Author Topic: 2021 Deathpool thread  (Read 72483 times)

njflex

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #100 on: February 01, 2021, 01:53:46 PM »
It seems like a lot of people end 2020 to 21 are passing no?

denarii

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #101 on: February 01, 2021, 01:58:37 PM »
covid clear out I guess

Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #102 on: February 01, 2021, 02:47:25 PM »
Rest In Peace Furious


denarii

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #103 on: February 02, 2021, 09:08:17 AM »
Covid strikes again, although 100 is a pretty good innings.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-55881753

Captain Sir Tom Moore has died with coronavirus.

The 100-year-old, who raised almost £33m for NHS charities, was taken to Bedford Hospital after requiring help with his breathing on Sunday.

His daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore said the family had "spent hours chatting to him" after he caught pneumonia. Last week he tested positive for Covid-19.

Buckingham Palace said the Queen was sending a private message of condolence to his family.

He was knighted by the Queen in July in a special ceremony at Windsor Castle.

joswift

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #104 on: February 02, 2021, 10:33:57 AM »
Covid strikes again, although 100 is a pretty good innings.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-55881753

Captain Sir Tom Moore has died with coronavirus.

The 100-year-old, who raised almost £33m for NHS charities, was taken to Bedford Hospital after requiring help with his breathing on Sunday.

His daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore said the family had "spent hours chatting to him" after he caught pneumonia. Last week he tested positive for Covid-19.

Buckingham Palace said the Queen was sending a private message of condolence to his family.

He was knighted by the Queen in July in a special ceremony at Windsor Castle.

Another taken too soon....

denarii

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #105 on: February 02, 2021, 01:53:18 PM »
He was 100 with pneumonia before gerrint Corona. Pretty frail.

Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #106 on: February 02, 2021, 07:22:42 PM »
R.I.P.
Hal Holbrook


njflex

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #107 on: February 02, 2021, 07:54:38 PM »

Moontrane

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #108 on: February 02, 2021, 09:10:32 PM »
Great actor

The man had a great run. 

Humble Narcissist

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #109 on: February 03, 2021, 04:43:57 AM »
The man had a great run.
He sure did.  He was in a ton of good movies.

Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #110 on: February 04, 2021, 07:09:14 PM »
Johannes Loima. Rest in peace forever. Thanks for everything.


harmankardon1

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #111 on: February 05, 2021, 05:49:35 AM »

Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #112 on: February 05, 2021, 06:06:47 PM »
Another fine actor gone.



From 'Sound of Music' to 'All the Money …,' Christopher Plummer was irreplaceable


Every great actor should be fortunate enough to become an internet meme in their 80s. Christopher Plummer, who died Friday at 91, experienced his own late-in-life social-media anointing at least twice over.

There was the oft-recurring GIF of Capt. von Trapp in “The Sound of Music,” Plummer’s best-known and most inescapable role, tearing a Third Reich flag in two — an image that has become handy Twitter shorthand for anti-neo-Nazi resistance over the past few years. That quick single shot is a marvelous bit of acting in itself: You can’t help but notice Plummer's ramrod-straight military-man posture or the tight-lipped expression playing on his handsome face, a grimace teetering on the edge of a smile. And then, of course, there are those two swift, satisfying rips right down the middle of the swastika. (He really puts his arms into it.)

Another Plummer meme caught fire in 2017, not long after news broke that in the wake of sexual-abuse allegations against Kevin Spacey, his scenes as billionaire J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World” would be completely reshot, with Plummer replacing him. It was an extraordinary down-to-the-wire decision, a major recasting made unprecedentedly close to the film’s release, and it turned this fact-based kidnapping drama into a kind of behind-the-scenes Hollywood escape thriller. Arguably more exciting than anything in the movie’s suspense-soaked narrative was the spectacle of two reliable old pros, Plummer and director Ridley Scott, working with an energy, speed and high-wire daring that artists half their age would be hard-pressed to muster.

