Thoughts on Barbara Bush Upon Her Passing

Not a whole bunch, except to note that she got a rather weird compliment from Nixon in the White House tapes, that, "She knows how to hate."

I think that there is a pretty good chance that, had she been born 2 or 3 decades later, she would have been the first major party woman candidate for US President.

I've always felt that she was both the smartest and tough member of the Bush family.

On the other hand, I have seen the discussions on Twitter regarding her, and I've alternately felt that they were crass and callous, and felt guilty for not understanding the mockery, and felt that they were very funny, and felt guilty for not being offended that they were crass and callous.

Basically, it's all guilt.

That is so Jewish.

Requiem for My Nemesis

RP's Film Debut


In the Cat Run

You may not be aware, but I have a nemesis.

The Perry the Platypus to my Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz was RP the Cat, the smartest, fastest, and most ferocious representative of the species Felis silvestris catus that I have ever met.


In late 2011, I caught one of the colony of feral cats in the area with the goal of adopting it.

It was RP the cat, and much mayhem ensued, all of which involved much blood loss on my part.

She, we later saw her with her litters, found a way to get into and out of the house

When we adopted cats from the Humane Society, RP came into the house and ate the cat food, a fact that we verified with a time lapse camera.

At this point, Charlie named the cat Rodentia Phage, eater of rodents, RP for short, though after my escapades with the cat, RP came to stand for Ravage and Pillage.

We were unamused with the situation, as RP brought in things from the outside, most notably fleas.

At this point, this cat came to be my great white whale.

So, I set up a "Have a Heart" trap that fed into a cat cage (about 1m x 1.5m x 1m), and when that did not work because RP knew not to step on the touch plate, so I used more computing power than was used to put Neil Armstrong on the moon to improve the cat.

It worked, but I never managed to tame her, and eventually I slipped up, and she got out, and she was in the house, but had forgotten how to get out, so for the next 5 years she was in the house skulking around and successfully evading us.

Two days ago, we noticed some blood on the couch, and after examining our cats, realized that it had to be RP.

I searched, and found her in an awful state, barely able to move, with a wound on her neck and trouble breathing.

She was feeble enough that I could catch her and get her to the vet.

The diagnosis was that it was an abscess that went septic, and there was nothing that could be done, so we had her put to sleep.

Valhalla has added its most hard core new resident.

I will be downing a bourbon in her honor tonight.

What follows is a list, in chronological order of my interactions with, and reflections about, RP the cat:

1. It Appears that I Do Have Time to Bleed
2. All that Blood, So Little Cat
3. I have a Cat Infestation
4. Who Knew that I Would Be the Proprietor of a Cat House?
5. This is Not Going to End Well………
6. Well, I got the Cat Trap Together
7. No Cat in Trap Yet………
8. How I Vanquished the RP!
9. Light Posting Tonight
10. Moar Katnip, or the Dog Gets It!
11. An Old Home Remedy that Worked for Me
12. Squee!!!!!

Requiem for a Hero

I am referring to John Raines, who was part of the team who broke into the Media, PA FBI office and secured documents revealing systematic misdeeds by the bureau. 

He was 84:

One day in May 1971, John C. Raines, a religion professor at Temple University, had just returned to his home in Germantown, Pa., from playing tennis when two F.B.I. agents knocked on the door.

For weeks, hundreds of agents had been combing Philadelphia for the amateur burglars who had embarrassed the F.B.I. by raiding a suburban field office and stealing a thousand files, and then baffled the bureau by evading capture.

The documents were delivered anonymously to journalists and congressmen as proof that the bureau had systematically and illegally infiltrated, intimidated and disrupted protest groups.

………

The burglary, and subsequent lawsuits by NBC and others, prompted a groundbreaking investigation in 1975 by the so-called Church committee, a special Senate panel led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee revealed details of the F.B.I.’s secret Cointelpro, or counterintelligence, operation, which included illegal sabotage of dissident groups deemed to be subversive.

