This is a dark time. A hard time. A time of disillusionment and potential despair. Because Donald Trump has proven not to be guilty of all we wished him to be guilty.

The Mueller Report. Liberal pundits on CNN and MSNBC immediately tried to put a Churchillian spin on it. (“This is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning.”)

What they did not do is admit that the agitation most progressives feel is that the Mueller Report fails to be what we had hoped it to be: a clear criminalization of everything ever done by the embarrassing president we hoped soon would be our impeached president. Which failure is, as our president so often says about things less so, “Sad.”

Progressives such as ourselves sat, stunned by the wonder and glare of Sunday TV news, the terrible truth slowly but inexorably taking hold: We must now make peace with a Donald Trump, who appears not to have colluded with the Russians but merely to have been duped by them. A president who did not need clandestine meetings or illegal communications to disregard the abundant evidence gathered by our intelligence services who assured us that the Russians interfered with past elections and intend to interfere in future elections, as well.

Truth has taken away the bejeweled Easter Egg of our suspicion that the clown prince is so absurd as to confirm every prejudice progressives have of the intellectual flabbiness, the lack of moral rigor, the situational politics of Donald Trump and his Republicans.

The disappointment is not that we no longer can continue to believe him to be guilty of more than that of which he is guilty — even Mueller said his report does not “exonerate” President Trump — but that we wanted more drama. A Pink Panther cat burglar who clings to the parapets of power until he can swing elegantly through an impossibly high and narrow window to make off with a fortune in jewels; then return in his tuxedo to the dinner party below and enjoy vodka shots with Vladimir Putin.

We wanted a criminal mastermind, an engineer of clandestine intrigue who invented vast disinformations to cover up his Russian peccadillos. Even though a significant portion of us have no trouble forgiving or forgetting his peccadillos here at home. We wanted a mover and shaker guilty of shaking and moving the foundations of democratic government, but instead we got a swollen toady who cheats at golf.

We are left with a president who has revealed himself to be a clumsy petty thief, a surly braggart, a preposterous engineer of epithets we gobble like goodies at a party honoring bullies. But not — oh, “Callooh! Callay!” — anything so interesting as a Russian spy!

By being common, he has disappointed our ambition for him. And the ambitions held out by the liberal media we wanted to not only be confident but correct in their endlessly repeated self-talk about high treason and other impeachable offenses. But what did we get from the pretensions of our entertainment news: “Nattering nabobs of negativism” unable even to do the accounting required to prove him guilty of emoluments violations.

Wanting so badly for him to be guilty of everything makes it impossible to be satisfied for having discovered him to be only guilty of almost everything. We who hoped too much, who wished more than we proved, we are once again convicted by the fact that a majority of us were unable to forestall a minority of us from electing an oaf. And for our weakness we are condemned to suffer the physical sight and emotional affront of Donald Trump, who every day offends dignity, morality, and the public sense of well-being.

We wanted — we fasted and prayed! — to turn Donald Trump’s offense of our delicate sensibilities into the high crimes and misdemeanors of a grand schemer — a traitor — when all Trump appears to be is a dumb guy who hasn’t done a high thing in his life … that didn’t have a penthouse at the top.

Robert Rees teaches religion at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Calif.

Clifton Jolley is president of Advent Communications, Ogden.

Contrary to what Utah Gov. Gary Herbert claims, there is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between road access and fewer wildland fires.

That was the conclusion in 2001 when a team of U.S. Forest Service employees were charged with analyzing whether a proposal called “the Roadless Rule” – which would ban new road building in remote national forest roadless areas — would make wildfires worse. As a 37-year veteran of the Forest Service, a fire management and fire ecology analyst and a member of the original national Roadless Rule assessment team, I can confidently say today that I still stand by that original conclusion.

I reside in Ogden, but from 1999-2000, I was detailed to Washington, D.C., where I helped to analyze the affects the Roadless Rule would have on our national forests. The Roadless Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) team worked to determine whether the Roadless Rule would increase the risk of wildfires. Our research was exhaustive and detailed and, in subsequent years, stood up against numerous court challenges, including legal reviews at the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Ninth and 10th Circuits.

Now, the Roadless Rule is yet again facing another adversary. This time, in my home state of Utah, Herbert wishes to undo protection for Utah’s national forest roadless areas under the veil of making residents safe from wildfire. I can say, unequivocally, based on the scientific analysis found in the original 2001 Roadless EIS, that to build roads in roadless areas will not reduce the risk of wildfire.

It’s true that wildfires pose a serious risk to communities across the West, but that’s because climate change has created a hotter, dryer, more explosive fire environment.

Utah should pay close attention to the threat of wildfire. Unfortunately, Herbert is looking in the wrong place. Backcountry forests far removed from communities are not the best use of limited wildfire funds.

Further, the national Roadless Rule Herbert seeks to overturn in Utah already allows for reducing fuels where needed to protect communities.

The Forest Service has 1.3 million acres “shovel-ready” hazardous fuel reduction projects ready for implementation. These fuel-management projects have gone through environmental review. But fire hazard reduction projects cost money — more than $340 million — and the Forest Service continues to be starved for fuel management project funding. Funding these projects would be far more effective than trying to develop new, costly projects, and, surely, from a public standpoint, controversial projects, in roadless areas.

Using the threat of wildfire to justify building roads into Utah’s roadless areas won’t make Utahans safer from wildfire. And a controversial and contentious proposal not based on science won’t help either. Wildfire is a real threat in Utah and elsewhere, and one that deserves a serious response, based in science, and focused on solutions that work.

If Herbert were serious about reducing the threat wildfire poses to communities, he could sign an agreement with the Forest Service permitting the state of Utah to undertake fuel reduction efforts on public land in and around communities in conjunction with similar efforts to reduce fuels on state or private land.

These common-sense wildfire hazard reduction ideas would help protect Utah communities from wildfire and would be less expensive, far more effective and receive more public support than controversial proposals to roll back existing protections for roadless areas.

As stated at the outset, the scientific analysis completed for the 2001 Roadless Rule still stands: “Fire occurrence data indicates that prohibiting road construction and reconstruction in inventoried roadless areas would not cause an increase in the number of acres burned by wildland fires or in the number of large fires.”

Dave Thomas, Ogden, a retired employee of the U.S. Forest Service, was a fuels specialist for the Forest Service Intermountain Region from 1996 to 2006 and lead fire management analyst on the Roadless Area Conservation EIS team from 1999 to 2000.

National Public Health Week is here. If the first thing that came to mind was, “So what?” or, maybe, “Why does that even matter?” you are not alone.

We celebrate National Public Health Week, April 1-7, because “Everyone deserves to live a long and healthy life in a safe environment.” National Public Health Week is a time for all of us to focus on what we can do to make our own communities healthier places to live. The theme for the 2019 National Public Health Week is “Creating the Healthiest Nation: For science. For action. For health.”

