#and he's really improved in performing and projecting in this program

[eggplantgifs]

Yuma Kagiyama: Believer » 2023 NHK Trophy

[vampyrial]

thoroughbred.

summary: You and Levi have been paired up. For what task? Propagating the species, of course.

warnings: nsfw (mdni), dubcon (not from anything Levi or Reader do, but because this is about state sanctioned breeding for repopulation, basically and those in authority are a little overzealous when it comes to making sure you're doing your part.)

contains: afab reader, breeding (duh), little plot, fingering, vaginal sex, voyeurism

author’s note: here, have the fruit of my ovulation horny mind. this will be multiple parts.

Restoration was a considerable effort. Many lives were lost in the war and those who remained were of considerable strength to have survived. They were of excellent stock, and in them lay the hope for the future.

It was agreed upon not to openly call it a breeding program, even if that was its more accurate title. Its official title was ‘The Propagation Project’, a far more tolerable name. You would be paired with a genetically suitable match, your cycle would be closely tracked and a few days out of the month would be set aside for you to…perform your duties. This was still a trial run, there were areas that would probably be improved in its second incarnation but mainly, everyone was just hoping something would come of it so that there could be a second incarnation.

Each pair would be paired until their prime childbearing years were over, all of their children being from each other. It was thought that this would reduce consanguinity. Matches were made based solely on the genes of each candidate, strong and agile with strong and agile, generally. Though, amongst those who were of the most desirable genes, there was some flexibility regarding personal preference. It was necessary to be more accommodating towards their whims, particularly the whims of those who would be doing the labor. Besides that, there were a few already established couples and it made sense to simply pair them if there was no drastic genetic incompatibility rather than risk contaminating the results and wasting the efforts of the candidates.

Your match was Levi Ackerman, your captain. You two were both of extremely desirable genes, though you hadn’t chosen each other, it was more that you felt more comfortable with him than any other candidate. When registering to be matched, they asked who you would hope to be matched with and you answered with Levi. He was just someone you knew you could trust and someone you knew you were attracted to. You hoped he felt the same as Levi hadn’t had any objections to the match. You wondered if he’d given your name when he was asked who he hoped his match would be.

You knew it didn’t really matter whether or not he was attracted to you, they had aphrodisiacs that would make him want you either way if need be. But you, like most everyone else involved in the project, didn’t want to just have sex because innovation allowed for such powerful drugs which made breeding like rabbits easier nor because you needed to propagate the species. You wanted there to at least be something there that wasn’t obligation. Something purely yours between yourself and the man who would father your children. You hoped that wasn’t asking too much.

So as to be sure you had done your duties, the first go around would be in a designated place, a building repurposed into a hotel of sorts. It was lovingly dubbed “the stable.” You and Levi had gone up to the room you were assigned, finding that an attendant would be waiting outside the door while you “consummated” as she put it. It seemed that losing a fertile day and wasting sperm could be punishable offenses with how strict they were. It had been explained to you that she would be checking the room afterward for fluids as proof as well as doing an inspection of you. With how desperately the population needed to bounce back and how much money was poured into the project you understood the fiscal implications behind their meticulousness but it all felt so sterile.

The room was plain looking and better than you’d thought it’d be, you’d half expected a pile of hay. A bed made with white sheets, nightstands, lamps hung on either side of the bed, a faded rug, thick curtains cutting off all but a sliver of the red afternoon light. On the right was the washroom. On the left nightstand, there were two blue vials of the aphrodisiac, also cursed with some deeply unfortunate name that you refused to recall.

“Should we…?” You asked nodding toward them, breaking the silence.

“You can if you think you need to, I’ll go without.”

His voice was low and every word went straight to your clouded little head. “No, I don’t need to.” You were bashful from the suddenness of your desire but it felt less like a job with the arousal already warming your body.

“May I?” He asked, brushing his fingers over the hem of your shirt. You nodded, not trusting yourself with words.

He pulled your shirt over your head, tossing it onto a chair by the window. He kissed the exposed skin of your neck down to your shoulder, his hand was cold as it ran up your back reaching for the clasp of your bra. You were practically shivering by the time you’d been made completely bare, Levi pushed you backwards onto the bed, earning a surprised yelp. He slipped his jacket off and crawled onto you, planting open mouthed kisses on your breasts before parting his pretty lips and taking your nipple into his mouth. His tongue swept over it, driving gasps from your mouth and making you squirm beneath him. Your fists balled in his shirt.

You could feel yourself becoming slick as he went on, hands caressing everywhere but your cunt. You pushed your hips up toward him, trying to gain more friction brushing against him and feeling his cock brush against your thigh. He hissed at the contact and pressed your hips flat down against the bed, putting an end to your writhing. You whined and although you would probably feel embarrassed for it later, you let a hand wander downward to touch yourself. Levi intercepted it and your other hand, holding it above your head.

You thought you’d done something wrong but then he slipped his other hand down your body to touch you through your panties, teasing you, making a wet spot on them. He palmed against your panties feeling them grow all the more obviously soaked, his fingers long and deft as you remembered from being grasped by them, pulled back from danger. You had begun to beg, forgetting all about the attendant outside who could most certainly hear you. “Please…” It was unbecoming behavior in front of your captain but that in and of itself was a bit appealing.

“You don’t have to beg me” He said in a hushed voice, finally pressing a chaste kiss to your lips. “I was just getting you ready.” He slipped your panties over and slipped a finger through your lips right up to your clit. His breaths were heavier hotter once he felt you, slick as satin.

“Captain…” You said as he pulled back to strip your panties off, his gray eyes staring straight at your cunt, slipping a finger in and seeming amused by how much slick there already was.

“You’re going to call me captain even in a situation like this?” He laughed, a little meanly you thought.

You nearly pouted. “You’re my captain...” You answered, lamely.

He scoffed. “Don’t call me that, it reminds me of why we’re here. Call me by my name so that I can forget we’re breeding stock.”

He slipped a second finger in before you could respond, then a third, stretching you as he pistoned them in and out. You could have cried for the teasing way he missed just slightly missed every spot you need from him, just grazing against the part of you that would make you absolutely serenade the attendant outside. He’s being cruel on purpose, too. Every time he misses, brushes against a place inside that makes you shudder, he says “Here?” with the most earnest smile you’ve ever seen grace his lips.

Suddenly, he pulls his fingers out, sopping wet. He spread them apart to admire the way your sticky arousal webbed between his fingers. “You really like being teased like this?” It wasn’t really a question, he sounded as if in awe.

“You’re definitely ready now” He murmured. You could feel it, slick at your thighs and underneath you and dripping from Levi’s fingers. He slipped them into his mouth, a deep pink blush spreading across his skin.

“Then, you too. Take your clothes off, too” You croak.

He obliged, stripping down to his boxers which were soaked with his sticky precum that wet the fabric with ease each time he felt you squeeze around him. His cock slipped past your swollen folds as he slowly slid in, carefully. Your legs were atop Levi’s hard, muscled thighs as he split you open. A moan tore free from his lips as he bottomed out.

“Fuck” He gritted his teeth.

He was finally pressing against that spot that made you feel like steel in a forge. Your agonized moans filled the room, one would think he was torturing you. He was moving quite slowly, gently, rocking his hips against you. Your pussy swallows him and as he savors the feeling, he is struck utterly dumb and unable to speak. He makes sure to kiss your cervix with each stroke for even as his body is inundated with pleasure greater than any he’s ever known, he still hasn’t completely forgotten his purpose.

You cling to him, your hands clutching the firm flesh of his biceps as your nails dug into his skin, tracing the old scars left from this and that. All the sense in your body is utterly fried, you’re babbling like a drunken fool.

“Levi cum inside me, please, please.” You knew you needn’t beg but you desired it more than anything and you were nearly in tears with the urgency of your need.

“Be quiet” Levi nearly choked. “I– I’m close.”

“Cum inside me” You beg again. “Breed me.” You had obviously gone insane, he’d already told you to let him forget and you thought he’d cool off upon hearing your idiotic ramble. However, soon as the words left your mouth he immediately set a punishing pace. Each kiss of his cock inside you brought you closer, more reckless, a mess. Shaky moans freed from his lips.

“Th-there…! It’s okay, you can breed me, please, Levi” You begged breathlessly as you reached your end, pulsating around him as he continued to bury his cock inside you with astounding preciseness, mercilessly pounded into that sweet spot that prolonged your orgasm until you were tender and sensitive.

“Oh fuck.” Levi released with a tortured groan, rather dutifully not wasting a drop. Even as his cum began to seep out of you slightly, he pushed your legs back as far as possible and fucked it back in, stuffing as much as possible where it belongs.

It was a breathtaking feeling, him filling you with rope after rope of his cum, it seemed he came a lot for even after a few seconds he was still spilling. Your mouth was agape all the while, a string of saliva between your lips. He leaned to kiss you, all tongues, sloppy and lustful, each of you needing the other to hold onto. Each of you eating the moans from the other’s mouth, almost sounding melodic in a carnal sort of harmony.

You did not part from each other for quite some time until you heard a knock at the door. “Give us a minute” Levi called, brow furrowing in annoyance. He pulled out of you, slowly. He dressed quickly and then helped you into your clothing before opening the door to the smiling attendant.

“I apologize, was I interrupting?” She asked.

Yes, Levi wanted to say. “What do you want?”

“Have you consummated?” God, she was straightforward wasn’t she?

“Yes, we fucked.” But Levi was just as deadpan.

“Excellent. Now I’ll need to inspect you.” She was referring to you, you had forgotten it was coming. “If you’d please undress the bottom half for me.” She pulled on a latex glove. God, she meant…

“I’ll need to ensure that you have properly consummated” She continued, unflinchingly somehow, with the same smile.

“What the fuck?” Levi exclaimed what you were thinking.

You shimmied out of your panties and spread your legs slightly. She pushed them open wider and pressed you onto your stomach over the bed, gently. You turned to gawk at her, shocked. You hadn’t known what the inspection would entail but it was certainly not whatever this was.

Levi frowned, stepping in closer and grasping her arm. “Oi, what do you think you’re doing?” Your thoughts exactly.

“I’m examining her, it’s easier in this position. It’s necessary for confirmation or else, I can’t flag the two of you as having completed your task. Please, this will only take a moment.” She stuck a finger inside you suddenly making you gasp, she pushed it far as it could go and twisted it around as if swabbing before pulling it out. A long. stretching string of sticky cum followed, stuck to her finger. The woman admired it for a moment. Levi watched, aghast even as his cock throbbed in his trousers against his will. What was wrong with him? The sex had surely gone to his head if he was getting turned on watching this. He hated that his body contradicted him, particularly now that it was contradicting the disgust he felt at learning the extent to which they’d go in order to ensure you’d done your ‘duty’.

“Very good, you two. I apologize for the inconvenience, it won’t need to continue on now that we have certainty.” You stood back up, pulling your trousers back on. “You two are free to continue until about eight.” She took her leave.

