Belligerent Strawman

ICE Signs $30 Million Contract With Palantir to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ ICE has awarded Palantir Technologies a $30 million contract to develop a new software platform to expand its surveillance and enforcement operations, building on Palantir’s decade-long collaboration with ICE. Key features and functions: ➤ ImmigrationOS will give ICE “real-time visibility” into visa overstays, self-deportation cases, and individuals flagged for removal, including foreign students flagged for removal for protesting US-Israeli genocide. ➤ ImmigrationOS will integrate data from multiple government database systems, helping ICE track immigration violators and coordinate with agencies like Customs and Border Protection. ➤ The platform is designed to streamline the entire immigration enforcement process—from identification to removal—aiming to reduce time, labor, and resource costs.

Incidentally, I'll be happy to delete this if Palantir publicly commits never to build things that help the government violate the US constitution. And in particular never to build things that help the government violate anyone's (whether citizens or not) First Amendment rights.

"Something is happening." "OH, WELL, would you look at the time, it's nothing-happens-o'clock-" "Chudjak... I guess I should tell you. I took the battery out of your Happening Watch over a year ago..."

This little leg space should not be legal.

Microdosing Alcohol: What You Need to Know There is a recent trend going around about taking alcoholic beverages at doses that most people would find imperceptible. It’s always important to remember that alcohol is not safe at any dose, and that it is a known addictive carcinogenic neurotoxin. Therefore we start out skeptical of any touted health benefits, and watchful about its possible long-term consequences. With that said, microdosing alcohol is perhaps phenomenologically valuable. Take 3ml of red wine. Yes, 3ml, measured with a pipette. You can still get a very decent phenomenological datapoint that tries to make sense of its aroma and texture (look for the linalool!). But you are nonetheless only drinking 50th of what a standard wine cup would be. In the microdose regime, alcohol has a subtle feel reminiscent of dissociation, delicate time distortion effects, and a hint of the sense of messing with death but doing it so gently that you’ll probably be fine. It’s a trip. Microdose wine once a day, and over the course of an entire year you’ll go through a bottle of wine and a half. At a distance it seems that you are someone who “has a few drinks now and then”, but that would actually be dozens of times more in a single sitting than you are actually doing. Your use of alcohol is entirely different, and you experience its effects every day consistently. Microdose wine once a week, and you’ll be having one cup of wine a year. And when you take it this way, seeing someone drink a whole glass of wine is like seeing hard core erotic pictures without any warning. It looks really excessive and unappreciative. And of course it’s then deeply surprising that people have “multiple” of those on a single night. Someone deeply used to the alcohol microdose regime tends to find it really strange how someone would have that kind of relationship with this drug.