The coronavirus almost killed Fucktard Trump. That would have been a good thing.

The Washington Post

Inside the extraordinary effort to save Trump from covid-19

His illness was more severe than the White House acknowledged at the time. Advisers thought it would alter his response to the pandemic. They were wrong.

By Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb

June 24, 2021

This article is adapted from “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” which will be published June 29 by HarperCollins.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar’s phone rang with an urgent request: Could he help someone at the White House obtain an experimental coronavirus treatment, known as a monoclonal antibody?

If Azar could get the drug, what would the White House need to do to make that happen? Azar thought for a moment. It was Oct. 1, 2020, and the drug was still in clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration would have to make a “compassionate use” exception for its use since it was not yet available to the public. Only about 10 people so far had used it outside of those trials. Azar said of course he would help.

Azar wasn’t told who the drug was for but would later connect the dots. The patient was one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers: Hope Hicks.

A short time later, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn received a request from a top White House official for a separate case, this time with even greater urgency: Could he get the FDA to sign off on a compassionate-use authorization for a monoclonal antibody right away? There is a standard process that doctors use to apply to the FDA for unapproved drugs on behalf of patients dealing with life-threatening illnesses who have exhausted all other options, and agency scientists review it. The difference was that most people don’t call the commissioner directly.

The White House wanted Hahn to say yes within hours. Hahn, who still did not know who the application was for, consulted career officials. The FDA needs to go by the book, the officials insisted. Hahn relayed the message back to the White House. They kept pressing him to effectively cut corners. No, we can’t do that, Hahn told them several times. We’re talking about someone’s life. We have to actually examine the application to make sure we’re doing it safely.

When Hahn later learned the effort was on behalf of the president, he was stunned. For God’s sake, he thought, it’s the president who’s sick, and you want us to bend the rules? Trump was in the highest-risk category for severe disease from covid-19 — at 74, he rarely exercised and was considered medically obese. He was the type of patient with whom you would want to take every possible precaution. As it did with all compassionate-use applications, the FDA made a decision within 24 hours. Agency officials scrambled to figure out which company’s monoclonal antibody would be most appropriate given the clinical information they had, and selected the one from Regeneron, known simply as Regen-Cov.

A five-day stretch in October 2020 — from the moment White House officials began an extraordinary effort to get Trump lifesaving drugs to the day the president returned to the White House from the hospital — marked a dramatic turning point in the nation’s flailing coronavirus response. Trump’s brush with severe illness and the prospect of death caught the White House so unprepared that they had not even briefed Vice President Mike Pence’s team on a plan to swear him in if Trump became incapacitated.

For months, the president had taunted and dodged the virus, flouting safety protocols by holding big rallies and packing the White House with maskless guests. But just one month before the election, the virus that had already killed more than 200,000 Americans had sickened the most powerful person on the planet.

Trump’s medical advisers hoped his bout with the coronavirus, which was far more serious than acknowledged at the time, would inspire him to take the virus seriously. Perhaps now, they thought, he would encourage Americans to wear masks and put his health and medical officials front and center in the response. Instead, Trump emerged from the experience triumphant and ever more defiant. He urged people not to be afraid of the virus or let it dominate their lives, disregarding that he had had access to health care and treatments unavailable to other Americans.

It was, several advisers said, the last chance to turn the response around. And once the opportunity passed, it was the point of no return.

The week leading up to Trump’s infection was frenzied, even by his standards. On Saturday, Sept. 26, he had hosted a party with scores of maskless attendees to announce Amy Coney Barrett as his pick for Supreme Court justice. The celebrations had continued indoors, where most people remained maskless. By that time, the virus was surging again, but Trump’s contempt for face coverings had turned into unofficial White House policy. He actually asked aides who wore them in his presence to take them off. If someone was going to do a news conference with him, he made clear that he or she was not to wear a mask by his side.

The day after the Supreme Court celebration, Trump had also hosted military families at the White House. At Trump’s insistence, few were wearing masks, but they were packed in a little too tight for his comfort. He wasn’t worried about others getting sick, but he did fret about his own vulnerability and complained to his staff afterward. Why were they letting people get so close to him? Meeting with the Gold Star families was sad and moving, he said, but added, “If these guys had covid, I’m going to get it because they were all over me.” He told his staff that they needed to do a better job of protecting him.