“Are you alright?” He asked, something was still stirring from the scene and it felt dishonest to you to ask something like that knowing what was on his mind. The way you avoided his gaze made him feel a tinge of guilt but he knew he deserved it.

“Yes, it was just…embarrassing. I didn’t know it’d be like that but I might’ve guessed, this is the stable after all.”

“Don’t remind me” He answered. “You can shower first, you’ve earned that much.”

You didn’t argue. You got into the near scalding water and tried not to think about having been bent over like that, inspected for the evidence of his cum before your captain. Let alone the fact that you had just fucked him. It was all too much to bear, maybe it wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t liked it so much, if even bent over before him, you hadn’t felt some glimmer of arousal spark back up. You were wrong when you thought the first time would be the hardest, it would be the second, having to see him again knowing you begged him to breed you, knowing you were practically fingered in front of a man who used to make you do drills. In the bathroom, luckily, there were changes of clothes and bags for the soiled ones. You knew you were taking your sweet time by military standards but you were stalling so that you didn’t have to look at him, he who had returned to being just your captain by now.

When you came out, Levi was sitting in the chair near the window, eyes closed and his expression weary. Had the day taken as much out of him as it had you?

“Goodnight, captain.” His eyes fluttered open, grey eyes fixing on you not with disgust but with vague curiosity for which you were relieved.

“Goodnight.” His voice was subdued, quiet. He did not stand and enter the washroom immediately as you thought he might, he seemed lost in thought. You supposed you would be too, when you were alone.

He was still sitting there bathed in the blue of early evening when you closed the door behind you, his face turned toward the window. In the light of the hallway, you could see a light blush dusted his cheeks.

[alwayshappyhoursomewhere]

Kiss & Cry vol.50 Shoma Uno x Stéphane Lambiel Special Cross Interview An "I love you" to figure skating

Shoma Uno is facing the 2023-2024 season with the goal of "pursuing expression". What does "expression" really mean to him, and what does he have in mind beyond that? We spoke to Uno and his coach Stéphane Lambiel.

[T/N: italics denote narration, regular text direct quotes. Please do not repost the translation elsewhere.]

What the two of them think about 'expression'. Shoma Uno won consecutive World Championships. In the 2023-2024 season, which is themed around the pursuit of expressiveness, he performs the short program from the movie 'Everything Everywhere All at Once'" choreographed by his coach Stéphane Lambiel, and the free program "Timelapse" choreographed by Kenji Miyamoto. How does Uno feel about his improvement in expressive ability now that he is more than halfway through the season? And as a coach, how does Lambiel see him? We talked to them on the day after the NHK Trophy FS.

To Coach Lambiel, what made you decide to use this song in the short program?

Stéphane: The program is a combination of three pieces from the movie soundtrack. The song I used at the beginning was originally in my big playlist, but what made me decide to use it for the program was when I was on a plane and watched the movie. I enjoyed the music from the film, enjoyed the movement, thought 'this is interesting,' and felt inspired. I originally had an idea that 'it would be interesting if Shoma moved like this', by mixing music with a bit of spirit to match the smoothness of his skating. When I started choreographing, he moved just as I had envisioned. That's how the program was created.

Shoma: Stéphane's choreography is difficult every year, but I have the impression that this season's choreography is easy for my body to get used to. Even without practicing it that much, my body got used to it from the beginning.

Stéphane: He projects the world I imagined into reality.

Shoma: The free is more difficult than the short. The music is unique and difficult. Up until now, in the second half of the program there was a part where the music got more exciting, but since this is not the case here, I have to practice much more to make up for it.

In the interview after the short, you said that you admired Coach Lambiel as an expressive performer. What specific aspects would you like to incorporate?

Shoma: I don't have the skills to incorporate Stéphane's performance, so it would be impossible for me to do so. As a coach, Stéphane gives me advice, saying, 'You should do this more,' and 'I want you to move with this kind of image.' I want to take in his words and do my best to embody them within what I can do.

Stéphane: There is no doubt that Shoma is a skater who naturally excels at expression. I think of 'expression' in this way; it may be something you are born with, or it may be something you cultivate. Either way, it's some kind of 'language'. Whether it's through words, music, or movement, I believe that it's about having a desire to convey something to the other person, conveying one's inner feelings, it's a communication between the person giving the message and the person receiving it. Shoma has that, and more importantly, he has the strength to move forward with determination in whatever he decides to do.

Speaking about expression, coach Lambiel touched upon the NHK Trophy.

Stéphane: There's one thing that remained in my heart from this NHK Trophy. The moment Shoma finished his performance, he first looked at me. I felt he conveyed a feeling of wanting to ask, 'How was my performance?' At that moment, from the bottom of my heart, I felt honored to have a student like this. I also felt that he treats figure skating with honesty, purity, and love. Inside me, there is no doubt that he's a hero.

[T/N: in-text narration of the NHK performances] Coach Lambiel's eyes were filled with tears as he reminisced about the NHK Trophy, as if deep, uncontrollable emotions were coming forth. At the NHK Trophy, Uno showed stunning performances that drew the audience in both the short and free skates. He captivated the audience with the emotion in his expression, creating a world of stillness or tranquillity. A standing ovation was inevitable. This showed the improvement of his expressive power, which he had been striving for this season. In the free skate, however, since all four of his quadruple jumps were marked with a "Q",  indicating a 90 degree underrotation, he finished in second place overall. The judgment of underrotation, which was clearly unusual compared to the way jumps were judged in previous competitions, put a damper on that good performance. Coach Lambiel must have felt that Uno's performance was excellent, as shown by the long hug he gave him after the free skate, and he could not hold back his emotions at the judging.

This is what Uno said about it.

Shoma: It had been a short time since Cup of China, but I was able to show the results of my practice, and I thought Stéphane must have been happy, so I was myself very happy when I finished my performance. Now, seeing how depressed Stéphane got [at the score] makes me feel glad he is my coach. However, no matter how good a performance is, if it doesn't get a good score, it will be seen as a bad performance. That saddens me too, and it also hurts to see Stéphane being sad. I don't like to put on a facade when I'm talking in public, but I think that saying exactly what you think isn't always a good thing, and it can also make you enemies. But I've been living my life this way, and the people around me, first of all those here like Stéphane, Demi-san, and my manager, understand my efforts and what I really value, and I'm really happy that there are people who can be happy with me. Figure skating competitions are scored by people, so I don't think there's anyone at fault. Right now I just feel so lucky to have been blessed with the people around me.

The All Japan Championship 2023 will begin on December 20th.

Shoma: "I believe that my performance at the NHK Trophy was wonderful, so I want to continue to do this kind of performance in the future. Otherwise, wouldn't this performance be wasted? People only pay attention to my statements and my scores, and don't realize that it was a good performance. I think it would be a waste for it to end like that, so I hope to perform as well as I did this time at the Japanese Nationals."

Stéphane: He is a person who can realize what he sets his mind to. He will decide for himself which direction he wants to take in life, and I don't doubt that he can succeed. That's an unshakeable conviction for me."

That was a praise grounded in unconditional love.

[T/N: yes they really ended the article like that]

[usafphantom2]

U.S. Air Force Awards RTX $1 Billion Contract to Upgrade F-22 Sensors

The contract follows the recent news about the tests of new advanced sensors on the F-22 Raptor, which the U.S. Air Force is planning to field quickly as part of the ongoing upgrade program.

Parth Satam

F-22 new sensors contract

An F-22 Raptor takes off from Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, June 30, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Zachary Rufus)

Amid the acute need for 5th generation fighters in modern combat scenarios against peer adversaries, the U.S. Air Force is looking to upgrade its F-22 Raptor with a series of sensors to make it more survivable and relevant. The service announced on Aug. 29, 2024, the award of a $1 billion contract to RTX‘s Raytheon for new sensors that are categorized as “Group B hardware”, together with spares and support equipment.

“Work will be performed in McKinney, Texas, and is expected to be completed by May 8, 2029,” said the DoD contracts statement. The Aviationist had recently reported that the Air Force was testing new sensors on the F-22 to extend its service life, which would also be applied to the NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance) family of systems.

That report also quoted Brig. Gen. Jason D. Voorheis, the Program Executive Officer for Fighter and Advanced Aircraft, who said they were hoping to field these sensors faster. The Raptor team had conducted six flight tests to demonstrate the advanced sensors.

“The F-22 team is working really hard on executing a modernization roadmap to field advanced sensors, connectivity, weapons, and other capabilities. We’re executing that successfully, and that will lead to […] a rapid fielding in the near future.” This would be done through a Middle Tier Acquisition (MTA) program.

Some of the sensors included in the contract could be the stealthy pods seen on the F-22. Air and Space Forces earlier quoted officials who confirmed that the pods host IRST (Infrared Search and Track) sensors. The development of a new IRST sensor for the Raptor was also confirmed by the service’s 2025 budget request, which however did not mention the sensor being podded.

This work is part of an F-22 improvement campaign that calls for $7.8 billion in investments before 2030, which includes $3.1 billion for research and development and $4.7 billion in procurement.

An F-22 Raptor with the Air Combat Command F-22 Raptor Demonstration Team performs a flyover and air demonstration at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., Aug 13, 2024. (U.S Air Force Photo by Trevor Cokley)

F-22’s future in the U.S. Air Force

The development is also in contrast with previously reported USAF plans to retire the older F-22 airframes, for which it had sought approval from the Congress. These F-22s are 32 Block 20 units from a total fleet of 186. At the same time, the service aims to upgrade the remaining 154 with new cryptography, an expanded open architecture, new weapons and an advanced threat warning receiver, beside the IRST.

However, the service now appears to be reconsidering that plan, after Voorheis was quoted in the ASF report: “From an F-22 sunsetting perspective, I don’t have a date for you.” “What I can tell you is that we are hyper-focused on modernization to sustain that air superiority combat capability for a highly contested environment for as long as necessary,” he added.

IMAGE 3: A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor assigned to the 3rd Wing takes off above Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, Jun. 17, 2024. (Image credit: USAF/Senior Airman Julia Lebens)

The U.S. Air Force describes the Raptor as a combination of stealth, supercruise, maneuverability, and integrated avionics, designed to project air dominance, rapidly and at great distance. Initially introduced as an air-superiority-only asset, the F-22 later started performing both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions.

The F-35 is largely a strike fighter and an airborne sensor-fusion and data-processing capable command post in its tactical orientation. But the Raptor is a pure air dominance interceptor. Although costly to upgrade and maintain, it nevertheless can play an important role in degrading adversary air power through either long-range BVR (Beyond Visual Range) and dogfights.

Moreover, having F-22s also increases the number of LO (Low Observable) aircraft in the inventory, at least until more F-35s are available, especially the TR-3 (Technology Refresh-3) Block 4 upgraded variants.

In 2021 too, then Air Force chief General Charles Q. Brown Jr. revealed his “4+1” fighter plan, suggesting the F-22 to be replaced by the NGAD while retaining the F-35, F-15E and EX, and the F-16. The “plus 1” was the A-10, but in March 2023, Brown said the A-10s were being retired faster than expected and the entire fleet would possibly be divested by 2030.