How does public health make a difference in my life or make my community stronger? Many people wonder what public health practitioners do. Public health encompasses many professions, all dedicated to keeping people healthy at the population and community level. First responders, restaurant inspectors, health educators, environmental scientists, researchers, nutritionists, community planners, social workers, epidemiologists, physicians, nurses, occupational health and safety officers, sanitarians and others work and advocate for public policy that moves in the direction of health equity.

In the words of Georges Benjamin, M.D., executive director of the American Public Health Association, “Forget genetic code. A zip code can make a difference of 15 years or more in life expectancy.”

This matters in Utah because, as seen in the just released County Health Rankings & Roadmap, not everyone living in Utah starts or ends up in a healthy place. The differences across communities, be it TRAX station, zip code or county line, are dramatic. Utah does well in obesity prevention, smoking rates and cancer deaths when compared to other states. However, 11 percent of Utah’s children live in poverty, rates that range from 5 percent to 33 percent, depending on where you live. Poverty limits opportunities for housing, neighborhood safety, access to healthy food and quality education.

Public health policy promotes responsible environmental stewardship, active surveillance for threats to public safety or well-being, access to appropriate treatment to support physical and mental health and science-based solutions to the major health problems that plague society today.

Public health professionals focus on prevention, providing education and access to resources so that you can make decisions about your health. We emphasize early access to vaccinations, preventing risky sexual behaviors, warning people about the dangers of tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse, and in all ways paving the way for people to live safe and disease-free lives.

The Utah Public Health Association invites everyone to celebrate the 2019 legislative wins that will result in a healthier Utah — Medicaid expansion, better air quality, reductions in tobacco use among minors and safer walking and biking routes to school for thousands of school children.

However you share your passion, whatever social media effort you prefer, and be it violence prevention, universal access to health care, clean air, nutrition, fitness, drug abuse prevention, or other public health topics, let your friends, family and neighbors know that the public’s health matters to you. Your opinion is important and it needs to become part of the discussion that will lead to solutions. Let National Public Health Week be your call to action to help eliminate the conditions that lead to suffering and early death and encourage behaviors, attitudes, and policies that promote wellness for everyone.

The Utah Public Health Association is an advocacy organization comprised of public health professionals. Its mission is to protect and improve the health of the public and achieve equity in health status. This letter is a collaborative effort from members of the UPHA Board of Directors: Anna Dillingham, Paul Wightman, Julie Gast, Steve Hawks, Brittany Guerra, Teresa Garrett, Shaheen Hossain, Turner Bitton, and Heather Borski and student intern Susan Cheever.

The call came from a blocked number, and the voice at the other end of the line wasn't one Mindi Wallenda recognized.

“You need to watch what you’re doing,” the person said. “You need to pay attention when you go places. Your ex is taking pictures of you.”

Wallenda was going through a messy divorce at the time and after the anonymous call, she started spotting her ex-husband in odd places — he’d drive by while she was at a McDonald’s or out running errands and snap photographs of her. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to find her.

It wasn’t until the anonymous caller (her ex-husband’s employee, she discovered) contacted her again and met her at her Murray home that she understood what was going on. The employee walked over to Wallenda’s black SUV, reached into the wheel well and pried loose a small box that had been magnet-fastened to the frame.

It was a GPS tracking device, and it had been pinging her every move to her ex-husband. Eight years later, Wallenda hasn’t completely shaken the feeling of being followed.

“I still to this day watch behind me,” she said. “I know every car around me.”

Wallenda’s ex-husband was charged with stalking for violating a court order that forbade him from going near her or contacting her, but there were no consequences for the private investigator who affixed the device to her car.

Cottonwood Heights Police Chief Robby Russo says Wallenda’s story illuminates a weakness in Utah’s law: With little fear of repercussion, private eyes can use vehicle trackers to help abusive or controlling exes spy on their former partners. Even in cases involving a protective order, there’s not much police can do if the private investigator claims ignorance of the court injunction, Russo said.

This state legislative session, Russo and state Rep. Marie Poulson set about tightening the statute on GPS trackers with a bill that touched off a robust debate on the little-understood world of private eyes and electronic surveillance.

On one side, Poulson and Russo said the trackers can act as weapons of control and intimidation against women who are leaving unhealthy relationships. On the other, private investigators said the devices are more often used to catch bad actors or bring peace of mind to people who feel threatened by someone.

"None of us want to scare anybody,” Michelle Palmer, legislative chairwoman and vice president of the Private Investigators Association of Utah, said in an interview.

At a national level, the law on vehicle tracking devices is thin. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that law enforcement must have a warrant to affix a tracking device to a person’s car, but the federal government has largely remained silent on how and when businesses or individuals can follow another person’s movements with GPS.

A number of states have stepped in to fill this void — a 2016 review by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that seven states generally forbid attaching a tracker to someone’s car without permission and another seven prohibit any use of these devices to monitor someone without consent.

But until now in Utah, there was little to prevent a person from slapping a tracking device on someone else’s car or asking a private eye to do the job for them.

“They can walk into your driveway, put this device on your car. In fact they can walk into your parking garage, place it on any of your cars. And there’s no requirement to notify you,” Russo told lawmakers during the legislative session.

And the gadgets are almost impossible for the average person to spot, he says. Some are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and blend in when slipped into the undercarriage of a vehicle.

In some cases, the tracker comes to light during an oil change, when an auto technician finds it beneath a person’s car, he said. Other times, the devices are attached and removed without the car’s owner ever knowing they were there.

During hearings on her bill, Poulson, a Cottonwood Heights Democrat, shared with lawmakers that her daughter once had a stalker — a convicted sex offender who was confined to his home and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. She suspects he used a vehicle tracker to monitor her whereabouts because whenever her daughter would pull into the driveway, the man would call the family home moments later.

Her bill as initially drafted would’ve made it a misdemeanor crime to place a tracking device on a car without the owner’s consent, in most cases, and private investigators would be no exception. But the measure had a rough ride through the Legislature and spent weeks pingponging between the House and Senate as lawmakers struggled to agree on how to reword the legislation.

The dispute dragged into the final day of the session, when a half dozen House and Senate legislators sat down for a spirited conference committee meeting to resolve their differences.

The final version passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gary Herbert does carve out an exemption for private detectives, who can still secretly put trackers on cars if the person they’re following isn’t shielded by a protective order. The private investigator is obligated to check for any active protective orders before installing the device, the new law states.

Rep. Kim Coleman, who represented the House in the conference committee, admits the final day debate got her a little fired up and says she’s still steamed by its conclusion.

“It still boggles my mind that we would say someone who can be hired by anybody can put a tracking device on my car,” Coleman said in an interview after the session. “I don’t get the world where you say a private entity can attach their property to my property without my knowledge. ... Why that does not make everybody’s hair stand up on the back of their necks in America is just a mystery to me.”

