Mountain Views News          Saturday, May 28, 2016

B3

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, May 28, 2016 

Mountain 
Views

News

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

CITY EDITOR

Dean Lee 

EAST VALLEY EDITOR

Joan Schmidt

BUSINESS EDITOR

LaQuetta Shamblee

PRODUCTION

Richard Garcia

SALES

Patricia Colonello

626-355-2737 

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WEBMASTER

John Aveny 

CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

Lori Koop

Rev. James Snyder

Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

Pat Birdsall (retired)

DICK Polman

TYRADES! by Danny Tyree


HIGH-TECH PROFILING 

HAS YOUR NUMBER

It’s mildly irritating when Facebook tries to nudge me into 
tagging a photo of my wife’s sister as my wife or my son as 
myself, but there are much more ominous possibilities in 
the world of facial recognition software.

 According to the Washington Post, an Israeli start-
up company called Faception claims to be able to take 
one look at a person’s face, compare it to a database and 
deduce a whole slew of character traits, including whether 
the person is a potential terrorist.

 Yes, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was all “old school” when he observed “Yon 
Cassius has a lean and hungry look”; but artificial intelligence is bringing snap 
judgments into the 21st century.

 With 80 percent accuracy, Faception’s technology can purportedly identify 
everything from great poker players to extroverts, pedophiles, geniuses, white 
collar criminals, wimps who won’t sue Faception if they get beat up after being 
misidentified as one of the aforementioned groups, etc.

 The main focus of Faception is on homeland security issues; but even there, 
effectiveness may be short-lived. The terrorists may figure ways around it. I 
understand ISIS is flooding the market with photos of jihadists on jowl-flapping 
roller coaster rides and urging its scientists to finalize new real life applications for 
advanced Wooly Willy technology.

 Keenly aware of ethics concerns, a Faception spokesman assures us that the 15 
different classifiers used by the company to produce its profiles will never be made 
available to the general public. I have my doubts. (“The secrets are guarded by a 
trusted employee – who, um, meets 14 of the 15 classifiers for being a member of 
WikiLeaks! Darn! Darn! Darn! Pay no attention to that massive data dump on the 
internet.”)

 Imagine the societal upheaval if such information does go public, gets exploited 
by unregulated copycats and tempts individuals and institutions to abuse it.

Suddenly everyone will be muttering “Maybe you CAN judge a book by its cover,” 
“Better safe than sorry” and “Guilty until proven innocent.”

 Romantic invitations will be rejected, job offers will be rescinded and adoptions 
will never take place. Even something as simple as a payday loan will be affected. 
(“Why do you REALLY need this loan? According to analysis of the surveillance 
camera photos, you probably need to establish a new identity after you mass 
murder my helpless family. Take your business somewhere else, sir! But please 
take a complimentary calendar, and a nail file for your 80 percent likelihood of 
having brittle nails.”)

 Remember the 1980s Pantene “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” ad? Soon 
it could be “Don’t hate me because my symmetrical follicles indicate bouts of 
melancholy.”

 The medical profession will never be the same, thanks to exchanges like the 
following:

 “The facial swelling from your allergic reaction to bee stings may never fully 
subside.”

 “I want a second opinion, doc.”

 “Okay, and you’ll probably win the backgammon tournament while humming a 
creditable version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”

 I’m all for preventing another 9-11, but there’s still something easily skewed and 
downright creepy about the services offered by Faception.

 I’m not sure I even want to live in a world where the inspirational words of 
Martin Luther King, Jr. have devolved into “I look to a day when people will not be 
judged by the color of their skin, but by whether their ears hang low and wobble 
to and fro.”

——-

 ©2016 Danny Tyree. Danny welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com 
and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades”. Danny’s’ weekly column is 
distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. newspaper syndicate.

TAKE A WILD GUESS 
WHICH POLITICAL PARTY IS 
IMPERILING BABIES 

We all know by now that Republicans are well practiced at the art of 
magical thinking — massive tax cuts balance the budget, human-
induced climate change isn’t real, Donald Trump is a normal 
candidate — but the delusion that tops them all is their apparent 
belief that the Zika virus will slow its pace and take its cues from the 
ideological cheapskates on Capitol Hill.

