Weekly Grounding #102
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
If you’re already subscribed and want to help the publication grow, consider sharing Handful of Earth with a friend.
“Pentagon Provided $2.4tn to Private Arms Firms to ‘Fund War and Weapons,’ Report Finds”
The Guardian reports that a “new study of defense department spending…shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a ‘continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing’….The report is compiled of statistics of Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024, during which time the top five Pentagon contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771bn in contract awards. Overall, private firms received approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4tn over that period.”
Despite Donald Trump’s earlier calls to “cut military spending in half,” the report notes that his administration has actively pushed for further increases to the Pentagon budget: “The growth in spending will increasingly benefit firms in the ‘military tech’ sector who represent tech companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril, the report said, that are ‘deeply embedded in the Trump administration, which should give it an upper hand in the budget battles to come.’”
“Taking into account supplemental funding for the Pentagon passed by Congress under Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ the report said, the US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000. The rapid growth in military spending that began under the Bush administration’s post-9/11 and the ‘global war on terror’ has now been continued on spending to counter China as the US’s main rival in the 21st century, as well record foreign arms transfers to Israel and Ukraine.”
“Activism, Uncensored: Alligator Alcatraz”
provides on-the-ground video reportage on recent demonstrations in Florida for . He covers the protests against the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades as well as counterprotests in support of the detention facility. The 10-minute video is well worth watching in full to get a sense of the politics surrounding Alligator Alcatraz. “CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs”
The Wall Street Journal reports that “CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go. ‘Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,’ Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. ‘AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.’”
The article notes that “The Ford CEO’s comments are among the most pointed to date from a large-company U.S. executive outside of Silicon Valley. His remarks reflect an emerging shift in how many executives explain the potential human cost from the technology. Until now, few corporate leaders have wanted to publicly acknowledge the extent to which white-collar jobs could vanish. In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses, noting that innovation historically creates a range of new roles. In private, though, CEOs have spent months whispering about how their businesses could likely be run with a fraction of the current staff. Technologies including automation software, AI and robots are being rolled out to make operations as lean and efficient as possible.”
The projected job losses are justified through the ideology of the inevitability of technological progress: “Professionals will need to accept the reality that few roles will be unchanged by AI, Micha Kaufman, CEO of the freelance marketplace Fiverr, wrote in a memo to his staff this spring. ‘This is a wake-up call,’ he wrote. ‘It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person—AI is coming for you.’”
For more on the ideology of inevitability that is central to maintaining the present ruling order, see my essay, “The Era When Nothing Ever Ends.”
“Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist?”
At
, writes on artificial intelligence and AI 2027: “I’m not the least bit religious, but I’ve had God on the brain recently. Partly that’s because I’ve been reading Stephen King’s The Stand, which is basically a story of Armageddon. Partly it’s because I recently attended the Doomer Optimism campout in Wyoming, where I interviewed Paul Kingsnorth, one of my favorite novelists, who happens to be a deeply spiritual Eastern Orthodox Christian. And it’s partly because I recently listened to Peter Thiel explaining to Ross Douthat on his new podcast that the people and forces arrayed against technological progress constitute ‘the Antichrist’…Kingsnorth, for his part, would probably say the same about Thiel. Or he would at least point out that Thiel and his clique of billionaire venture capitalists are creating and unleashing into the world demonic forces likely to destroy humanity and a good part of nature.”Woodhouse observes that “It’s easy to anticipate the end of the world. We’ve been doing it for centuries, and perhaps never so much as in the last few decades. But to those who scoff at AI 2027, I would say that it’s also easy to dismiss such warnings as the melodramatic rantings of unserious people. If there’s a market for doomsday prophecies, there’s an even bigger one for cheap skepticism of such bold claims, and for reassurance that you can trust the experts and the bigwigs in charge. Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here. A world populated by superintelligent robots that comprehend the world around them and are capable of superintelligence-level deception will be just like the one we grew up in, only better. The comforting stories may be even more far-fetched than the dystopian ones.”
He concludes: “I would be more than happy to continue in my agnostic indifference to God. I’ve spent a lifetime with my secular sense of the world as an explicable place governed by empirically verifiable Enlightenment Reason. It’s comfortable and familiar. But now we’re approaching a moment when humanity may assume God-like powers, or, worse, bestow such powers upon our own synthetic creation. If you’re not, in this moment, asking some fundamental ethical questions about the role of humankind in the natural world and the possibility of a consciousness that transcends our own, you may not be taking AI seriously enough. You may be sleepwalking under the hypnotic spell of the Antichrist.”
I share some of my thoughts on this topic in my essay, “Telos or Transhumanism.”
“Jeffrey Epstein Had 1,000+ Victims”
At his eponymous Substack,
writes that “Everyone is talking about [Jeffrey] Epstein again, from MAGA types furious that the Trump administration is not producing a supposed client list, to the mainstream media, which is giddily mocking just about anyone critical of the Justice Department here as conspiracy theorists. One person who doesn’t want to talk about it is Donald Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his buddy Epstein was a ‘fun’ guy who ‘likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’ Seldom one to shy away from blurting out whatever, when asked this week about the Epstein memo, Trump uncharacteristically changed the subject. He admonished the reporter, telling him that the question was a ‘desecration’ to the lives lost in the Texas flood.”Klippenstein continues: “There is no client list, Justice says in its memo; this despite [Pam] Bondi herself implying in February that such a list was on her desk. (She now says she was referring to files more generally.) There are so many explanations and unanswered questions raised by the release, which also says that there is ‘no credible evidence…that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.’ That means that the theories alleging Epstein was operating some kind of operation to collect incriminating information for a foreign government (most notably the Israelis) has also been dismissed by the U.S. government.”
He argues that “you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see there’s more here than we were told before. You just have to read the Justice Department’s review carefully—which the media evidently did not. It’s as if no one in power wants to deal with the substance of this scandal: that an industrial scale child abuse operation was taking place right under the noses of the countless household names with whom Epstein socialized. Now those same household names are ever so happy to cast the battle as a war between conspiracy nuts and the sober-minded adults, completely gliding over the obvious indictment here of the very high society of which they are a part.”
I wrote a piece on the Epstein case back in 2019 before Epstein’s death. The piece focused on his science philanthropy and interest in artificial intelligence. It can be read here in the Counterpunch archives.
“Why MAGA Is Right About Jeffrey Epstein”
At
, writes: “It’s rare that I agree with the MAGA conspiracy theory loonies, but, in the case of the Epstein files, they deserve an answer about why the full folder has not been released. I have never fully believed that Epstein committed suicide and my skepticism grows the more the mysteries accumulate.”When Brown was editor of The Daily Beast, she ran a multi-part investigative story on Epstein in 2010 by anti-human trafficking activist, Conchita Sarnoff. Brown recalls that “After we ran Sarnoff’s first piece in July 2010, Epstein called me personally to tell me that ‘she was a well-known nut case and to cease and desist.’ When I barreled ahead anyway, I had a creepy encounter with Epstein a few weeks later. I returned from lunch and was startled to find him sitting in a chair in my glass-walled office in Manhattan’s IAC building. It seems he had managed to blow through front desk security and arrive unannounced.
“He was morose and menacing, his snake eyes narrowed. ‘Just stop,’ he said heavily as I stared at him from the doorway. ‘There will be consequences if you don’t.’ I asked him to leave and suggested he talk to our lawyer. ‘You heard me,’ he said in a deadly tone. ‘Stop.’ We did not stop. But there were no more legal flurries from Epstein. It seems he had rightly computed that the story would fade if he didn’t fan it.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.