poems | thoughts on stories | thoughts on writing | angels | machines | electricity | god | love | wounds | anger | desire | damnation | death & decay | humanity | the ancients | classics | arthurian literature | renaiassance florentines | art | thoughts on art | uncommonly good pictures | aspirational women | kindred spirits | posts by me
find me:
stacking the works of new & old masters onto a tottering pile @adigitalatelier
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
A government committee says that the country’s growing dependence on the data analytics company is a serious liability.
A bipartisan group of UK politicians is sounding the alarm over the country's partnership with the data analytics company Palantir.
In a report published Tuesday, the 11 members of Parliament’s Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee warned that the country’s ballooning reliance on Palantir’s technology “represents an unacceptable point of weakness” that could hand the company overwhelming bargaining power in future negotiations.
“We know that with vendor lock-in, over time, we’ll get more expensive and worse services,” Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the committee and member of Parliament, tells WIRED. “It’s a trap that has to be avoided.”
In a worst-case scenario, a deeply entrenched supplier could threaten to withhold service as a way of imposing its will, Onwurah believes. “That could bring public services and our economy to a halt,” she says. “That’s a huge risk.”
Got a Tip?Are you a current or former UK government employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at Joel_Khalili.28.
Though the committee says that its objections to Palantir are not ideologically motivated, the report also describes a “clear mismatch with UK values.” It points to politically charged comments by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel—who in 2023 described the British public’s affection for the NHS as “Stockholm syndrome”—and a 22-point manifesto based on a recent book by CEO Alex Karp, which advocates for an overriding fealty to the US and its interests.
“We have a key vendor saying they will exercise technology in accordance with their political mission,” Onwurah says. “If what the UK is trying to do in our NHS or our defense does not align with Palantir’s political objectives, we clearly can’t depend upon them as a supplier.”
To minimize the risks, the committee recommended that the National Health Service, one of Palantir’s primary partners in the UK, activates a clause in its contract next February that would terminate the relationship early.
The UK government began to use Palantir’s technology in 2020 as it scrambled to map the spread of the Covid-19 virus and route medical equipment across the country. Since then, Palantir and its partners have won contracts worth a combined $750 million with the NHS and the Ministry of Defense, among others. The company has touted its ability to enable “innovation and fast-paced problem solving” in the UK public sector.
The report outlines similar dependencies on US-based cloud providers Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, and Fujitsu, the Japanese company at the center of the Post Office Horizon scandal. But “Palantir concerns us most,” the committee wrote.
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The relationship has attracted increased scrutiny of late over the company’s work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as the US and Israeli militaries. The manifesto based on Karp’s book further inflamed concerns about the company’s politics.
“They’re not a company that should be anywhere near British public services,” says Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at Foxglove, a nonprofit that has previously campaigned for the NHS to back out of its contract with Palantir. “Do you want to be giving a company of this kind—with these openly expressed opinions and ideologies—a central role in the UK state that it may get harder and harder to remove them from?”
Appearing before the committee in July last year, Louis Mosley, who heads up Palantir’s European business, distanced the company from Thiel’s comments about the NHS. Palantir’s objective is to “support democratically elected governments in delivering the mandate that they have been elected to deliver,” he said. “We represent a diversity of political views and do not take political positions as a company.”
Domingo Valdivieso y Henarejos, The Descent from the Cross, 1864 / Lodovico Cardi, Pietà, late 16th century / Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1520-1522 / Philippe de Champaigne, Le Christ mort couché sur son linceul, 1654.
“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
At my job as a social worker, we ask people if they have a religion/faith system/spiritual calling. Because we know that having religion generally helps people out of depression and keeps them from committing suicide. And people who go to church/synagogue/mosque/temple have a support system! When my grandfather died, my synagogue did a meal train. We didn't have to cook while mourning. They also organized meal trains for a congregant who had a baby and one who had gender affirming surgery. It's much easier to heal from heartbreak or surgery when people are caring about you and checking in on you.
my erotic fanfiction is more historically accurate than yours. here it claims that shes moaning 'yes,' however classical latin didn't have a word that corresponds to Modern English 'yes,' i.e. an affirmative answer to an interrogative. You could have easily avoided this glaring implausibility by allowing her to moan plus, 'more'—as exemplified in my critically acclaimed fic with an unprecedented number of kudos (eleven). I recommend that you log out of AO3 and return only after acquiring satisfactory knowledge of the subject matter.
Okay I have things I should be seeing to but I couldn't help myself. In case you, like me, have not read all of these stories and would like to be amongst the lucky 10,000 today:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell
The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words
**Originally published in the New Yorker in 1948; interestingly, the New Yorker still has this story archived on their website BEHIND A PAYWALL. CAN YOU IMAGINE.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming