Melissa Swenka

The "Room With A View" actor and another hiker, Bob Gregory, are both missing as dangerous winter weather conditions hit the San Gabriel Mountains.

Didion will long be remembered for her award-winning novels, memoirs and essays.

The singer-songwriter was also a pioneer in music video.

Bestselling novelist Howard Allen Frances O’Brien Rice (b.1941), known as Anne Rice, passed away on Saturday, December 11, at the age of 80. She was most known for her thirteen-book-plus Vampire Chronicles series, beginning with Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976 by Knopf. The series is often credited with bringing vampires and gothic horror back into vogue in popular culture. Its most recent installment was Blood Communion in 2018. Rice wrote well over thirty novels in her lifetime.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in creative writing. The Witching Hour (1990) received a Locus Award for Best Horror/Dark Fantasy novel, and she received the 1994 World Horror Grandmaster Award and the 2004 Bram Stoker Award for life achievement.

During her extensive career, Rice also wrote erotica as Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure, including 1985’s Exit to Eden. Under her own name, she wrote memoir, historical fiction novels The Feast of All Saints and Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt among others, and several gothic horror novels. Multiple adaptations of her work have been produced or optioned, including movies, television miniseries, comics, and a 2006 Broadway musical, Lestat.

Rice’s love for her hometown of New Orleans and its paranormal reputation, along with her Roman Catholic upbringing, were strong influences on her work. Rice is survived by her son and sometimes co-writer, Christopher Rice. Book three of the Ramses the Damned series, which they wrote together, is due out next year.

SFWA President Jeffe Kennedy had the following to say on Rice’s passing, “Anne Rice’s books were hugely influential, on me as a person and as a writer, and also on the entire genre. Her stories broke genre boundaries and explored themes few authors dared to bring into the light at that time. I’m heartbroken by this loss, for myself and for her son, Christopher.”

The post In Memoriam – Anne Rice appeared first on SFWA.

A Kansas City school district had prohibited the boy, whose name has not been released, from using bathrooms in line with his gender identity.

Self-help won't fix COVID. Here’s what to do when all the pandemic mental health advice feels frivolous.

bell hooks, 69, author and feminist critic, died of renal failure on December 15 at her home in Berea, KY. She was the author of more than 30 books on gender and race, including Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity.

The post Obituary: bell hooks appeared first on Publishers Lunch.

“Over time, individuals who continued consuming cannabis within this longitudinal study reported lower pain severity and pain interference scores, as well as improved quality of life and general health symptoms scores."

The post Study: Nearly Half of Medical Cannabis Users Cease Using Opioids for Pain After Twelve Months appeared first on NORML.

Ned Price — the agency's first openly gay spokesman, who was appointed by President Joe Biden — made the announcement on Friday afternoon.

Longtime talk show host and newsman Larry King has died of complications from COVID-19 at age 87 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, his company announced on social media Saturday morning.

pic.twitter.com/x0Hl0X6vqU

— Larry King (@kingsthings) January 23, 2021

Said the statement: “For 63 years an across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry’s many thousands of interview, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster. Additionally, while it was his name appearing in the shows’ titles, Larry always viewed his interview subjects as the true stars of his programs, and himself as merely an unbiased conduit between the guest and audience. Whether he was interviewing a U.S. president, foreign leader, celebrity, scandal-ridden personage, or an everyman, Larry liked to ask short, direct, and uncomplicated questions. He believed concise questions usually provided the best answers, and he was not wrong in that belief.”

The post Talk Show Legend Larry King Dead of Complications from COVID-19 at 87 appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The economic adviser accused Democrats of asking for too much in the next federal coronavirus relief package.

The president's gambit gives Democrats a potent attack line just months away from the November election.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli are not qualified, according to the Government Accountability Office.

An economics of the future will have to reanimate the concepts of the Physiocrates. by Charles Mudede
Look at all of this corn blown down by a storm that showed the farmers of Iowa no mercy on Monday, August 10.

If we use the Shona word for "no," we can imagine a farmer looking at a field after the "thunderstorm complex known as derecho" had passed, see his old baseball cap, his worn-out jeans, his dusty boots, his untucked shirt flapping in the wind, and hear him saying to himself, with his lips barely moving and cracked by the long and hot summer, "Iowa, iowa, iowa, iowa."

Washington Post:

The destructive storms laid siege to more than 10 million acres of Iowa’s corn and soybean crop, devastating farmers and capping off what has already been a difficult few years of farming for many.