From that point on, of course, that audacious and entirely successful stunt became a reliable online running gag. Suddenly, almost every plum role was in danger of becoming a Plummer role: Whoever needed replacing, for reasons scandalous or benign, Christopher Plummer, acting genius and octogenarian workhorse, was your man. Some at the time puzzled over the ethics of the “All the Money in the World” solution, the dubious ease with which a toxic figure could be erased from the frame, leaving behind no visible residue of scandal or guilt. The aesthetics, though, were beyond reproach: Plummer was, of course, magnificent in the movie. Magnificence by then had become his trademark. To watch him as Getty — a figure of reptilian malevolence and cunning, the hollowness of greed made flesh — was to wonder how anyone else could have been considered in the first place.

The Canadian-born Plummer began his career in theater and television, but his talent for scene-stealing villainy was clear in one of his earliest pictures, “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964), in which he made a madly eccentric Commodus, consumed by the blaze of his own political destruction. He was Jane Seymour’s domineering manager in “Somewhere in Time” (1981) and the Klingon General Chang (“Cry havoc!”) in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” (1991). His high voice and schoolmaster’s diction made him a uniquely mellifluous antagonist, especially in animated productions; not for nothing was he cast as the voice of the sinister Barnaby Crookedman in 1997’s direct-to-video “Babes in Toyland” and scheming explorer Charles Muntz in “Up” (2009).

But if Plummer possessed one of cinema’s most memorable smirks, he could also vanish into cooler, more complicated figures — men who, like Getty, were defined by a deep inner chill, a power to mesmerize the viewer without making any demands of their affection. He gave one of his finest performances in Michael Mann's “The Insider” (1999), eerily reproducing the famed mannerisms of veteran CBS News journalist Mike Wallace while also granting more private, explosive glimpses of a large and easily wounded ego. And although he was markedly warmer as Leo Tolstoy in “The Last Station,” maddening fits of self-absorption were also central to that grandly boisterous turn, which earned him the first of three Oscar nominations (all for best supporting actor).

That Plummer didn’t receive the motion picture academy’s formal recognition until he was 80 — well after winning two Tonys and two Emmys and more than 50 years after his big-screen debut in Sidney Lumet’s “Stage Struck” (1958) — is a testament to the Oscars’ history of screwy, often-arbitrary judgment. But it’s also a heartening sign of the resurgence Plummer experienced during what is often euphemistically described as a performer’s twilight years. (He remains the academy's oldest acting winner, at 82, for "Beginners," and its oldest acting nominee, at 88, for "All the Money in the World.") You could say he finally hit his stride, though I suspect it was really the other way around; it was the industry, perhaps even the audience, that at last found its footing, that properly appreciated him for the treasure he’d been all along.

Plummer won the Oscar and a raft of other valedictory prizes for his deeply felt performance in Mike Mills’ memory piece “Beginners” (2011), a movie about the potential vibrancy and vitality of old age. Playing a lonely father and widower who comes out as gay at the age of 75, fully embracing a life of new loves, friendships and heartaches, Plummer did some of the loveliest, most nakedly emotional work of his career. It was a beautiful change of pace, though the signature rascally wit was still very much in evidence, the impishness and irascibility that made him such an ideal fit for “Knives Out” (2019), one of his last major films. Who better suited to play a wily multimillionaire with a steel-trap mind, a twinkle in his eyes and an unexpectedly tender heart — a scoundrel and a softie rolled into one?

That wasn’t the first time that Plummer played a wealthy paterfamilias who regards his many offspring with frosty contempt. Capt. von Trapp comes around in the end, of course, and apparently, Plummer did eventually, though it took him awhile. Much has been reported over the years about how “The Sound of Music” was very far from one of his favorite things, to the point where Plummer may well have wished that he could have been erased and replaced (though not by himself). Stories of his grumpiness on the set are legion: his dislike of “Edelweiss,” his initial dislike of Julie Andrews (they eventually became close friends) and his complaints about having to carry Kym Karath, the actress who played the young Gretl von Trapp, during the movie’s Alps-crossing finale. (A lighter double was used instead.)