Meanwhile the NGAD’s future itself is uncertain after U.S.A.F have noted its technical complexity and financial implications. The F-22 thus seems to be back in the running.

On Jul. 10, 2024, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach said during a Mitchell Institute event that the service has no official plan to retire its F-22 Raptors. “Right now, there’s…frankly isn’t an F-22 replacement and the F-22 is a fantastic aircraft,” said Wilsbach. “I’m in favor of keeping the Block 20s. They give us a lot of training value, and even if we had to in an emergency use the Block 20s in a combat situation, they’re very capable.”

F-22 Indonesia

U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors assigned to the 27th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, conduct Dynamic Force Employment operations at I Gusti Ngurah Rai Air Force Base, Indonesia, on Aug. 6, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Mitchell Corley)

Other known F-22 upgrades

Other upgrades mentioned in the 2025 budget request are a Mode 5 Identification Friend or Foe (IFF), Link 16, a Multifunction Information Distribution System Joint Tactical Radio System (MIDS JTRS), a new Operational Fight Program, advanced radar Electronic Protection and an Embedded GPS/Inertial Navigation System (INS) Modernization (EGI-M).

Voorheis also mentioned the GRACE (Government Reference Architecture Compute Environment) software that would allow “non-traditional F-22 software” to be installed on the aircraft and provide “additional processing and pilot interfaces.”

A new helmet is also being tested, as part of the Next Generation Fixed Wing Helmet program to replace the current 40-year-old HGU-55P headgear. The new helmet would also allow the introduction of helmet-mounted devices which provide essential flight and weapon aiming information through line of sight imagery, easing the workload of the pilots.

About Parth Satam

Parth Satam's career spans a decade and a half between two dailies and two defense publications. He believes war, as a human activity, has causes and results that go far beyond which missile and jet flies the fastest. He therefore loves analyzing military affairs at their intersection with foreign policy, economics, technology, society and history. The body of his work spans the entire breadth from defense aerospace, tactics, military doctrine and theory, personnel issues, West Asian, Eurasian affairs, the energy sector and Space.

@Theaviationist.com

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jason L. Riley

Published: Sep 5, 2023

Yes, this is another September “back to school” column. My apologies. But someone needs to keep pointing out that our national debate over which books to allow in classrooms, or how to teach slavery to middle-schoolers, is far less consequential than the continuing inability of most youngsters to read or do math at grade level.

In Florida, where GOP governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has taken lumps for a couple sentences in a 200-page black-history curriculum, only 39% of Miami-Dade County fourth-graders are proficient in reading, according to a Miami Herald report last year on standardized test results. By eighth grade the number drops to 31%, and math scores are just as bad. Who cares if kids have access to books by Toni Morrison or Jodi Picoult if most of them can’t comprehend the contents?

These dismal outcomes have persisted nationwide for decades, and the racial achievement gap is even more disturbing. The U.S. Education Department reported last year that in 2022 the average reading score for black fourth-graders in New York on the National Assessment of Educational Progress trailed that of white fourth graders by 29 points. This “performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998,” the report added.

The progressive left’s response to these outcomes has been to wage war on meritocracy rather than focus on improving instruction. The goal is to eliminate gifted-and-talented middle-school programs, high-school entrance exams and the use of the SAT in college admissions. One defense of racial preferences in education for black students is that recipients, including those who go into teaching, are more likely to work in low-income minority communities after graduation. That’s true, but is it what economically disadvantaged students really need, more second-rate teachers?

In his lively autobiography, “Up From the Projects,” the late economist Walter Williams related an incident from his teaching days at California State University, Los Angeles in the late 1960s. A black student approached him at the end of the course and said he needed a B to graduate. The student told Williams that he wanted to teach school in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles. Williams replied that Watts didn’t need any more mediocre educators. He added, jokingly, “If you’d said San Fernando Valley”—a predominantly white area back then—“I’d have given you the B.”

Williams was appalled that many of his academic colleagues were holding their black students to lower standards. “There was no more effective way to mislead black students and discredit whatever legitimate achievements they might make than giving them phony grades and ultimately fraudulent diplomas,” he wrote. Sadly, the downstream effects of lax standards for black students that concerned him more than 50 years ago have only gotten worse.

Medical students in all 50 states must pass a licensure exam before they can practice. The exam has three parts, and Step 1 is administered at the end of the second year of medical school. It measures your grasp of basic science topics—anatomy, biology, biochemistry, pharmacology—and is highly predictive of how you will perform in medical school going forward.

A student’s numerical score on the Step 1 exam has long been the most important tool in evaluating candidates for the most competitive medical disciplines and residency programs. Three years ago, representatives of the nation’s leading medical groups voted to scrap numerical scores and report the results of the Step 1 exam as pass/fail.

The reason is simple, according to Stanley Goldfarb, an academic physician and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. In a recent book on how social-justice activism has affected medical training, “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns,” Dr. Goldfarb explained that black students underperform on the Step 1 exam. “The solution to the fact that white students score better on the exam was to eliminate reporting scores,” he wrote, which “makes about as much sense as Major League Baseball eliminating batting averages to assure that no ethnic cohort outperforms the others.”

Dr. Goldfarb’s book has an amusing title—which comes from an op-ed he wrote for this paper in 2019—but what it describes is nothing to laugh at. Those who complain about racial disparities in medical outcomes might consider how racial double standards contribute to them. Medical schools have been pressured to relax admission standards for diversity purposes, which has led to the relaxation of grading standards and licensure requirements.

Black doctors are more likely than white doctors to practice in medically underserved areas, but low-income blacks need second-rate doctors even less than they need second-rate teachers. For whatever reason, it seems lost on progressives that addressing the racial achievement gap in K-12 education would go a long way toward addressing the one in medical school.

[ Via: https://archive.is/HXGgR ]

==

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Reading, Grade 4) ]

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Math, Grade 4) ]

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Reading, Grade 12) ]

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Math, Grade 12) ]

This is honestly the thing that's the most troubling. There are activists in schools masquerading as teachers who insist it's a moral imperative to teach young children complicated postmodern intersectional conspiracy theories, yet can't - or won't - actually teach those same kids to read.

"Antiracist" teachers behaving like black kids don't need to learn to read, and it's more important that they understand their place in a perverted conception of social hierarchy, is a disturbing rehabilitation of the KKK's golden years.

[tutuandscoot]

I know everyone loves the moment in the knc when Tessa and Scott win gold in 2018 and it’s gonna be etched in everyone’s minds forever. I feel like people mainly focus on Scott jumping up and then their hug(s) which, yeah fair 🥺 but I feel like we don’t talk enough about Tessa’s high pitched little scream right before Scott pulls her up and we don’t talk enough about Scott’s muffled yell into her shoulder after he sets her down from the hug. Truly the most iconic knc ever.

O•M•G YES!

Why don’t we talk abt this more?? T’s lil scream is.. I don’t want to say my fave part of it bc that’s silly.. but yes let’s talk about that. Them both screaming ‘YES’ but vocally and physically that coming out in very different ways.

The fact that you can HEAR her scream “YES!” Obviously none of us know her personally and we just make assumptions based on footage and things they say publicly and at least here in my space I hope everyone feels they can appreciate and love them for who they are without all the BS takes, so (hopefully) the consensus is she’s such a sweetheart and is reserved and quieter compared to Scott but the fact is even though they are very different they are both very competitive perfectionists and as much as they made their comeback *PROJECT as I’m now referring to it* about writing this incredible chapter in their lives together and improving and exploring and challenging themselves removed from how the judges reward them and had come to learn that medals don’t signify how great you are, they set the goal of winning that gold medal FOR EACH OTHER and they both wanted it more than anything to culminate all this hard work, represent their country, do their country proud, stand on the top of the podium together one last time…. *takes deep breath😮‍💨*

She wanted that. He wanted that. And their reactions are fully, unfiltered, completely in the moment reactions to their goal being achieved by having the performance of their dreams. As is said in the book by their families in regards to their reaction immediately after they finished their program, ‘the scene was so them’. And the same is true of their reaction in the K+C, almost polar opposite physical reactions but inside feeling the exact same thing. I love how they are different but feel so many things the same way 🥹

Her scream is soooo her (again without knowing her). The humble little bby muffins they are do not hold anything back in that moment of celebration and let everyone know just how much they fought for it.

The fact that she’s holding a water bottle then drops it as she screams before he picks her up. Like that’s so T 😄🥹. Even now I think ‘bby angel maybe don’t hold anything I guarantee you the celebration will require your hands to be free’.

Then as I said on a shared post the other day how he kinda turns to her as if telling her to get up immediately but don’t worry he’s already getting her up, like I almost think he’s about to like cradle her up- one hand behind her back and other under her knees, he’s so desperate to hold her and it’s just like there’s no time to wait. She doesn’t get to her feet at all he just throws her up (reminds me of when I was really little and my dad would lift me and throw me in the air- not saying that’s what is like here with TS- not the father/daughter thing just the physical action and the size difference..) and the fact from her reaction she’s kinda rendered paralysed and is folded forward and he’s so full of energy he has enough for both of them to jump to their feet.

Then of course we can’t see from the board in the front but the way she’s hanging there mirrors exactly how they celebrated on the ice when he skates into her and just as matter of physics him going into her makes her go up and her little legs dangle for a moment with the purest freaking smile I have ever seen:

(Honestly have you ever seen a more precious human being???)

And then YES EvErYtHiNg that was going on on his side of that hug. The fist pump, THE HAND COVERING THE FACE AS HE ‘CRIES’. The gently putting her down still pressed into her. The SCREAM INTO HER SHOULDER- exactly the same as their end pose- which btw I can’t believe people actually thought he was biting her there 😑 he was screaming “YES” into her, and not that it was conscious but as he said later on he was trying so hard to contain his excitement, not celebrate before the dance was over- give the end pose a minute to settle there, so he screamed where it would be made least obvious, which was into her with his mouth against her 🥲.

And then let’s KEEP GOING BC I HAVE THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THIS. But as they briefly let go and she says (it seems the most obvious but can’t be 100% sure) “thank you so much” which is just too freaking perfect as a mirror to him saying that exact thing to her at the end of Mahler in 2010 🥲🥲… the SOFNESSSSS in the way he goes back in to hug her. Like all that excitement and euphoria and squeezing so tight then that slight but overwhelming calm for those few moments, so briefly taking her like how all us ladies want to be taken; the kiss and the soft squeeze and the sweet whispering fuckinggg hell scoot ur too perfect 😩 + assumably T re/starting the laugh cry with that shudder (same as here in K+C at worlds 08 🥲🥲🥲- first appearance of the laugh cry)

And the ‘😃 we fucking did it 😃’ third hug’.

