Page 4 - Dinuba Sentinel 1-31-19 E-edition

Opinion
In My Opinion
A4 | Thursday, Janauary 31,, 2019
Fred Hall
country power
rates. They are in the process of going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy amidst the emotional wrath of a consumer
base and state government blaming them for the wildfires last year.
Fred Hall - Publisher Rick Curiel - Editor
Debunked reports are proof of a biased media
Just as when one is in Las Vegas playing Blackjack, there are times in life when it is entirely
proper and well-advised to “double- down” on one’s position on certain issues. Last week, I wrote, at some length, about today’s “journalists” lack of ethics in agenda-driven reporting vis-a-vie rush-to-judgment methods
of reporting on preconceived notions of the event they are covering. Fact checking and reliable sources be damned! We even went so far as to identify five stipulations of that code of fair practices for journalists.
Since that original column was penned, an internet “news site” named Buzz Feed broke a story about the President telling Michael Cohen,
his attorney, to lie to the Mueller investigation as well as Congress. Although the report named no sources or featured any quotes, it was quickly parroted by the “usual suspects” in the mainstreammedia. RobertMueller’s investigatory group quickly affirmed the report was “untrue” but it didn’t make any difference.
The word impeachment, by
talking heads in the media, appeared approximately 200 times during the following 24 hours before cooler heads began to prevail. That only counted CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS. Adding to the travesty were The New York Times, Washington Post and various other members of the print press.
This past weekend, a small
snippet of video of small town Kentucky Catholic high school boys
in Washington for a pro-life march resulted in calls for everything from their being punched in the face to their being killed arose on the internet. Mainstream media pounced without questioning any of the details. It appears, now that everyone has had access to the facts, they were the ones being assaulted by the Black Hebrew Israelites and a drum-feating native American who reportedly was a Viet Nam war veteran. That has since beendebunked. Weunderstandthe boys were waiting for a bus to pick them up after the rally when they were confronted. Releaseandreviewof
the entire video showed everything in context.
All appearances are that their greatest sin was wearing Make America Great Again caps while being white. Until we, in the journalism business, get past this hate Trump we will continue winding up with egg on our face. There can be little doubt that many will continue along this mind- numbed path!
When one is growing older, it’s really difficult to isolate any benefits associated with the aging process. Setting aside the disappearance of physical prowess and the ability to perform tasks which once seemed so simple, we generally continued to be blessed by God with the experience and wisdom accumulated over a lifetime. Older, generally wiser people, tend to still be able to make rational considerations based on that experience.
With many today, the enemy du jour seems to be Pacific Gas and Electric Company with their highest-in-the-
Guest Column
WReady to become a robot?
It’s really easy to hate a big company like this, especially after pulling stunts like paying big bonuses to executives and allowing those checks to clear before they took the same action a few years ago.
While one’s emotions can be extremely powerful, it’s often wise to stop and examine the facts, trying to locate real culprits. No one can argue with the facts that, at first blush, it’s difficult to understand why they charge so much for their product which is essential to all of us. My personal (at home) bill for power ranges anywhere from $300 to $700 per month!
All of this anger is compounded by the power company’s use of a “base- rate” system which seems to vary from house to house and no one can explain. Couple that with their incestuous relationship with California Public Utilities commission which has been little more than a rubber stamp on rate increases.
As usual, the first place anyone should look to as a basis for something that is inexplicably ridiculous would be the gang which we elect to represent us in Sacramento. When our lawmakers pass legislation requiring that certain percentage of our electric power
comes from renewable sources such
as wind, solar and steam, little or no thought is ever given to the cost of those sources which are astronomical compared to traditional sources such as coal. Special interest groups and environmentalists have “snowed” our elected representatives to the point they have 100 percent buy-in with the global warming theory.
We’ve reached the point in California where it’s either Donald Trump or global warming that is at the heart of all our problems—according to those who claim to be much wiser than we. Setting our system of public schooling aside, we hope everyone is smarter than that.
Pacific Gas and Electric would not make my list well-run, admirable companies but they are indicative of what happens when, increasingly, government is becoming a “partner” in all of our businesses. Their rules and regulations—especially from people who have never signed a paycheck or run a business—has become stifling to free enterprise in this state which once so glowingly represented what was good about America.
A pronounced loss of freedom by the private sector is inherently harmful to an entire populace. It even drives up the cost of the basic utilities, which are the engine of a robust economy.
But, as always, that’s only one man’s opinion.
Fred Hall is publisher of the Dinuba Sentinel.