The West Jordan Republican ended up voting for the compromise bill on the House floor but only because it was better than nothing, she says.

Palmer, owner of Corner Canyon Investigations, was satisfied with the bill’s final form, although she wishes her industry was consulted on the front end and wasn’t maligned during the legislative process.

In actuality, she said, most private investigators seldom use trackers and never give their clients access to real-time information about a person’s location. The devices are a cheaper alternative to round-the-clock physical surveillance and can come in handy during child custody disputes or when businesses want to keep track of a disgruntled former employee.

Once, she used a tracker to keep tabs on a client’s alcoholic ex-husband while he was watching the divorced couple’s children. That continued until the device pinpointed the man’s location at a bar and police found him inside drinking while his kids sat in the car.

He was arrested and full custody was awarded to the mother, Palmer said.

Sometimes, a woman who was the victim of domestic violence might use a tracker as a form of protection against an abuser, she said. Private investigators can erect a virtual “fence” around a woman’s home or workplace and alert her if the abuser crosses this invisible line.

Palmer said she and her peers reject clients who seem to have a nefarious intent.

“Those of us that value what we do, we’re helping people, not hurting people,” she said.

Sim Gill, Salt Lake County district attorney, said his office is screening a potential case against a private investigator, but he can’t recall previously prosecuting a private detective for using a GPS tracker. It’s hard to view attaching a device to a vehicle as a property crime, he said, asking whether you’d charge someone for sticking a Post-it to a car.

But he said a situation in which a person hired a private detective to circumvent a protective order would raise interesting legal questions.

“A victim of domestic violence or sexual assault or a stalking victim has every right to privacy, whether that is violated by the defendant themselves of a third party acting on behalf of the defendant,” he said.

One point repeated by the private investigators during hearings on Poulson’s bill is that they use the tracking devices to help women keep tabs on an abusive ex or stalker, not the other way around. That’s a claim Wallenda has difficulty buying.

“I don’t know any woman that is a normal mom ... who would say, ‘Oh, I need to find out where my ex is because I’m afraid of him,’” said Wallenda, who testified on Capitol Hill in support of Poulson’s original bill. “You just do your thing ... and try and stay away.”

Russo said he’s not entirely happy with the language ultimately approved by the Legislature this year. Even though private investigators would be forced to check for protective orders before attaching a device, there are still loopholes, he said. For instance, if a woman gets a court order after the tracker is put on her car, the private eye wouldn’t be required to remove it, he says.

The chief said delving into the world of private investigators even has him looking over his shoulder — and sweeping his car weekly for tracking devices.

Excommunication. That would do it. Years of intensive self-examination convinced me that being officially cut off is the only thing that would force me from being a member in fair standing with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It’s different for other people. There are hosts of reasons for getting fed up with a particular faith or religion in general and announcing, “The hell with it. I’m done.”

I’ve been close a time or two myself. Here are the top three reasons I ever considered leaving the faith for good. None of them has anything to do with “truth.” For me, it’s all about annoyance generated by:

• Rhetorical lessons.

• Pontificating leaders.

• Doctrinal smugness.

Note: I don’t count murder. Had I killed a certain missionary companion, leaving the church wouldn’t have been up to me.

So, for my entire life I have been Mormon in a wide variety of standings — ranging from downright pathetic to the dizzying heights (at least for me) of just average. That’s OK because it was all up to me. Or so I thought.

I received a letter from my sister Monday. On a Post-it was written, “Very important paper I came across.” The paper was old and creased. I thought maybe a draft notice, traffic ticket, bail receipt or something shameful.

When I unfolded it, I discovered my “1968-69 Barstow, California. LDS Seminary” report card, a very telling document.

In a year (four terms) of early morning seminary — which was not my idea but rather that of my parents — I received the final letter grade of C.

I had forgotten that “middle-of-the-night” seminary was graded by a report card, which Mom signed because the Old Man was in Korea and would have killed me if he’d seen it.

According to Brother Ellsworth Merrell (a good guy), I cut seminary 20 times, was in desperate need of paying attention better in class, had been caught on the roof of the chapel twice, and couldn’t manage to pull my interest in the gospel above a C.

I blame God. If he’d wanted me to pay attention more, he would have revealed certain legally prescribed psychotropic drugs sooner instead of letting me find out about illegal alternatives on my own.

The only positive marks I got for “oh-dark-thirty” seminary were for punctuality, which I can’t claim any credit for because my sister and I were picked up every morning by Brother Merrell himself.

How I still managed to work in 20 absences despite that fact still remains a point of pride.

Who knew that theological report cards were even a thing outside of “release time” seminary in Utah? More important, why haven’t report cards caught on in regular church?

Instead, we have worthiness interviews to help determine whether we are passing or failing.

I’m not entirely sure what grade the bishop would give me in the following subjects: attendance, comportment, participation, reverence, dress code, financial contributions and tardiness.

My guess? C, C-minus, D-plus, D, F, F, B.

But that’s what Bishop Geertsen would give me if he were being fair. I suspect my grades would be worse if my efforts were judged by those with sterner dominions, like, oh, say, the church public affairs office.

Chances are I’d have to repeat mortal life. That’s OK. I earned it. Hell, I only graduated from premortal life by the skin of my teeth.

Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.

I recently read “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey” by Kamala Harris in an effort to get acquainted with our various 2020 presidential candidates through reading their books.

Harris spoke about her efforts to clean up the air in the highly polluted California town of Mira Loma. As California attorney general, she listened to various citizens who brought difficult health circumstances to her and then decided to join a lawsuit challenging Riverside County’s approval of an industrial project. The proposed project, named the Mira Loma Commerce Center, consisted of a million square feet of warehouses and industrial buildings, resulting in approximately increased 1,500 additional daily diesel trucks trips.

“The proposed Mira Loma complex carries significant health risks to a community that is already suffering the impacts of what is among the worst particulate pollution levels in the nation,” Harris said. “All California residents could be put at risk if developments like this are pushed through by officials without appropriate, and legally-mandated, consideration of the environmental effects on health and welfare.”

Harris’s statement includes many stark comparisons with our proposed inland port in Salt Lake City. Much like Mira Loma already having the worst pollution in California, our Salt Lake County already has the worst pollution in the entire nation on many days of the year. In 2018 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has given Utah just three years to reverse a trend of rising ozone pollution in some of its most populated counties.

The inland port would contribute significantly more pollution for Salt Lake County, harming our resident’s health and damaging a travel industry that is already beginning to experience difficulty for our reputation for dirty air. This plan for the 20,000-acre (1.6 times the size of the Mira Loma proposal), distribution hub in Salt Lake City’s westernmost area would bring increased rail, truck and air traffic along with tailpipe emissions.

