TRUMP GOES AFTER UCLA FIRST AND HARDEST BECAUSE IT’S A FAT TARGET

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“TRUMP GOES AFTER UCLA FIRST AND HARDEST BECAUSE IT’S A FAT TARGET”

 

Go almost anywhere in the multiple medical centers of slogan-obsessed UCLA and you’ll see signs reading “It Begins With U” and “Innovating Patient Care since 1926,” bromides urging every employee from nurses to heart surgeons toward ever-better performances and ratings.

 

So far, the slogans have helped place UCLA’s medical centers first among Western hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report ratings, topping even famed institutions like Stanford University’s hospital, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA’s sister medical centers in San Francisco, Sacramento and Irvine.

 

But UCLA now also places first in a far less desirable category: It is the university which President Trump seeks to dun the most in federal research and fine money, going after a total of $1.7 billion. That’s in keeping with Trump’s practice of attacking prominent targets, rarely secondary ones.

 

The $1.7 billion represents virtually all annual federal research money UCLA gets, sixth most in the country behind places like UC San Francisco, Michigan and Johns Hopkins, schools which had far less anti-Semitic activity during the 2023-24 school year. By contrast, UCLA sprouted anti-Israel encampments like mushrooms. So in many ways, UCLA was the largest target Trump could find, and his psychology suggests that’s why he singled it out.

 

Fully $500 million of the federal research money was to be taken from UCLA’s medical facilities and research before a judge the other day stopped the process at least temporarily on grounds the demands were made via form letters not listing any transgressions by researchers. The other $1.2 billion is a “fine” for allowing anti-Semitic camps and other anti-Jewish activities on the campus for weeks.

 

Totally ignored were petitions signed by hundreds of Jewish UCLA faculty noting the campus has seen no medically-linked anti-Semitism.

 

Trump’s administration more than any other appears struck with the central injustice of Gaza: Over 1,000 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, but Israel somehow has been blamed for the entire conflict.

 

UCLA has been widely blasted ever since for its long tolerance of the campus encampments and concurrent interference with other students’ freedom of movement.

 

The overall University of California system says it will resist any federal penalties, a big commitment from this huge institution. Overall, UC campuses get about $17 billion per year from the federal government, including more than $9 billion for the care of Medicare and Medicaid patients and almost $9 billion in research funding.

 

It’s no wonder UCLA doctors show signs of insecurity from the standoff between school and government. “What’s going to happen to my family?” wondered one cardiologist while examining a patient. “Will I and my colleagues have to go somewhere else?” If they do, what happens to all those “Best in the West” awards and slogans?

 

What does America get for its research money? Early on, it got CT (computerized tomography) scans. More recently, there have been a wireless implantable brain device that partially restores vision in some of the blind; drug delivery systems that cross the blood/brain barrier to reach cancers in the central nervous system, and gene therapies for babies born without immune systems.

 

Should advances like these be lost to Donald Trump’s “war on California,” of which the attempted UCLA extortion is one part? 

 

So far, UCLA and the larger UC system appear to be resisting via a mix of lawsuits and compromise. The campus last month announced new protest rules at least partly matching federal demands. UCLA will allow pre-approved overnight events, but not in the campus center. It stopped far short of cutting off admissions of students with pro-Palestinian or anti-American views, as Trump demanded. The rules make clear that campus disruptions and blocking of building access will not be allowed.

   

All this meets many Trump demands.

 

Similar rules have not yet been applied to other UC campuses, including those in urban settings like UCSF and the UC San Francisco school of law.

 

Settlement talks reportedly involve 10 of the 24 members of UC’s Board of Regents, along with President James Milliken.

 

It’s an open question whether Trump appointees will make more demands. Further pressures figure to spur an increase in UC’s emphasis on lawsuits to uphold its rights.

 

Meanwhile, it’s all made the slogan “It starts with U” as good as obsolete, for no campus employee from nurse to specialized researcher did anything to provoke the crisis.

 

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WILDFIRE FUND LEADS INEVITABLY TO SMUG UTILITIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILDFIRE FUND LEADS INEVITABLY TO SMUG UTILITIES”

 

The tone has bordered on smug among executives of the Southern California Edison Co. ever since the Eaton Fire last January destroyed most of Altadena and some of neighboring Pasadena, consuming a total of about 9,400 structures and doing at least $27 billion worth of damage.