Two days after that, he flew to Cleveland for the first presidential debate against his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Trump was erratic that whole evening, and he seemed to deteriorate as the night went on. The pundits’ verdicts were brutal.

Almost 48 hours later, Trump became terribly ill. Hours after his tweet announcing he and first lady Melania Trump had coronavirus infections, the president began a rapid spiral downward. His fever spiked, and his blood oxygen level fell below 94 percent, at one point dipping into the 80s. Sean Conley, the White House physician, attended the president at his bedside. Trump was given oxygen in an effort to stabilize him.

The doctors gave Trump an eight-gram dose of two monoclonal antibodies through an intravenous tube. That experimental treatment was what had required the FDA’s sign-off. He was also given a first dose of the antiviral drug remdesivir, also by IV. That drug was authorized for use but still hard to get for many patients because it was in short supply.

Typically, doctors space out treatments to measure a patient’s response. Some drugs, such as monoclonal antibodies, are most effective if they’re administered early in the course of an infection. Others, such as remdesivir, are most effective when they’re given later, after a patient has become critically ill. But Trump’s doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once. His condition appeared to stabilize somewhat as the day wore on, but his doctors, still fearing he might need to go on a ventilator, decided to move him to the hospital. It was too risky at that point to stay at the White House.

Many White House officials and even his closest aides were kept in the dark about his condition. But after they woke up to the news — many of them were asleep when Trump tweeted at nearly 1 a.m. on Friday that he had the virus — Cabinet officials and aides lined up at the White House to get tested. A large number had met with him the previous week to brief him about various issues or had traveled with him to the debate.

It was unclear even to Trump’s closest aides just how sick he was. Was he mildly ill, as he and Conley were saying, or was he sicker than they all knew? Trump was supposed to join a call with nursing home representatives later that day as part of his official calendar. Officials had been scheduled to do it in person from the White House, but that morning they were informed the call would be done remotely. Trump’s aides insisted that he would still be on it.

As one aide waited in line for a coronavirus test, she saw Conley sprint out of his office with a panicked look. That’s strange, the aide thought. An hour or two later, officials were informed that Pence would be joining the nursing homes call. Trump couldn’t make it.

‘Like a miracle’

Trump’s condition worsened early Saturday. His blood oxygen level dropped to 93 percent, and he was given the powerful steroid dexamethasone, which is usually administered if someone is extremely ill (the normal blood oxygen level is between 95 and 100 percent). The drug was believed to improve survival in coronavirus patients receiving supplemental oxygen. The president was on a dizzying array of emergency medicines by now — all at once.

Throughout Trump’s time in the hospital, his doctors consulted with the medical experts on the White House coronavirus task force whom the president had long ago discarded. They talked to Hahn, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, seeking input about his treatment.

Trump and his aides had ignored numerous warnings from the task force doctors that they were putting themselves and everyone in the West Wing at risk by their cavalier behavior. Over the past eight months, Trump had come dangerously close to the virus a number of times. Those repeated escapes had made the White House more careless, constantly tempting fate. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, and Redfield wrote to top aides after every White House outbreak, warning them that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was not safe. Birx took her concerns to Pence directly. This is dangerous, she told him. If White House staff can’t or won’t wear masks, they need to be more than 10 feet away from one another. This is just too risky.

Their warnings had gone unheeded, and now some would pay a price. Trump hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital, but his aides had spelled out the choice: He could go to the hospital Friday, while he could still walk on his own, or he could wait until later, when the cameras could capture him in a wheelchair or gurney. There would be no hiding his condition then.

At least two of those who were briefed on Trump’s medical condition that weekend said he was gravely ill and feared that he wouldn’t make it out of Walter Reed. People close to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said he was consumed with fear that Trump might die.

It was unclear if one of the medications, or their combination, helped, but by Saturday afternoon Trump’s condition began improving. One of the people familiar with Trump’s medical information was convinced the monoclonal antibodies were responsible for the president’s quick recovery.

