Chris Hedges's Blog, page 395

What Trump and Drugs Have in Common

I took my first hit of speed in 1970 during my freshman year in college. That little white pill — Dexedrine — was a revelation. It made whatever I was doing absolutely fascinating. Amphetamine sharpened my focus and banished all appetites except a hunger for knowledge. I spent that entire night writing 35 pages of hand-scrawled notes about a 35-page article by the philosopher Ludwig Feurbach, thereby convincing the professor who would become my advisor and mentor that I was absolutely fascinating.

Speed was definitely not a respectable drug in those days. I bought mine from a seedy hippie who hung out on the edge of campus with some of my edgier friends. My college was probably one of the few in the country whose infirmary actually prescribed Dexedrine for its students, presumably to keep us from buying it from guys like him.

Nowadays, respectable doctors all over the country prescribe speed for people with ADHD, under brands like Adderall and Ritalin. It does for them what it did for me — makes whatever they’re doing fascinating, allowing them to focus for many hours at a time. My students now don’t have to buy it on the street. They can cadge (or buy) it from friends with prescriptions. I sometimes wonder whether they think they have a choice about this, or whether it’s considered almost a dereliction of duty to write their papers without a chemical assist.

Of course, speed had its ugly side, and I’m hardly recommending it as a cure for boring classes or a boring life. Coming down is horrible, the prelude often to a nasty, gray depression. Campus lore said it intensified menstrual cramps and I believed it. (When you’re depressed, it’s certainly easy to believe that this month’s cramps are worse than the last batch.) In any case, I quickly realized that I liked the stuff far too much for my own good. I learned to drink coffee instead.

And then, decades later, Donald Trump got elected president and I felt I was back on Dexedrine with all the usual liabilities and more. Like the drug, Trump speed gave the new president’s every action a deceptive fascination.

The Whole World at Trump Speed

There’s speed and then there’s Trump speed: the dizzying, careening way that the president drives the Formula One car of state. Just when we’ve started to adjust to one outrage — say, the ripping of migrant children from their mothers’ arms (a procedure that continues to this day, despite court prohibition) — here comes another down the track. This time it’s the construction in Texas of a tent city to house immigrant children. No, wait. That was the last lap. Now, it’s the mustering of almost 6,000 troops on the border, authorized to use lethal force “if they have to” against people desperately fleeing lethal conditions in their own countries.

No, now it’s the president, like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, redefining the word “rock” to mean “rifle.” During a press briefing in November, he told reporters, “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like what they did to the Mexican military and police I say consider it a rifle.”

Oops, that was the last lap, too. Now it’s the launching of tear gas grenades — a weapon that the Geneva Conventions prohibit in actual warfare — against a few hundred mostly peaceful migrants, including small children on Mexican, not U.S. territory. And now it’s the president blaming the decision to deploy a toxic chemical agent against unarmed people on individuals whom — he says — an unidentified “they” call “grabbers.” Those grabbers are apparently seizing random migrant children to use as “human shields.” Before we can absorb that bizarre contention, he follows up with a new lie: that “three Border Patrol people yesterday were very badly hurt, getting hit with rocks and stones.”

Unlike the speed of my college days, which sharpened the attention, Trump speed makes it impossible to focus on anything for very long, not when the next outrage is already heading for you at full tilt.

In ordinary times, we would have focused, at least for a while, on any one of these occurrences. There would have been space to carefully consider the unlawful practice of taking children from their parents and shipping them thousands of miles away. We could have paid more than a fleeting moment’s attention to the cruel bureaucratic incompetence that left officials unable to reunite some families because records had been lost or destroyed — or were never kept in the first place. There would have been time to discuss the legality of deploying U.S. troops inside this country on what has essentially been a policing mission, in possible violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. We could have stopped to consider whether such a deployment might be a prelude to other domestic uses of the military under an increasingly authoritarian president.

We might even have had a moment to ask ourselves what it means that we’ve stopped being surprised by a president who consistently makes things up. Maybe it is a matter of opinion whether the caravan of refugees traveling from Central America in hopes of getting asylum in the United States constitutes an “invasion” (as Trump told CNN reporter Jim Acosta the day before the White House pulled his press credentials). Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the truthfulness of a metaphor. But we generally would expect at least some data to back up a presidential assertion that the caravan includes “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.” When pressed for evidence, the president simply said, “There’s no proof of anything but they could very well be.” He then added, “over a course of a period of time you [will] have [Middle Eastern individuals in the caravan], or they don’t necessarily have to be in that group. But certainly, you have a lot of people coming up through the southern border from the Middle East and other places that are not appropriate for our country.”

How should we interpret the meaning of statements like this that simply have no basis in fact? Should we focus on how the president is shoving us into a pond of epistemological quicksand? (What is truth, after all?) Or should we turn our attention to the racial implications of the presidential view that — whether or not they exist — people “from the Middle East and other places… are not appropriate for our country”? Are those “other places” perhaps the “shithole countries” the president has mentioned in the past? And if so, then what exactly distinguishes those immigrants who are “appropriate for our country?”

But really there’s no time for thoughts like those, because it’s on to the next outrage! The crazy keeps piling up, along with the exclamation points. (There were eight of them in that November 20th 633-word statement on U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia that the president released in response to international outrage about the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.)

And Speaking of Outrage …

You’d think, by the way, that a brutal murder of a U.S. resident inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, might spark a little bit of horror, even in this White House. In his statement about Khashoggi’s death, however, President Trump went out of his way to remind the rest of us that, although he doesn’t “condone” murder, the Saudis had good reason to dislike the journalist. After all, their “representatives” personally assured him “that Jamal Khashoggi was an ‘enemy of the state’ and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood” — charges that are both untrue and irrelevant to his murder.

Once again, we found ourselves caught up in a Trumpian epistemological vortex, as our philosopher president offered us this summary of the situation:

“It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t! That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran.”

And don’t forget that fantasy $450 billion the Saudis are going to spend in the U.S., creating “over a million jobs,” or the $110 billion in Saudi arms purchases included in that figure, which turn out to be the particular fantasyof presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

It’s almost enough to make you forget to wonder why exactly we’re so much fonder of Saudi Arabia than Iran. Let’s see, Iran hangs a lot of people, including a woman who at 17 killed her violent husband in self-defense. Saudi Arabia doesn’t do that. It beheads them instead, sometimes even for non-violent offenses. Iran meddles in countries in its neighborhood — unlike the Saudi state, except, of course, for its actions in relation to Qatar… and, oh yes, that little intervention in Yemen’s civil war, where Saudis flying U.S.-made planes (there’s that wonderful Saudi investment) have killed untold numbers of civilians, while the fighting and blockades have sent the price of food skyrocketing so that as many as 85,000 children have already starved to death and half the population is at risk of famine.

But how could there be any time to think about that, when Donald Trump is already racing on to his (and our) next distraction?

A World on Fire

It’s enough to make your head spin — or your heart break. Among other things, the news about planetary destruction just keeps piling up. At the end of September, we learned that the Earth has lost half its wildlife in the last 40 years. Only a week later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report on the harm likely to be caused by even a 1.5-degree Celsius average warming across the planet — which seems likely to happen much more quickly than previously thought. As the New York Times reports, the IPCC has concluded that “avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic precedent.’” Given an American president intent on driving the U.S. economy full-tilt in the opposite direction, it’s obvious that, in every way imaginable, Trump speed is literally going to kill many of us.

And before we could even digest that IPCC report, the federal government had issued its own National Climate Assessment — conveniently trundled out by the Trump administration on Black Friday, our annual Day of Maximum Consumption, with an intent to bury it. The Assessment concluded that, by century’s end, climate change will have caused thousands of deaths in this country and the U.S. economy could shrink by 10%. And that’s not this administration’s first apocalyptic report. Who even remembers that in July of this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency issued its own environmental report, anticipating not the dire 1.5 degree Celsius rise, but one of at least four degrees?

A few days after the National Climate Assessment was released, in an interview with the Washington Post, President Trump was quick to dismiss it. As he put it: “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers [in human-caused climate change].” Why not? Because he relies on the evidence of his own eyes, which are presumably more observant than the combined work of more than 1,000 scientists in 13 federal agencies. “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it,” he assured the Post.

Just in case he hadn’t quite said what he meant, he then offered this Trumpian clarification:

“You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small.”

Well, that explains it. Oceans are very small. After all, they only cover about two-thirds of the planet. For some, this observationmight have proven a tad disconcerting, since there had been little time even to absorb his contention days earlier, on touring areas of northern California hit by the worst fire in its history, that such blazes only happened because, unlike Finland, my fellow Californians have failed to properly rake our forests.

At least we no longer have to worry about having a presidency that can’t tell fact from fairy tale. The administration that once brought us “alternative facts” recently developed a sudden affection for those “stubborn things” (as John Adams once called them), at least when it comes to climate-change denial. The president’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, explained that Trump’s problem with the report wasn’t that it didn’t convince people like him with “very high levels of intelligence.” The problem, she claimed, was that the report was “not based on facts.” As she put it, “It’s not data driven. We’d like to see something that is more data driven. It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”

We can only hope that Sanders will let us in on the secret of collecting data from the future.  Or maybe someone should tell her that our confidence that summer will follow spring is based on data and a mathematical model of planetary motion.

Speed Kills

Racing through our minds as fast as a California wildfire, the president’s pronouncements, by turns vicious and comical, fly by so fast that it’s impossible to concentrate on any of them. One day he’s warning us about marauding migrants; the next he’s retweeting an image of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein behind bars, along with former president Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Robert Mueller, among others. (“Now that Russia collusion is a proven lie,” read the caption, “when do the treason trials begin?”)

Once, the spectacle of a president accusing political opponents of treason would have horrified most people in this country. Now, we’re so whiplashed that we hardly react. We just brace ourselves for the next shock. As New York Times opinion writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recently observed, Trump’s “paranoid inventions suck up our attention and make us focus, week after week, upon him.” Like that first hit of Dexedrine that I took all those years ago, Trump’s version of speed narrows our focus in a dangerous way.

Every decade or so, safe driving campaigns reinvent the slogan “Speed Kills” to encourage motorists to slow down and save lives. Anti-drug campaigners then pick up the phrase, using it to remind people (quite rightly) that another kind of speed — amphetamines — also kills.

And so, in a very real way, does the zig-zagging speed of Donald Trump’s government. A world traveling at Trump speed is, to use the president’s own words (and punctuation), “a very dangerous place!” It’s a place where people burn to death in climate-change-fueled forest fires or starve to death in man-made famines. And it only gets harder to focus as the president keeps on riffing, faster and faster, just like someone on speed. Coming down is definitely going to be depressing.

John Kelly Leaving as Trump’s Chief of Staff

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Saturday that chief of staff John Kelly will leave his job by year’s end amid an expected West Wing reshuffling reflecting a focus on the 2020 re-election campaign and the challenge of governing with Democrats reclaiming control of the House.

Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, is Trump’s top choice to replace Kelly, and the two have held discussions for months about the job, a White House official said. An announcement was expected in the coming days, the president told reporters as he left the White House for the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia.

Kelly had been credited with imposing order on a chaotic West Wing after his arrival in June 2017 from his post as homeland security secretary. But his iron first also alienated some longtime Trump allies, and he grew increasingly isolated, with an increasingly diminished role.

Known through the West Wing as “the chief” or “the general,” the retired Marine Corps four-star general was tapped by Trump via tweet in July 2017 from his perch atop the Homeland Security Department to try to normalize a White House riven by infighting and competing power bases.

“John Kelly will leaving — I don’t know if I can say retiring — but he’s a great guy,” Trump said. “John Kelly will be leaving at the end of the year. We’ll be announcing who will be taking John’s place — it might be on an interim basis. I’ll be announcing that over the next day or two, but John will be leaving at the end of the year. … I appreciate his service very much.”

Kelly had early successes, including ending an open-door Oval Office policy that that had been compared to New York’s Grand Central Station and instituting a more rigorous policy process to try to prevent staffers from going directly to Trump.

But those efforts also miffed the president and some of his most influential outside allies, who had grown accustomed to unimpeded access. Kelly’s handling of domestic violence accusations against the former White House staff secretary also caused consternation, especially among lower-level White House staffers, who believed Kelly had lied to them about when he found out about the allegations.

Lauding Kelly, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the country was “better for his duty at the White House.” He called Kelly “a force for order, clarity and good sense.”

Trump and Ayers were working out terms under which Ayers would fill the role and the time commitment he would make, the White House official said. Trump wants his next chief of staff to agree to hold the job through the 2020 election. Ayers, who has young triplets, had long planned to leave the administration at the end of the year, but he has agreed to serve in an interim basis through the spring of 2019.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Word of Kelly’s impending departure comes a day after Trump named his picks for attorney general and ambassador to the United Nations, and two senior aides shifted from the White House to Trump’s campaign.

In any administration, the role of White House chief of staff is split between the responsibilities of supervising the White House and managing the man sitting in the Oval Office. Striking that balance in the turbulent times of Trump has bedeviled both Kelly and his predecessor, Reince Priebus.

White House aides say Trump has developed confidence in Ayers, in part by watching the effectiveness of Pence’s largely independent political operation. Ayers also earned the backing of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law and senior advisers, for taking on the new role, White House officials said.

The Georgia native’s meteoric rise in GOP politics included a successful stint at the Republican Governors Association, time as campaign manager for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s failed White House bid and consultant work for dozens of high-profile Republicans, including Pence.

Ayers, 36, would be the youngest chief of staff since 34-year-old Hamilton Jordan served under Jimmy Carter. Kelly is 68.

Trump had discussed replacing Kelly on multiple occasions, including following the negative publicity surrounding Kelly’s handling of domestic violence accusations against then-White House staff secretary Rob Porter. Some lower-level White House staffers believed Kelly had lied to them about when he knew of the allegations and when he made clear to Porter that he’d have to leave.

Trump had often tossed around potential replacements, but sensitive to charges that his administration has been marked by record turnover, he said in July that he would keep Kelly in the job through 2020.

But inside the White House, it was viewed largely as an attempt to clamp down on speculation about Kelly’s fate during the midterm elections, rather than a true vote of confidence.

Kelly, too, made no secret of the trials of his job, and often joked about how working for Trump was harder than anything he’d done before, including on the battlefield. In private, Kelly, whom friends said took the job out of a sense of duty to his country, cast himself as safeguarding the public from an impulsive and mercurial president. Reports of those conversations infuriated the president, who is especially sensitive of attacks on his competence and perceptions he is being managed.

At an event celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kelly joked that he missed everyone in the department “every day,” offering a deadpan eye roll and smile that drew laughs and applause.

“At six months, the last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the great honors of my life, being the secretary of Homeland Security, but I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess,” he joked.

Kelly, who had threatened to quit on several occasions, told friends he would be happy if he lasted until his one-year anniversary: July 28.

__

Associated Press writers Michele Salcedo and Catherine Lucey contributed to this report.

Federal Judge Blocks Pre-Construction Work on Keystone XL Pipeline

Opponents of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline—from indigenous and environmental groups to local farmers and ranchers—celebrated a win in court after a federal judge ruled on Friday that the fossil fuel giant cannot conduct pre-construction work on the pipeline until the full environmental review ordered last month is complete.

“Somehow TransCanada still hasn’t gotten the message that Keystone XL is a lost cause,” observed Sierra Club senior attorney Doug Hayes. “We’ve held off construction of this dirty tar sands pipeline for a decade because it would be a bad deal for the American people, and [Friday’s] ruling is yet another reminder that it will never be built.”

The ruling (pdf) from U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris of Great Falls, Montana followed a November decision which found that the Trump administration ignored “prior factual findings related to climate change” and relied on “outdated information” regarding Keystone XL’s threat to endangered species, tribal lands, and regional water resources when issuing a permit for the pipeline.

In a move denounced as “corporate bulling at its worst” by Friends of the Earth legal director Marcie Keever, TransCanada had sought permission to conduct pre-construction work. Morris ruled that Calgary-based company may continue activities such as security efforts and conducting surveys needed to revise the environmental review, but barred all field activities along the proposed route.

Good news! A federal judge reaffirmed today that TransCanada cannot conduct any pre-construction field activities on its proposed Keystone XL pipeline. This ruling means that construction on the Keystone XL pipeline will continue to be delayed.

Read: https://t.co/SqoBP9ZDnK pic.twitter.com/yxoNCv59ZG

— Center for Bio Div (@CenterForBioDiv) December 8, 2018

“Farmers and ranchers thank the judge for seeing through TransCanada’s transparent power grab,” added Bold Alliance president Jane Kleeb. “We want our property rights and water protected, yet all the Trump administration cares about is aiding a foreign oil corporation.”

Calling the judge’s latest decision “one more victory for the rule of law over this reckless and risky project,” Natural Resource Defense Council senior attorney Jackie Prange said: “Keystone XL cannot be built unless and until the Trump administration complies with the law. So far, we’ve seen no indication that it plans to do so.”

Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, agreed—concluding that “if the Trump administration takes an honest look at Keystone XL’s impacts, it won’t be able to justify this horrible climate-killing project.”

Critics of the Keystone XL continue to battle it in court and on the ground by organizing protests, installing solar panels along the proposed path, and returning land to local tribes in hopes of blocking the hotly contested project.

Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, turned to Twitter after the ruling to thanks those who have continued the fight against the project:

Month after month, year after year, good lawyers help make sure Keystone Pipeline doesn't get built. Another win today–many thanks @CenterForBioDiv @BoldNebraska @SierraClub @NRDC @foe_us https://t.co/YnZGMCvB0M

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) December 8, 2018

Prominent Doctors Fail to Disclose Industry Ties in Medical Journals

This story was co-published by The New York Times and ProPublica.

One is dean of Yale’s medical school. Another is the director of a cancer center in Texas. A third is the next president of the most prominent society of cancer doctors.

These leading medical figures are among dozens of doctors who have failed in recent years to report their financial relationships with pharmaceutical and health care companies when their studies are published in medical journals, according to a review by ProPublica and The New York Times and data from other recent research.

Dr. Howard A. “Skip” Burris III, the president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for instance, declared that he had no conflicts of interest in more than 50 journal articles in recent years, including in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

However, drug companies have paid his employer nearly $114,000 for consulting and speaking, and nearly $8 million for his research during the period for which disclosure was required. His omissions extended to the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which is published by the group he will lead.

In addition to the widespread lapses by doctors, the review by ProPublica and The Times found that journals themselves often gave confusing advice and did not routinely vet disclosures by researchers, although many relationships could have been easily detected on a federal database.

Medical journals, which are the main conduit for communicating the latest scientific discoveries to the public, often have an interdependent relationship with the researchers who publish in their pages. Reporting a study in a leading journal can heighten their profile — not to mention that of the drug or other product being tested. And journals enhance their cachet by publishing exclusive, breakthrough studies by acclaimed researchers.

In all, the reporting system still appears to have many of the same flaws that the Institute of Medicine identified nearly a decade ago when it recommended fundamental changes in how conflicts of interest are reported. Those have yet to happen.

“The system is broken,” said Dr. Mehraneh Dorna Jafari, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. She and her colleagues published a study in August that found that, of the 100 doctors who received the most compensation from device makers in 2015, conflicts were disclosed in only 37 percent of the articles published in the next year. “The journals aren’t checking and the rules are different for every single thing.”

Calls for transparency stem from concerns that researchers’ ties to the health and drug industries increase the odds they will, consciously or not, skew results to favor the companies with whom they do business. Studies have found that industry-sponsored research tends to be more positive than research financed by other sources. And that in turn can sway which treatments become available to patients. There is no indication that the research done by Burris and the other doctors with incomplete disclosures was manipulated or falsified.

Journal editors say they are introducing changes that will better standardize disclosures and reduce errors. But some have also argued that since most researchers follow the rules, stringent new requirements would be costly and unnecessary.

The issue has gained traction since September, when Dr. José Baselga, the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, resigned after The Times and ProPublica reported that he had not revealed his industry ties in dozens of journal articles.