Seeing them go through at least 3 different stages of excitement in the k+c alone, then ofc everything on the ice and that beautiful story of their quiet little hug back stage where they just wanted to stay there for as long as possible. (S favourite moment from the games 🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲)

The best we can get from that is him asking her to go backstage with him and then disappearing behind the curtains:

Ahhhhh what a freaking moment. And the best part is re watching it and going through all those emotions with them when you care about them so much and know how hard they worked for it❤️

[jemstarearrings]

S01E07: Starbright Part 2: Colliding Stars

While watching this episode and taking my notes, I immediately got derailed within the first minute. We pick up from the last episode in the ophthalmologist's office and learn Ba Nee has a wonderfully vague condition only described as "a degenerative eye condition."

This is not a diagnosis and describes at least half a dozen disorders.

Narrowing it down to disorders that can affect children and match the presented symptoms, the most likely condition Ba Nee has is cataracts; a clouding of the lens of the eye. Now I'm no doctor, but here's what I learned about cataracts AND cataract surgery within 20 minutes on the Internet:

The first cataract surgery was performed in 1747 with a 50% success rate, which only improved over time.

Without insurance, a double-eye cataract surgery and lens replacement can cost as little as $3,200.

Medicaid (signed into law in 1965, 21 years before the show) covers cataract surgery and lens replacement.

Foster homes have Medicaid, and Starlight Home is a foster home for girls.

TL;DR Ba Nee doesn’t need a $250,000 experimental surgery and could probably get her relatively common eye problem fixed for free or for a reduced cost through the state.

Forget the Misfits, the real villain of this episode is Ba Nee’s doctor:

Anyway, back to the other 21 minutes of the episode.

Thanks to a series of setbacks, the Holograms have to return to the movie to earn the money to save Ba Nee’s sight, and man is it hard watching the crew gossip about the Holograms. Even Rio’s a jerk when they come back and uggghhhh God I can’t stand Rio in this episode.

I get that Rio's supposed to have a sad backstory or whatever, but for every one thing he does that makes you like him, he does 5 more things that make you hate him. When he isn't saving the day like Superman, he's assaulting people, yelling at his girlfriend, cheating on his girlfriend WITH his girlfriend, and judging everyone as if he has any moral high ground. Then when his tantrum subsides, he has to go sulk in the corner until the plot needs him again.

Honestly, cringey teenage me who thought she would treat Jem better was probably right. A potted plant could treat Jem better than Rio does. Oh wait...

My favorite part of this episode though has to be the hologram logistics. Jerrica has to be both herself and Jem only a couple feet from one another and has to switch back and forth so her physical body can interact with the right people. It’s fantastic when hologram Jerrica can’t pick up a script thrown through her torso and she reacts like Jerrica naturally would. Synergy’s programming really is that impressive, and it’s just amazing.

I also can’t help but think, y’know, part of me sees stuff like this and wants to go “How did nobody notice that,” but it reminds me of something my aunt once told me a long time ago: We see weird things happen all the time, but we rationalize it away with more “realistic” answers. Those weird shadows by the road at night aren’t highway trolls, they’re probably racoons or plants blowing in the wind. The glasses you lost in the car didn’t fall into another universe, they probably just fell into a crevice you can’t reach. The person standing next to you didn’t disappear because she was a hologram projected remotely by the earrings of someone nearby, she just stepped out of your line of sight for a moment.

Makes you wonder how often crazy, unrealistic things actually happen right in front of you but your brain tells you it’s something more understandable so you don’t notice.

On a less schizo note before the Misfits Crime Counter commences, I also have to ask; what the fuck is Starbright even about?? There’s a casino scene, a jungle temple with a fight against pirates, a chase through the forest, and a motorcycle ride through the desert between explosions. The music videos aren’t even diagetic, they’re set in space or abstract neon futuristic backdrops with fire spouts. Is it some kind of space opera? That’s the only possible explanation I can give that would string all the scenes together correctly and it still doesn’t seem right.

idk someone go tweet at Christy Marx and let’s get a real answer lol

Eric makes Jem perform dangerous stunts with none of the safety precautions met. This is a good ol’ fashioned OSHA violation and runs Eric a hefty fine of $70,000.

Roxy and Clash sabotage the pyrotechnics with the intent to hurt Kimber, and had Jeff not acted valiantly Kimber could actually have died. This counts as Attempted Voluntary Manslaughter, earning both Roxy and Clash 11 years in prison and $10,000 fines each.

TOTAL CHARGES: $90,000 and 22 years in prison. Still not as much as Ba Nee’s “experimental eye surgery,” which goes to show that the true villains were the ophthalmologists we met along the way.

[mariacallous]

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating mathematical patterns. The first result put a new cap on how big a set of integers can be without containing three evenly spaced numbers, like {2, 4, 6} or {21, 31, 41}. The second and third similarly put new bounds on the size of networks without clusters of points that are either all connected, or all isolated from each other.

The proofs address what happens as the numbers involved grow infinitely large. Paradoxically, this can sometimes be easier than dealing with pesky real-world quantities.

For example, consider two questions about a fraction with a really big denominator. You might ask what the decimal expansion of, say, 1/42503312127361 is. Or you could ask if this number will get closer to zero as the denominator grows. The first question is a specific question about a real-world quantity, and it’s harder to calculate than the second, which asks how the quantity 1/n will “asymptotically” change as n grows. (It gets closer and closer to 0.)

“This is a problem plaguing all of Ramsey theory,” said William Gasarch, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. “Ramsey theory is known for having asymptotically very nice results.” But analyzing numbers that are smaller than infinity requires an entirely different mathematical toolbox.

Gasarch has studied questions in Ramsey theory involving finite numbers that are too big for the problem to be solved by brute force. In one project, he took on the finite version of the first of this year’s breakthroughs—a February paper by Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Raghu Meka of the University of California, Los Angeles. Kelley and Meka found a new upper bound on how many integers between 1 and N you can put into a set while avoiding three-term progressions, or patterns of evenly spaced numbers.

Though Kelley and Meka’s result applies even if N is relatively small, it doesn’t give a particularly useful bound in that case. For very small values of N, you’re better off sticking to very simple methods. If N is, say, 5, just look at all the possible sets of numbers between 1 and N, and pick out the biggest progression-free one: {1, 2, 4, 5}.

But the number of different possible answers grows very quickly and makes it too difficult to employ such a simple strategy. There are more than 1 million sets consisting of numbers between 1 and 20. There are over 1060 using numbers between 1 and 200. Finding the best progression-free set for these cases takes a hefty dose of computing power, even with efficiency-improving strategies. “You need to be able to squeeze a lot of performance out of things,” said James Glenn, a computer scientist at Yale University. In 2008, Gasarch, Glenn, and Clyde Kruskal of the University of Maryland wrote a program to find the biggest progression-free sets up to an N of 187. (Previous work had gotten the answers up to 150, as well as for 157.) Despite a roster of tricks, their program took months to finish, Glenn said.

To lessen their computational load, the team used simple tests that prevented their program from pursuing dead-end searches and split their sets into smaller parts that they analyzed separately.

Gasarch, Glenn, and Kruskal also tried several other strategies. One promising idea leaned on randomness. A simple way to come up with a progression-free set is to put 1 in your set, then always add the next number that doesn’t create an arithmetic progression. Follow this procedure until you hit the number 10, and you’ll get the set {1, 2, 4, 5, 10}. But it turns out this isn’t the best strategy in general. “What if we don’t start at 1?” Gasarch said. “If you start at a random place, you actually do better.” Researchers have no idea why randomness is so useful, he added.

Calculating the finite versions of the two other new Ramsey theory results is even more vexing than determining the size of progression-free sets. Those results concern mathematical networks (called graphs) made up of nodes connected by lines called edges. The Ramsey number r(s, t) is the smallest number of nodes a graph must have before it becomes impossible to avoid including either a group of s connected nodes or t disconnected ones. The Ramsey number is such a headache to compute that even r(5, 5) is unknown—it’s somewhere between 43 and 48.

In 1981, Brendan McKay, now a computer scientist at Australian National University, wrote a software program called nauty, which was intended to make calculating Ramsey numbers simpler. Nauty ensures that researchers don’t waste time checking two graphs that are just flipped or rotated versions of one another. “If somebody’s in the area and is not using nauty, the game is over. You must use it,” said Stanisław Radziszowski, a mathematician at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Still, the amount of computation involved is almost incomprehensible. In 2013, Radziszowski and Jan Goedgebeur proved that r(3, 10) is at most 42. “It took, I think, almost 50 CPU years,” said Goedgebeur, a computer scientist at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

If you can’t compute an exact Ramsey number, you can try narrowing down its value with examples. If you found a 45-node graph without five nodes that were all connected and without five nodes that were all disconnected, that would prove that r(5, 5) is bigger than 45. Mathematicians studying Ramsey numbers used to think that finding those examples, called Ramsey graphs, would be simple, Radziszowski said. But it wasn’t so. “There was this expectation that nice, cool mathematical constructions will give the best possible constructions, and we just need more people to work on it,” he said. “My feeling is more and more that it’s chaotic.”

Randomness is both an obstacle to understanding and a useful tool. Geoffrey Exoo, a computer scientist at Indiana State University, has spent years refining random methods to generate Ramsey graphs. In a 2015 paper announcing dozens of new, record-beating Ramsey graphs, Exoo and Milos Tatarevic generated random graphs and then gradually tweaked them by deleting or adding edges that reduced the number of unwanted clusters until they found a Ramsey graph. Exoo’s techniques are as much an art as anything, though, Radziszowski said. They sometimes require him to combine multiple methods, or to use judgment about what kind of graphs to start with. “Many, many people try it, and they cannot do it,” Radziszowski said.

The techniques developed to generate Ramsey graphs could be more broadly useful someday, said Goedgebeur, who has worked on producing other kinds of graphs, such as graphs that represent chemical compounds. “It is not unlikely that these techniques can also be transferred and adjusted to help generate other classes of graphs more efficiently (and vice versa),” he wrote in an email.

To Radziszowski, however, the reason for studying the small Ramsey numbers is much simpler. “Because it’s open, because nobody knows what the answer is,” he said. “The trivial cases we do by hand; a little larger, you need a computer, and a little larger, even the computer is not good enough. And so the challenge emerges.”

[mysteclipse7]

Just some random thoughts about Airi from Project Sekai and Mitsuki from Idolish7 I am hesitantly sharing :>

<Contains somewhat (I think) minor character detail/story spoilers for Momoi Airi (specifically the Happy Lovely Day event story) from Project Sekai and Izumi Mitsuki from Idolish7 (specifically Idolish7 Second Beat and onwards)>

When I got into Project Sekai I couldn’t help kinda noticing similarities and parallels between Airi and Mitsuki. I never really wrote anything or properly got into it and this is not an analysis for that, but just some vague observations, inferences and just rambling about two characters I like :)

For Airi, as she did more and more variety work, her regular idol work became less. She became seen and thought of less as an idol like she wished and more like a variety star for people to laugh at. Not only that, she had a role encouraged onto her that she took out of a mixture of wanting to support her group, thinking it would be good to do, and hoping it would further her idol career. Instead, it was more like a disguise that didn't let her be seen as the 'idol Airi' she wanted to be seen as. She wasn't overly close with those in her group, and like this, she also didn't believe she could truly reach anyone as an idol. In Mitsuki's case, his idol work amount didn't lessen but his variety work did. And while this helped improve and develop his MCing skills, such a role is not something that is as appreciated by fans watching. This was similar in a sense to how Airi would make jokes and do similar "MCing" stuff in performances, but in the end were simple parts to laugh at before moving on to the main performance. In Mitsuki's case as well, him being an opposite to Tamaki (furthest from fans and closest to the staff, while Tamaki is closest to the fans and furthest from the staff), led to some people getting annoyed with his presence in their regular show, viewing him as "stealing the spotlight" and "taking up time" from the other members talking, rather than him just working to keep the conversation flowing and moving. Both Airi and Mitsuki want to be recognised as themselves and as idols, and they also both had slightly different resolutions for how they dealt with their respective challenges in a similar situation.