 

Edison has all but admitted some of its equipment sparked that fire, but somehow has acted as if it needs never even to worry about bankruptcy, the procedure its sister utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went through after its equipment sparked the fire that destroyed virtually all of Paradise in Butte County seven years ago.

 

Edison has even offered settlements to Eaton fire victims who lost homes: $900,000 in rebuilding money to owners of burnt typical 1,500-square-foot homes, plus a $200,000 reward for settling directly with the utility and more for pain and suffering. 

 

This move to defuse the myriad lawsuits against the utility is a first, made possible by the work Gov. Gavin Newsom, his legislative minions and his appointees to the state Public Utilities Commission did to protect PG&E and its fellow privately owned utilities from most liability when they cause fires in the future. Now Edison gets that protection.

 

The bailout mechanism invented by Newsom and friends in 2019 while consumer groups were advocating a breakup of PG&E, is known as the California Wildfire Fund. As part of the rescue, almost all customers of the three big private California utilities (San Diego Gas & Electric also benefits), now pay a $3 monthly surcharge on their bills to cover post-2019 fire damages caused by utilities. 

 

Even the $21 billion or so in the Wildfire Fund today might not be enough to cover all Edison’s prospective liabilities from the Eaton fire. So pending Newsom's expected signature, the Legislature this month agreed to extend the $3 monthly customer payments all across the state until 2045 rather than the previously scheduled 2035 expiration date.

 

That will up the Wildfire Fund $18 billion, half paid by Edison shareholders and half by customers.

 

Californians cannot blame President Trump for this, even if his firing thousands of Forest Service workers could help make this year’s fire season the most costly ever. This injustice sits squarely with Newsom, who appears unworried because the $3 fee is buried in most electric bills and rarely noticed by rate payers.

 

Myriad lawsuits from homeowners hit by the Eaton fire now charge Edison with failure to turn off the power to a transmission tower just above that fire’s generally accepted ignition point. The lawsuits claim Edison had ample warning of fire prone conditions, but still left the juice on. Those actions go away in cases where victims opt for Edison’s offers.

 

Final damage figures from the Eaton fire and the simultaneous Palisades fire are not certain and could almost double the current $27 billion estimate. Even if Edison’s payments are widely accepted, insurance companies would likely pay back much of that amount. Edison could also take a big drawdown from the Wildfire Fund, possibly leaving the fund broke.

 

All of which raises the question that dogged the original legislation creating the fund: Why are most California electric customers paying for damages caused by negligence or malfeasance from the state’s monopoly investor-owned utilities?

 

Customers did not cause the fires; in fact many are fire victims still trying to get fair settlements from their own insurance companies.

 

The upshot is that the swiftly and carelessly drawn legislation created solely to keep today’s companies in business despite self-made crises could prove both unfair to most consumers and inadequate to cover damages assessed to Edison and future perpetrators of other fires. 

 

Meanwhile, Edison’s chief executive Pedro Pizarro, when queried during the summer about prospects for an extension of the Wildfire Fund surcharge, correctly responded that “The governor’s office is engaged, as are our legislative leaders.” How smug could he sound?

 

The alternative could have been much simpler and more just: If proven negligent and/or careless, Edison and its utility brethren could have been forced into bankruptcy and then broken up, with cities, counties and the state picking up parts of the current infrastructure.

 

For if privately-owned utilities keep starting fires, why do they deserve their current monopolies, complete with billions yearly in guaranteed profits?

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

IF COVID-WRACKED BODIES STACK UP THIS YEAR, BLAME RFK Jr., TRUMP

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IF COVID-WRACKED BODIES STACK UP THIS YEAR, BLAME RFK Jr., TRUMP”

 

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues making vaccines in general and COVID-19 inoculations in particular harder to get, it will become more and more clear that the blame for any resulting deaths lies with him and his boss, President Trump.

 

That also applies to the current outbreak of whooping cough (or pertussis), of which 10,082 cases were reported by the end of May, killing five infants. That led Kennedy’s top U.S. Senate critic, Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, whose state had three times as many cases as last year, to call on him to encourage mass vaccinations for whooping cough. At this writing, Kennedy had not responded, and the outbreak was unabated.

