Friday, September 30, 2016

Is California about to be shaken to the bone? Something bigger than an election is afoot!

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California's chances of having a magnitude-7 or greater earthquake in the next couple days just skyrocketed


1:18 p.m. ET
A cluster of more than 200 small earthquakes beneath the Salton Sea in Southern California earlier this week has scientists waiting to see if the slumbering San Andreas fault nearby could be the next to move. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that following the quake swarm at the Salton Sea on Monday and Tuesday, the likelihood of a magnitude-7 or greater earthquake being triggered is as high as 1 in 100 over the next seven days, though the odds will lower as time goes on.


But for now, local seismologists might feel their hearts racing. "When there's significant seismicity in this area of the fault, we kind of wonder if [the San Andreas] is somehow going to go active," Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson told the Los Angeles Times. "So maybe one of those small earthquakes that's happening in the neighborhood of the fault is going to trigger it, and set off the big event."


And by big event, they mean big:


A San Andreas earthquake starting at the Salton Sea has long been a major concern for scientists. In 2008, USGS researchers simulated what would happen if a magnitude-7.8 earthquake started at the Salton Sea and then barreled up the San Andreas fault, sending shaking waves out in all directions.


By the time the San Andreas fault becomes unhinged in San Bernardino County's Cajon Pass, Interstate 15 and rail lines could be severed. Historic downtowns in the Inland Empire could be awash in fallen brick, crushing people under the weight of collapsed buildings that had never been retrofitted.


Los Angeles could feel shaking for a minute — a lifetime compared with the seven seconds felt during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Shaking waves reach as far as Bakersfield, Oxnard, and Santa Barbara. About 1,600 fires spread across Southern California. And powerful aftershocks larger than magnitude-7 pulverize the region, sending shaking into San Diego County and into the San Gabriel Valley. [Los Angeles Times]


Scientists say major earthquakes happen in Southern California about once every 150 or 200 years; the last big quake at the Salton Sea-tip of the San Andreas fault was 330 years ago. Read the full chilling report at the Los Angeles Times. Jeva Lange

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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Trump Sign 58,000 square feet appears in Michigan - An Alien Conspiracy?

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Another Adorable Deplorable


No debate over his support: Michigan homeowner mows  58,000 square-foot TRUMP sign into his lawn


  • Wally Maslowsky is a General Motors retiree who lives in rural Almont
  • He decided to cut 'TRUMP' into his grass in 176-feet-high letters
  • It took four to five hours over the weekend to complete  

A retired Michigan man decided it wasn't enough to put a Donald Trump campaign sign in his front yard to show his support for the controversial Republican candidate.

Instead, Almont resident Wally Maslowsky, decided to mow 'TRUMP' in huge letters into the grass of his 8-acre lawn in Lapeer County.

Drone footage taken from the air shows how expansive the sign spreads across the land.



Measured from the front of the 'T' to the back of the 'P', is 330 feet, while the letters are 176-feet high, making the entire creation over 58,000 square feet, Maslowsky told CBS Detroit 

Maslowsky worked at General Motors before retiring, and came up with the idea during his spare time gardening.  

'I was cutting out there one day and I said, well, it would be pretty neat to put a sign in here,' he told CBS.

'Being that I've got a design background I just kind of came in the house and laid it out and plotted some points kinda like you're doing a survey when you're laying out a basement for a house.' 

Maslowsky says the project took about four or five hours over the weekend to complete.

Maslowsky told the station that there is a lot of support for Donald Trump in the area around Almont. 

Hillary Clinton still leads Trump 38%-35% in Michigan, according to the latest polls.
'I decided, well, I could do this; so just for the heck of it I did it,' Maslowsky said. 

'I mean, that's what retired people do to keep busy, right? …Either that or sit in front of the TV and get old.'

Maslowsky said he didn't think the sign would become a big deal, until his daughter-in-law posted pictures of what he had done to Twitter.

'And I said, well, you know, I didn't do this for the news or anything, I'm not looking for any kind of publicity, and she says, ''Well, why'd you do it?''

'I said, just for fun, just to do it! Let the planes see it when they fly over.'

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Scientists Are Freaking Out Over This 25-Year-Old's Solution to Superbugs

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Health 

After three years of research, a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne may have discovered a way to kill superbugs without the use of antibiotics.