Not to suggest that Plummer had no pride in the project, or at least in his own work: The director, Robert Wise, spoke later in interviews about how delicately Plummer had to be persuaded to have his singing dubbed in the movie because his voice — though one of his great gifts as an actor — wasn’t up to snuff musically. In later years, Plummer responded to questions about “The Sound of Music” with amused resignation, grudgingly accepting that his legacy was forever tied to one of the biggest and most beloved cash cows in Hollywood history, doubtless realizing it would be the first title mentioned in obituaries and appreciations like this one.

In any case, as Andrews and others pointed out years later, Plummer’s utter contempt for the material could only have improved his performance. “The Sound of Music” — or “The Sound of Mucus,” as he legendarily called it — is total treacle, as many of us who love it unabashedly and watch it semi-religiously have long acknowledged. And Plummer’s aloofness, his disdain for the movie’s sugary sentimentality, doesn’t just match his character’s own initial hardness of heart. It dovetails with the audience’s own initial skepticism, at least up to a point: Roll your eyes at it if you must, but you, like Capt. von Trapp, will ultimately be worn down, steamrolled by the movie's uplift offensive.

“The Sound of Music” overshadowed Plummer’s screen work for years , despite bright spots like “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975), in which he played a memorably mustachioed Rudyard Kipling. It also ensured his big-screen immortality. Capt. von Trapp's defiance of Hitler made him an instantly iconic hero (no wonder Plummer preferred his villains), while his immaculate tailoring and disciplinarian temperament made him the most wholesome of sex symbols. To watch the movie again — and you know you will, sooner than you think — is to glimpse a quality evident in so many of Plummer’s great performances: a disarming sense of mischief, an ability to fully inhabit the material and stand, with a wink, outside it. He was an actor to whom you never wanted to sing, “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehn, goodbye” — any more than he wanted to hear it.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/from-sound-of-music-to-all-the-money-christopher-plummer-was-irreplaceable/ar-BB1dr3Xp?ocid=msedgdhp

Moontrane

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #113 on: February 05, 2021, 06:16:39 PM »
Another fine actor gone.



Neat film, great acting.


Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #114 on: February 05, 2021, 07:30:07 PM »
Mike Henry Dies: USC Footballer, LA Ram, Played ‘Tarzan’ And ‘Junior’ In ‘Smokey And The Bandit’, Was 84

Mike Henry, a USC and NFL linebacker and later an actor in Tarzan movies of the 1960s and the Smokey and the Bandit films, has died.

Henry died at age 84 in Burbank, Calif. on January 8 from chronic traumatic encephalopathy and Parkinson’s disease, according to social media posts. 

Henry played football for the University of Southern California and was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1958. He moved on to the Los Angeles Rams in 1962 and was noticed by a Warner Bros. producer. subsequently He was cast as Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, in three films: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), Tarzan and the Great River (1967), and Tarzan and the Jungle Boy (1968).

His run as the jungle lord ended after being bitten by a chimpanzee while filming.

Henry segued into another franchise in 1977, playing Junior, the son of Jackie Gleason’s Sheriff Buford T. Justice, in Smokey and the Bandit. He reprised the role in the film’s 1981 and 1983 sequels.

Among Henry’s other film roles were appearances in Skyjacked (1972), Soylent Green (1973) and The Longest Yard (1974). His TV credits included roles on M*A*S*H, General Hospital and Fantasy Island.

No information was immediately available on survivors or a memorial service.



https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/mike-henry-dies-usc-footballer-la-ram-played-tarzan-and-junior-in-smokey-and-the-bandit-was-84/ar-BB1dr77Q?ocid=msedgdhp

Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #115 on: February 05, 2021, 07:43:07 PM »
Remembering Robb Webb, longtime voice of 60 Minutes

The name Robb Webb might not be familiar to 60 Minutes viewers, but his voice almost certainly is.




Beginning in the mid-1990s, Robb Webb's warm baritone voice greeted 60 Minutes viewers to inform them what to tune in for on our Sunday evening broadcast. Webb was the distinguished voice of 60 Minutes and the "CBS Evening News" during a long and storied career as a voice artist.

Nelson Robinette "Robb" Webb died this week in New York City, from complications related to COVID-19. A native of Whitesburg, Kentucky, Webb was 82 years old.

In addition to his high-profile voice roles at CBS News, Webb was widely known for his television commercial work, including DirecTV's notable "Get Rid of Cable" campaign. According to his family, Webb provided the voiceovers for thousands of TV spots.

"Robb Webb's voice made people stop in their tracks, the same way the 60 Minutes stopwatch does," 60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens said. "Deep, warm and with just enough authority, Robb's voice alerted millions of Americans every week as to what 60 Minutes reporters were up to. We were all admirers of his work and very proud to be his colleague. Robb Webb was a gentleman and consummate professional."

Robb Webb is survived by his wife, Pat DeRousie-Webb of New York City, his daughter Allison (Donald) Willcox, grandson Michael Willcox and granddaughter Sara Willcox of Annandale, Virginia. Webb's family has noted to 60 Minutes that donations in his memory be made to the The Actor's Fund.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/remembering-robb-webb-longtime-voice-of-60-minutes/ar-BB1dqjNx?ocid=msedgdhp

evacnam

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #116 on: February 06, 2021, 11:22:39 AM »
Shizzo's mom

Humble Narcissist

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #117 on: February 06, 2021, 12:22:15 PM »

Taffin

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #118 on: February 06, 2021, 01:14:34 PM »
Shizzo's mom

 ;D

Thought it - this is the Thunder Dome after all - but lacked the testicular fortitude to post it

T

evacnam

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #119 on: February 06, 2021, 01:19:13 PM »
;D

Thought it - this is the Thunder Dome after all - but lacked the testicular fortitude to post it
oh we all thought it, you know that  :D

Walter Sobchak

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #120 on: February 06, 2021, 05:31:39 PM »
I think Leon Spinks passed away today.

Moontrane

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #121 on: February 06, 2021, 06:26:17 PM »
I think Leon Spinks passed away today.

All he wanted for Christmas were his two front teeth.

(Too soon?)

evacnam

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #122 on: February 06, 2021, 06:27:52 PM »
All he wanted for Christmas were his two front teeth.

(Too soon?)

7 seconds post mortem isnt too soon on getbig

Gregzs

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #123 on: February 07, 2021, 01:48:18 PM »
George P. Shultz, Influential Cabinet Official Under Nixon and Reagan, Dies at 100

George P. Shultz, who presided with a steady hand over the beginning of the end of the Cold War as President Ronald Reagan’s often embattled secretary of state, died on Saturday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 100.

His death was announced by the Hoover Institution, where he was a distinguished fellow. He was also professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Mr. Shultz, who had served Republican presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower, moved to California after leaving Washington in January 1989. He continued writing and speaking on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to climate change into his late 90s, expressing concern about America’s direction.

“Right now we’re not leading the world,” he told an interviewer in March 2020. “We’re withdrawing from it.”

He carried a weighty résumé into the Reagan White House, with stints as secretary of labor, budget director and secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon. He had emerged from the wars of Watergate with his reputation unscathed, having shown a respect for the rule of law all too rare in that era. At the helm of the Treasury, he had drawn Nixon’s wrath for resisting the president’s demands to use the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon against the president’s political enemies.

As secretary of state for six and a half years, Mr. Shultz was widely regarded as a voice of reason in the Reagan administration as it tore itself asunder over the conduct of American foreign policy. He described those struggles as “a kind of guerrilla warfare,” a fierce and ceaseless combat among the leaders of national security.

He fought “a battle royal” in his quest to get out the facts, as he later testified to Congress during the Iran-contra affair. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Casey, followed his own foreign policy in secret, and the State Department and the Pentagon constantly clashed over the use of American military force. Estranged from the White House, Mr. Shultz threatened to resign three times.

Mr. Shultz was summoned to Camp David and handed the wheel of American foreign policy in June 1982. Initially deemed too politically moderate by Reagan’s advisers, he had been passed over for the post of secretary of state the previous year. (The position had gone to Alexander M. Haig Jr., the mercurial and combative general who lasted barely 18 months before he abruptly left office amid fierce disputes over the direction of diplomacy and the projection of American power.)

The Middle East was exploding, the United States was underwriting covert warfare in Central America, and relations with the Soviet Union were at rock bottom when Mr. Shultz became the 60th secretary of state.