Burris, president of clinical operations and chief medical officer at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, referred questions to his employer. It defended him, saying the payments were made to the institution, although the New England Journal of Medicine requires disclosure of all such payments.

Other prominent researchers who have submitted erroneous disclosures include Dr. Robert J. Alpern, the dean of the Yale School of Medicine, who failed to disclose in a 2017 journal article about an experimental treatment developed by Tricida that he served on that company’s board of directors and owned its stock. Tricida, which is developing therapies for chronic kidney disease, had financed the clinical trial that was the subject of the article.

Alpern said in an email that he initially believed that his disclosure — that he had been a consultant for Tricida — was adequate. However, “because of concerns recently raised about disclosures,” he said he notified the publication, the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, in October that he also served on Tricida’s board and had stock holdings in the company.

The journal initially told Alpern that his disclosure was sufficient. But after ProPublica and The Times contacted the publication in November, it said it would correct the article.

“The failure to disclose this information at the time of peer review is a violation of our policy,” Dr. Rajnish Mehrotra, the journal’s editor-in-chief, said in an email.

He later said that an additional inquiry had revealed that all 12 of the article’s authors had been incomplete in their disclosures, and that the journal planned to refer the matter to the ethics committee of the American Society of Nephrology. Mehrotra also said that the journal had decided to conduct an audit of some recent articles to evaluate the broader issue.

Dr. Carlos L. Arteaga, the director of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas, said he had “nothing to disclose” as an author of a 2016 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine of the breast cancer drug Kisqali, made by Novartis. But Arteaga had received more than $50,000 from drug companies in the three-year disclosure period, including more than $14,000 from Novartis.

In an email, Arteaga described the omission as an “inexcusable oversight and error on my part,” and subsequently submitted a correction.

Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, associate vice president for research integrity at the University of Utah, recently argued in JAMA, a leading medical journal, that researchers should face misconduct charges when they do not disclose their relationships with interested companies. “They really are falsifying the information that others rely on to assess that research,” he said. “Money is a very powerful influencer, and people’s opinions become subtly biased by that financial relationship.”

But Dr. Howard C. Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of JAMA, said that verifying each author’s disclosures would not be worth the time or effort. “The vast majority of authors are honest and do want to fulfill their obligations to tell readers and editors what their conflicts of interest could be,” he said in an interview.

As the debate continues, an influential group, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, is considering a policy that would refer researchers who commit major disclosure errors to their institutions for possible charges of research misconduct.

Concerns about the influence of drug companies on medical research have persisted for decades. Senator Estes Kefauver held hearings on the issue in 1959, and there was another surge of concern in the 2000s after a series of scandals in which prominent doctors failed to reveal their industry relationships.

Medical journals and professional societies strengthened their requirements. The drug industry restricted how it compensates doctors, prohibiting gifts like tickets to sporting events or luxury trips — although evidence of kickbacks and corruption continues to surface in criminal prosecutions. And a 2010 federal law required pharmaceutical and device makers to publicly report their payments to physicians.

Despite these changes, the system for disclosing conflicts remains fragmented and weakly enforced. Medical journals and professional societies have a variety of guidelines about what types of relationships must be reported, often leaving it up to the researcher to decide what is relevant. There are few repercussions — beyond a correction — for those who fail to follow the rules.

For example, the American Association for Cancer Research has warned authors that they face a three-year ban if they are found to have omitted a potential conflict. But the group’s conflict-of-interest policy contains no mention of such a penalty, and it said no author had ever been barred. Baselga’s failure to disclose his industry relationships extended to the association’s journal, Cancer Discovery, for which he serves as one of two editors-in-chief. The association said it is investigating Baselga’s actions.

Most authors do seem to disclose their ties to corporate interests. About two-thirds of the authors on the Kisqali study, for example, reported relationships with companies, including Novartis. But the researchers who did not included Arteaga, Burris and Denise A. Yardley, a senior investigator who works with Burris at Sarah Cannon.

The Tennessee-based research center received more than $105,000 in fees for consulting, speaking and other services on Yardley’s behalf in the three-year period in which she declared no conflicts.

The Sarah Cannon institute said it switched over a year ago to a “universal disclosure” practice promoted by ASCO, the cancer group that Burris will lead. That requires doctors to disclose all payments, including those made to their institutions.

“We believe we adhere to the highest ethical standards in the industry by not allowing personal compensation to be paid to our leadership physicians,” the center said.

ASCO said it would post corrections to Burris’ disclosures in the Journal of Clinical Oncology for the past four years. The group said that in the fall of 2017 — as Burris was seeking a leadership role in the organization — it began working with him to disclose all his company relationships, including indirect payments. Burris will become president in June 2019.

“Disclosure systems and processes in medicine are not perfect yet, and neither are ASCO’s,” the group said in an email.

Burris, Yardley and Arteaga submitted updated disclosures to the New England Journal of Medicine, which posted them on Thursday.

Burris’ updated disclosure listed relationships with 30 companies, including that he provided expert testimony for Novartis.

Other studies recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine also omitted disclosures, including one on a 2018 study on a treatment for sickle cell disease and another on the recently approved cancer drug Vitravki, to be sold by Bayer and Loxo Oncology.

Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for the journal, said it was contacting those studies’ authors, and that it now asked researchers to certify that they had checked their disclosures against the federal database.

Some institutions have pushed back, arguing that the journals’ inconsistent rules make it difficult for even well-meaning researchers to do the right thing.

In a letter last month to the New England Journal of Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering objected to the treatment of one of its top researchers, Dr. Jedd Wolchok. When he tried to correct his disclosures, the journal shifted its position, from saying its editors were satisfied with his disclosures to saying he had failed to comply with the rules, the center said in citing communications with the journal.

Wolchok, a pioneer in cancer immunotherapy, ultimately corrected 13 articles and letters to the editor.

To clarify reporting requirements, several publications are attempting only now to do what the Institute of Medicine recommended in 2009. The New England Journal is testing a new system in partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges that would act as a central repository for reporting financial relationships.

This year, JAMA began requiring authors to confirm multiple times that they had nothing to disclose. ASCO has a centralized system for reporting conflicts to all of its journals and speaker presentations.

Dr. Bernard Lo, the chairman of the 2009 Institute of Medicine panel, said journals have only begun to confront some of the systemic flaws. “They’re certainly not out in front trying to be trailblazers, let me just say it that way,” he said. “The fact that it hasn’t been done means that nobody has it on their priority list.”

Heather Heyer’s Killer Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder

Self-professed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. was convicted of first-degree murder on Friday for killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer when he intentionally drove his car into a group of counterprotesters at last year’s violent Unite the Right rally that brought scores of white supremacists to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

The 21-year-old with ties to the hate group Vanguard America is now facing up to life in prison. After more than seven hours of deliberations, the jury found him guilty of Heyer’s murder and several other charges—five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of leaving the scene of a crime—related to the dozens of others who were injured.