Shu Lam believes that she has found the key to averting a health crisis so severe that the United Nations recently declared it a "fundamental threat" to global health.

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs kill about 170,000 people a year and, according to a British study, are estimated to kill up to 10 million people a year by 2050 and cost the world economy $100 trillion.

"If we fail to address this problem quickly and comprehensively, antimicrobial resistance will make providing high-quality universal healthcare coverage more difficult if not impossible," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told The Guardian. "It will undermine sustainable food production. And it will put the sustainable development goals in jeopardy."

The Superbug Doctors Have Been Dreading Is Now in the U.S.http://ow.ly/XsDC300OvUC  @greenpeaceusa @Sierra_Magazine

The Superbug Doctors Have Been Dreading Is Now in the U.S.


In what is being hailed by scientists in the field as "a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine," Lam and her team developed a star-shaped peptide polymer that targets the resistant superbugs, rips apart their cell walls and kills them.

"These star polymers screw up the way bacteria survives," Lam told VICE. "Bacteria need to divide and grow but when our star is attached to the membrane it interferes with these processes. This puts a lot of stress on the bacteria and it initiates a process to kill itself from stress."


A bacterium cell before (left) and after being treated by the star-shaped polymers.University of Melbourne
Lam told The Telegraph the polymers have been effective in treating mice infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are relatively non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body. The reduction in toxicity is because of the larger size of the polymers which make them too big to enter healthy cells.

Lam's findings were recently published in the Nature Microbiology journal and while the results are promising in the lab and on mice, she said there is still a long way to go.

"We still need to do a lot of studies and a lot of tests—for example, to see whether these polymers have any side effects on our bodies," she explained to Vice. "We need a lot of detailed assessments like that, [but] they could hopefully be implemented in the near future."

Professor Greg Qiao, her Ph.D. supervisor, told The Telegraph they will need at least five more years to fully develop her project unless millions of dollars are invested into speeding up the process.

However, "The really good news about this is that, at the moment, if you have a superbug and you run out of antibiotics, there's not much you can do. At least you can do something now," he said.

So what would the star polymer treatment look like in the future? As Lam explained in an interview with VICE:

"The quickest way to make this available to the public is through topical application, simply because you go through less procedures as opposed to ingesting these molecules into the body. So when you have a wound or a bacterial infection on the wound then you [generally] apply some sort of antibacterial cream.

"The star polymers could potentially become one of the anti-bacterial ingredients in this cream. Ultimately, we hope that what we're discovering here could replace antibiotics. In other words, we also hope that we will be able to inject this into the body to treat serious infections, or even to disperse it in the form of a pill which patients can take, just like somebody would take an antibiotic."







Does this 25 year-old hold the key to winning the war against superbugs?


Not many 25-year-olds can claim to get up at 4am and work weekends to save the world from an impending Armageddon that could cost tens of millions of lives.

But for the past three years, Shu Lam, a Malaysian PhD student at the University of Melbourne, has confined herself to a scientific laboratory to figure out how to kill superbugs that can no longer be treated with antibiotics.

She believes that she has found the key to averting a health crisis so severe that last week the United Nations convened its first ever general assembly meeting on drug-resistant bacteria.
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The overuse and incorrect use of antibiotics has rendered some strains of bacteria untreatable, allowing so-called “superbugs” to mutate. Last Wednesday, the problem was described by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a “fundamental threat” to global health and safety. 

Superbugs kill an estimated 700,000 people a year, among them 230,000 newborns. But, according to a recent British study, this number will rise to a staggering 10 million a year by 2050 – as many as cancer – if no action is taken. It could cost the world economy $100 trillion.

Following a UK-led drive to raise awareness of the potential impact of antimicrobial resistance, UN members pledged to deliver an update on the superbug war by 2018, but in her small laboratory on the other side of the world, Lam is already several steps ahead.

She believes her method of killing bacteria using tiny star-shaped molecules, built with chains of protein units called peptide polymers, is a ground-breaking alternative to failing antibiotics.

On current trends, a common disease like gonorrhoea may become untreatable.

“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” says Lam, who leads a half-a-dozen-strong research team. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”
Her research, published this month in the prestigious journal, Nature Microbiology, has already been hailed by scientists as a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine.