 

It's important to make clear neither Trump nor Kennedy is responsible for the summertime measles death of a Los Angeles child infected when too young for vaccination and before either RFK Jr. or Trump took office.

 

Yet, there’s little doubt much of the blame in any future stackup of bodies dead from COVID-19 varieties will lie with Kennedy. For years, he was America’s foremost critic of vaccines of most types, from long-established preventives like the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) inoculations required for most schoolchildren to the newer COVID-19 antidotes.

 

We know New York City and parts of New Jersey experienced such high death tolls early in the COVID pandemic that hospitals and morgues used refrigerated trucks to store piled-up bodies. Images of mass burials on Hart Island near the Bronx also circulated widely during 2020 and 2021.

 

In that same year’s winter surge (the deadliest wave yet), hospitals in California, Arizona and Oregon also converted trucks into temporary morgues.

 

Now another round of COVID threatens, and we shall see how responsible the American public that elected Donald Trump president is willing to hold him and his political deal-making.

 

Just now, a new variety of COVID-19 – at least the fourth since the pandemic’s supposed end – proliferates across the nation, while Kennedy makes it continually more difficult for people to get protected by new forms of the vaccine.

 

As secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy names the committees that set the rules for this. He has systematically filled them with anti-vaccine cronies he calls “distinguished scientists.”

 

They’ve set rules making it almost impossible for anyone under 65 to get previously free vaccinations unless they tell a pharmacist they have some kind of underlying condition weakening their health.

 

Even some over-65s in California and other states have reported being forced to get COVID-shot prescriptions from physicians.

 

These are far higher barriers to inoculation than Americans faced as recently as last year, before RFK Jr. took over HHS.

 

Why blame Trump, too? For one thing, he put Kennedy where he is, part of a Trump/Kennedy political bargain sealed very publicly in August 2024.

 

That’s when Kennedy – until then a secondary presidential candidate – agreed to throw whatever support he had at the polls (it wasn’t much) behind Trump, often reported as an exchange for any cabinet job he desired.

 

Kennedy sorely wanted HHS. He has used it to the hilt, first lying about the extent of his anti-vaccine sentiments during Senate confirmation hearings and then acting on his true feelings after taking over the only federal job he ever wanted.

 

Trump knew he was suborning this deceit, saying later that “Everyone knows these (vaccines) work,” but still refusing to fire Kennedy even after most of Kennedy’s family begged him to. Who knows what written “pre-nup” may exist between the two men, restraining Trump from taking appropriate action?

 

Even senators who voted to confirm Kennedy as a cabinet member now loudly point out contradictions between his confirmation hearing testimony and his actions in office. “I would say effectively we are denying people vaccines,” said Cassidy, a doctor and the decisive vote to confirm Kennedy.

 

The bottom line: The direct line of responsibility for today’s rising positive results for COVID-19 and other once quiescent ailments like pertussis runs through both Kennedy and Trump. But no one knows if voters will hold either to account.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

IT’S LESS OVERT, BUT TRUMP’S ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ CARRIES ON

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IT’S LESS OVERT, BUT TRUMP’S ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ CARRIES ON”

 

It’s not exactly the 100 years war, but Donald Trump’s undeclared ‘War on California’ carries on this fall just as intently as ever before.

 

No, it’s not as obvious as when he defied the governor and several judges to send National Guard and Marine troops by the thousands to quell a riot that wasn’t.

 

It isn’t merely that the count of California lawsuits against him is higher today than at the same point in his first presidential term. In some cases, Trump lets other Republicans carry his water and in others he is harming California more than other states with his nationwide moves, including the tariffs he has (possibly illegally) imposed on California’s largest trade partners.

 

These things will not likely knock California off its pedestal as the world’s No. 4 economy, just ahead of India and just behind Germany. For one thing, the large amount of rebuilding construction that will soon follow last January’s Los Angeles County firestorms will keep the cost of goods created here higher than before, suggesting a potential move up in the worldwide economic rankings.

 

But make no mistake, through a wide series of moves, Trump is doing what he can to make life less pleasant, more expensive and even less truthful for Californians.