Throughout the day Saturday, Oct. 3, the restless Trump made a series of phone calls to gauge how his hospitalization was being received by the public. In all likelihood, the steroid he was taking had given him a burst of energy, though no one knew how long it would last. Perhaps buoyed by that, Trump continued to post on Twitter from the hospital, anxious to convey that he was upright and busy. At one point Trump even called Fauci to discuss his condition and share his personal assessment of the monoclonal antibodies he had received. He said it was miraculous how quickly they made him feel much better.

“This is like a miracle,” Trump told his campaign adviser Jason Miller in another one of his calls from the hospital. “I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t feeling that great.”

Waiting for a sign

Redfield spent the weekend Trump was sick praying. He prayed the president would recover. He prayed that he would emerge from the experience with a newfound appreciation for the seriousness of the threat. And he prayed that Trump would tell Americans they should listen to public health advisers before it was too late. The virus had begun a violent resurgence. Redfield, Fauci, Birx and others felt they had limited time to persuade people to behave differently if they were going to avoid a massive wave of death.

There were few signs that weekend that Trump would have a change of heart. It had already been a battle to get him to agree to go to Walter Reed in the first place. Now, he was badgering Conley and others to let him go home early. Redfield heard Trump was insisting on being discharged and called Conley on the phone. The president can’t go home this early, Redfield advised the doctor. He was a high-risk patient, and there were no guarantees that he wouldn’t backslide or experience some complication. (Many covid-19 patients seemed to be on an upswing and then quickly deteriorated.) Trump needed to stay in the hospital until that risk had passed. Conley agreed but said the president had made up his mind and couldn’t be convinced otherwise.

If they couldn’t keep him in the hospital, the advisers hoped that Trump would at least emerge from Walter Reed a changed man. Some even began mentally preparing to finally speak their minds. It would surely be the inflection point, they all thought. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to serve as a wake-up call. It was, at the end of the day, a national security failure. The president had not been protected. If this fiasco wasn’t the turning point, what would be?

Just as the country had been watching a few days before, many people tuned in again as Trump took Marine One back to the White House’s South Lawn on Monday night. They saw him step out in a navy suit, white shirt and blue-striped tie, with a medical mask on his face. He walked along the grass before climbing the steps to the Truman Balcony.

But Trump didn’t go inside. It was a moment of political theater too good to pass up — as suffused with triumph as his trip Friday had been humbling. He turned from the center of the balcony and looked back toward Marine One and the television cameras. It was clear that he was breathing heavily from the long walk and the climb up the flight of stairs.

Redfield was watching on television from home. He was praying as Trump went up the steps. Praying that he would reach the Truman Balcony and show some humility. That he would remind people that anyone could be susceptible to the coronavirus — even the president, the first lady and their son. That he would tell them how they could protect themselves and their loved ones.

But Trump didn’t waver. Facing the cameras from the balcony, he used his right hand to unhook the mask loop from his right ear, then raised his left hand to pull the mask off his face. He was heavily made up, his face more orange tinted than in the photos from the hospital. The helicopter’s rotors were still spinning. He put the mask into his right pocket, as if he was discarding it once and for all, then raised both hands in a thumbs-up. He was still probably contagious, standing there for all the world to see. He made a military salute as the helicopter departed the South Lawn, and then strode into the White House, passing staffers on his way and failing to protect them from the virus particles emitted from his nose and mouth.

Right then, Redfield knew it was over. Trump showed in that moment that he hadn’t changed at all. The pandemic response wasn’t going to change, either.

Nobody cares.

I have a lot of time on my hands these days. When I'm not losing chess games I read books.

I am now reading the best books ever written, the 7 Harry Potter books. Lots of magical stuff, everything well done. I already read the 7 Potter books twice. This is the 3rd time.

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https://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com/search?q=%22nobody+cares%22

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Fictional universe of Harry Potter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The fictional universe of British author J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of fantasy novels comprises two distinct societies: the Wizarding World and the Muggle world. In the novels, the Muggle world is the world inhabited by the non-magical majority, with which the Wizarding world exists coextensively, albeit mostly remaining hidden from the non-magical humans. The plot of the series is set in 1990s Britain, but in a veiled and separate shadow society wherein magic is commonly used and practiced, and those who can use it live in self-enforced seclusion, hiding their abilities from the rest of the world. The term "Wizarding World" refers to the global wizard community that lives hidden in parallel with the Muggle world; the different terms refer to different communities within the same area rather than separate planets or worlds. Any new works taking place in this universe are released under the "J. K. Rowling's Wizarding World" brand.

Darwin's Origin of Species: Books That Changed the World by Janet Browne | Feb 18, 2008

I have been reading a book about Charles Darwin, "Darwin's Origin of Species" by Janet Browne. I recommend it.

Darwin's most brilliant idea, natural selection, was strong evidence for the idea that the Magic Man didn't do it. This was the god fairy's most important job, the magical creation of species. Darwin proved the fairy had nothing to do with it. It was a natural process, no magic required.

To fix the problem religious fucktards had to throw out the science or stick the Magic Jeebus Man into the science. They can't do that, but they did it anyway because reality makes them cry.

Charles Darwin killed the ridiculous Magic Man.

Why do billions of people still think the magic fairy is real? That's easy, it's because they're uneducated morons.

Madrid, Spain. I have been a bullfight fan all my life. I recommend "Death in the Afternoon" by Ernest Hemingway.

https://www.thelocal.es/20190525/madrids-bullfighting-ritual-acclaimed-and-contested/

When the bull collapses and dies in front of the matador, silence descends on Madrid's bullfighting ring, a "ritual" that its French manager Simon Casas vigorously defends in an increasingly conflictive climate.

Around 500,000 enthusiasts are expected to descend on Madrid's Las Ventas arena during the month-long Feria de San Isidro, the Spanish capital's biggest bullfighting festival. But now more than ever, activists and politicians are getting involved as regional and municipal elections loom on Sunday.

Madrid's outgoing left-wing mayor has promised “corridas” (bullfights) “without blood or death”. But the conservatives and far-right defend a “tradition” associated with Spanish identity. To make their point, they enlisted three “toreros” (bullfighters) as candidates for April's general election.

“I don't know anyone who loves the fighting bull more than the torero,” says Casas, a 71-year-old former matador, as he strolls through Las Ventas, built in 1929. It “is never an enemy for the torero but a glorified partner.”

In a corral next to the ring, visitors measure up these “fighting bulls” that have been reared solely for combat and sometimes weigh more than 600 kilos.

“If I had to be an animal, I wouldn't want to be a kitten or a doggie but a fighting bull,” says Casas. “I'd die, yes, but… I would make my destiny glorious.”

Spectators follow a bullfight at the Las Ventas bullring during the 2019 San Isidro festival in Madrid. Photo: GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP

Operating room and abattoir

Every day, representatives of the toreros pick at random the bull that will face off with each matador that evening in a solemn ceremony that involves picking papers out of a hat.

“That's the way it's been done since the 19th century,” says Casas.

In his office, paintings and photos pay homage to toreros killed by bulls: Joselito in 1920, Manolete in 1947… Before a fight, rare are the matadors — those toreros tasked with killing the bull — who don't pass by the chapel in Las Ventas to pray. Nearby, two operating rooms are on hand for injured toreros.

As for the bull, it will die unless it receives an extremely rare pardon — “because you have to follow things through otherwise it becomes a performance and not a ritual,” says Casas.

Bullfights that involve killing the bull in the ring are legal in Spain, part of France, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and some of Ecuador. In Portugal, it's illegal but the bull is slaughtered afterwards.

'He killed it badly'

On this spring day, the Las Ventas ring is teeming with close to 24,000 people. “Long live Spain” shouts the crowd as former king Juan Carlos I joins onlookers.

First off, the bull is weakened by toreros who drive pikes and “banderillas” — coloured darts — into it, drawing blood. Then a flourish of trumpets announces the entrance of the matador who has 10 minutes to finish the bull off.

“Ole!” “Good!” The matador is applauded when he manages to attract the bull into circles around him, standing close to its horns. Suddenly thousands of white handkerchiefs rise in the audience: “a bull was very valiant, it was killed at once, the public is asking for an ear” as a reward for the torero, explains Antonio Mercader, a 54-year-old economist and enthusiast.