Lam builds the star-shaped molecules at Melbourne’s prestigious school of engineering. Each star has 16 or 32 “arms” made from peptide polymers, a process she likens to putting together small blocks of Lego. 
When unleashed, the polymers attack the superbugs directly, unlike antibiotics, which create a toxic swamp that also destroys nearby healthy cells. 

Lam successfully tested the polymer treatment on six different superbugs in the laboratory, and against one strain of bacteria in mice. Even after multiple generations of mutations, the superbugs have proven incapable of fighting back.

“We found the polymers to be really good at wiping out bacterial infections,” she says. “They are actually effective in treating mice infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. At the same time, they are quite non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body.”

The reduction in toxicity is because the larger size of the peptide polymers, about 10 nanometres in diameter, means they cannot enter healthy cells.

Her scientific breakthrough has left Lam little time for socialising. Due to the sensitivities of her biological experiments, even her weekends cannot be regarded as her own. “For a time, I had to come in at 4am in the morning to look after my mice and my cells,” she says.

But for the ambitious doctor’s daughter, the sacrifice has been worth it. “I wanted to be involved in some kind of research that would help solve problems,” she says.

“This research is significant because everyone is worried about superbugs. Suddenly, a lot of people have been telling me that either they themselves or their relatives have been infected, that they have been in intensive care because of a superbug, and that people they know have actually died,” added Lam.

“I really hope that the polymers we are trying to develop here could eventually be a solution.”
The growing superbug crisis has been described by scientists as a “slow-motion tsunami”.

The world is slowly waking up to the nightmare threat of a post-antibiotic era that could end modern medicine and create a situation where mundane problems such as a sore throat or a grazed knee could prove fatal.

But it was Alexander Fleming, the Scot who in 1928 discovered penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, who first sounded a warning about the consequences of its misuse. “There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and, by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant,” he cautioned while accepting his Nobel Prize in 1945.

A mere 71 years after Fleming’s discovery revolutionised global healthcare, Margaret Chan, the director of the World Health Organisation, has warned that the gains antibiotics have brought to modern medicine may soon be reversed.

“On current trends, a common disease like gonorrhoea may become untreatable,” Chan said last week. “Doctors facing patients will have to say: ‘I’m sorry – there’s nothing I can do for you.’”

An outbreak of a tough strain of typhoid in Africa and a form of tuberculosis found in 105 countries have already proven impervious to antibiotics. Gram-negative bacteria, which cause diseases like pneumonia and meningitis, and wound- or surgical-site infections, is also proving resistant.

Meanwhile, only two new classes of antibiotics have entered the market in the last half-century.

For pharmaceutical companies, antibiotics have proven to be a poor investment, because development costs are high, the resulting drugs rid the patient of the target disease after a short period of time. By contrast, chronic illness such as high blood pressure require treatments to be taken daily for the rest of a patient’s life.

“Incentives must be found to recreate the prolific era of antibiotic discovery that took place from 1940 to 1960,” said Chan.

Lam hopes her “innovative” research will encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest. “I hope it will attract some interest, because what we have discovered is quite different from antibiotics,” she says.
“Some people have been telling me ‘Please work harder, so that we can have a solution and put it out on the market.’ But with research, you need to have a lot of patience because we still have quite a long way to go.”
 

Presidential debate ratings set record with 81.4M viewers, Nielsen says

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The Coltons Point Times says -

Despite falling a huge 20% short of the news media projections, the Clinton-Trump debate barely beats out former leader Reagan-Carter.

Is this 20% shortfall a foreboding warning of how the news media is way off on poll results?


HIGHLIGHTS
  • Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton debate at Hofstra is most-watched debate in history
  • Bulk of viewers watched on the four major broadcast networks
Monday’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was seen by 81.4 million viewers across numerous broadcast and cable networks, according to Nielsen, making it the most-watched debate in history. The 1980 encounter between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter was seen by 80.6 million.


The bulk of viewers watched on the four major broadcast networks, with 43.8 million tuning in. An estimated 26.1 million watched the three cable news networks with Fox News (11.359 million) attracting the most viewers.


advertisement | advertise on newsday
The bulk of viewers watched on the network-owned stations, but other networks simulcast the debate, including Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, PBS, CNBC, MSNBC, Univision, Telemundo and C-SPAN. The networks’ websites also simulcast the debate. Numerous other websites, from BuzzFeed to Yahoo, streamed the debate, but those numbers are not counted by Nielsen.


