Pantopia Reading Nook 📰🚩

Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024. The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT. Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data. When Drop Site asked Perplexity “Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?” the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: “Yes.” The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatbots-gaza

https://novaramedia.com/2026/08/13/meta-systematically-suppresses-palestinian-voices-research-finds/

This summer, researchers at internet provider Cloudflare reported that “automated bot traffic has eclipsed human activity on the Internet, now generating roughly 57% of all web requests. This milestone emphasizes a seismic evolution from an Internet built for human clicks to a digital landscape now dominated by AI agents.” It’s no surprise, then, that anyone who relied on search engine inbound traffic is taking a hit. We are well and truly in the predicted “Google Zero” era. It’s also no surprise that these new numbers are altering the long-established calculus about whether outlets want to submit themselves to Google Search. Currently, Google’s offering is all-or-nothing: If you want to show up in search results, you’re also agreeing to let the company feed your content into the maw of its Gemini AI apparatus. And an increasing number of people and properties aren’t particularly interested in that arrangement.  [...] Last month, after AdWeek’s Mark Stenberg reported on some of the fed-up companies that were considering withdrawing their content from Google’s indexes, he received a number of social media comments from some mom-and-pop shops of the internet. The people behind a recipe blog called Inspired Taste referred to Google’s business model as a “hostage situation,” adding: “As you already know, what Google is doing to recipes is shameful.” Another webmaster piped up to say that “we have discussed blocking Google completely so we can protect our copyrighted content from AI scraping theft. The Google traffic is so small anyway because they have nuked our website”—My Sex Toy Guide dot com, in case you’re wondering!—“from their search results.” On September 15, Cloudflare will change its settings to block Google crawlers by default.t https://www.theringer.com/2026/08/04/tech/google-search-ai-interne

https://jacobin.com/2026/07/belgium-ptb-health-care-class

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/tracking-extreme-heat-by-the-hour-makes-climate-change-seem-even-worse/

https://jacobin.com/2026/07/green-capital-public-sector-decarbonization

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose

Gig workers in the US are being offered individualised wages depending on what algorithms decide about how desperate they are for work. Ride-hailing companies have long used algorithms to determine how much to pay drivers for a trip – and tech vendors in the US are now exporting that model to other sectors, according to a Washington Center for Equitable Growth report from last year. According to the report, platforms like Uber and Lyft track users’ personal data – like how often they find work through the app and for what wage – to find workers who will accept the bare minimum without the protections that come with fixed-term contracts. One Lyft driver in the US found that over a two-month period, it took her longer and longer to earn $200. It seemed like the longer she spent on the app, the less she would be paid per trip. “Uber was the baseline model, and we are seeing that model being exported into different industries,” Travis Hall, state director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Bloomberg Law. https://novaramedia.com/2026/06/22/gig-companies-are-using-your-data-to-see-how-low-a-wage-youll-accept/

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/the-spark-green-home-energy/

https://evonomics.com/how-western-europe-is-richer-than-the-us/

https://theconversation.com/how-rewilding-could-help-stop-the-spread-of-britains-wildfires-288968

The political opponents that have the centrist Democrats newly energized and willing to fight like hell are the democratic socialists who have become a powerful organizing force within their party and some of its most popular national figures. That’s according to the New York Times, which reported yesterday that the centrist organization Third Way, in concert with unnamed “moderates,” plan to launch a “discrediting campaign” lasting from now until 2028 that takes aim at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group whose members include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and is a key part of the coalition behind the party’s Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. That campaign will see Third Way not just do opposition research into DSA and target its elected officials but also go after politicians like El-Sayed, who don’t identify as socialists but make common cause with the group. “We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, told the Times about the campaign. This is a month after Cowan and Third Way’s executive vice president, Matt Bennett, warned in the Washington Post that DSA was “not a faction to be appeased,” urging the party to “fight” the group by pledging “money, organization, and spine.” https://jacobin.com/2026/08/democrats-centrists-third-way-dsa

