[Trinidad]

I saw on Bridgewinners that Harold Feldheim past away. I can not claim that I knew him very well, but my wife and I have dear memories of the one time we did encounter him.

The following hand is hanging in a frame in our bedroom:

---

Harold was South, my wife was East and I was sitting West. A lady that I don't know was sitting North. My wife and I had met at the bridge course and we had finished it about two years before this happened at the 1997 Regional in Warren, MI.

I noted the vulnerability only after I had made my Michaels' bid and I was thinking that this could get out of hand. Before his first pass, Harold turned to me and said: "These ladies sure bid them up!". I thought that he hadn't seen my hand yet. Before his next pass, he turned to me again: "These ladies are aggressive!".
After the auction was over, he led a top heart and I put the dummy down. I wrote the following in 1997 (it is in the same frame as the hand):
"South started to laugh out loud. A friendly, honest laugh from somebody who is really enjoying himself. I saw his point. This was not your everyday vulnerable Michaels bid."
Suddenly he stopped laughing, realizing that he was playing 2 beginners. He apologized to me for his rudeness. I said it was okay and that my hand was somewhat funny, but he wouldn't have anything of it. He apologized at least three times more.
The play continued. My wife didn't have any trouble finding the singleton king of trump and a minute later 5♠X made on the nose.

Now Harold really started to laugh. My wife and I laughed along with him and the North lady left the table, since it was the last board of the round and a hospitality break was about to start.

Harold introduced himself, and we introduced ourselves. He told about his chess adventures and the Fischer-Spasski match on Iceland. And, since I played chess before I started playing bridge, I was interested. We had a most enjoyable conversation.

My wife and I went for dinner. When we came back, we decided to watch the beginner lecture that had started already. It turned out that Harold was giving it. A few seconds after we had come in. Harold asked a question to the audience. Nobody was answering. My wife and I knew the answer, but we,... obviously... were not beginners anymore, playing in the open section. Then he vaguely pointed towards me. I pointed towards myself with an asking face: Do you mean me? He yelled through the room:

     "YOU!! No, not you! 5♠X making against me! I never want to see you again!"

After the lecture, I went to ask him whether my bid was really that bad. He answered that it was the worst bid he had seen in years, but that he could not argue with success. And he followed that with: "You used to play chess, right? Do you play blind chess? You are white, make your first move." We proceeded to play about 25 moves until the new round was called. His position was clearly better, but he offered me a draw.

Only on the way home, it dawned on me that we actually had one of his books on the shelf...

Our paths did not cross for more than about half an hour, but it was one of the best half an hours of my life..

Harold, rest in peace,

From a one time bridge opponent that you must have forgotten ages ago

Rik

[Winstonm]

George Chambers

“Time Has Come Today” Chambers Brothers, 1967.

[Winstonm]

Maryland Rep. Elijah E. Cummings 68

[hrothgar]

Winstonm, on 2019-October-17, 06:35, said:

Maryland Rep. Elijah E. Cummings 68

One of the greats

[y66]

From Russell Berman at The Atlantic:

Quote

In the age of Donald Trump, even funerals are political.

Elijah Cummings and John McCain did not share a whole lot in common besides the profession of politics. They were of different races and political parties; they had greatly different life experiences; they lived on different ends of the country; and they even served on different sides of the Capitol.

But both lawmakers died during Trump’s presidency, and as such, they were both remembered in death for the roles they played in this tumultuous political era—as distinctly honorable men who stood up to a man who is not.

“There is nothing weak about kindness and compassion,” former President Barack Obama said this afternoon as he eulogized Cummings, the senior Democratic congressman who died last week at the age of 68. “There is nothing weak about looking out for others. There is nothing weak about being honorable. You are not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect.”

As Obama spoke, a crowd of thousands at the New Psalmist Baptist Church, in Cummings’s hometown of Baltimore, applauded knowingly and cheered. He riffed on the title “The Honorable,” which is given by default to people in elected office, affixed to their first and last names. “Elijah Cummings was honorable before he was elected to office,” Obama said. “There’s a difference.”