There are 115.6 million homes in the United States with TVs; however, Nielsen doesn’t count one person per viewing household, but — on average — over two.



Pundits in recent days had thrown around a figure of 100 million viewers as the benchmark that could be possibly be achieved, or even exceeded.

The People Pick Trump winner - The News Media Love Hillary - Guess the Establishment backs the Establishment

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Fox News (Conservative) and Yahoo News (Liberal) Agree

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Online votes declare Trump debate winner, despite media consensus for Clinton

 



If polls only included media pundits, Hillary Clinton would have won Monday’s debate by a landslide, but online surveys had Donald Trump as the yuge winner.

The Drudge Report online vote had 80 percent of respondents giving the victory to Trump, and a Time.com survey had the Republican nominee leading Clinton by 4 percentage points – 52 percent to 48 percent – after more than 1,300,000 votes were cast. CNBC and Breitbart votes also had Trump winning the event, at New York’s Hofstra University.
A Fox News online vote had Trump winning with 50 percent of respondents, Clinton at 35 percent and the other 15 percent declaring no one won.

The online surveys are not scientific and, in many cases, supporters of either candidate can cast multiple ballots. Still, the disconnect in judging Trump’s performance was reminiscent of the Republican Party primary, when pundits often said his competitors bested him while online polls put him on top.
Experts say the online votes are a good gauge of enthusiasm, which could mean Trump’s performance was enough to energize those who already backed him.
Experts were near unanimous in finding Clinton was more disciplined and armed with greater recall of facts, but Trump’s supporters believe his blunt style and unconventional background are among his best attributes.

Trump’s best moment, according to Stuart Tarlow, of American Thinker, came when he distinguished himself from Clinton based on their disparate backgrounds. Trump characterized his opponent as a "typical politician," who knows how to make statements and promises that sound good, but who never actually gets things done, Tarlow wrote.
Most experts agree the winner and loser won’t be determined based on arcane rules of debating. Hillary’s mission was to come off as well-versed on the facts and warm, while Trump’s goal was to appear capable of filling the role of chief executive.
The real test of who won and who lost will likely come in the next wave of scientific polling in what has become a dead-even race. If Trump continues to surge in key battleground states, it will be taken as evidence he accomplished what he needed to in the debate. If Clinton stops or even reverses his momentum, she may be retroactively declared the winner.

Edward Panetta, professor of communication studies at the University of Georgia and director of the Georgia Debate Union, said Trump got out of the gate fast, but then struggled.
“While Donald Trump was strong in the first 20 minutes of the debate he faltered badly as the debate progressed,” Panetta said. 

Monday, September 26, 2016

Time for a Laugh!

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Double click for full screen.
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CPT Spirits in the Sky - Arnold Palmer a true USA Original

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America has many heroes in the form of celebrities and personalities but what makes Arnold Palmer unique among giants is that it was Arnie, Arnie's Army, the sport of golf, and television broadcasting that exploded together and defined for all time the characteristics of a true American hero.

When Arnold Palmer first came to the attention of a war weary nation in the 1950's, at the same time television was just beginning to realize the importance of sports in the broadcast world, and the image was changing from black and white to color, golf was an obscure and elitist sport for the rich.


Palmer was the son of a greenskeeper and professional from Pennsylvania, a member of the working class who maintained the course for the rich and powerful.  From 1954 on Arnold Palmer was the face of golf in America and the world in one of the greatest meteoritic climbs to fame and fortune in our history.

One day in 1954 an unknown Arnold Palmer won the US Amateur Golf tournament and just four years later, in 1958, he won the Masters, the most prestigious tournament in the world of professional golf.  Besides popularizing golf for the masses, he became the first professional athlete to become a commercial icon through endorsements.


Palmer was the first sports client signed by legendary Mark McCormack, founder of powerful IMG, the International Management Group.  McCormack summed up Palmer's astonishing appeal in the following words.

McCormack listed five attributes that made Palmer especially marketable: his good looks; his relatively modest background (his father was a greenskeeper before rising to be club professional and Latrobe was a humble club); the way he played golf, taking risks and wearing his emotions on his sleeve; his involvement in a string of exciting finishes in early televised tournaments; and his affability.