Moscow and Washington had not spoken for years; nuclear tensions escalated and hit a peak during his first months in office. The hard work of replacing fear and hatred with a measure of trust and confidence took place in more than 30 meetings with Mr. Shultz and the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, between 1985 and 1988. The Soviets saw Mr. Shultz as their key interlocutor; in private, they called him the prime minister of the United States.



Continuous meetings between Mr. Shultz and Mr. Shevardnadze helped ease the tensions between the superpowers and paved the way for the most sweeping arms control agreement of the Cold War, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Ratified in June 1988, it banned land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and missile launchers with ranges of up to 3,420 miles. Within three years the two nations had eliminated 2,692 missiles and started a decade of verification inspections.

The treaty remained in force until August 2019, when President Donald J. Trump scrapped it, contending that Russia had broken the accord by developing a new cruise missile.

Almost alone among the members of the Reagan team, Mr. Shultz had seen early on that the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and his allies in Moscow were different from their predecessors. The rest of the national security team, and especially Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger (known as Cap), had scoffed at the idea that the Kremlin could change its tune.

“Many people in Washington said: ‘There is nothing different, these are just personalities. Nothing can be changed,’” Mr. Shultz recounted in an oral history of the Reagan administration. “That was the C.I.A. view; that was Cap’s view; that was the view of all the hard-liners.”

“They were terribly wrong,” he added.

The world seemed on the verge of a lasting peace when he left office; the Berlin Wall still stood, but not for long. “It is fair to say that the Cold War ended during the Reagan years,” Mr. Shultz wrote in his 1993 memoir, “Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State.” The easing of four decades of grinding tension changed the global landscape. There would be fewer nuclear weapons pointed at great cities, fewer proxy wars in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

But a lethal force was rising in Afghanistan, where American-supplied weapons in the hands of Afghan rebels killed Soviet occupying forces throughout the 1980s. Both Moscow and Washington had poured billions of dollars into the fight, and both sides continued to support rival Afghan factions after the Soviets pulled out in February 1989.

“We assert confidently our right to supply our friends in Afghanistan as we see the need to do so,” Mr. Shultz announced in April 1988. American arms had helped empower a generation of holy warriors who had bled the Red Army, but who would eventually shelter and support the Qaeda terrorists who struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Strategies Against Terror

The United States was hit by terrorist attacks repeatedly in the Reagan years; the worst was the October 1983 suicide bombing of the Marine Corps headquarters at the Beirut International Airport that killed 241 Americans. They had been sent to Lebanon as peacekeepers while the United States tried and failed to broker a deal among the leaders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Mr. Shultz had proposed a new strategy of counterterrorism — “preventive or pre-emptive actions against terrorists before they strike,” as he said in a June 1984 speech. The idea won only muted support at the time, but it became a tenet of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

Mr. Shultz decisively lost the battle for control of foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. The White House, the National Security Council and the C.I.A. believed that the rise of a left-wing government in Nicaragua foreshadowed a chain reaction that could inflame all of Central America. They chose to fight back through covert action, secret paramilitary operations and support for a counterrevolutionary force, the contras. Congress cut off aid to the rebels, but secret operations to support them continued apace.

Reagan’s national security adviser, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, and Mr. Casey, the C.I.A. chief, oversaw the secret sale of arms to Iran as ransom for American hostages held in Lebanon. Both men knew that millions of dollars in profits from the arms sales were being channeled covertly to the Nicaraguan rebels, in defiance of the congressional ban.

Mr. Shultz had been kept in the dark about secret presidential directives authorizing the trading of arms for hostages. Chagrined and outraged, he denounced the secret dealings after they were revealed in November 1986, directly challenging Reagan. He came close to losing his job. But alone among the senior members of the Reagan team, he emerged untarnished after the Iran-contra affair unraveled.

The arms-for-hostages deal was “totally outside the system of government that we live by,” Mr. Shultz later told Congress. “I don’t think desirable ends justify means of lying, deceiving, of doing things that are outside our constitutional processes.”

Mr. Shultz knew the consequences of criminal acts and cover-ups. He had lived through Watergate.

