Theocracy Continues Its Conquest of Secularism

The supreme court made its first decision related to religious liberty with Justice Barrett siding with the GOP and its radical right ideology. This case helps elevate religious freedom over some pandemic-related restrictions intended to protect public health. Churches can now ignore public safety restrictions in the name of religious liberty. The radical justices argued that violated the Constitution for local officials to impose restrictions on houses of worship that are more stringent than restrictions on businesses considered essential. The presence of Barrett was pivotal in the majority because the court had upheld similar regulations in Nevada and California before she was on the court.

The decision was 5-4, with GOP chief justice Roberts joining the liberal minority. 

The New York Times writes:

“In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society earlier this month, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. amplified his objections, saying the pandemic ‘has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty. .... This is especially evident with respect to religious liberty. It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.’

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, another Trump appointee to the court, took pointed aim at Roberts’s opinion in the California case and declared that it should no longer guide lower courts when weighing pandemic-related restrictions on religious services.

‘Courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause’, Gorsuch wrote. ‘Today, a majority of the Court makes this plain.’

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Jewish organizations led by Agudath Israel challenged Cuomo’s system of imposing drastic restrictions on certain neighborhoods when coronavirus cases spike.”

As pointed out here before, the supreme court is now controlled by a majority of Christian nationalist judges. That radical right religious ideology relies on using the free exercise clause to elevate religious liberties to a status above other liberties and secular concerns such as public health. 

This decision seems to mean that churches can hold services with numbers of people equivalent to what is allowed in essential businesses such as grocery stores. In essence, that puts religious practice on the same level of importance as getting food. Religious group complained that religion was being treated unfairly. New York state asserted that religion was being treated favorably compared to other activities. 

Wafer Scale Engine Computer: Faster than Reality

The 1st generation WSE 1.2 trillion transistor chip (~8.5 x 8.5 inches) -- 

the 2nd generation chip will have 2.6 trillion transistors, 

850,00 cores and more than twice the memory

An article at the SungularityHub, The Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just Left a Supercomputer in the Dust, describes what seems to be the first actualization of an old idea in computer chips. The idea is to make computer processing chips bigger, not smaller. So far, all the innovation has gone into making chips and components smaller and smaller and smaller. At present, billions of transistors can be put on a small chip as shown above. The new wafer-scale engine (WSE) takes existing miniaturization technology to put a trillion transistors on a big chip. The big chip is made by Cerebras, a California startup company.

SingularityHub writes:

“The Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine is massive any way you slice it. The chip is 8.5 inches to a side and houses 1.2 trillion transistors. The next biggest chip, NVIDIA’s A100 GPU, measures an inch to a side and has a mere 54 billion transistors. The former is new, largely untested and, so far, one-of-a-kind. The latter is well-loved, mass-produced, and has taken over the world of AI and supercomputing in the last decade.

When Cerebras first came out of stealth last year, the company said it could significantly speed up the training of deep learning models.

Since then, the WSE has made its way into a handful of supercomputing labs, where the company’s customers are putting it through its paces. One of those labs, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, is looking to see what it can do beyond AI.

So, in a recent trial, researchers pitted the chip—which is housed in an all-in-one system about the size of a dorm room mini-fridge called the CS-1—against a supercomputer in a fluid dynamics simulation. Simulating the movement of fluids is a common supercomputer application useful for solving complex problems like weather forecasting and airplane wing design.

The trial was described in a preprint paper written by a team led by Cerebras’s Michael James and NETL’s Dirk Van Essendelft and presented at the supercomputing conference SC20 this week. The team said the CS-1 completed a simulation of combustion in a power plant roughly 200 times faster than it took the Joule 2.0 supercomputer to do a similar task.

The CS-1 was actually faster-than-real-time. As Cerebrus wrote in a blog post, ‘It can tell you what is going to happen in the future faster than the laws of physics produce the same result.’

The researchers said the CS-1’s performance couldn’t be matched by any number of CPUs and GPUs. And CEO and cofounder Andrew Feldman told VentureBeat that would be true “no matter how large the supercomputer is.” At a point, scaling a supercomputer like Joule no longer produces better results in this kind of problem. That’s why Joule’s simulation speed peaked at 16,384 cores, a fraction of its total 86,400 cores.