For Airi, she learnt that she *was* actually reaching some people when she was working on variety programs, and there were those out there recognising her as the idol "Airi" rather than the "Happy Lovely Everyday" persona she had for her variety work. She also had the opportunity to try and change her perception for other fans, and now that she is in a group she is close with, she can appreciate both the fun variety side she can use as well as her idol side – both are meaningful.

For Mitsuki, he first had to learn that it's just impossible to please everyone. No matter how hard he tries, there will always be people who find him annoying when he does MCing. He had to learn to recognise his own value and how even if people might not even think he's necessary or important to be there, he is important to the group how he is. He had to realise he needed to keep the courage to stay as he is, and not try and change his ways to suit the impossible demands of their fanbase.

Pretty much, I think these two are cool, I love them (and the series they’re from) a lot and it was cool to see their similarities :)

[binauralbeatsforastraltravel]

binaural beats for astral travel

Improve your Journey: Binaural Sounds for Astral Travel

Are you excited in order to start an awesome adventure which goes beyond our normal globe? Astral travel, or even astral projection like a call it, is definitely an opportinity for us to be able to visit different areas and dimensions without having having to proceed our physical physiques. This idea has been around forever, catching the fascination of countless who happen to be into spiritual things because they want to learn more about this specific mysterious astral aircraft. Lately, binaural beats for astral travel are getting to be quite well-liked among those trying to make their spirit travel experiences a lot better. These special sounds can change just how our brains work somewhat, helping people go into deeper deep breathing states and generating it easier for us to experience the astral realm. In case you try applying binaural beats regarding astral travel when you're practicing spirit projection, your trip could reach fresh heights and connect to something bigger as compared to ourselves. To definitely get the hang of how binaural beats boost estelar travel, we require to start with the basic principles. Astral travel is focused on leaving your own physical body at the rear of and going on adventures in other worlds or dimensions employing what's called a great astral body.

Today, for binaural music for astral vacation they're a great audio trick to listen to two different looks in each ear. Your brain next does this cool thing where that finds the mid ground between these sounds, developing a 3 rd sound known as the binaural beat. This specific beat can clutter with your brainwaves in a method that changes precisely how awake or calm you feel. When talking about astranl output, those beats will be super helpful. Since we calm down coming from being wide up to getting directly into deeper meditation vibes, our brain dunes alter too. Binaural beats help match our brain's ambiance to one that’s great for jumping into a good astro trip producing it easier to leave our bodily self and phase into another sphere. By tuning in to specific binarual beets made exclusively for astrol treveling, we could far better slip into serious relaxation and change over to checking out the astro basic. These tunes allow us break no cost from our bodily boundaries and dive strong intot he unlimited probability of traveling together with an astrel boddy, leading us toward some incredible breakthroughs and personal development.

Binaural beats are generally about an amazing trick our brains do called brainwave entrainment. Think of your brain because having different vibes or waves, each vibe matching program how you're experience or what most likely doing. These vibes have their own velocity, measured in hertz (Hz), and each speed zone fits up to specific feelings. With binaural beats, the concept would be to nudge our own brainwaves into the particular speed zone all of us want. Say jooxie is aiming for several chill time or even deep meditation; tuning in to binaural beats for astral traveling that hum with alpha or theta speeds could possibly get people there. It works mainly because these sounds perform slightly different eq in each headsets, developing a beat that gets our brainwaves aboard with wherever we wish them to be able to go. Studies show fine-tuning into binaural sounds can really assist out by reducing stress levels, maintenance focus and focus, and making sleeping better. By having the lowdown how binaural beats work their magic, we are able to use them not necessarily just for hitting back also for chiller stuff like faramineux travel—exploring beyond our usual mental hangouts—and reaching deeper says of consciousness during meditation.

[cancerspecialistindore]

Meet the Best Oncologist in Indore: Dr. Suyash Agrawal

Introduction

When faced with a cancer diagnosis, the search for the best oncologist in Indore leads to one distinguished name: Dr. Suyash Agrawal. Dr. Agrawal is well-known for his extraordinary abilities, kind disposition, and commitment to improving cancer therapy. Both patients and colleagues have come to respect and like him. This introduction lays the groundwork for an examination of why Dr. Suyash Agrawal is the best option for oncological care in Indore. 

A Beacon of Excellence

Dr. Suyash Agrawal’s journey to becoming the best oncologist in Indore is marked by a profound commitment to his patients and a relentless pursuit of medical excellence. After completing his medical education at esteemed schools, he underwent oncology specialty training. Dr. Agrawal’s patients receive the best care possible because to his vast experience and constant search for cutting-edge medical procedures. 

Advanced Cancer Treatments Offered by Dr. Suyash Agrawal

Dr. Suyash Agrawal offers a comprehensive range of cancer care services, encompassing diagnosis, treatment, and supportive care. His areas of expertise include:

Precision Medicine: Changing therapy methods in order to maximize therapeutic results using genetic and molecular profiling.

Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy: Administering advanced chemotherapy and immunotherapy protocols to target cancer cells while minimizing side effects.

Surgical Oncology: Performing complex cancer surgeries with precision and expertise to remove tumors effectively.

Radiation Oncology: Utilizing advanced radiation techniques to deliver targeted radiation therapy with accuracy and minimal impact on healthy tissues.

Palliative Care: Providing compassionate care to improve the quality of life for patients facing advanced cancer stages.

Patient-Centered Approach

The patient-centered approach of Dr. Suyash Agrawal is what really makes him stand out as the best oncologist in Indore. He is aware of the psychological and physical difficulties associated with receiving a cancer diagnosis. With his patients and their families, Dr. Agrawal places a strong emphasis on open communication, empathy, and collaborative decision-making. By providing each patient with individualized attention and support throughout their course of therapy, he cultivates confidence and trust.

Innovation in Oncology

Dr. Suyash Agrawal is dedicated to using creativity and research to advance the field of oncology. In an effort to find better cancer treatments and enhance patient outcomes, he actively takes part in clinical trials and research projects. In addition to improving his personal practice, his contributions to medical research support the international hunt for more effective cancer treatment and management strategies.

Patient Testimonials: Insights into Dr. Suyash Agrawal’s Reputation as the Best Oncologist in Indore

The positive outcomes of Dr. Suyash Agrawal’s patients attest to the value of his skill and kind treatment. Many people have complimented him on his commitment, knowledge, and the successful results they have obtained while in his care. The positive treatment outcomes and enhanced quality of life mentioned in these testimonies highlight Dr. Agrawal’s dedication to providing top-notch oncological care.

Community Engagement and Education

Dr. Suyash Agrawal is actively involved in patient education and community outreach programs in addition to his clinical practice. In order to give people the power to take control of their health, he runs awareness campaigns about cancer prevention, early detection, and available treatments. Dr. Agrawal’s dedication to community education is indicative of his conviction that proactive healthcare management is essential.

Conclusion

In the realm of oncology, where expertise, empathy, and innovation are crucial, Dr. Suyash Agrawal emerges as the best oncologist in Indore. His outstanding credentials, patient-focused philosophy, and commitment to improving cancer treatment distinguish him as a pioneer in the industry. Whether you are looking for preventive care or have been diagnosed with cancer, Dr. Agrawal’s skill and kindness will make sure you get the best care possible.

Choosing the best cancer doctor in Indore is a significant decision, and Dr. Suyash Agrawal’s unwavering commitment to patient well-being and medical excellence makes him the ideal choice for individuals and families navigating the complexities of cancer care. Discover the difference with Dr. Suyash Agrawal, Indore’s trusted partner in the fight against cancer.

[jcmarchi]

Creating bespoke programming languages for efficient visual AI systems

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/creating-bespoke-programming-languages-for-efficient-visual-ai-systems/

Creating bespoke programming languages for efficient visual AI systems

A single photograph offers glimpses into the creator’s world — their interests and feelings about a subject or space. But what about creators behind the technologies that help to make those images possible? 

MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley is one such person, who has designed everything from tools for visual effects in movies to the Halide programming language that’s widely used in industry for photo editing and processing. As a researcher with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Ragan-Kelley specializes in high-performance, domain-specific programming languages and machine learning that enable 2D and 3D graphics, visual effects, and computational photography.

“The single biggest thrust through a lot of our research is developing new programming languages that make it easier to write programs that run really efficiently on the increasingly complex hardware that is in your computer today,” says Ragan-Kelley. “If we want to keep increasing the computational power we can actually exploit for real applications — from graphics and visual computing to AI — we need to change how we program.”

Finding a middle ground

Over the last two decades, chip designers and programming engineers have witnessed a slowing of Moore’s law and a marked shift from general-purpose computing on CPUs to more varied and specialized computing and processing units like GPUs and accelerators. With this transition comes a trade-off: the ability to run general-purpose code somewhat slowly on CPUs, for faster, more efficient hardware that requires code to be heavily adapted to it and mapped to it with tailored programs and compilers. Newer hardware with improved programming can better support applications like high-bandwidth cellular radio interfaces, decoding highly compressed videos for streaming, and graphics and video processing on power-constrained cellphone cameras, to name a few applications.

“Our work is largely about unlocking the power of the best hardware we can build to deliver as much computational performance and efficiency as possible for these kinds of applications in ways that that traditional programming languages don’t.”

To accomplish this, Ragan-Kelley breaks his work down into two directions. First, he sacrifices generality to capture the structure of particular and important computational problems and exploits that for better computing efficiency. This can be seen in the image-processing language Halide, which he co-developed and has helped to transform the image editing industry in programs like Photoshop. Further, because it is specially designed to quickly handle dense, regular arrays of numbers (tensors), it also works well for neural network computations. The second focus targets automation, specifically how compilers map programs to hardware. One such project with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab leverages Exo, a language developed in Ragan-Kelley’s group.

Over the years, researchers have worked doggedly to automate coding with compilers, which can be a black box; however, there’s still a large need for explicit control and tuning by performance engineers. Ragan-Kelley and his group are developing methods that straddle each technique, balancing trade-offs to achieve effective and resource-efficient programming. At the core of many high-performance programs like video game engines or cellphone camera processing are state-of-the-art systems that are largely hand-optimized by human experts in low-level, detailed languages like C, C++, and assembly. Here, engineers make specific choices about how the program will run on the hardware.