Arnie the Icon (double click for full screen)


The following is a wonderful tribute to Arnie by Adam Schupak of Golfweek magazine. 

Golf Week Magazine

Golf’s most beloved figure, Arnold Palmer, dies at 87



Sep 25, 2016

Arnold Palmer, a seven-time major winner who brought golf to the masses and became the most beloved figure in the game, died Sunday in Pittsburgh from heart complications. He was 87.

Palmer, a native of Latrobe, Pa., had been admitted to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he was scheduled to have heart surgery Monday, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Reaction poured in from “Arnie’s Army” of admirers in the world of golf.

“We loved him with a mythic American joy,” said Palmer biographer James Dodson. “He represented everything that is great about golf. The friendship, the fellowship, the laughter, the impossibility of golf, the sudden rapture moment that brings you back, a moment that you never forget, that’s Arnold Palmer in spades. He’s the defining figure in golf.”


No one did more to popularize the sport than Palmer. His dashing presence singlehandedly took golf out of the country clubs and into the mainstream. Quite simply, he made golf cool.

“I used to hear cheers go up from the crowd around Palmer,” Lee Trevino said. “And I never knew whether he’d made a birdie or just hitched up his pants.”

Golfweek subscriber Bob Conn of Guilford, Conn., in a letter to the editor, captured the loyalty and devotion that the public felt for Palmer.

“If Arnold Palmer sent me a personal letter asking me to join the cleanup crew at Bay Hill, I would buy a green jumpsuit, stick a nail in a broom handle, grab some Hefty garbage bags and shake his hand when I arrived.”


It wasn’t just the fans. His fellow competitors revered him, and the next generation and the generation after that worshipped him. When reporters at the 1954 U.S. Amateur asked Gene Littler to identify the golfer as slender as wire and as strong as cable cracking balls on the practice tee, Littler said: “That’s Arnold Palmer. He’s going to be a great player some day. When he hits the ball, the earth shakes.”

Palmer attended Wake Forest on a golf scholarship. At age 24, he was selling paint and living in Cleveland, just seven months removed from a three-year stint in the Coast Guard, when he entered the national sporting consciousness by winning the 1954 U.S. Amateur at the Country Club of Detroit.

“That victory was the turning point in my life,” he said. “It gave me confidence I could compete at the highest level of the game.”


Palmer’s victory set in motion a chain of events. Instead of returning to selling paint, Palmer played the next week in the Waite Memorial in Shawnee-on-Delaware, Pa., where he met Winifred Walzer, who would become his wife of 45 years until her death in 1999. On Nov. 17, 1954, Palmer announced his intentions to turn pro, and golf would never be the same.

In his heyday, Palmer famously swung as if he were coming out of his shoes.

“What other people find in poetry, I find in the flight of a good drive,” Palmer said.

He unleashed his corkscrew-swing motion, which produced a piercing draw, with the ferocity of a summer squall. In his inimitable swashbuckling style, Palmer succeeded with both power and putter. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he won 62 PGA Tour titles from 1955 to 1973, placing him fifth on the Tour’s all-time victory list. He collected seven major titles in a six-plus-year explosion, from the 1958 Masters to the 1964 Masters.


Palmer didn’t lay up or leave putts short. His go-for-broke style meant he played out of the woods and ditches with equal abandon, and resulted in a string of memorable charges. At the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills near Denver, Palmer drove the first green and with his trademark knock-kneed, pigeon-toed putting stance went out and birdied six of the first seven holes en route to shooting 65 and winning the title in a furious comeback.

“Palmer on a golf course was Jack Dempsey with his man on the ropes, Henry Aaron with a three-and-two fastball, Rod Laver at set point, Joe Montana with a minute to play, A.J. Foyt with a lap to go and a car to catch,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray.

Even Palmer’s setbacks were epic. He double-bogeyed the 18th hole at Augusta in the 1961 Masters after accepting congratulations from a spectator whom he knew in the gallery. Palmer lost playoffs in three U.S. Opens, the first to Jack Nicklaus in 1962; the second to Julius Boros in 1963; and the third to Billy Casper in 1966 in heart-breaking fashion. Palmer blew a seven-stroke lead with nine holes to go in regulation at Olympic Club and lost to Casper in an 18-hole playoff the next day.