While Fields isn’t scheduled to be sentenced until next week, news of his conviction was widely celebrated by anti-racist activists and many others as “a small measure of justice for Heather Heyer.”

PHOTOS: Charlottesville activists march through the city following James Fields' conviction.https://t.co/hV0FLob1Ty pic.twitter.com/v9zxmm2MuK

— The Daily Progress (@DailyProgress) December 8, 2018

“We must always hold bigots accountable,” tweeted writer and activist Shaun King, who has been a vocal critic of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville.

Sending love to all of my friends in Charlottesville as white supremacist Trump supporter James Alex Fields, Jr is found guilty of First Degree murder and 9 other felonies for deliberately running over Heather Heyer & others with his car.

We must always hold bigots accountable. pic.twitter.com/Je2nURUD0l

— Shaun King (@shaunking) December 7, 2018

“This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. Today, we have reclaimed our streets,” local activist Rosia Parker proclaimed at a Charlottesville memorial for Heyer, according to The Daily Progress.

Led by community activist Rosia Parker, members of the Charlottesville community chant in solidarity with the victims.
Parker began the chant by reclaiming a chant used by Unite the Right attendees on Aug 12: You will not replace us pic.twitter.com/RDhhNkxKBy

— Tyler Hammel (@TylerHammelVA) December 7, 2018

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, connected it to the broader race issues that have plagued the United States since its founding and persist today. “Fields is the face of violent white supremacy in our country,” she said. “Every last one of them must be held accountable.”

James Alex Fields found guilty of murder after plowing his car into a crowd and killing Heather Heyer.

Fields is the face of violent white supremacy in our country. Every last one of them must be held accountable. https://t.co/c6rRwuN6wx

— Kristen Clarke 866-OUR-VOTE (@KristenClarkeJD) December 7, 2018

The verdict on Friday followed an intense trial. As the New York Times reports:

The nine-day trial featured days of emotional testimony from victims who were seriously injured in the crash, including a man who pushed his girlfriend out of the way, bearing the brunt of the impact himself, and a single mother who suffered two broken legs and a broken back. Many of the victims returned to the courtroom day after day to listen to other witnesses, and jurors saw them hugging and comforting one another.

During the trial, prosecutors introduced evidence that Mr. Fields intended to commit harm when he drove from Ohio to attend the rally, which featured neo-Nazis bearing swastikas and Ku Klux Klan members. In a text message exchange with his mother before the rally, Mr. Fields was told to “be careful.” “We’re not the one[s] who need to be careful,” he replied in a message that also included a photo of Adolf Hilter.

Earlier this week, BuzzFeed News had reported that in a phone call with his mother in December of 2017—months after plowing into Heyer and at least 35 other people with his vehicle—Fields had referred to Heyer as “that one girl who died, or whatever” and said her death “doesn’t fucking matter.”

The Grimoire of Kensington Market

Excerpted from “The Grimoire of Kensington Market,” Copyright 2018, Lauren B. Davis. Published by Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers. This excerpt is reproduced with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Chapter Three

The next night a bitterly cold wind worried the corners of the house and rattled the windows. Maggie could almost imagine it as an elemental being, a malicious spirit. It snuck under the door and was strong enough to riffle the thin mat. For a moment she imagined this might be the spirit responsible for the compacting of her garden and was thankful whatever magic held the Grimoire together seemed strong enough to withstand it.

She carried a tureen of chicken stew to the table. The steam rose, fragrant with rosemary, onions and black olives. She placed it next to the bowl of green salad. Badger sat by her chair, his ears cocked, his mouth open. “You’ve had yours. Lie down. Go on, now.” The dog, grumbling a little, slunk to his bed by the stove.

Alvin sat at the table, slicing the crusty bread. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his heavy grey sweater and Maggie thought his forearms were quite beautiful, as she did his strong and long-fingered hands. Even though they were calloused from the hard work on the boat, there was something elegant about them, just as there was something well worn about his big slab of a face, the result of time spent in sun and wind. Deep creases around the eyes and mouth. Skin not coarse, but a bit leathery. The thick hair that always looked wind-ruffled and was bleached from the sun.

“That smells good.” His knee bumped the table leg and the plates shook. Alvin Mustby was a big man, with long legs and big feet and big hands, and he always seemed to be bumping into things. “I’m going to bring you chicken every week if you promise to cook like this.” He often did that, popping round with a bag of groceries. He was the sort of man who could be counted on for such practical things as chicken and salad and bread and so forth. She did not expect roses or perfume, nor did she crave them.

“Is this your way of inviting yourself to dinners?” Maggie poured tea from the squat brown pot into their mugs.

“Well, it’s only fair the hunter’s fed, isn’t it?”

“Stopping off at the grocery store is hardly the same as tracking a deer through the winter woods, now is it.”

“You’ve never had to contend with the wilds of Whole Foods.” He spooned the stew into their bowls. “What’s been going on here?”

She considered telling him about the letters but decided against it. She had almost convinced herself it was a bad joke. “There’s something strange about the garden. Sounds mad, but it looks smaller, and, well, darker.”

Alvin forked a large, dripping chunk of meat into his mouth and made appreciative noises, then got up and peered out the window to the garden. “Hard to tell much in the dark. Odd stuff going on all over, I hear. Most of it just gossip.”

“What about?”

He returned to the table. “Lots of cops on the streets over by the Forest.”

The Forest used to be a social housing project called Regent Park, full of red-brick low-rises, mixed-income families and some petty crime, but since elysium had taken over the drug market, the neighbourhood had become something different – more menacing, more insular, a thousand times more dangerous. At first, because of the park in its old name, Pipers had started calling it the Enchanted Forest. But the more they used, and the more Pipers there were, the less enchanted it looked. Once there had been a sort of gritty, hardscrabble sense of community, but that was over now. Some low-income families had moved out, displaced, others had nowhere else to go. The place was a no-go zone for just about anyone else, even the police. Maggie knew it only too well.

“Some sort of unrest,” Alvin continued, “but no one’s saying for sure, and there’s nothing in the papers. Rumours, though, which sound as nuts as your shrinking garden.” He scratched his head. “People think the Forest is taking up more space.”

“Pipers moving into buildings outside the Forest?” The only good thing about the Forest was its self-containment. One side of the street was a reasonable, if down-on-its-luck neighbourhood, the other, the Forest side, had become something out of that Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell.

“No, not that. More like the neighbourhood itself is . . . expanding.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Streets getting smaller on the border between Cabbagetown and the Forest, and something about streets ending where they didn’t used to. You know, the geographical confusion that’s happened in the Forest for a long time.”