A comparison of the two machines drives the point home. Joule is the 81st fastest supercomputer in the world, takes up dozens of server racks, consumes up to 450 kilowatts of power, and required tens of millions of dollars to build. The CS-1, by comparison, fits in a third of a server rack, consumes 20 kilowatts of power, and sells for a few million dollars. 

Computer chips begin life on a big piece of silicon called a wafer. Multiple chips are etched onto the same wafer and then the wafer is cut into individual chips. While the WSE is also etched onto a silicon wafer, the wafer is left intact as a single, operating unit. This wafer-scale chip contains almost 400,000 processing cores. Each core is connected to its own dedicated memory and its four neighboring cores.”

What does all that mean?

What that means is that there is a new generation computer technology that can do some things better than existing supercomputers. It's simulations of events can be faster than real time, allowing predicting and acting in advance of future events. At present, the things that WSE dowes best relate to solving specific, highly complex problems that require vast amounts of computing power. WSE will not replace existing technology like the ipad or laptop, which are designed for general uses and generally work quite well. As with most or all new technologies, this can be, and probably will be, used for good and bad. 

WSE excels at doing high speed simulations in real time. It can simulate and at least partially automate aircraft landings. It works faster to train artificial intelligence software than current supercomputers. WSE can be used to train neural networks, simulating brain data processing. Since this is still early days in WSE technology development, it is not known how influential this will become. Competing technologies include quantum computers and memristor-based neuromorphic chips, that mimic the brain by putting processing and memory into individual transistor-like components. 

My guess is that WSE will be tested in stock markets to see if the future can be predicted far enough out to trade on a stock before it moves up or down. It also seems reasonable to think that WSE will be tested in medical situations where real time computing can help in diagnosis or predicting future medical problems using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AI is used in medicine for a growing number of applications.

 

Lots more cores, memory and bandwidth -- more is better!

(A PB is a petabyte = 2 to the 50th power of bytes; 

1,024 terabytes (TB) = 1 petabyte, or 1 million gigabytes; for comparison, 

human brain data processing operates unconsciously at about 

1.4 million bytes/second and about 1-60 bytes/second consciously)

A Radical Right Elite Lie

“The highlight of the Koch summit in [January] 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined ... they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.

Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Caroline Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment frings of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.

. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."

In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.

As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division.” -- Investigative journalist Jane Mayer describing one of the events in the collapse of mainstream ('establishment') GOP conservatism and the rise of the radical right ideology that has displaced it, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, 2107

Radical right elites

The radical right consists mostly of the GOP and libertarians. Presumably there are some independents in the mix too, but those two parties are probably the greatly dominant sources (~85% ?) of this new, aggressive radicalism. The GOP is the much bigger of the two radical right groups (~96% bigger?). The elites who shape and control the ideology and tactics are mostly multi-millionaires, billionaires and business and religious leaders. Their political and social goals are, among other things, rigidly anti-government, anti-taxes, anti-civil liberties and rabidly pro-rich and powerful people and interests, usually at the expense of the public interest. That ideology comes with a significant tinge of bigotry or outright racism. 

By contrast, the image the elites portray in their deceptive, manipulative dark free speech (propaganda) is one defense of individual liberty, American power, white privilege and service to the average person and their economic and social concerns. 

A recurring Koch brother lie

The Koch brothers have been major financial contributors to the rise of the radical right for decades. The Koch family had been staunch adherents of the John Birch Society (JBS), a virulently racist, anti-civil rights organization that opposed civil liberties. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred C. Koch was a founding member of the JBS. The sons Charles and David supported the JBS during the 1960s when the group was attacking Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

In the last 10 days or so, multiple sources have reported that the surviving brother, Charles Koch, is commenting on regrettable(?) governmental, social and commercial effects of his own radical right ideology. Charles has published a new book and his comments seem to be aimed at promoting it. 

Investigative journalist Jane Mayer has researched the Kochs in detail for years and asserted that what Charles is telling the public about his political activities, i.e., his regrets about his radicalism, is a bald faced lie. She points out that for some time now, Koch has been making the same claims about every two years after elections. Despite those lies, Charles still financially backs divisive, corrupt, racist and/or crackpot radical right republican candidates.

