers people being surprised to learn that Markowitz answered his own phone, Anichini said, but it made sense because Markowitz “loved being talked to.”

Lynda Claassen, director of special collections and archives at UC San Diego’s Geisel Library, said his groundbreaking research will be housed on campus.

“Economics can be very difficult for people to understand and he could find that frustrating because he wanted people to understand,” Claassen said. “But what I remember more is how much he loved and engaged with life, and how charming he could be. He always seemed to have a twinkle in his eye.”

In addition to the $4 million endowment for the Harry Markowitz Fellowship, he donated his Nobel Prize medal and other awards to UC San Diego.

He taught at the Rady School of Management as an adjunct professor from 2007 until 2019, when he was in his early 90s. In a 2015 interview with the Union-Tribune, Markowitz discussed his thoughts on aging.

“I reject the words ‘old age’ as they apply to me. Except for not being able to stand too long, I am still me. Someday I will hit a wall, but I haven’t.”

He added: “Some people marginalize themselves. They’ll retire and say, ‘I will not work. I will not teach. I will find retired friends and drink coffee.’ They sit on a park bench all day. They have marginalized themselves. I won’t be doing that.”

Harry Max Markowitz was born on Aug. 24, 1927, in Chicago, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. In high school, he began to read the original works of Charles Darwin and such classical philosophers as René Descartes and David Hume. In financial terms, Hume’s work lay behind the maxim that past performance is not a guide to the future.

He continued on this track in a two-year bachelor’s program at the University of Chicago, where, inspired in part by Hume’s focus on the uncertainty of knowledge, he decided to pursue economics.

Markowitz learned from renowned figures such as Milton Friedman, Tjalling Koopman and Jacob Marschak and he went on to specialize in risk analysis, particularly as it applies to the stock market.

At the RAND Corporation, during stints in the 1950s and ’60s, Markowitz worked on practical problems in American industry that required the development of simulation methods.

He went on to work for IBM and General Electric, where he built models of manufacturing plants. In 1962, he co-founded the California Analysis Center Incorporated, a computer software company that would become CACI International.

Markowitz’s first two marriages, to Luella Johnson and Gloria Hardt, ended in divorce. In 1970, he married Barbara Gay. She died in 2021.

He is survived by two children from his first marriage, Susan Ulvestad and David Markowitz; two from his second, Laurie Raskin and Steven Markowitz; his wife’s son from a previous marriage, James Marks; 13 grandchildren; and more than a dozen great-grandchildren.

[misskit]

Allen Arkin is one of my all time favorite actors. The first movie I saw him in as a teenager was Freebie and the Bean.



RIP Mr. Arkin.

[Ukan Kizmiaz]

Catch 22 is a great movie

[misskit]

^ I have never seen that. Will keep my eye out for it. Maybe some of Arkin’s old films will start popping up now he has passed on.