Agave • they/it • white • 30s • USA • 🔞 🎮Sovereign Tower 📚Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer 📺Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho! 📽️Man Finds Tape (2025) Linktr.ee | TeePublic | Redbubble icon is my DnD character Merrythought (aka Merry), art by littlestpersimmon
I think it's really cowardly to draw canonically flat chested/twig women as curvy hourglass D cup women. Get over yourself. Draw her as she is or at least make her fat if you love boobs so much. Better yet, make her flat chested and fat.
Actually, no, I don't think that friendships dropping like flies in your late 20s and early 30s because no one has time for that between overwork and family obligations and marriage and kids and partners and the ritual of the time slayer is normal and ok. No I don't think deep conversations and spontaneous adventures being replaced with a tired coffee every six months is a normal part of growing up. I don't think that emotional intimacy and soul bonds disintegrating in the face of practical inconvenience is a fact of life. I think that means something is deeply deeply wrong with our society and I will never forgive it for the friends I've lost
Headline: Inside the influence machine: Israel's billion-dollar battle for US public opinion
Publisher: The New Arab
Date published: 05 August 2026
Selected text from article:
Israel is increasingly shifting away from its traditional reliance on powerful US lobbying groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), turning to foreign agents, PR firms, influencers, and AI-powered campaigns.
Seventeen firms registered under FARA to represent Israeli interests in 2024 and 2025. The largest contract, worth $46.5 million, went to Clock Tower X, the firm founded by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Based on its disclosures, the company has been building a network of websites to seed pro-Israel narratives into content that may be used to train large language models, to shape how AI chatbots like ChatGPT characterise Israel.
FARA disclosures reveal a broader influence campaign targeting social media, religious communities, and young Americans.
[...]
Yet even a sophisticated and costly influence campaign has so far failed to halt the growing challenge to the long-standing consensus around unconditional US military and diplomatic support for Israel, while criticism of its genocide in Gaza and policies toward Palestinians has been gaining traction across Congress and both major political parties.
As Nick Cleveland-Stout, author of the Quincy paper, noted, Israel’s new tactics may be transforming America’s influence landscape, but they have failed to overcome “the erosion in public support that is being driven by Israel’s deeply unpopular policies”.
[...]
In a further effort to counter growing reputational damage, Israel is funding a multimillion-dollar campaign to influence AI chatbot responses on Gaza and Israel, according to Cleveland-Stout’s latest report. Overseen by Brad Parscale, the operation uses a network of around 1,000 websites, hundreds of blog posts and mass-texting campaigns directing Americans to Israeli government-funded content.
ICE is spending millions on shock gloves designed to overpower subjects through intense, localized pain.
Headline: The Painful Truth of Exactly How ICE’s New Shock Gloves Work
Publisher: Wired
Archive link: https://archive.ph/O7TKI
Date published: 13 August 2026
Selected text from article:
With the revelation that ICE will spend up to $20 million by March on gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to subdue an individual, according to a notice published earlier this week by the Department of Homeland Security, it's worth looking at how this apparel, designated as a nonlethal tool for law enforcement, actually works.
When activated via a one-second press on a wrist switch, conductive pads embedded on the palm and undersides of the fingers of the gloves can transmit high-frequency electrical pulses directly to the wearer’s point of contact on a subject. A rechargeable battery and microprocessor module tucked inside a zippered pouch on the cuff powers the entire system.
The electrical pulse overstimulates nerve endings in the subject's peripheral nervous system, resulting in pain that inhibits coordinated muscle movement, but without causing systemic muscle lockup. The pain induced is localized to just the area touched by the glove's conductive pads. The manufacturer claims the gloves result in a subject's compliance in less than three seconds and leave no burns, marks, or scars.
[...]
Crucially, the GLOVE has limitations, chief among them that for the device to work effectively and deliver its restraining pain shock, it must come into contact with the subject's bare skin. According to Compliant Technologies, the gloves won't work through dry clothing or thick hair. The gloves will work, however, if the subject is wearing thin, wet clothing, such as soaked T-shirts or blouses. The GLOVE also does not like being dunked in water and will likely be rendered inoperable if this happens.
Michael Crowley, a senior researcher at Omega Research Foundation—an organization that tracks human rights abuses committed across the world by people using police, security, and military equipment—is concerned that the GLOVE is seemingly designed not to restrain or incapacitate, but to hurt.
“CD3 technology inflicts pain," Crowley says. "The company talks about it as a de-escalation solution, but the whole idea of it is to get control or influence somebody through pain. Omega considers it to be an inherently abusive technology that should not be manufactured, sold, or used by law enforcement officials, including ICE.”
