Weekly Grounding #103
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.
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“I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
At The New York Times, Omer Bartov writes that “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”
Bartov notes that “Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure—government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.”
“Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care.”
Bartov observes that, “To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust—and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it—have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan ‘Never again,’ transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.”
“The Markets Are Signalling a Clear Winner in the Middle East”
Meanwhile, at The Financial Times, Ruchir Sharma reports that “Since the October 7 2023 attacks on Israel, the best-performing major stock market in the world is…Israel. After taking an initial hit, the market recovered fully in four weeks, and since then is up around 80 per cent in dollar terms…Despite all the international criticism of Israel for its multiple military offensives, from Gaza to Iran, a surge in foreign buying has fuelled the rally in its stock market.”
Sharma highlights Israel’s R&D sector, bankrolled by investments from multinational corporations that are indifferent to or actively engaged in its genocide in Gaza: “Perhaps the most telling sign of its dynamism is that Israel now spends more than 6 per cent of GDP on research and development—more than any other nation and over double the global average. An unusually high share—about half—of that R&D funding comes from foreign multinationals, many involved in defence-related industries.”
“Spillovers from defence have made Israel a global leader in fields from air-traffic control to, above all, cyber security. With more start-ups per head than any other country, its business culture is closer to that of California than the Middle East. It has 73 start-ups in the hot field of generative artificial intelligence, the third largest in the world. Half of its exports are tech products—a share few advanced economies can match—while its neighbours still export mainly oil, an old-fashioned commodity…To many observers, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East still seems precarious. But the market’s optimistic take on Israel’s tech-driven economy is now showing up in economists’ forecasts, which are projecting growth at nearly 4 per cent in coming years. That’s relatively strong for a developed nation. It validates the market view that Israel is cementing its status as the region’s dominant economic force.”
“Inside the Silicon Valley Push to Breed Super-Babies”
The Washington Post profiles Noor Siddiqui, “a rising star in the realm of fertility start-ups backed by tech investors. Her company, San Francisco-based Orchid Health, screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses, letting prospective parents plan their families with far more information about their progeny than ever before. For now, her approach has been taken up mostly in her moneyed social circle. But one day, maybe not far off, it could change the way many babies are made everywhere—posing new moral and political questions as reproduction could increasingly become an outcome not of sex but of genetic preselection and data-mining.”
“It is now standard for pregnant women and couples undergoing in vitro fertilization to test for rare genetic disorders stemming from a single gene mutation, such as cystic fibrosis, or chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. But Orchid is the first company to say it can sequence an embryo’s entire genome of 3 billion base pairs. It uses as few as five cells from an embryo to test for more than 1,200 of these uncommon single-gene-derived, or monogenic, conditions. The company also applies custom-built algorithms to produce what are known as polygenic risk scores, which are designed to measure a future child’s genetic propensity for developing complex ailments later in life, such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and schizophrenia.”
The article notes that “Siddiqui, who intends to have four children using her own Orchid-screened embryos, advocates a bolder idea gaining ground in the tech world: that increasingly available and sophisticated fertility technologies will supplant sex as a preferred method of reproduction for everyone.”
“The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out”
The death of Jeffrey Epstein (who himself believed that his DNA could seed a massive cohort of super-babies) has gotten even more convoluted after this Wired investigation. Wired reports that “Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut from what the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation described as ‘full raw’ surveillance video from the only functioning camera near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The video was released last week as part of the Trump administration’s commitment to fully investigate Epstein’s 2019 death but instead has raised new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.”
“WIRED previously reported that the video had been stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files, contradicting the Justice Department’s claim that it was ‘raw’ footage. Now, further analysis shows that one of the source clips was approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video, indicating that footage appears to have been trimmed before release. It’s unclear what, if anything, the minutes cut from the first clip showed.”
The article continues: “Amid backlash from supporters and critics alike, President Donald Trump defended Bondi on Saturday, saying she was doing a ‘fantastic job.’ Trump wrote: “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Remembering the Idealism of Mumbai’s 1985 Aid Bhopal Rock Concert”
Scroll revisits a 1985 benefit concert in Mumbai following the Bhopal industrial disaster: “The disaster in Bhopal seemed so enormous, everyone wanted to do their bit to help out. So just under a year after the devastating gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in December 1984, approximately 10,000 Mumbai youngsters filed into Brabourne Stadium downtown to listen to some of India’s most exciting rock bands play their hearts out for the survivors.”
“Many people who attended the Aid Bhopal concert were left two vivid memories: the pile of liquor bottles at the entrance that had been confiscated by security guards as they frisked entrants, and spending the chilly night out on nearby Marine Drive, waiting for the first train to get home: Mumbai had no deadlines in the early 1980s, and the concert went on long past the last local had pulled out from Churchgate station. In the end, the concert raised Rs 2.5 lakhs, which was handed over to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. A few months later, Doordarshan broadcast the concert as a four-part serial, for a whole month of Sundays. Long after the lights dimmed at Brabourne Stadium, the music of Aid Bhopal still elicits a smile from middle-aged viewers across India.”
“The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters”
At his self-titled Substack,
writes that “Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by 50 percent. Almost every age group cut their party time in half in the last two decades. For young people, the decline was even worse. Last year, Americans aged 15-to-24 spent 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did in 2003.”Summarizing an argument from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Thompson notes that “women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar. Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties, the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family jobs for salaried positions. In 1970, right around the inflection point of America’s social decline, the share of women between 25 and 54 who participated in the labor force surged past 50 percent for the first time; it’s currently near 80 percent. As more women poured their weekdays into 9-to-5 work, men failed to take over the logistical labor required to fill out the social calendar, and adult gatherings gradually eroded in the age of the dual-earner household.”
Noting the role of screens in the decline of partying, Thompson suggests that “When we use technology to extend our powers, we risk sacrificing something in the opposite direction. Sometimes these sacrifices are easy to see, such as the discovery of oil leading to the demise of the firewood industry, or the invention of the internal combustion engine causing the demise of the farm animal. But sometimes, progress incurs tradeoffs that are more subtle and only reveal themselves in time. Today, I believe we’ve built ourselves a world of greater professional ambition, more intensive parenting, and lavish entertainment abundance. But in making this world, we’ve lost a bit of each other. If summoning these magnificent technologies incurs the death of our social lives, a permanent surge of anxiety, and the long-term demise of deep friendships, then we’ll have built ourselves a glittering dungeon of insularity and called it progress.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.