Arnold Daniel Palmer, born Sept. 10, 1929, grew up in the working-class mill town of Latrobe, in a two-story frame house off the sixth tee of Latrobe Country Club, where his father, Milfred “Deacon” Palmer, was the greenskeeper and professional.

Though for decades Palmer made his winter home in Orlando, Fla., he never lost touch with his western Pennsylvania roots in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.

“Of all the places I’ve been, there isn’t any place that I’m more comfortable than I am right here,” he told Golfweek in 2009 in Latrobe ahead of his 80th birthday.


Palmer was 3 years old when his father wrapped his hands around a cut-down women’s golf club in the classic overlapping Vardon grip, and instructed him to, “Hit it hard, boy. Go find it and hit it hard again.”

Palmer’s combination of matinee-idol looks, charisma and blue-collar background made him a superstar just as golf ushered in the television era. He became Madison Avenue’s favorite pitchman, accepting an array of endorsement deals that generated millions of dollars in income on everything from licensed sportswear to tractors to motor oil and even Japanese tearooms. Credit goes to agent Mark McCormack, who sold the Palmer personality and the values he represented rather than his status as a tournament winner.

Palmer’s business empire grew to include a course-design company, a chain of dry cleaners, car dealerships, as well as ownership of Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Orlando. He even bought Latrobe Country Club, which his father helped build with his own hands and where as a youth Palmer was permitted only before the members arrived in the morning or after they had gone home in the evening. Palmer designed more than 300 golf courses in 37 states, 25 countries and five continents (all except Africa and Antarctica), including the first modern course built in China, in 1988.


Palmer led the PGA Tour money list four times, and was the first player to win more than $100,000 in a season. He played on six Ryder Cup teams, and was the winning captain twice. He is credited with conceiving the modern Grand Slam of the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship during a conversation with golf writer Bob Drum on a flight to Ireland for the 1960 Canada Cup. Palmer won the Masters four times, the British Open twice and the U.S. Open once.

It was Palmer who convinced his colleagues that they could never consider themselves champions unless they had won the Claret Jug. Nick Faldo, during Palmer’s farewell at St. Andrews in 1995, may have put it best when he said, “If Arnold hadn’t come here in 1960, we’d probably all be in a shed on the beach.” Mark O’Meara went a step further. “He made it possible for all of us to make a living in this game,” he said.

In 1974, Palmer was one of the original inductees into the World Golf Hall of Fame. As he grew older, Palmer was let down by a shaky putter, but his popularity never waned. The nascent Senior PGA Tour hitched its star to golf’s first telegenic personality when Palmer turned 50. He relished winning again and became a regular on the senior circuit, remaining active until 2006.


Palmer maintained a high profile in the game, presiding over the Arnold Palmer Invitational every March, the only living player with his name attached to a PGA Tour event. He also served as the longtime national spokesperson for the USGA’s member program, and was an original investor and frequent guest on Golf Channel. To countless others, he became known for his eponymous drink consisting of equal parts iced tea and lemonade.

On Sept. 12, 2012, Palmer was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. He became just the sixth athlete to receive the honor. Coupled with the Presidential Medal of Freedom that he was awarded in 2004, Palmer held both of the highest honors that the U.S. can give to a civilian.

Palmer, who gave up his pilot’s license in 2011, had been in deteriorating health since late 2015.

A ceremonial tee shot at the 2015 British Open was his last public golf shot. Palmer looked increasingly frail in public appearances at the API in March and as an onlooker instead of an active participant during the opening tee shot at the 2016 Masters in April.


“Winnie once said to me, ‘When Arnold Palmer gives up flying his airplane and his ability to hit a golf ball, he won’t be with us long,’ ” said Dodson, the biographer.

Palmer is survived by his second wife, Kit, daughters Amy Saunders and Peggy Wears, six grandchildren, including Sam Saunders, who plays on the PGA Tour, and nine great-grandchildren.


As a measure of his popularity, Palmer, like Elvis Presley before him, was known simply as “The King.” But in a life bursting from the seams with success, Palmer never lost his common touch. He was a man of the people, willing to sign every autograph, shake every hand, and tried to look every person in his gallery in the eye.

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