Former BYU Professor Misuses Previous Association

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Mike

A letter from Frank W. Fox addressed to “Arizona Mormons” is being circulated on social media and around the country. It has been picked up by various news outlets in the West such as the Salt Lake Tribune as well as nationally. Its distribution on Facebook is being supported by paid promotions, apparently by Fox himself.

Furthermore, not only has this letter been sent to many people in Arizona in mailings that were supported by the Democratic Party there, but at least one candidate for congress in Arizona has used it in her campaign efforts.

Fox is free to support whomever he chooses, but his denigration of President Trump, with documented falsehoods, needs to be called out. While Annie and I support Donald J. Trump for President, we are not, as Fox describes, members of “a mindless, militant personal following” who support the president. We recognize that Trump, like the rest of us, is imperfect.

While we are open about our support of President Trump for reelection, we are not blind to his failings. Our position is described quite well, however, in an excerpt of one of the sources we came across, a Facebook group, “LDS Fact Checker.”

Some have asked: Why would any Latter-day Saint ever vote for Trump when we all know Trump exaggerates excessively, tweets too much, viciously attacks his critics, and gloats and boasts ad nauseum? What is it that has convinced so many Latter-day Saints to “hold their noses” while mindfully and thoughtfully choosing to support Trump and vote for him?

Maybe it’s because they believe, as a popular Facebook meme states, that a vote is not a Valentine nor a way to profess one’s love for a candidate, but rather, it’s a strategic chess move—a strategy, designed to move the various chess pieces toward a desired end.

President Trump, despite his great weaknesses and flaws, has done more than any other president in the last several decades to protect the sanctity of life and religious freedom, and he has committed to continue doing the same if re-elected. Biden and Harris, on the other hand, have done the exact opposite in their political careers and have committed to continue to do the same if elected. Biden and Harris’ voting records on religious freedom, life, and on other critical issues of great concern to members of the Church speaks volumes.

This group describes itself as “Members concerned about confusing & harmful misinformation often perpetuated by media, social media and in public and political discourse in relation to life and family.” Their Facebook page was created on 14 October 2020, most likely in response to Fox’s efforts. The entire response of the group is located here. We found another, slightly shortly document that also takes issue with the various points of Fox’s attempted justification at his anti-Trump position, this one by Kevin Ray Hadlock.

We also subscribe wholeheartedly to the description of one political commentator, who recently said that the president “violates rhetorical norms on a daily basis,” which is an apt description. This commentator, Ben Shapiro, explains his views in this short video, which we strongly recommend. He states that although he did not vote for Trump in 2016, he is definitely voting for him this time. Our feeling is that people who consider themselves conservatives but who have doubts about voting for Trump would without a doubt benefit from watching what Shapiro has to say. For anyone who lacks the time to watch the video, the transcript of this video is available here.

Here are links to several additional interesting resources:

  • Three Video Documents
    These were created by “actor, writer, and director,” Darrin Southam. Southam is earnest and perhaps even a bit overdramatic, but the essence of his response to Fox’s letter is sound.
  • Comments written in reaction to the first video above:
    • Thank you, thank you for making this video. I was so upset when I was sent this letter as an alumni of BYU. What a wonderful rebuttal. We need to stand up to falsehoods and lies. We need President Trump desperately to continue to support our freedoms as written in the Constitution. Thank you for your courage.
    • I keep hearing that quote about ” Imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with. ” played over and over in my head. Anyone who wants to condemn president Trump over his imperfections ought to be thankful that our Savior,  Jesus Christ doesn’t condemn them for their own imperfections.
    • Amazing!!! Thank you for saying so eloquently what so many of us felt after reading Prof. Fox’s letter.  God bless America!  And God protect all true freedom fighters!
    • I about puked when this professor bet his eternal salvation that the brethren were not supporting Trump. He doesn’t know and neither do I. Thank you for putting this together.
  • Use of the Fox Letter by Joan Greene, Democratic Candidate for Arizona’s 5th Congressional District
  • The Pro-Abortion Position of Senators Biden and Harris.

Posted in Current Events | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Around the World

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Mike

Click on the link below to interact with a chart from an interesting site. It is possible to look at what is going on with COVID-19 around the world with various lock-down strategies. Mouse over the country names to see each plot. You can also add other countries for comparison.

The chart is based on population and with rolling seven-day averages to smooth the curve a bit. Sweden has not locked down as other nations have, so for comparison I have included Denmark and Norway that did lock down. Nevertheless, it appears that they might be turning the corner at the upper plateau and are now on the way down, without having reached the high per capita mortality rates of other countries.

Posted in Current Events | Leave a comment

Three knee replacements? But I only have two knees!

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Mike
Time to Recuperate

Anyway, both surgeries seemed to have gone quite well, and I worked hard at the physical therapy part of the program. The bottom line is that my wife and I have been able to do a lot since the surgeries that would have been otherwise impossible before. Activities have included:

Okay, so this is knee replacement #3 for me! Both knees had been replaced in 2017, one in August and the other in October. The operations seemed to have both been a success. My surgeon had been a missionary companion in Paris 50 years ago (“missionary companion”: missionaries for our church are always assigned in teams of two). He had an excellent, international reputation with the clinic that bears his name: Rosenberg Cooley Metcalf Orthopedic Clinic of Park City, Utah. He is the Rosenberg part of the name. Their clinic has treated lots of professional and Olympic athletes, with Tiger Woods having been one of those. Tom’s specialty was knees.