Guest Column
GWreed may have caused Global Warming
e either keep fossil fuels in the ground, or we groups committed to averting a fry. climatic cataclysm.
That’s the conclusion of another new Limiting future global temperature
blockbuster study on climate change, this one from the National Academy of Sciences. Our fossil-fuel industrial economy, the study details, has made for the fastest climate changes our Earth has ever seen.
“If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society,” notes the study’s lead author, Kevin Burke from the University of Wisconsin.
“In the roughly 20 to 25 years I have been working in the field,” adds his colleague John Williams, “we have gone from expecting climate change to happen, to detecting the effects, and now we are seeing that it’s causing harm” — as measured in property damage and deaths, in intensified flooding and fires.
The last time climate on Earth saw nearly as drastic and rapid a climate shift, relates another new study, came some 252 million years ago, and that shift unfolded over the span of a few thousand years. That span of time saw the extinction of 96 percent of the Earth’s ocean species and almost as devastating a loss to terrestrial creatures.
Other scientific studies over this past year have made similarly alarming observations, and together all these analyses provided an apt backdrop for this past December’s United Nations climate change talks in Poland.
Climate change activists hoped these talks would stiffen the global resolve to seriously address climate change.
But several nations had other ideas. The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait all refused to officially “welcome” the recent dire findings of a blue-ribbon Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, essentially throwing a huge monkey-wrench into efforts to protect our Earth and ourselves.
What unites these four recalcitrant nations? One key characteristic stands out: The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait all just happen to rate among the world’s most unequal nations.
Just a coincidence? Absolutely not, suggests a new analysis from the Civil Society Equity Review coalition, a worldwide initiative that counts in its ranks scores of
Sam Pizzigati
rises, this coalition notes, will require “disruptive shifts” and heighten public anxieties. People will tolerate these disruptions, but only if they believe that everyone is sharing
in the sacrifice — the wealthy and powerful included.
Environmental policy makers typically define the wealthy at the
level of the nation state. They focus on the relationships between wealthy nations and developing nations
still struggling to amass wealth. Wealthier nations,
the conventional climate change consensus holds,
have a responsibility to help poorer nations meet the environmental challenges ahead.
But the wealthy have the power to shirk those responsibilities — unless we expand our focus from inequality between nations to inequality within nations as well.
The more unequal a wealthy society, the coalition explains, the greater the power of the rich — and the corporations they run — to ignore their debt to Mother Earth.
And the economic inequality their wealth engenders, researchers add, has “much to do with the dark character of the current political moment,” referring to the growing xenophobia and racism that make serious environmental aid from developed to developing nations ever less likely. The world’s wealthiest people and their corporations, left to their own devices, would for the most part rather not bear any sort of significant sacrifice. That’s all the more reason to address the inequality that bestows so much power upon them.
“Addressing climate change effectively and justly,” sums up Basav Sen, the climate policy director at the Institute for Policy Studies, “requires us to transform the unjust social and economic systems that gave us climate change in the first place.”
Distributed by OtherWords.org.
e humans have got to get the devil” by
a whole lot smarter, says creating a new Elon Musk, the billionaire superior species
founder of Tesla automobiles and CEO of SpaceX rockets.
Musk isn’t merely reacting to humanity’s recent tendency to elect lunatics to lead our countries. Rather, he’s trying to warn us about the rapid rise of a radical new technology: artificial intelligence.
In common parlance, he’s referring to robots, but these aren’t the clunky, somewhat cute machines performing rote tasks. AI essentially has evolved to become an electronic brain — a web of evermore-complex super-computers interacting as one cognitive unit that can program itself, make decisions, and act independently of humans.
These thinking machines are rapidly increasing in number and geometrically advancing their IQ, prompting Musk and others to view AI technologies in apocalyptic terms. As algorithms and systems inevitably grow more sophisticated, he says, “digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin.”
In graphic terms, Musk warns that profiteering humans are “summoning
Jim Hightower
of beings that will end up dominating humanity, becoming “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.”
What’s weird isn’t his dystopian prognosis (other experts agree that
runaway bot intelligence is a real threat), but his solution. The way for human beings to compete with AI, says Musk, is to merge with it — not
a corporate transaction, but a literal merger: Surgically implant AI devices in human brains with “a bunch of tiny wires” that would fuse people with super intelligence.
Uh-huh... and what could go
wrong with that? It’s good to have technological geniuses alert us to looming dangers, but maybe the larger community of humanists ought to lead the search for answers.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
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