Yes, Maggie knew. Space inside the Forest wasn’t precisely static. “But not outside the Forest.”

“Not until now, if the rumours are to be believed. Not that I do. Probably just what you said – more people on the pipe. You do realize you’re the only person I’ve heard of ever getting off the stuff.”

She considered that. She’d never heard of anyone getting off it either, not permanently, unless you counted death. And when Srebrenka had come after her, hadn’t she said as much? “That can’t be true, can it?”

Alvin shrugged. “Well, no one I can think of has ever stayed off it like you have. Speaking of people who are still at it, no word from Kyle?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about him. He’ll turn up one of these days.”

She considered. “Possibly. Then again, he’s been so angry at me for so long, maybe not. He’s been pissed ever since I left home and didn’t take him.”

“You were just a kid. You’re not to blame.”

Just a kid in the thrall of Lenny the Predator Poet, she thought.

So much might have been different if she’d not run away with Lenny. But then again, maybe not. Kyle had stayed with the cousins, who, after their parents’ deaths had become their negligent guardians, and look what happened to him. Maybe even if Lenny hadn’t put that first silver pipe between her lips, she’d have done it herself. If she refused to accept responsibility for Kyle’s addiction, she couldn’t put the blame for what happened to her on Lenny. Lenny died out there. So many Pipers did. But surely not all. Thinking she might be the only one who’d stayed clean this long was unsettling. It felt like a responsibility she didn’t want. She’d done it, and all by herself, so why couldn’t others? Why couldn’t Kyle?

“Kyle cut down the apple tree in the backyard, you know. Just to spite me.” How she’d loved that tree. How many afternoons had she sat beneath it, nose in a book, hiding from her cousins’ varied tortures?

Alvin gnawed on a bone. “What will you do if he does come back?”

“I didn’t tell you, but when I saw him a few weeks ago he asked if he could stay here.”

“Did he?”

“Right. Look at your face. That’s the point. I don’t trust him any more than you do.”

“Yes, well, I’m a jaded bastard. Not like my uncle.”

Maggie blushed. “Your uncle was a saint, and you know God protects them, them and fools.”

Natalie Portman Goes Full Diva in a Flat ‘Vox Lux’

A star since the age of 13, knows a little bit about childhood fame and the pitfalls that have claimed so many young actors on their way to adulthood. With the exception of Jodie Foster, few have treaded  that path with the grace and class of Portman, starring in quality popular fare like “Mars Attacks!” and “V for Vendetta” as well as art-house movies like the “The Other Boleyn Girl” and “Black Swan,” for which she won an Oscar. Never one to shy away from a challenge, she commonly defies audience expectations, convincingly playing roles as varied as a stripper in “Closer” and an astronaut in “Annihilation.” Her latest, “Vox Lux,” by neophyte filmmaker , has her singing and strutting as a pop diva in a way that flies in the face of her Audrey Hepburn-like persona—a challenge she might have been better off avoiding.

Beginning in 1999, when we first meet Celeste (Raffey Cassidy), she is in a Staten Island high school music class. After her life is horrifically interrupted in a way that leaves her on death’s door, a memoriam song composed by Celeste and her sister in the wake of the catastrophe goes viral, presenting an opportunity at stardom that she eagerly pursues. This includes taking on a salty manager (Jude Law) and a steely publicist (Jennifer Ehle), as well as learning slick dance moves for her first music video. When Celeste meets a drug-addled guitarist at a club in L.A., she thinks she might be falling in love. But soon 9/11 happens, prompting narrator Willem Dafoe to hyperbolically inform us that “Celeste’s loss of innocence curiously mirrored that of the nation.”

After about 50 minutes we jump to 2017 to find Celeste, now a famous pop star played by Portman, in Manhattan on the day of a big concert. Over lunch with her estranged teenage daughter, Tony (Sophie Lane Curtis), she sneaks a glass of wine and offers the girl narcotics, then reprimands the restaurant manager for having the temerity to ask for a photo with her. The scene looks as if it could have been filmed on Portman’s first day of shooting, as she uncharacteristically hams it up, initially struggling with a Staten Island accent.

Returning to the hotel, she argues with her long-suffering sister, Eleanor (Stacy Martin), bullying and abusing her, revealing the corrosion of the girl whom Dafoe earlier described as “kind and full of grace.” In short, Celeste has become the brat she never was as a child. In a press conference, she dances around the subject of a mass shooting in Croatia (do they have those there?), in which the gunmen wore masks resembling those worn in one of her music videos.

Later, she argues with her manager before doing drugs and having sex with him. On the way to the concert in Staten Island, she has the van pull over by a wintry beach and, joined by her daughter, drops to her knees in prayer. By the time they arrive at the venue, Celeste is too high to go on, but she does so anyway—and crushes it. The final 15 minutes of the film are taken up with Celeste strutting and singing three songs written for the soundtrack by real-life pop star Sia. Meanwhile, Dafoe informs us that when she was nearly killed all those years ago, Celeste claimed to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for her life.

It wouldn’t be fair to tell viewers not to see this film. Some might like it, and hard-core fans of Portman may love it, but the script is flat, with no themes or ideas behind it other than that tired old chestnut about fame corrupting the innocent. Corbet’s limited experience as a filmmaker results in takes that run too long, matching scenes that do the same.

An established actor from an early age, Corbet counts among his credits Jack Bauer’s girlfriend’s son in the fifth season of the hit TV show “24.” As is often the case with actors who direct, he apparently works well with his cast, particularly Jude Law. Unrecognizable as a grumpy old music-industry hack, Law plays like he’s always on edge and eager for any substance or piece of flesh that might dull that edge. As he’s aged, he’s evolved from an impossibly pretty movie star in titles like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and the aforementioned “Closer” to a more mundane and relatable presence, actually delivering some of the best work of his career in “Vox Lux.”

Despite the film’s many problems, Portman emerges unblemished. Like the pro she is, no matter how trite the dialogue or how unbelievable a scene might play, as when she denigrates Eleanor, Portman makes it work. While it’s difficult to imagine her as a pop diva in a form-fitting suit (she hasn’t the persona and has not overtly played up her sex appeal), once she takes the stage, all doubts are dispatched.

Still, one has to wonder why Portman might agree to a film like “Vox Lux.” Perhaps she connected on the basis of her own upbringing in the spotlight, or she might have been drawn by the movie’s depiction of mass shootings and the aftermath in the hopes of shedding light on the subject. Maybe Corbet is an old friend, or maybe she just likes helping out new filmmakers, since the movie would likely not have been financed without her. Whatever her reasons, she is due the benefit of the doubt given a career that has suggested largesse to be a stronger motivating factor than self-aggrandizement.

“Vox Lux” won’t help Portman’s career much, but a misstep for the right reasons is not something to deride. Still, to see two seasoned actors like Portman and Law drastically outshining the movie around them is a pity more than a thrill. Maybe next time she should just say no.

