What Can We Learn from the General Michael Flynn Case?

            Last week we learned that embarrassing documents had been released showing that the FBI acted illegally in their case against former national security adviser, retired General Michael Flynn. Today the Justice Department announced that it had dropped its case against him because the documents showed FBI bias toward Flynn and undermined his case. This is good news for Flynn and his supporters, but it is also surprising because the Justice Department almost never drops a case. It seems that the “swamp” is starting to drain.


            The documents released last week included notes of a discussion that took place among top officials of the FBI. Someone asked about the goal of the investigation. Was the goal to entrap Flynn, “to get him to lie” to the FBI and get him fired or prosecuted? Under pressure from the FBI, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States before Donald Trump took office.


            It seems that there are people in the United States that will destroy anyone that gets in their way of taking down Trump. Flynn specialized in intelligence operations and could have been instrumental in exposing them. They had to get him out of the way, and they apparently did not care what it did to me. Flynn’s legal defense cost millions of dollars, and he was forced to sell his home to pay some of his bills. His reputation was damaged.


            Americans should be grateful that it is Donald Trump sitting in the White House and not Hillary Clinton. If Clinton had won, it would have been “business as usual” for the corrupt men and women who held important positions in our nation’s government. With Trump in the White House, some of the slime has been removed from the swamp, and the rats who dwell there are being exposed. If it could happen to General Flynn, it could happen to any other person! May God bless President Trump, and may God bless America!

Did Your City or State Ban Plastic Bags?

            Anchorage banned plastic bags in October. Residents were warned that the ban was coming, and most of us started collecting reusable bags. We were just getting used to taking the bags into the stores with us when COVID-19 hit town. Then we were told that we should not take our reusable bags into the stores because they could be contaminated with the coronavirus.

Suddenly, plastic bags were not so bad!


            According to John Stossell, Anchorage was not the only city to ban plastic bags because there were more than 400 cities that succumbed to the demands of politicians and environmentalists. In fact, numerous states banned plastic bags, beginning with California and Hawaii, and including New York, Oregon, Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont. Consumers were told that plastic bags were “evil” because they were dangerous for animals. Now they are told that cloth bags carry bacteria.


            The truth is that the reusable bags have always carried bacteria into stores. Most consumers do not wash their bags but merely put them back into their cars for the next trip to the store. I tried to always put raw meat in plastic bags before placing the meat into my bags to avoid food poisoning. Now my groceries are delivered in paper and/or plastic bags.


            I prefer my reusable bags to paper or plastic despite the risk of sickness. They hold more food, and they do not tear. Plastic bags are stronger than paper bags, but they must be doubled for safety. They have convenient handles, but they do not measure up to reusable bags.


            I expect to see plastic bags banned once again when the COVID-19 scare is over. I do not see plastic bags as a problem in America because Americans are good are recycling reusable materials. However, I expect politicians and environmentalists to demand that plastic bags be discontinued. Then consumers will have to remember to take their bags into the stores.

What Do You Think Will Happen with General Flynn and the FBI?

            Three weeks into the new Trump Administration, the newly appointed national security advisor, retired Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn, resigned. During his three weeks of service, he was interviewed by two FBI agents and accused of lying about conversations with representatives for Russia. He resigned due to lack of trust in him by the President and Vice President. However, facts are coming to light showing that the FBI entrapped Flynn.


            The FBI arrested General Flynn and threatened to imprison his son if he did not plead guilty to making false statements. Flynn subsequently declared bankruptcy and had to sell his house to pay debts. He changed his attorney and recently filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea and to have the court dismiss the case. His new lawyer found that the “government and his own former legal team were not turning over exculpatory evidence.” 


            A batch of documents from the FBI were released last week, and they show evidence of FBI agents plotting against Flynn. At this point, it looks like Flynn could be exonerated and former leaders in the FBI prosecuted. 

If Flynn is not completely exonerated and the charges dropped, I expect that President Donald Trump will pardon him. He has even suggested that he would invite Flynn to rejoin his cabinet.