Mayer makes her point in the ~3 minute video below. 

This is what The Hill quotes these lies by Charles: “Boy, did we screw up! What a mess! .... I hope we all use this post-election period to find a better way forward. .... Because of partisanship, we've come to expect too much of politics and too little of ourselves and one another.” Only the last sentence is something the virulently anti-government, libertarian Charles actually believes.

The Hill gives some context:

“GOP mega-donor Charles Koch said he regrets his decades of partisanship and now wants to focus on bridging the political divide, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

In an interview shortly before the election, the 85-year-old libertarian tycoon told the newspaper that after funding conservative causes, he is turning his attention to issues like poverty, addiction, gang violence, homelessness and recidivism.

Over the years, the Koch brothers — Charles and David Koch — built an influence network that poured money into conservative causes and candidates. Charles Koch remains head of Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with 130,000 employees. 

Despite Koch's calls for unity, his political contributions largely favored GOP candidates in the 2020 election cycle, with $2.8 million donated to Republicans and just $221,000 for Democratic candidates, the Journal reported.”

It is not surprising that some or most people who do not know the Koch family history would fall for Charles’ lies. What is deeply disappointing is that some members of the professional media and news sources actually believe the lies. That apparently includes The Hill, which entitled its article Charles Koch regrets his partisanship: 'Boy, did we screw up!'

Charles does not regret his partisanship. Not even a little. There is no evidence to back it up. Koch just wants to rehabilitate his reputation as a toxic, hate-spewing radical right ideologue.

This feeble attempt by Charles is just like our crackpot, immoral president falsely claiming massive election fraud without evidence of massive fraud. We live in a time of alt-facts, alt-reality and radical right motivated reasoning. For the radicals and their ideology, lies, deceit, emotional manipulation and crackpot reasoning are all normal, moral and patriotic.

Does that crackpottery sound familiar? 

How about now (see below)?

Memes and the Art of Nonsense

By Serena G. Pellegrino, Contributing Opinion Writer

https://www.thecrimson.com/column/whats-left-unsaid/article/2020/11/20/pellegrino-memes-arts-of-nonsense/

I believe in the importance of nonsense. More specifically, that a little bit of nonsense in life is very valuable. Nonsense, in this case, being internet memes.

Usually, I’m quick to criticize the internet. I have dedicated a significant amount of time to blaming it for many of our generation’s social conflicts. And honestly, contemplating social media and the web at large frequently leads me down a path of existential desperation. But memes are, for me, an exception. They are deceivingly relevant and their function is more profound than their shallow perceptions afford them. Of course, not all memes are funny, many are pointless, and offensive ones are unacceptable. But the concept of a meme is significant. It is an authentic, unfiltered expression rarely seen elsewhere online. It is a sign of humanity, something we often try to erase from our virtual selves.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” where he defines it as “a unit of cultural transmission.” From the Greek word “mimema,” meaning “imitated,” memes are contingent on imitating relevant cultural patterns. Dawkins considers memes to be cultural genes — they have heredity, undergo replication, and require fitness to survive. His analogy, while so unfortunately untimely, explains meme fitness in terms of virus: ideas worth passing on are contagious.

The fittest, most contagious memes allow us to feel and relate to others. Their images — the face of Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” superimposed onto Mike Wazowski’s, Kermit the Frog drinking tea, or Baby Yoda — are so detached from reality, that we feel free to laugh at their captions because there is distance between us and them. Without feeling exposed, we empathize.

But memes are so refreshing because they remind us to take ourselves less seriously. When an online audience is constantly watching and judging, they render our every action a performance — an evaluation of self. So choosing what information to disclose and how we should look on our profiles is in itself an act. Who we so carefully portray is a character. However, memes are a break in character — a sigh of relief when we’re off stage. Through memes’ ridiculousness, we acknowledge the show can’t go on forever. We’re flawed and our flaws can be funny. We take off our masks to laugh at the fact that we can be a mess. Sometimes, relating to a comic of a dog sitting in flames drinking coffee insisting “this is fine” can be therapeutic.

