Category: News

“Christian Nationalism” and Love for Country

Copyright: seanlockephotography

I think a lot about our country and our culture. And for those of you who know me, you know that I have deep Christian roots.

There have been a few news reports about “Christian Nationalism”, and why that may be a bad thing. While some may be saying “we Christians shouldn’t care about what is going on in the culture, because we’ve got a better kingdom ahead of us”, I think you’ve got it all wrong. For several reasons.

1. Genesis 1 makes men and women to be the stewards (in their own roles) not of some unseen creation, but of THIS creation. Those of us created “in the image of God” all have a role to play.

2. “Creation” isn’t simply “the environment”. It has to take into account everything about the way the world runs. That includes our families, our local communities, and yes, given the preamble to the US Constitution, “we the people” are responsible for how we govern our country.

3. Our “Great Commission” doesn’t begin once you set foot on foreign soil. The need for the Gospel in OUR COUNTRY has never been greater than it is today.

The overturning, today, of Roe vs Wade, is certainly the end of an era, but it only means it is a new beginning. Christians have a greater need than ever to be able to express the reasons why we have such a hope in a new Kingdom. We have a greater need than ever to show what it means to “repent and believe the good news”.

But as Paul wrote to Timothy, in order to be good stewards of the Gospel, we must first put our own households in order.

By extension, that means everything we touch, including “country”, is within our realm of responsibility.

“Christian nationalism” isn’t a dirty word. It should be the heart and soul of why we do what we do.

Strength Training vs Cardio

Strength training carries more benefits vs cardiovascular diseases, according to a recent study:

“While it is well known that physical activity is important for heart health, neither research nor recommendations consistently differentiate between the benefits of different types of physical activity. New research, presented at the ACC Latin America Conference 2018 in Lima, Peru, found that while all physical activity is beneficial, static activities—such as strength training—were more strongly associated with reducing heart disease risks than dynamic activities like walking and cycling.”

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323732.php
https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/170906

Updated: my résumé and LinkedIn profile

I am still: a marketing manager (recently with a start-up software/robotics firm), long-term copywriter, seeking a position as a marketing technologist (Eloqua preferred) on a team dedicated to marketing automation, digital marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and social media.

My current résumé: Bugay-2013-Resume-REVISED-07-01

I’ve also added links to articles I’ve published in the last several weeks:

Understanding Buyer Personas: A Collision of Human and Technology (June 19)
http://acooze.co/capital/buyer-personas-a-collision-of-human-and-technology/

If content marketing is one side of the coin, then could marketing automation be the other? In fact, could we argue that the software came first, and [only] more recently, the set of best practices that have evolved around the software (which became known as content marketing or inbound marketing)?

Define the Human Side of the Buyer Persona (June 26)
http://acooze.co/capital/define-the-human-side-of-the-buyer-persona/

The buyer persona from the human angle: Most likely, you as a marketer will need to work with sales in order to understand who you’re likely to be speaking to. You know what you should do this with as much detail as possible. You may even want to poll or interview some customers.

Buyer Personas and the Marketing Funnel (July 5)
http://acooze.co/capital/buyer-personas-and-the-marketing-funnel/

Of course, to draw a proper map at this point would be an extremely complex task, even in the generic. All that we’ve done at this point is to try to put together the big picture of content management and data analysis, and how they fit together. To get specific would become even more complex than that. We have not yet begun to map data to the various touch-points.

See also: http://acooze.co/content-marketing/

Please follow me @johnbugay

One year ago today, Beth had her stem cell transplant

On December 14, 2011, my wife, half-dead from a fight with leukemia, “intensive chemotherapy” and full-body radiation, received a new infusion of adult stem cells from a young female donor in Europe. She became radically sick – somehow she got hold of a MRSA infection in her blood; later she had other viral infections that nearly cost her life. She spent the better part of three months in the hospital. You can read more about this struggle in the pages below.

She is still weak, and doesn’t have the energy to do much at all. Her immune system perceives her body as “foreign”, and so she is still taking some anti-rejection medications, which keep the immune system suppressed. So she’s still susceptible to pneumonia and other infections. She is looking forward with great anticipation to celebrating Christmas with her family. In another few months, they’ll start to give her the full cycle of baby vaccinations.

In a series of “Chimerism” tests which measure the level of the donor’s DNA vs her own DNA in her blood cells, she has consistently been “100% donor in all three cell lines”. That indicates no sign that the leukemia is coming back. The longer she shows such results, the closer she comes to being declared “cured” (a happy event which happens after two years).