Read: Barack Obama’s eulogy for Elijah Cummings

Obama never uttered Trump’s name or directly referenced the current president. Nor did the other luminaries who eulogized Cummings this afternoon: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the congressman’s widow and his possible successor in the House.

But just as he was when McCain was laid to rest a year ago in Washington, D.C., Trump seemed a spectral presence at Cummings’s funeral—an object of implicit scorn in contrast with the deceased; a figure who was, in internet speak, subtweeted in speech after speech. Cummings died at the pinnacle of his power, 10 months after becoming chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and just as he was about to assume a prominent role in the impeachment inquiry into Trump.

“He stood against corrupt leadership, like King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,” said Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, comparing Cummings to his biblical namesake.

When her husband spoke, he observed with wonder how Cummings could befriend so many Republicans at a time of such intense partisanship.

“You can’t run a free society if you have to hate everybody you disagree with,” the former president said, as again the mourners cheered what they saw as a reference to the current one. Those in the pews included two of Trump’s most loyal congressional GOP allies, Representatives Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Jim Jordan of Ohio. Meadows was a close friend of Cummings, and Jordan sparred with him as the top Republican on the oversight panel.

Like McCain, whose service in Vietnam Trump denigrated, Cummings spent the last months of his life in the president’s rhetorical crosshairs. Trump called out Cummings’s beloved Baltimore as “a disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” and blamed the Democrat for the city’s struggles with crime and poverty. Trump didn’t attend Cummings’s funeral. Nor did he go to McCain’s. But his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, sat in the church last year as the late senator’s daughter Meghan McCain castigated their father without naming him. “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again,” she said, “because America was always great.”

Read: Elijah Cummings, reluctant partisan warrior

This afternoon, Cummings’s widow drew the sharpest contrast between her late husband and the president who attacked him. She began by acknowledging Obama and the Clintons in the front row. “You didn’t have any challenges like we do now,” Rockeymoore Cummings told Obama, drawing a laugh from the former president. She noted how Cummings was a fierce defender of Hillary Clinton against “very spurious claims” made by Republicans over the years. “Then he had to go on fighting for our democracy against very real corruption,” she added, as Clinton herself nodded along.

Rockeymoore Cummings’s voice rose as she described how, despite his “grace and dignity in public forums,” her husband was truly “hurt” by the attacks on him and his city. She said that although Cummings did not want a memorial service in the Capitol, where yesterday he became the first African American lawmaker to lie in state, she insisted that he be remembered with “the respect and the dignity that he deserved.”

“He was a man of integrity!” she thundered, as the mourners rose, cheering, to their feet. “Do you hear me?”

Rockeymoore Cummings was speaking to an audience who already knew well her husband’s integrity; in a service that stretched nearly four hours, it was the topic of just about every eulogy. But the attacks Cummings sustained from the president toward the end of his life seemed to demand that his core attributes be recalled with greater urgency, just as it was with McCain a year ago.

It’s yet another reminder of how broadly Trump has affected American public life in the past few years, his influence felt even in death and legacy. The president has changed how his rivals are mourned, even at funerals to which he was not invited.

[y66]

Gahan Wilson "whose outlandish, often ghoulish cartoons added a bizarrely humorous touch to Playboy, The New Yorker, National Lampoon and other publications in the era when magazines propelled the cultural conversation."

[y66]

William Ruckelshaus

Quote

A lawyer and political troubleshooter, Mr. Ruckelshaus twice headed the United States Environmental Protection Agency, as its founding administrator from 1970 to 1973 under Nixon, and from 1983 to 1985 under President Ronald Reagan. He won praise for laying the new agency’s foundations, and later for salvaging an E.P.A. that had strayed from its mission and lost the confidence of the public and Congress.

Mr. Ruckelshaus was a champion of America’s natural resources in his home state of Indiana; in Washington State, where he lived; and while serving on presidential commissions and conservation groups. But he also worked for big business, was not an environmentalist of the Greenpeace and Sierra Club stripe, and in 50 years of public and private service was hailed and vilified by partisans on both sides as he tried to balance economic and ecological interests.