While the proponents say it would create more jobs, it appears that these will not be high-paying jobs, and the projected increase in population to support it is not economically feasible considering our population is projected a substantial increase already of over a million and a half residents by 2050.

We are already experiencing deep problems within our state with lack of affordable housing. The inland port would only exacerbate our current and deep pollution and lack of affordable housing problems. Let’s not repeat history as we review the difficulty in Mira Loma, also known as the “diesel death zone.” Let’s stop the inland port plan right now and let your legislators know you don’t like the way this has been rammed through the Legislature in special sessions without any citizen or environmental studies or impact hearings.

We need a better solution for those 20,000 acres, perhaps more affordable housing and clean high tech/high paying job development there. We don’t need an inland port, with the high cost of our health and congestion to our already congested infrastructure and freeways. While it may be a great windfall of money for some state legislators owning land there or near there and sweetheart deals for some wealthy developers, this inland port will greatly harm our state and the quality of life we enjoy here.

I would like to see action taken by our Utah attorney general, our Salt Lake City Council, Utah state senators and representatives to join Mayor Jackie Biskupski in her lawsuit and fight to stop the inland port.

Cheryl Nunn, Layton, is a financial advisor and will be a candidate for the Utah House of Representatives, District 16, in 2020.

A house is burning while the children play inside. The kids don’t want to stop their game. It’s an ancient story with a riddle: How to lure them out?

We can take that story as a metaphor. The house is the whole earth, and we’re the grownups who will need to stop the game.

Let’s think first about the recent California fires, in an extended drought, where houses literally burned.

In 2015, after a tree hit a Pacific Gas & Electric power line, not far from Sacramento, 70,000 forest acres burned, and 2 people died. In 2017, another tree fell on a PG&E power line near Napa, burning 100,000 acres and 1,475 structures. Then, last year, a live wire broke off a PG&E tower. This time 14,000 homes, including a whole town, were lost, and 85 people died, unable to escape. Facing up to $30 billion in liabilities, PG&E prepared recently to file for bankruptcy.

Is our power infrastructure safe enough and well enough maintained? Further, on a human scale, how best redress the harm?

Warming air becomes more turbulent. It can also hold more water. As the climate warms, we’ll see not only longer, hotter droughts, as in California, but also fiercer, truly catastrophic storms. Storms, for instance, like this month’s “bomb cyclone” that flooded much of the Missouri River basin. Submerged fields, ice chunks the size of cars, hundreds of dead calves, farm after farm. Deep personal and economic trauma for farm families and communities across the region.

Let’s be clear: Global warming didn’t cause this storm directly, but it raised the odds that storms like that, and bigger ones, will happen more and more. It also leads, both here and as in California, to harsher, longer droughts.

It’s not just about infrastructure. Or the urgent need to cut greenhouse emissions. When homes, towns, livelihoods and precious lands are wrecked, are we committed, as a society, to help redress the many kinds of loss? The victims, specifically, didn’t bring this trouble on themselves, but the harm they face goes very deep.

In the short term, we need to rethink, and rebuild, the infrastructure that produces and distributes energy. Safe power lines in forests. Flood preparation on key rivers. Watershed protection. Better snowmelt capture. Renewable electric power. It’s not enough to say we need, as soon as possible, to cut greenhouse emissions. We need, as a society, to think about each other, and the impacts we all face.

What kind of world will our children have to live in? It’s our world, too. Let’s not forget the student demonstrations two Fridays ago, here and all around the world. Climate impacts like the ones I write about affect us now, in our short lifetimes, but more, much more, will come.

As the old expression goes, we need to get along — get moving — like a house on fire. Let’s not distract ourselves by thinking it’s impossible. We need to bring it off.

Robert Speiser, Millcreek, is a retired mathematician and educator.

It was the great basketball philosopher John Wooden who said, “Happiness begins where selfishness ends.”

Quin Snyder wholeheartedly agrees, having emphasized to anyone willing to listen, and some not willing, the importance of team-oriented play.

Wooden also said, “Selfishness is the greatest challenge for a coach. Most players are more concerned with making themselves better than the team.”

Not just with making themselves better, but with making themselves look better.

This past week, there were two contrasting circumstances involving the Utah Jazz and an opponent that underscored this point, the fruitlessness of it, in an unmistakable way.

The first came when the Jazz played the Suns, and ended up crushing them by 33 points. In that beatdown, visiting guard Devin Booker scored 59 points, all as the Jazz rolled.

It was quite an individual performance. Booker displayed a variety of skills in getting 19 field goals, five 3-pointers, and 16 made free throws. With the game hopelessly out of reach, Booker was subbed out late in the fourth quarter by Phoenix coach — and former Jazz assistant — Igor Kokoskov.

What wasn’t so impressive was Booker essentially checking himself back in so he could try to reach 60. Nobody liked the move, except for Booker. The Jazz even fouled to prevent him from getting another point. And his own teammates appeared to be avoiding him once he re-entered.

On one hand, achieving such a lofty scoring perch is kind of cool. On the other, it is not cool.

Going for 60 in the normal course of a game is a fine achievement, particularly if doing so is advancing the cause of the team. If it is advancing the cause of a single player, at the expense of the team, it is nothing short of destructive.

It could be argued that nobody else on the Suns was scoring worth a darn and that Booker properly decided, if none of his teammates could do it, he would. It could be better argued that it would have been more constructive for an established scorer like Booker to involve his teammates in the offense as a way to improve and coordinate the overall attack and to help develop other players, especially the younger, yet-unseasoned ones, as a means of pushing forward the team’s outlook not in this already lost season, but in the seasons ahead. Which is to say, showing leadership.

Instead, there was the lasting image of Booker re-entering a game that was a blowout only for the purpose of trying to hit a self-aggrandizing number.

Contrast that with what happened against the Lakers in the subsequent Jazz game, when Joe Ingles was part of a memorable night in which he was attempting to bring attention to the cause of helping autistic children a month or two after his own young child, Jacob, was diagnosed as one of those kids. It was a beautiful thing.

And Ingles made it more beautiful by playing like a star in what turned out to be another easy Jazz win. He scored in double figures, he had double-digit assists, and he fell one rebound short of collecting a career-first triple-double. Everybody in the building knew he was one board away. But when he was removed from the game with it well-decided, time still on the clock, there was no temptation to put him back in to seek a triple-double that would have been meaningless to the welfare of the team.

Not even Ingles wanted that.

“I’m never going to go box out Rudy so I can get another rebound,” he said during his weekly appearance on the DJ and PK Show on 97.5/1280 The Zone. “It’s just not me to go chase something like that.”

He added that when Snyder took him out in the closing minutes, he was disinclined to go back in because, “That’s an opportunity for other guys to play.”