The best news of all is that, over the last year, she has come to a new understanding of how the Lord Jesus Christ saves us in spite of anything else we might do to help or hurt that process, and is becoming deeply engaged in the life of our church.

Again, I’d like to thank all of you who helped us through this very demanding time with your prayers and your support.

Beth’s donor has signed, and we now have a transplant schedule

I got a call yesterday afternoon from Renee, the transplant coordinator at West Penn. Beth’s donor has signed all the necessary paperwork, and a date of December 14 has been set for the transplant. That means, working backward from that date, the following schedule has been established:

December 5-7: Outpatient treatment at West Penn’s Medical Short Stay unit. Beth will be treated with a drug called Kepivance, the purpose of which is to prevent “mucositis” – mouth sores – one of the more severe side effects of the chemotherapy drugs that Beth will receive. This is an intravenous treatment.

December 8: Beth will be admitted to West Penn’s “T-7” floor – the Hematology/Oncology (or “hem/onc”) unit.

December 8-12: She’ll receive the “intensive” chemotherapy, also called “conditioning”. She’ll receive two or three intravenous drugs spread out over these five days:

Fludarabine: “It has been unofficially and casually referred to as “AIDS in a bottle” amongst healthcare professionals due to its significant immunosuppresive activity”.

Busulfan: “Currently, its main uses are in bone marrow transplantation, … where it is used as a conditioning drug. Busulfan can control tumor burden but cannot prevent transformation or correct cytogenic abnormalities”. To put this into perspective, the Vidaza that Beth was receiving had two functions: it had a cytotoxic effect – it killed things – but it was also supposed to enable her to make her own blood cells (a thing it never did).

Thymoglobulin: I don’t know if Beth is getting this one; it’s on the transplant sheet that Dr Rossetti gave to us, but Renee yesterday said Beth was getting two chemo drugs. Thymoglobulin “very substantially reduces immune competence in patients with normal immune systems”.

December 13-14: Total Body Irradiation (200 cGy).

The donor will undergo five or six days of Neupogen injections “to move stem cells from bone marrow to peripheral blood”. She will then undergo one or two days worth of “collection” – a four- to six-hour process by which blood will be withdrawn from one arm, will flow through a filtering device (similar to a dialysis machine) that will collect only stem cells, and the remaining blood will be re-infused into the other arm.

The stem cells will then be flown into Pittsburgh, where a (we hope) properly-“conditioned” Beth will be awaiting their arrival. The donor is a young female, and she is not from the United States. That’s all we may know about her at this time. I may have mentioned earlier, that we found three “10/10” matches. This is out of 10 million US-based donors, and an international database of seven million donors. For more information on this, see http://www.marrow.org.

It’s interesting to me that they call this procedure a “transplant” – but really, it’s like a slow motion transplant – a damaged organ (in this case, the bone marrow) is removed, slowly, and a new organ, in the form of stem cells, is “transplanted”, albeit slowly.

Veterans Administration Burn Pits Study is Inconclusive

Beth again featured in article on VA study on Burn PitsA study on the long-term effects of burn pits on the health of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan has come back “inconclusive”. This is a study that we had hoped would have provided the VA with guidelines enabling Beth to receive disability compensation through the VA. She hasn’t been able to work for five months, and with the upcoming bone marrow transplant procedure, she’ll most likely continue to be out of work for many more months.

Beth qualifies for health care benefits through the VA, but having this illness rated as a “service-related” illness would have ramifications in case Beth does not survive this procedure (according to her doctor, she has “less than a 50 percent chance of recovery” because of immediate and longer-term effects, though this is “the only curative option” for the type of leukemia that she has), in the form of disability benefits now, and survivor benefits for the kids and me.

We have a scheduled intake appointment in a few weeks with the VA. Beth is already receiving very good care for this illness through my employer’s health care benefits. We are very near to the point at which we can select a donor for a potential bone marrow transplant procedure, which “the only curative option” for her.

Last week, she spent most of the week in the hospital, receiving IV antibiotics treatments for infections related to her impaired immunities. All of her blood levels – hemoglobin, white blood cells, and platelets, are at low and critically low levels from Vidaza treatments she is receiving. So far, three individuals have qualified as stem cell donors. We’re hoping to select a donor this week and establish a schedule for a transplant.