For many Americans, however, the deeds of Mr. Ruckelshaus’s varied career were all but eclipsed by his role in the events of a single night in the autumn of 1973, as the political dirty tricks and cover-up conspiracies of the Watergate scandal closed in on his boss, the beleaguered President Nixon.

The scandal had already forced some of Nixon’s closest associates to resign and face criminal charges, and Mr. Ruckelshaus, with his E.P.A. successes and reputation for integrity, was named acting head of the F.B.I. in April 1973, replacing L. Patrick Gray III, who had allowed Nixon aides to examine Watergate files and had even destroyed evidence in the case.

Mr. Ruckelshaus was soon named the top deputy to Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson. And on a night of high drama, as the nation held its breath and constitutional government appeared to hang in the balance, Nixon ordered his top three Justice Department officials, one after another, to fire the Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, rather than comply with his subpoena for nine incriminating Oval Office tape recordings.

Mr. Cox’s complete independence had been guaranteed by Nixon and the attorney general during the prosecutor’s Senate confirmation hearings the previous May. He could be removed only for “cause” — some gross malfeasance in office. But none was even alleged. Nixon’s order to summarily dismiss Mr. Cox thus raised a most profound question: Was the president above the law?

Mr. Richardson and Mr. Ruckelshaus refused to fire Mr. Cox and resigned even as orders for their own dismissals were being issued by the White House. But Robert H. Bork, the United States solicitor general and the acting attorney general after the dismissal of his two superiors, carried out the presidential order, not only firing Mr. Cox but also abolishing the office of the special Watergate prosecutor.

The dismissals, all on Saturday, Oct. 20, labeled the “Saturday Night Massacre” by news media, set off a firestorm of protest across the country. Some 300,000 telegrams inundated Congress and the White House, mostly calling for Nixon’s resignation. The outcry was so ferocious that the White House said within days that it had decided to surrender the tape recordings after all.

Less than a month later, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Cox’s dismissal had been illegal and ordered him reinstated, but Mr. Cox indicated that he did not want the job back. After a protracted legal struggle, scores of tapes were eventually turned over to Mr. Cox’s successor, Leon Jaworski, and Mr. Nixon, facing certain impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, resigned in August 1974.

Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumed the presidency, Mr. Cox returned to teaching at Harvard, Mr. Richardson was named Mr. Ford’s commerce secretary in 1976, and Mr. Bork became a federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987 was defeated in the Senate. Mr. Ruckelshaus, who joined a Washington law firm and soon moved to Seattle, said he had no regrets.

“I thought what the president was doing was fundamentally wrong,” he told The New York Times years later. “I was convinced that Cox had only been doing what he had the authority to do; what was really of concern to the president and the White House was that he was too close. He hadn’t engaged in any extraordinary improprieties, quite the contrary.”

[y66]

Jack Merritt

[kenberg]

Paul Volker

[Cyberyeti]

Another voice of my past, Marie Fredriksson of Roxette died aged 61 https://www.youtube....h?v=k2C5TjS2sh4

[y66]

From Martin Wolf at FT:

Quote

“Paul Volcker is the greatest man I have known. He is endowed to the highest degree with what the Romans called virtus (virtue): moral courage, integrity, sagacity, prudence and devotion to the service of country.” Thus did I open my review of his memoir, Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government, published last year. As Hamlet said of his father, “He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.”

That book was Volcker’s counsel to the world. It embodied the former US Federal Reserve chairman’s virtues and his values. With his passing this week, we need to dwell on both, while recognising how different the world is today.

Volcker’s virtues are eternal. It is impossible to enjoy a stable polity without public servants of his quality and, as important, without a public who know they need public servants of this quality. In no other way can what the Romans called res publica (a republic) — literally, “the public thing” — be sustained. We rely on the marriage of ability to character. We forget that truth at our peril.

