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.
Urban Demons IX👻
城市鬼魂 IX 👻
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5 400 Plus, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
I think, and it may be an unpopular opinion among my peers indeed, that we need to learn to actually make this into an Engineering discipline.
I *want* to develop code that one can reasonably trust to perform life sustaining functionality, much like I reasonably trust every bridge I drive over not to collapse under me.
We’re far from it, but these days, it seems we’ve actively decided to do *exactly the opposite of that*, and that I just can’t be a part of.
Closed-Loop Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Control for Efficient Drone Flight
Jingli Li, Yiyan Ma, Bo Ai, Wei Chen, Weijie Yuan, Qingqing Cheng, Tongyang Xu, Guoyu Ma, Mi Yang, Yunlong Lu, Wenwei Yue, Christos Masouros, Zhangdui Zhong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29220 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29220 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.29220
arXiv:2603.29220v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWN) require drones to follow specific trajectories controlled by ground base stations (GBSs). However, given complex low-altitude channel conditions and limited spectrum and power resources, sensing errors and wireless link unreliability cannot be ignored, leading to trajectory deviations that threaten flight safety. To address this issue, this paper proposes an integrated sensing-communication-control (ISCC) closed-loop trajectory tracking approach, aiming to reveal the coupling mechanisms among communication, sensing, and control during drone flight. In detail, we incorporate sensing errors in trajectory state estimation, packet losses in control command transmission, and finite blocklength transmission effects into the closed-loop dynamics. First, through theoretical analysis, we identify the dominant role of the time-frequency resources allocated to control in ensuring system stability and derive a lower bound on the resources required to guarantee stable operation. Second, to minimize tracking error, we formulate a time-frequency resource allocation optimization problem for the sensing, communication, and control components, subject to constraints on communication rate and closed-loop stability. Accordingly, a solution algorithm based on successive convex approximation is proposed. Third, simulation results indicate that once stability is ensured, system performance is primarily determined by sensing accuracy, with the trajectory tracking error exhibiting an approximately linear dependence on the position error bound. Finally, it is shown that the proposed ISCC scheme avoids trajectory divergence under FBL transmission compared with ISCC designs ignoring control packet loss, and could achieve decimeter-level average tracking accuracy, reducing the error to only 17.37% of that observed in the baseline global navigation satellite system scheme.
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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.
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Learning how to psyop Third World populations with Manual of The Mercenary Soldier
https://archive.org/details/PaulBalorManualOfTheMercenarySoldier
Some City Some Nature VI 🏙️
一些城一些自然 VI 🏙️
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
Experimental study of turbulent thermal diffusion of inertial particles in a convective turbulence forced by oscillating grids
E. Elmakies, O. Shildkrot, N. Kleeorin, A. Levy, I. Rogachevskii
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22008 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.22008 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.22008
arXiv:2602.22008v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We investigate the phenomenon of turbulent thermal diffusion of inertial solid particles in laboratory experiments with convective turbulence forced by one or two oscillating grids in the air flow. Turbulent thermal diffusion causes a non-diffusive contribution to turbulent flux of particles described in terms of an effective pumping velocity directed opposite to the gradient of the mean fluid temperature. For inertial particles, this effective pumping velocity depends on the Stokes and Reynolds numbers. In the experiments, fluid velocity and spatial distribution of inertial particles are measured using Particle Image Velocimetry system, and the temperature field is measured in many locations by a temperature probe equipped with 12 thermocouples. Measurements of temperature and particle number density spatial distributions have demonstrated formation of large-scale clusters of inertial particles in the vicinity of the mean temperature minimum due to turbulent thermal diffusion. In the experiments, the effective pumping velocity resulting in formation of large-scale clusters of inertial particles (having the diameter $10 \mu m$) is in 2.5 times larger than that for non-inertial particles (having the diameter $0.7 \mu m$). This is in an agreement with the theoretical predictions.
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