 

Start with the Clean Air Act, where Trump coerced every Republican in the House of Representatives to vote last spring for elimination of the California waiver in the Clean Air Act of 1970. That’s the provision that allowed this state to clean up its air (not completely, by far) through measures like catalytic converters and electric vehicles, pioneered here and often resented elsewhere. Such resentment was why 35 Democrats voted with the House GOP.

 

Trump tried for this repeatedly in his first term, but was voted out before he could finish, rendering moot any legal cases surrounding his effort. Now it will be up to Democrats in the Senate to stop this effort to dirty up California air.

 

There is also significant legal debate on this. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has stated that waivers like California’s are not subject to congressional review, suggesting Congress lacks the authority to overturn them. If this measure goes through, with a smirking Trump signing it, that issue would be decided by the courts.

 

But that’s only one move against California. Here are a few others (not the complete list):

 

n Termination of a study on guaranteed income. Trump halted a $9 million UC San Francisco clinical trial providing $500 monthly to 300 low-income Black young adults that aimed to learn whether this tactic can cut crime and homelessness.

 

n An executive order to Attorney General Pam Bondi to halt enforcement of state laws on climate change, explicitly challenging California’s cap-and-trade program that, among other things, produces electric and natural gas bill credits of about $50 per customer twice a year.

 

n Another order opening floodgates in two Central California reservoirs, supposedly aiming to address wildfire issues. But there were no fires near those reservoirs and none of the water reached any fire area, most of it flowing into depleted San Joaquin Valley aquifers.

 

n Trying to eliminate past California atrocities from the Smithsonian Institute and all other government-sponsored exhibits purporting to deal with all aspects of California history.

 

n Ignoring the bragging he voiced while visiting the January fire zones and again in an Oval Office meeting with Gov. Gavin Newsom – to provide quick federal aid to wildfire survivors. Reality is there has been no movement in Congress toward passing California’s request for $40 billion in fire aid.

 

Taken together, these moves compose an attack on California’s ability to control its own environment and fix its problems with tax money paid by this state’s citizens, who annually put far more into the federal treasury than they get back.

 

They would instead put this state on equal or even lesser footing than Republican-controlled states like West Virginia and Alabama, where smog and water safety issues have never been taken seriously, as they are here.

 

 

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

Suggested pullout quote: “These moves are major parts of an attack on California’s ability to control its own environment and fix its problems.”

 

WHO ARE THE REAL HYPOCRITES IN THE GERRYMANDERING FIGHT?

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHO ARE THE REAL HYPOCRITES IN THE GERRYMANDERING FIGHT?”

 

For the better part of 20 years, Republican politicians across the nation have taken advantage of whatever privileges their status as state legislators gave them to assure they would stay in office perpetually, or at least as long as they wanted.

 

This has all been done at the expense of both Democratic pols and the minority groups many of them represent in Congress thanks to districts they have drawn for themselves from Texas to Florida, West Virginia to the Dakotas.

 

The GOP operatives never felt the slightest embarrassment or compunction about what they were doing, no matter how many times courts forced them to alter their maps and return to square 1 in the gerrymandering wars.

 

That’s why it is utterly laughable for figures like Joel Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. or the newly elected Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, who runs a fund-raising operation titled “Reform California,” to toss around words like hypocrite and apostate when California Democrats try to turn the tables on them, for once.

 

This all began when the order came down from Donald Trump in the Oval Office to Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, who despite his frequent toadying to the President nevertheless brags incessantly about what a political hotshot he is.

 

So when Trump essentially ordered Abbott early last summer to turn six minority congressional districts in the mostly minority Houston area into five white Republican districts and just one minority district, it was clearly meant as a tactic to assure continued Trump or Trumpist rule in the House of Representatives in perpetuity.

 

Never mind that the Constitution very plainly says congressional districts are to be drawn once every 10 years, just after the Census, and intended to last the full 10 years.

 

Democrats have stood still for this chicanery every time it’s been tried in the past. That’s likely why the GOP operatives who have pulled these trick plays so often in the past were taken aback when California Gov. Gavin Newsom, plainly running for president in 2028, decided to give them a piece of their own medicine.

 

Yes, California has a non-partisan state elections commission to draw its decennial borders. And that’s how it worked in 2021, the year after the last Census.