There are calls now for the current FBI Director Christopher Wray to decide where he stands. Is he going to help the FBI come clean and become great again, or is he going to continue to stonewall every effort to get documents out of the FBI? The House Judiciary panel sent a letter to Wray asking for all FBI documents that refer to “Crossfire Razor,” the FBI’s code name for Flynn. They want to know why the FBI continued investigating Flynn after they determined that there was no evidence that he was a Russian agent. They want to interview the two FBI agents that interviewed Flynn, and they want to know when Wray “first learned that FBI officials might have delayed the disclosure of exculpatory information related to Flynn.” 

It seems obvious that the FBI, at least the former top officials of the FBI, were out of control. They seem to have taken the law into their own hands and made it do what they wanted rather than bring justice according to the law. They had the victim and were looking for a crime rather than having a crime and finding the perpetrator.

What Is the Common Denominator for Serious COVID-19 Cases?

            Dr. Thomas Yadegar is my VIP for this week because he discovered the common denominator for treating serious COVID-19 cases. He has provided critical care for more than 20 years and is currently the director of the intensive care unit at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, California. As anyone would expect, he has been on the front lines of the battle with COVID-19. Like many other intensive care specialists, he has searched for a way to treat patients with the coronavirus. It seems that there are many patients that seem to be improving, and then they suddenly start deteriorating.


            According to Kevin Pham, Dr. Yadegar was stumped when he first experienced a patient starting to deteriorate. Even though he had 20 years of critical care experience, he did not know what happened to his patient. One night an exhausted Dr. Yadegar searched through the records of his patients trying to find something that was common to all of them.


            Following suggestions from doctors throughout the world, Dr. Yadegar and his colleagues had avoided anti-inflammatory treatment but were aggressive in using ventilators to prevent further decline among patients. They knew that the guidelines were for treating patients with severe viral respiratory disease, but they also knew that they did not help patients whose other organs started to fail. After a long search, Dr. Yadegar recognized that the common feature of all his patients was inflammation. As Pham explained, ventilators were not the secret weapon.

In fact, using a ventilator is a highly invasive procedure, and the repeated and forced inspiration of air irritates the lungs, which feeds back into the inflammatory cycle….

The only way to explain the highly complex disease course that seems to change from one patient to the next is that the virus is causing an autoimmune response, in which the body’s natural defense mechanisms go haywire and begin destroying the body they’re trying to protect.

The disease course is so unpredictable because every person’s immune system is unique to that person.

            Once Dr. Yadegar understood that an autoimmune response was common in all the patients that deteriorated, he and the ICU staff adjusted their protocol.  After patient is tested for COVID-19 and their results come back positive, they are tested for inflammatory markers.

Those with elevated inflammatory markers are kept in the hospital with a close eye on their oxygen saturation levels. If the patient begins to desaturate, the medical team evaluates the patient before starting a course of steroids and an IL-6 inhibitor.

IL-6 (interleukin-6) is a powerful mediator for the inflammatory pathway, so an IL-6 inhibitor would prevent a significant amount of inflammation from happening. Steroids have strong anti-inflammatory effects and also suppress the immune system more broadly.

            As Pham explained, this treatment stops the autoimmune response before it becomes deadly but does not treat the coronavirus at all. Dr. Yadegar learned that each patient needed their own protocol because what worked with one patient did not work with another. Plus, the doctors had to watch closely for infections because the steroids shut down the immune system. An infection would most likely kill the patient.


            Because they were treating the autoimmune response rather than the virus, Dr. Yadegar and his staff stopped using ventilators and watched the mortality rate drop to single digits. It sounds to me like this information needs to be broadcast to other hospitals. Maybe this is the reason why the demand for ventilators suddenly dropped.

What Should the US Do about Mail-In Ballots?

            The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns the coming presidential election. Democrats and Republicans are, as usual, on different sides. Democrats want to have an election where people vote absentee, while the Republicans are wary of it. Republicans are convinced that absentee voting brings more possibility of voter fraud, and there appears to be reason for concern.


            In an essay titled “28 Million Reasons Not to Trust a Mail-In Election,” Tony Perkins shared information from four previous elections. He wrote that in the four elections since 2012, 28.3 million mail-in ballots have been lost. This means that “1 in 5 absentee votes just vanished.” No one knows why they are missing. Are they missing because of outright “fraud, system failure, general ineptitude, or a combination of all three”? The fact that we should be concerned about is that Democrats want Americans to mail-in their ballots in the 2020 presidential election.