Dr. Raines died on Sunday in Philadelphia at 84. His wife said the cause was congestive heart failure.

………

Among the files was an F.B.I. order to interview dissidents aggressively. The bureau’s goal, the order said, was to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles” and “to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox.”

What that proved, Dr. Raines said, was that J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, “was not simply into surveillance; Hoover was into taking the voice of dissent away from dissent.”

The cache also included a routine routing slip with the word “Cointelpro.” The burglars overlooked the document, but the Church Committee later exposed the program in detail.

This man was a hero, like Ellsburg and Snowden.

Well, This Sucks

It appears that Tom Petty suffered a cardiac arrest, and may or may not be dead though the most recent reports strongly imply that it's just a matter of time:

For several hours on Monday, rock star Tom Petty was dead to some members of the news media, even if he wasn’t in fact.

Though gravely ill and lingering near death, Petty was still clinging to life when CBS News incorrectly reported that he had died. The report — which the outlet blamed on unidentified sources in the Los Angeles Police Department — was later withdrawn and corrected.

But not before touching off a stampede of he’s-dead/no-he’s-not reporting by other news organizations. The result was a monumental mishmash of confusion, joining the long history of misreporting on the deaths of well-known people.

TMZ, the tabloid website with a history of being first on celebrity deaths, was the first outlet to report that Petty was in the hospital and soon updated its story to say: “TMZ reports that Petty had no brain activity when he got to the hospital and a decision was made to pull him from life support,” while never pronouncing that the “American Girl” singer had died.

Rolling Stone magazine reported around 4:15 p.m. EST that Petty had died and published a lengthy obituary of him. But the magazine upgraded Petty’s condition to “hospitalized” about an hour later without explaining what had happened to its earlier report. A note at the bottom of its story said, “This story is developing.”

I rather liked his music, and he did the best Mad Hatter ever, so I will miss him.

Funeral Delayed Until They Can Shut the Casket

Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, has died at age 91.

Yes, it is a dick joke.

Good Bye Rocket J. Squirrel

June Foray Dead at 99.

Voice of:

• Rocky (Bullwinkle)
• Natasha Fatale (Bullwinkle)
• Nell Fenwick (Dudley Dorite)
• Ursula (George of the Jungle)
• Grandma (Looney Tunes)
• Cindy Lou Who (How the Grinch Stole Christmas)
• Lucifer the Cat (Cinderella)
• Grandmother Fa (Mulan)
• Wheezy (Who Framed Roger Rabbit)
• Lena Hyena (Who Framed Roger Rabbit)

And hundreds more.

She will be missed.

Hopefully, He Wakes Up in Hell

Zbigniew Brzezinski has died at age 89.

He was head of the National Security Council during the Carter Administration, and as such, proposed, a policy to buy a civil war in Afghanistan because he thought that it would hamstring the Soviets.

He was right, but he also lit the fuse that created al Qaeda and its ilk.

I don't think that he deserves to be in hell for indirectly causing 911, he could not have predicted that.

He deserves to be in hell for what he successfully accomplished: Creating a Vietnam for the Soviets in Afghanistan.

With the Vietnam war having ended only a few years prior, he knew what that meant, because there were somewhere around 2 MILLION civilian deaths in during the Vietnam war.

He knew that he was unleashing a cycle of unspeakable violence and brutality on the people of Afghanistan, but he did not care, because he hated Russians.

He was a war criminal.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that the buck stopped for these policies with Carter, who someday will share a place in hell with him.

Damn!

Mary Tyler Moore just died:

Mary Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. She was 80.

Her family said her death, at Greenwich Hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.

Ms. Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People” as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Broadcast from 1970 to 1977, it was produced by both Ms. Moore and her second husband, Grant Tinker, who later ran NBC and who died on Nov. 28.

A part of my childhood just left us.

