The President's Toxic Legacy

Is the president an elitist?

Troye described one COVID-19 task-force meeting in which she said the president — a known germophobe — remarked that the pandemic might be a "good thing" because it prevented him from having to shake hands with "disgusting people." -- Business Insider, Sept. 17, 2020

Building the authoritarian radical GOP deep state

A Washington Post article describes an effort the president is making to enable mass firings of federal employees he deems to have been disloyal. If he succeeds, they will be fired for being ‘underperformers’ or agents of the deep state. Fortunately, Biden can undo most of the damage by executive action because the damage is being done be executive action. Also, since the employee protections were put in place by congress, a lawsuit claims that the apparently intended mass firings are illegal. WaPo writes:

“The outgoing Trump administration is racing to enact the biggest change to the federal civil service in generations, reclassifying career employees at key agencies to strip their job protections and leave them open to being fired before Joe Biden takes office.

The move to pull off an executive order the president issued less than two weeks before Election Day — affecting tens of thousands of people in policy roles — is accelerating at the agency closest to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget.

By fast-tracking a process that gave agencies until Jan. 19 to identify affected jobs, the administration appears to be signaling its intent to leave as big an imprint as possible on a workforce it has long mistrusted. Democrats on Capitol Hill are trying to block the effort.

The executive order has a flip side, too. The administration could use it to assign current political appointees to the new personnel category, giving them a more permanent status than they currently have — although Biden could easily fire them.”

In other words, a new GOP precedent is the building of a true deep state by demanding federal employees be loyal to the president before being loyal to the constitution, the law, the public interest or truth. At present, those values are above loyalty to the president. What we had is, more or less, the opposite of a deep state. What the president wants is the epitome of a deep state. And, by its acquiescence the GOP leadership accepts this apparent new normal. It is now fair to call the GOP leadership the head of a deep state, radical right Christian nationalist ideology. Most rank and file republicans would not see it that way, but that's what it is.

Before the 2016 election, a few observers predicted that such back and forth changes seemed to be inevitable when a president from the other party came to power after an election. The first president would be reversed as much as possible by a new president in the other party. The ping-pong game of doing and undoing would go on for as long as the two-party system remains hyper-partisan, broken and paralyzed like it is now.

Reinforcing the radical right mirage and hypocrisy of concern for the little guy 

Political theorist Hannah Arendt was familiar with the demagogue dictator propaganda tactic of lying so outrageously and often that people started to believe the lies. The main ‘rationale’ for the phenomenon is purely human: No one could possibly make up such incredible whoppers, so they had to be true. 

The GOP is now fully engaging with this toxic tactic. Demagogues, dictators and totalitarians of the past have used it with great but lethal success. Packaged with the toxicity is blatant hypocrisy.  The WaPo writes on the latest whooper:

“President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself ‘Middle Class Joe.’

While Trump’s populism often manifested in style rather than substance, he was able to appeal to a unique coalition of voters that politicians from both parties are now aiming to capture in a post-Trump era, said Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

‘It’s this us-versus-them mentality — a belief system that there’s a real America, and we’re the only party fighting for it,’ Walter said. ‘I think that’s where Trump was the most successful, and I don’t know how well anyone else is going to be able to do that.’

‘Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,’ Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. ‘I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.’”

Elitist president recently playing golf as he quite often does

(since inauguration, at least 145 golf outings, most recently Nov. 26, 2020; 

total taxpayer cost to date: ~$142 million)

Apparently, Rubio forgot that the GOP was fully on board with ‘normal’ policies that left us dependent on China.’ He helped get us here.  Rubio himself wanted more trade with China and he supported the TTP multilateral trade agreement before he was against them. Not surprisingly, he is a lying hypocrite about this, just like most of the rest of the GOP leadership.

This hypocritical elitism criticism is purely hyper-partisan GOP dark free speech intended to deceive and further polarize the American people. The GOP never complained about the millionaires, billionaires, lobbyists and ethically challenged and conflicted business executive elites he larded his incompetent, corrupt administration with and/or took his orders from. 