 

But Newsom realized that anything enacted by a California ballot initiative – as was the non-partisan election commission – can be undone by another initiative.

 

So he did the unprecedented: He decided to match Texas tit for tat, saying if you take away five Democratic districts in a 2026 election that figures to be extraordinarily tight, we’ll figure a way to get them back, right here in California.

 

Hence, the Legislature quickly approved a new map with five districts that figure to switch from red to blue, mostly in the eastern and southern parts of the state.

 

This didn’t sit too well with James Gallagher, the minority leader of the state Assembly. Gallagher had hoped to pick up one of the unknown number of changed seats due to come up after 2030. But James Gallagher, meet Jeff Stone.

 

Stone is a former Riverside County supervisor who devised another north-south split for California, this one intended to give the new eastern California state a couple more seats in Congress and two more Republican seats in the Senate. It was essentially the same things Gallagher wants to try now.

 

No shame on Stone’s part in this attempted manipulation. It didn’t work, just like all the other 40-plus state split schemes presented over the last half century.

 

Meanwhile, Newsom’s lone-wolf attempt to thwart Trump’s attempt at self-perpetuation is the only significant effort trying to stop the Republicans from cementing themselves into power for years, maybe decades, to come.

It appears to be the sort of tactic frustrated Democrats want their 2028 hopefuls to attempt. So even if Newsom’s effort fails, at least he will have tried, putting himself ahead of rivals like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune) and Kentucky Gov. Andy Breshears. For now, at least, it gives Newsom a leg up on the rest of the Democratic field, although no one knows how long that advantage might last.

 

-30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NERVOUS TIME FOR SOME HISPANICS AT MANY CALIFORNIA COLLEGES -- AND NOT BECAUSE OF ICE

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"NERVOUS TIME FOR SOME HISPANICS AT MANY CALIFORNIA COLLEGES -- AND NOT BECAUSE OF ICE”

 

As students headed back to school at California’s more than 200 college and university campuses, some had more reason than usual to be nervous.

 

For a federal program that – for a change – is not currently threatened for defunding by President Trump appears to be in trouble from a completely different source.

 

That’s the Hispanic Serving Institutions (HIS) grants given annually since 1995 to community colleges, four-year colleges and universities whose student bodies are 25 percent or more Latino. These have totaled more than $600 million for California campuses alone since the avent of the program.

 

With its huge populace of immigrants of varying legal status, California has gotten more than one-fourth of the money available under this plan, which lets campuses improve their student support programs from faculty instruction on how best to boost Hispanic students to added counseling for them, and student retention programs that keep both Hispanics and others in school when they might otherwise drop out.

 

Like Project Head Start for much younger folks, this is one of the great successes inaugurated or expanded during the Clinton Administration.

 

But the program is now under fire, and its survival is threatened in a day when the Trump administration has managed to eliminate many programs it labels as diversity, equity and inclusion because they are designed to help minority groups move up.

 

For sure, Hispanic students in California need some kind of help. Only 35 percent of all students in the K-12 grades met or exceeded grade-level standards in math and reading, with huge performance gaps between Latinos and Blacks at one end and whites and Asians on the other. White and Asian students had gaps averaging about 25 percentage points in performance on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress during 2023-24, the last available full year for which figures are available.

 

The obvious need for something to lift up Hispanic students, who might otherwise be doomed to second-class citizenship, does not matter to the folks opposed to the HSI funding.

 

The current opposition comes from the state of Tennessee and a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which previously sued successfully forcing Harvard University to end affirmative action admissions. It argues the rules for getting HSI funding are as unconstitutional as favoring some racial groups over others in admissions.

 

A current federal lawsuit from Tennessee and the Fair Admissions group uses essentially the same arguments employed against Harvard’s former affirmative action plan. The main contention is that all colleges serving low-income students of any ethnicity ought to be eligible for grants now available only to HSIs.

 

Of course, the efforts for which the HSI funds are used at the 167 California schools that get them are also supposed to benefit all students, not just Latinos. No one is screening Asians out of counseling programs, for example, even if they are designed specifically to meet Hispanic needs and not others.

 

Because the lawsuit is pretty much in line with Trump administration goals and initiatives, and because it names the federal Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon as defendants, it’s uncertain the action will even be seriously contested. The administration can simply concede and Tennessee and its companion citizen group would win.

