RIP -- 2020 Going Into 2021 Edition

[AnBr]

Olympia Dukakis

[AnBr]

Norman Lloyd

[Art Vandelay]

Spencer Silver

Spencer Silver, a chemist who accidentally invented the delicate adhesive used in Post-it Notes, an innovation that blanketed the office landscape like a blizzard with messages and reminders and became a favored modern medium for jotting notes to oneself and others, died May 8 at his home in St. Paul, Minn. He was 80.

[Art Vandelay]

Charles Grodin

[Art Vandelay]

Art Gensler

Art Gensler, who founded the world’s largest architecture firm, died on Monday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 85. Though he helped design a number of important buildings, he was perhaps best known for creating a collaborative culture that helped Gensler become a global behemoth, with 5,000 employees in 50 offices. “The firm was not about him,” says its co-CEO, Andy Cohen, “but about all its people moving forward together.”



“He believed that great ideas could come from anywhere, and so he listened to everyone,” said John J. Parman, who worked as an editor at Gensler from 1997 to 2019 and often interacted with the founder. And though he expected professionalism, he didn’t ask for martyrdom. One of his maxims (included in his 2015 book “Art’s Principles”) was, “It’s 6:00 p.m. Go home! Get a life!”

[pnwguy]

May 19, 2021 15:21:30 GMT Art Vandelay said:

Charles Grodin

Grodin's performance as a straight man in Midnight Run was stellar.  The tension chemistry between he and Robert DeNiro in that film was priceless.

[Art Vandelay]

Man, architects seem to be dropping right and left

Helmut Jahn

Architect Helmut Jahn, who designed the postmodern James R Thompson Center, has been killed while riding his bicycle near his home in a Chicago suburb.



The German-American architect was struck and killed by two vehicles while riding his bicycle in Campton Hills, around 70 kilometres west of central Chicago, on Saturday afternoon.



Local police confirmed that the 81-year-old architect died at the scene.



Jahn was the architect of numerous buildings in his adopted city of Chicago, most notably the James R Thompson Center in the city's downtown and United Airlines Terminal One at O'Hare airport.



The architect's other prominent work includes the Sony Centre complex on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and the Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok.

[LFC]

F. Lee Bailey at age 87.

[Deleted]

215 first nations children; died some time between 1890 and 1969. A stain on my country - both that of my birth and that of adoption. My people did this

[goldenvalley]

Jun 4, 2021 11:22:19 GMT @islander said:

215 first nations children; died some time between 1890 and 1969. A stain on my country - both that of my birth and that of adoption. My people did this

I had no idea.  That is utterly terrible.

[Art Vandelay]

Clarence Williams III

[LFC]

Ned Beatty

[goldenvalley]

John McAfee of antivirus fame 

[AnBr]

Didn't he go off his nut a few years back?

[LFC]

Jun 23, 2021 23:37:53 GMT AnBr said:

Didn't he go off his nut a few years back?

More than a few.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 24, 2021 0:12:38 GMT LFC said:

Jun 23, 2021 23:37:53 GMT AnBr said:

Didn't he go off his nut a few years back?

More than a few.

Here's a BBC story on him.  

[LFC]

Donald Rumsfeld. To shorten the famous quote, "He's dead. Good."

[AnBr]

Was going to post with great delight about Rumsfeld.

www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/politics/donald-rumsfeld-dead.html

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/how-donald-rumsfeld-deserves-be-remembered/619334/

[LFC]

Surprisingly TAC didn't have a full out apologetic article on Rumsfeld. Of course the Iraq War was never particularly popular in that brand of conservatism. The best part was this comment:

engineerscotty • 16 hours ago

You go to Hell with the soul you have, not the soul you wish you had.

[LFC]

Another note on Rumsfeld. Everybody should be reminded that yes, he was indeed a war criminal.

George Zornick
@gzornick

The torture memo signed by Donald Rumsfeld, 12/2/02, authorizing 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, the use of phobias, and stress positions for up to 4 hours.

Note his handwriting at bottom: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours A day. Why is Standing limited to 4 hours"

[LFC]

Spencer Ackerman doesn't pussyfoot around the death and destruction wrought by Rumsfeld in a piece accurately entitled Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully.

The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t occur in an Iraqi prison. Yet that was foreordained, considering how throughout his life inside the precincts of American national security, Rumsfeld escaped the consequences of decisions he made that ensured a violent, frightening end for hundreds of thousands of people.

An actuarial table of the deaths for which Donald Rumsfeld is responsible is difficult to assemble. In part, that’s a consequence of his policy, as defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, not to compile or release body counts, a PR strategy learned after disclosing the tolls eroded support for the Vietnam War. As a final obliteration, we cannot know, let alone name, all the dead.

