JustPassingThrough

They wouldn't be treating it like this if a recovery were even remotely expected. Miracles do happen, but it's clear that her condition took a very sudden and extremely dramatic turn for the worse over the last day or so that can't be easily remedied. The Palace isn't in the business of putting out statements like the one they did unless they're trying to prepare the public. On a side note, I do wonder what in particular did happen? There's been much talk of circulatory issues, and I think the suggestion someone made yesterday (so about 20 pages ago) that she had a TIA last year is very plausible. Perhaps she had a more damaging stroke?

At a rally two days ago, he appeared to believe that a dinner he held at the White House in 2019 happened "last week": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-mark-zuckerberg-weirdo-b2159532.html

And the other four were also in series of two that happened days apart. Looking through previous years on the list, it’s not unheard of for there to be scattered clusters of deaths like this for whatever reason, but 2022 has been a really pronounced example of it.

It's a quote from the new interview where he says that he wants to return to Britain because he doesn't want to die and be buried in the US.

A very long profile about the end of her show in The Hollywood Reporter. My personal opinion of her aside, the article paints a very troubling picture. I honestly found it depressing to read at points, though I'll share what stuck out to me: Executives held a meeting with her in September 2021 about whether she was well enough to come back to her show. They arrived early and she seemed fine, but as soon as the time came to start, the meeting fell apart within three minutes because she suddenly had no idea what was going on. While her histories with addiction and Grave's disease are well known, she's had many other health problems that have led to severe cognitive impairment, and it's apparently still not clear what's causing them. Executives say that they had to tell her multiple times that her show was being cancelled and she was not coming back to TV. I think some of this could have been denial early on. But after a point it seems that she genuinely did not remember any of the previous conversations. This continued up until she saw a promo for the final episode of the show, and was apparently completely shocked about it even though she had been told multiple times over the last several months it was coming. There's a general consensus for those around her that she is very much not well enough to return to broadcasting, and that she absolutely shouldn't have done the interviews that she has.

NYT actually went with this as the lead photo on their obit:

I was going to say some of both, but the more I look into this the more it just seems like miscommunication: his wife believed that he had died this morning and told this to his management team. The editor's note the NYT ran says that they used the Facebook post as confirmation, but CNN's article on Dow says that his spokespeople were sending out his death announcement to media outlets. I know the NYT has at least a stated policy of explicitly saying who they got direct confirmation of someone’s death from (family member/rep/etc), but even if they had for Dow instead of just using the FB post, I don’t think that it would have changed anything in this case. The people they would have sought confirmation from thought he had died.

Awful day for the Ravens.

I'd say a good number of Americans know of EastEnders, but probably not much more than the title and the genre. In June Brown's New York Times obit, for example, the show itself goes fairly well unexplained. But the actual length of the article is nowhere near as extensive as the ones she's gotten in the British newspapers. It appearing the day after the announcement of her death also suggests they didn't have a prewritten one on file for her, which again is a pretty major contrast to the UK coverage.

Yes, I remember seeing a video of him speaking recently and noticing how healthy he seemed, especially in comparison to some other members of Congress around his age. Definitely felt like this came out of nowhere (relatively speaking for someone nearing 90).

Doesn't appear so. The most recent comments I can find from him are in this article, for a speech he pre-recorded on February 20th for a conference this past week.

Guessing a reference to this?

However, I would not put such a reaction past Gary Johnson:

No, they didn't. That isn't a request for Biden to actually send in troops right now. It's a request that should the situation hypothetically arise, it should be subject to congressional approval first, which is, of course, something that U.S. presidents in the last half-century haven't been particularly keen on doing. Looking at some of the signatories on that letter, I can't imagine some of them endorsing intervention anywhere under anything except the most dire circumstances.

Last poll I can find was conducted before the invasion, but shows that 26% believe that the US should take a "major role", 52% think the US should play a "minor role", and 22% want no role at all: https://apnorc.org/projects/americas-role-in-the-russia-and-ukraine-situation/ Of course, how one imagines minor and major roles is, to put it lightly, imprecise. But that hardly screams "public mandate for troops on the ground!" to me, and I can't see that changing barring something unforeseeable, even for this conflict.

The news first leaking to a random gossip blog in a different country is about as likely as it first leaking to that WhatsApp group chat that had a dick pic as the avatar.

There was a video that was posted online of her last week. People magazine makes a big point, maybe too big, about how in the clip, she repeatedly gives her age as 56, though she is 57. Either this is a misspeak (as her publicist says), she is just lying about her age (by only one year?), or this is an older video and her team is posting it to downplay concerns about her health. But the article also points out that there's a moment where she talks about where her mother lives, present tense, even though she died in 2020.

Terry Teachout (wiki), the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, has died aged 65: https://www.wsj.com/articles/terry-teachout-wall-street-journal-drama-critic-dies-at-age-65-11642115600 (paywalled beyond first paragraph) Don't subscribe to the Journal so I didn't read his reviews, but I've read some of his writing elsewhere, and heard him on various podcasts and other formats over the years, and he always seemed genuinely personable and well-informed.

Yeah, there aren't really any foreseeable political risks to the party if Feinstein were to step down. What's keeping her there is stubbornness, and the fact that she seems to be the only one in her orbit who doesn't realize how bad things have gotten. The leaks from her staff (regarding her apparent memory loss/cognitive decline) have been brutal over the last couple of years. And when her office pre-emptively filed papers to run for re-election the other year, which is often just done for fundraising purposes, it was very telling that her staff practically tripped over themselves to clarify "this doesn't mean she's actually running again!"

February 7th

Looks like the last time someone on the DL died this close to the end of the year was Luise Rainer, who died on December 30, 2014: https://deathlist.net/lists/2014

And that article has confirmation from her agent, so I think that dispels any lingering doubts. RIP.

Her son, Samuel West, has also done a new interview last week where he talks about her: https://twitter.com/exitthelemming/status/1465643316373041152/photo/1 He says that her personality really isn't there anymore and he doesn't know how much new information she takes in (for example, he's not sure how much she really comprehends about the pandemic/lockdown). But she's still in a good mood most of the time and, as he puts it, recognizes him and at least knows that he has two children of his own. Seems like about the same as it's been over the last couple of years, based on his previous comments.

That whole episode with the Telegraph reminds me of a story I heard about the reason the New York Times adopted the policy of always including a sentence in their obits mentioning how they've confirmed the death, like from a family member or a spokesperson: apparently, some years ago, they got caught up running a premature obit after only hearing reports from the death from another news outlet -- the Telegraph. I have no great love for either newspaper in most respects, but I do think it's a sensible policy.

December 26th