Recent Deaths

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[wjfox]

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^^^I think Dolly Parton was the ultimate futurist. She didn't just predict, she did a great deal to make the future. I suspect a lot of younger people today have a hard time understanding what I am saying. Partly because she helped transform society in ways that had little to nothing to do with new technology or dramatic ecological impacts. This was most evident in her contributions to the feminist movement. She didn't provide deep sociological studies like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Rather, with her music and acting appearances she took a more light-hearted approach. The song and movie by the same title Nine to Five comes to mind. In that movie she co-starred with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, actresses more readily identified with liberal causes. Perhaps it was that light-hearted approach that made her more universally loved, at least here in the United States.. She will be missed.

Here is more concerning her life: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -tribute/

I didn't realize she was such a philanthropist. Most notable for my theme that she was a futurist was her $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge Covid vaccine. "According to the New York Times, Dr. Mark Denison, who led the research, credited Parton’s donation with funding its critical early stages."

Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -tribute/

More on her literacy promotion: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/d ... -literacy

[wjfox]

Damn, another legend gone.

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Tim Curry, star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Stephen King’s It, dies aged 80

A prolific performer across stage, screen and TV, the actor starred in Legend, Clue and It, but will always be associated with the flamboyantly camp rock’n’roll musical in which he made his breakthrough

Wed 26 Aug 2026 16.47 BST

Tim Curry, the versatile performer of screen and stage, who made his name as the flamboyant Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, has died aged 80. Reports say Curry died at his home in Los Angeles.

Ironically, Curry’s best-known roles all required a considerable physical transformation, to the extent that he was unrecognisable in all of them. Frank-N-Furter, Rocky Horror’s deranged scientist, saw him daubed in garish makeup and wearing stockings and suspenders, for the stage show (which debuted in 1973) and the film adaptation (released in 1975). In the Ridley Scott-directed fantasy Legend (1985), he was equipped with giant horns and scarlet skin as the Lord of Darkness. And in 1990, Curry was transformed with full-face clown pancake to play Pennywise in the TV miniseries It, based on the Stephen King novel.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/a ... egend-film



Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Lorimar Television

[wjfox]

Scumbag. Rot in Hell.

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Convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Mladić dies aged 84

27 August 2026, 14:46 BST

Convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladić has died in a UN prison at The Hague aged 84.

He was jailed for life in 2017 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in 1992-95.

After the Bosnian war, he went on the run for 16 years until he was finally tracked down in rural Serbia in 2011 and put on trial in the Dutch city.

The sentence for the man known as the "Butcher of Bosnia" was upheld on appeal in 2021. He was being given palliative care in the hospital of the UN detention facility, where he died.

[...]

During the war his troops committed "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, besieged the main city of Sarajevo with the deaths of more than 10,000 people, and carried out the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ywxpryj95o



Reuters

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Wendell Berry, Writer and Activist Who Fought Corporate Takeover of U.S. Farming, Dies at 92
By September 1, 2026

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) The death of poet, activist, and conservationist Wendell Berry on Monday was called by one labor organizer “a loss of morality and clarity and compassion,” as admirers of Berry’s lifelong crusade to defend the environment honored his memory by sharing favorite poems and other works.

Berry died at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he spent decades writing about his farming the land, teaching, and writing about the need to fight “the concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands,” as he wrote in one of his best-known works, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

“The true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land,” wrote Berry in the essay collection, published in 1977.

He stressed that the “increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines” in the agricultural sector “is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance.”

The Unsettling of America was one of more than 50 works published by Berry, whose commitment to interdependent community-building, small farms, and the protection of nature was woven into his fiction, poems, and essays alike.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/wendell-berry

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Gloria Steinem, Feminist Icon and Founder of Ms. Magazine, Dies at 92
By Zoe Sottile and Chris Boyette
September 3, 2026

Introduction:

(CNN) Gloria Steinem, the American journalist and political activist who became the face of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has died at age 92, according to her verified Instagram account.

Steinem died Wednesday in New York City, “surrounded by some of the many who loved her,” the statement on social media said.

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the statement read.

Steinem was a feminist icon who spent the better part of a century advocating for women’s rights in the workplace, the right to abortion and sex education. Her name and face became almost synonymous with the fight for women’s rights. She continued to be a vocal proponent of feminism and other liberal causes, like anti-war activism, into her 90s.

She even coined the term “reproductive freedom,” according to an interview published in the 1981 oral biography book, “Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.”

Read more here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/03/us/glor ... ead-obit