On the secretly recorded White House tapes, Nixon railed about Mr. Shultz’s reluctance to use the I.R.S. to investigate and intimidate hundreds of people on the president’s so-called enemies list.

“He didn’t get secretary of the Treasury because he has nice blue eyes,” Nixon said. “It was a goddamn favor to get him that job.”

Nixon named Mr. Shultz labor secretary in January 1969, a post he held for 18 months until he took over the newly formed White House Office of Management and Budget in July 1970. His deputy there was Mr. Weinberger, whose zeal to carry out the president’s demands to cut federal spending earned him the nickname “Cap the Knife.”

“Caspar Weinberger was noted as a big budget cutter,” Mr. Shultz said in an oral history of the Nixon administration. “Nixon railed against the C.I.A. and their lousy intelligence, and said, ‘Cap, I want you to cut the C.I.A.’s budget to one-third its present size.’ Cap would light up like a Christmas tree. Then Nixon said: ‘No. Make it one-half its present size.’ Then we’d leave the meeting, and Cap would be very excited, and I would say: ‘Cap, relax. He’s just showboating.’”

After two years at the budget office, Mr. Shultz became Treasury secretary in June 1972. The previous year, Nixon unilaterally made the dollar inconvertible to gold. That forced the rest of the world to move from a system of fixed rates of exchange for national currencies to a flexible system. Exchange rates ceased to be the way in which governments made monetary policy. Mr. Shultz traveled the world trying to make sure the dollar remained almighty.

He quit the Nixon administration in May 1974, three months before the president resigned in disgrace, the last of Nixon’s original cabinet members to depart. Before his death, he was the oldest surviving member of Nixon’s inner circle and, along with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, among the last.

After 25 years in academia and government, Mr. Shultz joined the Bechtel Corporation (now Bechtel Group), one of the world’s biggest engineering and construction companies, serving as its president from 1974 to 1982. He was paid nearly $600,000 a year (about $2 million in today’s money) to run its global and domestic operations, which included the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Washington Metro subway, King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and much of the infrastructure of the Saudi government.

Throughout his years in power in Washington, Mr. Shultz tried to keep one secret out of print: that he had a tiger tattoo on his posterior, a legacy of his undergraduate days at Princeton University. When queried about the tattoo, Phyllis Oakley, a State Department spokeswoman at the time, replied, “I am not in a position to comment.”

Princeton, Then the Pacific

George Pratt Shultz was born in Manhattan on Dec. 13, 1920, the only child of the former Margaret Lennox Pratt and Birl E. Shultz, an official with the New York Stock Exchange. He grew up in Englewood, N.J., and entered Princeton in the fall of 1938.

In his senior year in 1941, he was majoring in economics when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. He joined the Marines after graduation and saw combat in the Pacific. He joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after earning his doctorate in industrial relations there in 1949. His field was labor economics.

In 1955, he took a year’s leave to serve as a senior staff member of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers, under its chairman, Arthur F. Burns, who later led the Federal Reserve Board.

Starting in 1957, Mr. Shultz taught at the University of Chicago, where he was dean of its business school from 1962 to 1968. That year he took a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a wooded retreat for academics in Stanford. He returned to Stanford after leaving public office and receiving in 1989 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Over the next three decades he wrote for academic journals and op-ed pages.

His most recent book, published in the fall, was “A Hinge of History,” written with James Timbie, a longtime State Department adviser. In the book, Mr. Shultz argued that the world is at a pivot point in history, much like the one it reached at the end of World War II, requiring international cooperation in grappling with an era that will bring fundamental changes in education, migration, national security, technology, economics and democratization.

Mr. Shultz was a Marine when he met his future wife of nearly 50 years, Helena M. O’Brien, known as Obie. He was on a rest-and-recreation trip to Kauai, Hawaii, where she was an Army nurse. She died in 1995.

In 1997, he married Charlotte Smith Mailliard Swig, San Francisco’s chief of protocol.The high-society ceremony was held in the city’s Grace Cathedral. He wore black tie with red, white and blue studs of rubies, diamonds and sapphire, and sported a tiger orchid boutonniere.