This critique through parody is no novelty. In the early 1700s, Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni innovated the theatre scene and revitalized “commedia dell’arte,” a then-declining dramatic art form, to realize a vision proving quite meme-like. Just as memes unveil a more authentic emotional and human experience, Goldoni eliminated the use of masks and replaced stock characters with more realistic personalities. And like our trove of recycled meme images, Goldoni created a fixed set of these personalities. Their scripted jokes were scattered into improvised acting, functioning much like captions we apply according to context.

In addition to emotional release, Goldoni’s dramatic arts offered cultural commentary and political criticism. His productions were popular for their transgressive humour, actors often speaking in Italian dialects to criticize the different regions of Italy. And we see much the same online, memes calling out the odd idiosyncrasies of different states or disagreeing with our government. Especially in the COVID era, we are in constant disagreement with laws, politicians, and each other. As Goldoni’s productions did so many years ago, memes give us grounds to transgress. In the guise of ridiculousness, we can push the boundaries and express contentious opinions without direct, explicit confrontation. After all, where else would we be able to overlay a “Karen” wig onto Donald Trump’s hair?

Yet the real beauty of Goldoni’s art and the world of memes is their ability to pantomime and portray the world as it is. As viewers, we enjoy watching scenarios in which we can see ourselves — joyful, tragic, awkward, or hopeless as they may be. Experiencing objectively helps us process. It takes the edge off the lives we live so seriously.

But while history repeats itself to a large extent, it evolves, too. Memes are far more abstract than people playing parts on stage. That we can feel seen by seeming gibberish may go to show just how critical of ourselves we have become; we don’t like it when things get too real. Our solution, then, is both escape and catharsis. Teary-eyed cats, Spongebob imitating a chicken, or Bernie Sanders “once again asking” for something cushions the blow of discomfort or dissent.

The internet has become a place full of dividing constructs like artificial hierarchies, popularity contests, or assessments of perceived success. But we’re not walking LinkedIn profiles or Facebook bios and we all know it. We’re more memeish than we are post-like, so embrace the memeishness. To accept ourselves, organically human and imperfect as we are, we have to laugh a little. Of course, there are sides of us that are less than brag-worthy, but there is no need to deny them. No one is spared by the truth of memes; they’re an unexpectedly equalizing online presence. Regardless of status and online artifice, we naturally react and relate to one another in the same way. We all feel the joy of laughter when we come across that meme that resonates. The power of a meme shouldn’t be underestimated just because it seems like nonsense — nonsense isn’t worthless. It allows us to laugh together. And there’s no nonsense more meaningful than that.

Trump supporter charged after breathing forcefully on protesters

 

A 61-year-old man who breathed on protesters while wearing a Trump innertube has been charged with assault, after a heated encounter outside the president’s Virginia golf course on Saturday.

Raymond Deskins, 61, of Sterling, Va., faces one count of misdemeanour assault after a citizen obtained a warrant through a county magistrate, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.

The charge stems from an encounter captured partially on video outside the Trump National Golf Club, where Deskins and two anti-Trump protesters engaged in a shouting match over the weekend. The brief video has circulated widely on social media, although it does not show how the argument began.

The video opens with Deskins shouting at a protester while standing right in front of her. Deskins is not wearing a mask or standing at a distance of six feet — two measures that doctors recommend to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Get away from me, get away from me, get away from me!” the woman with the camera can be heard saying, while the man stands immediately in front of her.

Deskins then steps away and walks toward the other woman.

“Do what you want, sweetheart. I’m not in anybody’s face,” he says in the video.

“You are in my face, and you don’t have a mask, so you need to back up,” the other woman says.

The man inhales deeply and breathes forcefully at her, then turns away with a smirk on his face.

“That’s assault!” the women yell at him.

“I breathed on you!” the man says. He then lets out another huff at the woman with the camera. “Now call the cops and ask them to come get me, you simpleton.”

Photos and video show the man was wearing an inner-tube around his belly that had been styled to look like U.S. President Donald Trump. He also sported a Trump campaign shirt.