Saudis Targeted Khashoggi With This Israeli Surveillance Tool

Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz, who is based in Montreal, filed a lawsuit in an Israeli court on Sunday against Tel Aviv-based cyber intelligence company NSO Group for monitoring his messages with Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The company has denied accusations that its spyware played a role in Khashoggi’s killing at the Saudi consulate in Turkey in October.

Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto reported that Abdulaziz’s phone had been infected by NSO’s Pegasus spyware, which can access photos, phone calls and emails, as well as a user’s GPS location. The researchers had previously found possible Pegasus surveillance operations in 45 countries, including the United States.

“The hacking of my phone played a major role in what happened to Jamal, I am really sorry to say,” Abdulaziz told CNN. “The guilt is killing me.” He has requested $160,000 in damages and for NSO Group to stop selling its products to Saudi Arabia.

In 2014, American private equity firm Francisco Partners bought NSO for $130 million. Other critics of the Saudi regime who have been targeted with the Pegasus software include human rights activist Yahya Assiri and political satirist Ghanem Almasarir, both of whom are based in the United Kingdom.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden said in November that NSO surveilled Khashoggi. “The reality is that they bugged one of his few friends and contacts using software created by an Israeli company,” Snowden said. He described NSO as “the worst of the worst in selling these burglary tools that are being actively used to violate the human rights of dissidents, opposition figures, activists, to some pretty bad players.”

The Israeli Ministry of Defense approves each of NSO’s sales individually. Amnesty International is considering legal action to pressure the government to revoke NSO’s export license.

“Our findings paint a bleak picture of the human rights risks of NSO’s global proliferation,” Citizen Lab wrote. “At least six countries with significant Pegasus operations have previously been linked to abusive use of spyware to target civil society, including Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.”

The Pegasus software has been detected targeting a range of private citizens. In July, as Amnesty International urged Saudi Arabia to release six women’s rights activists who had been detained, a staff member was targeted with the Pegasus software. Last year, Citizen Lab reported that the Pegasus software had been used to target Mexican journalists and lawyers tracking government corruption and human rights abuses. Ahmed Mansoor, an activist in the United Arab Emirates who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for social media posts, was previously targeted with Pegasus as well.

“We have example, after example, after example of this software being used to harass and threaten activists around the world,” Amnesty International’s Danna Ingleton said. “They’re using national security as an excuse for acting outside the law.”

The Nauseating Spectacle of George H.W. Bush’s Funeral

You will often find mentioned, in history books recounting the grim march of the 20th century, the 1910 funeral of King George VII. A clownish panoply paraded through the streets of London: nine monarchs, a small army of minor royals, a wire fox terrier named Caesar. These honored guests, the great potentates of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, were already dead, and did not know it. Ridiculous relics of an age that had already elapsed—of swordsmen, doffed hats, and fur-hatted hussars—their kind would soon be incinerated in the trenches of World War I.

The same stench is in the air over a century later, in America, now that George Herbert Walker Bush has been laid to rest. The 41st president of the United States finally expired, after an extended dotage spent leering from a wheelchair like an ailing mob boss. And to a degree that is still somehow surprising, Bush’s death has inspired a low-grade panic among a certain class of American elite—ludicrously rich, self-obsessed in the extreme, lifelong killers.

For those invited, the events Wednesday within the National Cathedral constituted a rearguard maneuver against what should be the final judgment of every living thing. George H.W. Bush dealt out an awful lot of death over the course of his life to a diverse array of peoples: AIDS patients, bereft of comfort and care; terrified Iraqis, slaughtered in retreat or at their homes; young people of color, jailed on an industrial scale. Any remembrance of such victims was an uphill battle, against the cold kind of power that not only killed them, but rendered them despicable first—in effect, worthy of killing.

But now that it’s time for Bush to meet his maker, no expense is being spared to pretend there is some glory in death, when it happens to the right kind of person. The most tangible illustration is in the nauseating pageantry of the funeral ceremonies, all to honor that singular statesman who once vomited into the lap of a Japanese prime minister. Flags are to be flown at half-mast—not merely for a day, or a week, but until 2019. Washington, D.C., was shut down for not one, not two, but three days of mourning, followed by a second memorial service in Houston. A Union Pacific funeral train, its 11 cars and two locomotives painted in the colors of Air Force One, chugged through the Texas hinterland, its arrival capped by the Navy’s first-ever 21-fighter-jet salute, screeching through the sky and climaxing with a “missing man formation.” In this aerial show, one jet breaks away and ascends to the heavens, escorting the commander in chief to his final office, “the Celestial White House,” to be reunited with Barb and Lee Atwater and Bill Casey….

To hell with that. You expect a child to be unstrung by the death of a pet dog, or grandparent; to see the most powerful figures of recent U.S. history, grief-stricken over the death of a 94-year-old man, is not a little bizarre. They are also weeping for themselves and aren’t even sure why, exactly. In the same way that the processes of putrefaction mystified peasants in the Middle Ages, the Beltway village has been gripped by a collective hysteria—perhaps confronting the fact that nothing they do on earth will change the fact that they, too, will die. And it won’t matter what angles they played in their comfortable lives.

Pomp and circumstance are still very important in America—rituals to which the power-worshippers cling, lest the contradictions of their existences become too much to bear. But the construction of George H.W. Bush as some avatar of decency, all noblesse oblige in a gentler era of American politics, is infuriatingly false. The only requirement for adopting this viewpoint is a total, willful ignorance of history.

Perhaps that’s why I was so glad to see Donald Trump sitting among the mourners in the National Cathedral. There he sat—chair a little too far away from the First Lady, eyes wandering, not even pretending he wasn’t bored. He looked like a boy who had got dragged to church, which, really, he was. They say that funerals are for the living, not the dead, and never does that seem more true with all of the smug suggestions, in the media and from the mourners, that this spectacle was somehow a rebuke of Trump, that George H.W. Bush stood in valiant opposition to the presidency today.

But there was Trump, stuffed into his enormous, billowing suit, hands tucked petulantly into his armpits. The media has made a great show of celebrating Bush’s modesty, which is more a reflection on the vulgarity of the Oval Office’s current occupant than anything else. And despite the president kicking Poppy’s favored sons in the teeth, repeatedly, the deceased oh-so-graciously invited Trump to his funeral anyway.

While this was savored as yet another example of the Bush clan’s famous chivalry, any person with an ounce of self-respect would have barred Trump from setting foot in that church. But then, these scions abandoned such lofty ideals long ago; there is a greater game being played here. Virtually every aspect of the nauseating spectacle that was the Bush presidential funeral can be understood as a defensive clinging to power and privilege. Even in death, the doctrine of preemptive action against a vague but almighty threat reigns supreme.