No less important are Volcker’s values. He believed in good government, international co-operation, fiscal discipline, sound money and finance that is a servant, not master, of the economy. This credo is as valid today as it was during his long life of public service.

Volcker joined those virtues and values in the great fight of his life: the battle to defeat inflation. It is often forgotten how hopeless that cause had seemed before he was appointed chairman of the US Federal Reserve by a brave Jimmy Carter in 1979. The struggle was hard and the costs high. Many suffered greatly. But the battle was won, ushering the long period of stable inflation that later generations now take for granted.

While Volcker won on inflation, he lost elsewhere. He was uncomfortable with the fiscal and financial policies of Ronald Reagan’s administration. He was duly replaced in 1987 by Alan Greenspan, far more in tune with the administration’s ideology. Volcker diverged most clearly from his successor on the virtues of liberalised finance. Indeed, he remarked in 2009: “The most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine.”

The 2008 financial crisis vindicated this longstanding scepticism. Out of it came the “Volcker rule”, which aimed to prohibit US banking institutions from proprietary trading. When I was a member of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010-11, Volcker came to talk to us about this proposal. We were not persuaded of its workability. But nobody could doubt the passion he brought to the cause of creating a more stable and useful financial system.

What, then, are Volcker’s legacies, apart from low inflation and an outstanding record of public service? He demonstrated the benefit of having independent central banks and — closely related but broader — of having first-class technocrats deliver on public mandates notwithstanding short-term pressures from politicians. These remain as relevant as ever. In our populist age, however, they are being challenged on both sides of the Atlantic.

In other respects, the world of today is almost the opposite of the one Volcker confronted, especially on monetary policy. In the first five decades after the second world war, the dominant monetary concerns were excess demand and inflation. Today, it is weak demand and deflation. In Volcker’s world, the job of monetary policy was politically difficult, but technically easy: to constrain demand. As one of his predecessors, William McChesney Martin, said, it was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going”. That required tightening monetary policy in well-known ways.

When demand is weak and inflation low, however, central banks must ease monetary policy. But expansionary policy is technically difficult once short-term interest rates reach zero. Central banks have to consider various unconventional alternatives: expansion of balance sheets via “quantitative easing”; negative interest rates; and what the monetarist Milton Friedman called “helicopter drops” of money to the public through direct payments or permanent monetary financing of fiscal deficits. Choosing from these alternatives is complex and contentious. Some options awaken strong political resistance, albeit not in the intense way that deliberately causing recessions, to curb inflation, once did.

The unpopularity is most obviously true for negative interest rates. People tend to be furious about the idea of being taxed on their bank deposits. But, if negative rates are not passed on to depositors, they act as a tax on banks. That is unpopular with a powerful lobby and, some also argue, economically damaging.

Low long-term interest rates undermine the solvency of pension funds and some insurance companies. High asset prices are condemned by many for increasing wealth inequality. Finally, direct financing of government can be seen as a licence to fiscal irresponsibility and a way to subvert central bank independence.

In tackling today’s challenges, the details of what Volcker did are irrelevant. But his lessons are not: do the right thing even if the right choice is rather less obvious today; do not put your trust in unbridled finance; and have courage. The world is a complex and surprising place. But these truths abide forever.

[y66]

Baba Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert.

From David Marchese's September 2019 interview at NYT:

Quote

For more than 50 years, Ram Dass has watched as other nontraditional spiritual leaders have come and gone while he has remained. He has been active since the early 1960s, back when he was still known as Richard Alpert and worked alongside his Harvard psychology department colleague Timothy Leary, researching the mind-altering effects of LSD and psilocybin and helping to kick off the psychedelic era. Later, as did many people before him, he ventured east, spending time in India as a disciple of the Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba. Upon his return, newly known as Ram Dass, he wrote the philosophically misty, stubbornly resonant Buddhist-Hindu-Christian mash-up “Be Here Now,” in which he extolled the now-commonplace, then-novel (to Western hippies, at least) idea that paying deep attention to the present moment — that is, mindfulness — is the best path to a meaningful life.