Protester Kathy Beynette says she started recording the video after the man came “charging across the street” to confront her and her friend.

“He just proceeded to assault us by taking a deep breath and doing a very powerful exhalation on both of us,” Beynette told NBC Washington.

Beynette added that she’s cancelled her Thanksgiving plans because she worries the man might have given her and her friend the coronavirus.

“We’re both senior citizens both close to 70 years old, which puts us in a high-risk category,” she said.

The outgoing president spent Saturday and Sunday golfing. Pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators gathered outside the golf course on both days.

Deskins did not respond to requests for comment from The Guardian, NBC and CNN.

The sheriff’s office announced the charge on Sunday.

“As the incident was not witnessed by law enforcement and the video did not capture the entire interaction, an investigation was conducted on scene and both parties were advised they could go to a Loudoun County Magistrate and seek a citizen obtained warrant,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

One of the protesters obtained that warrant, and the sheriff’s deputies served it to Deskins on Sunday afternoon.

He was released on a summons.

The assault allegation has not been tested in court.

Heavy breathing, coughing and spitting have become extremely contentious in 2020, as the global coronavirus pandemic has made people more afraid of one another’s germs. Some have shown they are willing to weaponize that fear in a dispute.

Partisan tensions have been running high in the United States this month, particularly in the wake of the president’s election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has refused to concede the election and has falsely alleged widespread voter fraud, without presenting evidence in public or in court. Many of his supporters have loudly backed his claims, while his opponents have denounced him with equal force.

Biden won the popular vote by six million, and appears to have secured a larger electoral college win than Trump did in 2016. Trump described that win at the time as a “landslide.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1330636227150815232

https://globalnews.ca/news/7478860/trump-supporter-breathing-assault-protest/

Why there’s mainstream silence about freethinkers

The modern freethought movement is gigantic. Numerous skeptic organizations, magazines, websites, books, online blogs, student secular chapters, videos, podcasts and other voices spread the message that supernatural religion is absurd. But America has a strange contradiction: Mainstream magazines, newspapers, television shows, radio programs and other general media rarely allow a direct challenge to supernatural faith.

I think it’s because they’re mostly for-profit commercial businesses dependent on advertising and/or subscribers. They have multitudes of religious customers who would stop paying or listening if insulted, causing severe audience and ad revenue loss. Print media is an especially endangered species these days, barely clinging to life. Hazards must be avoided like the plague.

As a longtime newspaper editor in Appalachia’s Bible Belt, I have known the dilemma firsthand. Years ago, a column syndication agent visited our newsroom. I told him I’d like to write a national atheist column. He choked on his coffee. I knew my proposal was impossible. No newspaper would print such a column. We couldn’t even print it in my own paper. We would lose thousands of subscribers, maybe sink into bankruptcy.

Since for-profit mainstream outlets are forced into silence, our nonprofit freethought movement lives mostly within its own realm, greatly aided by the wide-open Internet. We have freedom to speak in our own domain, but aren’t fully welcome outside it.

However, religion is dying in the United States. American churches have lost 20 percent of their members in the past two decades. About one-fourth of adults now say their religion is “none” — and for young adults, it’s one-third. Eventually, I hope, “Nones” will become the largest category.

In other words, we skeptics are winning the cultural struggle. Scientific-minded honesty is prevailing. Maybe this snowballing trend will eventually force mainstream media to open their doors.

As for now, commercial media outlets don’t dare assert that religion is hokum. But our freethought community can. We don’t depend on religious subscribers or advertisers. We can proceed full steam ahead to proclaim rational truths without risking losses. We are free to act — driven by convictions, not by the profit motive — and thus the “free” in freethought has multiple meanings.

A great social transformation is occurring in America. Supernaturalism is withering away. The Secular Age is blossoming. Our freethought movement is delivering the message because for-profit media cannot.

FFRF Member James A. Haught, syndicated by PeaceVoice, was the longtime editor at the Charleston Gazette and has been the editor emeritus since 2015. He has won two dozen national newswriting awards and is author of 12 books and 150 magazine essays. He also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine and was writer-in-residence for the United Coalition of Reason.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/why-theres-mainstream-silence-about-freethinkers/