Man, Does 2016 Suck Wet Farts from Dead Pigeons

Now Carrie Fisher and Richard Adams.

This year has so much Fail.

Fake News of the Day

One Last Humiliation: The CIA Just Bungled An Attempt To Drop A Piano On Fidel Castro’s Funeral Procession

It's funny because it's true.

This Just In

Fidel Castro is still dead.

Needless to say, there a lot of folks at the CIA who are bumming that they didn't get to kill him.

That's Fronkensteen

Gene Wilder has died at the age of 83:

Gene Wilder, who established himself as one of America’s foremost comic actors with his delightfully neurotic performances in three films directed by Mel Brooks; his eccentric star turn in the family classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”; and his winning chemistry with Richard Pryor in the box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” died on Sunday night at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 83.

Eric Weissmann, who was Mr. Wilder’s lawyer for many years, confirmed the death. A nephew, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, said that the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

………

He made his movie debut in 1967 in Arthur Penn’s celebrated crime drama, “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which he was memorably hysterical as an undertaker kidnapped by the notorious Depression-era bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. He was even more hysterical, and even more memorable, a year later in “The Producers,” Mr. Brooks’s first film and the basis of his later Broadway hit.

………

He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as the wizardly title character in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971). The film was a box-office disappointment, partly because of parental concern that the moral of Roald Dahl’s story — that greedy, gluttonous children should not go unpunished — was too dark in the telling. But it went on to gain a devoted following, and Willy Wonka remains one of the roles with which Mr. Wilder is most closely identified.

His next role was more adult but equally strange: an otherwise normal doctor who falls in love with a sheep named Daisy in a segment of Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask,” in 1972. Two years later, he reunited with Mr. Brooks for perhaps the two best-known entries in either man’s filmography.

In “Blazing Saddles,” a raunchy, no-holds-barred spoof of Hollywood westerns, Mr. Wilder had the relatively quiet role of the Waco Kid, a boozy ex-gunfighter who helps an improbable black sheriff (Cleavon Little) save a town from railroad barons and venal politicians. The film’s once-daring humor may have lost some of its edge over the years, but Mr. Wilder’s next Brooks film, “Young Frankenstein,” has never grown old.

Mel Brooks movies were a part of my adolescence, and Mr. Wilder had a real skill in being both low key and hysterically funny at the same time.

A Witness has Left Us

Elie Wiesel, has died at age 87:

Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Menachem Rosensaft, a longtime friend and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death in a phone call.

Mr. Wiesel, a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor, was the author of several dozen books. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, the traumatized survivors — and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren — seemed frozen in silence.

He will be missed.

Quote of the Day

You know someone has lived a life when, at their funeral, you can see Kris Kristofferson get introduced to the president of Turkey.

—Charlie Pierce on the funeral of Muhammad Ali

Truly a remarkable live.

Don't Call Him the 5th Beatle, He Hated That

Legendary Beatles producer George Martin is dead at age 90:

George Martin, who produced much of the Beatles' classic catalog, has died. The cause of death has not yet been released. He was 90.

Ringo Starr reported the news on Twitter. "God bless George Martin," he wrote late Tuesday night. "Peace and love to Judy and his family, love Ringo and Barbara. George will be missed." In another post, accompanied by a photo of Martin with the Beatles, Starr wrote, "Thank you for all your love and kindness."

Over the decades, many people have claimed to be the "fifth Beatle." But the only person who can credibly hold that title was Martin. The producer not only signed the Beatles to their first record contract in 1962 but went on to work extensively with them on the vast majority of music they recorded over the next eight years, from "Love Me Do" to the majestic suite that wrapped up Abbey Road.

………

One of the many remarkable things about Martin is that he managed to produce highly complex, layered pieces of music like Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band, using a mere four-track recorder. "I felt that was the album which turned the Beatles from being just an ordinary rock & roll group into being significant contributors to the history of artistic performance," Martin wrote in his memoir. "It was the watershed which changed the recording art from something which will stand the test of time as a valid art form: sculpture in music, if you like."