Published in 1971, that book, an early classic of New Age thinking, has sold around two million copies, according to his website; Ram Dass, who has since written a dozen other books, continues to find new readers via praise from the likes of Lena Dunham and the presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. The 88-year-old’s archived lectures have also found second lives as popular podcasts, and he has been the subject of multiple documentaries, including the life-spanning “Becoming Nobody,” which premieres on Sept. 6. “First I was a professor,” said Ram Dass, who in 1997 suffered a stroke that affected his speaking ability. “Then I was a psychedelic. Now I’m old. I’m an icon.” He smiled knowingly. “There are worse things to be.”

About that core message: I’ve read “Be Here Now” probably a half-dozen times. I’ve listened to countless lectures of yours and read a bunch of your other books. And I have to say that I still find it difficult to explain exactly what your philosophy is beyond the phrase “Be here now,” which is admittedly a very useful phrase. So while I have you: What is your philosophy? “Be here now” is: In each moment, go into the moment. Our minds take us back and forth in time. I teach a moment. And I teach that we identify with the ego. The ego is a mind warp, and most people don’t identify with their soul. They’re worried about excess meaning. The soul witnesses the ego and witnesses thoughts. “Be here now” gives people an opportunity to reidentify outside of their thinking-mind ego and into that thing that’s called the soul. It is the perspective from which we could live a life without being caught so much in fear. To reidentify there is to change your whole life.

[y66]

From Tyler Kepner at NYT:

Quote

The ultimate pitching achievement comes with no warning. For a while, even as a perfect game unfolds, nobody suspects a thing. On Oct. 8, 1956, the fifth game of the World Series was halfway over before the visiting team at Yankee Stadium realized that Don Larsen, of all people, had a chance.

“It was probably the end of the fifth inning that somebody on the bench said, ‘Do you know we haven’t had a base runner yet?’” said Carl Erskine, a Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher, over the phone this summer. “And everybody kind of woke up and said, ‘No, really?’

“So everybody started watching close, but we didn’t expect Larsen to beat us — and we never went into the game thinking, ‘This is the greatest pitcher that ever put on the uniform.’”

Larsen, who died on Wednesday at age 90, was hardly the greatest pitcher ever. He played for seven teams in 14 seasons, with 81 victories and 91 defeats. A year after his perfect game, he lost Game 7 of the World Series to the Milwaukee Braves.

Yet all these years later, Larsen’s 2-0 masterpiece for the Yankees in 1956 remains a singular phenomenon in baseball history. No pitcher has carried even a no-hitter into the ninth inning of a World Series game since; the closest, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, was Boston’s Jim Lonborg, who no-hit the St. Louis Cardinals for seven and two-thirds innings in Game 2 in 1967.

Larsen lived the rest of his life as a baseball legend, his name among the most hallowed in the history of the sport.

“I mean, it was ‘perfect game’ — you never even looked at his stats over his career,” Joe Torre, the Hall of Fame manager, said by phone on Thursday. “And a perfect game is one thing, but to do it in the World Series is certainly another level of excellence. It’s like, when you think of Ron Swoboda, you think of his catch in right-center field in 1969, diving with no chance to catch the ball — and he did. You look at his numbers and say, ‘O.K., nothing that’s startling.’ But when something happens in the World Series, you’re always going to hold it in high regard.”

Torre was in the stands for Larsen’s perfect game. He was 16 years old and had hoped to be watching his brother Frank, a rookie with the Braves, who had been beaten out by the Dodgers for the pennant. On the morning of the game, Torre showed his ticket to the principal at St. Francis Preparatory School in Brooklyn and got the rest of the day off. He does not remember who went with him that day, but he knows he sat in the upper deck between third base and the left-field foul pole.

“I remember that part because you remember your perspective of watching the game,” Torre said. “Mickey Mantle was sort of running in my direction when he caught the ball off Gil Hodges’s bat.”