Ragan-Kelley notes that programmers can opt for “very painstaking, very unproductive, and very unsafe low-level code,” which could introduce bugs, or “more safe, more productive, higher-level programming interfaces,” that lack the ability to make fine adjustments in a compiler about how the program is run, and usually deliver lower performance. So, his team is trying to find a middle ground. “We’re trying to figure out how to provide control for the key issues that human performance engineers want to be able to control,” says Ragan-Kelley, “so, we’re trying to build a new class of languages that we call user-schedulable languages that give safer and higher-level handles to control what the compiler does or control how the program is optimized.”

Unlocking hardware: high-level and underserved ways

Ragan-Kelley and his research group are tackling this through two lines of work: applying machine learning and modern AI techniques to automatically generate optimized schedules, an interface to the compiler, to achieve better compiler performance. Another uses “exocompilation” that he’s working on with the lab. He describes this method as a way to “turn the compiler inside-out,” with a skeleton of a compiler with controls for human guidance and customization. In addition, his team can add their bespoke schedulers on top, which can help target specialized hardware like machine-learning accelerators from IBM Research. Applications for this work span the gamut: computer vision, object recognition, speech synthesis, image synthesis, speech recognition, text generation (large language models), etc.

A big-picture project of his with the lab takes this another step further, approaching the work through a systems lens. In work led by his advisee and lab intern William Brandon, in collaboration with lab research scientist Rameswar Panda, Ragan-Kelley’s team is rethinking large language models (LLMs), finding ways to change the computation and the model’s programming architecture slightly so that the transformer-based models can run more efficiently on AI hardware without sacrificing accuracy. Their work, Ragan-Kelley says, deviates from the standard ways of thinking in significant ways with potentially large payoffs for cutting costs, improving capabilities, and/or shrinking the LLM to require less memory and run on smaller computers.

It’s this more avant-garde thinking, when it comes to computation efficiency and hardware, that Ragan-Kelley excels at and sees value in, especially in the long term. “I think there are areas [of research] that need to be pursued, but are well-established, or obvious, or are conventional-wisdom enough that lots of people either are already or will pursue them,” he says. “We try to find the ideas that have both large leverage to practically impact the world, and at the same time, are things that wouldn’t necessarily happen, or I think are being underserved relative to their potential by the rest of the community.”

The course that he now teaches, 6.106 (Software Performance Engineering), exemplifies this. About 15 years ago, there was a shift from single to multiple processors in a device that caused many academic programs to begin teaching parallelism. But, as Ragan-Kelley explains, MIT realized the importance of students understanding not only parallelism but also optimizing memory and using specialized hardware to achieve the best performance possible.

“By changing how we program, we can unlock the computational potential of new machines, and make it possible for people to continue to rapidly develop new applications and new ideas that are able to exploit that ever-more complicated and challenging hardware.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: James Lindsay

Published: Mar 13, 2024

I’m here to talk about Queer Theory. Some major points can be summarized very easily.

Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult;

That religious cult is based on sex;

That sex-based religious cult primarily targets children; and

Almost none of it has anything to do with gay identity.

Let’s address the last point first because it’s the least obvious.

The term “queer” in “Queer Theory” gets its definition from David Halperin in a 1995 book called Saint Foucault. The first words of the relevant paragraph (on p. 62) are “Unlike gay identity.” There, Halperin explains that gay identities are grounded in a positive fact of homosexuality. That means homosexuality is in some way real. “Queer,” by contrast, he says, need not be based on any positive truth or in any stable reality. There’s nothing in particular to which it refers. It’s an identity without an essence. That means it’s not based in reality.

What is Queer Theory, then, if it’s not based in reality? It’s a radical political view. Halperin tells us “queer” means adopting a politics that is whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant. Just to prove I’m not making it up, here’s the relevant quote.

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

To underscore his point, he then continues with,

“Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices.

In other words, you cannot be queer. You can only do queerness. It’s an act. 

So nobody is “queer.” People feel “queer” against some standard, perhaps imagined, and people act queerly. By that, it means they act defiantly against normalcy and legitimacy while denying reality. You can only perform queerness—or, if you refuse, straightness. Performing straightness, to Queer Theory, isn’t being who you are if you’re straight; it’s just another kind of performance, one that upholds the allegedly oppressive “status quo” instead of opposing it.

Now let’s consider the Drag Queen Story Hour curriculum paper from a couple of years ago.

It explains in a section titled “from empathy to embodied kinship” that queer programs are presented as improving LGBT empathy, and that Drag Queen Story Hour makes use of such “tropes,” their word.

It then says that’s not really what Drag Queen Story Hour, queer education, or “queer worldmaking” are about, though. Instead, they use the “tropes” of empathy “strategically” as a “marketing” platform to justify getting it into schools, libraries, and in front of kids, but it’s actually about leading kids to see the world and themselves in a queer way. Here’s how they word it:

Finally, it is often assumed that the primary pedagogical goal of queer education should be to increase empathy towards LGBT people. While this premise has some merit – and underlies many sincere projects in educational and cultural work, including DQSH – the notion of empathy has also been critiqued by feminist scholars of colour and others for the ways in which empathy can enable an affective appropriation of an individual’s unique experiences and reinforce hierarchies of power. … Whether through literature or virtual reality, these tropes tend to reflect an overstated ability to understand difference, as well as empathy’s potential to preclude meaningful relationships of solidarity. It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars’ critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept…This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBT.

That’s what Drag Queen Story Hour is actually about. It’s not about empathy—that’s a marketing strategy that is, in fact, a bit problematic. It’s about getting kids to discover any aspects of themselves that might be considered “queer” and developing those into a queer political stance that will be conflated with who they believe they are. More than that, they’ll be told they’re not truly allowed to be who that is, even though it’s who they really are. Society will object. Their parents will object. It has to be kept secret from their parents in case it isn’t affirmed by them.

Now, I’m not supposed to use the word “grooming” to describe this grotesque set of activities. It’s part of a major controversy—one the Pitt students showed up (potentially menacingly, but in fact as clowns) to protest outside. So I’ll ask a question instead. I’m going to show you something, and then I want to know what word am I supposed to use for this. This self-characterization for the program comes up shortly thereafter in the same paper.

Drag Queen Story Hour presents itself as “family friendly” in a way that it characterizes as a “preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.” What does that mean? 

It then says that the “family” in “family friendly” refers to a “queer code” for the “other queers [they connect with] on the street.” So they’re not just lying about the empathy but also what they mean by “family”—which is a “queer code” for a “new family” that Drag Queen Story Hour is teaching kids to be “friendly” to. 

The paper repeatedly invokes the concept of a “drag family” for the kids too, and then the paper ends with “we’ll leave a trail of glitter that will never come out of the carpet.” What’s the carpet here?

Here’s the full quote of the “family friendly” part, so you don’t think I’m lying.

Queer worldmaking, including political organizing, has long been a project driven by desire. It is, in part, enacted through art forms like fashion, theatre, and drag. We believe that DQSH offers an invitation towards deeper public engagement with queer cultural production, particularly for young children and their families. It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.

So, I’m asking. What word am I supposed to use for that? I know which one I can’t use, and that puts me at a complete loss.

So here’s how Queer Theory works. You can’t describe it unless you support it—just like a cult, one we now see targets kids. If you criticize it, that’s “hate.” The rumor widely printed about me is that my using that word, “groomer,” to describe that, above, implicates me in some social crime called “anti-LGBTQ hate,” which is very bad, very serious, and utterly toxic. It’s not just “harmful rhetoric” but a “conspiracy theory.” I am a very bad person, apparently, for naming the obvious, not as a result of inference or guesswork but from their own proudly printed writings.

The accusation and resulting social dynamic, which is always hostile, is straight out of Maoist China. I am alleged to be engaging in a crime called “anti-LGBTQ hate,” and “the right side of” society is to judge me and hold me to account for that crime by whatever means it can manage. This bullying is to continue until I learn to recognize from the “queer position” (that is, standpoint) how what I said was socially criminal and pledge to reform my thought, adopt Queer Theory, and not only do better but also become an activist on behalf of Queer Theory. This is identical to the thought reform of Maoist China with a slightly different ideology.

The accusation is obviously nonsense, but that’s not the point. The point is to initiate the social struggle session on me to “transform” my views. The accusation is of an old Marxist standard form, though. It’s a truth married to a lie.

Here’s the truth: Gays and lesbians fought for decades to break the public perception that they are predators and groomers of children. Here’s the lie: That’s who and what I’m talking about when I criticize their theory and activism, which is the very groomery thing I just described previously, in their own words.

As we saw from Halperin and from the “marketing” admission in the Drag Queen Story Hour curriculum paper, Queer Theory doesn’t represent gay identities. It hides behind them and uses them. 

The truth is that “queer” used to be a slur for gay people, one many activists took to describe themselves in defiance of prejudice and bigotry. The lie is that Queer Theory ever represented a civil rights movement for anyone. It’s a destructive form of radical activism that actually historically opposed gay civil rights and equality. Why would it do that? Because gay equality and acceptance would normalize being gay within society and legitimize gay people as fully equal members of society, and Queer Theory is, by definition, radically opposed on principle to anything normal and legitimate. They even have a word for it, homonormativity, which is also very bad.

Gay activists from the 1990s will readily attest that the Queer Activists were often strongly opposed to their ambitions: civil and legal equality, marriage, and social acceptance. Queer Theory needs radical activists, not stable citizens who can go about their lives in a society that doesn’t discriminate meaningfully against them. Those activists fought hard for decades to overcome stereotypes of predatory behavior and the idea that they’re intrinsically groomers. That’s why the Queer Activists can claim that calling out their blatant grooming is an “anti-LGBTQ” theme. Those were stereotypes that good people fought like hell to overcome.

The fact is that Queer Activism, exactly as described here, puts the appearance of glaring truth back into those stereotypes, and then the Queer Activists hide behind gay people and say, “see, they’re attacking you; see, everyone hates you.” Of course, everyday gay people who are good citizens lose the most from this little trick, and the Queer Activists gain the most. Queer activism is strictly parasitic behavior.

On the theme of grooming, specifically into a cult, I want to direct you to another scholar, Kevin Kumashiro, who wrote a paper in 2002 called “Against Repetition.” In that paper, he describes the purpose of queer education of children. Kumashiro explicitly says that teaching children about social justice, including about ideas from Queer Theory, induces emotional and identity-based crises in them.

