Weekly Grounding #111
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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“Bari Weiss Closes In on Major Role at CBS News”
The New York Times reports that “Bari Weiss has spent the past few years leading The Free Press, a scrappy online media start-up that was founded as a rebuke to traditional news organizations. Now, she is closing in on a leadership role at CBS News, the country’s quintessential traditional TV news organization. The new owner of CBS News is weighing giving Ms. Weiss the job of editor in chief or co-president of the network, as part of a broader deal to buy The Free Press, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. The people cautioned that the terms of a deal were not final. But even the consideration of Ms. Weiss for such a prominent role at CBS News is the strongest sign yet that the network’s new owner, David Ellison, intends to make major changes at the news organization.”
The article continues: “Mr. Ellison, whose company Skydance merged with Paramount last month in an $8 billion deal, has been in talks to acquire The Free Press for over two months. Any deal is expected to put the price tag for The Free Press at over $100 million, its valuation in 2024, the two people said. The total price, which is still being negotiated, depends in part on how long Ms. Weiss stays at Paramount. Some expect the value to exceed $150 million, paid with some cash and the remainder in stock.”
“Larry Ellison Is Spending Billions to Reshape Oxford and His Own Legacy”
Meanwhile, David Ellison’s father, billionaire Larry Ellison, is seeking to shape Oxford University in his own image. The Wall Street Journal reports that “When the American tech titan Larry Ellison showed up here wanting to buy a historic pub called the Eagle and Child that was a beloved hangout of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, he was told it wasn’t for sale. The response from the billionaire’s camp: Everything’s for sale. And it was. Ellison now owns the pub after ponying up £8 million, or $10.7 million now, far above its market value, according to records and people familiar with the matter. Trustees of the University of Oxford college that owned the pub for two decades debated the sale. They touched on the reputational risks of selling a famous British treasure, especially to an American billionaire. But the offer, described by college financiers as unsolicited and ‘exceptional,’ easily prevailed.”
“About 4 miles from the pub, in a science office park outside the city center, the Oracle founder is bankrolling a massive for-profit research campus costing upward of $1.3 billion, the planned home of his Ellison Institute of Technology by 2027. Ellison announced two years ago his plans to shift the institute’s hub to Oxford from its smaller site in Los Angeles. The venture aims to tackle issues ranging from food security and healthcare to artificial intelligence and robotics, operating as a sustainable private business powered by Oracle technology. Since then, Ellison has been splashing out hundreds of millions on real estate in and around Oxford and luring top academics from the publicly funded university to come work for him for outsize salaries.”
The article reports that, “This week, Oxford and the institute announced funding of £118 million for Oxford University medical researchers to work alongside the institute on using artificial intelligence and Oracle technology to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines. Intellectual property developed through the project will belong to the Ellison Institute, people familiar with the agreement say. The Oxford institute’s sleek, modern plans, from the firm of renowned British architect Norman Foster, include an oncology clinic, auditorium, laboratories, library, classrooms and park space with a formal pond surrounded by trees, all designed to host as many as 7,000 scientists. That rivals the size of Oxford University’s entire academic research staff.”
“Death of the Holocaust Industry”
At
, observes that “Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians…The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as a vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present.”Hedges writes that Auschwitz prisoner, Primo Levi, “deplored ‘Manichaeanism,’ those who ‘shun nuance and complexity’ and who ‘reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duals, us and them.’ He warned that the ‘network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.’ The enemy, he knew, ‘was outside but also inside.’ Levi writes about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski, known as ‘King Chaim,’ turned the ghetto into a slave labor camp which enriched the Nazis and himself. He deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience and embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.”
Hedges continues: “These bitter lessons of the Holocaust, which warn that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin, that we can all become willing executioners, that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust, are what Zionists seek to deny. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel.”
“The ability to peddle the fiction that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, or that Jews are uniquely entitled, has ended,” Hedges concludes. “The genocide presages a new world order, one where Europe and the United States, along with their proxy Israel, are pariahs. Gaza has illuminated a dark truth—barbarism and Western civilization are inseparable.”
“How the Police Became the Goon Squad of Trans Activists”
At Spiked,
explores the roots of Graham Linehan’s recent arrest in London: “The arrest of Graham Linehan for the crime of tweeting has rightly provoked near-universal outrage. On Monday, the Father Ted writer was detained by five armed police officers as soon as he stepped on to the tarmac at Heathrow Airport, where he had arrived from Arizona. He was told that three gender-critical tweets from April were being investigated on suspicion of ‘inciting violence.’ [T]he arrest of Linehan marks the culmination of a long decline in British policing, beginning nearly 20 years ago, at the fag-end of Gordon Brown’s premiership. Since then, police forces across the UK have effectively turned into the armed wing of Stonewall, the LGBT lobby group.”“As a result of the hand-in-glove relationship between Stonewall and the College of Policing, every officer that has graduated in the past decade has been told that it is their duty to fight an alleged epidemic of transphobic hate crime. They’ve sat in classes lectured by trans activists, who’ve told them heart-wrenching tales of their personal suffering. Myths peddled by the trans lobby are presented as facts—such as that trans people, particularly children, are being driven to suicide by an atmosphere of bigotry. Linehan’s arrest comes after more than a decade of trans activism being promoted at the heart of British policing. As shocking as his arrest may have been, it should hardly have been a surprise. The police are only following orders. Stonewall’s orders, of course.”