 Way back on Feb. 8, President Obama — acting on dire warnings 
from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — 
requested that the Republican Congress pony up nearly $1.9 billion to head off an impending 
public health emergency. The mosquito-borne Zika virus was nearing American shores and 
imperiling pregnant women, who, if infected, could give birth to babies with abnormally 
small heads and severe brain defects. What could be more prudent than to pump sufficient 
money into preventive mosquito control, vaccine research, and public education?

 Sixteen weeks later, the Republican Congress has passed squat. With no end in sight. It 
simply refuses to spend the money that health experts know is necessary.

 I had long assumed that, for all their hostility to governance, Republicans at minimum 
believed that protecting American families was paramount. (You know, family values.) I now 
stand corrected. Apparently, even babies are to be sacrificed on their ideological altar.

 The Republican House wants to give the NIH and CDC only $622 million — roughly one-
third of what Obama requested. That money would come from the funds that were OK’d in 
2014 to fight the Ebola outbreak (we’re still fighting Ebola, in Africa). The Republican House 
also says that the $622 million would basically expire in September, and at that point Obama 
would have to ask for more. Meanwhile, the Republican Senate wants to provide $1.1 billion 
— roughly half of what Obama requested. It toyed with the idea of financing the Zika fight by 
taking money out of Obamacare, but it finally passed the bill without doing something that 
stupid.

 No doubt you’ve spotted the big problem: The Republican House and the Republican Senate 
are far apart on how many pennies should be pinched, and that stalemate is expected to last well 
into the summer. That should give the Zika virus more time to infect more people — unless, 
of course, the virus agrees to abide by the Republican timetable. More than 1,300 cases have 
already been confirmed; most are pregnant American travelers and citizens of Puerto Rico.

 Public health experts can’t fathom why Congress is behaving this way. Dr. Peter J. Hotez, at 
the Baylor College of Medicine, recently said, “I’m very worried, especially for our U.S. Gulf 
Coast states ... It’s like refusing emergency preparedness funds for an approaching hurricane.” 
Even the GOP-dominated National Governors Association pleaded for Congress to act, 
warning in a statement this month that “the nation is on the threshold of a public health 
emergency.”

 Best of all, we have Marco Rubio. Freed of the need to pander, the lame duck senator — 
mindful of Zika’s threat to Florida — is clanging the alarm.

 “Do we (spend) now before it becomes a crisis, or do we wait for it to become a crisis?” Rubio 
asked “Congress is going to have to explain to the people why it is we sat around and did 
nothing on something of this magnitude.”

 And let’s not kid ourselves here. The main reason they’ve been sitting around since February 
is because the request came from Obama. Saving babies is a lower priority than hating Obama.

Two years ago, in the early days of the Ebola crisis, Republicans said that Obama wasn’t 
doing enough to keep the disease away from American shores. Yet today, with Obama doing 
everything he can to keep Zika away from American shores, Republicans don’t like that, 
either. And if, as expected, the Zika cases mount after the virus hits here, rest assured they’ll 
try to blame Obama. 

 But like Rubio, a few rare Republicans prefer to be rational. Earlier this month, House 
member Vern Buchanan — mindful of the virus threatening his Florida district - announced 
his support for Obama’s money request, and cited medical research which shows that Zika 
“eats away” at the brain and “destroys the ability to think.”

 Destroys the ability to think…

 Sounds like a Zika mutation has already infected his colleagues. 

——-

 Copyright 2016 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

 Dick Polman is the national political columnist at NewsWorks/WHYY in Philadelphia 
(newsworks.org/polman) and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email 
him: dickpolman7@gmail.com

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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

H. SUSAN Henderson

 MAKING SENSE by Michael Reagan

 
Howard is 
unavailable for his 
Left Turn column 
this week, so I 
thought I would 
share a few of my 
thoughts with you. 
As I am certain 
you are aware, 
the state of our 
election process 
has been on most 
people’s minds. On 
every TV channel, all over the news, and yes, 
sadly, even in community based newspapers 
such as this, all day, every day. I don’t think a 
week has gone by in 2016 without a column on 
the upcoming election. And, with all of this 
attention, one thing is crystal clear, the state of 
our electoral process is a MESS! Not only is it a 
mess, the chaos is being exploited for the sake of 
ratings and free media, and the end result may 
very well be the election of a man who is far 
worse than Nancy Reagan’s ‘village idiot’. (See 
footnote below*). 

 So, who do we really blame for this hysterical 
candidate selection process and sophomoric, 
media influenced way of choosing our next 
President? Do you have a mirror handy? Then 
take a good look at the image in it. Yes, we 
are all to blame and for so very many reasons. 
What we are experiencing are the consequences 
of our actions (or inactions). Think about it:

 1. Too many people don’t vote! It is staggering 
to read the statistics of just who participates 
in the voting process. In 2012, there were 
240,926,957 Voting Eligible Americans. How 
many went to the polls? Only 130,234,600…a 
little over 50%. To be exact, 53.6%. (Source: 
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.
html). We no longer celebrate the privilege 
when our kids turn voting age. We no longer 
instill in them their responsibility to have 
their voices heard. And, almost half of you 
reading this won’t vote either. Almost half of 
the eligible voters will stay home with dozens of 
lame excuses as to why not. Being in Intensive 
Care is acceptable, not missing your favorite 
TV show is not. Personally, my parents taught 
me a long time ago that if I sit on the fence and 
do nothing, then I have given away my right to 
complain. They were right. The solution is not 
to say ok and stay on the fence, the solution is, if 
you really care about something, to get involved 
or at least do your part, VOTE.

 2. Don’t be surprised at the way things work! 
Most people never paid attention to the political 
organizational structure (The Parties) before 
this election cycle. Do you even know what your 
party’s County Central Committee is? And 
yet, you go to the polls and vote for “County 
Central Committee Members” and have no idea 
who they are or what they do. You relegate the 
internal workings and rules to these volunteers 
and never look back until someone like Sanders 
or Trump exploit the process to escalate the 
discontent among the masses. Those who 
want change within the party should have 
been proactive instead of reactive at the most 
inopportune time. Those who are dissatisfied, 
should have been INVOLVED long before this 
cycle began.

 3. Stop letting people treat you like dummies! 
Recognize when your intelligence is being 
insulted. The President of the United States 
does not operate in a vacuum as we have all 
painfully witnessed with President Obama. If 
the opposition party goes to congress and sits on 
their hands, nothing will get done. So don’t let 
anyone suggest to you that their ascendency to 
the highest office in the land is a magic wand. It 
takes experience and a commitment to serving 
others to even begin qualifying to be the leader 
of this country. If you’ve been serving your 
own self-interests all your life, unless the Good 
Lord himself recently touched you, looking out 
for others is just not in your wheel house -- Mr. 
Trump. Personally, whether I agree with an 
elected official or not, they all are to be given 
credit for stepping up to the plate, they are all 
public servants, warts and all. 

 4. Know who the devil is. The devil is NOT 
Wall Street. The devil sits on the shoulders of 
those members of Congress who waste time 
and millions of dollars investigating some 
married man’s dalliances, a matter that really 
is not their business, and those members who 
will do anything that will make the 6 o’clock 
news with their names attached. They are the 
elected officials who will not work together and 
come up with regulations that protect citizens 
from abuse in our financial markets. Oh my, 
that would be more government regulations, 
huh? Imagine what this country would be like 
without Wall Street? No banks, no corporations 
to work for, no mechanism for maintaing and 
facilitating growth of retirement funds. Yes, 
Wall Street needs managing to protect us, but 
it is not our enemy. Elected officials whose 
only job is to be obstructionist are our enemy. 
Demonizing everything is an easy way to get 
people’s emotions riled up, but an INFORMED 
electorate should be able to see through that. 
Do your own homework.

 5. Stop eating up red herrings, they give you 
indigestion! According to the dictionary, a red 
herring is: “something unimportant that is used 
to stop people from noticing or thinking about 
something important”. Really, personal e-mails, 
someone else’s sins, red herring debates (Trump’s 
invitation to Bernie), name calling, bullying....
What do any of those things that we tend to 
commit to memory and may use to decide 
who we vote for, have to do with improving the 
quality of life for any of us? When a candidate 
cannot or will not articulate the who, why, when 
and where of what they intend to do if elected, 
don’t waste your time listening to anything they 
have to say. It’s the issues…not the insults.

 I could go on and on, but the bottom line is 
this, too many of us sit on our hands and don’t 
vote. Too many of us let others think for them. 
Too many of us don’t do any research from 
reliable sources in order to learn the facts on 
our own. Too many of us blindly just ‘go for 
the sound bites’. This isn’t Reality TV folks. 
This isn’t the schoolyard in second grade. This 
is real life. It is our future. It is time for us to 
demand that our elected officials to do their jobs 
and stop playing games, because if we don’t, the 
consequences will be unimaginable. 