Putting him back in for a number not related to winning, he said, “is not the Jazz, it’s not what we do. It’s not me, it’s not our team. It never will be.”

Nobody’s saying Booker is an evil dude or that Ingles is an angel. And it should be noted that the Jazz do include hefty bonuses in player contracts for individual achievements that are numbers-centric.

But it is easy to say Ingles knows what’s most important, as do the Jazz as a whole, when it comes to team basketball and rock-steady competitive priorities, even in a big-money league where stacks of cash are available to those who make themselves look valuable.

There is, indeed, a useful place for egocentrism in John Wooden’s game — if that egocentrism is in alignment with the greater good. But when it honors itself as a means to a shallow, singular end, at the disadvantage to the team and the others on it, that’s where selfishness begins and happiness ends.

GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Jake Scott weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.

Ogden • A musical director at a Catholic school in northern Utah has composed a concerto that he said is inspired by the political chaos in his native Venezuela that has led many, including him, to flee the country.

The Standard-Examiner reported last week that Alfonso Tenreiro’s concerto, called “The Prayer,” is scheduled to be performed at the Ogden Bach Festival next week.

Tenreiro, who first came to the United States as a teen in 1981, said he hopes the music brings awareness to the country that faces hardship amid political unrest and economic turmoil.

He said the concerto is a prayer for the country, and it reflects both the anguish and hope in Venezuela.

The classical composer serves as music director at St. Joseph Catholic High School and Elementary School.

Washington • Former Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday he doesn’t believe he ever acted inappropriately toward women but will “listen respectfully” to suggestions he did.

Biden, who is deciding whether to join the 2020 presidential race, released a new statement in response to allegations from a Nevada politician that he kissed her on the back of the head in 2014 and made her uncomfortable.

"In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once — never — did I believe I acted inappropriately," he said. "If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention."

The allegation was made in a New York Magazine article written by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor.

Going on the attack against the prospective 2020 contender, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Flores was "quite bold" to "go up against the highest levels of her political party" with the allegations and suggested that Biden should consider apologizing to Flores.

"If anybody just types in 'Creepy Uncle Joe Videos' you come up with a treasure trove," Conway told "Fox News Sunday."

"I think Joe Biden has a big problem here because he calls it affection and handshakes. His party calls it completely inappropriate," she said.

Some of the Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for Flores, but they haven't said it disqualifies Biden from joining the race.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a candidate for president, said she had "no reason not to believe" Flores' allegations.

"And I think we know from campaigns and from politics that people raise issues and they have to address them and that's what he will have to do with the voters if he gets into the race," Klobuchar told ABC's "This Week."

Speaking to reporters in Iowa over the weekend, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro said they believed Flores and indicated it's up to Biden to decide whether he should join the race.

In the New York Magazine article published Friday, Flores wrote that she and Biden were waiting to take the stage during a rally in Las Vegas before the 2014 election.

"I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. 'Why is the vice president of the United States touching me?'" Flores wrote. "He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head."

The rally’s organizer, Henry R. Munoz III, said in a statement Saturday that he spoke to several key people and staff who attended the rally and that they “do not believe that circumstances support allegations that such an event took place.”

New York • On a Sunday morning, a crane lowered a rusty remnant of the Holocaust onto tracks outside Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage — a vintage German train car like those used to transport men, women and children to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

The windowless boxcar is among 700 Holocaust artifacts, most never before seen in the United States, which are being prepared for one of the largest exhibits ever on Auschwitz — a once ordinary Polish town called Oswiecim that the Nazis occupied and transformed into a human monstrosity.

The New York exhibit opens May 8, the day in 1945 when Germany surrendered and the camps were liberated.

German-made freight wagons like the one in the exhibit were used to deport people from their homes all around Europe. About 1 million Jews and nearly 100,000 others were gassed, shot, hanged or starved in Auschwitz out of a total of 6 million who perished in the Holocaust.

That fate awaited them after a long ride on the kind of train car that's the centerpiece of the New York exhibit.

"There were 80 people squeezed into one wooden car, with no facilities, just a pail to urinate," remembers Ray Kaner, a 92-year-old woman who still works as a Manhattan dental office manager. "You couldn't lie down, so you had to sleep sitting, and it smelled."

She and her sister had been forced to board the train in August 1944 in occupied Poland, after their parents died in the Lodz ghetto where Jews were held captive.

The Germans promised the sisters a better new life.

"We believed them, and we schlepped everything we could carry," she said. "We still had great hope."

Once in Auschwitz, "they took away whatever we carried," and prisoners were beaten, stripped naked and heads shaved bald.

Titled "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away," the upcoming exhibit will transport visitors into the grisly faceoff between perpetrators and victims.

On display will be concrete posts from an Auschwitz fence covered in barbed and electrified wires; a gas mask used by the SS; a desk belonging to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss; and a dagger and helmet used by Heinrich Himmler, the chief architect of Hitler's "final solution."

The collection of prisoners' personal items includes a comb improvised from scrap metal; a trumpet one survivor used to save his life by entertaining his captors; and tickets for passage on the St. Louis, a ship of refugees whom the United States refused to accept, sending them back to Europe where some were killed by the Nazis.

The materials are on loan from about 20 institutions worldwide, plus private collections, curated by Robert Jan van Pelt, a leading Auschwitz authority, and other experts in conjunction with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and Musealia, a Spanish company that organizes traveling shows.

The New York one will run through Jan. 3.

The eight-decade-old box car brought to New York on a cargo ship came from a German auction, in terrible condition. Van Pelt's team bought it and restored it.

"The dark, smelly car represents that moment of transition from the world of the living that people understood and trusted to the radically alien world of the camps where the doors opened and families were separated forever," said van Pelt, whose relatives in Amsterdam lived down the street from Anne Frank's family.

"The Nazis wanted to wipe out every last Jew in the world," and at the end of a train trip, "this is where the last goodbyes were said."

The exhibit items all belonged to somebody — most now gone, either because they were murdered in camps or survived and have since died. Some people who inherited artifacts came forward with stories attached to them.

Thousands of survivors live in New York City, among the last who can offer personal testimony.

And that's why the exhibit is important, said real estate developer Bruce Ratner, the chairman of the museum's board of trustees.

“While we had all hoped after the Holocaust that the international community would come together to stop genocide, mass murder and ethnic cleansing, these crimes continue and there are more refugees today than at any time since the Second World War,” said Ratner. “So my hope for this exhibit is that it motivates all of us to make the connections between the world of the past and the world of the present, and to take a firm stand against hate.”

Washington • A robot walks into a bar. It goes CLANG.

Alexa and Siri can tell jokes mined from a humor database, but they don't get them.

Linguists and computer scientists say this is something to consider on April Fools' Day: Humor is what makes humans special. When people try to teach machines what's funny, the results are at times laughable but not in the way intended.

"Artificial intelligence will never get jokes like humans do," said Kiki Hempelmann, a computational linguist who studies humor at Texas A&M University-Commerce. "In themselves, they have no need for humor. They miss completely context."

And when it comes to humor, the people who study it — sometimes until all laughs are beaten out of it — say context is key. Even expert linguists have trouble explaining humor, said Tristan Miller, a computer scientist and linguist at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

"Creative language — and humor in particular — is one of the hardest areas for computational intelligence to grasp," said Miller, who has analyzed more than 10,000 puns and called it torture. "It's because it relies so much on real-world knowledge — background knowledge and commonsense knowledge. A computer doesn't have these real-world experiences to draw on. It only knows what you tell it and what it draws from."

Allison Bishop , a Columbia University computer scientist who also performs stand-up comedy, said computer learning looks for patterns, but comedy thrives on things hovering close to a pattern and veering off just a bit to be funny and edgy.

Humor, she said, "has to skate the edge of being cohesive enough and surprising enough."

For comedians that's job security. Bishop said her parents were happy when her brother became a full-time comedy writer because it meant he wouldn't be replaced by a machine.

"I like to believe that there is something very innately human about what makes something funny," Bishop said.

Oregon State University computer scientist Heather Knight created the comedy-performing robot Ginger to help her design machines that better interact with — and especially respond to — humans. She said it turns out people most appreciate a robot's self-effacing humor.

Ginger, which uses human-written jokes and stories, does a bit about Shakespeare and machines, asking, "If you prick me in my battery pack, do I not bleed alkaline fluid?" in a reference to "The Merchant of Venice."

Humor and artificial intelligence is a growing field for academics.

Some computers can generate and understand puns — the most basic humor — without help from humans because puns are based on different meanings of similar-sounding words. But they fall down after that, said Purdue University computer scientist Julia Rayz.

"They get them — sort of," Rayz said. "Even if we look at puns, most of the puns require huge amounts of background."

Still, with puns there is something mathematical that computers can grasp, Bishop said.

Rayz has spent 15 years trying to get computers to understand humor, and at times the results were, well, laughable. She recalled a time she gave the computer two different groups of sentences. Some were jokes. Some were not. The computer classified something as a joke that people thought wasn't a joke. When Rayz asked the computer why it thought it was a joke, its answer made sense technically. But the material still wasn't funny, nor memorable, she said.

IBM has created artificial intelligence that beat opponents in chess and "Jeopardy!" Its latest attempt, Project Debater , is more difficult because it is based on language and aims towin structured arguments with people, said principal investigator Noam Slonim, a former comedy writer for an Israeli version "Saturday Night Live."

Slonim put humor into the programming, figuring that an occasional one-liner could help in a debate. But it backfired during initial tests when the system made jokes at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Now, Project Debater is limited to one attempt at humor per debate, and that humor is often self-effacing.

"We know that humor — at least good humor — relies on nuance and on timing," Slonim said. "And these are very hard to decipher by an automatic system."

That's why humor may be key in future Turing Tests — the ultimate test of machine intelligence, which is to see if an independent evaluator can tell if it is interacting with a person or computer, Slonim said.

There's still "a very significant gap between what machines can do and what humans are doing," both in language and humor, Slonim said.

There are good reasons to have artificial intelligence try to learn to get humor, Darmstadt University's Miller said. It makes machines more relatable, especially if you can get them to understand sarcasm. That also may aid with automated translations of different languages, he said.

Texas A&M's Hempelmann isn't so sure that's a good idea.

"Teaching AI systems humor is dangerous because they may find it where it isn't and they may use it where it's inappropriate," Hempelmann said. "Maybe bad AI will start killing people because it thinks it is funny."

Comedian and computer scientist Bishop does have a joke about artificial intelligence: She says she agrees with all the experts warning us that someday AI is going to surpass human intelligence.

“I don’t think it’s because AI is getting smarter,” Bishop jokes, then she adds: “If the AI gets that, I think we have a problem.”

Columbia, S.C. • The man accused of killing a woman who got into his car thinking it was her Uber ride had activated the child locks in his backseat so the doors could only be opened from the outside, police in South Carolina say.

Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook also said investigators found the victim's blood in Nathaniel David Rowland's vehicle. Rowland, 24, was arrested and charged in the death of 21-year-old Samantha Josephson of Robbinsville, New Jersey.

Investigators would not say what they think Rowland did to Josephson from the time she got into his black Chevrolet Impala in Columbia’s Five Points entertainment district around 1:30 a.m. Friday until her body was dumped in woods off a dirt road in Clarendon County about 65 miles away.

Josephson had numerous wounds to her head, neck, face, upper body, leg and foot, according to arrest warrants released Sunday by the State Law Enforcement Division. The documents didn't say what was used to attack her.

Josephson's blood was found in the trunk and inside Rowland's car along with her cellphone, bleach, window cleaner and cleaning wipes, Holbrook said.

"This was a bad scene," the police chief said at a news conference late Saturday.

Hunters found Josephson's body Friday afternoon just hours after it was dumped, despite being left in an area that was "very difficult to get to unless you knew how to get there," Holbrook said.

Rowland has recently lived in the area, he said.

The night after Josephson was kidnapped, a Columbia police officer noticed a black Chevrolet Impala about two blocks from the Five Points bars where Josephson was kidnapped. The driver ran, but was arrested after a short chase, Holbrook said.

Rowland is charged with kidnapping and murder, Holbrook said. He was being held in the Richland County jail. It wasn't known if he had a lawyer.

Safety advocates urged college students to match the vehicle color and model, the license tag number, and the photo of their ride-share drivers before getting in a vehicle.

"She simply, mistakenly, got into the car thinking it was an Uber ride," Holbrook said.

The crime shook Columbia, the state capital where the University of South Carolina is one of the main economic engines. Josephson was a student at the school.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster and his wife, Peggy, asked on a message on Twitter for prayers for Josephson's family.

“Peggy and I are devastated and crushed over the Josephson family losing their beautiful daughter Samantha. She was one of the brightest young stars,” McMaster wrote.

If you weren’t happy with your tax bill this year, or you’re worried about next year’s, this is the time to take action.

Check your withholdings

If you do only one thing, review the withholdings on your paycheck.

The tax overhaul changed how much employers withhold from paychecks. If you withhold too much, you are due a refund. If you withhold too little, you owe. While the government urged people to review their withholdings to make sure they were up to date, few did. As a result, some people got more money in their checks during the year but were surprised at tax time.

The IRS urges all taxpayers to do a "Paycheck Checkup" now so that if a withholding adjustment is needed, there is time for it to happen more evenly this year. You can change your withholdings at any time. Waiting means fewer pay periods to withhold the necessary federal tax. The IRS has a withholding calculator on its site, which will help people determine their correct withholding amount.

