Tootfinder

Det er snart 10 år siden jeg var med på å skrive denne kronikken om fremtiden for Den norske filmskolen. Jeg står fremdeles for innholdet, men dessverre virker det som de viktigste kampene er tapt.
Den norske filmskolen i et nytt fusjonert landskap https://www.

Den norske filmskolen i et nytt fusjonert landskap
Handlefriheten som Filmskolen på Lillehammer har vært avhengig av for å skape en fremragende utdanning, er under sterkt press. En rekke organisasjoner er bekymret i kjølvannet av fusjonen mellom høgskolene Lillehammer og Hedmark.

“The U.S. military used a laser Thursday to shoot down a ‘seemingly threatening’ drone flying near the U.S.-Mexico border. It turned out the drone belonged to Customs and Border Protection, lawmakers said.”
https://apnews.com/article/military-la

US military uses laser to down drone and FAA closes more El Paso airspace, officials say
Members of Congress say the U.S. military used a laser to shoot down a Customs and Border Protection drone. The Federal Aviation Administration responded Thursday by closing more airspace near El Paso, Texas. No commercial flights were affected this time. The FAA shut down the El Paso airport and the surrounding area just over two weeks ago after another use of an anti-drone laser. The Defense Department and Transportation Department referred questions to the FAA. The FAA, CBP and the Pentagon …

"When you focus on growth in GDP as your primary goal without any concern for whether what creates that growth is of real value rather than simply being capable of being counted, whilst being indifferent to the distribution of the gains, those already vulnerable are bound to suffer as a consequence... The policy failure this chart exposes is not an accident; it will be achieved by #Labour by d…

Labour is failing people by hidden design. Reform would do so explicitly.
As The Guardian notes this morning: The country’s most deprived neighbourhoods will have higher crime rates and worse unemployment by the end of the parliament, according to a report written at the request of No. 10 Downing Street. No. 10 has apparently focused its attention on what are called

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

Sources: SpaceX weighs filing confidentially for an IPO as soon as March, targeting a June listing that could raise up to $50B at a $1.75T valuation (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-27/spacex-is-sa…

On the spatial structure and intermittency of soot in a lab-scale gas turbine combustor: Insights from large-eddy simulations
Leonardo Pachano, Daniel Mira, Abhijit Kalbhor, Jeroen van Oijen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23155 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.23155 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.23155
arXiv:2602.23155v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This work presents a numerical investigation of soot formation in the Cambridge lab-scale gas turbine combustor. Large-eddy simulations (LES) of a swirl-stabilized ethylene flame are performed using the flamelet generated manifold method coupled with a discrete sectional model to account for soot formation, growth, and oxidation. The study aims to elucidate the mechanism governing the spatial structure and intermittency of soot, supported by comparisons with experimental data. The predicted soot distribution agrees well with measurements, with peak concentrations near the bluff body. Flow recirculation is identified as the key mechanism driving soot accumulation in fuel-rich regions, where surface reactions dominate soot mass growth. Soot intermittency arises from fluctuations in the flow field driven by interactions between the flame front and the recirculation vortex. Two soot modeling approaches are evaluated, differing in their treatment of soot model quantities: the first approach employs on-the-fly computation of source terms (FGM-C), while the second uses fully pre-tabulated source terms (FGM-T). Their predictive performance and computational cost are compared in the context of unsteady, sooting flames in swirl-stabilized combustors.
toXiv_bot_toot

There is someone who has taken a lot of old films and used AI to colorize them badly and "boosted" the frame rate from 24 to 60fps and then uploaded this trash to the Internet Archive.
I hate this. Films shot in b&w have an aesthetic that is destroyed by colorizing them. Video games might look better with more frames per second but movies don't. We didn't accidentally settle on 24fps, it was trial and error. A film shot in 60fps looks bad. A movie that has been ar…

📢 Brigitte Bardot im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben
Die französische Filmikone Brigitte Bardot ist tot. Die frühere Schauspielerin sei im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben, teilte ihre Stiftung mit. Seit den 1970er-Jahren hatte sich Bardot vor allem für den Tierschutz eingesetzt.
➡️ https://w…

Brigitte Bardot im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben
Die französische Filmikone Brigitte Bardot ist tot. Die frühere Schauspielerin sei im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben, teilte ihre Stiftung mit. Seit den 1970er-Jahren hatte sich Bardot vor allem für den Tierschutz eingesetzt.

The Trump administration appeared to acknowledge on Monday that its investigation into
the killing of a Veterans Affairs nurse, Alex Pretti, by federal agents this weekend
was limited to a “use of force” review meant to establish whether government employees had violated training standards.
Such a move, disclosed in court filings, would represent a much narrower inquiry
-- focused on tactics and conduct
-- than one that would examine whether federal agents shoul…

Greg Bovino Set to Leave Minneapolis as Trump Shakes Up Immigration Operation: Live Updates
Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who became a target of fierce criticism, is set to depart as President Trump moves to deflect anger over a second fatal shooting. Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, will now direct ICE operations in the state.

Attorneys for NFL again filing appeal in Jon Gruden lawsuit https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/civil-courts/attorneys-for-nfl-again-filing-appeal-in-jon-gruden-lawsuit-3612267/