  1. A six-month mission for our church at the Visitors’
    Center at the new Paris Temple in 2018,
  2. Eight weeks in France last year. We went for the
    celebration of the 75th Anniversary of D-Day and stayed on until the wedding of
    a friend on 26 July, with a wonderful 10 days in Italy coming towards the end,
    and
  3. Lots of activities with our 21 grandkids, who
    work hard to keep us young!

It is important to recognize that we never would have been able to do all we have without the surgeries.

Nevertheless, the situation with the left knee (second replacement) has never been quite right, and we don’t really know what has caused the problems. I began seeing the surgeon again following our trip to France last year. Rosenberg’s replacement (a really young guy!) determined that there was a great deal more play in the left knee than in the right. He suggested as a first step more physical therapy to try to compensate for the looseness. As I learned about what helped, I added new exercises to the exercises and stretches I had been doing since the first surgeries. Specifically, the thing that seemed to help the most were strengthening exercises with an exercise ball between my back and the wall for partial, squats. As time passed, however, it became clear that something more had to be done.

The surgeon was hopeful that the simple replacement of the polyethylene spacer between the tibial and femoral components would do the trick. To have a better idea as to what to expect when he got in there, he ordered up a bone scan (skeletal scintigraphy with intravenous radioactive tracers). This revealed inflammation below the tibial components in each knee, but there was much more inflammation present in the left knee than the right. Combining that evidence with X-Rays, he told me that we needed to anticipate the possibility of a Plan B (replacement of the tibial component as well as the spacer) or even Plan C (a changeout of the whole shooting match and adding a posterior stabilized prosthesis by Stryker. When I explained these various possibilities to our kids, our oldest son said, “Pops, if none of those three works, there is always Plan D: A peg leg and a parrot!” ?

When the doc got in there, however, he discovered that things were in some ways worse than he had anticipated. The metal protection added to the back of the patella was attached by only one of the three connective elements to the point that it could be spun in place. The polyethylene spacer was worn on one side, so bad as “it could have come from a knee where it had been in place for 20 years.” Was this uneven wear due to errors in the angles of bone cuts and placement upon initial replacement? Was it caused by an unfortunate occurrence just after I returned home, the CPM machine had fallen over in bed, twisting my knee something fierce? The surgeon and his PA were adamant back then that this would not be a problem. The new surgeon told me that he could not assert that the CPM machine tipping over was not the cause!

So, here I am recovering from TKA #3! My wife just said a few minutes ago, “I cannot get over how much easier this one is compared with the first two.” No doubt some of the difference has to do with changes in anesthesia: a spinal block and then a femoral block that lasted several days. This gets the patient past the early pain. The anesthesiologist said I could stay awake and watch if I wanted. I am not sure he was serious, but I declined and was happy when they squirted the sleep-inducing drug into my IV and then woke up in the recovery room, totally oblivious to the fact that four hours had passed.

Another possibility to explain how comparatively easy this one was is the fact that the muscles in my leg were already accustomed to dealing with a prosthesis. Of course there is the trauma of opening up the knee, pulling out the old, and inserting the new and then putting it all back together again and sewing it up (They used internal, dissolvable sutures this time rather than the gruesome looking staples from the first time around.). That said, things are going so much better this time around that the difference is rather astounding.

So, I know that you are not excited about having to go through the experience again, but I can assure you that there is every reason to believe that things will be better for you this time around! It is amazing the miracles these surgeons can pull off and they keep getting better at it!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Raspberry Pi 4 Announced

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Mike

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently announced the Raspberry Pi 4. The little, single-board computer has been an incredible development from the beginning, but the newest edition has now crossed what I believe to be an important threshold. For starters, the Raspberry Pi 4 now runs at 1.5 gigahertz instead of 1.4. This is nothing to sniff at, but other feature improvements such as more memory, the USB upgrade, and faster Ethernet are even more significant.

Raspberry Pi 4 Image and Description
The new Raspberry Pi 4 and key new features

For example, the maximum memory available on previous versions was 1 GB, but 1 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB configurations will be available. The Raspi 4 maintains the same form factor and its layout is quite similar, with four USB ports still available. Two of those are USB 3.0, thus increasing data input and output by a factor of 10. That improvement, along with the full-speed gigabit network connection, turns the little unit into a more than adequate core of a network-attached storage (NAS) system.

The graphics processor not only supports 4K output, it can drive two monitors through its two mini-HDMI ports. It supports one 4K monitor at 60 frames per second (FPS) and two and two at 40 FPS.

The basic price point of $35 still applies, but increased memory size will understandably increase the price to $55 for the 4 GB version.

Incredible!

Posted in Geeky Stuff | Tagged , | Leave a comment