Tootfinder

"‘Denial machine’: climate misinformation is fuelling conflict in Australian communities, inquiry finds"
#Australia #Climate #ClimateChange

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.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #WoPop
DŸlle JŸlle:
🎵 Balearic Incarnation
#DølleJølle
https://heavenlyrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/d-lle-j-lle-balearic-incarnation-todd-terjes-extra-d-ll-mix-2
https://open.spotify.com/track/6HxN4OABi6VovLm3VigN6o

According to Mandiant's latest threat data, the median time between an initial access event and the hand-off to a secondary threat group dropped from more than 8 hours in 2022 to only 22 seconds in 2025.
Check out my latest CSO report for more insights on how attacker dwell time rose, voice phishing topped email phishing, and threat actors increasingly targeted backup and identity systems.
Faster attacks and ‘recovery denial’ ransomware reshape threat landscape

Faster attacks and ‘recovery denial’ ransomware reshape threat landscape
In 2025, attacker dwell time rose, voice phishing topped email phishing, and threat actors increasingly targeted backup and identity systems, according to Mandiant’s latest incident response data.

Will Daniel Jones return to form? The Colts are banking on it https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/48259762/will-daniel-jones-return-form-colts-banking-it

New Gist: A Denial of Service Attack
"The state is happy to assert it can achieve incredible and unprecedented feats of change, later, while always arguing that it can't so much as buy a new pair of shoes right now."
https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-denial-of…

The Gist: A Denial Of Service Attack
The fuel blockade demonstrated state fragility and inability. This is the Gist.

Marie Hurabiell is a transphobe, xenophobe, and racist, but the silver lining of her running for Congress is that it got the Standard to publish this flyer.
Activists handed this out at a protest outside her org's gala, highlighting both Hurabiell's bigoted comments and her ties to Mayor Denim Dan Lurie. More people should know!

‘An actual moderate’: Lurie ally and former Trump appointee enters SF congressional race
Marie Hurabiell, director of the moderate group ConnectedSF, aims to appeal to centrist and right-leaning voters.

The English-language edition of Wikipedia
is blacklisting Archive.today
after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.
In
course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS,
Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages
to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.
The alterations were apparently…

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links
If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.

Counterflow around a cylinder
Matheus P. Severino, Leandro F. Souza, Elmer M. Gennaro, Daniel Rodr\'iguez, Fernando F. Fachini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22022 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.22022 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.22022
arXiv:2602.22022v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The incompressible flow around a circular cylinder, positioned at the center of an unconfined planar counterflow, is studied by means of numerical solutions of the conservation equations and linear stability analysis. The flow is completely defined by the Reynolds number ($\Rey$) -- based on the cylinder radius, the strain rate defining the counterflow, and the kinematic viscosity. For very low values of $\Rey$, the flow is steady, two-dimensional, and fully attached to the cylinder wall. Increasing $\Rey$ above $\Rey_s \approx 16.86$, the flow separates, giving rise to two symmetric, counter-rotating recirculation regions on each side of the cylinder. Further increasing $\Rey$ leads to a progressive enlargement of the recirculation regions and the appearance of multiple recirculation centers, akin to Moffatt eddies. However, the convective acceleration imposed by the counterflow limits their size. An oscillatory mode becomes linearly unstable for $\Rey_{c} \approx 4146$. This mode gives rise to a sinuous meandering of the wake flow, on each side of the cylinder, being analogous to the well-known von K\'arm\'an instability. The frequency of this mode is directly proportional to the strain rate defining the counterflow.
toXiv_bot_toot

"…first case in which a federal agent has been criminally charged for…actions during the Trump administration's…immigration crackdown in Minnesota…
Gregory Donnell Morgan, Jr is accused of pointing a gun at motorists…he was driving illegally on the shoulder of a state highway in February…"
https://www.…

ICE agent charged for pulling gun on motorists, Minnesota prosecutor says
There is a nationwide warrant for the agent's arrest as he faces two second-degree assault charges filed by state prosecutors.