Save for retirement

If you set more aside for your future retirement, it can actually help you on your taxes now. That's because money put in a 401(K) account is pretax, thereby lowering your income level. There are also tax breaks for contributing to IRAs and other retirement accounts.

So check to make sure you are contributing as much as possible to your retirement plan, said Dave Du Val, chief consumer advocacy officer at TaxAudit.

Don’t overlook deductions

Yes, the tax overhaul did away with or limited a number of popular deductions but there are still some out there for the taking.

You can claim mortgage interest on up to two homes. Consider bunching your charitable donations together into one year instead of spreading them out over multiple years to get the biggest tax bang for your buck. If you have medical expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income, make sure to claim those. And you can still deduct up to $10,000 in personal property tax, real estate tax, and state and local income or sales tax.

The standard deduction is much higher, but experts say it’s still worth running through the exercise to see if your itemized deductions are larger.

Modern police work involves many tools. Cars. Guns. Computers. Tasers. Handcuffs. Batons. Body cams. GPS. Radios. Bullet-proof vests.

All cost the taxpayers money and can literally weigh down the pockets, belts, holsters, shoulders, maybe even the morale, of every officer.

But perhaps the most important asset in a law enforcement officer’s tool kit weighs nothing, costs nothing and provides more protection, to both the officers and to the community, than any of those items or gadgets.

It is the trust of the public.

The hope that people of all ages, all ethnic and socioeconomic groups, will feel secure in reaching out to the police when they need help, and in offering assistance to those officers when necessary. To feel that officers are part of their community, not occupying armies.

In recent days we have seen two examples of how local governments in Utah are making efforts to regain and build the trust of law enforcement agencies by the communities they serve.

In Salt Lake City, Mayor Jackie Biskupski announced a renewed effort to train and guide the police officers who are assigned to public schools.

Cops who spend most of their on-duty time in and around schools are often referred to as “resource officers.” The idea was always that, beyond their usefulness as security guards, the officers so assigned would build a rapport with staff and students and create an environment where the sight of a police officer was a reassurance, not a threat.

It hasn’t always worked out that way.

Too often, school-based officers have been accused of throwing their weight around. Of criminalizing acts, real or suspected, that should be the responsibility of normal school discipline practices. Of coming down hard on students who belong to ethnic minority groups. Of creating what’s been dubbed the school-to-prison pipeline.

Biskupski announced that officers will receive specialized training in keeping with the original purpose of resource officers, to minimize conflict and suspicion, to make the idea of young people speaking to uniformed police officers a normal, even a pleasant, occurrence.

Meanwhile, down in Utah County, the sheriff’s office is taking another look at its policies governing high-speed pursuits of criminal suspects. After a driver who was suspected of nothing more serious than a traffic violation tried to flee from an officer, and the officer gave chase, the suspect ran a red light crashed into another car, killing one innocent person and injuring another.

The sheriff, along with making an undisclosed financial settlement with the family of the person who was killed, has called in an outside consultant to suggest new policies governing when officers should engage in dangerous pursuits and when to let it go.

In the movies, cops never refrain from high-speed chases. They are exciting.

In real life, it is often just not worth it. Unless the target of the pursuit is a clear and present danger to the community, it can make a lot more sense to get a license tag number and catch him later.

Building and keeping the public trust can be difficult, and require a lot more efforts that those mentioned here. But it is crucial. And deserves to be noticed whenever it happens.

Two weeks ago, lawyers representing the Sandy Hook families suing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones recorded a three-hour interview with him, a court-ordered formality that, under normal circumstances, would have remained private until the defamation lawsuit eventually went to trial.

But this case is not normal.

Jones — who was censored by Twitter, Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify for his inflammatory rhetoric — has used his Infowars web show to speak publicly about the case and the people who are suing him — families of 10 Sandy Hook victims who were massacred during the mass shooting at the Connecticut elementary school in 2012. During one show, Jones brought his lawyer on-air to outline their defense strategy.

So on March 29, the Sandy Hook attorneys took the extraordinary step of posting the hours-long deposition of Jones to YouTube — in the spirit of "transparency," they said.

"Alex Jones has tried to do everything he can to try his case in the media," said Wesley Ball, one attorney in the team of lawyers representing the Sandy Hook families. Ball said the deposition was part of a motion filed by Jones' attorneys to ensure there was enough evidence against their client to proceed in the court.

"The best thing we can hope for is to get Alex Jones to trial," Ball said. For now, he said they prefer to let the evidence and deposition speak for themselves.

The videos, published in two parts, offer a window into Jones’ thoughts on the years-long smear campaign he and his Infowars show waged against the facts of the shooting at Sandy Hook, the integrity of the investigation that followed and the families of the 26 children and educators who were killed.

Most notably, Jones refused to acknowledge whether his actions added to the grief and distress of those who had lost loved ones in the shooting and claimed the lawsuits filed against him were retaliatory for Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bid in the 2016 election. When shown short video clips of himself from his own TV show, Jones continuously claimed they had been manipulated or taken out of context.

He also blamed his years of misinformation and spin about the massacre on "psychosis." Jones claimed that years of witnessing "corrupt" governments and institutions made him deeply skeptical of the "mainstream media" and the "agenda hidden behind things."

"And I, myself, have almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I'm now learning a lot of times things aren't staged," Jones said. "So I think as a pundit, someone giving an opinion, that, you know, my opinions have been wrong. But they were never wrong consciously to hurt people."

Jones acknowledged that he now believes the shooting happened and that children were killed, even after years of calling the event a "hoax" and survivors "crisis actors" without evidence. But, he said he still believes there was a "coverup."

"I still have questions about Sandy Hook, but I know people that know some of the Sandy Hook families. They say, 'No, it's real' — people I think are credible. And so over the years, I've — you know, especially as it's become a huge issue, had time to really retrospectively think about it," Jones said. "And as the whole thing matured, I've had a chance to believe that children died, and it's a tragedy. But there are still real anomalies in the attempt to basically keep it blacked out that generally, when you see that in government, something's being covered up."

During the questioning, the Sandy Hook attorneys outlined the main conspiracy theories Jones has broadcast during the last six years and provided evidence debunking each one. Jones acknowledged that some of the so-called anomalies that initially inspired his conspiracy theories were later proven to be false. But he stopped short of taking responsibility for creating those theories; he told the Sandy Hook lawyers he was simply reporting on Internet chatter and providing a platform for the free exchange of ideas.

Jones claimed that the media, corporate lawyers, "the establishment" and the Democratic Party tried to make it seem like he was obsessed with the Sandy Hook massacre and that it was his only "identity." They "tricked" him into consistently debating it, he said.

"I see the parties that continually bring this up and drag these families through the mud as the real villains, the conscious villains attempting to shore up the First Amendment in the process," Jones said. "I do not consider myself to be that villain."