His survivors include his wife; three daughters from his first marriage, Margaret Ann Shylt Tilsworth, Kathleen Pratt Shultz Jorgensen and Barbara Lennox Shultz White; two sons from his first marriage, Peter and Alexander; 11 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

The only scandal that touched Mr. Shultz’s personal life began to erupt in 2015. For four years, he had been a member of the board of directors of Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up founded by Elizabeth Holmes, a young college dropout who claimed to have invented a revolutionary new blood-testing system. His enthusiastic support drew power brokers to the board, including Mr. Kissinger and James Mattis, the retired Marine general who would become President Trump’s defense secretary.

Theranos was valued at $9 billion before whistle-blowers inside the company began talking to a Wall Street Journal reporter, saying the technology did not work as promised. The insiders included Mr. Shultz’s grandson, Tyler Shultz, and the elder statesman pressured him to stay silent.

It was not until Theranos collapsed in 2018 and its founders faced indictment on fraud charges that Mr. Shultz finally acknowledged the “troubling practices” at Theranos, saying in a public statement that his grandson had “felt personally threatened” by their confrontation “and believed that I had placed allegiance to the company over allegiance to higher values and our family.”

A lifelong Republican, Mr. Shultz largely stayed out of the political fray after leaving Washington. But he refused to publicly endorse Mr. Trump in 2016 and in 2020, adding that he did not back his Democratic opponents, either. In an interview with The New York Times in October, however, he offered no criticism of Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic challenger at the time. The two had worked together collegially when Mr. Shultz was secretary of state and Mr. Biden was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Shultz said he had recently teased Mr. Biden, who was 77 at the time, telling him, “From my standpoint, you’re a promising young man.”

A Legacy Undone

Mr. Shultz lived long enough to see his most lasting legacy from the Reagan years come largely undone.

The arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union were bristling with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons when he became secretary of state. Fears of Armageddon approached an all-time high. In June 1983, General Secretary Yuri Andropov warned a former American ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, that the two nations were nearing “the dangerous ‘red line’” of nuclear war.

“I don’t think the Soviets were crying wolf,” Robert M. Gates, the C.I.A.’s top Soviet analyst at the time and later the secretary of defense, observed a quarter of a century later. “They may not have believed a NATO attack was imminent in November 1983, but they did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous.”

Washington and Moscow had been preparing for World War III since the dawn of the nuclear age. They also had been negotiating a strategic arms limitation treaty since 1969. An agreement signed in 1979 would have reduced both sides’ nuclear arsenals substantially. But after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan that year, the Senate never ratified it.

Mr. Shultz’s crowning arms-control achievement was the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and he was dismayed when President Trump scrapped it in 2019.

“Withdrawing from the I.N.F. treaty was a giant mistake,” Mr. Shultz said in the October interview with The Times. “You lose not only the agreement itself, but you lose all those verification provisions that we worked so hard on.”

Mr. Shultz and Mr. Gorbachev had argued to no avail in a Washington Post op-ed article in 2018 that abandoning the treaty “would be a step toward a new arms race, undermining strategic stability and increasing the threat of miscalculation or technical failure leading to an immensely destructive war.”

Mr. Shultz agonized over that threat. “We desperately need to have a discussion with Russia about this,” he told an interviewer in November 2019. “There is too much loose talk about not just having nuclear weapons, but using them,” he said.

“People have forgotten their power. In my day, I remember nuclear weapons. We knew what they could do. It was very vividly wrong.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/george-p-shultz-influential-cabinet-official-under-nixon-and-reagan-dies-at-100/ar-BB1dtyJl?ocid=msedgdhp

Obvious Gimmick

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Re: 2021 Deathpool thread
« Reply #124 on: February 08, 2021, 06:38:13 PM »
Billy Brown -- the Brown family patriarch featured in 12 seasons of the hit series "Alaskan Bush People" -- has died.

Billy died Sunday following a seizure. His son, Bear, wrote on Instagram the family is "heartbroken to announce that our beloved patriarch Billy Brown passed away last night after suffering from a seizure."   



Weird family. I suspect mostly reality bullshit. But RIP nonetheless