“Setting Man Free from Men”
At
, reviews Tiffany Jenkins’ new book, Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. Summarizing Jenkins’ argument, he writes that “It was over the course of the twentieth century that private life was ‘desacralized’… and it is then that the roots of our current malaise are to be found.”“The firm division between public and private life was undermined by multiple cultural and social trends. First, there was the influence of behaviourism: Edward Bernays’ notion of the ‘engineering of consent’ meant that ‘no part of inner life was beyond interrogation.’ Second, the New Left’s disillusionment with the prospect of social transformation led it to switch to a politics of the ‘authentic self,’ in which liberation was reduced to ‘self-realisation’ and ‘defining one’s truth and confronting internalised oppressions that mirrored the external world.’ Third, through their motto that ‘the personal is political,’ radical feminists challenged the traditional distinction between the public and private spheres, arguing that the struggle for gender equality ought to be extended into the private realm of the home and family, which was seen as the source of many social ills. These were sites of the subjugation of women, by means that were at least as coercive—if not more so—than those of the state. The right to be left alone had served as a shield for domestic violence and marital rape, which wasn’t criminalised in many Western countries until as late as the 1990s. Fourth, there was the growing popularity of fly-on-the-wall reality television series that purported to show real family life to the world. And finally, the growth of therapy culture meant that social ills were less likely to be ascribed to material deprivation or to how society was organised but to personal issues and especially family dynamics that needed to be brought out into the light of public scrutiny.”
“Human beings need privacy and solitude as much as we need socialisation,” Leonard concludes. “‘Originality begins in private,’ Jenkins writes in the book’s much too short epilogue. It is in the interest of society that we should cherish private life. We need to recreate something that the theatre does so well: provide a sharp distinction between the bright light of the stage and the dark oblivion beyond its borders, for the benefit of both our public and private selves. Whether those of us who want to retain our privacy are fighting a losing battle is another question. But meanwhile, Jenkins’ wonderful history reminds us where the notion of private life came from, why it is valuable, and why it should be defended—especially in a society that seems to have forgotten why private life matters.”
“Obama Era Raps and the Rapture”
In her September Notebook at
, writes that “I’ve been thinking about the Obama era, as another realm of mass formation psychosis, another world, a former, more secular come-to-Jesus epoch during which Obama as president was his proxy. His popularity made edgy black liberals in entertainment and influence, who Google embraced with retreats like ‘Youtube Black,’ believe this corporate revelry in our identities as expensive and worthy data aggregators, would last forever. Many who made it in on this wave were relatively new to the middle class which was more cultural than economic by then, a myth surviving on credit and institutional enmeshment. The heroes of this myth spent eight years listening to cocaine as rap in the form of Watch the Throne, alongside the laid back renaissance of Good Kid Maad City, and thinking we had captured the White House, because it was a less painful notion than facing that fact that it had learned how to regulate us for the optics and would follow this performance of deep-state endorsed liberalism with certain backlash, which would ensure another century of conservatism and fascism on both sides. Now that we’re in that century, the territory songs aren’t as self-aggrandizing, or there are none, and rappers are on trial or coming out as CIA informants on prison phones, and moving to the UK or Bali just in case they catch a case and need to resist extradition.”“I think we were all in the sunken place then, but it felt okay, it felt habitable and even meaningful on the best days, like one of the new black horror films that’s both too camp and too literal. We were in the documentary version from 2008 until yesterday. And some are still there, waiting for the rapture with stunned over-eager looks in their eyes, like addicts about to get their first hit of the century. It’s a jittery stupor that tells me if it doesn't come soon they’re gonna cause it themselves, by any means necessary, by pretending this isn’t a post 9/11, post October 7th consciousness trying to get into heaven but too vain to even for Pale September in Hollywood.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
Speaking of Mass Psychosis this reference describes the situation
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/undreaming-wetiko-introduction
This essays describes the influence of the most powerful culturally formative medium - TV
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/aricles/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-comes-to-life
Are you familiar with the book by Iain McGilchrist The Master & His Emissary - The Left brain and the Making of the Modern World? It seems to me that despite their seemingly good intentions these techno-enthusiastic Overlords putting together this new Oxford venture are leading edge vectors of this now world dominant left-brained paradigm, and the Wetiko Psychosis introduced in the first reference above.