The Sandy Hook lawyers said the deposition was part of a series of them they are taking that will help the judge decide if there is enough evidence to move the case forward. If that happens, lawyers from both sides will have an opportunity to take additional depositions in preparation for a trial to determine if Jones caused the victims' families undue harm.

During the deposition, Jones was posed this question: "Mr. Jones, are you finally prepared to admit that you have, indeed, caused these families a substantial amount of pain?" attorney Mark Bankston asked. "Are you prepared to admit that?"

“I am not prepared to sign on to whatever you and the mainstream media make up about me,” Jones said.

A man walking on a St. George sidewalk was injured after a driver suspected of driving under the influence struck him and left the scene Saturday, police say.

The driver, 37-year-old Trevor Andreasen Royce, was later tracked down at a hotel by police and arrested, FOX 13 reports. He was charged with felony counts of DUI and leaving the scene of an accident.

The man was struck after Royce drove his black Ford truck over the curb and onto the sidewalk, police say.

For more information, visit FOX 13.

Editor’s note: The Salt Lake Tribune and FOX 13 are content-sharing partners.

After blowing all of a 15-point third-quarter lead against the Wizards on Friday night before pulling the game out in the final minutes, Jazz coach Quin Snyder was asked if his team perhaps had gotten a little complacent.

“That could be said for sure,” he agreed, before going on to disagree. “I don’t think that’s something we want to point to — we weren’t complacent or [not] urgent when we got up [15].”

That said, he did acknowledge that while he didn’t find that to be the specific issue in the Washington game, that didn’t mean it hasn’t been the issue at other times.

It is human nature to some degree, after all, to let up a bit once you’ve achieved a substantial advantage. Then, there is the fact that Utah’s second-half schedule has been littered with lottery-bound opponents, who theoretically are either inferior competition or not playing with peak effort or efficiency.

Regardless of the reasons, the coach did concede that, while the defense is typically posting stellar numbers, and the offense seems to be going well of late, there have been times this season when taking the foot off the gas — be it for an entire game, or merely a segment of one — has been a problem the Jazz have had to overcome.

Quin, on if easy games led to complacency: "That could be said for sure. I don’t think that’s something we want to point to — we weren’t complacent or [not] urgent when we got up [15]. For us, it’s more about being able to maintain our focus and our urgency in those situations." pic.twitter.com/HK8rdCdVjr

— Eric Walden (@tribjazz) March 30, 2019

“For us, it’s more about being able to maintain our focus and our urgency in those situations,” Snyder said. “It’s been something that this group — it’s happened, it’s happened enough times for us to recognize that it’s something we’ve got to be aware of and deal with and do better.”

The last time the Jazz played a team in playoff position was eight games ago, on March 16 against the Brooklyn Nets, who have not yet clinched a postseason berth but are presently occupying the seventh spot in the Eastern Conference.

And the last time the Jazz have faced an opponent that actually has already punched its playoff ticket was three games before that, on March 11 against the Thunder.

It’s not an issue that’s going away, either. Of Utah’s six remaining games, only the final two — a back-to-back set, home against the Nuggets, then at the Clippers — feature playoff-bound teams with winning records.

The next four on the slate, starting with Monday’s game against Charlotte at Vivint Smart Home Arena, are all against sub-.500 competition. And the Hornets are the only team of that quartet not yet eliminated from postseason contention.

So given that, while the Jazz certainly weren’t happy about giving the lead away against the Wizards, they could at least find a silver lining in it.

“That’s definitely the positive. You wanna get that 18-, 20-point lead and keep it, extend it out, but at this time of year, there’s gonna be close games coming,” said Kyle Korver. “And so for us to have some in-game decisions to make, shots to make, plays to make, it’s probably good for us.”

Kyle Korver, post-Wizards, on pulling the game out after losing the lead: "That’s definitely the positive. … At this time of year, there’s gonna be close games coming. And so for us to have some in-game decisions to make, shots to make, plays to make, it’s probably good for us." pic.twitter.com/yDOSxMAN7j

— Eric Walden (@tribjazz) March 31, 2019

Point guard Ricky Rubio agreed.

“It’s good to get a game like that,” he said, “because the playoffs aren’t gonna be [easy].”

Of course, as the Wizards game showed, sometimes the supposedly “easy” games turn out to be not so easy, either.

Korver conceded that having that many games in a row against non-playoff teams, while potentially good for bolstering the Jazz’s record (which it has done, considering they’ve won nine their last 10), could also prove problematic in terms of not doing everything quite the right way.

“This time of year, when [some] teams aren’t in the playoff chase anymore, games just get kind of weird,” he said. “And after you get a few weird games, it’s easy for some bad habits [to creep in], or to lose a little urgency.”

Snyder would like to see his group excise those bad habits as soon as possible. After all, the Jazz still have plenty to play for, even if their opponents don’t.

“There’s so many unpredictable variables right now as far as where people finish — from 1 to 8,” he said. “It’s really a unique year in that sense. So you want to play well. … Right now, our team’s focus is on being as good as we can be when it comes time to play in the playoffs.”

A 76-year-old man is dead after his SUV was hit by a car and rolled, partially ejecting him, West Valley City police tweeted Sunday. The driver of the car suffered a minor injury in the crash.

The man who was killed in the rollover was identified as Richard Alan Learned of Sandy.

Authorities closed Redwood Road from 3500 South to 3800 South while they investigated and reconstructed the crash, the cause of which is unclear.

Yuma, Ariz. • Two Marine pilots have died in a helicopter crash during a training mission in southwestern Arizona, U.S. Marine Corps officials said Sunday.

The AH-1Z Viper crashed Saturday night while the pilots were conducting a training mission as part of a weapons and tactical instructor course, according to the Marine Corps. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Capt. Gabriel Adibe, a Marine Corps spokesman, said the helicopter crashed on the vast Marine Corps Air Station Yuma training grounds but no additional information was immediately available.

The names of the pilots who died have not been released pending notification of their families.

The station is located about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from Yuma and the 1,300-square-mile (3,367-square-kilometer) training ground is one of the world's largest military installations.

There have been several fatal crashes involving Marine Corps aircraft near Yuma over the years.

In 1996, a Marine electronic-warfare plane went down during a training mission on a gunnery range near the Gila Mountains, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of the Yuma station, killing all four people aboard. The crew was from the Marine base at Cherry Point, North Carolina, and was training at Yuma.

Two Marine pilots, a crew chief and a Navy corpsman died in a 2007 crash of a search-and-rescue helicopter near the Colorado River during a training mission. The crew members were attached to a headquarters squadron of Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma.

In 2012, seven Marines were killed when an AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter and a UH-1Y Huey utility helicopter collided in midair during a training exercise in a remote area of the Yuma training grounds. The crash site was in the Chocolate Mountains on the California side of the range.