            As Perkins pointed out, 28.3 million missing mail-in ballots divided by four elections makes an average of 7 million missing votes per election. Even though “Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by 2.8 million,” there were “nearly 6 million unaccounted mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016.” Those numbers were low according to the federal Election Assistance Commission. Perkins had more important information.

For starters, the 28.3 million missing ballots doesn’t include the number that were “spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.”

Making matters worse, not every area of the country reported back with their statistics – including major cities like Chicago. In other words, this is just the tip of the malfunctioning iceberg.

And these problems, analyst Logan Churchwell shakes his head, aren’t getting much attention. First of all, they’re embarrassing for election officials – and secondly, “people just aren’t paying attention.” But they’d better start.

With Democrats trying to use the coronavirus to push America toward its endgame of universal mail-in ballots, voters need to wake up to the gamble they’d be taking with democracy.

            Numerous people are sounding an alarm for American and Americans. Democrats are using the COVID-19 pandemic to push for mail-in voting, something fraud with danger. With mail-in ballots there is no guarantee who receives, signs, and mails it. Plus, there is no guarantee that any ballot will be counted or become one of the millions of “lost” ballots.

What Is a Seer?

            Members sustain one man as the Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but they sustain fifteen men as prophets, seers, and revelators. Three of these men make up the First Presidency, and the other twelve are the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Most people know about the prophets in the Old Testament, and most Christians know about John the Revelator in the New Testament. How many people understand seer?


            The Bible Dictionary defines prophet as a man who acts as a messenger for God and declares God’s will to the people. Hebrew prophets kept the records of God’s dealings with the Hebrew people. A prophet is a “preacher of righteousness,” calls the people to repentance, and foretells what will happen if they do not repent. A prophet gets his title from the fact that he sometimes prophecies future events. “In a general sense a prophet is anyone who has a testimony of Jesus Christ by the Holy Ghost” (p. 754).


            The book in the King James New Testament is titled “The Revelation of St. John the Divine.” It begins “The Revelation of Jesus Christ….” The revelation came from God and is about Jesus Christ. Because it came through the Apostle John, he is known as John the Revelator. A revelator makes known truth that is unknown. The truth may be new, or it may be something that was previously known but lost. True revelations always come from God.


            A seer sees events that are past, unknown in the present, or future. The Bible Dictionary states, “There have been many seers in the history of God’s people on tis earth, but not so many as there have been prophets.” A seer can use the Urim and Thummim or holy interpreters, but he may not always do so. The Book of Mormon – Another Testament of Jesus Christ teaches, “A seer is a revelator and a prophet also” (Mosiah 8:15-16). It also says, “A seer is greater than a prophet… and a gift which is grater can no man have…” (Mosiah 8:15-18).


            In my Come, Follow Me studies this week, I studied Mosiah 8 where Ammon taught King Limhi about a seer. The King had asked if Ammon knew of anyone who could translate records, and Ammon told him that King Mosiah had that gift. When King Limhi said “a seer is greater than a prophet,” (verse 15), Ammon replied, “a seer is a revelator and a prophet also” (verse16) and continued with this explanation in verse 17:

But a seer can know of things which are past, and also of things which re to come, and by them shall all things be revealed, or, rather, shall secret things be made manifest, and hidden things shall come to light, and things which are not known shall be made known by them, and also things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known.

            The Lord provides prophets, seers, and revelators to benefit mankind and has done so in all dispensations. The Prophet Joseph Smith is the great seer who stands at the head of the present dispensation. He saw Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and numerous other heavenly beings who restored priesthood keys and authority to the earth. These priesthood keys, power, and authority were handed down from prophet to prophet until President Russell M. Nelson holds them today. The role of a seer is clearly defined in the following quotes.

President Howard W. Hunter (1907-95) explained the unique role of a seer and how a seer views things differently than others: “A seer is one who sees. This does not mean that he sees through his natural eyes but rather through spiritual eyes. The seeric gift is a supernatural endowment” (in The Teachings of Howard W. Hunter, ed. Clyde J. Williams [1997], 224).