Onlookers whistle with disapproval at another matador as “the bull suffers too much,” adds his wife, Paqui Fernandez, pulling a face. “He killed it badly.”

The 'art of killing'

Protesting for the “abolition of bullfighting,” activists estimate that some 200 bulls will be killed during the Feria of San Isidro, and thousands in the whole of Spain this year.

Calling corridas a “show of cruelty,” author Manuel Rivas published an opinion piece earlier this month asking Spain to renounce the “art of killing.”

However, bullfighting, part of Spain's cultural heritage list, appears untouchable. Its ban in Catalonia in 2010 was overturned by the Constitutional Court. In practice, however, corridas no longer take place in the northeastern region, nor in the Balearic and Canary Islands.

In 2008, 810 bullfights took place across Spain. Ten years later, there were only 369, according to the culture ministry.

“Don't leave bullfighting high and dry,” pleads this year's poster for San Isidro.

It is a poster that appealed to Eladio Galan, a 25-year-old pharmacist who wonders whether bullfighting will still exist in 30 years.

“I have friends who are indifferent, others who tell me: 'you're heartless'.”

By AFP's Laurence Boutreux

The Washington Post: Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, dies at 90

 The Apollo 11 crew: Neil Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, module pilot; Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, lunar module pilot.

Obituaries

Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, dies at 90

By Sarah Kaplan

April 28, 2021 at 11:36 a.m. CDT

On July 20, 1969, eight years after President John F. Kennedy pledged to land a man on the lunar surface and return him safely to Earth, astronaut Michael Collins sat alone in the command module Columbia. He was floating 60 miles above what he later called the “withered, sun-seared peach pit” of the moon.

A lander carrying his fellow Apollo 11 crewmen, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, sped away from the main craft, en route to fulfilling Kennedy’s goal.

“You cats take it easy,” Mr. Collins radioed to his crew mates.

While Armstrong and Aldrin took their giant leap for mankind, in Armstrong’s memorable phrase, Mr. Collins circled the moon alone, keeping the command module going and running through the 117-page list of contingencies he’d prepared in the event anything went awry.

He was a quarter of a million miles from home — further than any traveler had ever gone on his own — without even radio communication to tether him to the rest of humanity. The moon’s bulk blocked the Earth from view and cut off contact with mission control for large portions of his orbit.

“Not since Adam has any human known such solitude,” NASA public affairs officer Douglas Ward remarked to reporters at the time.

The diffident Mr. Collins, who died April 28 at 90, later brushed off the comparison to the biblical first man, but he admitted to feeling petrified. In his 17 years as a fighter pilot, test pilot and astronaut, no flight had worried him as much as the lunar lander’s 31/2 -hour trip to reunite with the Apollo 11 command module.

“My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter,” he wrote in his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.” He had resolved not to commit suicide if Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t make it, but he knew that being the mission’s sole survivor would make him “a marked man for life.”

That foreboding never came to pass. All three crew members were present for Apollo 11’s triumphant splashdown in the Pacific and the subsequent victory tour. At its close, three weeks later in Los Angeles, they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

“His contribution to this great undertaking,” each man’s citation read, “will be remembered so long as men wonder and dream and search for truth on this planet and among the stars.”

That was not always true of Mr. Collins, whose name never gained the universal recognition of Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s.

This was partly a function of personality. Genial and levelheaded, he had stayed clear of the rivalries and showdowns that marked life at Johnson Space Center in Houston — including the reported bitterness between Armstrong and Aldrin over who would get to set foot on the moon first. Post-Apollo, when Armstrong turned recluse and Aldrin struggled with alcoholism, Mr. Collins thrived outside the glare of publicity.

Still, Mr. Collins had the deep respect of those who understood what his mission entailed. The pioneering transatlantic aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who would later write the foreword to “Carrying the Fire,” sent a letter to Mr. Collins after the moon landing lauding his role in the mission.

“I watched every minute of the walk-out, and it certainly was of indescribable interest. But it seems to me you had an experience of in some ways great profundity,” Lindbergh wrote. He went on to compare Mr. Collins’s solitude to his own solo flight across the Atlantic: “I felt closer to you in orbit than to your fellow astronauts I watched walking on the surface of the moon.”