But in 2018, Brown University’s Costs of War Project put together something that serves as the basis for an estimate. According to Neda C. Crawford, Brown’s political-science department chair, the Afghanistan war to that point claimed about 147,000 lives, to include 38,480 civilians; 58,596 Afghan soldiers and police (about as many American troops as died in Vietnam); and 2,401 U.S. servicemembers.

Rumsfeld was hardly the only person in the Bush administration responsible for the Afghanistan war. But in December 2001, under attack in Kandahar, where it had retreated from the advance of U.S. and Northern Alliance forces, the Taliban sought to broker a surrender—one acceptable to the U.S.-installed Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld refused. “I do not think there will be a negotiated end to the situation, that's unacceptable to the United States,” he said. That statement reaped a 20-year war, making it fair to say that the subsequent deaths are on his head, even while acknowledging that Rumsfeld was hardly the only architect of the conflict.

Crawford in 2018 also tallied between 267,792 and 295,170 deaths to that point in Iraq. That is almost certainly a severe undercount, and it includes between a very conservatively estimated 182,000 to 204,000 civilians; over 41,000 Iraqi soldiers and police; and 4,550 U.S. servicemembers. As one of the driving forces behind the invasion and the driving force behind the occupation, Rumsfeld is in an elite category of responsibility for these deaths, alongside his protege Dick Cheney and the president they served, George W. Bush.

[AnBr]

Jun 30, 2021 19:49:55 GMT LFC said:

Donald Rumsfeld. To shorten the famous quote, "He's dead. Good."

[Bact PhD]

Long-time Louisiana political figure Edwin Edwards, 93:

www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/edwin-edwards-dead/2021/07/12/c475ef5e-c22c-11e1-99f6-7f2e755d43fd_story.html

In Louisiana, a state notorious for colorful politicians, Edwin Edwards blazed for half a century, a near-perpetual neon rainbow.


The former Louisiana governor and U.S. congressman, 93, who died July 12 of respiratory problems, was a brazen practitioner of the corrupt-politics-as-theatrics style mastered by the legendary Depression-era demagogue Huey Long.


Mr. Edwards served three full terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, four terms as governor and, starting in 2000, eight years in federal prison for racketeering, extortion and related crimes. He staged an unsuccessful political comeback in 2014, running once again for a House seat, and was quick-witted and resilient even at the lowest points of his career.
He could joke about being sentenced to prison, at age 73. “The government asked the judge to sentence me to life or 35 to 40 years,” he recalled. “I said I’d take life, it’s shorter.” The judge, he added, “didn’t see the humor in that.”


He gambled prodigiously. He boasted of chasing women half his age; he met his third wife, who was 51 years his junior, through a prison correspondence. He wore his hair, which turned silver, in the smooth pompadour of a televangelist.


His lovable-rogue persona tended to overshadow genuine achievements. He was credited with helping to shape the modern Democratic Party by advocating racial inclusiveness and with streamlining Louisiana’s outdated government. The Superdome sports arena opened on his watch as governor in 1975.


In the 1991 gubernatorial runoff election, a shrewd Edwards campaign contributed to the crushing defeat of then-state Rep. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, whose rise as a national symbol of White anger was brought to a halt.




In that race, Mr. Edwards employed his trademark humor to good effect. His supporters printed bumper stickers that read, “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important,” alluding to unsuccessful attempts to prosecute him on corruption charges. And he joked roguishly that he and Duke were both “wizards under the sheets.”


On a personal note, I was Bact GradStudent during the Edwards-Duke campaign. One of my colleagues drew up a Letterman-style Top Ten list of reasons to vote for Edwards and put it on the whiteboard outside his office. Among the entries:
-No need for a nose job.
-(I forget the number of) indictments and not a single conviction.

My advisor walked by, saw the list, and added an eleventh item to the list:
HE ISN’T DUKE!!!!

[goldenvalley]

What does it say about a state that has the KKK head running against a convicted felon?

[Bact PhD]

Jul 12, 2021 17:02:56 GMT goldenvalley said:

What does it say about a state that has the KKK head running against a convicted felon?

He wasn’t convicted until 2000-ish, after he had left office; this election was in 1991.

But, yeah, the point still stands. Louisiana has a history of flamboyant, populist, and incredibly crooked politics going back to the Long era[1], which reminds me of another entry on that Top Ten list:

Earl and Huey are dead and Russell’s not interested.

[1] Remember the movie “Blaze” from the ‘90s? Even with artistic license, a lot of that story fell pretty close to reality.