What’s worse, for more of the public than we might like to acknowledge, it seemed to work. The military marching, the passing of a sucking candy to Michelle Obama, George W. Bush breaking down in tears over his aristocrat father’s death—this was comfort food for a broad swath of America. CBS’ Bob Schieffer went so far as to describe the proceedings as the “rituals of democracy”—the rituals in question being a taxpayer-funded entombing to which the public was not invited, in a cathedral constructed exclusively for the masters of the universe. Alan Simpson, the former senator best known of late for advocating the starving of his fellow senior citizens, offered that Bush knew “hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”

Bush sure knew that, didn’t he? The wages of hate. He and his family certainly lacked any such contempt for the masses when his father, Prescott Bush, pocketed a bundle off his partners in Nazi Germany; when he himself conducted an affair for years with his mistress, Jennifer Fitzgerald, ever presenting himself as the dutiful family man; when he kicked his friends at Planned Parenthood to the curb, pretending he’d always hated abortion the moment the vice presidency was dangled in front of him; when he sweatily pardoned all his underlings before the rising waters of Iran-Contra got above his ears; when he had no idea what a supermarket checkout machine was; or served as director of the CIA; or performed any of the other monstrous acts we’ve come to expect from our blue-blooded politicians.

These days, we’re not really living in Donald Trump’s America. It would be nice to think that, and plenty do—eager to pretend the country isn’t likely broken beyond repair, and that Trump is an aberration who will soon pass. That sputtering strain of mustard gas, wafting over the fields and streets, is nothing compared to the marble walls through which it seeped. The racism, the violence, the power-grabbing, the arrogant eternity—it’s a great legacy George H.W. Bush built on, like Reagan and Nixon and Goldwater before him. It’s a shame he couldn’t recognize Trump as his own heir.

Navy Veteran, 97, Recalls 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor

HONOLULU — Retired U.S. Navy Cmdr. Don Long was alone on an anchored military seaplane in the middle of a bay across the island from Pearl Harbor when Japanese warplanes started striking Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, watching from afar as the bombs and bullets killed and wounded thousands.

The waves of attacking planes reached his military installation on Kaneohe Bay soon after Pearl Harbor was struck, and the young sailor saw buildings and planes start to explode all around him.

When the gunfire finally reached him, setting the aircraft ablaze, he jumped into the water and found himself swimming through fire to safety.

Now 97, Long will remember the 77th anniversary of the attack from his home in Napa, California.

He shared some of his memories this week with The Associated Press:

___

DECADES OF ANNIVERSARIES

Long was fresh out of boot camp when he arrived in Hawaii in 1941.

“I got off that ship with my sea bag over my shoulder and we threw it on a truck and they carted me over to Kaneohe from Pearl Harbor where we had landed,” Long recalled.

It was a different experience when he flew to Hawaii for the 75th anniversary in 2016, a trip that was paid for by a survivor’s group.

“We came in on a first class United chartered jet . all the girls with the leis were there with the Hawaiian music,” he remembered. “We ended up not in a bunk in the barracks, but in a very nice ocean room at the Hawaiian Hilton.”

He attended a dinner where survivors were seated at random with dignitaries. At his table were Japan’s Honolulu-based consul general and his wife.

“He and his wife were there in full regalia,” Long said. He asked if they might be able to help him identify the pilot who attacked his plane 77 years ago.

“They did some searching I guess, or told somebody to do it, but within a month or so I got a message from them and the proof is not positive but they sent the information on three Japanese pilots. It was probably one of those three,” Long said. All three have died, but Long was impressed the consul general had taken the time to find out.

Long no longer harbors ill will against Japan or its people.

“I don’t know when that feeling left me. But as you are probably well aware, we were taught to hate those people with all our hearts, and when you’re looking at one down a gun sight, you can’t really feel much love for anyone — that’s for darn sure,” he said.

“That has long since changed.”

Long has not always marked the anniversary like he does now.

“For about 50, 60 years or so, it was a day that rang a little bell to me, but I did not do much,” he said. “In the past 20 or so (years), I take part in some kind of activity that I’ll say is appropriate for the day.”

This year, Long plans to visit school children to talk about Pearl Harbor , then will light a beacon atop Mount Diablo in Concord, California. The beacon, known as the Eye of Diablo, was put out shortly after the attack in 1941. In 1964, Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander of U.S. Pacific forces during World War II, relit the beacon, beginning a yearly tradition.

___

A ROUTINE WEEKEND

Long remembers that weekend of the attack as routine, “or so it started out,” he wrote in a 1992 essay that he provided to The Associated Press.

The 20-year-old seaman from Minnesota enrolled in boot camp in March 1941, a “snotty nose kid, fresh off the farm.” That Sunday morning was his first day of operational duty with the squadron he had been assigned to about a month earlier.

He was tasked with standing watch aboard a seaplane in the bay across the island from Pearl Harbor.

He arrived early and took a small boat toward the awaiting Catalina flying boat, cruising across the turquoise waters of windward Oahu with Hawaii’s 73-degree air splashing across his face.

“I recall it was a beautiful sunny day in Hawaii that morning,” Long said.

He relieved a comrade who had stood watch overnight, and began preparing for a day of signal drills and regular maintenance checks. He settled into the pilot’s compartment to wait for contact from the beach signaling station to begin his drills.

A few minutes later, he heard the roar of airplanes overhead and then the sound of explosions. He assumed it was U.S. military making practice runs, but quickly realized he was wrong. In the distance, Long saw planes flying over hangars and buildings exploding. Another plane that was anchored nearby was hit and burst into flames.

Seconds later, a Japanese plane made a run toward his moored aircraft. “The sequence of events during the next few minutes is not entirely clear,” he recalled.

Long jumped from the pilot’s seat and started looking for a life jacket, but bullets were immediately producing fountains of seawater inside the cabin. The fuel tanks in the wings were hit, and he was quickly surrounded by flames.

He gave up on the life jacket and made a run for the rear exit. Gasoline was ablaze on the water, so he jumped into the bay and swam beneath the flames to get away from the burning plane. He came to the surface and through the flames three times for air.

He soon realized his military-issued high-top work shoes were bogging him down, so he dove underwater and removed them. Still far from shore, Long found a wooden channel marker and swam to it, ducking beneath the waves to hide every time a Japanese plane made a pass.

Once the attack planes left Long saw flames, smoke and sinking aircraft all around the bay. He spotted a boat that was searching for survivors and flagged them down.

Swimming through the flames burned his head, face and arms, but Long considered himself in good health compared to the wounded and dead around him.

“Shipmates on the shore greeted me with comments like ‘we never expected to see you again,’” Long recalled. “I was told I looked pretty bad.”

“The attack was over, but much turmoil remained,” he wrote. “That’s it — the start of the first day of a long war.”