Mr. Collins went on to become an eloquent advocate for space exploration, in his many books and as founding director of Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He was an inductee of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, among other honors. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 at the rank of major general.

Michael Collins was born in Rome on Oct. 31, 1930, to a distinguished military family. His father, Army Maj. Gen. James Lawton Collins, had long served as an aide-de-camp to Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.

The elder Collins was a military attache in Italy when his son was born. His father’s brother, Gen. Joseph Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins, was Army chief of staff during the Korean War. Michael’s older brother, the late James L. Collins Jr., was an Army brigadier general and military historian.

Mr. Collins grew up following his father on assignments to Oklahoma, New York City and Puerto Rico, among other places, before settling in Washington after America’s entry into World War II.

He graduated in 1948 from the private St. Albans School, where classmates nicknamed him “Scarecrow” for his tall and trim frame. He was an intense athletic competitor and proved more adept on the playing fields there and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., than in the classroom.

After completing his bachelor’s degree in 1952, he joined the Air Force — pointedly, a branch of the military where he didn’t have family. He was drawn to test piloting because of what he called the thrill of flying planes no one ever has before.

Described as reserved and levelheaded, but with flashes of wry wit, he once told Life magazine of his work as a test pilot: “People think we’re baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out. There is little of that. Essentially, we’re learning an in­cred­ibly complex array of machines — and learning what to do if some of it doesn’t go as advertised.”

Mr. Collins said he would have been content to remain in the Air Force, had it not been for astronaut John Glenn’s history-making solo orbit around Earth in 1962. Whereas most of the great barriers in flight had already been broken, he said, space travel offered countless opportunities to be first at something.

He immediately applied when NASA announced it was looking for candidates to supplement Glenn’s original astronaut class. He was accepted on his second attempt. In addition to the wide-ranging scientific and survival training all astronauts go through, he was assigned to work with the engineers developing pressure suits for spacewalks. The mission patch that adorned his, Aldrin’s and Armstrong’s suits — an eagle holding an olive branch over the pockmarked lunar surface — was largely his design.

Before his trek to the moon, Mr. Collins orbited the Earth in 1966 as the pilot for Gemini 10. The three-day mission saw him and crew mate John Young, a spaceflight veteran, establish a new orbital altitude record and rendezvous with two unmanned Agena target vehicles. In addition, Mr. Collins became the first astronaut in history to journey outside his spacecraft twice.

A slipped disk in 1968 nearly derailed his astronaut career, but Mr. Collins recovered from surgery in time to be included on the Apollo 11 roster. He freely acknowledged that his was not the best job on the mission but claimed that he didn’t resent being confined to the command module.

“This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two,” he wrote in “Carrying the Fire.”

He might have had another chance at a moon walk — according to NASA’s rotation system for crew selection, he was slated to be named commander of Apollo 17, which would take flight three years later and was the last mission to put men on the moon.

But in 1970, chafing from the constant attention and reluctant to undergo three more years of the exhausting physical training required for astronauts, Mr. Collins opted to retire from NASA. “My mind-set was ‘It’s over, we did it,’ ” he explained in a 2015 talk at MIT.

He had married Patricia Finnegan in 1957, and they had three children, Kate, Ann and Michael. His wife died in 2014, and their son died decades earlier, reportedly by suicide.

Mr. Collins died of cancer, his family announced in a statement on Twitter. Additional details, including information on survivors, were not immediately available.

After leaving NASA, Mr. Collins told the New York Times, he was determined to “prevent the rest of my life from being an anticlimax.” He spent a year as assistant secretary for public affairs at the State Department, then was named founding director of the National Air and Space Museum, overseeing its opening in time for the nation’s bicentennial festivities. In the late 1970s, he was undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution before moving into the directorship of a private aerospace and defense company. He later ran an aerospace consulting firm.

In several books, including “Flying to the Moon and Other Strange Places” (1976) and “Mission to Mars” (1990), Mr. Collins was also an eloquent advocate for continued space exploration. In his New York Times book review, journalist and space flight author Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. said of “Carrying the Fire” that “no other person who has flown in space has captured the experience so vividly.”