In 2011, Martin looked back fondly on his time with the Beatles. "I think they're so damn good they'll be with us for generations, into the middle of the next century," he said. "They're just great musicians and great writers, like Gershwin or Rodgers and Hammerstein. They are there in history, and the Beatles are there in history, too. They'll be there in 100 years, too. But I won't be."

Also, read Paul McCartney's tribute to Martin.

On the Death of Nancy Reagan

I don't have anything to say, but read Charlie Pierce's thoughts.

It's actually rather kind.

How Scalia's Death Makes the World a Better Place

Without Scalia on the court, business have lost a staunch defender of a business's right to defraud its customers, and so they are settling with plaintiffs:

Dow Chemical Co (DOW.N) agreed to pay $835 million to settle a decade-long lawsuit on price fixing, saying it had less chance of winning its petition at the Supreme Court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Dow, which is in the process of merging with Dupont (DD.N), said on Friday it decided to settle, without admitting any wrongdoing, citing "growing political uncertainties due to recent events within the Supreme Court."

The chemicals company was found liable by a federal jury in Kansas in February 2013 in the class-action lawsuit, which alleged Dow had conspired to artificially inflate polyurethane prices.

………

Justice Scalia died earlier this month. The next justice could tilt the balance of the nation's highest court, which was left with four conservatives and four liberals.

"While Dow is settling this case, it continues to strongly believe that it was not part of any conspiracy and the judgment was fundamentally flawed as a matter of class action law," the company said in a statement on Friday.

While we think of Scalia as a culture warrior, his role as the leading opponent of consumer protection and corporate accountability on the court has arguably hurt more people than anything else that he has done.<sup>*

*</sup>Except, of course for Bush v. Gore, but, as that opinion notes, it doesn't count.  It never counts.

He Probably Choked on His Own Bile

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at age 79.

I have noted over the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) excessive levels of bile have appeared to produce neurological complications.

The Republicans are already saying that the next SCOTUS nomination should be put off until after the elections, which is no surprise.

I really do not think that they have anything to worry about though:  I cannot see the Obama administration selecting someone in less than 3 months, at which point there will not be time.

While I do understand that the friends and family of Antonin Scalia, including Justice Ruth  Bader "Notorious RBG" Ginsburg, are mourning their loss, the fact that a partisan hack who had stopped caring has left the court is a net plus for the people of the United States.
 

The Snake Had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

Another victim of repeated head trauma in the NFL, only this time it is a quarterback, Ken Stabler of the Oakland Raiders:

Former Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, who died in July at the age of 69 of colon cancer, was found to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease found in people who have had repeated blows to the head, according to a researchers at Boston University.

Stabler’s diagnosis is the latest in a line of former NFL players who have been found to have the disease. Scientists in Boston said that on a scale of one to four, Stabler had high stage three CTE.

“He had moderately severe disease,” Ann McKee, the chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston healthcare system and a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University school of medicine, told the New York Times.

………

After his death, Stabler’s brain was removed and donated to researchers at the NFL’s “brain bank” at Boston University, who spent months dissecting it for clues as to why the quarterback’s mind declined in his final years. During the last few years of his life, Stabler rapidly slowed down in his cognitive functions. He began complaining of a high-pitched ringing in his head, couldn’t handle bright lights or loud noises, and began repeating himself.

McKee, who conducted the examination, called Stabler’s case “pretty classic”.

“It may be surprising since he was a quarterback, but certainly the lesions were widespread, and they were quite severe, affecting many regions of the brain,” McKee, who conducted the examination, said. “There was no question about the diagnosis.”

If this happens to a quarter back, it happens to everyone on the field.

Mothers, do not let your kids play football.

Bummer ……… I Thought that He Would Live Forever

Actor Abe Vigoda is dead at 94.