Conclusion

Both matters discussed here point to the same thing. Hyper-partisanship, polarization and partisan distrust and intolerance are not going to go away. Neither is the contempt for truth and sound reasoning the authoritarian radical right GOP has to rely on to keep from being swept away by natural demographic and social change. In its deep immorality, the radical right will continue to poison American society and the minds of tens of millions of Americans. This does not bode well for the health of democracy, the rule of law, truth or social healing. What, if anything, can snap the GOP leadership out of the toxic authoritarian hold that the president and ruthless radical right ideology has trapped it in?

2020 Was Too Unprecedented for Just One Word of the Year

 

We talked about the environment, social justice, and mostly the pandemic.

If someone asked you for one word to describe 2020, chances are you might come up with something profane. But even if your vocabulary was a little less colorful, you might have difficulty limiting your selection to just one word.

That’s the same problem the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary had when they were debating on their annual Word of the Year. Last year, they settled on "climate emergency," and in 2018, their pick was "toxic."

But they said, “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.”

So instead they analyzed their continually updated database of about 11 billion words to highlight the “words of an unprecedented year.”

Of course, the majority of them revolve around the pandemic. In fact, the use of the word “pandemic” itself increased by more than 57,000% over last year.1

The word “coronavirus” dates back to the 1960s, but not many people outside of the medical and scientific fields dropped it in casual conversation until early this year. By March, it was one of the most frequently used nouns in the English language.

“COVID-19” wasn’t even a word until Feb. 11 when the World Health Organization named the mysterious new disease. By May, people were using it more often than coronavirus, Oxford notes.

In March and April, new phrases and words became common parts of our conversations. We had “social distancing” and “lockdown,” “stay at home,” “self-isolating” and “self-quarantine.” Throughout the year, so many pandemic-related terms have continued to surface from PPE (personal protective equipment) to face coverings. And we all learned what it meant to try to “flatten the curve” and many of us were concerned about “superspreader” events.

But because this has been a year of unending news, we’ve talked about so much more than the virus.

How We Talked About the Environment

In January, one of the top keywords was “bushfire” because of the Australian fires that devastated the country at the end of 2019 and through the early part of this year. Other climate-related events include the catastrophic wildfires in California, a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season, and historic Arctic sea ice loss.

“And yet, with a few exceptions, climate change has not received nearly the amount of media attention as it has in previous years, as Covid-19 and other issues have dominated the news,” according to Oxford.

“Last year, the Oxford Languages Word of the Year was ‘climate emergency,’ with a shortlist composed entirely of words relating to climate and environmental issues. In March this year, the frequency of climate, global warming, and related terms plummeted in our corpus.”

By March, the frequency of the word “climate” plunged by nearly 50% from where it was at the start of the year.1

There is good news for the environment. “Climate” and related terms are becoming more popular again, as is “net zero.” The change in attention is partly due to the pledge by China’s President Xi Jinping in September that the country will be carbon neutral by 2060.2

Social Movements and Politics

The Oxford report highlighted phrases related to social movements and social justice. This year we discussed “Black Lives Matter” and “BLM.” We used “BIPOC” as an abbreviation of black, indigenous, and other people of color. There was talk of “wokeness” and “systemic racism” while the use of “cancel culture” also soared.

And of course, there were politics. We talked a lot about “impeachment” in January, “acquittal” in February, and “mail-in” voting in August.

Words at Home

Because so many people started work at home and staying at home more this year, the language reflected that. They’re not new at all, but “remote” and “remotely” saw a huge surge in use since March. Along with it, the word “unmute” saw a 500% rise. 1(What’s the use of being on Zoom if no one can hear you?)

But not only were we talking about Zoom, we now know what “Zoombombing” is when people infiltrate Zoom calls for disruptive purposes.

“The English language, like all of us, has had to adapt rapidly and repeatedly this year,” the Oxford lexicographers write, when sharing their vast list.

"I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had," said Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl in a statement. "It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic—in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other."

And we still have more than a month to go.

https://www.treehugger.com/2020-too-unprecedented-one-word-year-5088823

WAIT A BLOODY MINUTE!

Definitely 2020 revealed to the world that the USA definitely has way too many SNOWFLAKES!

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)