Mantle’s catch was one of two close calls in the fifth inning; the other was a deep drive to right field by Sandy Amoros that hooked foul. The pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell batted last, and Torre recalled the plate umpire, Babe Pinelli, punching the air with his right fist for the final out. Larsen trotted casually off the mound until his catcher, Yogi Berra, vaulted into his arms.

“It’s funny, leaping into the pitcher’s arms is something I’d never done before,” Berra wrote for The New York Times in 1998. “Once I jumped on Bob Kuzava after he saved the 1952 World Series for us, but he had his back turned.”

Berra called Larsen “Ol’ Gooney Bird,” and said he sometimes had to work to keep him focused during games. News media reports of the perfect game played up Larsen’s personality; “Clown Prince ascends the throne,” said a headline in The Star-Ledger of Newark. Jimmy Cannon, the renowned Newsday columnist, called Larsen “a midnight kid who doesn’t miss many laughs.”

The Daily Mirror’s Arthur Richman — later a club executive who encouraged the Yankees to hire Torre — was friends with Larsen and went out with him the night before the perfect game. For years, the avuncular Richman would tell the story of how he urged Larsen to take it easy, just in case he pitched the next day.

“God love him,” Torre said, laughing. “I can just hear Arthur saying, ‘Donnie, Donnie, you should get some sleep, Donnie.’”

Larsen must have had a lot on his mind. The day of the perfect game, his estranged wife, Vivian, asked the State Supreme Court to hold up his World Series winnings in an alimony dispute. A court order over unpaid child support was said to have been in Larsen’s locker as he pitched; newspapers called him a playboy.

By the end of his career, though, Larsen had settled into a role as an elder statesman. He logged time with the Athletics, the White Sox, the Giants, the Astros, the Orioles and the Cubs. He faced the Yankees as a Giants reliever in the 1962 World Series, and helped mentor a young Jim Palmer with Baltimore three years later.

“He was a huge guy, very soft-spoken, a really nice man,” Palmer, the Hall of Fame pitcher, said by phone on Thursday, recalling a time when Manager Hank Bauer called Larsen into a game at Yankee Stadium, only to realize he had summoned the wrong pitcher.

“Nine years earlier he’d pitched the greatest game in the history of the World Series, and now he comes in and Hank says, ‘No I don’t want you, you’ve got to go back to the bullpen,’” Palmer said. “But he was the type of guy — it didn’t bother him. He was a gentle giant.”

Palmer starred on the mound in the 1970s, a decade in which no pitcher threw a perfect game. The feat has been accomplished only 23 times, and Larsen’s was the only one between 1922 (Charlie Robertson) and 1964 (Jim Bunning).

Two other Yankees — David Wells in 1998 and David Cone in 1999 — have done it, and Larsen had a connection to both. Larsen and Wells both attended Point Loma High School in San Diego, and Larsen threw the ceremonial first pitch to Berra on the day of Cone’s gem.

“Coney pitched his in July and Wells pitched his in May,” Torre said, “and if it was reversed, neither one of them probably would have done it, because Coney needed the warm weather to stay loose and Wells needed the cool weather to keep from getting exhausted. The stars have to be aligned, I guess.”

Seven Hall of Famers have pitched a perfect game, but so have seven pitchers with a sub-.500 career record. Larsen’s day stands out above all, a testament to the enchanting whims of the baseball gods.

“If somebody’s a baseball fan, you can explain to your child that on one autumn afternoon in Yankee Stadium, in under two and a half hours, Don Larsen, who would be 10 games under .500, would pitch the most memorable game in the history of the World Series,” Palmer said. “That’s what baseball’s all about.”

[mycroft]

-.-- -.-- --..

Farewell Neil. May that tag, one final time, give you the same welcoming feeling as always.

[y66]

Jim Lehrer

Quote

While best known for his anchor work, which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.

A low-key, courtly Texan who worked on Dallas newspapers in the 1960s and began his PBS career in the 1970s, Mr. Lehrer saw himself as “a print/word person at heart” and his program as a kind of newspaper for television, with high regard for balanced and objective reporting. He was an oasis of civility in a news media that thrived on excited headlines, gotcha questions and noisy confrontations.