Although Mr. Collins never got to leave his footprints on the moon, one small spot there bears his name: a tiny impact crater in the Sea of Tranquility, about 15 miles from the Apollo 11 landing site.

That was about as much recognition as he wanted. In a 2009 interview with NASA, Mr. Collins expressed irritation with “the adulation of celebrities and the inflation of heroism.”

“Heroes abound, and should be revered as such, but don’t count astronauts among them,” he said. “We work very hard; we did our jobs to near perfection, but that was what we had hired on to do. . . . Celebrities? What nonsense.”

He sounded grumpy, the interviewer remarked.

“No, no, lucky!” Mr. Collins replied. “Usually, you find yourself either too young or too old to do what you really want, but consider: Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. Buzz Aldrin was born in 1930, and Mike Collins, 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 percent shrewd planning and 90 percent blind luck. Put Lucky on my tombstone.”

Read more Washington Post obituaries

Sarah Kaplan Follow

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity's response to a warming world. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe.

This is the best chess quote I have ever read. Some chess players don't agree with it but they are wrong. I found the quote in the book "Bronstein on the King's Indian". The King's Indian is my favorite chess opening.

Chess is a friendly game, which is why it was invented. The main idea of each player is to capture the chief of the opposing chess army, which according to the rules of the game leads to the surrender of the opposing forces. This rule was introduced because it was thought more beautiful for a lesser army to be able to outplay and force the surrender of a superior force. If you can understand the spirit of chess this way, then you will see that the fewer men that are captured, the more noble is the victory, and this reflects a peculiarly human way of thinking.

So winning or losing is not the main idea of chess at all. A chess game is in fact a friendly exchange of intentions, hidden in individual moves. You always have the choice either of putting into action your planned move, or of first calmly preventing the intended move of the friend with whom you are playing chess in this brief, finite moment of your life.

-- David Bronstein

Wikipedia:

David Bronstein, February 19, 1924 – December 5, 2006) was a Soviet and Russian chess player. Awarded the title of International Grandmaster by FIDE in 1950, he narrowly missed becoming World Chess Champion in 1951. Bronstein was one of the world's strongest players from the mid-1940s into the mid-1970s, and was described by his peers as a creative genius and master of tactics. Also a renowned chess writer, his book Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953 is widely considered one of the greatest chess books ever written.

At War: The end of the United States’ Forever War. New York Times. April 16, 2021.

The End of the United States’ Forever War

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff Reporter

Dear Reader,

Wesley Morgan’s recently released book about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, “The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley,” is unique in its completeness. Arguably, it is the closest any book about the American war in Afghanistan has come to capturing what transpired in a slice of territory occupied by U.S. forces.

It is especially relevant now, in the wake of President Biden’s announcement that all American troops will withdraw from the country by September. Books like Morgan’s will serve as the epitaphs for the failures of the American military in its two-decade-long war.

Thousands of troops passed through the Pech in Afghanistan’s violent east, where famous documentaries and films were born and the Korengal Valley turned practically into a household name. The soldiers there built and tore down outposts. Went on hundreds of patrols. Fought and died. Morgan, a military affairs reporter, documents it all from the beginning to the end, a herculean task in a conflict that has gone on for so long, and with characters who continuously rotated in and out every few months. These men and women all left their own marks on a military strategy that was never understood or clearly defined.

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Morgan spoke with The Times about the book and what he thinks comes next in the Pech after the United States leaves Afghanistan.

What was the main event that spurred you to write the book?

I first went to the Pech in 2010 — when I was a freelancer and I was still in college — for an embed with a battalion from the 101st Airborne Division. That visit just got me obsessed. It was my fourth reporting trip to the wars, and I think the 12th battalion I’d embedded with in a combat situation, but the fighting in the Pech was just so different, with the amount of artillery being fired, the restrictive terrain, the gunfights and how outrageous the terrain was.

And at these little outposts, like COP Michigan at the mouth of the Korengal, which was the most frequently and heavily attacked outpost in eastern Afghanistan at the time, nobody really knew when or why they’d been built, even though it had just been a few years earlier.