 “…in “The New York Post,” Cindy Adams wrote a column 
[2001] in which he said that Nancy Reagan is not very 
impressed with President Bush. In fact, according to Cindy 
Adams, she calls him the village idiot.” From CNN Transcript. 
The statement was later retracted.

CONSEQUENCES

Consequence: (n) something that happens as a result of a particular 
action or set of conditions


LOOK WHO’S CRYING NOW

Look which party is blowing itself up now and struggling to unify 
behind a single candidate.

 Hint: It’s not the Republicans.

 After all those months of worrying and complaining about having 
too many candidates, the GOP finally found its 2016 presidential 
candidate, for good and bad.

 A couple weeks ago I said the Republican Party was in such sad shape it should use Leslie 
Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s my party” for its theme song.

 The opening line -- It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to -- was a perfect description of 
how miserable conservative Republicans and the GOP establishment were at the prospect of 
having Donald Trump as their standard bearer.

 Now the GOP is suddenly getting its act together and Donald Trump is looking stronger.

 He has been picking up more support from the party establishment -- though it’ll dry up 
real fast if he keeps sucker-punching Republican governors like Susana Martinez of New 
Mexico for no good reason.

 Trump’s poll numbers against Hillary are up.

He’s already giving “Crooked Hillary” the same roughing up he gave his primary opponents.

 He’s exhuming subjects that she, her pretend husband Bill and their liberal media friends 
thought were buried decades ago in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository.

 Already the names of Bill’s victims are coming back to haunt us – Jennifer, Paula, Juanita, 
Kathleen, Monica…

 Trump will be repeating those names until November, whether Hillary, Big Media or 
squeamish Republicans like it or not.

 For the next six months he’ll do to Hillary what liberal journalists won’t do because they’ve 
still in bed with the Clintons after 24 years.

 He’ll be hitting Hillary every day on Benghazi, her emails, her Wall Street speeches, her 
crooked foundation, her Senate record, her record as secretary of state, Whitewater, Vince 
Foster, her hairdos, her voice, etc., etc. 

 With Trump and Hillary’s negative poll numbers being as high as they are, we might still 
see a third party candidate emerge to go after conservative Republicans and the NeverTrump/
Anybody But Hillary voter.

 Meanwhile, it’s the Democrat Party that’s gone to war with itself.

 Bernie Sanders isn’t giving up in his leftwing crusade to take down Hillary. He’s got the 
money, the troops and the rage to make the Democratic convention an ugly battle scene.

 America’s most lovable socialist is pushing Hillary so far to the left she’s about to fall in the 
Pacific Ocean. She’ll never have time to swim back to the center.

Even MSNBC can see Hillary’s whole campaign is a fiasco.

 Apparently, she still hasn’t watched the highlight reel of the Republican primary to see how 
Trump destroyed his attackers like they were monsters in a video game.

She’s making the same stupid mistake they did. She’s attacking him, which only makes him 
stronger with his base and lets Trump hit back even harder at her.

Hillary’s campaign “style,” if you can call it that, is so boring and scripted it’s like she’s teaching 
a chemistry class or reading for a poorly written part in a movie.

Everything she screeches at her pep rallies has been measured, weighed and poll-tested a 
dozen times until it’s clichéd liberal mush. 

 She should let Elizabeth Warren or Larry David read her scripts from now on before half 
the country slips into a coma.

 Trump needs to pick a perfect conservative VP candidate to allay the fears of the Paul 
Ryans in the GOP, offset his lack of experience and bring some grown-up gravitas to his 
political stand-up routine.

 But nothing can save Hillary from herself.

 My old girlfriend Leslie Gore had a follow-up hit to “It’s My Party” that, if adapted slightly, 
describes where Mrs. Clinton is right now.

 ‘Cause now it’s Hillary’s turn to cry

 Hillary’s turn to cry

 Hillary’s turn to cry

——-

 Copyright ©2016 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, 
a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). 
He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy 
Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send 
comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. 

 Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info 
on using columns contact Sales at sales@cagle.com.

 Susan Henderson,

 Publisher/Editor

Mountain Views News

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