“I have an old-fashioned view that news is not a commodity,” Mr. Lehrer told The American Journalism Review in 2001. “News is information that’s required in a democratic society, and Thomas Jefferson said a democracy is dependent on an informed citizenry. That sounds corny, but I don’t care whether it sounds corny or not. It’s the truth.”

[Cyberyeti]

Kobe Bryant, 41 in a helicopter crash

[barmar]

Cyberyeti, on 2020-January-26, 15:21, said:

Kobe Bryant, 41 in a helicopter crash

I didn't hear about it until I made my weekly call to Mom last night. She asked if I was watching the news, and I wondered what Trump did now. How morbid is it that I was relieved that it was "just" a celebrity death (along with his daughter and other passengers)?

[y66]

Pete Stark

Quote

As a policymaker, Mr. Stark was often ahead of his time: He was an early proponent of universal health care and a carbon tax, which would charge users of fossil fuels a fee based on carbon emissions.

While his constituents re-elected him repeatedly, he was less popular with his congressional colleagues, many of whom found him ill-tempered. He once challenged a colleague to a fistfight on the House floor. He called another a “fruitcake,” accused another of having several children out of wedlock and denounced still another as a “whore for the insurance industry,” a remark for which he apologized.

His tendency to mouth off limited his advancement in Congress. In 2010, Mr. Stark was positioned to become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, but his colleagues blocked him.

[y66]

Li Wenliang

Quote

Last week, Elsie Chen, a Times researcher working with our correspondents Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers, interviewed Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who was silenced after warning colleagues about the coronavirus in late December. On Friday, Dr. Li died from the virus, which he caught from a patient; he was hospitalized when Ms. Chen interviewed him on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, via the WeChat social media platform. These are edited and condensed excerpts from the interview.

When did you first realize that this new virus was highly contagious? It seemed that you hadn’t taken any precautions when you were infected.

I knew it when the patient I came in contact with infected her family, and I was infected right afterward. Thus I discovered it was highly contagious. The patient had no symptoms, so I got careless.

On Dec. 31, when you told people in the WeChat group about the SARS-like virus, did you do so because you had seen the high risk of human-to-human transmission?

I suspected that, and it’s always better to be cautious and take protective measures.

Why were you so suspicious at that point? Had you already received any news or heard anything?

Because there were already patients being treated under quarantine.

Was that at the end of December?

Yes.

Were there other doctors who shared the information and reminded others to protect themselves from this mysterious pneumonia?

There were discussions among our colleagues.

What was everybody talking about? How did they evaluate the situation at that point?

It was that SARS might come back. We needed to be ready for it mentally. Take protective measures.

Looking back at what has happened, do you think the situation would be very different now if the Wuhan government hadn’t stopped you from warning others and sharing the information? Do you think it would have been better if the information had been more public and transparent, for the public and for doctors?

If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier, I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.

How did you feel when the police accused you of spreading rumors?

The police believed this virus was not confirmed to be SARS. They believed I was spreading rumors. They asked me to acknowledge that I was at fault.

I felt I was being wronged, but I had to accept it. Obviously I had been acting out of good will. I felt very sad seeing so many people losing their loved ones.

Why did you decide to become a doctor? What made you proud to be one? Can you say anything about your family?

I thought it was a very stable job. Lately, patient-doctor relationships have soured. I am happy as long as my patients are satisfied with their treatment.

My older child is 4 years and 10 months old. The younger one is still unborn, due in June. I miss my family. I talk to them by video.

How long will it take you to recover? What do you plan to do afterward?

I started coughing on Jan. 10. It will take me another 15 days or so to recover. I will join medical workers in fighting the epidemic. That’s where my responsibilities lie.

[Cyberyeti]

Larry Tesler, the guy who invented copy/cut/paste

https://www.bbc.co.u...9kVFQOUhVleax5U