Up to 43 percent of the state’s corn and soybean crop has suffered damage from the storms, a severe blow to a $10 billion industry that’s central to the Hawkeye State’s economy. The magnitude of the battered vegetation was even visible on the same weather satellites used to track Monday’s violent thunderstorms.

What is interesting here is the value of the destroyed crops. What was the flattened corn worth? What kind of money did the Iowan farmers have in mind before the derecho, a Spanish word that shares a root (directus) and its meaning with the English word "direct"? Direct blow, direct destruction, direct losses. The value question is important to think about because it reminds one of the only school of economic thought that kept it real, the Physiocrates.

#LunesDeClásicos | Construyendo la economía con el 'Tableau Economique' de Quesnay (1758) ~> http://t.co/89OkAczzPZ pic.twitter.com/uriWr5xJkD
— Cartográfica (@cartograficamx) October 13, 2015

The Physiocratic movement had its leader and founder in a French doctor named François Quesnay. The program he initiated near the middle of the 18th century placed agriculture at the center of the economic world. According to this view, which the Physiocates described in a simple but influential model called the Tableau économique, only farmers were productive. The rest—kings, courtiers, soldiers, merchants, manufacturers—were sterile.

If you recognize a similarity between this conception of the economy with the long-established scheme of ecology (it identifies plants as the primary producers in an ecosystem), you are certainly on to something. The Physiocrats not only believed the farmers created value, but, more importantly, also surplus value, which is why they stressed the importance of the capitalist farmer. The wealth of a nation would rapidly expand if it broke with peasant production and shifted to that of the farmer.

Ronald L. Meek makes this point in his masterpiece of 1963, The Economics of Physiocracy. He writes that
"fermiers, i.e. farmers... exercised entrepreneurial functions. These fermiers often possessed considerable capital, and their methods of cultivation were frequently superior to those of the metayers and poor peasants."

Later in the book, Meek writes:

[The Physiocrats] pinned their hopes quite largely on the new class of fermiers, the men of substance whose entrepreneurial activities were already beginning to make certain of the northern provinces relatively prosperous. Agricultural entrepreneurs were the main agents of agricultural reform, and government policy should be aimed in particular at stimulating and encouraging them.

The Physiocrats wanted the government to leave the farmer alone. Let them grow the food. And let society grow with their wealth. They called this demand for farmer autonomy laissez-faire.

If we jump to 2017, we find the economist Mariana Mazzucato introducing her readers to the concept of a production boundary in the third section, "Meet the Production Boundary," of the introduction to her book, The Value of Everything. Her idea here is that the financial sector, to justify its prominent place in the economy, expanded the "production boundary" to include financial services. Those on Wall Street or in conventional banks and shadow banks were as productive as factory workers, people who made things that had a concrete use value. But back in 1776, it was none other than Adam Smith who challenged the Physiocratic conception of the economy by expanding the boundary of production to include factory work. For Adam Smith, it was the aristocratic class and their servants and soldiers who were sterile.

Even the Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg insisted, in her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), on the backwardness of the view that "agricultural labour is the only kind of labour which is productive," and praised Adam Smith, classified as a bourgeois economist, for making a "decisive advance... in proclaiming every kind of labour as productive, thus revealing the creation of surplus value in manufacture as well as in agriculture."

And now we arrive at the point I want to make, and how the woes of the Iowa farms play a role in this point. If we look at the Physiocratic concept of not just the production boundary but also the surplus value generated by the agricultural entrepreneur, we find that it is a real thing. It is the stuff of photosynthesis. Plants use the air around them and the light falling on them to produce nutritious bio-products. They are, in the language of ecology, autotrophs. You can't make a chair or car if you have nothing to eat. You can't be human or dog without autotrophs. Our value and surplus value begins with with the exploitation of vegetables. If we have this image in mind, we can see how value and surplus value leapt from the real of the fields to the fictions of culture. Surplus value in the condition of culture is realized as profits. (Forgive me using that word, culture. I know very well it is related to cultivation, to farming. I know. I know. But let's move on.)

By the time finance is included in the boundary of production, all meaning of surplus value as thing in the world is lost. It's now a hyper-culture of value inflation that's as unreal as the nation of Uqbar and the planet of Tlön in Jorge Luis Borges's short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

Most the Iowan farmers owe debts. Much of the surplus value of their crops is not in the actual crops but is securitized and transcoded as radio waves that bounce back and fourth from the ground to satellites that connect the markets of the world. The largest irrigated crop in the US is not something humans can even eat. It is grass. And this grass is often tied to the one financial asset a member of the middle class can own, a house. The real is certainly somewhere in the capitalist economy, but it's so tiny.