Initially it was for a senior thesis project that I turned in a decade ago — I helped break the news of the imminent U.S. pullout from the Pech in 2011 in a story for this paper with C. J. Chivers and Alissa Rubin because I stumbled onto the information while doing that thesis research. And then later it was for this book, as I kept going back to Afghanistan and U.S. troops got sucked back into the Pech.

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What kind of feedback has the book gotten so far?

The first thing that struck me was how many of the reviews were being written by military veterans. Then what blew me away was a pair of reviews, both by Afghanistan infantry veterans, in two publications that both cover war but with drastically different audiences, and the reviews had quite a bit in common. And a big part of what they had in common was a sense of bitterness over how a lot of heroic fighting had been built on really shaky foundations in terms of the intelligence and assumptions and decisions that led us into these valleys, and grief over how casualties had mounted as military units continually reinvented the wheel and kept flying back up to the same villages in the same valleys to go looking for firefights year after year, without a lot of knowledge being passed down or absorbed.

A soldier from the 101st Airborne Division patrolling the Pech Valley in 2010.Wesley Morgan

What happens after the U.S. completely withdraws from Afghanistan?

I think in the Pech and its tributaries, we’re already well into the post-withdrawal phase. It’s been this way at a bunch of points in the story: The U.S. embraced the counterinsurgency outpost in the Pech a couple of years before it did in other places like Kandahar and Helmand. And then when the surge was underway in those places, the battalion I first visited in the Pech was saying, “This isn’t working, time to leave,” and they did — only for them to get sucked back out there and have to reopen some of the bases, as would wind up happening in a lot of parts of Afghanistan a few years later during Trump’s mini surge.

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So I think for the Pech and its tributaries, the post-2021 future is already happening. The government and the Taliban are fighting each other, but they’re also observing truces with each other and finding ways to accommodate one another on governance and especially on fighting ISIS, which is their mutual enemy.

How does this bode for the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the region?

The U.S. has kind of outsourced our counterterrorism mission against ISIS to this weird Taliban-government partnership, to the extent that in the months before the Doha deal, the Rangers were actually using Reaper strikes to help the Taliban fight ISIS. I wrote in the book that there was a Ranger targeting team that jokingly called themselves the “Taliban Air Force” because of this, and since the book came out someone told me they even had a “Taliban Air Force” sign in their ops center, which is a detail I wish I could’ve included.

We’re going to be seeing in the months ahead whether the Taliban is willing to kind of act as our surrogate for counterterrorism like that in other parts of the country — I think where ISIS is concerned, they will, but it seems pretty clear that where Al Qaeda is concerned, they won’t.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a correspondent in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman.

Afghan War Casualty Report: April 2021

Afghan soldiers this month securing a base previously used by the U.S. military in the Haska Meyna District of Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.Ghulamullah Habibi/EPA, via Shutterstock

At least 147 pro-government forces and 25 civilians have been killed so far this month. [Read the casualty report.]

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Editor’s Picks

Here are five articles from The Times that you might have missed.

Traffic last month in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. American intelligence analysts say security in the country may worsen almost immediately.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

“As good as our intelligence and over-the-horizon capabilities are, there is no substitute for being there.” Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used by the United States and Western allies in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base after American troops leave the country. [Read the article.]

“I am so worried about my future. It seems so murky. If the Taliban take over, I lose my identity.” Many Afghans fear that without the umbrella of U.S. protection, the country will be unable to preserve its modest gains toward democracy and women’s rights. [Read the article.]

“He’s dealing with the kiss of death from his own closest partner.” The Taliban are gaining militarily in Afghanistan, and President Ashraf Ghani’s international supporters are impatient with the stumbling peace process. [Read the article.]

“There’s no easy answer, no victory dance, no ‘we were right and they were wrong.’” Was it worth it? After two decades of midnight watches and gut-twisting patrols, after all of the deaths and bloodshed and lost years, that is the one inescapable question among many of the 800,000 Americans who have served in Afghanistan since 2001. [Read the article.]

“The I.S.I., with the help of America, defeated America.” Pakistan’s military stayed allied to both the Americans and Taliban. But now the country may face intensified extremism at home as a result of a perceived Taliban victory. [Read the article.]