We’ve continued to try to raise money. We’ve set up a Facebook-based fundraising tool, which you can easily send, share on your own page, like, or tweet, and we hope you would help us with this in any way you can.

We’re also receiving a great deal of help and care from our church, and other sources.

The US moves toward oil independence

I saw this article over the weekend, and honestly, I find things like this to be far more encouraging than the “double-dip recession” stories are discouraging.

With six children who are going to grow up in “the new economy” (whatever that is), I’m constantly trying to understand how that new economy is going to work, and where the “growth drivers” are going to be. My oldest son is going into nursing, and while, with our aging population (especially here in Pittsburgh) it seems like the medical field will offer secure employment opportunities, it’s not truly a “growth opportunity” in the sense that fixing people is a lot like fixing broken windows.

Over the last five years, “America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation’s fastest-growing manufacturing sector”.

No one is more responsible for that resurgence than [Harold] Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: “No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels.”

If he’s right, that’ll double America’s proven oil reserves. “Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska,” he continues. According to Department of Energy data, North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years. Mr. Hamm explains over lunch in Washington, D.C., that the more his company drills, the more oil it finds. Continental Resources has seen its “proved reserves” of oil and natural gas (mostly in North Dakota) skyrocket to 421 million barrels this summer from 118 million barrels in 2006.

“We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years.” And for those who think this oil find is only making Mr. Hamm rich, he notes that today in America “there are 10 million royalty owners across the country” who receive payments for the oil drilled on their land. “The wealth is being widely shared.”

One reason for the renaissance has been OPEC’s erosion of market power. “For nearly 50 years in this country nobody looked for oil here and drilling was in steady decline. Every time the domestic industry picked itself up, the Saudis would open the taps and drown us with cheap oil,” he recalls. “They had unlimited production capacity, and company after company would go bust.”

Today OPEC’s market share is falling and no longer dictates the world price. This is huge, Mr. Hamm says. “Finally we have an opportunity to go out and explore for oil and drill without fear of price collapse.” When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada. That’s why Mr. Hamm thinks North America can achieve oil independence.

It is the current high-regulatory environment in Washington DC that is the biggest hindrance to this development. Ham says, “Washington keeps ‘sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: “’Why aren’t you creating more jobs,”’he says.”

Mr. Hamm believes that if Mr. Obama truly wants more job creation, he should study North Dakota, the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3.5%. He swears that number is overstated: “We can’t find any unemployed people up there. The state has 18,000 unfilled jobs,” Mr. Hamm insists. “And these are jobs that pay $60,000 to $80,000 a year.” The economy is expanding so fast that North Dakota has a housing shortage. Thanks to the oil boom—Continental pays more than $50 million in state taxes a year—the state has a budget surplus and is considering ending income and property taxes.

It’s true, this is not a high tech growth opportunity, but more of a 19th century-style growth opportunity. Still, it’s a “driver of growth” that can lead to the development of manufacturing, refining, and infrastructure opportunities in the north-central U.S., and along with that infrastructure development will come the need for all the high-tech that goes along with it.

Positive, on balance

We got back from the doctor’s appointment just a bit ago. There’s good news … Beth’s levels are rising back up (although still “suppressed”). The level of “blasts” in her bone marrow is back to normal.

The real significance of this is that she hasn’t progressed into aggressive leukemia. When we started, her marrow level of blasts was around 15%, and one of the primary goals of the treatment was to simply prevent her from advancing into AML leukemia (20%). The fact that that level is back to 4% (5% is the normal level) is probably the best news of all.

Though, the doctor says he can’t yet use the words “partial remission,” because while the level of blasts in her marrow is down, and while the Vidaza is suppressing the bad stuff, it is also keeping counts on the good cells low, too.

So they’ve reduced her Vidaza a bit — they think that was the reason for her low blood counts is because the Vidaza is working a bit too well and suppressing not only the bad stuff, but the good stuff. So instead of getting 100 [whatever the units are] five days, she’s getting 75 [units a day] over seven days. The hope is, that will be a bit easier on her.

They still haven’t found a donor. They have six potential 10/10 donors. But she’s got an unusual string of DNA at a pretty important point. So whoever the donor is, isn’t going to be ideal.

I still haven’t digested all of this, and I still haven’t looked at the marrow results and the recent blood tests. But anyone who knows me (and that I post most things very early in the morning) knows that for now, it’s about time for me to be being brain dead.

But I wanted to put this up tonight, because, on balance, it was a very positive appointment.