Elder John A. Widtsoe (1872-1952) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles further described a seer as one who “perceives the meaning of that which seems obscure to others; therefore he is an interpreter and clarifier of eternal truth. He foresees the future from the past and the present. This he does by the power of the Lord operating through him directly, or indirectly with the aid of divine instruments such as the Urim and Thummim. In short, he is one who sees, who walks in the Lord’s light with open eyes” (Evidences and Reconciliations, arr. G. Homer Durham [1960], 258).

I am grateful to live in a day when prophets, seers, and revelators walk the earth, and I am grateful to live in a day when I can hear their counsel through numerous technological means. I know that President Russell M. Nelson is the Lord’s Prophet, Seer, and Revelator on earth today and that he is assisted by fourteen other good men whom I sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators of God.

Are You Surviving or Enduring Isolation?

            Wise parents teach their children to be survivors rather than victims because survivors strengthen their community and nation. A survivor comes out of any test, trial, or tribulation with a winner’s attitude. I did it! A victim develops a mentality of he/she did it to me and should pay! A survivor looks at a difficult situation and says, “What can I learn from this experience?” A victim whines, “Why did this happen to me?”


            People all over the world are going through a difficult time with the coronavirus pandemic. It is not easy to stay in isolation for nearly two months because we are social creatures – some of us more than others – and we need other people. Nevertheless, we can look at our situation and have a negative attitude about it, or we can use our forced and extended time at home to accomplish great things.


            My husband and I often walk past the house of a neighbor. It seems that he is always outside doing something. One day he was working on his boat and getting it ready to go fishing. Another day he was washing his car and truck. Still another day he was painting the trim on his house. He may be doing these tasks to keep from going crazy, but he is also freeing up time later in the summer when he can enjoy himself.


            Meghan Decker posted an essay title “Are You Surviving or Enduring? Here’s What Makes All the Difference.”She reminded her readers that the phrase “endure to the end” is common in the scriptures and in many messages with gospel content. She wrote that “Enduring is a fundamental part of our covenant obligations. It can also be a joyful way of living as we exercise faith in Jesus Christ, repent, and prepare ourselves for baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost.” She suggested that we “examine the world “endure” to see if our expectations line up with [God’s] plan for our lives.”

Originating from the Latin indurare and Old French endurer, the term “endure” means “to harden, to make lasting.”

This definition clarifies that enduring isn’t passive or reactive – it actually expresses a sense of growth. It is hopeful. We’re not just getting through the rest of our lives, instead we are agents unto ourselves coming to know good and evil through our own experience.

            Elder Richard G. Scott of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught how we can move from the mentality of a victim to that of a survivor or one who endures, which is the best.

When you face adversity, you can be led to ask many questions. Some serve a useful purpose; others do not. To ask, Why does this have to happen to me? Why do I have to suffer this, now? What have I done to cause this? Will lead you into blind alleys…. Rather ask, What am I to do? What am I to learn from this experience? What am I to change? Whom am I to help? How can I remember my many blessings in times of trial?

Elder Scott reminded us that there is a purpose to our life on earth. When we understand the plan of salvation given by Heavenly Father, we know that we came to earth to gain a body and experience. We were not promised sunshine and roses in this life. We knew that we were to learn and gain experience – both good and bad. The Lord promises us that all our experiences will be for our own good.

Decker suggested in her essay that to endure our trials well, we must have hope. We must have hope that when this isolation finally ends that we will gradually return to a good life. She suggests that we can strengthen our hope for a better life by creating two lists – one of the many blessings for which we are grateful and one of our fears. The gratitude list is important because counting our blessings makes us realize how much we have and gives us opportunities to see how God is helping us.

According to Decker, creating a list of our fears helps us to identify our them – the big ones and small ones. This can be a scary task, but it is a cleansing one. By identifying our fears, we shine a bright light on them, and by naming them, we gain power over them. The third way that this list helps is that it allows us to lay those fears at the feet of the Savior. We know that we cannot control everything, but we also know that the Savior has all power and can help us to overcome our fears and deal with the situations that cause them.

The rising generations should be taught to endure, and the parents’ attitude will determine to a large degree the attitudes of their children. None of us can better ourselves by being a victim, and all of us must recognize that just surviving a difficult situation is not good enough. We must learn to endure our tests, trials, and tribulations and to endure them well if we are to learn and grow from them. When we learn to endure well, we gain the capacity to help others. In this way, we strengthen our families, communities, and nations.