He then says that’s why it’s important to have queer educators who can guide the vulnerable students who are experiencing their crises to resolve them in favor of social justice and Queer Theory beliefs and actions. The relevant quotes are these:

Repeating what is already learned can be comforting and therefore desirable; students’ learning things that question their knowledge and identities can be emotionally upsetting. For example, suppose students think society is meritocratic but learn that it is racist, or think that they themselves are not contributing to homophobia but learn that in fact they are. In such situations, students learn that the ways they think and act are not only limited but also oppressive. Learning about oppression and about the ways they often unknowingly comply with oppression can lead students to feel paralyzed with anger, sadness, anxiety, and guilt; it can lead to a form of emotional crisis. (p. 74) Once in a crisis, a student can go in many directions, some that may lead to anti-oppressive change, others that may lead to more entrenched resistance. Therefore, educators have a responsibility not only to draw students into a possible crisis, but also to structure experiences that can help them work through their crises productively. (pp. 74–75)

This practice is indoctrination, and it is knowingly willful and deliberate. In a 2019 paper, Torres and Ferry say explicitly that what their model of education represents is indoctrination. Here’s how they said it.

For all the criticism teachers receive for ‘indoctrinating’ students, turning them into liberal-minded cry-babies, not much has been said in defense. At the very least, a shy denial is made. It is time for educators to own this criticism and admit that is exactly what we do. (“Not everyone gets a seat at the table!” p. 33)

What Kevin Kumashiro is describing, though, is worse than indoctrination. The cycle of inducing crisis and then resolving it toward a doctrine, though, isn’t indoctrination. It’s a technique called trauma bonding, which is a practice of cult grooming and ideological transformation—that is, thought reform or brainwashing.

It can be said plainly, then. Queer Theory practices thought reform because Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult. That cult is based on sex and primarily targets children, and it has little or nothing to do with being gay.

Nobody joins a cult to join a cult. People join a cult because they are suffering in some way, and the cult offers them a resolution to their suffering. Virtually everyone who has escaped a cult tells the same story: they wanted to belong, they wanted a social circle, they wanted understanding, and they wanted purpose. The cult preys upon these people and slowly locks them in.

Trauma bonding is as harmful and manipulative as it sounds. It is a technique of cult initiation and abuse. It’s like a kind of hazing. The basic formula is simple. First you traumatize your targets until you’ve harmed them enough for the process to work, and then you celebrate them when they do what you want.

In Queer Theory, you tell them the world isn’t at all the way it seems. It isn’t the way they’ve been led to believe. If they’re different, it’s because they’re oppressed. If not, it’s because they’re hurting other people. If they’re interested in exploring, even though they’re young, they should. If they’re uncomfortable with their bodies for any reason, perhaps their body is wrong for who they really are. If their parents might disagree, they shouldn’t be included in the decisions. Queer Theory is then offered as the lens that resolves all of the confusion, shock, dissonance, and pain. 

Then you affirm and celebrate them when they show interest. You lead them to believe they’re making brave decisions that are worthy of interest and respect. You coerce their social groups to participate in this ritual and tacitly threaten anyone who doesn’t want to go along with it. You make them feel like they belong and that they—just for being who they are—are special and have a special purpose to fulfill. You teach them special words that describe the very small but growing number of people who identify just like them.

This cult programming—or grooming—takes predictable paths. First, it leads people into emotional vulnerability followed by resolution. This generates personal and social interest, then psychological and social commitment. This is then deepened into an increasingly deep social and emotional commitment achieved largely through trauma bonding techniques, among others, detailed below.

This process creates emotionally and socially bonded members who populate the wide majority of any cult’s membership: those who are socially and emotionally locked in even without necessarily understanding the doctrine. This is sometimes called the “outer school” of the cult. The social, psychological, and emotional cues are steadily deepened over time, particularly increasingly playing upon themes of guilt, shame, isolation, alienation, and confusion on the one hand and hope, excitement, inclusion, and belonging on the other. Shunning “haters” who don’t support and affirm them, even within their own families, is also increased to make sure the cult environment is the predominant influence in the victims’ lives.

When commitment is high enough, a process of “study” begins, where the more committed outer school members start learning the cult doctrine. Here, they’d be studying Queer Theory. They’re not just learning how to use pronouns, present themselves, denounce everything against Queer Theory, and shut people out of their lives for disagreeing with what the cult thinks is good. They’re learning to defend it with pseudo-intellectual arguments based in Queer Theory. They’re also doing a lot of Queer Activism, which in turn deepens commitment. Why would you do this stuff, which is unpopular and difficult, when you have other and better things to do unless you are really committed? These people, who are socially and emotionally dependent on the cult and intellectually committed to it form an “inner school.” They are the “adepts” of the cult, where the “outer school” are its initiates. Most of the scholars and community organizers in the Queer Theory cult are in this tier.

There’s another tier, of course. The so-called “inner circle.” The members of the inner circle of a cult direct it and profit from it. They might or might not believe its doctrine, depending on their motivations. With Queer Theory, undoubtedly some of the biggest organizers and financiers of the movement, which primarily targets our children, do not believe it in itself but fully believe in its destructive and disruptive potential. Others believe in the enormous amount of profit that’s available from destroying lives and turning them into permanent, complicated medical or psychiatric patients. Others see the political utility of a permanently disaffected group with partially legitimate demands against a system they hate. Others see getting millions of people participating in the cult and its affirmations as a way to affirm themselves in their own “journeys,” and they just so happen to have the money to finance a campaign for mass affirmation.

The most important thing to remember about these tiers is the basic structure and the guiding principle behind each. The “outer school” initiates are seeing psychological and social reward through the cult’s manipulative offering, and they’re the overwhelming majority of captured cultists. The “inner school” seeks the same with existential fervor and some degree of intellectual and moral superiority. The “inner circle” is very small in number and ultimately is using the whole cult to their own twisted purposes. In the case of Marxist cults, the inner circle always uses the revolutionary cult of the era and then disposes of it when it’s time to move on to the next “phase of the revolution.”

The environment in which cults transform their victims is worth understanding in greater depth. According to Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the Maoist cult in detail as it was happening, cults effectively take advantage of up to eight qualities. Queer Theory very obviously utilizes all of them in sophisticated ways. I’ll touch upon them briefly.

Milieu control: Cults control the environment and make sure it only reflects cult doctrine. This is why they cut people off from friends, family, and outside information and views. This is your inclusion policies to ensure institutions and people only present cult-agreeable views and affirmation and remove anything that might cause doubt in the cult. This is cancel culture. This is immersive media and messaging from all levels.

Mystical manipulation: Cults create an appearance of total agreement (silencing all disagreement), inevitability (“there’s a change coming and there’s nothing you can do about it but get on the right side of it”), planned spontaneity (organized protests that look organic), and a higher purpose (like being on “the right side of history”) in order to convince their victims of their power and influence. It makes the cult appear more “right” and righteous to those captured within its spells. Think of the film The Truman Show. Jim Carrey’s character, Truman, was at the center of a huge operation of mystical manipulation within a fully controlled milieu.

Demand for purity: Cults are almost always puritanical in their values systems. They present their victims with stark contrasts of good and evil, right and wrong, on virtually every issue, and they demand purity with being on the “right” side of every issue. These dynamics manifest in dichotomies like pure vs. impure, absolutely good vs. absolutely evil, sacred vs. profane, or, specifically in the “social justice” cults like Queer Theory, affirmation vs. existential denial and care vs. “hate.” They are also interested, if not obsessed, with the binary of innocence vs. initiation to various levels of standing within the cult, including inclusion in the cult itself. In the extreme, this demand for purity sets up a dichotomy as stark as “the people” versus “the enemies of the people,” who must be destroyed in the name of “the people.”

Cult of Confession: The demand for purity leads the cult’s victims to readily identify how they fall short of cult perfection, leading them to both fear and desire to confess their failures and evil ways. Cults often encourage this behavior to facilitate the trauma bonding process. The trauma bonding wheel-of-pain is turned through pressuring people to confess—say to homophobia or transphobia or being a made-up gender or sexuality, and then rewarding them when they do—only to later indicate the confession wasn’t sufficiently total or sincere enough, initiating another round.

The milieu control and demand for purity come together to create a uniquely exquisite psychological environment. In this environment, almost everyone believes everyone else is pure while they, themselves, are not. You are the one falling short, even though you see your “classmates” confess to their own failures. You alone have the deepest, darkest failures. The guilt and shame are overwhelming, and they fuel even more accusation (criticism) and confession (self-criticism). This is the part of the environment that does the bulk of the thought-reforming work.

A “Sacred Science”: At the heart of the cult is what Lifton refers to as a “sacred science” that is infallible—though people can and do fail it all the time—into which people are being brainwashed. The point of the cult of confession dynamic is to force people to confess their failure to understand, internalize, enact, and even embody the “sacred science,” while accusing others of their failings as much and often as possible. The point of the confession is to get people to willingly adopt the lens of the sacred science so they can “recognize their crimes” against it and pledge to “do better.” “Do better” means “ideological remolding.” Here, Queer Theory is the correct understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, and all “normal” features of society. 

Doctrine over person: Cults place doctrine over people (“History uses people and then discards them.” -Hegel) The person isn’t even a person if they don’t hold and enact the doctrine. “Not to have correct political opinions is like not having a soul.” -Mao)

Loading the language: This is painfully obvious at this point, isn’t it?

Dispensing of existence: At the deepest level, the cult decides whose existence counts and who doesn’t. The punchline is that those who accept the cult doctrine (the “sacred science”) and its application are people, and no one else is. Only the doctrinally legitimate are allowed to exist. Others are “haters,” effectively enemies and non-people, justifying their abuse, disenfranchisement, silencing, etc.

Under the standard Iron Law of Woke Projection, the dispensing of existence aspect of cult environments is why Woke activists say everything is “denying their existence” or a “genocide.” They’re projecting. You don’t have a right to exist if your beliefs “deny their right to exist.” In Queer Theory, this means if you don’t affirm their embodied political activism against the legitimate and the normal, you’re denying their existence. You are therefore beyond the pale of humanity and do not deserve to exist. All totalitarian genocides come from this darkest piece of cult logic.

Frankly, we could go a lot deeper into the cult nature of Queer Theory than this. We could talk about how it’s ultimately a Gnostic and Hermetic conception of the world with “normal society” acting as an evil spirit that imprisons everyone into performing a fake persona for the world so they can never be liberated to be who they truly are. I’ve done that at length elsewhere.

That would require us to talk in depth about one of Queer Theory’s progenitors, Judith Butler, and her belief that gender and sex aren’t actually real but are performances we learn and repeat to satisfy normal society. Her whole body of work could be summarized in six words and a little explanation: “Drag is life; life is drag.” Everyone, always is doing drag in everything they do, whether they realize it or not. Society writes the scripts for how their drag (usually “cishetero”) is to be performed, and that imprisons their souls, which they then have to script physically onto and through their bodies. Becoming aware of the “doingness” of gender and even sex and sexuality opens a door to a “queer horizon” of possibilities beyond the norm.

Judy got those ideas in turn from people like the postmodern philosopher, sadomasochist, and pedophile Michel Foucault, from whose work David Halperin derived his definition from Queer. Foucault was asking what it means to be a homosexual absent society’s definition of the term, absent the homosexual versus heterosexual binary and privileged status of being straight within it, and absent the patterns of discipline and punishment that enforce these definitions on people through society, most frequently through themselves. The idea that it is the soul that imprisons the body, exactly in this way, didn’t originate with Judith Butler. She got it from Foucault.

Interlaced into aspects of Queer Theory from the broader milieu of the sexuality studies and sex-positive radical feminism from which it was born are the ideas of people like John Money and Alfred Kinsey, among others, who sought to divorce sex and “gender identity” completely and to liberate sexuality to the greatest possible extent.

Most of the inspiration, outside of the sexual aspects of Queer Theory, however, derive from gender-critical feminism, as it evolved eventually into the sex-positive branch, which went to war with its prudish sisters primarily through the 1980s and eventually won. That, in turn, means to understand this cult deeply, we’d have to start with the first truly gender-critical feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, who initiated the pressing question of our day way back in 1949: What is a woman? Her point was the same as Foucault’s: what does it mean to be a woman when no one else—and particularly society and patriarchy—are defining it for the people who actually are women?

In short, we are imprisoned by the features of our social reality but can escape with the right hidden insights about who we really are and into what we have been thrown. The thinkers above derived this transformative Sociological Gnosticism from earlier mystics of greater fame. We don’t have time for that now, but it’s not a hard legacy to trace from characters such as Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx through Beauvoir, Foucault, and Butler to arrive at the conclusion that we’re dealing not with social science but social alchemy here. One of its primary laboratories is our children.

Why children? Four reasons, mainly. First, children in schools and even with their entertainment are a captive audience. Second, children have not achieved the necessary cortical development to distinguish reality from fantasy, so the mystifications of Queer Theory can be considered plausible to them where adults would be less interested. Third, children are going through the developmental process of identity formation, which needs to be hijacked for this ideology to take firm root. Finally, children become a gateway and a wedge to other targets, like their families, faiths, and other institutions in which they take part.

So that is Queer Theory. It’s the doctrine of a religious cult. That cult is primarily sex-based. It predominantly targets our children. And it has little to nothing to do with being gay. But what can we do? 

Normally, we would turn to our institutions and ask them to see the light and step in. That isn’t working. We face a problem of captured institutions. Our institutions accept and promote Queer Theory. We therefore cannot count on our institutions—educational, psychological, medical, or governmental—to help us here. They are all captured. They are all part of the controlled milieu, creating the mystical manipulation, and peddling the sacred science of Queer Theory.

We find ourselves in the position of a pilot who has lost all of his instrumentation on his aircraft and has to fly it safely to a runway and land. No navigation computer, no altimeter, nothing—just him and his wits and hopefully his ability to see what’s in front of him and do the right thing. Our institutions are like the instruments in the cockpit but for society. Right now, they’re putting out all the wrong information. They cannot help us find the runway or land the plane safely, upon which our lives and the lives of others depend. What would we do? We would use our senses directly to find the runway, line up and lower the plane, and land it. We wouldn’t look to the broken instruments at all. We’d look at reality and navigate without the intermediary. That’s what we need to start finding ways to do at the societal level now—one individual at a time.

What, individually, though? What we must do is start with the truth. Not the mediated “truth” peddled by the corrupt institutions. The plain, simple truth. There are two sexes. Most people are straight. Gay happens. Queer isn’t an identity; it’s a defiant political stance we don’t have to tolerate or accommodate. If someone claims to have an identity or sexuality that requires an explanation, it’s fake and doesn’t demand our respect. Predatory behavior of any kind in any place and perversion outside of the confines of consenting adults acting in private do not deserve our tolerance and shouldn’t be given it. Pornography doesn’t need to exist in children’s libraries, and children do not benefit from its presence there. Enough.

Regarding the truth, though, I want to make a point. It’s important to say the truth, but you actually have to do more. You have to love the truth. You have to love the truth with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength, and then you have to love your neighbor enough as you would yourself to tell him the truth that you love. These are basic commandments.

But you have to love the truth. If you love the truth, you’ll say it. You’ll also seek it and defend it. You’ll defend other people saying it. You have to love the truth because if you don’t, when the pressure mounts, you’ll eventually buckle. You’ll be asked to care and affirm, but there’s no caring and no affirmation that isn’t built upon the truth first. So you must love the truth. Every time you tell a lie to be nice or to fit in, you’re selling a piece of your soul. You have to stop doing that. That takes loving the truth.

When you do this—which is what it means to be based—you break the milieu control. You break the mystical manipulation. You call doubt upon the sacred science. You break the cycles of abuse and confession. You tell people that it is okay to trust their eyes and ears and even their gut intuition that what they’re experiencing from Queer Theory is abusive and manipulative.

Queer Theory is the doctrine of a cult religion based on sex that primarily targets our children. It is our necessary responsibility to learn about it and to oppose it. If you are so inclined, I’m releasing a new book, primarily written by Logan Lancing with my contributions, called The Queering of the American Child. I recommend you pick it up and get in the fight.

[govindhtech]

Elevate Your Experience: Radeon Pro W7700 and AMD Graphics Advanced

Graphics Advanced on which Radeon Pro W7700 by AMD’s processor

Graphics Advanced on which Revolutionize your routine with Ryzen 7700 paired with AMD’s Graphics Advanced. This daily comparison delves into the excellence of AMD’s mid-range workstation graphics cardby AMD’s processor In terms of daily use, how does AMD’s mid-range workstation graphics card compare? Using disassembly and material analysis

AMD has finally completed its own line of RDNA3 graphics cards for practical usage with the Radeon Pro W7700, narrowing the significant difference between the previously evaluated Radeon Pro W7800 and W7600. The purpose of today’s test is to examine this chip’s usability in productive applications, even if its design as a gaming graphics card would slot it nicely between a Radeon RX 7600 and the RX 7700XT.

Naturally, he will unable to provide street costs since availability in Germany is still quite limited. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that even the RRP may still be marginally below (or slightly over) the 1000 euro threshold. Given that you can contrast the card with many equivalents from the NVIDIA universe, that’s quite the claim.

Because you really need to distinguish reasonably between regions where the Radeon Pro W7700 truly works well and others where the image is pretty muddled, you may find out precisely where you end up in the conclusion. Driver improvements may be performed in this area as well over time, but just the status quo as of right now is relevant; the remainder can be verified later.

Where is this card seen by AMD?

AMD has finally filled the enormous gap in its own portfolio with the Radeon Pro W7700, the newest graphics card in the Radeon PRO series for workstation PCs. Despite its comparatively modest price, this mid-range model of the next generation card promises to give remarkable performance in the fields of AI and CAD. AMD claims that the W7700 delivers an exceptional price/performance ratio, with its RDNA 3 architecture and 16 GB GDDR6 RAM being 1.7 times greater than that of its predecessors.

For designers and other creative professionals looking to enhance their workflows in programs like Solidworks, Adobe Premiere, or Da Vinci Resolve, The Radeon Pro W7700 was created specifically. Its performance may reach up to 28 TFLOPS (in FP32 values), and its 48 compute units (CUs) and matching number of ray accelerators make it suitable for ray tracing jobs. It also has AMD’s new Radiance Display Engine, which allows projects on up to four screens to have stunning resolutions and vibrant color depths.

Therefore, it seems that professionals searching for a robust but reasonably priced graphics card for demanding applications like CAD and AI may choose the Radeon Pro W7700. According to AMD, it’s a compelling choice among workstation graphics cards because of its cutting-edge technology, excellent performance, and affordable pricing. he also tried complete versions of Adobe Creative Cloud, Solidworks, Creo, and other programs to confirm this; however, more on that in a bit.

Details about the Radeon Pro W7700

The card with the chrome applications and the black light metal clothing seems larger than it really is. Alright, the radial fan blower design automatically contributes to weight savings, resulting in the scales showing just 833 grams in the end. That’s fine for a card that is 24.2 cm long.

With no backplate, the card has a genuine dual-slot design and a net thickness of 3.5 cm (or 3.8 cm when the rear screws and clamping cross are included). The usual installation height of 10.5 cm is determined by the slot panel. The card’s end has a standard 6 2 pin connection for power supply, eliminating any need for cords to obstruct the installation process.

The slot bracket has four DisplayPorts 2.1 in total, which is really adequate for all scenarios in the places where the card positions itself, in addition to the air outlet apertures required for the DHE concept of the card. Naturally, this also rubs a little salt in NVIDIA’s wounds, as Ada generation workstation graphics cards still use DisplayPort version 1.4, which has much lower throughput. With “only” half the RAM and half the CUs of the W7800, it is more of a mid-range card in the new Radeon PRO series; nonetheless, given its price, many professional users would find it to be an appealing alternative.

AI speedup and compatibility for the AV1 codec:

For effective encoding procedures, the Radeon Pro W7700 supports the AV1 codec and provides hardware-based AI accelerators. This is particularly helpful for programs like Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve that gain from AI improvements.

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[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 12 - Assignment 3 Post-mortem

Introduction

Swordsage: Oakwood Adventure was my first collaborative game development experience. I worked in a team to code and create a platformer game. This game used a pixel art style and involved the player working their way through a level, taking out monsters, and saving their progress, as they went.

Team

The team consisted of myself, Antonio Naoher, and Luke Boulter. The contributions include

Alex - Playtesting, Programming, Asset design, sprite cutting, hitbox rigging, prototyping

Antonio - Game Testing, Level Design

Luke - Playtesting, Part B doc setup

Objectives and Goals:

The initial objective of this assignment was to create a game that would challenge my programming skills as well as my creative design skills, while also documenting my progress and reflecting on and improving the game based on extensive feedback.

What Went Well:

The game programming and designing went well, as I had lots of fun turning my ideas into a real game and it felt very satisfying being able to program what I wanted to put into my game. As a team, we also worked well together, by effectively communicating through discord to lay out the work for who would do what. Playtesting also went well as we got lots of valuable feedback which helped us to reflect on feedback on the game. Luke was very proactive with the documentation of part B of assignment 3 as he created the template for us to work on. Antonio also exceeded expectations numerously as he turned my sprites and coding into a beautiful level, which surprised me.

What Didn't Go Well:

Prototyping didn't go very well as we had lots of features that we initially wanted to have in the game but couldn't due to time restrictions. Additionally, there were also issues with some of the game design where we had features coded that couldn't be used due to performance issues, which ended up being a setback.

Root Causes and Analysis:

I think many of our shortcomings were caused by time restraints and a lack of game design/programming skills. However, many of the reasons for our successes are due to our team's dedication and specifically our teamwork and communication.

Lessons Learned:

The first lesson I learned from this assignment was, that the sooner I get started on an assignment the better I can do on it because I have heaps of time and wouldn't need to be as stressed. I also learned that programming can be lots of fun when I know what I'm doing. This assignment also reinforced the importance of teamwork and communication. These lessons are valuable to me as they will aid me in future assignments throughout my bachelor of games and interactive design and ideally will also aid me when I join the workforce of the games industry. This will also aid me in any personal projects that I choose to do as it will help me manage my workflow.

Closing Remarks:

In closing, I think I have learned valuable information and lessons in game design and teamwork as I am really proud of how the game turned out. I am especially happy with the findings and feedback as it helped us greatly in improving the game.