My feeling, however, is that an economics of the future will have to reanimate the concepts of the Physiocrates. This renewed economics will bring the inputs of nature into the production scheme. Energy and its sources will become the key function of production (for the neoclassical school and Marxists, it is capital and labor.) The first economist of note to head in this direction is certainly the post-Keynesian, Steve Keen.

The role of energy in production. Completely ignored by standard production functions in economic models by all schools of thought. Until is fixed, economics defies the Laws of Thermodynamics. And no-one defies the Laws of Thermodynamics https://t.co/XD8dibBesi
— Steve Keen (@ProfSteveKeen) February 22, 2019

Before anything else, I consider my myself a neo-Physiocrat. That said, I will leave this post with a passage from Riccardo Bellofiore's close examination of the ideas Piero Sraffa expounded in his economics classes at Cambridge University in the 1920s, Sraffa after Marx: An Open Issue:

It is however in these months that we see the beginning of Sraffa’s reconstructive theoretical effort based on physical real costs. In a note on the ‘degenerazione del concetto di costo e valore’ (degeneration of the notion of cost and value) he writes: It was only Petty + the Physiocrats who had the right notion of cost as ‘loaf of bread’. Then somebody started measuring it in labour, as every day’s labour requires the same amount of food. Then they proceeded to regard cost as actually an amount of labour. Then A. Smith interpreted labour as the ‘the toil and trouble’ which is the ‘real cost’ and the ‘hardship’. Then this was by Ricardo brought back to labour, but not far back enough, and Marx went only as back as Ricardo. Then Senior invented Abstinence. And Cairnes unified all the costs (work, abstinence + risk) as sacrifice.

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A maskless Tennessee cop who went viral earlier this week for ripping the face mask off a man who was filming a pair of state troopers has been fired.

WKRN reports: “Trooper Harvey Briggs, a 22-year veteran of THP, was served a termination notice Friday for “unprofessional conduct” following an incident Aug. 10, according to a department spokesperson. Briggs had been placed on discretionary leave with pay Wednesday, after the department opened an investigation into reported policy violations the day prior.”

615-251-5228. Just spoke with Arlene. Lovely and patient. Said an investigation into this incident with Officer Harvey Briggs, Tennessee Highway Patrol, was opened yesterday. Declined to say if he’s on desk duty pending outcome of report. https://t.co/QeDFcsJwQV

— Pamela Popeil (@pamelapopeil) August 12, 2020

TMZ reported: “Andrew Golden says this went down Monday near the Tennessee State Capitol building as he was recording state troopers who had pulled over a motorist. He says he kept a safe distance away on a public sidewalk before State Trooper Harvey Briggs — who was not involved in the traffic stop — threw a fit. … Golden claims Briggs then stepped on his foot — all without wearing a mask, mind you — and then, suddenly, ripped Golden’s mask off his face. He immediately called out Briggs for it … and you hear Briggs deny it as he walked away saying, ‘I’m tired of you people making stuff up.’”

The post Tennessee Highway Patrol Fires Trooper Who Ripped Face Mask Off Man in Viral Video appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Confronted with aggressive landlords and layoffs, tenants across the country are trying to avoid eviction, debt and homelessness.

The changes have stoked fears they are aimed at holding up mail-in election ballots.

A senior Trump campaign adviser was less than forthcoming about the topic, however.

The White House chief of staff also said that mail-sorting machines will not be removed "between now and the election."

Read more, or leave your own tips, on PostSecret social media; facebook, Instagram and twitter.

It was only four years ago that all these postcards and more were exhibited in the White House.

The "American Idol" veteran, who split from husband Brandon Blackstock earlier this month, said maintaining her mental health is a "daily" process.

“Black lives do matter, and this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag,” the music icon said.

"Weird Al" turns his polka treatment of the play into a brilliant new video.

“It’s a tough one to swallow," she said of director George Miller's decision to cast a younger actor in the role.

The actor, who denies allegations he abused Amber Heard, is suing the publisher of The Sun over an article calling him a "wife-beater"

Morris contacted authorities to ask if she can "help in any way" as they continue to look for Rivera.