 

Those who favor that outcome, according to the EdSource information service, consider the 25 percent-plus Latino enrollment benchmark illegal because it does not let other institutions with lower Hispanic enrollments participate.

 

Right now, HSI funds go to five of the nine University of California undergraduate campuses, all but one of the California State University campuses and the majority of the state’s community colleges.

 

Since the lawsuit’s objective is not to eliminate the funds, but rather make them more widely available, it’s possible most of those schools will still be able to participate in whatever new programs HSI might morph into.

 

Still, it’s unsettling for the faculty and counseling staff now using the money mostly to serve Latinos, especially since no one knows whether campuses would put up some of their other funds to keep these activities going if they are ruled illegal. It’s also doubtful the Trump administration would do anything to uplift any minority, considering how many of their campus actions now seem aimed to push them down.

 

-30-
Elias is author of the current book The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It, now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

STILL HOPE FOR A RETURN TO SANITY ON A.I.

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 “STILL HOPE FOR A RETURN TO SANITY ON A.I.”

 

There were plenty of lousy votes taken during the summer’s congressional sessions, when President Trump’s omnibus “Big Beautiful Bill” eventually passed after numerous senators and House members obtained their various pounds of flesh from it.

 

Trump gave concessions to senators from Alaska, Wyoming and many other states in order to win continued tax cuts for billionaires, plus massive slashes in Medicaid and in funds for rural hospitals. Even Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson made an inexplicable vote: With 40 percent of residents of his Louisiana district on some form of Medicaid, he pushed hard for cuts in the program. Politicians have rarely made more suicidal-seeming efforts.

 

But in this mishmash of mistaken policy and misunderstanding, there was one extremely sane vote: The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to kill a proposed 10-year ban on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence.

 

No, there will not soon be federal or worldwide regulations on A.I., but there is at least hope that some of the 50 state legislatures will do the right thing and make rules that protect humans from artificial intelligence turning malignant.

 

It has happened. Last fall, for example, a graduate student in Michigan was told “please die” by Google’s artificial chatbot Gemini. “This is for you, human,” Gemini told the student. “You are not special, you are not important and you are not needed. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”

 

That’s an extremely human sentiment, reflecting anger and malevolence. It really does not matter what the student might have been having the chatbot do, there is no excuse for letting a human creation turn on a human in that way.

 

But so far, no state or nation has dared take the basic step to regulate A.I. (which can also function as robots) so that it cannot turn against its makers.

 

The idea for such regulation is nothing new. As far back as 1942, when America was at war with malevolent forces from Europe to East Asia and the Pacific, the scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov saw this very danger coming and invented laws of robotics to prevent anything like the message that graduate student received or any actions that might follow up on the message itself.

 

In his short story “Runaround,” Asimov put forward three laws which would become staples in his future works, like the bestselling “Foundation” trilogy.

 

“The first law,” Asimov wrote, “is that a robot shall not harm a human or by inaction allow a human to come to harm. The second law is that a robot shall obey any instruction given to it by a human, and the third law is that a robot shall avoid actions or situations that could cause it to harm itself.”

 

So Asimov conceived independent-minded machines, much like many of today’s, without having his three laws imprinted upon them. Right now, no one knows whether these machines are secretly plotting to get rid of humans just like Gemini wanted its human graduate student eliminated.

 

This kind of threat was perceived early last year by more than 100 technology leaders, corporate CEOs and scientists who warned that “A.I. poses an existential threat to humanity.”

 

The notion that the Trump administration could put a prohibition on state regulation into a draft of its key legislation for this year shows officials and the president totally ignored warnings.

 

At the same time, major A.I. companies from Meta to Open A.I., makers of the ChatGPT function built into many of today’s computers, oppose any kind of regulation on what their machines’ capabilities should be. This represents pure human arrogance in assuming machines will never develop the sophistication to become a threat to our race.

 

But the Senate knew better. By a huge bipartisan majority, it clearly saw how fast A.I. is moving in precisely the potentially threatening manner anticipated by Asimov decades before A.I. actually existed.

 

At least, states still have the right to act on the wisdom of such visionaries, and hopefully prevent what could prove a fatal flaw for the entire human race.

 

 

 

 

    -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net