https://www.popsci.com/science/stone-age-women-tools/

Comparison of EU and US CRM policy The comparison of the US critical minerals and EU critical raw materials strategies allows the following considerations: • On funding, the US provides significantly more public funding than the EU. US federal agencies mobilise about EUR 46 billion, offering flexible, large-scale support with high risk-sharing; the EU provides EUR 5–6 billion in CRM funding, relying mostly on grants and loans. • Regarding stockpiling, the models reflect different levels of centralisation. The US uses a dual system: the long-standing National Defense Stockpile and the EXIM-backed Project Vault. The EU is operationalising its stockpiling strategy, relying on the CRM Centre and coordinated governance among Member States. Both approaches contrast with Japan’s JOGMEC, which is seen as a foundational operational stockpiling template, combining market intelligence, direct funding along the entire supply chain, and physical reserves within a single state agency. • For price-stabilisation, the US relies on trade-linked price floors and adjustable tariffs, which may be hard to sustain in isolation—unless implemented collectively with allies through frameworks like FORGE. The EU still lacks a dedicated instrument to guarantee long-term revenues for mine and processing plant developers. Used widely in the renewable energy sector, contracts for difference could offer a middle way to bridge this gap. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/772657/ECTI_ATA(2026)772657_EN.pdf

https://aeon.co/essays/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around

Pantopia Reading Nook 📰🚩 pinned «Recommendations 1. Distinguish between finance that helps people obtain a home to live in and finance that treats housing as an investment asset. 2. Apply this distinction consistently across the EU rather than leaving it to each MS. 3. Reintroduce credit…»

Recommendations 1. Distinguish between finance that helps people obtain a home to live in and finance that treats housing as an investment asset. 2. Apply this distinction consistently across the EU rather than leaving it to each MS. 3. Reintroduce credit guidance, meaning measures that steer bank lending towards affordable housing production. 4. Direct lending towards productive investment in line with the EU's competitiveness agenda. 5. Make access to public support conditional on capital that is long-term and accepts nonspeculative returns. 6. Assess housing finance carefully: support new affordable construction but avoid measures that raise existing house prices. 7. Strengthen transparency over who owns property, how it changes hands, and how rents and valuations are set. 8. Confront the tax-avoidance structures of cross-border landlords. 9. Strengthen rent regulation frameworks to limit excessive rent increases. 10. Prevent renovictions and restrict renovation-driven rent increases. 11. Improve security of tenure by strengthening tenant protections 12. Expand and reinvest in social housing where strong social housing sectors already exist. 13. Develop non-profit and permanently affordable housing sectors where social housing is limited. 14. Use public land strategically, by using rights of first refusal and public acquisition powers to secure land and housing for social purposes. 15. Coordinate action at EU level to prevent regulatory arbitrage https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2026/783542/CASP_STU(2026)783542_EN.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KqWW9mfSGo

After handing the White House to Donald Trump a second time and scrambling to dump the blame on someone else, Democrats did what they usually do when they royally screw up: they blamed the Left, pretending that this deeply unpopular and cynical political style — whose hallmarks include shallow appeals to racial and gender identity, questionable insinuations of bigotry against their political opponents, and a fixation on bashing men, a demographic the party is desperate to win back — was something that had been forced on them by progressives and socialists. As this magazine pointed out at the time, this was pretty rich. There are certainly forces on the progressive left, rooted in college campuses and nonprofit groups, that stoked and continue to stoke the worst of wokeness. But it was Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him that had been saying the way forward was a politics that put people’s bread-and-butter concerns front and center and divisive identity politics and finger-wagging to the side. For their troubles, establishment Democrats lined up to declare them a bunch of racist, sexist “Bernie Bros,” even secret right-wingers who, being white guys, were out of touch with a voting public that wanted to only talk about race and gender, and that they should move out of the way entirely. (Why is the Democratic brand in the toilet with working-class men? We’ll never know.) So the idea that Democratic elites had had this political style forced on them, and forced on them by the Left no less, is laughable. But what’s extra comical is that they couldn’t even keep this pretense up for two years before going back to doing the thing they claimed they had never wanted to do in the first place. [...] Then there’s the intraparty tussle over the Democratic primary calendar for 2028, long used by the party establishment to try to tip the scales toward their preferred candidates and to hold back a progressive insurgent. In their public-facing rhetoric, centrists have framed their push to make the solidly red South Carolina the very first primary around the exact identity politics they were saying in November 2024 needed to go. https://jacobin.com/2026/07/democrats-wokeness-el-sayed-jackson

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/nasa-art-program/